"Is it over?" Violet asked breathlessly.
"It is over," Peter answered.
It was, after all, an unrecorded tragedy. In an obscure corner of the morning papers one learned the next day that a Frenchman, who had apparently come to the end of his means, had committed suicide in a furnished flat in Shaftesbury Avenue. Two foreigners were deported without having been brought up for trial, for being suspected persons. A little languid interest was aroused at the inquest when one of the witnesses deposed to the deceased having been a famous French criminal. Nothing further transpired, however, and the readers of the halfpenny press for once were deprived of their sensation. For the rest, Peter received, with much satisfaction, a remarkably handsome signet ring, bearing some famous arms, and a telegram from Sogrange: "Well done, Baron! May the successful termination of your enterprise nerve you for the greater undertaking which is close at hand. I leave for London by the night train.—Sogrange."
CHAPTER X
THE THIRTEENTH ENCOUNTER
The Marquis de Sogrange arrived in Berkeley Square with the grey dawn of an October morning, showing in his appearance and dress few enough signs of his night journey. Yet he had travelled 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."
"You really believe this?" Peter asked gravely.