“By nothing more dangerous than a hand upon your bridle and an excuse that you might do me some small service at Olvera.”

“An excuse, a falsity!  To be sure,” said Shere bitterly.  “Yet you still stand before the door though you know the letter will not be yours.  Is the trick after all so harmless?  Is there no one—­Esteban, for instance—­in the dark passage outside the door or on the dark road outside the gates?”

“I will prove to you you are wrong.”

Christina dropped her arms to her side, moved altogether from the door, and rang a bell.  “Esteban shall come here; he will see you outside the gates; he will set you safely on your road to Olvera.”  She spoke now quite quietly; all the panic and agitation had gone in a moment from her face, her manner, and her words.  But the very suddenness of the change in her increased Shere’s suspicions.  A moment ago Christina was standing before the door with every nerve astrain, her face white, and her eyes bewildered with horror.  Now she stood easily by the table with the lighted lamp, speaking easily, playing easily with the gloves upon the table.  Shere watched for the secret of this sudden change.

A servant answered the bell and was bidden to find Esteban.  No look of significance passed between them; by no gesture was any signal given.  “No harm was intended to any man,” Christina continued as soon as the door again was closed; “I insisted—­I mean there was no need to insist; for I promised to get the letter from the bearer once he had come into this room.”

“How?” Shere asked with a blunt contempt.  “By tricks?”

Christina raised her head quickly, stung to a moment’s anger; but she did not answer him, and again her head drooped.

“At all events,” she said quietly, “I have not tried to trick you,” and Shere noticed that she arranged with an absent carelessness the gloves in the form of a cross beneath the lamp; and at once he felt that her action contradicted her words.  It was merely an instinct at first.  Then he began to reason.  Those gloves had been so arranged when first he entered the room.  Christina and Esteban were bending over the table.  Christina was explaining something.  Was she explaining that arrangement of the gloves?  Was that arrangement the reason of her ready acceptance of his refusal to part with his orders?  Was it, in a word, a signal for Esteban—­a signal which should tell him whether or not she had secured the letter?  Shere saw a way to answer that question.  He was now filled with distrust of Christina as half an hour back he had been filled with faith in her; so that he paid no heed to her apology, or to the passionate and pleading voice in which she spoke it.