At last his turn came, and if a doubt as to M. Le Merquier had remained, he doubted no longer when he saw this great office, simple and severe, yet a little more ornate than the waiting-room, a fitting frame for the austerity of the lawyer’s principles, and for his thin form, tall, stooping, narrow-shouldered, squeezed into a black coat too short in the sleeves, from which protruded two black fists, broad and flat, two sticks of Indian ink with hieroglyphs of great veins. The clerical deputy had, with the leaden hue of a Lyonnese grown mouldy between his two rivers, a certain life of expression which he owed to his double look--sometimes sparkling, but impenetrable behind the glass of his spectacles; more often, vivid, mistrustful, and dark, above these same glasses, surrounded by the shadow which a lifted eye and a stooping head gives the eyebrow. After a greeting almost cordial in comparison with the cold bow which the two colleagues exchanged at the Chamber, an “I was expecting you” in which perhaps an intention showed itself, the lawyer pointed the Nabob into a seat near his desk, told the smug domestic in black not to come till he was summoned, arranged a few papers, after which, sinking into his arm-chair with the attitude of a man ready to listen, who becomes all ears, his legs crossed, he rested his chin on his hand, with his eyes fixed on a great rep curtain falling to the ground in front of him. The moment was decisive, the situation embarrassing. Jansoulet did not hesitate. It was one of the poor Nabob’s pretensions to know men as well as Mora. And this instinct, which, said he, had never deceived him, warned him that he was at that moment dealing with a rigid and unshakable honesty, a conscience in hard stone, untouchable by pick-axe or powder. “My conscience!” Suddenly he changed his programme, threw to the winds the tricks and equivocations which embarrassed his open and courageous disposition, and, head high and heart open, held to this honest man a language he was born to understand. “Do not be astonished, my dear colleague,”--his voice trembled, but soon became firm in the conviction of his defence--“do not be astonished if I am come to find you here instead of asking simply to be heard by the third committee. The explanation which I have to make to you is so delicate and confidential that it would have been impossible to make it publicly before my colleagues.” Maitre Le Merquier, above his spectacles, looked at the curtain with a disturbed air. Evidently the conversation was taking an unexpected turn.