Her eyebrows rose.
“In uniform?” she asked.
He laughed.
“No, you goose,” he chuckled, “in his dressing-gown.”
She followed him down the corridor.
“You’ve learnt that from Lord Verlond,” she said reproachfully.
She waited till the car had carried her father from view, then walked back to her room, happy with the happiness which anticipates happiness.
The night before had been a miserable one till, acting on an impulse, she had humbled herself, and found strange joy in the humiliation.
The knowledge that this young man was still her ideal, all she would have him to be, had so absorbed her that for the time being she was oblivious of all else.
She recalled with a little start the occasion of their last meeting, and how they had parted.
The recollection made her supremely miserable again, and, jumping up from her stool, she had opened her little writing-bureau and scribbled a hurried, penitent, autocratic little note, ordering and imploring him to come to her the instant he received it.
Frank came promptly. The maid announced his arrival within ten minutes of Mr. Sandford’s departure.
May ran lightly downstairs and was seized with a sudden fit of shyness as she reached the library door. She would have paused, but the maid, who was following her, regarded her with so much sympathetic interest that she was obliged to assume a nonchalance that she was far from feeling and enter the room.
Frank was standing with his back to the door, but he turned quickly on hearing the light rustle of her gown.
May closed the door, but she made no effort to move away from it.
“How do you do?” she began.
The effort she was making to still the wild beating of her heart made her voice sound cold and formal.
“I am very well, thank you.” Frank’s tone reflected her own.
“I—I wanted to see you,” she continued, with an effort to appear natural.
“So I gathered from your note,” he replied.
“It was good of you to come,” she went on conventionally. “I hope it has not inconvenienced you at all.”
“Not at all.” Again Frank’s voice was an expressive echo. “I was just on the point of going out, so came at once.”
“Oh, I am sorry—won’t you keep your other appointment first? Any time will suit me; it—it is nothing important.”
“Well, I hadn’t an appointment exactly.” It was the young man’s turn to hesitate. “To tell the truth, I was coming here.”
“Oh, Frank! Were you really?”
“Yes, really and truly, little girl.”
May did not answer, but something Frank saw in her face spoke more plainly than words could do.
Mr. Sandford returned that afternoon to find two happy people sitting in the half-darkness of the drawing-room; and ten members of the Criminal Investigation Department waited at Scotland Yard, alternately swearing and wringing their hands.
XVI
Colonel Black Meets a Just Man
Dr. Essley’s house at Forest Hill stood untenanted. The red lamp before the door was unlit, and though the meagre furnishings had not been removed, the house, with its drawn blinds and grimy steps, had the desolate appearance of emptiness.
The whisper of a rumour had agitated the domestic circles of that respectable suburb—a startling rumour which, if it were true, might well cause Forest Hill to gasp in righteous indignation.
“Dr.” Essley was an unauthorized practitioner, a fraud of the worst description, for he had taken the name and the style of a dead man.
“All I know,” explained Colonel Black, whom a reporter discovered at his office, “is that I met Dr. Essley in Australia, and that I was impressed by his skill. I might say,” he added in a burst of frankness, “that I am in a sense responsible for his position in England, for I not only advanced him money to buy his practice, but I recommended him to all my friends, and naturally I am upset by the revelation.”
No, he had no idea as to the “doctor’s” present location. He had last seen him a month before, when the “doctor” spoke of going to the Continent.
Colonel Black had as much to tell—and no more—to the detectives who came from Scotland Yard. They came with annoying persistence and never seemed tired of coming. They waited for him on the doorstep and in his office. They waited for him in the vestibules of the theatres, at the entrance doors of banks. They came as frequently as emissaries of houses to whom Colonel Black was under monetary obligation.
A week after the events chronicled in the last chapter. Colonel Black sat alone in his flat with a light heart. He had collected together a very considerable amount of money. That it was money to which he had no legal right did not disturb the smooth current of his thoughts. It was sufficient that it was money, and that a motorcar which might carry him swiftly to Folkestone was within telephone-call day and night. Moreover, he was alive.
The vengeance of an organization vowed against Dr. Essley had passed over the head of Colonel Black—he might be excused if he thought that the matter of a grey wig and a pair of shaggy eyebrows, added to some knowledge of medicine, had deceived the astute men who had come to England to track him down.
This infernal man Fellowe, who appeared and disappeared as if by magic, puzzled him—almost alarmed him.
Fellowe was not one of the “Four Just Men”—instinct told him that much. Fellowe was an official.
A Sergeant Gurden who had been extremely useful to Black had been suddenly transferred to a remote division, and nobody knew why. With him had disappeared from his familiar beats a young police-constable who had been seen dining with Cabinet Ministers.
It was very evident that there was cause for perturbation—yet, singularity enough, Colonel Black was cheerful; but there was a malignant quality to his cheerfulness. He busied himself with the destruction of such of his papers—and they were few—which he had kept by him.
He turned out an old pocketbook and frowned when he saw its contents. It was a wagon-lit coupon for the journey from
