He left his hat and stick behind him, under a shrub, and he began to make his way up the half-bare branches of the gnarled cedar. They bore him well, without crack or rustle, and the way was very easy. No ladder made by man could have offered a much simpler ascent. So, mounting slowly and with care, his head came level with the top of the wall. He climbed to the next branch, a foot higher, and rested there. The drooping foliage from the upper part of the cedar-tree, which was still alive, hung down over him and cloaked him from view, but through its aromatic screen he could see as freely as through the window curtain in the rue d'Assas.

The house lay before him, a little to the left and perhaps a hundred yards away. It was a disappointing house to find in that great enclosure, for though it was certainly neither small nor trivial, it was as certainly far from possessing anything like grandeur. It had been in its day a respectable, unpretentious square structure of three stories, entirely without architectural beauty, but also entirely without the ornate hideousness of the modern villas along the route de Clamart. Now, however, the stucco was gone in great patches from its stone walls, giving them an unpleasantly diseased look, and long neglect of all decent cares had lent the place the air almost of desertion. Anciently the grounds before the house had been laid out in the formal fashion with a terrace and geometrical lawns and a pool and a fountain and a rather fine, long vista between clipped larches, but the same neglect which had made shabby the stuccoed house had allowed grass and weeds to grow over the gravel paths, underbrush to spring up and to encroach upon the geometrical turf-plots, the long double row of clipped larches to flourish at will or to die or to fall prostrate and lie where they had fallen.

So all the broad enclosure was a scene of heedless neglect, a riot of unrestrained and wanton growth, where should have been decorous and orderly beauty. It was a sight to bring tears to a gardener's eyes, but it had a certain untamed charm of its own, for all that. The very riot of it, the wanton prodigality of untouched natural growth, produced an effect that was by no means all disagreeable.

An odd and whimsical thought came into Ste. Marie's mind that thus must have looked the garden and park round the castle of the sleeping beauty when the prince came to wake her.

But sleeping beauties and unkempt grounds went from him in a flash when he became aware of a sound which was like the sound of voices. Instinctively he drew farther back into the shelter of his aromatic screen. His eyes swept the space below him from right to left, and could see no one. So he sat very still, save for the thunderous beat of a heart which seemed to him like drum-beats when soldiers are marching, and he listened—"all ears," as the phrase goes.

The sound was in truth a sound of voices. He was presently assured of that, but for some time he could not make out from which direction it came. And so he was the more startled when quite suddenly there appeared from behind a row of tall shrubs two young people moving slowly together up the untrimmed turf in the direction of the house.

The two young people were Mlle. Coira O'Hara and Arthur Benham, and upon the brow of this latter youth there was no sign of dungeon pallor, upon his free-moving limbs no ball and chain. There was no apparent reason why he should not hasten back to the eager arms in the rue de l'Universite if he chose to—unless, indeed, his undissembling attitude toward Mlle. Coira O'Hara might serve as a reason. The young man followed at her heel with much the manner and somewhat the appearance of a small dog humbly conscious of unworthiness, but hopeful nevertheless of an occasional kind word or pat on the head.

The world wheeled multi-colored and kaleidoscopic before Ste. Marie's eyes, and in his ears there was a rushing of great winds, but he set his teeth and clung with all the strength he had to the tree which sheltered him. His first feeling, after that initial giddiness, was anger, sheer anger, a bewildered and astonished fury. He had thought to find this poor youth in captivity, pining through prison bars for the home and the loved ones and the familiar life from which he had been ruthlessly torn. Yet here he was strolling in a suburban garden with a lady—free, free as air, or so he seemed. Ste. Marie thought of the grim and sorrowful old man in Paris who was sinking untimely into his grave because his grandson did not return to him; he thought of that timid soul—more shadow than woman—the boy's mother; he thought of Helen Benham's tragic eyes, and he could have beaten young Arthur half to death in that moment in the righteous rage that stormed within him.

But he turned his eyes from this wretched youth to the girl who walked beside, a little in advance, and the rage died in him swiftly.

After all, was she not one to make any boy—or any man—forget duty, home, friends, everything?

Rather oddly his mind flashed back to the morning and to the words of the little photographer, Bernstein. Perhaps the Jew had put it as well as any man could:

"She was a goddess, that lady, a queen of goddesses ... the young Juno before marriage...."

Ste. Marie nodded his head. Yes, she was just that. The little Jew had spoken well. It could not be more fairly put—though without doubt it could have been expressed at much greater length and with a great deal more eloquence. The photographer's other words came also to his mind, the more detailed description, and again he nodded his head, for this, too, was true.

"She was all color—brown skin with a dull-red stain under the cheeks, and a great mass of hair that was not black but very nearly black—except in the sun, and then there were red lights in it."

It occurred to Ste. Marie, whimsically, that the two young people might have stepped out of the door of Bernstein's studio straight into this garden, judging from their bearing each to the other.

"Ah, a thing to touch the heart! Such devotion as that! Alas, that the lady should seem so cold to it! ... Still, a goddess! What would you? A queen among goddesses! ... One would not have them laugh and make little jokes.... Make eyes at love-sick boys. No, indeed!"

Certainly Mlle. Coira O'Hara was not making eyes at the love-sick boy who followed at her heel this afternoon. Perhaps it would be going too far to say that she was cold to him, but it was very plain to see that she was bored and weary, and that she wished she might be almost anywhere else than where she was. She turned her beautiful face a little toward the wall where Ste. Marie lay perdu, and he could see that her eyes had the same dark fire, the same tragic look of appeal that he had seen in them before—once in the Champs-Elysees and again in his dreams.

Abruptly he became aware that while he gazed, like a man in a trance, the two young people walked on their way and were on the point of passing beyond reach of eye or ear. He made a sudden involuntary movement as if he would call them back, and for the first time his faithful hiding-place, strained beyond silent endurance, betrayed him with a loud rustle of shaken branches. Ste. Marie shrank back, his heart in his throat. It was too late to retreat now down the tree. The damage was already done. He saw the two young people halt and turn to look, and after a moment he saw the boy come slowly forward, staring. He heard him say:

"What's up in that tree? There's something in the tree." And he heard the girl answer: "It's only birds fighting. Don't bother!" But young Arthur Benham came on, staring up curiously until he was almost under the high wall.

Then Ste. Marie's strange madness, or the hand of Fate, or whatever power it was which governed him on that day, thrust him on to the ultimate pitch of recklessness. He bent forward from his insecure perch over the wall until his head and shoulders were in plain sight, and he called down to the lad below in a loud whisper:

"Benham! Benham!"

The boy gave a sharp cry of alarm and began to back away. And after a moment Ste. Marie heard the cry echoed from Coira O'Hara. He heard her say:

"Be careful! Be careful, Arthur! Come away! Oh, come away quickly!"

Ste. Marie raised his own voice to a sort of cry. He said:

"Wait! I tell you to wait, Benham! I must have a word with you. I come from your family—from Helen!"

To his amazement the lad turned about and began to run toward where the girl stood waiting; and so, without a moment's hesitation, Ste. Marie threw himself across the top of the wall, hung for an instant by his hands, and dropped upon the soft turf. Scarcely waiting to recover his balance, he stumbled forward, shouting:

"Wait! I tell you, wait! Are you mad? Wait, I say! Listen to me!"

Vaguely, in the midst of his great excitement, he had heard a whistle sound as he dropped inside the wall. He did not know then whence the shrill call had come, but afterward he knew that Coira O' Hara had blown it. And now, as he ran forward toward the two who stood at a distance staring at him, he heard other steps and he slackened his pace to look.

A man came running down among the black-boled trees, a strange, squat, gnomelike man whose gait was as uncouth as his dwarfish figure. He held something in his two hands as he ran, and when he came near he threw this thing with a swift movement up before him, but he did not pause in his odd, scrambling run.

Ste. Marie felt a violent blow upon his left leg between hip and knee. He thought that somebody had crept up behind him and struck him; but as he whirled about he saw that there was no one there, and then he heard a noise and knew that the gnomelike running man had shot him. He faced about once more toward the two young people. He was very angry and he wished to say so, and very much he wished to explain why he had trespassed there, and why they had no right to shoot him as if he were some wretched thief. But he found that in some quite absurd fashion he was as if fixed to the ground. It was as if he had suddenly become of the most ponderous and incredible weight, like lead—or that other metal, not gold, which is the heaviest of all. Only the metal, seemingly, was not only heavy but fiery hot, and his strength was incapable of holding it up any longer. His eyes fixed themselves in a bewildered stare upon the figure of Mlle. Coira O'Hara; he had time to observe that she had put up her two hands over her face, then he fell down forward, his head struck something very hard, and he knew no more.

* * * * *



XV

A CONVERSATION AT LA LIERRE

Captain Stewart walked nervously up and down the small inner drawing-room at La Lierre, his restless hands fumbling together behind him, and his eyes turning every half-minute with a sharp eagerness to the closed door. But at last, as if he were very tired, he threw himself down in a chair which stood near one of the windows, and all his tense body seemed to relax in utter exhaustion. It was not a very comfortable chair that he had sat down in, but there were no comfortable chairs in the room—nor, for that matter, in all the house. When he had taken the place, about two months before this time, he had taken it furnished, but that does not mean very much in France. No French country-houses—or town-houses, either—are in the least comfortable, by Anglo-Saxon standards, and that is at least one excellent reason why Frenchmen spend just as little time in them as they possibly can. Half the cafes in Paris would promptly put up their shutters if Parisian homes could all at once turn themselves into something like English or American ones. As for La Lierre, it was even more dreary and bare and tomblike than other country-houses, because it was, after all, a sort of ruin, and had not been lived in for fifteen years, save by an ancient caretaker and his nearly as ancient wife. And that was, perhaps, why it could be taken on a short lease at such a very low price.

