“Now, are you satisfied?” she asked, “Now that we have both shown you we have nothing to conceal; or would you like to take me to the police station, and have some dreadful female search me more thoroughly still?  I’ll go with you, if you wish.  I won’t even he indiscreet enough to ask questions, since you seem inclined to do what we’ve no need to do—­keep your own secrets.  All I stipulate is, that if you care to take such measures you’ll take them at once, for as you may possibly be aware, this is the first night of my new play, and I should be sorry to be late.”

The Commissary of Police looked fixedly at Maxine for a moment, as if he would read her soul.

“No, Mademoiselle,” he said, “I am convinced that neither you nor Monsieur are concealing anything about your persons.  I will not trouble you further until we have searched the room.”

Maxine could not blanch, for already she was as white as she will be when she lies in her coffin.  But though her expression did not change, I saw that the pupils of her eyes dilated.  Actress that she is, she could control her muscles; but she could not control the beating of the blood in her brain.  I felt that she was conscious of this betrayal, under the gaze of the policeman, and she laughed to distract his attention.  My heart ached for her.  I thought of a meadow-lark manoeuvering to hide the place where her nest lies.  Poor, beautiful Maxine!  In spite of her pride, her high courage, the veneer of hardness which her experience of the world had given, she was infinitely pathetic in my eyes; and though I had never loved her, though I did love another woman, I would have given my life gladly at this minute if I could have saved her from the catastrophe she dreaded.

CHAPTER V

IVOR DOES WHAT HE CAN FOR MAXINE

“How long a time do you think I had been in this room, Monsieur,” she asked, “before you—­rather rudely, I must say—­broke in upon my conversation with my friend?”

“You had been here exactly three minutes,” replied the Commissary of Police.

“As much as that?  I should have thought less.  We had to greet each other, after having been parted for many months; and still, in the three minutes, you believe that we had time to concoct a plot of some sort, and to find some safe corner—­all the while in semi-darkness—­for the hiding of a thing important to the police—­a bomb, perhaps?  You must think us very clever.”

“I know that you are very clever, Mademoiselle.”

“Perhaps I ought to thank you for the compliment,” she answered, allowing anger to warm her voice at last; “but this is almost beyond a joke.  A woman comes to the rooms of a friend.  Both of them are so placed that they prefer her call not to be talked about.  For that reason, and for the woman’s sake, the friend chooses to take a name that isn’t his—­as he has a right to do.  Yet, just because that woman happens unfortunately to be well-known—­her face and name being public property—­she is followed, she is spied upon, humiliated, and all, no doubt, on account of some silly mistake, or malicious false information.  Ah, it is shameful, Monsieur!  I wonder the police of Paris can stoop to such stupidity, such meanness.”