unexpected honour.

'It will be well,' said Laurent in his professional tone, 'for Madame
Armstrong to return to bed.'

He turned the key in the door, and at this Annette sent out shriek on
shriek, until the whole corridor seemed to shrill with the outcry.

'Madame,' said Laurent in his deep nasal voice, when the clamour died
down for a moment, 'your husband is in the house. He is within hearing.
I have his entire authority to speak to you, and I am intent to use it I
am here to tell you that you have abused his absence and his confidence,
and that on his arrival at Janenne last night I told him the result of
my observations during the last four or five weeks.'

Paul, boots in hand, sat on the edge of his own bed, and heard a kind of
gasping noise. Then for a moment there was silence until Laurent spoke
again.

'If you will permit, madame,' he said, 'this interview may go smoothly.
If you choose to be angry, that is your affair. I am authorized by your
husband, as your physician, to speak plain truths to you. You need not
trouble to deny me, but I see you have already been drinking.'

'How dare you!' she flashed out, and Paul heard the stamp of her little
naked foot upon the fox-skin rug which lay beside their bed.

'Madame,' said Laurent, 'there is no question of daring or not daring. I
have told your husband everything, and he is sitting in the next room at
this moment, and hears every word we speak.'

'Paul!' she cried, 'Paul is here? Why hasn't he been to see me? Why has
he no word for me?'

'Madame,' said Laurent sternly, 'I bid you cease these theatrical
pretences. Your unhappy husband saw you last night when you three times
seized the decanter which had been left for him.'

She gasped: 'You liar!'

'That is all very well, madame,' responded Laurent, 'but my eyes are
mine, and I have known the truth for months past. Why do you venture on
a hope so vain? Now, I will tell you plainly, Madame Armstrong, you
are going on the way to hell. You are to be stopped, and you shall be
stopped. Pray make no mistake as to the authority that is to be exerted.
It shall be exerted as mildly as you permit. It shall be exerted as
inexorably as the necessities of the case demand I have told you already
many times into what a pitfall you were descending, but until last night
I never dared to warn your husband. He knows the truth now, knows
it all, and he leaves you in my hands. You have not heeded advice or
beseeching, an