"Call it yourself what you will, but station yourself there!"
"And you are sincere in wishing me to do so?"
"I pray you to do so! Retire in the interval, leave the door open, and when you hear Monsieur de Camors enter the court of the hotel, return."
"No!" said the General, after a moment's hesitation; "since I have gone so far"—and he sighed deeply "I do not wish to leave myself the least pretext for distrust. If I leave you before he comes, I am capable of fancying—"
"That I might secretly warn him? Nothing more natural. Remain here, then. Only take a book; for our conversation, under such circumstances, can not be lively."
He sat down.
"But," he said, "what mystery can there be between you two?"
"You shall hear!" she said, with her sphinx-like smile.
The General mechanically took up a book. She stirred the fire, and reflected. As she liked terror, danger, and dramatic incidents to blend with her intrigues, she should have been content; for at that moment shame, ruin, and death were at her door. But, to tell the truth, it was too much for her; and when she looked, in the midst of the silence which surrounded her, at the true character and scope of the perils which surrounded her, she thought her brain would fail and her heart break.
She was not mistaken as to the origin of the letter. This shameful work had indeed been planned by Madame de la Roche-Jugan. To do her justice, she had not suspected the force of the blow she was dealing. She still believed in the virtue of the Marquise; but during the perpetual surveillance she had never relaxed, she could not fail to see the changed nature of the intercourse between Camors and the Marquise. It must not be forgotten that she dreamed of securing for her son Sigismund the succession to her old friend; and she foresaw a dangerous rivalry—the germ of which she sought to destroy. To awaken the distrust of the General toward Camors, so as to cause his doors to be closed against him, was all she meditated. But her anonymous letter, like most villainies of this kind, was a more fatal and murderous weapon than its base author imagined.