[74] Note in Lady Atkyns’ handwriting at the foot of a letter from Cormier, dated June 3, 1795. CHAPTER V THE MYSTERY OF THE TEMPLE (_continued_) Meanwhile the feelings of jealousy and suspicion which had sprung up between Cormier, still Lady Atkyns’s principal lieutenant and confidant, and the Chevalier de Frotté were becoming more and more marked. At the beginning of October, 1794, Cormier learns of a correspondence in progress between Lady Atkyns and a person whom he imagines to be his rival (but who turns out to be merely the “little baron”), and his ill-humour breaks out in the form of reproaches. “Chance has willed that I should become acquainted with the fact that some one has been getting up a correspondence with you,” he writes to Lady Atkyns, “in such a way as to prevent me from hearing of it.... You will admit that I am justified in assuming there are reasons why this correspondence is being kept secret from me.” But he proceeds to assure Lady Atkyns that she still retains all his admiration and respect, and to protest that he only acquaints her with the discovery that he has made because of his attachment to her. Filled with mistrust of Frotté, Cormier withholds from him particulars as to the progress of affairs at the Temple, and only vouchsafes his information now and again in vague terms. “I refused to give Frotté the names of the agents,” he wrote to Lady Atkyns some months later. “Please remember that. I shall always be proud of that.” It is not astonishing that Frotté should show some surprise at the way in which he was being treated, though he was prevented by other causes of annoyance--his failure to get any satisfaction out of the British Government and the repeated postponements of his departure--from taking his position in this respect too much to heart. Lady Atkyns herself was keeping him at a distance at this time and avoiding him when she came to London. When he asks for an interview, she refuses on the pretext of her widowed state and public opinion. “I wished to avoid seeing or writing M. de Frotté,” she herself records at a later period, “as I was not in a position to talk to him about the means being taken for the rescue of the King.” However, on the eve of setting out from England into the unknown, the Chevalier makes one more effort to see her.