"How much is all? Will you pay five million marks?"
"That's too much. Put it two millions—half when you hand over the cipher, half when we hold the working drawings and Antonino's ammunition."
"Be it so," she answered after a brief pause, during which both listened. "If Antonino will help me, so much the better for him. It would be delightful to see Italy with a native! Now go away. We must not be seen conversing together."
"If the young man turns restive?" suggested the prudent spy.
"Impossible! he is charmed. However, remember this: Return to-night after the party has gone to the station, secrete yourself in the grounds where you can watch the drawing-room windows. If one opens and I call, run up to aid me. If none open to you, hasten away. The danger with which I contend will be one which you could not overcome!"
CHAPTER XX.
ON THE EVE.
The evening was calm and clear over Montmorency, where there was even grandeur in the stillness. Nature—the discreet confident and inexhaustible counsellor, always ready to intermediate between God and man—nature was appeasing passion and misery in all bosoms but Felix Clemenceau's, as he strolled in the garden which he did not expect long to possess. Rebecca was going away and Césarine had come, two sufficient reasons for him to detest the place. He had called upon the scene to give him advice on his course, and he hoped to understand clearly what it had commanded to him in the hour of grief tempered with faith. He had not the resources of others; he could not consult the shades of his parents; his mother's tomb was not one to be pointed out with pride, any more than his father's.
It seemed to him that he was ordered to continue struggling till he vanquished; this he had always tried. Work and seek out! And yet his mind wavered and his resolve was unsettled. It was the ever dulcet voice of that Circe which sufficed to agitate and obscure his soul in spite of his having believed it was forever detached from her. But these umbrageous and odoriferous hills, knew how deeply he loved her, for he had spoken of his thraldom to them when he might not speak to her under pain of shame and debasement.