starve, as the keeper of it.  Come here, my jolly little Mouse!  Hey! presto! pass!  I transform you, for the time being, into a respectable lady.  Stop there, in the palm of my great big hand, my dear, and listen.  You marry the poor man whom you love, Mouse, and one half your friends pity, and the other half blame you.  And now, on the contrary, you sell yourself for gold to a man you don’t care for, and all your friends rejoice over you, and a minister of public worship sanctions the base horror of the vilest of all human bargains, and smiles and smirks afterwards at your table, if you are polite enough to ask him to breakfast.  Hey! presto! pass!  Be a mouse again, and squeak.  If you continue to be a lady much longer, I shall have you telling me that Society abhors crime—­and then, Mouse, I shall doubt if your own eyes and ears are really of any use to you.  Ah!  I am a bad man, Lady Glyde, am I not?  I say what other people only think, and when all the rest of the world is in a conspiracy to accept the mask for the true face, mine is the rash hand that tears off the plump pasteboard, and shows the bare bones beneath.  I will get up on my big elephant’s legs, before I do myself any more harm in your amiable estimations—­I will get up and take a little airy walk of my own.  Dear ladies, as your excellent Sheridan said, I go—­and leave my character behind me.”

He got up, put the cage on the table, and paused for a moment to count the mice in it.  “One, two, three, four——­Ha!” he cried, with a look of horror, “where, in the name of Heaven, is the fifth—­the youngest, the whitest, the most amiable of all—­my Benjamin of mice!”

Neither Laura nor I were in any favorable disposition to be amused.  The Count’s glib cynicism had revealed a new aspect of his nature from which we both recoiled.  But it was impossible to resist the comical distress of so very large a man at the loss of so very small a mouse.  We laughed in spite of ourselves; and when Madame Fosco rose to set the example of leaving the boat-house empty, so that her husband might search it to its remotest corners, we rose also to follow her out.

Before we had taken three steps, the Count’s quick eye discovered the lost mouse under the seat that we had been occupying.  He pulled aside the bench, took the little animal up in his hand, and then suddenly stopped, on his knees, looking intently at a particular place on the ground just beneath him.

When he rose to his feet again, his hand shook so that he could hardly put the mouse back in the cage, and his face was of a faint livid yellow hue all over.

“Percival!” he said, in a whisper.  “Percival! come here.”

Sir Percival had paid no attention to any of us for the last ten minutes.  He had been entirely absorbed in writing figures on the sand, and then rubbing them out again with the point of his stick.

“What’s the matter now?” he asked, lounging carelessly into the boat-house.