"I've just met some one," she commenced. "Yes, a person from The Paradise, who is very well informed. It appears that they are going to offer you eighty thousand francs to-morrow."
"Eighty thousand francs!" he interrupted, in a terrible voice; "eighty thousand francs! Not for a million now!"
She tried to reason with him. But at that moment the shop door opened, and she suddenly drew back, pale and silent. It was her uncle Baudu, with his yellow face and aged look. Bourras caught his neighbour by the buttonhole, and without allowing him to say a word, as if goaded on by his presence, roared in his face: "What do you think they have the cheek to offer me? Eighty thousand francs! They've got to that point, the brigands! they think I'm going to sell myself like a prostitute. Ah! they've bought the house, and think they've got me now! Well! it's all over, they shan't have it! I might have given way, perhaps; but now it belongs to them, let them try to take it!"
"So the news is true?" said Baudu, in his slow voice. "I had heard of it, and came over to know if it was so."
"Eighty thousand francs!" repeated Bourras. "Why not a hundred thousand at once? It's this immense sum of money that makes me so indignant. Do they think they can make me commit a knavish trick with their money! They shan't have it, by heavens! Never, never, you hear me?"
Then Denise broke her silence to remark, in her calm, quiet way: "They'll have it in nine years' time, when your lease expires."
And, notwithstanding her uncle's presence, she begged the old man to accept. The struggle was becoming impossible, he was fighting against a superior force; it would be madness to refuse the fortune offered him. But he still replied no. In nine years' time he hoped to be dead, so as not to see it.
"You hear, Monsieur Baudu," he resumed, "your niece is on their side, it's she whom they have commissioned to corrupt me. She's with the brigands, my word of honour!"
Baudu, who had so far appeared not to notice Denise, now raised his head, with the surly movement that he affected when standing at his shop door, every time she passed. But, slowly, he turned round and looked at her, and his thick lips trembled.
"I know it," he replied in an undertone, and he continued looking at her.