“Very easily. Will not Count Baranoff and his brother Loris, Chief of the Secret Police, have the direction of this affair? And have we not in our possession a letter containing matter enough to hang them ten times over? We must go at once to St. Petersburg and make this compact with them, that unless they are prepared to do our bidding we shall reveal their guilt to the Czar. And our bidding is that they instruct their subordinates to let this island alone. We need not shrink from stating the reason. Has it not been Baranoff’s aim to make yonder pair fall in love with each other? What are we doing but pursuing the same plan, though for a different reason? Freed from the intrusion of police agents Runö thus becomes a sacred asylum, an enchanted garden, in which our two wards may make love to their hearts’ content without the knowledge of the Court.”
“And the end of it all?”
“When her love is sufficiently strong she will be willing to fly with him from Russia. Cronstadt harbour is distant by water but eighteen miles. A swift boat and a dark night, and they are on board a vessel bound for England.”
“But should we in the meantime be detected in our plot by Alexander——”
“What then? Will he be very much vexed when we are supplying him with the pretext he wants?”
Pauline sighed.
“Ah me! If only I had told Lord Courtenay yesterday who his inamorata is, it would have prevented me from beginning this course of deception. Not till nightfall did it suddenly occur to me that knowledge of this fact would have been the best way of making him cease from the duel; and then from very pity I refrained from the telling, knowing what pain the revelation would bring him, and now—now it is too late! What will he think when he learns—as learn he must—how basely I am deceiving him?”
“Pooh! what matters what he thinks?”
“Much—to me,” she answered moodily.