There was a jeweller’s shop in the Boulevard St. Germain before which Carola used to keep him standing every day. A day or two earlier, she had discovered a curious pair of sleeve-links in the flashy shop window; they were joined together two and two by a little gilt chain and were cut out of a peculiar kind of quartz--a sort of smoky agate, which was not transparent, though it looked as if it were--and made to represent four cats’ heads. Venitequa, as I have already said, was in the habit of wearing a tailormade coat and skirt and a man’s shirt with stiff cuffs, and as she had a taste for oddities, she coveted these sleeve-links. They were more queer than attractive; Lafcadio thought them hideous; it would have irritated him to see his mistress wearing them; but now that he was going to leave her.... He went into the shop and paid a hundred and twenty francs for the links. “A piece of writing-paper, please.” And leaning on the counter, he wrote on a sheet of note-paper which the shopman brought him, these words: NIND “For Carola Venitequa, With thanks for having shown the stranger into my room, and begging her never to set her foot in it again.” He folded the paper and slipped it into the box in which the trinkets were packed. “No precipitation!” he said to himself as he was on the point of handing the box to the porter. “I’ll pass one more night under this roof. For this evening let’s be satisfied with locking Miss Carola out.” VI The moral law which Descartes considered provisional, but to which he submitted in the meantime, until he had established the rules that should regulate his life and conduct hereafter, was the same law--its provisional powers indefinitely protracted--which governed Julius de Baraglioul. But Julius’s temperament was not so intractable nor his intellect so commanding as to have given him hitherto much trouble in conforming to the proprieties. On the whole all that he demanded of life was his comfort--part of which consisted in his being successful as a man of letters. The failure of his last novel was the first experience of his life which had ever really galled him. He had been not a little mortified at being refused admittance to his father; he would have been much more so if he had known who it was who had forestalled him. On his way back to the Rue de Verneuil, it was with less and less conviction that he repelled the importunate supposition which had assailed him as he went to visit Lafcadio in the morning. He too had juxtaposed facts and dates; he too was obliged to recognise in this strange conjunction something more than a mere coincidence. Lafcadio’s youthful grace, moreover, had captivated him, and though he suspected his father was going to cheat him of a portion of his patrimony for the sake of this bastard brother, he felt no ill will towards him; he was even expecting him this morning with a curiosity that was almost tender in its solicitude.