This, then, was the alibi prepared in case of trouble.  Juliette, had she been less carried away by her own feelings, would have noticed old Tabaret’s emotion, and would certainly have held her tongue.  He was perfectly livid, and trembled like a leaf.

“Well,” he said, making a great effort to utter the words, “the supper, I suppose, was none the less gay for that.”

“Gay!” echoed the young woman, shrugging her shoulders; “you do not seem to know much of your friend.  If you ever ask him to dinner, take good care not to give him anything to drink.  Wine makes him as merry as a funeral procession.  At the second bottle, he was more tipsy than a cork; so much so, that he lost nearly everything he had with him:  his overcoat, purse, umbrella, cigar-case—­”

Old Tabaret couldn’t sit and listen any longer; he jumped to his feet like a raving madman.

“Miserable wretch!” he cried, “infamous scoundrel!  It is he; but I have him!”

And he rushed out, leaving Juliette so terrified that she called her maid.

“Child,” said she, “I have just made some awful blunder, have let some secret out.  I am sure that something dreadful is going to happen; I feel it.  That old rogue was no friend of Noel’s, he came to circumvent me, to lead me by the nose; and he succeeded.  Without knowing it I must have spoken against Noel.  What can I have said?  I have thought carefully, and can remember nothing; but he must be warned though.  I will write him a line, while you find a messenger to take it.”

Old Tabaret was soon in his cab and hurrying towards the Prefecture of Police.  Noel an assassin!  His hate was without bounds, as formerly had been his confiding affection.  He had been cruelly deceived, unworthily duped, by the vilest and the most criminal of men.  He thirsted for vengeance; he asked himself what punishment would be great enough for the crime.

“For he not only assassinated Claudine,” thought he, “but he so arranged the whole thing as to have an innocent man accused and condemned.  And who can say that he did not kill his poor mother?”

He regretted the abolition of torture, the refined cruelty of the middle ages:  quartering, the stake, the wheel.  The guillotine acts so quickly that the condemned man has scarcely time to feel the cold steel cutting through his muscles; it is nothing more than a fillip on the neck.  Through trying so much to mitigate the pain of death, it has now become little more than a joke, and might be abolished altogether.

The certainty of confounding Noel, of delivering him up to justice, of taking vengeance upon him, alone kept old Tabaret up.

“It is clear,” he murmured, “that the wretch forgot his things at the railway station, in his haste to rejoin his mistress.  Will they still be found there?  If he has had the prudence to go boldly, and ask for them under a false name, I can see no further proofs against him.  Madame Chaffour’s evidence won’t help me.  The hussy, seeing her lover in danger, will deny what she has just told me; she will assert that Noel left her long after ten o’clock.  But I cannot think he has dared to go to the railway station again.”