ned gently, and Madame Berselius entered. She was dressed just as
she had traveled from Vaux. She had only just arrived, to find death in
the house, and as she looked at the figure on the bed she fancied she
beheld it indeed.

Closing the door gently she approached the bed. No, it was not death but
sleep. He was breathing evenly and rhythmically, sleeping, apparently, as
peacefully as a child.

She was about to turn away when, like a bather who has ventured into some
peaceful tropic rock pool wherein lurks an octopus, she found herself
seized and held. Berselius's eyes were open, he was not asleep. His gaze
was fixed on hers, and he held her with his eyes as the cat holds the bird
or the python the man.

He had been waiting for her with the patience and the artfulness of the
hunter, but no game had ever inspired such ferocity in him as this woman,
vile and little, who yet had abased him to the earth.

He was dying, but what beast full of life is more dangerous than the dying
tiger?

As Berselius gazed at the woman, she, with all her will urging her body to
retreat, approached him. Then, her knees touching the bed, she fell on her
knees beside him and his hand fell on her shoulder.

Holding her thus, he gazed on her coldly, dispassionately, and critically,
as an emperor of old might have gazed on a defaulting slave. Then, as
though his anger had turned to disgust, as though disdaining to waste a
word on her, he struck her full in the face with the back of his right
hand, a blow that caused her to cry out and sent her groveling on the
marble floor, where a moment after the nurse on duty, attracted by the
cry, found her.

Berselius was dead, but the mocking smile on his lips remained, almost
justified by the words of the nurse imploring the woman on the floor to
calm herself and restrain her grief.

Whatever his life may have been, his death affected Adams strangely. The
magnetism of the man's character had taken a strong hold upon him,
fascinating him with the fascination that strength alone can exercise. And
the man he regretted was not the ambiguous being, the amended Berselius,
so obviously a failure, but the real Berselius who had returned to meet
death.

CHAPTER XLII

AMIDST THE LILIES

One day in March, nine months later, at Champrosay, in the garden of a
little cottage near the Paris road, Maxine Berselius stood directing the
movements of an old man in a blue blouse--Father Champardy by name,