"Pardon! I don't quite understand?" asked the little lady in the sheath costume with just a slight tremor of the eyelids.
"Well—I have discovered that you and Henry Banfield are friends—that to you he owes much of his success, and that to you is the credit of a little affair in Marienbad, which ended rather unpleasantly for a certain hosiery manufacturer from Chemnitz named Müller."
Her faced blanched, her eyes grew terrified, and her nails clenched themselves into her white palms.
"Ah! Then you—you have found me, m'sieur, for purposes of revenge—you—you intend to give me over to the police because of the fraud I practised upon you! But I ask you to have pity for me," she begged in French. "I am a woman—and—and I swear to you that I was forced to act towards you as I did."
"You forced open my despatch-box, believing that I carried valuables there, and found, to your dismay, only a few papers."
"I was compelled to do so by Banfield," she said simply. "He mistook you for another man, a diplomat, and believed that you had certain important documents with you."
"Then he made a very great mistake," I laughed. "And after your clever love-making with me you only got some extracts from a Government report, together with a few old letters."
"From those letters we discovered who you really were," mademoiselle said. "And then we were afraid."
"Afraid that I would pay Banfield back in his own coin, eh?"