“I saw you,” he said, now quite brutally frank, “with your arms about Captain Moray’s neck, and as if that were not sufficient, I heard you acknowledge your love for him.”
Laurence played her next card with praiseworthy determination.
“Well—and what of it?” she said. “You chose to spy upon me, but you have merely discovered a mare’s nest. Since you want the truth, I’ll give it to you on all-fours. Captain Moray and I have known each other since childhood, and there has always been a deep affection between us. Hearing of my arrival in Paris, he hastened to call upon me at the Embassy. I was out, and later on I sent him a petit-bleu inviting him here to-night with several other friends ... and—your assent. As to my greeting to him, it is perfectly natural and proper after so many years’ separation; nothing more than it should have been. Are you satisfied?”
“No!” answered Régis, looking down at her with a grim smile, and suddenly she came face to face with her position. What could she offer the Marquis to win him over, to silence him? She was dealing with a man who—so to speak—held the best cards. Would he play them? She breathed hard, for she was passing in those short seconds through æons of torture. Her high position, her whole future, her as yet unblemished name, were utterly and completely at Régis’s mercy.
“What more do you want, then?” she asked at last, in a lowered voice that was shaking with dread and anger. She broke off with a ghastly forced laugh, and attempted to meet his straight glance with sullen, defiant eyes, but her gaze slowly fell before his own.
“I do not want much,” Régis said, bending a little toward her and emphasizing each word by a gentle tap of his fingers on the inlaid table-top. “I am not your judge, nor do I desire to persecute you. Of that rest assured.”
He paused, and in the intense silence that followed, a shower of rose-petals dropping to the floor was almost painfully audible.
“If this is the case, what do you demand of me?” she murmured, her head drooping so that he could see the artificial waving of her hair rising from her white neck to the circlet of her starred diadem.
“First of all, that you should never see Marguerite again, excepting in public and when it absolutely cannot be avoided,” he said, with a sort of repressed intensity that made her wince. “Secondly, that during your stay away from your husband you should, as far as possible, avoid us. The rest is with you. You know very well that I will not betray what I have discovered—to my amazement and regret. To preach is just as far from my mind and character. But remember; if ever Basil learns that you have stepped down from the pedestal upon which he placed you, he will be unmerciful.”
“But”—she struggled—“there is nothing—I have done nothing—to deserve his anger! Your ‘Madonna’ is in no danger from me. I am an honest woman. I swear it! I swear it! I have never seen Captain Moray since my marriage before to-night.”