"I have kept ten thousand francs for Planard," said the Count, touching his waistcoat pocket. "Will that satisfy him?" asked the lady. "Why--curse him!" screamed the Count. "Has he no conscience? I'll swear to him it's half the entire thing." He and the lady again came and looked at me anxiously for a while, in silence; and then the old Count began to grumble again about Planard, and to compare his watch with the clock. The lady seemed less impatient; she sat no longer looking at me, but across the room, so that her profile was toward me--and strangely changed, dark and witch-like it looked. My last hope died as I beheld that jaded face from which the mask had dropped. I was certain that they intended to crown their robbery by murder. Why did they not dispatch me at once? What object could there be in postponing the catastrophe which would expedite their own safety. I cannot recall, even to myself, adequately the horrors unutterable that I underwent. You must suppose a real night-mare--I mean a night-mare in which the objects and the danger are real, and the spell of corporal death appears to be protractible at the pleasure of the persons who preside at your unearthly torments. I could have no doubt as to the cause of the state in which I was. In this agony, to which I could not give the slightest expression, I saw the door of the room where the coffin had been, open slowly, and the Marquis d'Harmonville entered the room. Chapter XXV DESPAIR A moment's hope, hope violent and fluctuating, hope that was nearly torture, and then came a dialogue, and with it the terrors of despair. "Thank Heaven, Planard, you have come at last," said the Count, taking him with both hands by the arm, and clinging to it and drawing him toward me. "See, look at him. It has all gone sweetly, sweetly, sweetly up to this. Shall I hold the candle for you?" My friend d'Harmonville, Planard, whatever he was, came to me, pulling off his gloves, which he popped into his pocket. "The candle, a little this way," he said, and stooping over me he looked earnestly in my face. He touched my forehead, drew his hand across it, and then looked in my eyes for a time. "Well, doctor, what do you think?" whispered the Count. "How much did you give him?" said the Marquis, thus suddenly stunted down to a doctor. "Seventy drops," said the lady. "In the hot coffee?" "Yes; sixty in a hot cup of coffee and ten in the liqueur." Her voice, low and hard, seemed to me to tremble a little. It takes a long course of guilt to subjugate nature completely, and prevent those exterior signs of agitation that outlive all good. The doctor, however, was treating me as coolly as he might a subject which he was about to place on the dissecting-table for a lecture. He looked into my eyes again for awhile, took my wrist, and applied his fingers to the pulse. "That action suspended," he said to himself.