“That is forbidden,” he said to Ivor.  Then, turning sharply to me.  “What language was that?”

“Spanish,” I answered.  “He only bade me good-bye.  We have been—­very dear friends, and there was a misunderstanding, but—­it’s over now.  It was natural he shouldn’t want you to hear his last words to me.”

“Nevertheless, it is forbidden,” repeated the warder obstinately, “and though the five minutes you were granted together are not over yet, the prisoner must go with me now.  He has forfeited the rest of his time, and must be reported.”

With this, he ordered Ivor to leave the room, in a tone which sounded to me so brutal that I should have liked him to be shot, and the whole French police force exterminated.  To hear a little underbred policeman dare to speak like that to my big, brave, handsome Englishman, and to know that it would be childish and undignified of Ivor to resist—­oh, I could have killed the creature with my own hands—­I think!

As for Ivor, he said not another word, except “good-bye,” smiling half sadly, half with a twinkle of grim humour.  Then he went out, with his head high:  and just at the door he threw me back one look.  It said as plainly as if he had spoken:  “Remember, I know you won’t fail me.”

I did indeed remember, and I prayed that I should have pluck and courage not to fail.  But it was a very hard thing that he had asked me to do, and he had said well in saying that he would not ask it of me if it did not mean more than his life.

The words he had whispered so hastily and unexpectedly in Spanish, were these:  “Go to the room of the murder alone, and on the window balcony find in a box under flower-pots a folded document.  Take this to Maxine.  Every moment counts.”

So it seemed that it was always of her he thought—­of Maxine de Renzie!  And I, of all people in the world, was to help him, with her.

As I thought of this task he’d set me, and of all it meant, it appeared more and more incredible that he should have had the heart to ask such a thing of me.  But—­it “meant more than his life.”  And I would do the thing, if it could be done, because of my pride.

As I drove away from the prison a kind of fury grew in me and possessed me.  I felt as if I had fire instead of blood in my veins.  If I had known that death, or worse than death, waited for me in the ghastly house to which Ivor had sent me, I would still have gone there.

My first thought was to go instantly, and get it over—­with success or failure.  But calmer thoughts prevailed.

I hadn’t looked at the papers yet.  My only knowledge of last night’s dreadful happenings had come from Uncle Eric and Lord Robert West.  I had said to myself that I didn’t wish to read the newspaper accounts of the murder, and of Ivor’s supposed part in it.  I remembered now, however, that I did not even know in what part of Paris the house of the murder was.  I recalled only the name of the street, because it was a curiously grim one—­like the tragedy that had been acted in it.