André had understated the truth to Madame de Pompadour when he said that he had learned much from Yvonne. Bit by bit her simple confessions had convinced him that “The Cock with the Spurs of Gold” played an important part in the inscrutable mystery of successful treachery summed up in the blood-stained cipher of “No. 101.” Yvonne indeed sorely puzzled him. She was only a hired wench at this hostelry kept by a man and his wife against whom nothing discreditable could be ferreted out. And he had utterly failed to break down the barriers of her simplicity. She related things she had seen or heard which to André with his knowledge of the facts were damningly conclusive, but that she was aware of this was contradicted at every turn by her speech, her gestures, her amazing innocence. In vain had he laid pitfall after pitfall to catch her tripping. Not one syllable, one flutter of an eyelid, one blush, one faltering tone, had rewarded his cunningest or his most artless efforts. The girl had passed ordeal after ordeal just as a peasant wench should who was only a peasant wench. Yet every failure only deepened the feeling that Yvonne was not merely Yvonne of the Spotless Ankles; proof he had none; proof indeed pointed to the very reverse. André had nothing but a vague, indefinable, apparently irrational, suspicion, and it maddened him. In the critical struggle on which he had now embarked he was convinced he was being beaten, tricked by a woman; she held, if he were right, the keys which would unlock the mystery and she was simply playing with him, no doubt for her own ends; she was probably betraying him daily to her accursed allies. Worse still, because it was ridiculous as he felt it, there was an inexplicable charm in this girl which threatened to master him. Despite Denise and Madame de Pompadour and the Comtesse des Forges and half a dozen other refined and attractive women at the Court to inspire love and gratify passion, he, André de Nérac, a Cordon Bleu, a Croix de St. Louis, a noble of the Maison du Roi, was in danger of falling a victim to an unkempt peasant with a smudged face. Yvonne told him things eminently useful, Yvonne baffled him, but these were not the only reasons why daily he went to see her. And he had discovered this humiliating fact by trying to answer a torturing question. If he could prove Yvonne to be a traitor or the ally of traitors, was he ready to hand her over to the awful mercies of the King’s justice? And if not, why not? Supposing he could show that she was the woman who had foiled him in the charcoal-burner’s cabin at Fontenoy, what then? And his heart revolted in its answer against his reason: “No, I cannot; I cannot leave Denise to the vengeance of Madame de Pompadour, because I love her; I cannot give Yvonne to the rack, the executioner’s whip and wheel, because”—and then he always stopped, because he had not the courage even in the most intimate sanctuary of his conscience to finish the answer.

But discover the mystery he must more than ever now. His own fate and Madame de Pompadour’s hung on success. The war was drawing to an end; the negotiations for peace were beginning. If the King’s secrets were betrayed as in the past Madame would be disgraced. André had deliberately broken with his friends and his order. Their implacable lust for vengeance on the mistress would require his punishment too. The issue was as clear as daylight. Either he must crush them or they would crush him. And succeed he must, because success alone meant safety, honour, and the love of Denise.

And so, after leaving Madame de Pompadour, André went as usual straight to Yvonne, whom he found in the stalls feeding the spotted cow. “The Englishman,” she informed him, “has been here, Monseigneur. He spoke with a gentleman from the Court. I only know that to-morrow night they will meet at a tavern in Paris; they called it ‘The Gallows and the Three Crows.’”

André took the lantern from her and let the light fall on her stained face.

“And this tavern, where is it?” he demanded.

Yvonne met his gaze with the calmness of innocent ignorance. “Monseigneur, I do not know. I have never been in Paris.”

“You will swear you heard it as you say?”

“Surely. They said the name twice.”

“And the gentleman from the Court?”

“His cloak was over his face, but I think—I am certain—it was Monsieur the Chevalier.”

André had heard enough. His blood was tingling with passion and excitement. “You have done me a great service, Yvonne,” he cried.

Yvonne very modestly disengaged the arm which for the first time he had slipped about her supple waist. “Monseigneur must not kiss me,” she whispered, humbly. “I cannot betray my lover even to you, sir.”

André started as if he had been detected in a crime. “You have a lover, Yvonne?” he exclaimed.

The girl threw back her shock of matted hair and laughed. “Many lovers,” she said, looking down at her clumsy sabots, “but only one dares to kiss me. Would it be wrong?” she inquired thoughtfully, “for me to let Monseigneur kiss me, too?”

“No,” said André, still in the grip of passion.

“Then Monseigneur will do as he pleases,” she answered quietly. “I am his servant and,” she laughed, “a peasant girl would remember the kiss of a grand gentleman who has surely kissed many great ladies.”

There was no satire in her voice, and the roguish gleam in her eyes was simply bright with an innocent vanity, yet the words fell like ice-cold water on molten steel.

