Really, that was a master stroke on your part.

The fourteenth paragraph! He himself confessed the secret to me,--how he forged a note, some years ago, in the name of a good friend of his, who now holds the incriminating document in his possession.

With it he can at any time crush his false friend and deliver him over to a long imprisonment.

The trembling culprit wished to free himself at any cost from this sword of Damocles suspended over his head, and he proposed to me two ways to effect the desired end.

One was for me to seduce the young artist and then, as the price of my smiles, cajole him into surrendering the fatal note." The beautiful Cyrene threw at her listener a look full of the proud consciousness of her own dangerous charms.