“This necklace, too, of all things in the world!” murmured Maxine, lost in the mystery.  “It’s like a dream.  Yet here—­by some miracle—­it is, in our hands.  And the treaty is gone.”

“The treaty is gone,” I repeated, miserably.

It was Maxine herself who had spoken the words which I merely echoed, yet it almost killed her to hear them from me.  No doubt it gave the dreadful fact a kind of inevitability.  She flung herself down on the sofa with a groan, her face buried in her hands.

“My God, what a punishment!” she stammered.  “I’ve ruined the man I risked everything to save.  I will go to the theatre, and I will act to-night, my friend, but unless you can give me back what is lost, when to-morrow morning comes, I shall be out of the world.”

“Don’t say that,” I implored, sick with pity for her and shame at my failure.  “All hope isn’t over yet; it can’t be.  I’ll think this out.  There must be a solution.  There must be a way of laying hold of what seems to be gone.  If by giving my life I could get it, I assure you I wouldn’t hesitate for an instant, now:  so you see, there’s nothing I won’t do to help you.  Only, I wish the path could be made a little plainer for me—­unless for some reason it’s necessary for you to keep me in the dark.  The word ‘treaty’ I heard for the first time from you.  I didn’t know what I was bringing you, except that it was a document of international importance, and that you’d been helping the British Foreign Secretary—­perhaps Great Britain as a Power—­in some ticklish manoeuvre of high politics.  He said that, so far as he was concerned, you might tell me more if you liked.  He left it to you.  That was his message.”

“Then I will tell you more!” Maxine exclaimed.  “It will be better to do so.  I know that it will make it easier for you to help me.  The document you were bringing me was a treaty—­a quite new treaty between Japan, Russia and France:  not a copy, but the original.  England had been warned that there was a secret understanding between the three countries, unknown to her.  There was no time to make a copy.  And I stole the real treaty from Raoul du Laurier, to whom I am engaged—­whom I adore, Ivor, as I didn’t know it was in me to adore any man.  You know his name, perhaps—­that he’s Under Secretary in the Foreign Office, here in Paris.  Oh, I can read in your eyes what you’re thinking of me, now.  You can’t think worse of me than I think of myself.  Yet I did the thing for Raoul’s sake.  There’s that in my defence—­only that.”

“I don’t understand,” I said, trying not to show the horror of Maxine’s treachery to a man who loved and trusted her, which I could not help feeling.