“After the service I have rendered you to-day, Mr. Noel,” she said, “I have at least earned a claim on your respect, if I have earned nothing more.  I wish you good-morning.”

“Two thousand!” cried Noel Vanstone, with the courage of despair.

Mrs. Lecount folded up her papers and hung her traveling-bag over her arm in contemptuous silence.

“Three thousand!”

Mrs. Lecount moved with impenetrable dignity from the table to the door.

“Four thousand!”

Mrs. Lecount gathered her shawl round her with a shudder, and opened the door.

“Five thousand!”

He clasped his hands, and wrung them at her in a frenzy of rage and suspense.  “Five thousand” was the death-cry of his pecuniary suicide.

Mrs. Lecount softly shut the door again, and came back a step.

“Free of legacy duty, sir?” she inquired.

“No.”

Mrs. Lecount turned on her heel and opened the door again.

“Yes.”

Mrs. Lecount came back, and resumed her place at the table as if nothing had happened.

“Five thousand pounds, free of legacy duty, was the sum, sir, which your father’s grateful regard promised me in his will,” she said, quietly.  “If you choose to exert your memory, as you have not chosen to exert it yet, your memory will tell you that I speak the truth.  I accept your filial performance of your father’s promise, Mr. Noel—­and there I stop.  I scorn to take a mean advantage of my position toward you; I scorn to grasp anything from your fears.  You are protected by my respect for myself, and for the Illustrious Name I bear.  You are welcome to all that I have done, and to all that I have suffered in your service.  The widow of Professor Lecompte, sir, takes what is justly hers—­and takes no more!”

As she spoke those words, the traces of sickness seemed, for the moment, to disappear from her face; her eyes shone with a steady inner light; all the woman warmed and brightened in the radiance of her own triumph—­the triumph, trebly won, of carrying her point, of vindicating her integrity, and of matching Magdalen’s incorruptible self-denial on Magdalen’s own ground.

“When you are yourself again, sir, we will proceed.  Let us wait a little first.”

She gave him time to compose himself; and then, after first looking at her Draft, dictated the second paragraph of the will, in these terms: 

“I give and bequeath to Madame Virginie Lecompte (widow of Professor Lecompt e, late of Zurich) the sum of Five Thousand Pounds, free of Legacy Duty.  And, in making this bequest, I wi sh to place it on record that I am not only expressing my own sense of Madame Lecompte’s attachment and fidelity in the capacity of my housekeeper, but that I also believe myself to be executing the intentions of my deceased father, who, but for the circumstance of his dying intestate, would have left Madame Lecompte, in his will, the same token of grateful regard for her services which I now leave her in mine.”