The room in which Captain Stewart sat was behind the large drawing-room, which was always kept closed now, and it looked out by one window to the west, and by two windows to the north, over a corner of the kitchen garden and a vista of trees beyond. It was a high-ceiled room with walls bare except for two large mirrors in the Empire fashion, which stared at each other across the way with dull and flaking eyes. Under each of these stood a heavy gilt and ebony console with a top of chocolate-colored marble, and in the centre of the room there was a table of a like fashion to the consoles. Further than this there was nothing save three chairs, upon one of which lay Captain Stewart's dust-coat and motoring cap and goggles.

A shaft of golden light from the low sun slanted into the place through the western window from which the Venetians had been pulled back, and fell across the face of the man who lay still and lax in his chair, eyes closed and chin dropped a little so that his mouth hung weakly open. He looked very ill, as, indeed, any one might look after such an attack as he had suffered on the night previous. That one long moment of deathly fear before he had fallen down in a fit had nearly killed him. All through this following day it had continued to recur until he thought he should go mad. And there was worse still. How much did Olga Nilssen know? And how much had she told? She had astonished and frightened him when she had said that she knew about the house on the road to Clamart, for he thought he had hidden his visits to La Lierre well. He wondered rather drearily how she had discovered them, and he wondered how much she knew more than she had admitted. He had a half-suspicion of something like the truth, that Mlle. Nilssen knew only of Coira O'Hara's presence here, and drew a rather natural inference. If that was all, there was no danger from her—no more, that is, than had already borne its fruit, for Stewart knew well enough that Ste. Marie must have learned of the place from her. In any case Olga Nilssen had left Paris—he had discovered that fact during the day—and so for the present she might be eliminated as a source of peril.

The man in the chair gave a little groan and rolled his head wearily to and fro against the uncomfortable chair-back, for now he came to the real and immediate danger, and he was so very tired and ill, and his head ached so sickeningly that it was almost beyond him to bring himself face to face with it.

There was the man who lay helpless upon a bed up-stairs! And there were the man's friends, who were not at all helpless or bedridden or in captivity!

A wave of almost intolerable pain swept through Stewart's aching head, and he gave another groan which was almost like a child's sob. But at just that moment the door which led into the central hall opened, and the Irishman O'Hara came into the room. Captain Stewart sprang to his feet to meet him, and he caught the other man by the arm in his eagerness.

"How is he?" he cried out. "How is he? How badly was he hurt?"

"The patient?" said O'Hara. "Let go my arm! Hang it, man, you're pinching me! Oh, he'll do well enough. He'll be fit to hobble about in a week or ten days. The bullet went clean through his leg and out again without cutting an artery. It was a sort of miracle—and a damned lucky miracle for all hands, too! If we'd had a splintered bone or a severed artery to deal with I should have had to call in a doctor. Then the fellow would have talked, and there'd have been the devil to pay. As it is, I shall be able to manage well enough with my own small skill. I've dressed worse wounds than that in my time. By Jove, it was a miracle, though!" A sudden little gust of rage swept him. He cried out: "That confounded fool of a gardener, that one-eyed Michel, ought to be beaten to death. Why couldn't he have slipped up behind this fellow and knocked him on the head, instead of shooting him from ten paces away? The benighted idiot! He came near upsetting the whole boat!"

"Yes," said Captain Stewart, with a sharp, hard breath, "he should have shot straighter or not at all."

The Irishman stared at him with his bright blue eyes, and after a moment he gave a short laugh.

"Jove, you're a bloodthirsty beggar, Stewart!" said he. "That would have been a rum go, if you like! Killing the fellow! All his friends down on us like hawks, and the police and all that! You can't go about killing people in the outskirts of Paris, you know—at least not people with friends. And this chap looks like a gentleman, more or less, so I take it he has friends. As a matter of fact, his face is rather familiar. I think I've seen him before, somewhere. You looked at him just now through the crack of the door; do you know who he is? Coira tells me he called out to Arthur by name, but Arthur says he never saw him before and doesn't know him at all."

Captain Stewart shivered. It had not been a pleasant moment for him, that moment when he had looked through the crack of the door and recognized Ste. Marie.

"Yes," he said, half under his breath—"yes, I know who he is. A friend of the family."

The Irishman's lips puckered to a low whistle. He said:

"Spying, then, as I thought. He has run us to earth."

And the other nodded. O'Hara took a turn across the room and back.

"In that case," he said, presently—"in that case, then, we must keep him prisoner here so long as we remain. That's certain." He spun round sharply with an exclamation. "Look here!" he cried, in a lower tone, "how about this fellow's friends? It isn't likely he's doing his dirty work alone. How about his friends, when he doesn't turn up to-night? If they know he was coming here to spy on us; if they know where the place is; if they know, in short, what he seems to have known, we're done for. We'll have to run, get out, disappear. Hang it, man, d'you understand? We're not safe here for an hour."

Captain Stewart's hands shook a little as he gripped them together behind him, and a dew of perspiration stood out suddenly upon his forehead and cheek-bones, but his voice, when he spoke, was well under control.

"It's an odd thing," said he—"another miracle, if you like—but I believe we are safe—reasonably safe. I—have reason to think that this fellow learned about La Lierre only last evening from some one who left Paris to-day to be gone a long time. And I also have reason to believe that the fellow has not seen the one friend who is in his confidence, since he obtained his information. By chance I met the friend, the other man, in the street this afternoon. I asked after this fellow whom we have here, and the friend said he hadn't seen him for twenty-four hours—was going to see him to-night."

"By the Lord!" cried the Irishman, with a great laugh of relief. "What luck! What monumental luck! If all that's true, we're safe. Why, man, we're as safe as a fox in his hole. The lad's friends won't have the ghost of an idea of where he's gone to.... Wait, though! Stop a bit! He won't have left written word behind him, eh? He won't have done that—for safety?"

"I think not," said Captain Stewart, but he breathed hard, for he knew well enough that there lay the gravest danger. "I think not," he said again.

He made a rather surprisingly accurate guess at the truth—that Ste. Marie had started out upon impulse, without intending more than a general reconnaissance, and therefore without leaving any word behind him. Still, the shadow of danger uplifted itself before the man and he was afraid. A sudden gust of weak anger shook him like a wind.

"In Heaven's name," he cried, shrilly, "why didn't that one-eyed fool kill the fellow while he was about it? There's danger for us every moment while he is alive here. Why didn't that shambling idiot kill him?"

Captain Stewart's outflung hand jumped and trembled and his face was twisted into a sort of grinning snarl. He looked like an angry and wicked cat, the other man thought.

"If I weren't an over-civilized fool," he said, viciously, "I'd go up-stairs and kill him now with my hands while he can't help himself. We're all too scrupulous by half."

The Irishman stared at him and presently broke into amazed laughter.

"Scrupulous!" said he. "Well, yes, I'm too scrupulous to murder a man in his bed, if you like. I'm not squeamish, but—Good Lord!"

"Do you realize," demanded Captain Stewart, "what risks we run while that fellow is alive—knowing what he knows?"

"Oh yes, I realize that," said O'Hara. "But I don't see why you should have heart failure over it."

Captain Stewart's pale lips drew back again in their catlike fashion.

"Never mind about me," he said. "But I can't help thinking you're peculiarly indifferent in the face of danger."

"No, I'm not!" said the Irishman, quickly. "No, I'm not. Don't you run away with that idea! I merely said," he went oh—"I merely said that I'd stop short of murder. I don't set any foolish value on life—my own or any other. I've had to take life more than once, but it was in fair fight or in self-defence, and I don't regret it. It was your coldblooded joke about going up-stairs and killing this chap in his bed that put me on edge. Naturally I know you didn't mean it. Don't you go thinking that I'm lukewarm or that I'm indifferent to danger. I know there's danger from this lad up-stairs, and I mean to be on guard against it. He stays here under strict guard until—what we're after is accomplished—until young Arthur comes of age. If there's danger," said he, "why, we know where it lies, and we can guard against it. That kind of danger is not very formidable. The dangerous dangers are the ones that you don't know about—the hidden ones."

He came forward a little, and his lean face was as hard and as impassive as ever, and the bright blue eyes shone from it steady and unwinking. Stewart looked up to him with a sort of peevish resentment at the man's confidence and cool poise. It was an odd reversal of their ordinary relations. For the hour the duller villain, the man who was wont to take orders and to refrain from overmuch thought or question, seemed to have become master. Sheer physical exhaustion and the constant maddening pain had had their will of Captain Stewart. A sudden shiver wrung him so that his dry fingers rattled against the wood of the chair-arms.

"All the same," he cried, "I'm afraid. I've been confident enough until now. Now I'm afraid. I wish the fellow had been killed."

"Kill him, then!" laughed the Irishman. "I won't give you up to the police."

He crossed the room to the door, but halted short of it and turned about again, and he looked back very curiously at the man who sat crouched in his chair by the window. It had occurred to him several times that Stewart was very unlike himself. The man was quite evidently tired and ill, and that might account for some of the nervousness, but this fierce malignity was something a little beyond O'Hara's comprehension. It seemed to him that the elder man had the air of one frightened beyond the point the circumstances warranted.

"Are you going back to town," he asked, "or do you mean to stay the night?"

"I shall stay the night," Stewart said. "I'm too tired to bear the ride." He glanced up and caught the other's eyes fixed upon him. "Well!" he cried, angrily. "What is it? What are you looking at me like that for? What do you want?"

