“Nothing has happened, and I have the paper,” I reassured her. “No adventures, to speak of, on the way, and no reason to think I’ve been spotted. Anyway, here I am; and here is something which will put an end to your anxiety.” And I tapped the breast of my coat, meaningly.
“Thank God!” breathed Maxine, with a thrilling note in her voice which would have done her great credit on the stage, though I am sure she was never further in her life from the thought of acting. “After all I’ve suffered, it seems too good to be true. Give it to me, quick, Ivor, and let me go.”
“I will,” I said. “But you might seem to take just a little more interest in me, even if you don’t really feel it, you know. You might just say, ‘How have you been for the last twelve months?’”
“Oh, I do take an interest, and I’m grateful to you—I can’t tell you how grateful. But I have no time to think either of you or myself now,” she said, eagerly. “If you knew everything, you’d understand.”
“I know practically nothing,” I confessed; “still, I do understand. I was only teasing you. Forgive me. I oughtn’t to have done it, even for a minute. Here is the letter-case which the Foreign—which was given to me to bring to you.”
“Wait!” she exclaimed, still in the half whisper from which she had never departed. “Wait! It will he better to lock the door.” But even as she spoke, there came a knock, loud and insistent. With a spring, she flung herself on me, her hand fumbling for the pocket I had tapped suggestively a moment ago. I let her draw out the long case which I had been guarding—the case I had not once touched since leaving London, except to feel anxiously for its outline through my buttoned coat. At least, whatever might be about to happen, she had it in her own hands now.
Neither of us spoke nor made a sound during the instant that she clung to me, the faint, well-remembered perfume of her hair, her dress, in my nostrils. But as she started away, and I knew that she had the letter-case, the knock came again. Then, before I could be sure whether she wished for time to hide, or whether she would have me cry “come in,” without seeming to hesitate, the door opened. For a second or two Maxine and I, and a group of figures at the door were mere shadows in the ever deepening pink dusk: but I could scarcely have counted ten before the long expected light sprang up. I had turned it on in more than one place: and a sudden, brilliant illumination showed me a tall Commissary of Police, with two little gendarmes looking over his shoulder.
I threw a glance at Maxine, who was still veiled, and was relieved to see that she had found some means of putting the letter-case out of sight. Having ascertained this, I sharply enquired in French what in the devil’s name the Commissary of Police meant by walking into an Englishman’s room without being invited; and not only that, but what under heaven he wanted anyway.
He was far more polite than I was.
“Ten thousand pardons, Monsieur,” he apologised. “I knocked twice, but hearing no answer, entered, thinking that perhaps, after all, the salon was unoccupied. Important business must be my excuse. I have to request that Monsieur Dundas will first place in my hands the gift he has brought from London to Mademoiselle de Renzie.”