“Miss Nevill, do you know a man called Kynaston?  Captain Maurice Kynaston?” He was watching her keenly now.

Vera turned suddenly very white:  then controlling herself with an effort, she answered quietly.

“Yes, I know him.  Why?”

“Because that is the man I want you to give my parcel to.”  He drew something out of his breast coat-pocket, and handed it to her across the oblong table that was still between them.  She took it in her hands, and turned it over doubtfully and uneasily.  It was a small square parcel, done up in brown paper, fastened round with string, and sealed at both ends.

It might have been a small book; it probably was.  She had no reason to give why she should not do his commission for him, and yet she felt a strange and unaccountable reluctance to undertake it.

“I had very much rather that you asked somebody else to do this for you, Monsieur D’Arblet,” she said, handing the packet back to him.  He did not attempt to take it from her.

“It concerns the most sacred emotions of my heart, mademoiselle,” he said, sensationally.  “I could not entrust it to an indifferent person.  You, who have plunged me into such an abyss of despair by your cruel rejection of my affection, cannot surely refuse to do so small a thing for me.”

Miss Nevill was again looking at the small parcel in her hands.

“Will it hurt or injure Captain Kynaston in any way?” she asked.

“Far from it; it will probably be of great service to him.  Come, Miss Nevill, promise me that you will give it to him; any time will do before the end of the year, any time that you happen to see him, or to be near enough to visit him; I only want to be sure that it reaches him.  All you have to do is to give it him into his hands when no one else is near.  After all, it is a very small favour I ask you.”

“And it is precisely because it is so small, Monsieur D’Arblet,” said Vera, decidedly, “that I cannot imagine why you should make such a point of a trifle like this; and as I don’t like being mixed up in things I don’t understand, I must, I think, decline to have anything to do with it.”

“Allons donc!” said the vicomte to himself.  “I am reduced to the china.”

He took an excited turn up and down the room, then came back again to where she stood.

“Miss Nevill!” he cried, with rising anger, “you seem determined to wound my feelings and to insult my self-respect.  You reject my offers, you sneer at my professions of affection; and now you appear to me to throw sinister doubts upon the meaning of the small thing I have asked you to do for me.”  At each of these accusations he waved his arm up and down to emphasize his remarks; and now, as if unconsciously, his hand suddenly fell upon the neck of one of the “Long Eliza” vases on the table before him.  He lifted it up in the air.

“For Heaven’s sake, Monsieur D’Arblet, take care—­please put down that vase,” cried Vera; suddenly returning to her former terrors.