“‘Are you not Mademoiselle de Renzie’s lover?’ was the next enquiry. ‘I admire her, as do thousands of others, who also respect her as I do,’ your friend returned very prettily. At last, dearest lady, you begin to see what there is in this string of questions and answers to bring me straight to you?”
“No, Count Godensky, I do not,” I answered steadily. But a sudden illuminating ray did show me, even as I spoke, what might be in his scheming mind.
“Then I must be clear, and, above all, frank. Du Laurier loves you. You love him. You mean, I think, to marry him. But deeply in love as he is, he is a very proud fellow. He will have all or nothing, if I judge him well; and he would not take for his wife a woman who accepts diamonds from another man, saying as she takes them that he is her lover.”
“He wouldn’t believe it of me!” I cried.
“There is a way of convincing him. Oh, I shall not tell him! But he shall see in writing all that passed between the Juge d’Instruction and Mr. Dundas, unless—”
“Unless?—but I know what you mean to threaten. You repeat yourself.”
“Not quite, for I have new arguments, and stronger ones. I want you, Maxine. I mean to have you—or I will crush you, and now you know I can. Choose.”
I sprang up, and looked at him. Perhaps there was murder in my eyes, as for a moment there was in my heart, for he exclaimed:
“Tigeress! You would kill me if you could. But that doesn’t make me love you less. Would du Laurier have you if he knew what you are—as he will know soon unless you let me save you? Yet I—I would love you if you were a murderess as well as a—spy.”
“It is you who are a spy!” I faltered, now all but broken.