a present, too. Here is a couple of hundred
franc notes by way of notice. I wish you well wherever you go."

To the amazement of the speaker, instead of accepting the token of
kindness, Hedwig suddenly put both hands behind her back, and stood
confounded. Tears silently flowed down her cheeks; then, falling on her
knees, she sobbed:

"Oh, master, I do not deserve this! Oh, master please forgive me! I am a
very wicked girl!"

"What are you about?" he exclaimed, fearing that the unexpected boon had
crazed her. "Do get up!"

"No, no; not before master forgives me!" moaned she.

"Oh, yes, yes--anything!" aiding her to rise.

But she continued weeping, and with the fluency in the illiterate when
they have long brooded over a speech to relieve their mind, she said:

"You don't know what goes on, master! but I am forced to tell you now,
since you are so good. I have always been in madame's service since we
came out of Germany. I was devoted to her, and I knew her when I was at
the Persepolitan Hotel, but devotion when women are concerned, becomes
complicity.

"Madame never has cared for you, monsieur, for you and yours. She did
not marry you for any liking, but because of spite. Not spite from your
father having punished one of her precious family--they are all a bad
lot--a witch's brood! faugh! but to Mademoiselle Daniels whom she feared
would secure the prize. Madame carried on dreadful! When she went away
last time, it is true she had a telegram from her uncle--but that was a
happy accident. She was going to bolt anyway, and that came in so
nicely! She was planning to elope with one of her conquests--the
Viscount--"

"I know!"

"You know? Well, you don't know that the dead man found in the ditch was
the Viscount--"

"I saw him killed!" in the same measured tone.

"Oh!" She paused, but recovering, she continued, in a lower voice and
looking furtively around: "You cannot know that she came back with no
good end. I believe it was to meet the gentleman who came in at the same
time, a-pretending to buy the house--"

"M. Cantagnac!" muttered the inventor, a tolerable flock of suspicions
which that ingenious individual had unintentionally excited, rushing
upon his brain.

"He's no Marseillais--he's a German, and he is a secret agent. He is--he
is--well, I may make a clean breast of it--he is one you ought to have
remembered, the major whom you cudgelled in Munich--"

"Von Sendlingen!"

"Yes, and a colonel--I