his wife and his son.  It was as if I expected to hear the marquis moaning after me again.  I listened, but I heard nothing.  It was a very still night; I never knew a night so still.  At last the very stillness itself seemed to frighten me, and I came out of my room and went very softly down-stairs.  In the anteroom, outside of the marquis’s chamber, I found Mr. Urbain walking up and down.  He asked me what I wanted, and I said I came back to relieve my lady.  He said he would relieve my lady, and ordered me back to bed; but as I stood there, unwilling to turn away, the door of the room opened and my lady came out.  I noticed she was very pale; she was very strange.  She looked a moment at the count and at me, and then she held out her arms to the count.  He went to her, and she fell upon him and hid her face.  I went quickly past her into the room and to the marquis’s bed.  He was lying there, very white, with his eyes shut, like a corpse.  I took hold of his hand and spoke to him, and he felt to me like a dead man.  Then I turned round; my lady and Mr. Urbain were there.  ‘My poor Bread,’ said my lady, ’M. le Marquis is gone.’  Mr. Urbain knelt down by the bed and said softly, ’Mon pere, mon pere.’  I thought it wonderful strange, and asked my lady what in the world had happened, and why she hadn’t called me.  She said nothing had happened; that she had only been sitting there with the marquis, very quiet.  She had closed her eyes, thinking she might sleep, and she had slept, she didn’t know how long.  When she woke up he was dead.  ’It’s death, my son, It’s death,’ she said to the count.  Mr. Urbain said they must have the doctor, immediately, from Poitiers, and that he would ride off and fetch him.  He kissed his father’s face, and then he kissed his mother and went away.  My lady and I stood there at the bedside.  As I looked at the poor marquis it came into my head that he was not dead, that he was in a kind of swoon.  And then my lady repeated, ’My poor Bread, it’s death, it’s death;’ and I said, ’Yes, my lady, it’s certainly death.’  I said just the opposite to what I believed; it was my notion.  Then my lady said we must wait for the doctor, and we sat there and waited.  It was a long time; the poor marquis neither stirred nor changed.  ‘I have seen death before,’ said my lady, ’and it’s terribly like this.’  ‘Yes please, my lady,’ said I; and I kept thinking.  The night wore away without the count’s coming back, and my lady began to be frightened.  She was afraid he had had an accident in the dark, or met with some wild people.  At last she got so restless that she went below to watch in the court for her son’s return.  I sat there alone and the marquis never stirred.”

Here Mrs. Bread paused again, and the most artistic of romancers could not have been more effective.  Newman made a movement as if he were turning over the page of a novel.  “So he was dead!” he exclaimed.