_ is damning and complete. You didn't know
that Ferez Bey was sent across the frontier yesterday, did you? Your
English spy didn't inform you last night, did he?"

"N-no."

"You lie! You _did_ know it! That was why you stole away last night
and met your jackal--to sell him something besides yourself, this
time! You knew they had arrested Ferez! I don't know how you knew it,
but you did. And you told your lover. And both of you thought you had
me at last, didn't you?"

"I--what are you trying to say to me--do to me?" she stammered, losing
colour for the first time.

"Put you where you belong--you dirty spy!" he said with grinning
ferocity. "If there is to be trouble, I've prepared for it. When they
try you for espionage, they'll try you as a foreigner--a dancing girl
in the pay of Germany--as my mistress whom Max Freund and I discover
in treachery to France, and whom I instantly denounce to the proper
authorities!"

He shoved his pistol into his breast pocket and put on his marred silk
hat.

"Which do you think they will believe--you or the Count d'Eblis?" he
demanded, the nervous leer twitching at his heavy lips. "Which do you
think they will believe--your denials and counter-accusations against
me, or Max Freund's corroboration, and the evidence of the packet I
shall now deliver to the authorities--the packet containing every
cursed document necessary to convict you!--you filthy little----"

The girl bounded from her bed to the floor, her dark eyes blazing:

"Damn you!" she said. "Get out of my bedroom!"

Taken aback, he retreated a pace or two, and, at the furious menace of
the little clenched fist, stepped another pace out into the corridor.
The door crashed in his face; the bolt shot home.

* * * * *

In twenty minutes Nihla Quellen, the celebrated and adored of European
capitals, crept out of the street door. She wore the dress of a
Finistere peasant; her hair was grey, her step infirm.

The _commissaire_, two _agents de police_, and a Government detective,
one Souchez, already on their way to identify and arrest her, never
even glanced at the shabby, infirm figure which hobbled past them on
the sidewalk and feebly mounted an omnibus marked Gare du Nord.

* * * * *

For a long time Paris was carefully combed for the dancer, Nihla
Quellen, until more serious affairs occupied the authorities, and
presently the world at large. For, in a fe