"Surely your memory provides you with one instance to the contrary;" and I mounted the steps and knocked at the door.
Otto Krax answered my summons, and for once in his life he betrayed surprise. At the sight of Lady Tracy, he leaped backwards into the hall, and stared from her to me. Lady Tracy laid a hand within my arm, and the fingers tightened convulsively upon my sleeve; it seemed as though she were on the point of fainting. I bade the fellow, roughly, to wait upon his mistress, and inquire whether she would receive me, and a friend whom I was most anxious to present to her. With a curiosity very unusual, he asked of me my companion's name, that he might announce it. But since my design was to surprise Hugh Marston, I ordered him to deliver the message in the precise terms which I had used.
So changed indeed was the man from his ordinary polite impassivity, that he abruptly left us standing in the hall, and departed on his errand with no more ceremony than a minister's servant shows to the needy place-seekers at his master's levée. We stood, I remember particularly, in a line with the high window of which I have already spoken, and the full light of the noontide sun fell athwart our faces. I set the circumstance down here inasmuch as it helped to bring about a very strange result.
"Who is the man?" whispered Lady Tracy, in an agitated voice. "Does he know me?"
"Nay," said I, reassuring her. "It may be that he has seen you before, at Bristol, for he was Count Lukstein's servant. But it is hardly probable that the Count shared his secret with him. And the matter was a secret kept most studiously."
"But his manner? How account for that?"
"Simply enough," said I. "The person who slandered us to the Countess, gave her, as a warrant and proof, a miniature of you."
"A miniature!" she exclaimed, clinging to me in terror. "Oh, no! no!"
"Gott im Himmel!"
The guttural cry rang hoarsely from the top of the stairs. I looked up; Otto was leaning against the wall, his mouth open, his face working with excitement, and his eyes protruding from their sockets. I had just sufficient time to notice that, strangely enough, his gaze was directed at me, and not at the woman by my side, when I felt the hand slacken on my arm, and with a little weak sigh, Lady Tracy slipped to the floor in a swoon.