“No, Count Godensky, I do not,” I answered steadily.  But a sudden illuminating ray did show me, even as I spoke, what might be in his scheming mind.

“Then I must be clear, and, above all, frank.  Du Laurier loves you.  You love him.  You mean, I think, to marry him.  But deeply in love as he is, he is a very proud fellow.  He will have all or nothing, if I judge him well; and he would not take for his wife a woman who accepts diamonds from another man, saying as she takes them that he is her lover.”

“He wouldn’t believe it of me!” I cried.

“There is a way of convincing him.  Oh, I shall not tell him!  But he shall see in writing all that passed between the Juge d’Instruction and Mr. Dundas, unless—­”

“Unless?—­but I know what you mean to threaten.  You repeat yourself.”

“Not quite, for I have new arguments, and stronger ones.  I want you, Maxine.  I mean to have you—­or I will crush you, and now you know I can.  Choose.”

I sprang up, and looked at him.  Perhaps there was murder in my eyes, as for a moment there was in my heart, for he exclaimed: 

“Tigeress!  You would kill me if you could.  But that doesn’t make me love you less.  Would du Laurier have you if he knew what you are—­as he will know soon unless you let me save you?  Yet I—­I would love you if you were a murderess as well as a—­spy.”

“It is you who are a spy!” I faltered, now all but broken.

“If I am, I haven’t spied in vain.  Not only can I ruin you with du Laurier, and before the world, but I can ruin him utterly and in all ways.”

“No—­no,” I gasped.  “You cannot.  You’re boasting.  You can do nothing.”

“Nothing to-night, perhaps.  I’m not speaking of to-night.  I am giving you time.  But to-morrow—­or the day after.  It’s much the same to me.  At first, when I began to suspect that something had been taken from its place, I had no proof.  I had to get that, and I did get it—­nearly all I wanted.  This affair of Dundas might have been planned for my advantage.  It is perfect.  All its complications are just so many links in a chain for me.  Girard—­the man Dundas chose to employ—­was the very man I’d sent to England; on what errand, do you think?  To watch your friend the British Foreign Secretary.  He followed Dundas to Paris on the bare suspicion that there’d been, communication between the two, and he was preparing a report for me when—­Dundas called on him.”

“What connection can Ivor Dundas’ coming to Paris have with Raoul du Laurier?” I dared to ask.

“You know best as to that.”

“They have never met.  Both are men of honour, and—­”

“Men of honour are tricked by women sometimes, and then they have to suffer for being fools, as if they had been villains.  Think what such a man—­a man of honour, as you say—­would feel when he found out the woman!”

“A woman can be calumniated as well as a man,” I said.  “You are so unscrupulous you would stoop to anything, I know that.  Raoul du Laurier has done nothing; I—­I have done nothing of which to be ashamed.  Yet you can lie about us, ruin him perhaps by a plot, as if he were guilty, and—­and do terrible harm to me.”