“There is something else. But I am not sure that it is worth mentioning, or that the circumstances warrant the uneasiness they have caused me.”
“For Heaven’s sake! tell me all there is to tell. You little dream all there may be at stake.”
“I am convinced that there is a spy in the house. Hush—what was that?”
As I uttered the last words, I sprang to my feet, and ran toward a large portière, which seemed to me to have moved while I was speaking. The door behind the portière was open, and I was just in time to see the figure of a man disappear round an angle of the great corridor into which all the rooms on this floor opened. When I turned and faced madame again, after carefully shutting the door, I saw that she was deadly pale, and that she was literally shaking with nervous apprehension. I hastily gave her a glass of wine, which she just as hastily drank, and then sat looking at me with a mute question in her startled eyes.
“A man has just run away from this door. He has been listening,” I whispered, feeling as if the raising of my voice might bring ruin on the unnerved woman of whom I had already grown fond. Then I rapidly related how I had been driven to the conclusion that the house was under espionage.
“Was there anything in the letter that could be construed as matter of a mischievous tendency?” madame asked anxiously.
“Nothing whatever,” was my confident reply. “I had merely said that my life in St. Petersburg was being made very pleasant, and that I had met a great number of very nice people. After I discovered that my correspondence had been overlooked, I destroyed the letter and resolved not to dispatch another in its place until I had consulted you. On Thursday I wrote out a page from Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost,’ and left it, together with my blotting-book and writing materials, on the escritoire in this room. When I examined the things on my return, I found that the page of poetry and the top layer of blotting-paper out of my blotter had disappeared. Ah—that door is opening!”
The door, which slid on noiseless hinges, was quite concealed by the portière, but a very slight motion imparted to the latter by the incoming draught had not escaped my watchful attention, and the spy, whoever he was, was baffled again for a time, for madame sprang up, and drew the large curtains to one side, so that it was impossible for the door to be moved again without our being aware of it. To make assurance doubly sure, we slid the bolts that were on the inside. Then we explored the room which opened out of the large morning-room in which we had been sitting. We soon satisfied ourselves that nobody was there, and then, after locking the doors of that room also, to prevent unwarranted intrusion, we sat down to discuss the matter more fully.
“Dora,” said madame, “just reach me my desk, will you?”
Willingly I obeyed, and then the desk was carefully overhauled by its owner, who became still more agitated when she failed to discover certain papers of which she was in search.