There are men that can steal a fortune, yet can never cheat at cards, and Mistrial was one of their race; he could not openly dishonor himself in petty ways. Many a scoundrel has a pride of his own. It is both easy and difficult to compare a bandit to a sneak-thief, Napoleon to Cartouche. Mistrial had nothing of the Napoleon about him, and he was lacking even in the strength which Cartouche possessed. But among carpet highwaymen commend me to his peer. And now, as he thought of the will, Gonfallon's query recurred to him, and he asked himself where was that sting? Not in the present, surely--for that from a bitterness had changed to a delight; and as for the future, each instant of it was sentient with invocations, fulfilled to the tips with the surprises of dream. The day he had claimed but a share in; the morrow was wholly his. He could have a dwelling in Mayfair and a marble palace on the Mediterranean Sea. For a scrap of paper he would never miss there was a haunt of ghosts dozing on the Grand Canal. In spring, when Paris is at her headiest, there, near that Triumphal Arch which overlooks the Elysian Fields, stood, _entre cour et jardin_, an hotel which he already viewed as his own. And when he wearied of the Old World, there was the larger and fuller life of the New. There was Peru, there was Mexico and Ecuador; and in those Italys of the Occident were girls whose lips said, Drink me; whose eyes were of chrysoberyl and of jade. _Ah, oui, les femmes; tant que le monde tournera il n'y aura que ca._ With blithe anticipation he hummed the air and snapped his fingers as Capoul was wont to do. At last he saw himself the Roland Mistrial that should have been, prodigal of gold, sultanesque of manner, feted, courted, welcomed, past-master in the lore and art of love. There were worlds still to be conquered; and before his hair grizzled and the furrows came he felt conscious of the possession of a charm that should make those worlds his own. He had waited indeed; he had toiled and manoeuvred; but now the great clock we call Opportunity had struck. Let him but ask, and it would be given. Wishes were spaniels; he had but a finger to raise, and they fawned at his feet. And then, as those vistas of which we have all caught a glimpse rose in melting splendor and swooned again through sheer excesses of their own delights, suddenly he bethought him of the multiples of one and of two.