things, and I felt myself grow red
and pale. What a fool I was--and how weak! But I couldn't help it. I
didn't wait to go home. I wrote a few lines in the cab, and sent off the
packet, registered, in time I hoped, to catch the post--but after all,
it didn't. Coming out from the post office, there was Godensky again, in
his motor-brougham. _That_ could have been no coincidence. A horrid
certainty sprang to life in me that he'd followed my cab from the
Foreign Office, to see where I would go. Why couldn't I have thought of
that danger? I have always thought of things, and guarded against them;
yet this time, this time of all others, I seemed fated."

"But if Godensky had known what you were doing, the game would have been
up for you before this," I said.

"He didn't know, of course. Only--if he wants to be a woman's lover and
she won't have him, he's her enemy and he's the enemy of the man who
_is_ her lover. He's too clever and too careful of his own interests to
speak out prematurely anything he might vaguely suspect, for it would do
him harm if he proved mistaken. He wouldn't yet, I think, even warn
those whom it might concern, to search and see if anything in Raoul's
charge were out of order or missing. But what he would do, what I think
he has done, is this. Having some idea, as he may have, that my
relations with certain important persons in England are rather friendly,
and seeing me come from the Foreign Office to go almost straight to the
post, it might have occurred to him to try and learn the name of my
correspondent. He has influence--he could perhaps have found out: but if
he did, it wouldn't have helped him much, for naturally, my dealings
with the British Foreign Secretary are always well under cover--hence a
delay sometimes in his receiving word from me. What I send can never go
straight to him, as you may guess. Godensky would guess that, too: and
he would have perhaps informed the police, very cautiously, very
unofficially and confidentially, that he suspected Maxine de Renzie of
being a political spy in the pay of England. He would have advised that
my movements be watched for the next few days: that English agents of
the French police be warned to watch also, on their side of the Channel.
He would have argued to himself that if I'd sent any document away, with
Raoul's connivance or without, I would be wanting it back as soon as
possible; and he would have mentioned to the police that possibly a
messeng