sation."

"If I make any accusation, it's less against you than du Laurier."

"Oh, you make an accusation against him. Why do you make it to me?"

"As a warning."

"Or because you don't dare make it to anyone else."

"Dare! I haven't accused him thus far, because to do so would brand your
name with his."

"Ah!" I said. "You are very considerate."

"I don't pretend to be considerate--except of myself. I've waited, and
held my hand until now, because I wanted to see you before doing a thing
which would mean certain ruin for du Laurier. I love you as much as I
ever did; even more, because, in common with most men, I value what I
find hard to get. To-night I ask you again to marry me. Give me a
different answer from that you gave me before, and I'll be silent about
what I know."

"What you know of the document you mentioned?" I asked, my heart
drumming an echo of its beating in my ears.

"Yes."

"But--I thought you said that its loss was already discovered?" (Oh, I
was keeping myself well under control, though a mistake now would surely
cost me more than I dared count!)

For half a second he was taken aback, at a loss what answer to make.
Half a second--no more; yet that hardly perceptible hesitation told me
what I had been playing with him to find out.

"Discovered by me," he explained. "That is, by me and one person over
whom I have such an influence that he will use his knowledge, or--forget
it, according to my advice."

"There is no such person," I said to myself. But I didn't say it aloud.
Quickly I named over in my mind such men in the French Foreign Office as
were in a position to discover the disappearance of any document under
Raoul du Laurier's charge. There were several who might have done so,
some above Raoul in authority, some below; but I was certain that not
one of them was an intimate friend of Count Godensky's. If he had
suspected anything the day he met me coming out of the Foreign Office he
might, of course, have hinted his suspicions to one of those men (though
all along I'd believed him too shrewd to risk the consequences, the
ridicule and humiliation of a mistake): but if he had spoken, it would
be beyond his power to prevent matters from taking their own course,
independent of my decisions and his actions.

I believed now that what I had hoped was true. He was "bluffing." He
wanted me to flounder into some admission, and to make him a promise in
order to save the man I loved. I was o