Madame Gilbert and Captain Rust travelled to Brighton on the Friday evening in the Pullman train. They occupied different carriages. Their hotel, one of those facing the sea which washed the far-off shores of their beloved, bleeding France, had been selected by Madame—"I desire a hotel, my friend, not a caravanserai!" Madame arrived ten minutes before Rust, and had disappeared within her own appartement when his cab drove up to the doors. Rust then booked his room, one upon the second floor. He took that which was offered, and did not observe that Madame's room was also au seconde. But he did notice—he could not help it—that the imposing lady in charge of the hotel office was French. "Ah, monsieur le capitaine," said she, beaming caresses upon him, "with what joy do I perceive the tenue de campagne of my own Army. I will gladly grant to you one of the rooms of the very best and at the price of the lowest. The patron, he also is French, and would be furious if I did not give the most cordial welcome to an officier francais." Rust thanked the lady of the bureau, and heartily approved Madame's choice of an hotel.

"One moment, if you please," said I to Madame, who supplied me with these details. "I perceive that both the rooms, yours and Rust's, were upon the second floor. Is it in this way, you shameless woman, that you preserved from reproach the honour of the late imaginary stove man?"

Madame sighed, and turned upon me the look which, in my mind, I have labelled "Innocence unjustly traduced." One of these days, with German thoroughness, I shall prepare a numbered and annotated catalogue of Madame Gilbert's looks and tones. Though it cannot teach her sex anything which the youngest member does not already know, it will be full of valuable instruction and warning for the innocent male.

"Am I responsible," wailed Madame, "for the allotment of rooms by hoteliers?"

"Most certainly," I said severely. "I do not know your methods. It is not given to man to penetrate the unfathomable duplicity of woman. But I am convinced that had you wished it, you would have been placed an premier, and Rust consigned to the uttermost cock-loft in the roof."

Madame and Rust dined that first evening at separate tables, but discovered in one another old friends when they accidentally met afterwards in the lounge…. "What happiness, can it indeed be le Capitaine Rouille, the friend closer than a brother of my poor slain husband?" … "Madame Guilbert! Can it be you whom I meet thus unexpectedly? You whom I have not seen since that dreadful never-to-be-forgotten day upon which I broke to you the news, the terrible news—" Rust's voice failed; even Madame, who thinks little of his ability, admits that he performed on this occasion to admiration. The rencontre was a most affecting one, conducted in voluble French in the full blaze of publicity in a crowded hotel lounge. The English audience was impressed and honestly sympathetic; our insular reserve has been melted in the fires of war. "It is a French lady, poor thing, who has lost her husband," they whispered, the one to another, "and that handsome fellow in ordinary evening-dress is her man's brother officer, who was with him at the last, and who brought the sad news to her. How sweet she looks, and how tenderly sympathetic he is!" The eyes of the men had already been drawn to Madame's royal beauty and those of the women to her dress, a masterpiece of Paquin. Now that she had met Rust the men were sorrowful, regretting a vanished opportunity of making her acquaintance, and the women were relieved. She was too formidable a rival to be at large, alone and unattended, but now she would be monopolised naturally and properly by her good-looking compatriot. So when Madame and Rust slipped away to a corner of the lounge, kindly eyes followed them, and the voices of the censorious had no excuse to be raised. "You are a wonder, madame," whispered Rust. "And you, my friend, did not so badly," replied Madame in frank approval.

They separated early that evening, for Madame, who knew not what it was to feel really tired, shammed fatigue as a reason for retiring betimes. To her came Marie, a little dark French femme de chambre of the second floor, imploring to be allowed to assist at the night toilet of a desolate widow of France. While Marie brushed out the long, rich, copper hair the two chattered unceasingly of France and the Army of steel-hearted poilus which held the frontiers of civilisation away yonder in Picardy, Artois, Champagne, and the Vosges. Marie herself had a man out there of whose welfare she had heard nothing since the war began. She had received no letters, and the French publish no casualty lists. "Mon cher petit homme est mort, madame. C'est certain, mais j'espere toujours." There are many, many Frenchwomen to whom the death of their loved ones is certain, though they hope always. "I felt rather a pig talking fibs to the poor girl," confessed Madame.

