Page:Braddon--The Trail of the Serpent.djvu/125

Rh and the thin white lips move silently and rapidly, from seven to nine, and back again to seven.

"There is something on the cards that puzzles you," says Raymond, breaking the deathly silence. "What is it?"

"A death!" answers the passionless voice of Monsieur Blurosset. "A violent death, which bears no outward sign of violence. I said, did I not, that the king of spades was in danger?"

"You did."

From three to five, from five to nine, from nine to seven, from seven to nine: the groups of cards form a circle: three times round the circle, as the sun goes; back again, and three times round the circle in a contrary direction: across the circle from three to seven, from seven to five, from five to nine, and the blue spectacles come to a dead stop at nine.

"Before twelve o'clock to-morrow night the king of spades will be dead!" says the monotonous voice of Monsieur Blurosset. The voices of the clocks of Paris seem to take up Monsieur Blurosset's voice as they strike the hour of midnight.

Twenty-four hours for the king of spades!

Monsieur Blurosset gathers up his cards and drops them into his pocket. Malicious people say that he sleeps with them under his pillow; that he plays écarté by himself in his sleep; and that he has played piquet with a very tall dark gentleman, whom the porter never let either in or out, and who left a sulphureous and suffocating atmosphere behind him in Monsieur Blurosset's little apartment.

"Good!" says Monsieur Raymond Marolles. "So much for the pasteboard. Now for the crucible."

For the first time since the discovery of the treachery of her husband Valerie de Lancy smiles. She has a beautiful smile, which curves the delicate lips without distorting them, and which brightens in her large dark eyes with a glorious fire of the sunny south. But for all that, Heaven save the man who has injured her from the light of such a smile as hers of to-night.

"You want my assistance in some matters of chemistry?" asks Blurosset.

"Yes! I forgot to tell you, madame, that my friend Laurent Blurosset—though he chooses to hide himself in one of the most obscure streets of Paris—is perhaps one of the greatest men in this mighty city. He is a chemist who will one day work a revolution in the chemical science; but he is a fanatic, madame, or, let me rather say, he is a lover, and his crucible is his mistress. This blind devotion to a science is surely only another form of the world's great madness—love! Who knows what bright eyes a problem in Euclid may have replaced? Who can