who bought back from him the mansion which he had been compelled to give up building on the Boulevard Malesherbes. The contractors were at last smitten with the desire of residing on "their Boulevard." As they had sold their share of the building plots at a profit, and scented the embarrassed circumstances of their ex-partner, they offered to rid him of the enclosure in the centre of which the mansion rose to the flooring of the first storey, where the iron girders were partly placed. Only they talked of the solid foundations in cut stone as "useless rubbish," saying that they would have preferred the soil to be bare so as to build upon it according to their taste. Saccard had to sell, without taking the hundred and odd thousand francs which he had already expended into account. And what exasperated him the more was that the contractors would never agree to take the ground back at the rate of two hundred and fifty francs the metre, at which figure it had been valued when the plots were shared. They knocked off twenty-five francs per metre, like those second-hand dealers who will only give four francs for an object which they sold for five the day before. Forty-eight hours later, Saccard had the grief of seeing an army of masons invade the enclosure and continue building upon the so called "useless rubbish." He thus played the impecunious all the better before his wife, as his affairs were becoming more and more muddled. He was not the man to confess himself for the simple love of truth. "But if you find yourself embarrassed," said Renée with an air of doubt, "why did you buy me that aigrette and necklace which cost you, I believe, sixty-five thousand francs? I have no use for those jewels and I shall be obliged to ask your permission to dispose of them so as to give Worms something on account." "Never do that!" he exclaimed nervously. "If you were not seen wearing those jewels at the ball at the ministry to-morrow people would gossip about my position." He was good-natured that morning, so he ended by smiling and muttering with a wink: "We speculators, my dear, are like pretty women, we have our little trickeries. Pray keep your aigrette and your necklace for love of me."