“Save me from what?” I asked temporising.  “You’re very mysterious, Count Godensky.  And I’m Mademoiselle de Renzie except to my very intimate friends.”

“I am your friend, always.  Maybe you will even permit me to speak of myself as your ‘intimate friend’ when I have done what I hope to do for you in—­in the matter of a certain document which has disappeared.”

I was quivering all over.  But I had not lost hope yet; I think that some women, feeling as I did, would have fainted.  But it would have been better for me to die and be out of my troubles for ever, than to let myself faint and show Godensky that he had struck home.

“Be quiet.  Be cool.  Be brave now, if never again,” I said to myself.  And my voice sounded perfectly natural as I exclaimed:  “Oh, the ‘document’ again.  The one you spoke about when we first met to-night.  You rouse my curiosity.  But I don’t in the least know what you mean.”

“The loss of it is known,” he said.

“Ah, it’s a lost document?”

“As you will be lost, Maxine, if you don’t come to me for the help I’m only too glad to give—­on conditions.  Let me tell you what they are.”

“Wouldn’t it be more to the point if you told me what the document is, and how it concerns me?” I parried him, determined to bring him to bay.

“Aren’t you evading the point far more than I?  The document—­which you and I can both see as plainly before our eyes at this instant as though it were in—­let us say your hands, or—­du Laurier’s, if he were here—­that document is far too important even to name within hearing of other ears.”

“Marianne’s?  But I told you she can’t understand a word of Russian.”

“One can’t be sure.  We can never tell, in these days, who may not be—­a spy.”

There was a stab for me!  But I would not give him the satisfaction of showing that it hurt.  He wanted to confuse me, to put me off my guard; but he should not.

“They say one judges others by one’s self,” I laughed.  “Count Godensky, if you throw out such lurid hints about my poor, fat Marianne, I shall begin to wonder if it’s not you who are the spy!”

“Since you trust your woman so implicitly, then,” he went on, “I’ll tell you what you want to know.  The document I speak of is the one you took out of the Foreign Office the other day, when you called on your—­friend, Monsieur le Vicomte du Laurier.”

“Dear me!” I exclaimed.  “You say you want to be my friend, yet you seem to think I am a kleptomaniac.  I can’t imagine what I should want with any dry old document out of the Foreign Office, can you?”

“Yes, I can imagine,” said Godensky drily.

“Pray tell me then.  Also what document it was.  For, joking apart, this is rather a serious accusation.”

“If I make any accusation, it’s less against you than du Laurier.”

“Oh, you make an accusation against him.  Why do you make it to me?”