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 "If your services can go no higher than the cold-blooded murder of my friends and adherents, I shall be glad for your Government to release you from a position that you fill in a manner so unworthy of Russia and so bitterly hateful to myself."

He had drawn a blank in the attempt to intimidate her, and was quick to see and wily enough to abandon it.

"Yet I have not been unmindful hitherto of your interests," he answered.

"Hitherto they do not appear to have clashed with your own plans and private animosities," she flashed, with a sting that festered at once.

"This is rather a matter of your private feelings than mine," he said, with a significant glance in my direction.

"I will not affect to misunderstand you," she answered readily, with mounting colour. "Our interview yesterday makes that unnecessary. That, as I read it, is the real reason at the bottom of this last act of yours. I gave my word then to marry the Duke Sergius, and I would have kept it at all hazards. But I did not mean, and will not suffer, that my marriage with the Duke should be the death-sentence upon Count Benderoff."

"You 'would have kept' your word. Do you mean?" He paused; and how I hung upon her reply may be imagined.

"I mean that, as the Duke has involved himself in a quarrel, and been seriously wounded for his pains, I cannot well become his wife the day after to-morrow."

"There must be no delay," he retorted quickly.

"Delay!" she cried, her eyes flashing again brilliantly. "Do you think if you had murdered my