"You need not leave me, Renée," said the professor, as she was about to retire. "I am sure these gentlemen will not mind, and I know she wants to know the worst, don't you, Renée?" Delapine listened quietly to the history of the New Jerusalem bubble, and leaning back with his eyes half closed, and with the tips of his fingers pressed together after the manner of divines, but said nothing. When Payot and Beaupaire had quite finished, Delapine looked up with a smile. "Well," he answered, "I like you to put your confidence in me. You are a man after my own heart, and I promise you I will put you straight again, in fact all my arrangements for doing it have been completed for several days past." "What do you mean, professor?" the two men called out together. "Have I not put it clearly then?" "Yes, but we don't understand you." "Ah, that is another affair. As a matter of fact I did not intend that you should understand me. But I know everything that has happened since you first met with that arch-rogue, Baron D'Ormontagne, who by the way was a bookmaker's clerk who got dismissed for swindling, and is no more a baron than you are." "My God," said Payot, "how did you learn all these things?" "A little bird told me," said Delapine, smiling. "Now, my dear Payot, all you have to do is to sell everything you have got, and pay off your debts like a man of honour as I know you are. I give you fourteen days to do it in." "Good," replied Payot, "and then?" "Then come and see me again." Renée nodded significantly to Delapine. "My lady doctor is in command of the ship, and her orders have to be obeyed, and they are that both of you must leave the room at once. Pray do not think that I want to get rid of you, gentlemen, but I have no option in the matter," said Delapine, smiling. CHAPTER XXI MARCEL MAKES AN UNEXPECTED ACQUAINTANCE Beaupaire and Payot had no sooner left the house than they encountered Marcel walking up and down the garden footpath. He was so absorbed in composing aloud a new poem on Christopher Columbus that he was quite unconscious that he was being overheard. "Dis donc, mon cher Marcel, what is that you are saying about a flock of parrots?" "It was a remarkable incident in the great navigator's voyage which profoundly affected mankind--but I had no idea that I was declaiming aloud." "Indeed you were, and we were both remarking what charming verses they were. But tell us what the parrots had to do in the matter?"