(“Very good reason,” I thought bitterly, behind my sofa. “You’ve been busy, too—falling in love with Diana Forrest.”)
“It hasn’t been announced yet, but I thought as an old friend you might have been told. I believe Mademoiselle wants to surprise everybody when the right time comes—if the poor girl isn’t ruined irretrievably in this affair of ours.”
“Is there really serious danger of that?” “The most serious. If you can’t save her, not only will the Entente Cordiale be shaken to its foundations (and I say nothing of my own reputation, which is at stake), but her future happiness will be broken in the crash, and—she says—she will not live to suffer the agony of her loss. She will kill herself if disaster comes; and though suicide is usually the last resource of a coward, Mademoiselle de Renzie is no coward, and I’m inclined to think I should come to the same resolve in her place.”
“Tell me what I am to do,” said Ivor, evidently moved by the Foreign Secretary’s strange words, and his intense earnestness.
“You will go to Paris by the first train to-morrow morning, without mentioning your intention to anyone; you will drive at once to some hotel where you have never stayed and are not known. I will find means of informing the lady what hotel you choose. You will there give a fictitious name (let us say, George Sandford) and you will take a suite, with a private sitting-room. That done, you will say that you are expecting a lady to call upon you, and will see no one else. You will wait till Mademoiselle de Renzie appears, which will certainly be as soon as she can possibly manage; and when you and she are alone together, sure that you’re not being spied upon, you will put into her hands a small packet which I shall give you before we part to-night.”
“It sounds simple enough,” said Ivor, “if that’s all.”
“It is all. Yet it may be anything but simple.”
“Would you prefer to have me call at her house, and save her coming to a hotel? I’d willingly do so if—”
“No. As I told you, should it be known that you and she meet, those who are watching her at present ought not to suspect the real motive of the meeting. So much the better for us: but we must think of her. After four o’clock every afternoon, the young Frenchman she’s engaged to is in the habit of going to her house, and stopping until it’s time for her to go to work. He dines with her, but doesn’t drive with her to the theatre, as that would be rather too public for the present, until their engagement’s announced. He adores her, but is inconveniently jealous, like most Latins. It’s practically certain that he’s heard your name mentioned in connection with hers, when she was in London, and as a Frenchman invariably fails to understand that a man can admire a beautiful woman without being in love with her, your call at her house might give Mademoiselle Maxine a mauvais quart d’heure.”
“I see. But if she sends him away, and comes to my hotel—”