“I understand.  You must have persuaded yourself that you were justified.  But, good Heavens, Maxine,” I couldn’t help breaking out, “it was an awful thing to do.”

“I know—­I know.  But I had to have the money—­for Raoul.  And there was no other way to get it.  You remember, I’d refused, till the diamonds were lost, and would have refused even if Raoul had nothing to do with the French Foreign Office.  But let me go on telling you what happened.  I had time enough.  I had even a minute or two to spare.  And fortunately for me, the man I’d sent Raoul to find was out.  I looked at my watch, pretended to be surprised, and said I must go at once.  I couldn’t bear to waste a second in hurrying the treaty off, so that it might the more quickly be on its way back.  I hadn’t come to visit Raoul in my own carriage, but in a cab, which was waiting.  As Raoul was taking me to it, Count Godensky got out of a motor-brougham, and saw me.  If only it had been anywhere except in front of the Foreign Office!  I told myself there was no reason why he should guess that anything was wrong, but I was in such a state of nerves that, as he raised his hat, and his eyebrows, I fancied that he imagined all sorts of things, and I felt myself grow red and pale.  What a fool I was—­and how weak!  But I couldn’t help it.  I didn’t wait to go home.  I wrote a few lines in the cab, and sent off the packet, registered, in time I hoped, to catch the post—­but after all, it didn’t.  Coming out from the post office, there was Godensky again, in his motor-brougham. That could have been no coincidence.  A horrid certainty sprang to life in me that he’d followed my cab from the Foreign Office, to see where I would go.  Why couldn’t I have thought of that danger?  I have always thought of things, and guarded against them; yet this time, this time of all others, I seemed fated.”

“But if Godensky had known what you were doing, the game would have been up for you before this,” I said.

“He didn’t know, of course.  Only—­if he wants to be a woman’s lover and she won’t have him, he’s her enemy and he’s the enemy of the man who is her lover.  He’s too clever and too careful of his own interests to speak out prematurely anything he might vaguely suspect, for it would do him harm if he proved mistaken.  He wouldn’t yet, I think, even warn those whom it might concern, to search and see if anything in Raoul’s charge were out of order or missing.  But what he would do, what I think he has done, is this.  Having some idea, as he may have, that my relations with certain important persons in England are rather friendly, and seeing me come from the Foreign Office to go almost straight to the post, it might have occurred to him to try and learn the name of my correspondent.  He has influence—­he could perhaps have found out:  but if he did, it wouldn’t have helped him much, for naturally, my dealings with the British Foreign Secretary are always well under cover—­hence a delay sometimes