"I want nothing," said the Irishman, a little sharply. "And I wasn't aware that I'd been looking at you in any unusual way. You're precious jumpy to-day, if you want to know.... Look here!" He came back a step, frowning. "Look here!" he repeated. "I don't quite make you out. Are you keeping back anything? Because if you are, for Heaven's sake have it out here and now! We're all in this game together, and we can't afford to be anything but frank with one another. We can't afford to make reservations. It's altogether too dangerous for everybody. You're too much frightened. There's no apparent reason for being so frightened as that."

Captain Stewart drew a long breath between closed teeth, and afterward he looked up at the younger man coldly.

"We need not discuss my personal feelings, I think," said he. "They have no—no bearing on the point at issue. As you say, we are all in this thing together, and you need not fear that I shall fail to do my part, as I have done it in the past.... That's all, I believe."

"Oh, as you like! As you like!" said the Irishman, in the tone of one rebuffed. He turned again and left the room, closing the door behind him. Outside on the stairs it occurred to him that he had forgotten to ask the other man what this fellow's name was—the fellow who lay wounded up-stairs. No, he had asked once, but in the interest of the conversation the question had been lost. He determined to inquire again that evening at dinner.

But Captain Stewart, left thus alone, sank deeper in the uncomfortable chair, and his head once more stirred and sought vainly for ease against the chair's high back. The pain swept him in regular throbbing waves that were like the waves of the sea—waves which surge and crash and tear upon a beach. But between the throbs of physical pain there was something else that was always present while the waves came and went. Pain and exhaustion, if they are sufficiently extreme, can well nigh paralyze mind as well as body, and for some time Captain Stewart wondered what this thing might be which lurked at the bottom of him still under the surges of agony. Then at last he had the strength to look at it, and it was fear, cold and still and silent. He was afraid to the very depths of his soul.

True, as O'Hara had said, there did not seem to be any very desperate peril to face, but Stewart was afraid with the gambler's unreasoning, half-superstitious fear, and that is the worst fear of all. He realized that he had been afraid of Ste. Marie from the beginning, and that, of course, was why he had tried to draw him into partnership with himself in his own official and wholly mythical search for Arthur Benham. He could have had the other man under his eye then. He could have kept him busy for months running down false scents. As it was, Ste. Marie's uncanny instinct about the Irishman O'Hara had led him true—that and what he doubtless learned from Olga Nilssen.

If Stewart had been in a condition and mood to philosophize, he would doubtless have reflected that seven-tenths of the desperate causes, both good and bad, which fail in this world, fail because they are wrecked by some woman's love or jealousy—or both. But it is unlikely that he was able just at this time to make such a reflection, though certainly he wondered how much Olga Nilssen had known, and how much Ste. Marie had had to put together out of her knowledge and any previous suspicions which he may have had.

The man would have been amazed if he could have known what a mountain of information and evidence had piled itself up over his head all in twelve hours. He would have been amazed and, if possible, even more frightened than he was, but he was without question sufficiently frightened, for here was Ste. Marie in the very house, he had seen Arthur Benham, and quite obviously he knew all there was to know, or at least enough to ruin Arthur Benham's uncle beyond all recovery or hope of recovery—irretrievably.

Captain Stewart tried to think what it would mean to him—failure in this desperate scheme—but he had not the strength or the courage. He shrank from the picture as one shrinks from something horrible in a bad dream. There could be no question of failure. He had to succeed at any cost, however desperate or fantastic. Once more the spasm of childish, futile rage swept over him and shook him like a wind.

"Why couldn't the fellow have been killed by that one-eyed fool?" he cried, sobbing. "Why couldn't he have been killed? He's the only one who knows—the only thing in the way. Why couldn't he have keen killed?"

Quite suddenly Captain Stewart ceased to sob and shiver, and sat still in his chair, gripping the arms with white and tense fingers. His eyes began to widen, and they became fixed in a long, strange stare. He drew a deep breath.

"I wonder!" he said, aloud. "I wonder, now."

* * * * *



XVI

THE BLACK CAT

That providential stone or tree-root, or whatever it may have been, proved a genuine blessing in disguise to Ste. Marie. It gave him a splitting headache for a few hours, but it saved him a good deal of discomfort the while his bullet wound was being more or less probed and very skilfully cleansed and dressed by O'Hara. For he did not regain consciousness until this surgical work was almost at its end, and then he wanted to fight the Irishman for tying the bandages too tight.

But when O'Hara had gone away and left him alone he lay still—or as still as the smarting, burning pain in his leg and the ache in his head would let him—and stared at the wall beyond his bed, and bit by bit the events of the past hour came back to him, and he knew where he was. He cursed himself very bitterly, as he well might do, for a bungling idiot. The whole thing had been in his hands, he said, with perfect truth—Arthur Benham's whereabouts proved Stewart's responsibility or, at the very least, complicity and the sordid motive therefor. Remained—had Ste. Marie been a sane being instead of an impulsive fool—remained but to face Stewart down in the presence of witnesses, threaten him with exposure, and so, with perfect ease, bring back the lost boy in triumph to his family.

It should all have been so simple, so easy, so effortless! Yet now it was ruined by a moment's rash folly, and Heaven alone knew what would come of it. He remembered that he had left behind him no indication whatever of where he meant to spend the afternoon. Hartley would come hurrying across town that evening to the rue d'Assas, and would find no one there to receive him. He would wait and wait, and at last go home. He would come again on the next morning, and then he would begin to be alarmed and would start a second search—but with what to reckon by? Nobody knew about the house on the road to Clamart but Mlle. Olga Nilssen, and she was far away.

He thought of Captain Stewart, and he wondered if that gentleman was by any chance here in the house, or if he was still in bed in the rue du Faubourg St. Honore, recovering from his epileptic fit.

After that he fell once more to cursing himself and his incredible stupidity, and he could have wept for sheer bitterness of chagrin.

He was still engaged in this unpleasant occupation when the door of the room opened and the Irishman O'Hara entered, having finished his interview with Captain Stewart below. He came up beside the bed and looked down not unkindly upon the man who lay there, but Ste. Marie scowled back at him, for he was in a good deal of pain and a vile humor.

"How's the leg—and the head?" asked the amateur surgeon. To do him justice, he was very skilful, indeed, through much experience.

"They hurt," said Ste. Marie, shortly. "My head aches like the devil, and my leg burns."

O'Hara made a sound which was rather like a gruff laugh, and nodded.

"Yes, and they'll go on doing it, too," said he. "At least the leg will. Your head will be all right again in a day or so. Do you want anything to eat? It's near dinner-time. I suppose we can't let you starve—though you deserve it."

"Thanks; I want nothing," said Ste. Marie. "Pray don't trouble about me."

The other man nodded again indifferently and turned to go out of the room, but in the doorway he halted and looked back.

"As we're to have the pleasure of your company for some time to come," said he, "you might suggest a name to call you by. Of course I don't expect you to tell your own name—though I can learn that easily enough."

"Easily enough, to be sure," said the man on the bed. "Ask Stewart. He knows only too well."

The Irishman scowled. And after a moment he said:

"I don't know any Stewart."

But at that Ste. Marie gave a laugh, and a tinge of red came over the Irishman's cheeks.

"And so, to save Captain Stewart the trouble," continued the wounded man, "I'll tell you my name with pleasure. I don't know why I shouldn't. It's Ste. Marie."

"What?" cried O'Hara, hoarsely. "What? Say that again!"

He came forward a swift step or two into the room, and he stared at the man on the bed as if he were staring at a ghost.

"Ste. Marie?" he cried, in a whisper. "It's impossible! What are you," he demanded, "to Gilles, Comte de Ste. Marie de Mont-Perdu? What are you to him?"

"He was my father," said the younger man; "but he is dead. He has been dead for ten years."

He raised his head, with a little grimace of pain, to look curiously after the Irishman, who had all at once turned away across the room and stood still beside a window with bent head.

"Why?" he questioned. "What about my father? Why did you ask that?"

O'Hara did not answer at once, and he did not stir from his place by the window, but after a while he said:

"I knew him.... That's all."

And after another space he came back beside the bed, and once more looked down upon the young man who lay there. His face was veiled, inscrutable. It betrayed nothing.

"You have a look of your father," said he. "That was what puzzled me a little. I was just saying to—I was just thinking that there was something familiar about you.... Ah, well, we've all come down in the world since then. The Ste. Marie blood, though. Who'd have thought it?"

The man shook his head a little sorrowfully, but Ste. Marie stared up at him in frowning incomprehension. The pain had dulled him somewhat. And presently O'Hara again moved toward the door. On the way he said:

"I'll bring or send you something to eat—not too much. And later on I'll give you a sleeping-powder. With that head of yours you may have trouble in getting to sleep. Understand, I'm doing this for your father's son, and not because you've any right yourself to consideration."

Ste. Marie raised himself with difficulty on one elbow.

"Wait!" said he. "Wait a moment!" and the other halted just inside the door. "You seem to have known my father," said Ste. Marie, "and to have respected him. For my father's sake, will you listen to me for five minutes?"

"No, I won't," said the Irishman, sharply. "So you may as well hold your tongue. Nothing you can say to me or to any one in this house will have the slightest effect. We know what you came spying here for. We know all about it."

"Yes," said Ste. Marie, with a little sigh, and he fell back upon the pillows. "Yes, I suppose you do. I was rather a fool to speak. You wouldn't all be doing what you're doing if words could affect you. I was a fool to speak."

The Irishman stared at him for another moment, and went out of the room, closing the door behind him.

