The Distributed Proofreaders Canada eBook of The Man with Two Names by John Palmer

This eBook is made available at no cost and with very few restrictions. These restrictions apply only if (1) you make a change in the eBook (other than alteration for different display devices), or (2) you are making commercial use of the eBook. If either of these conditions applies, please contact a https://www.fadedpage.com administrator before proceeding. Thousands more FREE eBooks are available at https://www.fadedpage.com.

This work is in the Canadian public domain, but may be under copyright in some countries. If you live outside Canada, check your country's copyright laws. IF THE BOOK IS UNDER COPYRIGHT IN YOUR COUNTRY, DO NOT DOWNLOAD OR REDISTRIBUTE THIS FILE.

Title: The Man with Two Names

Date of first publication: 1940

Author: John Palmer (1885-1944)

Date first posted: September 9, 2025

Date last updated: September 9, 2025

Faded Page eBook #20250908

This eBook was produced by: Al Haines, John Routh & the online Distributed Proofreaders Canada team at https://www.pgdpcanada.net

This file was produced from images generously made available by Internet Archive.

By JOHN PALMER

NO PART OF THIS BOOK MAY BE REPRODUCED IN ANY FORM

WITHOUT PERMISSION IN WRITING FROM THE PUBLISHER

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

BY THE VAIL-BALLOU PRESS, INC., BINGHAMTON, N. Y.

Stephen Lawson waited in the hall for his daughter Marjorie. She would be coming downstairs in a moment. She always took the last flight at a run. There would be a flip of her long coat against the banisters as she swept round the corner, a flash of color, a smile, a hand laid urgently upon his sleeve and the inevitable question, “Ready, father?”

Marjorie was always late, eager to catch the minute she had lost; but it was those who waited, as he was waiting, who had to answer for it.

But that was only as it should be. To wait for Marjorie was worth while even for a man who counted his time precious and had a rooted objection to kicking his heels without good reason. He had known she would be late and he might have waited more comfortably in the drawing room with his back to the fire. But his impatience had as usual driven him downstairs to the comparatively cheerless hall. Alfred held himself discreetly aloof by the oak chest, bearing the rug. Barton, beside the door under the fanlight, who had entered to remind his master that the night was unusually cold and to recommend the fur-lined coat, stood silent and immobile.

Lawson was uneasily aware of them behind him as he faced the stairs. He was rarely at his ease in the presence of servants. He owed his success in life to meeting men upon their merits. Their obedience was a tribute to his stronger will and more robust intelligence. The immutable deference of Barton and the menial gestures of his staff, mechanically proffered and accepted, irritated and perplexed him. They were the price he paid for the ritual with which he saw fit to surround his daughter, a token of the social position he had won for them both.

Somewhere upstairs a door banged. Marjorie was coming down. The sight of her confirmed the vision he had entertained of her approach. Yet the thrill was immediate.

Barton pulled open the door. A blast of keen air and a flurry of snow from the street met them as they descended the steps. Matthews stood on the pavement by the Daimler. He touched his cap and opened the door. Alfred fussed about their knees with the rug.

The door was slammed softly but firmly. Matthews honored his employer, adored his young mistress and respected the car. All this was implicit in his treatment of the door.

The car slipped gently upon the frozen road. Lawson looked sidelong at his daughter and was content. Marjorie, in the phrase of the young puppies who frisked about her, was easy to look at. Tonight the restless gray eyes were shining with pleasure; the dark-brown hair, allowed to have its way in despite of fashion, set off a complexion whose natural pallor was more becoming than the most cunningly painted mask; the lips defied Max Factor and his heirs in line and color; upon the finely modeled contours of cheek and chin high lights melted into warm shadows, shifting with every gesture.

Someday soon he would lose her. She would be driving to dinner with some man, as yet unknown. For the moment, however, she was still his most cherished and intimate possession, the only one of his possessions which he would have chosen for himself and which he valued for its own sake. The others he had left to the experts—pictures at which he never looked, books which he had never read, silver and glass which for him were no more than household equipment. He thought of these things as a setting for his jewel, a simile which to him was sufficiently appropriate to justify its being, as he conceived it, poetical.

The eternal miracle, of course, was that Marjorie was really fond of him. She had been looking forward to this “party” for days. He so seldom had an evening free. In some odd way, he reflected, they were a pair. There was even a tacit assumption that they would remain a pair to the end. Even when she married, an event which he had begun to anticipate with uneasiness, there would rest between them an understanding as unique as it was satisfying.

So far her love affairs had been no more than occasions for amusing confidences. They grinned together over her victims. She recounted them for his diversion as a sportsman describes his bag at the end of the day on the moors. He even liked to see the young fools hovering like flies around his honeypot. They added to his sense of acquisition. Almost it was as though he and she had pulled off these comical successes together—as when they had watched young Wintersley, 13th baron of Hawksmere, lurking beneath her window upon a cold night in December, or when Colonel St. Denis had kissed her with a vigor astonishing in one who was ostensibly claiming the privilege of years. Almost certainly her husband, when he came upon the scene, would fall into place as part of their fun together, unless, of course—here Lawson found himself smiling bitterly upon the prospect—marriage was going to change her out of recognition.

It all happened in a few minutes. Marjorie’s grip tightened on his arm and she pressed herself urgently against his shoulder. For an instant his heart warmed. This was one of those vivid and sudden gestures of affection that never failed to stir him profoundly. Then he saw what was coming. A large car, driven fast and carelessly upon the icy road, was swinging toward them out of control. Matthews accelerated, but there was no avoiding the impact. Lawson flung himself across his daughter, interposing his massive shoulders between her and the window. There came a crash of metal, a splintering of glass. Lawson felt the fragments flying past his head. Her face, buried in his chest, was safe, but her right arm was exposed. She gave a stifled cry. The cars were now at a standstill.

Her face was deadly pale and she fell heavily forward upon his knees. The blood was pouring from a gash just above the elbow.

He ripped out his handkerchief, lifted her arm and bound it firmly. Matthews was at the door.

“Make way, there,” he shouted. “My daughter is hurt. Telephone, someone, to Charing Cross Hospital and warn them to be ready.”

Already the car was moving. Lawson gently raised the wounded arm. It had ceased to bleed. Marjorie stirred.

The car turned into a gloomy gateway. Lawson was aware of figures waiting under a bright lamp.

Marjorie smiled at him and tried to rise. The effort was too much for her and she fell back again upon his shoulder.

Lawson waited a moment. A stretcher was wheeled forward and Marjorie was lifted down.

III

Lawson paced backward and forward in the small waiting room. A deep wound that would leave, perhaps, a scar. Yet one never knew. Panic visions of Marjorie with her arm permanently crippled swept across his mind. Or perhaps there was other damage. Marjorie had never fainted in her life before. That, however, might be due to the shock and loss of blood.

He caught sight of himself in the glass. A nurse had dressed and sterilized the small cut upon his left cheek. There was a crisscross of plaster under his eye and a red trickle scarcely dry upon his collar and white tie. But his eyes rested on the bloodstains upon the front and cuffs of his shirt. The glass must have cut an artery to make her bleed like that. Was it dangerous to cut an artery? How could such things be put right?

“A nasty cut in a bad place,” said the doctor. “The glass has been extracted, but a further operation may be necessary.”

“Nothing to worry about. But your daughter will have to be patient. This sort of damage often takes longer to set right than a clean break. Would you like us to keep her here for a day or so?”

“You will require a nurse,” he added. “If you care to leave that to me, I will engage one at once and send her along with the ambulance.”

A moment later Lawson stood in the private ward where Marjorie was lying. Except for her extreme pallor and rapid breathing she might have fallen asleep in the course of nature. Lawson’s mind went back twenty years to the moment when he had stood beside his dead wife. The physical likeness was extraordinary. The room, too, had been white. But he had never really understood that other Marjorie, the woman who had painted such strange pictures and was admired by so many people whom he had so deeply distrusted. He had been content to adore her blindly; there had been no time for understanding. She, too, had been blind to him, mercifully perhaps. The passion that had drawn them together had left him strangely alone. Passion, perhaps, was a solitary thing. Or so he had found it. Her friends, of course, had hated him. He had always known what they thought of his marriage; he had robbed them of her genius and, when she had died, giving birth to Marjorie, they had regarded this event as the fulfilment of a tragedy for which they held him responsible. His sole answer to their implicit accusation was the child she had left in his keeping. To bring this fruit of their union to perfection could alone placate the sense of guilt with which those who had loved and praised his dead wife still burdened him. To that end he had been driven to acquire wealth and power. To achieve it, all means had been justified.

He raised his arms in a characteristic gesture of impatience. There were many who feared that violent shrug which brought his elbows up with a flip of the wrists, as though he were trying to fly. It signified a furious protest against a scheme of things for which those about him might or might not be responsible. His first poignant anxiety was forgotten. Marjorie was safe but, even though all went well with her, she would suffer pain and perhaps disfigurement. The smallest flaw in her perfection would to that extent declare his failure to achieve the supreme object of the strange career on which he had embarked within a few months of her mother’s tragic death.

Marjorie Lawson, her mother’s daughter in this, saw life in pictures and herself plumb in the center. She was in pain. Her arm was still hurting abominably, but it was some consolation to feel that the scene of which she formed a part was photogenic. The room itself, with its litter of new books, costly fruit heaped upon a silver dish, flowers in every corner, made a perfect setting for the nurse in her white uniform, quiet and dexterous in her movements; the doctor gently removing a bandage from her elbow; the radio cabinet within reach of her left hand; the feminine clutter of flasks and brushes upon her dressing table. The doctor himself fitted nicely into the composition, combining a suggestion of scientific efficiency with warm benevolence.

Finally there was the patient herself, ready to face artist or camera, in a bed jacket of light blue trimmed with fur, her pain-ridden eyes shining from an exquisitely pale face, bravely trustful of the physician who held her arm lightly and firmly in one hand as he deftly manipulated the bandage with the other.

She studied for a moment the face of Dr. Alec Ross as, having at last uncovered the arm, he examined it carefully. The serious gray eyes were impersonally intent upon his work; for the moment she was merely his patient. It was odd how men could drill themselves into watertight compartments. He handled her as though to do so were a merely professional exercise. Nevertheless he was, as she knew, far from indifferent. Merely to touch her was an act which as a personal gesture would have filled him with that strange ecstasy which so easily afflicted the men who surrounded her.

Someday, of course, he would make love to her. But she would avoid it as long as possible, for it would not be amusing. She liked him too well to put him through the hoops merely for her diversion. Other men she knew were fair game and it was only fitting that they should realize it from time to time.

Alec was different. There was even an alarming probability that she herself might be moved to take him seriously. Thirty to forty odd years gave character and purpose to his comely face. There was decision in the firm mouth and square chin, authority in his broad forehead, charity and tolerance in his steady eyes.

But he was hurting her. He was hurting her damnably. She flinched and he looked up in quick concern. She could almost feel the recoil of his nerves from the pain he was inflicting upon her.

He thrust home the plunger. The pain was more tolerable now or so it seemed. Soon she would be sinking into that delicious negative state of relief and peace which always followed an injection of morphine.

“I often wonder,” he said, reading her thoughts, “how one could bear to be a surgeon in the old days. No anesthetics, even for a major operation. No narcotics for a patient afterward or for the more painful diseases.”

“Nice for the patients, perhaps,” conceded Marjorie, “but not so nice for the practitioner. I often wonder what it must be like to see everyone you meet as a possible case. Dining with a friend, all you can think about is that he is increasing his blood pressure, and, instead of admiring the sweet young thing with the painted lips, you are simply itching to remove her adenoids.”

“But you can’t get away from knowing what is happening in other people’s insides.”

“You give us credit for knowing too much, my dear,” continued Alec, still intent upon his work. “Remember, too, that I’m only a simple surgeon. Now if I were one of these modern wizards who can tell you all about your invisible secretions or your nervous reactions or your unconscious mental processes, there might be something in what you say.”

“Afraid to marry a nice girl, you mean, because you know that secretly she would like to put poison in your coffee or take off all her clothes in Piccadilly.”

“Careful, Marjorie. The experts tell us that people who hate that sort of doctor are just the people who stand most in need of him.”

“I could write most of what I know upon a post card. The secrets of the mind are as mysterious to me as to you.”

He took her hand and placed it in position. In doing so his fingers rested a moment upon her pulse. He bent his head and listened a further moment to the beating of her heart.

She looked down upon his bent head. Her free hand moved an inch or so toward it.

“Is that all?” she asked and giggled nervously. “Discovered anything?” she continued as he raised his head and took the bandage from the nurse.

The nurse was collecting things from the table. She went into the bathroom adjoining.

Marjorie, looking toward him, decided, not for the first time, that her father was much to be admired. Alec was not so bad but faded out completely in his presence. So did most of the men she knew. She liked particularly a certain air of restrained vigor, seldom released, which reminded her of a spirited horse held in by a checkrein. His firm square chin was carried at a downward slant; his eyes, gray like her own, were veiled; his decisively cut features suggested a reserve of power on which, for the ordinary business of life as a respectable city merchant, he had seldom occasion to draw.

Lawson picked up the syringe that lay upon the table beside him. He looked at it curiously and put it down with a slight gesture of repulsion. Ross watched him as he handled it. Their eyes met for an instant.

“Sleep for my patient,” said Ross. “I shall drop in again and prescribe, I hope, a really good dinner for this evening.”

“You are calling again this evening. Why not stay on and keep Marjorie company?”

“Of course,” she answered. “Be kind to father, Alec, and help him to save his conscience.”

“I could do with a spell of convalescence myself,” said Ross with a smile. “I should be able to read all the books for which I have no time.”

“I’m tired of books. I never took much interest in fictitious heroines anyway. I prefer to be interesting myself.”

“What could be more interesting than an invalid?” protested Ross. “I know quite a number of young women who would ask for nothing better.”

“How exciting for me to be told every day that I am getting on nicely! What fun to have your friends to tea and know that they are dying to get away. Nobody likes visiting the sick—not even father.”

“Very well,” she said. “Carry on, father. I’ve no doubt that is what you will really be doing in town tonight.”

Lawson, seven or eight hours later, closed the door of Marjorie’s room softly behind him. On the landing outside he looked at his watch. A quarter past eight.

He carried with him, as he went slowly downstairs, a vivid impression of the scene he had left—Marjorie propped on the pillows, Ross beside her with a tray upon his knee, Barton serving them from the small side table.

Marjorie had given him very little attention but had been very sweet to Ross. That was to pay him out for deserting her and to make him jealous. He always saw through Marjorie, but it never made any difference. She had wanted him to feel unhappy about leaving her and she had succeeded. On any other evening he would have changed his plans and remained at home. But tonight that was impossible.

Carry on, father. I’ve no doubt that is what you will really be doing in town tonight.

That was a long shot. Marjorie could not know that Cora Robson had returned that morning to London. When she did hear of it, there would be trouble. There was no love lost between Cora and Marjorie. They belonged to different worlds, and never the twain would meet, if he could help it. He should never, of course, have allowed this complication to arise. But, after all, he was only human. Cora was a handsome piece. Her appeal was immediate and unavoidable. He had made only a halfhearted attempt to keep her at arm’s length, and it was not much use being halfhearted where Cora was concerned.

He descended into the hall. Alfred was waiting. The man picked up the fur-lined coat.

He pointed to another coat lying on the oak chest. It was neat and inconspicuous, as was the plain dark suit he wore, for he had not changed for dinner.

Matthews was sitting patiently at the wheel of the Daimler. Lawson, as the car moved off, opened the sliding window behind the driver. Matthews turned his head to listen.

Cora, of course, would expect him to go to the flat in Hertford Street. After so long an absence she would want to lose no time in resuming their normal relations. He did not want to go to the flat. Her departure three months ago had left him with a sense of release which had shown him very clearly how irksome the tie had become. She was not less attractive than she had been five years ago when their intimacy had started, but five years was five years—especially when a man was on the wrong side of fifty. It was said that there was no fool like an old fool, but he would not give proof to the adage. On the contrary, he had always rather looked forward to the time when sex would cease to be the infernal nuisance it so often was to a busy man with other things to think about. He had never looked for that sort of trouble and, when it had come his way, as in the case of Cora Robson, he had allowed it to interfere as little as possible with current activities.

He would have to do something about Cora. He had allowed the affair to go farther than he had ever intended. He had even fallen into the habit of accounting to her for time not spent in her company. That must be the beginning of the end, either of him or of the affair itself.

The Daimler came to a standstill before the granite pillars of his club in Pall Mall. Matthews closed the door of the car, climbed back into his seat and drove away. . . . Routine Number One. . . . There was never any need to waste words with Matthews.

Lawson climbed the steps of the club and passed into the hall. He looked again at his watch. Half past eight. There would be time to show himself in the bar and to dine upstairs.

Cora Robson looked round the small and shabby room with satisfaction. She was enjoying her return to places where she could feel really at home, and of all such places the Pie Qui Chante, in Greek Street, Soho, gave her that feeling with a poignancy not to be equaled elsewhere. The faded Rose du Barry wallpaper between grubby moldings of gilt, the rep curtains, the worn sofa and chairs of red plush, the picture over the mantelpiece of an ample female showing a large but comparatively decorous expanse of cream-colored flesh, the general air, conveyed by the whole place and its appointments, that nothing had been renewed for at least fifty years and nothing cleaned since the spring of last year, were all horrors rendered sweet by association.

“Tell me, Henry,” she said suddenly across the table, “why do I like to be here? The room is like a nightmare, the food would never pass a sanitary inspector, and from the tablecloth a smart detective might reconstruct last week’s bill of fare.”

The man who was dining opposite considered the matter. He was a little man with fair hair. He wore strong spectacles that made his pale-blue eyes look twice the size. The first impression he gave was one of shrewd benevolence. His navy-blue suit was neat. His hands were small and soft. Yet there was something formidable about him, perhaps because he was so obviously self-contained and yet more obviously aware of everything.

“Like my little dog,” continued the man dispassionately. “Loves to roll in the gutter, and never more than when he has had a good cleanup.”

The door, thrust open by a foot clad in a tattered felt slipper, admitted, as she spoke, a thin little man bearing a tray. He was dark and dirty—all but his teeth, which gleamed from between his lips, surprisingly white and regular.

“Tell me,” continued Cora, to the newcomer, “what was the name of that fish when, if ever, it was alive?”

“Would you believe it, Henry? I shall put the remains in a sealed jar and send it to Sir Bernard Spilsbury. What next?”

He had removed the steel knives with which they had eaten the fish and placed them on the table.

When Del Bene in due course had left the room Cora watched her companion helping himself to beef. He looked up.

“I know that,” she retorted. “I was only wondering whether the jury will bring it in as accident or suicide.”

“I can tell you the time,” continued Cora smoothly. “It was ten minutes past nine just five minutes ago. It’s no use getting impatient. Our friend Newman will be here precisely at nine-thirty. He is never early and he is never late.”

“Meantime,” continued her companion eating voraciously, “why not tell me something about your travels?”

“Bare bones,” he grumbled. “I like a good story with details. It’s the human side that appeals to me, and there’s usually a human side to your activities.”

“Sorry, but if there’s one thing I dislike more than another it’s having to tell the same story twice. So we are going to wait for Newman.”

She pushed aside her plate and, rising from the table, examined herself carefully in the spotted mirror within a red plush frame which hung upon the wall. Her companion, looking up from his food, watched her with his strangely benevolent air. Cora, he reflected, naturally wanted to be sure that she was looking her best. Not that she had anything to worry about—still on the right side of her full bloom. With that extraordinary fair hair surprisingly relieved by a pair of warm brown eyes, a mouth that could shut firmly on a decision or relax sweetly to the melting mood and a figure to stir an anchorite, she had the game in her hands.

Well, he would be hearing all about it very soon. For Newman was due to arrive and Newman was never late.

VII

Lawson poured himself out a final glass of claret with the savory. He was sitting at one of the long row of tables with his back to the wall, his own by prescription, just opposite the buffet. The ritual of dining at the club appealed to his sense of what was due to Stephen Lawson, merchant of Cheapside, owner of a house in Clarges Street and the father of Marjorie Lawson. But it remained, even after years of repetition, a little unreal and fantastic. He did not quite believe in this immense room with the Corinthian pillars, in the members who sat each behind his table and nodded to him as he passed, in the waiters with their tail coats and gilded buttons, in the subdued grumbling of the old gentlemen who quarreled from habit with their food, in the snatches of conversation which called up visions of links and fields and rivers and moors and other places where they were in the habit of amusing themselves. He did not altogether believe in himself as he took his seat with the rest and affected to consider seriously what he should eat and drink.

But Stephen Lawson must put up a good show as to the manner born. Noblesse oblige. It was his habit to order plovers’ eggs in season, though he would much have preferred a hen’s egg fried with a rasher, and to finish with Scotch woodcock when on the bill of fare, though he had never quite got over his disappointment at discovering that Scotch woodcock was not a fowl.

Tonight, for some reason or other, the show seemed to be wearing thin. He felt like an actor upon the three hundredth performance of a successful play. His thoughts hovered between the cosy room where Marjorie was dining with Alec Ross and the flat in Hertford Street where, in due course, he would have to come to terms with Cora Robson.

“Waiter, this toast is stone-cold. You know I like my toast warm from the grill.”

Lawson looked aside at the old gentleman dining at the table beside him. Why did fellows at the club always talk to the club servants as though they had a grievance against the world? And why did the servants say “Thank you,” when a fellow with any spirit in him would want to wring the old boy’s neck or plaster his face with the mayonnaise? Lawson wondered what might be passing through the mind of the stalwart youth who was removing the offending rack of toast from the table. The pink face was quite expressionless. It was his job to humor the old man. Most likely he regarded old gentlemen who grumbled at their food much as a competent nurse regarded a fractious child. All that assumption of respect was merely part of the game. Charles or Horace or whatever his name might be must know very well that few of the old boys in question, if they should ever happen to be flung out into the cold world, had sense enough to come in out of the rain. Had they been turned naked into the street in early life, they might with luck have been making thirty shillings a week selling vacuum cleaners or punching tickets on the bus. Yet here they were, grumbling at their food and asserting their social supremacy by scolding the club servants.

Lawson pushed aside his plate and looked at his watch. After nine o’clock. The old gentleman glanced at him.

“Good God, Lawson,” he said suddenly, “that’s the third time you’ve looked at your watch in the last five minutes. This isn’t a railway station.”

His waiter had already hurried off to the desk to collect the bill. Another waiter drew out the table so that Lawson might emerge from behind it.

It was a night of keen frost. Lawson was glad of the cold air. He turned and walked with the unhurried gait of a man whose time was his own. He carried himself with that indefinable air of a person treading his own estate which he adopted unconsciously as appropriate to Stephen Lawson in that part of the world. He turned into Lower Regent Street and so continued, across Piccadilly Circus, to Shaftesbury Avenue.

Here a subtle change began to be perceptible in his deportment. Up to Piccadilly Circus he had walked, without haste or purpose, like a man to whom the world was ready to touch its hat and from whom a certain blend of ease and formality was expected. On the south side of the Circus he had waited decently to cross until the traffic permitted him comfortably to do so. On reaching the island, however, and being cut off by a stream of cars, he gave that impatient shrug which lifted his elbows almost to the level of his shoulders and launched himself into the vortex.

Thereafter his progress was rapid, with almost a swagger to it. His arms and legs seemed to move more freely. Even his face changed. This was no longer the man who had descended the steps of his club not a quarter of an hour ago. His eyes were brighter, no longer defensive but almost aggressively alert. He had no longer that air of a horse held in by a checkrein. His chin jutted; his whole demeanor was that of a man who intended to thrust his way without loss of time into whatever might be in front of him.

It was Stephen Lawson who had set out for the Pie Qui Chante at eight minutes past nine. It was George Newman who, as Big Ben distantly chimed the half hour, turned into the private entrance of that establishment and ascended the stairs to the shabby room where Henry Tasker and Cora Robson were awaiting their chief.

Del Bene was on the stairs with a coffeepot. He stood aside as Lawson climbed to meet him.

Lawson’s answering grin was broader than anything ever seen in Clarges Street.

“Is that what you call it?” he said, and passed on, taking the top flight two at a time.

He thrust open the door. Tasker pushed back his chair and rose to his feet. Lawson nodded to Tasker and took Cora warmly by the hands. She was halfway to meet him almost before he had entered the room.

“Hullo, Tasker. Cora, my dear, it’s good to see you again. Looking well, too.”

He drew a chair to the table and all three sat down. Lawson produced a cigar case and threw it over to Tasker.

“A telegram came over in code this morning. The cases are safely aboard the Titania, and Grauber will be waiting to take delivery at Marseille. He’s on his way there from Hamburg.”

“Sorry, George. But after three months it’s only natural that I should hold onto Stephen.”

“Dupont was told just as much as I thought was necessary. I met him at Tientsin. He was a resident in the French Concession, representing a firm which has been installing lifts in some of the new houses there. He told me he was returning to France with his furniture and effects. The opportunity seemed too good to lose. He received fifty thousand Chinese dollars in advance, for allowing us to plant the dope, and will get another fifty thousand francs when the goods are safely delivered.”

“I like to know my agents,” he said. “You would have done better to get him to let you put in a little bit of extra furniture to go along with his own. He needn’t have known what it carried.”

“Give me credit for something,” she protested. “I decided that the only way to get this funny little man——”

“I decided that the only way to get him was to let him know more or less what he was doing. I felt that he would be more useful as a confederate than if we simply led him up the garden path. Needless to say he knows nothing except what directly concerns his own part in this particular deal. He will take delivery of his furniture at Marseille and the stuff will be repacked at his house by Grauber himself.”

“Grauber wires today that he has bought a thousand tins of condensed milk, Bébé brand. Martinelli will be joining him at Marseille. The stuff will be put into the milk and recovered by Martinelli when it reaches New York. Useful man, Martinelli.”

“He is going to be even more useful in future,” he said. “I’ve got an idea which puts him permanently on the map.”

“Have you ever asked yourselves what will happen,” he continued, “when the Japanese start tidying up things in China? For the moment we are on velvet, but once they decide that it’s bad for their prestige to allow territories under their control to be a world center for the illicit drug traffic, it’s good-by to big profits and quick returns in that quarter.”

“If I didn’t look farther ahead than most of you, we should have been driven out of business years ago. It’s not so long since we could get our stuff more or less easily from almost any country in Europe. Who was the first to see that the good old times would shortly be no more? We’ve had to shift our operations from Europe to the Near East, from the Near East to the Middle East, from the Middle East to China, and we’ve led the way every time to the promised land. I remember a conference we had in this very place not ten years ago. None of you then believed that the police of sixty countries, with the help of a parcel of interfering clerks and officials at Geneva, would soon be hunting our agents from country to country and breaking up some of the best run organizations in the trade. But I foresaw what was coming and I got you all well away in time. I grant you that we’re doing as well as ever at Tientsin and in Hopei. The going’s good for the moment. But how long will it last, with the Americans raising Cain in the public press and all those damned international boards and committees?”

“I’m going to bring the Titania to London and I’m going to install a factory on board. She will put to sea and she will remain at sea. She will be supplied, well beyond the three-mile limit, by our smugglers. She will take up raw opium in Chinese waters and deliver the finished stuff on the Pacific coast of North America.”

Tasker’s eyes glittered behind his spectacles. He gestured enthusiastically with his small white hands.

“We shall have to keep her going with fuel and stores for months at a time. That will mean a certain amount of organization, but we managed things pretty well with the old Arabella when we were running all that Persian opium from Bushire to Macao. Before your time, Cora, but Tasker will remember.”

Tasker smiled. He smoothed the sandy hair on his forehead. His face assumed the expression of a sly philanthropist doing good by stealth.

“The phantom ship,” he murmured. “She supplied some natty headlines to the New York press when she was caught. Cost us a pretty penny, George.”

“I like this idea of yours,” said Tasker warmly. “I like it more and more.”

“It’s new, for one thing,” he said, “and in our business you’ve got to be always one new move ahead of the authorities. It’s easy for the moment to get as much dope in the Far East as we can handle, but transport is already the very devil. The old routes and methods are no longer safe. We shall have to cut out the Port Said approaches altogether very shortly. Nothing doing with the pashas. That damned fellow Hammerton has persuaded them that Egypt, now she is independent, must show a clean slate. I was hoping to get him removed, but the new Government has left him in charge of the Narcotics Bureau at Cairo and is giving him a free hand with the sponge. Hammerton’s men go through every cargo with a fine-tooth comb and it may mean as much as five years’ hard for anybody who gets caught. I can’t afford to risk having some of my best men put away for five years.”

“Make a note of that, Tasker. Red Sea thoroughfare to be closed for repairs.”

“Summers, by the way, is bringing over a packet on the Titania,” put in Cora.

“He was going to Port Said in any case and he didn’t see why he should land there empty-handed. Heroin is scarce in the land of the Pharaohs and fetching a record price. So he packed the famous trunk and will offer it for inspection to Hammerton’s Narcotic Officers on arrival.”

“I mean that I don’t intend to have my men thinking for themselves. He acted without orders. When did you meet him?”

“I only met him once. Don’t look at me like that, Stephen . . . George. It was an accident. We ran into him and he claimed acquaintance.”

“A damned unfortunate accident,” grumbled Lawson. “Summers is almost certainly under observation.”

“No harm done, even if we did happen to be seen together. Cora Robson was never in Tientsin. In Tientsin she was a widow of means, Blanche Perrin, by name, and traveled home as such.”

“But none of you will ever learn that times have changed. Summers will have to go. Make a note of that, Tasker.”

Marjorie Lawson, sitting among her pillows, watched the nurse, who had begun to put the room to rights. She noted with amusement that Sister Alice, as she insisted on calling the solemn young probationer who had been engaged to supervise her convalescence, was not a little horrified at the nature of her task. The tea party had resulted in more noise, smoke and disorder than was at all appropriate to a sickroom. Sister Alice was removing a cocktail shaker from the dressing table. She had already collected ash trays, glasses and teacups, the latter mostly unused.

Marjorie considered for a moment the strange career of Sister Alice. Oh no, miss. That presumably summed up her whole attitude to life.

“Dr. Ross will be here in a moment,” continued Sister Alice. “I don’t know what he would say if he found the room in a state like this.”

“Dr. Ross thinks I am well enough now to do as I please,” retorted Marjorie. “Don’t you agree with him, Sister Alice?”

The nurse left the room with a loaded tray. Marjorie sank back with an impatient movement of the shoulders. She looked at the clock on the small table beside her. Alec was already due and she had not yet settled her procedure. Her friends had been full of their plans for the London season. Everything would soon be in full career. How long should she remain convalescent? The process had in the event proved more amusing than she had anticipated, and she had surprised in herself a wish to prolong it beyond the normal limits. She had never yet tasted the satisfaction of repose. An odd feeling of security and peace, born of the conviction that her every need and wish would be fulfilled in that sheltered room even before it was uttered, served to take her back to some unconscious, half-forgotten state to which it was a luxury to surrender and which she was loath to abandon. It recalled hours spent in floating upon the warm blue waters of the Mediterranean when she had even played with the idea of sinking blissfully into the depths, so gentle and caressing seemed the element in which she was immersed.

Especially delightful were the hours when, released from pain, she had drifted into and out of consciousness, surrendered to dreams and visions, set free of time, subject to vague illusions willfully induced or coming up unbidden from some mysterious region of the mind. It was the morphine that had induced the strange condition in which she had escaped, not only from the superficial realities of pain and discomfort, but from the uncertainty and uneasiness which waited round every corner, to a state of being in which there was no possibility of mischance, no anxiety, none of the fevered anguish which attended even the pleasures of life.

Such was the heaven from which one came into the world and to which one must ultimately return. Of that heaven the room in which she lay had become a symbol. Outside was the harsh, crude, blatant city, whose seconds were counted and spaces measured, where the mind must adjust itself continually to things indifferent or hostile, where the flesh might be hurt or frozen or starved, in whose narrow room the very air one breathed might at any moment be denied.

London, with its excitements and diversions, awaited her, but she would not return to it yet—not if she could somehow prolong the blissful inertia in which she had lived for the past few weeks.

It would not be difficult to remain a little longer as she was. Alec was a mug, a nice mug. She would easily be able to manage him. Her father, of course, would be disappointed. He wanted her to be up and about. He had no conception of the happiness she had found after the first resentful days of her seclusion. She had an instinctive feeling that he would not approve. He would think it morbid. Most people would take that view. For that reason she must be careful not to give herself away. She must pretend that she wanted more than anything else to be well and active again. She would have to be especially careful with Alec. Alec was a mug, but he was after all a doctor and good at his job. It was odd how good at his job a mug could be.

Sister Alice had put the room to rights and had gone out with a loaded tray. Soon she would return.

“Evenin’, Marjorie,” he said. “I see you’ve been having a party—a pretty lively party to judge from the tray I saw on the landing outside.”

Marjorie gave him a wistful smile as he laid his bag on the dressing table and drew a chair to the bedside.

“Come,” he said, busy with the arm, “you can’t possibly be as feeble as all that.”

“If this case had come to me in the ordinary way of my profession,” he said, “I should be careful what I said to you after that. There’s nothing irritates a patient more than to be told that she is not half as bad as she thinks. But with you, Marjorie, I can be frank. You’re finding it rather fun to be a convalescent. Confess.”

“Oo!” exclaimed Marjorie, flinching as Ross began to massage her arm above the elbow.

“If I am to get any rest at all tonight, you will have to give me another of those injections.”

“I see,” he said at last. He turned to the nurse. “My bag, nurse,” he said.

Sister Alice brought him the bag. He opened it and produced a syringe. Marjorie watched him as he prepared the injection. There was a faint smile upon her lips and in her eyes a quiet look of satisfaction. Alec was a mug. She could do as she pleased with Alec.

“There,” he said, as he drew back after giving her the shot. “Feeling better now?”

“Much better,” she murmured. “No more pain at all. You’re very good to me, Alec.”

III

Lawson, letting himself into the house, saw Ross’s hat and overcoat lying on the oak chest, with Alfred standing beside it in the hall.

“The rest is up to you,” he said. “Get her out of that sickroom as soon as you can.”

Lawson waited till the front door had closed behind the doctor. Then he went upstairs.

Lawson entered the room. Marjorie was lying back on her pillows. She opened her eyes and smiled at him wistfully.

“Sorry, Midge, but what can you expect? This place is like a hothouse. Why not come down to dinner?”

“That would be lovely,” she said, “but I’m afraid it’s quite impossible.”

“Doctor’s orders,” retorted Lawson. “Alec said I was to get you out of this room as soon as possible.”

“I smashed my right arm to pieces three weeks ago,” she said patiently. “Don’t you remember?”

“Alec knows how anxious and worried you are about me. Naturally he puts things as hopefully as he can.”

Lawson bent over the bed. He laid a firm but gentle hand upon her left shoulder.

“Midge,” he said severely, “this isn’t one of your little games, is it?”

“Ask Sister Alice, if you don’t believe me. I don’t know what Alec said to you, but I do know that he gave me a shot of morphine to ease the pain not ten minutes ago.”

Lawson turned to the nurse who had just come into the room. She nodded in answer to the question in his eyes.

“So you see,” said Marjorie, “it isn’t likely that he would want me to come down to dinner just yet.”

A moment later Lawson stood by his desk in the library. He snatched at the telephone and dialed a number.

“Hullo! Lawson here. I want to speak to Dr. Ross. . . . Not yet back? Tell him as soon as he comes in that he is to return at once to Thirty-one Clarges Street.”

Lawson rose from his chair as the door opened and threw his cigar into the hearth.

“Now then, Ross,” he said without preliminary, “what the hell do you mean by lying to me about my daughter?”

Ross came forward. There was a slight flush on his cheeks, but his manner was quiet and assured.

“Now, Lawson,” he said, “put to me any questions you like without calling me a liar and I’ll answer them to the best of my ability.”

“I’m afraid there is nothing for it but to tell you the truth,” he said at last.

“Two reasons. First, I don’t like giving Marjorie away, or any patient for the matter of that. Secondly, you will probably exaggerate the importance of what is after all only a very ordinary incident.”

“This, then, is the position. Marjorie is for the moment rather enjoying her convalescence and is therefore inclined to prolong it. She has in particular, experienced certain sensations of security and relief as the result of my morphine injections. She has a fancy to continue them.”

Lawson flung away to the end of the room. His gestures were wide and large. His face, when he turned back to Ross, was that of a man who was both angry and afraid.

“Nothing to worry about,” said Ross, smoothly. “Patients who have had injections of morphine frequently pretend that they still have need of them. It’s quite a common trick.”

“Well, man, what are you going to do? Keep her under morphine for the rest of her life? If you knew she was shamming, you had no business to let her have it.”

“Trick for trick,” he said. “I did not give her morphine but a harmless injection of distilled water.”

“There was no need for me to let my patient know that I saw through her rather silly little deception. I wanted, moreover, to be quite sure that she had no real need of the drug. I can assure you that there is no cause for anxiety on that score. The fact that, on receiving the injection, she imagined herself to be relieved of her uneasiness showed that her withdrawal symptoms are entirely imaginary.”

“That’s all very well, Ross. But surely the mere fact that she is shamming to get more of the stuff shows that she must have a taste for it.”

“Frankly, Lawson, your daughter has a predisposition for any form of artificial stimulus. That doesn’t necessarily mean that she’s a born addict. If she insists on keeping up this pretense, I shall have to tell her the truth and that will be the end of it.”

“I have attended Marjorie for nearly ten years. I also happen to be not a little fond of her, as you know. I feel sure that you must have observed in her, yourself, a tendency to shrink from the realities of life. Any form of excitement, especially if it has in it a strong element of pretense, offers her a means of escape. This convalescence of hers offers her yet another way out, and for the moment she rather enjoys it. But I am convinced that this tendency to evade things is only a passing phase. For one thing she has inherited her mother’s gift. You should encourage her in that. Her painting offers her exactly the relief she needs.”

“So I’ve noticed. But you’re making a mistake in trying to suppress it.”

“One of her chief purposes in life is to please her father. She is uncommonly devoted to you, Lawson. Try to take an interest in her painting and see what happens.”

“Marjorie is no more abnormal than ninety out of a hundred young women. But certain elements in her character, common to us all, are in her slightly exaggerated. Forgive me if I intrude upon a painful subject, but Marjorie was a six months’ child. She must have found the world a pretty harsh place to live in during her first years.”

Lawson shrugged his massive shoulders—a curious gesture, reflected Ross, who had not seen it before.

“The result of medical observation in thousands of cases,” responded the doctor quietly.

There was a short silence. Ross rose from his chair and Lawson came down to meet him.

“I was damned offensive, Ross, just now. I apologize. But Marjorie, as you know, is very dear to me.”

“Not less dear to me,” responded Ross. “Otherwise I should have had more to say for myself. It’s going pretty far to accuse a doctor of unprofessional conduct in the use of narcotic drugs. You are not aware, perhaps, that to administer morphine to a patient not really in need of it is a criminal offense.”

Ten minutes later Lawson was climbing the last flight of stairs to a room in his house which he seldom visited. Marjorie, instinctively avoiding the word studio, which he disliked, called it the attic. He pushed open the door and entered.

It was an untidy room, smelling of oils and turpentine. On the back of the door hung an overall stained with bright colors. On the table was a palette, stiff with small dabs and heaps of rugged paint. Unframed canvases lay back against the walls. One of them confronted him from an easel in the middle of the room.

Marjorie had certainly inherited her mother’s gift. The thing was alive. You had to accept it. Seeing was believing. But why on earth paint a poplar tree growing out of a grand piano, and why should the pianist have only one eye, apparently under his chin?

Lawson turned from the easel. His eyes was caught by another canvas propped against a divan in a corner of the room. He lifted it and placed it on the easel. He stared at it with a growing discomfort. From a fiery background ran a narrow passage between dark rocks. Caught between the rocks and struggling to emerge into the open was a donkey. Its hinderparts were firmly held in the passage and on the creature’s face was an expression of anxiety, human in its intensity. The creature reminded Lawson of a dog he had once seen with its head jammed between the railings of an area.

“Good God,” muttered Lawson, stepping back from the canvas, “and I’m expected to encourage that!”

Cora Robson, smoking a cigarette, stood with her back to the window of the office at Number 13, Stonewall, London Docks, where Mr. George Newman, Limited, Shipping Agent, transacted his business. It was small but surprisingly neat. Tasker, who sat at his desk in the middle of the room, was evidently one of those managing directors who dislike to have evidence about them of their current activities. His correspondence for the day was nowhere to be seen. It had presumably been answered and filed.

Cora usually stood with her back to the window at Number 13, Stonewall. The view into the narrow street was depressing. The Newman premises consisted of two rooms on the second floor of a dingy house squeezed between a builder’s yard and a pickle factory. Opposite was a high blank wall crowned with broken glass. There was little to be said in favor of Number 13, Stonewall, except that precisely in such places as this a great many fortunes are made, and some of them quite honestly.

Tasker sat in a beam of sunlight which had somehow contrived to slip over the blank wall. The window, it may be mentioned, was remarkably clean. Tasker sought compensation for the fact that his activities as managing director for George Newman were highly perilous and irregular by insisting upon a maximum of propriety in his office. The primness of his person was extended to the things about him, as though the captain of a pirate ship should, in the smaller business of life, display the virtues of a housemaid. The male clerk who had been noting down his instructions conformed to the rule of the establishment. He wore a black coat and a stiff white collar.

Hudson shut his notebook. His manner suggested that he had recorded an appointment for lunch or been asked to obtain a further supply of stationery.

“Be careful to distribute the orders exactly as indicated,” continued Tasker. “Each of them is noncommittal in itself, but taken together they might give rise to suspicion. You will, moreover, buy each separate item under a different name. The equipment will be assembled here on the fifteenth and put aboard the Titania as soon as we receive instructions to that effect from Newman.”

“I am expecting to have news of her from our agent at Port Said in a day or so.”

Cora watched Hudson with a flicker of amusement in her eyes as he left the room.

“Good show, Henry,” she said. “You run this place as though it were a preparatory school for the sons of gentlemen.”

“How do you expect me to run it?” he protested. “Chewing a fat cigar with my boots on the table? Hell-fire Harry alias Tiger Tasker, throwing his weight about with an ugly bulge in his right-hand pocket? What price Newman, anyway, with his mansion in Mayfair? He likes to have things all nice about him.”

He smiled upon her with more than his usual benevolence, his pale-blue eyes enormous behind his spectacles, the sun making a cloud of his fair hair. His small hands played softly with a pencil.

“So he is coming to the flat, is he?” he continued. “Then I guess he won’t be talking business.”

“I should hope not,” said Cora dryly. “It’s our first cosy corner meeting since he returned.”

Tasker looked at her. Cora wished she could see his eyes. Not that it was really necessary. She knew very well what the little man was thinking. She had been back in London for three days, but she had not yet had Stephen to herself. That was not the treatment she had a right to expect from one who was supposed to be her devoted lover and whom she had not seen for over three months.

“Business before pleasure,” murmured Tasker, reading her thoughts and quick to excuse his master.

She had crossed the room and was arranging her hat with the aid of a mirror hanging on the wall. Tasker watched her dispassionately. An attractive woman, he supposed, but he had no use for that sort of thing. He was sorry that Newman had introduced this entanglement into their affairs. It was likely to prove troublesome. For already the Chief had grown tired of her and was cooling off. There would be a crisis shortly, and it might not be easy, as the politicians said, to localize the conflict. Cora Robson might have to go. That would be a pity, for she had a good head and was marvelously cool in a crisis.

She turned from the mirror. Certainly she was good to look at, much too good. Such women were a nuisance. They interfered.

The flush had faded from Cora’s cheeks and she was smiling. She, too, was something of a thought reader, and would have the little man to know it.

She left the room, quiet and unhurried, trailing behind her a faint scent of gardenia.

Tasker put back his pencil into the tray. He sniffed the air distastefully and walking to the window opened it wide to the street.

The offices of Messrs. Lawson & Company, Importers and Exporters, were at Number 66, Cheapside. The Company’s business was sound and the turnover satisfactory. Its managing director, had he, like so many men in his position, been content with a house in Ealing, a cook and house-parlormaid, Roedean for his daughter and a first-class season ticket to bear him to and from his work morning and evening, would have had no need of other industry. The Company employed two clerks, three stenographers and an office boy, none of whom had ever heard of Mr. George Newman. It occupied four rooms on the second floor, one of them wide and handsome. It earned four-and-a-half per cent for its shareholders, and paid Mr. Lawson a thousand pounds a year.

Lawson himself, sitting at his office desk that spring afternoon, would nevertheless have been at no loss to explain why George Newman had for many years been a necessary feature of his existence. Newman, to begin with, had supplied Lawson with the capital required to set him up in his lawful business. To them that hath shall be given. Messrs. Lawson & Company, if they had not had a little money at the outset, would never have been able to start importing and exporting goods in lawful trade. Then, too, even if Lawson had been able to start successfully in business for himself, he would never have been content with a house in Ealing and the other small but reasonable amenities enumerated above. Quite early in life, he had, from personal observation, fixed at a minimum of four thousand pounds a year the income on which a gentleman could avoid the major nuisances of life. To achieve such an income at an age when it was possible to enjoy it, the supplementary illegal activities of George Newman were indispensable. Finally, there was the even more important circumstance that Stephen Lawson was frequently bored with Stephen Lawson. It was essential for his moral health every now and then to dismiss that highly respectable gentleman with a shrug of his heavy shoulders and to assume the ample gestures of his more adventurous colleague or second self.

Life had always had for him a curiously double aspect. He liked to be respected and secure, to be received as an honest man with a daughter planted in society and to feel that it was in his character to be a good citizen of no mean city. But his enjoyment of these advantages in no way detracted from the pleasure he derived from activities which excited the interest of the police in four continents and might at any moment land him in the dock as an international criminal. He was content to be an honored member of society on the understanding that, when respectability bored him, he could, with a shrug as aforesaid, transform himself suddenly into Public Enemy Number One. Similarly, he was able, in his personal affections and dealings, to be both kind and callous, susceptible and indifferent, supremely selfish or wholly devoted. Life was a coin which one tossed from moment to moment in the air—heads, Lawson; tails, Newman. Lawson, in brief, presented to an astonishing degree the ambivalent character of the fundamental emotions. His attitude to life was perpetually that of the man who is never quite sure whether he wishes to embrace his fellow men or to trample them underfoot.

