“As a warning.”

“Or because you don’t dare make it to anyone else.”

“Dare!  I haven’t accused him thus far, because to do so would brand your name with his.”

“Ah!” I said.  “You are very considerate.”

“I don’t pretend to be considerate—­except of myself.  I’ve waited, and held my hand until now, because I wanted to see you before doing a thing which would mean certain ruin for du Laurier.  I love you as much as I ever did; even more, because, in common with most men, I value what I find hard to get.  To-night I ask you again to marry me.  Give me a different answer from that you gave me before, and I’ll be silent about what I know.”

“What you know of the document you mentioned?” I asked, my heart drumming an echo of its beating in my ears.

“Yes.”

“But—­I thought you said that its loss was already discovered?” (Oh, I was keeping myself well under control, though a mistake now would surely cost me more than I dared count!)

For half a second he was taken aback, at a loss what answer to make.  Half a second—­no more; yet that hardly perceptible hesitation told me what I had been playing with him to find out.

“Discovered by me,” he explained.  “That is, by me and one person over whom I have such an influence that he will use his knowledge, or—­forget it, according to my advice.”

“There is no such person,” I said to myself.  But I didn’t say it aloud.  Quickly I named over in my mind such men in the French Foreign Office as were in a position to discover the disappearance of any document under Raoul du Laurier’s charge.  There were several who might have done so, some above Raoul in authority, some below; but I was certain that not one of them was an intimate friend of Count Godensky’s.  If he had suspected anything the day he met me coming out of the Foreign Office he might, of course, have hinted his suspicions to one of those men (though all along I’d believed him too shrewd to risk the consequences, the ridicule and humiliation of a mistake):  but if he had spoken, it would be beyond his power to prevent matters from taking their own course, independent of my decisions and his actions.

I believed now that what I had hoped was true.  He was “bluffing.”  He wanted me to flounder into some admission, and to make him a promise in order to save the man I loved.  I was only a woman, he’d argued, no doubt—­an emotional woman, already wrought up to a high pitch of nervous excitement.  Perhaps he had expected to have easy work with me.  And I don’t think that my silence after his last words discouraged him.  He imagined me writhing at the alternative of giving up Raoul or seeing him ruined, and he believed that he knew me well enough to be sure what I would do in the end.

“Well?” he said at last, quite gently.

My eyes had been bent on my lap, but I glanced suddenly up at him, and saw his face in the light of the street lamps as we passed.  Count Godensky is not more Mephistophelian in type than any other dark, thin man with a hook nose, keen eyes, heavy browed; a prominent chin and a sharply waxed, military moustache trained to point upward slightly at the ends.  But to my fancy he looked absolutely devilish at that moment.  Still, I was less afraid of him than I had been since the day I stole the treaty.