So he was left once more alone to his pain and his bitter self-reproaches and his wild and futile plans for escape. But O'Hara returned in an hour or thereabout with food for him—a cup of broth and a slice of bread; and when Ste. Marie had eaten these the Irishman looked once more to his wounded leg, and gave him a sleeping-powder dissolved in water.

He lay restless and wide-eyed for an hour, and then drifted away through intermediate mists into a sleep full of horrible dreams, but it was at least relief from bodily suffering, and when he awoke in the morning his headache was almost gone.

He awoke to sunshine and fresh, sweet odors and the twittering of birds. By good chance O'Hara had been the last to enter the room on the evening before, and so no one had come to close the shutters or draw the blinds. The windows were open wide, and the morning breeze, very soft and aromatic, blew in and out and filled the place with sweetness. The room was a corner room, with windows that looked south and east, and the early sun slanted in and lay in golden squares across the floor.

Ste. Marie opened his eyes with none of the dazed bewilderment that he might have expected. The events of the preceding day came back to him instantly and without shock. He put up an experimental hand, and found that his head was still very sore where he had struck it in falling, but the ache was almost gone. He tried to stir his leg, and a protesting pain shot through it. It burned dully, even when it was quiet, but the pain was not at all severe. He realized that he was to get off rather well, considering what might have happened, and he was so grateful for this that he almost forgot to be angry with himself over his monumental folly.

A small bird chased by another wheeled in through the southern window and back again into free air. Finally, the two settled down upon the parapet of the little shallow balcony which was there to have their disagreement out, and they talked it over with a great deal of noise and many threatening gestures and a complete loss of temper on both sides. Ste. Marie, from his bed, cheered them on, but there came a commotion in the ivy which draped the wall below, and the two birds fled in ignominious haste, and just in the nick of time, for when the cause of the commotion shot into view it was a large black cat, of great bodily activity and an ardent single-heartedness of aim.

The black cat gazed for a moment resentfully after its vanished prey, and then composed its sleek body upon the iron rail, tail and paws tucked neatly under. Ste. Marie chirruped, and the cat turned yellow eyes upon him in mild astonishment, as one who should say, "Who the deuce are you, and what the deuce are you doing here?" He chirruped again, and the cat, after an ostentatious yawn and stretch, came to him—beating up to windward, as it were, and making the bed in three tacks. When O'Hara entered the room some time later he found his patient in a very cheerful frame of mind, and the black cat sitting on his chest purring like a dynamo and kneading like an industrious baker.

"Ho," said the Irishman, "you seem to have found a friend!"

"Well, I need one friend here," argued Ste. Marie. "I'm in the enemy's stronghold. You needn't be alarmed; the cat can't tell me anything, and it can't help me to escape. It can only sit on me and purr. That's harmless enough."

O'Hara began one of his gruff laughs, but he seemed to remember himself in the middle of it and assumed an intimidating scowl instead.

"How's the leg?" he demanded, shortly. "Let me see it." He took off the bandages and cleansed and sprayed the wound with some antiseptic liquid that he had brought in a bottle. "There's a little fever," said he, "but that can't be avoided. You're going on very well—a good deal better than you'd any right to expect." He had to inflict not a little pain in his examination and redressing of the wound. He knew that, and once or twice he glanced up at Ste. Marie's face with a sort of reluctant admiration for the man who could bear so much without any sign whatever. In the end he put together his things and nodded with professional satisfaction. "You'll do well enough now for the rest of the day," he said. "I'll send up old Michel to valet you. He's the gardener who shot you yesterday, and he may take it into his head to finish the job this morning. If he does I sha'n't try to stop him."

"Nor I," said Ste. Marie. "Thanks very much for your trouble. An excellent surgeon was lost in you."

O'Hara left the room, and presently the old caretaker, one-eyed, gnomelike, shambling like a bear, sidled in and proceeded to set things to rights. He looked, Ste. Marie said to himself, like something in an old German drawing, or in those imitations of old drawings that one sometimes sees nowadays in Fliegende Blaetter. He tried to make the strange creature talk, but Michel went about his task with an air half-frightened, half-stolid, and refused to speak more than an occasional "oui" or a "bien, Monsieur," in answer to orders. Ste. Marie asked if he might have some coffee and bread, and the old Michel nodded and slipped from the room as silently as he had entered it.

Thereafter Ste. Marie trifled with the cat and got one hand well scratched for his trouble, but in five minutes there came a knocking at the door. He laughed a little. "Michel grows ceremonious when it's a question of food," he said. "Entrez, mon vieux!"

The door opened, and Ste. Marie caught his breath.

"Michel is busy," said Coira O'Hara, "so I have brought your coffee."

She came into the sunlit room holding the steaming bowl of cafe au lait before her in her two hands. Over it her eyes went out to the man who lay in his bed, a long and steady and very grave look. "A goddess that lady, a queen among goddesses—" Thus the little Jew of the Boulevard de la Madeleine. Ste. Marie gazed back at her, and his heart was sick within him to think of the contemptible role Fate had laid upon this girl to play: the candle to the moth, the bait to the eager, unskilled fish, the lure to charm a foolish boy.

The girl's splendid beauty seemed to fill all that bright room with, as it were, a richer, subtler light. There could be no doubt of her potency. Older and wiser heads than young Arthur Benham's might well forget the world for her. Ste. Marie watched, and the heartsickness within him was like a physical pain, keen and bitter. He thought of that first and only previous meeting—the single minute in the Champs-Elysees, when her eyes had held him, had seemed to beseech him out of some deep agony. He thought of how they had haunted him afterward both by day and by night—calling eyes—and he gave a little groan of sheer bitterness, for he realized that all this while she was laying her snares about the feet of an inexperienced boy, decoying him to his ruin. There was a name for such women, an ugly name. They were called adventuresses.

The girl set the bowl which she carried down upon a table not far from the bed. "You will need a tray or something," said she. "I suppose you can sit up against your pillows? I'll bring a tray and you can hold it on your knees and eat from it." She spoke in a tone of very deliberate indifference and detachment. There seemed even to be an edge of scorn in it, but nothing could make that deep and golden voice harsh or unlovely. As the girl's extraordinary beauty had filled all the room with its light, so the sound of her voice seemed to fill it with a sumptuous and hushed resonance like a temple bell muffled in velvet. "I must bring something to eat, too," she said. "Would you prefer croissants or brioches or plain bread-and-butter? You might as well have what you like."

"Thank you!" said Ste. Marie. "It doesn't matter. Anything. You are most kind. You are Hebe, Mademoiselle, server of feasts." The girl turned her head for a moment and looked at him with some surprise.

"If I am not mistaken," she said, "Hebe served to gods." Then she went out of the room, and Ste. Marie broke into a sudden delighted laugh behind her. She would seem to be a young woman with a tongue in her head. She had seized the rash opening without an instant's hesitation.

The black cat, which had been cruising, after the inquisitive fashion of its kind, in far corners of the room, strolled back and looked up to the table where the bowl of coffee steamed and waited.

"Get out!" cried Ste. Marie. "Va t'en, sale petit animal! Go and eat birds! That's my coffee. Va! Sauve toi! He, voleur que tu es!" He sought for something by way of missile, but there was nothing within reach.

The black cat turned its calm and yellow eyes toward him, looked back to the aromatic feast, and leaped expertly to the top of the table. Ste. Marie shouted and made horrible threats. He waved an impotent pillow, not daring to hurl it for fear of smashing the table's entire contents, but the black cat did not even glance toward him. It smelled the coffee, sneezed over it because it was hot, and finally proceeded to lap very daintily, pausing often to take breath or to shake its head, for cats disapprove of hot dishes, though they will partake of them at a pinch.

There came a step outside the door, and the thief leaped down with some haste, yet not quite in time to escape observation. Mlle. O'Hara came in, breathing terrible threats.

"Has that wretched animal touched your coffee?" she cried. "I hope not." But Ste. Marie laughed weakly from his bed, and the guilty beast stood in mid-floor, brown drops beading its black chin and hanging upon its whiskers.

"I did what I could, Mademoiselle," said Ste. Marie, "but there was nothing to throw. I am sorry to be the cause of so much trouble."

"It is nothing," said she. "I will bring some more coffee, only it will take ten minutes, because I shall have to make some fresh." She made as if she would smile a little in answer to him, but her face turned grave once more and she went out of the room with averted eyes.

Thereafter Ste. Marie occupied himself with watching idly the movements of the black cat, and, as he watched, something icy cold began to grow within him, a sensation more terrible than he had ever known before. He found himself shivering as if that summer day had all at once turned to January, and he found that his face was wet with a chill perspiration.

When the girl at length returned she found him lying still, his face to the wall. The black cat was in her path as she crossed the room, so that she had to thrust it out of the way with her foot, and she called it names for moving with such lethargy.

"Here is the coffee at last," she said. "I made it fresh. And I have brought some brioches. Will you sit up and have the tray on your knees?"

"Thank you," said Ste. Marie. "I do not wish anything."

"You do not—" she repeated after him. "But I have made the coffee especially for you," she protested. "I thought you wanted it. I don't understand."

With a sudden movement the man turned toward her a white and drawn face.

"Mademoiselle," he cried, "it would have been more merciful to let your gardener shoot again yesterday. Much more merciful, Mademoiselle."

She stared at him under her straight, black brows.

"What do you mean?" she demanded. "More merciful? What do you mean by that?"

Ste. Marie stretched out a pointing finger, and the girl followed it. She gave, after a tense instant, a single, sharp scream. And upon that:

"No, no! It's not true! It's not possible!"

