In order to increase the passionate impatience of the count, they had told him that Miss Brandon was still dressing, but that she was making all haste to come down to him.  Not a word had been said of her being out, and of her return at that very moment.  Where had she been?  What new intrigues had compelled her to leave the house just then?  It must have evidently been something of great importance to have kept her out till so late an hour, and when she knew, moreover, that the count was waiting for her.

This incident threw a flood of light on the cunning policy pursued in this house, and on the clever and active complicity of M. Thomas Elgin and Mrs. Brian.  What their game really was, and how Count Ville-Handry had been caught in the trap, he now understood well enough; he would have been caught in it himself.

How clever these actors were! how perfect all the arrangements! and how scientifically the smallest details were prepared!  How marvellously well even the parlor was arranged to serve the purposes of the owners!  This simple elegance could not but banish all doubts; and this horrible portrait of the so-called Gen. Brandon—­what a stroke of genius!

As to the lame leg of Sir Thorn, Daniel no longer believed in it.

“His leg is no more broken than mine,” he thought.

But at the same time he marvelled at the self-denial of this gentleman, who, in order to prove a falsehood, consented to wear his leg bandaged up for months, as if it really had been severely injured.

“And to-night,” said Daniel to himself, “the performance, no doubt, is to be specially artistic, as they expected me.”

Still, like a duellist, who tries to regain all his strength after a sleepless night, Daniel was now fully prepared for the battle.  He even returned to the fireplace, for fear that his standing alone, and his preoccupation, might betray his thoughts.

The conversation between Count Ville-Handry and M. Elgin had in the meantime become very familiar; and the count was just detailing all his arrangements for the approaching wedding.  He would live, he said, with his wife in the second story of his palace.  The first story was to be divided into two suites of apartments,—­one for M. Thomas Elgin, and the other for Mrs. Brian; for he knew very well that his adored Sarah would never consent to part with her dear relatives, who had been father and mother to her.

The last words remained in his throat; he stood as if he were petrified, his eyes starting from their sockets, his mouth wide open.

Mrs. Brian had entered the room, followed by Miss Brandon.  Daniel was even more struck by her strange beauty to-day than at the opera; it was literally dazzling.  She wore on that night a dress of tea-color embroidered with tiny bouquets in Chinese silk, and trimmed below with an immense flounce of plaited muslin.  In her hair, which looked even more carelessly put up than usually, she had nothing but a branch of fuschia, the crimson bells falling gracefully down upon her neck, where they mingled with her golden curls.