They did at once admit it, and with a celerity and sudden change of front that not only took Mr. Allonby's breath away, but also that of M. Isidore, who happened--no doubt by the merest chance--to be lounging outside the ever open office door, intently studying the _Figaro_, and who also happened to have dispatched Heinrich, the porter, on an errand, by the latter deemed trivial and unnecessary to the last degree. What M. Allonby had had the complaisance to observe, Madame Bontemps blandly stated in reply, put an entirely different complexion on the whole matter. She deeply regretted having, even in thought, wronged Madame or M. Isidore, whom she embraced as a son--he made a grimace over his _Figaro_ outside at this remark--she deplored the inconvenience suffered by Madame Allonby, and she should for the rest of her life cherish the memory of M. Allonby as that of a valued, a beloved, an inestimable, friend of the whole of her family. M. Bontemps corroborated these assertions with tears of a noble and profound emotion; Mlle. Geneviève (just then at the climax of an explanatory and embarrassing interview with Mrs. Allonby) was promptly summoned from the depths of the back premises at the very moment when M. le Vicomte Isidore Augustin René Joseph Marie de Beauregard de Vieuxbois was making a dramatic entrance from the front hall; and all was joy, reconciliation, effusion, tears, transport, intoxication. "It was all that little cat, Dorris," Ermengarde confided afterwards to those fellow-conspirators, the ex-Anarchist and the woman of mystery; "so that what she got this morning was perhaps not altogether wasted. Only I wish she hadn't had it quite so hot." "My conscience pricks me about de Vieuxbois' people," Arthur confessed, when gratuitous champagne unexpectedly crowned the banquet in the evening, and the visitors were asked by Madame Bontemps to drink to the betrothal of M. Isidore and Mlle. Geneviève. "They won't thank me for this afternoon's work. Just fancy a man in de Vieuxbois' position falling in love with a girl like Mlle. Bontemps, and taking a post as general utility person in a small hotel for her sake. Romantic young ass! The girl showed her sense in refusing him. His mother is distracted. The whole family have been at him about it! But the little chap would have her--Madame la Vicomtesse!"