slowly.

“Will you allow me to speak,” she said, “as it were, man to man? Two hundred thousand pounds cannot buy for me that which I desire.”

She laughed harshly.

Mme. Estelle, as though she were far away, said dreamily, and a little wistfully. “Still, I will try.”

She roused herself from her momentary abstraction and shook her head almost fiercely.[Pg 93] “I cannot help you because I do not know what the secret is,” she cried.

[Pg 93]

Westerham looked at her with his cold, bright eyes, and saw that she spoke the truth, and he was amazed.

If she did not know what the secret was, then she could not know the price of it.

Should he tell her the price?

Melun had said nothing to him on that point, but he could clearly see where matters were trending. Money, he understood, would be of little value to Melun compared to a marriage with Kathleen.

He started, and started to such a degree that Madame surveyed him with open suspicion. “Sacrifice,” he said to himself. “Sacrifice.”

“Was that what she meant?”

And then he added to himself: “Oh, Heaven! If that's the sacrifice, then it shall never be.”

Outwardly, however, he only straightened his back and made a formal little bow to the astonished woman on the sofa.

“I believe you, Madame,” he said, “when you declare that you do not know.”

For a few moments he lapsed into silence, debating with himself whether he should drop the bombshell into Madame's camp now, or whether he should keep what, to this woman, would be the coping-stone of Melun's villainy—his intention to marry Kathleen—until such a moment when its dramatic force would turn the scales in his favour.

It required almost superhuman resolution on Westerham's part to hold this second secret to himself. But with an effort he held his lips in silence.

[Pg 94]

[Pg 94]

With the 

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