ue Englishman's
devotion.

"I feel I owe the company some apology for my apparent churlishness," he
said; "but the fact is, that I have received some very harrowing, but
at the same time very interesting, news this morning. I think I told you
the other day how the vacancy in my kitchen has led up to a very real
tragedy, and that the abhorred Fury was already hovering terribly near
the head of poor Narcisse. Well, I have just received from a friend in
Paris journals containing a full account of the trial of Narcisse and of
his fair accomplice. The worst has come to pass, and Narcisse has been
doomed to sneeze into the basket like a mere aristocrat or politician
during the Terror I was greatly upset by this news, but I was
interested, and in a measure consoled, to find an enclosure amongst
the other papers, an envelope addressed to me in the handwriting of the
condemned man. This voix d'outre tombe, I rejoice to say, confides to
me the secret of that incomparable sauce of his, a secret which I feared
might be buried with Narcisse in the prison ditch."

The Marchesa sighed as she listened. The recipe of the sauce was safe
indeed, but she knew by experience how wide might be the gulf between
the actual work of an artist and the product of another hand guided by
his counsels, let the hand be ever so dexterous, and the counsels ever
so clear. "Will it be too much," she said, "to ask you to give us the
details of this painful tragedy?"

"It will not," Sir John replied reflectively. "The last words of many a
so-called genius have been enshrined in literature: probably no one
will ever know the parting objurgation of Narcisse. I will endeavour,
however, to give you some notion as to what occurred, from the budget
I have just read. I fear the tragedy was a squalid one. Madame, the
victim, was elderly, unattractive in person, exacting in temper, and
the owner of considerable wealth--at least, this is what came out at
the trial. It was one of those tangles in which a fatal denouement is
inevitable; and, if this had not come through Mademoiselle Sidonie,
it would have come through somebody else. The lovers plotted to remove
madame by first drugging her, then breaking her skull with the
wood chopper, and then pitching her downstairs so as to produce the
impression that she had met her death in this fashion. But either the
arm of Mademoiselle Sidonie--who was told off to do the hammering--was
unskilled in such work, or the opiate w