“Oh, master, I do not deserve this!  Oh, master please forgive me!  I am a very wicked girl!”

“What are you about?” he exclaimed, fearing that the unexpected boon had crazed her.  “Do get up!”

“No, no; not before master forgives me!” moaned she.

“Oh, yes, yes—­anything!” aiding her to rise.

But she continued weeping, and with the fluency in the illiterate when they have long brooded over a speech to relieve their mind, she said: 

“You don’t know what goes on, master! but I am forced to tell you now, since you are so good.  I have always been in madame’s service since we came out of Germany.  I was devoted to her, and I knew her when I was at the Persepolitan Hotel, but devotion when women are concerned, becomes complicity.

“Madame never has cared for you, monsieur, for you and yours.  She did not marry you for any liking, but because of spite.  Not spite from your father having punished one of her precious family—­they are all a bad lot—­a witch’s brood! faugh! but to Mademoiselle Daniels whom she feared would secure the prize.  Madame carried on dreadful!  When she went away last time, it is true she had a telegram from her uncle—­but that was a happy accident.  She was going to bolt anyway, and that came in so nicely!  She was planning to elope with one of her conquests—­the Viscount—­”

“I know!”

“You know?  Well, you don’t know that the dead man found in the ditch was the Viscount—­”

“I saw him killed!” in the same measured tone.

“Oh!” She paused, but recovering, she continued, in a lower voice and looking furtively around:  “You cannot know that she came back with no good end.  I believe it was to meet the gentleman who came in at the same time, a-pretending to buy the house—­”

“M.  Cantagnac!” muttered the inventor, a tolerable flock of suspicions which that ingenious individual had unintentionally excited, rushing upon his brain.

“He’s no Marseillais—­he’s a German, and he is a secret agent.  He is—­he is—­well, I may make a clean breast of it—­he is one you ought to have remembered, the major whom you cudgelled in Munich—­”

“Von Sendlingen!”

“Yes, and a colonel—­I do not know but he is a general now; he has the manner and means of one!” said Hedwig, shuddering.  “He knows all of madame’s peccadilloes—­ay, all her crimes—­”

“Crimes! be careful, girl!”

“Yes, crime, for she killed her little boy!  Thank heaven, I had no hand in that—­she would not trust me there, and that shows I am not so very bad a woman, don’t it?  She poisoned the little innocent as surely as we stand here under the eye of God!”

“Go on; go on,” said Clemenceau, hoarsely.

“The colonel threatened to tell you these and other things unless she consented to sell him all your business secrets—­and give him the model gun that goes off without any powder and caps.”