"And the Chancellor answered him: 'Do not you trouble yourself! All is well with the pretty young daughter of de Bayard, by that disreputable old woman who played the mistress of Count Max in '67.'"
She screamed, and struck with her clenched hand at the fair, flushed, grinning face as though she would willingly have battered out its beauty. He caught her wrist with a fencer's quickness, and prisoned the other in the twinkling of an eye. He went on, holding her immovable, leisurely enjoying the changes upon her tortured face:
"As a good German I do not interfere with my superiors. His Excellency knows where the girl is, and does not at present choose to tell. But you, Werte Frau, have the right to question His Excellency, whose answer was repeated to me by my Chief, Count Moltke. Do not forget, however, that you lay claim to the disrepute as well as the daughter when you present yourself at the Foreign Office ... in the Rue de Provence...."
She panted breathlessly:
"I shall not go! No one shall compel me!"
"Oh, in that case," said Valverden, rising and releasing her, "I can only leave you to the arguments of M. de Straz. He is coming now—I can hear his voice in the garden. Auf Wiedersehen!" He said over his shoulder, as he lounged out of the cottage: "In the affair of Von Kissling, do not count on my assistance. It is only given on condition you fall in with our views."
So he and Straz were in league.... Rage stung her to the mad imprudence of rebellion—the proud sultana whom a thousand freakish cruelties on the part of her swarthy master had taught to be a trembling slave.
The Roumanian, we know, was nothing if not subtle. When Adelaide flatly refused to call at the Foreign Office in the Rue de Provence in the character of a bereaved and yearning mother, he smiled on her, almost tenderly. He kissed the wrists Valverden's grip had bruised.
"Queen Rose of my Garden of Delights," he said, "why did you let the girl go in the beginning? You recognized her value even when you did not know that she has money in her own right."
Money.... A new light began to break upon Adelaide. The fear of a sudden and violent death no longer stiffened her muscles. She moistened her lips, pale under their rose-tinged salve, and lifted her eyebrows inquiringly.