At that moment it opened wide and the Comtesse de Valorme appeared. "You see," she said, speaking with withering scorn, "I am the only person the room contains. Now do as Sylvia suggested--search the house." "Monsieur Francbois need scarcely trouble so far as that," a voice said from the foot of the garden steps, while all turned their eyes on Bevill standing below. "I have heard enough to know that he seeks an opportunity of speaking with me. Monsieur Francbois, I pray you to descend. I, too, must have some talk with you. Afterwards, we can arrange our affairs pleasantly, I do not doubt. You understand?" looking at Francbois. CHAPTER XVI. Francbois, his face become suddenly ashy, as both ladies observed, from the moment he had heard Bevill's voice and saw its owner standing at the foot of the steps, nevertheless did as he was invited and went out to the verandah. Then, seeing that, without any further word or sign, the Englishman was slowly making his way towards the gate, he followed him. Yet once the thought came to his mind as he did so, "If this were not the garden of the house wherein I dwell, if those women were not there, how easy 'twould be--now, as he walks ahead disdainfully--to put him out of my path, for ever." While, as he thus thought, his hand itched to draw the spadroon at his side. In the room which he had left, the women were now standing at the open window, gazing down at the figures of the retiring men. On Sylvia's face there was a look of intense anxiety, of nervousness--an expression that, on the face of a woman of less heroic mould, might have been construed into one of fear. But, though this look was not, truly, one that depicted fear, the agitation that possessed her whole being was the outcome of fear. Not for herself--that could never be!--but for him--him--the man whose every path, every footstep, was day by day and hour by hour becoming more environed and beset by danger. "And the bitterness of it all is," she thought to herself, "that the danger need never have arisen. I was safe. Short of this city being besieged by the English and fired by grenades or bombarded, or sacked and destroyed by the French in their rage, naught could harm me. Yet, to protect me, to shield me from harm, as he deemed in his chivalry, danger surrounds his every movement, his whole existence. How-- how--shall I therefore save him, how repay him in turn? If we cannot leave this city, if I cannot save him by the pretence, the make-believe, that he is saving me--oh! what shall become of him? What?" "They have passed out through the gate," the Comtesse said at this moment. "They----" "What! is he going to kill him? To force him into a duel?" "'Twere well he should do so," the Comtesse de Valorme said in a hard, dry voice that sounded strangely in Sylvia's ears, or would have done so had she not been too agitated to observe the tone of the other. "Very well it would."