I was wild with fear lest the servants, in their stupid but well-meant wish not to disturb me, might have sent important visitors away.  However, when Marianne came flying in, in answer to my long peal of the electric bell, she said that no one had been.  There were letters and one telegram, and all the morning papers, as usual after the first night of a new play.

My heart gave a spring at the news that there was a telegram, for I thought it might be from Ivor, saying he was on the track of the treaty, even if he hadn’t yet got hold of it.  But the message was from Raoul; and he had not found the brocade bag.  He did not put this in so many words, but said, “I have not found what was lost, or learned anything of it.”

From Ivor there was not a line, and I thought this cruel.  He might have wired, or written me a note, even if there were nothing definite to say.  He might, unless—­something had happened to him.  There was that to think of; and I did think of it, with dread, and a growing presentiment that I had not suffered yet all I was to suffer.  I determined to send a servant to the Elysee Palace Hotel to enquire for him, and despatched Henri immediately.  Meanwhile, as there was nothing to do, after pretending to eat breakfast under the watchful eyes of Marianne, I pretended also to read the newspaper notices of the play.  But each sentence went out of my head before I had begun the next.  I knew in the end only that, according to all the critics, Maxine de Renzie had “surpassed herself,” had been “astonishingly great,” had done “what no woman could do unless she threw her whole soul into her part.”  How little they knew where Maxine de Renzie’s soul had been last night!  And—­only God knew where it might be this night.  Out of her body, perhaps—­the one way of escape from Raoul’s hatred, if he had come to know the truth.

Of course the enquiry at the hotel was not for Ivor Dundas, but for the name he had adopted there; yet when my servant came back to me he had nothing to tell which was consoling—­rather the other way.  The gentleman had gone out about midnight (I knew that already), and hadn’t returned since.  Henri had been to the Bureau to ask, and it had struck him, he admitted to me on being catechised, that his questions had been answered with a certain reserve, as if more were known of the absent gentleman’s movements than it was considered wise to tell.

My servant had not been long away, though it seemed long to me, and he had delayed only to buy all the evening papers, which he “thought that Mademoiselle would like to see, as they were sure to be filled with praise of her great acting.”  It was on my tongue to scold him for stopping even one moment, when he had been told to hurry, but he looked so pleased at his own cleverness that I hadn’t the heart to dash his happiness.  I would, however, have pushed the papers aside without so much as glancing at them, if it hadn’t suddenly occurred to me that, if any accident had befallen Ivor, news of it might possibly have got into print by this time.