Madame Gilbert had made her plans with thoughtful care, and proposed to carry them out with hardihood. She had determined to work so adroitly on the Saturday upon the curiosity and "poor strained heart" of Rust that he would be speeded up to run big risks. He did not know that, however judiciously frail her conduct might be, she was a very dragon of virtue in defence of her honour. "I gave my heart," said she to me quite seriously, "to the Signor Guilberti, one far, far different from le mari imaginaire of le Grand Couronne. Until, if ever, I give my heart again no man shall possess me. I play, I kiss, I philander—as you call it—but what are these trifles? Des bagatelles, rien de tout!" He did not realise her serene indifference to the small change of love and her respect for its true gold. But I do not think that Rust, when Madame consented to be his companion at Brighton, seriously misjudged her motives. He did not know, of course, or in the last degree suspect that she designed his capture as a professional victim.

Again and again she had told him that she was an agent of the English police, and again and again, as she intended, he had disbelieved her. She was so incomparably his intellectual superior that she could make him believe or disbelieve precisely as she chose. She made him think that she had come to Brighton for companionship, and as a proof of her kindly forgiveness of a grave indiscretion. He believed; for never was Rust, even Rust, so idiotic as to suppose that she had succumbed before his charms and had come to throw herself into his arms.

But for the machinations of Madame the visit would, I am sure, have passed without incident. Rust would not have lost his turnip of a head. He would, out of loyalty to his orders from Froissart, have tried to grab the despatch-case and ravish its secrets. But he would not have done what he did, at the risk of compromising the bloom of her so precious reputation, if she had not deliberately worked him up to do it. Therefore, while I acquit Rust of evil intention, my reproofs, my grave reproofs—at which she laughs and snaps her fingers—are reserved for that unscrupulous Madame.

At breakfast Madame Gilbert and Captain Rust found that a private table, a table of the best in a bay window facing the sea, had been reserved for them by orders of the patron. The news of their pitiful rencontre in the lounge had sped to his ears; he had wept copiously before his sympathetic staff, and declared that the bereaved widow and the so gallant captain should lack for nothing in his hotel. "If it were not that I feared to offend their delicacy I would refrain from presenting to them l'addition. Make, I pray you, mademoiselle du bureau, their charges of the lowest." He was a most noble patron.

The path of the wicked was thus made smooth. By the English guests, by the entire staff, it was considered inevitable, indeed highly becoming, that Madame and Rust should devote themselves wholly to one another. Had they embraced in public, and wept many times a day upon one another's necks, the staff—half of which was French—would have deemed the exhibition most seemly and fitting, and the English, though embarrassed, would not have been censorious. By so much has war brought to us an understanding of the simple honest hearts of our closest Allies. In ceasing to be insular we are ceasing to worship our wooden conventional gods.

Madame, who, as I have before remarked, says the most frightful things in her soft, musical voice, regarding one the while with frank, steady eyes, commented thus upon the attitude of le patron and his assistants towards them. "They wrapped us about so thoroughly in their tender sympathy that nothing which we had chosen to do in mutual consolation could have shocked them."

I do not propose to weary the reader by detailing at length the progress of Madame's Saturday campaign. Her methods of offence will, by now, have become clear. To the "suffocating gas" of her smiles, and the "liquid fire" of her eyes she had added the devastating "Tank"—her despatch-case. She worked its mysteries unceasingly. When it was not under her own hand it reposed—during meal times, for example—in the steel safe of le patron. All except one paper, of the most thrilling importance, which never left her person. This small, unobtrusive paper, upon which, according to Madame, the destinies of nations depended, was hidden always—happy paper—in the bosom of her corset.

Did she not, inquired Rust, greatly daring, find it rather hard and scratchy? To him its resting-place seemed too delicate a spot to be used as a general store. Madame frowned at the allusion to so intimate a topic, and Rust, terrified, implored her pardon, which was graciously vouchsafed.

"You should not, mon ami, speak to me as if I were that which you once thought me—a light woman." She reduced him nearly to tears, and then, in kindly consolation, permitted him to hold her hand. Both as a pretended French officer, and as an English agent of the Secret Service, Rust was the most derisory of frauds.

