She came forward with outstretched hands. “André,” she asked with passionate eagerness, “you are safe?”

He took her to his breast, looking into her eyes. “Sweetheart,” he whispered, “why are you here?”

“Because you sent for me,” she began innocently.

“Sent for you?” he repeated, in dull bewilderment. “Mad,” he muttered, “mad, mad.” His brain was beginning to break down.

“Yes,” she whispered, for his face frightened her, “you sent for me. See; read.”

André took the strip of paper from her. After a few minutes he was able to spell out these words:

The paper dropped. The writing was his, at least it appeared to be. Could he have written it? He searched his whirling thoughts, recalling the events of this awful night following on the King’s illness, the strain of waiting in Madame de Pompadour’s room after the scene at the inn, the discovery of Denise, the interviews that followed, the finding of the Chevalier and Mont Rouge, the gallop to Paris, and then all that had happened in this salon. He snatched at the paper again; he had not written it; no, it was a clever forgery, the work of the only woman who could do it—“No. 101.”

Denise was watching him in terror, for his lips moved, yet he said nothing.

“A girl called Yvonne,” she whispered, “brought it to me at midnight; she conducted me to this house, and I have been waiting here ever since, waiting for you. Yvonne has disappeared and the doors were all locked. There is only the woman who——”

They both turned sharply at the rustle of a dress and stood hand in hand gazing in silence, for there had entered the girl whom André had seen plotting with Onslow at “The Cock with the Spurs of Gold.”

André mechanically whipped off his hat, Denise mechanically answered the curtsey of the lady who had entered, for this was a gentlewoman of their own rank, whose beauty would have adorned the great hall in the Château de Beau Séjour.

“We agreed,” she began quietly, “that Mademoiselle la Marquise was to decide. Monsieur le Vicomte, what I have to say is for the ears of Mademoiselle alone. Permit me to show you where you can wait. I shall not keep you long.” She pointed with her fan to the door and then held out her fingers.

André walked out of the room like one in a dream. The door closed. The two women were alone.

“I can be brief,” the stranger said quietly. “You have heard of ‘No. 101’; you know of the stealing of the secret despatch. I am the thief. I am ‘No. 101.’”

Denise recoiled with a cry of horror, her eyes fixed on the girl’s face with an expression of indignant stupefaction.

“The Vicomte de Nérac,” the stranger proceeded, “knows what you know now, and he will return to Versailles a hero,” she paused, “if he will arrest me. He has the despatch; he has a letter which will convict the Comte de Mont Rouge, who, Mademoiselle, by loaded dice, sent you to be the thief of the Court. The Vicomte has been seen to come here; it has also been discovered that I am in this house, and unless he returns to Versailles with that despatch he will be ruined and Madame de Pompadour will also send you to the Bastille, for she has proof that you were in her room this night. The Vicomte is in great danger, and you were summoned here to save him, for at your bidding alone will he do his duty and arrest the traitress—myself.”

Denise’s indignation had already begun to melt. She freed the necklace at her throat as if it were choking her.

“Shall I now ask the Vicomte to return?” The girl moved towards the door.

“Wait—one moment! You are”—Denise broke off in agitation—“you are Yvonne?” she whispered.

The stranger sat down and unconcernedly began to tear up one of the sheets of paper littering the floor. “I am,” she answered quietly.

“And you gave the Vicomte de Nérac the secret despatch which you stole?”

“He took it from the English agent to whom I had given it.”

“Ah!” Again Denise had guessed the truth. “You once saved the Vicomte’s life?” she went on.

“I helped to do so.”

“Yet you are a traitress?”

“Yes, I am a traitress, and a traitress I should have continued to be if you and the Vicomte de Nérac had not stepped in to prevent me.”

The emotionless voice in which this confession was made had ceased to startle Denise, for she was scanning the girl’s face intently.

“Ah!” she cried with sudden conviction, “the Chevalier de St. Amant is your brother!”

The other looked up quickly. “Was my brother,” she corrected gently. “The Chevalier de St. Amant is dead.”

“Merciful God!” Denise was leaning against a chair, faint and white.

“He was killed at the inn by the English agent, from whom in this room the Vicomte de Nérac took the secret despatch.” Denise had covered her face with her hands. “And you are right, Mademoiselle; the Chevalier was my brother, who helped me till to-night to be the traitress that I am.”

“Silence,” Denise cried in anguish. “Oh, for God’s sake be silent!”

