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"Always the most thoughtful of men," Mademoiselle Reneaux declared. "No fussing with the carte, no thrusting it into one's hand and saying: 'See anything you'd like, my dear? I rather fancy the boeuf-
Lanyard and Athenais Reneaux had dawdled over dinner and coffee and cigarettes with so much tacit deliberation that, by the time Lanyard suggested they might move on, it was too late for a play and still a bit too early to begin the contemplated round of all-night restaurants. Also, it was too warm for a music-hall.
Forestalling Athenais, Lanyard replied with a whimsical grimace: "Is one, then, so unfortunate as to have been forgotten by Madame la Comtesse de Lorgnes?" With any other woman than Athenais Reneaux he would have hesitated to deal so bold an offensive stroke; but his confidence in her quickness of apprehension and her unshakable self-possession was both implicit and well-placed.
"If it comes," she sighed, "it will find me waiting, and not unwilling. But it will have to come in another form than those I know about." "My dear," said Lanyard, "be unafraid: it always does." She called herself Athenais Reneaux, but she didn't pretend to Lanyard that she had no better title to another name.
It might save time if you would give me their names." "Now it is you who ask me to risk losing an enjoyable evening. But so be it. Le Comte de Lorgnes?" Mademoiselle Reneaux looked blank. "Madame la Comtesse de Lorgnes?" The young woman shook her head. "Both of a class sure to be conspicuous in such places as Maxim's," Lanyard explained. "The names, then, are probably fictitious."
It was possible, he thought it extremely probable, that Liane Delorme was as powerful as Athenais Reneaux had asserted; influential, that is, with the State, with the dealers in its laws and the dispensers of its protection. But now she had not to reckon with such as these, but with enemies of her own sort, with an antagonism as reckless of law and order as she herself.
Whereas to-night, while still that poor mutilated body lay nameless in the Morgue... Mademoiselle Athenais Reneaux lived up in most gratifying fashion to the tone of her note. In the very beginning she demonstrated excellent discretion by failing to be on hand and eager when Lanyard strolled into the Ritz on the minute of their appointment.
That, too, knows itself. But Liane retired only from the stage... You understand?" "Perfectly." "She continued to make many dear friends, some of them among the greatest personages of Europe. So that gradually she became what she is to-day," Athenais Reneaux pronounced soberly: "as I think, the most dangerous woman on the Continent." "How 'dangerous'?"
"Paul dear," said Athenais Reneaux more in sorrow than in anger: "somebody has been taking advantage of your trusting nature. Whitaker Monk is short, hopelessly stout, and the most commonplace person imaginable." "Then it would appear," Lanyard commented ruefully, "one did wisely to telegraph London for a keeper.
Lanyard had not been so long an exile as to have forgotten his way about entirely, and with what was new since his time Mademoiselle Reneaux was thoroughly acquainted.
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