"How comes she to be here?" asked Olga, in a voice of suppressed anger.
"I will tell you all that another time," I answered, speaking hurriedly and in a very low tone. "Another point has occurred to me. She is very bitter against you and has been urging your brother to get you to receive her. This was to have been done last night. My apparent refusal to speak to her at all came as a crowning insult, and she was mad. There is one way in which I think we might the more easily deceive her, if you can bring yourself to do it. Come in now and let me present her to you: or let me go and tell her that you will call on her."
"Will it make things safer for you?" she asked, always thinking of the trouble into which she would persist in saying she had brought me.
"It would make them safer for you, I think."
"I care nothing for myself. She can't harm me. Do you wish it? Do you think it desirable? I will do it if you say yes." She spoke so earnestly that I smiled... Then she added:—"Ah, it is so good to have someone that I can trust. That's why I leave it to you."
"I don't wish it," I answered, gravely, "because she is the reverse of a good woman, but I do think it would be prudent."
"Let's go to her at once," cried the girl, getting up from her chair readily. "We can talk afterwards. That's the one privilege...." she checked herself and then coloured slightly. I pretended not to notice it; but this absolute confidence pleased me not a little.
"Bear in mind, we are only playing a part with this woman," I whispered.
"I know. She is too dangerous for me ever to forget that, or to play badly." She dashed a glance of quick understanding at me and then seemed to change suddenly into a Russian grande dame. An indescribable air of distinction manifested itself in a hundred little signs, and she carried herself like a stately duchess, as we entered the room where Paula Tueski sat waiting impatiently.
A great glad light of triumph leapt into the latter's eyes as she saw Olga was with me, and she, too, drew herself up as I made the two formally known to each other. It was a delightful bit of comedy. Olga was full of quite stately regrets that she had not had the pleasure of knowing the other long before: said that her brother's friends were, of course, her friends; and that she hoped to call that week on Madame Tueski and that Madame would find an opportunity of returning the visit speedily. She made such an appearance of unbending to the other, that the difference between them was all the more pronounced.