She went from the room, shutting the communicating door behind her. For a moment, when she was alone, she could only stand still, conscious that her breath was coming quickly, her heart beating with sheer unbridled rage. Then with something suspiciously like a sob she unlocked the drawer of her wardrobe and took from the bottom of it the big jewel case which had been in Jeanne’s keeping on their journey.

Emilie set it down on the bed and drawing a key from the bosom of her gown she slipped the long chain on which it was threaded over her head and unlocked the jewel box. Inside were all her worldly possessions – the Deeds of the house in Paris, the Bank Statement ending with the withdrawal of everything she had deposited there, and finally a great pile of notes of very large denominations.

She had withdrawn everything before she left Paris, determined that all traces of Madame Bleuet should cease and that, when she opened a new banking account, it should be in another name. As she looked at the money lying there in the box, the money which it had seemed to her she had earned so hardly, almost giving her life blood in her toil for it, she felt a sob break in her throat.

A hundred thousand francs! It was over half of everything she possessed in the whole world. She picked up the notes, one by one and, as she did so, she was suddenly aware of something which lay beneath them, something she had taken from Léon’s desk the last day before they left Paris. She was not even certain why she had brought it with her except perhaps because of the memory of her last journey to Monaco and the tales of travellers being held up by robbers which had terrified Alice and herself as they bumped over the road from Nice.

Slowly, her face working strangely but her hand steady, Emilie drew it from its hiding place beneath the money.

It was a pistol, and Léon, who had always been desperately afraid of burglars, had on more than one occasion shown her how to use it.

There was always money in the house in Paris, for he banked but once a week, and the safe in which he kept the nightly receipts from 5 Rue de Roi and his other places of business stood behind a Chinese screen in their sitting room.

‘If you are alarmed by anything you hear, fire at once,’ Léon had instructed her. ‘Bullets are more effective than words.’

Emilie could almost hear his voice beside her. Mechanically her fingers loaded the pistol. Then she looked down at it. There was the same look in her face as had been there twelve years ago when she had set out alone for Paris.

‘Bullets are more effective than words!’