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The Frenchman bit the end of his cigarette, and angrily wiped the tobacco from his lips. "She may have information of which you are ignorant," he suggested. "Precisely. It is that particular point which gives me trouble at the present moment. It is that that I wish to discover." De Chauxville looked up coolly. He saw his advantage. "Hence your sudden flow of communicativeness?" he said.
The road over which they were passing had not been beaten down by the passage of previous sleighs, so that the powdery snow rose up like dust, and filled the eyes and mouth. "It will be better presently," gasped Catrina, wrestling with her fractious little Tartar thoroughbreds, "when we get out on to the high-road." De Chauxville sat quite still.
When I have finished telling you all that I have to tell, you will understand. You will perhaps thank me for being merciful." Etta laughed defiantly. "You are afraid of Paul," she cried. "You are afraid of Karl Steinmetz; you will presently be afraid of me." "I think not," said De Chauxville coolly.
He saw Claude de Chauxville, and before the Frenchman had turned round the expression on Steinmetz's large and placid countenance had changed from the self-consciousness usually preceding an introduction to one of a dim recognition. "I have had the pleasure of meeting madame somewhere before, I think. In St. Petersburg, was it not?"
I chose the young because the petticoats are so ludicrously small." "If you never do anything weaker than that," said Etta, looking into the fire, "you will not come to much harm." "Perhaps not; what have you been doing something weaker?" "Yes. I have been quarrelling with M. de Chauxville."
"Karl Steinmetz is no friend of yours," he said. Etta did not answer. She was thinking of the conversation she had had with Steinmetz in Petersburg. She was wondering whether the friendship he had offered the solid thing as he called it was not better than the love of this man. "I have information now," went on De Chauxville, "which would have made you my wife, had I had it sooner."
Please do it please " Paul looked at her with hard, unresponsive eyes. Lives depended on his answer. "I did not come here to discuss Claude de Chauxville," he said, "but you, and our future." Etta drew herself up as one under the lash, and waited with set teeth. "I propose," he said, in a final voice which made it no proposition at all, "that you go home to England at once with your cousin.
"And in guessing let us be charitable is it not so?" he said, turning to her, with a twist of his humorous lips. "I suppose," he went on, after a little pause, "that Claude de Chauxville has been at the bottom of all our trouble. All his life he has been one of the stormy petrels of diplomacy. Wherever he has gone trouble has followed later.
If one wishes to be epigrammatic, one must relinquish the hope of being either agreeable or veracious. M. de Chauxville did not really intend to convey the idea that any of the persons assembled in the great guest chambers of the French Embassy that evening were anything but what they seemed.
Etta looked from one to the other. She had at the first impulse gone over to Steinmetz. She was now meditating drawing back. If De Chauxville kept cool all might yet be well the dread secret of the probability of Sydney Bamborough being alive might still be withheld from Steinmetz. For the moment it would appear that she was about to occupy the ignominious position of the bone of contention.
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