There lay the danger, and they both knew it.

But she was the wife of one of them and their lips were necessarily sealed.
"And it will be permitted," Claude de Chauxville happened to be saying at that moment, "that I call and pay my respects to an exiled princess ?" "There will be difficulties," answered Etta, in that tone which makes it necessary to protest that difficulties are nothing under some circumstances--the which De Chauxville duly protested with much fervor.
"You think that twenty miles of snow would deter me," he said.
"Well, they might." "They might if--well--" He left the sentence unfinished--the last resource of the sneak and the coward who wishes to reserve to himself the letter of the denial in the spirit of the meanest lie..