“It was a big game you were playing.”
“As it turned out, I was staking my life. In making up his mind to kill me he was undoubtedly actuated by the desire to rid himself of the love which was a torture to him, since I did not respond to it. And over and above that he was terrified at having revealed these secrets to me. I had suddenly become the enemy who might reach the goal before he did. The day he saw the mistake he had made I was doomed.”
“Yet his revelations were, after all, nothing but some historical data, and vague at that,” he objected.
“That’s all they were,” she admitted.
“And the branch of the candlestick which I got out of the little pillar was the first piece of definite evidence that came to light?”
“The very first.”
“At least I suppose it was. For there is nothing to show that, after your rupture, he did not advance a step or two himself,” suggested Ralph.
“A step or two?” she exclaimed in a tone of dismay.
“Certainly, one step,” he declared. “Last night Beaumagnan went to the theater. Why, if not for the reason that Bridget Rousselin wore across her forehead a bandeau set with seven jewels. He wished to learn what it meant; and it was undoubtedly he who had her house watched this morning.”
“Admitting that it is so, there is no way of our knowing it,” she objected.