“Jenkins, mon bon, you have already worked miracles for me.  I ask you for one more.  Double the dose of my pearls; find something, whatever you will.  But I must be feeling young by Sunday.  You understand me, altogether young.”

And on the little letter in his hand, his fingers, warm once more and feverish, clinched themselves with a thrill of eager desire.

“Take care, M. le Duc,” said Jenkins, very pale and with compressed lips.  “I have no wish to alarm you unnecessarily with regard to the feeble state of your health, but it becomes my duty—­”

Mora gave a smile of pretty arrogance: 

“Your duty and my pleasure are two separate things, my worthy friend.  Let me burn the candle at both ends, if it amuses me.  I have never had so fine an opportunity as this time.”

He started: 

“The duchess!”

A door concealed behind a curtain had just opened to give passage to a merry little head with fair curls in disorder, quite fairy-like amid the laces and frills of a dressing-jacket worthy of a princess: 

“What do I hear?  You have not gone out?  But do scold him, doctor.  He is wrong, isn’t he, to have so many fancies about himself?  Look at him—­a picture of health!”

“There—­you see,” said the duke, laughing, to the Irishman.  “You will not come in, duchess?”

“No, I am going to carry you off, on the contrary.  My uncle d’Estaing has sent me a cage full of tropical birds.  I want to show them to you.  Wonderful creatures, of all colours, with little eyes like black pearls.  And so sensitive to cold—­nearly as much so as you are.”

“Let us go and have a look at them,” said the minister.  “Wait for me, Jenkins.  I shall be back in a moment.”

Then, noticing that he still had his letter in his hand, he threw it carelessly into the drawer of the little table at which he had been signing papers, and left the room behind the duchess, with the fine coolness of a husband accustomed to these changes of situation.

What prodigious mechanic, what incomparable manufacturer of toys, must it have been who succeeded in endowing the human mask with its suppleness, its marvellous elasticity!  How interesting to observe the face of this great seigneur surprised in the very planning of his adultery, with cheeks flushed in the anticipation of promised delights, calming down at a moment’s notice into the serenity of conjugal tenderness; how fine the devout obsequiousness, the paternal smile, after the Franklin method, of Jenkins, in the presence of the duchess, giving place suddenly, when he found himself alone, to a savage expression of anger and hatred, the pallor of a criminal, the pallor of a Castaing or of a Lapommerais hatching his sinister treasons.

One rapid glance towards each of the two doors, and he stood before the drawer full of precious papers, the little gold key still remaining in the lock with an arrogant carelessness, which seemed to say, “No one will dare.”