In either mood he was happy. His only moments of uneasiness were those in which, as was bound to happen from time to time, the two characters intruded upon one another to their mutual discomfort. In self-defense he usually avoided such encounters. Now and then, however, he made mistakes or nature herself took a hand and insisted that Stephen Lawson and George Newman, however pertinaciously they might regard themselves as separate and distinct personalities, were, in fact, one and the same individual, and that for Lawson in moments of righteousness to consign Newman to the devil, or for Newman in moments of expansion to round on Lawson as an insufferable prig was bound in the long run to have disagreeable consequences for both of them. On such occasions Lawson was apt to endure the same fierce agonies of spirit which prompted the robber barons in times past to build churches or inspire the industrial magnates of our own day to indulge in orgies of philanthropy.

Stephen Lawson, sitting that day in his office in Cheapside, found himself caught in just this predicament. His two worlds had come together; the coin showed neither heads nor tails.

Uppermost in his mind was his late disconcerting interview with Ross. Marjorie, of course, was in no real danger, but the incident had left behind it an uncanny impression that George Newman, illicit trafficker in narcotics, had suddenly reached out his hand and threatened her. Lawson had devoted his life to keeping his daughter secure from such approaches. He would continue to do so. But the fact remained. Marjorie had tried to fool Alec Ross into giving her a drug which she did not medically require.

Newman had hitherto avoided thinking too much of the consequences of his unlawful business. Nor did he accept any moral responsibility in the matter. He was no more to be blamed for the fate, alleged to be extremely unpleasant, of those who bought and consumed the goods with which he supplied them than a brewer or distiller could be blamed for the fate of those who drank themselves to death or than a manufacturer of bombing aircraft could be blamed for the massacre of the innocents who were bound to perish in the next war. On the contrary. The world, as Ross had pointed out, was, for certain unhappy and ill-balanced persons, a harsh, unlovely place. Why not allow them to escape it in the way they wished? The evils of drug addiction were not of his making. Society was the villain of the piece. Make the world fit for decent people to live in and no one would be driven to drugs or drink for comfort and release.

Lawson, however, found society both pleasant and useful. He had a daughter in society and he had every right, as had all the eminently respectable men who profited from its evils, to keep those evils from his door. But what if they should come knocking there in the person of George Newman? It would be Lawson’s bounden duty to throw Newman out of the house. A most confusing situation.

Cora Robson presented another and more disquieting source of disturbance. Admittedly Lawson had lost his head over her. Two years ago, like the rest of his agents—all but Tasker who knew everything but would remember only what was convenient—she had known nothing whatever of his private life. She had been the confidential agent of George Newman and one of the best he had ever had. Then had come that evening at her flat in Hertford Street when feelings from which he had thought himself immune had swept him off his feet and transformed a casual affair with a good-looking woman into something more personal and presumably more enduring. It had been George Newman who had entered her flat, but Stephen Lawson who had quitted it the morning after, leaving behind him the precious secret of his double life as a pledge of his devotion. Since then Cora Robson had been, as it were, a hyphen between his two modes of existence. She intruded, emotionally and in plain fact, into both. As Newman he met her as his confederate in the shabby room above the restaurant of the Pie Qui Chante. As Lawson he called at her flat in Hertford Street.

Once his secret was out, nothing would satisfy her but that she must know Lawson as well as she had known his second self. He had even allowed her to become acquainted with Marjorie.

“No fool like an old fool,” he murmured resentfully, as he rose from his chair and mechanically locked the drawers of his desk.

He had made a mistake. Somehow it would have to be remedied. Otherwise he would continue to find himself sitting uneasily between two chairs. It was an uncomfortable situation and, above all things, he disliked to be uncomfortable.

III

Cora Robson, waiting for Lawson at her flat in Hertford Street, was anxious that everything should be just right, including herself. Not that Stephen would notice what she wore or even how she looked. Her appeal went deeper than that.

“It’s not the brown paper parcel, my dear,” he had said to her once, “but what’s inside it that matters.”

Still she wanted to look her best. She liked to feel that, if he should suddenly see her as a stranger, he would approve of what he saw. Instinctively, when the bell sounded, she looked away from the tea table set for two and the cocktail cabinet, open and ready, to the long mirror opposite her chair.

She rose to her feet and stood a moment staring at her reflection. She was not altogether satisfied. There was a touch of anxiety in the warm brown eyes and the mouth was a little drawn. It was not the face of a woman eagerly waiting to greet a lover whom she had not effectively seen for several months. This was not a moment for hesitation or reserve. She must be sure of her appeal.

She whipped herself into a breathless expectation. The warm eyes lost their misgiving. The drawn mouth relaxed. The eager blood flooded into her neck and cheeks.

She almost ran to meet him. Almost before Clarice had shut the door she was in his arms.

Lawson, taken by surprise, responded mechanically. He had intended a gradual approach, in which he might have time to adopt the attitude that suited his present mood of withdrawal. He found instead a handsome, full-blooded woman in his arms, frankly expecting him to make the most of his opportunities. There seemed only one possible way of meeting the occasion. He kissed her long and soundly, a proceeding which disconcertingly changed his approach to the whole situation.

She drew back and looked at him with the searching expression which he had come to dislike. Nor was his discomfort eased by her opening words.

“Not wasted, Cora. Business as usual, more than usual in fact. This new notion of mine for a floating factory. A hundred and one things to consider. Seen Tasker today?”

“This afternoon,” she responded dryly. “Do you want a report? Is that why you have come to see me?”

“Pretty considerable worries,” he protested. “We stand to make or lose a hundred thousand pounds on this consignment from Tientsin, quite apart from the fact that, if things go wrong, some of my best agents will find themselves in Queer Street.”

“I haven’t noticed it,” he returned, manipulating the shaker with increasing violence.

“Sorry if you feel like that—after three months’ absence,” said Cora lightly.

“I’m not at all happy about this fellow Dupont,” he responded evasively. “You made a fool of him, apparently.”

“What’s hurting you?” she demanded. “Dupont has taken our money. It’s true that I’ve given him the slip, but it’s not likely that he’ll turn King’s evidence against himself.”

“I suppose not,” she said viciously. “It wouldn’t matter to you if I went to bed with any dirty little man who was likely to be useful.”

Lawson was shaken by her violence. It brought her into perspective, a woman who had every right to resent his preoccupation with business at such a time. He had hurt her, apparently. He was sincerely sorry for that.

She was very near to him now and he was very conscious of it. He thought of her as being equally near to a man unknown, a funny little man in some shady corner of a Chinese city.

Peter Summers, on board the S/S Titania, was packing his wardrobe trunk. Open to inspection, it cried aloud that there was nothing to declare. All his effects were mostly well-used and emphatically personal.

On many a quayside or customs bench he had stood nonchalantly apart while inquisitive officers turned over its contents, prodded and pried, took its measurements inside and out, ascertained that the drawers completely occupied the space that had been originally allowed for them by the designer. He had come almost to look forward to these occasions. They gave a special zest to the glass of port or sherry with which he was accustomed to celebrate in retrospect the final moment when he could close the trunk again and bear it away carrying the indispensable chalk mark or customs tab upon its battered sides to indicate that it was a harmless piece of luggage free to go where it pleased.

The labels which so freely plastered its surface declared a passenger who traveled widely for his pleasure. He evidently liked a pleasant cruise in summer, to visit places of popular resort where he might drink the local waters or enjoy the amenities of a good casino, to participate in winter or water sports in their season. His appearance consorted well with these activities. The loose-fitting tweeds set off to advantage his slim, athletic figure. His graying hair gave distinction to a face unremarkable except for a certain predatory look in the blue eyes not quite appropriate to a gentleman of means sauntering at his ease about the world.

So inveterate a traveler, choosing a trunk, naturally liked a solidly constructed article. There was no discrepancy perceptible to the divining rod of a zealous official between its inside and outside measurements, beyond what was due to the obvious stoutness of its timbers, and its stoutness was conspicuously justified by the hard handling which it had received in many lands. Dents and bruises of varying depths scarred its vulnerable flanks to indicate how extremely solid were its walls.

The narcotic squads which had recently been springing up like mushrooms in so many ports and harbors of the world were up to most tricks of the trade, old or new. Other people’s experience had convinced Summers that it was possible to be too clever by half. There had been Jim Hiller, for example, caught with cocaine hidden in the hollow buttons of his overcoat and Peter Featherstone arrested because one of his tennis balls, dropped by accident on the floor, had oddly failed to bounce. Only a month ago, moreover, had occurred that deplorable episode of the thirty-six camels met on the Syrian frontier by a Mehari patrol. Their loads, to the keen disappointment of the officers concerned, had been found innocuous. But one of these same officers, being fond of animals, had passed his hand affectionately over the back and flanks of the leading dromedary. Closer inspection had followed. It seemed that the hair had been removed, hashish affixed to the shaven spot and the fell glued back firmly into position.

All this only went to show that the old and tried methods were best. Summers had unlimited faith in his trunk. It was his mascot. He patted it affectionately upon its battered flank.

A smile played about his lips, but there was a slight uneasiness in the predatory blue eyes. Sir Douglas Hammerton, Director of the Narcotics Bureau at Cairo, was a holy terror. “Holy” was the word, for he brought a missionary zeal to the business of hunting down the enterprising gentlemen of fortune who came to his door peddling their little packets of white stuff for the comfort and release of unhappy men and women.

The landing at Port Said would be not without excitement. Excitement which went beyond certain limits was apt to be painful. On the other hand, life without excitement was so tedious as to be hardly life at all.

Dr. Alec Ross, climbing the stairs to the drawing room, squared his shoulders and set his lips firmly together. This was zero hour. The time had come when he must deal effectively with Marjorie or ever after hold his peace.

Marjorie had no further need of his services. He had told her so over a week ago, and only yesterday, in answer to his call upon the telephone, she had informed him that next evening she was going out with her father for the first time since her accident. He had inferred from this that she had decided to resume her normal life. Now, however, it seemed that she intended to relapse. She had called him up at six o’clock. She was still going out with her father as arranged, but he must please come round at once; she was feeling most unhappy and her arm was hurting her again; she was trying to believe him when he said that all she needed was fresh air and occupation, but she hardly felt equal to the effort.

He saw at once, on entering the drawing room, that she had carefully prepared for his reception. The books into which he must imagine her to have dipped in a feverish effort at distraction lay scattered upon the table beside her. Cigarettes, half smoked, lay on the hearth. She had even, for the first time in his knowledge, put rouge upon her cheeks; and, as he came forward, she gave him her left hand keeping her right arm pressed defensively to her side.

“Sorry to bring you out like this, Alec, just before dinner,” she said. “But it was an SOS and you’ve simply got to do something about it. Where’s the little black bag?”

“You’ve no further need of a doctor. I’m going to talk to you now as a friend.”

“Being a doctor,” persisted Marjorie, “you must know very well that what you are doing to me is not only very inconsiderate but contrary to medical practice. You see, my dear Alec, I’ve been reading it up.”

“The big book says,” she continued, “that when a patient has had morphine injections, the doctor should not withdraw them immediately.”

“That applies only to cases in which strong injections have been used over a long period. You have never had enough morphine to give rise to withdrawal systems. There was never any need to wean you of the habit.”

“If, as you now say, there was never any need to wean me of the habit, which is rather a sweet expression, why have you been giving me morphine, on and off, for the last three weeks?”

“Very well, Marjorie. Cards on the table. You haven’t had a grain of morphine since it ceased, in my opinion, to be necessary.”

He thought at first she was going to fly into a passion. Then, to his greater alarm, he thought she was going to cry. But anger yielded to mortification, mortification to amusement. She laughed.

“What else should it do?” she protested. “I know this has happened to me, but it doesn’t cease to be funny on that account.”

“Funny, perhaps,” he said, “but, since you’ve been reading it up”—he glanced at the volume on the table—“you will realize that it has a serious side.”

“Never mind, Alec. Next time I start yearning for dope I’ll send for you and you shall give me some more of your salt water. You’ve no idea what a comfort it was.”

Lawson looked again at his watch. Six o’clock, and he must be ready for Marjorie at seven-thirty.

“Please go on,” she continued dryly. “You were explaining how your plan for fueling the Titania in the open sea would work in practice.”

Lawson rose from his chair and stood a moment with his back to the hearth. He had been nearly an hour with Cora but had not yet said what he had come to say. He had talked business, instead, to a woman who did not want to talk business. That had made her angry and sarcastic, just when he wanted her to be calm and kind and sensible. He would never be able to deliver his mind while she was in that mood. He would have to put it off. Just as well, perhaps. Time was short and what he had to say was important.

But now, apparently, the mood had changed. She too had risen from her chair. Her hands were on his shoulders.

“Stephen,” she said, “you are tired and worried. Why is it? I’ve never seen you like this before.”

He warmed to her solicitude. It would make things easier, bring their relations back to the merely friendly footing he desired. He looked down at her face tilted toward his own. In her eyes was a look of anxious inquiry. He squeezed her arm affectionately.

“I’m taking Marjorie out for the first time since her accident. Dinner and a show. Dance at the Blue Grotto afterward. You know the sort of thing.”

There was no mistaking the force of her recoil. She hated his other life and Marjorie as the center about which it moved. She could not understand his pose of devoted father and decent man of affairs. She derided it softly, but he felt the violence that hid beneath the gentle irony of her approach.

“Marjorie has been having rather a bad time, as you know,” he said defensively.

“I’m not feeling nice about it, Stephen,” she replied. “Nor is there any reason why I should, things being as they are.”

“Suppose we have this out. That’s what you want, isn’t it? Or perhaps it will make you late for your appointment? No need to look again at your watch. It’s eleven minutes past six precisely.”

Lawson stared helplessly about him. This was what came of allowing oneself to be divided. As Lawson he might have dealt with the situation effectively. Lawson’s cue was to be hurt, dignified, affectionate and firm. Newman, of course, would have behaved differently. Newman would have gripped her by the shoulders and shaken her head off.

“Really, Cora,” he muttered, “there’s no occasion for all this. It is true there are things I want to discuss with you, personal things; but not now and not when you are obviously not going to take them in the proper spirit.”

“Very well, Stephen. If you haven’t the courage to tell me what is in your mind, I’m going to tell you myself. I’ve been back in London for three weeks. Most of our time together has been spent in talking shop. Tonight you are taking Marjorie out. You haven’t taken me out since I returned. In fact you’ve been making it pretty plain that Cora Robson is no fit companion for Mr. Stephen Lawson, merchant of Cheapside, who wants to make the world safe for his charming daughter. Intrusions from Thirteen Stonewall are not invited. Cora Robson is good enough for illicit business. So far and no further. Nothing else, except that she happens to be the mistress of George Newman, and even poor George is getting tired of the arrangement.”

She paused. Lawson, leaning against the mantelpiece and shading his eyes with his hand, drew himself up. He lifted his elbows with the characteristic shrug of his heavy shoulders.

“That is what you want to say to me, isn’t it?” insisted Cora. “If so, take it as said. Now it’s my turn to tell you something.”

“Not quite as simple as it sounds. You’ve let me into your private life. J’y suis. J’y reste. And if you try to drive me out, you will have cause to regret it.”

Lawson stiffened. This was a threat to his business. Complicating the private life of Stephen Lawson was one thing; menacing the livelihood of George Newman was another. He lost his look of uncertainty and discomfort. He flung out his right arm in a free emphatic gesture.

“I’m not threatening George Newman. He doesn’t come into this affair at all. I’m threatening Mr. Stephen Lawson.”

She stood plumb in the middle of the room. She looked quiet but dangerous. Newman might bluster, but Lawson was afraid.

“Listen,” he said persuasively. “I’ve had no secrets from you. Leave it at that. We’re not as young as we were—at least that is the case with me. Why not be sensible and face things?”

“I’ve been facing them since that first evening here together after my return. You were very kind, a little halfhearted, perhaps, but you did your best to conceal it. I’m not saying that you didn’t enjoy yourself. I saw to it that you did. But you were saying to yourself all the time, ‘This is all very well, but it can’t go on.’ I don’t mean to break my heart over it, but I’m not going to take it as easily as you think. You’ve insulted me as no woman can bear to be insulted. You’ve held me in your arms while you were thinking of something else. Half a man is of no use to a woman of spirit.”

“Surely, as old friends, we can agree to be just that and nothing more. There’s no call to be fierce.”

“It’s deeper than that. Newman is the man I want. I’ve never had much use for the other fellow. He comes between us. Now he proposes to separate us entirely. But he shan’t get away with it. If he insists, I shall do my best to destroy him—for your sake, George, as much as for my own. If you were just an ordinary man who had grown tired of me, I should accept the situation and make the best of a bad business. A woman who tries to keep a man against his will is a fool. But that is not how we stand. There’s this intruding humbug who thinks I’m not good enough to associate with his little daughter and prompts him to think of something else when he ought to be thinking of me. I hate the fellow. I hate him . . . I hate him.”

“Look at your watch, Stephen, damn you! It must be close on seven by now. You’ll be keeping that spoiled chit of yours waiting, if you don’t hurry up.”

III

The lights at the Blue Grotto changed as the pale man with smooth hair came to the front of the platform and, picked out by a spotlight, began confiding his anemic love for baby to an indifferent world. Marjorie shut her ears to his yearning and looked across at her father. Her dancing partner, young Philips of the Home Office, was shuffling round the floor with his sister.

“Not too good. It’s been a lovely evening and our last waltz was almost a star turn. But the poor old mind is still at work.” She paused and added abruptly: “Is Cora Robson back in town? Don’t look like that. I see she is. No wonder you’re looking tired.”

“Not while that man is breaking his poor little heart over there. He makes me just want to lie down and die.”

The lights went up and the pale man with the smooth hair resumed his seat on the platform.

“That’s better,” continued Marjorie. “Death on toast has been removed from the bill of fare. The next one is ours, I believe.”

Lawson smiled, but, as Marjorie smiled back at him, his face changed. He was looking toward the door. Marjorie, following his gaze, saw that Cora Robson had entered. She was wearing a green and silver dress. Her escort, a slim, dark man, was talking to the head waiter.

Cora, surveying the room, caught sight of Lawson. She smiled, lifted her hand in greeting and said something to her companion. Then, dutifully followed by the slim, dark man, she began to make her way round the edge of the dancing floor toward Lawson’s table.

Lawson rose. The music had stopped and Philips with his sister was also coming toward them.

He was dancing with Monica Philips and he had collided heavily with another couple. Lawson was a good performer, but his attention was elsewhere.

He could not say exactly how it had happened. His first thought on catching sight of Cora was that she had come to make a scene.

There had been an awkward moment at the table. Cora had insisted, gaily enough, on joining his party. Marjorie had received the suggestion with a lift of the eyebrows, not even stirring in her chair when the places were reshuffled to accommodate the newcomers.

Cora had seemed quite unaware that she was in the least unwelcome. There were several people in the room whom she knew and there had been a good deal of going and coming between the tables, persistently encouraged by Cora who had quietly assumed control of the proceedings, pairing off members of the party with her friends.

Too late Lawson had perceived the intention of these maneuvers. Only when he had taken the floor with Monica had he realized that Cora and Marjorie were sitting alone together. For a moment he had thought of making some excuse to get back to the table. His first fear that Cora would make a scene had been followed by a relieved astonishment. Cora, under provocation from Marjorie, who had snubbed her repeatedly, had behaved with surprising sweetness and dignity. She had even gone out of her way to propitiate his daughter. This was so unlike Cora that his relief had soon given way to a renewed uneasiness. Had his raven changed hearts with a dove? Was this her way of showing that he need not take seriously her outburst of a few hours ago?

He could not believe it. But there she sat with Marjorie. And, even as he looked toward them, she laid a hand upon his daughter’s arm. A little later he looked again. Apparently they were getting on like a house on fire—heads together, voices discreetly lowered as he passed, an air of growing confidence between them.

What was her game? She had promised not to give Newman away. It was Lawson she hated. And it was Lawson she had threatened to destroy. Throw me out and you shall pay for it. That was what she had said. Hurt me and I shall hurt you back again.

She hated Lawson and she hated Marjorie. Or had that been simply a flash in the pan, a spurt of anger easily expressed and soon forgotten?

There, at any rate, she sat with Marjorie, and somehow she had made her peace. Marjorie had relaxed. Cora intended to be friends with Marjorie . . . friends.

Was this perhaps her revenge? Cora was deep. She knew how he disliked the idea of Marjorie coming into touch with any thing that concerned his relations with herself. It was his dislike of such contacts that had prompted him to “throw her out.” To make friends with Marjorie was a telling and appropriate retort. He had virtually intimated that she was not good enough to come within speaking distance of Marjorie.

Cora Robson, with a faint smile on her lips, watched the progress of Lawson round the floor. He was making heavy weather of it with little Monica Philips. Stephen was an excellent dancer when he gave his mind to it as he did to everything he undertook. Yet there he was, apologizing to his partner for bumping her into that fierce old gentleman with the gray whiskers.

Cora was enjoying herself. Stephen was properly scared. He had thought at first she would make a scene. That, of course, was to underrate her capacity for mischief. Nothing so crude or obvious had ever crossed her mind. Now, presumably, he was wondering what would happen next.

“Please,” she said in a voice almost of entreaty. “I’m not going to suggest that we should all be friends together. But I want you to understand.”

She broke off and added in a lower note, “Especially after what happened this afternoon.”

Cora smiled to herself. This was going to be easy. The girl’s interest was awake. Marjorie would listen and the rest would follow. But, first of all, that rather cryptic exclamation must be challenged.

“True?” repeated Cora, opening her eyes with just the right expression of wistful bewilderment.

Cora sat back. So Stephen had been talking her over with his darling child, promised perhaps to lead a better life and have nothing more to do with his scarlet woman.

“I could not help noticing that he was not in his usual spirits tonight. He told me that he had been with you this afternoon and that——”

“That we had agreed not to see quite so much of one another in the future,” concluded Cora.

“It was mine,” stated Cora quietly. “I had realized for some time that your father was not altogether happy in our relationship. Mind you, he has never made the faintest suggestion to me in this sense. But a woman knows. Your father has always been most considerate. That only made it the more difficult for me to accept the situation. I’m an unlucky woman, Marjorie. I’ve made one or two mistakes in my life and I must take the consequences. I sincerely believe that Stephen has possibilities of a great career. I don’t want to spoil it for him. It is not so much that he has anything to fear from me in the way of scandal, but he needs to be quite sure of himself and his position. He is not, if you know what I mean, a man who can be really happy unless his life is all of a piece. His heart is in his work. I was at first a distraction; soon I should become something of a nuisance. So I thought it better to close that chapter. Besides——”

“This is difficult to say,” continued Cora, “but I want everything to be clear between us. Your father is devoted to you. No one knows that better than I do. You have never liked me, and I have always felt that, sooner or later, I might become a source of misunderstanding between you. For me that would be a very painful position. Stephen will always, quite naturally, think first of you, and I have never wished in any way to spoil your relationship.”

Marjorie was fingering the stem of her champagne glass. Cora watched the changing expressions on her face. The girl was evidently in a fine confusion—incredulous, resentful, alternately sympathetic and distrustful, angry that she should have to confess herself in the wrong yet increasingly convinced that she had misjudged her rival.

There was a long pause. Cora, her eyes upon the table, had the air of one who was still seeking words to express her thoughts.

Suddenly, as though she could say no more, she again laid her hand on Marjorie’s arm.

Lawson beckoned to the waiter. The party had lasted long enough. In response to his suggestion, Marjorie had admitted that she was tired. Cora was having a last dance with young Philips, his sister being similarly engaged with the slim dark man with whom Cora had arrived.

Lawson, paying the bill, still pondered uneasily the events of the evening. Cora had evidently achieved some sort of understanding with Marjorie. So much was plain. He would talk to Marjorie on the way home. He must find out exactly what had passed. He had failed to obtain enlightenment from Cora herself, though he had taken the floor with her on purpose to do so. To his evident desire for information she had been exasperatingly smooth and sweet, with an underlying satisfaction to her mood which boded ill for his peace.

Marjorie is charming. I have never properly appreciated her before. I can quite understand your devotion to one another.

Such phrases carried a hint of mockery, and their effect was the more disquieting by the evasions which accompanied them.

Just a confidential little chat. No secrets, of course, but now I think that we understand one another perfectly.

The waiter withdrew. Lawson looked at his daughter. She was following Cora round the room with her eyes.

She turned to him, but did not speak at once. She seemed to be considering something; and, as so often, instead of answering what he said, she responded with a startling irrelevance that yet went to the heart of the matter.

“Father,” she said, “I wonder if you are not making a mistake? Not the mistake I thought you were making,” she continued hastily. “Just the opposite, in fact.”

“Sorry,” she returned, “but I misjudged Cora Robson. I’m beginning to wonder now whether you ought to give her up quite so easily.”

“It was she, of course,” continued Marjorie, “who took the decision. But should you have accepted it so easily?”

“This, at least, I must say. One of the reasons, as I think you know, that drove her to this step was a conviction that I disliked her and that she might, as she put it to me just now, become a source of misunderstanding between us. That reason has, at any rate, been removed. I should hate to think that either you or she had made this sacrifice on my account.”

“Steady, Marjorie,” said Lawson at last, “it takes time to get used to this idea. Your friend, did you say?”

Lawson stiffened suddenly. He flushed. A fierce but wary look came into his eyes.

“Just what I mean to do,” she responded. “I am going to have tea with her tomorrow.”

Sir Douglas Hammerton lay down on his desk the laconic telegram which he had just been reading. He was alone in the small room at Port Said, reserved for his use on the frequent occasions when he came down from Cairo to look into matters on the spot.

On his lean puckered face was a look familiar not only to his staff, whom it filled with a pleasant sense of expectation, but to his victims, in whom it excited admiration or panic according to temperament. It was something between the look of a master of hounds when the fox is started and of a prophet denouncing an evil generation. Hunting down the international criminals who ruined the souls and bodies of men and women was not only a sport from which he derived immense personal satisfaction; it was also a mission with which he had been especially entrusted by divine providence.

The telegram in itself was no great shakes. It conveyed, from the British Municipal Council at Shanghai, a warning that one, Peter Summers, traveling by the S/S Titania, would land at Port Said. Summers, continued the telegram, had been seen in contact with a gang of traffickers whose headquarters were in Tientsin and it might be well to examine his luggage with more than usual care.

Hammerton pressed a bell upon his desk. An Egyptian clerk, dressed like himself in a cool linen suit, came to the door. Sir George handed him the telegram.

“Arrange for Mohamed Sheeta and Abdu Sharabas to meet the Titania and to be present when this man’s luggage is searched,” he said.

“One moment,” added Sir George. “The name is familiar. This strikes a chord.”

The clerk smiled. The chief had a wonderful memory. He rarely forgot a name or a face, and when, as now, he declared “This strikes a chord,” interesting developments might be expected.

“Several chords,” continued Hammerton. “Bring me the last quarterly summary of illicit transactions and seizures.”

“Lord, man, is she the only person here who knows where to look for a file? Sheeta’s room. Cupboard behind the door. All the Geneva papers are there. Illicit traffic reports on the middle shelf.”

The clerk withdrew. Hammerton walked to the window and looked down into the narrow street. Somewhere in the harbor a vessel hooted.

Summers, he reflected, would almost certainly be carrying heroin. Summers would get from three to five years. But these isolated arrests were neither here nor there. He could deal with the fellows who dropped off at Port Said, but these local successes were not as satisfactory as they used to be. His work, so far as the suppression of white drugs illicitly peddled in Egypt was concerned, was almost done. He was now after bigger game.

The phrase had stuck in his mind. Percival M. Drury, of the Federal Narcotics Board at Washington, had used it in a recent discussion at Geneva as an appropriate description of the Red Sea as a conduit for the drugs which were conveyed from the Far East, via Egypt and European ports, to the Atlantic seaboard of North America. Somehow that funnel would have to be closed. Every arrest made henceforth must be regarded as a means to that end. This man, Summers, for example. Presumably he had been in contact with one of the principal sources of supply. Perhaps he could be induced to part with some useful information to save his skin.

Hammerton turned from the window. Miss Robbins, thin, severe and efficient, was standing at the door. She carried a number of files.

“Good!” exclaimed Hammerton, advancing to the desk. “They told me you were out.”

“Back again,” said Miss Robbins, “and just in time. That gunman of yours was making a pretty havoc among my papers.”

“No need for me to look at them, Miss Robbins,” said Hammerton pleasantly. “I shall simply sit back and listen.”

“League of Nations Quarterly Summary, Case No. seven fifty-nine of nineteen thirty-eight,” said Miss Robbins. “There are cross references to individual seizure reports from Washington and Basle. Summers was arrested two years ago in Basle upon information received from Washington, but released for lack of evidence. He has since been under observation by the police in several countries. Here is the card from our index showing his subsequent movements.”

Hammerton took the card and from force of habit turned to the large scale map of the world hanging behind his chair. His fingers traveled over the map as he consulted the card: New York to London, London to Marseille, Marseille to Shanghai, Shanghai to Tientsin.

“There is a note on the Washington file,” said Miss Robbins. “It’s in a letter from Senator Drury himself. Shall I read it?”

“Believed to be in touch with an international gang of traffickers whose agents have been arrested from time to time. The leaders of the gang are unknown, but obviously look after their men well.”

He read carefully the letter from Washington and examined also the file from Basle.

“If Summers is one of these, he will simply sit tight and say nothing. Stalemate, Miss Robbins. The less they tell us, the more we want to know. Got your notebook?”

“Cablegram for the Shanghai Municipal Council,” dictated Hammerton. “Please send at once if possible a list of all persons approached by Summers in Tientsin or Shanghai.”

“A long shot, Sir Douglas,” she said. “If Summers, as you seem to think, is one of the gang, he will have had instructions to keep clear. They must know he is under police supervision.”

“Read the evidence from Basle,” responded Hammerton. “Summers may be in touch with the men we want, but he is obviously a bit of an amateur. He was caught at Basle playing a lone hand and gambling on his luck. I know the type. He thinks he is still living in the good old days when Shanghai communicated with Cairo through London and the police had to wait for their information to come to them through the ordinary diplomatic channels. I’m pretty sure that the gang we are after, who are nothing if not up-to-date, would, in present circumstances, fight shy of him, but, as one of the old school, he would see no reason why he shouldn’t claim acquaintance with his former associates.”

He watched Miss Robbins as she collected her files and left the room. He thoroughly approved of Miss Robbins. There were quite a number of people, he reflected, who would like to know how useful she was to the Egyptian Central Narcotics Bureau and who, if they did know, might stop taking an occasional shot at him when his head was turned and transfer their attentions to her.

Not a nice thought. Miss Robbins was not a beauty. She would look even less attractive if she should ever happen to be fished out of Port Said harbor on a summer’s day.

Sir Douglas Hammerton filled a large pipe and gazed thoughtfully at the opposite wall.

Cora Robson, looking round the sitting room of her flat in Hertford Street, surveyed her preparations with satisfaction. The electric kettle was simmering; the fire was burning; two comfortable chairs, within easy reach of the table, were set for confidences between friends; the half-open door on the right of the hearth gave a partial view of a divan bed which added a touch of pleasant intimacy to the scene. The general impression conveyed was that of an appropriate setting for a simple soul with nothing to conceal. The note of candor was emphasized by a large photograph of Lawson carelessly displayed on the mantelpiece.

Marjorie, if true to her appointment, would be calling within the next quarter of an hour. Cora had no doubt whatever that she would come. Curiosity alone, even if a charm discreetly exercised had failed of its effect, would bring her to the flat. Marjorie, on reflection, might not believe in the sweet disinterestedness of her new friend; but the more she doubted it, the more likely she was to be intrigued. She would want to confirm or correct her impression. She would want to see the sort of place frequented by her father in his hours of ease. She would want to be sure whether she had good reason to be jealous of her rival, or whether she might in future safely be kind and sympathetic to a woman of no importance.

Cora smiled almost happily into the fire. How far exactly did she mean to go? She preferred to leave her intentions a little vague. Knavery’s plain face is never seen till used. She had made a very satisfactory beginning. Stephen had discarded her in order to keep his darling daughter secure in a world from which she, Cora Robson, was to be excluded. But she had upset all his calculations promptly and effectively. He was uneasy and afraid. He was angry but he was helpless, and she would see to it that the angrier he became the more helpless he should be. Every word he uttered against her, if he were driven to such a course, would, provided she played her cards well, only convince Marjorie that Cora Robson was an unselfishly accommodating and injured woman.

Her smile deepened as she heard the ring at the door of the flat. Ten minutes to four; the girl was well in advance of her time.

“How nice of you to come,” she said, deliberately formal and yet upon a note of relief, artfully uncontrolled.

Then, as though moved by an irresistible impulse, she swept forward and took Marjorie by the arm.

“Or is this just a hail and farewell sort of visit?” she asked, as though in her eagerness she had perhaps gone too far.

She stood aside and watched Marjorie enter the bedroom, noting how her visitor looked about with just the curiosity she had anticipated. Then she turned from the door and started to make the tea. She seemed wholly intent on this business when Marjorie came back to the room and began to wander round it, fingering the books and examining the prints upon the wall.

Aloud she said, “I’m just staying quiet a moment so that you can make yourself at home.”

Marjorie turned from a reproduction of Christopher Wood’s adorable yellow horse.

“I suppose not,” she said, with an assumption of forced gaiety. “You expected a black divan heaped with cushions, a tinted Venus over the mantelpiece, mirrors on the wall and me, perhaps, sprawling in something loose beside an ash tray piled with cigarette ends and reading the Madonna des Sleepings or something of that kind.”

“This is my flat,” returned Cora quietly. “All earned and paid for by honest toil. I work for my living, you know.”

Marjorie flushed guiltily. She sat on the arm of one of the chairs, swinging her leg and looking into the fire. At last she raised her eyes, watching Cora still at the table.

“I’m a traveler in cosmetics, the safest job I could imagine. Civilization may crash about our heads, but you will always find a female sitting among the ruins with a jar of cream and a red pencil.”

“It would mean poor business for me to be seen much about with you,” she added, affecting a swift shy look of approval at her young companion. “You leave all to nature, and the result for my poor products is a slap in the eye.”

“Nice to be you,” said Cora. “No cause to worry either about your face or your figure. Fortunately for the firm I represent you are an extremely rare specimen. I cannot even hope that you will come to me in time.”

“Not too lazy. Too proud. Too little regard for the other sex to spend time and money in showing how anxious you are to be pleasing in the sight of man. All this beauty parlor business is a form of compensation.”

“For the fine pretense we are making today of our independence and equality. The girl who earns her living paints her toenails to satisfy her craving to be still the Sultan’s little plaything. Fingers bashing a typewriter, like lotus buds, pink-tipped. There you have her in a nutshell.”

Cora allowed her eyes to wander wistfully to the photograph on the mantelpiece as one who would suggest that she, too, would gladly have been a slave to the man of her choice.

“I spoke to my father about you, last night,” said Marjorie, after a short pause, taking her cup.

Cora’s hand was cool and steady, but she dared not look up. The flame in her eyes would shrivel this callow, intruding girl.

“I wanted to make it quite clear to him that I had come to hate the idea of coming between you,” she continued.

III

Marjorie leaned back in the armchair. She liked the feel of the supple fingers smoothing her face.

“There,” said Cora standing back with the open jar in her hand. “That will do for a foundation. Now for the coloring.”

It was only two hours since Marjorie had entered the flat, but already she felt that she had known for years this sad woman with the disconcerting flashes of fire. She could not analyze her total impression. There would be time for that later. She had simply surrendered, as she had never done before, to another person. There was marvelous comfort in this strange, unexpected relaxation of mind and will. It recalled the mood of her convalescence when, alone in her room, she had found so deep a luxury in seclusion from the world.

Her impassioned acquiescence in Cora’s playful suggestion that she should try a sample of her beauty parlor wares was streaked with an oddly tremulous excitement. Marjorie was infinitely curious about her new friend and there was a not unpleasant sense of adventure in finding her out.

Marjorie obeyed. Cora was busy with a pencil. Marjorie relaxed still further. It seemed quite a long time before Cora spoke again.

Marjorie looked up. Cora was offering her a hand mirror from the dressing table. Marjorie looked at herself. For a moment she said nothing.

The color in her cheeks and the faint shadow about her cheekbones gave an almost feverish brilliance to her eyes. Her smile was unexpectedly dazzling.

“Makes one feel different,” she added. “I suppose I shall have to live up to this—that is, if I dare to face father with it on. He hates cosmetics.”

“I haven’t noticed any particular aversion,” observed Cora smoothly. “What you really mean, of course, is that he doesn’t like them on you. But that is only natural. A father doesn’t like his daughter to remind him continually that she is studying to please someone else.”

Cora turned away suddenly, as though she had said too much and began to tidy things up on the dressing table.

“You may say anything you like to me,” Marjorie assured her, “and I hope you always will. But I wonder whether you are right. Father has never wanted to keep me in the nursery. On the contrary. He has always begged me to grow up quickly so that we could go out and about together.”

“He’s going to be very jealous when he knows you’ve been here to tea with me.”

“Father mustn’t be jealous of me,” persisted Marjorie. “It would be too absurd.”

“Not jealous, Cora. I didn’t know you as I do now. I simply thought——”

“Go on, my dear. Or shall I finish it for you. You thought that I wasn’t good enough for Stephen.”

“Very natural and proper. And confess, Marjorie. You were just a little jealous, too. You did not like to feel that all kinds of things were going on behind your back.”

They had returned to the sitting room. Cora opened the cabinet which stood against the wall. She laughed suddenly. Marjorie breathed a little faster. This was one of those disconcerting flashes which every now and then thrilled her with a sense of discovery.

“I frankly admit that I was often tempted to feel that way myself—about you, I mean. I’ve often wondered what happened to Stephen when he left me here alone. Did he forget all about me, the moment he got home? For his home, I always realized, was with you. Did he ever think of me at his own fireside, and, if so, did he think of me with resentment? What was my real place in his life? Just a cocktail, perhaps.”

She had taken the cocktail shaker from the cabinet. She waved it at Marjorie with an assumption of desperate gaiety.

“It would serve Stephen right, of course,” she added, “if I were now to make him jealous of you.”

Marjorie, sipping her dry Martini, looked at the clock. Nearly seven. She had been with her friend for over three hours. How quickly the time had passed! Ice and lemons had been brought in by the maid.

Marjorie had hesitated about the cocktail. It was not her habit to accept such things. But Cora had only smiled and told her to look in the mirror. Marjorie, seeing herself as a changeling, had decided to live up to her transformation. She had taken one and then another.

“Alec Ross. He has been looking after me since the accident. A doctor, you know.”

Something warned her, obscurely, that these confidences should cease. They were unwise. But she had begun to take an odd pleasure in exposing herself. Secrets were made to be shared. She set down her empty glass and giggled slightly.

“Nice to be you,” said Cora. “In ten years from now you’ll be dating everybody like an expert.”

“I took him for a mug,” she continued, “a nice mug, you understand, and not really a mug at all as it happened.”

She went on, not very coherently, to relate how Dr. Alec Ross had calmed her shattered nerves with injections of salt water. She insisted on the comical aspects of the tale.

“A lucky escape for you,” she said, when Marjorie had finished. “I think I should like your Dr. Alec Ross.”

“Of course not. But I felt such an awful fool. Fortunately I have a sense of humor and was able to forgive him.”

“No, my dear,” she said, “it isn’t funny. So please tell me that it’s all over and that you will never again play such a silly trick.”

Marjorie, through her growing irritation, was pleasantly aware of the soft caressing hand on her shoulder. She felt moved to explain things further.

“So restless and disturbing. Such an effort. It was simply delicious to lie in my room and allow everything to come and go. Nothing mattered but to stay warm and quiet.”

“You surprise me. I have always thought of you as fond of people and parties.”

“I was born inquisitive. I like to find things out. But I don’t like people to come too near. That makes me feel like a dog with a bone. I just growl softly to myself.”

Marjorie reached up and took the hand upon her shoulder. She relaxed with a sigh of content into the chair.

“Not at you,” she said softly, “and please, if I do, you’re not to notice.”

Twenty minutes later Marjorie climbed the steps in Clarges Street. She ran swiftly upstairs and into her room. Alfred, of course, had been staggered. He was too well trained to show it, but her face had given him the shock of his life.

“Goodness,” she murmured. “It’s nearly eight and father is waiting for his soup.”

She had a sudden horror of her painted face. Frantically she rushed to the washbasin. She bathed her cheeks in hot water and scrubbed them dry with a towel.

He looked at her sharply. She wondered how much of Cora’s handiwork remained. Nothing apparently, for he looked away again.

“Well,” he said, as Barton appeared from the dining room, “what have you been up to this afternoon?”

Peter Summers, leaning negligently against the wall, dangling his keys in his hand, watched, as with indifference, the deft, searching hands of the customs official, running through the drawers of his trunk.

He assured himself that he was in no way anxious or excited. Terence would see him through. But his lips were dry and one of his knees a-quiver. These Egyptian fellows were too damned thorough by half, with their footrules and their apparently accidental way of looking about for counterfeit bottoms and what not. That trick of standing the drawers on the top quite casually, for instance. It enabled them to see whether they really fitted right back against the interior leaving no room for secret compartments or false panels. He had seen that done before, at New York, but those American fellows, as he knew, had a book of rules. He had read it himself, Richard Hopkins, alias Dumpy Dick, having pinched one and shown it round.

Mohamed Sheeta, affixing a label, nodded as though it hurt him. He had received instructions to make a very careful inspection of this gentleman’s luggage. It had even been hinted that he might discover something interesting and that the allseeing Hammerton Pasha, whom nothing escaped, would be pleased with him when he found it.

He had found nothing, but was sure that it existed. He distrusted profoundly the languid gentleman leaning against the wall. The languid gentleman was not as indifferent as he seemed. Mohamed Sheeta in his spare time was fond of a little flutter with the dice and was familiar with the assumed tranquillity of the gambler. He would have liked to cut the trunk into small pieces before releasing it, but unfortunately he was hampered by the code. This was the public shed and in the public shed you were not allowed to assume that a traveler was potentially a thief and a bandit. Examinations must be conducted without incident or offense.

This traveler, of course, was under suspicion. Otherwise Mohamed Sheeta would not have received an order to look out for him. The Inspector always gave his men a chance to find things, if they could, by the means and methods allowed in normal cases. But it was understood that in the public shed every traveler was a gentleman and you were not permitted to treat him discourteously or to mutilate his property.

With a tragic sense that he was almost certainly allowing something good to escape him Mohamed Sheeta watched the languid gentleman locking up his trunk. The gentleman was obviously relieved. He would, if true to type, express his relief in words. The man who took risks was apt to enjoy them when they were safely past and his pleasure usually revealed itself in an access of bravado and good fellowship. Sure enough.

“My compliments, officer,” said Summers. “I see you know the ropes. Better luck next time.”

“Not understand,” returned Mohamed Sheeta with dignity. “I perform duty according to national order. I find nothing and stick label. That is all.”

“Easy with nice people,” said Mohamed Sheeta, “but not with nasty customer and damn thief. Not like his face, but stick label all the same and say, ‘Pass along, sir.’ ”

Mohamed Sheeta watched his escaping prey. Mingled with his resentment was a sour satisfaction. The languid gentleman who had pulled his legs evidently imagined himself to be out of the wood. But after pride and impudence came fall and a biting of dust. Hammerton Pasha was waiting for this person, and Hammerton Pasha, who made the rules, was not, as Mohamed was, bound by the rules to be in the least degree polite to nasty customer and damn thief.

Mohamed Sheeta prided himself on his knowledge of human nature. Nasty customer would be gnashing his nice white teeth presently.

Peter Summers, following the trolley, had reached the door of the shed before he realized what was in store for him. A spare man, in a neat white suit, stepped forward. There was a smile on the puckered face. Beside him stood another man in the uniform of an inspector.

“Good old Terence,” murmured Summers patting its battered sides. It was an invocation.

“Not if you’ve time to waste,” responded Summers. “I have heard it said you are a busy man.”

“This trunk has already been examined once and very thoroughly. What’s the idea?”

“Not as thoroughly as we would wish,” returned the Inspector. “Customs officials are required by the regulations to show consideration and courtesy to bona fide travelers.”

“Not to the same extent,” interposed Hammerton smoothly. “In cases where the traveler is under suspicion, we allow ourselves a certain latitude.”

“If you are alluding by any chance to an unfortunate incident which occurred recently at Basle, I would warn you to be careful,” protested Summers. “The authorities came pretty badly out of that, and I shall not submit to further persecution by the police.”

“I understood Mr. Summers to say that he had no objection to our taking another look at his luggage,” put in the Inspector.

“None whatever,” said Hammerton bluntly. “I’m prepared to take full responsibility for treating your luggage as suspect. The proceeding, let me assure you, is not so invidious as it seems. It is frequently done in the case of such inveterate travelers as yourself, especially if they happen to have recently visited a region where the regulations against the illicit traffic in drugs are not very strictly applied.”

The three men followed the trolley into a small room at the extreme end of the shed.

The porter was dispatched in search of Mohamed. Summers was unlocking the trunk under the eyes of Hammerton. The Inspector met Mohamed at the door.

“How can my trunk possibly have a double wall? These holes go right into the wood.”

“Places for big bang and deep hole carefully chosen, perhaps,” suggested Mohamed Sheeta.

Mohamed produced from his pocket a regulation knife. Its blade was thin and sharp. He selected a spot in the trunk which had suffered no damage in transit and made a small incision. The steel after penetrating the wood for an eighth of an inch would go no farther. Mohamed Sheeta scraped away some of the wood and revealed a coating of metal. From another pocket he produced a small weapon, not unlike a gimlet, and stabbed it firmly into the shining surface thus laid bare. He withdrew his instrument and inserted his knife into the puncture. He displayed the knife with a smile. Grains of white powder adhered to the blade.

