“Who can it be?” the Baroness exclaimed, setting her glass down abruptly.
“It is, perhaps, our fourth guest who arrives,” Sogrange remarked.
They all three listened, Peter and Sogrange with their glasses still suspended in the air.
“Our fourth guest?” the Baroness repeated. “Madame von Estenier is upstairs, lying down. I cannot tell who this may be.”
Her lips were parted. The lines of her forehead had suddenly appeared. Her eyes were turned toward the door, hard and bright. Then the glass which she had nervously picked up again and was holding between her fingers, fell on to the tablecloth with a little crash, and the yellow wine ran bubbling on to her plate. Her scream echoed to the roof and rang through the room. It was Bernadine who stood there in the doorway, Bernadine in a long traveling ulster and the air of one newly arrived from a journey. They all three looked at him, but there was not one who spoke. The Baroness, after her one wild cry, was dumb.
“I am indeed fortunate,” Bernadine said. “You have as yet, I see, scarcely commenced. You probably expected me. I am charmed to find so agreeable a party awaiting my arrival.”
He divested himself of his ulster and threw it across the arm of the butler, who stood behind him.
“Come,” he continued; “for a man who has just been killed in a railway accident, I find myself with an appetite. A glass of wine, Carl. I do not know what that toast was, the drinking of which my coming interrupted, but let us all drink it together. Aimee, my love to you, dear. Let me congratulate you upon the fortitude and courage with which you ignored those lying reports of my death. I had fears that I might find you alone in a darkened room, with tear-stained eyes and sal volatile by your side. This is infinitely better. Gentlemen, you are welcome.”
Sogrange lifted his glass and bowed courteously. Peter followed suit.
“Really,” Sogrange murmured, “the Press nowadays becomes more unreliable every day. It is apparent, my dear Von Hern, that this account of your death was, to say the least of it, exaggerated.”