‘You had a search made, Mademoiselle,’ I continued quietly. ‘Your servants left no place unexplored The paths, the roads, the very woods were ransacked, But in vain, because all the while the orange sachet lay whole and unopened in my pocket.’ ‘No!’ she cried impetuously. ‘There, you lie sir, as usual! The sachet was found, torn open, many leagues from this place!’ ‘Where I threw it, Mademoiselle,’ I replied, ‘that I might mislead your rascals and be free to return to you. Oh! believe me,’ I continued, letting something of my true self, something of my triumph, appear at last in my voice. ‘You have made a mistake! You would have done better had you trusted me. I am no bundle of sawdust, Mademoiselle, though once you got the better of me, but a man; a man with an arm to shield and a brain to serve, and--as I am going to teach you--a heart also!’ She shivered. ‘In the orange-coloured sachet that you lost I believe that there were eighteen stones of great value?’ She made no answer, but she looked at me as if I fascinated her. Her very breath seemed to pause and wait on my words. She was so little conscious of anything else, of anything outside ourselves, that a score of men might have come up behind her, unseen and unnoticed. CHAPTER VIII. A MASTER STROKE--Continued I took from my breast a little packet wrapped in soft leather, and I held it towards her. ‘Will you open this?’ I said. ‘I believe that it contains what your brother lost. That it contains all I will not answer, Mademoiselle, because I spilled the stones on the floor of my room, and I may have failed to find some. But the others can be recovered; I know where they are.’ She took the packet slowly and began to unroll it, her fingers shaking. A few turns and the mild lustre of the stones shone out, making a kind of moonlight in her hands--such a shimmering glory of imprisoned light as has ruined many a woman and robbed many a man of his honour. MORBLEU! as I looked at them and as she stood looking at them in dull, entranced perplexity--I wondered how I had come to resist the temptation. While I gazed her hands began to waver. ‘I cannot count,’ she muttered helplessly. ‘How many are there?’ ‘In all, eighteen.’ ‘There should be eighteen,’ she said. She closed her hand on them with that, and opened it again, and did so twice, as if to reassure herself that the stones were real and that she was not dreaming. Then she turned to me with sudden fierceness, and I saw that her beautiful face, sharpened by the greed of possession, was grown as keen and vicious as before. ‘Well?’ she muttered between her teeth. ‘Your price, man? Your price?’