That night the body of an unknown foreigner was found in the attic of a cheap lodging-house in Soho. The discovery itself and the verdict at the inquest occupied only a few lines in the morning newspapers. Those few lines were the epitaph of one who was very nearly a Rienzi. The greater part of his papers de Grost mercifully destroyed, but one in particular he preserved. Within a week the much-delayed treaty was signed at Paris, London and St. Petersburg.
CHAPTER IV
THE FIRST SHOT
De Grost and his wife were dining together at the corner table in a fashionable but somewhat Bohemian restaurant. Both had been in the humour for reminiscences, and they had outstayed most of their neighbours.
"I wonder what people really think of us," Violet remarked pensively. "I told Lady Amershal, when she asked us to go there this evening, that we always dined together alone somewhere once a week, and she absolutely refused to believe me. 'With your own husband, my dear?' she kept on repeating."
"Her ladyship's tastes are more catholic," the baron declared dryly. "Yet, after all, Violet, the real philosophy of married life demands something of this sort."
Violet smiled and fingered her pearls for a minute.
"What the real philosophy of married life may be I do not know," she said, "but I am perfectly content with our rendering of it. What a fortunate thing, Peter, with your intensely practical turn of mind, that Nature endowed you with so much sentiment."