"Your country, my dear Marquis," he said, "is on its last legs. No one knows better than I that it is, at the present moment, honeycombed with sedition and anarchical impulses. The people are rotten. For years the whole tone of France has been decadent. Its fall must even now be close at hand." "You take a gloomy view of my country's future," Sogrange declared. "Why should one refuse to face facts?" Bernadine replied. "One does not often talk so frankly, but we three are met together this evening under somewhat peculiar circumstances. The days of the glory of France are past. England has laid out her neck for the yoke of the conqueror. Both are doomed to fall. Both are ripe for the great humiliation. You two gentlemen whom I have the honour to receive as my guests," he concluded, filling his glass and bowing towards them, "in your present unfortunate predicament represent precisely the position of your two countries." "_Ave Cæsar!_" Peter muttered grimly, raising his glass to his lips. Bernadine accepted the challenge. "It is not I, alas! who may call myself Cæsar," he replied, "although it is certainly you who are about to die." Sogrange turned to the man who stood behind his chair. "If I might trouble you for a little dry toast?" he inquired. "A modern, but very uncomfortable, ailment," he added, with a sigh. "One's digestion must march with the years, I suppose." Bernadine smiled. "Your toast you shall have, with pleasure, Marquis," he said, "but as for your indigestion, do not let that trouble you any longer. I think that I can promise you immunity from that annoying complaint for the rest of your life." "You are doing your best," Peter declared, leaning back in his chair, "to take away my appetite." Bernadine looked searchingly from one to the other of his two guests. "Yes," he admitted, "you are brave men. I do not know why I should ever have doubted it. Your pose is excellent. I have no wish, however, to see you buoyed up by a baseless optimism. A somewhat remarkable chance has delivered you into my hands. You are my prisoners. You, Peter Baron de Grost, I have hated all my days. You have stood between me and the achievement of some of my most dearly cherished tasks. Always I have said to myself that the day of reckoning must come. It has arrived. As for you, Marquis de Sogrange, if my personal feelings towards you are less violent, you still represent the things absolutely inimical to me and my interests. The departure of you two men was the one thing necessary for the successful completion of certain tasks which I have in hand at the present moment." Peter pushed away his plate.