‘But consider what a rash thing you are doing. Besides, how is this going to benefit you or injure him? He will boast of it; he will talk of it to his friends, and injure you.’ ‘Not while I have this,’ Isodore cried triumphantly, touching the clasp of her cloak.—‘Do not you see how he is within my power? Besides, he can give me some information of the utmost value. They hold a Council to-morrow night; the business is pressing, and a special envoy is to go to Rome. The undertaking will be one of extreme danger. They will draw lots, but the choice will fall upon Frederick Maxwell.’ ‘How do you know this?’ Valerie asked. ‘I do not understand your mission; but it seems to me that where every man has a stake at issue, it is his own interest to see the matter conducted fairly.’ ‘You may think so; but perhaps you will think differently when I tell you that Le Gautier is, for the evening, President of the Council. It does not need a vast amount of discrimination to see how the end will be. Le Gautier is determined to marry this Enid Charteris; and much as she despises him, he will gain his end if he is not crossed.’ ‘But what are you going to do?’ Valerie asked, horrified at the infamous plot. ‘You will not allow an innocent man to go to his death like this?’ ‘I shall not, as you say, allow a good man to be done to death,’ Isodore replied with the calmness of perfect conviction. ‘The pear is not yet ripe. Le Gautier is not sufficiently hoist with his own petard. This Maxwell will go to Rome; but he will never execute the commission allotted to him; I shall take care of that.—And now, mind you are out of the way, when Le Gautier comes to-morrow night.’ Valerie silently shivered as she turned over the dark plot in her mind. ‘Suppose you fail, Isodore,’ she suggested—‘fail from over-confidence? You speak of the matter as already accomplished, as if you had only to say a thing and it is done. One would think, to hear you, that Frederick Maxwell’s safety, my husband’s life even, was yours.’ ‘Yes,’ she answered calmly; ‘his life is mine. I hold it in the hollow of my hand.’ CHAPTER XI. In one of those quiet by-thoroughfares between Gray’s Inn Road and Holborn stands a hairdresser’s shop. It is a good enough house above stairs, with capacious rooms over the shop; below, it has its plate-glass windows and the pole typical of the tonsorial talent within; a window decorated with pale waxen beauties, rejoicing in wigs of great luxuriance and splendour of colour; brushes of every shape and design; and cosmétiques from all nations, dubbed with high-sounding names, and warranted to make the baldest scalp resemble the aforesaid beauties, after one or more applications. But the polite proprietor of ‘The Cosmopolitan Toilette Club’ had something besides hair-cutting to depend upon, for Pierre Ferry’s house was the London headquarters of the League.