During the day the pair of plotters were inseparable, and Madame played continually with unfailing deftness upon the two strings of Rust's poor heart and of his intense curiosity, which she clearly perceived though she did not know it to be professional. When the heart swelled with stimulated emotion, and Rust began to show inconvenient fondness, Madame would frown reproof and lead the despatch-box into action. Very often she would carry her hand to that pleasant spot where nestled the paper of so great international importance, and she would speak of it and of the terrible responsibilities which rested upon her as a secret agent de police. "When I carry a document such as this," she would say, "one pour faire les Boches se crever, it never leaves my bosom all the day and rests under my pillow by night. Under my pillow, mon ami." She dwelt upon that pillow, and raised in the mind of Rust a charming vision of a white lace-edged surface upon which was spread out a lovely disorder of red copper hair. She so worked upon him that his emotions and his duties became inextricably mixed. Somehow he must secure that paper and solve the baffling problem of the wonderful widow who appeared to be French, and yet was not French. His brain by itself could not have conceived of a means, but Madame assisted to stimulate its imagination as she had done the beating of his heart. "It was wrong of you, mon ami" she said, in gentle reproof, "to select a room upon the same floor as mine, it was a proceeding bold and not a little indelicate, which might have compromised my precious reputation had I not been secure in the honour of my poor lost Captain Guilbert." Rust protested that he had left the choice of rooms entirely to the lady of the bureau, but Madame's smile showed that she was wholly sceptical. "I speak frankly to you," said she, "so that there may be no longer in your mind any thought that I am a woman of light conduct. I have come here, driven by your sad pleadings, to give you of my companionship, and my heart would be desolated if I thought that you still misjudged me." The beautiful voice shook, and I do not doubt that the violet eyes, glistening with pumped-up tears, were raised to Rust's face. I, her friend, know that she can feel deeply, and I can distinguish that which she simulates from that which moves her, but the poor creature Rust was in her hands the most helpless and deluded of victims.

So the day passed. They lunched together and dined together. In the intervals they walked upon the sunny front, for the weather was perfect and the sun shone as it only shines at Brighton. Madame, I am quite sure, did not sit upon the sand. It appears also that they visited a succession of picture houses. Madame declares that she is fascinated by this form of entertainment; the variety and rapid movement delight her—as I admit they do my dull self—and she deeply enjoys the blatant crudity of cinematic drama. "It is so entirely unlike life that it transports one to another world," says she. "Here in this strange visionary world of the pictures one lives in a maelstrom of emotions. Boys and girls meet, embrace, and marry all within the space of a few minutes upon the screen and of an hour or two of dramatic action. Children are conceived and born by some lightning process which it would be a happiness for the human kind to learn. Heroes die while strong men bare their heads in grief, and ten minutes later the corpse is capering joyously in a new piece. By attending three or four houses in one afternoon one sups upon emotions and feeds without restraint upon rich, satisfying laughter. Yes, mon ami, I love the cinema. Rust did not, I think, greatly interest himself in the pictures, but was happy in the darkness—holding my hand."

She laughed as I broke into growls. "Is it not, mon cher" she went on, "that the cinemas will always be most popular—however dull may be the pictures—so long as boys and girls, men and women, who love, desire to fondle one another's hands in the dark?"

"You and Rust did not love one another," I grunted.

"No. We were not the real thing, but we made ourselves into quite a plausible imitation."

Madame pursued her programme with indefatigable ardour and patience. She impressed again and again upon Rust's imagination a picture of herself sleeping unprotected, in a room not far distant from his own, while beneath her pillow reposed a paper precious and mysterious beyond words to describe. She even hinted that a dread of fire, from which she always suffered when sleeping at hotels, forbade the locking of her door. "I am not afraid to die," said she, "for what have I to bind me to life now that I can never visit the spot where repose the shattered fragments of my beloved Capitaine Guilbert? But to be burned, helpless, while rescue was cut off from me by a locked door! I shrink from so terrible a fate." Subtlety, she had discovered, was thrown away upon the obtuseness of Rust. She was compelled to be brutally plain, and so she drove into his thick head the tempting fact that nothing interposed during the hours of darkness between his eager hands and the paper which she had taught him to covet. If she awoke and mistook his motives—if she thought that he had ventured into her room with designs upon her honour—Rust felt sure that her kind heart would forgive him, by breakfast-time, though she would certainly dismiss him from her bedside with the most haughty of reproaches. If he could not find some other way before they separated for the night, he had almost decided to essay the venture. She slept very soundly, said Madame; she had not awakened in her appartement in Paris upon one night when a bomb from a Prussian aeroplane had exploded within two hundred yards of her house. Another way was still possible, and Rust, while he was dressing for dinner, determined to try it; it was a way, too, which thrilled him with pleasurable anticipation.

