“Don’t say ’bothered’!” I reproached him.  “That’s a cruel word.  The question is—­I’m worn out.  I don’t think I shall be able to eat supper.  My maid will want to put me to bed, the minute I get home.  Poor old Marianne!  She’s such a tyrant, when she fancies it’s for my good.  It, generally ends in my obeying her—­seldom in her obeying me.  But we’ll see how I feel when the last act’s over.  We’ll talk of it when you come here—­after my death.”  I tried to laugh, as I made that wretched jest, but I was sorry when I made it, and my laugh didn’t ring true.  There was a shadow on Raoul’s face—­that dear, sensitive face of his which shows too much feeling for a man in this work-a-day, strenuous world—­but I had little time to comfort him.

“It will be like coming to life again, to see you,” I said.  “And now, good-bye! no, not good-bye, but au revoir.”

I sent him away, and flew into my dressing-room next door, where Marianne was growing very nervous, and aimlessly shifting my make-up things on the dressing table, or fussing with some part of my dress for the next act.

“There’s a letter for you, Mademoiselle,” said she.  “The stage-door keeper just brought it round.  But you haven’t time to read it now.”

A wave of faintness swept over me.  Supposing Ivor had had bad news, and thought it best to warn me without delay?

“I must read the letter,” I insisted.  “Give it to me at once.”

Occasionally Marianne (who has been with me for many years, and is old enough to be my mother) argues a matter on which we disagree:  but something in my voice, I suppose, made her obey me with extraordinary promptness.  Then came a shock—­and not of relief.  I recognised on the envelope the handwriting of Count Godensky.

I know that I am not a coward.  Yet it was only by the strongest effort of will that I forced myself to open that letter.  I was afraid—­afraid of a hundred things.  But most of all, I was afraid of learning that the treaty was in his hands.  It would be like him to tell me he had it, and try to drive some dreadful bargain.

Nerving myself, as I suppose a condemned criminal must nerve himself to go to the guillotine or the gallows, I opened the letter.  For as long as I might have counted “one, two,” slowly, the paper looked black before my eyes, as if ink were spilt over it, blotting out the words:  but the dark smudge cleared away, and showed me—­nothing, except that, if Alexis Godensky held a trump card, I was not to have a sight of it until later, when he chose.

“MY DEAR MAXINE,” [he began his letter, though he had never been given the right to call me Maxine, and never had dared so to call me before] “I must see you, and talk to you this evening, alone.  This for your own sake and that of another, even more than mine, though you know very well what it is to me to be with you.  Perhaps you may be able to guess that this is important.  I am so sure that you will guess, and that you will not only be willing but anxious to see me to-night, if you never were before, that I shall venture to be waiting for you at the stage door when you come out.

    “Yours, in whatever way you will,