"You lie!" the woman interrupted. "You lie, or you do yourself an injustice! We gave you four years, and, looking into your face, I think that it has been enough. I think that the weariness is there already. In any case, the charge which I lay upon you in these, my last moments, is one which you can escape by death only!"
A low murmur of voices from those others repeated her words.
"By death only!"
Peter Ruff opened his lips, but closed them again without speech. A wave of emotion seemed passing through the room. Something strange was happening. It was Death itself which had come amongst them.
A morning journalist wrote of the death of Madame eloquently and with feeling. She had been a broadminded aristocrat, a woman of brilliant intellect and great friendships, a woman of whose inner life during the last ten or fifteen years little was known, yet who, in happier times, might well have played a great part in the history of her country.
Peter Ruff drove back from the cemetery with the Marquis de Sogrange, and for the first time since the death of Madame serious subjects were spoken of.
"I have waited patiently," he declared, "but there are limits. I want my wife."
Sogrange took him by the arm and led him into the library of the house in the Rue de St. Quintaine. The six men who were already there waiting rose to their feet.