‘Poor chap!’ Hugo murmured.

The dead man looked so young, artless, and content.

‘Why “poor"?’ Darcy turned on him sharply but coldly.  ’Is not a sudden death the best?  Would you not wish it for yourself, for your friends?’

‘Yes,’ said Hugo; ’but when one is dead one is dead.  That’s all I meant.’

‘I have heard much of you, Mr. Hugo,’ said the other.  ’And, if I may be excused a certain bluntness, it is very obvious that, though you say little, you are no ordinary man.  Can it be possible that you have lived so long and so fully and are yet capable of pitying the dead?  Have you not learnt that it is only they who are happy?’ He vaguely indicated the corpse.  ‘If you will be so good as to assist me—­’

‘Willingly,’ said Hugo, who could find nothing else to say.  ’I suppose we must call the servants?’

’Why call the servants?  To begin with, there is only one here, a somewhat antique housekeeper.  Let her sleep.  She has been through sufficient to-day.  Morning will be time enough for the futile formalities which civilization has invented to protect itself.  Night, which is the season of death, should not be disturbed by them.’

‘As you think best,’ Hugo concurred.

‘And now,’ Darcy began, in a somewhat relieved tone, when he had finished his task, and the remains of Francis Tudor lay decently covered on a sofa in the drawing-room, that mortuary chamber, ’will you oblige me by coming into the study for a while?  I am not in the mood for sleep, and perhaps you are not.  And I will admit frankly that I should prefer not to be alone at present.  Yes,’ he added, with a faint deprecatory smile, ’my theories about death are thoroughly philosophical, but one cannot always act up to one’s theories.’

And in the study, at the other end of the flat, far from the relics of humanity, he began to roll cigarettes with marvellous swiftness in his long thin fingers.

Hugo surmised that under his singular and almost glacial calm the man concealed a temperament highly nervous and sensitive.

‘You do not inquire about the—­the coffin?’ said Darcy at length, when they had smoked for a few moments in silence.

As a fact, Hugo had determined that, at no matter what cost to his feelings, he would not be the first to mention the other fatality.

The two men looked at each other, and each blew out a lance of smoke.

‘What did she die of?’ Hugo demanded curtly.

‘You are aware, then, who it is?’

‘Naturally, I guessed.’

‘Ah! she died of typhoid fever.  You knew her?’

‘I knew her.’

‘Of course; I remember.  She was in your employ.  Yes,’ he sighed; ’she contracted typhoid fever in Paris.  It’s always more or less endemic there.  And what with this hot summer and their water-supply and their drainage, it’s been more rife than usual lately.  Tudor called me in at once.  I am qualified both in England and France, but I practise in Paris.  It was a fairly ordinary case, except that she suffered from severe and persistent headaches at the beginning.  But in typhoid the danger is seldom in the fever; it is in the complications.  She had a haemorrhage.  I—­I failed.  A haemorrhage in typhoid is not necessarily fatal, but it often proves so.  She died from exhaustion.’