One by one Peter read out the names. Then he stopped short. A little exclamation broke from Sogrange's lips. The thirteenth name upon that list of dead was the name of Bernadine, Count von Hern.
"Bernadine!" Peter faltered. "Bernadine is dead!"
"Killed by the strikers!" Sogrange echoed. "It is a just thing, this."
The two men looked down at the paper and then up at each other. A strange silence seemed to have found its way into the room. The shadow of death lay between them. Peter touched his forehead and found it wet.
"It is a just thing, indeed," he repeated, "but justice and death are alike terrible."
Late in the afternoon of the same day a motor car, splashed with mud, drew up before the door of the house in Berkeley Square. Sogrange, who was standing talking to Peter before the library window, suddenly broke off in the middle of a sentence. He stepped back into the room and gripped his friend's shoulder.
"It is the Baroness," he exclaimed quickly. "What does she want here?"
"The Baroness who?" Peter demanded.
"The Baroness von Ratten. You must have heard of her—she is the friend of Bernadine."
The two men had been out to lunch at the Ritz with Violet, and had walked across the Park home. Sogrange had been drawing on his gloves in the act of starting out for a call at the Embassy.