I nodded and walked forward to meet them; for by now I knew the man, yes, and the woman, though she wore a veil.  And it was too late to stop their approach.  Uncovering my head, I stepped up to them, and they stopped in surprise at seeing me.  For the pair were Gustave de Berensac and the duchess.  He had gone, as he told me afterward, to see the duchess, and they had spent the afternoon in a drive, and she was going to set him down at his friend’s quarters in Pontorson, when Marie met them, and not knowing them nor they her (though Gustave had once, two years before, heard her sing) had brought them on this errand.

The little duchess threw up her veil.  Her face was pale, her lips quivered, and her eyes asked a trembling question.  At the sight of me I think she knew at once what the truth was:  it needed but the sight of me to let light in on the seemingly obscure story which Marie had told, of a duel planned, and then interrupted by a treacherous assault and attempted robbery.  With my hand I signed to the duchess to stop; but she did not stop, but walked past me, merely asking: 

“Is he badly hurt?”

I caught her by the arm and held her.

“Yes,” said I, “badly;” and I felt her eyes fixed on mine.

Then she said, gently and calmly: 

“Then he is dead?”

“Yes, he is dead,” I answered, and loosed her arm.

Gustave de Berensac had not spoken:  and he now came silently to my side, and he and I followed a pace or two behind the duchess.  The servant had halted ten or fifteen yards away.  Marie had reached where the duke lay and stood now close by him, her arms at her side and her head bowed.  The duchess walked up to her husband and, kneeling beside him, lifted the handkerchief from his face.  The expression wherewith he had spoken his epitaph—­the summary of his life—­was set on his face, so that he seemed still to smile in bitter amusement.  And the little duchess looked long on the face that smiled in contempt on life and death alike.  No tears came in her eyes and the quiver had left her lips.  She gazed at him calmly, trying perhaps to read the riddle of his smile.  And all the while Marie Delhasse looked down from under drooping lids.

I stepped up to the duchess’ side.  She saw me coming and turned her eyes to mine.

“He looked just like that when he asked me to marry him,” she said, with the simple gravity of a child whose usual merriment is sobered by something that it cannot understand.

I doubted not that he had.  Life, marriage, death—­so he had faced them all, with scorn and weariness and acquiescence—­all, save that one passion which bore him beyond himself.

The duchess spread the handkerchief again over the dead man’s face, and rose to her feet.  And she looked across the dead body of the duke at Marie Delhasse.  I knew not what she would say, for she must have guessed by now who the girl was that had brought her to the place.  Suddenly the question came in a tone of curiosity, without resentment, yet tinctured with a delicate scorn, as though spoken across a gulf of difference: