Yvonne very modestly disengaged the arm which for the first time he had slipped about her supple waist.
“Then Monseigneur will do as he pleases,” she answered quietly. “I am his servant and,” she laughed, “a peasant girl would remember the kiss of a grand gentleman who has surely kissed many great ladies.”
There was no satire in her voice, and the roguish gleam in her eyes was simply bright with an innocent vanity, yet the words fell like ice-cold water on molten steel.
“Damn her!” was André’s savage comment as he galloped back to the palace. Was she playing with him or was it sheer naïveté of soul?—for as usual Yvonne had in her mysterious way lured him on and then administered a humiliating rebuke.
The tavern with the grim name of “The Gallows and the Three Crows” lay in the mouth of a slum on the south side of the river, and when André, cloaked and disguised to the best of his power, entered its dark parlour he recognised that the police were not wrong in telling him it was partly a gaming hell, partly the haunt of the select of the scum, male and female, of Paris, the rendezvous for the low amours of bullies, sharpers, and broken gentry, and the women who were their victims or their tools. He felt that the half-dozen occupants of the room eyed his swaggering entry with the keenest interest, but it was not his first introduction to such resorts, and a soldier of half a dozen campaigns and a swordsman of his quality knew no fear. Nor was the wine so bad, and the flower girl who impudently took a seat at once at his table, though he could scarcely see her face in the gloom, promised some pleasant fun, when she had ceased to turn her back on him and to chaff a man at the next table.
Nothing in particular, however, happened until a figure heavily cloaked rose from the further corner, and as he passed the flower girl tapped her familiarly on the shoulder. She looked up, started unmistakably, and André noticed the man had tried to slip a piece of paper into her basket of flowers. Unnoticed by both, the paper fell on the dirty sanded floor among the refuse, and in a trice André had his foot on it.
He felt his heart beating like a sledge hammer. He had caught a glimpse of the man’s face—the same face that had puzzled him behind the trees near “The Cock with the Spurs of Gold.” Ah! the memories rushed in on him. Yes; he remembered now, of course, he had seen that face in the glare of the flaming charcoal-burner’s cabin and in London at a supper party. It was the face of George Onslow, an Englishman. Yvonne had not been mistaken. Onslow was the English spy in Paris. Onslow at Fontenoy had come to receive the plans from “No. 101.” Ha! should he follow him? Yes? No? Before he could decide he recognised two other men drinking carelessly but stealthily watching the room. These were servants, trusted servants, of the Duke de Pontchartrain and the Comte de Mont Rouge. What the devil were they doing here? By accident, or to meet some wench of the town, or as spies on whom or what?
George Onslow had meanwhile disappeared. The flower girl, too, humming a catch, was slipping away. André stooped to pick up the piece of paper, but by the time he had reached the door, pest on her nimble heels, she, too, had vanished! And André was only conscious that the two servants were following him out. Ah, that was their game, was it? Calling for another bottle of wine, he went back to the table, and immediately the pair returned to their seat. That was conclusive. They were there to watch him, but why? Clearly because the Court desired to know of all his movements. The consequences of his refusal to the Comtesse des Forges were in fact beginning. André smiled grimly, stretched out his legs and examined the precious slip of paper. At once his heart pounded the more fiercely. The scrap had no writing on it at all; all that he could see was a curious symbol, two crossed daggers and the figures “101” in red ink—no, blood! There was no mistaking it—blood. The mysterious traitor’s sign, pass, or counterword. He set his teeth. Why, oh, why had he allowed that girl to escape him?