“Give them the glimpse of a possibility of money in hand,” the lynx had said, when Petit-Claud brought the news of the arrest; “once let them grow accustomed to that idea, and they are ours; we will drive a bargain, and little by little we shall bring them down to our price for the secret.” The argument of the second act of the commercial drama was in a manner summed up in that speech. Mme. Séchard, heartbroken and full of dread for her brother’s fate, dressed and came downstairs. An agony of terror seized her when she thought that she must cross Angoulême alone on the way to the prison. Petit-Claud gave little thought to his fair client’s distress. When he came back to offer his arm, it was from a tolerably Machiavellian motive; but Eve gave him credit for delicate consideration, and he allowed her to thank him for it. The little attention, at such a moment, from so hard a man, modified Mme. Séchard’s previous opinion of Petit-Claud. “I am taking you round by the longest way,” he said, “and we shall meet nobody.” “For the first time in my life, monsieur, I feel that I have no right to hold up my head before other people; I had a sharp lesson given to me last night----” “It will be the first and the last.” “Oh! I certainly shall not stay in the town now----” “Let me know if your husband consents to the proposals that are all but definitely offered by the Cointets,” said Petit-Claud at the gate of the prison; “I will come at once with an order for David’s release from Cachan, and in all likelihood he will not go back again to prison.” This suggestion, made on the very threshold of the jail, was a piece of cunning strategy--a _combinazione_, as the Italians call an indefinable mixture of treachery and truth, a cunningly planned fraud which does not break the letter of the law, or a piece of deft trickery for which there is no legal remedy. St. Bartholomew’s for instance, was a political combination. Imprisonment for debt, for reasons previously explained, is such a rare occurrence in the provinces, that there is no house of detention, and a debtor is perforce imprisoned with the accused, convicted, and condemned--the three graduated subdivisions of the class generically styled criminal. David was put for the time being in a cell on the ground floor from which some prisoner had probably been recently discharged at the end of his time. Once inscribed on the jailer’s register, with the amount allowed by the law for a prisoner’s board for one month, David confronted a big, stout man, more powerful than the King himself in a prisoner’s eyes; this was the jailer.