"You know me too well to believe it," Castanier retorted. Aquilina was
benumbed by his coolness.

"Then how do you know it?" she murmured.
"I did not know it until I went into the drawing-room; now I know it--

now I see and know all things, and can do all things."
The sergeant was overcome with amazement.

"Very well then, save him, save him, dear!" cried the girl, flinging
herself at Castanier's feet. "If nothing is impossible to you, save

him! I will love you, I will adore you, I will be your slave and not
your mistress. I will obey your wildest whims; you shall do as you

will with me. Yes, yes, I will give you more than love; you shall have
a daughter's devotion as well as . . . Rodolphe! why will you not

understand! After all, however violent my passions may be, I shall be
yours for ever! What should I say to persuade you? I will invent

pleasures . . . I . . . Great heavens! one moment! whatever you shall
ask of me--to fling myself from the window for instance--you will need

to say but one word, 'Leon!' and I will plunge down into hell. I would
bear any torture, any pain of body or soul, anything you might inflict

upon me!"
Castanier heard her with indifference. For an answer, he indicated

Leon to her with a fiendish laugh.
"The guillotine is waiting for him," he repeated.

"No, no, no! He shall not leave this house. I will save him!" she
cried. "Yes; I will kill any one who lays a finger upon him! Why will

you not save him?" she shrieked aloud; her eyes were blazing, her hair
unbound. "Can you save him?"

"I can do everything."
"Why do you not save him?"

"Why?" shouted Castanier, and his voice made the ceiling ring.--"Eh!
it is my revenge! Doing evil is my trade!"

"Die?" said Aquilina; "must he die, my lover? Is it possible?"
She sprang up and snatched a stiletto from a basket that stood on the

chest of drawers and went to Castanier, who now began to laugh.
"You know very well that steel cannot hurt me now----"

Aquilina's arm suddenly dropped like a snapped harp string.
"Out with you, my good friend," said the cashier, turning to the

sergeant, "and go about your business."
He held out his hand; the other felt Castanier's superior power, and

could not choose but to obey.
"This house is mine; I could send for the commissary of police if I

chose, and give you up as a man who has hidden himself on my premises,
but I would rather let you go; I am a fiend, I am not a spy."

"I shall follow him!" said Aquilina.
"Then follow him," returned Castanier.--"Here, Jenny----"

Jenny appeared.
"Tell the porter to hail a cab for them.--Here Naqui," said Castanier,

drawing a bundle of bank-notes from his pocket; "you shall not go away
like a pauper from a man who loves you still."

He held out three hundred thousand francs. Aquilina took the notes,
flung them on the floor, spat on them, and trampled upon them in a

frenzy of despair.
"We will leave this house on foot," she cried, "without a farthing of

your money.--Jenny, stay where you are."
"Good-evening!" answered the cashier, as he gathered up the notes

again. "I have come back from my journey.--Jenny," he added, looking
at the bewildered waiting-maid, "you seem to me to be a good sort of

girl. You have no mistress now. Come here. This evening you shall have
a master."

Aquilina, who felt safe nowhere, went at once with the sergeant to the
house of one of her friends. But all Leon's movements were

suspiciously watched by the police, and after a time he and three of
his friends were arrested. The whole story may be found in the

newspapers of that day.
Castanier felt that he had undergone a mental as well as a physical

transformation. The Castanier of old no longer existed--the boy, the
young Lothario, the soldier who had proved his courage, who had been

tricked into a marriage and disillusioned, the cashier, the passionate
lover who had committed a crime for Aquilina's sake. His inmost nature

had suddenly asserted itself. His brain had expanded, his senses had
developed. His thoughts comprehended the whole world; he saw all the

things of earth as if he had been raised to some high pinnacle above
the world.

Until that evening at the play he had loved Aquilina to distraction.
Rather than give her up he would have shut his eyes to her

infidelities; and now all that blind passion had passed away as a
cloud vanishes in the sunlight.

Jenny was delighted to succeed to her mistress' position and fortune,
and did the cashier's will in all things; but Castanier, who could

read the inmost thoughts of the soul, discovered the real motive
underlying this purelyphysicaldevotion. He amused himself with her,

however, like a mischievous child who greedily sucks the juice of the
cherry and flings away the stone. The next morning at breakfast time,

when she was fully convinced that she was a lady and the mistress of
the house, Castanier uttered one by one the thoughts that filled her

mind as she drank her coffee.
"Do you know what you are thinking, child?" he said, smiling. "I will

tell you: 'So all that lovely rosewood furniture that I coveted so
much, and the pretty dresses that I used to try on, are mine now! All

on easy terms that Madame refused, I do no know why. My word! if I
might drive about in a carriage, have jewels and pretty things, a box

at the theatre, and put something by! with me he should lead a life of
pleasure fit to kill him if he were not as strong as a Turk! I never

saw such a man!'--Was not that just what you were thinking," he went
on, and something in his voice made Jenny turn pale. "Well, yes,

child; you could not stand it, and I am sending you away for your own
good; you would perish in the attempt. Come, let us part good

friends," and he coolly dismissed her with a very small sum of money.
The first use that Castanier had promised himself that he would make

of the terrible power brought at the price of his eternal happiness,
was the full and complete indulgence of all his tastes.

He first put his affairs in order, readily settled his accounts with
M. de Nucingen, who found a worthy German to succeed him, and then

determined on a carouse worthy of the palmiest days of the Roman
Empire. He plunged into dissipation as recklessly as Belshazzar of old

went to that last feast in Babylon. Like Belshazzar, he saw clearly
through his revels a gleaming hand that traced his doom in letters of

flame, not on the narrow walls of the banqueting-chamber, but over the
vast spaces of heaven that the rainbow spans. His feast was not,

indeed, an orgy confined within the limits of a banquet, for he
squandered all the powers of soul and body in exhausting all the

pleasures of earth. The table was in some sort earth itself, the earth
that trembled beneath his feet. His was the last festival of the

reckless spendthrift who has thrown all prudence to the winds. The
devil had given him the key of the storehouse of human pleasures; he

had filled and refilled his hands, and he was fast nearing the bottom.
In a moment he had felt all that that enormous power could accomplish;

in a moment he had exercised it, proved it, wearied of it. What had
hitherto been the sum of human desires became as nothing. So often it

happens that with possession the vast poetry of desire must end, and
the thing possessed is seldom the thing that we dreamed of.

Beneath Melmoth's omnipotence lurked this tragical anticlimax of so
many a passion, and now the inanity of human nature was revealed to

his successor, to whom infinite power brought Nothingness as a dowry.
To come to a clear understanding of Castanier's strange position, it

must be borne in mind how suddenly these revolutions of thought and
feeling had been wrought; how quickly they had succeeded each other;

and of these things it is hard to give any idea to those who have
never broken the prison bonds of time, and space, and distance. His

relation to the world without had been entirely changed with the
expansion of his faculties.

Like Melmoth himself, Castanier could travel in a few moments over the
fertile plains of India, could soar on the wings of demons above