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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 9779 ***
+THE BLACK BAG
+
+
+By LOUIS JOSEPH VANCE
+
+
+[Illustration: cover]
+
+
+WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY THOMAS FOGARTY
+
+
+COPYRIGHT 1908
+
+
+
+
+TO MY MOTHER
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+ CHAPTER I. DIVERSIONS OF A RUINED GENTLEMAN
+ CHAPTER II. “AND SOME THERE BE WHO HAVE ADVENTURES THRUST UPON THEM”
+ CHAPTER III. CALENDAR’S DAUGHTER
+ CHAPTER IV. 9 FROGNALL STREET, W. C.
+ CHAPTER V. THE MYSTERY OF A FOUR-WHEELER
+ CHAPTER VI. “BELOW BRIDGE”
+ CHAPTER VII. DIVERSIONS OF A RUINED GENTLEMAN—RESUMED
+ CHAPTER VIII. MADAME L’INTRIGANTE
+ CHAPTER IX. AGAIN "BELOW BRIDGE"; AND BEYOND
+ CHAPTER X. DESPERATE MEASURES
+ CHAPTER XI. OFF THE NORE
+ CHAPTER XII. PICARESQUE PASSAGES
+ CHAPTER XIII. A PRIMER OF PROGRESSIVE CRIME
+ CHAPTER XIV. STRATAGEMS AND SPOILS
+ CHAPTER XV. REFUGEES
+ CHAPTER XVI. TRAVELS WITH A CHAPERON
+ CHAPTER XVII. ROGUES AND VAGABONDS
+ CHAPTER XVIII. ADVENTURERS’ LUCK
+ CHAPTER XIX. i—THE UXBRIDGE ROAD
+ ii—THE CROWN AND MITRE
+ iii—THE JOURNEY’S END
+
+
+
+
+ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+ Permit me to introduce an old friend.
+ “I’m awaiting your explanation,” she said coldly.
+ The boat gathered impetus.
+ He helped the boy to his feet, and stood waiting.
+ Eccles
+ “Hi, matey!” he blustered. “’Ow goes it now?”
+ Straddling Mulready’s body, he confronted Calendar and Stryker.
+ From the window, Mrs. Hallam turned with a curling lip.
+ A costume consisting mainly of a flowered dressing-gown and slippers.
+ “Good evening, all!” he saluted them blandly.
+
+
+
+
+THE BLACK BAG
+
+
+
+
+I
+DIVERSIONS OF A RUINED GENTLEMAN
+
+
+Upon a certain dreary April afternoon in the year of grace, 1906, the
+apprehensions of Philip Kirkwood, Esquire, _Artist-peintre_, were
+enlivened by the discovery that he was occupying that singularly
+distressing social position, which may be summed up succinctly in a
+phrase through long usage grown proverbial: “Alone in London.” These
+three words have come to connote in our understanding so much of human
+misery, that to Mr. Kirkwood they seemed to epitomize absolutely, if
+not happily, the various circumstances attendant upon the predicament
+wherein he found himself. Inevitably an extremist, because of his
+youth, (he had just turned twenty-five), he took no count of mitigating
+matters, and would hotly have resented the suggestion that his case was
+anything but altogether deplorable and forlorn.
+
+That he was not actually at the end of his resources went for nothing;
+he held the distinction a quibble, mockingly immaterial,—like the store
+of guineas in his pocket, too insignificant for mention when contrasted
+with his needs. And his base of supplies, the American city of his
+nativity, whence—and not without a glow of pride in his secret heart—he
+was wont to register at foreign hostelries, had been arbitrarily cut
+off from him by one of those accidents sardonically classified by
+insurance and express corporations as Acts of God.
+
+Now to one who has lived all his days serenely in accord with the
+dictates of his own sweet will, taking no thought for the morrow, such
+a situation naturally seems both appalling and intolerable, at the
+first blush. It must be confessed that, to begin with, Kirkwood drew a
+long and disconsolate face over his fix. And in that black hour,
+primitive of its kind in his brief span, he became conscious of a
+sinister apparition taking shape at his elbow—a shade of darkness
+which, clouting him on the back with a skeleton hand, croaked hollow
+salutations in his ear.
+
+“Come, Mr. Kirkwood, come!” its mirthless accents rallied him. “Have
+you no welcome for me?—you, who have been permitted to live the quarter
+of a century without making my acquaintance? Surely, now, it’s high
+time we were learning something of one another, you and I!” “But I
+don’t understand,” returned Kirkwood blankly. “I don’t know you—”
+
+“True! But you shall: I am the Shade of Care—”
+
+“Dull Care!” murmured Kirkwood, bewildered and dismayed; for the
+visitation had come upon him with little presage and no invitation
+whatever.
+
+“Dull Care,” the Shade assured him. “Dull Care am I—and Care that’s
+anything but dull, into the bargain: Care that’s like a keen pain in
+your body, Care that lives a horror in your mind, Care that darkens
+your days and flavors with bitter poison all your nights, Care that—”
+
+But Kirkwood would not listen further. Courageously submissive to his
+destiny, knowing in his heart that the Shade had come to stay, he yet
+found spirit to shake himself with a dogged air, to lift his chin, set
+the strong muscles of his jaw, and smile that homely wholesome smile
+which was his peculiarly.
+
+“Very well,” he accepted the irremediable with grim humor; “what must
+be, must. I don’t pretend to be glad to see you, but—you’re free to
+stay as long as you find the climate agreeable. I warn you I shan’t
+whine. Lots of men, hundreds and hundreds of ’em, have slept tight o’
+nights with you for bedfellow; if they could grin and bear you, I
+believe I can.”
+
+Now Care mocked him with a sardonic laugh, and sought to tighten upon
+his shoulders its bony grasp; but Kirkwood resolutely shrugged it off
+and went in search of man’s most faithful dumb friend, to wit, his
+pipe; the which, when found and filled, he lighted with a spill twisted
+from the envelope of a cable message which had been vicariously
+responsible for his introduction to the Shade of Care.
+
+“It’s about time,” he announced, watching the paper blacken and burn in
+the grate fire, “that I was doing something to prove my title to a
+living.” And this was all his valedictory to a vanished competence.
+“Anyway,” he added hastily, as if fearful lest Care, overhearing, might
+have read into his tone a trace of vain repining, “anyway, I’m a sight
+better off than those poor devils over there! I really have a great
+deal to be thankful for, now that my attention’s drawn to it.”
+
+For the ensuing few minutes he thought it all over, soberly but with a
+stout heart; standing at a window of his bedroom in the Hotel Pless,
+hands deep in trouser pockets, pipe fuming voluminously, his gaze
+wandering out over a blurred infinitude of wet shining roofs and sooty
+chimney-pots: all of London that a lowering drizzle would let him see,
+and withal by no means a cheering prospect, nor yet one calculated to
+offset the disheartening influence of the indomitable Shade of Care.
+But the truth is that Kirkwood’s brain comprehended little that his
+eyes perceived; his thoughts were with his heart, and that was half a
+world away and sick with pity for another and a fairer city, stricken
+in the flower of her loveliness, writhing in Promethean agony upon her
+storied hills.
+
+There came a rapping at the door.
+
+Kirkwood removed the pipe from between his teeth long enough to say
+“Come in!” pleasantly.
+
+The knob was turned, the door opened. Kirkwood, swinging on one heel,
+beheld hesitant upon the threshold a diminutive figure in the livery of
+the Pless pages.
+
+“Mister Kirkwood?”
+
+Kirkwood nodded.
+
+“Gentleman to see you, sir.”
+
+Kirkwood nodded again, smiling. “Show him up, please,” he said. But
+before the words were fairly out of his mouth a footfall sounded in the
+corridor, a hand was placed upon the shoulder of the page, gently but
+with decision swinging him out of the way, and a man stepped into the
+room.
+
+“Mr. Brentwick!” Kirkwood almost shouted, jumping forward to seize his
+visitor’s hand.
+
+“My dear boy!” replied the latter. “I’m delighted to see you. ’Got your
+note not an hour ago, and came at once—you see!”
+
+“It was mighty good of you. Sit down, please. Here are cigars.... Why,
+a moment ago I was the most miserable and lonely mortal on the
+footstool!”
+
+“I can fancy.” The elder man looked up, smiling at Kirkwood from the
+depths of his arm-chair, as the latter stood above him, resting an
+elbow on the mantel. “The management knows me,” he offered explanation
+of his unceremonious appearance; “so I took the liberty of following on
+the heels of the bellhop, dear boy. And how are you? Why are you in
+London, enjoying our abominable spring weather? And why the anxious
+undertone I detected in your note?”
+
+He continued to stare curiously into Kirkwood’s face. At a glance, this
+Mr. Brentwick was a man of tallish figure and rather slender; with a
+countenance thin and flushed a sensitive pink, out of which his eyes
+shone, keen, alert, humorous, and a trace wistful behind his glasses.
+His years were indeterminate; with the aspect of fifty, the spirit and
+the verve of thirty assorted oddly. But his hands were old, delicate,
+fine and fragile; and the lips beneath the drooping white mustache at
+times trembled, almost imperceptibly, with the generous sentiments that
+come with mellow age. He held his back straight and his head with an
+air—an air that was not a swagger but the sign-token of seasoned
+experience in the world. The most carping could have found no flaw in
+the quiet taste of his attire. To sum up, Kirkwood’s very good
+friend—and his only one then in London—Mr. Brentwick looked and was an
+English gentleman.
+
+“Why?” he persisted, as the younger man hesitated. “I am here to find
+out. To-night I leave for the Continent. In the meantime ...”
+
+“And at midnight I sail for the States,” added Kirkwood. “That is
+mainly why I wished to see you—to say good-by, for the time.”
+
+“You’re going home—” A shadow clouded Brentwick’s clear eyes.
+
+“To fight it out, shoulder to shoulder with my brethren in adversity.”
+
+The cloud lifted. “That is the spirit!” declared the elder man. “For
+the moment I did you the injustice to believe that you were running
+away. But now I understand. Forgive me.... Pardon, too, the stupidity
+which I must lay at the door of my advancing years; to me the thought
+of you as a Parisian fixture has become such a commonplace, Philip,
+that the news of the disaster hardly stirred me. Now I remember that
+you are a Californian!”
+
+“I was born in San Francisco,” affirmed Kirkwood a bit sadly. “My
+father and mother were buried there ...”
+
+“And your fortune—?”
+
+“I inherited my father’s interest in the firm of Kirkwood & Vanderlip;
+when I came over to study painting, I left everything in Vanderlip’s
+hands. The business afforded me a handsome living.”
+
+“You have heard from Mr. Vanderlip?”
+
+“Fifteen minutes ago.” Kirkwood took a cable-form, still damp, from his
+pocket, and handed it to his guest. Unfolding it, the latter read:
+
+“_Kirkwood, Pless, London. Stay where you are no good coming back
+everything gone no insurance letter follows vanderlip_.”
+
+“When I got the news in Paris,” Kirkwood volunteered, “I tried the
+banks; they refused to honor my drafts. I had a little money in
+hand,—enough to see me home,—so closed the studio and came across. I’m
+booked on the _Minneapolis_, sailing from Tilbury at daybreak; the
+boat-train leaves at eleven-thirty. I had hoped you might be able to
+dine with me and see me off.”
+
+In silence Brentwick returned the cable message. Then, with a
+thoughtful look, “You are sure this is wise?” he queried.
+
+“It’s the only thing I can see.”
+
+“But your partner says—”
+
+“Naturally he thinks that by this time I should have learned to paint
+well enough to support myself for a few months, until he can get things
+running again. Perhaps I might.” Brentwick supported the presumption
+with a decided gesture. “But have I a right to leave Vanderlip to fight
+it out alone? For Vanderlip has a wife and kiddies to support; I—”
+
+“Your genius!”
+
+“My ability, such as it is—and that only. It can wait.... No; this
+means simply that I must come down from the clouds, plant my feet on
+solid earth, and get to work.”
+
+“The sentiment is sound,” admitted Brentwick, “the practice of it,
+folly. Have you stopped to think what part a rising young
+portrait-painter can contribute toward the rebuilding of a devastated
+city?”
+
+“The painting can wait,” reiterated Kirkwood. “I can work like other
+men.”
+
+“You can do yourself and your genius grave injustice. And I fear me you
+will, dear boy. It’s in keeping with your heritage of American
+obstinacy. Now if it were a question of money—”
+
+“Mr. Brentwick!” Kirkwood protested vehemently. “I’ve ample for my
+present needs,” he added.
+
+“Of course,” conceded Brentwick with a sigh. “I didn’t really hope you
+would avail yourself of our friendship. Now there’s my home in Aspen
+Villas.... You have seen it?”
+
+“In your absence this afternoon your estimable butler, with commendable
+discretion, kept me without the doors,” laughed the young man.
+
+“It’s a comfortable home. You would not consent to share it with me
+until—?”
+
+“You are more than good; but honestly, I must sail to-night. I wanted
+only this chance to see you before I left. You’ll dine with me, won’t
+you?”
+
+“If you would stay in London, Philip, we would dine together not once
+but many times; as it is, I myself am booked for Munich, to be gone a
+week, on business. I have many affairs needing attention between now
+and the nine-ten train from Victoria. If you will be my guest at Aspen
+Villas—”
+
+“Please!” begged Kirkwood, with a little laugh of pleasure because of
+the other’s insistence. “I only wish I could. Another day—”
+
+“Oh, you will make your million in a year, and return scandalously
+independent. It’s in your American blood.” Frail white fingers tapped
+an arm of the chair as their owner stared gravely into the fire. “I
+confess I envy you,” he observed.
+
+“The opportunity to make a million in a year?” chuckled Kirkwood.
+
+“No. I envy you your Romance.”
+
+“The Romance of a Poor Young Man went out of fashion years ago.... No,
+my dear friend; my Romance died a natural death half an hour since.”
+
+“There spoke Youth—blind, enviable Youth!... On the contrary, you are
+but turning the leaves of the first chapter of your Romance, Philip.”
+
+“Romance is dead,” contended the young man stubbornly.
+
+“Long live the King!” Brentwick laughed quietly, still attentive to the
+fire. “Myself when young,” he said softly, “did seek Romance, but never
+knew it till its day was done. I’m quite sure that is a poor paraphrase
+of something I have read. In age, one’s sight is sharpened—to see
+Romance in another’s life, at least. I say I envy you. You have Youth,
+unconquerable Youth, and the world before you.... I must go.”
+
+He rose stiffly, as though suddenly made conscious of his age. The old
+eyes peered more than a trifle wistfully, now, into Kirkwood’s. “You
+will not fail to call on me by cable, dear boy, if you need—anything? I
+ask it as a favor.... I’m glad you wished to see me before going out of
+my life. One learns to value the friendship of Youth, Philip. Good-by,
+and good luck attend you.”
+
+Alone once more, Kirkwood returned to his window. The disappointment he
+felt at being robbed of his anticipated pleasure in Brentwick’s company
+at dinner, colored his mood unpleasantly. His musings merged into
+vacuity, into a dull gray mist of hopelessness comparable only to the
+dismal skies then lowering over London-town.
+
+Brentwick was good, but Brentwick was mistaken. There was really
+nothing for Kirkwood to do but to go ahead. But one steamer-trunk
+remained to be packed; the boat-train would leave before midnight, the
+steamer with the morning tide; by the morrow’s noon he would be upon
+the high seas, within ten days in New York and among friends; and then
+...
+
+The problem of that afterwards perplexed Kirkwood more than he cared to
+own. Brentwick had opened his eyes to the fact that he would be
+practically useless in San Francisco; he could not harbor the thought
+of going back, only to become a charge upon Vanderlip. No; he was
+resolved that thenceforward he must rely upon himself, carve out his
+own destiny. But—would the art that he had cultivated with such
+assiduity, yield him a livelihood if sincerely practised with that end
+in view? Would the mental and physical equipment of a painter,
+heretofore dilettante, enable him to become self-supporting?
+
+Knotting his brows in concentration of effort to divine the future, he
+doubted himself, darkly questioning alike his abilities and his temper
+under trial; neither ere now had ever been put to the test. His eyes
+became somberly wistful, his heart sore with regret of Yesterday—his
+Yesterday of care-free youth and courage, gilded with the ineffable,
+evanescent glamour of Romance—of such Romance, thrice refined of dross,
+as only he knows who has wooed his Art with passion passing the love of
+woman.
+
+Far away, above the acres of huddled roofs and chimney-pots, the
+storm-mists thinned, lifting transiently; through them, gray,
+fairy-like, the towers of Westminster and the Houses of Parliament
+bulked monstrous and unreal, fading when again the fugitive dun vapors
+closed down upon the city.
+
+Nearer at hand the Shade of Care nudged Kirkwood’s elbow, whispering
+subtly. Romance was indeed dead; the world was cold and cruel.
+
+The gloom deepened.
+
+In the cant of modern metaphysics, the moment was psychological.
+
+There came a rapping at the door.
+
+Kirkwood removed the pipe from between his teeth long enough to say
+“Come in!” pleasantly.
+
+The knob was turned, the door opened. Kirkwood, turning on one heel,
+beheld hesitant upon the threshold a diminutive figure in the livery of
+the Pless pages.
+
+“Mr. Kirkwood?”
+
+Kirkwood nodded.
+
+“Gentleman to see you, sir.”
+
+Kirkwood nodded again, smiling if somewhat perplexed. Encouraged, the
+child advanced, proffering a silver card-tray at the end of an
+unnaturally rigid forearm. Kirkwood took the card dubiously between
+thumb and forefinger and inspected it without prejudice.
+
+“‘George B. Calendar,’” he read. “‘George B. Calendar!’ But I know no
+such person. Sure there’s no mistake, young man?”
+
+The close-cropped, bullet-shaped, British head was agitated in vigorous
+negation, and “Card for Mister Kirkwood!” was mumbled in dispassionate
+accents appropriate to a recitation by rote.
+
+“Very well. But before you show him up, ask this Mr. Calendar if he is
+quite sure he wants to see Philip Kirkwood.”
+
+“Yessir.”
+
+The child marched out, punctiliously closing the door. Kirkwood tamped
+down the tobacco in his pipe and puffed energetically, dismissing the
+interruption to his reverie as a matter of no consequence—an obvious
+mistake to be rectified by two words with this Mr. Calendar whom he did
+not know. At the knock he had almost hoped it might be Brentwick,
+returning with a changed mind about the bid to dinner.
+
+He regretted Brentwick sincerely. Theirs was a curious sort of
+friendship—extraordinarily close in view of the meagerness of either’s
+information about the other, to say nothing of the disparity between
+their ages. Concerning the elder man Kirkwood knew little more than
+that they had met on shipboard, “coming over”; that Brentwick had spent
+some years in America; that he was an Englishman by birth, a
+cosmopolitan by habit, by profession a gentleman (employing that term
+in its most uncompromisingly British significance), and by inclination
+a collector of “articles of virtue and bigotry,” in pursuit of which he
+made frequent excursions to the Continent from his residence in a
+quaint quiet street of Old Brompton. It had been during his not
+infrequent, but ordinarily abbreviated, sojourns in Paris that their
+steamer acquaintance had ripened into an affection almost filial on the
+one hand, almost paternal on the other....
+
+There came a rapping at the door.
+
+Kirkwood removed the pipe from between his teeth long enough to say
+“Come in!” pleasantly.
+
+The knob was turned, the door opened. Kirkwood, swinging on one heel,
+beheld hesitant upon the threshold a rather rotund figure of medium
+height, clad in an expressionless gray lounge suit, with a brown
+“bowler” hat held tentatively in one hand, an umbrella weeping in the
+other. A voice, which was unctuous and insinuative, emanated from the
+figure.
+
+“Mr. Kirkwood?”
+
+Kirkwood nodded, with some effort recalling the name, so detached had
+been his thoughts since the disappearance of the page.
+
+“Yes, Mr. Calendar—?”
+
+“Are you—ah—busy, Mr. Kirkwood?”
+
+“Are you, Mr. Calendar?” Kirkwood’s smile robbed the retort of any
+flavor of incivility.
+
+Encouraged, the man entered, premising that he would detain his host
+but a moment, and readily surrendering hat and umbrella. Kirkwood,
+putting the latter aside, invited his caller to the easy chair which
+Brentwick had occupied by the fireplace.
+
+“It takes the edge off the dampness,” Kirkwood explained in deference
+to the other’s look of pleased surprise at the cheerful bed of coals.
+“I’m afraid I could never get acclimated to life in a cold, damp
+room—or a damp cold room—such as you Britishers prefer.”
+
+“It is grateful,” Mr. Calendar agreed, spreading plump and well
+cared-for hands to the warmth. “But you are mistaken; I am as much an
+American as yourself.”
+
+“Yes?” Kirkwood looked the man over with more interest, less
+matter-of-course courtesy.
+
+He proved not unprepossessing, this unclassifiable Mr. Calendar; he was
+dressed with some care, his complexion was good, and the fullness of
+his girth, emphasized as it was by a notable lack of inches, bespoke a
+nature genial, easy-going and sybaritic. His dark eyes, heavy-lidded,
+were active—curiously, at times, with a subdued glitter—in a face
+large, round, pink, of which the other most remarkable features were a
+mustache, close-trimmed and showing streaks of gray, a chubby nose, and
+duplicate chins. Mr. Calendar was furthermore possessed of a polished
+bald spot, girdled with a tonsure of silvered hair—circumstances which
+lent some factitious distinction to a personality otherwise
+commonplace.
+
+His manner might be best described as uneasy with assurance; as though
+he frequently found it necessary to make up for his unimpressive
+stature by assuming an unnatural habit of authority. And there you have
+him; beyond these points, Kirkwood was conscious of no impressions; the
+man was apparently neutral-tinted of mind as well as of body.
+
+“So you knew I was an American, Mr. Calendar?” suggested Kirkwood.
+
+“’Saw your name on the register; we both hail from the same neck of the
+woods, you know.”
+
+“I didn’t know it, and—”
+
+“Yes; I’m from Frisco, too.”
+
+“And I’m sorry.”
+
+Mr. Calendar passed five fat fingers nervously over his mustache,
+glanced alertly up at Kirkwood, as if momentarily inclined to question
+his tone, then again stared glumly into the fire; for Kirkwood had
+maintained an attitude purposefully colorless. Not to put too fine a
+point upon it, he believed that his caller was lying; the man’s
+appearance, his mannerisms, his voice and enunciation, while they might
+have been American, seemed all un-Californian. To one born and bred in
+that state, as Kirkwood had been, her sons are unmistakably
+hall-marked.
+
+Now no man lies without motive. This one chose to reaffirm, with a show
+of deep feeling: “Yes; I’m from Frisco, too. We’re companions in
+misfortune.”
+
+“I hope not altogether,” said Kirkwood politely.
+
+Mr. Calendar drew his own inferences from the response and mustered up
+a show of cheerfulness. “Then you’re not completely wiped out?”
+
+“To the contrary, I was hoping you were less unhappy.”
+
+“Oh! Then you are—?”
+
+Kirkwood lifted the cable message from the mantel. “I have just heard
+from my partner at home,” he said with a faint smile; and quoted:
+“‘Everything gone; no insurance.’”
+
+Mr. Calendar pursed his plump lips, whistling inaudibly. “Too bad, too
+bad!” he murmured sympathetically. “We’re all hard hit, more or less.”
+He lapsed into dejected apathy, from which Kirkwood, growing at length
+impatient, found it necessary to rouse him.
+
+“You wished to see me about something else, I’m sure?”
+
+Mr. Calendar started from his reverie. “Eh? ... I was dreaming. I beg
+pardon. It seems hard to realize, Mr. Kirkwood, that this awful
+catastrophe has overtaken our beloved metropolis—”
+
+The canting phrases wearied Kirkwood; abruptly he cut in. “Would a
+sovereign help you out, Mr. Calendar? I don’t mind telling you that’s
+about the limit of my present resources.”
+
+“Pardon _me_.” Mr. Calendar’s moon-like countenance darkened; he
+assumed a transparent dignity. “You misconstrue my motive, sir.”
+
+“Then I’m sorry.”
+
+“I am not here to borrow. On the other hand, quite by accident I
+discovered your name upon the register, down-stairs; a good old Frisco
+name, if you will permit me to say so. I thought to myself that here
+was a chance to help a fellow-countryman.” Calendar paused,
+interrogative; Kirkwood remained interested but silent. “If a passage
+across would help you, I—I think it might be arranged,” stammered
+Calendar, ill at ease.
+
+“It might,” admitted Kirkwood, speculative.
+
+“I could fix it so that you could go over—first-class, of course—and
+pay your way, so to speak, by, rendering us, me and my partner, a
+trifling service.”
+
+“Ah?”
+
+“In fact,” continued Calendar, warming up to his theme, “there might be
+something more in it for you than the passage, if—if you’re the right
+man, the man I’m looking for.”
+
+“That, of course, is the question.”
+
+“Eh?” Calendar pulled up suddenly in a full-winged flight of
+enthusiasm.
+
+Kirkwood eyed him steadily. “I said that it is a question, Mr.
+Calendar, whether or not I am the man you’re looking for. Between you
+and me and the fire-dogs, I don’t believe I am. Now if you wish to name
+your _quid pro quo_, this trifling service I’m to render in recognition
+of your benevolence, you may.”
+
+“Ye-es,” slowly. But the speaker delayed his reply until he had
+surveyed his host from head to foot, with a glance both critical and
+appreciative.
+
+He saw a man in height rather less than the stock size six-feet so much
+in demand by the manufacturers of modern heroes of fiction; a man a bit
+round-shouldered, too, but otherwise sturdily built, self-contained,
+well-groomed.
+
+Kirkwood wears a boy’s honest face; no one has ever called him
+handsome. A few prejudiced persons have decided that he has an
+interesting countenance; the propounders of this verdict have been, for
+the most part, feminine. Kirkwood himself has been heard to declare
+that his features do not fit; in its essence the statement is true, but
+there is a very real, if undefinable, engaging quality in their very
+irregularity. His eyes are brown, pleasant, set wide apart,
+straightforward of expression.
+
+Now it appeared that, whatever his motive, Mr. Calendar had acted upon
+impulse in sending his card up to Kirkwood. Possibly he had anticipated
+a very different sort of reception from a very different sort of man.
+Even in the light of subsequent events it remains difficult to fathom
+the mystery of his choice. Perhaps Fate directed it; stranger things
+have happened at the dictates of a man’s Destiny.
+
+At all events, this Calendar proved not lacking in penetration; men of
+his stamp are commonly endowed with that quality to an eminent degree.
+Not slow to reckon the caliber of the man before him, the leaven of
+intuition began to work in his adipose intelligence. He owned himself
+baffled.
+
+“Thanks,” he concluded pensively; “I reckon you’re right. You won’t do,
+after all. I’ve wasted your time. Mine, too.”
+
+“Don’t mention it.”
+
+Calendar got heavily out of his chair, reaching for his hat and
+umbrella. “Permit me to apologize for an unwarrantable intrusion, Mr.
+Kirkwood.” He faltered; a worried and calculating look shadowed his
+small eyes. “I _was_ looking for some one to serve me in a certain
+capacity—”
+
+“Certain or questionable?” propounded Kirkwood blandly, opening the
+door.
+
+Pointedly Mr. Calendar ignored the imputation. “Sorry I disturbed you.
+G’dafternoon, Mr. Kirkwood.”
+
+“Good-by, Mr. Calendar.” A smile twitched the corners of Kirkwood’s
+too-wide mouth.
+
+Calendar stepped hastily out into the hall. As he strode—or rather,
+rolled—away, Kirkwood maliciously feathered a Parthian arrow.
+
+“By the way, Mr. Calendar—?”
+
+The sound of retreating footsteps was stilled and “Yes?” came from the
+gloom of the corridor.
+
+“Were you ever in San Francisco? Really and truly? Honest Injun, Mr.
+Calendar?”
+
+For a space the quiet was disturbed by harsh breathing; then, in a
+strained voice, “Good day, Mr. Kirkwood”; and again the sound of
+departing footfalls.
+
+Kirkwood closed the door and the incident simultaneously, with a smart
+bang of finality. Laughing quietly he went back to the window with its
+dreary outlook, now the drearier for lengthening evening shadows.
+
+“I wonder what his game is, anyway. An adventurer, of course; the woods
+are full of ’em. A queer fish, even of his kind! And with a trick up
+his sleeve as queer and fishy as himself, no doubt!”
+
+
+
+
+II
+“AND SOME THERE BE WHO HAVE ADVENTURES THRUST UPON THEM”
+
+
+The assumption seems not unwarrantable, that Mr. Calendar figuratively
+washed his hands of Mr. Kirkwood. Unquestionably Mr. Kirkwood
+considered himself well rid of Mr. Calendar. When the latter had gone
+his way, Kirkwood, mindful of the fact that his boat-train would leave
+St. Pancras at half-after eleven, set about his packing and dismissed
+from his thoughts the incident created by the fat _chevalier
+d’industrie_; and at six o’clock, or thereabouts, let himself out of
+his room, dressed for the evening, a light rain-coat over one arm, in
+the other hand a cane,—the drizzle having ceased.
+
+A stolid British lift lifted him down to the ground floor of the
+establishment in something short of five minutes. Pausing in the office
+long enough to settle his bill and leave instructions to have his
+luggage conveyed to the boat-train, he received with entire equanimity
+the affable benediction of the clerk, in whose eyes he still figured as
+that radiant creature, an American millionaire; and passed on to the
+lobby, where he surrendered hat, coat and stick to the cloak-room
+attendant, ere entering the dining-room.
+
+The hour was a trifle early for a London dinner, the handsome room but
+moderately filled with patrons. Kirkwood absorbed the fact
+unconsciously and without displeasure; the earlier, the better: he was
+determined to consume his last civilized meal (as he chose to consider
+it) at his serene leisure, to live fully his ebbing moments in the
+world to which he was born, to drink to its cloying dregs one ultimate
+draught of luxury.
+
+A benignant waiter bowed him into a chair by a corner table in
+juxtaposition with an open window, through which, swaying imperceptibly
+the closed hangings, were wafted gentle gusts of the London evening’s
+sweet, damp breath.
+
+Kirkwood settled himself with an inaudible sigh of pleasure. He was
+dining, for the last time in Heaven knew how long, in a first-class
+restaurant.
+
+With a deferential flourish the waiter brought him the menu-card. He
+had served in his time many an “American, millionaire”; he had also
+served this Mr. Kirkwood, and respected him as one exalted above the
+run of his kind, in that he comprehended the art of dining.
+
+Fifteen minutes later the waiter departed rejoicing, his order
+complete.
+
+To distract a conscience whispering of extravagance, Kirkwood lighted a
+cigarette.
+
+The room was gradually filling with later arrivals; it was the most
+favored restaurant in London, and, despite the radiant costumes of the
+women, its atmosphere remained sedate and restful.
+
+A cab clattered down the side street on which the window opened.
+
+At a near-by table a woman laughed, quietly happy. Incuriously Kirkwood
+glanced her way. She was bending forward, smiling, flattering her
+escort with the adoration of her eyes. They were lovers alone in the
+wilderness of the crowded restaurant. They seemed very happy.
+
+Kirkwood was conscious of a strange pang of emotion. It took him some
+time to comprehend that it was envy.
+
+He was alone and lonely. For the first time he realized that no woman
+had ever looked upon him as the woman at the adjoining table looked
+upon her lover. He had found time to worship but one mistress—his art.
+
+And he was renouncing her.
+
+He was painfully conscious of what he had missed, had lost—or had not
+yet found: the love of woman.
+
+The sensation was curious—new, unique in his experience.
+
+His cigarette burned down to his fingers as he sat pondering.
+Abstractedly, he ground its fire out in an ash-tray.
+
+The waiter set before him a silver tureen, covered.
+
+He sat up and began to consume his soup, scarce doing it justice. His
+dream troubled him—his dream of the love of woman.
+
+From a little distance his waiter regarded him, with an air of
+disappointment. In the course of an hour and a half he awoke, to
+discover the attendant in the act of pouring very hot and black coffee
+from a bright silver pot into a demi-tasse of fragile porcelain.
+Kirkwood slipped a single lump of sugar into the cup, gave over his
+cigar-case to be filled, then leaned back, deliberately lighting a long
+and slender panetela as a preliminary to a last lingering appreciation
+of the scene of which he was a part.
+
+He reviewed it through narrowed eyelids, lazily; yet with some slight
+surprise, seeming to see it with new vision, with eyes from which
+scales of ignorance had dropped.
+
+This long and brilliant dining-hall, with its quiet perfection of
+proportion and appointment, had always gratified his love of the
+beautiful; to-night it pleased him to an unusual degree. Yet it was the
+same as ever; its walls tinted a deep rose, with their hangings of dull
+cloth-of-gold, its lights discriminatingly clustered and discreetly
+shaded, redoubled in half a hundred mirrors, its subdued shimmer of
+plate and glass, its soberly festive assemblage of circumspect men and
+women splendidly gowned, its decorously muted murmur of voices
+penetrated and interwoven by the strains of a hidden string
+orchestra—caressed his senses as always, yet with a difference.
+To-night he saw it a room populous with lovers, lovers insensibly
+paired, man unto woman attentive, woman of man regardful.
+
+He had never understood this before. This much he had missed in life.
+
+It seemed hard to realize that one must forego it all for ever.
+
+Presently he found himself acutely self-conscious. The sensation
+puzzled him; and without appearing to do so, he traced it from effect
+to cause; and found the cause in a woman—a girl, rather, seated at a
+table the third removed from him, near the farther wall of the room.
+
+Too considerate, and too embarrassed, to return her scrutiny openly,
+look for look, he yet felt sure that, however temporarily, he was
+become the object of her intent interest.
+
+Idly employed with his cigar, he sipped his coffee. In time aware that
+she had turned her attention elsewhere, he looked up.
+
+At first he was conscious of an effect of disappointment. She was
+nobody that he knew, even by reputation. She was simply a young girl,
+barely out of her teens—if as old as that phrase would signify. He
+wondered what she had found in him to make her think him worth so long
+a study; and looked again, more keenly curious.
+
+With this second glance, appreciation stirred the artistic side of his
+nature, that was already grown impatient of his fretted mood. The
+slender and girlish figure, posed with such absolute lack of intrusion
+against a screen of rose and gilt, moved him to critical admiration.
+The tinted glow of shaded candles caught glistening on the spun gold of
+her fair hair, and enhanced the fine pallor of her young shoulders. He
+saw promise, and something more than promise, in her face, its oval
+something dimmed by warm shadows that unavailingly sought to blend
+youth and beauty alike into the dull, rich background.
+
+In the sheer youth of her (he realized) more than in aught else, lay
+her chiefest charm. She could be little more than a child, indeed, if
+he were to judge her by the purity of her shadowed eyes and the absence
+of emotion in the calm and direct look which presently she turned upon
+him who sat wondering at the level, penciled darkness of her brows.
+
+At length aware that she had surprised his interest, Kirkwood glanced
+aside—coolly deliberate, lest she should detect in his attitude
+anything more than impersonal approval.
+
+A slow color burned his cheeks. In his temples there rose a curious
+pulsing.
+
+After a while she drew his gaze again, imperiously—herself all unaware
+of the havoc she was wreaking on his temperament.
+
+He could have fancied her distraught, cloaking an unhappy heart with
+placid brow and gracious demeanor; but such a conception matched
+strangely her glowing youth and spirit. What had she to do with Care?
+What concern had Black Care, whose gaunt shape in sable shrouds had
+lurked at his shoulder all the evening, despite his rigid
+preoccupation, with a being as charmingly flushed with budding
+womanhood as this girl?
+
+“Eighteen?” he hazarded. “Eighteen, or possibly nineteen, dining at the
+Pless in a ravishing dinner-gown, and—unhappy? Oh, hardly—not she!”
+
+Yet the impression haunted him, and ere long he was fain to seek
+confirmation or denial of it in the manner of her escort.
+
+The latter sat with back to Kirkwood, cutting a figure as negative as
+his snug evening clothes. One could surmise little from a fleshy thick
+neck, a round, glazed bald spot, a fringe of grizzled hair, and two
+bright red ears.
+
+Calendar?
