"My left arm is as sound as yours," he added; "and, maybe, better practiced." Our eyes met again, and the agreement was sealed. The duke was about to speak again, when a sudden thought struck me. I put my hand in my pocket and drew out the Cardinal's Necklace. And I flung it on the table before me, saying: "Let me return that to you, sir." The duke stood regarding the necklace for a moment, as it lay gleaming and glittering on the wooden table in the bare inn parlor. Then he stepped up to the table, but at the moment I cried: "You won't steal her away before--before--" "Before we fight? I will not, on my honor." He paused and added: "For there is one thing I want more even than her." I could guess what that was. And then he put out his hand, took up the necklace, and thrust it carelessly into the pocket of his coat. And looking across the room, I saw the inn-keeper, Jacques Bontet, standing in the doorway and staring with all his eyes at the spot on the table where the glittering thing had for a moment lain; and as the fellow set down the wine he had brought for the duke, I swear that he trembled as a man who has seen a ghost; for he spilled some of the wine and chinked the bottle against the glass. But while I stared at him, the duke lifted his glass and bowed to me, saying, with a smile and as though he jested in some phrase of extravagant friendship for me: "May nothing less than death part you and me?" And I drank the toast with him, saying "Amen." CHAPTER XVII. A Reluctant Intrusion. As Bontet the inn-keeper set the wine on the table before the Duke of Saint-Maclou, the big clock in the hall of the inn struck noon. It is strange to me, even now when the story has grown old in my memory, to recall all that happened before the hands of that clock pointed again to twelve. And last year when I revisited the neighborhood and found a neat new house standing on the site of the ramshackle inn, I could not pass by without a queer feeling in my throat; for it was there that the results of the duchess' indiscretion finally worked themselves out to their unexpected, fatal, and momentous ending. Seldom, as I should suppose, has such a mixed skein of good and evil, of fatality and happiness, been spun from material no more substantial than a sportive lady's idle freak. "By the way, Mr. Aycon," said the duke, after we had drunk our toast, "I have had a message from the magistrate at Avranches requesting our presence to-morrow morning at eleven o'clock. An inquiry has to be held into the death of that rascal Lafleur, and our evidence must be taken. It is a mere formality, the magistrate is good enough to assure me, and I have assured him that we shall neither of us allow anything to interfere with our waiting on him, if we can possibly do so." "I could have sent no other message myself," said I.