“I had better tell you,” she said with a gesture of despair. “Captain Monmouth and I love each other. It has awakened the good in us that we both thought was buried or had never existed. While my husband, Captain de Beaulieu, lived there was no chance of a divorce. He is Catholic. To-night after dinner one of Mr. Warren’s guests brought a late paper from New York and I saw that my husband was killed. I could stay there no longer. Coming home in the motor I asked myself whether it would be my fate to win happiness. I doubted it even though I repented in ashes. Then it was I began to think of you, the stranger whose money we needed, the stranger who reminded me vaguely of some day when there was danger in the air. Under the light as I came in I saw your hair. Then I knew that in the hour of my greatest hope I was to experience the most bitter despair.”
“You forget, Madame,” he said harshly, “that I have had the benefit of your consummate acting before.”
“And you think I am acting now?”
“Why shouldn’t I?” he retorted, “you have everything to gain by it. I can collect the Guestwick reward, and send you back to prison.”
“I can pay you more than the ten thousand dollars he offered,” she cried quickly.
“With the sale of the Rosewarne jewels?”
She shrank back. “Ciel! How could you know?”
“I do,” he said brusquely, “and that’s enough. You see you are trying to fool me again. You say your love has brought out the good in you that you didn’t know you possessed and yet a few weeks back you are at your old tricks again. Is that reasonable?”
“I’ll tell you everything,” she cried wildly. “You must understand. It was I who took the Rosewarne jewels. Why? Because I am fighting for my happiness. Captain Monmouth knows nothing of what my life has been. I have told him that after the war I shall go back to France and sell my property and with it help him to buy a place that was once a seat of his family. There, away from the world, we shall live and die. I want only him and he wants only me. We have known life and its vanities. We want happiness. You hold it in your hands. If you take your revenge by telling him, you break my heart. Is that a vengeance which satisfies you, Monsieur l’Inconnu? If so, it is very easy. He is in the next room. Call him. You have only to say, ‘Captain Monmouth, this woman whom you love is a notorious criminal. All Europe knows her as the Countess. The money that she wants to build her house of love with is stolen money. She will assuredly disgrace your name as she has that of the great family from which she sprang.’”
She looked supplicatingly at Anthony Trent. “You have only to tell him that and there is no happiness left for me in all the world.”