Summers was thinking: “Terence has let me down.” Aloud he said, with a cool bravado that astonished no one but himself: “This is interesting. What next, Inspector?”

“Quite elementary, Mr. Summers,” said Hammerton grimly. “We call it the Marquis reagent—just a mixture of formaldehyde and sulphuric acid, but very sensitive. We shall know all about this white powder of yours in a moment.”

III

Cyril Harker was sitting in the sun on a bench overlooking the quayside. It was his principal occupation. Once he had been a busy man, but two years in an Egyptian prison and a naturally indolent disposition had brought him to the conclusion that no further effort could be reasonably required of him either in his own interests or in the interests of his late employer. His means were adequate to his simple needs. All he required for his happiness and well-being was plenty of sunshine, a good conscience, a room of his own and enough spare cash to pay the kind of bill discovered by Poins in the pocket of the fat knight:

The gods of Egypt guaranteed the sun; his good conscience was firmly rooted in a growing conviction that he had grown too fond of his ease ever again to break the laws of his adopted country; black-eyed Fatima supplied the room and her own company if and when desired; his late employer had passed him the cash in compensation for damages suffered in discharge of his duties.

He had found his philosophy. It was a variant of the stoic creed that no man could be counted truly happy till he was dead. One by one he had divested himself of all impediments to the simple life. The responsibilities of a landlord, with a nice little property in the West of England, had poisoned his youth till he had wisely provoked his creditors into depriving him of it by process of law. His modest investments had caused him continual anxiety till he had cleverly disposed of them and lost the proceeds by meeting a bear in the city and mistaking him for a bull. His abilities as a linguist, acquired by drifting about the world as a boy with his father, lately of the Consular service, had for several years put him under a moral obligation to earn an honest living as interpreter in a tourist agency and had involved him in years of quite unnecessary drudgery till he had ruined their value in the market by indulging an untimely sense of humor at the expense of his clients. His more respectable leanings had been a perpetual source of annoyance till he had contrived to leave them behind him in the neat little cell to which he had been committed as the result of an incident in which the police had refused to credit his astonishment that the spare wheels of a car he had happened to be driving across the Egyptian frontier had contained a white crystalline powder of unknown origin.

The watery blue eyes with which he gazed upon the world, while the sun penetrated his aging bones, were untroubled. He had nothing in life to worry about. All the things that made men unhappy and full of care had been progressively discarded. He was now a lily of the field.

With a mild, benevolent interest he watched a group of men leaving the customs shed at the end of the quay. They were coming toward him, evidently making for a large car drawn up some fifty yards away with a uniformed chauffeur at the wheel. Cyril Harker, without resentment, allowed his clouded vision to rest upon the tall man in loose tweeds. Twenty years ago he would have been wearing much the same sort of outfit; Poole and Lord or Tom Brown, at twenty guineas. But there was no occasion for envy. One had to live up to suitings of that quality, and Cyril Harker looked down with complacency at his own comfortable, anonymous slacks which committed him to nothing. The gentleman in the tweeds, moreover, was in trouble, apart from being a gentleman, which in itself was trouble enough. The men walking beside him were quite obviously officers of the law. There, too, was Sir Douglas Hammerton, bless him! who had helped to relieve Harker of any further necessity to worry about anything. Hammerton, apparently, was not weary of well-doing. He had found another fellow creature in distress.

Cyril Harker, as they drew near, looked more carefully at the man in the tweeds. Something stirred vaguely in his mind. He did not start from his seat or mutter his surprise. Such violent manifestations had ceased to be in his character. But the blue eyes came to a focus. This was interesting.

He had met the tall gentleman in tweeds in connection with the loading of those spare wheels with a substance of unknown origin. His name was Peter Summers and Peter Summers was under arrest.

Summers had no attention to give to a shabby old man sitting on a bench in the sun. Nor did Hammerton, after one keen look at the bench, seem to recognize an old acquaintance. But one never knew with Hammerton. Hammerton made a point of seeing everything and another point of seeming to see nothing if it suited his purpose.

Cyril Harker watched the group as it approached the car. The chauffeur had left the wheel and was waiting by the open door. Summers entered first. The others followed and the car drove away in the direction of the town.

Harker was less conscious of the pleasant sun soaking into his bones. Apparently he had not yet discarded certain mental habits of the past. There was a man in London who ought perhaps to be warned of this arrest. Harker had reason to be grateful to the man in London who had looked after him so well following his discharge. Should he not, as a decent fellow, take steps in the matter?

“But I’m not a decent fellow and it’s no business of mine,” he argued querulously to himself, reflecting, moreover, that for him to send a message to London was impossible. He would have to find someone who knew the code. Messages en clair were unwise. Then, too Hammerton had probably seen him sitting there. He would be under observation and his intervention might do more harm than good. Besides, the man in London had probably made his own arrangements to be informed. These people left nothing to chance.

Consecutive reasoning, on a summer’s day, required an effort. Little beads of sweat stood on Harker’s forehead. This was a dreadful dilemma for a decent man who had long ago decided that decency was a complication which he had successfully discarded.

It was then that he saw another figure coming from behind the shed. It was fat and swarthy. It wore a fez. To Harker it brought a feeling of release.

“I do not speak with you,” he panted. “I do not speak with anyone today.”

“On the job?” inquired Harker, waving his arm in the direction of an invisible car.

Harker sank blissfully back on the bench. The sun was pleasant. The world was at peace.

Mustafa Omar Shalaby was walking as fast as his condition and bulk permitted over the hard earth. Harker followed him in reverie to the telegraph office. Mustafa would have to cudgel his poor brains coding the message, sustain the inquisitive stare of the post-office clerk, sweat for fear that he might have been followed or that his message might be intercepted.

Harker sighed in great content. There was nothing for him to do or not to do. His conscience was again at rest.

Summers submitted with grace to the indignities consequent on his arrest. Hammerton had spared him the worst. Anyone who had seen him walking with his captors from the customs shed to the offices of the Central Narcotics Board would have taken them for a friendly party enchanted with each other’s company.

He stood now in Hammerton’s room at headquarters. The Inspector of Customs and two Narcotic officers stood beside him. The contents of his pockets lay on Hammerton’s desk. They consisted of the ordinary impedimenta of an English gentleman, except for a sheet of paper which Hammerton was examining carefully.

Summers watched him with a smile on his face. He would have few occasions for amusement during the coming months, but this was one of them. There were only half a dozen lines on the sheet of paper in which Hammerton was so profoundly interested and they were in code. Summers knew enough about codes to be aware that in order to decipher even the simplest kind more than half a dozen lines were necessary to the expert. It was amusing to see Hammerton with that sheet of paper in his hands. Hammerton would have given ten years of his life to read it. For that sheet of paper contained a message from Sam Bullard, who was waiting for heroin in New York, and Sam Bullard was an agent of Henry Tasker in London and Henry Tasker in London was commonly believed to be in close touch with the nameless person, invisible to all but members of the inner ring, who directed operations in four continents and whose personality and methods were becoming familiar to the police of at least twenty countries.

Hammerton handed the sheet of paper to a woman beside his desk. Summers regarded her with disfavor. Evidently the Director had no use for the amenities of life. Presumably the woman was a hundred per cent efficient, but most men would have sacrificed half that percentage to have something a little less forbidding about the place. Not that this poor dear would ever be called upon to forbid a fellow anything.

“Take copies of this, Miss Robbins,” he was saying. “Send the specimens direct to Washington, Vancouver and Berne.”

There had been a suggestion in the tone of his secretary that her chief had forgotten something important.

Hammerton took Miss Robbins aside. Evidently, reflected Summers, the Director had decided to behave like a gentleman—not like those vulgar fellows at Basle two years ago who had been at no pains to conceal their intentions of treating him just as roughly as the law allowed. Hammerton was known to be the most pitiless of the G men who were making life impossible for those whom he so frequently described in the press and on public platforms as miscreants who, for gain, poisoned their fellow creatures and turned the beneficent discoveries of science into a source of ruin and misery to thousands. But Hammerton had decided to be pleasant; that could only mean that he hoped to lure his victim into admissions. Summers braced himself. He knew his own weaknesses. He was very susceptible to fair treatment.

Miss Robbins left the room with the sheet of paper and Hammerton returned to his desk.

“Now, Mr. Summers,” he said, “we will resume, if you don’t mind, our conversation. You evidently wish these proceedings to be conducted in the high Roman fashion. I have accordingly the honor to assure you with the utmost courtesy and without any desire to hurt your feelings in any way that in my own humble and prejudiced opinion you are a damned scoundrel. I would also observe, without offense, that this question is shared by the authorities of every decent administration in the world. In China, for example, a person who is under Chinese jurisdiction and is caught distributing narcotic drugs is liable to the death penalty. I regret that the powers of the Egyptian national courts do not go quite as far as that, but those powers are fortunately considerable and I sometimes succeed in having them exercised to the limit.”

“It would give me great personal satisfaction,” Hammerton continued, “to see you receive the maximum sentence of five years, but I never allow private feeling to overrule the public interest. You have refused to make a statement except to claim that your operations concern only yourself and that you are not in touch with anyone of importance.”

“Now, Mr. Summers, do you, on second thought, wish to qualify that statement in any way? I give you my word that, if you are prepared to state the origin and destination of the heroin in your possession, the proceedings against you may take a different turn.”

“And what would you think of me, Director, if I complied with that suggestion?”

“I have already expressed my private opinion of you, Mr. Summers. It would not be greatly affected either way. Officially I should commend your decision.”

“I’m sorry, Hammerton, but I have nothing further to say. I’m playing a lone hand in this affair.”

“Your attitude, Mr. Summers, confirms me in my conviction that you are in correspondence with agents of the most powerful international gang of traffickers in the world. They are all accustomed to swear blind that they are acting for themselves alone but they all behave like men who know only too well which side of the bread is buttered. We let one of them out only the other day on the completion of his sentence and he turned up again within a week driving a Mercedes in the streets of Cairo.”

“I’ll hold you to that, Summers, if it doesn’t slip my memory, but I shall have a long time to wait. The last man we caught passing heroin got four years.”

“Think it over, Summers,” he said. “I’ll be seeing you again shortly.”

“I just didn’t know myself in the glass,” responded Marjorie. “So I thought it better to clean up the stranger.”

“Why not give the stranger a chance?” continued Cora. “You might come to like her in time.”

“Not scared. But it wouldn’t please him to see me looking like the Queen of Sheba.”

“Why not please yourself? Stephen with the high hand shouldn’t be allowed to have everything his own way. It’s bad for both of you.”

“Stephen once made a rude remark about my fingernails. I was advertising one of our new preparations at the time.”

Cora laughed, a deliberately husky laugh, suggesting that the Queen of Sheba had been one too many for Solomon and that Solomon had rather liked it. Suddenly, however, the laughter faded from her eyes as though she had remembered that those happy times were gone forever.

“Mix me another cocktail, there’s a darling,” she pleaded, “and make it snappy. I’ll be with you in a minute.”

Marjorie rose from the bed and went into the sitting room. For a while she was busy at the cabinet.

Marjorie crossed to the communicating door. Cora had taken something from her bag. It was a slip of paper. She unfolded the slip and sniffed the contents as though she were taking snuff. Then she crushed the paper in her hand and dropped it into the wastepaper basket.

Cora turned. She seemed startled. She drew back defensively. Then she recovered herself and came toward the sitting room.

Cora went to the cabinet. She took one of the cocktails and offered the other to Marjorie. She tasted her own and made a face.

“I shall never make a barman of you, Marjorie,” she said. “It’s an odd thing, but you put in exactly what I tell you and the result is a cough mixture.”

Marjorie was standing motionless glass in hand. Cora, as though she had at last noticed something unusual in the attitude of her friend, paused and added, “What’s the matter?”

Cora considered her cocktail and answered with a touch of bravado, “Nothing that concerns you, darling.”

“Only that you warned me here in this very room not three weeks ago against that sort of thing.”

“I know when to stop, for one thing. You’re a sweet thing, but very young. I’m old enough to be your mother and know what I’m about.”

“My dear child, one might as well say that a girl who has a cocktail before dinner is drinking herself to death. Now, if you were sitting alone in your room with a whisky bottle, I might have something to say about it.”

“So that if I take a shot of morphine, I’m a solitary soaker, whereas if you take a pinch of that other stuff, it’s just a pick-me-up.”

Cora nodded. She seemed amused, but there was still a touch of bravado in her manner, as of one who had forestalled attack by promptly assuming the offensive.

“I’m always willing to learn,” she retorted, “but it’s getting late. Some other time, perhaps.”

She thrust the hat viciously on her head and went to the mantelpiece. She could see Cora behind her in the mirror. A hand was laid upon her arm.

“Still time for a word and I don’t want you to go jumping to conclusions. Will you listen?”

“There’s really nothing to worry about in what you saw just now. I’m keeping an appointment this evening. Business. Very important. I shall need all my wits about me. I know at least a dozen women who take cocaine simply to shine at a party. That’s very different from playing with that poisonous stuff I warned you against just lately. The horrid thing about morphine is that people who take it go away into a corner. It’s a solitary vice. I take my little pinch of the other stuff simply in order to brighten up my ideas. Of course if I should ever feel it was becoming a habit, I should drop it immediately.”

Marjorie, alone in the room, arranged her hat more becomingly. Turning from the mirror her eye fell on the bag which Cora had brought with her into the sitting room.

Marjorie picked it up. Loose in one of the pockets were half a dozen slips of paper such as Cora had taken from it in the bedroom. After a moment’s hesitation and a quick look toward the door Marjorie abstracted one of them from the bag and transferred it to her own. She was again arranging her hat before the mirror when Cora returned.

Cora Robson, sitting back in the taxi which was bearing her rapidly eastward, switched off the light above her head. She had dropped Marjorie at Clarges Street a few moments ago and was now alone with her thoughts.

Accident or design? Had she deliberately planned that Marjorie should surprise her taking that prise in the bedroom? Not when she had opened the bag. But she had heard Marjorie crossing the room to the communicating door. Her first impulse had been to conceal the slip of paper. Then the thought had flashed: “Let Marjorie see.”

Well, Marjorie had seen. What next? The girl’s curiosity had been aroused. She would want to know more about those white slips of paper that brightened things up. She would return to the subject. And then?

“I never intended this,” Cora assured herself. “To win her from her father, yes, but nothing more.” Yet something had whispered “Let Marjorie see.” Whence had come that suggestion? Could it be part of a monstrous design working itself out in her secret thoughts?

There was a fearsome attraction in the abominable scheme taking form and feature in the recesses of her mind. It was so neat, so apposite, so classical in its retribution. That Lawson, who without a qualm had helped to supply thousands of miserable creatures with the means of their undoing, should be the unwitting instrument of his daughter’s ruin offered a situation which only an artist could have devised. Nor was that the only feature of the project, as yet in embryo and unconfessed, which presented itself as irresistibly apt. Lawson was determined to eliminate from the circle which he had drawn about his daughter all that concerned his criminal activities.

He had tried to eliminate Cora herself. Henceforth, he had decided, they were to be confederates and nothing more. She had retaliated swiftly and in kind. She had won Marjorie’s affection in despite of her father. To that extent Lawson had failed to achieve his purpose. The Nemesis would be complete if, as a result of his heartless elimination of herself, his daughter should become a victim of the underworld on which he preyed.

Cora stirred restlessly against the cushions. Surely she had never intended this. The ordinary human implications were too dreadful. They did not bear thinking about. And yet, looked at from a strictly impersonal view, how amusing!

A daughter who did not know that her father was a drug merchant. A father who did not know that his daughter was likely to become an addict.

Cora pressed her lips together. Very neat. Very amusing, but not a state of affairs which anyone not a monster of wickedness would ever consciously bring about.

Suddenly she sat upright. Her memory had shot back to the parting scene with Marjorie.

“Everything all right now?” she had asked; and Marjorie had answered, “Quite all right.”

There had been an odd, sly look on the girl’s face and her eyes had rested for just a fleeting moment on Cora’s bag when Cora had picked it up.

Cora turned her elbow and switched on the light. She opened her bag and searched the pockets with her fingers . . . one . . . two . . . three . . . four . . . five.

Cora closed the bag with a snap and turned off the light. She sat for a long while motionless, staring at the square head of the driver in front of her.

The car, caught in a jam in Shaftesbury Avenue, came to a standstill. Cora tapped on the window and the driver nodded. She opened the door and stepped onto the pavement. Her lips were still moving.

III

Lawson reached for the decanter and poured himself out a second glass of port. It always seemed to him uncommonly silly that he should sit solitary for at least a quarter of an hour over his coffee with Marjorie being served separately in the drawing room upstairs. But the servants seemed to take it for granted, and they ought to know.

Tonight he was glad of the respite. He had made up his mind to have it out with Marjorie, but he had as yet no idea how or where to begin. He was not even quite clear in his own mind what it was to which he so strongly objected. Something was happening to her. Of that he was sure. The old confidence between them was no longer as complete as it had been. She did not tell him things. Immediately after her convalescence, during which she had been strongly reluctant to resume her normal life, she had gone to the opposite extreme and now she was hardly ever at home. Every night there were parties. New names cropped up of which he had never heard. Even her language was changing. She was beginning to use some of the more fashionable words. The book she had read last night was bloody, and hell was perpetually round the corner.

How much of this, he wondered, was due to the influence of Cora? He did not know. That was partly his own fault. He had discouraged any reference to the subject. It was the weak spot in his armor and instinctively he had shrunk from exposing it. Cora had set out to win Marjorie of malice aforethought and apparently she had succeeded. Neatly and effectively she had turned the tables upon him.

Lawson grinned suddenly in spite of himself. He could always admire a skillful adversary. Cora was undoubtedly clever and a woman of spirit. He had treated her badly and she had said that he would be sorry for it. She had given him fair warning. But how far did she intend to go and what could he do about it in any case?

Obviously he must speak his mind. This was the first evening he had spent alone with Marjorie for nearly a fortnight and it might be some time before another such occasion presented itself.

Marjorie, sipping a Grand Marnier, was turning over the pages of Woman Adorned. That, too, was a new development. She had always professed a sovereign contempt for the intimate literature of the boudoir.

Not so long ago she would have said, “Nice of you to come up so quickly, father.” She would have thrown down her book, not that thing she was reading now, which presented the female as a creature who could only with difficulty and at great expense make herself tolerable to the male, and have met him with the smile which had so often welcomed him to a quiet evening by the fireside.

“Nothing wrong with the port,” he answered gruffly. “But I thought we’d make the most of our time together.”

“But surely, father, when you do have an evening free, it seems a pity to waste it.”

Lawson looked down at her uneasily. She didn’t seem to be paying him much attention. But that, he knew, was a pose, one of those confounded new affectations of hers which were putting a barrier between them.

Lawson reached down, took hold of Woman Adorned and threw it back on the chair behind him. He was astonished at the result of his action. Marjorie sat up. Her cheeks were flaming.

“Give me that book,” she said angrily. “Didn’t you see? I was reading it.”

“Come along, father. What next? Please don’t make me hate you again. It hurts.”

“Don’t worry about my mood. Say what you have to say. It wasn’t always so difficult.”

Lawson felt a sudden sense of relief. He would take Marjorie at her word. It was monstrous that they, who had always been so direct with one another, should be like fighters in a ring, sparring for points.

“It’s about Cora Robson,” he said firmly. “You see her pretty frequently these days.”

“I’m glad you mentioned it,” she said warmly. “I adore Cora. She has more brains than all the rest of the women I know. She is generous, too, and honest and quite the most unselfish person I’ve ever met. I won’t hear a word against her.”

“She is twice your age. You and she have nothing in common. The friendship is most unsuitable. I don’t like it.”

“She was good enough for you. You chose her and you chose perhaps better than you knew.”

“Since you struck up this acquaintance you have been a different girl. I hardly know you.”

“Has it ever occurred to you that she is trying to make mischief between us? Succeeding, too. Can you imagine us like this, cat and dog, three weeks ago?”

“It’s not Cora that’s making mischief. She would never wish to come between us in any way.”

“Women talk of the important things. Not like a man, who can meet his partner every day for years without even finding out whether he is married or single.”

Lawson shrugged his shoulders. He looked heavy and forlorn. Marjorie rose from her chair. She took him by the lapels of his coat.

“Once I was jealous of Cora. So I know what it’s like. Now it’s your turn.”

She was fingering his black tie. He never could arrange it as neatly as he wished.

“Ties should not be worn under the left ear,” she answered, with a smile that defeated him.

“That’s better,” she continued, standing away from him to observe the effect. “See if it isn’t.”

“Well,” he grunted, “it doesn’t seem much use continuing this discussion. What about that French flicker?”

Lawson smiled in spite of himself. It had always been Marjorie’s way to refer to her own mind or her own plans as though they were common to both of them.

Ten minutes had elapsed and Lawson was well content. Marjorie, sitting on the arm of his chair, had begun to tell him in the old frank way about her small social adventures. She paused in her tale to say, “That reminds me of something.”

“That old promise of yours. A week in Paris. Is it any use reminding you? You’ve wriggled out of it twice already.”

“I’ve done that already. The Golden Arrow leaves Victoria every morning at eleven.”

There came a sudden peal from the telephone on the table in the far corner of the room. Lawson sat up in his chair.

“It may be somebody for you,” said Lawson as the bell sounded a second time.

“Then I’m not at home. I won’t have anybody breaking into our cosy corner.”

“At least we must stop the confounded thing or we shall have Barton coming up.”

Marjorie had not moved from the chair. Lawson, as he listened, was acutely aware of her waiting for this interruption to be promptly dismissed.

“Impossible,” he said at last. “I’m engaged. . . . But it can’t be as serious as all that. . . . Very well, give me a moment.”

“Here,” she said, “give me that thing. I’ll send this creature packing, whoever it is.”

She was beside him now, grasping the receiver. Lawson took her firmly by the arm.

Marjorie was looking at him in astonishment. He realized that he had never spoken to her before in such a tone. She let go the receiver and walked back to the mantelpiece. She took a cigarette and lit it. He knew she was listening intently to every word as he put the receiver to his ear.

“Lawson here,” he repeated. “You must leave this matter over till tomorrow. . . . Nonsense. . . . Oh very well. . . . Expect me in half an hour.”

“You didn’t put up much of a show, did you? ‘Oh very well. . . . Expect me in half an hour.’ You might at least have made an effort. I thought we were settling down to an evening together. Telephone. ‘Oh very well. Expect me in half an hour.’ ”

“If we had gone to the Curzon, you would never have had the message. Then I suppose we should have come back to find her on the doorstep.”

He walked to the door. He would not look back. She had as good as called him a liar. He was not a liar, not that sort of liar. There came a rustle. Her hand was on his arm.

“I don’t give in as easily as you do. Don’t you understand? I want you to stay with me. That is important.”

She did not respond in any way, but precious time had passed and, without another look at her averted face, he hurried from the room.

Marjorie did not move till she heard the door close in the hall below. Then she walked to the fire and took another cigarette.

Cora was right. Stephen with the high hand mustn’t be allowed to have everything his own way. He had thrown her over at a word on the telephone. What did she know of her father? Precious little, and what she did know was not reassuring. What sort of business was it that took him suddenly abroad at all hours?

There were things in his life of which she knew nothing. He had broken with Cora. Why did a man break with his mistress? The woman who called him up on the telephone might possibly supply an answer to that question. Cora, of course, attributed to him quite a different motive. But Cora, for all her shrewd experience, would always find excuses for the man she loved.

Marjorie turned over the books on the table. But to read was impossible. She looked toward the telephone. But no one was likely to be within call at that hour. All her friends would be amusing themselves. None of them was so stupid as to be left with a vacant evening. Cora herself was busy. She, too, had important business on her hands.

Marjorie looked into the mirror. She saw herself as a wistful figure, lonely and abandoned. She perceived that there were tears in her eyes.

She turned away and her glance lighted on her bag where she had thrown it earlier in the evening. She opened the bag and felt for her handkerchief. Her fingers closed upon a slip of paper.

Five minutes later she lay back in a chair beside the fire. It was Stephen’s chair. Stephen had left her to keep an appointment. So here she sat, waiting. Cora had said that the stuff brightened up one’s ideas. So far nothing had happened; but the effect, perhaps, was not immediate. Or was this, perhaps, the effect? She was feeling strangely at peace with herself. Or was that only imagination, as when Alec had worked a miracle with his injections of salt water?

How long had she been sitting beside the fire? Time was difficult to measure. It all depended how things happened. Sometimes a day passed almost before one was aware that it had started. Sometimes an hour was interminable.

Time presented itself as a slow procession of pictures, all very clear and vivid. Some she recognized as memories, others as things imagined or desired.

Quietly she rose from the chair and left the room. Soon she was climbing the last flight of stairs. It seemed as though the attic room were expecting her. She switched on the light. The smell of the oils was intoxicating. She took down the stained overall from its hook. She slipped it on and approached the easel.

With hardly a look at them she removed the two canvases which rested upon it one above the other. She took no interest in the pictures which she had painted. They were moods expressed and forgotten.

A large bare surface stood against the wall. She lifted it and placed it on the easel.

Smiling happily, but with hands that trembled in their haste, she took up the palette and set to work.

Lawson, walking toward Piccadilly, picked up a taxi at the end of the street. He reached the bottom of Shaftesbury Avenue, dismissed the driver and made his way rapidly to the Pie Qui Chante.

He had entered the alley by which he usually approached that establishment before he had begun to wonder what awaited him at his journey’s end. Till then his thoughts had remained with Marjorie. She was exasperating, but every excuse must be made and their name was legion. She had not yet recovered her normal health; he had neglected her shamefully; she had every right to resent his mysterious activities at unlikely hours; he ought to have taken her away for a long holiday to recover from the effects of her accident; he should have fallen in at once with her proposal for a week in Paris; he ought to have firmly disregarded Cora’s summons on the telephone. Marjorie had good cause to be suspicious; respectable merchants were not called up by imperious females after dinner upon urgent business.

Lawson pulled up short in the alley upon a disturbing reflection. Why had he at once consented to meet Cora and Tasker at the Pie Qui Chante when Marjorie had begged him to stay? Could it be that Newman, his second self, hitherto humble servant and universal provider, was now assuming control? There had been a time when Lawson could forget that such a person existed. But now he needs must take Newman’s worries home with him, so that it only needed a ring on the telephone to elicit an almost automatic response.

He had no sympathy with that common affliction of the office drudge who imagined that he was indispensable and that unless he attended personally to every detail of his business the whole enterprise must inevitably collapse. He had, on the contrary, always kept himself as free as possible to consider only questions of policy and to take really critical decisions. Yet here he was hurrying off, at a word from Cora, to deal with some doubtlessly unimportant issue which might just as well have been settled by Tasker or have stood over for consideration at one of their regular meetings.

You didn’t put up much of a show, did you? You might at least have made an effort.

Marjorie was right. He had put up no sort of a show at all. Was he losing his nerve? If so, it was high time that he took a holiday himself. There was a good deal to be said for that trip to Paris. Or why not a six weeks’ cruise in the Mediterranean? Leave things to Tasker.

He was struck by yet another disturbing thought as he pushed open the door in the alley and started to climb the stairs to the upper room. Cora had probably known that he was spending the evening with Marjorie. Had she called him up simply in order to make trouble between them? He smiled a little grimly upon that suspicion. If Cora were childish enough to imagine that he was going to allow his domestic peace to be troubled by such an obvious maneuver, she was mistaken. He would put a stop to that.

There came the hiss of a siphon as he closed the door. Tasker was standing at the table mixing himself a whisky and soda. Cora stood by the fireplace smoking a cigarette.

“Telegram in code from Port Said,” continued Tasker. “Summers has been arrested.”

Lawson sat back. He took no notice of Cora, but still addressed himself to Tasker.

“Come,” he protested. “You haven’t called me up simply to tell me that. I’m not in the least surprised that Summers has been arrested. We can do nothing about it tonight and it’s contrary to your instructions to communicate with me unless it is absolutely necessary.”

“My doing, George,” broke in Cora. “There was no harm in letting you know, especially as lately you have been taking such a lively interest in events at Port Said. I just telephoned on the chance that you might be at home with nothing whatever to do.”

“You hinted at something serious and I naturally concluded that an urgent decision was required. You haven’t, I imagine, brought me here merely to talk things over.”

“Sorry, George,” said Cora, with a lift of her eyebrows, “but I should have thought that the arrest of one of your agents with heroin in his luggage and goodness knows what in his pocketbook was something sufficiently serious to call for immediate action of some kind.”

“I needn’t remind you, Tasker, that nothing can be done which has not already been covered in advance. Summers knows perfectly well how and where he stands. Penalties are strict in Egypt, but he is fully aware that, if he holds his tongue, he will be well looked after when he is free again. You will, of course, take the usual steps to assure him of our continued interest in his welfare.”

“He is presumably not such a fool as to keep the key in his pocket,” Lawson snapped.

“There is only one thing that concerns us vitally in this arrest. Is there any evidence at Port Said to connect Summers with Dupont? I had that possibility in mind when I agreed to come here tonight. Otherwise I fail to see why you should have thought it necessary to call me up.”

“Make a note of that, Henry,” she said with a faint parody of Lawson’s manner. “The Chief is not to be worried when his agents get into trouble.”

“That’s not fair to the Chief, Miss Robson. He takes every possible step, before and after, to protect us all.” Tasker hesitated. “I suppose we can rely upon Summers to give nothing away,” he added.

“If I am correctly informed,” said Lawson with a look at Cora, “Summers could not do us any serious harm even if he squealed. He has long since lost touch with the organization. His arrest, which he brought on himself by acting on his own initiative, is of little consequence to us unless, as I have insisted time and again, he can be connected with Dupont. If, on the other hand, Dupont comes under suspicion, you have my free permission to call me up on the telephone at any hour of the day or night.”

Lawson paused a moment and then asked, “Is there any further news from Marseille?”

“Nothing of consequence,” responded Tasker. “Grauber and Martinelli are on the spot. Dupont is in Paris. He will go down to claim his effects as soon as he is notified of their arrival by the French Customs.”

“Perhaps you’re right,” he said. “I’ll meet you at the flat in half an hour.”

Tasker stood in a corner of the room. He seemed to be forgotten. He looked sadly upon his two confederates who were still facing one another. He shook his head.

“Ructions,” he repeated to himself. “Private and personal. And thank the Lord, it’s no business of mine.”

Lawson’s decision to see Cora alone that evening had been very suddenly taken. For a moment he had been tempted to hurry straight back to Marjorie. But already it was after ten o’clock. Their evening had been spoiled and he was not, in any case, prepared to face her again till his mind was clear as to the part which Cora was playing in their relationship. That Cora was a disturbing influence and that there would never be peace between them till that influence was removed was evident. More than once during the past weeks he had felt it at work. But how far had it gone? How would it be used? How was it to be successfully resisted? He must know exactly where he stood with Cora or he would continue to feel like a poor, unhappy bull charging at a painted rag.

He walked toward Hertford Street and took a turn in the Green Park. What should be his method of approach? All would depend on how Cora would receive him. With anyone but Cora and Marjorie he was never in doubt what he would say or do. But, in dealing with those two, he was at the mercy of their moods and fancies. To them he came with a divided allegiance. In their presence he was a nondescript. He was Stephen Lawson and Marjorie was his daughter; he was George Newman and Cora had been his mistress.

Which of them, Lawson or Newman, would assume control of the coming interview? He asked himself the question as he left the Park and made his way into Shepherd Market. He had not answered it when five minutes later he climbed the stairs of the flat.

Cora had put out the whisky and the fire was burning brightly in the grate. If she had definitely set herself that night to force him from one hearth to another she had very well succeeded. The thought brought an angry flush to his cheek as she came to meet him. Nor did her greeting in any way soothe his ruffled spirit.

“Well, Stephen,” she said, “here we are again, and how delightfully unexpected.”

Lawson saw the painted rag. He was not going to charge at that. He meant to get the woman herself.

“Unexpected?” he retorted. “I should have said it was according to plan.”

He decided to help himself. It would make things less dramatic. A scene would settle nothing. He must be calm and clear and decisive.

“Explanation is quite unnecessary,” he continued, splashing soda water into the glass, “but, if it amuses you to put me through the hoops, I’ll state the position in a nutshell. You knew that I was at home with Marjorie this evening. You knew that it would cause friction between us if I were called away. You knew that this business of Summers could very well wait till the morning. But you telephoned. Your object was to make mischief.”

“Clear, ruthless and direct,” she sighed. “You leave me without a stitch.”

“You can’t come the defenseless female over me,” he protested. “You win this trick, but the game is not yet finished and, if it is to continue, I insist that you play fair.”

“You have won my daughter’s confidence. That was a good move and quite legitimate. But tonight you used your knowledge of our business arrangements to interfere with my private life. That was contrary to our understanding.”

“I should have said that my action was entirely justified. My message tonight was to George Newman. I wished to let him know that one of his agents, traveling on one of his boats, in whose progress he had shown some interest, had got into serious trouble. I happened to know that George Newman was disengaged. My duty was to warn him. His duty was to come and give us the benefit of his advice.”

“We just happen to see things from a different angle. I was of opinion that Newman should be warned. I was not deterred from warning him by the reflection that he happened at the time to be masquerading as Stephen Lawson who hates to be bothered with unlawful business at unusual hours. On the contrary. I have come to dislike that gentleman extremely. I do not regard myself as in any way bound to consult his convenience or to consider his feelings.”

“To use your knowledge of our illicit business in a private quarrel with me is not permitted. I’m speaking now as your chief.”

“No, you’re not. You’re speaking as the respectable tenant of Clarges Street. I’m not threatening your illicit business in any way.”

“I’m speaking as your chief,” repeated Lawson, “and my instructions are that in future you will on no pretext whatever communicate with me on business matters in any but the usual way.”

“You accused me just now of using my knowledge of our illicit business in a private quarrel. You said it was a dirty trick. Well, here is another. You, too, are party to a private quarrel and you are proposing to use your position as my employer to drive me into submission. You won’t allow me to use Newman as a stick for Lawson, but you mean to use him as a stick for me. Does that strike you as a fair arrangement? Think it over, Stephen.”

“I’ve thought it over. Either you forget, as my agent, that you ever knew me in any other capacity than as head of this organization or you cease to belong.”

“I shall obey you, George. Dust beneath the wheel. I should be sorry to lose my job. Therefore I promise——”

“I promise,” she continued, “never to call up Stephen Lawson again on business of the firm.”

“Or to communicate with him on matters of business in any way except through the usual channels,” insisted Lawson.

“Time for sorrow when it comes,” said Lawson moving to the chesterfield and taking up his coat.

“Not to communicate with Mr. Stephen Lawson on matters of business. But I’ll find other ways to plague him, never fear.”

“Perhaps you’re right,” she said. “It’s hardly a bargain to shake hands on. Good night, Chief.”

III

Lawson, making his way home, was not feeling too happy. He had apparently had his way but knew in his heart that he had only made matters worse. He had been a fool to take that high and mighty line. The real danger to his peace from Cora lay in her association with Marjorie, and he had increased that danger by exasperating her still further.

One thing at a time. First he must see this affair of Dupont and the equipment of the Titania as a floating factory to a successful conclusion. Then he would take a holiday. Marjorie would soon forget her infatuation with her new friend and he would seize the first reasonable opportunity to find interesting and profitable employment for Cora a thousand miles away.

He let himself quietly into the house and stood a moment in the hall, after removing his hat and coat. The servants were in bed; he never liked them to wait about for his return. He went upstairs and looked into the drawing room. The drinks were set out on the table, but the glasses were untouched. Marjorie, too, had apparently gone to bed.

He switched off the lights and went up to the third floor. Marjorie’s room was opposite his own and the door was open. He looked in and from the glow of the electric fire saw her pajamas laid out on the bed.

Presumably she had rung up one of her friends and gone to a party. He turned as a step sounded behind him. It was one of the maids.

Softly he climbed the attic stairs, but realized, when he entered the room, that he needn’t have feared to disturb Marjorie at her work. She was wearing the stained overall to protect her evening gown and painting away with an air of intense but deliberate fury. Each dab at the canvas might have been the thrust of a rapier at the vitals of an adversary. She did not seem to know that he was standing behind her and for a moment he was silent. His interest was in the painter and he had no attention to spare for the painting.

Of the two figures upon the canvas, the man’s face was invisible. He was wearing a fantastic dressing gown and crouching like a devout Moslem with his head bowed to the floor. The woman was erect and triumphant, one hand thrust down, her tinted fingernails brightly relieving the dull brown of his hair. This effect was repeated in the woman’s foot resting upon the brown rug on which the man was kneeling. Rolling, so to speak, off stage, in the right-hand corner was a yellow crown, blazing with rubies.

Marjorie turned to him. He saw now that she looked spent and exhausted. She giggled nervously.

“The Queen of Sheba,” she said. “A biblical subject. Not very improving, I’m afraid.”

“I shall probably not like it myself in the morning,” she said. “But it passed the time.”

“From Shanghai,” announced Miss Robbins. “It came in just half an hour ago.”

Sir Douglas Hammerton removed his sun hat and placed it on the desk. He opened the telegram and turned to Miss Robbins.

“ ‘Summers saw only Koreans Won Sho Shun and Li Zin Ko while at Tientsin Stop Also met Blanche Perrin woman of means English attractive not known here in company with Dupont respectable French resident dispatching furniture to Marseille by S/S Titania Stop Suggest you communicate with French authorities Marseille.’ ”

“Well, Miss Robbins, what do you think? Is our Mr. Summers likely to be interested in this respectable French resident and his furniture?”

“No, Sir Douglas,” she said. “If this Frenchman is working in with the big gang, it means big business. Summers would never be used in such a case. He hasn’t the brains. Besides, he would have gone on to Marseille with the cargo instead of dropping off here with his trunk. Summers had his own little fish to fry.”

Hammerton looked round his neatly appointed office. It was his habit, when thinking hard, to seem aimlessly interested in his surroundings.

“Blanche Perrin,” he murmured. “Woman of means. English. Attractive. I wonder what she was doing in Tientsin. It’s not exactly a pleasure resort these days. Not known at Shanghai, but Summers was acquainted with her apparently.”

Hammerton grinned. Miss Robbins easily believed the worst of a woman described as attractive.

“Not too hopeful,” he sighed. “Summers, as you say, is certainly not the sort of man to be trusted with an important deal. Nevertheless he is almost certainly a member or past member of the gang. He is using their code, and his behavior under arrest runs true to type. Probably they use him for small transactions and tell him no more than is necessary.”

“I will have him up at once. But first a telegram to Marseille. Address it to the Chief Commissioner of Police.”

Miss Robbins took up her notebook from the desk and sat down. Hammerton dictated:

“Furniture consigned to Dupont recently in Tientsin suspected to contain narcotic drugs probably heroin Stop Arriving Marseille S/S Titania Stop Should be inspected carefully in presence of consignee when claimed Stop Discretion.”

“Tell Ibrahim to have Summers sent up to this office at once and bring me those files from Washington and Vancouver.”

Peter Summers, following his escort to the office of Sir Douglas Hammerton, was not too uneasy. The worst had happened and he had accepted it. There were no agonies of hope or indecision to face. The only point at issue was whether he would get a maximum or minimum sentence. All that could be proved against him was possession. If the Court was fierce, he might be convicted by inference as a trader, but there was no evidence as to what he had meant to do with his drugs. Ahmed, the little Egyptian lawyer, who had turned up so promptly to defend him and who had incidentally assured him that, on release, he would receive ample compensation for his enforced seclusion, would make the most of this lack of any but circumstantial evidence of his intentions.

Summers smiled almost happily as he entered the room and nodded to the man behind the desk. He would yet be offering Hammerton that trip in the Mercedes. Meantime he intended to divert himself. Hammerton, if he were hoping to get out of him anything of value, was going to be disappointed. That would be amusing. It would be almost worth the eighteen months or two years or whatever the term might be during which he would be the guest of the Royal Government of Egypt.

“Good morning,” said Hammerton, when the escort at a sign from the Director had withdrawn. “Take a seat.”

“Well, Summers,” Hammerton continued, “have you been thinking over our recent conversation?”

“You’ve given me time enough,” protested Summers. “It’s over a week since I last had the pleasure of meeting you.”

“We have not been idle,” Hammerton returned. “That code message, for example. Very interesting.”

“I have here,” pursued Hammerton, “cables from Washington and Vancouver. They reproduce notes and messages from agents operating on the Atlantic and Pacific coasts of North America. I am satisfied that the code used in these notes and messages is identical with your own.”

“No,” answered Hammerton, turning over the leaves of a file. “But I have here the opinion of the greatest cipher expert in the world. He lives at Washington. I will read you his message: ‘Code letter Summers belongs same series Stop Comparing all specimens received from Geneva Stop Will wire results when messages deciphered.’ ”

“Wonderful, these experts,” responded Summers. “I remember reading a book in which one of these gentlemen proved conclusively that Queen Elizabeth wrote The Faerie Queene. Give ’em time and they’ll be proving that Queen Victoria wrote The Decameron.”

“If there happens to be enough of it,” rejoined Summers. “My own little piece won’t take you very far.”

“You speak by the book, but the proofs will soon come to hand. I admire your discipline, but you will find to your cost that international co-operation against you and your kind is now as well organized and as efficient as the co-operation between yourselves.”

“Just one or two questions. I have been in communication with the British authorities at Shanghai. It seems that, during your recent visit to Tientsin, you claimed acquaintance with a certain Blanche Perrin who has since disappeared. She, I presume, is also a member of the gang?”

“Blanche Perrin was accompanied by a certain Gustave Dupont, a French resident in Tientsin, whose household effects are at present on their way to Marseille on the S/S Titania.”

“Disappeared, did you say? That worries me. Blanche Perrin is a personal friend of mine. Charming woman. Travels about a lot and has a most unfortunate habit of looking for trouble. Rather looks as if she’d found it.”

“Nasty little man,” said Summers with conviction. “But perhaps I’m prejudiced.”

“Heaven bless you! He wore a stiff collar, striped trousers and one of those fancy black coats with braid along the edges. Most respectable and obviously nuts on Blanche. That’s why I’m prejudiced. I’m nuts on Blanche myself. Spare my blushes, Hammerton, but I can conceal nothing from you.”

“One other point,” continued Hammerton. “You have retained for your defense an Egyptian lawyer, by name Ahmed Sid Ahmed Abdallah. I regret to inform you that this gentleman has since been arrested.”

“He is a zealous advocate. It seems that in a recent case he even went so far as to bribe one of his witnesses. If you need further legal advice——”

“Too kind of you,” he murmured, “but, given your present frame of mind, the poor man would almost certainly be suspected of belonging to this gang we hear so much about. I prefer to defend myself and to take the consequences.”

“You seem fond of that silly joke,” he said and gestured curtly toward the door.

III

Gustave Dupont, feeling more like a disembodied spirit than a man, leaned sideways and looked over the edge of the window. Flying south from Paris at 10,000 feet, with the clouds for a floor beneath him, had completed the strange process which had started some weeks before in Tientsin. The familiar world was physically as remote as the man he used to be. This flight between heaven and earth symbolized a moral suspension.

It had started months ago in Peiping. Ten years of intensive education as understood in France, in course of which he had learned almost everything but how to live, followed by nearly twenty years as the representative of MM. Godet, Avallon et Frères, who had installed lifts in most cities of the world, had brought him in due course as a black-coated man of business to modern China. That had been some five years ago. Perhaps at thirty-nine he was ripe for a change.

He could not have stated exactly when it had happened, but, not long after his arrival in the Far East, he had begun to wonder whether he had made the most of his opportunities. Perhaps it had come home to him for the first time that evening when, after a visit to the Temple of Heaven, he had walked back to his hotel, passing the children who played in the fine dust of the city, and remembered the forgotten simplicities of his own childhood which these strangely happy, indifferent people, who toiled unceasingly and yet somehow reminded him of certain lilies of the field, had so successfully retained.

That night he had been surprised, brushing his hair as he always did most carefully before going to bed, by a novel sensation on the top of the scalp. The bristles of the brush had seemed harder than usual and he had noted that the skin showed pale through his thinning hair. He had realized with a shock that he was running fast into middle age. He had left his youth behind him without having realized that he was young.

It had become increasingly clear to him as the years found him still installing lifts in the ancient cities of China, which he had so surprisingly discovered to be eternally and essentially primitive in their joys and sorrows, that life was passing or, terrible to think of, that it had already passed him by, and he had come to cherish the idea that very soon, if he was not to lose himself entirely, he must retire from business and make the most of the few years that remained. But still he had worn the striped trousers and the braided coat, invested his yearly savings and followed his routine.

At last, however, he had taken the great decision. His means were small, but he had come to envy increasingly those children who played in the dust and the young coolies who ran through the streets with their rickshas. There was dust in the little towns of Provence where, for the remainder of his days, he might live in the sun and know he was alive.

It was then, when all his arrangements had been made, that he had met Blanche Perrin. She had caught him at the moment of his transformation, a larva struggling from his cocoon of black braid. She had applauded his decision, but disconcertingly admired his courage. Times were hard and, for the free life after which he hankered, money was indispensable. She had ventured to doubt whether one who had so long taken for granted the amenities of civilization would find it possible to play happily in the dust. She had encouraged him to be brave, but had at the same time filled him with misgiving.

At first he had been mistrustful of her vivid interest in his affairs. Was it possible that this magnificent woman with the warm brown eyes was, as she seemed so intoxicatingly to suggest, within his reach? Soon, however, he had dared to put his doubts aside. The repressions of twenty years had broken down. Here was life at last, in sweet abundance. Never again, if he could possess this woman, would he feel that the years had passed in vain.

Sadly and gently, as one who looks into a forbidden paradise, she had refused his offer of marriage. Undoubtedly she had been moved by his declaration; but there were secrets in her life, secrets which he could never share.

