To himself he had muttered these words, yet words were not needed to tell either of the others that here was a circumstance which must tell hardly, cruelly, against Bevill. They understood that by some act of forgetfulness, some inadvertency, he must have kept about him a letter that prudence should have warned him to destroy the instant he had set foot in the neighbourhood of the French; and now--now it would tell against him with awful force. They could not doubt this to be the case; no further doubt could exist in either of their minds. De Violaine's face, as he thought to himself that the unfortunate prisoner could scarce claim kinship with a more dangerous man in the eyes of France than the Earl of Peterborough, had been enough to tell them all, to banish all hope from their hearts. CHAPTER XXVII. If the Comtesse de Valorme had taken but a secondary part in the conversation that had occurred, it was because she recognised that, to Sylvia, the moment was all important. Also she recognised, or understood well, that at the present moment the preservation, the earthly salvation of Bevill Bracton, if such were possible, stood before all else. Her own desires, her own hopes of coming into contact with the Generalissimo of the allied armies, or, short of him, of someone in high command, must, if only temporarily, give place to the saving of this man so young and so fearless. Yet, even as this thought possessed itself of her mind, she acknowledged that all power of so saving him was outside the efforts of Sylvia or herself.