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268 howling! If they continue barking the way they have been this morning, they'll be hoarse by tonight! And then we shall settle our account with Master Laurent!"

"After all, the affair isn't so bad for us … (here the execrable trafficker forgot himself so far as to rub his hands) … The ship wouldn't have lasted so much longer. The rats had already left it because so much water leaked into the hold. An old wooden shoe, the insurance on which will net us double what it was worth! And if we lose the bounties paid in advance to some of the vigorous and flourishing emigrants, like that Vingerhout—you remember, Bergmans' tool, the leader of the elevator riot. And now he's with his fathers!—after all, we collect the insurance on those of the crew who were drowned. There's some compensation in that!"

The ship-owner came in for dinner as if nothing had happened. Gine thought his expression bestially jovial and crafty. At dessert, as he meticulously cut a succulent melon and poured himself a glass of old Bordeaux with the ceremony of a taster, he announced in a hardly detailed fashion the shocking and complete loss of the ship which she had baptized.

Without noticing the sudden pallor that overspread his wife's face, he entered into, details and figured up the number of victims. She begged him to stop; he insisted, and pushed his sarcasm to the point of conjuring up to her that launching at the Fulton Dockyards. Then, utterly sick, she left the room and took refuge in her own suite, where she thought of the evil presage which certain onlookers had found in her hesitation and maladroitness when the boat was to have been cut loose upon the ways.

Laurent, after having escaped from the hands of