“Is this superstition?” Sogrange asked.
“Superstition, pure and simple,” Peter confessed, taking his key from the office. “It doesn’t alter anything. I am fatalist enough to shrug my shoulders and move on. But I tell you, Sogrange,” he added, after a moment’s pause, “I wouldn’t admit it to any one else in the world, but I am afraid of Bernadine. I have had the best of it so often. It can’t last. In all we’ve had twelve encounters. The next will be the thirteenth.”
Sogrange shrugged his shoulders slightly as he rang for the lift.
“I’d propose you for the Thirteen Club, only there’s some uncomfortable clause about yearly suicides which might not suit you,” he remarked. “Good-night, and don’t dream of Bernadine and your thirteenth encounter.”
“I only hope,” Peter murmured, “that I may be in a position to dream after it.”
CHAPTER XI. THE THIRTEENTH ENCOUNTER
The Marquis de Sogrange arrived in Berkeley Square with the gray dawn of an October morning, showing in his appearance and dress few enough signs of his night journey. Yet he had traveled without stopping from Paris, by fast motor car and the mail boat.
“They telephoned me from Charing Cross,” Peter said, “that you could not possibly arrive until midday. The clerk assured me that no train had yet reached Calais.”
“They had reason in what they told you,” Sogrange remarked, as he leaned back in a chair and sipped the coffee which had been waiting for him in the Baron de Grost’s study. “The train itself never got more than a mile away from the Gare du Nord. The engine-driver was shot through the head and the metals were torn from the way. Paris is within a year now of a second and more terrible revolution.”