In the house Storace had finished the aria, and was even now bowing in her classic garb, but in approved eighteenth-century fashion, to the enthusiastic audience, who cheered her to the echo.
“Chauvelin,” said Marguerite Blakeney at last, quietly, and without that touch of bravado which had characterised her attitude all along, “Chauvelin, my friend, shall we try to understand one another. It seems that my wits have become rusty by contact with this damp climate. Now, tell me, you are very anxious to discover the identity of the Scarlet Pimpernel, isn’t that so?”
“France’s most bitter enemy, citoyenne . . . all the more dangerous, as he works in the dark.”
“All the more noble, you mean. . . . Well!—and you would now force me to do some spying work for you in exchange for my brother Armand’s safety?—Is that it?”
“Fie! two very ugly words, fair lady,” protested Chauvelin, urbanely. “There can be no question of force, and the service which I would ask of you, in the name of France, could never be called by the shocking name of spying.”
“At any rate, that is what it is called over here,” she said drily. “That is your intention, is it not?”
“My intention is, that you yourself win a free pardon for Armand St. Just by doing me a small service.”
“What is it?”
“Only watch for me to-night, Citoyenne St. Just,” he said eagerly. “Listen: among the papers which were found about the person of Sir Andrew Ffoulkes there was a tiny note. See!” he added, taking a tiny scrap of paper from his pocket-book and handing it to her.
It was the same scrap of paper which, four days ago, the two young men had been in the act of reading, at the very moment when they were attacked by Chauvelin’s minions. Marguerite took it mechanically and stooped to read it. There were only two lines, written in a distorted, evidently disguised, handwriting; she read them half aloud—