swept from the coffin. The sight of the
bare deal box arrested her attention, and for the moment turned aside
her anger. What fresh surprise did they prepare her?

No sooner had she asked herself the question than herself she answered
it, and an icy hand seemed to close about her heart. It was Marius who
was dead. They had lied to her. Marius's was the body they had borne to
Condillac--those men in the livery of her stepson.

With a sudden sob in her throat she took a step towards the coffin. She
must see for herself. One way or the other she must at once dispel this
torturing doubt. But ere she had taken three paces, she stood arrested
again, her hands jerked suddenly to the height of her breast, her lips
parting to let out a scream of terror. For the coffin-lid had slowly
raised and clattered over. And as if to pile terror for her, a figure
rose from the box, and, sitting up, looked round with a grim smile; and
the figure was the figure of a man whom she knew to be dead, a man
who had died by her contriving--it was the figure of Garnache. It
was Garnache as he had been on the occasion of his first coming to
Condillac, as he had been on the day they had sought his life in this
very room. How well she knew that great hooked nose and the bright,
steely blue eyes, the dark brown hair, ash-coloured at the temples where
age had paled it, and the fierce, reddish mustachios, bristling above
the firm mouth and long, square chin.

She stared and stared, her beautiful face livid and distorted, till
there was no beauty to be seen in it, what time the Abbot regarded her
coldly and Tressan, behind her, turned almost sick with terror. But not
the terror of ghosts was it afflicted him. He saw in Garnache a man who
was still of the quick--a man who by some miracle had escaped the fate
to which they supposed him to have succumbed; and his terror was the
terror of the reckoning which that man would ask.

After a moment's pause, as if relishing the sensation he had created,
Garnache rose to his feet and leapt briskly to the ground. There was
nothing ghostly about the thud with which he alighted on his feet before
her. A part of her terror left her; yet not quite all. She saw that she
had but a man to deal with, yet she began to realize that this man was
very terrible.

"Garnache again!" she gasped.

He bowed serenely, his lips smiling.

"Aye, madame," he told her pleasantly, "always Garnache. Tenacious as
a leech, madame; and lik