to say."

The stupid, good old woman had taken her side already, and if anything
had been needed to confirm her own mistaken judgment of the case that
ludicrous accident would have supplied it. She fanned herself in an
emotion made up of wrath and grief and dignity, glancing at me from time
to time, and looking away again with an expression of disdain, which was
hard for an innocent man to bear.

"I suppose," I said, as coolly as I could, "that whatever information
you have upon this matter comes from the Baroness Bonnar?" I waited for
an answer, but she gave no sign. "I must trouble you to tell me if that
is so."

"You know that well enough," she answered. "The Baroness Bonnar is the
only friend the poor creature has in London."

"Do you know much of the Baroness Bonnar?" I asked. "Would it ever have
occurred to you to guess that the Baroness Bonnar is neither more nor
less than a paid Austrian spy, and that Miss Constance Pleyel is, in all
probability, her confederate?"

She looked at me with an incredulity so open that I felt it to be an
insult, and she preserved the same disdainful silence.

"I came here yesterday," I continued, "to consult Violet--"

She interrupted me almost with a shriek.

"Don't mention that poor girl's name!" she cried. "I won't have it
mentioned! I won't listen to it in this connection!"

"Pardon me," I said, "it has to be mentioned, and unless you are in the
humor to permit yourself to be made the dupe and tool of as wicked a
little adventuress as ever lived, you must listen to what I have to tell
you. I came here yesterday to consult Violet as to what I should do with
respect to a plot in which I have found the baroness to be engaged. You
have often heard the count and myself speak of poor old Ruffiano. You
know him as one of Violet's pensioners, and, indeed, I remember that
twice or thrice I have met him in your house. He has been betrayed to
the Austrians, and is at this minute in their hands. The prime mover
in that matter is the Baroness Bonnar, and her tool was the Honorable
George Brunow."

Now surely one would have thought that a charge so plain and dreadful
was at least worth investigation, and it had not entered my mind to
conceive that even an angry woman could fail to take some sort of
account of it. Lady Rollinson took it merely as a tissue of absurdities.

"It only shows," she said, "how desperate your own case must be when you
need to bolster it by a story like tha