+
+Somehow the fellow did suggest Kirkwood’s caller of the afternoon. The
+young man could not have said precisely how, for he was unfamiliar with
+the aspect of that gentleman’s back. None the less the suggestion
+persisted.
+
+By now, a few of the guests, theater-bound, for the most part, were
+leaving. Here and there a table stood vacant, that had been filled,
+cloth tarnished, chairs disarranged: in another moment to be
+transformed into its pristine brilliance under the deft attentions of
+the servitors.
+
+Down an aisle, past the table at which the girl was sitting, came two,
+making toward the lobby; the man, a slight and meager young
+personality, in the lead. Their party had attracted Kirkwood’s notice
+as they entered; why, he did not remember; but it was in his mind that
+then they had been three. Instinctively he looked at the table they had
+left—one placed at some distance from the girl, and hidden from her by
+an angle in the wall. It appeared that the third member had chosen to
+dally a few moments over his tobacco and a liqueur-brandy. Kirkwood
+could see him plainly, lounging in his chair and fumbling the stem of a
+glass: a heavy man, of somber habit, his black and sullen brows
+lowering and thoughtful above a face boldly handsome.
+
+The woman of the trio was worthy of closer attention. Some paces in the
+wake of her lack-luster esquire, she was making a leisurely progress,
+trailing the skirts of a gown magnificent beyond dispute, half
+concealed though it was by the opera cloak whose soft folds draped her
+shoulders. Slowly, carrying her head high, she approached, insolent
+eyes reviewing the room from beneath their heavy lids; a metallic and
+mature type of dark beauty, supremely self-confident and
+self-possessed.
+
+Men turned involuntarily to look after her, not altogether in undiluted
+admiration.
+
+In the act of passing behind the putative Calendar, she paused
+momentarily, bending as if to gather up her train. Presumably the
+action disturbed her balance; she swayed a little, and in the effort to
+recover, rested the tips of her gloved fingers upon the edge of the
+table. Simultaneously (Kirkwood could have sworn) a single word left
+her lips, a word evidently pitched for the ear of the hypothetical
+Calendar alone. Then she swept on, imperturbable, assured.
+
+To the perplexed observer it was indubitably evident that some
+communication had passed from the woman to the man. Kirkwood saw the
+fat shoulders of the girl’s companion stiffen suddenly as the woman’s
+hand rested at his elbow; as she moved away, a little rippling shiver
+was plainly visible in the muscles of his back, beneath his coat—mute
+token of relaxing tension. An instant later one plump and mottled hand
+was carelessly placed where the woman’s had been; and was at once
+removed with fingers closed.
+
+To the girl, watching her face covertly, Kirkwood turned for clue to
+the incident. He made no doubt that she had observed the passage; proof
+of that one found in her sudden startling pallor (of indignation?) and
+in her eyes, briefly alight with some inscrutable emotion, though
+quickly veiled by lowered lashes. Slowly enough she regained color and
+composure, while her _vis-à-vis_ sat motionless, head inclined as if in
+thought.
+
+Abruptly the man turned in his chair to summon a waiter, and exposed
+his profile. Kirkwood was in no wise amazed to recognize Calendar—a
+badly frightened Calendar now, however, and hardly to be identified
+with the sleek, glib fellow who had interviewed Kirkwood in the
+afternoon. His flabby cheeks were ashen and trembling, and upon the
+back of his chair the fat white fingers were drumming incessantly an
+inaudible tattoo of shattered nerves.
+
+“Scared silly!” commented Kirkwood. “Why?” Having spoken to his waiter,
+Calendar for some seconds raked the room with quick glances, as if
+seeking an acquaintance. Presumably disappointed, he swung back to face
+the girl, bending forward to reach her ears with accents low-pitched
+and confidential. She, on her part, fell at once attentive, grave and
+responsive. Perhaps a dozen sentences passed between them. At the
+outset her brows contracted and she shook her head in gentle dissent;
+whereupon Calendar’s manner became more imperative. Gradually,
+unwillingly, she seemed to yield consent. Once she caught her breath
+sharply, and, infected by her companion’s agitation, sat back, color
+fading again in the round young cheeks.
+
+Kirkwood’s waiter put in an inopportune appearance with the bill. The
+young man paid it. When he looked up again Calendar had swung squarely
+about in his chair. His eye encountered Kirkwood’s. He nodded
+pleasantly. Temporarily confused, Kirkwood returned the nod.
+
+In a twinkling he had repented; Calendar had left his chair and was
+wending his way through the tables toward Kirkwood’s. Reaching it, he
+paused, offering the hand of genial fellowship. Kirkwood accepted it
+half-heartedly (what else was he to do?) remarking at the same time
+that Calendar had recovered much of his composure. There was now a
+normal coloring in the heavily jowled countenance, with less glint of
+fear in the quick, dark eyes; and Calendar’s hand, even if moist and
+cold, no longer trembled. Furthermore it was immediately demonstrated
+that his impudence had not deserted him.
+
+“Why, Kirkwood, my dear fellow!” he crowed—not so loudly as to attract
+attention, but in a tone assumed to divert suspicion, should he be
+overheard. “This is great luck, you know—to find you here.”
+
+“Is it?” returned Kirkwood coolly. He disengaged his fingers.
+
+The pink plump face was contorted in a furtive grimace of deprecation.
+Without waiting for permission Calendar dropped into the vacant chair.
+
+“My dear sir,” he proceeded, unabashed, “I throw myself upon your
+mercy.”
+
+“The devil you do!”
+
+“I must. I’m in the deuce of a hole, and there’s no one I know here
+besides yourself. I—I—”
+
+Kirkwood saw fit to lead him on; partly because, out of the corner of
+his eye, he was aware of the girl’s unconcealed suspense. “Go on,
+please, Mr. Calendar. You throw yourself on a total stranger’s mercy
+because you’re in the deuce of a hole; and—?”
+
+“It’s this way; I’m called away on urgent business imperative business.
+I must go at once. My daughter is with me. My daughter! Think of my
+embarrassment; I can not leave her here, alone, nor can I permit her to
+go home unprotected.”
+
+Calendar paused in anxiety.
+
+“That’s easily remedied, then,” suggested Kirkwood.
+
+“How?”
+
+“Put her in a cab at the door.”
+
+“I ... No. The devil! I couldn’t think of it. You won’t understand. I—”
+
+“I do not understand,—” amended the younger man politely.
+
+Calendar compressed his lips nervously. It was plain that the man was
+quivering with impatience and half-mad with excitement. He held quiet
+only long enough to regain his self-control and take counsel with his
+prudence.
+
+“It is impossible, Mr. Kirkwood. I must ask you to be generous and
+believe me.”
+
+“Very well; for the sake of the argument, I do believe you, Mr.
+Calendar.”
+
+“Hell!” exploded the elder man in an undertone. Then swiftly,
+stammering in his haste: “I can’t let Dorothy accompany me to the
+door,” he declared. “She—I—I throw myself upon your mercy!”
+
+“What—again?”
+
+“The truth—the truth is, if you will have it, that I am in danger of
+arrest the moment I leave here. If my daughter is with me, she will
+have to endure the shame and humiliation—”
+
+“Then why place her in such a position?” Kirkwood demanded sharply.
+
+Calendar’s eyes burned, incandescent with resentment. Offended, he
+offered to rise and go, but changed his mind and sat tight in hope.
+
+“I beg of you, sir—”
+
+“One moment, Mr. Calendar.”
+
+Abruptly Kirkwood’s weathercock humor shifted—amusement yielding to
+intrigued interest. After all, why not oblige the fellow? What did
+anything matter, now? What harm could visit him if he yielded to this
+corpulent adventurer’s insistence? Both from experience and observation
+he knew this for a world plentifully peopled by soldiers of fortune,
+contrivers of snares and pitfalls for the feet of the unwary. On the
+other hand, it is axiomatic that a penniless man is perfectly safe
+anywhere. Besides, there was the girl to be considered.
+
+Kirkwood considered her, forthwith. In the process thereof, his eyes
+sought her, perturbed. Their glances clashed. She looked away hastily,
+crimson to her temples.
+
+Instantly the conflict between curiosity and caution, inclination and
+distrust, was at an end. With sudden compliance, the young man rose.
+
+“I shall be most happy to be of service to your daughter, Mr.
+Calendar,” he said, placing the emphasis with becoming gravity. And
+then, the fat adventurer leading the way, Kirkwood strode across the
+room—wondering somewhat at himself, if the whole truth is to be
+disclosed.
+
+
+
+
+III
+CALENDAR’S DAUGHTER
+
+
+All but purring with satisfaction and relief, Calendar halted.
+
+“Dorothy, my dear, permit me to introduce an old friend—Mr. Kirkwood.
+Kirkwood, this is my daughter.”
+
+
+[Illustration: Permit me to introduce an old friend.]
+
+
+“Miss Calendar,” acknowledged Kirkwood.
+
+The girl bowed, her eyes steady upon his own. “Mr. Kirkwood is very
+kind,” she said gravely.
+
+“That’s right!” Calendar exclaimed blandly. “He’s promised to see you
+home. Now both of you will pardon my running away, I know.”
+
+“Yes,” assented Kirkwood agreeably.
+
+The elder man turned and hurried toward the main entrance.
+
+Kirkwood took the chair he had vacated. To his disgust he found himself
+temporarily dumb. No flicker of thought illuminated the darkness of his
+confusion. How was he to open a diverting conversation with a young
+woman whom he had met under auspices so extraordinary? Any attempt to
+gloze the situation, he felt, would be futile. And, somehow, he did not
+care to render himself ridiculous in her eyes, little as he knew her.
+
+Inanely dumb, he sat watching her, smiling fatuously until it was borne
+in on him that he was staring like a boor and grinning like an idiot.
+Convinced, he blushed for himself; something which served to make him
+more tongue-tied than ever.
+
+As for his involuntary protégée, she exhibited such sweet composure
+that he caught himself wondering if she really appreciated the
+seriousness of her parent’s predicament; if, for that matter, its true
+nature were known to her at all. Calendar, he believed, was capable of
+prevarication, polite and impolite. Had he lied to his daughter? or to
+Kirkwood? To both, possibly; to the former alone, not improbably. That
+the adventurer had told him the desperate truth, Kirkwood was quite
+convinced; but he now began to believe that the girl had been put off
+with some fictitious explanation. Her tranquillity and self-control
+were remarkable, otherwise; she seemed very young to possess those
+qualities in such eminent degree.
+
+She was looking wearily past him, her gaze probing some unguessed abyss
+of thought. Kirkwood felt himself privileged to stare in wonder. Her
+naïve aloofness of poise gripped his imagination powerfully,—the more
+so, perhaps, since it seemed eloquent of her intention to remain
+enigmatic,—but by no means more powerfully than the unaided appeal of
+her loveliness.
+
+Presently the girl herself relieved the tension of the situation,
+fairly startling the young man by going straight to the heart of
+things. Without preface or warning, lifting her gaze to his, “My name
+is really Dorothy Calendar,” she observed. And then, noting his
+astonishment, “You would be privileged to doubt, under the
+circumstances,” she added. “Please let us be frank.”
+
+“Well,” he stammered, “if I didn’t doubt, let’s say I was
+unprejudiced.”
+
+His awkward, well-meant pleasantry, perhaps not conceived in the best
+of taste, sounded in his own ears wretchedly flat and vapid. He
+regretted it spontaneously; the girl ignored it.
+
+“You are very kind,” she iterated the first words he had heard from her
+lips. “I wish you to understand that I, for one, appreciate it.”
+
+“Not kind; I have done nothing. I am glad.... One is apt to become
+interested when Romance is injected into a prosaic existence.” Kirkwood
+allowed himself a keen but cheerful glance.
+
+She nodded, with a shadowy smile. He continued, purposefully, to
+distract her, holding her with his honest, friendly eyes.
+
+“Since it is to be confidences” (this she questioned with an all but
+imperceptible lifting of the eyebrows), “I don’t mind telling you my
+own name is really Philip Kirkwood.”
+
+“And you are an old friend of my father’s?”
+
+He opened his lips, but only to close them without speaking. The girl
+moved her shoulders with a shiver of disdain.
+
+“I knew it wasn’t so.”
+
+“You know it would be hard for a young man like myself to be a very old
+friend,” he countered lamely.
+
+“How long, then, have you known each other?”
+
+“Must I answer?”
+
+“Please.”
+
+“Between three and four hours.”
+
+“I thought as much.” She stared past him, troubled. Abruptly she said:
+“Please smoke.”
+
+“Shall I? If you wish it, of course....”
+
+She repeated: “Please.”
+
+“We were to wait ten minutes or so,” she continued.
+
+He produced his cigarette-case.
+
+“If you care to smoke it will seem an excuse.” He lighted his
+cigarette.
+
+“And then, you may talk to me,” she concluded calmly.
+
+“I would, gladly, if I could guess what would interest you.”
+
+“Yourself. Tell me about yourself,” she commanded.
+
+“It would bore you,” he responded tritely, confused.
+
+“No; you interest me very much.” She made the statement quietly,
+contemptuous of coquetry.
+
+“Very well, then; I am Philip Kirkwood, an American.”
+
+“Nothing more?”
+
+“Little worth retailing.”
+
+“I’m sorry.”
+
+“Why?” he demanded, piqued.
+
+“Because you have merely indicated that you are a wealthy American.”
+
+“Why wealthy?”
+
+“If not, you would have some aim in life—a calling or profession.”
+
+“And you think I have none?”
+
+“Unless you consider it your vocation to be a wealthy American.”
+
+“I don’t. Besides, I’m not wealthy. In point of fact, I ...” He pulled
+up short, on the verge of declaring himself a pauper. “I am a painter.”
+
+Her eyes lightened with interest. “An artist?”
+
+“I hope so. I don’t paint signs—or houses,” he remarked.
+
+Amused, she laughed softly. “I suspected it,” she declared.
+
+“Not really?”
+
+“It was your way of looking at—things, that made me guess it: the
+painter’s way. I have often noticed it.”
+
+“As if mentally blending colors all the time?”
+
+“Yes; that and—seeing flaws.”
+
+“I have discovered none,” he told her brazenly.
+
+But again her secret cares were claiming her thoughts, and the gay,
+inconsequential banter died upon her scarlet lips as a second time her
+glance ranged away, sounding mysterious depths of anxiety.
+
+Provoked, he would have continued the chatter. “I have confessed,” he
+persisted. “You know everything of material interest about me. And
+yourself?”
+
+“I am merely Dorothy Calendar,” she answered.
+
+“Nothing more?” He laughed.
+
+“That is all, if you please, for the present.”
+
+“I am to content myself with the promise of the future?”
+
+“The future,” she told him seriously, “is to-morrow; and to-morrow ...”
+She moved restlessly in her chair, eyes and lips pathetic in their
+distress. “Please, we will go now, if you are ready.”
+
+“I am quite ready, Miss Calendar.”
+
+He rose. A waiter brought the girl’s cloak and put it in Kirkwood’s
+hands. He held it until, smoothing the wrists of her long white gloves,
+she stood up, then placed the garment upon her white young shoulders,
+troubled by the indefinable sense of intimacy imparted by the
+privilege. She permitted him this personal service! He felt that she
+trusted him, that out of her gratitude had grown a simple and almost
+childish faith in his generosity and considerateness.
+
+As she turned to go her eyes thanked him with an unfathomable glance.
+He was again conscious of that esoteric disturbance in his temples.
+Puzzled, hazily analyzing the sensation, he followed her to the lobby.
+
+A page brought him his top-coat, hat and stick; tipping the child from
+sheer force of habit, he desired a gigantic porter, impressively ornate
+in hotel livery, to call a hansom. Together they passed out into the
+night, he and the girl.
+
+Beneath a permanent awning of steel and glass she waited patiently,
+slender, erect, heedless of the attention she attracted from wayfarers.
+
+The night was young, the air mild. Upon the sidewalk, muddied by a
+million feet, two streams of wayfarers flowed incessantly, bound west
+from Green Park or east toward Piccadilly Circus; a well-dressed throng
+for the most part, with here and there a man in evening dress. Between
+the carriages at the curb and the hotel doors moved others, escorting
+fluttering butterfly women in elaborate toilets, heads bare, skirts
+daintily gathered above their perishable slippers. Here and there
+meaner shapes slipped silently through the crowd, sinister shadows of
+the city’s proletariat, blotting ominously the brilliance of the scene.
+
+A cab drew in at the block. The porter clapped an arc of wickerwork
+over its wheel to protect the girl’s skirts. She ascended to the seat.
+
+Kirkwood, dropping sixpence in the porter’s palm, prepared to follow;
+but a hand fell upon his arm, peremptory, inexorable. He faced about,
+frowning, to confront a slight, hatchet-faced man, somewhat under
+medium height, dressed in a sack suit and wearing a derby well forward
+over eyes that were hard and bright.
+
+“Mr. Calendar?” said the man tensely. “I presume I needn’t name my
+business. I’m from the Yard—”
+
+“My name is _not_ Calendar.”
+
+The detective smiled wearily. “Don’t be a fool, Calendar,” he began.
+But the porter’s hand fell upon his shoulder and the giant bent low to
+bring his mouth close to the other’s ear. Kirkwood heard indistinctly
+his own name followed by Calendar’s, and the words: “Never fear. I’ll
+point him out.”
+
+“But the woman?” argued the detective, unconvinced, staring into the
+cab.
+
+“Am I not at liberty to have a lady dine with me in a public
+restaurant?” interposed Kirkwood, without raising his voice.
+
+The hard eyes looked him up and down without favor. Then: “Beg pardon,
+sir. I see my mistake,” said the detective brusquely.
+
+“I am glad you do,” returned Kirkwood grimly. “I fancy it will bear
+investigation.”
+
+He mounted the step. “Imperial Theater,” he told the driver, giving the
+first address that occurred to him; it could be changed. For the moment
+the main issue was to get the girl out of the range of the detective’s
+interest.
+
+He slipped into his place as the hansom wheeled into the turgid tide of
+west-bound traffic.
+
+So Calendar had escaped, after all! Moreover, he had told the truth to
+Kirkwood.
+
+By his side the girl moved uneasily. “Who was that man?” she inquired.
+
+Kirkwood sought her eyes, and found them wholly ingenuous. It seemed
+that Calendar had not taken her into his confidence, after all. She
+was, therefore, in no way implicated in her father’s affairs.
+Inexplicably the young man’s heart felt lighter. “A mistake; the fellow
+took me for some one he knew,” he told her carelessly.
+
+The assurance satisfied her. She rested quietly, wrapped up in personal
+concerns. Her companion pensively contemplated an infinity of arid and
+hansom-less to-morrows. About them the city throbbed in a web of misty
+twilight, the humid farewell of a dismal day. In the air a faint haze
+swam, rendering the distances opalescent. Athwart the western sky the
+after-glow of a drenched sunset lay like a wash of rose-madder.
+Piccadilly’s asphalt shone like watered silk, black and lustrous,
+reflecting a myriad lights in vibrant ribbons of party-colored
+radiance. On every hand cab-lamps danced like fire-flies; the rumble of
+wheels blended with the hollow pounding of uncounted hoofs, merging
+insensibly into the deep and solemn roar of London-town.
+
+Suddenly Kirkwood was recalled to a sense of duty by a glimpse of Hyde
+Park Corner. He turned to the girl. “I didn’t know where you wished to
+go—?”
+
+She seemed to realize his meaning with surprise, as one, whose thoughts
+have strayed afar, recalled to an imperative world.
+
+“Oh, did I forget? Tell him please to drive to Number Nine, Frognall
+Street, Bloomsbury.”
+
+Kirkwood poked his cane through the trap, repeating the address. The
+cab wheeled smartly across Piccadilly, swung into Half Moon Street, and
+thereafter made better time, darting briskly down abrupt vistas of
+shining pavement, walled in by blank-visaged houses, or round two sides
+of one of London’s innumerable private parks, wherein spring foliage
+glowed a tender green in artificial light; now and again it crossed
+brilliant main arteries of travel, and eventually emerged from a maze
+of backways into Oxford Street, to hammer eastwards to Tottenham Court
+Road.
+
+Constraint hung like a curtain between the two; a silence which the
+young man forbore to moderate, finding more delight that he had cared
+(or dared) confess to, in contemplation of the pure girlish profile so
+close to him.
+
+She seemed quite unaware of him, lost in thought, large eyes sober,
+lips serious that were fashioned for laughter, round little chin firm
+with some occult resolution. It was not hard to fancy her nerves keyed
+to a high pitch of courage and determination, nor easy to guess for
+what reason. Watching always, keenly sensitive to the beauty of each
+salient line betrayed by the flying lights, Kirkwood’s own
+consciousness lost itself in a profitless, even a perilous labyrinth of
+conjecture.
+
+The cab stopped. Both occupants came to their senses with a little
+start. The girl leaned out over; the apron, recognized the house she
+sought in one swift glance, testified to the recognition with a hushed
+exclamation, and began to arrange her skirts. Kirkwood, unheeding her
+faint-hearted protests, jumped out, interposing his cane between her
+skirts and the wheel. Simultaneously he received a vivid mental
+photograph of the locality.
+
+Frognall Street proved to be one of those by-ways, a short block in
+length, which, hemmed in on all sides by a meaner purlieu, has (even in
+Bloomsbury!) escaped the sordid commercial eye of the keeper of
+furnished lodgings, retaining jealously something of the old-time
+dignity and reserve that were its pride in the days before Society
+swarmed upon Mayfair and Belgravia.
+
+Its houses loomed tall, with many windows, mostly lightless—materially
+aggravating that air of isolate, cold dignity which distinguishes the
+Englishman’s castle. Here and there stood one less bedraggled than its
+neighbors, though all, without exception, spoke assertively of
+respectability down-at-the-heel but fighting tenaciously for existence.
+Some, vanguards of that imminent day when the boarding-house should
+reign supreme, wore with shamefaced air placards of estate-agents,
+advertising their susceptibility to sale or lease. In the company of
+the latter was Number 9.
+
+The American noted the circumstance subconsciously, at a moment when
+Miss Calendar’s hand, small as a child’s, warm and compact in its white
+glove, lay in his own. And then she was on the sidewalk, her face,
+upturned to his, vivacious with excitement.
+
+“You have been so kind,” she told him warmly, “that one hardly knows
+how to thank you, Mr. Kirkwood.”
+
+“I have done nothing—nothing at all,” he mumbled, disturbed by a
+sudden, unreasoning alarm for her.
+
+She passed quickly to the shelter of the pillared portico. He followed
+clumsily. On the door-step she turned, offering her hand. He took and
+retained it.
+
+“Good night,” she said.
+
+“I’m to understand that I’m dismissed, then?” he stammered ruefully.
+
+She evaded his eyes. “I—thank you—I have no further need—”
+
+“You are quite sure? Won’t you believe me at your service?”
+
+She laughed uneasily. “I’m all right now.”
+
+“I can do nothing more? Sure?”
+
+“Nothing. But you—you make me almost sorry I can’t impose still further
+upon your good nature.”
+
+“Please don’t hesitate ...”
+
+“Aren’t you very persistent, Mr. Kirkwood?” Her fingers moved in his;
+burning with the reproof, he released them, and turned to her so
+woebegone a countenance that she repented of her severity. “Don’t worry
+about me, please. I am truly safe now. Some day I hope to be able to
+thank you adequately. Good night!”
+
+Her pass-key grated in the lock. Opening, the door disclosed a dark and
+uninviting entry-hall, through which there breathed an air heavy with
+the dank and dusty odor of untenanted rooms. Hesitating on the
+threshold, over her shoulder the girl smiled kindly upon her
+commandeered esquire; and stepped within.
+
+He lifted his hat automatically. The door closed with an echoing slam.
+He turned to the waiting cab, fumbling for change.
+
+“I’ll walk,” he told the cabby, paying him off.
+
+The hansom swept away to a tune of hammering hoofs; and quiet rested
+upon the street as Kirkwood turned the nearest corner, in an unpleasant
+temper, puzzled and discontented. It seemed hardly fair that he should
+have been dragged into so promising an adventure, by his ears (so to
+put it), only to be thus summarily called upon to write “Finis” beneath
+the incident.
+
+He rounded the corner and walked half-way to the next street, coming to
+an abrupt and rebellious pause by the entrance to a covered alleyway,
+of two minds as to his proper course of action.
+
+In the background of his thoughts Number 9, Frognall Street, reared its
+five-story façade, sinister and forbidding. He reminded himself of its
+unlighted windows; of its sign, “To be let”; of the effluvia of
+desolation that had saluted him when the door swung wide. A deserted
+house; and the girl alone in it!—was it right for him to leave her so?
+
+
+
+
+IV
+9 FROGNALL STREET, W. C.
+
+
+The covered alleyway gave upon Quadrant Mews; or so declared a notice
+painted on the dead wall of the passage.
+
+Overhead, complaining as it swayed in the wind, hung the smirched and
+weather-worn sign-board of the Hog-in-the-Pound public house; wherefrom
+escaped sounds of such revelry by night as is indulged in by the
+British working-man in hours of ease. At the curb in front of the house
+of entertainment, dejected animals drooping between their shafts, two
+hansoms stood in waiting, until such time as the lords of their
+destinies should see fit to sally forth and inflict themselves upon a
+cab-hungry populace. As Kirkwood turned, a third vehicle rumbled up out
+of the mews.
+
+Kirkwood can close his eyes, even at this late day, and both see and
+hear it all again—even as he can see the unbroken row of dingy
+dwellings that lined his way back from Quadrant Mews to Frognall Street
+corner: all drab and unkempt, all sporting in their fan-lights the
+legend and lure, “Furnished Apartments.”
+
+For, between his curiosity about and his concern for the girl, he was
+being led back to Number 9, by the nose, as it were,—hardly willingly,
+at best. Profoundly stupefied by the contemplation of his own temerity,
+he yet returned unfaltering. He who had for so long plumed himself upon
+his strict supervision of his personal affairs and equally steadfast
+unconsciousness of his neighbor’s businesses, now found himself in the
+very act of pushing in where he was not wanted: as he had been advised
+in well-nigh as many words. He experienced an effect of standing to one
+side, a witness of his own folly, with rising wonder, unable to credit
+the strength of the infatuation which was placing him so conspicuously
+in the way of a snubbing.
+
+If perchance he were to meet the girl again as she was leaving Number
+9,—what then? The contingency dismayed him incredibly, in view of the
+fact that it did not avail to make him pause. To the contrary he
+disregarded it resolutely; mad, impertinent, justified of his unnamed
+apprehensions, or simply addled,—he held on his way.
+
+He turned up Frognall Street with the manner of one out for a leisurely
+evening stroll. Simultaneously, from the farther corner, another
+pedestrian debouched, into the thoroughfare—a mere moving shadow at
+that distance, brother to blacker shadows that skulked in the fenced
+areas and unlively entries of that poorly lighted block. The hush was
+something beyond belief, when one remembered the nearness of blatant
+Tottenham Court Road.
+
+Kirkwood conceived a wholly senseless curiosity about the other
+wayfarer. The man was walking rapidly, heels ringing with uncouth
+loudness, cane tapping the flagging at brief intervals. Both sounds
+ceased abruptly as their cause turned in beneath one of the porticos.
+In the emphatic and unnatural quiet that followed, Kirkwood, stepping
+more lightly, fancied that another shadow followed the first,
+noiselessly and with furtive stealth.
+
+Could it be Number 9 into which they had passed? The American’s heart
+beat a livelier tempo at the suggestion. If it had not been Number 9—he
+was still too far away to tell—it was certainly one of the dwellings
+adjacent thereunto. The improbable possibility (But why improbable?)
+that the girl was being joined by her father, or by friends, annoyed
+him with illogical intensity. He mended his own pace, designing to pass
+whichever house it might be before the door should be closed; thought
+better of this, and slowed up again, anathematizing himself with much
+excuse for being the inquisitive dolt that he was.
+
+Approaching Number 9 with laggard feet, he manufactured a desire to
+light a cigarette, as a cover for his design, were he spied upon by
+unsuspected eyes. Cane under arm, hands cupped to shield a vesta’s
+flame, he stopped directly before the portico, turning his eyes askance
+to the shadowed doorway; and made a discovery sufficiently startling to
+hold him spellbound and, incidentally, to scorch his gloves before he
+thought to drop the match.
+
+The door of Number 9 stood ajar, a black interval an inch or so in
+width showing between its edge and the jamb.
+
+Suspicion and alarm set his wits a-tingle. More distinctly he recalled
+the jarring bang, accompanied by the metallic click of the latch, when
+the girl had shut herself in—and him out. Now, some person or persons
+had followed her, neglecting the most obvious precaution of a
+householder. And why? Why but because the intruders did not wish the
+sound of closing to be audible to her—or those—within?
+
+He reminded himself that it was all none of his affair, decided to pass
+on and go his ways in peace, and impulsively, swinging about, marched
+straight away for the unclosed door.
+
+“’Old’ard, guvner!”
+
+Kirkwood halted on the cry, faltering in indecision. Should he take the
+plunge, or withdraw? Synchronously he was conscious that a man’s figure
+had detached itself from the shadows beneath the nearest portico and
+was drawing nearer, with every indication of haste, to intercept him.
+
+“’Ere now, guvner, yer mykin’ a mistyke. You don’t live ’ere.”
+
+“How do you know?” demanded Kirkwood crisply, tightening his grip on
+his stick.
+
+Was this the second shadow he had seemed to see—the confederate of him
+who had entered Number 9; a sentry to forestall interruption? If so,
+the fellow lacked discretion, though his determination that the
+American should not interfere was undeniable. It was with an ugly and
+truculent manner, if more warily, that the man closed in.
+
+“_I_ knows. You clear hout, or—”
+
+He flung out a hand with the plausible design of grasping Kirkwood by
+the collar. The latter lifted his stick, deflecting the arm, and
+incontinently landed his other fist forcibly on the fellow’s chest. The
+man reeled back, cursing. Before he could recover Kirkwood calmly
+crossed the threshold, closed the door and put his shoulder to it. In
+another instant, fumbling in the darkness, he found the bolts and drove
+them home.
+
+And it was done, the transformation accomplished; his inability to
+refrain from interfering had encompassed his downfall, had changed a
+peaceable and law-abiding alien within British shores into a busybody,
+a trespasser, a misdemeanant, a—yes, for all he knew to the contrary,
+in the estimation of the Law, a burglar, prime candidate for a
+convict’s stripes!
+
+Breathing hard with excitement he turned and laid his back against the
+panels, trembling in every muscle, terrified by the result of his
+impulsive audacity, thunder-struck by a lightning-like foreglimpse of
+its possible consequences. Of what colossal imprudence had he not been
+guilty?
+
+“The devil!” he whispered. “What an ass, what an utter ass I am!”
+
+Behind him the knob was rattled urgently, to an accompaniment of feet
+shuffling on the stone; and immediately—if he were to make a logical
+deduction from the rasping and scraping sound within the
+door-casing—the bell-pull was violently agitated, without, however,
+educing any response from the bell itself, wherever that might be
+situate. After which, as if in despair, the outsider again rattled and
+jerked the knob.
+
+Be his status what it might, whether servant of the household, its
+caretaker, or a night watchman, the man was palpably determined both to
+get himself in and Kirkwood out, and yet (curious to consider)
+determined to gain his end without attracting undue attention. Kirkwood
+had expected to hear the knocker’s thunder, as soon as the bell failed
+to give tongue; but it did not sound although there _was_ a
+knocker,—Kirkwood himself had remarked that antiquated and rusty bit of
+ironmongery affixed to the middle panel of the door. And it made him
+feel sure that something surreptitious and lawless was in process
+within those walls, that the confederate without, having failed to
+prevent a stranger from entering, left unemployed a means so
+certain-sure to rouse the occupants.
+
+But his inferential analysis of this phase of the proceedings was
+summarily abrupted by that identical alarm. In a trice the house was
+filled with flying echoes, wakened to sonorous riot by the crash and
+clamor of the knocker; and Kirkwood stood fully two yards away, his
+heart hammering wildly, his nerves a-jingle, much as if the resounding
+blows had landed upon his own person rather than on stout oaken
+planking.
+
+Ere he had time to wonder, the racket ceased, and from the street
+filtered voices in altercation. Listening, Kirkwood’s pulses quickened,
+and he laughed uncertainly for pure relief, retreating to the door and
+putting an ear to a crack.
+
+The accents of one speaker were new in his hearing, stern, crisp, quick
+with the spirit of authority which animates that most austere and
+dignified limb of the law to be encountered the world over, a London
+bobby.
+
+“Now then, my man, what do you want there? Come now, speak up, and step
+out into the light, where I can see you.”
+
+The response came in the sniffling snarl of the London ne’er-do-well,
+the unemployable rogue whose chiefest occupation seems to be to march
+in the ranks of The Unemployed on the occasion of its annual
+demonstrations.
+
+“Le’ me alone, carntcher? Ah’m doin’ no ’arm, officer,—”
+
+“Didn’t you hear me? Step out here. Ah, that’s better.... No harm, eh?
+Perhaps you’ll explain how there’s no harm breakin’ into unoccupied
+’ouses?”
+
+“Gorblimy, ’ow was I to know? ’Ere’s a toff ’ands me sixpence fer
+hopenin’ ’is cab door to-dye, an’, sezee, ‘My man,’ ’e sez, ‘yer’ve got
+a ’onest fyce. W’y don’cher work?’ sezee. ‘’Ow can I?’ sez I. ‘’Ere’m I
+hout of a job these six months, lookin’ fer work every dye an’ carn’t
+find it.’ Sezee, ‘Come an’ see me this hevenin’ at me home, Noine,
+Frognall Stryte,’ ’e sez, an’—”
+
+“That’ll do for now. You borrow a pencil and paper and write it down
+and I’ll read it when I’ve got more time; I never heard the like of it.
+This ’ouse hasn’t been lived in these two years. Move on, and don’t let
+me find you round ’ere again. March, I say!”
+
+There was more of it—more whining explanations artfully tinctured with
+abuse, more terse commands to depart, the whole concluding with
+scraping footsteps, diminuendo, and another perfunctory, rattle of the
+knob as the bobby, having shoo’d the putative evil-doer off, assured
+himself that no damage had actually been done. Then he, too, departed,
+satisfied and self-righteous, leaving a badly frightened but very
+grateful amateur criminal to pursue his self-appointed career of crime.
+
+He had no choice other than to continue; in point of fact, it had been
+insanity just then to back out, and run the risk of apprehension at the
+hands of that ubiquitous bobby, who (for all he knew) might be lurking
+not a dozen yards distant, watchful for just such a sequel. Still,
+Kirkwood hesitated with the best of excuses. Reassuring as he had found
+the sentinel’s extemporized yarn,—proof positive that the fellow had
+had no more right to prohibit a trespass than Kirkwood to commit
+one,—at the same time he found himself pardonably a prey to emotions of
+the utmost consternation and alarm. If he feared to leave the house he
+had no warrant whatever to assume that he would be permitted to remain
+many minutes unharmed within its walls of mystery.
+
+The silence of it discomfited him beyond measure; it was, in a word,
+uncanny.
+
+Before him, as he lingered at the door, vaguely disclosed by a wan
+illumination penetrating a dusty and begrimed fan-light, a broad hall
+stretched indefinitely towards the rear of the building, losing itself
+in blackness beyond the foot of a flight of stairs. Save for a few
+articles of furniture,—a hall table, an umbrella-stand, a tall dumb
+clock flanked by high-backed chairs,—it was empty. Other than
+Kirkwood’s own restrained respiration not a sound throughout the house
+advertised its inhabitation; not a board creaked beneath the pressure
+of a foot, not a mouse rustled in the wainscoting or beneath the
+floors, not a breath of air stirred sighing in the stillness.
+
+And yet, a tremendous racket had been raised at the front door, within
+the sixty seconds past! And yet, within twenty minutes two persons, at
+least, had preceded Kirkwood into the building! Had they not heard? The
+speculation seemed ridiculous. Or had they heard and, alarmed, been too
+effectually hobbled by the coils of their nefarious designs to dare
+reveal themselves, to investigate the cause of that thunderous summons?