At dinner Madame declined champagne, which she said was a poor, feeble drink. Let them for once share a bottle of sparkling Burgundy, a royal wine, the Wine of Courage. The patron brought them the bottle himself, and lamented that they would not indulge themselves in a second. Madame had no desire that Rust should, under its influence, become too enterprising. The evening was warm, and afterwards they moved into the pleasant garden behind the hotel and sat together in a quiet corner. Other guests were in the garden, but it had become tacitly agreed among them that Madame and Rust—the "dear French things"—should be permitted to console one another in seclusion. No one could perceive that the black-sleeved arm of Rust had found a happy resting-place around Madame's black-covered waist, or that her glowing head was not far from his shoulder. Her Paris evening frock was cut low, though never by the fraction of an inch would Madame permit her couturier to exceed the limits of perfect taste. Looking down over her shoulder Rust could see, protruding from the white lace below her bodice, the corner of a paper. She talked little. It seemed to give her pleasure to lean against his shoulder and dreamily, half asleep, to rest there reposefully like a tired child. "But, mon ami" said Madame to me in relating these tender details with the greatest satisfaction, "I was very wide awake indeed."

Rust eyed that corner of paper and waited without speaking until his companion should become almost unconscious of his movements. Then gently he moved his right arm from her waist and placed it over her shoulder. She moved slightly, but it was only to nestle more closely against him. His dangling fingers moved little by little towards the opening of her corsage, they descended, and with his thumb and forefinger he gripped the paper. Madame did not move her body nor, to Rust, did she seem to suspect his intentions. But her right arm lifted slowly up, she gently grasped his hand in hers, pressed it kindly for a moment, and then, still holding it, removed his arm from her shoulder to her waist. "Your coat sleeve scratches my shoulder," she murmured. Rust, who had instantly released the paper when Madame took his hand, never again got an opportunity of touching it, for she kept her arm pressed over his during the whole time that they sat together. "I gave him the chance," explained Madame to me, "and it worked beautifully. But once was enough. From that moment I became really suspicious of Rust. Before I had only been puzzled. What he was I could not guess, but I was dead set on finding out before the night was over. Till then I had allowed only little freedoms, but when I rose to go into the hotel and he bent over me I let him kiss me on my lips. It was a severe disappointment, that kiss," added Madame contemplatively.

"Spare me the loathsome details," said I crossly.

When at last Madame Gilbert went to her room she was smiling gaily and showing no signs of fatigue at the tiresome exercises of the day. Though it was approaching midnight the faithful Marie was waiting to assist her toilet. "Ah, madame," sighed Marie in her frank Parisienne fashion, "le Capitaine is so beautiful and devoted. He regards you as one who would devour. I marvel that you have the heart to separate from him."

"Marie," said Madame, laughing, "you are a naughty girl, a corrupter of my youthful morals. I am afraid that le bon Capitaine must go hungry. For—" and then she pranced off upon that wearisome old story about the blown-up Territorial bore of le Grand Couronne. Fidelity to the scattered corpse of a husband—un mari assommant, mon Dieu, pas un amant joyeux!—seemed to Marie the most wasted of emotions. She, in common with all the other Frenchmen and women in the hotel, was an ardent partisan of Captain Rouille.

"If my bell rings in the night, come quickly, Marie," said Madame, as she dismissed the girl. "I shall need you a la grande vitesse."

Madame slipped the seductive paper and something else under her pillow, saw that the electric and the light switch were close to her hand upon the bedside table, and snuggled down contentedly. "The trap is set and baited," she murmured; "I hope that the bird will not keep me waiting."

