gardness of some desperate
illness changed his features and I grew frightened. I came to his side.

"Master--we must take a cab. Have you any money?"

"Yes," he said faintly, "let us go home."

"But you are ill! You look as white as a ghost!" cried Joanna, in alarm.

"I had a dinner of herbs--in the liquid form of absinthe," said my
master with a clutch at Paragot. "How does it go? Better a dinner of
herbs where love is----"

"Ah! Monsieur has not yet gone," said the nurse, hurrying into the room.
"Monsieur le Comte begs me to give this to Monsieur."

She held out a letter.

"Monsieur le Comte made me open his despatch box, Madame," she added
apologetically.

She left the room. Paragot stood twirling the letter between his
fingers. Joanna bade him open it. It might be something important
Paragot drew from the envelope half a sheet of note-paper. He looked at
it, made a staggering step to the door and fell sprawling prone upon the
carpet.

Joanna uttered a little cry of fright, and, as I did, cast herself on
her knees beside him. He had fainted. Abstinence from food, drink, his
tremendous effort of will towards sobriety, the strain of the interview,
had brought him to the verge of the precipice, and it only required the
shock of the letter to send him toppling over. We propped his head on
cushions and loosened his collar.

"What can we do?" gasped my dear lady.

"I will call the nurse from Monsieur le Comte's room," said I.

"She will know," said Joanna hopefully.

I went to the Comte's room, opened the door and beckoned to the nurse.
She gave a glance at her sleeping patient and joined me in the corridor.
On my explanation she brought water and sal-volatile and returned with
me to the drawing-room. It was a night of stupefying surprises. The
_quartier_ would have called it _abracadabrant_ and they would not have
been far wrong. There was necromancy in the air. I felt it, as I
followed the nurse across the threshold. I anticipated something odd,
some grotesque development. In the atmosphere of those I loved in those
days I was as sensitive as a barometer.

Paragot lay still as death, his wild hairy head on the satin cushions,
but Joanna was crouching on her knees in the midst of the cone of light
cast by the shaded lamp, reading, with parted lips and blanched face,
the half sheet of note-paper. As we entered she turned and looked at me
and her eyes were frozen hard blue. The nurse bent over by my master'