Though the stairs were dim, I could see something glittering in the hand of the person mentioned, who was impersonating for the evening a dashing young captain of the general staff.  My fingers strayed toward my pocket and my own revolver.  Then I pried them away, temporarily, and took a provisional seat.

“That’s sensible,” Franz von Blenheim approved me blandly.  “Now, Miss Falconer, you know what I’m here for, isn’t that so?  Just hand me those papers and you’ll be as free as air.  I’ll take myself off; you’ll never see me again probably.  That’s a fair bargain, isn’t it?  What do you say?”

I was sitting close to the girl, so close that her soft furs brushed me and I could feel the flutter of her breath against my cheek.  At Blenheim’s proposition I glanced at her.  She was measuring him steadily.  Then she looked at me, and her eyes seemed to hold some message that I could not read.

“Perhaps, Miss Falconer,” I interposed, “you have not quite grasped the situation.”  I was sparring for time; she wanted to convey something to me, I was sure.  “It is rather complicated.  This gentleman has turned out to be a well-known agent of the kaiser.  He was traveling on the Re d’Italia, I gather, on a forged passport, and had helped himself to my baggage as the most convenient way of smuggling some papers to the other side.”

He grinned assentingly.

“You owe me one for that,” he owned.  “You see, it was my second trip on that line, and I thought they might have me spotted; I had a lot of things to carry home,—­reports, information, confidential letters, and I concluded they would be safer with a nice, innocent young man like you.  It didn’t work, as things went.  It was just a little too clever.  But if you hadn’t mixed yourself up with this young lady, and tossed packages overboard for her under the noses of the stewards, and got yourself suspected and your baggage searched, I should have turned the trick!”

His share in the tangled episode on board the steamer was unfolding.  I understood now why he had sprung to my rescue in the salon when I was accused.  Naturally he had not wanted my traps searched, considering what was in them.

“As you say, you were a little too clever,” I agreed.

His eyes glinted viciously.

“Well, it’s no use crying over spilt milk,” he retorted; “and besides, the papers you are going to hand me to-night will even up the score.  It was a piece of luck, my running across Miss Falconer on the liner.  Of course the minute I heard her name I knew what she was crossing for.”  The dickens he did!  “All I had to do was to follow her, and by the time we reached Bleau I had guessed enough to come ahead of her.  But I’ll admit, Mr. Bayne, now it’s all over, it made me nervous to have you popping up at every turn!  I began to think that you suspected me—­that you were trailing me.  If you had, you know, I shouldn’t have stood a chance on earth.  You could have said a word to the first gendarme you met and had me laid by the heels and ended it.  That was why I kept warning you off.  But I needn’t have worried.  You drank in everything I told you as innocent as a babe!”