And soon the dawn was stealing in, comfortless. Mme. Rozel extinguished the lamp, and sat, her hands locked tight together. As the daylight grew, so did the light in her eyes—a steady beacon. Her mouth hardened itself into an inflexible line, and at last, rising as one whose mind is irrevocably set, she began to go cautiously up the stairs to La Vireville's room.
So light was her tread that the steps did not creak. The door yielded to her touch. She went in, noiseless as a ghost, her face like a ghost's save for the flame in her eyes.
Under the tiny window, a little turned on his side, and with one arm crooked beneath his head, her guest lay in a profound sleep. She stood a minute by the door, then crept nearer and looked down at him long and steadily. Yes, it must be he! Here were the same features, as they had been painted to her; the same hair and brows, the same cleft in the chin. The mounting tide of hatred began to lift her off her feet. . . . And even while she studied his sleeping face she saw, hanging from the back of the chair by the bedside, a hunting-knife—his own.
She was not conscious of putting out her hand for it, still less of drawing it from its sheath, yet the moment after the bright blade was somehow in her grip. How absolutely he lay at her mercy!—and so still that his breathing scarcely lifted his half-open shirt. Staring down at the strong, bare throat she suddenly turned giddy. . . .
How far—or how little distance—would that wave of feeling have carried her? Next instant two eyes, quite calm and very alert, were looking up into hers, and the hand that had been under the sleeper's head held her wrist in a clutch like fate.
"Madame, private theatricals are out of fashion," said La Vireville in a lazy voice. A twist of his powerful fingers, and the hunting-knife dropped from her grasp to the coverlet, where his other hand secured it. "My own knife too! May I ask why you were rehearsing this dramatic scene?"
All the while he lay and looked up at her, too contemptuous, it seemed, to be at the trouble of raising himself, so long as he had her wrist prisoner in that hopeless grasp of his. White, silent, choking, her other hand at her throat, she did not even make an attempt to wrench herself away. At last, when her captor had run on a little more, he loosed his hold. "You can go, my fair assassin! In whose pay are you, by the way?"
She paid no heed to the taunt, but, having reached the door, she turned, and spoke in a voice rendered unsteady neither by fear nor shame, but by some more positive emotion.
"Listen, M. de la Vireville, and I will tell you my name. I am Raymonde de Guéfontaine—Raymonde du Coudrais, the sister of André du Coudrais, the man whom you hounded out of Coblentz on a lying charge of cheating at cards, whose reputation you blasted with your tongue, whose health you ruined with your sword! And now, before he is cold in his grave—murdered, for all I know, by your connivance—you come to claim his place! Oh, it is too much! After all, cold steel, could I have used it, is too good for you! I know a better way—a more fitting——"
"Du Coudrais!" broke in the thunderstruck La Vireville, on his elbow. "'Alexis' was du Coudrais! But he . . . it was——"