Then suddenly with a great effort of will she checked the scream which had forced itself up to her throat.
"Father!" was all that she contrived to say in a hoarse and passionate murmur.
Fortunately as he peered cautiously round the room, M. le duc caught sight of his daughter. She was staring at him—wide-eyed, her lips bloodless, her cheeks the colour of ashes. He looked but the ghost now of that proud aristocrat who little more than a week ago was the centre of a group of courtiers round the person of the heir to the English throne. Starved, emaciated, livid, he was the shadow of his former self, and there was a haunted look in his purple-rimmed eyes which spoke with pathetic eloquence of sleepless nights and of a soul tortured with remorse.
Just for the moment no one took any notice of him—every one was shrieking, every one was quarrelling, and M. le duc, placing a finger to his lips, stole cautiously round to his daughter. The next instant they were clinging to one another, these two, who had endured so much together—he the father who had wrought such an unspeakable wrong, and she the child who was so lonely, so forlorn and almost happy in finding some one who belonged to her, some one to whom she could cling.
"Father, dear! what shall we do?" Yvonne murmured, for she felt the last shred of her fictitious courage oozing out of her, in face of this awful lawlessness which literally paralysed her thinking faculties.
"Sh! dear!" whispered M. le duc in reply. "We must get out of this loathsome place while this hideous row is going on. I heard it all from the filthy garret up above, where those devils have kept me these three days. The door was not locked.... I crept downstairs.... No one is paying heed to us.... We can creep out. Come."
But at the suggestion, Yvonne's spirits, which had been stunned by the events of the past few moments, revived with truly mercurial rapidity.
"No! no! dear," she urged. "We must stay here.... You don't know.... I have had a message—from my own dear milor—my husband ... he sent a friend to take me out of the hideous prison where that awful Pierre Adet was keeping me—a friend who assured me that my dear milor was watching over me ... he brought me to this place—and begged me not to be frightened ... but to wait patiently ... and I must wait, dear ... I must wait!"
She spoke rapidly in whispers and in short jerky sentences. M. le duc listened to her wide-eyed, a deep line of puzzlement between his brows. Sorrow, remorse, starvation, misery had in a measure numbed his mind. The thought of help, of hope, of friends could not penetrate into his brain.
"A message," he murmured inanely, "a message. No! no! my girl, you must trust no one.... Pierre Adet.... Pierre Adet is full of evil tricks—he will trap you ... he means to destroy us both ... he has brought you here so that you should be murdered by these ferocious devils."