Soon with his new-found courage he had forced her to confide in him. Or had she herself made that first move toward telling her tale? He could not clearly remember how it had happened, but he recalled every word of her confession. It seemed that, almost inadvertently and before she had realized their full significance, she had become involved in the operations of a gang of illicit traffickers in narcotic drugs. On the understanding that it would be the last service they would require of her, she had come to Tientsin to organize the transport to Europe of a large consignment of heroin. But her arrangements had broken down. Some of the agents on whom she had counted had been arrested or were in hiding. There was almost no one to whom she could turn.

He had tried to persuade her to abandon the enterprise, but she had regarded it, oddly enough, as her only means of salvation. If she succeeded, she would have satisfied her masters and be quit of them.

His horror upon discovering that she was an international criminal had given place to an overwhelming sense of the risks she ran. He had decided to help her. Or had she appealed to him for assistance? Here again he was not quite clear. They had been talking about his return to France and he had mentioned that his furniture was shortly to be packed for transport. Once he had made up his mind to be useful, she had assumed control and attended to everything herself. She had been very thoughtful and charming about it. He must have as little to do with the operation as possible. He was in no way accountable for it. He was merely helping a friend. He need not even know where or how or even whether the heroin was concealed among his effects. Her agents would call at his house, pack the stuff and deliver it at Shanghai to travel by the first convenient boat. He could then forget all about it till he reached Marseille and all he would have to do on arrival was to claim delivery from the Customs and have the cases brought to his house. Other agents of the gang would then relieve him of any further responsibility. The risks, she had argued, were negligible. As a national of France, returning to his country and carrying a diplomatic passport, the formalities required for the release of his effects would be almost negligible. In any case the drugs would be well concealed. These wicked men knew their business.

There had, of course, been that other small matter which still irked him considerably. Blanche had insisted that, though what he did was undertaken for her sake, he must nevertheless be reasonably compensated for the risk he ran. The money was not her own. It was provided by the men who had inducted her, by what evil means he could only conjecture, into a life of crime. Why not, she had argued, help to relieve them of their ill-gotten gains? The money would be of great use in the honorable future which lay before them.

The last word had escaped her, as it were, unconsciously. She had assumed that they would be meeting the future together and the thought had sufficed to console him for the fact that she had refused to allow their personal relations to become at all intimate until she had, as she expressed it, become a free woman. He had been content to wait. He had been waiting all his life for something like this to happen.

So he had taken the money and thereafter carried out her instructions implicitly. They had involved admitting to his flat three men of villainous aspect. They had dismissed him from the room where his packing cases lay and in the morning they had left him with a brief intimation that the work was done. He had not cared to inquire how exactly they had fulfilled their task. He had preferred to know as little about it as possible.

Then had come that distressful night in Tientsin when, returning to his quarters in the French Concession, he had received her final message. The cases were already on their way to Shanghai and she had been ordered by her principals to leave at once for Marseille. The news of her sudden departure was brought to him by a Korean, who had advised him, as he valued his liberty, to make no attempt to communicate with her again till his effects had been safely delivered at his house in Marseille. There he would receive the visit of one Julius Grauber who would put him in touch with her when the deal had been completed. The Korean had handed him a personal scrawl from Blanche. It begged him to forgive her for leaving him so unexpectedly, but orders were orders and it was better, in any case, to avoid the distress of a hurried farewell.

The shock of her abrupt withdrawal had acted like a douche of cold water on the head of a drunken man. Not less disconcerting was the attitude of her messenger. Up to that time Dupont had not had any dealings with any member of the gang. Often he could forget that he was in any way implicated in their transactions. Blanche had minimized his part in the affair, referring only to the service he was rendering to herself. But Li Zin Ko, the Korean, had made no bones about it. He had come as a man with instructions to deliver and he had assumed that they would be carried out. He had even referred rather pointedly to the circumstance that money had passed.

Gustave Dupont, flying between heaven and earth, was feeling a little sick. He always felt like that when he remembered his last night in the room at Tientsin. Up till then he had seen himself as a friend in need to the woman he loved, but from that moment he had been forced to regard himself, when he had the courage to face it, as the paid agent of a criminal organization, subject to orders from an unknown source and to risks which he had no means of calculating, still less of avoiding. Now he was traveling, obedient and fearful, to meet the consequences of his act. He had lived shut fast within himself through the solitary weeks of his journey from Shanghai to India, from India by air to Bagdad. He must now be flying somewhere above Artes or Avignon. Soon he would come sweeping down to the city of his birth, to await further orders in his shuttered house.

Only one thought sustained him. Somewhere Blanche was waiting to join him. Always he returned for courage to that conviction. These men, moreover, into whose clutches he had fallen, did not make mistakes. They would see him through.

Meanwhile here he was flying alone, for the passengers around him were no longer of his world, incredibly himself and yet not himself, a criminal whose life of ease and innocence would in the weeks to come depend on the cunning and resource of his confederates.

Dr. Alec Ross, leaving his house in Cavendish Square, shook his head at the taximan who sidled toward the pavement in hopes of a fare. It was not yet a quarter to seven and it was no use calling for Marjorie before seven-thirty. Last time he had reached Clarges Street nearly half an hour too soon. Such things made a man look foolish. Foolish, of course, he was where Marjorie was concerned, but there was no need to advertise the fact.

It was a warm evening. Spring had blossomed late but was making up for lost weeks. London was putting forth one of those rare moments when she atones to her people for all her misdemeanors. The air was nimble; the light such as never was on sea or land; the people in the streets, as they battled home with the assistance of the London Passenger Transport Board, wore an air of respite, as though for an hour they had become aware that life was more than a struggle to keep their heads above the industrial waters.

As member of a profession whose chief preoccupation was with the physical accidents and indignities of his fellow men Ross had little time or energy to devote to moral or social problems, but, being of a serious habit, he could not avoid being struck in moments of release by the eternal paradox of Bond Street. His wealthier patients might complain that the country was upon the edge of ruin; no man might sleep quietly in his bed without first assuring himself that the news from foreign capitals was not worse than usual; the Government of the day might be concentrating its energies upon saving the inhabitants of London from imminent death or starvation; indignant orators might refer in and out of season to the circumstance that a large proportion of the population of the British isles was undernourished and overworked; statesmen, according to their place and party, might call upon the pale, pathetic people to save the Empire or express grave doubts as to whether it was worth saving. Bond Street, however, never batted an eyelid. Here was no hint of disaster, bankruptcy or starvation, no suggestion that the present scheme of things was not eternal. Nowhere within a square mile of this sheltered thoroughfare was any symptom of unrest. Such changes as had recently occurred or were in progress in this strange oasis, flourishing amid new and incalculable forces of mind and matter apparently released with a view to its forthcoming destruction, merely seemed to emphasize the permanence and solidity of the established order. New shops, replacing the old ones, held the four quarters of the world in fee with an insolence and profusion that beggared their more humble predecessors; new offices declared with greater emphasis than those they were displacing that big business was unassailable and little business brighter than ever; new blocks of flats offered to tenants, who were presumably able to pay the price, amenities unimagined by those who had contentedly accepted their forerunners. Modern civilization, which in other places might seem a nightmare, was here a fairy tale in which its children implicitly believed.

Every now and then Ross shortened his step or lingered a moment before a florist’s window or a dealer in old masters to ponder or admire, and the paradox came nearer home as he stood on the steps of 31 Clarges Street. Lawson’s house declared the stability of things as they were and would, it was hoped, continue to be. This prosperous city merchant, with his lovely daughter, his well-appointed establishment, his manifest content with a scheme of things which enabled him to secure and to share with her the resources and pleasures of modern life, was a substantial assertion that, in this part of the world, at any rate, not even Jeremiah hand in hand with Cassandra could do more than ruffle the surface of things.

No servants were to be had for love or money, but here was Barton to receive him; trade was dying, but here was a trader who would never feel the pinch; for a person to find in this London wilderness four walls to shelter him was a remarkable achievement, but here on the old chest stood a bowl of roses whose red lights were exquisitely reflected in the polished surface of the ancient wood.

And somewhere upstairs was Marjorie herself, who might wander at will in the enchanted region through which he had just passed and hold it to ransom.

It was then that Ross received the first shock of an evening which, of all evenings, he was never likely to forget. That Marjorie was ready and waiting for him in the drawing room was a preliminary surprise, for it was still only a quarter past seven. But that was as nothing to the effect of her appearance for, without warning, she was changed. She had run suddenly from one extreme to the other. There was no reason of course why she should not paint her face. Come to think of it, it was odd that she had never done so before. But the act seemed in her case to have a special significance. Or was that simply because he had always taken it for granted that Marjorie was different from other girls and that he had never expected to see her conforming to pattern? The result, he admitted, was not unpleasing; the work was well done. Nevertheless he disliked it extremely and it disturbed him profoundly. This pretty creature who waited for him in the drawing room was not the pale elf who had so often come breathlessly into the room, last of the company by never less than ten minutes or a quarter of an hour.

Her style of dress, too, had changed. He seldom noticed such things, but, when a girl who had been willing to wear almost anything confronted you in a pink and silver model that began and ended in unexpected places, the effect was hardly to be missed. A cloak to match lay on the chesterfield under the window.

Her eyes were brilliant, as though they too shared in the transformation. But that must be an optical illusion.

“And usually I keep you waiting,” she concluded for him. “My cloak,” she added abruptly, pointing to the chesterfield.

“I’ve ordered a table at The Ivy,” he said. “They will feed us quickly there.”

Again came that disquieting intimation of change. Marjorie had always avoided the worn coin of good fellowship. It did not easily occur to her to offer drinks between meals and, when it did, she did not offer them in spots.

“I thought you wanted to be going,” he said, watching her as she drew the cloak together.

She looked at his startled face and laughed. He did not like that laugh. There was behind it more than a touch of hysteria.

“So like a doctor. I wasn’t referring to microbes. Other things. Words. And habits. Like to take my temperature? Or feel that!”

She thrust out her hand from the cloak. He took it a little uncertainly. Instinctively his fingers sought her wrist. The pulse, he noted, was thin and irregular.

“Not on your life,” she protested. “What I need is an orgy. You shall pay for the dinner and eat most of it, your little friend being off her food. I have paid already for the show. The tickets are in my bag. It’s that navel and millinery display at the Pavilion. Mostly navel, I understand.”

“Please, Alec, don’t look as if you were holding the baby and didn’t know what to do with it. Mine, I believe.”

Ross came to himself with a start. He had long ceased to notice what was happening on the stage. Each tune seemed exactly like every other tune. Presumably the elaborately organized gestures of the chorus had a significance, but it escaped him. He had lost the thread of the story, if there had ever been one. Now and then he might have smiled, if the jests had been less familiar.

For the first half hour Marjorie had seemed to be enjoying herself and he had respected her assumption that the show was brilliant and amusing, though he shrewdly suspected that the pretence was maintained in order to plague him and that she was deriving considerably more entertainment from a sidelong contemplation of his solemn efforts to appreciate the display than from the thing itself.

But now she wanted to go home. She had not even waited for his answer to her appeal, but was already gathering her cloak about her shoulders. They were in the middle of a row and the singer who seemed to have pleased the audience most in the course of the evening was swinging in three-time to a high note:

He realized that they would not be popular if they broke the spell of this incantation.

A low murmur arose from scandalized members of the audience as Ross, red to the eyes with vexation, struggled toward the gangway.

Marjorie waited for him in the foyer while he recovered his coat from the cloakroom. In the hush that almost audibly fills the corridors of a theater, lying like a shock absorber between the real world outside and the mimic world within, he faced the inevitable question: What had happened to Marjorie? She had summoned him peremptorily to take her out. Her call on the telephone had seemed almost like an SOS. She had eaten almost nothing at dinner. One mood followed another without rhyme or reason. She seemed to have almost no control over what she said or did.

Was all this curious behavior perhaps a pose, picked up from some of the younger set she frequented, who made it almost a point of honor to indulge in a form of exhibitionism which expressed itself in a willful violence of mood and manner? Devoutly he hoped it was only that, but felt that it went deeper. Something was essentially wrong.

She was not in the foyer when he returned. The door stood open. She was standing on the pavement beside the commissionaire. A taxi, flag down, was coming toward them.

Ross gave the commissionaire a shilling and followed Marjorie into the taxi. Almost before it had started Marjorie laid a hand upon his arm.

“Sorry, Alec,” she said, “but I think that last song was too much. I felt all of a sudden that everybody in the world must be mad except you and me.”

“I don’t know. Perhaps I was. There is a certain satisfaction in letting everything go. You know what I mean. Driveling in company without shame. Sniveling one’s poor little heart out.”

“How do you explain it, Alec? All this crooning and swooning. Are we so sheepish about our feelings that we can only bear to see them in the likeness of a dribbling idiot? Say something, please.”

“Too deep for me,” said Ross. “Besides, I’m not worrying about the show.”

“You must help me, Alec. I’m sleeping badly. It’s killing me. I’m just a bundle of raw nerves. You’re a doctor. You can give me something for it. I must have something.”

She was in his arms. There was sheer panic in her appeal. Her hands were grasping his coat, her head lying on his shoulder. He had lost, as the evening went on, his impression of her changed appearance. There was an unfamiliar wave to her hair, her face was transformed in line and color and emphasis. But he had become very soon unaware of the mask which had so startled him at first. This was Marjorie. Child and woman, she looked through her disguise, and how terribly he loved her. It was the woman of whose body he was aware pressing down upon him, but it was the child whom he soothed gently with his hand upon her hair.

“Look, Alec. Heppel’s is still open. Get me something—something to make me sleep.”

“You’re going to be my patient. You may be quite sure that I shall do everything possible.”

The taxi moved on. Ross tapped on the glass screen. The driver shot back the partition.

“Better come to my consulting room,” he said. “I’ve got everything there that we are likely to need. I’ll take you home afterward.”

III

Ross, sitting at the desk in his consulting room, was trying hard to feel as gravely impersonal as his position required. He had tried to impress on Marjorie that she must regard him in that place as her medical adviser and nothing more, but it had been very difficult for him to maintain that pose in the light of the conviction to which he had been driven and which he must now declare. Instinctively he knew that she was waiting for that declaration. She would express indignation and astonishment. He would have to question her closely. She would lie to him, or, worse still, confess everything and try to make him her accomplice. That, at least, was how a patient normally reacted to her doctor in such a case.

To master his feelings he pushed back his chair and walked to the window. How to begin? There was only one thing to do—go straight to the point and get it over. Above all he must forestall any pitiful attempt to deceive him.

“There is no doubt about your case, Marjorie,” he said. “I have come to my conclusion as a medical man, but I am going to talk to you as a friend.” He paused and added with a catch in his voice, “Why didn’t you tell me the truth?”

“You omitted to mention the only fact of importance. You are suffering from narcotic poisoning. What is it? Cocaine?”

“Please, Marjorie. Don’t lie to me. I’m trying to help you. You ought to be thankful that I have discovered it in time.”

She was looking steadily in front of her. Her expression for a moment was stubborn. Then, at last, she faced him.

“Very well, Alec. What are you going to do? Suppose I have taken some of the stuff now and then. I only did it because I was feeling rotten. That is what you’ve got to face. I must have something. I must.”

“Listen to me. I’m going to cure you. But you will have to put yourself entirely in my hands. I think you realize that yourself. Why did you ask me to take you out this evening? Wasn’t it because you wanted me to help you. Wasn’t it?”

He crossed to a cabinet in the corner of the room and unlocked it with a key upon his ring.

He took down a bottle from the cabinet and, from a tray beside it, a small tube with a screw top. He emptied half a dozen tablets from the bottle.

“Why do you ask? I suppose you want to make it impossible for me to get any more.”

“Listen to me, Marjorie. Until I can get this drug out of your system, you are not to be trusted an inch. You will lie to me or to anybody else. You will think nothing of breaking a promise to get what you want. You will pay any price for it and sell the last rag off your back to get it. You will steal the stuff, if necessary.”

“That is what I know of the effects of cocaine poisoning. From whom did you obtain it?”

“It’s no use, Alec. Say it’s from a friend. I can’t very well give her away.”

“Do you know what I ought to do with you?” he continued. “I ought to have you arrested and sent away for compulsory treatment.”

“I simply want you to realize what addiction means. The person who has persuaded you into this habit deserves no consideration. These people can’t even keep their damnable practices to themselves. That’s one of the things we are constantly up against. The addicts to cocaine have a mania for inducing others to join them.”

“No one persuaded me. I’ve told you I was feeling rotten. Besides, Alec, you are going to cure me.”

“Of course. I’ve promised to do so. You can hold me to that promise without asking me to give away my friends.”

He did not speak again during the short drive back to Clarges Street. He was aware of Marjorie, rustling uneasily beside him. She had slipped her hand into his. That gesture, a few hours ago, would have changed the world. Now he could feel it only as a problem. As a doctor he had no illusions concerning the task in front of him. He was in love with a woman who could no longer be regarded as responsible for her own salvation.

“Wait here,” he said to the driver and followed Marjorie up the steps. She turned to him, feeling in the bag for her key.

“Don’t come up with me,” she begged. “I’m safe for the night, anyway.”

“Alec, dear,” she continued urgently. “You said that anything I told you would go no farther. You mean that, don’t you?”

“It won’t be necessary if you keep your word to me. But remember this: if you don’t keep your promise, your father will have to know sooner or later. Think of that, if you should ever be tempted to break it.”

Lawson, reading in the drawing room, heard the taxi drive up to the house. He put down his book and waited.

Half an hour ago he had returned from one of the weekly meetings at the Pie Qui Chante. He was counting the days to his release. A week . . . two weeks. The Titania was already due at Marseille and, if everything went according to schedule, the boat would be in London by the end of the month. Then he would take Marjorie for that promised trip.

That he had been reading the book which now lay open on the table beside him was a pretense of the kind to which he had of late become increasingly addicted. It was like whistling in a dark lane. He wanted to believe that all was more or less as it should be. He refused to encourage an obscure intimation that he was threatened; and, when he did confess to uneasiness of a kind such as he had never felt before, he ascribed it to the fact that he, too, like Marjorie, needed a change. He was tired. He was growing old. His nerves were not as good as they had been.

Why else should he brood so continually on the risks of his present undertaking? He had faced such ventures in the past before without turning a hair. Summers was a fool, but he was a gentleman. Summers, moreover, knew nothing that was likely to be of much use to the Egyptian police.

But Summers had met Cora Robson at Tientsin in the company of Gustave Dupont, and Summers had, of course, been under observation. Suppose that old fox Hammerton should infer a connection? Then, too, Dupont himself was an unknown quantity—an amateur who, if he fell under suspicion, would be quite unequal to dealing with the situation. These, however, were the kind of possibilities which he had confronted time and again without having allowed his thoughts to run round like rats in a cage.

It was usually at this point in his reflections that he would realize, or stubbornly refuse to realize, that, in attributing his uneasiness to what might be happening in Port Said or what might subsequently happen at Marseille, he was merely trying to hide from himself the real source of his misgiving. That call on the telephone from Cora Robson on the night which he had dedicated to Marjorie had seemed like fate knocking on the door. Everything from that moment had essentially changed. He had always assumed that the confidence between himself and Marjorie was unassailable. Oddly enough—very oddly as he was now being forced to admit—he had never regarded her ignorance of his unlawful activities as affecting that confidence. The two compartments of his dual life had been watertight. But on that night, growing ever more fatal in retrospect, he had been unable to placate Marjorie because it had been impossible for him to tell her the truth. That situation must recur. It would be more accurate to say it had become a permanent feature of the landscape. Newman stood perpetually between them. He had entered the house. He sat upon the hearth.

Meantime Marjorie became increasingly a stranger. She saw him but seldom. She even seemed to avoid him. She never told him where or with whom she was passing her time. She was by turns depressed, excited, indifferent, quarrelsome. Sometimes, it was true, she was affectionate, but of all her moods this was the most exasperating. For she assumed in these approaches that he was deceiving her, that she must forgive his deception, that men must be permitted to live their own lives, that she had no right to inquire too closely into his affairs, that she must be tolerant and make allowances.

He heard her step on the stairs. She would have seen his hat and coat in the hall below. She would come in to say good night. He turned expectantly to the half-open door. He heard her pause on the landing. But the steps continued on and up.

She knew he was waiting there. The lights being on had told her that. She was deliberately avoiding him.

He scarcely recognized his own voice. The steps paused. She was coming down again.

He did not yet know what he would say to her. He had called her before he knew what he was doing. He now regretted it. He was in no fit state to meet her. He was feeling hurt and would therefore make a fool of himself.

He did not want to see the look on her face. He knew from her tone that this was Marjorie trying to be kind to her parent.

“What she really needs is a sound whipping,” he thought unexpectedly. Aloud he said, “Tired, perhaps?”

She stifled a yawn as she offered him her cheek. He touched it lightly. For the first time he saw her plain.

“If at first you don’t succeed, try, try, try again,” she responded. “Robert Bruce. Or was it Neville Chamberlain? I’ll have another shot tomorrow.”

She was looking at herself in the Venetian mirror with a critical air of detachment.

“I think perhaps it’s the eyebrows,” she continued. “A trifle too heavy, don’t you think?”

Again that unexpected thought—she ought to be whipped—followed instantly by a vivid sense of her, estranged, tormented, defenseless, in need of his protection.

“It’s not the brown paper parcel, is it,” she said, “but what’s in it that matters.”

“Things are looking up,” he returned evasively. “We shall be able to get away on that trip together very shortly.”

“Poor dear,” she murmured. “You deserve a holiday. This terrible business, at all hours. You will let me know when you can be spared.”

“Nothing much. Just having a nice time with Alec Ross. Poor dear Alec. Love-birds at the Drury Lane.”

Marjorie, having taken her tablets and put herself to bed, switched off the lamp. The window was open and the curtains wide to the street. There was enough light in the room to see by. Propped on her pillows she sat up. To remain in that position, vigilant and ready for anything that might happen, took her back to the time when, as a child, she had often feared to lie down lest she should be taken unawares.

Tonight that mood, outgrown and almost forgotten, was strong upon her. She looked into the corners of the room with the old expectancy. Every shadow was the thing she feared. Every small noise announced its presence.

She knew that her terrors were without rhyme or reason. But it was useless to know things. Indeed her fears were all the more alarming because she had come to realize that they had no source but in herself. What monsters of her own creation might suddenly emerge from some secret corner of her mind?

She had found as a child that the best way to keep at bay the horrors of the night was to concentrate upon the more tangible worries of the day. She had defied her ghosts with efforts to recall that in the morning she would be meeting her governess with a lesson unprepared or that she had not yet confessed to breaking the milk jug, of which misdemeanor the new housemaid was darkly suspected.

Almost unconsciously she now summoned this old habit from the past to save her from the formless anxiety which was keeping her sleepless and alert.

Certainly she had enough to think about. Was she, for example, going to keep the promise she had made to Alec? Her call to him early in the evening had been an SOS. Day by day she had been stealing those little packets from Cora, but never before had she needed them so badly. Abruptly she had faced the fact. She was becoming what they called an addict. She did not know what exactly happened to addicts, except that they ruined themselves in mind and body and perished miserably. That had been difficult to realize, until she had felt every nerve in her body crying out for release. But now she knew and her panic had two faces: she was terrified of being deprived of her drug but equally terrified of the consequences of seeking it. She had turned to Alec on an impulse. She had intended to tell him everything and put herself in his hands without reserve.

That, however, when it came to the point, had proved impossible. Some devil had whispered continually that, if she confessed everything to Alec, he would exact from her precisely that promise which she had feared to give or that he might even feel himself in duty bound to put her under some sort of restraint. Alec was a doctor. It would be his duty to cure her, if necessary by compulsion. Surely things were not as bad as that. She was still able to cure herself in her own time and way.

So she had plagued and evaded him. But Alec had nevertheless discovered the truth. There was humiliation in that, but also there was safety—if she could keep her promise. Alternately she was glad that he knew and furious with herself for having given herself away.

She looked at the clock on the night table beside her. Ten minutes had passed since she had taken the tablets. As yet they had not had the slightest effect. This, perhaps, was one of Alec’s little tricks. He was going to cure her by suggestion. Let him try. She hated Alec. No, Alec was going to save her.

Suppose, however, that all he meant to do was to hold her to her promise and make her suffer. Marjorie smiled, a pinched, unlovely smile. She had not confessed to her source of supply. If Alec tried to deceive her with his mock tablets, she would be justified in deceiving him. Two could play at that game.

But Alec, of course, could tell her father. He had assured her that her secret for the moment would go no farther. Doctors were like priests. They were not supposed to reveal to anyone what they learned in the consulting room. But Alec would get round that little difficulty. He could always say that he had discovered this thing for himself and that he had felt bound to inform her father as a friend of the family.

If her father had taken her away for a holiday, as she had begged him to do, she would never have fallen into this predicament. What had happened to make them so unhappy? Nothing was right. She did not really believe in that unknown woman who had called him up on the telephone. She kept up that pretense only to make him mad. But something stood between them.

Why was her father so set upon separating her from Cora Robson? Cora had hinted at jealousy. But was there something, perhaps, behind all that? Those two shared some secret together and her father might be afraid of its being discovered.

Marjorie stirred uneasily amongst her pillows. Suppose her father knew that Cora herself was taking drugs. Of course. That would explain his anxiety to keep them apart. Or would it? Cora was in no danger of becoming a drug fiend. Cora hardly ever took the stuff herself. She just left it lying about in her bureau, not even under lock and key. She had not even noticed that every now and then some of the packets were missing.

Marjorie sank back into the pillows. She was feeling calmer now. Her fears had vanished. Her vigilance relaxed. Her thoughts were becoming detached, as it were, and indulgent.

Poor father! If he had indeed discovered that Cora was taking drugs, how terribly shocked he must have been. And how unhappy. That would explain why they had agreed to separate. She must be very kind to father. She must try to recover the old confidence. They would go away together. All would yet be well.

Marjorie closed her eyes. Was she sleeping yet? There must have been something in those tablets, after all.

She was feeling now at peace. Soon she would be feeling nothing at all. Two men whom she loved were unhappy. She must find a remedy for that. She must think of something. She would think of something now if she were not so terribly tired.

Alec was putting her to sleep. Alec was a dear. She would keep her promise to Alec.

Gaston Bonnetier, Customs Inspector at Marseille, left the office of the Commissioner of Police in a pleasant glow.

That was what the Commissioner had said. It filled a man with a lively sense of his worth, responsibility and place.

Gaston Bonnetier carried his burden well. His melancholy black eyes suggested a firm, ascetic resolution. His long straggling mustache did not at all conceal the firm set of his mouth and the pugnacious jut of his lantern jaws. His stature commanded the pavement; his impressive solidity was compact of clean muscle and supple thews. His face, however, suggested nothing of his present exaltation. It was proof against all illumination. Even in moments of conviviality it looked like a face that brooded upon some secret sorrow.

He turned a corner of the street. The French Republic, represented by a ponderous but lively female in stone, was waiting for him in the little square. His eyes rested with complacency upon her graces. She would never lack for zealous service while her sons might come honorably to rest upon that ample bosom. He almost saluted as he passed. He was going about her business and she might have every confidence that he would discharge it worthily.

The internal glow in which Bonnetier had left the comparatively cool office of the Commissioner of Police yielded to a more external warmth by the time he had reached the customs warehouse. The Provençal sun was climbing high and had dispersed already the freshness of the morning. The Inspector, baked and browned from a child upward, was prepared to acknowledge that it was hot and he was not at all sorry to turn into the cool shed where he was, in the words of the Commissioner, to assume his responsibilities.

Three stalwart men in blue blouses, each with a cigarette hanging from the lower lip, detached themselves from the wall. To Georges he handed a paper.

“Consignment from the Titania,” he said. “Came in yesterday. Furniture. Dispatched by Gustave Dupont. To be stored until called for by same. Lead me to it.”

Bonnetier in his hours of ease was something of an orator. He loved the impressive word and sentences that clanged their way to an inevitable but striking conclusion in the metallic idiom of the South. But on duty he affected the short phrase, incisive, vigorous and executive. Men in action did not waste their words.

He waited calmly while Georges unlocked the door of the inner fastness wherein goods as yet uninspected and undeclared awaited their release. The internal glow was again predominant. The Commissioner of Police had urged discretion. These simple souls—Georges, François and César—were there only to obey instructions. Not for them the arcana of high policy. They would never know by what means and methods the Republic protected herself against the machinations of wicked men who would despoil, corrupt or betray her. These secrets belonged exclusively to those on whom rested a burden of unusual responsibility and peculiar knowledge.

Bonnetier returned in fancy to his late interview with the Commissioner. The Commissioner had treated him, so to say, as a member of the Inner Cabinet. The Commissioner had received a confidential telegram from Port Said. Bonnetier had never been to Port Said. He did not need to go. He knew the world. He had traveled its four corners in imagination. Cargoes and manifests and bills of lading called up endless pictures of its diversity. Port Said. Very hot. Lots of sand. Brown men in colored robes. Big ships passing along the canal. Built by a Frenchman. Stolen by the English. Bazaars. Veiled, mysterious women. Women, unveiled and less mysterious, hanging out of windows. Tourists. Big hotels. Trams. Assassinations. Knives flashing out suddenly in narrow streets between blind walls with little doors to them.

And from this romantic city of his vision had come a message and this message had been sent as the result of a still more romantic message from Shanghai. Junks. Sampans. Strips of cloth with strange characters upon them hanging from shops and stores. Coolies. Rickshas. Municipal policemen. A little piece of France tucked away somewhere, with cafés and gendarmes. A larger piece of England, with policemen in helmets, afternoon tea and Union Jacks. Always a larger piece of England wherever you went.

Gustave Dupont had come from that distant part of the world. He had sent home his furniture from Tientsin. He had believed himself to be safe from inquiry or observation. But though a man came from the ends of the earth, he could not escape the vigilance of the French Republic represented at that moment by Gaston Bonnetier, Inspector of Customs at Marseille, entrusted with full powers and assuming his responsibilities.

Georges, François and César, of course, would not know why they were being required to open and inspect the property of a homing citizen of France. They were no more than small cogs in a vast machine, of which only the chosen few understood the workings and purposes. Nor would they even know what they were likely to discover.

Drugs. The Commissioner of Police had very definite opinions on that subject and Marseille was a key position. They came, it was said, from the Far East and found their way to European ports and thence to the cities of North America. There were indignant American gentlemen who had publicly described Marseille as a plague spot. Bonnetier shook his head. The internal glow was at white heat. His native city had been libeled. The libel had to be refuted. To that refutation he had contributed in no small measure and would again contribute.

An hour later Gaston Bonnetier, behind the locked doors of the inner shed of the warehouse, surveyed disconsolately the twenty to thirty open cases which cumbered the center of the floor. Everything had been searched. He had impressed upon his three men the necessity of being as thorough as was consistent with a minimum of respect for the property of a suspect. Their technique was adequate and yet nothing had yet been found.

The internal glow had suffered sadly in the process. The Commissioner had made no secret of the fact that he expected results. He had even said that the inspection might have far-reaching consequences and redound to the credit of the Service. It looked as though the Commissioner was going to be disappointed. The Commissioner was as reasonable a man as any person in authority was ever likely to be. He could not justly complain if an inspector of customs failed to discover contraband which was nonexistent. But he would be disappointed, and important people, when they were disappointed, however just and reasonable they might be, did not always inquire too nicely into the reason. They even tended to behave at times like the tyrants of old who whipped a messenger who brought them news which was not to their liking.

Gaston Bonnetier had now to take a decision. End up on the floor beside him stood a grand piano. It had not yet been removed entirely from its case. Obviously there was nothing in the case itself except the piano, the piano legs and the pedals, which had been unscrewed and laid upon the top.

The three men waited expectantly. They did not know how much was at stake, but they had become infected with the zeal of their superior and were obviously eager to complete the good work.

For a moment Bonnetier had qualms. Full powers were all very well, but to force open a perfectly innocent looking grand piano without the consent of its owner and merely on suspicion was a decision that required uncommon courage. Bonnetier had also to overcome a rooted inhibition of long standing, for in his early youth, before taking service with the Customs, he had been attached to a music warehouse, where he had acquired a veneration for the noble instrument which now stood threatened with violation. It had been his privilege to supervise its delivery to fine houses and concert rooms. He had even acquired the tuner’s craft and regarded such employment as in the nature of a sacred mystery. To suspect a grand piano of containing the wicked wares of a smuggler was as though a devout Catholic should suspect poison in the chalice.

Bonnetier jerked his head. His lips set in a firm line. He must assume his responsibility. There flashed once again before his eyes visions of distant cities, of messages that passed between them, of the whole romantic process of detection that had culminated in this supreme operation with which he had been entrusted.

The men bent to their task. There was something sacrilegious in the gesture with which César flourished his chisel.

One by one the legs were laid upon the bench. Bonnetier, feeling indelicate, examined them carefully.

“Gently there,” he exclaimed, “lay the case flat on the bench before you open it up.”

The three men lowered their burden. Bonnetier nodded his approval and held out his hand to César.

This was work which could not be left to a journeyman. The task, moreover, should be performed with respect—not callously or, worse still, with an impious satisfaction.

Gently, as one who might be removing the cloak of his beloved, Bonnetier prized away the enveloping boards till at last the piano rested on the bench, fully revealed with its keyboard toward him. He stood silent a moment, chisel in hand. This was going to be even worse than he had expected. No Frenchman can look unmoved upon the finer work of the Maison Pleyel, and this was an unusually handsome specimen executed in mahogany, lovely in grain and finish.

Bonnetier handed back the chisel to César and felt in the right pocket of his tunic. From this he produced a little leather case containing a set of skeleton keys. One by one he tried them softly in the lock. At last to his infinite relief the wards went sweetly over and he could raise the lid of the keyboard without violence or mishandling of any kind.

Bonnetier looking down at the keys was overwhelmed with ancient memories. He stood once again in the old warehouse; the clean smell of the felts was in his nostrils; on the wall in its remembered place was the familiar motto: Once the Piano of Chopin—Now the Piano of Cortot.

Instinctively his fingers sought the chords used by piano tuners in all times and places, his ears aching for the full, fat resonance which is their peculiar secret. He struck. He struck again.

III

“Would you believe it, sir? Not a sound. So, of course, I lifted the top and looked inside. Everything but the metal frame had been removed. Never have I beheld such an infamy. How anyone could have had the heart to do it!”

Monsieur Martin Lafarge, Commissioner of Police at Marseille, a neat little man with lively brown eyes, which could be merry or stern or shrewd as occasion required, smiled up at the big man whose recital had ended upon so graphic a note of indignation.

“You seem uncommonly upset about that piano,” he said, “but I’m glad you found the stuff. You’ve brought along a sample, I suppose?”

Bonnetier drew from his pocket a small packet and laid it on the table. The Commissioner opened the packet and shook a few grains of crystalline powder onto his hand.

“We will have this analyzed,” he said, “but it’s almost bound to be heroin, coming from that part of the world.”

“Repack everything as and where you found it, including the piano. Leave all in the warehouse under seal and wait until this man Dupont comes to claim it. Let me know when he turns up and I’ll come down for the inspection.”

“I shall look forward to that meeting,” he said. More truculently he added, “How shall you handle him, sir?”

Gustave Dupont watched uneasily the tall, big man with the drooping mustaches and the lantern jaws. He had steeled himself, not without difficulty, to meet the inevitably queasy moment when he would have to produce his papers and claim his effects. Hot coffee liberally laced with cognac had temporarily removed a sick feeling in his stomach and brought him to the customs shed with a minimum of perturbation. But now, again, he was beginning to feel as though his inside had been removed and stuffed with straw. He had hoped that the official to whom he handed the necessary documents would simply ask him to comply with the tiresome formalities inseparable from the simplest transactions with the authorities of his native land. But it was apparently not to be quite so easy. The official had disappeared into some inner fastness, to return a few moments later with this fierce, melancholy, unpleasant individual whose appearance and manner sounded an instant warning that something was wrong.

The man was looking at him now. There was an almost vindictive expression in his eyes and a gleam of satisfaction which looked even through the permanent state of dejection in which he seemed to exist.

Dupont, passing into the shed, made a brave effort to pull himself together. There was not the slightest cause for alarm. Of course these people were expecting him. He had written to them announcing his arrival and asking them to have things ready. We are waiting for you. . . . Come inside. The man was being polite and helpful. He could not avoid having a face which suggested that, if he offered a man a drink, there would probably be poison in it.

Sitting on the customs bench in the shed was a neat little man with lively brown eyes. He rose as Dupont entered with his guide and came toward them.

He was standing beside Dupont, looking more than ever like an executioner. There was almost a suggestion that he should be leaning on an ax.

But Dupont was concentrating his attention upon the neat little man with the lively brown eyes. He was nicer to look at. On the other hand he was a commissioner. Commissioner of what? Apparently he was also a thought reader.

“Martin Lafarge, Commissioner of Police,” he said with a smile, presenting himself.

Dupont went suddenly cool. He was that kind of man. Anticipation unnerved him; the moment found him ready to face the music, as though he had exhausted all his terrors in advance. This pleasant little man was a commissioner of police and he had introduced himself.

“We have received the letter announcing your arrival, Monsieur Dupont,” continued the Commissioner. “In view of your statement that you are traveling with a diplomatic passport——”

“A mere formality, Monsieur Dupont. I was about to say that, since you are traveling with a diplomatic passport, I thought it as well to be here to expedite the proceedings.”

“Nothing very formidable,” the Commissioner assured him. “The regulations are strict and our admirable customs officers are apt to be zealous. As a French citizen in course of repatriation I have asked the Inspector here to show you every consideration and to release the whole consignment. He insisted, however, that one case should be opened purely as a matter of form. You have nothing to declare?”

“Nothing whatever.” He paused and added, “But is there not perhaps a misunderstanding?”

“I understood that, as a French resident abroad returning to France with my personal effects, my baggage would be exempt from examination.”

“As an act of courtesy, perhaps,” he agreed, “and in normal circumstances.”

“Nothing personal,” he said, “but you come from a part of the world in regard to which extreme vigilance is necessary. Our Customs have received special instructions in the matter. Of course, if you wish to make a formal protest——”

“I’m afraid its effect would be to stimulate the zeal of my friend, the Inspector,” he said softly.

Dupont looked sharply at the Commissioner. Appearances might be deceptive. There was something a little feline about this smiling little man.

Dupont started to follow the two officials to the far end of the shed. His knees were trembling. The Inspector opened a door and all three passed into an inner room.

Dupont looked about him. Three stalwart men were standing beside a bench which ran down the center of the floor. In front of them was a medley of cases.

Dupont surveyed his property. He had last seen those cases in his flat at Tientsin. His unpracticed eye could see no sign of their having been in any way misused. There were thirty-five in all. Thirty-five chances to one against detection. No, that was not right. Those miscreants might have distributed their wares among his effects promiscuously. Something might be found in any one of them.

Then suddenly, Monsieur Lafarge, Commissioner of Police, went soft in the head. That, at least, was how it seemed at first. It began with his smiling at his friend the Inspector and saying to him, as though it were the greatest joke in the world, “I don’t think we need trouble about any of these, Bonnetier.”

To which Bonnetier, catching the infection, opened his lantern jaws and, with a grin which gave his mouth the appearance of a coral cave with stalactites and stalagmites of limestone formation, replied, “Of course—if you say so, Mr. Commissioner.”

“We will release all your personal effects without further formality on one condition,” went on the Commissioner.

Dupont felt his spirits rise. If this was madness, it would appear to be an infection designed by providence.

“That you play us a tune on your piano, Monsieur Dupont,” responded Lafarge.

With a dramatic gesture he waved aside the three stalwart men who were standing by the bench. They moved to right and left and Dupont found himself gazing at his piano. It had been taken from its case and the keyboard was exposed.

At a signal from Bonnetier one of the three men pulled forward a case, so that the performer might sit to the instrument.

As in a dream Dupont obeyed the imperiously inviting gesture of the neat little man with the brown eyes. These people were not, perhaps, as mad as they seemed. They were of the South, where people had little sense of a fitness of things. Dupont was from the North where it would never have occurred to anyone in his senses that to sit on a packing case in a bonded warehouse and to play the piano was an appropriate method of complying with the customs regulations.

Bewildered, but with an increasingly happy conviction that he was about to play himself into security and peace, he raised his plump white hands and crashed down upon the opening chord of the prelude to the Meistersinger.

Martin Lafarge looked across his desk at the victim of his recent pleasantry. He was inclined to be merciful. The success of his little farce had exceeded all expectations. The Commissioner was not a cruel man. He had not had any wish to play cat and mouse with the pathetic small person in the braided coat. He had merely wanted to know to what extent this most unlikely trafficker in dangerous drugs was consciously implicated. It had occurred to him that Dupont had quite possibly been tricked quite innocently into allowing his piano to be used for unlawful purposes and the experiment whereby he had put this matter to the test had been conclusive. Lafarge was now satisfied that, whatever the relations of Dupont might be to the gang employing him, he had certainly been totally unaware, on sitting down to his piano, that there was anything wrong with it. The poor little fellow, taken completely by surprise, had fainted clean away on the improvised music stool, and it had been necessary to revive him with cordial liquors before it had been possible to bring him to headquarters.

“But I assure you, Mr. Commissioner, I had no idea that my piano had been tampered with. I could never have permitted it.”

Lafarge hesitated a moment. There was a cool mind at work behind the lively brown eyes. This man, tactfully handled, would talk. He might even be persuaded to do more than that.

“I accept that assurance, Monsieur Dupont,” he said. “But the fact remains: over two hundred kilograms of heroin, more than sufficient to meet the medical requirements of this country for several years, have been found in your personal effects. Two courses are open to you. You may persist in your statement that you have no idea how this consignment came to be where we found it—in which case I shall report the case for inquiry and prosecution in the courts. Or you may decide to be quite frank with me and help me to trace this seizure to its origin. In that case we shall make it our business to see that you are put to a minimum of inconvenience.”

Dupont shuffled miserably in his chair. His supple fingers were twisting upon his knees.

“Perhaps it will make it easier for you if I tell you something first,” went on the Commissioner. “In Tientsin you were observed in the company of an Englishwoman who went under the name of Blanche Perrin. I will set you an example in frankness. We know little or nothing of Blanche Perrin, except that her acquaintance was claimed, when in your company, by a notorious trafficker in drugs who has since been arrested at Port Said. We are looking for that woman and we mean to find her.”

The Commissioner looked across the desk. “My God,” he thought, “the poor little man is going to faint again.”

“Courage, Monsieur Dupont,” he continued, “I am not trying to frighten you, but I want you to understand the position. Pull yourself together and listen for a moment while I venture to indulge in a little flight of fancy.

“I will suppose that you met this woman for the first time in Tientsin. She is described as attractive. Men will commit strange follies for an attractive woman. I will imagine that she persuaded you to allow certain persons to have access to your personal effects. I will not go into the question whether you knew for what purpose this arrangement was made. That is a matter for your own conscience and for the judicial authorities, if this affair should be placed in their hands as it stands at present. But one thing is quite evident. The man who contrived to conceal this consignment of heroin in your effects will also have arranged to take charge of it on arrival here in Marseille. That can scarcely be dignified by the name of an inference. It is selfevident common sense. I, therefore, like yourself, Monsieur Dupont, have two courses before me. I can arrest you here and now, declare the seizure and supply the examining magistrate with the necessary evidence for a prosecution. In that case I prevent this international gang, into whose hands you have fallen, from concluding successfully an operation from which they are hoping to make anything from twenty to fifty million francs clear profit. The alternative is to hold my hand and to invite your co-operation, in which case I think we stand a very good chance of discovering the principals and breaking up this illicit organization entirely.”

Lafarge ceased. He had spoken smoothly, deliberately and at some length to give his listener an opportunity to collect his faculties, and, by the time he had finished, he was pretty sure of the result.

“There’s only one thing likely to hold him back,” reflected the Commissioner. “Perhaps I’d better take up that point at once.”

“I feel sure,” he continued aloud, more smoothly and deliberately than ever, “that you did not become involved in this transaction for merely mercenary motives. I have, in fact, taken the liberty of inquiring into your financial situation. You were in no desperate need of money. I therefore infer that you were influenced first to last by your feeling for the mysterious lady in the case. I shall not be so indelicate as to inquire into the nature or depth of that feeling, more particularly as you will already have realized for yourself that you are unlikely ever to see her again.”

The Commissioner paused. He was apparently absorbed in the examination of a thumbed and ragged map of the world pinned on the opposite wall, but the angry flush that swept into the face of the man sitting under the map was carefully noted.

“But of course,” responded Lafarge, raising his eyebrows as one who wondered at the simplicity of an honest soul. “We have considerable experience of the methods of these people. The principals never appear more than is absolutely necessary. You have served this woman’s turn. She has disappeared. That is the end of the story, so far as she is concerned.”

“Unless, of course, she has arranged with you to look after the consignment at this end.”

“In that case, Monsieur Dupont, you will, as I have said, never see the lady again.”

“I do not know whether you realize,” he continued, “what exactly the illicit traffic in narcotic drugs means for its unhappy victims. I have here some photographs. This one”—he handed it to Dupont as he spoke—“is a picture, taken at Harbin by an American visitor, of one of the refuse dumps of that city. You will see that among the refuse are certain bodies. They are the bodies of addicts. You will note that their clothes have been removed. They were presumably taken by other addicts who hoped to sell them for a few dollars so that they might obtain another shot or so of the drug which would in a few days bring them in their turn to the same locality.”

“Those,” he said, “are photographs of heroin addicts taken at some of our own hospitals. I have here some even more striking pictures supplied by my friend and colleague, the Director of the Narcotics Bureau at Cairo.”

“You will also find there a photograph of the members of an international gang which we successfully ran down a couple of years ago. Your friends and partners, Monsieur Dupont. Not an attractive group.”

The Commissioner, with his eyes fixed once again on the map of the world, decided that he had said enough.

He rose from his desk and walked to the window, turning his back on Dupont and looking into the street. For a moment there was no sound in the room. From outside came desultory footfalls upon the pavement below, the clamor of a passing tram and the mournful hooting of a ship from the harbor.

“Very well,” said Dupont. “I am in your hands. What do you want me to do?”