+Or were they, perhaps, aware of Kirkwood’s entrance, and lying
+_perdui_, in some dark corner, to ambush him as he passed?
+
+True, that were hardly like the girl. True, on the other hand, it were
+possible that she had stolen away while Kirkwood was hanging in
+irresolution by the passage to Quadrant Mews. Again, the space of time
+between Kirkwood’s dismissal and his return had been exceedingly brief;
+whatever her errand, she could hardly have fulfilled it and escaped. At
+that moment she might be in the power and at the mercy of him who had
+followed her; providing he were not friendly. And in that case, what
+torment and what peril might not be hers?
+
+Spurred by solicitude, the young man put personal apprehensions in his
+pocket and forgot them, cautiously picking his way through the gloom to
+the foot of the stairs. There, by the newel-post, he paused. Darkness
+walled him about. Overhead the steps vanished in a well of blackness;
+he could not even see the ceiling; his eyes ached with futile effort to
+fathom the unknown; his ears rang with unrewarded strain of listening.
+The silence hung inviolate, profound.
+
+Slowly he began to ascend, a hand following the balusters, the other
+with his cane exploring the obscurity before him. On the steps, a
+carpet, thick and heavy, muffled his footfalls. He moved noiselessly.
+Towards the top the staircase curved, and presently a foot that groped
+for a higher level failed to find it. Again he halted, acutely
+distrustful.
+
+Nothing happened.
+
+He went on, guided by the balustrade, passing three doors, all open,
+through which the undefined proportions of a drawing-room and boudoir
+were barely suggested in a ghostly dusk. By each he paused, listening,
+hearing nothing.
+
+His foot struck with a deadened thud against the bottom step of the
+second flight, and his pulses fluttered wildly for a moment. Two
+minutes—three—he waited in suspense. From above came no sound. He went
+on, as before, save that twice a step yielded, complaining, to his
+weight. Toward the top the close air, like the darkness, seemed to
+weigh more heavily upon his consciousness; little drops of perspiration
+started out on his forehead, his scalp tingled, his mouth was hot and
+dry, he felt as if stifled.
+
+Again the raised foot found no level higher than its fellows. He
+stopped and held his breath, oppressed by a conviction that some one
+was near him. Confirmation of this came startlingly—an eerie whisper in
+the night, so close to him that he fancied he could feel the disturbed
+air fanning his face.
+
+“_Is it you, Eccles_?” He had no answer ready. The voice was masculine,
+if he analyzed it correctly. Dumb and stupid he stood poised upon the
+point of panic.
+
+“_Eccles, is it you_?”
+
+The whisper was both shrill and shaky. As it ceased Kirkwood was half
+blinded by a flash of light, striking him squarely in the eyes.
+Involuntarily he shrank back a pace, to the first step from the top.
+Instantaneously the light was eclipsed.
+
+“_Halt or—or I fire_!”
+
+By now he realized that he had been scrutinized by the aid of an
+electric hand-lamp. The tremulous whisper told him something else—that
+the speaker suffered from nerves as high-strung as his own. The
+knowledge gave him inspiration. He cried at a venture, in a guarded
+voice, “_Hands up_!”—and struck out smartly with his stick. Its ferrule
+impinged upon something soft but heavy. Simultaneously he heard a low,
+frightened cry, the cane was swept aside, a blow landed glancingly on
+his shoulder, and he was carried fairly off his feet by the weight of a
+man hurled bodily upon him with staggering force and passion. Reeling,
+he was borne back and down a step or two, and then,—choking on an
+oath,—dropped his cane and with one hand caught the balusters, while
+the other tore ineffectually at wrists of hands that clutched his
+throat. So, for a space, the two hung, panting and struggling.
+
+Then endeavoring to swing his shoulders over against the wall, Kirkwood
+released his grip on the hand-rail and stumbled on the stairs, throwing
+his antagonist out of balance. The latter plunged downward, dragging
+Kirkwood with him. Clawing, kicking, grappling, they went to the
+bottom, jolted violently by each step; but long before the last was
+reached, Kirkwood’s throat was free.
+
+Throwing himself off, he got to his feet and grasped the railing for
+support; then waited, panting, trying to get his bearings. Himself
+painfully shaken and bruised, he shrewdly surmised that his assailant
+had fared as ill, if not worse. And, in point of fact, the man lay with
+neither move nor moan, still as death at the American’s feet.
+
+And once more silence had folded its wings over Number 9, Frognall
+Street.
+
+More conscious of that terrifying, motionless presence beneath him,
+than able to distinguish it by power of vision, he endured interminable
+minutes of trembling horror, in a witless daze, before he thought of
+his match-box. Immediately he found it and struck a light. As the wood
+caught and the bright small flame leaped in the pent air, he leaned
+forward, over the body, breathlessly dreading what he must discover.
+
+The man lay quiet, head upon the floor, legs and hips on the stairs.
+One arm had fallen over his face, hiding the upper half. The hand
+gleamed white and delicate as a woman’s. His chin was smooth and round,
+his lips thin and petulant. Beneath his top-coat, evening dress clothed
+a short and slender figure. Nothing whatever of his appearance
+suggested the burly ruffian, the midnight marauder; he seemed little
+more than a boy old enough to dress for dinner. In his attitude there
+was something pitifully suggestive of a beaten child, thrown into a
+corner.
+
+Conscience-smitten and amazed Kirkwood stared on until, without
+warning, the match flickered and went out. Then, straightening up with
+an exclamation at once of annoyance and concern, he rattled the box; it
+made no sound,—was empty. In disgust he swore it was the devil’s own
+luck, that he should run out of vestas at a time so critical. He could
+not even say whether the fellow was dead, unconscious, or simply
+shamming. He had little idea of his looks; and to be able to identify
+him might save a deal of trouble at some future time,—since he,
+Kirkwood, seemed so little able to disengage himself from the clutches
+of this insane adventure! And the girl—. what had become of her? How
+could he continue to search for her, without lights or guide, through
+all those silent rooms, whose walls might inclose a hundred hidden
+dangers in that house of mystery?
+
+But he debated only briefly. His blood was young, and it was hot; it
+was quite plain to him that he could not withdraw and retain his
+self-respect. If the girl was there to be found, most assuredly, he
+must find her. The hand-lamp that had dazzled him at the head of the
+stairs should be his aid, now that he thought of it,—and providing he
+was able to find it.
+
+In the scramble on the stairs he had lost his hat, but he remembered
+that the vesta’s short-lived light had discovered this on the floor
+beyond the man’s body. Carefully stepping across the latter he
+recovered his head-gear, and then, kneeling, listened with an ear close
+to the fellow’s face. A softly regular beat of breathing reassured him.
+Half rising, he caught the body beneath the armpits, lifting and
+dragging it off the staircase; and knelt again, to feel of each pocket
+in the man’s clothing, partly as an obvious precaution, to relieve him
+of his advertised revolver against an untimely wakening, partly to see
+if he had the lamp about him.
+
+The search proved fruitless. Kirkwood suspected that the weapon, like
+his own, had existed only in his victim’s ready imagination. As for the
+lamp, in the act of rising he struck it with his foot, and picked it
+up.
+
+It felt like a metal tube a couple of inches in diameter, a foot or so
+in length, passably heavy. He fumbled with it impatiently. “However the
+dickens,” he wondered audibly, “does the infernal machine work?” As it
+happened, the thing worked with disconcerting abruptness as his
+untrained fingers fell hapchance on the spring. A sudden glare again
+smote him in the face, and at the same instant, from a point not a yard
+away, apparently, an inarticulate cry rang out upon the stillness.
+
+Heart in his mouth, he stepped back, lowering the lamp (which impishly
+went out) and lifting a protecting forearm.
+
+“Who’s that?” he demanded harshly.
+
+A strangled sob of terror answered him, blurred by a swift rush of
+skirts, and in a breath his shattered nerves quieted and a glimmer of
+common sense penetrated the murk anger and fear had bred in his brain.
+He understood, and stepped forward, catching blindly at the darkness
+with eager hands.
+
+“Miss Calendar!” he cried guardedly. “Miss Calendar, it is I—Philip
+Kirkwood!”
+
+There was a second sob, of another caliber than the first; timid
+fingers brushed his, and a hand, warm and fragile, closed upon his own
+in a passion of relief and gratitude.
+
+“Oh, I am so g-glad!” It was Dorothy Calendar’s voice, beyond mistake.
+“I—I didn’t know what t-to t-think.... When the light struck your face
+I was sure it was you, but when I called, you answered in a voice so
+strange,—not like yours at all! ... Tell me,” she pleaded, with
+palpable effort to steady herself; “what has happened?”
+
+“I think, perhaps,” said Kirkwood uneasily, again troubled by his
+racing pulses, “perhaps you can do that better than I.”
+
+“Oh!” said the voice guiltily; her fingers trembled on his, and were
+gently withdrawn. “I was so frightened,” she confessed after a little
+pause, “so frightened that I hardly understand ... But you? How did
+you—?”
+
+“I worried about you,” he replied, in a tone absurdly apologetic.
+“Somehow it didn’t seem right. It was none of my business, of course,
+but ... I couldn’t help coming back. This fellow, whoever he is—don’t
+worry; he’s unconscious—slipped into the house in a manner that seemed
+to me suspicious. I hardly know why I followed, except that he left the
+door an open invitation to interference ...”
+
+“I can’t be thankful enough,” she told him warmly, “that you did
+interfere. You have indeed saved me from ...”
+
+“Yes?”
+
+“I don’t know what. If I knew the man—”
+
+“You don’t _know_ him?”
+
+“I can’t even guess. The light—?”
+
+She paused inquiringly. Kirkwood fumbled with the lamp, but, whether
+its rude handling had impaired some vital part of the mechanism, or
+whether the batteries through much use were worn out, he was able to
+elicit only one feeble glow, which was instantly smothered by the
+darkness.
+
+“It’s no use,” he confessed. “The thing’s gone wrong.”
+
+“Have you a match?”
+
+“I used my last before I got hold of this.”
+
+“Oh,” she commented, discouraged. “Have you any notion what he looks
+like?”
+
+Kirkwood thought briefly. “Raffles,” he replied with a chuckle. “He
+looks like an amateurish and very callow Raffles. He’s in dress
+clothes, you know.”
+
+“I wonder!” There was a nuance of profound bewilderment in her
+exclamation. Then: “He knocked against something in the hall—a chair, I
+presume; at all events, I heard that and put out the light. I was ...
+in the room above the drawing-room, you see. I stole down to this
+floor—was there, in the corner by the stairs when he passed within six
+inches, and never guessed it. Then, when he got on the next floor, I
+started on; but you came in. I slipped into the drawing-room and
+crouched behind a chair. You went on, but I dared not move until ...
+And then I heard some one cry out, and you fell down the stairs
+together. I hope you were not hurt—?”
+
+“Nothing worth mention; but _he_ must have got a pretty stiff knock, to
+lay him out so completely.” Kirkwood stirred the body with his toe, but
+the man made no sign. “Dead to the world ... And now, Miss Calendar?”
+
+If she answered, he did not hear; for on the heels of his query banged
+the knocker down below; and thereafter crash followed crash, brewing a
+deep and sullen thundering to rouse the echoes and send them rolling,
+like voices of enraged ghosts, through the lonely rooms.
+
+
+
+
+V
+THE MYSTERY OF A FOUR-WHEELER
+
+
+“What’s that?” At the first alarm the girl had caught convulsively at
+Kirkwood’s arm. Now, when a pause came in the growling of the knocker,
+she made him hear her voice; and it was broken and vibrant with a
+threat of hysteria. “Oh, what can it mean?”
+
+“I don’t know.” He laid a hand reassuringly over that which trembled on
+his forearm. “The police, possibly.”
+
+“Police!” she iterated, aghast. “What makes you think—?”
+
+“A man tried to stop me at the door,” he answered quickly. “I got in
+before he could. When he tried the knocker, a bobby came along and
+stopped him. The latter may have been watching the house since
+then,—it’d be only his duty to keep an eye on it; and Heaven knows we
+raised a racket, coming head-first down those stairs! Now we are up
+against it,” he added brightly.
+
+But the girl was tugging at his hand. “Come!” she begged breathlessly.
+“Come! There is a way! Before they break in—”
+
+“But this man—?” Kirkwood hung back, troubled.
+
+“They—the police are sure to find and care for him.”
+
+“So they will.” He chuckled, “And serve him right! He’d have choked me
+to death, with all the good will in the world!”
+
+“Oh, do hurry!”
+
+Turning, she sped light-footed down the staircase to the lower hall, he
+at her elbow. Here the uproar was loudest—deep enough to drown whatever
+sounds might have been made by two pairs of flying feet. For all that
+they fled on tiptoe, stealthily, guilty shadows in the night; and at
+the newel-post swung back into the unbroken blackness which shrouded
+the fastnesses backward of the dwelling. A sudden access of fury on the
+part of the alarmist at the knocker, spurred them on with quaking
+hearts. In half a dozen strides, Kirkwood, guided only by instinct and
+the _frou-frou_ of the girl’s skirts as she ran invisible before him,
+stumbled on the uppermost steps of a steep staircase; only a hand-rail
+saved him, and that at the last moment. He stopped short, shocked into
+caution. From below came a contrite whisper: “I’m so sorry! I should
+have warned you.”
+
+He pulled himself together, glaring wildly at nothing. “It’s all
+right—”
+
+“You’re not hurt, truly? Oh, do come quickly.”
+
+She waited for him at the bottom of the flight;—happily for him, for he
+was all at sea.
+
+“Here—your hand—let me guide you. This darkness is dreadful ...”
+
+He found her hand, somehow, and tucked his into it, confidingly, and
+not without an uncertain thrill of satisfaction.
+
+“Come!” she panted. “Come! If they break in—”
+
+Stifled by apprehension, her voice failed her.
+
+They went forward, now less impetuously, for it was very black; and the
+knocker had fallen still.
+
+“No fear of that,” he remarked after a time. “They wouldn’t dare break
+in.”
+
+A fluttering whisper answered him: “I don’t know. We dare risk
+nothing.”
+
+They seemed to explore, to penetrate acres of labyrinthine chambers and
+passages, delving deep into the bowels of the earth, like rabbits
+burrowing in a warren, hounded by beagles.
+
+Above stairs the hush continued unbroken; as if the dumb Genius of the
+Place had cast a spell of silence on the knocker, or else, outraged,
+had smitten the noisy disturber with a palsy.
+
+The girl seemed to know her way; whether guided by familiarity or by
+intuition, she led on without hesitation, Kirkwood blundering in her
+wake, between confusion of impression, and dawning dismay conscious of
+but one tangible thing, to which he clung as to his hope of salvation:
+those firm, friendly fingers that clasped his own.
+
+It was as if they wandered on for an hour; probably from start to
+finish their flight took up three minutes, no more. Eventually the girl
+stopped, releasing his hand. He could hear her syncopated breathing
+before him, and gathered that something was wrong. He took a step
+forward.
+
+“What is it?”
+
+Her full voice broke out of the obscurity startlingly close, in his
+very ear.
+
+“The door—the bolts—I can’t budge them.”
+
+“Let me ...”
+
+He pressed forward, brushing her shoulder. She did not draw away, but
+willingly yielded place to his hands at the fastenings; and what had
+proved impossible to her, to his strong fingers was a matter of
+comparative ease. Yet, not entirely consciously, he was not quick. As
+he tugged at the bolts he was poignantly sensitive to the subtle warmth
+of her at his side; he could hear her soft dry sobs of excitement and
+suspense, punctuating the quiet; and was frightened, absolutely, by an
+impulse, too strong for ridicule, to take her in his arms and comfort
+her with the assurance that, whatever her trouble, he would stand by
+her and protect her.... It were futile to try to laugh it off; he gave
+over the endeavor. Even at this critical moment he found himself
+repeating over and over to his heart the question: “Can this be love?
+Can this be love? ...”
+
+Could it be love at an hour’s acquaintance? Absurd! But he could not
+laugh—nor render himself insensible to the suggestion.
+
+He found that he had drawn the bolts. The girl tugged and rattled at
+the knob. Reluctantly the door opened inwards. Beyond its threshold
+stretched ten feet or more of covered passageway, whose entrance framed
+an oblong glimmering with light. A draught of fresh air smote their
+faces. Behind them a door banged.
+
+“Where does this open?”
+
+“On the mews,” she informed him.
+
+“The mews!” He stared in consternation at the pallid oval that stood
+for her face. “The mews! But you, in your evening gown, and I—”
+
+“There’s no other way. We must chance it. Are you afraid?”
+
+Afraid? ... He stepped aside. She slipped by him and on. He closed the
+door, carefully removing the key and locking it on the outside; then
+joined the girl at the entrance to the mews, where they paused
+perforce, she as much disconcerted as he, his primary objection
+momentarily waxing in force as they surveyed the conditions
+circumscribing their escape.
+
+Quadrant Mews was busily engaged in enjoying itself. Night had fallen
+sultry and humid, and the walls and doorsteps were well fringed and
+clustered with representatives of that class of London’s population
+which infests mews through habit, taste, or force of circumstance.
+
+On the stoops men sprawled at easy length, discussing short, foul
+cutties loaded with that rank and odoriferous compound which, under the
+name and in the fame of tobacco, is widely retailed at tuppence the
+ounce. Their women-folk more commonly squatted on the thresholds,
+cheerfully squabbling; from opposing second-story windows, two leaned
+perilously forth, slanging one another across the square briskly in the
+purest billingsgate; and were impartially applauded from below by an
+audience whose appreciation seemed faintly tinged with envy. Squawking
+and yelling children swarmed over the flags and rude cobblestones that
+paved the ways. Like incense, heavy and pungent, the rich effluvia of
+stable-yards swirled in air made visible by its faint burden of mist.
+
+Over against the entrance wherein Kirkwood and the girl lurked,
+confounded by the problem of escaping undetected through this vivacious
+scene, a stable-door stood wide, exposing a dimly illumined interior.
+Before it waited a four-wheeler, horse already hitched in between the
+shafts, while its driver, a man of leisurely turn of mind, made
+lingering inspection of straps and buckles, and, while Kirkwood watched
+him, turned attention to the carriage lamps.
+
+The match which he raked spiritedly down his thigh, flared ruddily; the
+succeeding paler glow of the lamp threw into relief a heavy beefy mask,
+with shining bosses for cheeks and nose and chin; through narrow slits
+two cunning eyes glittered like dull gems. Kirkwood appraised him with
+attention, as one in whose gross carcass was embodied their only hope
+of unannoyed return to the streets and normal surroundings of their
+world. The difficulty lay in attracting the man’s attention and
+engaging him without arousing his suspicions or bringing the population
+about their ears. Though he hesitated long, no favorable opportunity
+presented itself; and in time the Jehu approached the box with the
+ostensible purpose of mounting and driving off. In this critical
+situation the American, forced to recognize that boldness must mark his
+course, took the girl’s fate and his own in his hands, and with a quick
+word to his companion, stepped out of hiding.
+
+The cabby had a foot upon the step when Kirkwood tapped his shoulder.
+
+“My man—”
+
+“Lor, lumme!” cried the fellow in amaze, pivoting on his heel. Cupidity
+and quick understanding enlivened the eyes which in two glances looked
+Kirkwood up and down, comprehending at once both his badly rumpled hat
+and patent-leather shoes. “S’help me,”—thickly,—“where’d you drop from,
+guvner?”
+
+“That’s my affair,” said Kirkwood briskly. “Are you engaged?”
+
+“If you mykes yerself my fare,” returned the cabby shrewdly, “I _ham_.”
+
+“Ten shillings, then, if you get us out of here in one minute and
+to—say—Hyde Park Corner in fifteen.”
+
+“Us?” demanded the fellow aggressively.
+
+Kirkwood motioned toward the passageway. “There’s a lady with me—there.
+Quick now!”
+
+Still the man did not move. “Ten bob,” he bargained; “an’ you runnin’
+awye with th’ stuffy ol’ gent’s fair darter? Come now, guvner, is it
+gen’rous? Myke it a quid an’—”
+
+“A pound then. _Will_ you hurry?”
+
+By way of answer the fellow scrambled hastily up to the box and
+snatched at the reins. “_Ck_! Gee-e hup!” he cried sonorously.
+
+By now the mews had wakened to the fact of the presence of a “toff” in
+its midst. His light topcoat and silk hat-rendered him as conspicuous
+as a red Indian in war-paint would have been on Rotten Row. A cry of
+surprise was raised, and drowned in a volley of ribald inquiry and
+chaff.
+
+Fortunately, the cabby was instant to rein in skilfully before the
+passageway, and Kirkwood had the door open before the four-wheeler
+stopped. The girl, hugging her cloak about her, broke cover (whereat
+the hue and cry redoubled), and sprang into the body of the vehicle.
+Kirkwood followed, shutting the door. As the cab lurched forward he
+leaned over and drew down the window-shade, shielding the girl from
+half a hundred prying eyes. At the same time they gathered momentum,
+banging swiftly, if loudly out of the mews.
+
+An urchin, leaping on the step to spy in Kirkwood’s window, fell off,
+yelping, as the driver’s whiplash curled about his shanks.
+
+The gloom of the tunnel inclosed them briefly ere the lights of the
+Hog-in-the-Pound flashed by and the wheels began to roll more easily.
+Kirkwood drew back with a sigh of relief.
+
+“Thank God!” he said softly.
+
+The girl had no words.
+
+Worried by her silence, solicitous lest, the strain ended, she might be
+on the point of fainting, he let up the shade and lowered the window at
+her side.
+
+She seemed to have collapsed in her corner. Against the dark upholstery
+her hair shone like pale gold in the half-light; her eyes were closed
+and she held a handkerchief to her lips; the other hand lay limp.
+
+“Miss Calendar?”
+
+She started, and something bulky fell from the seat and thumped heavily
+on the floor. Kirkwood bent to pick it up, and so for the first time
+was made aware that she had brought with her a small black gladstone
+bag of considerable weight. As he placed it on the forward seat their
+eyes met.
+
+“I didn’t know—” he began.
+
+“It was to get that,” she hastened to explain, “that my father sent me
+...”
+
+“Yes,” he assented in a tone indicating his complete comprehension. “I
+trust ...” he added vaguely, and neglected to complete the observation,
+losing himself in a maze of conjecture not wholly agreeable. This was a
+new phase of the adventure. He eyed the bag uneasily. What did it
+contain? How did he know ...?
+
+Hastily he abandoned that line of thought. He had no right to infer
+anything whatever, who had thrust himself uninvited into her
+concerns—uninvited, that was to say, in the second instance, having
+been once definitely given his congé. Inevitably, however, a thousand
+unanswerable questions pestered him; just as, at each fresh facet of
+mystery disclosed by the sequence of the adventure, his bewilderment
+deepened.
+
+The girl stirred restlessly. “I have been thinking,” she volunteered in
+a troubled tone, “that there is absolutely no way I know of, to thank
+you properly.”
+
+“It is enough if I’ve been useful,” he rose in gallantry to the
+emergency.
+
+“That,” she commented, “was very prettily said. But then I have never
+known any one more kind and courteous and—and considerate, than you.”
+There was no savor of flattery in the simple and direct statement;
+indeed, she was looking away from him, out of the window, and her face
+was serious with thought; she seemed to be speaking of, rather than to,
+Kirkwood. “And I have been wondering,” she continued with unaffected
+candor, “what you must be thinking of me.”
+
+“I? ... What should I think of you, Miss Calendar?”
+
+With the air of a weary child she laid her head against the cushions
+again, face to him, and watched him through lowered lashes, unsmiling.
+
+“You might be thinking that an explanation is due you. Even the way we
+were brought together was extraordinary, Mr. Kirkwood. You must be very
+generous, as generous as you have shown yourself brave, not to require
+some sort of an explanation of me.”
+
+“I don’t see it that way.”
+
+“I do ... You have made me like you very much, Mr. Kirkwood.”
+
+He shot her a covert glance—causelessly, for her _naiveté_ was
+flawless. With a feeling of some slight awe he understood this—a
+sensation of sincere reverence for the unspoiled, candid, child’s heart
+and mind that were hers. “I’m glad,” he said simply; “very glad, if
+that’s the case, and presupposing I deserve it. Personally,” he
+laughed, “I seem to myself to have been rather forward.”
+
+“No; only kind and a gentleman.”
+
+“But—please!” he protested.
+
+“Oh, but I mean it, every word! Why shouldn’t I? In a little while, ten
+minutes, half an hour, we shall have seen the last of each other. Why
+should I not tell you how I appreciate all that you have unselfishly
+done for me?”
+
+“If you put it that way,—I’m sure I don’t know; beyond that it
+embarrasses me horribly to have you overestimate me so. If any courage
+has been shown this night, it is yours ... But I’m forgetting again.”
+He thought to divert her. “Where shall I tell the cabby to go this
+time, Miss Calendar?”
+
+“Craven Street, please,” said the girl, and added a house number. “I am
+to meet my father there, with this,”—indicating the gladstone bag.
+
+Kirkwood thrust head and shoulders out the window and instructed the
+cabby accordingly; but his ruse had been ineffectual, as he found when
+he sat back again. Quite composedly the girl took up the thread of
+conversation where it had been broken off.
+
+“It’s rather hard to keep silence, when you’ve been so good. I don’t
+want you to think me less generous than yourself, but, truly, I can
+tell you nothing.” She sighed a trace resentfully; or so he thought.
+“There is little enough in this—this wretched affair, that I understand
+myself; and that little, I may not tell ... I want you to know that.”
+
+“I understand, Miss Calendar.”
+
+“There’s one thing I may say, however. I have done nothing wrong
+to-night, I believe,” she added quickly.
+
+“I’ve never for an instant questioned that,” he returned with a qualm
+of shame; for what he said was not true.
+
+“Thank you ...”
+
+The four-wheeler swung out of Oxford Street into Charing Cross Road.
+Kirkwood noted the fact with a feeling of some relief that their ride
+was to be so short; like many of his fellow-sufferers from “the
+artistic temperament,” he was acutely disconcerted by spoken words of
+praise and gratitude; Miss Calendar, unintentionally enough, had
+succeeded only in rendering him self-conscious and ill at ease.
+
+Nor had she fully relieved her mind, nor voiced all that perturbed her.
+“There’s one thing more,” she said presently: “my father. I—I hope you
+will think charitably of him.”
+
+“Indeed, I’ve no reason or right to think otherwise.”
+
+“I was afraid—afraid his actions might have seemed peculiar, to-night
+...”
+
+“There are lots of things I don’t understand, Miss Calendar. Some day,
+perhaps, it will all clear up,—this trouble of yours. At least, one
+supposes it is trouble, of some sort. And then you will tell me the
+whole story.... Won’t you?” Kirkwood insisted.
+
+“I’m afraid not,” she said, with a smile of shadowed sadness. “We are
+to say good night in a moment or two, and—it will be good-by as well.
+It’s unlikely that we shall ever meet again.”
+
+“I refuse positively to take such a gloomy view of the case!”
+
+She shook her head, laughing with him, but with shy regret. “It’s so,
+none the less. We are leaving London this very night, my father and
+I—leaving England, for that matter.”
+
+“Leaving England?” he echoed. “You’re not by any chance bound for
+America, are you?”
+
+“I ... can’t tell you.”
+
+“But you can tell me this: are you booked on the _Minneapolis_?”
+
+“No—o; it is a—quite another boat.”
+
+“Of course!” he commented savagely. “It wouldn’t be me to have _any_
+sort of luck!”
+
+She made no reply beyond a low laugh. He stared gloomily out of his
+window, noting indifferently that they were passing the National
+Gallery. On their left Trafalgar Square stretched, broad and bare, a
+wilderness of sooty stone with an air of mutely tolerating its
+incongruous fountains. Through Charing Cross roared a tide-rip of
+motor-busses and hackney carriages.
+
+Glumly the young man foresaw the passing of his abbreviated romance;
+their destination was near at hand. Brentwick had been right, to some
+extent, at least; it was quite true that the curtain had been rung up
+that very night, upon Kirkwood’s Romance; unhappily, as Brentwick had
+not foreseen, it was immediately to be rung down.
+
+The cab rolled soberly into the Strand.
+
+“Since we are to say good-by so very soon,” suggested Kirkwood, “may I
+ask a parting favor, Miss Calendar?”
+
+She regarded him with friendly eyes. “You have every right,” she
+affirmed gently.
+
+“Then please to tell me frankly: are you going into any further
+danger?”
+
+“And is that the only boon you crave at my hands, Mr. Kirkwood?”
+
+“Without impertinence ...”
+
+For a little time, waiting for him to conclude his vague phrase, she
+watched him in an expectant silence. But the man was diffident to a
+degree—At length, somewhat unconsciously, “I think not,” she answered.
+“No; there will be no danger awaiting me at Mrs. Hallam’s. You need not
+fear for me any more—Thank you.”
+
+He lifted his brows at the unfamiliar name. “Mrs. Hallam—?”
+
+“I am going to her house in Craven Street.”
+
+“Your father is to meet you there?”—persistently.
+
+“He promised to.”
+
+“But if he shouldn’t?”
+
+“Why—” Her eyes clouded; she pursed her lips over the conjectural
+annoyance. “Why, in that event, I suppose—It would be very
+embarrassing. You see, I don’t know Mrs. Hallam; I don’t know that she
+expects me, unless my father is already there. They are old friends—I
+could drive round for a while and come back, I suppose.”
+
+But she made it plain that the prospect did not please her.
+
+“Won’t you let me ask if Mr. Calender is there, before you get out,
+then? I don’t like to be dismissed,” he laughed; “and, you know, you
+shouldn’t go wandering round all alone.”
+
+The cab drew up. Kirkwood put a hand on the door and awaited her will.
+
+“It—it would be very kind ... I hate to impose upon you.”
+
+He turned the knob and got out. “If you’ll wait one moment,” he said
+superfluously, as he closed the door.
+
+Pausing only to verify the number, he sprang up the steps and found the
+bell-button.
+
+It was a modest little residence, in nothing more remarkable than its
+neighbors, unless it was for a certain air of extra grooming: the area
+railing was sleek with fresh black paint; the doorstep looked the
+better for vigorous stoning; the door itself was immaculate, its
+brasses shining lustrous against red-lacquered woodwork. A soft glow
+filled the fanlight. Overhead the drawing-room windows shone with a
+cozy, warm radiance.
+
+The door opened, framing the figure of a maid sketched broadly in
+masses of somber black and dead white.
+
+“Can you tell me, is Mr. Calendar here?”
+
+The servant’s eyes left his face, looked past him at the waiting cab,
+and returned.
+
+“I’m not sure, sir. If you will please step in.”
+
+Kirkwood hesitated briefly, then acceded. The maid closed the door.
+
+“What name shall I say, sir?”
+
+“Mr. Kirkwood.”
+
+“If you will please to wait one moment, sir—”
+
+He was left in the entry hall, the servant hurrying to the staircase
+and up. Three minutes elapsed; he was on the point of returning to the
+girl, when the maid reappeared.
+
+“Mrs. Hallam says, will you kindly step up-stairs, sir.”
+
+Disgruntled, he followed her; at the head of the stairs she bowed him
+into the drawing-room and again left him to his own resources.
+
+Nervous, annoyed, he paced the floor from wall to wall, his footfalls
+silenced by heavy rugs. As the delay was prolonged he began to fume
+with impatience, wondering, half regretting that he had left the girl
+outside, definitely sorry that he had failed to name his errand more
+explicitly to the maid. At another time, in another mood, he might have
+accorded more appreciation to the charm of the apartment, which,
+betraying the feminine touch in every detail of arrangement and
+furnishing, was very handsome in an unconventional way. But he was
+quite heedless of externals.
+
+Wearied, he deposited himself sulkily in an armchair by the hearth.
+
+From a boudoir on the same floor there came murmurs of two voices, a
+man’s and a woman’s. The latter laughed prettily.
+
+“Oh, any time!” snorted the American. “Any time you’re through with
+your confounded flirtation, Mr. George B. Calendar!”
+
+The voices rose, approaching. “Good night,” said the woman gaily;
+“farewell and—good luck go with you!”
+
+“Thank you. Good night,” replied the man more conservatively.
+
+Kirkwood rose, expectant.
+
+There was a swish of draperies, and a moment later he was acknowledging
+the totally unlooked-for entrance of the mistress of the house. He had
+thought to see Calendar, presuming him to be the man closeted with Mrs.
+Hallam; but, whoever that had been, he did not accompany the woman.
+Indeed, as she advanced from the doorway, Kirkwood could hear the man’s
+footsteps on the stairs.
+
+“This is Mr. Kirkwood?” The note of inquiry in the well-trained voice—a
+very alluring voice and one pleasant to listen to, he thought—made it
+seem as though she had asked, point-blank, “Who is Mr. Kirkwood?”
+
+He bowed, discovering himself in the presence of an extraordinarily
+handsome and interesting woman; a woman of years which as yet had not
+told upon her, of experience that had not availed to harden her, at
+least in so far as her exterior charm of personality was involved; a
+woman, in brief, who bore close inspection well, despite an elusive
+effect of maturity, not without its attraction for men. Kirkwood was
+impressed that it would be very easy to learn to like Mrs. Hallam more
+than well—with her approval.
+
+Although he had not anticipated it, he was not at all surprised to
+recognize in her the woman who, if he were not mistaken, had slipped to
+Calendar that warning in the dining-room of the Pless. Kirkwood’s state
+of mind had come to be such, through his experiences of the past few
+hours, that he would have accepted anything, however preposterous, as a
+commonplace happening. But for that matter there was nothing
+particularly astonishing in this _rencontre_.
+
+“I am Mrs. Hallam. You were asking for Mr. Calendar?”
+
+“He was to have been here at this hour, I believe,” said Kirkwood.
+
+“Yes?” There was just the right inflection of surprise in her carefully
+controlled tone.
+
+He became aware of an undercurrent of feeling; that the woman was
+estimating him shrewdly with her fine direct eyes. He returned her
+regard with admiring interest; they were gray-green eyes, deep-set but
+large, a little shallow, a little changeable, calling to mind the sea
+on a windy, cloudy day.
+
+Below stairs a door slammed.
+
+“I am not a detective, Mrs. Hallam,” announced the young man suddenly.
+“Mr. Calendar required a service of me this evening; I am here in
+natural consequence. If it was Mr. Calendar who left this house just
+now, I am wasting time.”
+
+“It was not Mr. Calendar.” The fine-lined brows arched in surprise,
+real or pretended, at his first blurted words, and relaxed; amused, the
+woman laughed deliciously. “But I am expecting him any moment; he was
+to have been here half an hour since.... Won’t you wait?”
+
+She indicated, with a gracious gesture, a chair, and took for herself
+one end of a davenport. “I’m sure he won’t be long, now.”
+
+“Thank you, I will return, if I may.” Kirkwood moved toward the door.
+
+“But there’s no necessity—” She seemed insistent on detaining him,
+possibly because she questioned his motive, possibly for her own
+divertisement.
+
+Kirkwood deprecated his refusal with a smile. “The truth is, Miss
+Calendar is waiting in a cab, outside. I—”
+
+“Dorothy Calendar!” Mrs. Hallam rose alertly. “But why should she wait
+there? To be sure, we’ve never met; but I have known her father for
+many years.” Her eyes held steadfast to his face; shallow, flawed by
+her every thought, like the sea by a cat’s-paw he found them altogether
+inscrutable; yet received an impression that their owner was now unable
+to account for him.
+
+She swung about quickly, preceding him to the door and down the stairs.
+“I am sure Dorothy will come in to wait, if I ask her,” she told
+Kirkwood in a high sweet voice. “I’m so anxious to know her. It’s quite
+absurd, really, of her—to stand on ceremony with me, when her father
+made an appointment here. I’ll run out and ask—”
+
+Mrs. Hallam’s slim white fingers turned latch and knob, opening the
+street door, and her voice died away as she stepped out into the night.
+For a moment, to Kirkwood, tagging after her with an uncomfortable
+sense of having somehow done the wrong thing, her figure—full fair
+shoulders and arms rising out of the glittering dinner gown—cut a
+gorgeous silhouette against the darkness. Then, with a sudden,
+imperative gesture, she half turned towards him.
