“I have never asked you for any account of it,” said Madame Thuillier, gently. “If it had been lost in the uses you made of it, you would never have heard a single word from me; but it has prospered, and it is just that I should have the benefit. It is not for myself that I reserve it.” “Perhaps not; if this is the course you take, it is not at all sure that you and I will go out of the same door long.” “Do you mean that Monsieur Thuillier will send me away? He must have reasons for doing that, and, thank God! I have been a wife above reproach.” “Viper! hypocrite! heartless creature!” cried Brigitte, coming to an end of her arguments. “Sister,” said Madame Thuillier, “you are in my apartment--” “Am I, you imbecile?” cried the old maid, in a paroxysm of anger. “If I didn’t restrain myself--” And she made a gesture both insulting and threatening. Madame Thuillier rose to leave the room. “No! you shall not go out,” cried Brigitte, pushing her down into her chair; “and till Thuillier comes home and decides what he will do with you you’ll stay locked up here.” Just as Brigitte, her face on fire, returned to the room where she had left Madame Colleville, her brother came in. He was radiant. “My dear,” he said to the Megaera, not observing her fury, “everything is going on finely; the conspiracy of silence is broken; two papers, the ‘National’ and a Carlist journal, have copied articles from us, and there’s a little attack in a ministerial paper.” “Well, all is not going on finely here,” said Brigitte, “and if it continues, I shall leave the barrack.” “Whom are you angry with now?” asked Thuillier. “With your insolent wife, who has made me a scene; I am trembling all over.” “Celeste make you a scene!” said Thuillier; “then it is the very first time in her life.” “There’s a beginning to everything, and if you don’t bring her to order--” “But what was it about--this scene?” “About madame’s not choosing that la Peyrade should marry her goddaughter; and out of spite, to prevent the marriage, she refused to give anything in the contract.” “Come, be calm,” said Thuillier, not disturbed himself, the admission of the “Echo” into the polemic making another Pangloss of him. “I’ll settle all that.” “You, Flavie,” said Brigitte, when Thuillier had departed to his wife, “you will do me the pleasure to go down to your own apartment, and tell Mademoiselle Celeste that I don’t choose to see her now, because if she made me any irritating answer I might box her ears. You’ll tell her that I don’t like conspiracies; that she was left at liberty to choose Monsieur Phellion junior if she wanted him, and she did not want him; that the matter is now all arranged, and that if she does not wish to see her ‘dot’ reduced to what you are able to give her, which isn’t as much as a bank-messenger could carry in his waistcoat pocket--”