"Perhaps not," rejoined Madame, with a careless shrug of the shoulders. "Our bear is no doubt still suffering from a sore head, after the correction you administered to him last year. What a million pities that was!" she added with a sigh. "If you only had kept your temper then, Laurent!" "Kept my temper?" he retorted hotly. "At sight of that lout forcing his attentions on my future wife?... I had been less than a man!" "Fernande was not your future wife, then, Laurent." "She was that in her heart already. Were you not, Fernande?" he added, as once again he drew near to the young girl and took hold of her hand. "Thank God she is that now!" he added, as he raised the little hand to his lips. Madame la Marquise frowned. With all her love for her youngest son she yet was wroth with him for having so clumsily upset all her plans. She had but little patience with sentimental dalliance, and would have parted Laurent from the object of his heart's desire even now if it suited her purpose, and without the slightest compunction. II "In any case, mother," rejoined the young man, after a while, "you have had no cause to quarrel with Ronnay's burst of ill-temper, which took him off to Poland for close upon a year. Had he been at home, I doubt if you could have trafficked so easily with Leroux." Before Madame la Marquise had time to reply the door was thrown open, and M. le Comte entered in the company of three other men, every one of whom Madame greeted most effusively: "M. de Puisaye!" she exclaimed. "It is really an honour for this house to harbour our valiant chief! And you too, my dear Monsieur Prigent, and M. d'Ache!" she continued, as the three men in turn kissed her slender, finely-chiselled hand, then bowed to Mademoiselle Fernande and shook Laurent de Mortain by the hand. "What a presage of greater things to come," she added excitedly, "that you should be able to enter the grounds and the Chateau of La Frontenay like this, in open daylight ... without fear of spies!" The shorter of the three men--he whom Madame had addressed as de Puisaye--rubbed his hands gleefully together. He was a small man, dressed in worn and shabby clothes, who might have been termed good-looking but for the air of recklessness and dissipation which had already furrowed his face and dimmed the brightness of his eyes. "A presage, indeed, Madame la Marquise," he said. "M. de Courson tells me that you have everything ready for our big coup, and that all we need decide now is the day on which it were best to carry it through." "Optimistic as ever," broke in Francois Prigent, a tall, lean man, whose threadbare coat was a miracle of neatness, his down-at-heel boots polished till they shone, and whose nails were carefully manicured. "Our friend Joseph already sees himself the master of the Maurel foundries."