+
+“But,” she exclaimed, perplexed, gazing to right and left, “but the
+cab, Mr. Kirkwood?”
+
+He was on the stoop a second later. Standing beside her, he stared
+blankly.
+
+To the left the Strand roared, the stream of its night-life in high
+spate; on the right lay the Embankment, comparatively silent and
+deserted, if brilliant with its high-swung lights. Between the two,
+quiet Craven Street ran, short and narrow, and wholly innocent of any
+form of equipage.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+“BELOW BRIDGE”
+
+
+In silence Mrs. Hallam turned to Kirkwood, her pose in itself a
+question and a peremptory one. Her eyes had narrowed; between their
+lashes the green showed, a thin edge like jade, cold and calculating.
+The firm lines of her mouth and chin had hardened.
+
+Temporarily dumb with consternation, he returned her stare as silently.
+
+“_Well_, Mr.—Kirkwood?”
+
+“Mrs. Hallam,” he stammered, “I—”
+
+She lifted her shoulders impatiently and with a quick movement stepped
+back across the threshold, where she paused, a rounded arm barring the
+entrance, one hand grasping the door-knob, as if to shut him out at any
+moment.
+
+“I’m awaiting your explanation,” she said coldly.
+
+
+[Illustration: “I’m awaiting your explanation,” she said coldly.]
+
+
+He grinned with nervousness, striving to penetrate the mental processes
+of this handsome Mrs. Hallam. She seemed to regard him with a suspicion
+which he thought inexcusable. Did she suppose he had spirited Dorothy
+Calendar away and then called to apprise her of the fact? Or that he
+was some sort of an adventurer, who had manufactured a plausible yarn
+to gain him access to her home? Or—harking back to her original
+theory—that he was an emissary from Scotland Yard? ... Probably she
+distrusted him on the latter hypothesis. The reflection left him more
+at ease.
+
+“I am quite as mystified as you, Mrs. Hallam,” he began. “Miss Calendar
+was here, at this door, in a four-wheeler, not ten minutes ago, and—”
+
+“Then where is she now?”
+
+“Tell me where Calendar is,” he retorted, inspired, “and I’ll try to
+answer you!”
+
+But her eyes were blank. “You mean—?”
+
+“That Calendar was in this house when I came; that he left, found his
+daughter in the cab, and drove off with her. It’s clear enough.”
+
+“You are quite mistaken,” she said thoughtfully. “George Calendar has
+not been here this night.”
+
+He wondered that she did not seem to resent his imputation. “I think
+not—”
+
+“Listen!” she cried, raising a warning hand; and relaxing her vigilant
+attitude, moved forward once more, to peer down toward the Embankment.
+
+A cab had cut in from that direction and was bearing down upon them
+with a brisk rumble of hoofs. As it approached, Kirkwood’s heart, that
+had lightened, was weighed upon again by disappointment. It was no
+four-wheeler, but a hansom, and the open wings of the apron, disclosing
+a white triangle of linen surmounted by a glowing spot of fire,
+betrayed the sex of the fare too plainly to allow of further hope that
+it might be the girl returning.
+
+At the door, the cab pulled up sharply and a man tumbled hastily out
+upon the sidewalk.
+
+“Here!” he cried throatily, tossing the cabby his fare, and turned
+toward the pair upon the doorstep, evidently surmising that something
+was amiss. For he was Calendar in proper person, and a sight to upset
+in a twinkling Kirkwood’s ingeniously builded castle of suspicion.
+
+“Mrs. Hallam!” he cried, out of breath. “’S my daughter here?” And
+then, catching sight of Kirkwood’s countenance: “Why, hello, Kirkwood!”
+he saluted him with a dubious air.
+
+The woman interrupted hastily. “Please come in, Mr. Calendar. This
+gentleman has been inquiring for you, with an astonishing tale about
+your daughter.”
+
+“Dorothy!” Calendar’s moon-like visage was momentarily divested of any
+trace of color. “What of her?”
+
+“You had better come in,” advised Mrs. Hallam brusquely.
+
+The fat adventurer hopped hurriedly across the threshold, Kirkwood
+following. The woman shut the door, and turned with back to it, nodding
+significantly at Kirkwood as her eyes met Calendar’s.
+
+“Well, well?” snapped the latter impatiently, turning to the young man.
+
+But Kirkwood was thinking quickly. For the present he contented himself
+with a deliberate statement of fact: “Miss Calendar has disappeared.”
+It gave him an instant’s time ... “There’s something damned fishy!” he
+told himself. “These two are playing at cross-purposes. Calendar’s no
+fool; he’s evidently a crook, to boot. As for the woman, she’s had her
+eyes open for a number of years. The main thing’s Dorothy. She didn’t
+vanish of her own initiative. And Mrs. Hallam knows, or suspects, more
+than she’s going to tell. I don’t think she wants Dorothy found.
+Calendar does. So do I. Ergo: I’m for Calendar.”
+
+“Disappeared?” Calendar was barking at him. “How? When? Where?”
+
+“Within ten minutes,” said Kirkwood. “Here, let’s get it straight....
+With her permission I brought her here in a four-wheeler.” He was
+carefully suppressing all mention of Frognall Street, and in Calendar’s
+glance read approval of the elision. “She didn’t want to get out,
+unless you were here. I asked for you. The maid showed me up-stairs. I
+left your daughter in the cab—and by the way, I hadn’t paid the driver.
+That’s funny, too! Perhaps six or seven minutes after I came in Mrs.
+Hallam found out that Miss Calendar was with me and wanted to ask her
+in. When we got to the door—no cab. There you have it all.”
+
+“Thanks—it’s plenty,” said Calendar dryly. He bent his head in thought
+for an instant, then looked up and fixed Mrs. Hallam with an
+unprejudiced eye, “I say!” he demanded explosively. “There wasn’t any
+one here that knew—eh?”
+
+Her fine eyes wavered and fell before his; and Kirkwood remarked that
+her under lip was curiously drawn in.
+
+“I heard a man leave as Mrs. Hallam joined me,” he volunteered
+helpfully, and with a suspicion of malice. “And after that—I paid no
+attention at the time—it seems to me I did hear a cab in the street—”
+
+“Ow?” interjected Calendar, eying the woman steadfastly and employing
+an exclamation of combined illumination and inquiry more typically
+British than anything Kirkwood had yet heard from the man.
+
+For her part, the look she gave Kirkwood was sharp with fury. It was
+more; it was a mistake, a flaw in her diplomacy; for Calendar
+intercepted it. Unceremoniously he grasped her bare arm with his fat
+hand.
+
+“Tell me who it was,” he demanded in an ugly tone.
+
+She freed herself with a twist, and stepped back, a higher color in her
+cheeks, a flash of anger in her eyes.
+
+“Mr. Mulready,” she retorted defiantly. “What of that?”
+
+“I wish I was sure,” declared the fat adventurer, exasperated. “As it
+is, I bet a dollar you’ve put your foot in it, my lady. I warned you of
+that blackguard.... There! The mischief’s done; we won’t row over it.
+One moment.” He begged it with a wave of his hand; stood pondering
+briefly, fumbled for his watch, found and consulted it. “It’s the
+barest chance,” he muttered. “Perhaps we can make it.”
+
+“What are you going to do?” asked the woman.
+
+“Give _Mister_ Mulready a run for his money. Come along, Kirkwood; we
+haven’t a minute. Mrs. Hallam, permit us....” She stepped aside and he
+brushed past her to the door. “Come, Kirkwood!”
+
+He seemed to take Kirkwood’s company for granted; and the young man was
+not inclined to argue the point. Meekly enough he fell in with Calendar
+on the sidewalk. Mrs. Hallam followed them out. “You won’t forget?” she
+called tentatively.
+
+“I’ll ’phone you if we find out anything.” Calendar jerked the words
+unceremoniously over his shoulder as, linking arms with Kirkwood, he
+drew him swiftly along. They heard her shut the door; instantly
+Calendar stopped. “Look here, did Dorothy have a—a small parcel with
+her?”
+
+“She had a gladstone bag.”
+
+“Oh, the devil, the devil!” Calendar started on again, muttering
+distractedly. As they reached the corner he disengaged his arm. “We’ve
+a minute and a half to reach Charing Cross Pier; and I think it’s the
+last boat. You set the pace, will you? But remember I’m an oldish man
+and—and fat.”
+
+They began to run, the one easily, the other lumbering after like an
+old-fashioned square-rigged ship paced by a liner.
+
+Beneath the railway bridge, in front of the Underground station, the
+cab-rank cried them on with sardonic view-halloos; and a bobby remarked
+them with suspicion, turning to watch as they plunged round the corner
+and across the wide Embankment.
+
+The Thames appeared before them, a river of ink on whose burnished
+surface lights swam in long winding streaks and oily blobs. By the
+floating pier a County Council steamboat strained its hawsers, snoring
+huskily. Bells were jingling in her engine-room as the two gained the
+head of the sloping gangway.
+
+Kirkwood slapped a shilling down on the ticket-window ledge. “Where
+to?” he cried back to Calendar.
+
+“Cherry Gardens Pier,” rasped the winded man. He stumbled after
+Kirkwood, groaning with exhaustion. Only the tolerance of the pier
+employees gained them their end; the steamer was held some seconds for
+them; as Calendar staggered to its deck, the gangway was jerked in, the
+last hawser cast off. The boat sheered wide out on the river, then shot
+in, arrow-like, to the pier beneath Waterloo Bridge.
+
+The deck was crowded and additional passengers embarked at every stop.
+In the circumstances conversation, save on the most impersonal topics,
+was impossible; and even had it been necessary or advisable to discuss
+the affair which occupied their minds, where so many ears could hear,
+Calendar had breath enough neither to answer nor to catechize Kirkwood.
+They found seats on the forward deck and rested there in grim silence,
+both fretting under the enforced restraint, while the boat darted, like
+some illuminated and exceptionally active water insect, from pier to
+pier.
+
+As it snorted beneath London Bridge, Calendar’s impatience drove him
+from his seat back to the gangway. “Next stop,” he told Kirkwood
+curtly; and rested his heavy bulk against the paddle-box, brooding
+morosely, until, after an uninterrupted run of more than a mile, the
+steamer swept in, side-wheels backing water furiously against the
+ebbing tide, to Cherry Gardens landing.
+
+Sweet name for a locality unsavory beyond credence! ... As they emerged
+on the street level and turned west on Bermondsey Wall, Kirkwood was
+fain to tug his top-coat over his chest and button it tight, to hide
+his linen. In a guarded tone he counseled his companion to do likewise;
+and Calendar, after a moment’s blank, uncomprehending stare,
+acknowledged the wisdom of the advice with a grunt.
+
+The very air they breathed was rank with fetid odors bred of the gaunt
+dark warehouses that lined their way; the lights were few; beneath the
+looming buildings the shadows were many and dense. Here and there
+dreary and cheerless public houses appeared, with lighted windows
+conspicuous in a lightless waste. From time to time, as they hurried
+on, they encountered, and made wide detours to escape contact with
+knots of wayfarers—men debased and begrimed, with dreary and slatternly
+women, arm in arm, zigzaging widely across the sidewalks, chorusing
+with sodden voices the burden of some popularized ballad. The
+cheapened, sentimental refrains echoed sadly between benighted
+walls....
+
+Kirkwood shuddered, sticking close to Calendar’s side. Life’s naked
+brutalities had theretofore been largely out of his ken. He had heard
+of slums, had even ventured to mouth politely moral platitudes on the
+subject of overcrowding in great centers of population, but in the
+darkest flights of imagination had never pictured to himself anything
+so unspeakably foul and hopeless as this.... And they were come hither
+seeking—Dorothy Calendar! He was unable to conceive what manner of
+villainy could be directed against her, that she must be looked for in
+such surroundings.
+
+After some ten minutes’ steady walking, Calendar turned aside with a
+muttered word, and dived down a covered, dark and evil-smelling
+passageway that seemed to lead toward the river.
+
+Mastering his involuntary qualms, Kirkwood followed.
+
+Some ten or twelve paces from its entrance the passageway swerved at a
+right angle, continuing three yards or so to end in a blank wall,
+wherefrom a flickering, inadequate gas-lamp jutted. At this point a
+stone platform, perhaps four feet square, was discovered, from the edge
+of which a flight of worn and slimy stone steps led down to a permanent
+boat-landing, where another gas-light flared gustily despite the
+protection of its frame of begrimed glass.
+
+“Good Lord!” exclaimed the young man. “What, in Heaven’s name,
+Calendar—?”
+
+“Bermondsey Old Stairs. Come on.”
+
+They descended to the landing-stage. Beneath them the Pool slept, a
+sheet of polished ebony, whispering to itself, lapping with small
+stealthy gurgles angles of masonry and ancient piles. On the farther
+bank tall warehouses reared square old-time heads, their
+uncompromising, rugged profile relieved here and there by tapering
+mastheads. A few, scattering, feeble lights were visible. Nothing moved
+save the river and the wind.
+
+The landing itself they found quite deserted; something which the
+adventurer comprehended with a nod which, like its accompanying,
+inarticulate ejaculation, might have been taken to indicate either
+satisfaction or disgust. He ignored Kirkwood altogether, for the time
+being, and presently produced a small, bright object, which, applied to
+his lips, proved to be a boatswain’s whistle. He sounded two blasts,
+one long, one brief.
+
+There fell a lull, Kirkwood watching the other and wondering what next
+would happen. Calendar paced restlessly to and fro upon the narrow
+landing, now stopping to incline an ear to catch some anticipated
+sound, now searching with sweeping glances the black reaches of the
+Pool.
+
+Finally, consulting his watch, “Almost ten,” he announced.
+
+“We’re in time?”
+
+“Can’t say.... Damn! ... If that infernal boat would only show up—”
+
+He was lifting the whistle to sound a second summons when a rowboat
+rounded a projecting angle formed by the next warehouse down stream,
+and with clanking oar-locks swung in toward the landing. On her thwarts
+two figures, dipping and rising, labored with the sweeps. As they drew
+in, the man forward shipped his blades, and rising, scrambled to the
+bows in order to grasp an iron mooring-ring set in the wall. The other
+awkwardly took in his oars and, as the current swung the stern
+downstream, placed a hand palm downward upon the bottom step to hold
+the boat steady.
+
+Calendar waddled to the brink of the stage, grunting with relief.
+
+“The other man?” he asked brusquely. “Has he gone aboard? Or is this
+the first trip to-night?”
+
+One of the watermen nodded assent to the latter question, adding
+gruffly: “Seen nawthin’ of ’im, sir.”
+
+“Very good,” said Calendar, as if he doubted whether it were very good
+or bad. “We’ll wait a bit.”
+
+“Right-o!” agreed the waterman civilly.
+
+Calendar turned back, his small eyes glimmering with satisfaction.
+Fumbling in one coat pocket he brought to light a cigar-case. “Have a
+smoke?” he suggested with a show of friendliness. “By Heaven, I was
+beginnin’ to get worried!”
+
+“As to what?” inquired Kirkwood pointedly, selecting a cigar.
+
+He got no immediate reply, but felt Calendar’s sharp eyes upon him
+while he manoeuvered with matches for a light.
+
+“That’s so,” it came at length. “You don’t know. I kind of forgot for a
+minute; somehow you seemed on the inside.”
+
+Kirkwood laughed lightly. “I’ve experienced something of the same
+sensation in the past few hours.”
+
+“Don’t doubt it.” Calendar was watching him narrowly. “I suppose,” he
+put it to him abruptly, “you haven’t changed your mind?”
+
+“Changed my mind?”
+
+“About coming in with me.”
+
+“My dear sir, I can have no mind to change until a plain proposition is
+laid before me.”
+
+“Hmm!” Calendar puffed vigorously until it occurred to him to change
+the subject. “You won’t mind telling me what happened to you and
+Dorothy?”
+
+“Certainly not.”
+
+Calendar drew nearer and Kirkwood, lowering his voice, narrated briefly
+the events since he had left the Pless in Dorothy’s company.
+
+Her father followed him intently, interrupting now and again with
+exclamation or pertinent question; as, Had Kirkwood been able to see
+the face of the man in No. 9, Frognall Street? The negative answer
+seemed to disconcert him.
+
+“Youngster, you say? Blam’ if I can lay my mind to _him_! Now if that
+Mulready—”
+
+“It would have been impossible for Mulready—whoever he is—to recover
+and get to Craven Street before we did,” Kirkwood pointed out.
+
+“Well—go on.” But when the tale was told, “It’s that scoundrel,
+Mulready!” the man affirmed with heat. “It’s his hand—I know him. I
+might have had sense enough to see he’d take the first chance to hand
+me the double-cross. Well, this does for _him_, all right!” Calendar
+lowered viciously at the river. “You’ve been blame’ useful,” he told
+Kirkwood assertively. “If it hadn’t been for you, I don’t know where
+_I’d_ be now,—nor Dorothy, either,”—an obvious afterthought. “There’s
+no particular way I can show my appreciation, I suppose? Money—?”
+
+“I’ve got enough to last me till I reach New York, thank you.”
+
+“Well, if the time ever comes, just shout for George B. I won’t be
+wanting.... I only wish you were with us; but that’s out of the
+question.”
+
+“Doubtless ...”
+
+“No two ways about it. I bet anything you’ve got a conscience concealed
+about your person. What? You’re an honest man, eh?”
+
+“I don’t want to sound immodest,” returned Kirkwood, amused.
+
+“You don’t need to worry about that.... But an honest man’s got no
+business in _my_ line.” He glanced again at his watch. “Damn that
+Mulready! I wonder if he was ’cute enough to take another way? Or did
+he think ... The fool!”
+
+He cut off abruptly, seeming depressed by the thought that he might
+have been outwitted; and, clasping hands behind his back, chewed
+savagely on his cigar, watching the river. Kirkwood found himself
+somewhat wearied; the uselessness of his presence there struck him with
+added force. He bethought him of his boat-train, scheduled to leave a
+station miles distant, in an hour and a half. If he missed it, he would
+be stranded in a foreign land, penniless and practically without
+friends—Brentwick being away and all the rest of his circle of
+acquaintances on the other side of the Channel. Yet he lingered, in
+poor company, daring fate that he might see the end of the affair. Why?
+
+There was only one honest answer to that question. He stayed on because
+of his interest in a girl whom he had known for a matter of three
+hours, at most. It was insensate folly on his part, ridiculous from any
+point of view. But he made no move to go.
+
+The slow minutes lengthened monotonously.
+
+There came a sound from the street level. Calendar held up a hand of
+warning. “Here they come! Steady!” he said tensely. Kirkwood, listening
+intently, interpreted the noise as a clash of hoofs upon cobbles.
+
+Calendar turned to the boat.
+
+“Sheer off,” he ordered. “Drop out of sight. I’ll whistle when I want
+you.”
+
+“Aye, aye, sir.”
+
+The boat slipped noiselessly away with the current and in an instant
+was lost to sight. Calendar plucked at Kirkwood’s sleeve, drawing him
+into the shadow of the steps. “E-easy,” he whispered; “and, I say, lend
+me a hand, will you, if Mulready turns ugly?”
+
+“Oh, yes,” assented Kirkwood, with a nonchalance not entirely
+unassumed.
+
+The racket drew nearer and ceased; the hush that fell thereafter seemed
+only accentuated by the purling of the river. It was ended by footsteps
+echoing in the covered passageway. Calendar craned his thick neck round
+the shoulder of stone, reconnoitering the landing and stairway.
+
+“Thank God!” he said under his breath. “I was right, after all!”
+
+A man’s deep tones broke out above. “This way. Mind the steps; they’re
+a bit slippery, Miss Dorothy.”
+
+“But my father—?” came the girl’s voice, attuned to doubt.
+
+“Oh, he’ll be along—if he isn’t waiting now, in the boat.”
+
+They descended, the man leading. At the foot, without a glance to right
+or left, he advanced to the edge of the stage, leaning out over the
+rail as if endeavoring to locate the rowboat. At once the girl
+appeared, moving to his side.
+
+“But, Mr. Mulready—”
+
+The girl’s words were drowned by a prolonged blast on the boatswain’s
+whistle at her companion’s lips; the shorter one followed in due
+course. Calendar edged forward from Kirkwood’s side.
+
+“But what shall we do if my father isn’t here? Wait?”
+
+“No; best not to; best to get on the _Alethea_ as soon as possible,
+Miss Calendar. We can send the boat back.”
+
+“‘Once aboard the lugger the girl is mine’—eh, Mulready?—to say nothing
+of the loot!”
+
+If Calendar’s words were jocular, his tone conveyed a different
+impression entirely. Both man and girl wheeled right about to face him,
+the one with a strangled oath, the other with a low cry.
+
+“The devil!” exclaimed this Mr. Mulready.
+
+“Oh! My father!” the girl voiced her recognition of him.
+
+“Not precisely one and the same person,” commented Calendar suavely.
+“But—er—thanks, just as much.... You see, Mulready, when I make an
+appointment, I keep it.”
+
+“We’d begun to get a bit anxious about you—” Mulready began
+defensively.
+
+“So I surmised, from what Mrs. Hallam and Mr. Kirkwood told me....
+Well?”
+
+The man found no ready answer. He fell back a pace to the railing, his
+features working with his deep chagrin. The murky flare of the gas-lamp
+overhead fell across a face handsome beyond the ordinary but marred by
+a sullen humor and seamed with indulgence: a face that seemed
+hauntingly familiar until Kirkwood in a flash of visual memory
+reconstructed the portrait of a man who lingered over a dining-table,
+with two empty chairs for company. This, then, was he whom Mrs. Hallam
+had left at the Pless; a tall, strong man, very heavy about the chest
+and shoulders....
+
+“Why, my dear friend,” Calendar was taunting him, “you don’t seem
+overjoyed to see me, for all your wild anxiety! ’Pon my word, you act
+as if you hadn’t expected me—and our engagement so clearly understood,
+at that! ... Why, you fool!”—here the mask of irony was cast. “Did you
+think for a moment I’d let myself be nabbed by that yap from Scotland
+Yard? Were you banking on that? I give you my faith I ambled out under
+his very nose! ... Dorothy, my dear,” turning impatiently from
+Mulready, “where’s that bag?”
+
+The girl withdrew a puzzled gaze from Mulready’s face, (it was apparent
+to Kirkwood that this phase of the affair was no more enigmatic to him
+than to her), and drew aside a corner of her cloak, disclosing the
+gladstone bag, securely grasped in one gloved hand.
+
+“I have it, thanks to Mr. Kirkwood,” she said quietly.
+
+Kirkwood chose that moment to advance from the shadow. Mulready started
+and fixed him with a troubled and unfriendly stare. The girl greeted
+him with a note of sincere pleasure in her surprise.
+
+“Why, Mr. Kirkwood! ... But I left you at Mrs. Hallam’s!”
+
+Kirkwood bowed, smiling openly at Mulready’s discomfiture.
+
+“By your father’s grace, I came with him,” he said. “You ran away
+without saying good night, you know, and I’m a jealous creditor.”
+
+She laughed excitedly, turning to Calendar. “But _you_ were to meet me
+at Mrs. Hallam’s?”
+
+“Mulready was good enough to try to save me the trouble, my dear. He’s
+an unselfish soul, Mulready. Fortunately it happened that I came along
+not five minutes after he’d carried you off. How was that, Dorothy?”
+
+Her glance wavered uneasily between the two, Mulready and her father.
+The former, shrugging to declare his indifference, turned his back
+squarely upon them. She frowned.
+
+“He came out of Mrs. Hallam’s and got into the four-wheeler, saying you
+had sent him to take your place, and would join us on the _Alethea_.”
+
+“So-o! How about it, Mulready?”
+
+The man swung back slowly. “What you choose to think,” he said after a
+deliberate pause.
+
+“Well, never mind! We’ll go over the matter at our leisure on the
+_Alethea_.”
+
+There was in the adventurer’s tone a menace, bitter and not to be
+ignored; which Mulready saw fit to challenge.
+
+“I think not,” he declared; “I think not. I’m weary of your addle-pated
+suspicions. It’d be plain to any one but a fool that I acted for the
+best interests of all concerned in this matter. If you’re not content
+to see it in that light, I’m done.”
+
+“Oh, if you want to put it that way, I’m _not_ content, Mr. Mulready,”
+retorted Calendar dangerously.
+
+“Please yourself. I bid you good evening and—good-by.” The man took a
+step toward the stairs.
+
+Calendar dropped his right hand into his top-coat pocket. “Just a
+minute,” he said sweetly, and Mulready stopped. Abruptly the fat
+adventurer’s smoldering resentment leaped in flame. “That’ll be about
+all, Mr. Mulready! ’Bout face, you hound, and get into that boat! D’you
+think I’ll temporize with you till Doomsday? Then forget it. You’re
+wrong, dead wrong. Your bluff’s called, and”—with an evil chuckle—“I
+hold a full house, Mulready,—every chamber taken.” He lifted meaningly
+the hand in the coat pocket. “Now, in with you.”
+
+With a grin and a swagger of pure bravado Mulready turned and obeyed.
+Unnoticed of any, save perhaps Calendar himself, the boat had drawn in
+at the stage a moment earlier. Mulready dropped into it and threw
+himself sullenly upon the midships thwart.
+
+“Now, Dorothy, in you go, my dear,” continued Calendar, with a
+self-satisfied wag of his head.
+
+Half dazed, to all seeming, she moved toward the boat. With clumsy and
+assertive gallantry her father stepped before her, offering his
+hand,—his hand which she did not touch; for, in the act of descending,
+she remembered and swung impulsively back to Kirkwood.
+
+“Good night, Mr. Kirkwood; good night,—I shan’t forget.”
+
+He took her hand and bowed above it; but when his head was lifted, he
+still retained her fingers in a lingering clasp.
+
+“Good night,” he said reluctantly.
+
+The crass incongruity of her in that setting smote him with renewed
+force. Young, beautiful, dainty, brilliant and graceful in her pretty
+evening gown, she figured strangely against the gloomy background of
+the river, in those dull and mean surroundings of dank stone and rusted
+iron. She was like (he thought extravagantly) a whiff of
+flower-fragrance lost in the miasmatic vapors of a slough.
+
+The innocent appeal and allure of her face, upturned to his beneath the
+gas-light, wrought compassionately upon his sensitive and generous
+heart. He was aware of a little surge of blind rage against the
+conditions that had brought her to that spot, and against those whom he
+held responsible for those conditions.
+
+In a sudden flush of daring he turned and nodded coolly to Calendar.
+“With your permission,” he said negligently; and drew the girl aside to
+the angle of the stairway.
+
+“Miss Calendar—” he began; but was interrupted.
+
+“Here—I say!”
+
+Calendar had started toward him angrily.
+
+Kirkwood calmly waved him back. “I want a word in private with your
+daughter, Mr. Calendar,” he announced with quiet dignity. “I don’t
+think you’ll deny me? I’ve saved you some slight trouble to-night.”
+
+Disgruntled, the adventurer paused. “Oh—_all_ right,” he grumbled. “I
+don’t see what ...” He returned to the boat.
+
+“Forgive me, Miss Calendar,” continued Kirkwood nervously. “I know I’ve
+no right to interfere, but—”
+
+“Yes, Mr. Kirkwood?”
+
+“—but hasn’t this gone far enough?” he floundered unhappily. “I can’t
+like the look of things. Are you sure—sure that it’s all right—with
+you, I mean?”
+
+She did not answer at once; but her eyes were kind and sympathetic. He
+plucked heart of their tolerance.
+
+“It isn’t too late, yet,” he argued. “Let me take you to your
+friends,—you must have friends in the city. But this—this midnight
+flight down the Thames, this atmosphere of stealth and suspicion,
+this—”
+
+“But my place is with my father, Mr. Kirkwood,” she interposed. “I
+daren’t doubt him—dare I?”
+
+“I ... suppose not.”
+
+“So I must go with him.... I’m glad—thank you for caring, dear Mr.
+Kirkwood. And again, good night.”
+
+“Good luck attend you,” he muttered, following her to the boat.
+
+Calendar helped her in and turned back to Kirkwood with a look of arch
+triumph; Kirkwood wondered if he had overheard. Whether or no, he could
+afford to be magnanimous. Seizing Kirkwood’s hand, he pumped it
+vigorously.
+
+“My dear boy, you’ve been an angel in disguise! And I guess you think
+me the devil in masquerade.” He chuckled, in high conceit with himself
+over the turn of affairs. “Good night and—and fare thee well!” He
+dropped into the boat, seating himself to face the recalcitrant
+Mulready. “Cast off, there!”
+
+The boat dropped away, the oars lifting and falling. With a weariful
+sense of loneliness and disappointment, Kirkwood hung over the rail to
+watch them out of sight.
+
+A dozen feet of water lay between the stage and the boat. The girl’s
+dress remained a spot of cheerful color; her face was a blur. As the
+watermen swung the bows down-stream, she looked back, lifting an arm
+spectral in its white sheath. Kirkwood raised his hat.
+
+The boat gathered impetus, momentarily diminishing in the night’s
+illusory perspective; presently it was little more than a fugitive
+blot, gliding swiftly in midstream. And then, it was gone entirely,
+engulfed by the obliterating darkness.
+
+
+[Illustration: The boat gathered impetus.]
+
+
+Somewhat wearily the young man released the railing and ascended the
+stairs. “And that is the end!” he told himself, struggling with an
+acute sense of personal injury. He had been hardly used. For a few
+hours his life had been lightened by the ineffable glamor of Romance;
+mystery and adventure had engaged him, exorcising for the time the
+Shade of Care; he had served a fair woman and been associated with men
+whose ways, however questionable, were the ways of courage, hedged
+thickly about with perils.
+
+All that was at an end. Prosaic and workaday to-morrows confronted him
+in endless and dreary perspective; and he felt again upon his shoulder
+the bony hand of his familiar, Care....
+
+He sighed: “Ah, well!”
+
+Disconsolate and aggrieved, he gained the street. He was miles from St.
+Pancras, foot-weary, to all intents and purposes lost.
+
+In this extremity, Chance smiled upon him. The cabby who, at his
+initial instance, had traveled this weary way from Quadrant Mews, after
+the manner of his kind, ere turning back, had sought surcease of
+fatigue at the nearest public; from afar Kirkwood saw the four-wheeler
+at the curb, and made all haste toward it.
+
+Entering the gin-mill he found the cabby, soothed him with bitter, and,
+instructing him for St. Pancras with all speed, dropped, limp and
+listless with fatigue, into the conveyance.
+
+As it moved, he closed his eyes; the face of Dorothy Calendar shone out
+from the blank wall of his consciousness, like an illuminated picture
+cast upon a screen. She smiled upon him, her head high, her eyes tender
+and trustful. And he thought that her scarlet lips were sweet with
+promise and her glance a-brim with such a light as he had never dreamed
+to know.
+
+And now that he knew it and desired it, it was too late; an hour gone
+he might, by a nod of his head, have cast his fortunes with hers for
+weal or woe. But now ... Alas and alackaday, that Romance was no more!
+
+
+
+
+VII
+DIVERSIONS OF A RUINED GENTLEMAN,—RESUMED
+
+
+From the commanding elevation of the box, “Three ’n’ six,” enunciated
+the cabby, his tone that of a man prepared for trouble, acquainted with
+trouble, inclined to give trouble a welcome. His bloodshot eyes blinked
+truculently at his alighted fare. “Three ’n’ six,” he iterated
+aggressively.
+
+An adjacent but theretofore abstracted policeman pricked up his ears
+and assumed an intelligent expression.
+
+“Bermondsey Ol’ Stairs to Sain’ Pancras,” argued the cabby assertively;
+“seven mile by th’ radius; three ’n’ six!”
+
+Kirkwood stood on the outer station platform, near the entrance to
+third-class waiting-rooms. Continuing to fumble through his pockets for
+an elusive sovereign purse, he looked up mildly at the man.
+
+“All right, cabby,” he said, with pacific purpose; “you’ll get your
+fare in half a shake.”
+
+“Three ’n’ six!” croaked the cabby, like a blowsy and vindictive
+parrot.
+
+The bobby strolled nearer.
+
+“Yes?” said Kirkwood, mildly diverted. “Why not sing it, cabby?”
+
+“Lor’ lumme!” The cabby exploded with indignation, continuing to give a
+lifelike imitation of a rumpled parrot. “I ’ad trouble enough wif you
+at Bermondsey Ol’ Stairs, hover that quid you promised, didn’t I? Sing
+it! My heye!”
+
+“Quid, cabby?” And then, remembering that he had promised the fellow a
+sovereign for fast driving from Quadrant Mews, Kirkwood grinned
+broadly, eyes twinkling; for Mulready must have fallen heir to that
+covenant. “But you got the sovereign? You got it, didn’t you, cabby?”
+
+The driver affirmed the fact with unnecessary heat and profanity and an
+amendment to the effect that he would have spoiled his fare’s
+sanguinary conk had the outcome been less satisfactory.
+
+The information proved so amusing that Kirkwood, chuckling, forbore to
+resent the manner of its delivery, and, abandoning until a more
+favorable time the chase of the coy sovereign purse, extracted from one
+trouser pocket half a handful of large English small change.
+
+“Three shillings, six-pence,” he counted the coins into the cabby’s
+grimy and bloated paw; and added quietly: “The exact distance is rather
+less than, four miles, my man; your fare, precisely two shillings. You
+may keep the extra eighteen pence, for being such a conscientious
+blackguard,—or talk it over with the officer here. Please yourself.”
+
+He nodded to the bobby, who, favorably impressed by the silk hat which
+Kirkwood, by diligent application of his sleeve during the cross-town
+ride, had managed to restore to a state somewhat approximating its
+erstwhile luster, smiled at the cabby a cold, hard smile. Whereupon the
+latter, smirking in unabashed triumph, spat on the pavement at
+Kirkwood’s feet, gathered up the reins, and wheeled out.
+
+“A ’ard lot, sir,” commented the policeman, jerking his helmeted head
+towards the vanishing four-wheeler.
+
+“Right you are,” agreed Kirkwood amiably, still tickled by the
+knowledge that Mulready had been obliged to pay three times over for
+the ride that ended in his utter discomfiture. Somehow, Kirkwood had
+conceived no liking whatever for the man; Calendar he could, at a
+pinch, tolerate for his sense of humor, but Mulready—! “A surly dog,”
+he thought him.
+
+Acknowledging the policeman’s salute and restoring two shillings and a
+few fat copper pennies to his pocket, he entered the vast and echoing
+train-shed. In the act, his attention was attracted and immediately
+riveted by the spectacle of a burly luggage navvy in a blue jumper in
+the act of making off with a large, folding sign-board, of which the
+surface was lettered expansively with the advice, in red against a
+white background:
+
+BOAT-TRAIN LEAVES ON TRACK 3
+
+
+Incredulous yet aghast the young man gave instant chase to the navvy,
+overhauling him with no great difficulty. For your horny-handed British
+working-man is apparently born with two golden aphorisms in his mouth:
+“Look before you leap,” and “Haste makes waste.” He looks continually,
+seldom, if ever, leaps, and never is prodigal of his leisure.
+
+Excitedly Kirkwood touched the man’s arm with a detaining hand.
+“Boat-train?” he gasped, pointing at the board.
+
+“Left ten minutes ago, thank you, sir.”
+
+“Wel-l, but...! Of course I can get another train at Tilbury?”
+
+“For yer boat? No, sir, thank you, sir. Won’t be another tryne till
+mornin’, sir.”
+
+“Oh-h!...”
+
+Aimlessly Kirkwood drifted away, his mind a blank.
+
+Sometime later he found himself on the steps outside the station,
+trying to stare out of countenance a glaring electric mineral-water
+advertisement on the farther side of the Euston Road.
+
+He was stranded....
+
+Beyond the spiked iron fence that enhedges the incurving drive, the
+roar of traffic, human, wheel and hoof, rose high for all the lateness
+of the hour: sidewalks groaning with the restless contact of hundreds
+of ill-shod feet; the roadway thundering—hansoms, four-wheelers,
+motor-cars, dwarfed coster-mongers’ donkey-carts and ponderous,
+rumbling, C.-P. motor-vans, struggling for place and progress. For St.
+Pancras never sleeps.
