But the flash that shot from the monarch's eyes seemed far more terrible to him. Rising to his feet and stretching out his arm, the bey crushed him with these words, prepared in advance and uttered slowly in a rather guttural voice accustomed to the harsh Arabic syllables, but in very pure French: "You may return home, Mercanti. The foot goes where the heart leads it, mine shall never enter the door of the man who has robbed my country." Jansoulet tried to say a word. The bey waved his hand: "Begone!" And the engineer having pressed the button of an electric bell, to which a whistle replied, the train, which had not come to a full stop, stretched and strained its iron muscles and started ahead under full steam, waving its flags in the wind of the storm amid whirling clouds of dense smoke and sinister flashes. He stood by the track, dazed, staggering, crushed, watching his fortune recede and disappear, heedless of the great drops of rain that began to fall upon his bare head. Then, when the others rushed toward him, surrounded him and overwhelmed him with questions: "Isn't the Bey going to stop?" he stammered a few incoherent words: "Court intrigues--infamous machinations." And suddenly, shaking his fist at the train which had already disappeared, with bloodshot eyes and the foam of fierce wrath on his lips, he cried with the roar of a wild beast: "Vile curs!" "Courage, Jansoulet, courage." You can guess who said that, and who, passing his arm through the Nabob's, tried to straighten him up, to make him throw out his breast as he did, led him to the carriages amid the stupefied silence of the braided coats, and helped him to enter, crushed and bewildered, as a relative of the deceased is hoisted into a mourning carriage at the close of the lugubrious ceremony. The rain was beginning to fall, the peals of thunder followed one another rapidly. They crowded into the carriages, which started hurriedly homeward. Thereupon a heart-rending, yet comical thing took place, one of those cruel tricks which cowardly destiny plays upon its victims when they are down. In the fading light, the increasing obscurity caused by the squall, the crowd that filled all the approaches to the station believed that it could distinguish a Royal Highness amid such a profusion of gold lace, and as soon as the wheels began to revolve, a tremendous uproar, an appalling outcry which had been brewing in all those throats for an hour past, arose and filled the air, rebounded from hill to hill and echoed through the valley: "Vive le Bey!" Warned by that signal, the first flourishes rang out, the singing societies struck up in their turn, and as the noise increased from point to point, the road from Giffas to Saint-Romans was naught but one long, unbroken wave of sound. In vain did Cardailhac, all the gentlemen, Jansoulet himself, lean out of the windows and make desperate signs: "Enough! enough!" Their gestures were lost in the