, making some last
arrangements about executions and such ugly things; and though these
duties were rootedly repulsive to him, he always performed them with
precision. Ruthless in the pursuit of criminals, he was very mild about
their punishment. Since he had been supreme over French--and largely
over European--policial methods, his great influence had been honourably
used for the mitigation of sentences and the purification of prisons.
He was one of the great humanitarian French freethinkers; and the only
thing wrong with them is that they make mercy even colder than justice.

When Valentin arrived he was already dressed in black clothes and the
red rosette--an elegant figure, his dark beard already streaked with
grey. He went straight through his house to his study, which opened on
the grounds behind. The garden door of it was open, and after he had
carefully locked his box in its official place, he stood for a few
seconds at the open door looking out upon the garden. A sharp moon
was fighting with the flying rags and tatters of a storm, and Valentin
regarded it with a wistfulness unusual in such scientific natures as
his. Perhaps such scientific natures have some psychic prevision of the
most tremendous problem of their lives. From any such occult mood,
at least, he quickly recovered, for he knew he was late, and that his
guests had already begun to arrive. A glance at his drawing-room when he
entered it was enough to make certain that his principal guest was not
there, at any rate. He saw all the other pillars of the little party;
he saw Lord Galloway, the English Ambassador--a choleric old man with a
russet face like an apple, wearing the blue ribbon of the Garter. He
saw Lady Galloway, slim and threadlike, with silver hair and a face
sensitive and superior. He saw her daughter, Lady Margaret Graham, a
pale and pretty girl with an elfish face and copper-coloured hair. He
saw the Duchess of Mont St. Michel, black-eyed and opulent, and with
her her two daughters, black-eyed and opulent also. He saw Dr. Simon,
a typical French scientist, with glasses, a pointed brown beard, and a
forehead barred with those parallel wrinkles which are the penalty
of superciliousness, since they come through constantly elevating
the eyebrows. He saw Father Brown, of Cobhole, in Essex, whom he had
recently met in England. He saw--perhaps with more interest than any
of these--a tall man in uniform, who had bowed to the Galloways without
r