+
+The misty air swam luminous with the light of electric signs as with
+the radiance of some lurid and sinister moon. The voice of London
+sounded in Kirkwood’s ears, like the ominous purring of a somnolent
+brute beast, resting, gorged and satiated, ere rising again to devour.
+To devour—
+
+Stranded!...
+
+Distracted, he searched pocket after pocket, locating his watch, cigar-
+and cigarette-cases, match-box, penknife—all the minutiæ of
+pocket-hardware affected by civilized man; with old letters, a
+card-case, a square envelope containing his steamer ticket; but no
+sovereign purse. His small-change pocket held less than three
+shillings—two and eight, to be exact—and a brass key, which he failed
+to recognize as one of his belongings.
+
+And that was all. At sometime during the night he had lost (or been
+cunningly bereft of?) that little purse of chamois-skin containing the
+three golden sovereigns which he had been husbanding to pay his steamer
+expenses, and which, if only he had them now, would stand between him
+and starvation and a night in the streets.
+
+And, searching his heart, he found it brimming with gratitude to
+Mulready, for having relieved him of the necessity of settling with the
+cabby.
+
+“Vagabond?” said Kirkwood musingly. “Vagabond?” He repeated the word
+softly a number of times, to get the exact flavor of it, and found it
+little to his taste. And yet...
+
+He thrust both hands deep in his trouser pockets and stared
+purposelessly into space, twisting his eyebrows out of alignment and
+crookedly protruding his lower lip.
+
+If Brentwick were only in town—But he wasn’t, and wouldn’t be, within
+the week.
+
+“No good waiting here,” he concluded. Composing his face, he reëntered
+the station. There were his trunks, of course. He couldn’t leave them
+standing on the station platform for ever.
+
+He found the luggage-room and interviewed a mechanically courteous
+attendant, who, as the result of profound deliberation, advised him to
+try his luck at the lost-luggage room, across the station. He accepted
+the advice; it was a foregone conclusion that his effects had not been
+conveyed to the Tilbury dock; they could not have been loaded into the
+luggage van without his personal supervision. Still, anything was
+liable to happen when his unlucky star was in the ascendant.
+
+He found them in the lost-luggage room.
+
+A clerk helped him identify the articles and ultimately clucked with a
+perfunctory note: “Sixpence each, please.”
+
+“I—ah—pardon?”
+
+“Sixpence each, the fixed charge, sir. For every twenty-four hours or
+fraction thereof, sixpence per parcel.”
+
+“Oh, thank you so much,” said Kirkwood sweetly. “I will call
+to-morrow.”
+
+“Very good, sir. Thank you, sir.”
+
+“Five times sixpence is two-and-six,” Kirkwood computed, making his way
+hastily out of the station, lest a worse thing befall him. “No, bless
+your heart!—not while two and eight represents the sum total of my
+fortune.”
+
+He wandered out into the night; he could not linger round the station
+till dawn; and what profit to him if he did? Even were he to ransom his
+trunks, one can scarcely change one’s clothing in a public
+waiting-room.
+
+Somewhere in the distance a great clock chimed a single stroke,
+freighted sore with melancholy. It knelled the passing of the half-hour
+after midnight; a witching hour, when every public shuts up tight, and
+gentlemen in top-hats and evening dress are doomed to pace the pave
+till day (barring they have homes or visible means of support)—till
+day, when pawnshops open and such personal effects as watches and
+hammered silver cigar-cases may be hypothecated.
+
+Sable garments fluttering, Care fell into step with Philip Kirkwood;
+Care the inexorable slipped a skeleton arm through his and would not be
+denied; Care the jade clung affectionately to his side, refusing to be
+jilted.
+
+“Ah, you thought you would forget me?” chuckled the fleshless lips by
+his ear. “But no, my boy; I’m with you now, for ever and a day. ‘Misery
+loves company,’ and it wouldn’t be pretty of me to desert you in this
+extremity, would it? Come, let us beguile the hours till dawn with
+conversation. Here’s a sprightly subject: What are you going to do, Mr.
+Kirkwood? _What are you going to do?_”
+
+But Kirkwood merely shook a stubborn head and gazed straight before
+him, walking fast through ways he did not recognize, and pretending not
+to hear. None the less the sense of Care’s solicitous query struck like
+a pain into his consciousness. What was he to do?
+
+An hour passed.
+
+Denied the opportunity to satisfy its beast hunger and thirst, humanity
+goes off to its beds. In that hour London quieted wonderfully; the
+streets achieved an effect of deeper darkness, the skies, lowering,
+looked down with a blush less livid for the shamelessness of man; cab
+ranks lengthened; solitary footsteps added unto themselves loud,
+alarming, offensive echoes; policemen, strolling with lamps blazing on
+their breasts, became as lightships in a trackless sea; each new-found
+street unfolded its perspective like a canyon of mystery, and yet
+teeming with a hundred masked hazards; the air acquired a smell more
+clear and clean, an effect more volatile; and the night-mist thickened
+until it studded one’s attire with myriads of tiny buttons, bright as
+diamond dust.
+
+Through this long hour Kirkwood walked without a pause.
+
+Another clock, somewhere, clanged resonantly twice.
+
+The world was very still....
+
+And so, wandering foot-loose in a wilderness of ways, turning
+aimlessly, now right, now left, he found himself in a street he knew,
+yet seemed not to know: a silent, black street one brief block in
+length, walled with dead and lightless dwellings, haunted by his errant
+memory; a street whose atmosphere was heavy with impalpable essence of
+desuetude; in two words, Frognall Street.
+
+Kirkwood identified it with a start and a guilty tremor. He stopped
+stock-still, in an unreasoning state of semi-panic, arrested by a silly
+impulse to turn and fly; as if the bobby, whom he descried approaching
+him with measured stride, pausing now and again to try a door or flash
+his bull’s-eye down an area, were to be expected to identify the man
+responsible for that damnable racket raised ere midnight in vacant
+Number 9!
+
+Oddly enough, the shock of recognition brought him to his
+senses,—temporarily. He was even able to indulge himself in a quiet,
+sobering grin at his own folly. He passed the policeman with a nod and
+a cool word in response to the man’s good-natured, “Good-night, sir.”
+Number 9 was on the other side of the street; and he favored its blank
+and dreary elevation with a prolonged and frank stare—that profited him
+nothing, by the way. For a crazy notion popped incontinently into his
+head, and would not be cast forth.
+
+At the corner he swerved and crossed, still possessed of his devil of
+inspiration. It would be unfair to him to say that he did not struggle
+to resist it, for he did, because it was fairly and egregiously
+asinine; yet struggling, his feet trod the path to which it tempted
+him.
+
+“Why,” he expostulated feebly, “I might’s well turn back and beat that
+bobby over the head with my cane!...”
+
+But at the moment his hand was in his change pocket, feeling over that
+same brass door-key which earlier he had been unable to account for,
+and he was informing himself how very easy it would have been for the
+sovereign purse to have dropped from his waistcoat pocket while he was
+sliding on his ear down the dark staircase. To recover it meant, at the
+least, shelter for the night, followed by a decent, comfortable and
+sustaining morning meal. Fortified by both he could redeem his luggage,
+change to clothing more suitable for daylight traveling, pawn his
+valuables, and enter into negotiations with the steamship company for
+permission to exchange his passage, with a sum to boot, for
+transportation on another liner. A most feasible project! A temptation
+all but irresistible!
+
+But then—the risk.... Supposing (for the sake of argument) the
+customary night-watchman to have taken up a transient residence in
+Number 9; supposing the police to have entered with him and found the
+stunned man on the second floor: would the watchman not be vigilant for
+another nocturnal marauder? would not the police now, more than ever,
+be keeping a wary eye on that house of suspicious happenings?
+
+Decidedly, to reënter it would be to incur a deadly risk. And yet,
+undoubtedly, beyond question! his sovereign purse was waiting for him
+somewhere on the second flight of stairs; while as his means of
+clandestine entry lay warm in his fingers—the key to the dark entry,
+which he had by force of habit pocketed after locking the door.
+
+He came to the Hog-in-the-Pound. Its windows were dim with low-turned
+gas-lights. Down the covered alleyway, Quadrant Mews slept in a dusk
+but fitfully relieved by a lamp or two round which the friendly mist
+clung close and thick.
+
+There would be none to see....
+
+Skulking, throat swollen with fear, heart beating like a snare-drum,
+Kirkwood took his chance. Buttoning his overcoat collar up to his chin
+and cursing the fact that his hat must stand out like a chimney-pot on
+a detached house, he sped on tiptoe down the cobbled way and close
+beneath the house-walls of Quadrant Mews. But, half-way in, he stopped,
+confounded by an unforeseen difficulty. How was he to identify the
+narrow entry of Number 9, whose counterparts doubtless communicated
+with the mews from every residence on four sides of the city block?
+
+The low inner tenements were yet high enough to hide the rear
+elevations of Frognall Street houses, and the mist was heavy besides;
+otherwise he had made shift to locate Number 9 by ticking off the
+dwellings from the corner. If he went on, hit or miss, the odds were
+anything-you-please to one that he would blunder into the servant’s
+quarters of some inhabited house, and—be promptly and righteously sat
+upon by the service-staff, while the bobby was summoned.
+
+Be that as it might—he almost lost his head when he realized
+this—escape was already cut off by the way he had come. Some one, or,
+rather, some two men were entering the alley. He could hear the
+tramping and shuffle of clumsy feet, and voices that muttered
+indistinctly. One seemed to trip over something, and cursed. The other
+laughed; the voices grew more loud. They were coming his way. He dared
+no longer vacillate.
+
+But—which passage should he choose?
+
+He moved on with more haste than discretion. One heel slipped on a
+cobble time-worn to glassy smoothness; he lurched, caught himself up in
+time to save a fall, lost his hat, recovered it, and was discovered. A
+voice, maudlin with drink, hailed and called upon him to stand and give
+an account of himself, “like a goo’ feller.” Another tempted him with
+offers of drink and sociable confabulation. He yielded not; adamantine
+to the seductive lure, he picked up his heels and ran. Those behind
+him, remarking with resentment the amazing fact that an intimate of the
+mews should run away from liquor, cursed and made after him, veering,
+staggering, howling like ravening animals.
+
+For all their burden of intoxication, they knew the ground by instinct
+and from long association. They gained on him. Across the way a
+window-sash went up with a bang, and a woman screamed. Through the only
+other entrance to the mews a belated cab was homing; its driver,
+getting wind of the unusual, pulled up, blocking the way, and added his
+advice to the uproar.
+
+Caught thus between two fires, and with his persecutors hard upon him,
+Kirkwood dived into the nearest black hole of a passageway and in sheer
+desperation flung himself, key in hand, against the door at the end.
+Mark how his luck served him who had forsworn her! He found a keyhole
+and inserted the key. It turned. So did the knob. The door gave inward.
+He fell in with it, slammed it, shot the bolts, and, panting, leaned
+against its panels, in a pit of everlasting night but—saved!—for the
+time being, at all events.
+
+Outside somebody brushed against one wall, cannoned to the other,
+brought up with a crash against the door, and, perforce at a
+standstill, swore from his heart.
+
+“Gorblimy!” he declared feelingly. “I’d ’a’ took my oath I sore’m run
+in ’ere!” And then, in answer to an inaudible question: “No, ’e ain’t.
+Gorn an’ let the fool go to ’ell. ’Oo wants ’im to share goo’ liker?
+Not I!...”
+
+Joining his companion he departed, leaving behind him a trail of
+sulphur-tainted air. The mews quieted gradually. Indoors Kirkwood faced
+unhappily the enigma of fortuity, wondering: Was this by any
+possibility Number 9? The key had fitted; the bolts had been drawn on
+the inside; and while the key had been one of ordinary pattern and
+would no doubt have proven effectual with any one of a hundred common
+locks, the finger of probability seemed to indicate that his luck had
+brought him back to Number 9. In spite of all this, he was sensible of
+little confidence; though this were truly Number 9, his freedom still
+lay on the knees of the gods, his very life, belike, was poised,
+tottering, on a pinnacle of chance. In the end, taking heart of
+desperation, he stooped and removed his shoes; a precaution which later
+appealed to his sense of the ridiculous, in view of the racket he had
+raised in entering, but which at the moment seemed most natural and in
+accordance with common sense. Then rising, he held his breath, staring
+and listening. About him the pitch darkness was punctuated with fading
+points of fire, and in his ears was a noise of strange whisperings,
+very creepy—until, gritting his teeth, he controlled his nerves and
+gradually realized that he was alone, the silence undisturbed. He went
+forward gingerly, feeling his way like a blind man on strange ground.
+Ere long he stumbled over a door-sill and found that the walls of the
+passage had fallen away; he had entered a room, a black cavern of
+indeterminate dimensions. Across this he struck at random, walked
+himself flat against a wall, felt his way along to an open door, and
+passed through to another apartment as dark as the first.
+
+Here, endeavoring to make a circuit of the walls, he succeeded in
+throwing himself bodily across a bed, which creaked horribly; and for a
+full minute lay as he had fallen, scarce daring to think. But nothing
+followed, and he got up and found a shut door which let him into yet a
+third room, wherein he barked both shins on a chair; and escaped to a
+fourth whose atmosphere was highly flavored with reluctant odors of
+bygone cookery, stale water and damp plumbing—probably the kitchen.
+Thence progressing over complaining floors through what may have been
+the servants’ hall, a large room with a table in the middle and a
+number of promiscuous chairs (witness his tortured shins!), he finally
+blundered into the basement hallway.
+
+By now a little calmer, he felt assured that this was really Number 9,
+Frognall Street, and a little happier about it all, though not even
+momentarily forgetful of the potential police and night-watchman.
+
+However, he mounted the steps to the ground floor without adventure and
+found himself at last in the same dim and ghostly hall which he had
+entered some six hours before; the mockery of dusk admitted by the
+fan-light was just strong enough to enable him to identify the general
+lay of the land and arrangement of furniture.
+
+More confidently with each uncontested step, he continued his quest.
+Elation was stirring his spirit when he gained the first floor and
+moved toward the foot of the second flight, approaching the spot
+whereat he was to begin the search for the missing purse. The knowledge
+that he lacked means of obtaining illumination deterred him nothing; he
+had some hope of finding matches in one of the adjacent rooms, but,
+failing that, was prepared to ascend the stairs on all fours, feeling
+every inch of their surface, if it took hours. Ever an optimistic soul,
+instinctively inclined to father faith with a hope, he felt supremely
+confident that his search would not prove fruitless, that he would win
+early release from his temporary straits.
+
+And thus it fell out that, at the instant he was thinking it time to
+begin to crawl and hunt, his stockinged feet came into contact with
+something heavy, yielding, warm—something that moved, moaned, and
+caused his hair to bristle and his flesh to creep.
+
+We will make allowances for him; all along he had gone on the
+assumption that his antagonist of the dark stairway would have
+recovered and made off with all expedition, in the course of ten or
+twenty minutes, at most, from the time of his accident. To find him
+still there was something entirely outside of Kirkwood’s reckoning: he
+would as soon have thought to encounter say, Calendar,—would have
+preferred the latter, indeed. But this fellow whose disability was due
+to his own interference, who was reasonably to be counted upon to raise
+the very deuce and all of a row!
+
+The initial shock, however shattering to his equanimity, soon, lost
+effect. The man evidently remained unconscious, in fact had barely
+moved; while the moan that Kirkwood heard, had been distressingly
+faint.
+
+“Poor devil!” murmured the young man. “He must be in a pretty bad way,
+for sure!” He knelt, compassion gentling his heart, and put one hand to
+the insentient face. A warm sweat moistened his fingers; his palm was
+fanned by steady respiration.
+
+Immeasurably perplexed, the American rose, slipped on his shoes and
+buttoned them, thinking hard the while. What ought he to do? Obviously
+flight suggested itself,—incontinent flight, anticipating the man’s
+recovery. On the other hand, indubitably the latter had sustained such
+injury that consciousness, when it came to him, would hardly be
+reinforced by much aggressive power. Moreover, it was to be remembered
+that the one was in that house with quite as much warrant as the other,
+unless Kirkwood had drawn a rash inference from the incident of the
+ragged sentry. The two of them were mutual, if antagonistic,
+trespassers; neither would dare bring about the arrest of the other.
+And then—and this was not the least consideration to influence
+Kirkwood—perhaps the fellow would die if he got no attention.
+
+Kirkwood shut his teeth grimly. “I’m no assassin,” he informed himself,
+“to strike and run. If I’ve maimed this poor devil and there are
+consequences, I’ll stand ’em. The Lord knows it doesn’t matter a damn
+to anybody, not even to me, what happens to me; while _he_ may be
+valuable.”
+
+Light upon the subject, actual as well as figurative, seemed to be the
+first essential; his mind composed, Kirkwood set himself in search of
+it. The floor he was on, however, afforded him no assistance; the
+mantels were guiltless of candles and he discovered no matches, either
+in the wide and silent drawing-room, with its ghastly furniture, like
+mummies in their linen swathings, or in the small boudoir at the back.
+He was to look either above or below, it seemed.
+
+After some momentary hesitation, he went up-stairs, his ascent marked
+by a single and grateful accident; half-way to the top he trod on an
+object that clinked underfoot, and, stooping, retrieved the lost purse.
+Thus was he justified of his temerity; the day was saved—that is,
+to-morrow was.
+
+The rooms of the second-floor were bedchambers, broad, deep, stately,
+inhabited by seven devils of loneliness. In one, on a dresser, Kirkwood
+found a stump of candle in a china candlestick; the two charred ends of
+matches at its base were only an irritating discovery, however—evidence
+that real matches had been the mode in Number 9, at some remote date.
+Disgusted and oppressed by cumulative inquisitiveness, he took the
+candle-end back to the hall; he would have given much for the time and
+means to make a more detailed investigation into the secret of the
+house.
+
+Perhaps it was mostly his hope of chancing on some clue to the mystery
+of Dorothy Calender—bewitching riddle that she was!—that fascinated his
+imagination so completely. Aside from her altogether, the great house
+that stood untenanted, yet in such complete order, so self-contained in
+its darkened quiet, intrigued him equally with the train of
+inexplicable events that had brought him within its walls. Now—since
+his latest entrance—his vision had adjusted itself to cope with the
+obscurity to some extent; and the street lights, meagerly reflected
+through the windows from the bosom of a sullen pall of cloud, low-swung
+above the city, had helped him to piece together many a detail of
+decoration and furnishing, alike somber and richly dignified. Kirkwood
+told himself that the owner, whoever he might be, was a man of wealth
+and taste inherited from another age; he had found little of
+meretricious to-day in the dwelling, much that was solid and sedate and
+homely, and—Victorian.... He could have wished for more; a box of early
+Victorian vestas had been highly acceptable.
+
+Making his way down-stairs to the stricken man—who was quite as he had
+been—Kirkwood bent over and thrust rifling fingers into his pockets,
+regardless of the wretched sense of guilt and sneakishness imparted by
+the action, stubbornly heedless of the possibility of the man’s
+awakening to find himself being searched and robbed.
+
+In the last place he sought, which should (he realized) have been the
+first, to wit, the fob pocket of the white waistcoat, he found a small
+gold matchbox, packed tight with wax vestas; and, berating himself for
+crass stupidity—he had saved a deal of time and trouble by thinking of
+this before—lighted the candle.
+
+As its golden flame shot up with scarce a tremor, preyed upon by a
+perfectly excusable concern, he bent to examine the man’s
+countenance.... The arm which had partly hidden it had fallen back into
+a natural position. It was a young face that gleamed pallid in the
+candlelight—a face unlined, a little vapid and insignificant, with
+features regular and neat, betraying few characteristics other than the
+purely negative attributes of a character as yet unformed, possibly
+unformable; much the sort of a face that he might have expected to see,
+remembering those thin and pouting lips that before had impressed him.
+Its owner was probably little more than twenty. In his attire there was
+a suspicion of a fop’s preciseness, aside from its accidental disarray;
+the cut of his waistcoat was the extreme of the then fashion, the white
+tie (twisted beneath one ear) an exaggerated “butterfly,” his collar
+nearly an inch too tall; and he was shod with pumps suitable only for
+the dancing-floor,—a whim of the young-bloods of London of that year.
+
+“I can’t make him out at all!” declared Kirkwood. “The son of a
+gentleman too weak to believe that cubs need licking into shape? Reared
+to man’s estate, so sheltered from the wicked world that he never grew
+a bark?... The sort that never had a quarrel in his life, ’cept with
+his tailor?... Now what the devil is _this_ thing doing in this
+midnight mischief?... Damn!”
+
+It was most exasperating, the incongruity of the boy’s appearance
+assorted with his double rôle of persecutor of distressed damsels and
+nocturnal house-breaker!
+
+Kirkwood bent closer above the motionless head, with puzzled eyes
+striving to pin down some elusive resemblance that he thought to trace
+in those vacuous features—a resemblance to some one he had seen, or
+known, at some past time, somewhere, somehow.
+
+“I give it up. Guess I’m mistaken. Anyhow, five young Englishmen out of
+every ten of his class are just as blond and foolish. Now let’s see how
+bad he’s hurt.”
+
+With hands strong and gentle, he turned the round, light head. Then,
+“Ah!” he commented in the accent of comprehension. For there was an
+angry looking bump at the base of the skull; and, the skin having been
+broken, possibly in collision with the sharp-edged newel-post, a little
+blood had stained and matted the straw-colored hair.
+
+Kirkwood let the head down and took thought. Recalling a bath-room on
+the floor above, thither he went, unselfishly forgetful of his
+predicament if discovered, and, turning on the water, sopped his
+handkerchief until it dripped. Then, returning, he took the boy’s head
+on his knees, washed the wound, purloined another handkerchief (of
+silk, with a giddy border) from the other’s pocket, and of this
+manufactured a rude but serviceable bandage.
+
+Toward the conclusion of his attentions, the sufferer began to show
+signs of returning animation. He stirred restlessly, whimpered a
+little, and sighed. And Kirkwood, in consternation, got up.
+
+“So!” he commented ruefully. “I guess I am an ass, all right—taking all
+that trouble for you, my friend. If I’ve got a grain of sense left,
+this is my cue to leave you alone in your glory.”
+
+He was lingering only to restore to the boy’s pockets such articles as
+he had removed in the search for matches,—the match-box, a few silver
+coins, a bulky sovereign purse, a handsome, plain gold watch, and so
+forth. But ere he concluded he was aware that the boy was conscious,
+that his eyes, open and blinking in the candlelight, were upon him.
+
+They were blue eyes, blue and shallow as a doll’s, and edged with long,
+fine lashes. Intelligence, of a certain degree, was rapidly informing
+them. Kirkwood returned their questioning glance, transfixed in
+indecision, his primal impulse to cut-and-run for it was gone; he had
+nothing to fear from this child who could not prevent his going
+whenever he chose to go; while by remaining he might perchance worm
+from him something about the girl.
+
+“You’re feeling better?” He was almost surprised to hear his own voice
+put the query.
+
+“I—I think so. Ow, my head!... I say, you chap, whoever you are, what’s
+happened?... I want to get up.” The boy added peevishly: “Help a
+fellow, can’t you?”
+
+“You’ve had a nasty fall,” Kirkwood observed evenly, passing an arm
+beneath the boy’s shoulder and helping him to a sitting position. “Do
+you remember?”
+
+The other snuffled childishly and scrubbed across the floor to rest his
+back against the wall.
+
+“Why-y ... I remember fallin’; and then ... I woke up and it was all
+dark and my head achin’ fit to split. I presume I went to sleep again
+... I say, what’re you, doing here?”
+
+Instead of replying, Kirkwood lifted a warning finger.
+
+“Hush!” he said tensely, alarmed by noises in the street. “You don’t
+suppose—?”
+
+He had been conscious of a carriage rolling up from the corner, as well
+as that it had drawn up (presumably) before a near-by dwelling. Now the
+rattle of a key in the hall-door was startlingly audible. Before he
+could move, the door itself opened with a slam.
+
+Kirkwood moved toward the stair-head, and drew back with a cry of
+disgust. “Too late!” he told himself bitterly; his escape was cut off.
+He could run up-stairs and hide, of course, but the boy would inform
+against him and....
+
+He buttoned up his coat, settled his hat on his head, and moved near
+the candle, where it rested on the floor. One glimpse would suffice to
+show him the force of the intruders, and one move of his foot put out
+the light; then—_perhaps_—he might be able to rush them.
+
+Below, a brief pause had followed the noise of the door, as if those
+entering were standing, irresolute, undecided which way to turn; but
+abruptly enough the glimmer of candlelight must have been noticed.
+Kirkwood heard a hushed exclamation, a quick clatter of high heels on
+the parquetry, pattering feet on the stairs, all but drowned by swish
+and ripple of silken skirts; and a woman stood at the head of the
+flight—to the American an apparition profoundly amazing as she paused,
+the light from the floor casting odd, theatric shadows beneath her eyes
+and over her brows, edging her eyes themselves with brilliant light
+beneath their dark lashes, showing her lips straight and drawn, and
+shimmering upon the spangles of an evening gown, visible beneath the
+dark cloak which had fallen back from her white, beautiful shoulders.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+MADAME L’INTRIGANTE
+
+
+“Mrs. Hallam!” cried Kirkwood, beneath his breath.
+
+The woman ignored his existence. Moving swiftly forward, she dropped on
+both knees by the side of the boy, and caught up one of his hands,
+clasping it passionately in her own.
+
+“Fred!” she cried, a curious break in her tone. “My little Freddie! Oh,
+what has happened, dearie?”
+
+“Oh, hello, Mamma,” grunted that young man, submitting listlessly to
+her caresses and betraying no overwhelming surprise at her appearance
+there. Indeed he seemed more concerned as to what Kirkwood, an older
+man, would be thinking, to see him so endeared and fondled, than moved
+by any other emotion. Kirkwood could see his shamefaced, sidelong
+glances; and despised him properly for them.
+
+But without attending to his response, Mrs. Hallam rattled on in the
+uneven accents of excitement. “I waited until I couldn’t wait any
+longer, Freddie dear. I had to know—had to come. Eccles came home about
+nine and said that you had told him to wait outside, that some one had
+followed you in here, and that a bobby had told him to move on. I
+didn’t know what—”
+
+“What’s o’clock now?” her son interrupted.
+
+“It’s about three, I think ... Have you hurt yourself, dear? Oh, why
+_didn’t_ you come home? You must’ve known I was dying of anxiety!”
+
+“Oh, I say! Can’t you see I’m hurt? ’Had a nasty fall and must’ve been
+asleep ever since.”
+
+“My precious one! How—?”
+
+“Can’t say, hardly ... I say, don’t paw a chap so, Mamma ... I brought
+Eccles along and told him to wait because—well, because I didn’t feel
+so much like shuttin’ myself up in this beastly old tomb. So I left the
+door ajar, and told him not to let anybody come in. Then I came
+up-stairs. There must’ve been somebody already in the house; I know I
+_thought_ there was. It made me feel creepy, rather. At any rate, I
+heard voices down below, and the door banged, and somebody began
+hammerin’ like fun on the knocker.”
+
+The boy paused, rolling an embarrassed eye up at the stranger.
+
+“Yes, yes, dear!” Mrs. Hallam urged him on.
+
+“Why, I—I made up my mind to cut my stick—let whoever it was pass me on
+the stairs, you know. But he followed me and struck me, and then I
+jumped at him, and we both fell down the whole flight. And that’s all.
+Besides, my head’s achin’ like everything.”
+
+“But this man—?”
+
+Mrs. Hallam looked up at Kirkwood, who bowed silently, struggling to
+hide both his amusement and perplexity. More than ever, now, the case
+presented a front inscrutable to his wits; try as he might, he failed
+to fit an explanation to any incident in which he had figured, while
+this last development—that his antagonist of the dark stairway had been
+Mrs. Hallam’s son!—seemed the most astounding of all, baffling
+elucidation completely.
+
+He had abandoned all thought of flight and escape. It was too late; in
+the brisk idiom of his mother-tongue, he was “caught with the goods
+on.” “May as well face the music,” he counseled himself, in
+resignation. From what he had seen and surmised of Mrs. Hallam, he
+shrewdly suspected that the tune would prove an exceedingly lively one;
+she seemed a woman of imagination, originality, and an able-bodied
+temper.
+
+“_You_, Mr. Kirkwood!”
+
+Again he bowed, grinning awry.
+
+She rose suddenly. “You will be good enough to explain your presence
+here,” she informed him with dangerous serenity.
+
+“To be frank with you—”
+
+“I advise that course, Mr. Kirkwood.”
+
+“Thanks, awf’ly.... I came here, half an hour ago, looking for a lost
+purse full—well, not _quite_ full of sovereigns. It was my purse, by
+the way.”
+
+Suspicion glinted like foxfire in the cold green eyes beneath her
+puckered brows. “I do not understand,” she said slowly and in level
+tones.
+
+“I didn’t expect you to,” returned Kirkwood; “no more do I.... But,
+anyway, it must be clear to you that I’ve done my best for this
+gentleman here.” He paused with an interrogative lift of his eyebrows.
+
+“‘This gentleman’ is my son, Frederick Hallam.... But you will
+explain—”
+
+“Pardon me, Mrs. Hallam; I shall explain nothing, at present. Permit me
+to point out that your position here—like mine—is, to say the least,
+anomalous.” The random stroke told, as he could tell by the instant
+contraction of her eyes of a cat. “It would be best to defer
+explanations till a more convenient time—don’t you think? Then, if you
+like, we can chant confidences in an antiphonal chorus. Just now
+your—er—son is not enjoying himself apparently, and ... the attention
+of the police had best not be called to this house too often in one
+night.”
+
+His levity seemed to displease and perturb the woman; she turned from
+him with an impatient movement of her shoulders.
+
+“Freddie, dear, do you feel able to walk?”
+
+“Eh? Oh, I dare say—I don’t know. Wonder would your friend—ah—Mr.
+Kirkwood, lend me an arm?”
+
+“Charmed,” Kirkwood declared suavely. “If you’ll take the candle, Mrs.
+Hallam—”
+
+He helped the boy to his feet and, while the latter hung upon him and
+complained querulously, stood waiting for the woman to lead the way
+with the light; something which, however, she seemed in no haste to do.
+The pause at length puzzled Kirkwood, and he turned, to find Mrs.
+Hallam holding the candlestick and regarding him steadily, with much
+the same expression of furtive mistrust as that with which she had
+favored him on her own door-stoop.
+
+
+[Illustration: He helped the boy to his feet, and stood waiting.]
+
+
+“One moment,” she interposed in confusion; “I won’t keep you
+waiting...;” and, passing with an averted face, ran quickly up-stairs
+to the second floor, taking the light with her. Its glow faded from the
+walls above and Kirkwood surmised that she had entered the front
+bedchamber. For some moments he could hear her moving about; once,
+something scraped and bumped on the floor, as if a heavy bit of
+furniture had been moved; again there was a resounding thud that defied
+speculation; and this was presently followed by a dull clang of metal.
+
+His fugitive speculations afforded him little enlightenment; and,
+meantime, young Hallam, leaning partly against the wall and quite
+heavily on Kirkwood’s arm, filled his ears with puerile oaths and
+lamentations; so that, but for the excuse of his really severe
+shaking-up, Kirkwood had been strongly tempted to take the youngster by
+the shoulders and kick him heartily, for the health of his soul.
+
+But eventually—it was not really long—there came the quick rush of Mrs.
+Hallam’s feet along the upper hall, and the woman reappeared, one hand
+holding her skirts clear of her pretty feet as she descended in a rush
+that caused the candle’s flame to flicker perilously.
+
+Half-way down, “Mr. Kirkwood!” she called tempestuously.
+
+“Didn’t you find it?” he countered blandly.
+
+She stopped jerkily at the bottom, and, after a moment of confusion.
+“Find what, sir?” she asked.
+
+“What you sought, Mrs. Hallam.”
+
+Smiling, he bore unflinching the prolonged inspection of her eyes, at
+once somber with doubt of him and flashing with indignation because of
+his impudence.
+
+“You knew I wouldn’t find it, then!... Didn’t you?”
+
+“I may have suspected you wouldn’t.”
+
+Now he was sure that she had been searching for the gladstone bag.
+That, evidently, was the bone of contention. Calendar had sent his
+daughter for it, Mrs. Hallam her son; Dorothy had been successful ...
+But, on the other hand, Calendar and Mrs. Hallam were unquestionably
+allies. Why, then—?
+
+“Where is it, Mr. Kirkwood?”
+
+“Madam, have you the right to know?”
+
+Through another lengthening pause, while they faced each other, he
+marked again the curious contraction of her under lip.
+
+“I have the right,” she declared steadily. “Where is it?”
+
+“How can I be sure?”
+
+“Then you don’t know—!”
+
+“Indeed,” he interrupted, “I would be glad to feel that I ought to tell
+you what I know.”
+
+“What you know!”
+
+The exclamation, low-spoken, more an echo of her thoughts than intended
+for Kirkwood, was accompanied by a little shake of the woman’s head,
+mute evidence to the fact that she was bewildered by his finesse. And
+this delighted the young man beyond measure, making him feel himself
+master of a difficult situation. Mysteries had been woven before his
+eyes so persistently, of late, that it was a real pleasure to be able
+to do a little mystifying on his own account. By adopting this reticent
+and non-committal attitude, he was forcing the hand of a woman old
+enough to be his mother and most evidently a past-mistress in the art
+of misleading. All of which seemed very fascinating to the amateur in
+adventure.
+
+The woman would have led again, but young Hallam cut in, none too
+courteously.
+
+“I say, Mamma, it’s no good standing here, palaverin’ like a lot of
+flats. Besides, I’m awf’ly knocked up. Let’s get home and have it out
+there.”
+
+Instantly his mother softened. “My poor boy!... Of course we’ll go.”
+
+Without further demur she swept past and down the stairway before
+them—slowly, for their progress was of necessity slow, and the light
+most needed. Once they were in the main hall, however, she extinguished
+the candle, placed it on a side table, and passed out through the door.
+
+It had been left open, as before; and Kirkwood was not at all surprised
+to see a man waiting on the threshold,—the versatile Eccles, if he
+erred not. He had little chance to identify him, as it happened, for at
+a word from Mrs. Hallam the man bowed and, following her across the
+sidewalk, opened the door of a four-wheeler which, with lamps alight
+and liveried driver on the box, had been waiting at the carriage-block.
+
+As they passed out, Kirkwood shut the door; and at the same moment the
+little party was brought up standing by a gruff and authoritative
+summons.
+
+“Just a minute, please, you there!”
+
+“Aha!” said Kirkwood to himself. “I thought so.” And he halted, in
+unfeigned respect for the burly and impressive figure, garbed in blue
+and brass, helmeted and truncheoned, bull’s-eye shining on breast like
+the Law’s unblinking and sleepless eye, barring the way to the
+carriage.
+
+Mrs. Hallam showed less deference for the obstructionist. The assumed
+hauteur and impatience of her pose was artfully reflected in her voice
+as she rounded upon the bobby, with an indignant demand: “What is the
+meaning of this, officer?”
+
+“Precisely what I wants to know, ma’am,” returned the man, unyielding
+beneath his respectful attitude. “I’m obliged to ask you to tell me
+what you were doing in that ’ouse.... And what’s the matter with this
+’ere gentleman?” he added, with a dubious stare at young Hallam’s
+bandaged head and rumpled clothing.
+
+“Perhaps you don’t understand,” admitted Mrs. Hallam sweetly. “Of
+course—I see—it’s perfectly natural. The house has been shut up for
+some time and—”
+
+“Thank you, ma’am; that’s just it. There was something wrong going on
+early in the evening, and I was told to keep an eye on the premises.
+It’s duty, ma’am; I’ve got my report to make.”
+
+“The house,” said Mrs. Hallam, with the long-suffering patience of one
+elucidating a perfectly plain proposition to a being of a lower order
+of intelligence, “is the property of my son, Arthur Frederick Burgoyne
+Hallam, of Cornwall. This is—”
+
+“Beg pardon, ma’am, but I was told Colonel George Burgoyne, of
+Cornwall—”
+
+“Colonel Burgoyne died some time ago. My son is his heir. This is my
+son. He came to the house this evening to get some property he desired,
+and—it seems—tripped on the stairs and fell unconscious. I became
+worried about him and drove over, accompanied by my friend, Mr.
