Page:Braddon--The Trail of the Serpent.djvu/128

124 The blue spectacles contemplated her gravely for a moment. Monsieur Blurosset laid one cold hand upon her pulse, and with the other took a little bottle from the cabinet, out of which he gave his visitor a few drops of a transparent liquid.

"She will do now," he said to Raymond, "till you get her home; then see that she takes this," he added, handing Monsieur Marolles another phial; "it is an opiate which will procure her six hours' sleep. Without that she would go mad."

Raymond led Valerie from the room; but, once outside, her head fell heavily on his shoulder, and he was obliged to carry her down the steep stairs.

"I think," he muttered to himself as he went out into the courtyard with his unconscious burden, "I think we have sealed the doom of the king of spades!"

a little table in the boudoir of the pavilion lay a letter. It was the first thing Valerie de Lancy beheld on entering the room, with Raymond Marolles by her side, half an hour after she had left the apartment of Monsieur Blurosset. This letter was in the handwriting of her husband, and it bore the postmark of Rouen. Valerie's face told her companion whom the letter came from before she took it in her hand.

"Read it," he said, coolly. "It contains his excuses, no doubt. Let us see what pretty story he has invented. In his early professional career his companions surnamed him Baron Munchausen."

Valerie's hand shook as she broke the seal; but she read the letter carefully through, and then turning to Raymond she said—

"You arc right; his excuse is excellent, only a little too transparent: listen.

"'The reason of my absence from Paris'—(absence from Paris, and to-night in the Bois de Boulogne)—'is most extraordinary. At the conclusion of the opera last night, I was summoned to the stage-door, where I found a messenger waiting for me, who told me he had come post-haste from Rouen, where my mother was lying dangerously ill, and to implore me, if I wished to see her before her death, to start for that place immediately. Even my love for you, which you well know, Valerie, is the absorbing passion of my life, was forgotten in such a moment. I had no means of communicating with you without endangering our secret. Imagine, then, my surprise on my arrival here, to find that my mother is in perfect health, and had of course sent no messenger to me. I fear in this mystery