Steinmetz winced.  He knew the expression of the face that was looking out of the window.

“This man has hated me all his life,” he said.  “It began as such things usually do between men—­about a woman.  It was years ago.  I got the better of him, and the good God got the better of me.  She died, and De Chauxville forgot her.  I—­have not forgotten her.  But I have tried to do so.  It is a slow process, and I have made very little progress; but all that is my affair and beside the question.  I merely mention it to show you that De Chauxville had a grudge against me—­”

“This is no time for mistaken charity,” interrupted Paul.  “Do not try to screen any body.  I shall see through it.”

There was a little pause.  Never had that silent room been so noiseless.

“In after-life,” Steinmetz went on, “it was our fate to be at variance several times.  Our mutual dislike has had no opportunity of diminishing.  It seems that, before you married, De Chauxville was pleased to consider himself in love with Mrs. Sydney Bamborough.  Whether he had any right to think himself ill-used, I do not know.  Such matters are usually known to two persons only, and imperfectly by them.  It would appear that the wound to his vanity was serious.  It developed into a thirst for revenge.  He looked about for some means to do you harm.  He communicated with your enemies, and allied himself to such men as Vassili of Paris.  He followed us to Petersburg, and then he had a stroke of good fortune.  He found out—­who betrayed the Charity League!”

Paul turned slowly round.  In his eyes there burned a dull, hungering fire.  Men have seen such a look in the eyes of a beast of prey, driven, famished, cornered at last, and at last face to face with its foe.

“Ah!  He knows that!” he said slowly.

“Yes, God help us! he knows that.”

“And who was it?”

Steinmetz moved uneasily from one foot to the other.

“It was a woman,” he said.

“A woman?”

“A woman—­you know,” said Steinmetz slowly.

“Good God!  Catrina?”

“No, not Catrina.”

“Then who?” cried Paul hoarsely.  His hands fell heavily on the table.

“Your wife!”

Paul knew before the words were spoken.

He turned again, and stood looking out of the window with his hands thrust into his pockets.  He stood there for whole minutes in an awful stillness.  The clock on the mantel-piece, a little travelling timepiece, ticked in a hurried way as if anxious to get on.  Down beneath them, somewhere in the courtyards of the great castle, a dog—­a deep-voiced wolf-hound—­was baying persistently and nervously, listening for the echo of its own voice amid the pines of the desert forest.

Steinmetz watched Paul’s motionless back with a sort of fascination.  He moved uneasily, as if to break a spell of silence almost unbearable in its intensity.  He went to the table and sat down.  From mere habit he took up a quill pen.  He looked at the point of it and at the inkstand.  But he had nothing to write.  There was nothing to say.