"Pardon!" said M. Ferraud, with a blithe laugh. "The butterfly I was describing was not so big."
Breitmann freed himself amid general laughter. And with Laura's rising the little after-dinner party became disorganized.
It was yet early; but perhaps she had some thought she wished to be alone with. This consideration was the veriest bud in growth; still, it was such that she desired the seclusion of her room. She swung across her shoulders the sleepy Angora and wished the men good night.
The wire bell in the hall clock vibrated twice; two o'clock of the morning. A streak of moon-shine fell aslant the floor and broke off abruptly. Before the safe in the library stood Breitmann, a small tape in his hand. For several minutes he contemplated somberly the nickel combination wheel. He could open it for he knew the combination. To open it would be the work of a moment. Why, then, did he hesitate? Why not pluck it forth and disappear on the morrow? The admiral had not made a copy, and without the key he might dig up Corsica till the crack of doom. The flame on the taper crept down. The man gave a quick movement to his shoulders; it was the shrug, not of impatience but of resignation. He saw the lock through the haze of a conjured face. He shut his eyes, but the vision remained. Slowly he drew his fingers over the flame.
Yet, before the flame died wholly it touched two points of light in the doorway, the round crystals of a pair of spectacles.
"Two souls with but a single thought!" the secret agent murmured. "Poor devil! why does he hesitate? Why does he not take it and be gone? Is he still honest? Peste! I must be growing old. I shall not ruin him, I shall save him. It is not goot politics, but it is good Christianity. Schlafen Sie wohl, Hochwohl geboren!"
CHAPTER XIII
THE WOMAN WHO KNEW
"Don't you sometimes grow weary for an abiding place?" Laura pulled off her gauntlets and laid her hot hands on the cool lichen-grown stones of the field-wall. The bridle-rein hung over her arm. Fitzgerald had drawn his through a stirrup. "Think of wandering here and there, with never a place to come back to."
"I have thought of it often in the few days I have been here. I have a home in New York, but I could not possibly afford to live in it; so I rent it; and when I want to go fishing there's enough under hand to pay the expenses. My poor old dad! He was always indorsing notes for his friends, or carrying stock for them; and nothing ever came back. I am afraid the disillusions broke his heart. And then, perhaps I was a bitter disappointment. I was expelled from college in my junior year. I had no head for figures other than that kind which inhabit the Louvre and the Vatican."