Bigourdin persisted. “Although you have lived long in the country and been married to a Frenchwoman, you do not know, like myself who have it in my veins, of what the peasant blood of France is capable where money is concerned. It is impossible on your own showing, that Cécile should have spent five thousand francs a year. You have seen for yourself that she received the money. What has she done with it?” He leaned across the table and with great forefinger tapped the shoulder of Fortinbras. “She has hoarded it. It is there in the Rue Maugrabine.” Fortinbras shook his leonine head. “It was absurd. In the olden days, when she had money, had she not scattered it recklessly?” Bigourdin agreed. “But then,” said he, “you struck misfortune, poverty. Did you not observe a change in her habits, and in her character? Of course, we have often spoken of it. It was the outer trappings of the bourgeois that had disappeared and the _paysanne_ asserted herself. For many years my father supported my mother’s mother, a peasant from La Beauce who gave out that she was penniless. When she died they accidentally found the mattress of her bed stuffed with a little fortune. The blood of Grandmère Tidier ran in the veins of Cécile. And Cécile like all the family knew of the fortune of Grandmère Tidier.” All that in Fortinbras was half-forgotten, buried beneath the rubbish heap of years, again protested: his gently nurtured childhood, his smooth English home, his impeccable Anglo-Indian father, Major-General Fortinbras, who had all the servants in morning and evening for family prayers and read the lessons in the little village church on Sundays, his school-days—Winchester, with its noble traditions—all, as we English understand it, that goes to the making of an honourable gentleman. If Pactolus, dammed by his wife, poured through the kitchen taps, he would not turn them. “It is I then that will do it,” said Bigourdin. “I am not Anti-Semite in any way; but to present a Jew dealer, who is already very well off, with many thousands of francs is the act of an imbecile.” He tossed off his glass of Armagnac, beckoned the waiter, threw down the coins for payment and rose. “_Allons!_” said he. Fortinbras, exhausted in mind and soul, followed him. An auto-taxi took them to the Rue Maugrabine. The desolate and haggard _femme de journée_ was restoring the house of death to some sort of aimless order. Bigourdin put a ten-franc piece into her hand. “That is for you. Come back in two hours’ time.” The woman went. The two men were left alone in the wretched little room, whose poverty stared from its cracked and faded wall paper, from its bare floor, from the greasy plush couch with one maimed leg stuck in an old salmon tin. Fortinbras threw himself with familiar recklessness on the latter article of furniture and covered his eyes with his hand.