‘It is a word that I shall never say,’ exclaimed La Chicot, decisively. ‘I am an honest woman. And then, I am too proud.’ Desrolles wondered whether it was pride, virtue, or rank obstinacy which made La Chicot reject such brilliant offers. It was not easy for him to believe in virtue, masculine or feminine. He had not travelled by those paths in which the virtues grow and flourish, but he had made intimate acquaintance with the vices. Since a certain interview with La Chicot’s husband, in which he had promised to keep a paternal eye upon the lady, Mr. Desrolles had wound himself completely into the wife’s confidence. He had made himself alike useful and agreeable. Though she kept her wealthy adorer at arm’s length, she liked to talk of him. The hothouse flowers he sent her adorned her table, and looked strangely out of place in the tawdry, littered room, where yesterday’s dust was generally left to be swept away to-morrow. One thing La Chicot did not know, and that was that Mr. Desrolles had made the acquaintance of her admirer, and was being paid by Mr. Lemuel to plead his cause. ‘You seem to be better off than you used to be, my friend,’ she said to him one day. ‘Unless I deceive myself, that is a new coat.’ ‘Yes,’ answered the man of the world, without blushing. ‘I have been dabbling a little on the Stock Exchange, and have had better luck than usual.’ Desrolles stirred the heaped-up coals into a blaze, and filled himself a third glass of cognac. ‘It’s as fine as a liqueur,’ he said, smacking his lips. ‘It would be a sin to dilute such stuff. By the way, when do you expect your husband?’ ‘I never expect him,’ answered La Chicot. ‘He goes and comes as he chooses. He is like the wandering Jew.’ ‘He is gone to Paris on business, I suppose!’ ‘On business or pleasure. I neither know nor care which. He earns his living. Those ridiculous pictures of his please both in London and Paris. See here!’ She tossed him over a crumpled heap of comic papers, English and French. Her husband’s name figured in all, affixed to the wildest caricatures--scenes theatrical and Bohemian, sketches full of life and humour. ‘To judge from those you would suppose he was rather a cheerful companion,’ said La Chicot, ‘and yet he is more dismal than a funeral.’ ‘He vents all his cheerfulness on his wood blocks,’ suggested Desrolles. Of late Jack Chicot had been a restless wanderer, spending very little of his life in the Cibber Street lodging. There was not even the pretence of union between his wife and him, and there never had been since La Chicot’s recovery. They were civil to each other, for the most part; but there were times when the wife’s tongue grew bitter, and her evil temper flashed out like a thin thread of forked lightning cleaving a dark summer sky. The husband was always civil. La Chicot could not exasperate him into retaliation.