“I will swear to nothing. Tell me or not, as you like.”
She canvassed me a little before deciding. I would not have accused her of guile, though I fancied I knew something of women. And at last she spoke:—
“I have got the Comtesse de Beaurepaire hidden away in the Conciergerie below, and I want you to take charge of her, to conceal and protect her, until such time as I can redeem her from your hands.”
She gave a gasp, having got it all quickly out, and stepped back, to observe the effect on me. It was startling enough; but, somehow, I was tickled rather than prostrated.
“The Comtesse—your young pupil—the little au pair?” I asked. “What on earth has the bad child been doing?”
“Her father is a madman,” said my step-sister, with more passion than I should have thought possible to her—“a morphiomaniac, who has suffered, as I know now, from toxic delirium. Some weeks ago he discovered, among his dead wife’s papers, compromising documents which made him doubt his daughter’s legitimacy. Since then he is like a rabid animal; he has always been an unnatural parent; and now the girl’s life is not safe in his hands. It came to this at last, that to rescue her from his brutality, she must be smuggled away into hiding. Arrangements were made to convey her this day after dark to the school of Les Loges, which is twelve miles distant. We started, she and I, in a hired fiacre; but had not reached the barriers, when a note was thrown into our carriage from an overtaking automobile informing me that our escape had been discovered, and that emissaries of the Marquis were even then on the way out to waylay and dispose of us. Panic seized me: I was in despair. To return would be to submit my charge, perhaps, to an unspeakable fate; to go on would be to invite some nameless catastrophe. I ordered the coachman to turn; and in the act a thought came to me. To forestall the chase, and, by doubling, be lost to it in the intricacies of the City! It was then the idea of you occurred to me, and we drove straight for the Rue de Fleurus, alighted short of it, and hurried the rest of the way on foot. Madame Crussol, in response to my entreaties, shut the gates upon us, and—there it stands.”
I sat up stiff, I ruffled my hair, I laughed aloud.
“My dear Marion! This wild melodrama in the midst of modern Paris! Have you not been testing some of his lordship’s drugs?”
She stood looking at me steadily.
“I should have thought,” she said, “that even for you by this time the criminal possibilities in a great capital could have no surprises.”