“You are very much mistaken.  He does count—­his money, I suppose, if that is his cash-box.”  And, yielding to her girlish curiosity, she went over to the steel-plated chest and avariciously contemplated it,

“Not at all, madame.  That is where they lock up the writings and drawings about the new gun!”

“Oh, what do they say?”

“Nothing a Christian can make head or tail of,” returned the servant reservedly.  “They write now in a hand no honest folk ever used.  An old man who ought to have known better—­the Jew—­he taught the master, and they call it siphon—­”

“Cipher, I suppose?  It appears the newspapers are right!” resumed the lady.  “He is a great man!” and she clapped her hands.

Hedwig regarded her puzzled, till her brow unwrinkling at last, she exclaimed: 

“Upon my word, I believe you have fallen in love with master.”

“You might have said:  I am still in love.  That is why I return to his side.”

“If you tell him that is the reason,” said this speaker, who used much Teutonic frankness to her superiors, “you will astonish him more than you did me by popping in this morning.  He will not believe you.”

Madame Clemenceau smiled as those women do who can warp men round to their way of thinking.

“But he will!  Besides, if it is a difficult task, so much the better—­when a deed is impossible, it tempts one.”

“Well, as far as I can see, madame, that is an odd idea for you to have had when far away from master.”

“Pish! did you never hear the saying that ’Absence makes the heart grow fonder?’ Oh, girl, I had so much deep meditation as I stared at the dim night-light,” and she shuddered and looked a little pale.

“Well, madame, I should have rolled over and shut my eyes,” said the matter-of-fact maid.

There was more truth in the lady’s speech than her hearer gave her credit for.  She was no exception to the rule that the wives of great inventors almost never properly appreciate them.  By the light of his success, breaking forth like the sun, she feared that the greatest error of her life had been made when she miscomprehended him.  In her dreams as well as her insomnia, it was Clemenceau that she beheld, and not the gallants who had flashed across her uneven path, not even the viscount, whose spoil was her nest-egg.  Alas! it was a mere atom to the solid ingot which her misunderstood husband’s genius had ensured.  She had perhaps lost the substance in snapping at the shadow.

“Any way, I love my husband,” she proceeded, moaning aloud, and resting her chin in the hollow of her hand—­the elbow on the table, to which she had returned and where she was seated.  “I am sure now.”

“No doubt,” said the servant, unconsciously holding the feather duster as a soldier holds his rifle; “madame has heard about our great discoveries in artillery?  They are revo—­revolutionizing—­oof!  What a mouthful—­the military world!”