He unlocked the door of the safe and stood waiting for me to gratify my whim. But I gaily motioned him behind me. “If you stand there you can see where I put it, and that won’t! be fair play. Turn your back.”
He obeyed. “You see how I trust you!” he said. “There lie my country’s secrets.”
“They’re safe from me,” I said pertly. (And so indeed they were—now.) “They’re too uninteresting to amuse me in the least.”
As I spoke I found and abstracted the dummy treaty and slipped the real one into its place. Then I laid the envelope with the note I had written where he could not help finding it at first or second glance.
“Now you can close the safe,” I said.
He shut the door, and I almost breathed aloud the words that burst from my heart, “Thank Heaven!”
“I must leave you,” I told him. And I was kind for a moment, capricious no longer, because, though the treaty had been restored, I was going to open the cage of Godensky’s vengeance, and—I was afraid of him.
“I may come to you as soon as I’m free?” Raoul asked.
“Yes. Come and tell me what you think of the news, and—what you think of me,” I said. And while I spoke, smiling, I prayed within that he might continue to think of me all things good—far better than I deserved, yet not better than I would try to deserve in the future, if I were permitted to spend that future with him.
The next thing I did was to send my letter to Count Godensky. This was a flinging down of the glove, and I knew it well. But I was ready to fight now.