That waywardness which was a legitimate inheritance from generations of wilful forebears, impatient of all those restraints which a fixed environment imposes upon the individual, an impatience which had always been hers though it slumbered in unsuspected latency, asserted itself of a sudden, possessed her wholly, and warmed, her being like forbidden wine.

In this humour she was set down at her door.

None saw her enter.  In a moment of vaguely prophetic foresight she had bidden Therese not to wait up for her and to tell the other servants there was no necessity for their doing so.  She might be detained, Heaven alone knew how late she might be; but she had her latch-key and was quite competent to undress and put herself to bed.

And Therese had taken her at her word.

She was glad of that.  In event that anything should leak out and be printed by the newspapers concerning the theft of Monsieur Lanyard’s famous “Corot” by a strange, closely veiled woman, it was just as well that none of the servants was about to see her come in with the canvas clumsily hidden under her cloak.

So she exercised much circumspection in shutting and bolting the door, mounted the stairs without making any unnecessary stir, and at the door of her boudoir waited, listening, for several moments, in the course of which she heard, or fancied she heard, a slight noise on the far side of the door which made her suspect Therese might after all still be up and about.

The sound was not repeated, but to make sure Sofia slipped out of her cloak and wrapped it round the canvas before she went in; which last she did sharply, with head up and eyes flashing ominously beneath scowling brows—­prepared to give Therese a rare taste of temper if she found she had been disobeyed.

But though the maid had left the lights on, she was nowhere to be seen.  Nor did she answer from the bedchamber when the princess called her.

With a sigh of relief that ran into the chuckle of a child absorbed in mischief, Sofia threw the cloak across a chaise-longue, and bore her prize in triumph to the escritoire.

It was her intention to rip the canvas off with a knife, to get at the letters; and a long, thin-bladed Spanish dagger that now did service as a paper-knife was actually in her hand when she noticed how slightly the painting was tacked to its stretcher, and for the first time was visited by premonition.

Dropping the knife, she caught a loose edge of the canvas and with one swift tug stripped it clear of the unpainted fabric beneath.

The cry that disappointment wrung from her was bitter with protest and chagrin.

Fortune had failed her, then, the jade had tricked her heartlessly.  With success within her grasp, it had trickled like quicksilver through her fingers.  Victor had been beforehand with her, had purloined the letters and restored the canvas to its frame.  She might have suspected as much if she had only had the wit to draw a natural inference from the way the painting had parted company with its frame when she dropped it.