HE now pulled himself together, trying to look unconcerned in the very midst of his anticipated triumph.
“No,” he said presently, “that is — as you were saying, Sir Percy — ?”
“I was saying,” said Blakeney, going up to Chauvelin, by the fire, “that the Jew in Piccadilly has sold me better snuff this time than I have ever tasted. Will you honour me, Monsieur l’Abbé?”*
He stood close to Chauvelin in his own careless, debonnaire way, holding out his snuff-box to his arch-enemy.
Chauvelin, who, as he told Marguerite once, had seen a trick or two in his day, had never dreamed of this one. With one ear fixed on those fast approaching footsteps, one eye to that door where Desgas and his men would presently appear, lulled into false security by the impudent Englishman’s airy manner, he never even remotely guessed the trick which was being played upon him.
He took a pinch of snuff.
* Sir Percy is being facetious. Chauvelin was in fact a member of the officially atheist Committee for Public Safety, but in a moment of theatricality he had adopted the disguise of a Roman Catholic clergyman, which did not fool Sir Percy for a moment.