Page:In the name of a woman (1900).djvu/27

 "You wonder why you find me here in this house alone at night. You must wonder; I will tell you. It is my mother's house—my own is across the city near the Palace—and to-night her own maid came to me with an urgent message that my mother had been stricken down suddenly and was dying, and that I must come at once. It was a lie, of course, though for the moment it blinded me. I hurried here on foot, too anxious even to wait for a carriage to be got ready, and when I arrived the place was empty. While I was wondering whether I had been betrayed, the men you saw—to whom keys of the place had been given—entered, and would assuredly have murdered me but for your arrival. That is how Russia plays her cards in Bulgaria."

"How do you know they were Russian agents?"

"How do I know that when I am hungry I want to eat? Wearied, I need sleep? Bah! do you think I have no instincts, and do not know my enemies? How do I know their plans and plots?" She fired the questions at me with vindictive indignation and a smile of surprise that I should even ask such a thing. Then her expression changed to one of deep earnestness, her tone hard and bitter.

"I will tell you how you shall know it, too. They have tried every other means but this to separate me from my Prince. Threats at which I laughed; bribes to be anything I pleased, which I scorned; hints of his assassination, which I carried to him; everything—till only this was left; and now this," and she touched her wound lightly. "And even this, thanks to your valour, Count, has now failed. And their object, you will ask? They have a plot to drive my Prince from Bulgaria, because he will not be their