“The truth,” replied the other in her passionless voice, “can never be silent.”

Denise walked to and fro, wrung by a torture unendurable to a woman’s soul.

Suddenly she paused. “Do you know,” she demanded, “that your brother saved the Vicomte de Nérac when he might have ruined him?”

“I know more than that. Yes, Mademoiselle, I know that what he did was done because he loved you. That also is the truth.”

Denise caught at her arms. The question in her gesture and her eyes needed no words. The girl rose and faced her.

“When we parted at the foot of Madame de Pompadour’s stairs his last words were, ‘Unless Denise or the Vicomte gets the paper Denise is ruined.’ The paper was in my possession and my brother went back to the inn to explain to the English agent why he could not have it.”

“But why did you not give me the paper at Versailles—you came to me as Yvonne—you——”

“If I had given you the paper at Versailles should I have been here now? I loved my life a little then—I did not know my brother’s fate.”

And Denise had no answer but a shiver of mute assent.

“You have forgotten my brother, who was to come here to meet me that we might fly together; you have also forgotten the Vicomte, to whom that despatch was a necessity, and you have forgotten yourself, Mademoiselle. Could my brother, who loved you, have wished that you should at Versailles have been proved to have stolen what you had tried to steal? You have forgotten Madame de Pompadour. Would she or the King have believed your story that a peasant girl had given you the despatch?” She paused for a moment. “Would the Vicomte have believed it?”

“André?” Denise cried passionately. “How dare you?”

“There was only one way,” the girl continued, quietly ignoring that cry of love’s conviction, “to save you from the trap into which your enemies had lured you, and that was to bring the Vicomte and yourself here. My brother would have wished it, and I am glad that I tried and succeeded.”

She turned away; her voice showed that the wonderful strength of will which had sustained her was giving way at last.

“You did it,” Denise said after a long silence, “not for my sake, not wholly for your brother’s, but—because you love André.”

The girl, who had sunk on to the sofa, presently rose and crossed the room, and Denise, watching her as only one woman can watch another, shrank at the sight of that noble and pathetic beauty.

“Yes,” was the unfaltering answer, “I did it because I love André, because I alone can save him. Ah! it is not you, but I—I, who have saved him.”

Denise gazed at her in silent helplessness. Fate was too strong for them all. The clock chimed out five strokes into the awful quiet of the room, and as Denise, in her restless misery, walked past the fireplace with its sculptured marble chimney-piece, she halted with a sharp-drawn breath. The crest on the clock had caught her eye, for the motto on it was “Dieu Le Vengeur!”

“Before we part,” she cried, “you will tell me, you must, who you are—no,” she added, in a stricken voice, “it is not necessary. I know, I know. Ah, God! this is terrible. ‘Dieu Le Vengeur!’” She covered her face with her hands.

A quiet hand was laid on her shoulder. “Denise.”

For some moments they looked at each other in breathless silence.

“It is true; yes it is true, and you—you have guessed because you are a woman who loves. Ah! when your ancestors were as nothing mine were the nobles who made kings, who were leading the armies of France. I am a traitress, but to what?” her voice rang out. “To the man called Louis the Fifteenth, a craven, a bigot, a liar, a libertine, the victim of the priests and his lusts. That man is not France, not your France and mine. Listen. What would you have done if the King—the King,” her scorn was immeasurable, “had stolen your mother, deserted her, sent your father to the scaffold for treason that he never committed? if you, the only daughter, had been saved from infamy and beggary by two faithful servants and brought up in secret to know that your name was corrupted, your brother a starveling in exile, your lands given to another? To that King I bear no allegiance and will bear none, so help me God, God who can avenge.”

“Then——”

“Do not say that name. It is blotted out, but it is mine. Fifteen years ago, a child, I swore, and every year since I have sworn it on the grave that is called mine, that I would have revenge.”

Denise answered with pale lips, “Yes, revenge.”

“My brother and I planned and plotted revenge and we succeeded. The Court and the King can judge of that. Beauty was mine and I nourished it for revenge, I used it for revenge, but I have never forgotten, never, that I am a daughter of the noblesse, a woman as proud of my womanhood as you, Denise.”

“Thank God,” she murmured gently.

“To the world I was simply a number, to myself a sexless tool, living for one object alone, until you came into my brother’s life, and then, ah, then, I dreamed of the day when my brother should win through you what is his by right—should be Marquis de Beau Séjour. But——”

Denise took her hand.

