She rose indignantly.  She had come as his child and he had received her as a beggar.  They had not reached that point yet, thank God!

“Do you think so?” queried M. Gardinois, with a savage light in his eye.

Claire shuddered and walked toward the door without replying.  The old man detained her with a gesture.

“Take care! you don’t know what you’re refusing.  It is in your interest, you understand, that I suggest bringing your husband here.  You don’t know the life he is leading up yonder.  Of course you don’t know it, or you’d never come and ask me for money to go where yours has gone.  Ah!  I know all about your man’s affairs.  I have my police at Paris, yes, and at Asnieres, as well as at Savigny.  I know what the fellow does with his days and his nights; and I don’t choose that my crowns shall go to the places where he goes.  They’re not clean enough for money honestly earned.”

Claire’s eyes opened wide in amazement and horror, for she felt that a terrible drama had entered her life at that moment through the little low door of denunciation.  The old man continued with a sneer: 

“That little Sidonie has fine, sharp teeth.”

“Sidonie!”

“Faith, yes, to be sure.  I have told you the name.  At all events, you’d have found it out some day or other.  In fact, it’s an astonishing thing that, since the time—­But you women are so vain!  The idea that a man can deceive you is the last idea to come into your head.  Well, yes, Sidonie’s the one who has got it all out of him—­with her husband’s consent, by the way.”

He went on pitilessly to tell the young wife the source of the money for the house at Asnieres, the horses, the carriages, and how the pretty little nest in the Avenue Gabriel had been furnished.  He explained everything in detail.  It was clear that, having found a new opportunity to exercise his mania for espionage, he had availed himself of it to the utmost; perhaps, too, there was at the bottom of it all a vague, carefully concealed rage against his little Chebe, the anger of a senile passion never declared.

Claire listened to him without speaking, with a smile of incredulity.  That smile irritated the old man, spurred on his malice.  “Ah! you don’t believe me.  Ah! you want proofs, do you?” And he gave her proofs, heaped them upon her, overpowered her with knife-thrusts in the heart.  She had only to go to Darches, the jeweller in the Rue de la Paix.  A fortnight before, Georges had bought a diamond necklace there for thirty thousand francs.  It was his New Year’s gift to Sidonie.  Thirty thousand francs for diamonds at the moment of becoming bankrupt!

He might have talked the entire day and Claire would not have interrupted him.  She felt that the slightest effort would cause the tears that filled her eyes to overflow, and she was determined to smile to the end, the sweet, brave woman.  From time to time she cast a sidelong glance at the road.  She was in haste to go, to fly from the sound of that spiteful voice, which pursued her pitilessly.