“You will instruct me?”

“Most gladly!”

“That is nice of you, and I am so sorry at having interrupted your experiments.”

“Thanks; but we have long since gone beyond the experimental stage.  I was only trying a new bullet that I fancy the shape of.  I ask your pardon for having given you a fright.”  He took her hand and kissed it.  She beckoned to Hedwig as soon as it was released, and smiled kindly on him as she left the room with her servant to dress befittingly to show herself to Mademoiselle Rebecca.  Had it been only her husband to face, she might have been content to look dusty with travel as she had to Antonino.

“How you delight that poor gentleman,” observed Hedwig, between pity and admiration.  “You would witch an angel.”

“I am only practicing to enchant my husband, you dull creature!” said Cesarine merrily.  “He is a great man, and I have been proud of him from the first.”

CHAPTER XIV.

TRULY A MAN.

Long after Madame Clemenceau had left the room, the Italian stood in the same position as he had taken after kissing her hand.  The mild voice from the pallid but little changed beauty thrilled him as formerly, and went far towards making him as mad as he had been ten days before when she had dropped, like an extinguished star, out of that small system.  In her absence, he had regained quiet and some coolness, and believed he had conquered the treasonable passion which threatened his benefactor with disgrace.  Had she not disgraced him as it was; had she not run away with another lover?

Clemenceau had not said one word to his associate about the telegram from Paris, which he seemed not to believe, or of the note beginning:  “The faithless one,” by which Von Sendlingen had been warned of Gratian’s absconding and which he instructed Hedwig to place where her master must see it.  Hence, the view by Clemenceau of the stamping out of the Viscount-baron, for his accomplices had not let the chance pass when he stumbled into their ambush, in order to see if the Frenchman in jealous spite would assail him.

Clemenceau had recognized his wife and he divined that the lonely man making for the same point was the villain, without understanding into what deathpit he had fallen.

At the juncture of his being about hurrying after his wife, he heard the half-strangled wretch’s outcry and the low appeal of humanity overpowering the hoarse summons of revenge in his bosom.  But when he arrived at the broken footway bridge, all was over.  A little farther, he fancied he saw a shadow in an osier bed, but when he waded to it, all was hushed.  He called, but no sound responded.  All seemed a vision—­victim and assassins.

And his wife was flying, by the train which had merely stopped to take her up.  As every resident is known at these suburban stations, he refrained from an inquiry which would have made him a laughing-stock.