Lady Deringham raised her hand to her forehead and sat thinking. The man’s growing earnestness bewildered her. What was to be done—what could she say? After all he was not changed; the old fear of him was creeping through her veins, yet she made her effort.
“You want those papers for something more than a magazine article!” she declared. “There is something behind all this! Victor, I cannot help you; I am powerless. I will take no part in anything which I cannot understand.”
He stood up, leaning a little upon his stick, the dull, green stone of which flashed brightly in the firelight.
“You will help me,” he said slowly. “You will let me into that room at night, and you will see that your husband is not there, or that he does not interfere. And as to that magazine article, you are right! What if it were a lie! I do not fly at small game. Now do you understand?”
She rose to her feet and drew herself up before him proudly. She towered above him, handsome, dignified, angry.
“Victor,” she said firmly, “I refuse; you can go away at once! I will have no more to say or to do with you! You have given me up my letters, it is true, yet for that you have no special claim upon my gratitude. A man of honour would have destroyed them long ago.”
He looked up at her, and the ghost of an unholy smile flickered upon his lips.
“Did I tell you that I had given them all back to you?” he said. “Ah! that was a mistake; all save one, I should have said! One I kept, in case—— Well, your sex are proverbially ungrateful, you know. It is the one on the yellow paper written from Mentone! You remember it? I always liked it better than any of the others.”
Her white hands flashed out in the firelight. It seemed almost as though she must have struck him. He had lied to her! She was not really free; he was still the master and she his slave! She stood as though turned to stone.