"

"Had you not heard?" he countered, looking up in surprise.

"Heard--?" He saw her eyes stabbed by fear, and knew himself justified
of his surmises. All day she had been expecting de Lorgnes, or word
from him, all day and all this night. One could imagine the hourly
augmented strain of care and foreboding; indeed its evidence were only
too clearly betrayed in her face and manner of that moment: she was on
the rack.

But there was no pity in Lanyard's heart. He knew her of old, what she
was, what evil she had done; and in his hearing still sounded the
echoes of those words with which, obliquely enough but without
misunderstanding on the part of either, she had threatened to expose
him to the police unless he consented to some sort of an alliance with
her, a collaboration whose nature could not but be dishonourable if it
were nothing more than a simple conspiracy of mutual silence.

And purposely he delayed his answer till her patience gave way and she
was clutching his arm with frantic hands.

"What is the matter? Why do you look at me like that? Why don't you
tell me--if there is anything to tell--?"

"I was hesitating to shock you, Liane."

"Never mind me. What has happened to de Lorgnes?"

"It is in all the evening newspapers--the murder mystery of the Lyons
rapide."

"De Lorgnes--?"

Lanyard inclined his head. The woman breathed an invocation to the
Deity and sank back against the wall, her face ghastly beneath its
paint.

"You know this?"

"I was a passenger aboard the rapide, and saw the body before it was
removed."

Liane Delorme made an effort to speak, but only her breath rustled
harshly on her dry lips. She swallowed convulsively, turned to her
glass, and found it empty. Lanyard hastened to refill it. She took the
wine at a gulp, muttered a word of thanks, and offered the glass to be
filled anew; but when this had been done sat unconscious of it, staring
witlessly at nothing, so lost to her surroundings that all the muscles
of her face relaxed and her years peered out through that mask of
artifice which alone preserved for her the illusion and repute of
beauty.

Thus the face of an evil woman of middle-age, debauched beyond hope of
redemption, was hideously revealed. Lanyard knew a qualm at seeing it,
and looked hastily away.

Beyond the rank of tables which stood between him and the dancing floor
he saw Athenais Reneaux with Le Brun sweeping past in the suave
movement of a waltz. The gi