“If that were only all.” She paused for a moment, overcome. “In London André came into my life. Till that fatal day I have inspired many men with the passion they call love. I thought I alone of women knew not what love could be, but another dream came to haunt me. It could not be. You did not love François. André did not love me. Some day he will tell you the story; the truth he must never know.”

“And your brother——”

“Yes, he worked for you as best he could and I for André. Remember what we were and how we were placed. But we have succeeded—love brought us through. We remembered our Beau Séjour, and you whom he loved, he whom I loved, will share it between you. I thank God for that. My mother,” the girl went on, “was a De Nérac, a cousin of André’s mother. Had justice been done fifteen years ago André’s father should have had my forfeited lands. But love will do what justice could not—your love and mine.”

“André can restore you your name, your honour. He shall, he must.”

“It is impossible. You cannot change the King. He would not, could not, undo the past—his past. My brother is dead, my family will die with me as will my secret. Fate is too strong for you, for me, for France. With François I worked to destroy the woman who now rules at Versailles and will continue to rule. And André from love for you strove to defeat us. Madame de Pompadour has triumphed over the Court, the noblesse, the Church, my brother, and you. Remember the past and to-night. Remember you can only ruin that woman by ruining yourself, by ruining André, and you will not save me. I see it all now. It is the destiny of France, and against the destiny of God’s will we must fight in vain.”

Denise had clasped her hands like one listening to the sentence of a supreme power. Were they not all caught alike in the web of a mysterious and inscrutable force, mere puppets as it seemed in a stupendous drama whose beginning and whose end were beyond all human insight and control, but puppets also of flesh and blood, whose passions and whose spirit, whose ambitions and whose ideals, whose souls and bodies so strong and so weak, gave to the drama the immortal breath of life? If—ah, if—Denise wrung her hands again. How few are there of those born of women from whom has not been wrung that bitter cry of revolt against the “if” of fate—if only they had been taught that out of the past comes the present and out of the present will come the future, and that they, the puppets, must make, every hour, their own lives and the lives of all others.

“You cannot save your France and mine,” the girl was saying. “She is doomed, doomed. The writing is on the walls. Ruin is coming on kings and nobles and the people. In ten, twenty, perhaps fifty years there will be a new France, for the greatness of my people and yours no power can crush. Voices are crying out in the streets of Paris to-day, but France will not listen. She is drunk, mad, diseased, corrupt. Yet I know it, it has been revealed to me, that there is a glorious future for our country, and see to it that the sons of what to-day is called Beau Séjour shall be in the hour of that rebirth on the side of the new France.”

She moved quietly to the door, opened it, and called softly, “Mademoiselle has decided. Come.”

As André entered he gazed from one to the other with the calmness of a great fear. What had he come to be told? He saw Denise’s mind was made up, and he knew he must obey.

“André,” she said, with dignified composure, “you will please bring the chief of police from the court-yard to this room.”

For an instant he wavered, then controlling his emotion he left the room. When he returned with the chief of police one woman, hooded and cloaked, alone was there.

Denise threw back the girl’s cloak which she had slipped on. The police agent started with intense surprise.

“You recognise me, Monsieur,” Denise said freezingly. “Yes, it is the Marquise de Beau Séjour, and one of the maids of honour to her Majesty, who is not accustomed to be shadowed when she visits a house that belongs to herself, as this does.”

“I offer my apologies to Mademoiselle la Marquise,” the man stammered, “but I thought—I felt sure——”

“What you chose to think,” Denise pursued, “can be no excuse for so insulting a mistake. The Marquise de Beau Séjour will, however, overlook it for once, provided that you promise not to repeat the offence. That will do.”

She turned her back on his fervent avowals and the man crept from her haughty presence. In five minutes the court-yard was clear of Madame de Pompadour’s spies.

Denise had fetched the stranger back. “André,” she said, “be so good as to conduct this lady yourself to the barriers. I will wait for you here.”

The girl quietly put on her cloak. “Adieu, Mademoiselle!” They clasped hands in silence. “Adieu—Denise,” she whispered. “Adieu for ever!” Without another word André and she left the room.

When he returned an hour later one glance at his face told Denise that, whatever had passed in the journey, he did not know the secret of “No. 101.” That was still to remain in the keeping of two women who loved the same man, and it would go with those two to the grave a secret for ever.