accomplice. The worst has come to pass, and Narcisse has been
doomed to sneeze into the basket like a mere aristocrat or
politician during the Terror I was greatly upset by this news, but
I was interested, and in a measure consoled, to find an enclosure
amongst the other papers, an envelope addressed to me in the
handwriting of the condemned man. This voix d'outre tombe, I
rejoice to say, confides to me the secret of that incomparable
sauce of his, a secret which I feared might be buried with Narcisse
in the prison ditch."

The Marchesa sighed as she listened. The recipe of the sauce was
safe indeed, but she knew by experience how wide might be the gulf
between the actual work of an artist and the product of another
hand guided by his counsels, let the hand be ever so dexterous, and
the counsels ever so clear. "Will it be too much," she said, "to
ask you to give us the details of this painful tragedy ?"

"It will not," Sir John replied reflectively. "The last words of
many a so-called genius have been enshrined in literature:
probably no one will ever know the parting objurgation
of Narcisse. I will endeavour, however, to give you some notion as
to what occurred, from the budget I have just read. I fear the
tragedy was a squalid one. Madame, the victim, was elderly,
unattractive in person, exacting in temper, and the owner of
considerable wealth--at least, this is what came out at the trial.
It was one of those tangles in which a fatal denouement is
inevitable; and, if this had not come through Mademoiselle Sidonie,
it would have come through somebody else. The lovers plotted to
remove madame by first drugging her, then breaking her skull with
the wood chopper, and then pitching her downstairs so as to produce