A Nest of Spies

Excerpt

SUDDEN DEATH

She sought in vain!

The young woman, who was finishing her toilette, lost patience. With a look of annoyance she half turned round, crying, "Well, Captain, it is easy to see that you are not accustomed to women's ways!"

This pretty girl's lover, a man about forty, with an energetic countenance, and a broad forehead adorned with sparse locks, was smoking a Turkish cigarette, taking his ease on a divan at the far end of the room.

He jumped up as if moved by a spring.

For some time the captain had followed with his eyes the gestures of his graceful mistress; like a good and attentive lover he guessed what she required. He rushed into the adjoining dressing-room and returned with a little onyx cup in which was a complete assortment of pins.

"There, my pretty Bobinette!" he cried, coming up to the young woman. "This will put me into your good graces again."

She thanked him with a smile; took the needed pins from the cup, and quietly finished dressing.

Bobinette was a red-haired beauty.

The thick braids of her abundant tresses, with their natural waves and curls, fell to where the lines of neck and shoulders meet, their tawny hues enhancing the milky whiteness of her plump flesh. This young creature was of the true Rubens type.

It was half past three in the afternoon of a dull November day. A kind of twilight was darkening the ground floor flat in the quiet rue de Lille, where the two lovers were together.

For some months now Captain Brocq had been on intimate terms with this intoxicating young person, who answered to the nickname "Bobinette." Her features, though irregular, were pleasing. Sprung from the people, Bobinette had tried to remedy this by becoming a past mistress of postures, of attitudes. Like others of her kind, from her very childhood she had learned to adapt herself to whatever company she was in, picking up almost intuitively those shades of taste, of tact, which can transform the most unconsidered daughter of the people into the most fastidious of Parisiennes.

It was the contrary as regards Captain Brocq, an artillery staff-officer and attached to the Ministry of War. Notwithstanding his intellectual capacities and his professional worth, so highly valued by his chiefs, he always remained the man of humble origin, somewhat gauche, timid, who was evidently better fitted to be at the head of a battery on the bastions of a fortress than frequenting the gossipy clubs of officials or society drawing-rooms. Brocq, who had passed out of the Military Academy exceedingly well, had been given an important post recently: a confidential appointment at the Ministry of War. During the first years of his military life Brocq had been entirely preoccupied by his profession. Of a truth, as pretty Bobinette had just told him, he was not at all "a man accustomed to women." This was why, when verging on forty, his heart, as young, as fresh as a student's, had suddenly caught fire when he happened to meet Bobinette.

Who was this woman?

Brocq could not place her with that mathematical exactitude dear to his scientific mind....