"Ugh!" said Patrice to himself. "I'm fairly sick of this sportsman, with his cool ironical ways. It looks as if he were doing a considerable piece of thimblerigging at my expense."
He restrained himself, however, and, with a pretense of wanting to keep on good terms with the magistrate, came and sat down beside him:
"You must forgive me, sir," he said, "for insisting in what may appear to you an indiscreet fashion. But my conduct is explained not only by such sympathy or feeling as I entertain for Mme. Essarès at a moment in her life when she is more lonely than ever, a sympathy and feeling which she seems to repulse even more firmly than she did before. It is also explained by certain mysterious links which unite us to each other and which go back to a period too remote for our eyes to
