He had consumed six hours in reading this sad account of the follies and crimes of the owners of illustrious names.

Mascarin had listened with the complacency of an author who hears his own work read aloud to him, but all the while he was keenly watching him beneath his spectacles and the faces of his companions.  The effect that was produced was immense, and exactly what he had anticipated.  Paul, Hortebise, and Catenac gazed upon each other with faces in which astonishment at the strange recital, and then at the power of the man who had collected these facts together, were mingled, and Catenac was the first who spoke.  The sound of his own voice seemed gradually to dispel the vague sense of apprehension that hung about the office.

“Aha!” cried he, “I always said that our old friend Mascarin would make his mark in literature.  As soon as his pen touches the paper the business man vanishes; we have no longer a collection of dry facts and proofs, but the stirring pages of a sensational novel.”

“Do you really consider that as a mere romance?” asked Hortebise.

“It reads like one certainly; you must allow that.”

“Catenac,” remarked Mascarin in his bitterly sarcastic tone, “is best able to pronounce upon the truth or falsehood of this narrative, as he is the professional adviser of this same Duke de Champdoce, the very Norbert whose life has just been read to you.”

“I do not deny that there is some slight foundation to it,” returned the lawyer.

“Then what is it that you do deny?”

“Nothing, nothing; I merely objected, more in jest than otherwise, to the sentimental manner in which you have set forward your case.”

“Catenac,” remarked Mascarin, addressing the others, “has received many confidential communications from his noble client, which he has not thought fit to communicate to us; and though he fancied that we were drifting into quicksands and among breakers, he displayed no signal of warning to save us from our danger, hoping, like a true friend, that, by this means, he might get rid of us.”

Catenac began to utter protestations and denials, but Mascarin cut him short with an imperative gesture, and, after a long pause, he again commenced,—­

“You must understand that my inquisitors have had but little to do in this affair, for my work has chiefly consisted in putting fragments together.  It is not to me that you are indebted for the sensational (I think that that was the term used) part of my story, but rather to Madame de Mussidan and Norbert de Champdoce.  I am sure that some of the phrases must have struck you considerably.”

“It seems to me,” objected Catenac—­

“Perhaps,” broke in Mascarin, “you have forgotten the correspondence which the Countess de Mussidan preserved so carefully—­both his letters and her own, which Norbert returned to her.”

“And we have those?”

“Of course we have, only there is a perfect romance contained in these letters.  What I have read is a mere bald extract from them; and this is not all.  The man who assisted me in the unravelling of this dark intrigue was the original promoter—­Daumon.”