“And every minute,” she pursued softly, “I felt sure you must recognise me. But you did not. My faith! soldiers are strange, so proud and fierce and stupid—eh? But you frightened me, upon my honour you did. I tremble still.”
André stumbled to his feet.
“I am in your power,” she whispered. “No one but you knows that I was at Fontenoy, not even the King. But all France knows that the Vicomte de Nérac saved the army, though they have not learned it was at the bidding of a vivandière,” she nodded, the corners of her mouth bewitching.
“It is amazing,” he cried, bewildered, “amazing!”
She gently closed the door behind him. “Perhaps,” she said. “But have you forgotten ‘No. 101’?”
For eighteen months André had not heard a word of that traitor. His existence had been blotted from his memory, but now in a flash the scene in the wood stormed into his mind.
“Ah!” he muttered. “Ah!” One minute of the past and he was once more back in this dainty salon, though his anger and pride were melting fast before the radiant witchery of this strange woman who had conquered a king.
“The treachery of ‘No. 101’ has begun again,” she was saying quietly. “And it will not stop this time, I have good reason to believe, unless—I—” she broke off—“unless——”
Across the memory of the charcoal-burner’s cabin in the grisly wood rang Denise’s warning. The Cordon Bleu gleamed at him from the table. And Captain Statham who had seen the traitor’s face lay dead at his feet. Madame smiled softly as if she divined the meaning of those clenched fingers, the lips that formed a sentence and then were pressed in silence.
Madame briefly recited as the Abbé had done in the Salon de la Paix the story of the stolen despatches and the courier’s fate in the ditch at Vincennes. “It is the second time in three months,” she summed up. “There will be a third before long.”