“You absolutely refuse to pay any attention?” I said.

“Oh, absolutely,” he answered.

“You know that I can do something, that I can expose you.”  I had a vague idea that I could, that the number of small things that I knew to his discredit and the mass of my hatred could be welded into a damning whole.  He laughed a high-pitched, hysterical laugh.  The dawn was beginning to spread pallidly above us, gleaming mournfully through the glass of the palm-house.  People began to pass, muffled up, on their way out of the place.

“You may go ...” he was beginning.  But the expression of his face altered.  Miss Granger, muffled up like all the rest of the world, was coming out of the inner door.  “We have been having a charming ...” he began to her.  She touched me gently on the arm.

“Come, Arthur,” she said, and then to him, “You have heard the news?”

He looked at her rather muzzily.

“Baron Halderschrodt has committed suicide,” she said.  “Come, Arthur.”

We passed on slowly, but de Mersch followed.

“You—­you aren’t in earnest?” he said, catching at her arm so that we swung round and faced him.  There was a sort of mad entreaty in his eyes, as if he hoped that by unsaying she could remedy an irremediable disaster, and there was nothing left of him but those panic-stricken, beseeching eyes.

“Monsieur de Sabran told me,” she answered; “he had just come from making the constatation.  Besides, you can hear ...”

Half-sentences came to our ears from groups that passed us.  A very old man with a nose that almost touched his thick lips, was saying to another of the same type: 

“Shot himself ... through the left temple ... Mon Dieu!”

De Mersch walked slowly down the long corridor away from us.  There was an extraordinary stiffness in his gait, as if he were trying to emulate the goose step of his days in the Prussian Guard.  My companion looked after him as though she wished to gauge the extent of his despair.

“You would say ‘Habet,’ wouldn’t you?” she asked me.

I thought we had seen the last of him, but as in the twilight of the dawn we waited for the lodge gates to open, a furious clatter of hoofs came down the long street, and a carriage drew level with ours.  A moment after, de Mersch was knocking at our window.

“You will ... you will ...” he stuttered, “speak ... to Mr. Gurnard.  That is our only chance ... now.”  His voice came in mingled with the cold air of the morning.  I shivered.  “You have so much power ... with him and....”

“Oh, I ...” she answered.

“The thing must go through,” he said again, “or else ...”  He paused.  The great gates in front of us swung noiselessly open, one saw into the court-yard.  The light was growing stronger.  She did not answer.

“I tell you,” he asseverated insistently, “if the British Government abandons my railway all our plans ...”