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146 "Ah!" she said. "You want to know that? So!"

"I do," he admitted.

"And yet," she remarked, "even for that it was not worth while to make love to me! You ask so much, my friend, and you give so little."

"If you" he began, a little awkwardly.

Her light laugh stopped him.

"Ah, no! my friend, you must not be foolish," she said. "I will tell you what I can for nothing, and that, I am afraid, is very little more than nothing. But as for offering me a bribe, you must not think of that. It would not be comme-il-faut; not at all gentil."

"Tell me what you can, then," he begged.

She shrugged her shoulders.

"It is so little," she declared; "only this. We are not adventuresses, Louise and I. We are living together because we were schoolfellows, and because we are both anxious to succeed in a certain undertaking to which, for different reasons, we have pledged ourselves. To succeed we needed some papers which had come into the hands of Mr. Morris Barnes. That is why I am civil to that little—what you call bounder, his brother."

"It sounds reasonable enough, this," Wrayson said; "but what about the murder of Morris Barnes, on the very night, you know, when Louise was there?"

"It is all a very simple matter," the Baroness answered, quietly, "but yet it is a matter where the death of a few such men would count for nothing. A few ages ago it would not have been a matter of a dozen Morris Barnes, no, nor a thousand! Diplomacy is just as cruel, and just as ruthless, as the battlefield, only it works, down there—underground!"