“Will you not sit down?” he asked.  “Can I fetch you a glass of wine?  I remember you never liked it, but perhaps, after so long a drive—­”

“I do not wish any wine,” said Madame Jumel, shortly.  She was nonplussed by this matter-of-fact acceptance of a situation which she had intended should be intensely dramatic.  She was not yet gone, however.

“No one ever could get the best of you, Hamilton,” she exclaimed.  “I have come here to-night—­how terribly delicate you look,” she faltered, with a sudden pallor.  “I have not seen you for so long—­”

“My health does not give me the least concern,” said Hamilton, hurriedly, wondering if he could lay his hand on a bottle of smelling-salts without awaking his wife.  “Pray go on.  To what am I indebted for the honour of this visit?”

Madame Jumel rose and swept up and down the long room twice.  “Can there be anything in that tale of royal blood?” thought Hamilton.  “Or in that other tale of equally distinguished parentage?”

She had paused with her back to him, facing one of the bookcases.

“Classics, classics, classics!” she exclaimed, in a voice which grew steadier as she proceeded.  “That was the only taste we did not share.  Don Quixote in Spanish, Dante and Alfieri in Italian; and all the German brutes.  Ah!  Voltaire!  Rousseau!  What superb editions!  No one can bind but the French.  And the dear old Moniteur—­all bound for posterity, which will never look at it.”

She returned and stood before him, and she was quite composed.

“I came to tell you,” she said, “that when you die, it will be by the hand of my deputy.  I tell you because I am determined that your last earthly thought shall be of me.”

“Cherchez la femme—­toujours! Why are you doing this?” he asked curiously.  “You no longer love me, and your hate should have worn out long since.”

“Neither my hate nor my love has ceased for a second.  I married Jumel for these jewels, for the courts of Europe, for a position in this country which the mighty Schuylers cannot take from me again.  But I would fly with you to-morrow, and live with you in a hole under ground.  I came to make no such proposal, however; I know that you would sacrifice even your family to your honour, and everything else in life to them.  For years I waited, hoping that you would suddenly come back to me, hating you and injuring you in every way my Jacobinism could devise, but ready to wipe your shoes with my hair the moment you appeared.  Now the hard work of your life is over.  You look forward to years of happiness with your family on this beautiful estate, while I am married to a silly old Frenchman—­who, however, has brought me my final means of revenge.  I know you well.  You would rather be alive now than at any time of your life.  Well, you shall go.  And I would pray, if that were my habit, that into these last days you may condense all the agonies of parting from those you love that I have ached and raged through in these eleven long years.”