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Returning across the Vieux Port in the bateau mouche, Monsieur Peloux no longer shuddered in dread of crime to be committed his shuddering was for accomplished crime. On his bald head, unheeded, the gushing tears of shame accumulated in pools.
Monsieur himself shall judge me when I have told him all!" And then with creditably imaginative variations on the theme of a hypothetical dying wife in combination with six supposititious starving children the man came close enough to telling all to make clear that his backer in cat-stealing was Monsieur Peloux! With a gasp of astonishment, the Major again took the word.
Moreover, she had personal incentives to take her revenges. From Monsieur Peloux, her only vail had been a miserable two-franc Christmas box. From the Major, as from a perpetually verdant Christmas-tree, boxes of bonbons and five-franc pieces at all times descended upon her in showers.
Judiciously ignoring this inopportunely equivocal incident, Monsieur Peloux reverted to the matter in chief and concluded his deliverance in these words: "I well understand, I repeat, that Madame for the moment makes a comedy of herself and of her cat for my amusing. But I persuade myself that her droll fancyings will not be lasting, and that she will be serious with me in the end.
Possessing these commendable characteristics, it follows that the doings of the Major Gontard in the railway station at Pas de Lanciers on the day sequent to the day on which Monsieur Peloux was the promoter of a criminal conspiracy could not have been other than they were. Equally does it follow that his doings produced the doings of the man with the bag.
Being literally true, this statement had in it so convincing a ring of sincerity that Monsieur Peloux paid down in full the blood-money and dismissed his bravo with commendation. Thereafter, being alone, he rubbed his hands gladly thinking of what was in the way to happen in sequence to the permanent removal of this cat stumbling-block from his path.
"Madame dines," was the announcement that met Monsieur Peloux when, in response to his ring, Madame Jolicoeur's door was opened for him by a trim maid-servant. "But Madame already has continued so long her dining," added the maid-servant, with a glint in her eyes that escaped his preoccupied attention, "that in but another instant must come the end.
Naturally, she bristled. "Monsieur must admit at least," she said sharply, "that her oglings did not come in his direction;" and with an irritatingly smooth sweetness added: "As to the dealings of Monsieur Peloux with the cat, Monsieur doubtless speaks with an assured knowledge.
The peloux of the Jardin Français were reëstablished and the curves and sweeps of the paths of the Jardin Anglais laid out anew. This ancient government property, arisen anew from its ruins, now bore the name of the Pavillon du Roi de Rome, after the son of Napoleon.
In that moment of his obscured perception a little black personage trotted into the salon on soundless paws. Quite possibly, in his then overwrought condition, had Monsieur Peloux seen this personage enter he would have shrieked in the confident belief that before him was a cat ghost! Pointedly, it was not a ghost.
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