William Massarene followed her narrative attentively and without interruption, leaning a little forward with his hands on his knee and glancing round to see that no one was in sight to wonder at his flattering but compromising _tête-à-tête_. He was magnetized by her voice, dazzled by her eyes, but what she spoke of was a matter of business and he was beyond all else a man of business. Business was his own domain. On that he was master; in that it was not in the power of anyone to cheat him. His sharp perception quickly understood her position, disentangled facts from fiction, and comprehended in what danger she was placed. He did not let her see that he knew she was glossing over and changing the circumstances; but he did know it, and stripped the false from the true in his own reflections as surely as he had shifted gold from quartz in his days in the gold-fields. He could have turned her narrative inside out and rent it to pieces in a second, but he forbore to do so, and appeared to accept her version of the matter as she presented it to him. “But what made you take the jewels to this Beaumont?” he asked her as she paused. “I wanted money,” she said sullenly. “Was it before you knew me?” “Just before.” “And you asked nobody’s advice?” “No.” The ghost of a grim smile flitted over his face: certainly for consummate folly he thought these great folks beat anything in all creation. “Oh, don’t laugh at one, Billy,” she said with genuine mortification and shame in her voice. “You don’t know what it is to want money as we do.” He looked at her indulgently. “I dare say it’s hard on you. You have to keep up all that swagger on nothing. Well, as I understand the matter, you must have these diamonds before Monday forenoon, eh?” “Yes,” she said shortly, with a catch in her breath; she felt by the change in his tone how far she had descended from her pedestal by her confession. “Oh, the brute!” she thought passionately; “how I should love to strangle him and fling him into the Thames pea-soup!” “What is it you want me to do?” he asked, whilst he knew without asking; but he liked “to keep her nose to the grindstone”; he was but paying in fair coin the innumerable insults she had passed on him, the countless awkward and painful moments she had entailed on him. She took up all her courage and trusted to the magic of her influence over him. “I want you to go over to Paris and get them for me. I dare say you could get them for half price. Beaumont would be afraid of you.” His face did not reveal his thoughts; his dull grey eyes stared at her fixedly. “What was the sum you had from him?” “Three hundred thousand francs; but then there is the cast of the false stones to add to that and the interest.” She spoke the truth in this, for she knew that it would be no use to do otherwise. “And what did you sign for?” “I can’t remember.” William Massarene laughed, a short, rasping, grim sound, like the chuckle of the big woodpecker.