Page:Eekhoud - The New Carthage.djvu/68

40 more worthy of a convict gang than a respectable place of business, stopped his partner's hand.

"I have just found a method of breaking your pigheaded will," he declared to Laurent, whom Felicité had come to remove to his cell. "Tomorrow you will leave for Saint Hubert, where parents lock up rascals like you with young thieves!"

Laurent told himself that, prison for prison, any one would be satisfactory that did not have Felicité for its jailor.

However, Tilbak, worried because he no longer saw his young friend, that very day asked the servants, and having been told what had happened, he immediately asked to see Monsieur Dobouziez about an urgent matter.

Sitting at his desk, his back turned to the door, the manufacturer, who had just condemned his ward, had recovered his habitual calm and was working with his usual lucidity of spirit. Tilbak presented himself, hat in hand, and took off his great boots in deference to the rich Tournal carpet. Dobouziez barely turned his head, and without raising his eyes from the diagram stretched before him called:

"Come here! What do you want of me?"

"Excuse me, sir, but it was I who gave Master Laurent the books which made you so angry with him …"

"Oh! It was yon, was it?" was all that Dobouziez said, and he pressed the electric button on his desk.

"Please ask Mademoiselle Felicité for the objects forfeited by Monsieur Paridael," he ordered the office boy who had run from the next room.

The circumstantial evidence having been brought to him, the manufacturer rose with a bored air,