"What have you done this evening?"
"I have been boring myself to death until you came. And now you make poor me talk and don't entertain me in the least!"
Suddenly she lifted her head.
"I hope you aren't in one of your moods?"
"Oh, no," said John, quickly. "What makes you think that?"
She looked at him long and steadily. He sustained her gaze; her brilliant, hard beauty smote his consciousness again.
"Do you remember how awful you were at first, Bernard?"
"I suppose I was pretty awful," answered John, wondering what Treves had done to earn himself that character.
Suddenly Mrs. Beecher Monmouth ceased her scrutiny and broke into a laugh, a long tinkle of laughter that showed all her fine teeth.
"What a boy you are," she said. "Do you remember that night when you swore and tore about this room like a madman?" She laughed again, as though in memory of a scene that had been grotesquely ridiculous. Somehow, in that moment John felt his instinctive dislike of her intensify. He saw her as an utterly cold-blooded traitor to her country. Only forty-eight hours earlier she had slipped into his hand information that had been intended to doom a great ship to disaster. The slip of paper that had so astoundingly come into his possession had in itself constituted a vile blow at the safety of England. And here was the woman who had safely engineered that atrocity, who had acted as an intermediary in Germany's pay. And this same woman was smiling at him in her Grosvenor Place boudoir, surrounded by all the luxuries of life, the wife of a politician of some eminence, who had only recently been in the running for an under-secretaryship.