Sometimes the unexpected comes to the help of the wicked.  Incredible as it appeared, she received, on the eve of her departure, a telegram from Paris.  At first she thought it a device of Viscount Gratian’s to cover her elopement, but it was not possible for him to have imagined the appeal.  It was from her uncle, who, traveling in France, and intending to pay her a visit since she was married honorably, was stricken with a malady.  He awaited her at a hotel.  Even Von Sendlingen could not have drawn up this message too simple not to be genuine and too precise in the genealogical allusions not to be a Russian’s and a Dobronowska’s.

She regarded this cloak as the act of her “fate”—­the evil person’s providence.  She handed the paper to Hedwig to be given to her husband as an explanation at a later hour.

Cesarine was still watching him when she saw him disappear suddenly.  It was in crossing an unnailed plank thrown across a drain-cutting.  This must have turned or broken under his feet unexpectedly, for his fall was complete.  In the ditch which received him, darkness ruled but it seemed to Cesarine that more shadows than one were engaged in deadly strife, standing deep in the mire.  They wore the aspect of the demons dragging down a soul in an infernal bog.

What increased the horror was the silence in which the tragedy was enacted; probably the unfortunate Gratian had been seized by the throat as soon as he dropped confused into the assassin’s clutches.

Halfway between this scene and the dismayed looker on, another shadow rose and appeared to take the direction to accost her instead of hurrying to the victim’s succor.  This made him resemble an accomplice, and, breaking the spell, Cesarine hurried on without the power to force a scream for help from her choking throat.

At that moment, while a strong fascination kept her head turned toward the field, a long beam from the locomotive’s head-light shot across it.  It fell for an instant on the solitary form and though its arm made an upward movement to obscure its face, she believed that she recognized her husband.

Clemenceau on her track!  Clemenceau, in concord with the bravest who had smothered her gallant in the mud! she had scorned him too much!  He was capable even of cowardly acts, of being revenged for this renewed disgrace upon his ill-fated house!

This time her feet were unchained and she flew up the hill.  She thought of nothing but to escape the double revenge of the husband she wronged, and Von Sendlingen whom she had cheated.

She took her ticket mechanically and entered a coach marked for “Ladies Only.”

They whisked toward Paris swiftly, before any sinister face looked in at the window, or she had time to reflect.  In her pocket was the real case of the sight-drafts for which she had palmed a duplicate filled with cut paper, upon the unlucky viscount.  She was rich enough to make a home wherever money reigns—­a broad enough domain.