She wrote a few words in her book.

“You made a note of that?”

She raised her head.

“I do not make mistakes,” she said.

His eyebrows were drawn together.  This was his work, he told himself, this magnificent physical subjection.  Yet his inability to stir her sometimes maddened him.

“You know who is in this house?” he asked.  “You know the name of my unknown guest?”

“I know nothing,” she replied.  “His presence does not interest me.”

“Supposing I desire you to know?” he persisted, leaning a little forward.  “Supposing I tell you that it is your duty to know?”

“Then,” she said, “I should tell you that I believe him to be the special envoy from New York to The Hague, or whatever place on the Continent this coming conference is to be held at.”

“Right, woman!” Mr. Fentolin answered sharply.  “Right!  It is the special envoy.  He has his mandate with him.  I have them both—­the man and his mandate.  Can you guess what I am going to do with them?”

“It is not difficult,” she replied.  “Your methods are scarcely original.  His mandate to the flames, and his body to the sea!”

She raised her eyes as she spoke and looked over Mr. Fentolin’s shoulder, across the marshland to the grey stretch of ocean.  Her eyes became fixed.  It was not possible to say that they held any expression, and yet one felt that she saw beneath the grey waves, even to the rocks and caverns below.

“It does not terrify you, then,” he asked curiously, “to think that a man under this roof is about to die?”

“Why should it?” she retorted.  “Death does not frighten me—­my own or anybody else’s.  Does it frighten you?”

His face was suddenly livid, his eyes full of fierce anger.  His lips twitched.  He struck the table before him.

“Beast of a woman!” he shouted.  “You ghoul!  How dare you!  How dare you—­”

He stopped short.  He passed his hand across his forehead.  All the time the woman remained unmoved.

“Do you know,” he muttered, his voice still shaking a little, “that I believe sometimes I am afraid of you?  How would you like to see me there, eh, down at the bottom of that hungry sea?  You watch sometimes so fixedly.  You’d miss me, wouldn’t you?  I am a good master, you know.  I pay well.  You’ve been with me a good many years.  You were a different sort of woman when you first came.”

 “Yes,” she admitted, “I was a different sort of woman.”

“You don’t remember those days, I suppose,” he went on, “the days when you had brown hair, when you used to carry roses about and sing to yourself while you beat your work out of that wretched typewriter?”

“No,” she answered, “I do not remember those days.  They do not belong to me.  It is some other woman you are thinking of.”

Their eyes met.  Mr. Fentolin turned away first.  He struck the bell at his elbow.  She rose at once.