e him!" and he went through the act with
his nervous, shaking fingers. "I could hold him like that! I could hold
him powerless as the dog that would bite and dare not!"

She stared at him. "You?" she said; it was hard to say whether
incredulity or scorn were written more plainly on her face. "You?"

"I! I!" he replied, with the same gesture of holding something. "And I
know how to put him in your power also!"

"In my power!"

"Ay."

Her face grew hard as if she too held her enemy passive in her grip.
Then her lip curled, and she laughed in scorn. "Ay! And what must I do
to bring that about? Something, I suppose, you dare not, Louis?"

"Something you can do more easily than I," he answered doggedly. "A
small thing, too," he continued, clasping his hands in his eagerness and
looking at her with imploring eyes. "A nothing, a mere nothing!"

"And yet it will do so much?"

"I swear it will."

"Then," she retorted, eyeing him shrewdly, "if it is so easy to do why
were you undone a minute ago? And puling like a child in arms?"

"Because," he said, flushing under her eyes, "it--it is not easy for me
to do. And I did not see my way."

"It looked like it."

"But I see it now if you will help me. You have only to take a packet of
letters from his room--and you go there when you please--and he is
yours! While you have the letters he dare not stir hand or foot, lest
you bring him to the scaffold!"

"Bring him to the scaffold?"

"Get the letters, give them to me, and I will answer for the rest."
Louis' voice was low, but he shook with excitement. "See!" he continued,
his eyes at all times prominent, almost starting from his head, "it
might be done this minute. This minute!"

"It might," the girl replied, watching him coldly. "But it will not be
done either this minute or at all unless you tell me what is in the
letters, and how you come to know about them."

Should he tell her? He fancied that he had no choice. "Messer Blondel
the Syndic wants the letters," he answered sullenly. And, urged farther
by her expression of disbelief, he told the astonished girl the story
which Blondel had told him. The fact that he believed it went far with
her; why, for the rest, doubt a story so extraordinary that it seemed to
bear the stamp of truth?

"And that is all?" she said when he came to the end.

"Is it not enough?"

"It may be enough," she replied, her resolute manner in strange contrast
with his cowardly haste. "Only