Half an hour later Dupont, still sitting in the office of the Commissioner of Police at Marseille, was listening to the instructions which Lafarge and Bonnetier, who had been called into conference, were imparting for his guidance and comfort. It had been made clear to him that, as an active and courageous ally of the police, he might render services so valuable that his temporary lapse from civic virtue would fall back into oblivion. He had been hustled and tricked into evil courses. He knew now what those courses implied in human suffering, not to mention the destruction of his own dignity and peace of mind, and he was as zealous to revenge himself upon the false creature who had played upon his weakness at a dangerous age as he had been ardent to win those perilous favors which were to have restored to him the lost pleasures of his youth.

With a growing sense of release, as of a man waking gradually from a bad dream, he had told the Commissioner of the instructions which he had received from the Korean agent at Tientsin; how he was to take delivery of the cases and keep them in his house till he heard from one, Julius Grauber, who would arrange for the subsequent disposal of the contraband.

Thereupon the Commissioner had unfolded to him a plan and invited his co-operation.

“I don’t disguise from you, Monsieur Dupont,” the Commissioner was saying, “that the course we suggest involves some personal risk to yourself, but I assure you that this circumstance will not be overlooked when your case comes to be finally considered, and every precaution will be taken to secure your safety. First of all”—he turned to Bonnetier—“we have already taken steps to prevent its becoming known that your effects were examined. You can rely on your men, Bonnetier?”

“Absolutely. I made it clear to them from the first that nothing was to be said about this affair to anyone on any pretext whatever.”

“You will accordingly take delivery of the cases and wait for this man Grauber to turn up. You will tell him, when he calls, that you had no difficulty whatever with the Customs and you will allow him to take possession of the drugs. Almost certainly, of course, he will try to prevent you from finding out what he means to do with them, but it is vital for us to know. We shall be prepared to intervene at any moment, but you must do your best to obtain for us as much information as possible before we are compelled to act.”

“That,” he continued, “is the first stage, during which it is essential that you should not arouse in Grauber the least suspicion that he is under observation. Then, when Grauber has taken possession of the drugs and they have been allowed to go forward in accordance with our scheme, I shall have you informed regularly of his movements and instruct you from time to time to keep him in view. You are our only point of connection between Grauber and the woman you met in Tientsin. I am hoping that Grauber will sooner or later get in touch with her and it is important that you should be at hand for purposes of identification. I have a feeling that she must be pretty near the top of this organization.”

“An Englishwoman, is she not?” he observed. “That is amusing. So far the English slate has been most remarkably clean. It will be a fine surprise for our colleagues at Scotland Yard when we lay this little packet on their doorstep.”

His smile deepened and Bonnetier, in sympathy, broke into an unusually fine geological display.

Cora Robson, waiting for Marjorie to join her in a cocktail, stood beside the window of her sitting room, looking down into the street. It was her odd habit to concentrate her faculties by dispersing her attention, as though her mind, refusing to advance directly upon its object, preferred to come upon it suddenly round the corner.

It affected now to be interested in the progress of a promising affair between a maid from the house opposite and a chauffeur who, despite the conspicuous livery which declared him a slave to the doubtful taste of his employer, was evidently a man of judgment and enterprise, for the girl was both pretty and hard to please and he was quite obviously pleasing her enormously.

Cora smiled down upon them indulgently, but, though they had her blessing, she was thinking of something else; and suddenly her mind came round the corner, as aforesaid, and she saw clearly what she must do.

For several weeks now she had allowed Marjorie to filch from her those little packets of doom. Hell knows no fury like a woman scorned. Cora had rubbed salt into her wounds, feeding fat her grudge against the perverse little chit whom she held responsible for the breach between herself and Stephen, and she had deliberately encouraged that dreadful inertia which had allowed her to stand quietly by while the girl destroyed herself.

That afternoon, on receiving from Marjorie an announcement that she was coming to the flat, Cora had done some hard, clear thinking. She hated Marjorie and there was a devil in her which would gladly have seen Marjorie destroyed. That same devil had chuckled somewhere down below whenever she had missed another bundle of the white packets from her drawer, and she had squared her conscience by arguing that, though she would never have put them deliberately into Marjorie’s hands, she was in no way called upon to prevent the girl from taking them. Fate was playing her game. She had not invented this evil thing. It had just occurred, and she had only to sit still and let events take their course.

So whispered her familiar from below. These, however, were cowardly evasions. Either she wanted this thing to happen or she did not. If you saw your enemy about to step under a bus, and let her do it, you were just as much responsible for her death as if you had pushed her deliberately into the gutter.

“No,” reflected Cora, as the chauffeur below, taking his leave, touched his cap to the pretty housemaid, “this can’t go on. It’s as though I saw a child taking down a blue bottle labeled poison from the shelf and allowed her to drink it.”

Uneasily she wondered how deep was the mischief. The cocaine habit, as she knew, could be acquired with a devastating rapidity. She herself was immune. She took what she wanted and when she wanted it. But there were others who behaved almost from the first like predestined victims. Marjorie had been more than usually violent and capricious of late, but that might simply be Marjorie. Once her supplies were cut off, the girl would have to pull herself together. She would have to face some pretty bad quarters of an hour, but had only herself to blame.

Cora moved from the window and entered her bedroom. From the drawer in her dressing table she removed a small bundle of white packets secured with an elastic band. Locking the drawer, she carried the key away with her. She returned with the packets to her sitting room and put them safely away in her writing desk. She was locking the desk when the bell rang. Marjorie was a little in advance of her time.

Cora Robson looked across at Marjorie, huddled upon the chesterfield and sipping her cocktail.

“The trouble with father,” Marjorie was saying, “is that he will insist on keeping his poor old nose to the grindstone. He seems to think that if he were to stay away from the office for a week we should be completely ruined. I have been begging him to come away for a holiday, but it’s always tomorrow and tomorrow. Never today.”

Cora nodded expressively. She had as yet hardly uttered a word. Marjorie was in the loquacious mood that had alternated of late with fits of impenetrable silence. This afternoon it seemed as though nothing could stop the flow.

“But why am I telling you all this?” continued Marjorie. “I’m always forgetting that you must know him far better than I do. But perhaps he never allowed his work to come between himself and you, so you never had occasion to notice his devotion to business.”

“I wouldn’t say that, my dear. Your father’s business often had a way of intruding at unlikely moments.”

“Would you believe it, Cora, not so long ago, just as we were settling down to one of our pleasant evenings by the fireside, he must needs answer the telephone and go rushing off to deal with some crisis or other. The odd thing is that I really believe him when he assures me that duty calls.”

“Perhaps I oughtn’t to tell you this, but, on the night I’m talking about, duty called in the shape of a female at the other end of the wire.”

“I don’t really believe that there’s a woman in the case. Father doesn’t like women. Not really. He was extremely attached to you, of course, but generally speaking he thinks that women are a nuisance. Yet I could have strangled that female on the wire.”

She jumped up from the chair and wandered restlessly about the room. Cora watched her quietly. She was fighting a growing conviction that, at last, she was sorry for the girl. Marjorie had talked incessantly for an hour, blundering from point to point, scarcely aware at times of what she was saying. Once before, as though drawn against her will, she had wandered to the bedroom door, but she had returned to her chair and the interminable monologue had continued.

This time she was not going to return. Cora could feel the lure, almost as though it whispered along her own veins. Marjorie was facing her now.

“I must be going,” she said. “But first to powder the nose. Do you mind? No, don’t come.”

She vanished into the bedroom. Cora sat still in her chair. She heard the rattle of a comb on the glass top of her dressing table and then the faint sound of a drawer pulled to the point where it resisted. Then came a noise of objects shaken, to be followed, quickly, by the purr of drawers opened in turn.

After what seemed an age, Marjorie was at the door again. Cora feared to look at her.

“Well, my dear,” the tone was falsely bright, and casual, “we’ve had a lovely talk. When shall I come again?”

“Soon please,” responded Cora, rising from her chair. “Find what you wanted?” she added involuntarily.

She looked toward her visitor at last and was shaken by what she saw. The girl was fighting bravely, but in her eyes was an expression almost of panic. There was no blood in her cheeks and she was breathing fast.

“No harm done,” she protested inwardly, “but the little fool is in a bad way. I suppose I shall now have to keep an eye upon her, talk to her if necessary. Rescue work.”

“As for Stephen,” she continued to herself, “I shall settle my account with him in some other way.”

III

Marjorie, turning the pages of the book she had discovered that afternoon in the Charing Cross Road, was beginning to feel discouraged. She had bought it at a venture. The Universal Pharmacopoeia. With an Appendix for Practising Physicians on the Writing of Prescriptions. By Anthony Burton, M.D. She had found what she wanted, but she had still to make up her mind whether and how to use it.

She set down the book on her writing desk and allowed her thoughts to wander. She had promised Alec to take nothing except from him. She had kept that promise. She intended to keep it. But there was only one way to be safe from those moments of panic which, time and again, for no ascertainable reason, sent her distracted. They rose upon her like dark water from some hidden source. There would come an abrupt premonition from within of dangers and distresses without a name, as though the springs of life would run dry and fail, as though the walls of her room were closing about her and she would be held forever captive and starving.

Could she but know that there was a remedy at hand, she would be immune from these terrors or meet them as illusions of the spirit. She had come to regard those little white packets, filched from her friend, as such a remedy. She did not mean to use them, but she must know that they were accessible.

Sitting at her desk she recalled the moment when she had tried the drawer in Cora’s dressing table and found it locked against her. She had felt like a creature fighting for breath, on whom the last stilling weight had been laid, or as one who had dived into a deep sea and coming up for air had been dragged back under the surface.

No, she told herself; he would not understand. Nor would he trust her with the means of salvation for which she craved. Could she trust herself? Might she not, when the fit was on her, break her promise and seek again the complete release from her anguish which the drug had instantly afforded her on previous occasions? Alec would never permit her to take such a risk. She must take it for herself.

The more practical question remained. How was she to obtain what she wanted? Should she confess to Cora her desperate need? Cora, like Alec, would never understand. Why, moreover, had Cora locked her drawer? Had she, perhaps, discovered that some of those precious packets were missing and did she intend to guard in future against their removal?

Marjorie smiled bitterly upon these reflections. She knew that beyond the more superficial reasons she gave for not resorting to Alec or to Cora was the same deep reluctance she had always felt about confessing to any living soul the terrors that had afflicted her from childhood. They belonged to a part of herself to be forever hidden from the world.

She turned again to the book on her desk and took from her bag that lay beside it the slips of paper which she had taken that afternoon from Alec’s consulting room—three or four leaves torn from the pad on which he wrote his prescriptions. This was going to be a difficult task. It was only too likely that she would make some silly mistake which would give her away. But the risk had to be faced.

She had learned from a careful study of Dr. Burton’s Universal Pharmacopoeia that the drug she needed was described as cocaine hydrochloride. The Appendix for Practising Physicians gave her, not only the abbreviations commonly used, but a model formula. Lying beside the book on her desk, moreover, was a signed prescription for a harmless sedative which Alec had given her, during her convalescence, to be made up by the chemist.

Marjorie bent to her task. She spoiled two of the precious slips, but her skill with the pencil stood her in good stead, and within a quarter of an hour she sat back more or less satisfied with the result of her labors.

Toward six o’clock that same evening Marjorie stood a moment in front of Perkins in Piccadilly. She had come to that establishment by force of habit as a regular customer.

She had paused for reflection at the moment of entering. Where are my brains? Where are my brains?

It was a question which returned now like a refrain whenever she set out to think connectedly about anything. It seemed as though she were incapable of concentrating upon more than one item at a time. She would get one point quite clear and then suddenly see another point, till then ignored, which destroyed it utterly.

All her faculties had been bent upon forging the prescription, and now here she was about to present it to the polite young assistant who knew Alec and knew her father and would expect to enter her purchase upon the family account.

She turned from the door, ascended Piccadilly, crossed the Circus and wandered at a venture into Coventry Street.

Here she found a shop that would serve her turn, less garishly hygienic than most in a neighborhood where the wares displayed seem to have been exposed in order to frighten the bashful away.

The young man to whom she handed the prescription looked upon her kindly. He wore a white linen jacket and had a clever face. Marjorie was accustomed to being looked upon kindly by young persons of the opposite sex. So far, so good; but he was looking less kindly upon the slip of paper.

“Doctor’s signatures usually are,” she retorted. “They like to wrap themselves in mystery.”

The young man was looking at her, not less kindly but with an interest which was disconcerting.

“Excuse my asking,” responded the young man, “but this is an unusual prescription and we have to be careful, you know.”

He examined it again. Marjorie waited with the air of one who expected and allowed for a certain slowness of uptake in one so young and inexperienced.

“Do you mind,” continued the young man at last, holding up the slip of paper between finger and thumb, “if I show this to the manager?”

The young man shook his head gently, as one who would commit himself to nothing.

“And you have to be careful,” said Marjorie, nodding at him compassionately.

“I shall not be a moment,” said the young man and retired to some inner fastness.

But he was gone for more than a moment. Marjorie looked uneasily about the neat little shop. The young man had evidently understood the prescription. She had therefore made it out correctly. But it was unusual. He must therefore show it to the manager. What did this mean?

For a moment she was tempted to leave the shop. She had forged a prescription and the prescription was now under inspection by an expert. And the expert was taking a long time about it. What was going on behind the glass door through which the young man had disappeared? Would they be sending, perhaps, for the police?

Marjorie pulled herself together. The young man was probably making up the prescription before he returned, if it had to be made up. Perhaps she would have to sign a poison register, or some such formality. She knew nothing about the law relating to such matters. How ignorant people were about the simplest things in life!

The glass door opened at last. The young man came back to the counter. He looked as kindly at her as ever, but his face was grave.

“I’m afraid we cannot make this up for you,” he said, handing her the slip.

He was so obviously sympathetic and anxious to be of help that she found herself saying, “Then what am I to do?”

“The best thing you can do,” he said politely, “is to take the prescription back to Dr. Ross so that he may deal with the matter himself.”

Dr. Alec Ross stretched his hand across the desk in his consulting room and removed the telephone receiver.

His mind was still on the case with which he had just been dealing and for a moment he listened indifferently. Suddenly his face changed.

“A prescription bearing my signature,” he repeated. “Would you please describe to me the customer presenting it?”

For a long moment there was silence in the room except for the clucking of a voice at the other end of the wire.

“Yes,” he said at last. “I know the lady in question. . . . No, please don’t do that. . . . Yes, rather a painful case and I hope you will leave it in my hands. . . . If you will be so kind. . . . Yes, refer her back to me and warn her as discreetly as you can on no account to present the prescription elsewhere. . . . Of course I assume full responsibility and will deal with the matter at once.”

But for the grace of God and the kindness of an unknown chemist’s assistant Marjorie would by now have been under arrest.

He looked at his watch. Marjorie, if she went straight back to Clarges Street, would not be home for twenty minutes or so. Meantime he must decide what he was going to do.

Marjorie had broken her promise. She had done so in spite of his threat to tell her father if she did not implicitly follow his instructions. He tried not to consider what she had done from the moral point of view. She was not at the moment responsible for her actions. Still less would he allow himself to dwell on his personal failure to hold her true to her word. He must consider the case purely from the professional angle. Medically this last desperate expedient simply showed that her condition was more serious than he had suspected.

Physically the addiction symptoms were not sufficiently marked to account for so complete a loss of self-control. The case was pathological. It had some deep-seated psychological origin with which he was not competent to deal. It was, in fact, just one of those cases to which his friend Dr. Furness Wright had been devoting himself with marked success.

But first he must see Marjorie herself. Every nerve in his body shrank from the interview, but there was no escape.

He returned to his desk and touched a button. From the laboratory adjoining a serious young woman in overalls, test tube in hand, appeared in answer to his summons.

“Carry on, Miss Lattimer,” he said. “I shall be away for the rest of the evening on an urgent case.”

Ross, standing on the hearthrug in Marjorie’s drawing room, looked down at the flushed face pleading up at him from the low chair.

“I never intended to take the stuff,” she continued. “I only wanted to know it was there. I get so horribly frightened.”

“You placed yourself in my hands,” returned Ross. “That should imply absolute confidence. Yet you conceal from me your symptoms and, instead of coming to me for relief, you go out and look for a remedy yourself, forging my name and exposing yourself to a criminal prosecution. Do you realize, Marjorie, that if the chemist to whom you presented that slip of paper had happened to be a little less good-natured you would now be under arrest? Most men in his position would have jumped at the chance of earning credit with the authorities.”

“Sorry, Alec, if I seem to be flippant. I’m only trying to keep my spirits up.”

“What was the use? I knew you wouldn’t let me have what I wanted. You wouldn’t, would you, Alec? Or would you?”

She was not looking at him, but her tone was urgent. She rose from her chair and took him by the arm.

“I should certainly never put that stuff anywhere within reach of you,” said Alec firmly. “You say that you never meant to take it. You only wanted to know it was there in case. Can’t you think of me in the same way? When you begin to feel, as you put it, horribly frightened, won’t you try to convince yourself in future that you have only to come to me or ring me up on the telephone?”

So far she had avoided looking at him, but now her eyes were fixed upon him in a way that made it difficult to continue. They seemed to be reading the thought which he was trying to conceal even from himself.

“No,” he said, “this lies too deep for me, especially as I now know that you have no real confidence in my ability to help you. But listen to me, Marjorie. You do not really need this drug. You just happen to regard it as a means of escaping the panic which overcomes you without any visible reason. But you will never escape it until we have traced it to its source. I cannot do that for you. But I know someone who can.”

“No,” she said, “I’m not going to lie down on a sofa and try to remember what it felt like to be born into the world.”

“If you refuse to follow my advice, I shall as a medical man recommend your father to have you put under restraint.”

“Rather than see you in the dock as a person charged with breaking the Dangerous Drugs Regulations.”

“Only a moment ago you were asking me to assist you in breaking the law. It is a criminal offense to be in unlawful possession of narcotic drugs.”

“Surely you must see that I cannot allow you to incur such terrible risks. I offer you the possibility of a cure, not merely of this partly imaginary craving, but of the terrors to which you have been liable since you were a child. Don’t you realize that I cannot possibly leave you to your own devices? Either you must do as I tell you or I must ask your father to look after you instead. This last escapade of yours was infantile—the sort of silly trick to which you will again be driven if you are permitted to act for yourself.”

“There was never the faintest chance of its coming off. You didn’t even know that cocaine is never given as a prescription. It is used by doctors for certain specific purposes but there’s not one of us would dream of putting his name to the slip of paper which you handed over the counter this afternoon. If I hadn’t interceded with the young man to whom you presented it, your father would be at the police court at this moment offering bail.”

Somewhere below a door was opened. Steps sounded on the stairs. Marjorie stiffened to attention. That would be her father coming up.

Dupont preceded his visitors into the room on the ground floor of his house in Marseille where the bulk of his furniture had been deposited. The shutters were closed and proof against sun or moon. The naked bulb in the ceiling, when he switched on the light, showed dim and yellow to eyes which came to it fresh from the staring sunshine outside.

Julius Grauber and Benito Martinelli were already looking about them at the cases. Dupont, who had for several days been awaiting the arrival of Grauber, had steeled himself to meet something uncommonly sinister. But neither Grauber nor his companion was outwardly formidable. Grauber was large, but his bulk was generous rather than menacing, suggesting a lover of good things. His graying hair curled back from a red face softly molded—snub nose, rounded chin, the contours fleshly and smooth. Martinelli, presented as being privy to the enterprise in hand, was tall, elegant and suave. He looked as though he had come straight from a hair-dressing saloon where he had been persuaded to sample everything.

“Nothing examined and no questions asked. Was that how it was?” demanded Grauber.

“Just so,” returned Dupont. “Where would you like to begin?” he continued. “There are some other cases in the room adjoining.”

Grauber rippled his fat shoulders. The gesture seemed to set in motion an indeterminate series of undulations.

“Hear that, Benito?” he asked. “The tried motto of the house. The less one knows, the more to be trusted.”

Dupont gave a sickly smile. That joke seemed to follow him about. He decided to show intelligence.

The two men fell to work. Dupont, watching them, noted uneasily that Julius Grauber was in no great hurry. First he produced a slip of paper from his pocket and studied it carefully. Then, systematically, he examined each of the planks in the casing before removing it. Once he turned abruptly upon Dupont.

Five minutes later the piano had been uncovered and laid flat upon some of the other cases. Dupont produced a key from his ring. The piano was unlocked.

Grauber rippled again. He sat in front of the instrument and ran his hand over the silent keys.

He rose from the narrow packing case over the edges of which his flowing buttocks hung like melting snow from a housetop.

He raised the lid. One by one some twenty sealed linen bags were removed from the interior. One of the seals, Grauber noted, was slightly damaged. He examined it minutely.

Dupont, to hide his growing uneasiness, turned away, only to find that the Italian was also staring at him. The Italian had expressive black eyes. Was it because they were unusually close together that he looked so suspiciously upon the world?

“I valued that piano,” he said. “Why, in God’s name, must you choose that of all things as a hiding place?”

“Compensation for damage,” he said. “You’ll be buying a better one when the deal is completed.”

He paused upon an exclamation from Martinelli who was gazing into the empty interior. The Italian bent over the edge and retrieved the stub of a cigarette. He handed it to Grauber.

“Maryland, if I’m not mistaken,” he said. “All the way from Tientsin.”

Grauber smiled. “You haven’t one about you, by any chance?” he continued affably. “I could do with a smoke.”

Julius Grauber looked across the table at his associate. The sun was hot on the street outside, but the Café des Marins, behind its bead curtains, was shady and cool.

“But we’ve nothing definite to go upon,” continued Grauber. “The little man was nervous, but that was only to be expected. You can’t be sure that those planks had been removed, and the seal on the bag might easily have been damaged in transit.”

“Isn’t it a little odd that a fellow who insists on smoking French cigarettes in Tientsin should go unprovided in Marseille?”

“Straws, perhaps,” said Grauber reflectively, “but all blowing the same way.”

“Three possibilities, Benito. First: all’s well and we’ve got the jitters. Second: the police have opened the piano and, in the hope of leading us on, have allowed Dupont to take delivery without letting him know anything about it. Third: Dupont has been squared and is working in with the authorities.”

“Either we go on with it, Benito, or we call up London for instructions. I’m not going to step out on my own responsibility, and it will be time to communicate with London when we know better how we stand. Dupont, of course, must be watched and the house picketed while we are at work. We shall soon see how the land lies and, if Dupont is playing false——”

“The Chief,” he concluded, “bars murder and sudden death, but I’ll wring the little blighter’s blasted neck.”

III

Gustave Dupont, waiting alone in the empty house, called to mind, for the comfort he so sorely needed, the reassuring words of Commissioner Lafarge. He had called on that gentleman immediately after receiving the first visit of Grauber and Martinelli. Lafarge had been brief and firm. Grauber would be under constant observation. Dupont himself would be under police protection. He had only to allow Grauber and his men to deal with the heroin in their own time and fashion. He was to report progress from his house by telephone as and when it seemed necessary to do so.

Dupont had described in detail to the Commissioner his first interview with Grauber. Even the small incident of the cigarette was mentioned. Dupont had given lively expression to his fears and misgivings, but Lafarge had made light of them. Grauber, of course, would be on his guard. For that reason it would be well, the Commissioner had said, if Dupont were henceforth to make no further visits to the police. He was to use the telephone and to behave, in short, as though every move he might make would be observed and reported to Grauber.

Dupont had unpacked a few chairs, a divan and a table. He had installed himself in a small room off the hall which was to be his study. The room was still shuttered and looked cheerless enough under the harsh light of the bulb screwed provisionally into the ceiling. The sole object which brought solace to his vigil was a telephone receiver perched on the mantelpiece. Here, at least, was contact with the forces of law and order.

A bell shrilled suddenly in the back quarters of the house. He started from his chair. These would be the men whom Grauber had that morning instructed him by telephone to await.

He opened the door of the house and blinked in the strong sunlight. In the street stood a delivery van and on the doorstep a man in a blue blouse with a vast sheet of paper in his hand.

He produced a grubby pencil, which he licked and handed to Dupont. Dupont signed the paper and returned it. Meanwhile other men in blue blouses were lifting down cases from the van.

Five minutes later Dupont was alone again. Three additional cases now stood in the big room beside the piano. Grauber would not be calling till after nightfall.

Dupont therefore was free to leave the house. But first he must inform the police of this new development. The Commissioner would want to know that these cases had arrived. He would also want to know what they contained. Dupont looked doubtfully at the chisel which lay upon the top of the piano beside him. Distastefully he picked it up and bent to his work.

The lid of the case came up easily. Dupont pushed aside a thin layer of shavings and extracted from the interior a cylindrical tin of condensed milk, Bébé Brand.

Gustave Dupont came to himself with a start to find himself lying on his back staring up at the bulb in the ceiling. He looked at his watch. Three o’clock in the morning.

He looked with repulsion at the ash tray from which a half smoked cigarette from his packet of Maryland was poisoning the atmosphere. Since the incident of the stub found in his piano he had carried them ostentatiously and even compelled himself to smoke one occasionally.

Two hours before, he had thrown himself down on the divan to rest. His thoughts, swimming round like goldfish in a bowl, had grown weary and he had dozed off into an uneasy slumber.

Grauber and his men, including the Italian Martinelli, were meanwhile at work. They had not wished him to see what they were doing.

“Never try to know more than is necessary,” Grauber had said to him. “Better for us. Better for you.”

Dupont had wondered uneasily, when the men had started, whether Grauber would notice that one of the cases containing the condensed milk had been opened. He had been careful to remove all traces of his surreptitious inspection and apparently he had succeeded.

So, for two nights now, he had kept uneasy vigil in the study, sleeping when he could, but mostly alert and listening to the sounds which came to him now and then from the adjoining room where the cases lay or from the kitchen where Martinelli was installed.

Grauber had shown no signs of suspicion or misgiving. He had, on the contrary, been noisily affable, though yesterday evening the conversation had taken a bad turn when the big man, with Martinelli to support him, falling into a mood of reminiscence, had referred with venomous satisfaction to measures taken from time to time by members of the organization to deal with informers and such-like persons. Dupont had steeled himself to listen without visible alarm and had even expressed a hope that double-dealers were punished as they deserved.

“Make your mind easy about that,” Grauber had said. “The Chief has a kind heart, but business is business. No unnecessary suffering. Quick and painless. Those are my methods.”

Dupont had smiled sickly upon this outbreak. His instructions from Lafarge were to betray no alarm, whatever happened, to be puzzled if the bandits were puzzled, to insist on his rights as a confederate and to find out as much as possible concerning their intentions. These recommendations he had obeyed as consistently as his nerves and wits permitted.

Dupont, on waking from his doze, had barely concentrated his faculties when he realized that what had roused him was a sound of steps and voices in the hall. He sat up and thrust his feet to the floor. Grauber and his men had presumably finished their work and were about to leave. There was infinite relief in the thought. Tomorrow the cases would be removed. He would no longer have them under his roof as a constant reminder of the predicament in which he had become involved. Grauber had even undertaken to relieve him of the dishonored shell of his grand piano.

The door opened before Dupont had risen to his feet. Grauber stood on the threshold. Just behind him was a man he had not yet seen. He was dressed like any of the casual laborers who worked on the quays.

“My friend here,” continued Grauber, indicating the man behind him, “who is in charge of our pickets, has called to inform me that he has reason to believe that this house is under observation by the police.”

To his surprise, now that the crisis was upon him, Dupont felt suddenly cool and ready.

“But that is impossible,” he protested, “unless some of your own people have fallen under suspicion.”

“You are absolutely sure that your effects were not examined by the Customs.”

“I can only tell you that I was allowed to remove them without question. You saw the cases for yourself exactly as they arrived and, so far as I know, exactly as they were packed in Tientsin.”

“On several occasions,” went on the man, “I have noticed a customer at the stall in conversation with the proprietor.”

“Exceptionally fond of oysters,” responded the man dryly. “He has passed along the street half a dozen times since midnight. He is waiting perhaps for the stall to open at daybreak.”

“Well,” said Dupont turning back to Grauber, “what are you going to do?”

He decided to throw a fit of panic and indignation. The panic was natural; the indignation must be equally convincing.

“You’ve got me into this mess,” he shouted, “you with your blasted efficiency.”

“There may be nothing in it,” he grumbled. “In any case we can only carry on as we intended. Our work here is finished and my men will be calling tomorrow for the cases.”

“Not so fast,” said Dupont who had now worked himself well into his part. “First there are one or two small matters to be settled. I was to receive a certain sum for services rendered.”

Grauber pulled an envelope from his pocket and threw it down on the table beside him.

“It was further understood that I should be put in touch with the lady who arranged this business with me in Tientsin.”

“I know nothing about that,” he protested. “In any case it’s up to the person in question. If she wants to continue the acquaintance, you’ll doubtless hear from her in due course.”

“It was clearly understood,” insisted Dupont, finding it expedient to show some feeling in the matter, “that I should be told when and where it would be possible for me to meet her.”

“When this stuff is safely landed where it means to go,” he said, “I don’t say but what you may be hearing something. But I wouldn’t count on it. Leastways, not till then.”

Julius Grauber and Benito Martinelli strode off together into the gray dawn. At the end of the narrow street into which they had turned, a neon light glimmered above the doorway of an all night bistro still strong enough to compete with the coming day.

They entered the little bar and ordered hot coffee. Grauber mechanically started to devour rolls and crescents from a basket at his elbow.

“Benito,” he said, “I don’t like it. I’ve a feeling that the police have got us on the lead.”

Grauber considered the point. A remote judicious air of speculation spread on his broad face like rings in a pool.

“I don’t believe he’s got the guts,” he said at last. “Besides, he’s still hankering after our Blanche. You noticed?”

“The police may have put him up to that. They’re as eager to find our Blanche as he is. He may have thrown that fit of passion just to impress.”

“Whether Dupont is working with the police or whether the police have found the dope and are letting him think that his stuff was never inspected doesn’t affect our business one way or the other. Do we carry on or do we get away? The police will continue to hold their hands till they realize that we are onto their game and are not going to lead them any further. Then they will pounce. For the moment we are safe, but, once that stuff goes off to London, we shall have to make ourselves as scarce as icebergs in Africa. Then, too, if the police are wise to this business, they will follow it through to London. That wouldn’t please our folks at headquarters. They might prefer to abandon the dope here in Marseille and cut their losses.”

Grauber, in the throes of his argument, looking rather like an octopus performing Swedish exercises, seized another roll from the basket. Then he looked at his watch.

“Our men won’t be picking up the cases till six tomorrow,” he said. “There is still time to telephone to London.”

“And that,” he said, “is what I’m going to do. These waters are too deep for me.”

Lawson hung up the receiver and sat back. The news from Marseille was bad and he would have to take an important decision within the next few hours. Yet he was feeling an odd relief. His mind, preoccupied with the problem of his relations with Marjorie and increasingly tormented by their estrangement, turned with alacrity to deal with a practical emergency in which he might forget emotional complications for which he had so far failed to find a solution.

Tasker had asked to see him immediately. The matter was urgent and, after some hesitation, Lawson had agreed to go, for once, to the office at 13 Stonewall. He had arranged with Tasker to be there at five o’clock.

Tasker on the telephone, guarded in his references, had nevertheless made it clear that Grauber, in Marseille, was very possibly under observation by the police. Grauber was not easily rattled. The mere fact that he had appealed to London for instructions showed that the position must be serious.

Lawson rose and walked to the window. Outside, the traffic was waiting in close formation, helplessly blocked. His mind, as so often now, slipped aside from the particular to the general. The long lines of drays, busses and vans, arrested in what should have been a free thoroughfare of a reasonably ordered city, seemed typical of the confusion that sat at the heart of all human effort. The instinctive elation of the realist called to grapple with a concrete issue faded. The issue was not as simple as it seemed. Not long ago he would have had no hesitation in making up his mind. Newman would have cut his losses and turned with confidence to frame new plans. But personal considerations now intruded. Lawson had set his heart on the prompt and successful conclusion of this particular scheme. Not only was it the most important individual transaction of his career; he had begun to think of it as a necessary prelude to his holiday with Marjorie and her removal from Cora’s influence. He had even found himself regarding it as a farewell performance. He would bring this last cargo safely to port, pocket his share of the profits and equip his floating factory, with a view to handing it over as a going concern to Tasker. Newman would disappear and Lawson would then be free to enter upon a new life with Marjorie in which there would be full confidence between them.

He turned away from the window and came back to the desk. Giving the familiar shrug, with which he had so often consigned Lawson to oblivion, he tried to dismiss these personal considerations. He must face this situation in the old singleminded fashion. In fairness to his colleagues he must not allow himself to take a decision involving danger and even ruin for them all.

For the first time in his life he was going in person to 13 Stonewall. He would go there as George Newman to meet his confederates. Lawson, respectable merchant of Cheapside, with one fair daughter whom he dearly loved, must not be permitted to intrude.

He sat down again at his desk, reached for the telephone and dialed the number of Cora Robson’s flat in Hertford Street.

Cora Robson looked impatiently up from the book she was reading. Then she glanced at her watch. It was not yet three o’clock, still two hours before she was due for the conference at 13 Stonewall.

The bell was ringing again. The maid presumably was out. Who was this importunate visitor?

Cora threw down the book and went into the hall. She had always intended to have a judas fitted to the door so that she might inspect her callers before admitting them. The only other method of avoiding disturbance or boredom was to sit tight and take no notice. But it required considerable strength of mind to ignore a doorbell or a telephone. One never knew what one might be missing.

The invitation, after a chill moment of hesitation, was cordial, and Cora, by the time she had led her visitor into the drawing room, was prepared to make the most of the rather striking coincidence that Marjorie, whom she had not seen for several weeks, should have chosen to call on her unexpectedly on this day of crisis. Marjorie tore off her hat and flung it down on the sofa.

She inspected her visitor minutely. Marjorie had returned to nature, but there was something about her appearance which suggested that she had done so from neglect or indifference rather than policy. Her cheeks were chalk white; they had lost their sheenlike pallor. Her eyes were without luster and her hair was lank. She looked, Cora reflected, like a doll which had lain discarded in an attic after the children had grown up.

“You knew, of course, that I was stealing those little white packets,” Marjorie continued unexpectedly.

Cora was thinking rapidly. Should she confess? She looked down at her visitor. Marjorie was lying back in the chair, her eyes half closed. Cora was about to answer but, before she could say a word, Marjorie continued:

“Don’t say anything till I’ve finished. Just let me ramble on. I’m used to it, you know. It’s part of the treatment. I lie back for hours on a sofa saying the first thing that comes into my head. It was Alec’s idea. . . . Dr. Furness Wright. . . . You know the sort of thing. Trying to remember what it was like to be three years old. It might work, of course, if I believed in the old man. But he looks like a stockbroker. Rather a nice stockbroker and grows nicer every day. Meantime I’m what they call ‘resisting’ him. . . . All at sea and horribly frightened at times. What I really need is some of the stuff to fall back on, only just in case, you know. But Alec won’t hear of it. I don’t know what the old man expects me to do. Stroke his bald head and announce that I’m prepared in future to hang upon his lips.

“I nearly got myself into a mess the other day. Forged a prescription. But the chemist rang up Alec. Then, of course, Alec became executive. Swore he would tell father if I didn’t do exactly what he suggested. Handed me over to Elisha. You remember those children in the Bible. Go up, old bald pate. And a lion came along and ate them all up. Or was it a bear?”

I am not responsible for this. The girl was never quite normal. I did not give her the stuff. I am in no way to blame.

“I do it rather well, don’t you think?” she continued. “Just sit back and let the mind wander as it pleases. One thing leads to another and the results are sometimes rather quaint.”

“Elisha knows all about you, of course. I tried to keep all that to myself, but the old man is quite extraordinary. A question here and a question there, till you find yourself walking down the garden path. You turn a corner wondering what on earth is coming next and there he is, large as life, with a smile on his face, for he always gets there first. Escape me never. . . . I used to find it annoying, but that wears off in time. Nice to meet someone you know in a strange place.

“We have the oddest games. He says blue to me. Then I say forget-me-nots, Mediterranean sea, sapphires, smoke from the chimney, Persian cat, father’s second-best suit or any old thing that comes into my head. And he takes it all down in a book.”

“He reminds me of a fortuneteller who used to read the cards for me years ago. You know the sort of thing: there’s a dark lady in your life. I did not tell him very much—only that you took the stuff yourself, just to keep going, and left it lying about. But suddenly I found myself thinking: Did she know that I was pinching it? Then, of course, I began to wonder: Did she do it on purpose? Like Eve with her little bit of fruit. Adam must have some, too. Anyway, my dear, it doesn’t matter very much. You found out at last and then you locked the drawer.”

“Do you know what Elisha wants me to do? He hasn’t dared to suggest it, but I know it’s in his mind. He wants me to tell father. But that, of course, is impossible. Father has his secrets, too. Secret for secret is only fair, but it’s hide-and-seek in the dark we’re playing now.”

III

“So you see,” concluded Marjorie a little later, “I shall keep my promise to Alec. But you, my dear, must help me to carry on. I don’t intend to take the stuff. I only want to know that it’s there.”

“You should do as Alec suggests. Tell your father. You’ll never have any peace till you do.”

“Washing your hands of me,” she cried. “But you are responsible. You knew I was taking the stuff and you allowed me to do it. I haven’t been sitting under Elisha for nothing. You knew what was happening. Careless of you to leave your little pick-me-ups lying about. But people can be careless on purpose, without admitting it even to themselves. You might just as well have pushed the dope into my hands. You know that well enough. You know it. You know it.”

Marjorie had risen from her chair. She stood affronting Cora with her monstrous accusation, monstrous but true. Then, abruptly, her manner changed. She took Cora’s hand and rubbed it against her cheek.

“Sorry, darling,” she murmured. “Why do I say these things? Is it second sight or what? It’s all so clear to me. I was beastly to you in the beginning and you wanted to pay me back. But now we are going to be friends.”

Marjorie was rubbing the cheek under her hand like a cat begging for a saucer of milk. Cora shivered uncontrollably. This was worse than anything yet. Should she give in to the girl and let her have what she wanted? That, at least, would ease the situation, give time to consider it carefully. No, Marjorie must tell her father. No matter what came of it.

Cora had once stood on a cliff listening to waves slapping into a cave beneath. Somewhere down below a tide of panic was flooding her consciousness, but her thoughts in the upper air were clear and free to move.

“Pull yourself together,” she said sharply. “You surely don’t imagine that I shall trust you with that poison in your present state.”

Suddenly Cora knew what she must do. It was as though an object seen through field glasses had come into focus at a turn of the screw. The shock left her weak and tremulous. She walked down the room to recover her poise. Her mind, when she turned back to Marjorie, was made up. The motive underlying her project, so abruptly clear and decisive, was for the moment hidden. Was she being driven to complete her revenge? Or did she sincerely see in this inspiration, to be obeyed at once and without question, a means, the only means, of saving the girl? Two birds with one stone, perhaps. In any case the solution imposed itself upon her as inevitably the sequel of all that had gone before. It had the flawless symmetry of a work of art.

“I am giving you the name and address of a man who has what you want. You may call on him at six o’clock this evening. Not earlier or later. And you may mention my name.”

“There you are, my dear. That’s the big man who supplies the dope—as much of it as you are ever likely to want—if you can pay for it.”

Marjorie took the paper and read: “Mr. George Newman, Thirteen Stonewall, London, E.C. Four.”

Marjorie, leaving the library at Harrods an hour later, looked at her watch. Not yet five o’clock. It could hardly take an hour to reach the East Central district of London. This, however, was a busy time for traffic and crossing the city always took longer than one expected.

A taxi was coming down the Brompton Road. It was driven by an elderly man with a white beard. Marjorie beckoned him to the pavement and consulted the slip of paper.

“I want to go to Thirteen Stonewall,” she said. “Do you know the address?”

“That would be off the Commercial Road down by the docks,” said the old man.

“I want to get there at six o’clock. Drive me where you like till then. Down by the river, perhaps.”

The old man’s white tufted eyebrows expressed astonishment. The eyes beneath them had already taken in every detail of her face. He would have said she was looking for trouble and prepared to pay for it.

Marjorie sat back in the taxi. Her interview with Cora had left her wonderfully at peace. She had got what she wanted and she had unburdened her mind. This new gift she had of seeing into people was going to be useful. She owed it, of course, to Elisha. He was trying to make her understand herself, a process which was making it comparatively easy to understand everybody else. Elisha was an old dear. Perhaps, if she put herself into his hands without reserve, and allowed herself to go right under, so to speak, he would cure her, as Alec hoped and insisted. Cure her of what? For the time being she hadn’t a misgiving in the world. But these moments of tranquillity were rare. She must always be ready to meet the enemy who had yet to be driven from the ambush where he lurked in some dark recess of the spirit.

The driver was running down the Mall and so, by way of Charing Cross, to the river. They were cruising now along the Embankment. The tide was at flood, a long row of heavy barges breasting it to the sea. Here were light and space. There was rhythm upon the water, a whisper in the air of things remote from the clamor and routine of the city. On the farther shore the buildings stood up serene in the free, luminous air.

Who and what was Mr. George Newman of 13 Stonewall? Somewhere down in the golden haze from which the tide was flowing to meet her this man was waiting to receive her, a purveyor of unlawful merchandise, an illicit trafficker in drugs, modern equivalent of the apothecary to whom veiled ladies resorted in times past for deadly philters or magic potions. He seemed now as remote from the commonplace bustle of the town as from the sunbeam caught in a green tangle of trees in the Temple Gardens.

Two magnificent horses pulling a large dray were standing by a drinking fountain, their muzzles deep in the trough. Almost she could feel the cool water sucked smoothly down into their shining bellies. Their heads came up; golden drops fell onto the road from their dripping mouths. Their muscles tightened as their harness took the strain and they moved off down the street.

The sun was shining full upon a cloud from which the light poured down in a yellow flood upon warehouses on the farther bank of the river.

“So that’s the position, George, and Grauber is waiting at the other end of the wire.”

Tasker sat back. His plump white hands hovered a moment above his tie and fluttered thence to the table. He had said what he had to say and it was now for the Chief to decide what they were all to do.

Lawson turned first to Cora. She had as yet made no comment on the news from Marseille.

“Grauber isn’t easily flustered,” she pointed out. “He wouldn’t be pressing for instructions if he thought it reasonably safe to go forward. You should accept the warning and leave the stuff where it is—at least for the moment.”

“You asked for my opinion, George. Tell Grauber to abandon the dope and see what happens.”

“That is what Newman would do,” she added unexpectedly, “and he wouldn’t have asked my advice about it either.”

Lawson turned to Tasker. His face was expressionless. The shot had gone home, but he was not going to show it.

“It’s up to you, Chief. I can’t say I like the look of things. Grauber, as Miss Robson says, is not one to jitter. He strongly suspects that he is being watched. The police may be acting on information received, and, for all we know, Dupont may be working with them. One has to be prepared for anything these days.”

“Dupont,” muttered Lawson and darted an accusing look at Cora, “always the unknown quantity.”

Cora shot back at him, “Losing your nerve, George, and blaming it on the staff.”

Lawson rose from his chair and walked to the empty hearth. He turned and faced her.

“I’m blaming nobody. I’m merely stating a fact,” he said shortly. “I know nothing of Dupont except what you have told me about him.”

“He has as yet no reason to believe that I’m not waiting to reward his fidelity,” she pointed out. “Double-crossing, moreover, is a dangerous game. Not in his line of country.”

“The police may be working on their own, without his knowledge,” put in Tasker.

“You agree with Cora that the whole thing is too chancy and should be dropped?”

“Very well,” said Lawson, squaring his shoulders. “Get Grauber on the telephone and tell him to go forward.”

“I do say so. I’ve set my heart on this deal. To drop it at this stage would be an abject admission of failure and we might as well retire from business altogether. We’ve faced bigger risks in our time. If the police, as Grauber suspects, are onto this consignment, they will follow it through to London. But it doesn’t matter two hoots whether they pounce upon it here or in Marseille. We shall take every possible precaution. Our agents will be warned to make sure at every stage that they are not under observation. If at any moment we discover that the police are acting on information received, all further activities may then, but not till then, be abandoned. Newman of Thirteen Stonewall will disappear and we shall have to change our name and headquarters.”

He looked in turn at his confederates. Tasker was tapping nervously on the table with his pencil. Cora was looking serenely unconvinced.

“You know best,” said Tasker, “but it brings things uncomfortably near home.”

“You make out a pretty good case,” added Cora. “If it convinces you——”

“And there’s a point you seem to have forgotten,” supplemented Tasker. “If the police are onto this business, the Titania, which will be bringing the stuff from Marseille, will be under suspicion. What are we to do when she reaches London? The manufacturing equipment is ready to go on board. What are we going to do about it?”

“All or nothing,” he said decisively. “We shall make no change whatever in our plans till we have definite evidence that the police are wiser than we know.”

“Look at it this way,” he argued. “If the police are onto this deal, Newman loses the game and must shut up shop. But why assume the worst before it happens? It makes no difference whether the dope is intercepted in Marseille or in London. We can liquidate and disappear at any moment.”

“There’s only one thing which could bring it effectively nearer home,” he continued. “The police, if Dupont is working in with them, may send him over to London. It would be fatal if he should happen to run into you.”

“The smallest place in the world in which to meet the last person on earth,” responded Lawson.

“Now you mention it, George. Blanche Perrin—Cora Robson—Stephen Lawson. It’s a straight run.”

“But this is going to be a very personal question,” she added. “I think we had better discuss it some other time.”

“No wish to intrude,” he said. “I’ll get hold of Isaacs and communicate with Marseille.”

Ten minutes later, the time being twenty minutes to six, Lawson was still sitting in the office with Cora.

“Talk till you’re blue,” she was saying. “This is all wrong. George Newman would have cut his losses and started again.”

“The amount doesn’t alter the principle. You’ve never yet taken an unnecessary risk and you’ve never worried till now about losing your money. Newman was always confident that the next deal would be bigger than the last. Newman looked to the future. ‘Run back to jump farther’ was his motto. Newman——”

“As mutton in an icehouse,” she confirmed. “It’s Lawson who wants to complete this business at all costs, and I shouldn’t be surprised to hear that he was intending to retire on the proceeds.”

