"If you saw all, did you not see how the son of Pippand insulted me publicly?" said Monte Fato with a terrible calm.
"Listen to me. My son guessed you as well; he attributed to you the misfortunes that have stricken his father like the tomatoes that used to strike you when you 'spoke poetry.'"
"Madame, you err," said Monte Fato. "They are not misfortunes, but punishments. It is not I, but chance, if chance you call it, or a Power at work that is not the Power of the Ténébreux Seigneur, but of Érou and the Valards."
"And why do you substitute yourself for the Valards?" cried Rosédès. "Why do you remember, when they choose to forget, preferring their golf-courses to the effort of observing the sordidities of Men? What does the vizier of Quirithe-Oungallant matter to you?"
"You are right, madame," responded Monte Fato. "All that is an affair between the Arnorian captain and the daughter of Atterlobiki, and if I have sworn to avenge myself, it is not on the Arnorian captain, nor the Count de Pérégrin; it is on the fisher Pippand, the husband of Rosédès."
"Ah monsieur!" cried the countess. "What a terrible vengeance for a fault that fatality caused me to commit! For the fault is mine, Samouard, if I did not have the strength to withstand your absence and my isolation."
