But here the danger held potentialities if not the certainty of
pain--pain, it might be, not for one alone.

Besides, it was too absurd ....




V

PHINUIT & CO.


In the upshot, however, the necessity of his dismal forebodings had
nothing to do with the length of time devoted by Monsieur Duchemin to
kicking idle heels in the town of Nant; where the civil authorities
proved considerate in a degree that--even making allowance for the
local prestige of the house of Montalais--gratified and surprised the
confirmed Parisian. For that was just what the good man was at heart
and would be till he died, the form in which environment of younger
years had moulded him: less French than Parisian, sharing the almost
insular ignorance of life in the provinces characteristic of the native
boulevardier; to whom the sun is truly nothing more or less than a
spotlight focussed exclusively on Paris, leaving the rest of France in
a sort of crepuscular gloom, the world besides steeped in eternal
night.

The driver-guide of La Roque turned out to have been a thorough-paced
scamp, well and ill-known to the gendarmerie; the wound sustained by