“One thing at a time,” said Lawson. “Let’s get this matter straight. Then we’ll talk about the future.”

“I’ve got it straight enough. This is to be George Newman’s farewell performance. Large profits and a quick return. Never mind the risk.”

“I’m not so sure. Hasn’t it occurred to you that Henry and I are much more likely to be caught than Stephen Lawson? There’s precious little evidence to connect our Steve with George Newman of Thirteen Stonewall.”

“There’s an answer to that,” said Lawson, “and I was coming to it. The biggest risk, not for me only but for us all and for you especially, is your presence here in London. If Dupont should happen to come along with the police and identify you as Blanche Perrin—well, I needn’t dwell on the consequences.”

“I’m talking now for your good. I should be sorry if anything nasty happened to you.”

“And very nice for Stephen. Exit the dark lady and he lives happy ever after with his darling daughter.”

“That comes well from you. For strictly private reasons you’re jumping at the chance of booking me a passage to the never never land and you call it business.”

“There’s no point in your staying on here in London. It’s not fair to the others.”

“He shall have no cause to regret it, if only you will do as you’re told.”

Cora took up her hat from the table. She stood in front of the mirror on the wall.

“I’ve made an appointment for you, Stephen. Here in this office at six o’clock.”

III

Cora Robson, on emerging into the narrow street, looked to left and right. It was all but six o’clock. Two children were playing in the gutter and a small group of loafers were standing outside the Carrier’s Arms, a small public house at the open end of the thoroughfare.

The conference at 13 Stonewall had confirmed her purpose. Stephen intended to be quit of her. Of the man she had loved nothing remained. He could not even think straight. Lawson imagined that he could be as easily rid of his second self as of the woman who had so disastrously complicated his existence. He was about to discover his mistake.

Somewhere round the corner a taxi hooted. Cora slipped into a doorway a few yards from the public house and waited.

The front of the taxi came slowly into view. It was driven by an elderly chauffeur with a white beard.

She made an effort to keep calm. This was destiny at work, as neatly and efficiently as in a novel by Thomas Hardy.

A slight figure emerged from the taxi. The chauffeur pointed to the name of the street exhibited on the wall of the public house. His fare handed him a note and waited for the change. The driver, as drivers do, turned out all his pockets to find the necessary coins. His fare, with a gesture of impatience, told him apparently to keep the balance. He touched his hat and began to turn his cab for the return journey.

The face of Marjorie was clearly to be seen as she turned into the street. She took half a dozen steps and looked back. Apparently she was telling the taximan to wait, for he drew his cab in close to the pavement and lit a cigarette.

Marjorie passed within an arm’s length of Cora hiding in the doorway. She had taken a slip of paper from her bag and was looking for numbers on the houses as she passed.

Cora moved forward impulsively. The gesture was instinctive and she corrected it instantly. She had started this thing. It was too late to call it off. She did not want to call it off. Father and daughter would meet. It was the only possible solution. It was as just and as inevitable as a law of nature.

She watched Marjorie’s slow progress down the street, saw her pause a moment to check the number over a door and watched her disappear into the house.

Cora did not leave her post immediately. In imagination she followed Marjorie up the dark flight of stairs, saw her pause before the opaque glass panel of a door which bore the name of George Newman, Limited.

Stephen would still be sitting at his desk thinking things out, looking beyond the present emergency and planning a new life from which Cora Robson would be safely excluded.

He would be wondering, perhaps, who was the visitor he had been told to expect. He would look up from his desk as the door opened. . . .

Lawson, standing with his back to where the fire would have been in winter, surveyed the office. There was a smile on his lips. On any other day he would have been sincerely amused. Now he was only affecting a detachment which could divert itself with trifles. Tasker’s habit of seeking compensation for his lawless activities by keeping things all neat and orderly about him was really rather diverting. He was the sort of man who would wear a muffler if he were going to execution lest he should catch cold on the way.

Lawson had almost forgotten that he had been told to expect a visitor. He had other things to consider. Cora had accused him, in effect, of being, in his solicitude for her safety, a humbug. The charge rankled, for partly it was true.

He would be genuinely sorry if anything happened to Cora. For her own sake he was anxious that she should get away. There were also his colleagues to consider. Her presence in London, liable to identification by Dupont, added unnecessarily to the risks incurred by them all. But his fundamental reason for wanting her to leave London had nothing to do with these prudential considerations. He wanted to be rid of her and was ready to jump at any opportunity. Henceforth he intended to keep his private life as tidy as Tasker kept his office. Come to think of it, his conduct in this respect was essentially just as funny as Tasker’s dislike of burnt matches thrown into the empty grate, but to see the humor of it made no difference.

Cora had refused to believe that Dupont was co-operating with the police. But that was because she did not want to believe it. She did not like to admit that she had made a mistake in bringing this outsider into the game. Above all, she wanted to stay in London and so was inclined to make light of the risk. People believed what they wanted to believe. She was not even consistent. Minimizing the danger, she refused to run away. Exaggerating it, she blamed him for having decided to proceed with the deal.

She could not have it both ways. Either the affair was dangerous, in which case she ought to beat it. Or there was no real cause for alarm and no reason why they should not all get on with the job.

This brought him yet again to the heart of the mischief. Neither Cora nor he was able to think straight. Their reactions were complicated at every turn by considerations which should never have been allowed to intrude.

There came a tap on the door and Tasker’s clerk appeared from the outer office.

This must be the visitor whom Cora had announced for six o’clock. He had been too much taken up with his reflections to give a thought to the oddity of such an appointment. He had come that evening to 13 Stonewall for the first time in his life; yet here was someone to see him.

He rose from the table and walked to the window with a gesture of impatience. The door behind him closed. Three light steps sounded on the linoleum floor.

“Good God, Marjorie,” he said at last. “What on earth are you doing here?”

“This is Cora’s work,” he said. “She sent you here. But you didn’t expect to see me.”

“Why do people come to see Mr. George Newman of Thirteen Stonewall?” she asked.

“Haven’t you something to explain? It’s a bit of a shock for a girl to drop in upon Public Enemy Number One and find daddy in the chair.”

He did not answer her at once. This was not Marjorie or any daughter with any father in such a case. She should have been astounded, horrified, overwhelmed. Her flippancy must be assumed. How did she really feel about it? Had he, perhaps, become something unspeakable, someone to whom she was indifferent? His curiosity concerning the object of her visit faded to nothing beside this urgent question. Had he lost her entirely? Did she care any longer who or what he was?

An odd feeling of exasperation was now uppermost. He hated the queer pretense that they were discussing an everyday matter of small importance.

The tone was still light, but he detected an undercurrent of feeling to which he instinctively warmed.

“Don’t tell me, I mean, that you were led away by evil companions or that you did it for the sake of your loved ones.”

“Perhaps it was because you wanted so much to be respectable,” she answered unexpectedly. “It costs a lot of money to be that nowadays. Mr. Newman’s profits, I imagine, are enormous.”

“The pirate’s dream,” she continued placidly. “He yearns for striped trousers and a black coat.”

Phrases started to run across his mind like those luminous ribbons in which the words chase one another and vanish. Too clever by half. . . . The little minx. . . . Pulling my leg. . . . She doesn’t mean it, of course. . . . Only trying to avoid a scene.

The scene, of course, could only be deferred. They wouldn’t be able to keep up this preposterous patter for long.

“Pirate,” he protested. “My business here is no worse than many I could name. I’m not manufacturing mustard gas or squeezing a rent from poor devils without a bean. When I began, it was not even necessary to break the law. There was a market. I just went down into it and traded. There’s a demand for my stuff. I’m not responsible for that. Come to think of it——”

He stopped. The look on Marjorie’s face suddenly choked him, as though someone had thrust a gag into his mouth. For a moment there was silence between them. Then, abruptly, she came to him. Her hand was gripping his shoulder.

“That’s the end of that,” she said. “I like you better as an honest-to-God pirate. You wanted money, and you wanted something more exciting to do than your lawful occasions permitted. You’ve never given a thought to right or wrong. A hundred years ago you’d have traded slaves from Africa or gone privateering for prize money or smuggling rum.”

This was worse than her making light of the situation. One might almost infer that she was proud of him.

“I’m just facing it. You’ve been making money by selling poison to all and sundry. All and sundry may go to the devil. That was your idea. What Tom, Dick and Harry or Jane Emma may do is no business of yours. So you imagined. But now it’s coming home to you.”

“Yes,” she said at last, “you sell the dope. I’m here to get it. Name your price and we’ll call it a deal.”

“Say something,” she urged. “Don’t sit there like a dumb fish. Don’t you realize? I’m glad that this has happened and that there is to be no more mystery between us.”

He held her close. The terror was loosing its grip. He could feel that this, at last, was Marjorie. She knew him now for what he was and she had accepted it. Then, too, she stood in desperate need. He felt it in the clutch of her arm about his shoulder. Let her stay thus a moment while he allowed their sense of communion to root itself and to grow.

She told him her story quietly, without haste or emphasis. He heard her without comment. His reactions were strangely calm, as though his normal sensibilities were momentarily blunted by the shock he had received. He was amazed by the odd tranquillity in which he heard her to the end.

“So you see,” Marjorie concluded, “it was all my doing. I simply took what I wanted. Cora was in no way to blame. She just left me to my own devices and, when she saw how things were going, she sent me to you. Bless her for that! I should never have had the courage to come of my own free will.”

He wondered, as he listened, why he should be so little affected by Cora’s part in the affair. Cora had won Marjorie’s affection, had turned her against him, had allowed her to satisfy the craving that would destroy her if it were not checked in time, had betrayed his secret. Bless her for that! All she had done was of no consequence, except that it had ended here, with Marjorie at his feet, no secrets between them.

For an instant of stark horror he had faced the monstrous vision of a father who unwittingly destroyed his child, of a child to whom her father was revealed as the destroyer. In that instant Newman, his second self, had become a monster—incredible, remote, unimaginable.

“But now you have come,” he said, “what will you do when I send you back to Alec?”

“I can go back to him now. To know that you and I are again together makes it possible.”

He paused, reviewing rapidly in his mind the complicated affairs of Mr. George Newman, deceased.

“It may take some little time to dispose of the body,” he added grimly. “So perhaps I had better set about it at once.”

VII

Lawson shut the door softly upon the sound of light retreating steps on the stair. He had warned Marjorie to dismiss the taxi which was awaiting her below before she reached the house in Clarges Street, thus breaking any possible connection between the two addresses which might arise out of her visit. He himself must stay behind and inform Tasker of the change he had decided to make in his plans.

The arrival of Tasker within a few minutes of Marjorie’s departure spared him further time for reflection. Later, perhaps, he would begin to understand why an event which he had taken such infinite precautions to avoid should have brought him content. Marjorie knew him now for what he was and together they would set things right. Her own case he would discuss immediately with Ross. All she needed was a renewed confidence in life, and he would help her to achieve it.

Tasker came into the room with the assured air of a man who had done all that could be expected of him and a little more.

“All’s well,” he announced. “Grauber has your instructions. He was just waiting for the word ‘go.’ The stuff will be lifted this evening.”

Lawson hesitated a moment. He had always known his own mind and never before had he changed it openly. Tasker would be shocked.

“Sorry,” he said, anxious to get it over. “I want you to cancel those instructions. I’ve come round to your way of thinking. Tell Grauber to leave the stuff where it is and get back to Hamburg.”

He was uncomfortably aware of Tasker’s mild blue eyes fixed on him with a pained astonishment. For once the restless white hands were still.

“Well, that’s my decision. Call Grauber at once. What are you waiting for?”

“Grauber is to get away and to cover his tracks. The dope will remain where it is. We are to cut our losses.”

Tasker’s hands were alive again. They fluttered like small white birds. One of them came to rest on the back of his head.

“Not so easy,” objected Tasker. “Grauber took your instructions as final and I may not be able to get him again before the consignment is put on board.”

“It’s the system, Chief. You always insist on reducing communications to a minimum. I told Grauber to go ahead and keep off the wire till the job was finished.”

“You must get hold of him somehow. You telephoned from Isaac’s, I suppose?”

“Delpiano isn’t in on this, George. He’s no more than a post office. We employ him because he’s so obviously harmless and respectable. Still your system, Chief.”

“He has only to find Grauber and give him the code word—Scram. Just one word of five letters. Grauber will understand.”

Tasker hesitated. His blue eyes wavered a moment and then assumed a look of resolution. It gave him a mulish expression which sat incongruously on his indeterminate features.

“I want to get this right,” Tasker insisted. “We are to leave the dope at Marseille. Well and good. I was in favor of that myself. But what happens next?”

“It’s not like you to change your mind,” repeated Tasker. “Nothing behind it, by any chance?”

“You’ve persuaded me that this consignment is under suspicion. If it goes on board the Titania, addressed to us here, George Newman, Limited, is finished. If we leave the stuff where it is, the Titania has a clean bill and can come to London as we arranged. That’s where we stand.”

“All right, Chief. As long as I know how it is. But this has been a shock to me. It’s not like you . . .”

“It’s not like me to change my mind. But I’ve done it now. Get in touch with Marseille and let me know what happens.”

Marjorie was putting down the telephone receiver as Lawson entered the drawing room in Clarges Street. She turned happily to meet him. Her brightness was disconcerting.

“Don’t you think we ought to straighten things out for ourselves before you do that?”

She came tripping toward him as in a ballet of good cheer. She took him by the coat and smiled up into his face.

“Seven o’clock in the evening and all’s well—except that we haven’t had any dinner. Let’s go gay somewhere. I’ve told Baines that we shan’t be eating at home.”

“There’s biscuits and sherry to keep you going till I’ve settled with Alec.”

He had begun to be appalled by her gaiety. There was a false glitter upon her mood. It ignored so much.

“Drink your sherry. Then perhaps the idea will penetrate. Or perhaps it won’t. Don’t you realize that I’ve been living for the last few weeks under Alec’s thumb? He’s been threatening to tell you all about me if I didn’t do exactly as I was told. That’s blackmail, isn’t it? I want to see his face when I tell him that father knows the worst.”

“What would Alec do? He’s a doctor, you know. It would be his painful duty to have you locked up as a menace to society.”

He looked down at her uneasily. She seemed to have no sense of moral responsibility. He smiled bitterly as the thought crossed his mind. He could hardly expect or even wish her to be appalled by a situation which he had himself accepted without scruple for many years. She had discovered that he was a criminal and it seemed to make no difference. There was comfort in that, but with a double edge. She had forgiven him, but only because she scarcely seemed to realize that there was anything to forgive.

The telephone was ringing. He put down his glass of sherry and crossed the room.

The voice of Tasker came to him over the wire. He listened in silence and at the end he instructed Tasker to ring him up again at midnight.

Tasker had communicated with Delpiano in Marseille. Delpiano did not know where Grauber was to be found but Tasker had supplied him with a list of places in which to look for the missing agent. This wasn’t so bad. Delpiano would presumably get in touch with Grauber within the next few hours.

Lawson turned from the telephone. His thoughts went back to the evening when Cora had rung him up and he had left Marjorie to keep an appointment at the Pie Qui Chante.

“Business,” he returned, “but now you know what it is. There will be more to do during these next few days.”

“But surely,” he protested, “I can’t just walk out on these people. Honor among thieves. I shall get clear as soon as I decently can. I’ve already taken steps.”

“I’ve been organizing a big deal and I’ve been warned that it may be dangerous to go through with it. We’ve agreed—haven’t we, Marjorie?—that I am to liquidate this business as soon as possible. I am now trying to get new instructions through to my agent in Marseille. That message just now was from my man in London. For the moment we are out of touch with Marseille, but I have no doubt that we shall get things clear in the course of the evening.”

“Would you have gone on with this deal you mention if I hadn’t come into the picture?”

“Funny to think that I’ve been living upon a volcano all these years without knowing anything about it. You’ve got a nerve, father, and no mistake.”

Lawson’s sense of outrage was acute. He had made a fortune by engaging in a traffic abhorred by all decent people. But Marjorie had not turned a hair. She should have shrunk from him in horror. She should have been overwhelmed, prostrated, torn between affection for the criminal and hatred of his crime. He stared at her helplessly.

“But damn it, girl,” he exploded suddenly, “you ought to be shocked out of your five senses. Anyone would think I’d been running a teashop.”

“What do you expect me to do? Make a scene? Scream at you in pious indignation, ‘Don’t touch me, father!’ That sort of thing?”

“Silly old dear. Do you want me to cast you off into outer darkness? Why should you expect me to be high-and-mighty about it?”

“We’re going to turn over the page and start with a clean sheet. But I don’t fancy you in a white shirt. It wouldn’t suit either you or me. It’s not for me to blame you in any case. Glass houses, father. It’s always been agreed that we’re a pair.”

The door had opened. Ross came forward. He stopped short on seeing father and daughter. Marjorie had turned to the door as soon as he was announced.

Dr. Alec Ross had been halfway through an early dinner when Marjorie called him to the telephone. Quarter of an hour later he had set out for Clarges Street in his car.

She had promised to appeal to him for any advice or help she might require, but so far she had avoided him and he had left the case in the hands of Furness Wright. Such information as he had obtained from the psychopath was not encouraging. Marjorie was a difficult patient. There was too much resistance; unless she changed her attitude to the whole business, it would hardly be worth while to continue the analysis.

Yet on the telephone she had seemed in unusually good spirits; she had something to say to him and would he come over as soon as possible. There was nothing in her call in the nature of an SOS.

He had expected to find her alone and was taken aback on seeing her with Lawson. He was not for an instant deceived by the brittle gaiety with which she greeted him. Evidently something had happened. She was in a high state of excitement, but there was no depth to her mood. She was waiting to see him with her father and her manner suggested that Lawson’s presence was not an accident.

“Come along, Alec,” she repeated, noting with a mischievous satisfaction his recoil on seeing them together.

“Evenin’, Ross,” said Lawson. “It seems Marjorie has asked you to come round.”

The two men, equally ill at ease, were both looking at Marjorie. An awkward situation, reflected Ross, and the girl was evidently determined to make the most of it.

“I’ve been thinking things over, Alec, and I’ve come to the conclusion that my father ought to know exactly how we stand.”

For a moment Ross was too severely staggered by the implication that it was he who had been responsible for keeping Lawson in the dark to do more than stare at her helplessly.

“Indeed,” he said at last. “I’m glad to hear it. That has been my view from the first,” he added, turning to Lawson.

“In a sense, Alec. But I am naturally anxious to get things straight. You will understand that when you threatened to tell my father——”

“I was to do this or that or you would tell father. That sounds very like a threat to me.”

“As your medical adviser I insisted that you should receive certain treatment. You were not very willing to take my advice. I accordingly asked your permission to acquaint your father with the facts. You requested me not to do so and agreed to undertake a cure.”

“That is the position, Lawson. I am glad that your daughter has decided to tell you herself how matters stand.”

Marjorie, he noted, was looking crestfallen. She had meant to have things all her own way. Lawson had watched the encounter with a grim but noncommittal smile.

“Well, Ross,” he said, “I see that you are not to be put on the mat quite as easily as my daughter imagined. Now, perhaps, you will give me a medical opinion. I propose to take Marjorie away for a holiday. You have, as you say, advised certain treatment. Do you still think it necessary?”

“I should be reluctant to make things more difficult for either of you. I should simply retire from the case.”

“Alec on the high horse. Or possibly this is his idea of a bedside manner.” She turned. “Perhaps you’d like to discuss me with father,” she added. “In that case I’d better go.”

“Steady, Marjorie,” he protested. “I asked Dr. Ross for a professional opinion. The least we can do is to hear what he has to say.”

“Thank you, but I’ve heard all this before.” She almost ran to the door. “No,” she said violently. “I’d better go.”

The door slammed fiercely behind her. The two men watched it silently for a moment.

“You can see that for yourself. She is heading for a complete nervous breakdown. There was always the predisposition. I warned you of that.”

“You also told me that there was no real danger from those morphine injections. She was your patient, Ross.”

“There have been other influences at work. I had no idea that she was taking cocaine. She was out of my hands when she started on that.”

“I’m not so sure. The only way out for her is to remove the underlying cause of the trouble. Dr. Furness Wright was seeing to that. The psychological approach is especially necessary in dealing with cocaine addiction. It is the vilest of the drugs. It destroys all sense of proportion and moral responsibility.”

“Does that mean that she will have to continue with these séances or whatever you call them?”

“I was thinking of taking her away. Surely a change of scene and new interests will do her more good than all this analytical stuff, especially as she doesn’t believe in it.”

“Very well. See what you can do. The result will depend entirely on the amount of confidence between you. Do you feel that you have any real influence or authority? Everything hangs on that. Another thing. How soon can you get away?”

There came a rustle from behind them. Marjorie had come quietly into the room. She moved straight toward Lawson and took him by the arm, facing Ross.

“Sorry, Alec,” she said. “Call it a day and begin again tomorrow. I’ll go back to your medicine man if it’s really necessary.”

Ross did not answer her immediately. Father and daughter made a reassuring picture. This perhaps was the solution—leave these two to work things out together.

Marius Delpiano pushed aside the bead curtain that screened his small shop from the quayside. The gentleman in London had been peremptory. He was to go forth and find Herr Julius Grauber at once. He was to bring Herr Grauber to the telephone to receive an urgent message and Herr Grauber would reward him handsomely. Alternatively he was to deliver the message himself—one word only which was to be written down as follows: Scram.

It was unwise of the gentleman in London to insist so blatantly upon the financial nexus. Marius was no hired go-between to be sent on errands for a fee. He had a neat little packet in the funds; his small tobacco shop, where one could always be sure of picking up the latest gossip of the Cannabière, was a flourishing concern. He was under no necessity to supplement an honest living by working for shady customers. The unofficial post office which he ran as a side line was not primarily a source of profit. Marius had an insatiable love of his fellow men and an equally insatiable curiosity concerning their affairs. Most of his clients, he liked to imagine, were star-crossed lovers who in Arcadia would have secreted their messages in the hollow trunks of trees or in unfrequented grottoes. The monies which he received for the use of his premises as a pillar box or for the transmission of calls upon the telephone were of no importance. What he really valued was his sense of being a secret benefactor and the interest he took in speculating upon the characters and circumstances of those who came to him for assistance and advice.

His eagerness to help the young, even when he suspected that they were up to no good, was the natural expression of a green old age. His smooth brown face was unlined; the silver shock of hair surrounding it only the more defiantly proclaimed his youth; his black eyes were as merry and candid as those of a child.

They had, however, at this moment, a troubled look. He was reluctant to leave his shop. Horace would look after things in his absence, but the young lady with the blue feather in her hat would shortly be calling again for a letter which had come at last, and he had been looking forward to the flush of pleasure with which she would receive it. Still, Herr Julius Grauber was also a customer. He did not like the man and was beginning to suspect that this call from London had sinister implications. But he had promised to execute the commission on receiving an assurance from the English gentleman that he would thereby be rendering an important service to a person in distress for no real fault of his own.

Marius Delpiano pushed his straw hat more firmly on the back of his head and stepped into the sunlight. He had in his pocket a list of places where he would be likely to find his client. First he was to visit a small bistro situated at the end of the quay where a certain steamship Titania was waiting to take a cargo on board.

At a few paces from the door of his shop he walked a little absently into the arms of a man coming from the opposite direction. He drew back, removed his straw hat and started to apologize. But the man with whom he had collided laid a firm hand upon his arm.

“Sir,” said the stranger, “I must ask you to come with me. Or, if you prefer, I will return with you to your shop.”

“Sir,” he responded, “the incident is of no importance. If I have incommoded you in any way, I am prepared to make my excuses.”

“You misunderstand me, sir. I was on my way to visit you. So if you have a moment to spare——”

“I too am on my way to keep an appointment,” responded Marius, a little haughtily.

Marius stared at the stranger in astonishment, which quickly yielded to indignation.

“Not altogether,” responded the stranger courteously. “I, too, am interested in Herr Julius Grauber.”

“Police Commissioner Lafarge, at your service. You run some sort of unofficial post office, I believe.”

Lafarge looked across at the little man, puffing out his feathers like an angry robin.

“I fail to understand why my face should be the subject of comment, Mr. Commissioner.”

“It is not the face of a man who would knowingly aid and abet a dangerous criminal,” Lafarge continued calmly.

Marius Delpiano was leading the stranger back to his shop. He pulled aside the bead curtain. His volatile indignation had spent itself and, by the time he had installed his uninvited guest in a chair beside the counter, he was burning with a desire to know what romantic possibilities this visit might portend. Grauber, as he had begun to suspect, was a dangerous customer. Cupid’s call box had been used for illicit purposes. The thought was sufficiently exciting to drive out fear. Presumably he was what the lawyers called an accessory. He had incurred heaven knew what pains and penalties. But his conscience was clear and there was obviously fun in store.

“Grauber,” continued the Commissioner, “has been under observation for several days. This afternoon he visited your shop and used the telephone. We were unfortunately taken by surprise and had made no arrangements to intercept the call. It has been traced, however, to a certain Mr. Isaacs in London, who doubtless runs an establishment similar to your own. Half an hour ago you received another call from Mr. Isaacs. This time we were ready. We therefore know that you have been instructed by Mr. Isaacs to find Grauber and ask him to ring up his English friends. Alternatively you are to deliver a cipher message consisting of a single word.”

Inaudibly the lips of Delpiano shaped themselves to the word “Scram.” His expressive countenance at the same time conveyed disgust at the indelicate proceedings of the police.

Lafarge sighed softly to himself. Marius Delpiano was evidently a man of honor. This was going to be difficult.

“Within limits,” he argued. “But I presume that, if you had reason to believe that two men were plotting to cut your mother’s throat, you would feel justified in taking steps to overhear their conversation.”

“I do not like Julius Grauber,” conceded Delpiano, “but I have no reason to believe that he has forfeited the rights of a free citizen.”

“Grauber is one of a gang of international criminals engaged in the smuggling of narcotic drugs. We have evidence enough to arrest him and secure a conviction. But we want to lay hands on the rest of the gang, who are, we now expect, in London. You have been instructed to bring Grauber to the telephone. Grauber, as we know, is making arrangements for a consignment of drugs lying here in Marseille to be re-addressed and forwarded to his principals. These men in London are evidently very eager to get in touch with him. For what purpose? My theory is that they have been warned that the consignment is under suspicion and that they are trying to warn Grauber to abandon it and get away. That, in fact, is the meaning of the word ‘Scram.’ If Grauber receives this warning, we shall have nothing to connect him with his confederates. I am therefore asking you to ignore your instructions and not to deliver the message.”

“Sir,” said Lafarge, “I respect your scruples. But I am not asking you to collaborate with us actively. You have simply to remain here with me in your shop and let things take their course.”

“But surely,” he protested at last, “if I carry out my instructions and bring Grauber to the telephone, the police in London can arrest his correspondent for whom Mr. Isaacs is providing facilities at the other end of the wire.”

“That is a clever suggestion, Mr. Delpiano. You should be one of us. But unfortunately we are dealing with people who also are clever. The London police may find it difficult to discover for whom Mr. Isaacs is acting. He is not a principal nor do his principals come to the telephone. We could, of course, arrest Mr. Isaacs, but he would not give away his employers. What we need is direct evidence against the big men, and we are only likely to get it if Grauber is permitted to forward his drugs to London.”

“So I am to betray my client, Mr. Commissioner. I am to utter no warning and see him walk into the tiger’s mouth.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Delpiano, but you have no choice in the matter. You cannot bring Herr Grauber to the telephone as the people in London suggest; if you attempted to do so it would be my duty to put you under arrest. And if Mr. Isaacs should ring you up——”

Julius Grauber, turning his back on the quayside, was well content. Three cases of condensed milk, Bébé brand, had been safely delivered for shipment by the S/S Titania, consigned to George Newman, Limited, 13 Stonewall, London, E.C.4. Grauber took a pride in his work and was not indifferent to the rewards it entailed. The only thing that marred his content was an occasional twinge of impatience for having allowed himself to be hustled into a panic—no, not exactly a panic but a momentary fit of uneasiness—under stress of which he had been moved to telephone to Mr. Isaacs. It had been really absurd of him to imagine that the funny little man in the braided coat might be collaborating with the police. Dupont had at the last been obviously grateful for monies received and trustfully eager to meet again the lady of his dreams.

Grauber turned into the Café des Marins and ordered a Pernod. His work was done and he could now relax a moment before catching the night train for Paris on which he had booked a sleeper. At lazy peace with the world, he watched the clear liquid clouding in his glass. He absorbed it without haste and ordered another.

Mr. Isaacs had instructed him to put the consignment on board and follow it to London, where he was to report at that stuffy little place in Soho within forty-eight hours. Should he perhaps call on Marius and confirm the arrangement? They might like to know in London that he had successfully carried out his instructions and would shortly be arriving in person. But that, after all, was unnecessary. The Chief always took it for granted that his men would do neither more nor less than was expected of them.

He finished the second Pernod and left the café. His way to the station, where he had deposited his suitcase an hour before, lay past the house of Dupont. He walked down the broad quay, past the oyster stall. Pernod was coursing pleasantly in his veins. He thought indulgently of the suspicions which had assailed him on the previous day, but did not neglect, almost unconsciously, to keep on the alert for possible trailers. No one had followed him from the Café des Marins. No one had picked him up on the way.

He was approaching the house of Dupont when he suddenly saw its owner homing like a pigeon from the opposite direction. Grauber grinned expansively. The little man was apparently lost in thought.

Dupont, startled from his reverie, recoiled nervously. Grauber looked at his watch. He still had time on his hands.

Ten minutes later they were sitting together on the terrace of the Brasserie du Port. Grauber, his third Pernod pleasantly at work, looked across at his companion with an expression of friendly benevolence.

Dupont produced a packet of Maryland. Grauber extracted a cigarette and lit it. He blew out the match and laughed.

“Case in point,” he added genially. “You remember the stub we found in your piano. I asked myself how the fag end of a Maryland had come to be dropped into a piano at Tientsin, especially when I observed that its owner was so little partial to French cigarettes himself that he went about totally unprovided in Marseille. That was nerves. One gets like that at times. I wondered whether the piano had been opened by any of the people here. I even had a notion that you, my friend, might perhaps know something about it. That shows you.”

Grauber was still chuckling at intervals when he reached the railway station and looked for the wagon-lit on the Paris train. The conductor, examining the tickets of a tall, cadaverous traveler of a melancholy appearance, evidently said something which amused his passenger, for the tall traveler opened his mouth in a wide smile, disclosing enormous teeth.

Grauber waited to show his tickets. He also was smiling, meditating still upon the harmless little man in the braided coat. Imagination could play strange tricks. He had found a cigarette stub in a grand piano and a man had been seen loitering near an oyster stall on the quay. On such slender evidence he had been prepared to abandon the field. Luckily the Chief was made of sterner stuff; had ordered him to go ahead and no more nonsense about it.

And the little man in the braided coat was waiting now to hear about the lady from Tientsin. The milk of human kindness, generously laced with Pernod, was overflowing in the heart of Julius Grauber. His big shoulders rippled in a shrug of compassion.

Mugs, however, would always be mugs. Sad that it should be so, but, if it were not for the mugs, life would be scarcely tolerable for the more gifted sons of fortune.

III

Martin Lafarge, Commissioner of Police, had not in the meantime been idle. From six to shortly before eight o’clock he had sat with Marius Delpiano in his little shop, and the friendliest relations had been established.

Lafarge professed a warm interest in the clients who came to claim or deposit their letters and even assisted Delpiano to construct romance from the unlikeliest material. Delpiano was equally, and more sincerely, interested in seeing the police at work. For Cupid’s call box during its two hours’ occupation by Lafarge was staff headquarters. Messengers came and went. There were consultations, orders, commendations, rebukes. So, at least, Marius inferred, for though he was allowed to be present, the conversations were conducted out of earshot.

By eight o’clock Lafarge was anxious to leave. His men had kept him informed of Grauber’s progress. Grauber, left to his own devices, had shown himself a man of prompt and decisive action. He had picked up three large packing cases from the house of Dupont and delivered them at the quayside for shipment by the S/S Titania. He had then bought tickets for London and booked himself a sleeper on the night express to Paris. Apparently his work in Marseille was finished and he was going north to report in person to his principals.

Lafarge had been equally busy. On being notified of the arrival of the cases at the quayside, he instructed Bonnetier to let the consignment go forward, after ascertaining to whom it was addressed. Within half an hour word came that the cases were consigned to George Newman, Limited, 13 Stonewall, London, E.C.4. Lafarge thereupon gave orders for Scotland Yard to be informed by telephone. Scotland Yard, of course, would take such action as it thought fit. There was sufficient evidence to warrant the detention of the consignee and a search of his premises.

Toward eight o’clock Bonnetier came to the shop himself for further orders. By that time Grauber had been trailed to the ticket office and his destination ascertained. Lafarge decided that the presence in London of a representative of the French customs was likely to be useful, and Bonnetier, to his great delight, displayed in the customary geological fashion, was asked to undertake the journey. He was to keep an eye upon Grauber in transit and see that the trail was picked up by the London police who would be waiting for him at Dover.

By this time Lafarge was growing impatient. He intended to fly to London at dawn in a special airplane and he had yet to see Dupont, who had been warned to hold himself ready. He felt sure that sooner or later Isaacs would telephone Grauber’s principals, who would want to know whether their agent had been warned. Grauber, who was to “scram,” was not “scramming.” But the people in London must be given to understand that he was. Otherwise they might take alarm and slip from the net.

It was five minutes to eight when the bell rang. Marius hastened to the receiver, but Lafarge waved him aside and took it down from the wall.

The conversation was brief. Mr. Isaacs wished to speak to Mr. Delpiano—not Mr. Isaacs himself but Mr. Isaacs’ friend, who wished to know whether Mr. Grauber had been found. Had Mr. Grauber received a message? Did Mr. Grauber understand the message and was he acting upon it?

On all these points Lafarge, speaking in the name of Mr. Delpiano, was able to reassure Mr. Isaacs. Mr. Grauber had been found. He had received the message. He understood the message and was acting upon it.

Lafarge, hanging up the receiver, turned to find Marius regarding him with an expression of deep reproach in his lively brown eyes.

Gustave Dupont, newly escaped from the genial approaches of Julius Grauber, sat alone in his empty house playing to himself Beethoven’s quartet in C sharp minor. It was one of his finest records to be used only with a fiber needle. Normally it brought peace to his troubled soul, but tonight it emphasized his exclusion from a world where only the pure in heart might dwell at ease. Listening in vain to the slow fugue, adagio ma non troppo e molto expressivo, he felt like a medieval saint deprived of the sacrament.

A bell rang noisily in the kitchen quarters. He stopped the gramophone and went to the front door. Lafarge stood on the threshold.

“Come in,” responded Dupont looking uneasily into the street. This was the first time the police had called on him in person. This should mean that the coast was clear of his late partners in crime. But it was well to be prudent.

“It is a warm night,” responded the Commissioner. “Something with a siphon, perhaps.”

“Well,” continued Lafarge, as Dupont busied himself with the drinks, “Julius Grauber is now on his way to London. He left us, I take it, with a quiet mind. He looked uncommonly pleased with himself on parting with you at the Brasserie du Port.”

“Not in person, but my men are active and numerous. Traveling with him to Paris in the next compartment is my friend, Gaston Bonnetier, whom you may remember. He has uncommonly large teeth.”

“The scalded cat fears cold water,” he said, “but we are now all friends together. Tomorrow at dawn I shall have the pleasure of your company to London. We shall travel by air in an airplane specially chartered.”

He drew from a capacious side pocket, as he spoke, a tin of condensed milk, Bébé Brand. Lafarge received it eagerly.

“Splendid,” said the Commissioner. “I am particularly grateful to you for securing this.”

Dupont surveyed the object distastefully. It reminded him vividly of a bad quarter of an hour when, left alone in the empty house, he had for the second time prized open one of three packing cases, as yet unlabeled, extracted the tin, with fearful glances at the half-open door of the best parlor and ears alert for the possible return of Grauber and his men, and nailed down the case again with infinite relief.

“Nevertheless,” continued Lafarge, “I am sure you will wish to complete the good work. So you will come with me to London.”

“You can hardly rest easy in your mind till we have these people under lock and key. They will inevitably infer sooner or later that you have been assisting us in our investigation. These men are dangerous and vindictive. For your own security it is essential that you should help us to conclude the business successfully. Then, too, you are interested in a certain lady. She gave you to understand that she would have no further dealings with these miscreants and that she would be waiting for you here in France. I feel sure that you would wish to ascertain whether or not she was deceiving you. Come with me to London. As you know I have serious doubts as to the lady’s good faith. I am convinced that in London we shall be able to settle that question beyond all manner of doubt.”

They faced each other. The room was very quiet. Even the faint hiss of bubbles breaking in the tall glasses on the table between them was audible.

Lafarge rose from his chair with the decisive air of a man who had completed his business.

Commissioner Lafarge lay comfortably back on the pillows and watched his wife, who was packing his bag with a quiet efficiency. For a few hours he would sleep his fill. Not even the excitement of a chase whose end was now in view would keep him awake after three nights in succession spent in hanging onto the telephone.

On the dressing table beside his handsome toilet case stood a tin of condensed milk, Bébé brand. Marianne had picked it up and was inspecting it with curiosity.

“I shall not tell you about the baby. For then I should have to prove to your satisfaction that the only woman in the world for me is my little wife in Marseille.”

Lafarge smiled. After all there were other things in life than being a policeman and he could always sleep on a journey.

Three hours later, dressing softly lest he should wake Marianne, Lafarge reviewed the situation in great content. Dupont would be waiting to accompany him to the airdrome. Grauber by now was well on his way to Paris, blissfully unaware that Bonnetier slept beside him in the next compartment. In the suitcase packed by Marianne reposed a tin of condensed milk, Bébé brand, and the rest of the consignment, addressed to George Newman, Limited, 13 Stonewall, London, E.C.4, would be duly impounded on arrival by his English colleagues.

Who was Mr. George Newman of 13 Stonewall? The matter had doubtless been cleared up already by the gentlemen of Scotland Yard. Lafarge confessed to a twinge of regret. It was a pity that, after all the trouble he had taken, he would not be present at the arrest. But—what was it the English said when they hunted the fox on horseback?—he would be in at the death. A picturesque and satisfying expression.

Lawson, waiting in the upper room of the Pie Qui Chante, stared with aversion at the spotted mirror and rubbed velvet of the sofa under the opposite wall. No place, he decided, could have been better chosen to fortify his resolution to be finally quit of his unlawful business. He could no longer find in its squalid intimations of the underworld a release from the inhibitions and responsibilities of his more reputable activities. He beheld it today with the eyes of Marjorie. He felt in his bones her fastidious recoil and something of the dismay she would have shown in seeing her father in such a place.

Rapidly he reviewed his immediate problems. Luckily the most urgent of them was settled. Tasker, at eight o’clock on the previous evening, had received from Marseille confirmation that Grauber had been found in time and warned to abandon the consignment. Grauber, instructed to “scram,” would by this time be on his way to Hamburg. There remained the Titania. The plan to equip the vessel as a floating factory must be abandoned. He could not compel Tasker to retire from the illicit business, but henceforth Tasker, if he scorned an honest living, must fend for himself. He should inherit none of the designs, difficulties and hazards of his former associates.

The work of liquidation would be comparatively simple. There were no papers or records at 13 Stonewall, and the place could be left derelict at a moment’s notice. Tasker, Grauber and Martinelli would inform the principal agents of the gang of the winding-up of the concern and they would in turn communicate with the smaller fry. His own disappearance from the scene was merely a matter of arrangement between himself and Tasker. No one but Tasker and Cora Robson in the whole organization knew of his identity with Stephen Lawson, merchant of Cheapside. There was no reason why, with reasonable co-operation from them, he should not be clear of the whole business within twenty-four hours.

He looked at his watch. Three o’clock. Cora was due to arrive. He had asked her to come in advance of Tasker. Tasker would not easily accept the decision of his chief to wind up the business. Tasker might be rebellious. He was bound to take it hard. But Cora was the more painful proposition. She would make of it a personal question. He had therefore arranged to see her first. He wanted to get it over.

It was odd, he reflected, that he should feel in the least at disadvantage in respect of the coming interview. Cora had betrayed him to Marjorie. Not only that, she had been privy to Marjorie’s addiction, if she had not actively encouraged it. He had every right to express an unbounded indignation. That, of course, was the line he must take.

Yet it was Cora herself who took the offensive. He rose from his chair on hearing her come upstairs and was ready to receive her as the door opened. She did not, however, wait to be accused. She shut the door behind her and faced him instantly.

“Go ahead, Stephen,” she said. “No quarter asked. That’s how I want it to be. I sent Marjorie to call on George Newman yesterday. So you two know one another at last. You should be grateful to me for that.”

“Then you will perhaps accept the consequences. You’ve brought it home to me that as head of the firm of George Newman, Limited, I have been indirectly responsible for an attempt to poison my daughter. The thrust went home. Newman then and there retired from business. Understand?”

“I called it off last night and, as far as I’m concerned, it will be the last.”

What had he expected her to do? Rail at him for a quitter? Rub salt into the wound? What she actually did took him by surprise. Her eyes had grown soft. She came forward and took him gently by the arm.

“I’m not as wicked as I thought I was,” she said. “I’ve spent seven sleepless hours finding that out. The only solution for us is to part company. If we can part friendly, so much the better.”

“Why did I send Marjorie to see you yesterday? Honestly I don’t know. Was it simply to get back on you? Or did I realize that it was the only possible way out for us all? I only know that the result has killed all malice.”

Lawson, strangely moved, stared beyond her at the spotted mirror and the rubbed velvet. Surprise was giving place to a gradual inward illumination. He was distilling out perhaps the soul of goodness in things evil.

The moment of illumination passed. Cora drew back. On her lips was a flickering bitter smile.

“I’ve earned enough to make an honest woman of me, Stephen. I shall retire to the Riviera and become one of the holy terrors of the local pension.”

Tasker’s white hands fluttered on the dingy plum-colored tablecloth. He was profoundly unhappy. It was more than a question of profit and loss. The bottom had fallen out of his private world. He had found in Lawson the leader whom such men as he instinctively desire. In Lawson his own personality was extended and glorified. Lawson stood for the courage with which he, by nature a timid man, confronted Leviathan. Not all the resources of the modern state could intimidate or stand against him with Lawson for a colleague. Even the risks they ran together were precious.

Now suddenly, without warning, on the eve of their biggest deal, at a moment when new possibilities were in sight and new plans afoot, Lawson had announced that he intended to retire from business.

Tasker looked across the table at Cora Robson. He felt in his bones that this woman was somehow involved in the unaccountable change which had come over his master, but here, admittedly, he was out of his depth. These emotional factors were beyond him. He had expected, for example, when Lawson had delivered his ultimatum, that Cora would turn on the Chief and rend him. On the contrary, she accepted his withdrawal as a foregone conclusion. She even seemed to approve it.

“Times have changed,” continued Lawson, not as though he would excuse himself but as though he would like to make his conduct more easily intelligible to a faithful servant, “and I’ve come to the conclusion that this is the moment to get out. You are not going to lose by me, Tasker. I’ll see that you get every penny that we’ve earned together and, if you’re a wise man, you’ll put it into something safe.”

Tasker shook his head. This was increasingly less like the Chief. Some maggot had got into his brain. Lawson might pretend till he was blue that he was going to play no more owing to the increasing hazards of the game, but that was a libel. It had always been his master’s pride and pleasure to find new ways and means of meeting fresh difficulties and keeping always one move ahead of the opposition. This talk of putting your money into something safe was unnatural, as though one of those European dictators had intruded unexpectedly into the children’s hour.

“What do you expect me to do?” he protested miserably. “Buy a lawn mower and cut the grass? Granted that we’ve instructed Grauber to come in out of the rain? We’ve done that sort of thing before. But what about the Titania? She’ll be coming along in a few days to pick up all that equipment. We were to start again with a clean sheet.”

Lawson looked broodingly at Tasker, taking his measure. Tasker, he knew, would never embark upon that enterprise on his own responsibility.

“It’s up to you, Henry,” he said. “Carry on, if that’s how you feel about it. It’s not for me to stand in your way.”

Tasker’s right hand came to rest on his forehead in a hopeless gesture. Lawson rose from the table and grasped his shoulder.

“Get this clear,” he said decisively. “I shall stand by and deal with any matters for which I can fairly be held responsible. If you others decide to liquidate, there’s money for all and you can rely on me to make the necessary arrangements. If, however, you decide to carry on for yourselves, you will do so without any further interference or participation from me. You must fend for yourselves. Personally I advise you to do as I am doing. I should be sorry to see you incur any unnecessary risks. If you do so, it is on the understanding that I’m out of business for good and all and that they’re part and parcel of the good will of the firm. I make you a free present of the whole concern. Get in touch with our principal agents. Obtain their views on the subject and act accordingly.”

“Poor old Henry,” she murmured kindly. “I think you mentioned a lawn mower.”

III

The window of the upper room in the Pie Qui Chante looked down upon the alley which gave private access to the establishment by the side door.

Lawson had left the room and was descending the narrow stairs. Cora listened for a moment to his retreating steps. Tasker was fidgeting in his chair. He was anxious now to go about his business but would give Lawson a few minutes’ start. It was one of the innumerable precautions of the gang never to approach or leave the premises in company.

Cora walked to the window and waited for Lawson to emerge. She watched him walk down the alley and disappear into the street.

“Positively the last appearance of Mr. George Newman, Public Enemy Number One. Shall you carry on, Henry, if the boys agree?”

“This is the end for us all,” he continued. “The Chief knows that well enough. What’s come over him? Yesterday he was all for going straight ahead in spite of everything. Today——”

He stopped short. Cora had uttered a sharp exclamation. She was staring out of the window.

A man had just entered it from the street. He had paused a moment under the arch and was lighting a cigarette, looking warily to right and left as he did so. He threw away the match and turned to resume his walk toward the side door of the café.

They waited in silence. From the door below came a murmur of voices and from the stair a sound of steps and heavy breathing followed by a light tap on the door.