+Kirkwood.”
+
+The policeman looked his troubled state of mind, and wagged a doubtful
+head over the case. There was his duty, and there was, opposed to it,
+the fact that all three were garbed in the livery of the well-to-do.
+
+At length, turning to the driver, he demanded, received, and noted in
+his memorandum-book, the license number of the equipage.
+
+“It’s a very unusual case, ma’am,” he apologized; “I hopes you won’t
+’old it against me. I’m only trying to do my duty—”
+
+“And safeguard our property. You are perfectly justified, officer.”
+
+“Thank you, ma’am. And would you mind giving me your cards, please, all
+of you?”
+
+“Certainly not.” Without hesitation the woman took a little hand-bag
+from the seat of the carriage and produced a card; her son likewise
+found his case and handed the officer an oblong slip.
+
+“I’ve no cards with me,” the American told the policeman; “my name,
+however, is Philip Kirkwood, and I’m staying at the Pless.”
+
+“Very good, sir; thank you.” The man penciled the information in his
+little book. “Thank you, ma’am, and Mr. Hallam, sir. Sorry to have
+detained you. Good morning.”
+
+Kirkwood helped young Hallam into the carriage, gave Mrs. Hallam his
+hand, and followed her. The man Eccles shut the door, mounting the box
+beside the driver. Immediately they were in motion.
+
+The American got a final glimpse of the bobby, standing in front of
+Number 9, Frognall Street, and watching them with an air of profound
+uncertainty. He had Kirkwood’s sympathy, therein; but he had little
+time to feel with him, for Mrs. Hallam turned upon him very suddenly.
+
+“Mr. Kirkwood, will you be good enough to tell me who and what you
+are?”
+
+The young man smiled his homely, candid smile. “I’ll be only too glad,
+Mrs. Hallam, when I feel sure you’ll do as much for yourself.”
+
+She gave him no answer; it, was as if she were choosing words. Kirkwood
+braced himself to meet the storm; but none ensued. There was rather a
+lull, which strung itself out indefinitely, to the monotonous music of
+hoofs and rubber tires.
+
+Young Hallam was resting his empty blond head against the cushions, and
+had closed his eyes. He seemed to doze; but, as the carriage rolled
+past the frequent street-lights, Kirkwood could see that the eyes of
+Mrs. Hallam were steadily directed to his face.
+
+His outward composure was tempered by some amusement, by more
+admiration; the woman’s eyes were very handsome, even when hardest and
+most cold. It was not easy to conceive of her as being the mother of a
+son so immaturely mature. Why, she must have been at least thirty-eight
+or -nine! One wondered; she did not look it....
+
+The carriage stopped before a house with lighted windows. Eccles jumped
+down from the box and scurried to open the front door. The radiance of
+a hall-lamp was streaming out into the misty night when he returned to
+release his employers.
+
+They were returned to Craven Street! “One more lap round the track!”
+mused Kirkwood. “Wonder will the next take me back to Bermondsey Old
+Stairs.”
+
+At Mrs. Hallam’s direction, Eccles ushered him into the smoking-room,
+on the ground floor in the rear of the dwelling, there to wait while
+she helped her son up-stairs and to bed. He sighed with pleasure at
+first glimpse of its luxurious but informal comforts, and threw himself
+carelessly into a heavily padded lounging-chair, dropping one knee over
+the other and lighting the last of his expensive cigars, with a
+sensation of undiluted gratitude; as one coming to rest in the shadow
+of a great rock in a weary land.
+
+Over his shoulder a home-like illumination was cast by an electric
+reading-lamp shaded with red silk. At his feet brass fire-dogs winked
+sleepily in the fluttering blaze of a well-tended stove. The walls were
+hung with deep red, the doors and divans upholstered in the same
+restful shade. In one corner an old clock ticked soberly. The
+atmosphere would have proved a potent invitation to reverie, if not to
+sleep—he was very sleepy—but for the confusion in the house.
+
+In its chambers, through the halls, on the stairs, there were hurryings
+and scurryings of feet and skirts, confused with murmuring voices.
+Presently, in an adjoining room, Philip Kirkwood heard a maid-servant
+wrestling hopefully with that most exasperating of modern time-saving
+devices, the telephone as countenanced by our English cousins. Her
+patience and determination won his approval, but availed nothing for
+her purpose; in the outcome the telephone triumphed and the maid gave
+up the unequal contest.
+
+Later, a butler entered the room; a short and sturdy fellow, extremely
+ill at ease. Drawing a small taboret to the side of Kirkwood’s chair,
+he placed thereon a tray, deferentially imparting the information that
+“Missis ’Allam ’ad thought ’ow as Mister Kirkwood might care for a bit
+of supper.”
+
+“Please thank Mrs. Hallam for me.” Kirkwood’s gratified eyes ranged the
+laden tray. There were sandwiches, biscuit, cheese, and a pot of black
+coffee, with sugar and cream. “It was very kindly thought of,” he
+added.
+
+“Very good, sir, thank you, sir.”
+
+The man turned to go, shuffling soundlessly. Kirkwood was suddenly
+impressed with his evasiveness; ever since he had entered the room, his
+countenance had seemed turned from the guest.
+
+“Eccles!” he called sharply, at a venture.
+
+The butler halted, thunderstruck. “Ye-es, s-sir?”
+
+
+[Illustration: Eccles]
+
+
+“Turn round, Eccles; I want a look at you.”
+
+Eccles faced him unwillingly, with a stolid front but shifty eyes.
+Kirkwood glanced him up and down, grinning.
+
+“Thank you, Eccles; I’ll remember you now. You’ll remember me, too,
+won’t you? You’re a bad actor, aren’t you, Eccles?”
+
+“Yes, sir; thank you, sir,” mumbled the man unhappily; and took instant
+advantage of the implied permission to go.
+
+Intensely diverted by the recollection of Eccles’ abortive attempt to
+stop him at the door of Number 9, and wondering—now that he came to
+think of it—why, precisely, young Hallam had deemed it necessary to
+travel with a body-guard and adopt such furtive methods to enter into
+as well as to obtain what was asserted to be his own property, Kirkwood
+turned active attention to the lunch.
+
+Thoughtfully he poured himself a cup of coffee, swallowing it hot and
+black as it came from the silver pot; then munched the sandwiches.
+
+It _was_ kindly thought of, this early morning repast; Mrs. Hallam
+seemed more and more a remarkable woman with each phase of her
+character that she chose to disclose. At odds with him, she yet took
+time to think of his creature needs!
+
+What could be her motive,—not in feeding him, but in involving her name
+and fortune in an affair so strangely flavored?... This opened up a
+desert waste of barren speculation. “What’s anybody’s motive, who
+figures in this thundering dime-novel?” demanded the American, almost
+contemptuously. And—for the hundredth time—gave it up; the day should
+declare it, if so hap he lived to see that day: a distant one, he made
+no doubt. The only clear fact in his befogged and bemused mentality was
+that he was at once “broke” and in this business up to his ears. Well,
+he’d see it through; he’d nothing better to do, and—there was the girl:
+
+Dorothy, whose eyes and lips he had but to close his own eyes to see
+again as vividly as though she stood before him; Dorothy, whose
+unspoiled sweetness stood out in vivid relief against this moil and
+toil of conspiracy, like a star of evening shining clear in a stormy
+sky.
+
+“Poetic simile: I’m going fast,” conceded Kirkwood; but he did not
+smile. It was becoming quite too serious a matter for laughter. For her
+sake, he was in the game “for keeps”; especially in view of the fact
+that everything—his own heart’s inclination included—seemed to conspire
+to keep him in it. Of course he hoped for nothing in return; a pauper
+who turns squire-of-dames with matrimonial intent is open to the
+designation, “penniless adventurer.” No; whatever service he might be
+to the girl would be ample recompense to him for his labors. And
+afterwards, he’d go his way in peace; she’d soon forget him—if she
+hadn’t already. Women (he propounded gravely) are queer: there’s no
+telling anything about them!
+
+One of the most unreadable specimens of the sex on which he pronounced
+this highly original dictum, entered the room just then; and he found
+himself at once out of his chair and his dream, bowing.
+
+“Mrs. Hallam.”
+
+The woman nodded and smiled graciously. “Eccles has attended to your
+needs, I hope? Please don’t stop smoking.” She sank into an arm-chair
+on the other side of the hearth and, probably by accident, out of the
+radius of illumination from the lamp; sitting sidewise, one knee above
+the other, her white arms immaculate against the somber background of
+shadowed crimson.
+
+She was very handsome indeed, just then; though a keener light might
+have proved less flattering.
+
+“Now, Mr. Kirkwood?” she opened briskly, with a second intimate and
+friendly nod; and paused, her pose receptive.
+
+Kirkwood sat down again, smiling good-natured appreciation of her
+unprejudiced attitude.
+
+“Your son, Mrs. Hallam—?”
+
+“Oh, Freddie’s doing well enough.... Freddie,” she explained, “has a
+delicate constitution and has seen little of the world. Such melodrama
+as to-night’s is apt to shock him severely. We must make allowances,
+Mr. Kirkwood.”
+
+Kirkwood grinned again, a trace unsympathetically; he was unable to
+simulate any enthusiasm on the subject of poor Freddie, whom he had
+sized up with passable acumen as a spoiled and coddled child completely
+under the thumb of an extremely clever mother.
+
+“Yes,” he responded vaguely; “he’ll be quite fit after a night’s sleep,
+I dare say.”
+
+The woman was watching him keenly, beneath her lowered lashes. “I
+think,” she said deliberately, “that it is time we came to an
+understanding.”
+
+Kirkwood agreed—“Yes?” affably.
+
+“I purpose being perfectly straightforward. To begin with, I don’t
+place you, Mr. Kirkwood. You are an unknown quantity, a new factor.
+Won’t you please tell me what you are and.... Are you a friend of Mr.
+Calendar’s?”
+
+“I think I may lay claim to that honor, though”—to Kirkwood’s way of
+seeing things some little frankness on his own part would be essential
+if they were to get on—“I hardly know him, Mrs. Hallam. I had the
+pleasure of meeting him only this afternoon.”
+
+She knitted her brows over this statement.
+
+“That, I assure you, is the truth,” he laughed.
+
+“But ... I really don’t understand.”
+
+“Nor I, Mrs. Hallam. Calendar aside, I am Philip Kirkwood, American,
+resident abroad for some years, a native of San Francisco, of a certain
+age, unmarried, by profession a poor painter.”
+
+“And—?”
+
+“Beyond that? I presume I must tell you, though I confess I’m in
+doubt....” He hesitated, weighing candor in the balance with
+discretion.
+
+“But who are you for? Are you in George Calendar’s pay?”
+
+“Heaven forfend!”—piously. “My sole interest at the present moment is
+to unravel a most entrancing mystery—”
+
+“Entitled ‘Dorothy Calendar’! Of course. You’ve known her long?”
+
+“Eight hours, I believe,” he admitted gravely; “less than that, in
+fact.”
+
+“Miss Calendar’s interests will not suffer through anything you may
+tell me.”
+
+“Whether they will or no, I see I must swing a looser tongue, or you’ll
+be showing me the door.”
+
+The woman shook her head, amused, “Not until,” she told him
+significantly.
+
+“Very well, then.” And he launched into an abridged narrative of the
+night’s events, as he understood them, touching lightly on his own
+circumstances, the real poverty which had brought him back to Craven
+Street by way of Frognall. “And there you have it all, Mrs. Hallam.”
+
+She sat in silent musing. Now and again he caught the glint of her eyes
+and knew that he was being appraised with such trained acumen as only
+long knowledge of men can give to women. He wondered if he were found
+wanting.... Her dark head bended, elbow on knee, chin resting lightly
+in the cradle of her slender, parted fingers, the woman thought
+profoundly, her reverie ending with a brief, curt laugh, musical and
+mirthless as the sound of breaking glass.
+
+“It is so like Calendar!” she exclaimed: “so like him that one sees how
+foolish it was to trust—no, not to trust, but to believe that he could
+ever be thrown off the scent, once he got nose to ground. So, if we
+suffer, my son and I, I shall have only myself to thank!”
+
+Kirkwood waited in patient attention till she chose to continue. When
+she did “Now for my side of the case!” cried Mrs. Hallam; and rising,
+began to pace the room, her slender and rounded figure swaying
+gracefully, the while she talked.
+
+“George Calendar is a scoundrel,” she said: “a swindler, gambler,—what
+I believe you Americans call a confidence-man. He is also my late
+husband’s first cousin. Some years since he found it convenient to
+leave England, likewise his wife and daughter. Mrs. Calendar, a
+country-woman of yours, by the bye, died shortly afterwards. Dorothy,
+by the merest accident, obtained a situation as private secretary in
+the household of the late Colonel Burgoyne, of The Cliffs, Cornwall.
+You follow me?”
+
+“Yes, perfectly.”
+
+“Colonel Burgoyne died, leaving his estates to my son, some time ago.
+Shortly afterwards Dorothy Calendar disappeared. We know now that her
+father took her away, but then the disappearance seemed inexplicable,
+especially since with her vanished a great deal of valuable
+information. She alone knew of the location of certain of the old
+colonel’s personal effects.”
+
+“He was an eccentric. One of his peculiarities involved the secreting
+of valuables in odd places; he had no faith in banks. Among these
+valuables were the Burgoyne family jewels—quite a treasure, believe me,
+Mr. Kirkwood. We found no note of them among the colonel’s papers, and
+without Dorothy were powerless to pursue a search for them. We
+advertised and employed detectives, with no result. It seems that
+father and daughter were at Monte Carlo at the time.”
+
+“Beautifully circumstantial, my dear lady,” commented Kirkwood—to his
+inner consciousness. Outwardly he maintained consistently a pose of
+impassive gullibility.
+
+“This afternoon, for the first time, we received news of the Calendars.
+Calendar himself called upon me, to beg a loan. I explained our
+difficulty and he promised that Dorothy should send us the information
+by the morning’s post. When I insisted, he agreed to bring it himself,
+after dinner, this evening.... I make it quite clear?” she interrupted,
+a little anxious.
+
+“Quite clear, I assure you,” he assented encouragingly.
+
+“Strangely enough, he had not been gone ten minutes when my son came in
+from a conference with our solicitors, informing me that at last a
+memorandum had turned up, indicating that the heirlooms would be found
+in a safe secreted behind a dresser in Colonel Burgoyne’s bedroom.”
+
+“At Number 9, Frognall Street.”
+
+“Yes.... I proposed going there at once, but it was late and we were
+dining at the Pless with an acquaintance, a Mr. Mulready, whom I now
+recall as a former intimate of George Calendar. To our surprise we saw
+Calendar and his daughter at a table not far from ours. Mr. Mulready
+betrayed some agitation at the sight of Calendar, and told me that
+Scotland Yard had a man out with a warrant for Calendar’s arrest, on
+old charges. For old sake’s sake, Mr. Mulready begged me to give
+Calendar a word of warning. I did so—foolishly, it seems: Calendar was
+at that moment planning to rob us, Mulready aiding and abetting him.”
+
+The woman paused before Kirkwood, looking down upon him. “And so,” she
+concluded, “we have been tricked and swindled. I can scarcely believe
+it of Dorothy Calendar.”
+
+“I, for one, don’t believe it.” Kirkwood spoke quietly, rising.
+“Whatever the culpability of Calendar and Mulready, Dorothy was only
+their hoodwinked tool.”
+
+“But, Mr. Kirkwood, she must have known the jewels were not hers.”
+
+“Yes,” he assented passively, but wholly unconvinced.
+
+“And what,” she demanded with a gesture of exasperation, “what would
+you advise?”
+
+“Scotland Yard,” he told her bluntly.
+
+“But it’s a family secret! It must not appear in the papers. Don’t you
+understand—George Calendar is my husband’s cousin!”
+
+“I can think of nothing else, unless you pursue them in person.”
+
+“But—whither?”
+
+“That remains to be discovered; I can tell you nothing more than I
+have.... May I thank you for your hospitality, express my regrets that
+I should unwittingly have been made the agent of this disaster, and
+wish you good night—or, rather, good morning, Mrs. Hallam?”
+
+For a moment she held him under a calculating glance which he withstood
+with graceless fortitude. Then, realizing that he was determined not by
+any means to be won to her cause, she gave him her hand, with a
+commonplace wish that he might find his affairs in better order than
+seemed probable; and rang for Eccles.
+
+The butler showed him out.
+
+He took away with him two strong impressions; the one visual, of a
+strikingly handsome woman in a wonderful gown, standing under the red
+glow of a reading-lamp, in an attitude of intense mental concentration,
+her expression plainly indicative of a train of thought not guiltless
+of vindictiveness; the other, more mental but as real, he presently
+voiced to the huge bronze lions brooding over desolate Trafalgar
+Square.
+
+“Well,” appreciated Mr. Kirkwood with gusto, “_she’s_ got Ananias and
+Sapphira talked to a standstill, all right!” He ruminated over this for
+a moment. “Calendar can lie some, too; but hardly with her picturesque
+touch.... Uncommon ingenious, _I_ call it. All the same, there were
+only about a dozen bits of tiling that didn’t fit into her mosaic a
+little bit.... I think they’re all tarred with the same stick—all but
+the girl. And there’s something afoot a long sight more devilish and
+crafty than that shilling-shocker of madam’s.... Dorothy Calendar’s got
+about as much active part in it as I have. I’m only from California,
+but they’ve got to show me, before I’ll believe a word against her.
+Those infernal scoundrels!...Somebody’s got to be on the girl’s side
+and I seem to have drawn the lucky straw.... Good Heavens! is it
+possible for a grown man to fall heels over head in love in two short
+hours? I don’t believe it. It’s just interest—nothing more.... And I’ll
+have to have a change of clothes before I can do anything further.”
+
+He bowed gratefully to the lions, in view of their tolerant interest in
+his soliloquy, and set off very suddenly round the square and up St.
+Martin’s Lane, striking across town as directly as might be for St.
+Pancras Station. It would undoubtedly be a long walk, but cabs were
+prohibited by his straitened means, and the busses were all abed and
+wouldn’t be astir for hours.
+
+He strode along rapidly, finding his way more through intuition than by
+observation or familiarity with London’s geography—indeed, was scarce
+aware of his surroundings; for his brain was big with fine imagery,
+rapt in a glowing dream of knighterrantry and chivalric deeds.
+
+Thus is it ever and alway with those who in the purity of young hearts
+rush in where angels fear to tread; if these, Kirkwood and his ilk, be
+fools, thank God for them, for with such foolishness is life savored
+and made sweet and sound! To Kirkwood the warp of the world and the
+woof of it was Romance, and it wrapped him round, a magic mantle to set
+him apart from all things mean and sordid and render him impregnable
+and invisible to the haunting Shade of Care.
+
+Which, by the same token, presently lost track of him entirely, and
+wandered off to find and bedevil some other poor devil. And Kirkwood,
+his eyes like his spirit elevated, saw that the clouds of night were
+breaking, the skies clearing, that the East pulsed ever more strongly
+with the dim golden promise of the day to come. And this he chose to
+take for an omen—prematurely, it may be.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+AGAIN “BELOW BRIDGE”; AND BEYOND
+
+
+Kirkwood wasted little time, who had not much to waste, were he to do
+that upon whose doing he had set his heart. It irked him sore to have
+to lose the invaluable moments demanded by certain imperative
+arrangements, but his haste was such that all was consummated within an
+hour.
+
+Within the period of a single hour, then, he had ransomed his luggage
+at St. Pancras, caused it to be loaded upon a four-wheeler and
+transferred to a neighboring hotel of evil flavor but moderate tariff,
+where he engaged a room for a week, ordered an immediate breakfast, and
+retired with his belongings to his room; he had shaved and changed his
+clothes, selecting a serviceable suit of heavy tweeds, stout shoes, a
+fore-and-aft cap and a negligée shirt of a deep shade calculated at
+least to seem clean for a long time; finally, he had devoured his bacon
+and eggs, gulped down his coffee and burned his mouth, and, armed with
+a stout stick, set off hotfoot in the still dim glimmering of early
+day.
+
+By this time his cash capital had dwindled to the sum of two pounds,
+ten shillings, eight-pence, and would have been much less had he paid
+for his lodging in advance. But he considered his trunks ample security
+for the bill, and dared not wait the hour when shopkeepers begin to
+take down shutters and it becomes possible to realize upon one’s
+jewelry. Besides which, he had never before been called upon to
+consider the advisability of raising money by pledging personal
+property, and was in considerable doubt as to the right course of
+procedure in such emergency.
+
+At King’s Cross Station on the Underground an acute disappointment
+awaited him; there, likewise, he learned something about London. A
+sympathetic bobby informed him that no trains would be running until
+after five-thirty, and that, furthermore, no busses would begin to ply
+until half after seven.
+
+“It’s tramp it or cab it, then,” mused the young man mournfully, his
+longing gaze seeking a nearby cab-rank—just then occupied by a solitary
+hansom, driver somnolent on the box. “Officer,” he again addressed the
+policeman, mindful of the English axiom: “When in doubt, ask a
+bobby.”—“Officer, when’s high-tide this morning?”
+
+The bobby produced a well-worn pocket-almanac, moistened a massive
+thumb, and rippled the pages.
+
+“London Bridge, ’igh tide twenty minutes arfter six, sir,” he announced
+with a glow of satisfaction wholly pardonable in one who combines the
+functions of perambulating almanac, guide-book, encyclopedia, and
+conserver of the peace.
+
+Kirkwood said something beneath his breath—a word in itself a
+comfortable mouthful and wholesome and emphatic. He glanced again at
+the cab and groaned: “O Lord, I just dassent!” With which, thanking the
+bureau of information, he set off at a quick step down Grey’s Inn Road.
+
+The day had closed down in brilliance upon the city—and the voice of
+the milkman was to be heard in the land—when he trudged, still briskly
+if a trifle wearily, into Holborn, and held on eastward across the
+Viaduct and down Newgate Street; the while addling his weary wits with
+heart-sickening computations of minutes, all going hopelessly to prove
+that he would be late, far too late even presupposing the unlikely. The
+unlikely, be it known, was that the _Alethea_ would not attempt to sail
+before the turn of the tide.
+
+For this was his mission, to find the _Alethea_ before she sailed.
+Incredible as it may appear, at five o’clock, or maybe earlier, on the
+morning of the twenty-second of April, 1906, A.D., Philip Kirkwood,
+normally a commonplace but likable young American in full possession of
+his senses, might have been seen (and by some was seen) plodding
+manfully through Cheapside, London, England, engaged upon a quest as
+mad, forlorn, and gallant as any whose chronicle ever inspired the pen
+of a Malory or a Froissart. In brief he proposed to lend his arm and
+courage to be the shield and buckler of one who might or might not be a
+damsel in distress; according as to whether Mrs. Hallam had spoken
+soothly of Dorothy Calendar, or Kirkwood’s own admirable faith in the
+girl were justified of itself.
+
+Proceeding upon the working hypothesis that Mrs. Hallam was a polished
+liar in most respects, but had told the truth, so far as concerned her
+statement to the effect that the gladstone bag contained valuable real
+property (whose ownership remained a moot question, though Kirkwood was
+definitely committed to the belief that it was none of Mrs. Hallam’s or
+her son’s): he reasoned that the two adventurers, with Dorothy and
+their booty, would attempt to leave London by a water route, in the
+ship, _Alethea_, whose name had fallen from their lips at Bermondsey
+Old Stairs.
+
+Kirkwood’s initial task, then, would be to find the needle in the
+haystack—the metaphor is poor: more properly, to sort out from the
+hundreds of vessels, of all descriptions, at anchor in midstream,
+moored to the wharves of ’long-shore warehouses, or in the gigantic
+docks that line the Thames, that one called _Alethea_; of which he was
+so deeply mired in ignorance that he could not say whether she were
+tramp-steamer, coastwise passenger boat, one of the liners that ply
+between Tilbury and all the world, Channel ferry-boat, private yacht
+(steam or sail), schooner, four-master, square-rigger, barque or
+brigantine.
+
+A task to stagger the optimism of any but one equipped with the sublime
+impudence of Youth! Even Kirkwood was disturbed by some little awe when
+he contemplated the vast proportions of his undertaking. None the less
+doggedly he plugged ahead, and tried to keep his mind from vain
+surmises as to what would be his portion when eventually he should find
+himself a passenger, uninvited and unwelcome, upon the _Alethea_....
+
+London had turned over once or twice, and was pulling the bedclothes
+over its head and grumbling about getting up, but the city was still
+sound asleep when at length he paused for a minute’s rest in front of
+the Mansion House, and realized with a pang of despair that he was
+completely tuckered out. There was a dull, vague throbbing in his head;
+weights pressed upon his eyeballs until they ached; his mouth was hot
+and tasted of yesterday’s tobacco; his feet were numb and heavy; his
+joints were stiff; he yawned frequently.
+
+With a sigh he surrendered to the flesh’s frailty. An early cabby,
+cruising up from Cannon Street station on the off-chance of finding
+some one astir in the city, aside from the doves and sparrows, suffered
+the surprise of his life when Kirkwood hailed him. His face was blank
+with amazement when he reined in, and his eyes bulged when the
+prospective fare, on impulse, explained his urgent needs. Happily he
+turned out a fair representative of his class, an intelligent and
+unfuddled cabby.
+
+“Jump in, sir,” he told Kirkwood cheerfully, as soon as he had
+assimilated the latter’s demands. “I knows precisely wotcher wants.
+Leave it all to me.”
+
+The admonition was all but superfluous; Kirkwood was unable, for the
+time being, to do aught else than resign his fate into another’s
+guidance. Once in the cab he slipped insensibly into a nap, and slept
+soundly on, as reckless of the cab’s swift pace and continuous jouncing
+as of the sunlight glaring full in his tired young face.
+
+He may have slept twenty minutes; he awoke faint with drowsiness,
+tingling from head to toe from fatigue, and in distress of a queer
+qualm in the pit of his stomach, to find the hansom at rest and the
+driver on the step, shaking his fare with kindly determination. “Oh, a’
+right,” he assented surlily, and by sheer force of will made himself
+climb out to the sidewalk; where, having rubbed his eyes, stretched
+enormously and yawned discourteously in the face of the East End, he
+was once more himself and a hundred times refreshed into the bargain.
+Contentedly he counted three shillings into the cabby’s palm—the fare
+named being one-and-six.
+
+“The shilling over and above the tip’s for finding me the waterman and
+boat,” he stipulated.
+
+“Right-o. You’ll mind the ’orse a minute, sir?”
+
+Kirkwood nodded. The man touched his hat and disappeared inexplicably.
+Kirkwood, needlessly attaching himself to the reins near the animal’s
+head, pried his sense of observation open and became alive to the fact
+that he stood in a quarter of London as strange to him as had been
+Bermondsey Wall.
+
+To this day he can not put a name to it; he surmises that it was
+Wapping.
+
+Ramshackle tenements with sharp gable roofs lined either side of the
+way. Frowsy women draped themselves over the window-sills. Pallid and
+wasted parodies on childhood contested the middle of the street with
+great, slow drays, drawn by enormous horses. On the sidewalks twin
+streams of masculine humanity flowed without rest, both bound in the
+same direction: dock laborers going to their day’s work. Men of every
+nationality known to the world (he thought) passed him in his short
+five-minute wait by the horse’s head; Britons, brown East Indians,
+blacks from Jamaica, swart Italians, Polaks, Russian Jews, wire-drawn
+Yankees, Spaniards, Portuguese, Greeks, even a Nubian or two: uniform
+in these things only, that their backs were bent with toil, bowed
+beyond mending, and their faces stamped with the blurred type-stamp of
+the dumb laboring brute. A strangely hideous procession, they shambled
+on, for the most part silent, all uncouth and unreal in the clear
+morning glow.
+
+The outlander was sensible of some relief when his cabby popped
+hurriedly out of the entrance to a tenement, a dull-visaged,
+broad-shouldered waterman ambling more slowly after.
+
+“Nevvy of mine, sir,” announced the cabby; “and a fust-ryte waterman;
+knows the river like a book, he do.”
+
+The nephew touched his forelock sheepishly.
+
+“Thank you,” said Kirkwood; and, turning to the man, “Your boat?” he
+asked with the brevity of weariness.
+
+“This wye, sir.”
+
+At his guide’s heels Kirkwood threaded the crowd and, entering the
+tenement, stumbled through a gloomy and unsavory passage, to come out
+at last upon a scanty, unrailed veranda overlooking the river. Ten feet
+below, perhaps, foul waters purred and eddied round the piles
+supporting the rear of the building. On one hand a ladder-like flight
+of rickety steps descended to a floating stage to which a heavy rowboat
+lay moored. In the latter a second waterman was seated bailing out
+bilge with a rusty can.
+
+“’Ere we are, sir,” said the cabman’s nephew, pausing at the head of
+the steps. “Now, where’s it to be?”
+
+The American explained tersely that he had a message to deliver a
+friend, who had shipped aboard a vessel known as the _Alethea_,
+scheduled to sail at floodtide; further than which deponent averred
+naught.
+
+The waterman scratched his head. “A ’ard job, sir; not knowin’ wot kind
+of a boat she are mykes it ’arder.” He waited hopefully.
+
+“Ten shillings,” volunteered Kirkwood promptly; “ten shillings if you
+get me aboard her before she weighs anchor; fifteen if I keep you out
+more than an hour, and still you put me aboard. After that we’ll make
+other terms.”
+
+The man promptly turned his back to hail his mate. “’Arf a quid, Bob,
+if we puts this gent aboard a wessel name o’ _Allytheer_ afore she
+syles at turn o’ tide.”
+
+In the boat the man with the bailing can turned up an impassive
+countenance. “Coom down,” he clenched the bargain; and set about
+shipping the sweeps.
+
+Kirkwood crept down the shaky ladder and deposited himself in the stern
+of the boat; the younger boatman settled himself on the midship thwart.
+
+“Ready?”
+
+“Ready,” assented old Bob from the bows. He cast off the painter,
+placed one sweep against the edge of the stage, and with a vigorous
+thrust pushed off; then took his seat.
+
+Bows swinging down-stream, the boat shot out from the shore.
+
+“How’s the tide?” demanded Kirkwood, his impatience growing.
+
+“On th’ turn, sir,” he was told.
+
+For a long moment broadside to the current, the boat responded to the
+sturdy pulling of the port sweeps. Another moment, and it was in full
+swing, the watermen bending lustily to their task. Under their
+unceasing urge, the broad-beamed, heavy craft, aided by the ebbing
+tide, surged more and more rapidly through the water; the banks, grim
+and unsightly with their towering, impassive warehouses broken by
+toppling wooden tenements, slipped swiftly up-stream. Ship after ship
+was passed, sailing vessels in the majority, swinging sluggishly at
+anchor, drifting slowly with the river, or made fast to the
+goods-stages of the shore; and in keen anxiety lest he should overlook
+the right one, Kirkwood searched their bows and sterns for names, which
+in more than one case proved hardly legible.
+
+The _Alethea_ was not of their number.
+
+In the course of some ten minutes, the watermen drove the boat sharply
+inshore, bringing her up alongside another floating stage, in the
+shadow of another tenement.—both so like those from which they had
+embarked that Kirkwood would have been unable to distinguish one from
+another.
+
+In the bows old Bob lifted up a stentorian voice, summoning one
+William.
+
+Recognizing that there was some design in this, the passenger subdued
+his disapproval of the delay, and sat quiet.
+
+In answer to the third ear-racking hail, a man, clothed simply in dirty
+shirt and disreputable trousers, showed himself in the doorway above,
+rubbing the sleep out of a red, bloated countenance with a mighty and
+grimy fist.
+
+“’Ello,” he said surlily. “Wot’s th’ row?”
+
+“’Oo,” interrogated old Bob, holding the boat steady by grasping the
+stage, “was th’ party wot engyged yer larst night, Bill?”
+
+“Party name o’ _Allytheer_,” growled the drowsy one. “W’y?”
+
+“Party ’ere’s lookin’ for ’im. Where’ll I find this _Allytheer?_”
+
+“Best look sharp ’r yer won’t find ’im,” retorted the one above. “’E
+_was_ at anchor off Bow Creek larst night.”
+
+Kirkwood’s heart leaped in hope. “What sort of a vessel was she?” he
+asked, half rising in his eagerness.
+
+“Brigantine, sir.”
+
+“_Thank—you!_” replied Kirkwood explosively, resuming his seat with
+uncalculated haste as old Bob, deaf to the amenities of social
+intercourse in an emergency involving as much as ten-bob, shoved off
+again.
+
+And again the boat was flying down in midstream, the leaden waters,
+shot with gold of the morning sun, parting sullenly beneath its bows.
+
+The air was still, heavy and tepid; the least exertion brought out
+beaded moisture on face and hands. In the east hung a turgid sky, dull
+with haze, through which the mounting sun swam like a plaque of brass;
+overhead it was clear and cloudless, but besmirched as if the polished
+mirror of the heavens had been fouled by the breath of departing night.
+
+On the right, ahead, Greenwich Naval College loomed up, the great
+gray-stone buildings beyond the embankment impressively dominating the
+scene, in happy relief against the wearisome monotony of the
+river-banks; it came abreast; and ebbed into the backwards of the
+scene.
+
+The watermen straining at the sweeps, the boat sped into Blackwall
+Reach, Bugsby Marshes a splash of lurid green to port, dreary Cubitt
+Town and the West India Docks to starboard. Here the river ran thick
+with shipping.
+
+“Are we near?” Kirkwood would know; and by way of reply had a grunt of
+the younger waterman.
+
+Again, “Will we make it?” he asked.
+
+The identical grunt answered him; he was free to interpret it as he
+would; young William—as old Bob named him—had no breath for idle words.
+Kirkwood subsided, controlling his impatience to the best of his
+ability; the men, he told himself again and again, were earning their
+pay, whether or not they gained the goal of his desire.... Their labors
+were titanic; on their temples and foreheads the knotted veins stood
+out like discolored whip-cord; their faces were the shade of raw beef,
+steaming with sweat; their eyes protruded with the strain that set
+their jaws like vises; their chests heaved and shrank like bellows;
+their backs curved, straightened, and bent again in rhythmic unison as
+tiring to the eye as the swinging of a pendulum.
+
+Hugging the marshy shore, they rounded the Blackwall Point. Young
+William looked to Kirkwood, caught his eye, and nodded.
+
+“Here?”
+
+Kirkwood rose, balancing himself against the leap and sway of the boat.
+
+“Sumwhere’s ... ’long ... o’ ’ere.”
+
+From right to left his eager glance swept the river’s widening reach.
+Vessels were there in abundance, odd, unwieldy, blunt-bowed craft with
+huge, rakish, tawny sails; long strings of flat barges, pyramidal
+mounds of coal on each, lashed to another and convoyed by panting tugs;
+steam cargo boats, battered, worn, rusted sore through their age-old
+paint; a steel leviathan of the deep seas, half cargo, half passenger
+boat, warping reluctantly into the mouth of the Victoria Dock tidal
+basin,—but no brigantine, no sailing vessel of any type.
+
+The young man’s lips checked a cry that was half a sob of bitter
+disappointment. He had entered into the spirit of the chase heart and
+soul, with an enthusiasm that was strange to him, when he came to look
+back upon the time; and to fail, even though failure had been
+discounted a hundredfold since the inception of his mad adventure,
+seemed hard, very hard.
+
+He sat down suddenly. “She’s gone!” he cried in a hollow gasp.
+
+The boatmen eased upon their oars, and old Bob stood up in the bows,
+scanning the river-scape with keen eyes shielded by a level palm. Young
+William drooped forward suddenly, head upon knees, and breathed
+convulsively. The boat drifted listlessly with the current.
+
+Old Bob panted: “‘Dawn’t—see—nawthin’—o’ ’er.” He resumed his seat.
+
+“There’s no hope, I suppose?”
+
+The elder waterman shook his head. “‘Carn’t sye.... Might be round—nex’
+bend—might be—passin’ Purfleet.... ’Point is—me an’ young Wilyum
+’ere—carn’t do no more—’n we ’as. We be wore out.”
