“You know,” said I, “what’s bad in both; and no doubt that’s a good deal.”

In that very room the duchess had called Gustave de Berensac a preacher.  Her husband had much the same reproach for me.

“Sermons are fine from your mouth,” he muttered.

And then his self-control gave way.  With a sweep of his arm he drove the necklace from him, so that the box whizzed across the table, balanced a moment on the edge, and fell crashing on the ground, while the duke cried: 

“God’s curse on it and you!  You’ve taken her from me!”

There was danger—­there was something like madness—­in his aspect as he rose, and, facing me where I sat, went on in tones still low, but charged with a rage that twisted his features and lined his white cheeks: 

“Are you a liar or a fool?  Have you taken the game for yourself, or are you fool enough not to see that she has despised me—­and that miserable necklace—­for you—­because you’ve caught her fancy?  My God! and I’ve given my life to it for two years past!  And you step in.  Why didn’t you keep to my wife?  You were welcome to her—­though I’d have shot you all the same for my name’s sake.  You must have Marie too, must you?”

He was mad, if ever man was mad, at that moment.  But his words were strong with the force and clear with the insight of his passion; and the rush of them carried my mind along, and swept it with them to their own conclusion.  Nay, I will not say that—­for I doubted still; but I doubted as a man who would deny, not as one who laughs away, a thought.  I sat silent, looking, not at him, but at the Cardinal’s Necklace on the floor.

Then, suddenly, while I was still busy with the thought and dazzled at the revelation, while I sat bemused, before I could move, his fingers were on my throat, and his face within a foot of mine, glaring and working as he sent his strength into his arms to throttle me.  For his wife—­and his name—­he would fight a duel:  for the sake of Marie Delhasse he would do murder on an invited stranger in his house.  I struggled to my feet, his grip on my throat; and I stretched out my hands and caught him under the shoulders in the armpits, and flung him back against the table, and thence he reeled on to a large cabinet that was by the wall, and Stood leaning against it.

“I knew you were a villain,” I said, “but I thought you were a gentleman.”  (I did not stop to consider the theory implied in that.)

He leaned against the cabinet, red with his exertion and panting; but he did not come at me again.  He dashed his hand across his forehead and then he said in hoarse breathless tones: 

“You shan’t leave here alive!”

Then, with a start of recollection, he thrust his hand into his pocket and brought out a key.  He put it in the lock of a drawer of the cabinet, fumbling after the aperture and missing it more than once.  Then he opened the drawer, took out a pair of dueling pistols, and laid them on the table.