“Do you order me to leave your house—knowing the consequences?”
I was in sore perplexity. She was a devil and she looked it as she stared at me, her lovely eyes glowing with rage and hate and menace.
“If you have more to say it must be at another time, when you are in a different mood,” I returned.
She seemed about to burst forth again in her wild, vehement way, but as suddenly changed her mood and said:
“I understand. You wish to find a bridge over as dangerous a chasm as a man ever yet had to cross. I will see you again; but next time it will be to hear from you that you accept my terms. You are not a man to walk open-eyed to sheer ruin. I will go.”
And as she left me, sweeping out of the room, with a challenging, defiant, triumphant smile, I could almost have found it in me to kill her.
CHAPTER XII
THE SPY
As soon as the door closed behind the Countess Bokara, I threw myself into a chair in a condition of unspeakable dismay, rage, and chagrin at this most unexpected turn.
It spelt ruin to everything and everybody concerned in our scheme. I had seen and heard quite enough of General Kolfort to know full well that the merest hint of such a plot as ours would drive him instantly to desperate extremes. He would put in force every engine of the powerful machinery at his instant disposal to crush and punish us. And that he could crush us as easily as he would pinch a fly between his fingers there was not a doubt. His power was practically absolute, and he would use it mercilessly, like the man of iron that he was.
Nor was that the worst. There was a traitor somewhere in our midst; a recreant who had carried the secret in hot haste to this vengeful woman. I could not hazard even a guess as to whose was the treachery, but that it threatened the future of the scheme, should even she herself be silenced, was as patent as the fingers on one’s hand.