"Nothing!" she exclaimed sharply, "I do not understand."

"No, nothing," I said, "Pray believe me, anything I did, however foolish,
was solely for myself. I have my own affair to settle with my father."

"Bah!" cried Mademoiselle, tapping her foot on the floor, and oddly
enough my reply seemed to have made her angry, "So you are like all the
rest of them, stupid, narrow, calculating!"

"If Mademoiselle will only listen," I began, strangely puzzled and
singularly contrite.

"Listen to you!" she cried, "No, Monsieur, I have listened to you quite
long enough to know your type. I see now you are quite what I thought you
would be. I say you are entirely ineffective, and must leave your father
alone. You do not understand him. You do not even know him. With me it is
different. I have seen the world. He is temperamental, your father, a
genius in his way, and a little mad, perhaps. Leave him to me, Monsieur,
and it will be quite all right. Last night, it was so sudden, that I was
frightened for a moment. I should have remembered he is erratic and apt
to change his mind. I should have guessed why he changed it. It is you,
Monsieur. You have had a bad effect upon him. You have made him turn
suddenly grotesque. What did you do to him last evening?

"Do to him?" I asked, stupidly enough. "Why, nothing. I listened to him,
Mademoiselle, just as I have been listening to him all this morning."

"And yet," she said, "it is your fault. Usually he is most well behaved.
He is moderate, Monsieur. At Blanzy a glass of wine at dinner was all he