It was dark in the little suite of rooms in the Rue de Constantinople; for George Du Roy and Clotilde de Marelle, having met at the door, had gone in at once, and she had said to him, without giving him time to open the Venetian blinds: “So you are going to marry Susan Walter?”

He admitted it quietly, and added: “Did not you know it?”

She exclaimed, standing before him, furious and indignant:

“You are going to marry Susan Walter? That is too much of a good thing. For three months you have been humbugging in order to hide that from me. Everyone knew it but me. It was my husband who told me of it.”

Du Roy began to laugh, though somewhat confused all the same; and having placed his hat on a corner of the mantelshelf, sat down in an armchair. She looked at him straight in the face, and said, in a low and irritated tone: “Ever since you left your wife you have been preparing this move, and you only kept me on as a mistress to fill up the interim nicely. What a rascal you are!”

He asked: “Why so? I had a wife who deceived me. I caught her, I obtained a divorce, and I am going to marry another. What could be simpler?”

She murmured, quivering: “Oh! how cunning and dangerous you are.”

He began to smile again. “By Jove! Simpletons and fools are always someone’s dupes.”

But she continued to follow out her idea: “I ought to have divined your nature from the beginning. But no, I could not believe that you could be such a blackguard as that.”