e said, "there is no resignation
which counts. You are as much our creature to-day, as I am the creature
of the disease which is carrying me across the threshold of death."

Peter Ruff remained silent. The woman's words seemed full of dread
significance. Besides, how was it possible to contradict the dying?

"It is upon the unwilling of the world," she continued, speaking slowly,
yet with extraordinary distinctness, "that its greatest honors are often
conferred. The name of my successor has been balloted for, secretly. It
is you, Peter Ruff, who have been chosen."

This time he was silent because he was literally bereft of words. This
woman was dying and fancying strange things! He looked from one to the
other of the stern, pale faces of those who were gathered around her
bedside. Seven of them there were--the same seven. At that moment their
eyes were all focused upon him. Peter Ruff shrank back.

"Madame," he murmured, "this cannot be."

Her lips twitched as though she would have smiled. "What we have
decided," she said, "we have decided. Nothing can alter that, not even
the will of Mr. Peter Ruff."

"I have been out of the world for four years," Peter Ruff protested. "I
have no longer ambitions, no longer any desire--"

"You lie!" the woman interrupted. "You lie or you do yourself an
injustice. We gave you four years, and looking into your face, I think
that it has been enough. I think that the weariness is there already. In
any case, the charge which I lay upon you in these my last moments, is
one which you can escape by death only."

A low murmur of voices from those others repeated her words.

"By death only!"

Peter Ruff opened his lips, but closed them again without speech. A
wave of emotion seemed passing through the room. Something strange was
happening. It was Death itself, which had come among them.

A morning journalist wrote of the death of Madame eloquently, and with
feeling. She had been a broad-minded aristocrat, a woman of brilliant
intellect and great friendships, a woman of whose inner life during the
last ten or fifteen years little was known, yet who, in happier times,
might well have played a great part in the history of her country.

Peter Ruff drove back from the cemetery with the Marquis de Sogrange,
and, for the first time since the death of Madame, serious subjects were
spoken of.

"I have waited here patiently," he declared, "but there are limits. I
want my wife."

Sogrange