There he was, radiant with his unselfish pride in me—­my big, handsome lover, looking more like the Apollo Belvedere come alive and dressed in modern clothes than like an ordinary diplomatic young man from the Foreign Office.  But then, of course, he is really quite out of place in diplomacy.  Since he can’t exist on a marble pedestal or some Old Master’s canvas, he ought at least to be a poet or an artist—­and so he is at heart; not one, but both; and a dreamer of beautiful dreams, as beautiful and noble as his own clear-cut face, which might be cold if it were not for the eyes, and lips.

There were people about, and we spoke like mere acquaintances until I’d led Raoul into the little boudoir which adjoins my dressing-room.  Then—­well, we spoke no longer like mere acquaintances.  That is enough to say.  And we had five minutes together, before I was obliged to send him away, and go to dress for the second act.

The touch of Raoul’s hands, and those lips of his that are not cold, gave me strength to go through all that was yet to come.  There’s something almost magical in the touch—­just a little, little touch—­of the one we love best.  For a moment we can forget everything else, even if it were death itself waiting just round the corner.  I’ve flirted with more than one man, sometimes because I liked him and it amused me,—­as with Ivor Dundas,—­sometimes because I had to win him for politic reasons.  But I never knew that blessed feeling until I met Raoul du Laurier.  It was a heavenly rest now to lay my head for a minute on his shoulder, just shutting my eyes, without speaking a word.

I thought—­for I was worn out, body and soul, with the strain of keeping up and hiding my secret—­that when I was dead the best paradise would be to lean so on Raoul’s shoulder, never moving, for the first two or three hundred years of eternity.  But as the peaceful fancy cooled my brain, back darted remembrance, like a poisonous snake.  I reminded myself how little I deserved such a paradise, and how my lover’s dear arms would put me away, in a kind of unbelieving horror, if he knew what I had done, and how I had betrayed his trust in me.

For ten years I’d been a political spy—­yes.  But I owed a grudge to Russia, which I’d promised my father to pay:  and France is Russia’s ally.  Besides, it seems less vile to betray a country than to deceive a man you adore, who adores you in return.  We women are true as truth itself to those we love.  For them we would sacrifice the greatest cause.  Always I had known this, and I had thought that I could prove myself truer than the truest, if I ever loved.  Yet now I had betrayed my lover and sold his country; and, realising what I had done, as I hardly had realised it till this moment, I suffered torture in his arms.

Even if, by something like a miracle, we were saved from ruin, nothing on earth could wash the stain from my heart, which Raoul believed so good, so pure.