An hour passed slowly. Rust has told me little of his feelings, but admitted that he was in the "devil of a funk." He had determined to make a daring shot at the paper and the solution of Madame's identity, but he shivered at the prospect of her wrath should she awake and catch him in the act. "She would have thought the worst of me, and, like you, Copplestone, I cherish her beautiful friendship as the most precious of privileges. On my honour I was only after the paper." Madame found the waiting time very tedious, but I am sure that her pulse did not quicken by a beat. She has a wonderful nerve.

At one o'clock, when the hotel was very quiet, and the boot-cleaner had made his round of collection, Madame heard the handle of her door move and the door itself push slowly open. Through her partly closed eyes she saw the momentary flash of an electric torch with which Rust took his bearings, and then she felt, rather than saw or heard, a figure draw gently towards her bed. Her right hand was under the pillow grasping that something, not the paper, which she had laid there in readiness. Rust approached, bent over her, and his fingers felt for the pillow. They touched her hair, and she knew that the moment for action had come. Out stretched her arm, holding the pistol well clear of his body, for she was loath to hurt him, and a sharp report within a couple of feet of his side frightened Rust more thoroughly than had the hottest of "crumps" in Flanders. He sprang away, and darted for the door; but in an instant the lights went up, and a loud, commanding voice—utterly unlike Madame's soft musical social tones—called to him to halt. "Halt!" cried Madame in English. "Right about turn! 'Shun!" The familiar words of command brought him round in prompt obedience, and there before him he saw Madame Gilbert sitting up in her bed, pointing a most business-like automatic pistol straight for his heart. Her hand held it true, without a quiver, and along the sights glittered an eye remorseless as blue steel. This was a woman wholly different from that kindly yielding creature whom he had embraced and kissed a couple of hours earlier!

"You will please stand quite still," said Madame, speaking the slightly tinged Irish-English of her birth, "for if I shoot, le Capitaine Rouille will be no more. See! Upon my dressing-table behind you is a small vase supporting a rose. I will cut off its stem," She quickly moved the pistol, and fired. "You may turn round." He obeyed, and saw that the vase was unbroken, but that the rose, cut off at the stem, lay upon the dressing-table. Behind it appeared a bullet-hole in the plaster of the wall.

Madame flicked the spent cartridge off her counterpane, where it had fallen upon ejection, and resumed. "I have rung the bell, and in a moment there will be a most interested audience. You will then please explain what brings you to my bedroom."

He had faced round towards her again, and his poor mind was a blank. The situation was too big for him. He had fallen into a trap, but why it had been set he could not guess. Who was this calmly capable, straight-shooting widow who, with the copper hair falling over her shoulders and streaming down the front of her dainty nightdress, appeared in action even more lovely than in repose?

The first to arrive was Marie, then followed another femme de chambre, then came the night porter, then the boot-collector, last, with eyes opened wide at the surprising spectacle of a beautiful young woman receiving her lover at the point of a pistol, appeared monsieur le patron himself. They clustered in a group by the door. "I think," said Madame serenely, "that we have enough. Marie, the house is full; shut the door and lock it." The order was obeyed. "Now," went on the commanding voice from the bed, using French for the effective shutting out of the English boot-cleaner and night porter, "if you men will turn your backs, and Marie will hand me my dressing-gown, I will prepare myself for the examination of Monsieur le Capitaine Rouille. It is not seemly that a court of inquiry should be conducted in a nightdress."

The men turned round, or were pushed round. Marie—gasping with wonder at the whole incredible business, so unlike that which she had suggested—brought the silk dressing-gown and robed Madame, who skipped out of bed for the purpose. Then the fair juge d'instruction, wrapped to the neck in blue silk, and looking prettier than ever, propped herself upon the pillows and opened the court.

"Captain Rouille," ordered she in French, "please tell these others why you came to my bedroom."

I regret to record that Marie and the other girl looked towards one another and sniggered. The patron lifted up his hands in amazement. Mon Dieu, what a question! The two English servants did not understand French.

Rust said nothing. Madame, who had observed the excusable misunderstanding of her French audience, condescended to explain. "I am sure," she said, "that Captain Rouille will not suggest that his visit was designed to attack my honour."

"Quelle dame extraordinaire!" moaned the patron. "C'est incroyable la sangfroid de celle-la."

