I felt her begin to _live_.

She had drunk a draught of hope and life, and, fortified by it, was gathering all her scattered forces together for a new fight, if fight she must again.
The Commissary of Police turned the leather case wrong side out.

It was empty.

There had been nothing inside but the necklace: not a card, not a scrap of paper.
"Where, then, is the document ?" Crestfallen, he put the question half to himself, half to Maxine de Renzie.
"What document ?" she asked, too wise to betray relief in voice or face.
Hearing the heavy tone, seeing the shamed face, the hanging head that lay against my shoulder, who--knowing a little less than I did of the truth--would have dreamed that in her soul she thanked God for a miracle?
Even I would not have been sure, had I not felt the life stealing back into her half-dead body.
"The contents of the case are not what I came here to find," admitted the Enemy.
"I do not know what you came to find, but you have made me suffer horribly," said Maxine.

"You have been very cruel to a woman who has done nothing to deserve such humiliation.