+
+“Yes,” Kirkwood assented, disconsolate, “You’ve certainly earned your
+pay.” Then hope revived; he was very young in heart, you know. “Can’t
+you suggest something? I’ve _got_ to catch that ship!”
+
+Old Bob wagged his head in slow negation; young William lifted his.
+
+“There’s a rylewye runs by Woolwich,” he ventured. “Yer might tyke
+tryne an’ go to Sheerness, sir. Yer’d be positive o’ passin’ ’er if she
+didn’t syle afore ’igh-tide. ’Ire a boat at Sheerness an’ put out an’
+look for ’er.”
+
+“How far’s Woolwich?” Kirkwood demanded instantly.
+
+“Mile,” said the elder man. “Tyke yer for five-bob extry.”
+
+“Done!”
+
+Young William dashed the sweat from his eyes, wiped his palms on his
+hips, and fitted the sweeps again to the wooden tholes. Old Bob was as
+ready. With an inarticulate cry they gave way.
+
+
+
+
+X
+DESPERATE MEASURES
+
+
+Old Bob seemed something inclined toward optimism, when the boat lay
+alongside a landing-stage at Woolwich, and Kirkwood had clambered
+ashore.
+
+“Yer’ll mebbe myke it,” the waterman told him with a weatherwise survey
+of the skies. “Wind’s freshenin’ from the east’rds, an’ that’ll ’old
+’er back a bit, sir.”
+
+“Arsk th’ wye to th’ Dorkyard Styshun,” young William volunteered.
+“’Tis th’ shortest walk, sir. I ’opes yer catches ’er.... Thanky, sir.”
+
+He caught dextrously the sovereign which Kirkwood, in ungrudging
+liberality, spared them of his store of two. The American nodded
+acknowledgments and adieux, with a faded smile deprecating his chances
+of winning the race, sorely handicapped as he was. He was very, very
+tired, and in his heart suspected that he would fail. But, if he did,
+he would at least be able to comfort himself that it was not for lack
+of trying. He set his teeth on that covenant, in grim determination;
+either there was a strain of the bulldog latent in the Kirkwood breed
+or else his infatuation gripped him more strongly than he guessed.
+
+Yet he suspected something of its power; he knew that this was
+altogether an insane proceeding, and that the lure that led him on was
+Dorothy Calendar. A strange dull light glowed in his weary eyes, on the
+thought of her. He’d go through fire and water in her service. She was
+costing him dear, perhaps was to cost him dearer still; and perhaps
+there’d be for his guerdon no more than a “Thank you, Mr. Kirkwood!” at
+the end of the passage. But that would be no less than his deserts; he
+was not to forget that he was interfering unwarrantably; the girl was
+in her father’s hands, surely safe enough there—to the casual mind. If
+her partnership in her parent’s fortunes were distasteful, she endured
+it passively, without complaint.
+
+He decided that it was his duty to remind himself, from time to time,
+that his main interest must be in the game itself, in the solution of
+the riddle; whatever should befall, he must look for no reward for his
+gratuitous and self-appointed part. Indeed he was all but successful in
+persuading himself that it was the fascination of adventure alone that
+drew him on.
+
+Whatever the lure, it was inexorable; instead of doing as a sensible
+person would have done—returning to London for a long rest in his hotel
+room, ere striving to retrieve his shattered fortunes—Philip Kirkwood
+turned up the village street, intent only to find the railway station
+and catch the first available train for Sheerness, were that an early
+one or a late.
+
+A hapchance native whom he presently encountered, furnished minute
+directions for reaching the Dockyard Station of the Southeastern and
+Chatham Rail-way, adding comfortable information to the effect that the
+next east-bound train would pass through in ten minutes; if Kirkwood
+would mend his pace he could make it easily, with time to spare.
+
+Kirkwood mended his pace accordingly, but, contrary to the prediction,
+had no time to spare at all. Even as he stormed the ticket-grating, the
+train was thundering in at the platform. Therefore a nervous ticket
+agent passed him out a first-class ticket instead of the third-class he
+had asked for; and there was no time wherein to have the mistake
+rectified. Kirkwood planked down the fare, swore, and sprinted for the
+carriages.
+
+The first compartment whose door he jerked violently open, proved to be
+occupied, and was, moreover, not a smoking-car. He received a fleeting
+impression of a woman’s startled eyes, staring into his own through a
+thin mesh of veiling, fell off the running-board, slammed the door, and
+hurled himself to-wards the next compartment. Here happier fortune
+attended upon his desire; the box-like section was untenanted, and a
+notice blown upon the window-glass announced that it was “2nd Class
+Smoking.” Kirkwood promptly tumbled in; and when he turned to shut the
+door the coaches were moving.
+
+A pipe helped him to bear up while the train was making its two other
+stops in the Borough of Woolwich: a circumstance so maddening to a man
+in a hurry, that it set Kirkwood’s teeth on edge with sheer impatience,
+and made him long fervently for the land of his birth, where they do
+things differently—where the Board of Directors of a railway company
+doesn’t erect three substantial passenger depôts in the course of a
+mile and a half of overgrown village. It consoled him little that none
+disputed with him his lonely possession of the compartment, that he
+_had_ caught the Sheerness train, or that he was really losing no time;
+a sense of deep dejection had settled down upon his consciousness, with
+a realization of how completely a fool’s errand was this of his. He
+felt foredoomed to failure; he was never to see Dorothy Calendar again;
+and his brain seemed numb with disappointment.
+
+Rattling and swaying, the train left the town behind.
+
+Presently he put aside his pipe and stared blankly out at a reeling
+landscape, the pleasant, homely, smiling countryside of Kent. A deeper
+melancholy tinted his mind: Dorothy Calendar was for ever lost to him.
+
+The trucks drummed it out persistently—he thought, vindictively:
+“_Lost!... Lost!... For ever lost!..._”
+
+And he had made—was then making—a damned fool of himself. The trucks
+had no need to din _that_ into his thick skull by their ceaseless
+iteration; he knew it, would not deny it....
+
+And it was all his own fault. He’d had his chance, Calendar had offered
+him it. If only he had closed with the fat adventurer!...
+
+Before his eyes field and coppice, hedge and homestead, stream and
+flowing highway, all blurred and ran streakily into one another, like a
+highly impressionistic water-color. He could make neither head nor tail
+of the flying views, and so far as coherent thought was concerned, he
+could not put two ideas together. Without understanding distinctly, he
+presently did a more wise and wholesome thing: which was to topple
+limply over on the cushions and fall fast asleep.
+
+
+After a long time he seemed to realize rather hazily that the
+carriage-door had been opened to admit somebody. Its smart closing
+_bang_ shocked him awake. He sat up, blinking in confusion, hardly
+conscious of more, to begin with, than that the train had paused and
+was again in full flight. Then, his senses clearing, he became aware
+that his solitary companion, just entered, was a woman. She was seated
+over across from him, her back to the engine, in an attitude which
+somehow suggested a highly nonchalant frame of mind. She laughed, and
+immediately her speaking voice was high and sweet in his hearing.
+
+“Really, you know, Mr. Kirkwood, I simply couldn’t contain my
+impatience another instant.”
+
+Kirkwood gasped and tried to re-collect his wits.
+
+“Beg pardon—I’ve been asleep,” he said stupidly.
+
+“Yes. I’m sorry to have disturbed you, but, you know, you must make
+allowances for a woman’s nerves.”
+
+Beneath his breath the bewildered man said: “The deuce!” and above it,
+in a stupefied tone: “Mrs. Hallam!”
+
+She nodded in a not unfriendly fashion, smiling brightly. “Myself, Mr.
+Kirkwood! Really, our predestined paths are badly tangled, just now;
+aren’t they? Were you surprised to find me in here, with you? Come now,
+confess you were!”
+
+He remarked the smooth, girlish freshness of her cheeks, the sense and
+humor of her mouth, the veiled gleam of excitement in her eyes of the
+changing sea; and saw, as well, that she was dressed for traveling,
+sensibly but with an air, and had brought a small hand-bag with her.
+
+“Surprised and delighted,” he replied, recovering, with mendacity so
+intentional and obvious that the woman laughed aloud.
+
+“I knew you’d be!... You see, I had the carriage ahead, the one you
+didn’t take. I was so disappointed when you flung up to the door and
+away again! You didn’t see me hanging half out the window, to watch
+where you went, did you? That’s how I discovered that your discourtesy
+was unintentional, that you hadn’t recognized me,—by the fact that you
+took this compartment, right behind my own.”
+
+She paused invitingly, but Kirkwood, grown wary, contented himself with
+picking up his pipe and carefully knocking out the dottle on the
+window-ledge.
+
+“I was glad to see _you_,” she affirmed; “but only partly because you
+were you, Mr. Kirkwood. The other and major part was because sight of
+you confirmed my own secret intuition. You see, I’m quite old enough
+and wise enough to question even my own intuitions.”
+
+“A woman wise enough for that is an adult prodigy,” he ventured
+cautiously.
+
+“It’s experience and age. I insist upon the age; I the mother of a
+grown-up boy! So I deliberately ran after you, changing when we stopped
+at Newington. You might’ve escaped me if I had waited until We got to
+Queensborough.”
+
+Again she paused in open expectancy. Kirkwood, perplexed, put the pipe
+in his pocket, and assumed a factitious look of resignation, regarding
+her askance with that whimsical twist of his eyebrows.
+
+“For you are going to Queensborough, aren’t you, Mr. Kirkwood?”
+
+“Queensborough?” he echoed blankly; and, in fact, he was at a loss to
+follow her drift. “No, Mrs. Hallam; I’m not bound there.”
+
+Her surprise was apparent; she made no effort to conceal it. “But,” she
+faltered, “if not there—”
+
+“’Give you my word, Mrs. Hallam, I have no intention whatever of going
+to Queensborough,” Kirkwood protested.
+
+“I don’t understand.” The nervous drumming of a patent-leather covered
+toe, visible beneath the hem of her dress, alone betrayed a rising tide
+of impatience. “Then my intuition _was_ at fault!”
+
+“In this instance, if it was at all concerned with my insignificant
+affairs, yes—most decidedly at fault.”
+
+She shook her head, regarding him with grave suspicion. “I hardly know:
+whether to believe you. I think....”
+
+Kirkwood’s countenance displayed an added shade of red. After a moment,
+“I mean no discourtesy,” he began stiffly, “but—”
+
+“But you don’t care a farthing whether I believe you or not?”
+
+He caught her laughing eye, and smiled, the flush subsiding.
+
+“Very well, then! Now let us see: Where _are_ you bound?”
+
+Kirkwood looked out of the window.
+
+“I’m convinced it’s a rendezvous...?”
+
+Kirkwood smiled patiently at the landscape.
+
+“Is Dorothy Calendar so very, very beautiful, Mr. Kirkwood?”—with a
+trace of malice.
+
+Ostentatiously Kirkwood read the South Eastern and Chatham’s framed
+card of warning, posted just above Mrs. Hallam’s head, to all such
+incurable lunatics as are possessed of a desire to travel on the
+running-boards of railway carriages.
+
+“You are going to meet her, aren’t you?”
+
+He gracefully concealed a yawn.
+
+The woman’s plan of attack took another form. “Last night, when you
+told me your story, I believed you.”
+
+He devoted himself to suppressing the temptingly obvious retort, and
+succeeded; but though he left it unspoken, the humor of it twitched the
+corners of his mouth; and Mrs. Hallam was observant. So that her next
+attempt to draw him out was edged with temper.
+
+“I believed you an American but a gentleman; it appears that, if you
+ever were the latter, you’ve fallen so low that you willingly cast your
+lot with thieves.”
+
+Having exhausted his repertoire of rudenesses, Kirkwood took to
+twiddling his thumbs.
+
+“I want to ask you if you think it fair to me or my son, to leave us in
+ignorance of the place where you are to meet the thieves who stole
+our—my son’s jewels?”
+
+“Mrs. Hallam,” he said soberly, “if I am going to meet Mr. Calendar or
+Mr. Mulready, I have no assurance of that fact.”
+
+There was only the briefest of pauses, during which she analyzed this;
+then, quickly, “But you hope to?” she snapped.
+
+He felt that the only adequate retort to this would be a shrug of his
+shoulders; doubted his ability to carry one off; and again took refuge
+in silence.
+
+The woman abandoned a second plan of siege, with a readiness that did
+credit to her knowledge of mankind. She thought out the next very
+carefully, before opening with a masked battery.
+
+“Mr. Kirkwood, can’t we be friends—this aside?”
+
+“Nothing could please me more, Mrs. Hallam!”
+
+“I’m sorry if I’ve annoyed you—”
+
+“And I, too, have been rude.”
+
+“Last night, when you cut away so suddenly, you prevented my making you
+a proposal, a sort of a business proposition....”
+
+“Yes—?”
+
+“To come over to our side—”
+
+“I thought so. That was why I went.”
+
+“Yes; I understood. But this morning, when you’ve had time to think it
+over—?”
+
+“I have no choice in the matter, Mrs. Hallam.” The green eyes darkened
+ominously. “You mean—I am to understand, then, that you’re against us,
+that you prefer to side with swindlers and scoundrels, all because of
+a—”
+
+She discovered him eying her with a smile of such inscrutable and
+sardonic intelligence, that the words died on her lips, and she
+crimsoned, treasonably to herself. For he saw it; and the belief he had
+conceived while attending to her tissue of fabrication, earlier that
+morning, was strengthened to the point of conviction that, if anything
+had been stolen by anybody, Mrs. Hallam and her son owned it as little
+as Calendar.
+
+As for the woman, she felt she had steadily lost, rather than gained,
+ground; and the flash of anger that had colored her cheeks, lit twin
+beacons in her eyes, which she resolutely fought down until they faded
+to mere gleams of resentment and determination. But she forgot to
+control her lips; and they are the truest indices to a woman’s
+character and temperament; and Kirkwood did not overlook the
+circumstance that their specious sweetness had vanished, leaving them
+straight, set and hard, quite the reverse of attractive.
+
+“So,” she said slowly, after a silent time, “you are not for
+Queensborough! The corollary of that _admission_, Mr. Kirkwood, is that
+you are for Sheerness.”
+
+“I believe,” he replied wearily, “that there are no other stations on
+this line, after Newington.”
+
+“It follows, then, that—that I follow.” And in answer to his perturbed
+glance, she added: “Oh, I’ll grant that intuition is sometimes a poor
+guide. But if you meet George Calendar, so shall I. Nothing can prevent
+that. You can’t hinder me.”
+
+Considerably amused, he chuckled. “Let us talk of other things, Mrs.
+Hallam,” he suggested pleasantly. “How is your son?”
+
+At this juncture the brakes began to shriek and grind upon the wheels.
+The train slowed; it stopped; and the voice of a guard could be heard
+admonishing passengers for Queensborough Pier to alight and take the
+branch line. In the noise the woman’s response was drowned, and
+Kirkwood was hardly enough concerned for poor Freddie to repeat his
+question.
+
+When, after a little, the train pulled out of the junction, neither
+found reason to resume the conversation. During the brief balance of
+the journey Mrs. Hallam presumably had food for thought; she frowned,
+pursed her lips, and with one daintily gloved forefinger followed a
+seam of her tailored skirt; while Kirkwood sat watching and wondering
+how to rid himself of her, if she proved really as troublesome as she
+threatened to be.
+
+Also, he wondered continually what it was all about. Why did Mrs.
+Hallam suspect him of designing to meet Calendar at Queensborough? Had
+she any tangible ground for believing that Calendar could be found in
+Queensborough? Presumably she had, since she was avowedly in pursuit of
+that gentleman, and, Kirkwood inferred, had booked for Queensborough.
+Was he, then, running away from Calendar and his daughter to chase a
+will-o’-the-wisp of his credulous fancy, off Sheerness shore?
+
+Disturbing reflection. He scowled over it, then considered the other
+side of the face. Presuming Mrs. Hallam to have had reasonably
+dependable assurance that Calendar would stop in Queensborough, would
+she so readily have abandoned her design to catch him there, on the
+mere supposition that Kirkwood might be looking for him in Sheerness?
+That did not seem likely to one who esteemed Mrs. Hallam’s acumen as
+highly as Kirkwood did. He brightened up, forgot that his was a fool’s
+errand, and began again to project strategic plans into a problematic
+future.
+
+A sudden jolt interrupted this pastime, and the warning screech of the
+brakes informed that he had no time to scheme, but had best continue on
+the plan of action that had brought him thus far—that is, trust to his
+star and accept what should befall without repining.
+
+He rose, opened the door, and holding it so, turned.
+
+“I regret, Mrs. Hallam,” he announced, smiling his crooked smile, “that
+a pressing engagement is about to prohibit my ’squiring you through the
+ticket-gates. You understand, I’m sure.”
+
+His irrepressible humor proved infectious; and Mrs. Hallam’s spirit ran
+as high as his own. She was smiling cheerfully when she, too, rose.
+
+“I also am in some haste,” she averred demurely, gathering up her
+hand-bag and umbrella.
+
+A raised platform shot in beside the carriage, and the speed was so
+sensibly moderated that the train seemed to be creeping rather than
+running. Kirkwood flung the door wide open and lowered himself to the
+running-board. The end of the track was in sight and—a man who has been
+trained to board San Francisco cable-cars fears to alight from no
+moving vehicle. He swung off, got his balance, and ran swiftly down the
+platform.
+
+A cry from a bystander caused him to glance over his shoulder; Mrs.
+Hallam was then in the act of alighting. As he looked the flurry of
+skirts subsided and she fell into stride, pursuing.
+
+Sleepy Sheerness must have been scandalized, that day, and its gossips
+have acquired ground for many, an uncharitable surmise.
+
+Kirkwood, however, was so fortunate as to gain the wicket before the
+employee there awoke to the situation. Otherwise, such is the temper of
+British petty officialdom, he might have detained the fugitive. As it
+was, Kirkwood surrendered his ticket and ran out into the street with
+his luck still a dominant factor in the race. For, looking back, he saw
+that Mrs. Hallam had been held up at the gate, another victim of
+British red-tape; her ticket read for Queensborough, she was attempting
+to alight one station farther down the line, and while undoubtedly she
+was anxious to pay the excess fare, Heaven alone knew when she would
+succeed in allaying the suspicions and resentment of the ticket-taker.
+
+“That’s good for ten minutes’ start!” Kirkwood crowed. “And it never
+occurred to me—!”
+
+Before the station he found two hacks in waiting, with little to choose
+between them; neither was of a type that did not seem to advertise its
+pre-Victorian fashioning, and to neither was harnessed an animal that
+deserved anything but the epithet of screw. Kirkwood took the nearest
+for no other reason than because it was the nearest, and all but
+startled the driver off his box by offering double-fare for a brisk
+pace and a simple service at the end of the ride. Succinctly he set
+forth his wants, jumped into the antiquated four-wheeler, and threw
+himself down upon musty, dusty cushions to hug himself over the joke
+and bless whatever English board of railway, directors it was that
+first ordained that tickets should be taken up at the end instead of
+the outset of a journey.
+
+It was promptly made manifest that he had further cause for
+gratulation. The cabby, recovering from his amazement, was plying an
+indefatigable whip and thereby eliciting a degree of speed from his
+superannuated nag, that his fare had by no means hoped for, much less
+anticipated. The cab rocked and racketed through Sheerness’ streets at
+a pace which is believed to be unprecedented and unrivaled; its
+passenger, dashed from side to side, had all he could do to keep from
+battering the vehicle to pieces with his head; while it was entirely
+out of the question to attempt to determine whether or not he was being
+pursued. He enjoyed it all hugely.
+
+In a period of time surprisingly short, he saw, from fleeting glimpses
+of the scenery to be obtained through the reeling windows, that they
+were threading the outskirts of the town; synchronously, whether by
+design or through actual inability to maintain it, the speed was
+moderated. And in the course of a few more minutes the cab stopped
+definitely.
+
+Kirkwood clambered painfully out, shook himself together and the
+bruises out of his bones, and looked fearfully back.
+
+Aside from a slowly settling cloud of dust, the road ran clear as far
+as he could see—to the point, in fact, where the town closed in about
+it.
+
+He had won; at all events in so much as to win meant eluding the
+persevering Mrs. Hallam. But to what end?
+
+Abstractedly he tendered his lonely sovereign to the driver, and
+without even looking at it, crammed the heavy weight of change into his
+pocket; an oversight which not only won him the awe-struck admiration
+of the cabby, but entailed consequences (it may be) he little
+apprehended. It was with an absentminded nod that he acquiesced in the
+man’s announcement that he might arrange about the boat for him.
+Accordingly the cabby disappeared; and Kirkwood continued to stare
+about him, eagerly, hopefully.
+
+He stood on the brink of the Thames estuary, there a possible five
+miles from shore to shore; from his feet, almost, a broad shingle beach
+sloped gently to the water.
+
+On one hand a dilapidated picket-fence enclosed the door-yard of a
+fisherman’s cottage, or, better, hovel,—if it need be accurately
+described—at the door of which the cabby was knocking.
+
+The morning was now well-advanced. The sun rode high, a sphere of
+tarnished flame in a void of silver-gray, its thin cold radiance
+striking pallid sparks from the leaping crests of wind-whipped waves.
+In the east a wall of vapor, dull and lusterless, had taken body since
+the dawn, masking the skies and shutting down upon the sea like some
+vast curtain; and out of the heart of this a bitter and vicious wind
+played like a sword.
+
+To the north, Shoeburyness loomed vaguely, like a low-drifted bank of
+cloud. Off to the right the Nore Lightship danced, a tiny fleck of warm
+crimson in a wilderness of slatey-blue waters, plumed with a myriad of
+vanishing white-caps.
+
+Up the shelving shore, small, puny wavelets dashed in impotent fury,
+and the shingle sang unceasingly its dreary, syncopated monotone. High
+and dry, a few dingy boats lay canted wearily upon their broad,
+swelling sides,—a couple of dories, apparently in daily use; a small
+sloop yacht, dismantled and plainly beyond repair; and an oyster-smack
+also out of commission. About them the beach was strewn with a litter
+of miscellany,—nets, oars, cork buoys, bits of wreckage and driftwood,
+a few fish too long forgotten and (one assumed) responsible in part for
+the foreign wealth of the atmosphere.
+
+Some little distance offshore a fishing-boat, catrigged and not more
+than twenty-feet over all, swung bobbing at her mooring, keen nose
+searching into the wind; at sight of which Kirkwood gave thanks, for
+his adventitious guide had served him well, if that boat were to be
+hired by any manner of persuasion.
+
+But it was to the farther reaches of the estuary that he gave more
+prolonged and most anxious heed, scanning narrowly what shipping was
+there to be seen. Far beyond the lightship a liner was riding the waves
+with serene contempt, making for the river’s mouth and Tilbury Dock.
+Nearer in, a cargo boat was standing out upon the long trail, the white
+of riven waters showing clearly against her unclean freeboard. Out to
+east a little covey of fishing-smacks, red sails well reefed, were
+scudding before the wind like strange affrighted water-fowl, and
+bearing down past a heavy-laden river barge. The latter, with tarpaulin
+battened snugly down over the cockpit and the seas dashing over her
+wash-board until she seemed under water half the time, was forging
+stodgily Londonwards, her bargee at the tiller smoking a placid pipe.
+
+But a single sailing vessel of any notable tonnage was in sight; and
+when he saw her Kirkwood’s heart became buoyant with hope, and he began
+to tremble with nervous eagerness. For he believed her to be the
+_Alethea_.
+
+There’s no mistaking a ship brigantine-rigged for any other style of
+craft that sails the seas.
+
+From her position when first he saw her, Kirkwood could have fancied
+she was tacking out of the mouth of the Medway; but he judged that,
+leaving the Thames’ mouth, she had tacked to starboard until well-nigh
+within hail of Sheerness. Now, having presumably, gone about, she was
+standing out toward the Nore, boring doggedly into the wind. He would
+have given a deal for glasses wherewith to read the name upon her bows,
+but was sensible of no hampering doubts; nor, had he harbored any,
+would they have deterred him. He had set his heart upon the winning of
+his venture, had come too far, risked far too much, to suffer anything
+now to stay his hand and stand between him and Dorothy Calendar.
+Whatever the further risks and hazards, though he should take his life
+in his hands to win to her side, he would struggle on. He recked
+nothing of personal danger; a less selfish passion ran molten in his
+veins, moving him to madness.
+
+Fascinated, he fixed his gaze upon the reeling brigantine, and for a
+space it was as if by longing he had projected his spirit to her
+slanting deck, and were there, pleading his case with the mistress of
+his heart....
+
+Voices approaching brought him back to shore. He turned, resuming his
+mask of sanity, the better to confer with the owner of the cottage and
+boats—a heavy, keen-eyed fellow, ungracious and truculent of habit, and
+chary of his words; as he promptly demonstrated.
+
+“I’ll hire your boat,” Kirkwood told him, “to put me aboard that
+brigantine, off to leeward. We ought to start at once.”
+
+The fisherman shifted his quid of tobacco from cheek to cheek, grunted
+inarticulately, and swung deliberately on his heel, displaying a bull
+neck above a pair of heavy shoulders.
+
+“Dirty weather,” he croaked, facing back from his survey of the eastern
+skies before the American found out whether or not he should resent his
+insolence.
+
+“How much?” Kirkwood demanded curtly, annoyed.
+
+The man hesitated, scowling blackly at the heeling vessel, momentarily
+increasing her distance from shore. Then with a crafty smile, “Two
+pound’,” he declared.
+
+The American nodded. “Very well,” he agreed simply. “Get out your
+boat.”
+
+The fisherman turned away to shamble noisily over the shingle, huge
+booted heels crunching, toward one of the dories. To this he set his
+shoulder, shoving it steadily down the beach until only the stern was
+dry.
+
+Kirkwood looked back, for the last time, up the road to Sheerness.
+Nothing moved upon it. He was rid of Mrs. Hallam, if face to face with
+a sterner problem. He had a few pence over ten shillings in his pocket,
+and had promised to pay the man four times as much. He would have
+agreed to ten times the sum demanded; for the boat he must and would
+have. But he had neglected to conclude his bargain, to come to an
+understanding as to the method of payment; and he felt more than a
+little dubious as to the reception the fisherman would give his
+proposition, sound as he, Kirkwood, knew it to be.
+
+In the background the cabby loitered, gnawed by insatiable curiosity.
+
+The fisherman turned, calling over his shoulder: “If ye’d catch yon
+vessel, come!”
+
+With one final twinge of doubt—the task of placating this surly dog was
+anything but inviting—the American strode to the boat and climbed in,
+taking the stern seat. The fisherman shoved off, wading out thigh-deep
+in the spiteful waves, then threw himself in over the gunwales and
+shipped the oars. Bows swinging offshore, rocking and dancing, the dory
+began to forge slowly toward the anchored boat. In their faces the wind
+beat gustily, and small, slapping waves, breaking against the sides,
+showered them with fine spray....
+
+In time the dory lay alongside the cat-boat, the fisherman with a
+gnarled hand grasping the latter’s gunwale to hold the two together.
+With some difficulty Kirkwood transhipped himself, landing asprawl in
+the cockpit, amid a tangle of cordage slippery with scales. The skipper
+followed, with clumsy expertness bringing the dory’s painter with him
+and hitching it to a ring-bolt abaft the rudder-head. Then, pausing an
+instant to stare into the East with somber eyes, he shipped the tiller
+and bent to the halyards. As the sail rattled up, flapping wildly,
+Kirkwood marked with relief—for it meant so much time saved—that it was
+already close reefed.
+
+But when at least the boom was thrashing overhead and the halyards had
+been made fast to their cleats, the fisherman again stood erect,
+peering distrustfully at the distant wall of cloud.
+
+Then, in two breaths: “Can’t do it,” he decided; “not at the price.”
+
+“Why?” Kirkwood stared despairingly after the brigantine, that was
+already drawn far ahead.
+
+“Danger,” growled the fellow, “—wind.”
+
+At a loss completely, Kirkwood found no words. He dropped his head,
+considering.
+
+“Not at the price,” the sullen voice iterated; and he looked up to find
+the cunning gaze upon him.
+
+“How much, then?”
+
+“Five poun’ I’ll have—no less, for riskin’ my life this day.”
+
+“Impossible. I haven’t got it.”
+
+In silence the man unshipped the tiller and moved toward the cleats.
+
+“Hold on a minute.”
+
+Kirkwood unbuttoned his coat and, freeing the chain from his waistcoat
+buttonholes, removed his watch.... As well abandon them altogether; he
+had designed to leave them as security for the two pounds, and had
+delayed stating the terms only for fear lest they be refused. Now, too
+late as ever, he recognized his error. But surely, he thought, it
+should be apparent even to that low intelligence that the timepiece
+alone was worth more than the boat itself.
+
+“Will you take these?” he offered. “Take and keep them—only set me
+aboard that ship!”
+
+Deliberately the fisherman weighed the watch and chain in his broad,
+hard palm, eyes narrowing to mere slits in his bronzed mask.
+
+“How much?” he asked slowly.
+
+“Eighty pounds, together; the chain alone cost me twenty.”
+
+The shifty, covetous eyes ranged from the treasure in his hand to the
+threatening east. A puff of wind caught the sail and sent the boom
+athwartships, like a mighty flail. Both men ducked instinctively, to
+escape a braining.
+
+“How do I know?” objected the skipper.
+
+“I’m telling you. If you’ve got eyes, you can see,” retorted Kirkwood
+savagely, seeing that he had erred in telling the truth; the amount he
+had named was too great to be grasped at once by this crude, cupidous
+brain.
+
+“How do I know?” the man repeated. Nevertheless he dropped watch and
+chain into his pocket, then with a meaning grimace extended again his
+horny, greedy palm.
+
+“What...?”
+
+“Hand over th’ two pound’ and we’ll go.”
+
+“I’ll see you damned first!”
+
+A flush of rage blinded the young man. The knowledge that the _Alethea_
+was minute by minute slipping beyond his reach seemed to madden him.
+White-lipped and ominously quiet he rose from his seat on the combing,
+as, without answer, the fisherman, crawling out on the overhand, began
+to haul in the dory.
+
+“Ashore ye go,” he pronounced his ultimatum, motioning Kirkwood to
+enter the boat.
+
+The American turned, looking for the _Alethea_, or for the vessel that
+he believed bore that name. She was nearing the light-ship when he
+found her, and as he looked a squall blurred the air between them,
+blotting the brigantine out with a smudge of rain. The effect was as if
+she had vanished, as if she were for ever snatched from his grasp; and
+with Dorothy aboard her—Heaven alone knew in what need of him!
+
+Mute and blind with despair and wrath, he turned upon the man and
+caught him by the collar, forcing him out over the lip of the overhang.
+They were unevenly matched, Kirkwood far the slighter, but strength
+came to him in the crisis, physical strength and address such as he had
+not dreamed was at his command. And the surprise of his onslaught
+proved an ally of unguessed potency. Before he himself knew it he was
+standing on the overhang and had shifted his hold to seize the fellow
+about the waist; then, lifting him clear of the deck, and aided by a
+lurch of the cat-boat, he cast him bodily into the dory. The man,
+falling, struck his head against one of the thwarts, a glancing blow
+that stunned him temporarily. Kirkwood himself dropped as if shot, a
+trailing reef-point slapping his cheek until it stung as the boom
+thrashed overhead. It was as close a call as he had known; the
+knowledge sickened him a little.
+
+Without rising he worked the painter loose and cast the dory adrift;
+then crawled back into the cockpit. No pang of compassion disturbed him
+as he abandoned the fisherman to the mercy of the sea; though the
+fellow lay still, uncouthly distorted, in the bottom of the dory, he
+was in no danger; the wind and waves together would carry the boat
+ashore.... For that matter, the man was even then recovering,
+struggling to sit up.
+
+Crouching to avoid the boom, Kirkwood went forward to the bows, and,
+grasping the mooring cable, drew it in, slipping back into the cockpit
+to get a stronger purchase with his feet. It was a struggle; the boat
+pulled sluggishly against the wind, the cable inching in jealously. And
+behind him he could hear a voice bellowing inarticulate menaces, and
+knew that in another moment the fisherman would be at his oars.
+Frantically he tugged and tore at the slimy rope, hauling with a will
+and a prayer. It gave more readily, towards the end, but he seemed to
+have fought with it for ages when at last the anchor tripped and he got
+it in.
+
+Immediately he leaped back to the stern, fitted in the tiller, and
+seizing the mainsheet, drew the boom in till the wind should catch in
+the canvas. In the dory the skipper, bending at his oars, was not two
+yards astern.
+
+He was hard aboard when, the sail filling with a bang, Kirkwood pulled
+the tiller up; and the cat-boat slid away, a dozen feet separating them
+in a breath.
+
+A yell of rage boomed down the wind, but he paid no heed. Careless
+alike of the dangers he had passed and those that yawned before him, he
+trimmed the sheet and stood away on the port tack, heading directly for
+the Nore Lightship.
+
+
+
+
+XI
+OFF THE NORE
+
+
+Kirkwood’s anger cooled apace; at worst it had been a flare of
+passion—incandescent. It was seldom more. His brain clearing, the
+temperature of his judgment quickly regained its mean, and he saw his
+chances without distortion, weighed them without exaggeration.
+
+Leaning against the combing, feet braced upon the slippery and
+treacherous deck, he clung to tiller and mainsheet and peered ahead
+with anxious eyes, a pucker of daring graven deep between his brows.
+
+A mile to westward, three or more ahead, he could see the brigantine
+standing close in under the Essex shore. At times she was invisible;
+again he could catch merely the glint of her canvas, white against the
+dark loom of the littoral, toned by a mist of flying spindrift. He
+strained his eyes, watching for the chance which would take place in
+the rake of her masts and sails, when she should come about.
+
+For the longer that manoeuver was deferred, the better was his chance
+of attaining his object. It was a forlorn hope. But in time the
+brigantine, to escape Maplin Sands, would be forced to tack and stand
+out past the lightship, the wind off her port bows. Then their courses
+would intersect. It remained to be demonstrated whether the cat-boat
+was speedy enough to arrive at this point of contact in advance of, or
+simultaneously with, the larger vessel. Every minute that the putative
+_Alethea_ put off coming about brought the cat-boat nearer that goal,
+but Kirkwood could do no more than hope and try to trust in the
+fisherman’s implied admission that it could be done. It was all in the
+boat and the way she handled.
+
+He watched her anxiously, quick to approve her merits as she displayed
+them. He had sailed small craft before—frail center-board cat-boats,
+handy and swift, built to serve in summer winds and protected waters:
+never such an one as this. Yet he liked her.
+
+Deep bosomed she was, with no center-board, dependent on her draught
+and heavy keel to hold her on the wind; stanch and seaworthy, sheathed
+with stout plank and ribbed with seasoned timber, designed to keep
+afloat in the wickedest weather brewed by the foul-tempered German
+Ocean. Withal her lines were fine and clean; for all her beam she was
+calculated to nose narrowly into the wind and make a pretty pace as
+well. A good boat: he had the grace to give the credit to his luck.
+
+Her disposition was more fully disclosed as they drew away from the
+beach. Inshore with shoaling water, the waves had been choppy and
+spiteful but lacking force of weight. Farther out, as the bottom fell
+away, the rollers became more uniform and powerful; heavy sweeping seas
+met the cat-boat, from their hollows looming mountainous to the man in
+the tiny cockpit; who was nevertheless aware that to a steamer they
+would be negligible.
+
+His boat breasted them gallantly, toiling sturdily up the steep
+acclivities, poising breathlessly on foam-crested summits for dizzy
+instants, then plunging headlong down the deep green swales; and left a
+boiling wake behind her,—urging ever onward, hugging the wind in her
+wisp of blood-red sail, and boring into it, pulling at the tiller with
+the mettle of a race-horse slugging at the bit.
+
+Offshore, too, the wind stormed with added strength, or, possibly, had
+freshened. For minutes on end the leeward gunwales would run green, and
+now and again the screaming, pelting squalls that scoured the estuary
+would heel her over until the water cascaded in over the lee combing,
+and the rudder, lifted clear, would hang idle until, smitten by some
+racing billow, the tiller would be all but torn from Kirkwood’s hands.