"Of course not," cried Rust, speaking for the first time. "Never would I have dared to think of such a thing. Madame Gilbert is a lady of the highest virtue. It was not to compromise her that I entered her room."

"The man," groaned the patron, "is no less extraordinary than the woman. Why in God's name this pistol, this scene so public! They are lovers, beyond doubt, yet they spring upon my hotel this scene of the most scandalous. It is not the way of France; I do not understand such goings on."

Madame drew a paper from her bed, and held it up. "Was it for this that you came?"

"Yes," said Rust, "for that and that only."

"Un billet doux" said the patron, playing without design the part of a bewildered chorus, "Why should not madame have given it to him if she wished to write that which she was too modest to say?"

"Why did you want it?"

"What more natural," cried the patron, "than that the brave captain should be eager to read the sweet confession of your love?" Madame missed not a word which dribbled from the lips of the poor, puzzled patron, who contributed the comic sauce which titillated her humorous palate. The patron to her was a sheer joy.

"Why did you want it?" repeated Madame sternly.

"Because," said Rust, "you said that it contained the most important of secrets."

"What have you to do with secrets which concern the fate of nations at war?"

"Nations! War!" muttered the patron. "What words are these to find upon the lips of lovers? By now they should, had they not both been quite mad, have forgotten war in their mutual embraces."

Rust was silent, considering what he should say. He had not the wit to invent a plausible story, and to such men there is only one safe rule—when in doubt, tell the truth. He told the truth.

"I wanted that paper because I am a member of the Secret Service."

"Of Germany?" snapped Madame, flashing violet lightning from her eyes. Sensation! The two French women broke into screams of rage, dreadful to hear; the patron raised his clenched hands, and roared like a furious beast. Rust, a brave man, shrank for a long, startled moment. His flesh quivered, as if it felt fierce French nails fasten into it. He saw the blood-lust flame in the eyes which searched his face. He trembled, but spoke up firmly.

"No. The Secret Service of England."

"Liar!" roared the patron. "Menteur! Espion! Foul seducer of a desolate veuve de France! Die, traitor! Madame, raise your pistol; shoot—shoot instantly for the honour of France!" The man, a fat, comfortable bourgeois, was transfigured with frightful, murderous rage. He had become a figure almost heroic.

But Madame did not shoot. In ten seconds her swift brain had recalled the whole series of incidents during her commerce with Rust; she penetrated to the heart of the mystery, and immediately became convinced that he spoke the truth.

"No," said she. "Monsieur le patron and you, mes demoiselles, cease your cries. You do the brave Capitaine Rouille a very grave injustice for which you must pray his forgiveness sur le champ. He is a soldier of France, and of our noble Allies, the English. He is an officer of the English Secret Service. The mistake was mine, for which, mon capitaine, I implore your pardon."

She lay back in her bed, and the laughter poured out of her in one unbroken flood. She laughed until she became weak as a baby, for the idiotic comedy which they two had played—at the expense of the British Treasury—was beyond any other means of expression. Rust, who began to grasp something of the truth, also broke into a laugh, and the amusement of the principals brought instant conviction to the audience. The repentance of those who had thirsted for Rust's blood a moment since was very pleasant to witness. The women begged permission to kiss his brave hands, which had slain the foul Boches, and the patron cast his burly person upon Rust's pyjama-clad bosom and saluted him on both cheeks. He had a stiff, hard beard!

"And now," cried the patron, "this scene, so deplorable and scandalous, is happily ended. Our beautiful Madame and the brave captain, their mistakes and misunderstandings removed, are again lovers of the fondest. Let us go, my friends, and leave them to forgive one another as they will desire to do in decent privacy. Allons, allons, vite!"

He drove away the boot-collector and the night porter, who had not understood one word of the quick French which had been spoken. They explained the scene satisfactorily to themselves by the one word, "French." The women would also have gone if Madame, who was still laughing, had not hastily recalled Marie.

"Marie," she whispered, spluttering with cheerful impropriety, "lead that captain away and lock him into his room or my reputation is gone for ever. Take Rouille away, and then leave me, for I want to laugh and then to sleep."

But Rust, blushing deeply at the preposterous closing of the scene, had sneaked quietly out of the room.

