It was time to leave.  Mme. Hemerlingue went to the door with some of the ladies, presented her forehead to the old princess, bent under the benediction of the Armenian bishop, nodded with a smile to the young men with the canes, found for each the fitting adieu with perfect ease; and the wretched man could not prevent himself from comparing this Eastern slave, so Parisian, so distinguished in the best society of the world, with the other, the European brutalized by the East, stupefied with Turkish tobacco, and swollen with idleness.  His ambitions, his pride as a husband, were extinguished and humiliated in this marriage of which he saw the danger and the emptiness—­a final cruelty of fate taking from him even the refuge of personal happiness from all his public disasters.

Little by little the room was emptied.  The Levantines disappeared one after another, leaving each time an immense void in their place.  Mme. Jenkins was gone, and only two or three ladies remained whom Jansoulet did not know, and behind whom the mistress of the house seemed to shelter herself from him.  But Hemerlingue was free, and the Nabob rejoined him at the moment when he was furtively escaping to his offices on the same floor opposite his rooms.  Jansoulet went out with him, forgetting in his trouble to salute the baroness, and once on the antechamber staircase, Hemerlingue, cold and reserved while he was under his wife’s eye, expanded a little.

“It is very annoying,” said he in a low voice, as if he feared to be overheard, “that Mme. Jansoulet has not been willing to come.”

Jansoulet answered him by a movement of despair and savage helplessness.

“Annoying, annoying,” repeated the other in a whisper, and feeling for his key in his pocket.

“Come, old fellow,” said the Nabob, taking his hand, “there’s no reason, because our wives don’t agree—­That doesn’t hinder us from remaining friends.  What a good chat the other day, eh?”

“No doubt” said the baron, disengaging himself, as he opened the door noiselessly, showing the deep workroom, whose lamp burned solitarily before the enormous empty chair.  “Come, good-bye, I must go; I have my mail to despatch.”

“Ya didon, monci” (But look here, sir) said the poor Nabob, trying to joke, and using the patois of the south to recall to his old chum all the pleasant memories stirred up the other evening.  “Our visit to Le Merquier still holds good.  The picture we were going to present to him, you know.  What day?”

“Ah, yes, Le Merquier—­true—­eh—­well, soon.  I will write to you.”

“Really?  You know it is very important.”

“Yes, yes.  I will write to you.  Good-bye.”

And the big man shut his door in a hurry, as if he were afraid of his wife coming.

Two days after, the Nabob received a note from Hemerlingue, almost unreadable on account of the complicated scrawls, of abbreviations more or less commercial, under which the ex-sutler hid his entire want of spelling: