In his turn Doctor Cazenove now came up. For the last quarter of an hour he had been vainly trying to restore animation to the poor woman's body in the coach-house, whither Martin had helped him to carry it. One could never tell, he said, what such whimsical old servants would do. She had never really got over her mistress's death.
'It didn't take her long,' he added. 'She just strung herself up by the strings of one of her kitchen aprons.'
Lazare and Louise, frozen with terror, said not a word. Chanteau, after listening in silence, felt a pang of disgust as he thought of the compromised dinner. And that wretched creature without hands or feet, who had to be put to bed and fed like a child, that pitiable remnant of a man, whose almost vanished life was nothing more than one scream of pain, cried out in furious indignation:
'What a fool one must be to go and kill oneself!'
THE END
[FOOTNOTES]
[1] See 'The Fat and the Thin,' in which story already figures little Pauline, who becomes the heroine of 'The Joy of Life.'—Ed.
[2] £320.
[3] The chief character in 'Money.'—Ed.