* * * * *

They met at breakfast without embarrassment. At least Madame was perfectly tranquil; I cannot answer so surely for Rust. In the eyes of the little world of the hotel nothing had been changed. They retained their assumed characters as a Widow and Soldier of France, who consorted with the freedom of old friends.

"So," said Madame, when all had been explained, "you were put on by our dear, fiery Froissart, and I by the dear, secretive Dawson. We blundered up against one another, and the rest followed naturally. You were such an one as I looked for, and I was of the kind pictured by the imaginative Froissart. It has all been most amusing, especially when one reflects that the English Government has paid for all our delightful lunches, teas, dinners, and motor runs. I doubt, though, whether we can with easy consciences send in the bill for this week-end."

"No. We will divide the cost between ourselves, for I am sure that you will refuse to be my guest. All I ask is that you do not cut our holiday the shorter on account of what has passed."

"Not by an hour," replied Madame heartily. "I like you, Captain Rust; we will enjoy ourselves to-day as colleagues en vacance, and to-morrow we will report at headquarters. We will leave Dawson and Froissart to sort out the responsibility for the whole comedy. It has been a most pleasing experience. Never shall I forget that scene of last night and the bewilderment of the poor patron. His comments were a delight, and the conclusion was so purely French in its artless conception that I felt for your innocent blushes."

"The patron was the limit," muttered Rust, flushing deeply.

"He was. And yet no one could convince him that the reconciliation so desired by him was not the most natural and decorous for us. I am still sore with excessive laughter. Again and again in the night I woke up and simply bellowed."

The Sunday was again a very fine day, and Rust speaks of it still with enthusiasm. Madame revealed herself to him, no longer as the seductive siren, but as a true-hearted colleague and helper. He saw her not only as a beautiful and most compelling fascinator, before whom he had grovelled, but as a big-brained and big-souled friend. "She is the only woman whom I have ever met with whom I would go tiger-shooting," said Rust to me. I will accept that one sentence as his considered verdict; no greater tribute could be paid by a man to a woman.

At first he did not fully grasp that the Madame of that Sunday, the real Madame, was wholly different from the one he had known before. As they sat together upon the cliffs towards Rottingdean, he slipped his arm about her waist. Gently, but very decidedly, she removed it. "No, mon ami," said she. "All that has passed with the necessity for its exercise. I do not play with my friends."

"Thank you," replied he—it was the brightest speech which Madame has recorded of him. There is hope that Rust will, with years and experience, develop in intelligence.

When Madame returned to London on the Monday, she sought an audience of Chief Inspector Dawson, and told the whole story. He was not pleased, but handsomely conceded that she had carried out her duties with skill and enterprise. "The farce was not your fault," said he; "it was entirely due to that French ass Froissart, who has no right to play games of his own without consulting me. I will make a protest to the Chief."

"Don't do that," urged Madame. "Froissart is rather a dear, and you know that the fault was partly yours, for not taking him into your confidence. I have determined to cultivate Froissart, and shall endeavour to persuade him that your feminine assistants are not all of microscopic intelligence and of repulsive appearance."

"You will succeed," said Dawson handsomely.

Froissart, to whom Rust reported, gleaned some consolation from the failure of his agent. "This wonder of a woman, of whom I must instantly make the honourable acquaintance, has saved the detested Dawson from the deeps of humiliation. But we have scored off him most surely. He has shown himself to be a blundering, conceited English pig, and I will protest to the Chief that never again must he keep me in ignorance of his projects. I shall laugh at him; all our people here will laugh. I shall be revenged. Conspuez Dawson!"

"Don't be too hard on Dawson," urged Rust. "Madame Gilbert thinks a lot of him, and would be pained if he suffered discredit through any fault of hers."

"Fault!" shouted the gallant Froissart. "La belle Madame is sans faute, peerless, a prodigy of skill and discretion! She is superb. If she implores me to spare the man Dawson, then I will consent, though my heart is rent in fragments. As for you, mon ami, I fear that in her hands you were not a figure of admiration. She twisted you about her pretty fingers like a skein of wool. I do not think that you are, what you call, cut out for the Secret Service."

"That is quite my own opinion," assented he gloomily.