Moving stiffly, she set down the bowl she carried, and the hot liquid splashed up round her wrists. For a moment she hung there, drooping, holding herself up by the strength of her hands upon the table. It was as if she had been seized with faintness. Then she sprang to where the cat crouched beside a chair. She dropped upon her knees and tried to raise it in her arms, but the beast bit and scratched at her feebly, and crept away to a little distance, where it lay struggling and very unpleasant to see.

"Poison!" she said, in a choked, gasping whisper. "Poison!" She looked once toward the man upon the bed, and she was white and shivering. "It's not true!" she cried again. "I—won't believe it! It's because the cat—was not used to coffee. Because it was hot. I won't believe it! I won't believe it!" She began to sob, holding her hands over her white face.

Ste. Marie watched her with puzzled eyes. If this was acting, it was very good acting. A little glimmer of hope began to burn in him—hope that in this last shameful thing, at least, the girl had had no part.

"It's impossible," she insisted, piteously. "I tell you it's impossible. I brought the coffee myself from the kitchen. I took it from the pot there—the same pot we had all had ours from. It was never out of my sight—or, that is—I mean—"

She halted there, and Ste. Marie saw her eyes turn slowly toward the door, and he saw a crimson flush come up over her cheeks and die away, leaving her white again. He drew a little breath of relief and gladness, for he was sure of her now. She had had no part in it.

"It is nothing, Mademoiselle," said he, cheerfully. "Think no more of it. It is nothing."

"Nothing?" she cried, in a loud voice. "Do you call poison nothing?" She began to shiver again very violently. "You would have drunk it!" she said, staring at him in a white agony. "But for a miracle you would have drunk it—and died!"

Abruptly she came beside the bed and threw herself upon her knees there. In her excitement and horror she seemed to have forgotten what they two were to each other. She caught him by the shoulders with her two hands, and the girl's violent trembling shook them both.

"Will you believe," she cried, "that I had nothing to do with this? Will you believe me? You must believe me!"

There was no acting in that moment. She was wrung with a frank anguish, an utter horror, and between her words there were hard and terrible sobs.

"I believe you, Mademoiselle," said the man, gently. "I believe you. Pray think no more about it."

He smiled up into the girl's beautiful face, though within him he was still cold and a-shiver, as even the bravest man might well be at such an escape, and after a moment she turned away again. With unsteady hands she put the new-made bowl of coffee and the brioches and other things together upon the tray and started to carry it across the room to the bed, but half-way she turned back again and set the tray down. She looked about and found an empty glass, and she poured a little of the coffee into it. Ste. Marie, who was watching her, gave a sudden cry.

"No, no, Mademoiselle, I beg you! You must not!"

But the girl shook her head at him gravely over the glass.

"There is no danger," she said, "but I must be sure."

She drank what was in the glass, and afterward went across to one of the windows and stood there with her back to the room for a little time.

In the end she returned and once more brought the breakfast-tray to the bed. Ste. Marie raised himself to a sitting posture and took the thing upon his knees, but his hands were shaking.

"If I were not as helpless as a dead man, Mademoiselle," said he, "you should not have done that. If I could have stopped you, you should not have done it, Mademoiselle."

A wave of color spread up under the brown skin of the girl's face, but she did not speak. She stood by for a moment to see if he was supplied with everything he needed, and when Ste. Marie expressed his gratitude for her pains she only bowed her head. Then presently she turned away and left the room.

Outside the door she met some one who was approaching. Ste. Marie heard her break into rapid and excited speech, and he heard O'Hara's voice in answer. The voice expressed astonishment and indignation and a sort of gruff horror, but the man who listened could hear only the tones, not the words that were spoken.

The Irishman came quickly into the room. He glanced once toward the bed where Ste. Marie sat eating his breakfast with apparent unconcern—there may have been a little bravado in this—and then bent over the thing which lay moving feebly beside a chair. When he rose again his face was hard and tense and his blue eyes glittered in a fashion that boded trouble for somebody.

"This looks very bad for us," he said, gruffly. "I should—I should like to have you believe that neither my daughter nor I had any part in it. When I fight I fight openly, I don't use poison. Not even with spies."

"Oh, that's all right," said Ste. Marie, taking an ostentatious sip of coffee. "That's understood. I know well enough who tried to poison me. If you'll just keep your friend Stewart out of the kitchen I sha'n't worry about my food."

The Irishman's cheeks reddened with a quick flush and he dropped his eyes. But in an instant he raised them again and looked full into the eyes of the man who sat in bed.

"You seem," said he, "to be laboring under a curious misapprehension. There is no Stewart here, and I don't know any man of that name."

Ste. Marie laughed.

"Oh, don't you?" he said. "That's my mistake then. Well, if you don't know him, you ought to. You have interests in common."

O'Hara favored his patient with a long and frowning stare. But at the end he turned without a word and went out of the room.

* * * * *



XVII

THOSE WHO WERE LEFT BEHIND

That meeting with Richard Hartley of which Captain Stewart, in the small drawing-room at La Lierre, spoke to the Irishman O'Hara, took place at Stewart's own door in the rue du Faubourg St. Honore, and it must have been at just about the time when Ste. Marie, concealed among the branches of his cedar, looked over the wall and saw Arthur Benham walking with Mlle. Coira O'Hara. Hartley had lunched at Durand's with his friends, whose name—though it does not at all matter here—was Reeves-Davis, and after lunch the four of them, Major and Lady Reeves-Davis, Reeves-Davis' sister, Mrs. Carsten, and Hartley, spent an hour at a certain picture-dealer's near the Madeleine. After that Lady Reeves-Davis wanted to go in search of an antiquary's shop which was somewhere in the rue du Faubourg, and she did not know just where. They went in from the rue Royale, and amused themselves by looking at the attractive windows on the way.

During one of their frequent halts, while the two ladies were passionately absorbed in a display of hats, and Reeves-Davis was making derisive comments from the rear, Hartley, who was too much bored to pay attention, saw a figure which seemed to him familiar emerge from an adjacent doorway and start to cross the pavement to a large touring-car, with the top up, which stood at the curb. The man wore a dust-coat and a cap, and he moved as if he were in a hurry, but as he went he cast a quick look about him and his eye fell upon Richard Hartley. Hartley nodded, and he thought the elder man gave a violent start; but then he looked very white and ill and might have started at anything. For an instant Captain Stewart made as if he would go on his way without taking notice, but he seemed to change his mind and turned back. He held out his hand with a rather wan and nervous smile, saying:

"Ah, Hartley! It is you, then! I wasn't sure." He glanced over the other's shoulder and said, "Is that our friend Ste. Marie with you?"

"No," said Richard Hartley, "some English friends of mine. I haven't seen Ste. Marie to-day. I'm to meet him this evening. You've seen him since I have, as a matter of fact. He came to your party last night, didn't he? Sorry I couldn't come. They must have tired you out, I should think. You look ill."

"Yes," said the other man, absently. "Yes, I had an attack of—an old malady last night. I am rather stale to-day. You say you haven't seen Ste. Marie? No, to be sure. If you see him later on you might say that I mean to drop in on him to-morrow to make my apologies. He'll understand. Good-day."

So he turned away to the motor which was waiting for him, and Hartley went back to his friends, wondering a little what it was that Stewart had to apologize for.

As for Captain Stewart, he must have gone at once out to La Lierre. What he found there has already been set forth.

It was about ten that evening when Hartley, who had left his people, after dinner was over, at the Marigny, reached the rue d'Assas. The street door was already closed for the night, and so he had to ring for the cordon. When the door clicked open and he had closed it behind him he called out his name before crossing the court to Ste. Marie's stair; but as he went on his way the voice of the concierge reached him from the little loge.

"M. Ste. Marie n'est pas la,"

Now, the Parisian concierge, as every one knows who has lived under his iron sway, is a being set apart from the rest of mankind. He has, in general, no human attributes, and certainly no human sympathy. His hand is against all the world, and the hand of all the world is against him. Still, here and there among this peculiar race are to be found a very few beings who are of softer substance—men and women instead of spies and harpies. The concierge who had charge of the house wherein Ste. Marie dwelt was an old woman, undeniably severe upon occasion, but for the most part a kindly and even jovial soul. She must have become a concierge through some unfortunate mistake.

She snapped open her little square window and stuck out into the moonlit court a dishevelled gray head.

"Il n'est pas la." she said again, beaming upon Richard Hartley, whom she liked, and, when he protested that he had a definite and important appointment with her lodger, went on to explain that Ste. Marie had gone out, doubtless to lunch, before one o'clock and had never returned.

"He may have left word for me up-stairs," Hartley said; "I'll go up and wait, if I may." So the woman got him her extra key, and he went up, let himself into the flat, and made lights there.

Naturally he found no word, but his own note of that morning lay spread out upon a table where Ste. Marie had left it, and so he knew that his friend was in possession of the two facts he had learned about Stewart. He made himself comfortable with a book and some cigarettes, and settled down to wait.

Ste. Marie out at La Lierre, with a bullet-hole in his leg, was deep in a drugged sleep just then, but Hartley waited for him, looking up now and then from his book with a scowl of impatience, until the little clock on the mantel said that it was one o'clock. Then he went home in a very bad temper, after writing another note and leaving it on the table, to say that he would return early in the morning.

But in the morning he began to be alarmed. He questioned the concierge very closely as to Ste. Marie's movements on the day previous, but she could tell him little, save to mention the brief visit of a man with an accent of Toulouse or Marseilles, and there seemed to be no one else to whom he could go. He spent the entire morning in the flat, and returned there after a hasty lunch. But at mid-afternoon he took a fiacre at the corner of the Gardens and drove to the rue du Faubourg St. Honore.

