“Don’t play with me!” he exclaimed.  “I can’t bear it.  You sent me away.  Yet you had an appointment with Godensky.  You took him into your carriage; and now—­”

“Marianne was in the carriage.  If I could have had you with me, I should have packed her off by herself, alone, that I—­might be alone with you.  Oh, Raoul, it isn’t possible you believe that I could lie to you for Godensky’s sake—­a man like that!  If I’d cared for him, why shouldn’t I have accepted him instead of you?  Could I have changed so quickly, do you think?”

“I don’t think; I’m not able to think.  I can only feel,” he answered.

“Then—­feel sure that I love you—­no man but you—­now and always.”

“Oh, Maxine!” he stammered.  “Am I a fool, or wise, to let myself believe you?”

“You are wise,” I answered, as firmly as if I deserved the full faith I was claiming from him as my right.  “If you wouldn’t believe, without my insisting, without my explaining and defending myself, I’d tell you nothing.  But you do believe, just because you love me—­I see it in your face, and thank God for it.  So I’ll tell you this.  Count Godensky hates me, because I couldn’t and wouldn’t love him, and he hates you because he thinks I love you.  He—­” I paused for a second.  A wild thought had flashed like the light of a beacon in my brain.  If I could say something now which, when the blow fell—­if it did fall—­might come back to Raoul’s mind and convince him instantly that it was Godensky, not I, who had stolen the treaty and broken him!  If I could make him believe the whole thing a monstrous plot of Godensky’s to revenge himself on a woman who’d refused him, by cleverly implicating her in her lover’s ruin, by throwing guilt upon her while she was, in reality, innocent!  If I could suggest that to Raoul now, while his ears were open, I might hold his love against the world, no matter what happened afterward.

It was a mad idea and a wicked one, perhaps; but I was at my wits’ end and desperate.  Though not guilty of this one crime which I would shift upon his shoulders if I could, as a means of escaping from the trap he’d helped to set, Godensky was capable of it, and guilty of others, I was sure, which had never been brought home to him.  I believed that he, too, was a spy, just as I was; and far worse, because if he were one he betrayed his own country, while I never had done that, never would.

All these thoughts rushed through my head in a second; and I think that Raoul could hardly have noticed the pause before I began to speak again.

“He—­Godensky—­would do anything to part you and me,” I said.  “There’s no plot too sly and vile for him to conceive and carry out against me—­and you.  No lie too base for him to tell you—­or others—­about me.  He sent me a letter at the theatre—­soon after you’d left me the first time.  In it, he said that I must give him a few minutes after the play, unless I wanted some dreadful harm to come