“Damn her!” was André’s savage comment as he galloped back to the palace. Was she playing with him or was it sheer naïveté of soul?—for as usual Yvonne had in her mysterious way lured him on and then administered a humiliating rebuke.

The tavern with the grim name of “The Gallows and the Three Crows” lay in the mouth of a slum on the south side of the river, and when André, cloaked and disguised to the best of his power, entered its dark parlour he recognised that the police were not wrong in telling him it was partly a gaming hell, partly the haunt of the select of the scum, male and female, of Paris, the rendezvous for the low amours of bullies, sharpers, and broken gentry, and the women who were their victims or their tools. He felt that the half-dozen occupants of the room eyed his swaggering entry with the keenest interest, but it was not his first introduction to such resorts, and a soldier of half a dozen campaigns and a swordsman of his quality knew no fear. Nor was the wine so bad, and the flower girl who impudently took a seat at once at his table, though he could scarcely see her face in the gloom, promised some pleasant fun, when she had ceased to turn her back on him and to chaff a man at the next table.

Nothing in particular, however, happened until a figure heavily cloaked rose from the further corner, and as he passed the flower girl tapped her familiarly on the shoulder. She looked up, started unmistakably, and André noticed the man had tried to slip a piece of paper into her basket of flowers. Unnoticed by both, the paper fell on the dirty sanded floor among the refuse, and in a trice André had his foot on it.

He felt his heart beating like a sledge hammer. He had caught a glimpse of the man’s face—the same face that had puzzled him behind the trees near “The Cock with the Spurs of Gold.” Ah! the memories rushed in on him. Yes; he remembered now, of course, he had seen that face in the glare of the flaming charcoal-burner’s cabin and in London at a supper party. It was the face of George Onslow, an Englishman. Yvonne had not been mistaken. Onslow was the English spy in Paris. Onslow at Fontenoy had come to receive the plans from “No. 101.” Ha! should he follow him? Yes? No? Before he could decide he recognised two other men drinking carelessly but stealthily watching the room. These were servants, trusted servants, of the Duke de Pontchartrain and the Comte de Mont Rouge. What the devil were they doing here? By accident, or to meet some wench of the town, or as spies on whom or what?

George Onslow had meanwhile disappeared. The flower girl, too, humming a catch, was slipping away. André stooped to pick up the piece of paper, but by the time he had reached the door, pest on her nimble heels, she, too, had vanished! And André was only conscious that the two servants were following him out. Ah, that was their game, was it? Calling for another bottle of wine, he went back to the table, and immediately the pair returned to their seat. That was conclusive. They were there to watch him, but why? Clearly because the Court desired to know of all his movements. The consequences of his refusal to the Comtesse des Forges were in fact beginning. André smiled grimly, stretched out his legs and examined the precious slip of paper. At once his heart pounded the more fiercely. The scrap had no writing on it at all; all that he could see was a curious symbol, two crossed daggers and the figures “101” in red ink—no, blood! There was no mistaking it—blood. The mysterious traitor’s sign, pass, or counterword. He set his teeth. Why, oh, why had he allowed that girl to escape him?

An hour passed. Nothing happened, and André goaded by a feverish curiosity which he could not satisfy, and feeling only that he had been baffled again, planned how to leave. Pausing, to be sure that the two servants were ready as before to follow him, he flung himself round the corner into the darkness and up the first alley and down the next, reckless of stabs in the back, until he was able to crouch in the first convenient doorway. He had thrown his spies off, that was something, and just as he was wondering what to do next a cloaked figure brushed past him. The Chevalier de St. Amant, as he lived! He grabbed at the cloak in vicious rage. The Chevalier at least should not escape him.

“Don’t be so rude, Vicomte,” laughed a woman’s voice. “I won’t vanish up the chimney.”

André, in sheer astonishment, staggered against the door, glaring all the time into the darkness. “You will be wise to follow me,” she continued, “and in silence.”

In two minutes the pair were standing in a small and empty back room of the tavern André had just left. The woman threw back her hood, revealing the trim figure and saucy face of the impudent flower girl, who was no other than his long-lost acquaintance, the crystal-gazer.

“You will present,” she said mockingly, “my humble duties to Madame la Marquise de Pompadour——”

André had recovered his bewilderment. “What is the meaning of that?” he demanded, brusquely, thrusting the slip of paper into her hands.

“I don’t know,” she retorted coolly, and then tore the slip into a dozen pieces, “and I do not care to know.”

André was so startled by the studied insolence of the act that for a few minutes he could neither speak nor move. When he did, it was to put his back to the door very significantly.

“One question, Madame,” he demanded. “You are aware that George Onslow is in Paris, that he spoke to you, gave you that paper?”

“Certainly. Mr. Onslow mistook me for some one else. I have just convinced him of his mistake.” She was positively smiling.

