"It was forced on me. You stood under my window there." I defended
myself indignantly. "I wish to heaven I had never heard. I did not
want to know; your secrets are your own affair."

"And my actions, I presume?" she put in with superb indifference.

"And their consequences, madam," but the shot failed rather of effect.
She merely smiled and shook her head recklessly, contemptuously. Was
she so old a hand, so hardened in crime, that the fears of detection,
arrest, reprisals, the law and its penalties had no effect upon her?
Undoubtedly at Calais she was afraid; some misgiving, some haunting
terror possessed her. Now, when standing before me fully confessed for
what she was, and practically at my mercy, she could laugh with cool
and unabashed levity and make little of the whole affair.

If I had hoped that I had done with her now, when the murder was out,
I was very much mistaken. She had some further designs on me, I was
sure. She wanted to make use of me, how or in what way I could not
imagine; but I soon perceived that she was anxious to be friends. The
woman was in the ascendant, and, as I thought, the eternal feminine
ever agog to attract and subjugate the male, she would conquer my
admiration even if she could not secure my esteem.

Suddenly, and quite without my invitation or encouragement, she
reseated herself by my side.

"See, Colonel Annesley, let us come to an understanding." She said it
quite gaily and with no shadow of apprehension left in her, not a sign
of shame or remorse in her voice. Her mood had entirely changed. She
was _débonnaire_, frolicsome, overflowing with fun.