“What do you take us for?” she cried, furiously.  “We want nothing from you—­nothing at all!”

She looked across at her husband, and there burst from her lips a torrent of words, uttered in the uncouth tongue which the Wachners used for secrecy.

Sylvia tried desperately to understand, but she could make nothing of the strange, rapid-spoken syllables—­until there fell on her ear, twice repeated, the name Wolsky....

Madame Wachner stepped suddenly back, and as she did so L’Ami Fritz moved a step forward.

Sylvia looked at him, an agonised appeal in her eyes.  He was smiling hideously, a nervous grin zig-zagging across his large, thin-lipped mouth.

“You should have taken the coffee,” he muttered in English.  “It would have saved us all so much trouble!”

He put out his left hand, and the long, strong fingers closed, tentacle-wise, on her slender shoulder.

His right hand he kept still hidden behind his back—­

CHAPTER XXV

The great open-air restaurant in the Champs Elysees was full of foreigners, and Paul de Virieu and Bill Chester were sitting opposite to one another on the broad terrace dotted with little tables embowered in flowering shrubs.

They were both smoking,—­the Englishman a cigar, the Frenchman a cigarette.  It was now half-past seven, and instead of taking the first express to Switzerland they had decided to have dinner comfortably in Paris and to go on by a later train.

Neither man felt that he had very much to say to the other, and Chester started a little in his seat when Paul de Virieu suddenly took his cigarette out of his mouth, put it down on the table, and leant forward.  He looked at the man sitting opposite to him straight in the eyes.

“I do not feel at all happy at our having left Mrs. Bailey alone at Lacville,” he said, deliberately.

Chester stared back at him, telling himself angrily as he did so that he did not in the least know what the Frenchman was driving at!

What did Paul de Virieu mean by saying this stupid, obvious thing, and why should he drag in the question of his being happy or unhappy?

“You know that I did my best to persuade her to leave the place,” said Chester shortly.  Then, very deliberately he added, “I am afraid, Count, that you’ve got quite a wrong notion in your mind concerning myself and Mrs. Bailey.  It is true I am her trustee, but I have no power of making her do what I think sensible, or even what I think right.  She is absolutely her own mistress.”

He stopped abruptly, for he had no wish to discuss Sylvia and Sylvia’s affairs with this foreigner, however oddly intimate Mrs. Bailey had allowed herself to get with the Comte de Virieu.

“Lacville is such a very queer place,” observed the Count, meditatively.  “It is perhaps even queerer than you know or guess it to be, Mr. Chester.”