position indeed was mine that night! The Duc obeyed the first impulse of
his wrath. He imagined that I had dishonoured him; he would dishonour me
in return. Easier to his pride, too, a charge against the robber of
jewels than against a favoured lover of his wife. But when I, obeying
the first necessary obligation of honour, invented on the spur of the
moment the story by which the Duchesse's reputation was cleared from
suspicion, accused myself of a frantic passion and the trickery of a
fabricated key, the Due's true nature of gentilhomme came back. He
retracted the charge which he could scarcely even at the first blush have
felt to be well-founded; and as the sole charge left was simply that
which men _comme il faut_ do not refer to criminal courts and police
investigations, I was left to make my bow unmolested and retreat to my
own rooms, awaiting there such communciations as the Duc might deem it
right to convey to me on the morrow.

"But on the morrow the Duc, with his wife and personal suite, quitted
Paris en route for Spain; the bulk of his retinue, including the
offending Abigail, was discharged; and, whether through these servants or
through the police, the story before evening was in the mouth of every
gossip in club or cafe,--exaggerated, distorted, to my ignominy and
shame. My detection in the cabinet, the sale of the jewels, the
substitution of paste by De N., who was known to be my servile imitator
and reputed to be my abject tool, all my losses on the turf, my debts,--
all these scattered fibres of flax were twisted together in a rope that
would have hanged a dog with a much better name than mine. If some
disbelieved that I could be a thief, few of those who should have known
me best held me guiltless of a baseness almost equal to that of theft,--
the exaction of profit from the love of a foolish woman."

"But you could have told your own tale, shown the letters you had