“You expect me to believe that?”

She shrugged her shoulders. “No,” she answered, “the truth told by women is never believed, least of all at Versailles by men.”

André ran his eye over her. As in the past, so now something in her voice and figure reminded him of some one else, but of whom he could not recall. “Madame,” he said earnestly, “I urge you to tell the truth. You were never in such danger as you are now.”

“Perhaps not. But I am not in such peril as you are, Monsieur le Vicomte.”

Instinctively he turned sharply round. The woman laughed and the laugh maddened him, for they were alone and the door had been locked by himself.

“My friend,” she said quietly, “you are being spied on. To-morrow the ministers, the Comtesse des Forges, and the Comte de Mont Rouge will know how the Vicomte de Nérac, who gave out he was going to visit Madame his aged mother, has spent the evening in the company of Mr. George Onslow and disreputable women. I feel sure the Marquise de Beau Séjour will hear it, too, with additions.”

“Well,” said André, stonily.

“Monsieur le Vicomte also is known to frequent the society of one Yvonne. Innocent peasant girls, when put on the rack, are sometimes obliged to tell lies, poor things, but lies useful to those who rack them. The Marquise de Beau——”

“Hold your tongue.”

“No, I will not. Monsieur le Vicomte is also the lover of Madame de Pompadour. You deny it? Then why go in the darkness with the King’s private key to her apartment? The noble whose arm you slit will enjoy taking that delightful scandal about the Captain of the Queen’s Guards to the King, and the King—mon Dieu! the King—” she laughed bloodthirstily, nor was it necessary to finish the sentence.

André wiped the sweat off his brow. The woman came close to him. “Supposing,” she said in a low voice, “supposing you had been arrested to-night with that slip of paper in your pocket, would all your services, all your oaths, your nobility, have saved you? Think, my friend, think. I did a bold thing, perhaps, in destroying it, but it was in your interest, Vicomte, not mine.”

André was silent, appalled at her knowledge. The tables had been turned on him with a vengeance, and this astonishing woman was right, which was hardest of all.

“You would know,” she proceeded, divining marvellously his confused thoughts, “how I have all this information. I have my crystal,” she laughed, “but I also hate the King and the woman who rules him. You and she are not the only persons at Versailles to whom it is a matter of life and death to discover the secret of ‘No. 101.’ Monsieur, I am the paid agent of the foes of that wanton, the King’s mistress, and of yourself.”

Unconsciously André’s fingers clutched the hilt of his sword.

“Why do I tell you all this?” she asked in a low voice. “Does that confession amuse or startle you? Am I the first woman who would sacrifice herself for the Vicomte de Nérac or the first to confess her love? No. And to prove I speak the truth I will reveal to you the secret of ‘No. 101’ that I alone have discovered, but on one condition”—she paused to put her hands on both his shoulders—“that you will promise from this moment to abandon Mademoiselle Denise, who is not worthy of you, and to love me alone.”

Dead silence. André stood hypnotised, half by fear, half by the witchery of her womanhood.

“I have beauty, wealth, power,” she whispered caressingly. “Yes, I am as fair a woman as Mademoiselle Denise; I can make you a greater man than Madame de Pompadour can; I can reveal to you the secret that is worth the ransom of the King’s crown; and I love you. Say yes, André, for your own sake; you will never regret it.”

André looked into her blue eyes, so resplendent against the cream tint of her skin, and at her magnificent black hair. Passion and ambition began to sap his will. Then slowly he dragged himself from his intoxicating dream and disengaged her hands.

“No,” he said gently but firmly, “I do not love you. I cannot—I cannot, because,” his voice rang out, “I love Denise.”

She was trembling, he thought, with rage, but there was no rage in her eyes, only a mysterious pity and pathos as of a woman who had staked all on one throw and lost, yet was not wholly sorry.

“Ah! well,” she said, controlling herself. “I know now that you will never discover the secret of ‘No. 101’—never!”

“I shall,” he answered, with unfaltering confidence, “I shall succeed because I must.”

She shrugged her shoulders with scorn. “Open that window,” she commanded, in the most matter-of-fact tone, “before you leave you had better be sure the King’s police are not waiting for you.”

With the key of the door in his pocket André quietly threw the shutters open and peered out.

“Well? No one?” said a voice at his elbow. “I fear, Vicomte, I cannot wait while you make up your mind what you will do with me. You will hear interesting news at Versailles to-morrow. Thank you. Good-night!”

A sharp push, the vision of two small boots, and a flutter of short skirts, and she had lightly vaulted into the street. When André recovered his balance the darkness of the network of slums had swallowed her. Tricked and baffled again by a woman, and with these questions above all crying out for an answer: why had he mistaken her for the Chevalier? Was she really in love with him? And was she an agent of the plotters against Madame de Pompadour?