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Valmont flatters himself he is not yet middle-aged, but poor Ducharme does not need his sparse gray beard to proclaim his advancing years. Valmont vaunts an air of prosperity; Ducharme wears the shabby habiliments and the shoulder-stoop of hopeless poverty. He shuffles cringingly along the street, a compatriot not to be proud of.
But now I can't settle down to nothin'; it's always that Frenchman before my eyes, and her." "Well, and after you have found her and disposed of her?" asked Sommers. "Oh, Ducharme will be all right then! He'll follow me like a lamb. He doesn't want to mess around with such. But she's got some power over him." "Simply he wants to live with her and not with you." The woman nodded her head sadly.
Ducharme, the king's interpreter, a kind-hearted, hospitable man, who frequently invited us to his house, where we enjoyed the charms of polished society and good cheer. The captain's residence was in the Iroquois division of the village; this circumstance led us to form another acquaintance that for some time afforded us some amusement, en passant.
In the first light of the morning the Ducharme woman, creeping from her room in the rear, caught sight of them. Mrs. Preston's head was lying on the doctor's arm, while he knelt beside the table, watching her pale face in its undisturbed sleep. At the footfall, he roused her gently. Mrs. Ducharme hastily drew back. She, too, did not seem to have passed a peaceful night.
Once she turned back to the lake, but finally she started across the frozen grass plots in the direction of the temple. She could see from a distance a black figure seated on the portico, and she hastened her steps. She recognized the familiar squat, black-clothed person of Mrs. Ducharme. There, in the sunlight between the broken pillars, this gloomy figure seemed of ill omen.
Alves regretted that she had turned back from the ice. Mrs. Ducharme showed no sign of life until Alves reached the steps. She was worn and unkempt. A ragged straw hat but partly disguised her rumpled hair. Alves recalled what Miss M'Gann had said about her drinking. "I've been to see you two, three times," Mrs. Ducharme said, in a hoarse, grumbling tone; "but you'se always out.
But besides M. Eugène Valmont, dressed in elegant attire as if he were still a boulevardier of Paris, occupier of the top floor in the Imperial Flats, there was another Frenchman in London to whom I must introduce you, namely, Professor Paul Ducharme, who occupied a squalid back room in the cheapest and most undesirable quarter of Soho.
I departed from my flat promptly at six o'clock, again as Paul Ducharme, carrying this time a bundle done up in brown paper under my arm, and proceeded directly to my room in Soho. Later I took a bus, still carrying my brown paper parcel, and reached Liverpool Street in ample time for the Continental train.
"I have a place in mind where you won't be likely to see many men that look like Ducharme!" He explained to her the situation of the Ninety-first Street cottage, and what Mrs. Preston needed. "You take this note there to-morrow morning, and tell her that you are willing to work for a home. Then I'll attend to the wages. If you do what I want, keep that fellow well locked up and relieve Mrs.
"I guess that's about it; but you see if she weren't around, he wouldn't know that he didn't love me." Mrs. Ducharme wiped away her tears, and looked at the doctor in hopes that he might suggest some plan by which she could accomplish her end. To him she was but another case of a badly working mechanism.
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