Captain Stewart was at home. He was in a dressing-gown, and still looked fagged and unwell. He certainly betrayed some surprise at sight of his visitor, but he made Hartley welcome at once and insisted upon having cigars and things to drink brought out for him. On the whole he presented an astonishingly normal exterior, for within him he must have been cold with fear, and in his ears a question must have rung and shouted and rung again unceasingly—"What does this fellow know? What does he know?"

Hartley's very presence there had a perilous look.

The younger man shook his head at the servant who asked him what he wished to drink.

"Thanks, you're very good," he said to Captain Stewart, and that gentleman eyed him silently. "I can't stay but a moment. I just dropped in to ask if you'd any idea what can have become of Ste. Marie."

"Ste. Marie?" said Captain Stewart. "What do you mean—'become of him'?" He moistened his lips to speak, but he said the words without a tremor.

"Well, what I meant was," said Hartley, "that you'd seen him last. He was here Thursday evening. Did he say anything to you about going anywhere in particular the next day—yesterday? He left his rooms about noon and hasn't turned up since."

Captain Stewart drew a short breath and sat down, abruptly, in a near-by chair, for all at once his knees had begun to tremble under him. He was conscious of a great and blissful wave of relief and well-being, and he wanted to laugh. He wanted so much to laugh that it became a torture to keep his face in repose.

So Ste. Marie had left no word behind him, and the danger was past!

With a great effort he looked up from where he sat to Richard Hartley, who stood anxious and frowning before him.

"Forgive me for sitting down," he said, "and sit down yourself, I beg. I'm still very shaky from my attack of illness. Ste. Marie—Ste. Marie has disappeared? How very extraordinary! It's like poor Arthur. Still—a single day! He might be anywhere for a single day, might he not? For all that, though, it's very odd. Why, no. No, I don't think he said anything about going away. At least I remember nothing about it." The relief and triumph within him burst out in a sudden little chuckle of malicious fun. "I can think of only one thing," said he, "that might be of use to you. Ste. Marie seemed to take a very great fancy to one of the ladies here the other evening. And, I must confess, the lady seemed to return it. It had all the look of a desperate flirtation—a most desperate flirtation. They spent the evening in a corner together. You don't suppose," he said, still chuckling gently, "that Ste. Marie is taking a little holiday, do you? You don't suppose that the lady could account for him?"

"No," said Richard Hartley, "I don't. And if you knew Ste. Marie a little better you wouldn't suppose it, either." But after a pause he said: "Could you give me the—lady's name, by any chance? Of course, I don't want to leave any stone unturned."

And once more the other man emitted his pleased little chuckle that was so like a cat's mew.

"I can give you her name," said he. "The name is Mlle.—— Bertrand. Elise Bertrand. But I regret to say I haven't the address by me. She came with some friends. I will try and get it and send it you. Will that be all right?"

"Yes, thanks!" said Richard Hartley. "You're very good. And now I must be going on. I'm rather in a hurry."

Captain Stewart protested against this great haste, and pressed the younger man to sit down and tell him more about his friend's disappearance, but Hartley excused himself, repeating that he was in a great hurry, and went off.

When he had gone Captain Stewart lay back in his chair and laughed until he was weak and ached from it, the furious, helpless laughter which comes after the sudden release from a terrible strain. He was not, as a rule, a demonstrative man, but he became aware that he would like to dance and sing, and probably he would have done both if it had not been for the servant in the next room.

So there was no danger to be feared, and his terrors of the night past—he shivered a little to think of them—had been, after all, useless terrors! As for the prisoner out at La Lierre, nothing was to be feared from him so long as a careful watch was kept. Later on he might have to be disposed of, since both bullet and poison had failed—he scowled over that, remembering a bad quarter of an hour with O'Hara early this morning—but that matter could wait. Some way would present itself. He thought of the wholly gratuitous lie he had told Hartley, a thing born of a moment's malice, and he laughed again. It struck him that it would be very humorous if Hartley should come to suspect his friend of turning aside from his great endeavors to enter upon an affair with a lady. He dimly remembered that Ste. Marie's name had, from time to time, been a good deal involved in romantic histories, and he said to himself that his lie had been very well chosen, indeed, and might be expected to cause Richard Hartley much anguish of spirit.

After that he lighted a very large cigarette, half as big as a cigar, and he lay back in his low, comfortable chair and began to think of the outcome of all this plotting and planning. As is very apt to be the case when a great danger has been escaped, he was in a mood of extreme hopefulness and confidence. Vaguely he felt as if the recent happenings had set him ahead a pace toward his goal, though of course they had done nothing of the kind. The danger that would exist so long as Ste. Marie, who knew everything, was alive, seemed in some miraculous fashion to have dwindled to insignificance; in this rebound from fear and despair difficulties were swept away and the path was clear. The man's mind leaped to his goal, and a little shiver of prospective joy ran over him. Once that goal gained he could defy the world. Let eyes look askance, let tongues wag, he would be safe then—safe for all the rest of his life, and rich, rich, rich!

For he was playing against a feeble old man's life. Day by day he watched the low flame sink lower as the flame of an exhausted lamp sinks and flickers. It was slow, for the old man had still a little strength left, but the will to live—which was the oil in the lamp—was almost gone, and the waiting could not be long now. One day, quite suddenly, the flame would sink down to almost nothing, as at last it does in the spent lamp. It would flicker up and down rapidly for a few moments, and all at once there would be no flame there. Old David would be dead, and a servant would be sent across the river in haste to the rue du Faubourg St. Honore. Stewart lay back in his chair and tried to imagine that it was true, that it had already happened, as happen it must before long, and once more the little shiver, which was like a shiver of voluptuous delight, ran up and down his limbs, and his breath began to come fast and hard.

* * * * *

But Richard Hartley drove at once back to the rue d'Assas. He was not very much disappointed in having learned nothing from Stewart, though he was thoroughly angry at that gentleman's hint about Ste. Marie and the unknown lady. He had gone to the rue du Faubourg because, as he had said, he wished to leave no stone unturned, and, after all, he had thought it quite possible that Stewart could give him some information which would be of value. Hartley firmly believed the elder man to be a rascal, but of course he knew nothing definite save the two facts which he had accidentally learned from Helen Benham, and it had occurred to him that Captain Stewart might have sent Ste. Marie off upon another wild-goose chase such as the expedition to Dinard had been. He would have been sure that the elder man had had something to do with Ste. Marie's disappearance if the latter had not been seen since Stewart's party, but instead of that Ste. Marie had come home, slept, gone out the next morning, returned again, received a visitor, and gone out to lunch. It was all very puzzling and mysterious.

His mind went back to the brief interview with Stewart and dwelt upon it. Little things which had at the time made no impression upon him began to recur and to take on significance. He remembered the elder man's odd and strained manner at the beginning, his sudden and causeless change to ease and to something that was almost like a triumphant excitement, and then his absurd story about Ste. Marie's flirtation with a lady. Hartley thought of these things; he thought also of the fact that Ste. Marie had disappeared immediately after hearing grave accusations against Stewart. Could he have lost his head, rushed across the city at once to confront the middle-aged villain, and then—disappeared from human ken? It would have been very like him to do something rashly impulsive upon reading that note.

Hartley broke into a sudden laugh of sheer amusement when he realized to what a wild and improbable flight his fancy was soaring. He could not quite rid himself of a feeling that Stewart was, in some mysterious fashion, responsible for his friend's vanishing, but he was unlike Ste. Marie: he did not trust his feelings, either good or bad, unless they were backed by excellent evidence, and he had to admit that there was not a single scrap of evidence in this instance against Miss Benham's uncle.

The girl's name recalled him to another duty. He must tell her about Ste. Marie. He was by this time half-way up the Boulevard St. Germain, but he gave a new order, and the fiacre turned back to the rue de l'Universite. The footman at the door said that Mademoiselle was not in the drawing-room, as it was only four o'clock, but that he thought she was in the house. So Hartley sent up his name and went in to wait.

Miss Benham came down looking a little pale and anxious.

"I've been with grandfather," she explained. "He had some sort of sinking-spell last night and we were very much frightened. He's much better, but—well, he couldn't have many such spells and live. I'm afraid he grows a good deal weaker day by day now. He sees hardly any one outside the family, except Baron de Vries." She sat down with a little sigh of fatigue and smiled up at her visitor. "I'm glad you've come," said she. "You'll cheer me up, and I rather need it. What are you looking so solemn about, though? You won't cheer me up if you look like that."

"Well, you see," said Hartley, "I came at this impossible hour to bring you some bad news. I'm sorry. Perhaps," he modified, "bad news is putting it with too much seriousness. Strange news is better. To be brief, Ste. Marie has disappeared—vanished into thin air. I thought you ought to know."

"Ste. Marie!" cried the girl. "How? What do you mean—vanished? When did he vanish?"

She gave a sudden exclamation of relief.

"Oh, he has come upon some clew or other and has rushed off to follow it. That's all. How dare you frighten me so?"

"He went without luggage," said the man, shaking his head, "and he left no word of any kind behind him. He went out to lunch yesterday about noon, and, as I said, simply vanished, leaving no trace whatever behind him. I've just been to see your uncle, thinking that he might know something, but he doesn't."

The girl looked up quickly.

"My uncle?" she said. "Why my uncle?"

"Well," said Hartley, "you see, Ste. Marie went to a little party at your uncle's flat on the night before he disappeared, and I thought your uncle might have heard him say something that would throw light on his movements the next day."

