“Extinguish the lights everywhere!” she ordered, with an angry stamp of her foot as if she had been in her own father’s house, and not at Sairmeuse.
He obeyed her, and then, with flashing eyes and dishevelled hair, she hastened to the little salon in which the denouement had taken place.
A crowd of servants surrounded the marquis, who was lying like one stricken with apoplexy.
“All the blood in his body has flown to his head,” remarked the duke, with a shrug of his shoulders.
For the duke was furious with his former friends.
He scarcely knew with whom he was most angry, Martial or the Marquis de Courtornieu.
Martial, by this public confession, had certainly imperilled, if he had not ruined, their political future.
But, on the other hand, had not the Marquis de Courtornieu represented a Sairmeuse as being guilty of an act of treason revolting to any honorable heart?
Buried in a large arm-chair, he sat watching, with contracted brows, the movements of the servants, when his daughter-in-law entered the room.
She paused before him, and with arms folded tightly across her breast, she said, angrily: