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94 Oh!" cried M. Léandre, limply. "Say what you will, my friend, this is ruin—the end of all our hopes. Your wits will never extricate us from this. Never!"

Through the gap strode now an enormous man with an inflamed moon face and a great nose, decently dressed after the fashion of a solid bourgeois. There was no mistaking his anger, but the expression that it found was an amazement to André-Louis.

"Léandre, you're an imbecile! Too much phlegm, too much phlegm! Your words would n't convince a ploughboy!  Have you considered what they mean at all?  Thus," he cried, and casting his round hat from him in a broad gesture, he took his stand at M. Léandre's side, and repeated the very words that Léandre had lately uttered, what time the three observed him coolly and attentively.

"Oh, say what you will, my friend, this is ruin—the end of all our hopes. Your wits will never extricate us from this.  Never!"

A frenzy of despair vibrated in his accents. He swung again to face M. Léandre. "Thus," he bade him contemptuously. "Let the passion of your hopelessness express itself in your voice. Consider that you are not asking Scaramouche here whether he has put a patch in your breeches.  You are a despairing lover expressing..."

He checked abruptly, startled. André-Louis, suddenly realizing what was afoot, and how duped he had been, had loosed his laughter. The sound of it pealing and booming uncannily under the great roof that so immediately confined him was startling to those below.

The fat man was the first to recover, and he announced it after his own fashion in one of the ready sarcasms in which he habitually dealt.

"Hark!" he cried, "the very gods laugh at you, Léandre." Then he addressed the roof of the barn and its invisible tenant. "Hi! You there!"

André-Louis revealed himself by a further protrusion of his tousled head.