inquiries. Instead he took the nine o'clock train
the next morning to Paris.

* * * * *

It was a chamber of death into which he was ushered--dismal, yet, of its
sort, unique, marvellous. The room itself might have been the sleeping
apartment of an Empress--lofty, with white panelled walls adorned simply
with gilded lines; with high windows, closely curtained now so that
neither sound nor the light of day might penetrate into the room. In the
middle of the apartment, upon a canopy bedstead which had once adorned a
king's palace, lay Madame de Maupassim. Her face was already touched
with the finger of death, yet her eyes were undimmed and her lips
unquivering. Her hands, covered with rings, lay out before her upon the
lace coverlid. Supported by many pillows, she was issuing her last
instructions with the cold precision of the man of affairs who makes the
necessary arrangements for a few days' absence from his business.

Peter Ruff, who had not even been allowed sufficient time to change his
travelling clothes, was brought without hesitation to her bedside. She
looked at him in silence for a moment with a cold glitter in her eyes.

"You are four days late, Monsieur Peter Ruff," she remarked. "Why did
you not obey your first summons?"

"Madame," he answered, "I thought that there must be a misunderstanding.
Four years ago I gave notice to the council that I had married and
retired into private life. A country farmer is of no further use to the
world."

The woman's thin lip curled.

"From death and the Double Four," she said, "there is no resignation
which counts. You are as much our creature to-day as I am the creature
of the disease which is carrying me across the threshold of death."

Peter Ruff remained silent. The woman's words seemed full of dread
significance. Besides, how was it possible to contradict the dying?

"It is upon the unwilling of the world," she continued, speaking slowly,
yet with extraordinary distinctness, "that its greatest honours are
often conferred. The name of my successor has been balloted for
secretly. It is you, Peter Ruff, who have been chosen."

This time he was silent, because he was literally bereft of words. This
woman was dying, and fancying strange things! He looked from one to the
other of the stern, pale faces of those who were gathered around her
bedside. Seven of them there were--the same seven. At that moment their
eyes were all focused u