Hartley remembered the unfortunate incident of the galloping pigs, and hurried on:

"He went to the party more for the purpose of having a talk with your uncle than for any other reason, I think. I was to have gone myself, but gave it up at the eleventh hour for the Cains' dinner at Armenonville. Well, the next morning after Captain Stewart's party he went out early. I called at his rooms to see him about something important that I thought he ought to know. I missed him, and so left a note for him which he got on his return and read. I found it open on his table later on. At noon he went out again, and that's all. Frankly, I'm worried about him."

Miss Benham watched the man with thoughtful eyes, and when he had finished she asked:

"Could you tell me what was in this note that you left for Ste. Marie?"

Hartley was by nature a very open and frank young man, and in consequence an unusually bad liar. He hesitated and looked away, and he began to turn red.

"Well—no," he said, after a moment—"no, I'm afraid I can't. It was something you wouldn't understand—wouldn't know about."

And the girl said, "Oh!" and remained for a little while silent. But at the end she looked up and met his eyes, and the man saw that she was very grave. She said:

"Richard, there is something that you and I have been avoiding and pretending not to see. It has gone too far now, and we've got to face it with perfect frankness. I know what was in your note to Ste. Marie. It was what you found out the other evening about—my uncle—the matter of the will and the other matter. He knew about the will, but he told you and Ste. Marie that he didn't. He said to you, also, that I had told him about my engagement and Ste. Marie's determination to search for Arthur, and that was—a lie. I didn't tell him, and grandfather didn't tell him. He listened in the door yonder and heard it himself. I have a good reason for knowing that. And then," she said, "he tried very hard to persuade you and Ste. Marie to take up your search under his direction, and he partly succeeded. He sent Ste. Marie upon a foolish expedition to Dinard, and he gave him and gave you other clews just as foolish as that one. Richard, do you believe that my uncle has hidden poor Arthur away somewhere or—worse than that? Do you? Tell me the truth!"

"There is not," said Hartley, "one particle of real evidence against him that I'm aware of. There's plenty of motive, if you like, but motive is not evidence."

"I asked you a question," the girl said. "Do you believe my uncle has been responsible for Arthur's disappearance?"

"Yes," said Richard Hartley, "I'm afraid I do."

"Then," she said, "he has been responsible for Ste. Marie's disappearance also. Ste. Marie became dangerous to him, and so vanished. What can we do, Richard? What can we do?"

* * * * *



XVIII

A CONVERSATION OVERHEARD

In the upper chamber at La Lierre the days dragged very slowly by, and the man who lay in bed there counted interminable hours and prayed for the coming of night with its merciful oblivion of sleep. His inaction was made bitterer by the fact that the days were days of green and gold, of breeze-stirred tree-tops without his windows, of vagrant sweet airs that stole in upon his solitude, bringing him all the warm fragrance of summer and of green things growing.

He suffered little pain. There was, for the first three or four days, a dull and feverish ache in his wounded leg, but presently even that passed, and the leg hurt him only when he moved it. He thought sometimes that he would be grateful for a bit of physical anguish to make the hours pass more quickly.

The other inmates of the house held aloof from him. Once a day O'Hara came in to see to the wound, but he maintained a well-nigh complete silence over his work, and answered questions only with a brief yes or no. Sometimes he did not answer them at all. The old Michel came twice daily, but this strange being had quite plainly been frightened into dumbness, and there was nothing to be got out of him. He shambled hastily about the place, his one scared eye upon the man in bed, and as soon as possible fled away, closing the door behind him. Sometimes Michel brought in the meals, sometimes his wife, a creature so like him that the two might well have passed for twin survivors of some unknown race; sometimes—thrice altogether in that first week—Coira O'Hara brought the tray, and she was as silent as the others.

So Ste. Marie was left alone to get through the interminable days as best he might, and ever afterward the week remained in his memory as a sort of nightmare. Lying idle in his bed, he evolved many surprising and fantastic schemes for escape, for getting word to the outside world of his presence here, and one by one he gave them up in disgust as their impossibility forced itself upon him. Plans and schemes were useless while he lay bedridden, unfamiliar even with the house wherein he dwelt, with the garden and park that surrounded it.

As for aid from any of the inmates of the place, that was to be laughed at. They were engaged together in a scheme so desperate that failure must mean utter ruin to them all. He sometimes wondered if the two servants could be bribed. Avarice unmistakable gleamed from their little, glittering, ratlike eyes, but he was sure that they would sell out for no small sum, and in so far as he could remember there had been in his pockets, when he came here, not more than five or six louis. Doubtless the old Michel had managed to abstract those in his daily offices about the room, for Ste. Marie knew that the clothes hung in a closet across from his bed. He had seen them there once when the closet-door was open.

Any help that might come to him must come from outside—and what help was to be expected there? Over and over again he reminded himself of how little Richard Hartley knew. He might suspect Stewart of complicity in this new disappearance, but how was he to find out anything definite? How was any one to do so?

It was at such times as this, when brain and nerves were strained and worn almost to breaking-point, that Ste. Marie had occasion to be grateful for the Southern blood that was in him, the strong tinge of fatalism which is common alike to Latin and to Oriental. It rescued him more than once from something like nervous breakdown, calmed him suddenly, lifted his burdens from outwearied shoulders, and left him in peace to wait until some action should be possible. Then, in such hours, he would fall to thinking of the girl for whose sake, in whose cause, he lay bedridden, beset with dangers. As long before, she came to him in a sort of waking vision—a being but half earthly, enthroned high above him, calm-browed, very pure, with passionless eyes that gazed into far distance and were unaware of the base things below. What would she think of him, who had sworn to be true knight to her, if she could know how he had bungled and failed? He was glad that she did not know, that if he had blundered into peril the knowledge of it could not reach her to hurt her pride.

And sometimes, also, with a great sadness and pity, he thought of poor Coira O'Hara and of the pathetic wreck her life had fallen into. The girl was so patently fit for better things! Her splendid beauty was not a cheap beauty. She was no coarse-blown, gorgeous flower, imperfect at telltale points. It was good blood that had modelled her dark perfection, good blood that had shaped her long and slim and tapering hands.

"A queen among goddesses!" The words remained with him, and he knew that they were true. She might have held up her head among the greatest, this adventurer's girl; but what chance had she had? What merest ghost of a chance?

He watched her on the rare occasions when she came into the room. He watched the poise of her head, her walk, the movements she made, and he said to himself that there was no woman of his acquaintance whose grace was more perfect—certainly none whose grace was so native.

Once he complained to her of the desperate idleness of his days, and asked her to lend him a book of some kind, a review, even a daily newspaper, though it be a week old.

"I should read the very advertisements with joy," he said.

She went out of the room and returned presently with an armful of books, which she laid upon the bed without comment.

"In my prayers, Mademoiselle," cried Ste. Marie, "you shall be foremost forever!" He glanced at the row of titles and looked up in sheer astonishment. "May I ask whose books these are?" he said.

"They are mine," said the girl. "I caught up the ones that lay first at hand. If you don't care for any of them, I will choose others."

The books were: Diana of the Crossways, Richard Feverel, Henri Lavedan's Le Duel, Maeterlinck's Pelleas et Melisande, Don Quixote de la Mancha, in Spanish, a volume of Virgil's Eclogues, and the Life of the Chevalier Bayard, by the Loyal Servitor. Ste. Marie stared at her.

"Do you read Spanish," he demanded, "and Latin, as well as French and English?"

"My mother was Spanish," said she. "And as for Latin, I began to read it with my father when I was a child. Shall I leave the books here?"

Ste. Marie took up the Bayard and held it between his hands.

"It is worn from much reading, Mademoiselle," he said.

"It is the best of all," said she. "The very best of all. I didn't know I had brought you that."

She made a step toward him as if she would take the book away, and over it their eyes met and were held. In that moment it may have come to them both who she was, who so loved the knight without fear and without reproach—the daughter of art Irish adventurer of ill repute—for their faces began suddenly to flush with red, and after an instant the girl turned away.

"It is of no consequence," said she. "You may keep the book if you care to."

And Ste. Marie said, very gently: "Thank you, Mademoiselle. I will keep it for a little while."

So she went out of the room and left him alone.

This was at noon on the sixth day, and, after he had swallowed hastily the lunch which had been set before him, Ste. Marie fell upon the books like a child upon a new box of sweets. Like the child again, it was difficult for him to choose among them. He opened one and then another, gloating over them all, but in the end he chose the Bayard, and for hours lost himself among the high deeds of the Preux Chevalier and his faithful friends—among whom, by the way, there was a Ste. Marie who died nobly for France. It was late afternoon when at last he laid the book down with a sigh and settled himself more comfortably among the pillows.

The sun was not in the room at that hour, but from where he lay he could see it on the tree-tops, gold upon green. Outside his south window the leaves of a chestnut which stood there quivered and rustled gently under a soft breeze. Delectable odors floated in to Ste. Marie's nostrils, and he thought how very pleasant it would be if he were lying on the turf under the trees instead of bedridden in this upper chamber, which he had come to hate with a bitter hatred.

He began to wonder if it would be possible to drag himself across the floor to that south window, and so to lie down for a while with his head in the tiny balcony beyond, his eyes turned to the blue sky. Astir with the new thought, he sat up in bed and carefully swung his feet out till they hung to the floor. The wound in the left leg smarted and burned, but not too severely, and with slow pains Ste. Marie stood up. He almost cried out when he discovered that it could be done quite easily. He essayed to walk, and he was a little weak, but by no means helpless. He found that it gave him pain to raise his left leg in the ordinary action of walking or to bend that knee, but he could get about well enough by dragging the injured member beside him, for when it was straight it supported him without protest.

