‘I am going to tell you,’ I replied, speaking so that every word might fall distinctly on her ears, and sating my eyes the while on her proud face. I had never dreamed of such revenge as this! ‘About a fortnight ago, M. de Cocheforet left here at night with a little orange-coloured sachet in his possession.’
She uttered a stifled cry, and drew herself stiffly erect.
‘It contained—but there, Mademoiselle, you know its contents,’ I went on. ‘Whatever they were, M. de Cocheforet lost it and them at starting. A week ago he came back—unfortunately for himself—to seek them.’
She was looking full in my face now. She seemed scarcely to breathe in the intensity of her surprise and expectation.
‘You had a search made, Mademoiselle,’ I continued quietly. ‘Your servants left no place unexplored The paths, the roads, the very woods were ransacked, But in vain, because all the while the orange sachet lay whole and unopened in my pocket.’
‘No!’ she cried impetuously. ‘There, you lie sir, as usual! The sachet was found, torn open, many leagues from this place!’
‘Where I threw it, Mademoiselle,’ I replied, ‘that I might mislead your rascals and be free to return to you. Oh! believe me,’ I continued, letting something of my true self, something of my triumph, appear at last in my voice. ‘You have made a mistake! You would have done better had you trusted me. I am no bundle of sawdust, Mademoiselle, though once you got the better of me, but a man; a man with an arm to shield and a brain to serve, and—as I am going to teach you—a heart also!’
She shivered.
‘In the orange-coloured sachet that you lost I believe that there were eighteen stones of great value?’
She made no answer, but she looked at me as if I fascinated her. Her very breath seemed to pause and wait on my words. She was so little conscious of anything else, of anything outside ourselves, that a score of men might have come up behind her, unseen and unnoticed.