avished on you!" he yelled. "Tell me his name or I'll kill
you!"

She reached under her pillow, clutched a jewelled watch and purse, and
hurled them at him. She twisted from her arm a gemmed bracelet, tore
every flashing ring from her fingers, and flung them in a handful
straight at his head.

"There's some more change for you!" she panted. "Now, leave my
bedroom!"

"I'll have that man's name first!"

The girl laughed in his distorted face. He was within an ace of
shooting her--of firing point-blank into the lovely, flushed features,
merely to shatter them, destroy, annihilate. He had the desire to do
it. But her breathless, contemptuous laugh broke that impulse--relaxed
it, leaving it flaccid. And after an interval something else
intervened to stay his hand at the trigger--something that crept into
his mind; something he had begun to suspect that she knew. Suddenly he
became convinced that she _did_ know it--that she believed that he
dared not kill her and stand the investigation of a public trial
before a _juge d'instruction_--that he could not afford to have his
own personal affairs scrutinised too closely.

He still wanted to kill her--shoot her there where she sat in bed,
watching him out of scornful young eyes. So intense was his need to
slay--to disfigure, brutalise this girl who had mocked him, that the
raging desire hurt him physically. He leaned back, resting against the
silken wall, momentarily weakened by the violence of passion. But his
pistol still threatened her.

No; he dared not. There was a better, surer way to utterly destroy
her,--a way he had long ago prepared,--not expecting any such
contingency as this, but merely as a matter of self-insurance.

His levelled weapon wavered, dropped, held loosely now. He still
glared at her out of pallid and blood-shot eyes in silence. After a
while:

"You hell-cat," he said slowly and distinctly. "Who is your English
lover? Tell me his name or I'll beat your face to a pulp!"

"I have no English lover."

"Do you think," he went on heavily, disregarding her reply, "that I
don't know why you chose an Englishman? You thought you could
blackmail me, didn't you?"

"How?" she demanded wearily.

Again he ignored her reply:

"Is he one of the Embassy?" he demanded. "Is he some emissary of
Grey's? Does he come from their intelligence department? Or is he only
a police jackal? Or some lesser rat?"

She shrugged; her night-robe slipped and she drew it over