She took it more calmly than he had expected, but she grew a little paler, and that look came into her eyes which Margaret and Logotheti saw there an hour afterwards; and presently she asked Griggs if he too would join the week-end party at Craythew, telling him that Van Torp would be there.  Griggs accepted, after a moment’s hesitation.

She was not quite sure why she had so frankly appealed to Logotheti for help when they left Margaret’s house together, but she was not disappointed in his answer.  He was ‘exotic,’ as she had said of him; he was hopelessly in love with Cordova, who disliked Van Torp, and he could not be expected to take much trouble for any other woman; she had not the very slightest claim on him.  Yet she had asked him to help her in a way which might be anything but lawful, even supposing that it did not involve positive cruelty.

For she had not been married to Leven four years without learning something of Asiatic practices, and she knew that there were more means of making a man tell a secret than by persuasion or wily cross-examination.  It was all very well to keep within the bounds of the law and civilisation, but where the whole existence of her best friend was at stake, Lady Maud was much too simple, primitive, and feminine to be hampered by any such artificial considerations, and she turned naturally to a man who did not seem to be a slave to them either.  She had not quite dared to hope that he would help her, and his readiness to do so was something of a surprise; but she would have been astonished if he had been in the least shocked at the implied suggestion of deliberately torturing Charles Feist till he revealed the truth about the murder.  She only felt a little uncomfortable when she reflected that Feist might not know it after all, whereas she had boldly told Logotheti that he did.

If the Greek had hesitated for a few seconds before giving his answer, it was not that he was doubtful of his own willingness to do what she wished, but because he questioned his power to do it.  The request itself appealed to the Oriental’s love of excitement and to his taste for the uncommon in life.  If he had not sometimes found occasions for satisfying both, he could not have lived in Paris and London at all, but would have gone back to Constantinople, which is the last refuge of romance in Europe, the last hiding-place of mediaeval adventure, the last city of which a new Decameron of tales could still be told, and might still be true.

Lady Maud had good nerves, and she watched the play with her friends and talked between the acts, very much as if nothing had happened, except that she was pale and there was that look in her eyes; but only Paul Griggs noticed it, because he had a way of watching the small changes of expression that may mean tragedy, but more often signify indigestion, or too much strong tea, or a dun’s letter, or a tight shoe, or a bad hand at bridge, or the presence of a bore in the room, or the flat failure of expected pleasure, or sauce spilt on a new gown by a rival’s butler, or being left out of something small and smart, or any of those minor aches that are the inheritance of the social flesh, and drive women perfectly mad while they last.