“I see you don’t want me,” said Camille sadly, turning away.

“Of course I want you,” she said, touched by the feeling he showed.  “You are my oldest and dearest friend.”

For a few minutes, they sat talking together, and Camille noticed the strange bracelet on her wrist, and praised its curious design.  Antoinette, struck by a sudden idea, took off the Persian ornament, and gave it to Camille, saying: 

“One of these plates, I believe, opens by a secret spring.  You are an engineer, can you find this spring for me?”

“The middle plate is hollow,” said Langis, tapping it with a pen-knife, “the other two are solid gold.  Oh, what a clumsy fool I am!  I have broken it open.”

“Is there any writing?” said Antoinette.  “Let me look.”

Yes, there was a long list of dates, and at the end of the dates were written:  “Nothing, nothing, nothing, that is all.  Anna Gulof.”

Antoinette became deathly pale; something seemed to break in her head; she felt that if she did not speak, her mind would give way.  Yes, she could trust Camille, but how should she begin?  She felt that she was stifling, and could not draw in enough air to keep breathing.

“What is the matter with you, dear Antoinette?” said Camille, alarmed by her pallor and her staring eyes.

She began to speak in a low, confused and broken voice, and Camille at first could not understand what she was saying.  But at last he did so, and his soul was then divided between an immense pity for the grief that overwhelmed her, and a ferocious joy at the thought of the utter rout of his successful rival.  Suddenly a step was heard on the garden path.

“Here he is,” said Antoinette.  “No, stay in here.  I will call you if I want you.  In spite of all I have said I shall never believe that he has deceived me unless I read the lie in his very eyes.”

Instead of waiting for the visitor to be shown into her room, she ran out, and met him in the garden.  He came up to her smiling, thinking that with the departure of Princess Gulof, all danger had vanished.  But when he saw the white face and burning eyes of Antoinette, he guessed that she knew everything.  He determined, however, to try and carry it off by sheer audacity.

“I am sorry I left so early last evening,” he said, “but that mad Russian woman, whom I took into dinner, made me almost as crazy as she was herself.  She ought to be in an asylum.  But the night repaid me for all the worries of the evening.  I dreamt of the Engadine, its emerald lakes, its pine-trees, and its edelweiss.”

“I, too, had a dream last night,” said Antoinette slowly.  “I dreamt that this bracelet which you gave me belonged to the mad Russian woman, and that she had engraved her name inside it.”  She threw the bracelet at him.  He picked it up, and turned it round and round in his trembling fingers, looking at the plate which had been forced open.