She glanced at the timepiece on the overmantel.  “It would be about half an hour ago.  It was a few minutes before the Rennes diligence passed through.”

“The Rennes diligence!” M. Binet was almost inarticulate.  “Could he... could he walk?” he asked, on a note of terrible anxiety.

“Walk?  He ran like a hare when he left the inn.  I thought, myself, that his agility was suspicious, seeing how lame he had been since he fell downstairs yesterday.  Is anything wrong?”

M. Binet had collapsed into a chair.  He took his head in his hands, and groaned.

“The scoundrel was shamming all the time!” exclaimed Climene.  “His fall downstairs was a trick.  He was playing for this.  He has swindled us.”

“Fifteen louis at least — perhaps sixteen!” said M. Binet.  “Oh, the heartless blackguard!  To swindle me who have been as a father to him — and to swindle me in such a moment.”

From the ranks of the silent, awe-stricken company, each member of which was wondering by how much of the loss his own meagre pay would be mulcted, there came a splutter of laughter.

M. Binet glared with blood-injected eyes.

“Who laughs?” he roared.  “What heartless wretch has the audacity to laugh at my misfortune?”

Andre-Louis, still in the sable glories of Scaramouche, stood forward.  He was laughing still.

“It is you, is it?  You may laugh on another note, my friend, if I choose a way to recoup myself that I know of.”

“Dullard!” Scaramouche scorned him.  “Rabbit-brained elephant!  What if Cordemais has gone with fifteen louis?  Hasn’t he left you something worth twenty times as much?”

M. Binet gaped uncomprehending.

“You are between two wines, I think.  You’ve been drinking,” he concluded.

“So I have — at the fountain of Thalia.  Oh, don’t you see?  Don’t you see the treasure that Cordemais has left behind him?”

“What has he left?”

“A unique idea for the groundwork of a scenario.  It unfolds itself all before me.  I’ll borrow part of the title from Moliere.  We’ll call it ‘Les Fourberies de Scaramouche,’ and if we don’t leave the audiences of Maure and Pipriac with sides aching from laughter I’ll play the dullard Pantaloon in future.”

Polichinelle smacked fist into palm.  “Superb!” he said, fiercely.  “To cull fortune from misfortune, to turn loss into profit, that is to have genius.”

Scaramouche made a leg.  “Polichinelle, you are a fellow after my own heart.  I love a man who can discern my merit.  If Pantaloon had half your wit, we should have Burgundy to-night in spite of the flight of Cordemais.”

“Burgundy?” roared M. Binet, and before he could get farther Harlequin had clapped his hands together.

“That is the spirit, M. Binet.  You heard him, landlady.  He called for Burgundy.”

“I called for nothing of the kind.”