He waited a long long time. Then he heard angry voices below stairs, and made up his mind to go down. Madame Poincot was standing up exasperated, just on the point of going away, while her husband had seized hold of her dress, exclaiming: "But remember that you are destroying our daughters, your daughters, our children!" She answered stubbornly: "I will not go back to you!" Renoldi understood everything, came over to them in a state of great agitation, and gasped: "What, does she refuse to go?" She turned towards him, and, with a kind of shame-facedness, addressed him without any familiarity of tone, in the presence of her legitimate husband, said: "Do you know what he asks me to do? He wants me to go back, and live under one roof with him!" And she tittered with a profound disdain for this man, who was appealing to her almost on his knees. Then Renoldi, with the determination of a desperate man playing his last card, began talking to her in his turn, and pleaded the cause of the poor girls, the cause of the husband, his own cause. And when he stopped, trying to find some fresh argument, M. Poincot, at his wits' end, murmured, in the affectionate style in which he used to speak to her in days gone by: "Look here, Delphine! Think of your daughters!" Then she turned on both of them a glance of sovereign contempt, and, after that, flying with a bound towards the staircase, she flung at them these scornful words: "You are a pair of wretches!" Left alone, they gazed at each other for a moment, both equally crestfallen, equally crushed. M. Poincot picked up his hat, which had fallen down near where he sat, dusted off his knees the signs of kneeling on the floor, then raising both hands sorrowfully, while Renoldi was seeing him to the door, remarked with a parting bow: "We are very unfortunate, Monsieur." Then he walked away from the house with a heavy step. * * * * * NO QUARTER