“Reduced to plain direct questions are you now? But don’t you think you could answer that yourself? I’ll give you one answer. I want you on my side and I don’t intend, if I can help it, to let the Queen’s advocate win you over for the Queen. No, I don’t; although she has the advantage of having been rescued by you. You needn’t try and look as if that were not true; because it is, and I know that it is. And if you think a moment you will see what a service I am rendering her in letting people think you came here for my sake. Think of the scandal it would cause if it were known that you, the American man of millions, had rescued her and then followed her to Belgrade. It would ruin her—and people are very particular about reputations in this Court. The Queen is obliged to be on account of her own past.”
“Perhaps you know how the Princess came to be in need of a rescuer?”
She laughed again lightly. I was growing to hate her laughter.
“Of course I do, seeing that Duke Barinski and I planned it all. The marriage with him would have taken place in Maglai, if she had not, most unfortunately for us, escaped.”
“You are very frank.”
“Why not. You have probably told her already that that brigand story was a fable and that we were at the bottom of it all. You shewed me you knew it all, this evening; and I don’t think so poorly of you as to dream you had not got proofs which satisfied you. I know what money can do in Belgrade.”
“Russian money, you mean.”
“Yes. Russian money, or any other,” she returned, parrying my thrust with the lightest air of indifference.
“It has not bought the support of the army for this Russian scheme of yours.”
“Ah, I heard that Colonel Petrosch’s jackal, Captain Nikolitch, had been closeted with you.”