There was for him in that affair a malignancy of perverted justice which, by means of a moral shock, attacked his vigorous physique.

"It will end by killing me," he used to affirm many times a day.

And, in fact, since that time he began to suffer from fever, from liver pains, and mostly from a worrying inability to think of anything else.

The Finance Minister could have formed no conception of the profound subtlety of his revenge.

Even Mr.Gould's letters to his fourteen-year-old boy Charles, then away in England for his education, came at last to talk of practically nothing but the mine.