"Your plans! What do I care for your plans?" cried the Count. "It is of my own plans I am thinking."
"But I thought, and as you know we agreed——"
"It is not for you to think, or to question my thoughts," interrupted the Count. "I allow no man to interpret my plans, or to criticise the way in which I work them out. But rest contented, my dear friend, John Brown," he added banteringly, "the success of your plans rests upon the success of my own."
While they were speaking Olga Petrovic gazed towards the window with unseeing eyes. She looked quite her age now: all suggestion of the young girl had gone, she was a stern, hard-featured woman. Beautiful she was, it is true, but with a beauty marked by bitter experience, and not the beauty of blushing girlhood.
"Well, Countess Olga, which is it to be?" asked Romanoff, who had been watching her while he had been speaking to Mr. Brown.
"What do you want me to do?"
"Do! Keep him in London. Enlist his sympathies. Make him your slave as you have made other men your slaves. Bind him to you hand and foot. Make him love you."
A strange light burned in the girl's eyes, for at the Count's last words she had seemingly thrown off years of her life. She had become young and eager again.
"Swear to me that you mean him no harm, and I will do it," was her reply. "If I can," she added, as an afterthought.
"Do you doubt it?" asked Romanoff. "Have you ever failed when you have made up your mind?"