“Yes, I noticed the hideous black diamond, as he wiped his forehead with his fleshless hand; which forms such a singular contrast to his corpulent figure and bloated face.”
“Whom are you talking about so?” said a young Russian lady, who had risen to spread out her gown over her hoop petticoat; “the Baron de Waldemora?”
“I was just about to say,” said Cristiano, without being disconcerted, “that that worthy man has not three months to live.”
“Oh, then,” cried the Russian, laughing, “you must make haste to marry him, Margaret!”
“Keep your advice for yourself, Olga,” replied the young countess.
“Alas! I have not, like you, an aunt who carries everything before her! But what makes you think, M. Goefle, that the baron is so ill?”
“From the unhealthy disproportion of his figure, from the yellow white of his glassy eyes, from the pinched-in look at the base of his hooked nose, and, above all, from an indefinable feeling that came over me as soon as I saw him.”
“Indeed! Are you gifted with the second sight, like the people in the north of this country?”
“I don’t know anything about that. I don’t consider myself a sorcerer; but I am quite satisfied that some organizations are more or less sensitive to certain mysterious influences, and I answer for it that the baron has not long to live.”
“I think,” said Margaret, “that he has been dead already for a long time; and that it is only by means of some diabolical secret that he succeeds in passing himself off for a living man.”