s voice, in his manner, that the man was a
little--well, _gris_. "If you do not," I said, "I shall forbid her to
see you and I shall ..."

"Oh, oh!" he interjected with the intonation of a reveller at a farce.
"We are at that--we are the excellent brother." He paused, and then
added: "Well, go to the devil, you and your forbidding." He spoke with
the greatest good humour.

"I am in earnest," I said; "very much in earnest. The thing has gone too
far, and even for your own sake, you had better ..."

He said "Ah, ah!" in the tone of his "Oh, oh!"

"She is no friend to you," I struggled on, "she is playing with you for
her own purposes; you will ..."

He swayed a little on his feet and said: "Bravo ... bravissimo. If we
can't forbid him, we will frighten him. Go on, my good fellow ..." and
then, "Come, go on ..."

I looked at his great bulk of a body. It came into my head dimly that I
wanted him to strike me, to give me an excuse--anything to end the scene
violently, with a crash and exclamations of fury.

"You absolutely refuse to pay any attention?" I said.

"Oh, absolutely," he answered.

"You know that I can do something, that I can expose you." I had a vague
idea that I could, that the number of small things that I knew to his
discredit and the mass of my hatred could be welded into a damning
whole. He laughed a high-pitched, hysterical laugh. The dawn was
beginning to spread pallidly above us, gleaming mournfully through the
glass of the palm-house. People began to pass, muffled up, on their way
out of the place.

"You may go ..." he was beginning. But the expression of his face
altered. Miss Granger, muffled up like all the rest of the world, was
coming out of the inner door. "We have been having a charming ..." he
began to her. She touched me gently on the arm.

"Come, Arthur," she said, and then to him, "You have heard the news?"

He looked at her rather muzzily.

"Baron Halderschrodt has committed suicide," she said. "Come, Arthur."

We passed on slowly, but de Mersch followed.

"You--you aren't in _earnest_?" he said, catching at her arm so that we
swung round and faced him. There was a sort of mad entreaty in his eyes,
as if he hoped that by unsaying she could remedy an irremediable
disaster, and there was nothing left of him but those panic-stricken,
beseeching eyes.

"Monsieur de Sabran told me," she answered; "he had just come from
making the _constatation_. Besides, you can hear ..."

H