We found the doctor and the sculptor.

The hotel was informed that Camilla was ill, and that the symptom pointed to typhoid fever.  Naturally, she kept her room.  That day the sculptor, a young American, who said that a thing was ‘bully’ when he meant it was good, arrived, and took a mask of Camilla’s head.  By the way, this was a most tedious and annoying process.  The two straws through which the poor girl had to breathe while her face was covered with that white stuff—!  Oh, well, I needn’t go into that.

The next day typhoid fever was definitely announced.  Hotels generally prefer these things to be kept secret, but we published it everywhere—­it was part of our plan.  In a few hours the entire Rue St. Augustin was aware that the English bride recently arrived from London was down with typhoid fever.

The disease ran its course.  Sometimes Camilla was better, sometimes worse.  Then all of a sudden a haemorrhage supervened, and the young wife died, and the young husband was stricken with trouble and grief.  The whole street mourned.  The death even got into the Paris dailies, and the correspondence column of the Paris edition of the New York Herald was filled with outcries against the impurities of Parisian water.

It was colossal.  I laughed, Polycarp.

My mind unhinged by sorrow, I insisted on taking the corpse to London for burial.  I had a peculiar affection for the Brompton Cemetery, though neither her ancestors nor mine had been buried there.  I insisted on Darcy accompanying me.  The procession left the Rue St. Augustin, and the hotel was disinfected.  This alone cost me a thousand francs.  I gave the sculptor one thousand five hundred, and the doctor two thousand.  Then there were the expenses of the journey with the coffin.  I forget the figure, but I know it was prodigious.

But I was content.  For, of course, Camilla was not precisely in that coffin.  Camilla had not been suffering from precisely typhoid fever.  In strict fact, she had never been ill the least bit in the world.  In strict fact, she had been spirited out of the hotel one night, and at the very moment when her remains were crossing the Channel in charge of an inconsolable widower, she was in the middle of the Mediterranean on a steamer.  The coffin contained a really wonderful imitation of her outward form, modelled and coloured by the American sculptor in a composition consisting largely of wax.  The widower’s one grief was that he was forced to separate himself from his life’s companion for a period of, at least, a week.

A pretty enough scheme, wasn’t it, Polycarp?  We shall shortly bury the wax effigy in Brompton Cemetery, with the assistance of Hugo’s undertakers, and a parson or so, and grave-diggers, and registrars of deaths, and so on and so on.  Louis Ravengar will breathe again, thankful that typhoid fever has relieved him of an unpleasant incubus, and since Camilla is underground, he will speedily forget all about her.  She will be absolutely safe from him.  The inconsolable widower will ostentatiously seek distraction in foreign travel, and in a fortnight, at most, will, under another name, resume his connubial career in a certain villa unsurpassed, I am told, for its picturesque situation.