heavily upon the cheek.

"If you stay here," she muttered, "I shall kill you myself...."

That night, the body of an unknown foreigner was found in the attic of a
cheap lodging-house in Soho. The discovery itself and the verdict at the
inquest occupied only a few lines in the morning newspapers. Those few
lines were the epitaph of one who was very nearly a Rienzi. The greater
part of his papers De Grost mercifully destroyed, but one in particular
he preserved. Within a week the much delayed treaty was signed at Paris,
London and St. Petersburg.

CHAPTER V. THE FIRST SHOT

De Grost and his wife were dining together at the corner table in a
fashionable but somewhat Bohemian restaurant. Both had been in the humor
for reminiscences, and they had outstayed most of their neighbors.

"I wonder what people really think of us," Violet remarked pensively. "I
told Lady Amershal, when she asked us to go there this evening, that we
always dined together alone somewhere once a week, and she absolutely
refused to believe me. 'With your own husband, my dear?' She kept on
repeating."

"Her Ladyship's tastes are more catholic," the Baron declared dryly.
"Yet, after all, Violet, the real philosophy of married life demands
something of this sort."

Violet smiled and fingered her pearls for a minute.

"What the real philosophy of married life may be I do not know," she
said, "but I am perfectly content with our rendering of it. What a
fortunate thing, Peter, with your intensely practical turn of mind, that
nature endowed you with so much sentiment."

De Grost gazed reflectively at the cigarette which he had just selected
from his case.

"Well," he remarked, "there have been times when I have cursed myself
for a fool, but, on the whole, sentiment keeps many fires burning."

She leaned towards him and dropped her voice a little. "Tell me,"
she begged, "do you ever think of the years we spent together in the
country? Do you ever regret?"

He smiled thoughtfully.

"It is a hard question, that," he admitted. "There were days there which
I loved, but there were days, too, when the restlessness came, days when
I longed to hear the hum of the city and to hear men speak whose words
were of life and death and the great passions. I am not sure, Violet,
whether, after all, it is well for one who has lived to withdraw
absolutely from the thrill of life."

She laughed, Softly but gayly.

"I am with you," she declared, "absolutely