"Let him," said mademoiselle contemptuously.
"Let him?" He was aghast. "And what's to become of us?"
"In no case will the Binet Troupe interest me much longer," said she. "I shall be going to Paris soon. There are better theatres there than the Feydau. There's Mlle. Montansier's theatre in the Palais Royal; there's the Ambigu Comique; there's the Comedie Francaise; there's even a possibility I may have a theatre of my own."
His eyes grew big for once. He stretched out a fat hand, and placed it on one of hers. She noticed that it trembled.
"Has he promised that? Has he promised?"
She looked at him with her head on one side, eyes sly and a queer little smile on her perfect lips.
"He did not refuse me when I asked it," she answered, with conviction that all was as she desired it.
"Bah!" He withdrew his hand, and heaved himself up. There was disgust on his face. "He did not refuse!" he mocked her; and then with passion: "Had you acted as I advised you, he would have consented to anything that you asked, and what is more he would have provided anything that you asked--anything that lay within his means, and they are inexhaustible. You have changed a certainty into a possibility, and I hate possibilities--God of God! I have lived on possibilities, and infernally near starved on them."
Had she known of the interview taking place at that moment at the Chateau de Sautron she would have laughed less confidently at her father's gloomy forebodings. But she was destined never to know, which indeed was the cruellest punishment of all. She was to attribute all the evil that of a sudden overwhelmed her, the shattering of all the future hopes she had founded upon the Marquis and the sudden disintegration of the Binet Troupe, to the wicked interference of that villain Scaramouche.
She had this much justification that possibly, without the warning from M. de Sautron, the Marquis would have found in the events of that evening at the Theatre Feydau a sufficient reason for ending an entanglement that was fraught with too much unpleasant excitement, whilst the breaking-up of the Binet Troupe was most certainly the result of Andre-Louis' work. But it was not a result that he intended or even foresaw.
So much was this the case that in the interval after the second act, he sought the dressing-room shared by Polichinelle and Rhodomont. Polichinelle was in the act of changing.
"I shouldn't trouble to change," he said. "The piece isn't likely to go beyond my opening scene of the next act with Leandre."