Madame, toying idly with a plate, her regards on the table, sighed. "And yet they say matches are made in heaven," she murmured softly.
"It is from heaven--from the stars--we derive our knowledge," he answered, in the same tone.
But his face!--it was well she did not see that! And before more passed, M. de Vidoche broke into the conversation. "What rubbish is this?" he said, speaking roughly to his wife. "Have you finished? Then let us pay this rascally landlord and be off. If you do not want to spend the night on the road, that is. Where are those fools of servants?"
He rose, and went to the door and shouted for them, and came back and took up his cloak and hat with much movement and bustle. But it was noticeable in all he did that he never once met the astrologer's eye or looked his way. Even when he bade him a surly "Good-night"--casually uttered in the midst of injunctions to his wife to be quick--he spoke over his shoulder; and he left the room in the same fashion, completely absorbed, it seemed, in the fastening of his cloak.
Some, treated in this cavalier fashion, might have been hurt, and some might have resented it. But the man in black did neither. Left alone, he remained by the table in an expectant attitude, a sneering smile, which the light of the candles threw into high relief, on his grim visage. Suddenly the door opened, and M. de Vidoche, cloaked and covered, came in. Without raising his eyes, he looked round the room--for something he had mislaid, it seemed.
"Oh, by the way," he said suddenly, and without looking up.
"_My address?_" the man in black interjected, with a devilish readiness. "The end of the Rue Touchet in the Quartier du Marais, near the river. Where, believe me," he continued, with a mocking bow, "I shall give you madame's horoscope with the greatest pleasure, or any other little matter you may require."
"I think you are the devil!" M. de Vidoche muttered wrathfully, his cheek growing pale.
"Possibly," the astrologer answered. "In that or any other case--_au revoir!_"
When the landlord came up a little later to apologise to M. Solomon Nôtredame de Paris for the inconvenience to which he had unwillingly put him, he found his guest in high good-humour. "It is nothing, my friend--it is nothing," M. Nôtredame said kindly. "I found my company good enough. This M. de Vidoche is of this country; and a rich man, I understand."