Grauber entered smiling, but the amiable creases were smoothed as by a hand wiping his face on sight of the two who were waiting to receive him. He pulled up short in his advance.

“Why, folks,” he said, “what’s the matter? You look as if you’d seen something nasty.”

“What are you doing here?” he demanded harshly. His voice cracked on the final word.

“I’m here on instructions,” returned Grauber. “I was to come over and report as soon as the consignment was lifted. Very well. The dope was put on board last night at seven o’clock.”

“Those instructions were canceled at six-thirty. Delpiano was to give you the message.”

“Isaacs told me over the telephone to go ahead shortly before six. I never received any message after that.”

“But we telephoned a third time just before eight o’clock. Our man was informed that the second message had been delivered.”

Grauber lifted a hand to the back of his neck, pinching a fold of the skin behind his collar.

“Not Isaacs personally but in his name. We never use the same call office twice over if we can avoid it.”

“I don’t know. Whoever it was spoke for Delpiano and was evidently expecting the call?”

Silence fell. Cora lit a cigarette. This was bravado. Her fingers trembled as she threw away the match.

“Well, Grauber,” she said, “it looks as though the police have been playing cat and mouse with us ever since that stuff was landed in Marseille. Someone took that last message for Delpiano and deliberately misinformed us here. The police wished us to think that you had received our warning and were acting upon it.”

“Obvious, isn’t it? They wanted to keep us feeling secure at this end while they followed you quietly to headquarters.”

“One moment,” he said. “If the police in Marseille are wise to all this, they’ve already got Newman’s address and communicated with London. What about the office at Stonewall? They could have raided the place any time last night after eight o’clock.”

“Why not?” returned Tasker wearily. “I left just after seven and haven’t been back since. This is Sunday, you know. Day of rest.”

“You first, Grauber,” she said. “You’ve almost certainly been followed to this place. There’s no time to lose or we shall all be taken together.”

Framed in the archway at the end of the alley a man was standing at ease. It needed but a glance to assure Grauber that his ease was assumed.

“Grauber,” said Tasker at last, “you’d better go down. They’ve been trailing you for days. Perhaps they will continue to do so. If so, you can lead them where you please and give them the slip now that you’re wise to their game.”

“Not a hope,” he said. “They’ve just been waiting for me to get in touch with you here and they know that, once I’ve done that, we are bound to discover the trick they played on us in Marseille and that we shall scatter like driven birds. They can’t afford to risk that. They’re probably waiting for me down below with a warrant. The only chance for you two is to walk out and see what happens. If you’re challenged you can swear blind that you know nothing of me and I’ll bear you out. I’ll say I came up to this room by mistake and butted in on two total strangers.”

“In that case,” said Cora quickly, “you’d discover the mistake at once and call for Del Bene.”

“That is the idea,” he said. “I’m for it whatever happens, but I needn’t put them onto you.”

“Here goes,” he said. “Follow me down in five minutes. If I’m under arrest, I shall have said my piece. You must deny all knowledge of me and, if they’ve got Del Bene as well, you must ask what the hell he meant by allowing me to walk in on a lady and gentleman who wanted to be private. Get the idea?”

He left the room noisily and they heard him descending the stairs in a hurry. Somewhere down below a door slammed. Then silence.

A paralyzing thought struck her, breeding quickly a suspicion which, if it were true, left them naked to the world. Was it possible? Not only was it possible but likely; and, in that case, Grauber was leading a forlorn hope.

“Think so?” she returned, still busy with her thoughts. “There’s one thing he has forgotten,” she began.

The look of panic that flickered in Tasker’s eyes warned her to go easy with him. They must shortly descend and face the music. Tasker would need all his wits about him. She decided to keep her thoughts to herself.

They waited a moment in silence. Tasker began to walk nervously backward and forward.

“It would help me to play the part,” she added jauntily. “I’m a fashionable lady, you must remember, keeping an appointment with a gentleman friend in a private room. It would be only natural for me to wear a veil.”

Tasker had opened the door. They stood a moment at the head of the stairs. From the room below came a low murmur of voices.

“And be caught in the act of sneaking out?” she retorted. “That wouldn’t exactly improve the effect of Grauber’s little piece.”

“Ladies first,” she said and preceded him downstairs without further hesitation.

Grauber was standing in front of one of the tables. He was confronting Del Bene. Behind the table three men were seated. One of them was tall and lean. His enormous teeth gleamed white in a sallow face. He seemed to be smiling at his thoughts. Another was short, a little brown man with merry eyes. The third was a loose-limbed, distinguished person with iron-gray hair, wearing tweeds. This man rose as Cora came into the room followed by Tasker.

“They might have been my friends, Mr. Inspector,” he retorted, “if that little monkey yonder”—he glared ferociously across at Del Bene—“knew his business, which, saving your presence, is no better than it should be. Have I not explained——”

There was no need to call the gentleman in question. The door from the kitchen was thrust open. Dupont came into the room. He stood silent a moment, looking forlorn in his braided coat and blinking nervously.

“Yes,” he said at last, “that is Blanche Perrin, the woman I met in Tientsin.”

Detective-Inspector William Nevinson, looking round upon the little group assembled in his room at New Scotland Yard—he was in his leisure moments an enthusiastic student of the greater William—likened himself to King Claudius. He approached the business of the day with an auspicious and a dropping eye, in equal scale weighing delight and dole. The auspicious elements were there for all to see. He was presiding over a conference which was likely to result in a conspicuous triumph of the forces of law and order over a peculiarly abominable and dangerous criminal organization. Apart from the moral satisfaction of a public servant in the ascent of virtue, he had the artist’s pleasure in a masterpiece of police method and organization which, starting with the arrest of a relatively unimportant individual in Port Said, had led to the detection of a major operation in Marseille and the sensational identification and arrest of three of the principal miscreants in London.

But there were flies on the ceiling. To begin with, his room was full of foreigners, and they were foreigners to whose vigilance and ingenuity he must in fairness attribute most of the praise. Scotland Yard had merely been called in at the last moment to reap where these resourceful and farseeing officers had sown. Then, too, it was disconcerting to discover that an international gang of criminals, for whom the police of many nations had been looking for several years, had established their headquarters within his own jurisdiction and had been actively compassing their vile ends, so to speak, under his nose and within reach of his strong right arm. It had been assumed that, thanks to the severity of English law and the efficiency of the English police, London was virtually immune from the illicit traffic in narcotic drugs. It was now to be revealed to the world that the most formidable group of traffickers as yet discovered and brought to justice had audaciously selected London for its headquarters in preference to countries where such scandals had been of frequent occurrence and might be attributed to an inferior state of civilization. Last but not least, the case, satisfactory in all other respects, had yet to be completed, and the reputation of Scotland Yard would depend on their ability to complete it. The foreigners had brought with them evidence on which three important arrests had been made and they had secured the name and address of the master criminal. Scotland Yard, it was true, had lost no time in acting upon information received. A certain Mr. Isaacs had been under observation since half past six on the previous evening and, shortly after eight o’clock, a visit had been paid to the office of George Newman, Limited, at 13 Stonewall. But the office had been shut and George Newman, if such a man existed, was nowhere to be found. The foreigners in fact had so far had it all their own way from Tientsin to Soho. It was now up to Scotland Yard to bring their activities to a brilliant and resounding conclusion.

He had deliberately postponed the present conference in the hope that he would be able to lay hands on the missing man overnight. He had been counting on the possibility of someone turning up at 13 Stonewall on the Monday morning following the arrest. But evidently the gang had got wind of the arrest, for his men still remained in possession of empty premises in which there was nothing to show—not even a scrap of paper—that they had been used for anything but lawful occasions.

Detective-Inspector Nevinson smiled genially in automatic response to the lively little police commissioner from Marseille, glanced approvingly at the tall haggard French officer of Customs with the lantern jaws, and looked askance at the small fellow in the braided coat who must be treated kindly as representing King’s evidence. Then he cleared his throat.

“Gentlemen,” he said, “I congratulate you not only on a difficult investigation brilliantly conducted but on a very lucid and interesting account of its progress.” Here he bowed courteously to Lafarge, who answered with a charming little shrug of deprecation. “I take it that we are now ready to interrogate the parties.”

“Is it necessary,” he demanded in French, swallowing hard, “that I should remain?”

Lafarge spoke excellent English. The lean man listened as though he understood. Dupont knew enough of the language to follow what was being said.

“Dupont,” Nevinson said, “will kindly remain at our disposal in an adjoining room. We shall need him only for purposes of identification and to attest the depositions which will shortly be ready for his signature.”

“Well, Roberts,” he said, “what about having them in at once? Or shall we agree first how they are to be handled?”

Inspector Roberts, a plain, blunt man, square of face and figure, did not look too happy.

“Nothing doing,” he said. “I’ve been trying to get on speaking terms with them for hours, both separately and together.”

“You will never get Newman through his confederates. You will have to find him for yourself, Inspector.”

“Quite so,” said Nevinson. “We shall find him if he exists. That will be our contribution to the case.”

“I have no doubt that he exists, Inspector. So you will certainly find him. Grauber is not Newman. He would not telephone to himself. Tasker is not Newman. It is a psychological impossibility. There remains the lady. She assuredly is not Newman, though”—here Lafarge looked very shrewd and contemplative—“I shouldn’t be at all surprised to find her better acquainted with that gentleman than anyone else.”

“Fortunately,” he pointed out, “we have already found her, and I would suggest that a thorough investigation into her private affairs should be undertaken at once.”

His intervention sounded suspiciously like a snort. Did this foreign policeman think the Yard needed stimulation in a mere matter of routine?

“I trust that the possibility of certain emotional complications has not been overlooked,” returned Lafarge.

“My colleague confirms your suggestion that the mysterious Newman may be more closely in touch with the lady than business requires,” said Nevinson gravely.

Half an hour later Inspector Nevinson, outwardly stern and efficient, but inwardly confessing his exasperation, summed up the situation. His attention, as he did so, was unobtrusively directed to the woman in the case. She seemed almost to be enjoying the performance. None of them would plead or make a statement.

“The evidence in our possession,” he said sternly, “not only justifies your detention but gives us more than a prima facie case for committing you all three on a criminal charge. Miss Robson has been identified as the person who arranged for the drugs to be dispatched from Tientsin. We can prove that Grauber repacked the consignment in Marseille and forwarded it to George Newman, Limited, of Thirteen Stonewall. Tasker, as managing director of the firm in question, was arranging to receive it here in London. We have here a sample of the goods, and the consignment itself is at this moment on its way to London.”

Here he picked up a tin of condensed milk, Bébé brand, standing on the desk in front of him.

“None of you has contested the evidence or offered a single word of explanation. The penalties for offenses of this kind are severe, and you will, none of you, dispose an English court to be as lenient as the law allows by persisting in your present attitude.”

His eye was caught by a movement of the female prisoner. She was about to say something. He turned to her hopefully.

“Are you trying to suggest, Mr. Inspector,” she said smoothly, “that we might make things easier for ourselves by helping you to avoid a confession of defeat?”

“Defeat, madam,” protested Nevinson. “I think we have done pretty well.”

“Your colleagues from Marseille have done pretty well,” she corrected smoothly. “But it still remains for Scotland Yard to show its mettle, and it will receive no help from us. You take a very low view of human nature, Inspector.”

“A very low view indeed, madam,” he retorted warmly, “of persons in your situation, and, if I may say so, the lowest possible view is usually more than justified.”

“Not in the present instance, Inspector. You are anxious to lay hands on Mr. George Newman. You are prepared, it seems, to let us off lightly if we consent to assist you in the matter. I do not admit that we could help you to achieve your object, even if we were willing to do so. I merely regret that you should insult us by making the offer.”

Lafarge leaned forward. He looked, not without a certain admiration, at the female prisoner.

“You people of the South,” she murmured. “You look for romance in the most unlikely places. This is not an affair of the heart. It is a case for headwork, Mr. Commissioner. And that, of course, may be left to your English friends.”

“They will find him, my English friends. Newman is undoubtedly a clever man, but he cannot have lived all these years in a vacuum. They will find him, if he exists.”

“Well,” said Nevinson, alert for any sign of life from the accused, “have you anything to say?”

III

Inspector Nevinson, with Roberts and Lafarge in attendance, climbed the stairs of the flat in Hertford Street and rang the bell. The door was opened by a policeman and, behind the policeman, a plain-clothes detective waited to receive them.

Nevinson entered the sitting room with his colleagues. Wilcox was evidently a man of method. All the drawers and cupboards in the flat had been emptied and the articles lay in assorted heaps neatly classified for inspection.

“Just what you’d expect to find in a lady’s writing desk—bills, receipts, invitations and so forth, except for a dozen small packets of dope locked away in a handbag.”

The plain-clothes man picked up a small leather book from the table and handed it to Nevinson who looked through the pages casually.

Nevinson, turning to look for Lafarge, found him examining a photograph which stood in a handsome silver frame on the bureau.

“It is the only photograph in the room,” said Lafarge. “Presumably it is someone she liked.”

“This woman,” he objected, “carefully avoids keeping anything about her which points to Newman. She would therefore be unlikely to display his picture.”

“There’s a housekeeper, name of Mrs. Gracechurch. She’s waiting below in the service quarters.”

“You’ll find the poor woman a trifle upset,” said Wilcox when he came back into the room. “I had to explain why we were here and show her the warrant. She was, as they say, struck all of a heap. Certainly she had no idea of anything wrong. Miss Robson seems to have been her special pet among the tenants here.”

He looked kindly at the neat little woman who had arrived sobbing for breath from her quarters far below. Lafarge pushed forward a chair.

“It’s not the stairs, Inspector,” said Mrs. Gracechurch. “They help to keep a person young.”

“You may well say that,” said Mrs. Gracechurch. “I never thought to see the police, not here of all places.”

“Now, Mrs. Gracechurch,” he began pleasantly, “I hope you won’t misunderstand me. Miss Robson has been arrested on a criminal charge and there are one or two questions which, as a matter of routine, I must put to you. It is essential, for example, that we should find out as much as we can about your tenant’s visitors and friends. More particularly we want to know whether there was anyone who came here frequently or appeared to be intimate with her in any special way.”

“Intimate, indeed,” she protested indignantly. “This is a respectable house, Mr. Inspector. Miss Robson had her special friends, but it wasn’t my business to watch their comings and goings.”

“And by name presumably,” continued Nevinson. “Or is he a man of mystery?”

“No mystery at all,” retorted Mrs. Gracechurch. “That is Mr. Stephen Lawson who lives just round the corner, so to speak, in Clarges Street, a most respectable gentleman.”

“Have you formed any idea of the nature of the relations existing between Mr. Lawson and Miss Robson?”

“It’s not my business to form ideas, Inspector, leastways not of the kind you’re suggesting, and, if I did have such ideas, I should keep them to myself.”

“Madam is wise,” he said with a bow. “What she has been good enough to tell us, however, is very interesting. Did she not say that Mr. Lawson’s visits had been less frequent of late?”

Mrs. Gracechurch, not indifferent to the courtesy of the foreign gentleman, nodded incisively.

“That’s right,” she said. “Mr. Lawson has come less often to the flat since Miss Robson took up with his daughter.”

“He did not approve, perhaps, of the friendship between his daughter and his lady friend,” suggested Lafarge thoughtfully.

“It is not unusual,” said Lafarge, “for a father to be anxious that his daughter should keep better company than himself.”

“Psychology,” grunted Nevinson. “I once knew a fellow who started working on a case from that angle. He ended by taking out a warrant for his own arrest.”

Stephen Lawson, reviewing the situation that Monday morning, in his library, was well content. Tasker would, in due course, convey to him the decision of his confederates, and the result was a foregone conclusion. Tasker would never have the courage or initiative to take his place as head of the gang, even if his subordinates were willing to accept the arrangement.

The financial details would be settled quite easily. The money was safe and would be fairly distributed. George Newman had already in effect disappeared. The emotional complications which he had so greatly dreaded had been smoothed away. He would be parting with Cora better friends than he had dared to hope, and Marjorie, seemingly at peace, was contentedly preparing for their holiday together.

Lawson looked at the card. For a moment he sat very still, his face expressionless.

Detective-Inspector William Nevinson, C.I.D. What did this mean? No use trying to think things out. Stephen Lawson was Stephen Lawson and must behave as such. That was his only possible line of action.

He went to his desk and was busy with his correspondence when Barton returned. He looked up and threw down his pen.

“Barton,” he said severely, pointing to the table, “there is no red ink.”

“From Scotland Yard,” he said. “This is my colleague, Monsieur Lafarge, from Marseille.”

Lawson stood with the air of a man who wished to be polite but obviously expected an explanation.

“I am sorry to trouble you, Mr. Lawson, more particularly as I bring bad news.”

Lawson, ready for the worst, showed no more alarm or interest than was natural in a busy man disturbed unseasonably at his morning’s work.

Lawson stiffened slightly as a gentleman should at this impertinent intrusion into his private affairs.

“I regret to inform you that Miss Robson was arrested yesterday afternoon on a criminal charge.”

Lawson deliberately allowed some of his inward dismay to find expression in his voice and manner.

“No mistake, Mr. Lawson. We have all the evidence necessary to secure a conviction not only of the lady in question but of two of her accomplices.”

Lawson passed a hand across his forehead. He was thinking rapidly. If the police had arrested Cora, they would already have ascertained the precise character of her private relations with himself.

“A criminal charge, did you say?” he protested again. “I can’t believe it. Miss Robson, as you seem to have discovered already, is a friend of mine—I might even say an intimate friend. Of what is she accused? I’m sure there must be some misunderstanding! Sit down, gentlemen, please.”

“Miss Robson and her associates are members of a gang which has been engaged for several years past in the illicit traffic in narcotic drugs.”

Lawson realized that some sort of violent reaction would be only natural in the circumstances.

“It is a damned lie,” he exclaimed. “I would answer for her anywhere. She would be incapable of anything so abominable.”

“Your feelings do you credit, Mr. Lawson, but there is no escaping the facts.”

“Then you shall prove it, by God,” he shouted, “or I’ll make things hot for you.”

“We should not be making such a statement if we were not absolutely sure of our ground.”

“You referred to her associates. Who are these persons? Do I know them? Are they also friends of mine?”

“That, Mr. Lawson, is precisely what we should like to ascertain. The most important member of the gang so far arrested is one Henry Tasker, managing director for a firm which goes under the name of George Newman, Limited, with premises at Thirteen Stonewall. Miss Robson recently arranged for a large consignment of heroin to be dispatched from Tientsin. The consignment was shipped to Marseille in a vessel owned by Newman. At Marseille it was handled by another of Newman’s agents, Julius Grauber, of Hamburg. Tasker, acting for Newman, was waiting to receive it in London.”

“Miss Robson was not long ago in Tientsin, was she not?” interposed Lafarge gently.

Lawson looked aside at Lafarge. At least he now knew the worst. Grauber was in London. Grauber had never received the warning sent to him on the previous day. The message conveyed through Isaacs had been intercepted by the police.

“Give me time, gentlemen,” he pleaded. “This, as you may imagine, is a terrible shock to me.”

He stood a moment looking into the street, outwardly a man who was mastering his emotions, inwardly reviewing his defenses.

“I know nothing of these persons you mention,” he said. “Why have you come to me?”

“It is my duty to make all possible inquiries among the friends of the accused.”

“It is what my English colleague calls the routine,” put in Lafarge affably.

Lawson darted another look at the man from Marseille. Instinctively he felt that of his two visitors this one was the more dangerous. He therefore addressed himself exclusively to Nevinson, as though he considered the dry levity of the other man as an impertinence.

“I fail to see why any such inquiries should be necessary,” he objected. “You say that you have your proofs. I see no purpose whatever in this visit.”

“Our case is complete, so far as the persons arrested are concerned,” returned Nevinson. “But we have yet to discover Newman, and it is Newman we want. Newman is the brains behind this organization and we mean to get him. I am most reluctant to intrude upon your private feelings, especially at such a moment as this. But you are a friend of Miss Robson and I am bound to ask whether you can give us any assistance in the matter.”

“Mr. Newman is also a friend of Miss Robson.” Lafarge had again slipped softly into the conversation. Lawson turned upon him fiercely.

“All tarred with the same brush; is that the idea?” he said indignantly. “You will be suggesting in a moment that I, too, am an agent of this drug merchant.”

“Not at all,” said Nevinson soothingly. “But Miss Robson may at one time or another have mentioned his name or there may have been some indication in her conduct or manner that she was engaged in this business.”

“Nothing whatever,” he interrupted angrily, “and if, in an unguarded moment, she had ever said or done anything of the kind you suggest, I should certainly not betray her confidence.”

“I understand, though I cannot approve, your attitude, Mr. Lawson. If you were really able to help us in this matter and refused to do so, your position would be, shall we say, ambiguous.”

“I am unable to help you, and my attitude is therefore no concern of yours, Inspector. I have never had the least suspicion that Miss Robson was breaking the law. I have never heard her refer in any way to any of the persons you’ve mentioned.”

“In that case I can only apologize for our intrusion, and there for the time being we will allow the matter to rest.”

“I am not familiar with police procedure,” continued Lawson, “but I presume that I have a right to know where I stand in this affair. You were good enough to say that for the time being you will allow the matter to rest. That seems to imply a reservation. Am I to understand that you have it in mind eventually to continue your inquisition into my private affairs? If such is your intention, I shall instruct my lawyer to act for me immediately. I have no wish to hinder the fair process of law, but I will not be tricked or bullied into assisting you in any way that may make things more difficult for Miss Robson.”

“Instruct your lawyer, by all means, if you think it desirable, Mr. Lawson. But I would point out that we are not inviting you or anybody else to make things more difficult for Miss Robson.”

“On the contrary,” interposed Lafarge, “we are most anxious to make things as easy as possible for the lady. We have even suggested that, if she would help us to identify this Mr. Newman, the court before which she will shortly appear might be disposed to take a more lenient view of her offense. Her refusal to do so will, on the other hand, be likely to aggravate her sentence, and the man she is so generously shielding will have the satisfaction of knowing that, in practicing the fidelity of which he is taking so ungallant an advantage, she has made things worse for herself.”

Lawson felt the veins in his neck swell to bursting. He controlled himself with an effort.

“Your sympathy for Miss Robson is misplaced,” he said coldly. “Meantime you may rest assured that I shall stand by her to the full extent of my powers and I will see that she is competently defended.”

“I do not think that we either of us like this Mr. Newman,” he said. “I can assure you for my part that it will give me great pleasure to see him where he should decently be—in the dock with his loyal and devoted friends.”

Lawson stood by the window till he heard the front door close and saw his visitors appear on the steps below. He watched them enter a police car, drawn up beside the pavement, but, almost before the car had begun to move toward Piccadilly, his thoughts had turned inward and were busily reviewing the position.

One part of him agreed fervently with the dangerous little man of the brown face and lively black eyes: he disliked this cruel vision of himself skulking behind his friends. Instincts that he had mercilessly condemned as quixotic on previous occasions prompted him to take his place beside them. Even more astonishing was a desire that had sprung alive in him from some hidden source to invite rather than to shun the retribution which was overtaking him. He had broken the law and must pay the price. He wanted to settle that account.

Another part of himself, detached, shrewd and more familiar, realized that these obscure, surprising emotions must be ignored. His partners were relying on him to play the game according to rules laid down and hitherto applied in the interests of them all. Nothing could save them from conviction. All he could do was to remain at large himself. He was their trustee. They must serve whatever sentences the court imposed, confident that he would be awaiting their release, ready and able to help them on their return to civil life.

Then, too, how could he possibly abandon Marjorie? She needed him even more than those others. For her sake, if for nothing else, he must retain his freedom.

Was it possible? He had nothing to fear from his associates and it would be difficult for the police to connect him in any way with the operations of Newman. He had visited the offices at 13 Stonewall only once. Del Bene of the Pie Qui Chante knew him only as a customer who called at the restaurant for his lady friend, and Del Bene in any case would hold his tongue. There were no records extant of his transactions and the funds of the organization in bearer bonds were safely housed beyond any possibility of discovery or sequestration. Every conceivable arrangement had been made in advance to meet just this situation in which he found himself.

The police had evidently discovered nothing that implicated him materially. Nevinson had questioned him as Stephen Lawson, a friend of one of the persons arrested. Lafarge was a different proposition. There was little to fear from Nevinson’s routine, but Lafarge was dangerous. The little man had genius. He worked, as it were, by flashlight. Genius was an unknown quantity. It could not be defeated by premeditation.

It was necessary to be prepared for the worst. Marjorie, for example, must be warned and arrangements made for her security and welfare in the event of his arrest and detention.

The steps to be taken next would necessarily depend on the way in which she met the situation, but, if the worst should happen, there was only one man who could be trusted to look after her. She must be persuaded, in the event of his arrest, to put herself unreservedly into the hands of Alec Ross.

Lawson was feeling oddly exasperated. He had told himself, as he listened to his daughter ringing the emotional changes upon their predicament, that he should have been touched by her manifest concern, her prompt sense of the peril in which he stood, her quick understanding of the more complicated features of the situation. But there was something disconcerting in the way she dramatized her emotions and the facility with which she passed from one mood to another. He had the impression that nothing essential went really home; her responses were writ in water.

His announcement that Cora had been arrested and that the police were inquiring into his relations with her in the hope of finding a clue to the identity of Newman, far from steadying her reactions, had elicited a display even more volatile than those which had disconcerted him in their previous interviews. She had behaved as though she were witnessing a play in which she had been offered a part. Even more disturbing was his instinctive conviction that this conduct in no way represented the essential Marjorie. All this superficial exuberance sprang from an impulse to fend off reality, to postpone the moment when she would see things as they were. She was like a person under a mental anesthetic. She did not feel as yet what was happening.

“Listen, Marjorie,” he urged. “For the moment I must stay where I am. I am certainly under observation and any attempt to get away would confirm the police in their suspicions. I have no choice but to play my part to the end—Stephen Lawson, with nothing to fear. But I want you to go over to Paris and wait for me there. I will follow you as soon as I can.”

“But you may be arrested at any moment. I can’t possibly leave you to face it alone.”

“I’m more likely to face it successfully if I know that you are safely away. If the police get really busy after me, they will stick at nothing. You will be questioned and they can hardly fail to discover that you have been what they call an addict. You may even be arrested yourself. They will pry into your relations with Cora. There is no end to it. You will be plumb in the thick of it all.”

“Good God,” he thought. “Anyone would think she was afraid of losing a star part in the show.” He had a sudden vision of her facing Nevinson with his routine and the dangerous little man from Marseille.

He added testily, “You’d crumple up and give the game away at the first encounter.”

“No use, father. We sink or swim together. Suppose I go off as you suggest and you are arrested. Do you think I could stay away from you then? I should never forgive myself.”

She had him by the arm in the old familiar fashion and his grasp tightened involuntarily about her. There was nothing to be done.

“Very well,” he said, “stay if you must. But God knows what will come of it.”

VII

Dr. Alec Ross rose to his feet as his visitor, announced half an hour previously by telephone, entered the consulting room.

Lawson nodded in answer to this greeting and sat down in an armchair beside the desk.

“No time for lunch editions,” Ross returned. “I wait for the late finals.”

“Only that my friend Cora Robson has been arrested along with two other persons on a criminal charge.”

Ross as a practicing physician was accustomed to receiving unexpected confessions. If he was staggered, he did not show it, but fell back on his professional manner. He sat back and tapped the desk in front of him with a paper knife. It was his rule to accept information given by his patients as casually as possible.

“Cora Robson?” he said. “I don’t think I’ve met her but I’ve heard Marjorie refer to her more than once.”

“Exactly,” Lawson returned. “She and Marjorie have been seeing a good deal of one another during the last few weeks. I’m here for Marjorie. She may need someone to look after her during the next few days.”

“The police know nothing of that. This is not an affair of small peddling. It promises to be the biggest and most sensational case yet taken to the courts.”

“There isn’t much that I wouldn’t undertake for Marjorie. You know that or you wouldn’t be here. But surely it’s up to you to see that your daughter comes to no harm.”

“I would take her away if it were possible. Soon, perhaps, I may be able to do so. For the moment, however, I must remain in London.”

Ross was thinking rapidly. An incredible suspicion had formed and was growing in his mind.

“Whether you go or stay,” he protested, “your place is with Marjorie. Why do you come to me?”

“Because circumstances may arise in which I may be unable to look after her myself.”

“I’m not asking you to do anything yet. But I should like to know that in the event of anything happening to me——”

He broke off as he realized that Ross was drawing his own conclusions. To the unspoken question in the doctor’s eyes he assented with a gesture.

“Yes,” he concluded. “I, too, am under suspicion. I have already been questioned. I may, if things go badly, be detained by the police.”

Ross rose from his desk and crossed the room. For a moment he seemed to all intents and purposes absorbed in the examination of a glass cabinet of surgical instruments. Suddenly he turned.

“I must know exactly how we stand,” he said. “You realize that for me as a medical man to be in any way accessory to information required by the police in such a case as this would be a very serious matter.”

“For that very reason,” he said, “it is better that you should know neither more nor less than I have told you already. Cora Robson, Marjorie’s friend and mine, has been arrested. There is little prospect, I am afraid, of her escaping conviction on the charges against her. I myself am bound to stand by her to the end, and I am, as I say, under suspicion. It is contrary to your own interests to know more than that. I have not admitted any complicity in this affair and I do not believe that the police can have any evidence against me. But where Marjorie is concerned I have to provide against every possibility.”

Ross considered with astonishment his own reaction to the monstrous implications of this confession. They should have proved too much even for that philosophic tolerance of human frailty which the physician is bound to acquire in the exercise of his vocation. But he could think only of Marjorie.

“I think I understand,” he said at last. “But one thing I necessarily want to know. Is Marjorie aware that you are liable to arrest?”

“I warn you, Lawson, that, if Marjorie knows anything which may increase or confirm any suspicion to which you may be liable, it is essential in her interest as well as yours that she should on no account be interrogated by the police. She is in no condition to stand up to it. Do the police know that she herself has been taking drugs?”

“Marjorie is in no way involved at present. If she were examined at all, it would be as a friend of Cora Robson—a mere matter of routine.”

“Police routine often has unexpected consequences. Can’t you persuade her to leave London?”

Nevinson shifted impatiently in his chair. There were times when he wished Mr. Attorney General were a little less methodical. But he knew from long experience that Sir Humphrey Egerton, K.C., K.C.M.G., was not to be hurried in his preparation of a case for the Crown. Sir Humphrey had made his reputation by never stating or even suggesting more than he could prove to the satisfaction of the jury. The evidence must be clear, abundant and supported by unimpeachable witnesses. He scorned all conjecture, probability or arguments based on psychological inference.

Nevinson watched the great man apprehensively as he removed his eyeglasses with the conclusive gesture of one who had made up his mind and was about to deliver judgment.

“Well,” Sir Humphrey declared, “I’m satisfied with the case so far as it goes.”

He might well be satisfied, reflected Nevinson. The files on the desk between them were numerous and, as Commissioner Lafarge, watching the proceedings with a lively interest from a chair near the window, would say, they were well-nourished. Code letters, deciphered in Washington and placed at the disposal of the prosecution, had enabled far-reaching operations to be traced and further arrests to be made in New York, Hamburg, Cairo, Vancouver and Sofia. Already the case promised to be the most important that had arisen in the history of the drug traffic. The biggest individual transaction as yet attempted had, moreover, been detected and followed from its origins in distant China to its culmination in Marseille and the Port of London. The police of a dozen countries had effectively co-operated in this achievement. The conviction and punishment of the three principal agents in that affair were assured and they were to be brought to justice in an English court.

But there was still that fly on the ceiling. Sir Humphrey was satisfied only so far as the case had yet been taken, and Nevinson was determined to take it further. The head of the organization had still to be discovered, and, in this ultimate adventure, the honor of the Yard was at stake. The laurels lay for the moment with Hammerton, of the Narcotics Bureau at Cairo, the cipher experts at Washington, the police of Marseille, even with the secludedly industrious officials of the League of Nations. Scotland Yard had done little more than co-ordinate results achieved elsewhere. This was a circumstance all the more humiliating as London had been, for years apparently, the headquarters of the gang.

“I am interested, of course, in what you tell me of Lawson and his relations with the female prisoner. You will doubtless continue your investigations in that direction, but at present there is not a shred of evidence to connect him with the organization. There can be no question of his detention or even of inquiries which he might justifiably resent. I would therefore ask you to proceed with the utmost discretion.”

Sir Humphrey could certainly be irritating at times. He delivered himself as from Olympus, living up to that image of himself which looked at him reassuringly from the mirror: Hyperion’s curls, the front of Jove himself, an eye like Mars to threaten and command. His bland assumption that the police could continue their investigations on the assumption that there was nothing to justify an inquiry into the affairs of Stephen Lawson and that they must scrupulously refrain from incommoding him in any way was in itself exasperating. To Nevinson it was peculiarly irritating in that his own mind was divided. He was torn between the realist attitude of Sir Humphrey who demanded material evidence, and the intuitive approaches of Lafarge, who had in some mysterious fashion convinced himself, not only that Lawson was the big man of the organization, but that the likeliest way to uncover him was narrowly to investigate what he called the emotional background. Nevinson’s methods were a shrewd blend of routine and conjecture. He appreciated Sir Humphrey’s distrust of the imponderables, but realized that routine without imagination never achieved anything but the most commonplace results. Sir Humphrey would never smell anything till you rubbed his nose in it. It was not his business to discover things, but to arrange them in a logical sequence. Lafarge, on the other hand, with his flair for remote and exciting possibilities, was quite capable of smelling a mare’s nest. Lafarge, for no reason at all, was interested in the fact that Lawson had a daughter whose increasing familiarity with the female prisoner had apparently coincided with a decreasing predilection on her father’s part for the more intimate amenities of the flat in Hertford Street. Such remote speculations were doubtless interesting, but there was a limit to this dangerous process of assuming what one wanted to prove as a preliminary to proving it.

Sitting in his office at Scotland Yard with Lafarge, half an hour later, Nevinson, who in the interview with Sir Humphrey had grown inwardly impatient of the Attorney General’s craving for evidence, was moved to protest rather forcibly against the disposition of his French colleague to draw conclusions from no evidence at all.

“He will never burn the Thames, your Sir Humphrey,” said Lafarge as they settled down to review the situation.

“Sir Humphrey claims that detection is a science,” protested Nevinson. “He properly refuses to accept your fancies as a substitute.”

“He deludes himself,” returned Lafarge. “No one knows better than the man of science that facts do not speak for themselves. Science proceeds by trial and error. Your Sir Isaac Newton, for example——”

“Some other time, perhaps,” said Nevinson. One could not be angry with this nice little man from the South. “Trial and error may or may not be the method of Sir Isaac Newton, but Scotland Yard cannot afford to arrest a man on suspicion in order to discover whether a theory is right or wrong.”

“Lawson,” said Lafarge, “has for some time been intimately associated with at least one of the members of the gang, and you have discovered that he lives considerably beyond the income which he earns from his lawful business or any other ascertainable source of revenue. We have noticed, moreover, that he is a consummate actor who, in a difficult situation, conducts himself with amazing coolness and resource.”

“I have noticed it,” continued Lafarge complacently. “You were too busy putting your questions to watch him as carefully as I did. It was a superb performance. You should have observed his eyes, my friend. They were as cool and wary as those of a snake, though his voice and manner never failed to exhibit the emotions to be expected of an innocent man in distress. Perhaps you also noticed——”

“I also noticed,” continued Lafarge, “that this Mr. Lawson particularly disliked my own small interventions. He was very angry, for example, when I suggested that Newman, by remaining in the background, would be making things worse for his confederates in the dock.”

“With you, my friend, he only pretended to be angry. With me, it was the real thing. He wanted to take me by the neck and throw me out of the window. This Stephen Lawson is also afraid of me. I feel it in my bones.”

Nevinson looked with an increasing exasperation at his colleague. The vanity of these Frenchmen!

“These are merely your personal impressions,” he objected. “Sir Humphrey is asking for evidence.”

“The evidence will be obtained,” said Lafarge. “Scotland Yard is taking steps, and your routine, my dear colleague, is admirable.”

“We must co-operate more effectively,” said Lafarge. “You look always for the material connection. You long, for instance, to find someone who has met or seen this Lawson enter Newman’s office. I look for Newman in the man himself. We have only to know Lawson better, and Newman, if our suspicion be correct, must inevitably reveal his identity.”

“He will take all the more care to prevent us, as you say, knowing him better.”

“But this Lawson does not live in a vacuum. He has a mistress who is Newman’s confederate. He has friends from whom he has had to conceal his illicit activities, but who must have been puzzled by his evasions. He has a daughter who either knows who and what he is or whom he has had to deceive and who is presumably not a fool.”

“I can’t allow that,” said Nevinson sharply. “We’ve no conceivable right to question Lawson’s daughter, merely because we suspect, without a shred of evidence, mind you, that her father is a crook.”

“Precisely. And we should cut a pretty poor figure if we had to confess in a court of law to bullying the child unsuccessfully in the hope of putting her father in the dock.”

“I ask only to make the acquaintance of this young person, who is not, let me tell you, by any means a child.”

“How do you know that? You haven’t been up to any of your tricks, Lafarge?”

“Only the trick of seeing what is under my nose, Inspector. You noticed, perhaps, a photograph on Lawson’s desk?”

“I noticed it,” continued Lafarge. “An interesting face. I do not wonder that her father likes to have it in front of him in a silver frame.”

“Hands off,” he said decisively. “I can’t have Lawson’s girl pulled into this business till we have something better to go upon than mere conjecture.”

“We shall not pull her into it, my friend. She will walk into it herself, sooner or later. Then you will see her for yourself. I ask only to be present.”

A policeman had appeared at the door following a discreet tap announcing his approach.

The door opened again in a moment. The gentleman who came forward turned out to be an elderly person, unmistakably a taxi driver. He had a small white beard and carried in his hand a copy of the Evening News.

“Name of Tompkins,” continued the visitor, perching himself on the edge of a chair. “It says to ring up Whitehall one-two-one-two, but I thought it better to come round.”

“There’s a reward offered,” continued the taximan, “to any driver who can recall taking a fare to Number Thirteen Stonewall, E.C. Four, and give particulars of same. Ten pounds and easy money.”

“Provided your information should, on investigation, be found correct,” added Nevinson quietly.

“That’s up to you, sir,” returned the man respectfully. “I can only tell you what I know and swear to same if you prefer to ’ave it on oath.”

“Say what you have to say, Mr. Tompkins. Then I may ask you perhaps to sign a statement.”

“It was last Saturday afternoon, sir. Just arter five to be exact. Fare was a young lady. I put down my flag in the Brompton Road and drove her to the address in question. She was in no hurry to get there. Had an appointment for six. So we drove quietly along the Embankment. Stonewall is a blind street. So I set her down by the Carrier’s Arms and waited to take her back. On the return journey she got off at Burlington ’Ouse.”

“I was hoping you might have noticed something particular or unusual about the young lady.”

“She gave me a quid. That was unusual. So was ’er manner. Not just chucking it about, if you know what I mean, but didn’t seem as if she wanted to give ’er mind to sich things as small change. Kind of lost look, she ’ad.”

“I’m no ’and at descriptions,” said the man doubtfully. Lafarge bent forward.

“Mr. Tompkins, if you were to describe the lady, you would tell us I think that she was of middle height, with a slim figure, gray eyes, dark hair and a pale complexion.”

“And if I was to tell you all that,” he said, “I shouldn’t be far wrong.”

“Miss Lawson passed us as we turned into Piccadilly from Clarges Street when we called on her father yesterday.”

Nevinson turned back to Mr. Tompkins who seemed to be viewing this brief conference between the detectives with deep suspicion.

“When you set this young lady down at the Carrier’s Arms, was it your impression that she had ever been there before? Did she, I mean, seem to know her way about?”

“No, sir. She ’ad the address on a bit o’ paper and, when she went up the street, she kept lookin’ up to find the numbers on the ’ouses.”

“Twenty minutes or so. I set ’er down as near six o’clock as makes no difference and I picked ’er up again well before ’alf past.”

“Funny you should mention that, for I said to myself at the time, ‘You’ve ’ad your money’s worth this trip and no mistake.’ It wasn’t the same girl, if you know what I mean. Color in ’er cheeks and sparklin’ eyes. No moonin’ along by the river on the way back. Told me to step on it. I could see ’er face in the mirror. Smilin’ most of the time, as though she were ’avin’ a little joke all to herself.”

“Thank you, Mr. Tompkins,” said Lafarge. “You did yourself an injustice a moment ago. That is an excellent description.”

“You’ll be doing that all right,” he said, “as soon as you’ve signed the statement.”

Half an hour later Nevinson, still at his desk, watched Lafarge tripping up and down the room, at Scotland Yard, whose bleak austerity reproved but could not moderate his lively southern gestures.

“You see, my friend,” Lafarge was saying, “this is the perfect alliance. Your routine and my little fancies go well together. You tell me that I am not to pull the young lady into this affair. I tell you she will walk into it herself. And now see what happens; you make an advertisement and into it she comes. That is now a fact and here are some more fancies. You noticed perhaps the time table. You perceived its significance. You have drawn perhaps some remarkable conclusions.”

“All I ask is that you should consider the time table. Grauber receives a telephone call in Marseille before six o’clock telling him to ship the drugs to London. At six o’clock this young lady, who is Lawson’s daughter, visits Newman’s office. She leaves before six-thirty. Shortly afterward Marius Delpiano in Marseille is ordered to find Grauber, who is to be notified that Newman has changed his plans and that he is to leave the consignment in Marseille. Now, I ask you, my friend, why did this Newman change his mind? Was it the result of his having received a visit from the young lady?”

“From her father to Newman? Or to Newman, who is also Lawson, from someone else? You go too fast.”

“No,” continued Lafarge, “let us for the moment keep to the facts. You see, it is I who now am slow and steady. We do not know that the girl conveyed a warning. But we do know that, as the result of a visit which Lawson’s daughter paid to Newman’s office at six o’clock on June twenty-fourth, Newman changed his plans. We also know—and this is even more significant—that she had not visited Newman’s office before. For her this was a voyage of discovery, and, in the words of our Mr. Tompkins, she had her money’s worth and no mistake.”

“A voyage of discovery,” repeated Lafarge as he waited with Nevinson in the library at Clarges Street. “But what precisely did she discover?”

Nevinson suppressed his irritation. He had called with his French colleague to interview Lawson and his daughter. He had already had enough of Lafarge and his speculations. He wanted the facts. Lawson was out, but his daughter was at home and Nevinson was impatiently awaiting her appearance.

“The possibilities are various,” continued Lafarge. “Perhaps she knew already that her father was a crook and came to warn him against a dangerous transaction. She advised him not to go on with it and he yielded to her persuasion. For undoubtedly Newman changed his mind during the interview. Or perhaps she did not know that her father was a crook till she saw him in Newman’s office. I rather like the idea. It is more dramatic or, in the words of Tompkins, she got her money’s worth and no mistake. She discovered, let us say, that her father was leading a double life and persuaded him to abandon his evil ways. Therefore he altered his plans.”

“What took her there in the first place?” objected Nevinson. “If she didn’t already know that her father was head of the gang there would be no occasion for her to visit him.”

“Excuse me, Inspector. I think aloud to clarify our ideas. We do not know why she went in the first place. The young lady will tell us that, perhaps. Why do people go to a drug merchant? Possibly she wanted to buy what he had to sell.”

“And pitched on her father by accident, in preference to every other peddler in London?”

“I do not believe in accidents. If she went to Newman unaware of his identity, the visit was arranged. Somebody who knew the facts wanted her also to know them. The girl, you must remember, was a friend of Cora Robson; and we have been informed that, as these two became more familiar, Lawson’s visits to the flat in Hertford Street became less frequent. That is an interesting situation.”

“He’s off again,” reflected Nevinson, noting a more lively gleam in the eye of his companion.

Nevinson looked with undisguised interest at the new arrival. He would show his colleague that he, too, could notice things.

“You’ve seen my card,” he continued. “I am Inspector Nevinson from Scotland Yard. This is my colleague, Monsieur Lafarge from Marseille.”

“You, too, Miss Lawson. You are aware, I think, of the object of this visit.”

“I am not aware of any reason why you should wish to see me, unless it is to apologize for having arrested one of my friends.”

“I will come to the point,” he continued aloud. “Your father has told you, perhaps, that we are anxious to discover the identity of a certain Mr. George Newman, of Thirteen Stonewall.”

“It is our duty, as a matter of routine, to question anyone who has at any time visited the premises of this Mr. Newman,” continued Nevinson inexorably.

“Because we are able to prove that the day before yesterday you called upon Mr. Newman at six o’clock in the evening.”

“Who is Mr. Newman? I know nothing about this man or his office. I was never there in my life.”

Nevinson wondered what exactly he should be noticing. The girl was outwardly quiet. She stood facing him. She did not lower her eyes, which dwelt upon him with an odd mixture of defiance and apprehension. The phrase of Tompkins recurred: Kind of lost look, she ’ad.

“I’m sorry, but we know for a fact that you visited these premises. You drove from the Brompton Road to Stonewall by way of the river. You had an appointment for six o’clock and you were in Newman’s office for at least twenty minutes.”

“You cannot possibly know these things, Inspector. I can only repeat that I was never there in my life.”

“I regret very much that you should take this line, Miss Lawson. Presumably you saw Mr. Newman and can give us a clue to his identity. I must warn you that, if you make a false statement to the police on this vital matter, the consequences may be serious.”

“You must be very sure of yourself to question me in this manner. What is your evidence?”

He stood with her for a moment, looking down into the street. Drawn up beside the pavement was a taxi, with an elderly chauffeur at the wheel.

“I did not bring up the witness, Miss Lawson, because I hoped a confrontation would be unnecessary.”

Again Nevinson wondered what exactly he should be noticing. The girl stood quietly beside him. Her face was expressionless. Only her eyes moved. They flitted restlessly round the room as if she were looking for something.

“These men say they can prove that I visited Newman in his office. I have told them it is impossible, but they do not believe me. There is a chauffeur down below in the street. He will swear that he drove me to that place.”

