label and the thread.  His peremptory manner, the eruption on his blotched countenance, the green eyes, and a malignant something about him,—­all these things struck the beholder with the same sense of surprise as storm-clouds in a blue sky.  If in his private office, as he showed himself to La Cibot, he was the common knife that a murderer catches up for his crime,—­now, at the Presidente’s door, he was the daintily-wrought dagger which a woman sets among the ornaments on her what-not.

A great change had taken place in the Rue de Hanovre.  The Count and Countess Popinot and the young people would not allow the President and his wife to leave the house that they had settled upon their daughter to pay rent elsewhere.  M. and Mme. la Presidente, therefore, were installed on the second floor, now left at liberty, for the elderly lady had made up her mind to end her days in the country.

Mme. Camusot took Madeleine Vivet, with her cook and her man-servant, to the second floor, and would have been as much pinched for money as in the early days, if the house had not been rent free, and the President’s salary increased to ten thousand francs.  This aurea mediocritas was but little satisfactory to Mme. de Marville.  Even now she wished for means more in accordance with her ambitions; for when she handed over their fortune to their daughter, she spoiled her husband’s prospects.  Now Amelie had set her heart upon seeing her husband in the Chamber of Deputies; she was not one of those women who find it easy to give up their way; and she by no means despaired of returning her husband for the arrondissement in which Marville is situated.  So for the past two months she had teased her father-in-law, M. le Baron Camusot (for the new peer of France had been advanced to that rank), and done her utmost to extort an advance of a hundred thousand francs of the inheritance which one day would be theirs.  She wanted, she said, to buy a small estate worth about two thousand francs per annum set like a wedge within the Marville lands.  There she and her husband would be near their children and in their own house, while the addition would round out the Marville property.  With that the Presidente laid stress upon the recent sacrifices which she and her husband had been compelled to make in order to marry Cecile to Viscount Popinot, and asked the old man how he could bar his eldest son’s way to the highest honors of the magistracy, when such honors were only to be had by those who made themselves a strong position in parliament.  Her husband would know how to take up such a position, he would make himself feared by those in office, and so on and so on.

“They do nothing for you unless you tighten a halter round their necks to loosen their tongues,” said she.  “They are ungrateful.  What do they not owe to Camusot!  Camusot brought the House of Orleans to the throne by enforcing the ordinances of July.”

M. Camusot senior answered that he had gone out of his depth in railway speculations.  He quite admitted that it was necessary to come to the rescue, but put off the day until shares should rise, as they were expected to do.