“Ah!” said Lanyard—­“but about Madame la Comtesse de Lorgnes...”

“My friend:  that was a good joke once; but now you must forget that name as utterly as I have forgotten another.”

“Impossible.”

“What do you say?” She frowned a little.  “Is it possible you misunderstood?  De Lorgnes was nothing to me.”

“I never thought he was.”

“You had reason.  Because we were thrown together, and our names were something alike in sound, it amused us—­not the two of us alone, but all our party—­to pretend I was madame la comtesse.”

“He was really a count?”

“Who knows?  It was the style by which he had always passed with us.”

“Alas!” sighed Lanyard, and bent a sombre gaze upon his glass.

Without looking he was aware of a questioning gesture of the woman’s head.  He said no more, but shook his own.

“What is this?” she asked sharply.  “You know something about de Lorgnes?”

“Had you not heard?” he countered, looking up in surprise.

“Heard—?” He saw her eyes stabbed by fear, and knew himself justified of his surmises.  All day she had been expecting de Lorgnes, or word from him, all day and all this night.  One could imagine the hourly augmented strain of care and foreboding; indeed its evidence were only too clearly betrayed in her face and manner of that moment:  she was on the rack.

But there was no pity in Lanyard’s heart.  He knew her of old, what she was, what evil she had done; and in his hearing still sounded the echoes of those words with which, obliquely enough but without misunderstanding on the part of either, she had threatened to expose him to the police unless he consented to some sort of an alliance with her, a collaboration whose nature could not but be dishonourable if it were nothing more than a simple conspiracy of mutual silence.

And purposely he delayed his answer till her patience gave way and she was clutching his arm with frantic hands.

“What is the matter?  Why do you look at me like that?  Why don’t you tell me—­if there is anything to tell—?”

“I was hesitating to shock you, Liane.”

“Never mind me.  What has happened to de Lorgnes?”

“It is in all the evening newspapers—­the murder mystery of the Lyons rapide.”

“De Lorgnes—?”

Lanyard inclined his head.  The woman breathed an invocation to the Deity and sank back against the wall, her face ghastly beneath its paint.

“You know this?”

“I was a passenger aboard the rapide, and saw the body before it was removed.”

Liane Delorme made an effort to speak, but only her breath rustled harshly on her dry lips.  She swallowed convulsively, turned to her glass, and found it empty.  Lanyard hastened to refill it.  She took the wine at a gulp, muttered a word of thanks, and offered the glass to be filled anew; but when this had been done sat unconscious of it, staring witlessly at nothing, so lost to her surroundings that all the muscles of her face relaxed and her years peered out through that mask of artifice which alone preserved for her the illusion and repute of beauty.