"I can think what I like," I said. "Even a _slave's_ thoughts are his own. But where's the danger, if you mean ordinary danger?"
"He is great," she almost whispered now, "and powerful, even in Paris. He is, too, enormously rich, richer than I am, and can hire people to do whatsoever he wishes. He _might_ hire vagabonds to assault you--to--to--oh! Adrian!--throw you into the Seine with your throat cut, or stab you under the shoulder in a dark alley, and--and--all because you do this out of friendship for me, and with no hope of reward."
[Illustration: "Stab you under the shoulder in a dark alley."]
For a moment she regarded me calmly; then she said, "You are very confident, very masterful."
"Yes," I replied, "very confident, and--well! very masterful."
In looking back upon the events of those days--as I now do from the calm autumn of my life--I am always struck by the extraordinary fact that I am still alive. For, from the moment that it began to be whispered about in the fashionable parts of Paris that the Princesa Ana de Carbajal was tricking his Highness the Prince of Csaba (in Hungary) and Miranda Vitoria (in Spain), who, although of the Royal House of Austria, intended to espouse her morganatically if he possibly could, my life began to be in danger. That is to say, it would begin to be in danger directly the Prince of Csaba learned, as he very soon must learn, that the Princess was being gallanted about by an Englishman, who was considered to be so far her inferior as to cause it to be said that she had contracted a love affair with a person beneath her.
For these haughty, arrogant Spanish-Austrians living in Paris had the impertinence to state that I, Adrian Trent, an English gentleman (to say nothing of my being also an English nobleman and an officer of French _mousquetaires_), was beneath the Princess, or--or Damaris, as I always thought of her. It made my blood boil, I can tell you, when I learned such was the case (and I hope it makes yours boil, too, who read, if you are a countryman of mine), and if there had ever been on my part any idea of drawing back from the part I had agreed to play with Damaris--which, in solemn truth, there was not--it only confirmed me all the more in the determination to play that part out to the very end.