“No, you must hear me out. The proof of my treachery is here; they, these men, will find it on me”; she had drawn a paper from her breast. “Do you know what that is? It is a copy of the secret despatch; it is addressed to the agent who would convey it to England, and it is signed.”
“Yvonne, of course; Yvonne of the spotless ankles,” she lifted her dress a few inches.
She held it up and in the flickering light André could see the red mystic sign of the crossed daggers and the cipher number. He shivered as she replaced it in her bosom. “The game is up for me,” she said in her impassive voice. “That paper will send me to the scaffold, and unless you arrest me it will send you too.”
“You are mad,” he cried incoherently, and he really believed what he said. “You are mad.”
“Was the woman mad who tricked you at Fontenoy, who has tricked and befooled you at every turn since you came back? I have betrayed your country, your King, your army, yourself, and yet you, a noble hating treason, loving France, hesitate to arrest the traitress whom you have sworn to bring to justice. It is you who are mad, my friend, not I; or shall I say,” she had dropped her eyes and curtsied, “Monseigneur is too good?”
“Yvonne!” the exclamation burst from his lips. He was leaning heavily on a chair and peering dazed into her eyes.
“Yvonne, of course; Yvonne of the Spotless Ankles,” she lifted her dress a few inches. “Yvonne whom at the bidding of another woman you were to make your tool. Did you? I think not, for the Vicomte de Nérac can be more easily tricked by women into doing what they please than the most unscrupulous libertine in France. But you must take your revenge on Yvonne now.”
Yvonne! André’s brain reeled. Yvonne, who had saved his life, was a traitress, the traitress whose crimes merited condign punishment, whom now, by the devilish device of fate, he must arrest and send to a felon’s death to save himself and Denise.
He seized her arm. “Who and what are you?” he cried, beside himself, for the torture of the fascinating riddle racked him beyond endurance.