He said calmly: “By the tomb of my mother I swear to you that twenty minutes after Clarice has crossed this threshold I will show you the exact place where that block of granite is, that is to say, the hiding-place of the treasure accumulated by the monks of the abbeys of France.” She tried to thrust off the incredible fascination that Ralph was of a sudden exercising over her with this fabulous offer, and cried in a tone of revolt: “No, no! It’s a trap! You know nothing at all!” “Not only do I know, but I’m not the only one to know,” he said. “Who else knows?” “Beaumagnan and the Baron.” “Impossible!” she cried. “Think a little,” he said quietly. “The day before yesterday Beaumagnan was at La Haie d’Etigues. Why? Because the Baron had recovered the casket and they studied the inscription together. Then, if there are not only the five words mentioned by the Cardinal, if there is also _the_ word, the magic word which sums them up and gives the key to the mystery, they have seen it and they know it.” “What does that matter?” she said, gazing at Beaumagnan. “I hold him safely enough.” “But you do not hold Godfrey d’Etigues; and perhaps at this very minute he is on the spot with his cousin, the two of them sent in advance by Beaumagnan to explore the spot and make preparations for carrying off the treasure. Do you understand the danger? Do you understand that the loss of a minute may mean the loss of the game?” She held out fiercely, crying: “I win it if Clarice speaks.” “She will not speak--for the excellent reason that she has told you all she knows,” he said in a tone that carried conviction. “Be it so, but then do you speak yourself, since you have been so foolish as to make this disclosure. Why should I set her free? Why should I obey you? As long as Clarice is in the hands of Leonard, I have only to will to drag from you everything you know.” He shook his head. “No,” he said. “That danger is passed; that storm is at a distance. Perhaps, as a matter of fact, you have only to will; but equally as a matter of fact, you can no longer will that. You have no longer the strength to will it.” And it was true; and he was certain of it. Hard, cruel, “infernal,” as Beaumagnan had said, but none the less a woman and subject to failure of nerve, she committed her evil deeds rather on impulse than by a deliberate effort of will--in an access of madness and hysteria, which was followed by a kind of lassitude, by enfeeblement as much moral as physical. Ralph was sure that at that very moment she was suffering from such a reaction. “Come, Josephine: be consistent,” he said. “You have staked your life on this card, the conquest of boundless riches. Are you going to throw away the fruit of all your efforts when I offer you those riches?” Her resistance was weakening. But she protested: “I don’t trust you.”