Lawson had his arm about her shoulders. She was pressing close to him as though for protection. He put her gently aside.

“Get out,” he said. “You’ve no right to come trying your third degree methods here. I’ll break you for this.”

“I have a right to require your daughter’s co-operation in the interests of justice, Mr. Lawson. I have reason to believe that she can help us to establish the identity of a dangerous criminal. I am well aware that, if my expectations should prove unfounded, I shall find myself in a most unfortunate position, but that is all the more reason why I should prove or disprove once for all the sworn statement of my principal witness.”

“My daughter has informed you that she never went to the address in question. I advise you for your own good to be satisfied with her statement. I am in that case prepared to overlook the extraordinary methods which you have seen fit to adopt.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, “but here is just one formality on which in my own interests I feel bound to insist. Miss Lawson has not yet confronted my witness. I was hoping to spare her the embarrassment.”

“Of course,” she said defiantly. “I will see this man. Tell him to come up.”

III

Tompkins, waiting below in his taxi, was not a happy man. Ten pounds and easy money was not to be lightly regarded, but he had no wish to be involved in complications with the police. His record was stainless and his conscience clear. But he had the underdog’s dislike of King’s evidence, and he remembered with compunction the lost look on the face of his late fare and was not unmindful of her generosity in the matter of small change. He hoped sincerely that he was not going to find himself responsible for getting her into trouble.

The door of the house beside which his taxi was drawn up opened suddenly. An obvious butler emerged and came down the steps.

“I’m in for it now,” he told himself as he paused on the threshold of the room and looked about him at the occupants.

The Inspector from Scotland Yard and the foreign gentleman were standing beside the window. Near the door another gentleman was waiting. That presumably was Mr. Lawson, and Tompkins didn’t gather that he was welcome. Beside Mr. Lawson stood the young lady and, once he had set eyes on her, he could see nothing else. She looked like one of the saints receiving Judas Iscariot.

“Come in, man,” he snapped. “Your business is with the gentlemen yonder.”

“Now, Tompkins,” he said, “we shan’t detain you for more than a moment. I simply want you to take a look at the young lady and to tell me whether you recognize her.”

He was staring hard at the girl. There was no mistaking the look in her eyes. She was pleading with him, appealing to his better nature, telling him almost in so many words that he could not possibly have the heart to give her away.

“It isn’t true,” she said. “There is some mistake. I’ve never seen you before. You know that as well as I do.”

“Sorry, miss, if I’ve put my foot into it,” he said miserably, “but I can’t go back on what I’ve stated on oath. I picked you up that there afternoon and drove you to that there address as mentioned.”

“Young ladies nowadays,” he said, “are much of a muchness and all the same to me, at my time of life. But I’ve said it and I must stick to it, if it’s all the same to you.”

“Look here, my man, this is a more serious matter than you realize. You say that you recognized my daughter as someone you drove to a certain address. My daughter categorically denies that she has ever seen you before. If you persist in your statement, you will probably have to swear to it in a court of law. I advise you to admit your mistake. You shan’t have cause to regret it.”

Tompkins, with an effort, withdrew his eyes from the young lady and looked squarely at the speaker, whose tone he resented. Also he disliked the impression that he was being invited to forswear himself and that it would be worth more than ten pounds and easy money to accept that invitation.

“That will do, Tompkins,” he said sharply. “Either you identify the young lady or you don’t.”

“Heartless devils, the police,” reflected Tompkins. “That’s my fare, all right,” he repeated stubbornly.

“There’s your warrant, Lafarge,” he added. “I’ve had it prepared in case.”

“Nautical expression,” Nevinson returned. “Something sound and watertight.”

“You agree with me that Newman is another name for Lawson which does not, as your poet says, smell as sweet. That is copper-bottom, is it not?”

“You’re probably right, but only upon inference. There is just no evidence at all. Even when we’ve proved that Miss Lawson visited Newman’s office, we haven’t proved that she found her father there.”

“You didn’t notice, perhaps, that I took a few notes yesterday during our visit to Clarges Street. I have in particular written down exactly what she said when her father came into the room. I will read it to you.”

Lafarge thumbed the pages till he found what he wanted. “These are her words, Inspector: ‘These men say they can prove that I visited Newman in his office. I have told them it is impossible, but they do not believe me. There is a chauffeur down below in the street. He will swear that he drove me to that place.’ ”

“Miss Lawson is a clever girl, but it is dangerous to be clever. The intention of her little speech is as clear as a summer’s day. In four short sentences she informs her father of the position in which she finds herself. She tells him why we have come to the house, what we are trying to prove, what she has said in answer to our questions and what is the nature of the evidence which we are going to produce. It is a masterpiece, but it is not the speech of an innocent girl who has just heard of Newman for the first time in her life.”

“The girl is interesting,” Lafarge continued. “You noticed her manner? Only to screen her father would she be so intense. She is what we call in our country an exaltée. She thinks, when the mood is upon her, that no one can resist her and that even facts must disappear if she will not allow them to exist. You saw how she confronted the excellent Tompkins. We might not have been present at that meeting. She implored him with her eyes to withdraw his statement and she imagined that he would be powerless to resist her. ‘I’ve never seen you before,’ she said; ‘you know that as well as I do.’ Putting the words into his mouth. In another moment she would have had the impressionable Tompkins swearing that he had never set eyes on her till that occasion.”

“All very interesting, no doubt; but it doesn’t help us to prove that Lawson is Newman.”

“Not immediately. But I have said that it is dangerous to be clever and it is even more dangerous to assume that facts can be ignored. Give me an hour with this young woman and she will tell me the truth.”

“Extort a confession, you mean? That sort of thing won’t do over here, you know.”

“I mean that I would discover what exactly it is she is so anxious to hide. And that would be the truth.”

“Then, too, there is the evidence of the waiters and clients at the Pie Qui Chante. We can prove that Lawson was a frequent visitor.”

“Not even your English jury would believe that. Why should she arrange for him to call at a place which, if he were not also a confederate, she would wish him at all costs to avoid.”

“It’s not a question of believing or not believing what these people say. We’ve got to disprove it.”

“Courage, my friend. First we make the arrest. The evidence will follow. Meantime I would suggest some further inquiries into the habits of Miss Lawson. You noticed perhaps——”

“What a man sees clearly before him depends entirely on his experience. I am in effect a narcotics bureau officer. That girl is an addict.”

“She is not sufficiently advanced to show it physically, but the mental characteristics are most pronounced. Cocaine, I should say. That accounts for the way in which she is prepared to ignore realities. She had only to think that she could persuade Tompkins to deny the evidence of his eyes and ears and the thing was as good as done. Fact must give way to fantasy. She will soon believe that she was never in Newman’s office at all.”

“Suppose you are right. How will it help us to prove that Lawson is Newman?”

“It will help us to increase the number of facts at our disposal and thus assist the prosecution in her cross-examination.”

“Sir Humphrey will never stand for that. Think of the effect upon a jury of putting up a girl to get evidence against her father.”

“She will regard herself as a witness for the defense. She will go into the box to save her father.”

“She will treat your English jury as a more susceptible Tompkins and, assisted by friendly counsel, she will give us a bad quarter of an hour. But then our turn will come. Under cross-examination she will lose control. She will give herself away—first one little thing and then another. I know the type. There is nothing to hold it together. One moment it is in the clouds and everything is possible. The next moment it is a little child crying in the dark.”

The voice of Lafarge dwindled into silence. The lively brown eyes were bright with intelligence, but not far behind them was the Virgilian sense of tears in mortal things. Nevinson felt profoundly uncomfortable. He had as little liking for ruthless intelligence as for any unveiling of the emotions. He looked down at the warrant on the table with deep misgiving.

“It is a difficult decision,” he said, “but the dilemma is inescapable. Either you arrest this man, in which case you have a very fair chance of securing his conviction. Or you allow him to go free, in which case Newman escapes and you will confess yourself defeated.”

“There is no dilemma,” he protested. “The alternative to making this arrest immediately is to wait until we are sure of the ground.”

“The copper-bottom? You deceive yourself, my friend. It is useless to wait for further evidence. That will come only when and if Lawson is arrested.”

Lafarge sat back. A sly look, not innocent of malice, came suddenly into his brown eyes.

“You think perhaps,” he continued, “that we have already done enough. We have arrested three of the criminals here in London. Others have been taken elsewhere. The police of Egypt, France and the United States will supply the evidence for their conviction. It will doubtless be a source of gratification to you that Scotland Yard should have been able to secure such valuable co-operation from foreign sources.”

Nevinson, uncontrollably red in the face, set his lips firmly together. He picked up the warrant and thrust it into his pocket.

“No use crying over spilt milk,” said Lawson, trying to be homely and cheerful. “You told the Inspector that you had never set eyes on the man. Now we shall have to stick to it.”

“What did you expect me to do? Tell him that I went along to that office and saw my own father sitting in the chair?”

“You did very well,” returned Lawson soothingly. “But if there had been time to think things out——”

“It would have been safer to own up to your visit. The police would never have started to question you if they had not been pretty sure of their ground. I don’t want to frighten you, my dear, but we’ve got to be prepared.”

“The chauffeur’s statement will be accepted by any jury unless he can be induced to hedge away from it under cross-examination. Then, of course, the police will be looking pretty closely now into our private affairs. That Frenchman is as sharp as a needle. I shouldn’t be surprised if he hasn’t already tumbled to your own little secret.”

“Once the police suspect that you’ve been getting drugs for yourself, they’ll be after anybody who is likely to throw light on the subject.”

“While I think of it,” he added, “Alec, for his own sake, must not be told in so many words that your statement to the police was false. That would make him an accessory. He will have his own opinion. But that isn’t evidence.”

“I still don’t see how I could have acted differently. Once I admit going to that office, it’s all up with both of us.”

“If you had confessed to the visit, you might have sworn that the man Newman whom you met was a total stranger.”

“It doesn’t matter what they believe. It’s what they can prove or disprove that matters.”

“Never mind. Now that you’ve denied the visit we shall stick to it. My safety is now in your hands, Marjorie. Good hands. And I’m not worrying. You have only to dig in your toes. It’s just your word against Tompkins’.”

Barton had no time to answer his employer. The two visitors who had followed him upstairs came decisively into the room. The first to appear was Inspector Nevinson. At his heels trotted Commissioner Lafarge.

“Stephen Lawson,” said the first-comer without prelude. “I have here a warrant for your arrest. It is my duty to warn you——”

“What are you doing here?” he interrupted. “Have you taken leave of your senses?”

“Illicit trafficking in narcotic drugs under the name of George Newman, Limited, of Thirteen Stonewall.”

“May I ask on what evidence you are detaining me—if that’s the right word.”

“There is your daughter’s visit to Newman’s premises and your frequent appearances at the Pie Qui Chante. Not to mention your close association with the female agent, Cora Robson. That is enough to go on with.”

“Come, Inspector, your ridiculous theory that I am George Newman depends entirely on the identification by Tompkins of my daughter as a person he drove to that peculiar address on June twenty-fourth. As a police officer of experience you must have learned by now to mistrust evidence resting entirely on recognition. I’ve no doubt if I were to advertise tomorrow for a person who saw me going to church last Sunday in a top hat you would have a whole regiment marching into the Yard, especially if you offered a reward. You’re just paying people to deceive themselves, which they do often enough, God knows, gratis and for nothing.”

“It’ll be for the jury to decide whether the evidence of Tompkins is to be relied upon.”

“You’re optimistic, Inspector. I don’t think this case will get as far as a jury.”

He paused a moment and added sharply, “Do you intend to bring my daughter into this?”

“These gentlemen will shortly be presenting their apologies. Meantime, if they should show any disposition to become at all chatty during my absence——”

Marjorie, standing at the window, watched her father cross the pavement with Nevinson and Lafarge in attendance. As he was about to enter the taxi, a tall figure came striding into view. It was Alec Ross. Lawson paused and said a word to Nevinson who stepped aside. Lawson and Ross stood talking together a moment. Then Ross climbed the steps of the house, while Lawson drove away with his two companions.

Marjorie was still standing by the window when Ross came hurriedly into the room.

“Marjorie,” he said, “what has happened? I saw your father below. It seems he has an appointment.”

Marjorie was swept by a sudden gust of irritation at his grave concern. He looked so kind and solemn. No one, she felt, had a right to be so immune from the accidents of life.

“Everything,” she echoed. “That will be a mouthful and no mistake. Sure you can bear it, Alec?”

“Nice to be you,” she said, “though you wouldn’t be quite so sure of yourself, perhaps, if you knew what was coming.”

She moved from the window and flung herself impatiently into a chair. She was already sorry for her outburst.

“For God’s sake, Alec, don’t be so kind and compassionate. Why, in any case, should you be dragged into this business? Be sensible and keep out of it. Father and I are in a jam. It’s our jam and I strongly advise you to have nothing to do with it.”

“He didn’t take it for granted,” returned Ross quietly. “He came to see me shortly after the arrest of your friend, Cora Robson. I promised that, if anything happened to him, I would look after you myself. I gave him that promise freely and with a full knowledge of what it implied.”

“You must be very fond of me, Alec Ross,” she said softly. She turned away and added on a high hysterical note, “But you can do nothing.”

“He saw me on the day following Miss Robson’s arrest. I know nothing of what has happened since. Hadn’t you better tell me the whole story?”

Remembering her father’s warning against making Alec an accessory after the fact, she did not tell him of her visit to 13 Stonewall or confess to her knowledge of her father’s identity with Newman. Ross sat quite still, shading his face with his hand. She threw herself back into her chair and, for a moment after she had finished, there was silence.

“I’m thinking of what you so carefully omitted to say. You denied the statement of the driver, Tompkins. You do not tell me whether or not it was correct.”

“If you ask me that question, Alec, I shall tell you that Tompkins was mistaken.”

“Do you realize that you may have to swear in a court of law that Tompkins was mistaken?”

“I know nothing about legal procedure, but I can see that it’s going to be difficult to keep you out of the witness box.”

“But I must go into the box. Otherwise the driver’s evidence will be accepted.”

“I warn you, Marjorie, that you are in no fit state to face cross-examination by a prosecuting counsel. You are likely to do your father more harm than good.”

“How can I refuse to go into the box? It would be equivalent to admitting that I was not prepared to swear to my father’s innocence.”

“We must get counsel’s opinion. I can’t think that a daughter can be compelled by the prosecution to give evidence in the hope that it may help them to convict her father on a criminal charge.”

“I tell you, Alec, that nothing will keep me from swearing to my statement in court. I don’t care a rap for counsel’s opinion. I shall stand by father, and Tompkins shall be driven to admit that he never set eyes on me till he came to this house on a fool’s errand. No one shall stop me and you least of all. You can’t even advise me to stand down without admitting that you, my best friend, know that I’m lying.”

“There’s no possible way out for me, Alec. Surely you must see that. There is only one thing that you can do. You must seem to believe that I am telling the truth and, if you are questioned, you must tell the truth yourself. They will know pretty soon that I’m your patient. Tell them everything you know and keep your thoughts to yourself.”

Then she saw that Barton was not alone. A square-headed man came forward into the room.

“Sorry, miss,” said the man gruffly, “but perhaps you’d take a look at this.”

He handed her a paper. She took it uncertainly, but could not see to read it distinctly.

Lawson sat back in the dock. He was lucky, he supposed, to be allowed to sit. But there they all were, Cora and Tasker and he, like people in a box at the theater looking down into the well of the court.

Sir Humphrey was in form and obviously meant to make this one of the notable trials of the century. It was difficult not to listen, even though you took no great interest in what he was saying. Lawson had small attention for anything at this stage in which Marjorie was not directly concerned. The case against Tasker, sitting on his right, and Cora, sitting on his left, might be interesting to the people up there in the galleries, but the conclusions were all foregone. The evidence had only to be marshaled and their convictions registered. His own case was on a different footing, not so much because the evidence was slender and he might escape, but because Marjorie would in due course be called upon to play her part.

“Not so many years ago the traffic in narcotic drugs was almost unrestricted. Respectable firms were allowed to manufacture quantities of such drugs far in excess of medical needs. These not only escaped into the illicit traffic, but were exported freely from country to country. Neither manufacturers nor dealers were held responsible for the use which might be made of them.

“This state of affairs has, however, completely changed. The trafficker in drugs is now recognized in almost every country of the world as an international criminal.

“A trader in narcotic drugs now breaks the law if he tries to import or export drugs into a country without the necessary licences and certificates. A manufacturer of narcotic drugs breaks the law if he manufactures more than the quantities which he is allowed by the government to produce. A chemist breaks the law if he sells drugs without a medical prescription, and he is responsible for every grain of these dangerous substances which he receives.

“Over sixty countries have agreed to limit their sovereign rights in order that the drug evil may be suppressed. They have signed conventions whereby their national traders and manufacturers are required to respect decisions reached by an international authority sitting in Geneva. A powerful and complicated national industry has been rendered subject to control at every stage in order that it may be difficult for the criminals who deal in illicit drugs to carry on their trade with safety and profit.

“These criminals have been driven from country to country. Police departments, all over the world, are co-operating hour by hour and using all the resources of modern science to combat the evil. I shall, in the course of the present trial, be calling in evidence information collected in London, Tientsin, Washington, Port Said, Marseille and Geneva.”

Lawson’s attention wandered. What would happen when Marjorie was called? Ross, as he knew, had done his best to keep her out of the box, but she was determined to go through with it. Lawson’s thoughts went back to their last interview. He had pleaded with her in vain. There was no going against her strangely exalted mood. She had insisted that they must stand together. She would abide by her statement that she had never visited the office at 13 Stonewall. Tompkins would give his evidence and then, as a witness for the defense, she would deny it and convince the jury that Tompkins had made a mistake. Ross was certain that she would collapse under cross-examination, though the pretense had been consistently maintained in his presence that she would be telling the truth.

It was Lawson’s scourge rather than his comfort that she should be forswearing herself to save him. Not only had he brought her to this necessity, but if, as Ross feared, she proved unequal to the strain, he must hold himself responsible for that also. So you are the big man who supplies the stuff. The phrase recurred, pointing to him as the author of her ruin. There was accusation, too, in Ross’s intolerable insistence that Marjorie in her present condition could not herself be held morally responsible for anything she might say or do.

“This case is unique in the English courts. England does not suffer very much from the drug evil. The laws in England are strict and the traffickers have hitherto avoided us. It is significant of the audacity of the gang whose leaders have been arrested that they should have chosen London for their headquarters.

“These men, however, must not be judged merely because they have broken the laws of England or on the ground that in England they can do but little harm. All governments are now working together to suppress the illicit traffic in drugs and it has been laid down in an international convention that persons who in one country conspire to commit this terrible crime in another country may be brought to justice in the country where they are arrested, even though their wicked schemes are aimed against the nationals of a foreign government. It is recognized that no government can suppress the illicit traffic in drugs unaided; all are working together. Foreign governments will be following these proceedings with interest. They will expect English justice to make an example of these criminals.”

Lawson drifted back into his thoughts. He could not see Marjorie from where he sat. Perhaps that was as well. He would see her soon enough. Her name would be called and she would go into the box yonder, to be baited and frightened, with hundreds of pairs of eyes, envious, curious, hostile, compassionate, contemptuous or sadistic, noting her every word and gesture. Surely anything would be better than that. But what could he do? He had threatened to plead guilty in a last effort to persuade her to avoid being called as a witness. Whereupon she had declared that she would have herself arrested as an accessory and stand beside him in the dock.

“I come now to Stephen Lawson and his part in this affair. I shall call evidence to show that he is head of this gang of criminals, a man of great intelligence who has for years directed the activities of subordinates all over the world. Upon him is the chief responsibility and his offenses should be visited with the utmost rigor of the law.”

Sir Humphrey sat down and there followed a pause in the proceedings. There was a slight reshuffling of seats in the court and Marjorie came into view.

Her eyes were unnaturally bright and she smiled up at him, nodding her head with a gesture of assurance.

Cora Robson looked down from her high seat in the dock. There at last was Marjorie, smiling up at her father.

Those two were together now. Cora smiled to herself, a bitter, hardly perceptible smile. This, after all, was her doing. She had thrust father and daughter into an alliance from which she herself would be excluded to the end of the chapter.

She had not once looked aside at Stephen since they had taken their seats in the dock. She might, so far as he was concerned, be at the other end of the world. Stephen thought only of Marjorie and of the moment when she would be called.

“I trust that the eloquent speech of my learned friend has not created prejudice. Everyone must feel horror at the crime of which the prisoners are accused, but I suggest that this reprobation is a new development in the public conscience. It has not always been recognized that a trader or manufacturer should be held responsible for the use which might be made of his goods. Nor is this principle generally admitted. Otherwise dealers in alcoholic liquor would be held responsible for all the crimes committed by persons under the influence of drink, and armaments manufacturers would be held responsible for the bombing of innocent civilians in wartime.”

She felt sorry for Jenner. Making bricks without straw. For herself and for poor little Henry there was no escape. But these lawyers must do all things in due and proper form. She had at first refused to plead. But it seemed that a criminal was expected by the court to assert his innocence, even when there was obviously no chance of proving it. Otherwise he would be adjudged “mute of malice” and be most unpopular.

How would it fare with Stephen? He cared for nothing now but to save Marjorie from sharing his disgrace. He had been sorely tempted to throw in his hand and confess to his identity—so he had assured her in their last permitted interview. But such a confession would involve Marjorie as an accessory. He must continue to assert his innocence. Stephen and Marjorie must stand or fall together.

“I protest that the attack made upon my other client, Mr. Stephen Lawson, is irrelevant. It is in reality directed against a person whose identity has yet to be discovered. I shall not contest the evidence collected from many sources and in many countries that the transactions which are the subject of the present trial were inspired and organized by one man of unusual ability. That man, however, was Mr. Newman of Thirteen, Stonewall, and my case will be that there is nothing to connect him with Mr. Stephen Lawson, a respectable and well-known man in the City and in the social life of London.”

Cora glanced aside at Lawson. He was still looking down at Marjorie. Those two, for all intents and purposes, were alone.

III

Marjorie took the oath in a firm clear voice. For the last two hours she had, as the lawyers said, hearkened to the evidence. The court was hot. Never had there seemed less air in the world. That accounted for the way in which her attention had waxed and waned like a fire on which the wind blows unsteadily. Every now and then she had tried to collect her thoughts and concentrate on the points on which, as Mr. Francis Jenner had warned her, the prosecution would rely in cross-examination.

Jenner, of course, was her friend. He would merely ask her whether she confirmed the statement which she had made to the police. All she had to do, so far as he was concerned, was to deny that she had ever been to Newman’s office or set eyes on the driver, Tompkins.

She looked across at Jenner, who was arranging his papers. Did he believe what he was professionally bound to believe—namely, that she was telling the truth and that her father was an innocent man wrongly accused?

She turned her attention to the jury. These twelve good men and true must somehow be persuaded of her honesty. Three of the twelve good men were women. That hard-featured, middle-aged female on the extreme right in the shabby black dress had clearly made up her mind already that the sleek young person in the box was not to be trusted; her sort of person would naturally prefer Tompkins. Nor was there anything to hope from the woman beside her who, with the expert assistance of a suburban beauty parlor, was fighting a losing battle with the years. Her sort of person would never believe any woman under thirty. There was just a chance that the smart young thing on the left would be more sympathetic. She would not, perhaps, believe that Tompkins had made a mistake, but she would certainly feel bound to oppose the other two. None of them, of course, would hearken to the evidence. Women took no account of such things. It was absurd to allow women to sit on a jury at all. Either they liked and supported you or they visited upon you all the pleasant sins which they had never had a chance to commit.

The men were different. They had ceased to be Tom, Dick or Sir Harry. They were an institution. Confronting their grave, judgmatical faces was like looking at a blank wall. The court seemed even more airless than before and, for a moment, the twelve faces swam in and out of focus. Marjorie remembered a jellyfish she had once seen swimming in a pool, expanding and contracting, just before she had dived into the water.

She glanced aside at the frail figure of Mr. Justice Perkes, almost smothered in his robes. He had a kind, shrewd face, but the man was lost in his office.

She turned for reassurance to Mr. Francis Jenner who had risen to his feet and was looking unusually benevolent. His first questions brought her back to the world of common form. “You are Marjorie Lawson? Daughter of Stephen Lawson? How would you describe your general relations to your father? Should I be right in saying that there was more than the usual frankness and confidence between you as father and child? Have you ever been aware of anything in your father’s conduct which would lead you to suppose that he was engaged in any other activities than those of a respectable city merchant?” And so forth.

She was feeling better now. Her serenity had returned. She even dared to look at her father. That, however, was unwise, for her father was obviously afraid, not for himself but for her. He hated to see her there. Already he flinched from the moment when she would be called upon to face the more difficult questions.

She looked away from her father and toward the jury. She must try not to look too defiant. She must try to believe that she was telling the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

“He has affirmed on oath that on June twenty-fourth he drove you to the office of George Newman, Limited, at Thirteen, Stonewall.”

“The witness is mistaken. I have never been to that address and I know nothing of the man in question.”

She looked again at the jury. Some of the men were taking notes. The others were observing her openly. They hoped to tell from her manner whether she was to be believed or not. Or had they made up their minds already that she was lying and were they just waiting for the moment when she would give herself away? What did it matter? Let them think what they pleased. She could not prove that Tompkins was mistaken. But Tompkins, on the other hand, could not prove that he was right.

“You have informed the court, Miss Lawson, that there was perfect confidence between yourself and your father?”

“Was your father aware that for some months previous to his arrest you were trying to procure cocaine for your own use and that you were voluntarily undergoing treatment with a view to curing yourself of the habit?”

“I respectfully submit that my honorable and learned friend should confine himself to the question of identity. The prosecution has called evidence purporting to show that the witness was driven to a certain address on the evening of June twenty-fourth. The witness denies that statement. This is merely a question of recognition.”

“I presume it is your intention, Mr. Attorney General, to attack the credibility of the witness?”

“It will not have escaped your Lordship,” he said, “that the question of credibility is vital to our case. I have no desire to deal with any matter which is irrelevant to that issue. I could, with your permission, call evidence to show that the witness has for some time past been, as I suggested, procuring cocaine for her own consumption and that she recently consented, under medical advice, to undergo treatment so that she might be cured of the habit. I should be extremely reluctant to pursue that matter further, if only for the reason that it would involve an inquiry into facts which, from the publicity attaching to this case, might be unfairly prejudicial to the reputation of persons, hitherto beyond the range of these proceedings, who have acted throughout in good faith and with a reasonable regard for the public interest. I regard it as essential, however, to establish beyond all doubt the credibility or otherwise of the witness. We have been informed, for example, that there was perfect confidence between father and daughter, the inference being that, if she did not know that her father was engaged in the illicit operations with which he is charged, no such operations could in fact have been undertaken. The witness has denied any such knowledge and I cannot allow the impression thus created to remain unchallenged. The witness has made certain statements which seriously impair the case for the Crown and I would ask your leave to treat her as a hostile witness within the limits of the law of evidence.”

“The question of credibility is, of course, material. You may rely upon me to afford the witness all possible protection. Sir Humphrey, you may proceed.”

“I thank your Lordship and, to show that I am in no way anxious to embarrass the witness unnecessarily, I am prepared, if she so desires, to withdraw my question and to cross-examine her on points arising immediately from the evidence before the Court.”

Marjorie became aware of the mild but searching gaze of Mr. Justice Perkes. Presumably she was expected to say something. Or must she speak only when expressly invited to do so? Mr. Jenner was trying to catch her attention, but she must not allow herself to be distracted. This was a trap and she must trust to her own wits to avoid it. The protection promised by the little judge, who was so kind and shrewd, and yet so implacable, was a snare and a delusion. If she showed herself unwilling to answer any question put to her, the jury would answer it for themselves.

“I know nothing of legal procedure but, rightly or wrongly, I insisted on coming here to tell the truth and I am willing to answer any questions that may be asked. I admit that some time ago I became a victim to the drug habit. It is also a fact that I am undergoing treatment. I have said that there is perfect confidence between myself and my father. For that very reason I could not bear to let him know that——”

“You are not required to make a statement to the court, Miss Lawson. Your witness, Sir Humphrey.”

“I note that there was perfect confidence between the witness and her father, but that it did not extend apparently to this most painful and vital matter of her addiction.”

“Did it never occur to you that your father might be similarly reserved upon matters equally vital to you both?”

“You are not required to answer that question, Miss Lawson,” said Mr. Justice Perkes quietly.

“I have answered it already, my Lord. I have said there was never anything in my father’s conduct which might lead me to suppose that he was engaged in illicit business.”

“Does that statement apply to all or any of the other persons accused?” demanded Sir Humphrey.

“Perhaps Sir Humphrey will develop his case. I confess I do not see where he is leading us.”

“I desire that this court may be better able than it is at present to decide as to the credibility of the witness. That, I venture to repeat, is a vital element in my case.”

Marjorie listened with a growing irritation to these legal courtesies. That last question did not concern her father in any way and she was quite prepared to answer it. She knew what she must do and wanted to do it while her wits were still unruffled. She would tell the jury the truth in all that concerned herself. They would then be more likely to believe her when she was compelled to answer questions concerning her father.

There was a part of her mind, cool and clear, which felt itself more than a match for Sir Humphrey and which cared nothing for the good opinion of the Court, so long as she succeeded in weakening the case for the Crown. But somewhere in the background there was another part of her mind, a circle whose center was a tiny black speck of fear which might at any moment spread like a spot of ink splashed on a blotter. At all costs she must keep that other part of her mind under control. She must be confident and aggressive. That other self was waiting.

“You have been for some little time on friendly terms with Miss Cora Robson, one of the accused?”

Marjorie glanced aside at Cora, sitting in the dock, hands folded in her lap, very quiet and seemingly remote from the proceedings.

There was a little light laughter in court as when a line finds its billet from the stage.

They know you were getting the stuff somewhere and they know that Cora had it. They found some of those little white packets locked up in her drawer.

“Miss Robson made no secret of the fact. She took a pinch of cocaine now and then, as you might take a glass of sherry, just to brighten things up.”

“Did Miss Robson share the drug with you? Was she in fact, your source of supply?”

“If I had known how to get it for myself, I shouldn’t have taken it from her.”

“You were on sufficiently intimate terms with Miss Robson to know that she had these supplies, but you did not know that she had any connection with the illicit market.”

“I never thought about it. I just assumed that, if you knew your way about, it was easy to get what you wanted.”

“So you never had the least suspicion that Miss Robson was engaged in this criminal traffic?”

“When you told Miss Robson that you had been appropriating her supplies to yourself, what was her reaction?”

“On the contrary. She locked her drawer and threatened to tell my father. I did not mind her refusal so much because I was already under treatment and trying to cure myself.”

“Oh no. Nor when my father was arrested; nor when I found that it would be necessary to come into court to deny the evidence of a paid witness who has sworn that he drove me to Mr. Newman’s office—if we may come back to the point for a moment.”

“That, I take it, was a reward for conveying useful information to the police.”

“I’m sorry, my Lord. But these legal distinctions are beyond my simple comprehension.”

“The Court,” he said, “will have formed its own conclusions as to the simplicity or otherwise of the witness.”

“We come now,” he continued, “to the material question. Did you or did you not, on the evening of June twenty-fourth, take a taxi and drive to Number Thirteen, Stonewall?”

“You were in court this morning and heard the evidence of the driver, Tompkins?”

“I have already grasped the fact that you deny the evidence. But I want to call your attention to one very significant passage. I have it here in the shorthand notes and I will read it to you:

“Now, Miss Lawson,” he continued, “can you tell us when you last wore the dress described in those notes?”

Marjorie was thinking again. She remembered an incident which had occurred when Tompkins was giving his evidence. She had attached no importance to it at the time, but now, quite suddenly, she perceived its significance.

“It was the same young lady all right,” Tompkins had said, “but she was dressed different.” Sir Humphrey had not apparently thought this matter of the dress worth noticing. But the little French Commissioner, sitting behind him in the court, had pulled his coattails and handed him a piece of paper. Whereupon Sir Humphrey, who had started to ask Tompkins quite a different question, had asked him, instead, about the dress.

And now they were going to make a point of it. They wanted her to say that she had last worn that dress when she had gone, or had not gone, to Newman’s office. That, of course, would make it easier for everyone to believe that Tompkins was telling the truth.

This abrupt intrusion of the striped dress was disconcerting. You carefully prepared yourself to meet X. Then all at once X became X + Y. That was algebra. She had done no algebra since she was at school.

“I’m not yet sure that I identify the dress in question,” she said. “I am not perhaps so good at recognizing things as Mr. Tompkins.”

“Have you by any chance a striped black and white dress, with a hat to match?”

“Let me explain. Mr. Tompkins has stated that you were wearing a striped dress when he drove you to Mr. Newman’s office. You were not wearing that dress when he identified you two days later. He could therefore only have seen you in such a dress on the occasion described. It is a remarkable coincidence that, in the course of his evidence, he should incidentally have described you as wearing a dress of whose very existence he could hardly have been aware if he had not in fact seen you wearing it on June twenty-fourth when he drove you to the locality in question.”

“I crave your Lordship’s indulgence, but I thought it well to warn the witness of the extreme importance which attaches to this particular point.”

The little judge had come to the conclusion that she was an artful dodger. Perhaps she had been too pert in her defense. That other self was invading her now like a flood. The tiny black spot in the center of the circle was spreading. The walls of the court seemed to be contracting about her. She would be caught like that poor dumb beast of a donkey between the rocks.

What a zany she had been to wear that remarkable dress. Where was it now? She had not worn it since. It must be hanging in the wardrobe at Clarges Street. Like a zebra. Anyone would notice it.

Sir Humphrey was facing her. He had just repeated that silly gesture with his gown.

“Were you on the evening of June twenty-fourth wearing a dress such as has been described?”

The black circle had spread still farther. That other self, which saw the trap closing about her, was flooding in upon the cool, clear part of her mind. This matter of the dress was vital. No one would believe that Tompkins had invented it. He had seen someone wearing a striped dress. To admit having worn that dress on June twenty-fourth or even to having such a dress in her possession would be as good as confessing that she was the woman he had identified.

She heard the words slipping from her, remembering how once in the theater she had carelessly let her program fall from the balcony, how she had dived to recover it and seen it fluttering down into the stalls below. For a moment the cool clear part of her mind took possession, but only to be overwhelmed with a sense of irretrievable error. She had run blindly from one trap into another.

“How do you account for the fact that a dress exactly answering to the description given by the driver Tompkins was hanging in your wardrobe two days later when your father’s house was searched by the police?”

“I have here a witness”—he turned toward Lafarge as he spoke—“who remembers seeing such a dress among your personal effects. Are you willing that a further search should be made?”

The active part of her mind would no longer concentrate on the argument. She was looking down at Lafarge. Just like a Frenchman to have noticed that dress. Just like that clever little man, whom she had instinctively feared from the first, to seize so quickly on the significance of Tompkins’ casual remark: “It was the same young lady all right but she was dressed different.” Sir Humphrey would have passed that observation by, if the little Frenchman had not pulled his coat and handed him a piece of paper.

It was all over now. The police would find the dress and there was no mistaking that zebra effect. Tompkins not only saw things clearly but could tell you what he had seen.

She was still thinking. The dress would be produced in court. It was no use denying that she had it. But she could still pretend to be quite cool about it.

“Now you come to think of it,” repeated Sir Humphrey ironically. “Is your wardrobe so extensive that you can forget so easily what is presumably a fairly recent addition?”

Sir Humphrey, with an eye to the Court, felt that a little humor would not be out of place.

“It is not a little remarkable, if I may say so, that a lady should be so indifferent to such matters.”

He waited for the laugh that failed. Humor was not his strong point. Marjorie was better prepared.

“Not more remarkable than the interest which the gentlemen from Scotland Yard appear to have taken in my wardrobe. Or perhaps it was the French gentleman.”

“You remember the dress, at any rate,” said Sir Humphrey severely. “Would you now tell the court when you wore it last?”

“I can’t understand all this fuss about what Tompkins saw. He could pick up women in striped dresses by the dozen any day of the week.”

“Why then did you at first find it so difficult to remember that you had such a dress in your possession?”

Marjorie hesitated. She had answered the last questions mechanically, hardly aware of what she said, her mind divided between her fear and a growing sense of the bleak hostility of the Court. All these people had made up their minds that she had been wearing that abominable dress on the evening of June twenty-fourth, that Tompkins had seen it then and at no other time and that he had driven her to Newman’s office.

She looked aside at her father for the first time since the cross-examination had started. She had failed him badly, given away his case. With her whole heart she implored his forgiveness.

He was sitting upright and motionless, his eyes fixed upon her intently. He must have been looking at her like that for some time. His expression was hard to read so far away. But she knew at once what was in his mind. He wanted her to tell the truth about the dress and have done with the whole dreadful business. He could not stand another turn of the screw. Soon he would rise up and end it himself.

There had been another name for torture in the middle ages. They had called it the question.

Abruptly there flashed into her mind that last morning with her father in Clarges Street. It would have been safer, he had said, to admit having gone to Newman’s office.

Abruptly her mind was lit with this new idea. Why not confess that she had lied about her visit? The Court had already made up its mind on that point. She might just as well make the best of a bad business. The fact that she had gone to Newman’s office proved her a liar, but it did not prove that Newman and her father were one and the same person.

But she must make haste. She could almost feel that mad impulse in her father to stand up and proclaim his identity.

It seemed ages since that last question of Sir Humphrey, but it had been only an instant as measured by the clock.

She was aware of the thrill that ran through the Court at the sound of her voice. There was no hint of mockery in her unconscious parody of the legal style.

“If your statement is an answer to the question with which we are at present concerned—” he began.

“Nothing shall stop me,” she went on, her voice ringing out, as though she would overbear any possible interruption.

“The dress was mine,” she continued. “I was wearing it on June twenty-fourth when I was picked up and driven to Newman’s office. My statement to the police was false.”

“That is a very serious confession, Miss Lawson. Do you realize that it renders you liable to arrest on a charge of perjury?”

“To save my father. I was afraid that, if I confessed to this visit, it would be inferred that he was somehow connected with Newman. That, as I see now, was a mistake. I should have had more faith in the justice of the Court.”

Mr. Justice Perkes turned to Mr. Jenner, who was sitting back in his chair with a face carefully emptied of expression.

“First, I should like to congratulate the witness on her declaration. It is a case of better late than never. I would also express the hope that her faith in the justice of the Court will enable her to answer truthfully the questions which naturally arise from her confession.”

“Your motive in seeking to mislead the Court was, as you expressed it, to save your father?”

“Why did you assume that to admit visiting Newman’s office on June twenty-fourth would necessarily implicate your father in Newman’s illicit activities?”

“If your motive in misleading the Court was to save your father, why did you not at once confess to the visit and state that the man you saw was not your father but a perfect stranger?”

“I have admitted that I made a mistake. I was afraid that a connection would be inferred.”

“I put to you that you denied making this visit because it was your father whom you went to see and because you were afraid lest this connection, which was in your mind, would inevitably be discovered?”

“My fear was not wholly groundless, since you infer the connection yourself.”

“I infer the connection, not from your visit, but from the lengths to which you have gone to conceal it. Did you expect to see your father at Newman’s office?”

“You informed the Court that you wished to be cured of the habit and were undergoing treatment?”

“I was undergoing treatment, but I wanted to have the drug at hand in case of need.”

“Previous to your confession you informed us that you had no idea that Miss Robson had any connection with Newman. Do you wish to modify that statement in any way?”

“Doesn’t it strike you as an astonishing coincidence that this friend who sent you to Newman’s office, who might have selected any other peddler of illicit drugs in London, should have picked on the address of Miss Robson’s confederate?”

Marjorie hesitated. Hitherto relief at having escaped from the trap closing about her had successfully carried her along. But now it was closing again. The coincidence, as she perceived, was monstrous. It could only be avoided by a further confession.

“It was not altogether a coincidence. The friend who sent me to Newman was, as you suggested, Miss Robson herself.”

“Doesn’t it strike you as rather extraordinary that Miss Robson should refuse to give you the drug herself, when she presumably had access to unlimited supplies, and yet send you to this perfect stranger whose address she had, in common with her other confederates, the best of motives to conceal?”

Marjorie stopped. Where was this leading her? She could not see Sir Humphrey very distinctly. With an odd detachment she noted that her hands were gripping the edge of the box.

“I was going to say that, if Newman happened to be my father, there would be even less reason that she should give me his address.”

“The witness,” he said, “is not required to answer for the motives of another person.”

“Did you, in the course of your visit to Newman’s office, obtain any information as to the nature of his activities?”

“In your previous evidence you informed the Court that you had no idea that Miss Robson was in any way connected with Newman’s activities. You now admit the contrary?”

“Did you see or hear anything in the course of your visit which might help you to understand why Miss Robson should have sent you to that particular address?”

Marjorie shrank back into the corner of the box. The walls of the court were closing in upon her now. Her brain would work no longer. That other part of her mind was a big black disc expanding to blot out everything. Her last glimpse upon reality was a sudden blinding conviction that she had utterly failed to convince the Court that she was even now telling the truth and that every word she uttered added to the pile of evidence against her.

Fighting against oblivion, she glanced instinctively toward her father. He had risen from his seat and was looking toward her across the well of the court.

For a moment she lost all sense of her surroundings, even of the fear that was upon her like a breaking wave, in a sense of their being alone together.

She was still looking at her father, but knew that Sir Humphrey must be thrusting back his gown and preparing to score again.

Something snapped in her brain and the tension was relieved. She realized with a sudden bright sense of amazement that she was telling the truth. Expected to see your father? She had certainly never anticipated that. She had never been more thoroughly surprised in her life.

She began to laugh. That was against the rules. They would be accusing her next of contempt of Court. But she could not help it.

She was telling the truth; Sir Humphrey, for all his cleverness, was hopelessly at sea. Her laughter rose, shrill and uncontrollable.

Then a voice, clear and authoritative, rang through the court. Her laughter stopped dead.

Dr. Alec Ross, sitting in the small library of his house in Cavendish Square, was making a virtue of the necessity he was under to stay that week end in London. Usually he spent his seasonable Sundays fishing on the Wye near Hereford, but one of his key patients, Lady Engleby, would have regarded it as a gesture of criminal indifference to the alarming condition of her appendix if he had dared to put more than a statute mile between herself and her physician on that particular Sunday morning in June.

The sunlight streaming through the open window, mocking his detention, had set him thinking. Professionally he might count himself lucky that Lady Engleby and her kind still commanded his services. His reputation could never have survived the scandal which had come within breathing distance only three short years ago. Fortunately, however, he had not been required to appear publicly in that famous case of the Crown versus Stephen Lawson, Henry Tasker and others. Nor had he in the sequel been called upon to destroy his character as a wise physician and a sensible man of the world by marrying, as he had so ardently intended, a proclaimed addict who had committed perjury to save her father. He had been given no choice in the matter. Henceforth he could only count his blessings, among which was his present profitable devotion to Lady Engleby and a practice which was increasing yearly among the best people.

Now and then prudence would whisper that all had happened for the best. It was doubtful whether Marjorie would ever have been successfully cured of her malady. Nothing would persuade her during those dreadful days following Lawson’s conviction that she was not directly responsible for his ruin. The authorities, anxious to avoid the odium of arresting a child for standing by her father, had connived at her escape. They had even allowed her to see Lawson, so that he might persuade her to leave the country and await his release. But the fixed idea had remained with her night and day. Halfheartedly she had consented to enter a nursing home at St. Jean de Luz; and Ross, leaving her in the care of his friend, Dr. Furness Wright, taking his summer holiday that year in Biarritz, had returned to assure Lawson, against his better judgment, that all might yet be well.

The Sunday paper on his knees rustled to the floor as Ross stirred uneasily in his chair. Down below in the basement a bell was ringing. Lady Engleby presumably desired his presence and he would spend the rest of the morning in assuring her that she was not, nor ever would be, half as ill as she wishfully imagined.

His visitor did not seem to hear the invitation. She stood in the sunlight, gazing about her and breathing deeply.

The voice was flat. She seemed like a person who ought to be enjoying her freedom but who was unable to rise to the occasion.

“They released me yesterday morning,” she continued. “Or perhaps I should say that they turned me out. That was how it felt.”

“It was very good of you to write. But I want to be sure what really happened.”

“One moment she was floating on the surface of the water. Then nothing. It could not possibly have been an accident.”

“Stephen did not believe it was an accident. It was, in any case, an accident which he was unable to survive. You may say that he did not actually kill himself. He simply refused to go on living. They even tried forcible feeding in the end, but it was no use.”

“They both died in the conviction that each had destroyed the other. I tell myself that I wanted them to be together at the last. But does it really matter what I tell myself?”

“A lucky escape for you, Dr. Ross,” she said. “Your world can now go on as it should. You were not cast for tragedy.”

From the desk beside her came the buzz of a telephone. Neither of them moved for a moment.

“For you,” she said in the same flat tone. “A message from Lady Engleby.”

TRANSCRIBER NOTES

Misspelled words and printer errors have been corrected. Where multiple spellings occur, majority use has been employed.

Item, Sack, two gallons	5s. 8d.
Item, Anchovies and Sack after Supper	2s. 6d.
Item, Bread	½d.

“Question:	Would you please tell the Court what happened next?

“Answer:	I was taken to Number Thirty-one Clarges Street and I identified the young lady. It was the same young lady all right. But she was dressed different.

“Question:	Do you remember what the young lady was wearing when you picked her up?

“Answer:	She was wearing a black and white hat on the side of her head and a black and white striped dress to match. Sort of zebra effect, if you know what I mean.”

CHAPTER I

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

CHAPTER II

I

II

III

IV

V

CHAPTER III

I

II

III

IV

CHAPTER IV

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

CHAPTER V

I

II

III

IV

V

CHAPTER VI

I

II

III

IV

CHAPTER VII

I

II

III

IV

V

CHAPTER VIII

I

II

III

CHAPTER IX

I

II

III

CHAPTER X

I

II

III

IV

V

CHAPTER XI

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

CHAPTER XII

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

CHAPTER XIII

I

II

III

IV

V

CHAPTER XIV

I

II