The notary was not at his office. Of what consequence now to the young man were those financial difficulties which had seemed so formidable to him? What were they in presence of this other horrible thing? He left his letter, and went on, on foot, toward the club on Rue Scribe where he had determined to lunch. A telegraph office that he passed reminded him of his promise to send M. de Claviers a despatch. He went in; and there, as he rested his elbow on the desk of blackened wood, before the printed form, and dipped his pen into the ink, this species of somnambulism suddenly ceased. His consciousness returned, acute and heart-rending. That ghastly hour that he had just lived through was a reality. Jaubourg was really dying. He had really said to him those words which still filled his ears and which had rooted in his mind the most cruel, the most ineradicable of ideas. A sudden evocation showed him M. de Claviers entering that same room, and the dying man, in the throes of the same delirium, uttering the same words. "That shall not be!" he said, and he crumpled the paper, on which he had not even begun to write the address, with a convulsive gesture of dismay. Feverishly he wrote on another sheet: "Marquis de Claviers-Grandchamp. Château de Grandchamp, Oise.--Don't be alarmed. A decided improvement;" and signed it. Then he handed the untruthful despatch through the wicket. He was within two steps of the club. The sight of one of the members going in at the door, who, fortunately, did not see him, made him stop short and walk away, almost run, in the opposite direction. That member of the club knew Charles Jaubourg, as all the others did. He would ask him for news of him. The friendship between the sick man and M. de Claviers was legendary.--Friendship!--Suddenly Landri said to himself: "They all know. Such scandals as this the world always knows; it hawks them about and laughs at them. The whole club knows. All Paris knows. There were only two people who didn't know." He walked on and on,--how long he could not have told,--flying from those witnesses of the family disgrace, flying from himself. He mechanically entered a restaurant for luncheon, but had hardly begun to eat when he rose. Another image sprang up in his mind,--that of Valentine Olier. She too knew. That was the meaning of the exclamation that rushed from her lips: "Monsieur Jaubourg dying? I hope he won't see you"; of her entreaty not to see the sick man. She knew! With a bound as brutally instinctive as the contraction of his fingers on the white telegraphic form just before, Landri left the restaurant. He hailed another cab, to fly to her.