Reeder stooped down and drew the girl to her feet.
“Take this lady with you,” he said, and, to Olga: “I will get your box, and I may not—I am not quite sure—ask you to open it for me.”
He waited till the officer had gone, and added:
“Just now I am feeling rather—tender toward young lovers. That is a concession which an old lover may make to youth.”
His voice had grown husky. There was something in his face that brought the tears to her eyes.
“Was it—not Margaret Belman?” she asked in a hushed voice, and she knew before he answered that she had guessed well.
Tragedy dignified this strange-looking man, so far past youth, yet holding the germ of youth in his heart. His hand fell gently on her shoulder.
“Go, my dear,” he said. “I will do what I can for you—perhaps I can save you a great deal of unhappiness.”
He waited until she had gone, then strolled into the deserted lounge. What an eternity had passed since he had sat there, munching his toast and drinking his cup of tea, with an illustrated newspaper on his knees!
The place in the half gloom seemed full of ancient ghosts. The House of Tears! These walls had held sorrows more poignant, more hopeless than his.
He went to the panelled wall and rubbed his finger down the little scar in the wood that a thrown knife had made and smiled at the comparative triviality of that offence.
He had reason to remember the circumstances without the dramatic reminder which nature gave. Suddenly the floor beneath him swayed, and the two lights went out. He guessed that the earth tremors were responsible for the snapping of wires, and he hurried into the vestibule and had passed from the house when he remembered Olga Crewe’s request.
The lantern was still hanging about his neck. He switched it on and went back to the safe and inserted the key. As he did so, the house swayed backward and forward like a drunken man. The smashing of glass, the crash of overturned wardrobes startled him so that he almost fled with his mission unperformed. He even hesitated; but a promise was a promise to J. G. Reeder. He put the key in again, turned the lock, and pulled open one of the great doors—and Margaret Belman fell into his arms!
XX
He stood, holding the half-swooning girl, peering into the face he could only see by the reflected light of his lantern, and then suddenly the safe fell back from him without warning, leaping a gaping cavern.
He lifted her in his arms, ran across the vestibule into the open air. Somebody shouted his name in the distance, and he ran blindly toward the voice. Once he stumbled over a great crack that had appeared in the earth, but managed to recover himself, though he was forced to release his grip of the girl.
She was alive—breathing—her breath fanned his cheek and gave him new strength.
The sound of falling walls behind him; immense, hideous roarings and groanings; thunder of sliding chalk and rock and earth—he heard only the breathing of his burden, felt only the faint beating of her heart against his breast.
“Here you are!”
Somebody lifted Margaret Belman from his arms. A big soldier pushed him into a wagon, where he sprawled at full length, breathless, more dead than alive, by the side of the woman he loved; and then, with a whirr of wheels, the ambulance sped down the hillside toward safety. Behind him, in the darkness, the House of Tears shivered and crackled, and the work of ancient masons vanished piecemeal, tumbling over new cliffs, to be everlastingly engulfed and hidden from the sight of man.
Dawn came and showed, to an interested party that had travelled by road and train to the scene of the great landslide, one gray wall, standing starkly on the edge of a precipice. A portion of the wrecked floor still adhered to the ruins, and on that floor the bloodstained bed where Old Man Flack had laid his murdered servant.
The story that Olga Flack told the police, which appears in the official records of the place, was not exactly the same as the story she told to Mr. Reeder that afternoon when, at his invitation, she came to the flat in Bennett Street. Mr. Reeder, minus his glasses and his general air of respectability which his vanished side whiskers had so enhanced, was at some disadvantage.
“Yes, I think Ravini was killed,” she said, “but you are wrong in supposing that I brought him to my room at the request of my father. Ravini was a very quick-witted man and recognized me. He came to Larmes Keep because he”—she hesitated—“well, he was rather fond of Miss Belman. He told me this, and I was rather amused. At that time I did not know his name, although my husband did, and I certainly did not connect him with my father’s arrest. He revealed his identity, and I suppose there was something in my attitude, or something I said, which recalled the schoolgirl he had met years before. The moment he recognized me as John Flack’s daughter, he also recognized Larmes Keep as my father’s headquarters.
“He began to ask me questions: whether I knew where the Flack million, as he called it, was hidden. And of course I was horrified, for I knew why Daver had allowed him to come.
“My father had recently escaped from Broadmoor, and I was worried sick for fear he knew the trick that Daver had played. I wasn’t normal, I suppose, and I came near to betraying my father, for I told Ravini of his escape. Ravini did not take this as I had expected; he rather overrated his own power, and was very confident. Of course, he did not know that Father was practically in the house, that he came
