Breathing all her hate in a dolorous cry, Lady Beltham wrung her beautiful hands, and groaning aloud, cried: “Go, Tom Bob, go and ask the officers of justice, go and learn from the police the fate I have reserved for your mistress, and the opinion she now has of you!” “Of me!” “Yes, sir, of you!” It was the brigand’s turn now to tremble with apprehension, but such was the empire he possessed over himself, he was able to hide his agitation under a mask of smiling irony. “Lady Beltham,” he asked quietly, “so you have told the princess who I am, have you?” Very certainly, Lady Beltham had not gone so far as this, for despite her jealousy, she still cherished for the outlaw one of those monstrous passions that are like consuming fires devouring women’s hearts, fires that are only extinguished by death! Nevertheless the jealous woman suffered her lover to believe that during a scene of angry altercation she had revealed to her rival the ignominy, the baseness, the crimes of the man whom the too trustful Sonia Danidoff had thought well to choose as the object of her heart’s desire. Fantômas bit his lips and his eyes fell, while Lady Beltham demanded in a questioning, defiant tone: “And why should I not have told the princess who you were?” Receiving no answer, she proceeded, smiling in her turn with a show of scornful dignity: “You are afraid, it seems, that knowing you in your true aspect, she might cease to feel for you the fatal infatuation that consumes her? Poor princess! poor pitiful passion!... what matter the faults, the vices of the man a woman loves, when she truly loves him? Fantômas,” the sobs were rising to her lips as she went on, “I ask you, have your villainies, have your crimes silenced in me the fond feelings I entertain for you? Have I, for all the hideous life of blood and terror I live because of you, have I ceased to love you?” Fantômas broke in: “You profess to love me, madam, to love me still, and yet you harass me with your threats....” Lady Beltham interrupted in her turn: “Hate, Fantômas, is it not another form of love?” But the outlaw shook his head sadly. “Madam,” he declared, “I have lost all confidence; trusting to appearances, you have doubted my loyalty—I have proof of it, I know it; perhaps your distrustful attitude has gone for much in that I have shown towards you....” “What do you mean?” demanded Lady Beltham, “have you not, many times over, tried to kill me? Remember, Fantômas, the evening of the Pré Catalan!” “You were there, madam, and I knew it; but recollect how, by an accident contrived by me, your car could not be started, a circumstance which saved you from the accident in the lake.” “Say rather,” protested Lady Beltham, shuddering, “that hitch, that breakdown, seemingly providential, enabled you to start back alone and unhindered with the Princess Sonia Danidoff.” Fantômas shrugged as he avowed with a cynical grin: