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 crystals of arsenic. “Don’t take that!” he cried, but she had already placed it in her bag.

“I see you will be a great man,” she said softly. “I never imagined such things. Did you say that Darwin was carried to his grave by dukes? Who were they?”

“That doesn’t matter.”

She kissed him. “You are nice! Why doesn’t it matter?”

“Well the Duke of Argyll and  the Duke of Devonshire,” he muttered.

“Really!” she considered this, frowning. “I should never have imagined that scientists were so  And you only mentioned it incidentally!” She put her arms round his shoulders, as if for the first time. “And you, you could? Really?”

“Well, wait until I am buried.”

“Ah, if that were only very soon,” she said reflectively with naïve cruelty. “You’d be wonderful if you were famous. Do you know what I like the most?”

“No.”

“I don’t, either,” she said musingly, and turned and kissed him. “I don’t know. Whoever and whatever you were” She moved her shoulders with a gesture of impatience. “It’s for always, you understand?”

Prokop recoiled from this relentless monogamy. She stood before him, muffled up to her eyes in her blue fox fur and looked at him in the twilight with glistening eyes. “Oh!” she cried suddenly and sank back into a chair, “my legs are trembling.” She smoothed and rubbed them with naïve shameless-