He took his pillows across to the window and disposed them there, for it was a French window opening to the floor, and the level of the little balcony outside was but a few inches above the level of the room. Then the desire seized him to make a tour of his prison walls. He went first to the closet where he had seen his clothes hanging, and they were still there. He felt in the pockets and withdrew his little English pigskin sovereign-purse. It had not been tampered with, and he gave an exclamation of relief over that, for he might later on have use for money. There were eight louis in it, each in its little separate compartment, and in another pocket he found a fifty-franc note and some silver. He went to the two east windows and looked out. The trees stood thick together on that side of the house, but between two of them he could see the park wall fifty yards away. He glanced down, and the side of the house was covered thick with the ivy which had given the place its name, but there was no water-pipe near, nor any other thing which seemed to offer foot or hand hold, unless, perhaps, the ivy might prove strong enough to bear a man's weight. Ste. Marie made a mental note to look into that when he was a little stronger, and turned back to the south window where he had disposed his pillows.

The unaccustomed activity was making his wound smart and prickle, and he lay down at once with head and shoulders in the open air, and out of the warm and golden sunshine and the emerald shade the breath of summer came to him and wrapped him round with sweetness and pillowed him upon its fragrant breast.

He became aware after a long time of voices below, and turned upon his elbows to look. The ivy had clambered upon and partly covered the iron grille of the little balcony, and he could observe without being seen. Young Arthur Benham and Coira O'Hara had come out of the door of the house, and they stood upon the raised and paved terrace which ran the width of the facade, and seemed to hesitate as to the direction they should take. Ste. Marie heard the girl say:

"It's cooler here in the shade of the house," and after a moment the two came along the shady terrace whose outer margin was set at intervals with stained and discolored marble nymphs upon pedestals, and between the nymphs with moss-grown stone benches. They halted before a bench upon which, earlier in the day, a rug had been spread out to dry in the sun and had been forgotten, and after a moment's further hesitation they sat down upon it. Their faces were turned toward the house, and every word that they spoke mounted in that still air clear and distinct to the ears of the man above.

Ste. Marie wriggled back into the room and sat up to consider. The thought of deliberately listening to a conversation not meant for him sent a hot flush to his cheeks. He told himself that it could not be done, and that there was an end to the matter. Whatever might hang upon it, it could not be asked of him that he should stoop to dishonor. But at that the heavy and grave responsibility, which really did hang upon him and upon his actions, came before his mind's eye and loomed there mountainous. The fate of this foolish boy who was set round with thieves and adventurers—even though his eyes were open and he knew where he stood—that came to Ste. Marie and confronted him; and the picture of a bitter old man who was dying of grief came to him; and a mother's face; and hers. There could be no dishonor in the face of all this, only a duty very clear and plain. He crept back to his place, his arms folded beneath him as he lay, his eyes at the thin screen of ivy which cloaked the balcony grille.

Young Arthur Benham appeared to be giving tongue to a rather sharp attack of homesickness. It may be that long confinement within the walls of La Lierre was beginning to try him somewhat.

"Mind you," he declared, as Ste. Marie's ears came once more within range—"mind you, I'm not saying that Paris hasn't got its points. It has. Oh yes! And so has London, and so has Ostend, and so has Monte Carlo. Verree much so! I like Paris. I like the theatres and the vaudeville shows in the Champs-Elysees, and I like Longchamps. I like the boys who hang around Henry's Bar. They're good sports all right, all right! But, by golly, I want to go home! Put me off at the corner of Forty-second Street and Broadway, and I'll ask no more. Set me down at 7 P.M., right there on the corner outside the Knickerbocker, for that's where I would live and die." There came into the lad's somewhat strident voice a softness that was almost pathetic. "You don't know Broadway, Coira, do you? Nix! of course not. Little girl, it's the one street of all this large world. It's the equator that runs north and south instead of east and west. It's a long, bright, gay, live wire!—that's what Broadway is. And I give you my word of honor, like a little man, that it—is—not—slow. No-o, indeed! When I was there last it was being called the 'Gay White Way.' It is not called the 'Gay White Way' now. It has had forty other new, good names since then, and I don't know what they are, but I do know that it is forever gay, and that the electric signs are still blazing all along the street, and the street-cars are still killing people in the good old fashion, and the news-boys are still dodging under the automobiles to sell you a Woild or a Choinal or, if it's after twelve at night, a Morning Telegraph. Coira, my girl, standing on that corner after dark you can see the electric signs of fifteen theatres, not one of them more than five minutes' walk away; and just round the corner there are more. I want to go home! I want to take one large, unparalleled leap from here and come down at the corner I told you about. D'you know what I'd do? We'll say it's 7 P.M. and beginning to get dark. I'd dive into the Knickerbocker—that's the hotel that the bright and happy people go to for dinner or supper—and I'd engage a table up on the terrace. Then I'd telephone to a little friend of mine whose name is Doe—John Doe—and in about ten minutes he'd have left the crowd he was standing in line with and he'd come galloping up, that glad to see me you'd cry to watch him. We'd go up on the terrace, where the potted palms grow, for our dinner, and the tables all around us would be full of people that would know Johnnie Doe and me, and they'd all make us drink drinks and tell us how glad they were to see us aboard again. And after dinner," said young Arthur Benham, with wide and smiling eyes—"after dinner we'd go to see one of the roof-garden shows. Let me tell you they've got the Marigny or the Ambassadeurs or the Jardin de Paris beaten to a pulp—to—a—pulp! And after the show we'd slip round to the stage-door—you bet we would!—and capture the two most beautiful ladies in the world and take 'em off to supper."

He wrinkled his young brow in great perplexity. "Now I wonder," said he, anxiously—"I wonder where we'd go for supper. You see," he apologized, "it's two years since I left the Real Street, and, gee! what a lot can happen on Broadway in two years! There's probably half a dozen new supper-places that I don't know anything about, and one of them's the place where the crowd goes. Well, anyhow, we'd go to that place, and there'd be a band playing, and the electric fans would go round and round, and Johnnie Doe and I and the two most beautiful ladies would put it all over the other pikers there."

Young Benham gave a little sigh of pleasure and excitement. "That's what I'd like to do to-night," said he, "and that's what I'll do, you can bet your sh—boots, when all this silly mess is over and I'm a free man. I'll hike back to good old Broadway, and if ever you see any one trying to pry me loose from it again you can laugh yourself to death, because he'll never, never succeed.

"That's where I'll go," he said, nodding, "when this waiting is over—straight back to Liberty Land and the bright lights. The rest of the family can stay here till they die, if they want to—and I suppose they do—I'm going home as soon as I've got my money. Old Charlie'll manage all that for me. He'll get a lawyer to look after it, and I won't have to see anybody in the family at all.

"Nine more weeks shut in by stone walls!" said the boy, staring about him with a sort of bitterness. "Nine weeks more!"

"Is it so hard as that?" asked the girl.

There was no foolish coquetry in her tone. She spoke as if the words involved no personal question at all, but there was a little smile at her lips, and Arthur Benham turned toward her quickly and caught at her hands.

"No, no!" he cried. "I didn't mean that. You know I didn't mean that. You're worth nine years' waiting. You're the best—d'you hear?—the best there is. There's nobody anywhere that can touch you. Only—well, this place is getting on my nerves. It's got me worn to a frazzle. I feel like a criminal doing time."

"You came very near having to do time somewhere else," said the girl. "If this M. Ste. Marie hadn't blundered we should have had them all round our ears, and you'd have had to run for it."

"Yes," the boy said, nodding gravely. "Yes, that was great luck."

He raised his head and looked up along the windows above him.

"Which is his room?" he asked, and Mlle. O'Hara said:

"The one just overhead, but he's in bed far back from the window. He couldn't possibly hear us talking."

She paused for a moment in frowning hesitation, and in the end said:

"Tell me about him, this Ste. Marie! Do you know anything about him?"

"No," said Arthur Benham, "I don't—not personally, that is. Of course I've heard of him. Lots of people have spoken of him to me. And the odd part of it is that they all had a good word to say. Everybody seemed to like him. I got the idea that he was the best ever. I wanted to know him. I never thought he'd take on a piece of dirty work like this."

"Nor I," said the girl, in a low voice. "Nor I."

The boy looked up.

"Oh, you've heard of him, too, then?" said he.

And she said, still in her low voice, "I—saw him once."

"Well," declared young Benham, "it's beyond me. I give it up. You never can tell about people, can you? I guess they'll all go wrong when there's enough in it to make it worth while. That's what old Charlie always says. He says most people are straight enough when there's nothing in it, but make the pot big enough and they'll all go crooked."

The young man's face turned suddenly hard and old and bitter.

"Gee! I ought to know that well enough, oughtn't I?" he said. "I guess nobody knows that better than I do after what happened to me.... Come along and take a walk in the garden, Maud! I'm sick of sitting still."

Mlle. Coira O'Hara looked up with a start, as if she had not been listening, but she rose when the boy held out his hand to her, and the two went down from the terrace and moved off toward the west.

Ste. Marie watched them until they had disappeared among the trees, and then turned on his back, staring up into the softly stirring canopy of green above him and the little rifts of bright blue sky. He did not understand at all. Something mysterious had crept in where all had seemed so plain to the eye. Certain words that young Arthur Benham had spoken repeated themselves in his mind, and he could not at once make them out. Assuredly there was something mysterious here.

In the first place, what did the boy mean by "dirty work"? To be sure, spying, in its usual sense, is not held to be one of the noblest of occupations, but—in such a cause as this! It was absurd, ridiculous, to call it "dirty work." And what did he mean by the words which he had used afterward? Ste. Marie did not quite follow the idiom about the "big enough pot," but he assumed that it referred to money. Did the young fool think he was being paid for his efforts? That was ridiculous, too.