"You mistrust me. It is only natural," he said unctuously. "But what can I do?"
"Write me a letter," she replied coldly, "embodying your terms for the release of Philip Imrey and Anna Heves, and your promise to keep to the bargain if I accept those terms."
"Will that satisfy you?" he asked.
"It would hold you to your word, at any rate. For if it did not——"
He gave his soft, throaty laugh, and a glimmer of satisfaction shot through his eyes.
"You Englishwomen are truly marvellous," he observed. "So business-like. Everything in black and white—what?"
"Preferably," she rejoined drily.
"Well, then, you shall have the letter, dear lady," he concluded blandly. "And I promise you that I shall so tie myself down to my share of this interesting transaction that you will not hesitate any longer to fulfil yours."
And the next moment, even while Rosemary turned towards the window in order to look for one brief moment, at any rate, on something clean and pure, Naniescu had gone, softly closing the door behind him and leaving in his wake a faint odour of Havana cigar and eau de Cologne, and an atmosphere of intrigue which Rosemary felt to be stifling. She threw open the window and inhaled the clean air right down into her lungs. Her thoughts were still in a whirl. The situation was so impossible that her brain at present rejected it. It could not be. Things like this did not occur. It was not modern. Not twentieth century. Not post-war. Civilised men and women did not have interviews such as she had just had with this smooth-tongued Roumanian. There was something mediæval about this "either-or," this impasse to which in very truth there was no issue.
Rosemary now started pacing up and down the room. She was alone and could indulge in this time-tried method of soothing jangled nerves. With both forefingers she tapped her temples, as if to stimulate the work of a jaded brain. Issue? There must be an issue to this impasse. She was a British subject, the wife of an English peer. She could not be bullied into doing things against which her sense of honour rebelled. She could not be made to lend her name to falsehoods, knowing them to be falsehoods. Of course not. Of course not. She could not be compelled to write a single line she would not wish to see published.