De Grost flicked the ash from his cigarette.
"The days are passing," he remarked, "when men point revolvers at one another, and hire assassins to gain their ends. Now it is more a battle of wits. We play chess on the board of life still, but we play with ivory pieces instead of steel and poison. Our brains direct, and not our muscles."
She sighed.
"It is only the one man of whom I am afraid," she said. "You have outwitted him so often and he does not forgive."
De Grost smiled. It was an immense compliment, this.
"Bernadine," he murmured softly, "otherwise our friend, the Count von Hern."
"Bernadine," she repeated. "All that you say is true; but when one fails with modern weapons, one changes the form of attack. Bernadine at heart is a savage."
"The hate of such a man," de Grost remarked complacently, "is worth having. He has had his own way over here for years. He seems to have found the knack of living in a maze of intrigue and remaining untouchable. There were a dozen things before I came upon the scene which ought to have ruined him. Yet there never appeared to be anything to take hold of. The Criminal Investigation Department thought they had no chance. I remember Sir John Dory telling me in disgust that Bernadine was like one of those marvellous criminals one only reads about in fiction, who seem when they pass along the dangerous places to walk upon the air and leave no trace behind."
"Before you came," she said, "he had never known a failure. Do you think that he is a man likely to forgive?"
"I do not," de Grost answered grimly. "It is a battle, of course—a battle all the time. Yet, Violet, between you and me, if Bernadine were to go, half the savour of life for me would depart with him."