+Again and again this happened; and those were times of trembling. But
+always the cat-boat righted, shaking the clinging waters from her and
+swinging her stem into the wind again; and there would follow an
+abbreviated breathing spell, during which Kirkwood was at liberty to
+dash the salt spray from his eyes and search the wind-harried waste for
+the brigantine. Sometimes he found her, sometimes not.
+
+Long after he had expected her to, she went about and they began to
+close in upon each other. He could see that even with shortened canvas
+she was staggering drunkenly under the fierce impacts of the wind. For
+himself, it was nip-and-tuck, now, and no man in his normal sense would
+have risked a sixpence on the boat’s chance to live until she crossed
+the brigantine’s bows.
+
+Time out of reckoning he was forced to kneel in the swimming cockpit,
+steering with one hand, using the bailing-dish with the other, and
+keeping his eyes religiously turned to the bellying patch of sail. It
+was heartbreaking toil; he began reluctantly to concede that it could
+not last much longer. And if he missed the brigantine he would be lost;
+mortal strength was not enough to stand the unending strain upon every
+bone, muscle and sinew, required to keep the boat upon her course;
+though for a time it might cope with and solve the problems presented
+by each new, malignant billow and each furious, howling squall, the end
+inevitably must be failure. To struggle on would be but to postpone the
+certain end ... save and except the possibility of his gaining the
+brigantine within the period of time strictly and briefly limited by
+his powers of endurance.
+
+Long since he had become numb with cold from incessant drenchings of
+icy spray, that piled in over the windward counter, keeping the bottom
+ankle-deep regardless of his laborious but intermittent efforts with
+the bailing dish. And the two, brigantine and cockle-shell, were
+drawing together with appalling deliberation.
+
+A dozen times he was on the point of surrender, as often plucked up
+hope; as the minutes wore on and he kept above water, he began to
+believe that if he could stick it out his judgment and seamanship would
+be justified ... though human ingenuity backed by generosity could by
+no means contrive adequate excuse for his foolhardiness.
+
+But that was aside, something irreparable. Wan and grim, he fought it
+out.
+
+But that his voice stuck in his parched throat, he could have shouted
+in his elation, when eventually he gained the point of intersection an
+eighth of a mile ahead of the brigantine and got sight of her windward
+freeboard as, most slowly, the cat-boat forged across her course.
+
+For all that, the moment of his actual triumph was not yet; he had
+still to carry off successfully a scheme that for sheer audacity of
+conception and contempt for danger, transcended all that had gone
+before.
+
+Holding the cat-boat on for a time, he brought her about handsomely a
+little way beyond the brigantine’s course, and hung in the eye of the
+wind, the leach flapping and tightening with reports like rifle-shots,
+and the water sloshing about his calves—bailing-dish now altogether out
+of mind—while he watched the oncoming vessel, his eyes glistening with
+anticipation.
+
+She was footing it smartly, the brigantine—lying down to it and snoring
+into the wind. Beneath her stem waves broke in snow-white showers,
+whiter than the canvas of her bulging jib—broke and, gnashing their
+teeth in impotent fury, swirled and eddied down her sleek dark flanks.
+Bobbing, courtesying, she plunged onward, shortening the interval with
+mighty, leaping bounds. On her bows, with each instant, the golden
+letters of her name grew larger and more legible until—_Alethea_!—he
+could read it plain beyond dispute.
+
+Joy welled in his heart. He forgot all that he had undergone in the
+prospect of what he proposed still to do in the name of the only woman
+the world held for him. Unquestioning he had come thus far in her
+service; unquestioning, by her side, he was prepared to go still
+farther, though all humanity should single her out with accusing
+fingers....
+
+They were watching him, aboard the brigantine; he could see a line of
+heads above her windward rail. Perhaps _she_ was of their number. He
+waved an audacious hand. Some one replied, a great shout shattering
+itself unintelligibly against the gale. He neither understood nor
+attempted to reply; his every faculty was concentrated on the supreme
+moment now at hand.
+
+Calculating the instant to a nicety, he paid off the sheet and pulled
+up the tiller. The cat-boat pivoted on her heel; with a crack her sail
+flapped full and rigid; then, with the untempered might of the wind
+behind her, she shot like an arrow under the brigantine’s bows, so
+close that the bowsprit of the latter first threatened to impale the
+sail, next, the bows plunging, crashed down a bare two feet behind the
+cat-boat’s stern.
+
+Working in a frenzy of haste, Kirkwood jammed the tiller hard alee,
+bringing the cat about, and, trimming the mainsheet as best he might,
+found himself racing under the brigantine’s leeward quarter,—water
+pouring in generously over the cat’s.
+
+Luffing, he edged nearer, handling his craft as though intending to ram
+the larger vessel, foot by foot shortening the little interval. When it
+was four feet, he would risk the jump; he crawled out on the overhang,
+crouching on his toes, one hand light upon the tiller, the other
+touching the deck, ready ... ready....
+
+Abruptly the _Alethea_ shut off the wind; the sail flattened and the
+cat dropped back. In a second the distance had doubled. In anguish
+Kirkwood uttered an exceeding bitter cry. Already he was falling far
+off her counter....
+
+A shout reached him. He was dimly conscious of a dark object hurtling
+through the air. Into the cockpit, splashing, something dropped—a coil
+of rope. He fell forward upon it, into water eighteen inches deep; and
+for the first time realized that, but for that line, he had gone to his
+drowning in another minute. The cat was sinking.
+
+As he scrambled to his feet, clutching the life-line, a heavy wave
+washed over the water-logged craft and left it all but submerged; and a
+smart tug on the rope added point to the advice which, reaching his
+ears in a bellow like a bull’s, penetrated the panic of his wits.
+
+“Jump! _Jump, you fool_!”
+
+In an instant of coherence he saw that the brigantine was luffing; none
+the less much of the line had already been paid out, and there was no
+reckoning when the end would be reached. Without time to make it fast,
+he hitched it twice round his waist and chest, once round an arm, and,
+grasping it above his head to ease its constriction when the tug should
+come, leaped on the combing and overboard. A green roaring avalanche
+swept down upon him and the luckless cat-boat, overwhelming both
+simultaneously.
+
+The agony that was his during the next few minutes can by no means be
+exaggerated. With such crises the human mind is not fitted adequately
+to cope; it retains no record of the supreme moment beyond a vague and
+incoherent impression of poignant, soul-racking suffering. Kirkwood
+underwent a prolonged interval of semi-sentience, his mind dominated
+and oppressed by a deathly fear of drowning and a deadening sense of
+suffocation, with attendant tortures as of being broken on the
+wheel—limb rending from limb; of compression of his ribs that
+threatened momentarily to crush in his chest; of a world a-welter with
+dim swirling green half-lights alternating with flashes of blinding
+white; of thunderings in his ears like salvoes from a thousand
+cannon....
+
+And his senses were blotted out in blackness....
+
+Then he was breathing once more, the keen clean air stabbing his lungs,
+the while he swam unsupported in an ethereal void of brilliance. His
+mouth was full of something that burned, a liquid hot, acrid, and
+stinging. He gulped, swallowed, slobbered, choked, coughed, attempted
+to sit up, was aware that he was the focal center of a ring of glaring,
+burning eyes, like eyes of ravening beasts; and fainted.
+
+His next conscious impression was of standing up, supported by friendly
+arms on either side, while somebody was asking him if he could walk a
+step or two.
+
+He lifted his head and let it fall in token of assent, mumbling a yes;
+and looked round him with eyes wherein the light of intelligence burned
+more clear with every second. By degrees he catalogued and comprehended
+his weirdly altered circumstances and surroundings.
+
+He was partly seated, partly held up, on the edge of the cabin
+sky-light, an object of interest to some half-dozen men, seafaring
+fellows all, by their habit, clustered round between him and the
+windward rail. Of their number one stood directly before him, dwarfing
+his companions as much by his air of command as by his uncommon height:
+tall, thin-faced and sallow, with hollow weather-worn cheeks, a mouth
+like a crooked gash from ear to ear, and eyes like dying coals, with
+which he looked the rescued up and down in one grim, semi-humorous,
+semi-speculative glance. In hands both huge and red he fondled tenderly
+a squat brandy flask whose contents had apparently been employed as a
+first aid to the drowning.
+
+As Kirkwood’s gaze encountered his, the man smiled sourly, jerking his
+head to one side with a singularly derisive air.
+
+“Hi, matey!” he blustered. “’Ow goes it now? Feelin’ ’appier, eigh?”
+
+
+[Illustration: “Hi, matey!” he blustered. “’Ow goes it now?”]
+
+
+“Some, thank you ... more like a drowned rat.” Kirkwood eyed him
+sheepishly. “I suppose you’re the man who threw me that line? I’ll have
+to wait till my head clears up before I can thank you properly.”
+
+“Don’t mention it.” He of the lantern jaws stowed the bottle away with
+jealous care in one of his immense coat pockets, and seized Kirkwood’s
+hand in a grasp that made the young man wince. “You’re syfe enough now.
+My nyme’s Stryker, Capt’n Wilyum Stryker.... Wot’s the row? Lookin’ for
+a friend?” he demanded suddenly, as Kirkwood’s attention wandered.
+
+For the memory of the errand that had brought him into the hands of
+Captain William Stryker had come to the young man very suddenly; and
+his eager eyes were swiftly roving not along the decks but the wide
+world besides, for sight or sign of his heart’s desire.
+
+After luffing to pick him up, the brigantine had been again pulled off
+on the port tack. The fury of the gale seemed rather to have waxed than
+waned, and the _Alethea_ was bending low under the relentless fury of
+its blasts, driving hard, with leeward channels awash. Under her port
+counter, a mile away, the crimson light-ship wallowed in a riot of
+breaking combers. Sheerness lay abeam, five miles or more. Ahead the
+northeast headland of the Isle of Sheppey was bulking large and near.
+The cat-boat had vanished....
+
+More important still, no one aboard the brigantine resembled in the
+remotest degree either of the Calendars, father or daughter, or even
+Mulready, the black-avised.
+
+“I sye, ’re you lookin’ for some one you know?”
+
+“Yes—your passengers. I presume they’re below—?”
+
+“Passengers!”
+
+A hush fell upon the group, during which Kirkwood sought Stryker’s eye
+in pitiful pleading; and Stryker looked round him blankly.
+
+“Where’s Miss Calendar?” the young man demanded sharply. “I must see
+her at once!”
+
+The keen and deep-set eyes of the skipper clouded as they returned to
+Kirkwood’s perturbed countenance. “Wot’re you talking about?” he
+demanded brusquely.
+
+“I must see Miss Calendar, or Calendar himself, or Mulready.” Kirkwood
+paused, and, getting no reply, grew restive under Stryker’s inscrutable
+regard.
+
+“That’s why I came aboard,” he amended, blind to the absurdity of the
+statement; “to see—er—Calendar.”
+
+“Well ... I’m damned!”
+
+Stryker managed to infuse into his tone a deal of suspicious contempt.
+
+“Why?” insisted Kirkwood, nettled but still uncomprehending.
+
+“D’you mean to tell me you came off from—wherever in ’ell you did come
+from—intendin’ to board this wessel and find a party nymed Calendar?”
+
+“Certainly I did. Why—?”
+
+“Well!” cried Mr. Stryker, rubbing his hands together with an air
+oppressively obsequious, “I’m sorry to _hin_-form you you’ve come to
+the wrong shop, sir; we don’t stock no Calendars. We’re in the ’ardware
+line, we are. You might try next door, or I dessay you’ll find what you
+want at the stytioner’s, round the corner.”
+
+A giggle from his audience stimulated him. “If,” he continued acidly,
+“I’d a-guessed you was such a damn’ fool, blimmy if I wouldn’t’ve let
+you drownd!”
+
+Staggered, Kirkwood bore his sarcastic truculence without resentment.
+
+“Calendar,” he stammered, trying to explain, “Calendar _said_—”
+
+“I carn’t ’elp wot Calendar said. Mebbe ’e _did_ myke an engygement
+with you, an’ you’ve gone and went an’ forgot the dyte. Mebbe it’s
+larst year’s calendar you’re thinkin’ of. You Johnny” (to a lout of a
+boy in the group of seamen), “you run an’ fetch this gentleman
+Whitaker’s for Nineteen-six. Look sharp, now!”
+
+“But—!” With an effort Kirkwood mustered up a show of dignity. “Am I to
+understand,” he said, as calmly as he could, “that you deny knowing
+George B. Calendar and his daughter Dorothy and—”
+
+“I don’t ’ave to. Listen to me, young man.” For the time the fellow
+discarded his clumsy facetiousness. “I’m Wilyum Stryker, Capt’n
+Stryker, marster and ’arf-owner of this wessel, and wot I says ’ere is
+law. We don’t carry no passengers. D’ye understand me?”—aggressively.
+“There ain’t no pusson nymed Calendar aboard the _Allytheer_, an’ never
+was, an’ never will be!”
+
+“What name did you say?” Kirkwood inquired.
+
+“This ship? The _Allytheer_; registered from Liverpool; bound from
+London to Hantwerp, in cargo. Anythink else?”
+
+Kirkwood shook his head, turning to scan the seascape with a gloomy
+gaze. As he did so, and remarked how close upon the Sheppey headland
+the brigantine had drawn, the order was given to go about. For the
+moment he was left alone, wretchedly wet, shivering, wan and shrunken
+visibly with the knowledge that he had dared greatly for nothing. But
+for the necessity of keeping up before Stryker and his crew, the young
+man felt that he could gladly have broken down and wept for sheer
+vexation and disappointment.
+
+Smartly the brigantine luffed and wore about, heeling deep as she spun
+away on the starboard tack.
+
+Kirkwood staggered round the skylight to the windward rail. From this
+position, looking forward, he could see that they were heading for the
+open sea, Foulness low over the port quarter, naught before them but a
+brawling waste of leaden-green and dirty white. Far out one of the
+sidewheel boats of the Queensborough-Antwerp line was heading directly
+into the wind and making heavy weather of it.
+
+Some little while later, Stryker again approached him, perhaps swayed
+by an unaccustomed impulse of compassion; which, however, he artfully
+concealed. Blandly ironic, returning to his impersonation of the
+shopkeeper, “Nothink else we can show you, sir?” he inquired.
+
+“I presume you couldn’t put me ashore?” Kirkwood replied ingenuously.
+
+In supreme disgust the captain showed him his back. “’Ere, you!” he
+called to one of the crew. “Tyke this awye—tyke ’im below and put ’im
+to bed; give ’im a drink and dry ’is clo’s. Mebbe ’e’ll be better when
+’e wykes up. ’E don’t talk sense now, that’s sure. If you arsk me, I
+sye ’e’s balmy and no ’ope for ’im.”
+
+
+
+
+XII
+PICARESQUE PASSAGES
+
+
+Contradictory to the hopeful prognosis of Captain Stryker, his
+unaccredited passenger was not “better” when, after a period of
+oblivious rest indefinite in duration, he awoke. His subsequent
+assumption of listless resignation, of pacific acquiescence in the
+dictates of his destiny, was purely deceptive—thin ice of despair over
+profound depths of exasperated rebellion.
+
+Blank darkness enveloped him when first he opened eyes to wonder. Then
+gradually as he stared, piecing together unassorted memories and
+striving to quicken drowsy wits, he became aware of a glimmer that
+waxed and waned, a bar of pale bluish light striking across the gloom
+above his couch; and by dint of puzzling divined that this had access
+by a port. Turning his head upon a stiff and unyielding pillow, he
+could discern a streak of saffron light lining the sill of a doorway,
+near by his side. The one phenomenon taken with the other confirmed a
+theretofore somewhat hazy impression that his dreams were dignified by
+a foundation of fact; that, in brief, he was occupying a cabin-bunk
+aboard the good ship _Alethea_.
+
+Overhead, on the deck, a heavy thumping of hurrying feet awoke him to
+keener perceptiveness.
+
+Judging from the incessant rolling and pitching of the brigantine, the
+crashing thunder of seas upon her sides, the eldrich shrieking of the
+gale, as well as from the chorused groans and plaints of each
+individual bolt and timber in the frail fabric that housed his
+fortunes, the wind had strengthened materially during his hours of
+forgetfulness—however many the latter might have been.
+
+He believed, however, that he had slept long, deeply and exhaustively.
+He felt now a little emaciated mentally and somewhat absent-bodied—so
+he put it to himself. A numb languor, not unpleasant, held him
+passively supine, the while he gave himself over to speculative
+thought.
+
+A wild night, certainly; probably, by that time, the little vessel was
+in the middle of the North Sea ... _bound for Antwerp_!
+
+“Oh-h,” said Kirkwood vindictively, “_hell_!”
+
+So he was bound for Antwerp! The first color of resentment ebbing from
+his thoughts left him rather interested than excited by the prospect.
+He found that he was neither pleased nor displeased. He presumed that
+it would be no more difficult to raise money on personal belongings in
+Antwerp than anywhere else; it has been observed that the first flower
+of civilization is the rum-blossom, the next, the conventionalized
+fleur-de-lis of the money-lender. There would be pawnshops, then, in
+Antwerp; and Kirkwood was confident that the sale or pledge of his
+signet-ring, scarf-pin, match-box and cigar-case, would provide him
+with money enough for a return to London, by third-class, at the worst.
+There ... well, all events were on the knees of the gods; he’d squirm
+out of his troubles, somehow. As for the other matter, the Calendar
+affair, he presumed he was well rid of it,—with a sigh of regret. It
+had been a most enticing mystery, you know; and the woman in the case
+was extraordinary, to say the least.
+
+The memory of Dorothy Calendar made him sigh again, this time more
+violently: a sigh that was own brother to (or at any rate descended in
+a direct line from) the furnace sigh of the lover described by, the
+melancholy Jaques. And he sat up, bumped his head, groped round until
+his hand fell upon a doorknob, opened the door, and looked out into the
+blowsy emptiness of the ship’s cabin proper, whose gloomy confines were
+made visible only by the rays of a dingy and smoky lamp swinging
+violently in gimbals from a deck-beam.
+
+Kirkwood’s clothing, now rough-dried and warped wretchedly out of
+shape, had been thrown carelessly on a transom near the door. He got
+up, collected them, and returning to his berth, dressed at leisure,
+thinking heavily, disgruntled—in a humor as evil as the after-taste of
+bad brandy in his mouth.
+
+When dressed he went out into the cabin, closing the door upon his
+berth, and for lack of anything better to do, seated himself on the
+thwartships transom, against the forward bulkhead, behind the table.
+Above his head a chronometer ticked steadily and loudly, and, being
+consulted, told him that the time of day was twenty minutes to four;
+which meant that he had slept away some eighteen or twenty hours. That
+was a solid spell of a rest, when he came to think of it, even allowing
+that he had been unusually and pardonably fatigued when conducted to
+his berth. He felt stronger now, and bright enough—and enormously
+hungry into the bargain.
+
+Abstractedly, heedless of the fact that his tobacco would be
+water-soaked and ruined, he fumbled in his pockets for pipe and pouch,
+thinking to soothe the pangs of hunger against breakfast-time; which
+was probably two hours and a quarter ahead. But his pockets were
+empty—every one of them. He assimilated this discovery in patience and
+cast an eye about the room, to locate, if possible, the missing
+property. But naught of his was visible. So he rose and began a more
+painstaking search.
+
+The cabin was at once tiny, low-ceiled, and depressingly gloomy. Its
+furniture consisted entirely in a chair or two, supplementing the
+transoms and lockers as resting-places, and a center-table covered with
+a cloth of turkey-red, whose original aggressiveness had been darkly
+moderated by libations of liquids, principally black coffee, and burnt
+offerings of grease and tobacco-ash. Aside from the companion-way to
+the deck, four doors opened into the room, two probably giving upon the
+captain’s and the mate’s quarters, the others on pseudo state-rooms—one
+of which he had just vacated—closets large enough to contain a small
+bunk and naught beside. The bulkheads and partitions were badly broken
+out with a rash of pictures from illustrated papers, mostly offensive.
+Kirkwood was interested to read a half-column clipping from a New York
+yellow journal, descriptive of the antics of a drunken British sailor
+who had somehow found his way to the bar-room of the Fifth Avenue
+Hotel; the paragraph exploiting the fact that it had required four
+policemen in addition to the corps of porters to subdue him, was
+strongly underscored in red ink; and the news-story wound up with the
+information that in police court the man had given his name as William
+Stranger and cheerfully had paid a fine of ten dollars, alleging his
+entertainment to have been cheap at the price.
+
+While Kirkwood was employed in perusing this illuminating anecdote,
+eight bells sounded, and, from the commotion overhead, the watch
+changed. A little later the companion-way door slammed open and shut,
+and Captain Stryker—or Stranger; whichever you please—fell down, rather
+than descended, the steps.
+
+Without attention to the American he rolled into the mate’s room and
+roused that personage. Kirkwood heard that the name of the
+second-in-command was ’Obbs, as well as that he occupied the starboard
+state-room aft. After a brief exchange of comment and instruction, Mr.
+’Obbs appeared in the shape of a walking pillar of oil-skins capped by
+a sou’wester, and went on deck; Stryker, following him out of the
+state-room, shed his own oilers in a clammy heap upon the floor, opened
+a locker from which he brought forth a bottle and a dirty glass, and,
+turning toward the table, for the first time became sensible of
+Kirkwood’s presence.
+
+“Ow, there you are, eigh, little bright-eyes!” he exclaimed with
+surprised animation.
+
+“Good morning, Captain Stryker,” said Kirkwood, rising. “I want to tell
+you—”
+
+But Stryker waved one great red paw impatiently, with the effect of
+sweeping aside and casting into the discard Kirkwood’s intended speech
+of thanks; nor would he hear him further.
+
+“Did you ’ave a nice little nap?” he interrupted. “Come up bright and
+smilin’, eigh? Now I guess”—the emphasis made it clear that the captain
+believed himself to be employing an Americanism; and so successful was
+he in his own esteem that he could not resist the temptation to improve
+upon the imitation—“Na-ow I guess yeou’re abaout right ready, ben’t ye,
+to hev a drink, sonny?”
+
+“No, thank you,” said Kirkwood, smiling tolerantly. “I’ve got any
+amount of appetite...”
+
+“’Ave you, now?” Stryker dropped his mimicry and glanced at the clock.
+“Breakfast,” he announced, “will be served in the myne dinin’ saloon at
+eyght a. m. Passingers is requested not to be lyte at tyble.”
+
+Depositing the bottle on the said table, the captain searched until he
+found another glass for Kirkwood, and sat down.
+
+“Do you good,” he insinuated, pushing the bottle gently over.
+
+“No, thank you,” reiterated Kirkwood shortly, a little annoyed.
+
+Stryker seized his own glass, poured out a strong man’s dose of the
+fiery concoction, gulped it down, and sighed. Then, with a glance at
+the American’s woebegone countenance (Kirkwood was contemplating a
+four-hour wait for breakfast, and, consequently, looking as if he had
+lost his last friend), the captain bent over, placing both hands palm
+down before him and wagging his head earnestly.
+
+“Please,” he implored,—“Please don’t let me hinterrupt;” and filled his
+pipe, pretending a pensive detachment from his company.
+
+The fumes of burning shag sharpened the tooth of desire. Kirkwood stood
+it as long as he could, then surrendered with an: “If you’ve got any
+more of that tobacco, Captain, I’d be glad of a pipe.”
+
+An intensely contemplative expression crept into the captain’s small
+blue eyes.
+
+“I only got one other pyper of this ’ere ’baccy,” he announced at
+length, “and I carn’t get no more till I gets ’ome. I simply couldn’t
+part with it hunder ’arf a quid.”
+
+Kirkwood settled back with a hopeless lift of his shoulders.
+Abstractedly Stryker puffed the smoke his way until he could endure the
+deprivation no longer.
+
+“I had about ten shillings in my pocket when I came aboard, captain,
+and ... a few other articles.”
+
+“Ow, yes; so you ’ad, now you mention it.”
+
+Stryker rose, ambled into his room, and returned with Kirkwood’s
+possessions and a fresh paper of shag. While the young man was hastily
+filling, lighting, and inhaling the first strangling but delectable
+whiff, the captain solemnly counted into his own palm all the loose
+change except three large pennies. The latter he shoved over to
+Kirkwood in company with a miscellaneous assortment of articles, which
+the American picked up piece by piece and began to bestow about his
+clothing. When through, he sat back, troubled and disgusted. Stryker
+met his regard blandly.
+
+“Anything I can do?” he inquired, in suave concern.
+
+“Why ... there _was_ a black pearl scarfpin—”
+
+“W’y, don’t you remember? You gave that to me, ’count of me ’avin syved
+yer life. ’Twas me throwed you that line, you know.”
+
+“Oh,” commented Kirkwood briefly. The pin had been among the most
+valuable and cherished of his belongings.
+
+“Yes,” nodded the captain in reminiscence. “You don’t remember? Likely
+’twas the brandy singing in yer ’ead. You pushes it into my
+’ands,—almost weepin’, you was,—and sez, sez you, ‘Stryker,’ you sez,
+‘tyke this in triflin’ toking of my gratichood; I wouldn’t hinsult
+you,’ you sez, ‘by hofferin’ you money, but this I can insist on yer
+acceptin’, and no refusal,’ says you.”
+
+“Oh,” repeated Kirkwood.
+
+“If I for a ninstant thought you wasn’t sober when you done it.... But
+no; you’re a gent if there ever was one, and I’m not the man to offend
+you.”
+
+“Oh, indeed.”
+
+The captain let the implication pass, perhaps on the consideration that
+he could afford to ignore it; and said no more. The pause held for
+several minutes, Kirkwood having fallen into a mood of grave
+distraction. Finally Captain Stryker thoughtfully measured out a second
+drink, limited only by the capacity of the tumbler, engulfed it
+noisily, and got up.
+
+“Guess I’ll be turnin’ in,” he volunteered affably, yawning and
+stretching.
+
+“I was about to ask you to do me a service....” began Kirkwood.
+
+“Yes?”—with the rising inflection of mockery.
+
+Kirkwood quietly produced his cigar-case, a gold match-box, gold
+card-case, and slipped a signet ring from his finger. “Will you buy
+these?” he asked. “Or will you lend me five pounds and hold them as
+security?”
+
+Stryker examined the collection with exaggerated interest strongly
+tinctured with mistrust. “I’ll buy ’em,” he offered eventually, looking
+up.
+
+“That’s kind of you—”
+
+“Ow, they ain’t much use to me, but Bill Stryker’s allus willin’ to
+accommodate a friend.... Four quid, you said?”
+
+“Five....”
+
+“They ain’t wuth over four to me.”
+
+“Very well; make it four,” Kirkwood assented contemptuously.
+
+The captain swept the articles into one capacious fist, pivoted on one
+heel at the peril of his neck, and lumbered unsteadily off to his room.
+Pausing at the door he turned back in inquiry.
+
+“I sye, ’ow did you come to get the impression there was a party named
+Almanack aboard this wessel?”
+
+“Calendar—”
+
+“’Ave it yer own wye,” Stryker conceded gracefully.
+
+“There isn’t, is there?”
+
+“You ’eard me.”
+
+“Then,” said Kirkwood sweetly, “I’m sure you wouldn’t be interested.”
+
+The captain pondered this at leisure. “You seemed pretty keen abaht
+seein’ ’im,” he remarked conclusively.
+
+“I was.”
+
+“Seems to me I did ’ear the nyme sumw’eres afore.” The captain appeared
+to wrestle with an obdurate memory. “Ow!” he triumphed. “I know. ’E was
+a chap up Manchester wye. Keeper in a loonatic asylum, ’e was. ’That
+yer party?”
+
+“No,” said Kirkwood wearily.
+
+“I didn’t know but mebbe ’twas. Excuse me. ’Thought as ’ow mebbe you’d
+escyped from ’is tender care, but, findin’ the world cold, chynged yer
+mind and wanted to gow back.”
+
+Without waiting for a reply he lurched into his room and banged the
+door to. Kirkwood, divided between amusement and irritation, heard him
+stumbling about for some time; and then a hush fell, grateful enough
+while it lasted; which was not long. For no sooner did the captain
+sleep than a penetrating snore added itself unto the cacophony of waves
+and wind and tortured ship.
+
+Kirkwood, comforted at first by the blessed tobacco, lapsed insensibly
+into dreary meditations. Coming after the swift movement and sustained
+excitement of the eighteen hours preceding his long sleep, the monotony
+of shipboard confinement seemed irksome to a maddening degree. There
+was absolutely nothing he could discover to occupy his mind. If there
+were books aboard, none was in evidence; beyond the report of Mr.
+Stranger’s Manhattan night’s entertainment the walls were devoid of
+reading matter; and a round of the picture gallery proved a diversion
+weariful enough when not purely revolting.
+
+Wherefore Mr. Kirkwood stretched himself out on the transom and smoked
+and reviewed his adventures in detail and seriatim, and was by turns
+indignant, sore, anxious on his own account as well as on Dorothy’s,
+and out of all patience with himself. Mystified he remained throughout,
+and the edge of his curiosity held as keen as ever, you may believe.
+
+Consistently the affair presented itself to his fancy in the guise of a
+puzzle-picture, which, though you study it never so diligently, remains
+incomprehensible, until by chance you view it from an unexpected angle,
+when it reveals itself intelligibly. It had not yet been his good
+fortune to see it from the right viewpoint. To hold the metaphor, he
+walked endless circles round it, patiently seeking, but ever failing to
+find the proper perspective.... Each incident, however insignificant,
+in connection with it, he handled over and over, examining its every
+facet, bright or dull, as an expert might inspect a clever imitation of
+a diamond; and like a perfect imitation it defied analysis.
+
+Of one or two things he was convinced; for one, that Stryker was a liar
+worthy of classification with Calendar and Mrs. Hallam. Kirkwood had
+not only the testimony of his sense to assure him that the ship’s name,
+_Alethea_ (not a common one, by the bye), had been mentioned by both
+Calendar and Mulready during their altercation on Bermondsey Old
+Stairs, but he had the confirmatory testimony of the sleepy waterman,
+William, who had directed Old Bob and Young William to the anchorage
+off Bow Creek. That there should have been two vessels of the same
+unusual name at one and the same time in the Port of London, was a
+coincidence too preposterous altogether to find place in his
+calculations.
+
+His second impregnable conclusion was that those whom he sought had
+boarded the _Alethea_, but had left her before she tripped her anchor.
+That they were not stowed away aboard her seemed unquestionable. The
+brigantine was hardly large enough for the presence of three persons
+aboard her to be long kept a secret from an inquisitive fourth,—unless,
+indeed, they lay in hiding in the hold; for which, once the ship got
+under way, there could be scant excuse. And Kirkwood did not believe
+himself a person of sufficient importance in Calendar’s eyes, to make
+that worthy endure the discomforts of a’tween-decks imprisonment
+throughout the voyage, even to escape recognition.
+
+With every second, then, he was traveling farther from her to whose aid
+he had rushed, impelled by motives so hot-headed, so innately,
+chivalric, so unthinkingly gallant, so exceptionally idiotic!
+
+Idiot! Kirkwood groaned with despair of his inability to fathom the
+abyss of his self-contempt. There seemed to be positively no excuse for
+_him_. Stryker had befriended him indeed, had he permitted him to
+drown. Yet he had acted for the best, as he saw it. The fault lay in
+himself: an admirable fault, that of harboring and nurturing generous
+and compassionate instincts. But, of course, Kirkwood couldn’t see it
+that way.
+
+“What else could I do?” he defended himself against the indictment of
+common sense. “I couldn’t leave her to the mercies of that set of
+rogues!... And Heaven knows I was given every reason to believe she
+would be aboard this ship! Why, she herself told me that she was
+sailing ...!”
+
+Heaven knew, too, that this folly of his had cost him a pretty penny,
+first and last. His watch was gone beyond recovery, his homeward
+passage forfeited; he no longer harbored illusions as to the steamship
+company presenting him with another berth in lieu of that called for by
+that water-soaked slip of paper then in his pocket—courtesy of Stryker.
+He had sold for a pittance, a tithe of its value, his personal jewelry,
+and had spent every penny he could call his own. With the money Stryker
+was to give him he would be able to get back to London and his
+third-rate hostelry, but not with enough over to pay that one week’s
+room-rent, or ...
+
+“Oh, the devil!” he groaned, head in hands.
+
+The future loomed wrapped in unspeakable darkness, lightened by no
+least ray of hope. It had been bad enough to lose a comfortable living
+through a gigantic convulsion of Nature; but to think that he had lost
+all else through his own egregious folly, to find himself reduced to
+the kennels—!
+
+So Care found him again in those weary hours,—came and sat by his side,
+slipping a grisly hand in his and tightening its grip until he could
+have cried out with the torment of it; the while whispering insidiously
+subtile, evil things in his ear. And he had not even Hope to comfort
+him; at any previous stage he had been able to distil a sort of
+bitter-sweet satisfaction from the thought that he was suffering for
+the love of his life. But now—now Dorothy was lost, gone like the
+glamour of Romance in the searching light of day.
+
+Stryker, emerging from his room for breakfast, found the passenger with
+a hostile look in his eye and a jaw set in ugly fashion. His eyes, too,
+were the abiding-place of smoldering devils; and the captain,
+recognizing them, considerately forbore to stir them up with any
+untimely pleasantries. To be sure, he was autocrat in his own ship, and
+Kirkwood’s standing aboard was _nil_; but then there was just enough
+yellow in the complexion of Stryker’s soul to incline him to sidestep
+trouble whenever feasible. And besides, he entertained dark suspicions
+of his guest—suspicions he scarce dared voice even to his inmost heart.
+
+The morning meal, therefore, passed off in constrained silence. The
+captain ate voraciously and vociferously, pushed back his chair, and
+went on deck to relieve the mate. The latter, a stunted little Cockney
+with a wizened countenance and a mind as foul as his tongue, got small
+change of his attempts to engage the passenger in conversation on
+topics that he considered fit for discussion. After the sixth or eighth
+snubbing he rose in dudgeon, discharged a poisonous bit of insolence,
+and retired to his berth, leaving Kirkwood to finish his breakfast in
+peace; which the latter did literally, to the last visible scrap of
+food and the ultimate drop of coffee, poor as both were in quality.
+
+To the tune of a moderating wind, the morning wearied away. Kirkwood
+went on deck once, for distraction from the intolerable monotony of it
+all, got a sound drenching of spray, with a glimpse of a dark line on
+the eastern horizon, which he understood to be the low littoral of
+Holland, and was glad to dodge below once more and dry himself.
+
+He had the pleasure of the mate’s company at dinner, the captain
+remaining on deck until Hobbs had finished and gone up to relieve him;
+and by that time Kirkwood likewise was through.
+
+Stryker blew down with a blustery show of cheer. “Well, well, my little
+man!” (It happened that he topped Kirkwood’s stature by at least five
+inches.) “Enj’yin’ yer sea trip?”
+
+“About as much as you’d expect,” snapped Kirkwood.
+
+“Ow?” The captain began to shovel food into his face. (The author
+regrets he has at his command no more delicate expression that is
+literal and illustrative.) Kirkwood watched him, fascinated with
+suspense; it seemed impossible that the man could continue so to employ
+his knife without cutting his throat from the inside. But years of such
+manipulation had made him expert, and his guest, keenly disappointed,
+at length ceased to hope.
+
+Between gobbles Stryker eyed him furtively.
+
+“’Treat you all right?” he demanded abruptly.
+
+Kirkwood started out of a brown study. “What? Who? Why, I suppose I
+ought to be—indeed, I _am_ grateful,” he asserted. “Certainly you saved
+my life, and—”
+
+“Ow, I don’t mean that.” Stryker gathered the imputation into his paw
+and flung it disdainfully to the four winds of Heaven. “Bless yer ’art,
+you’re welcome; I wouldn’t let no dorg drownd, ’f I could ’elp it. No,”
+he declared, “nor a loonatic, neither.”
+
+He thrust his plate away and shifted sidewise in his chair. “I ’uz just
+wonderin’,” he pursued, picking his teeth meditatively with a
+pen-knife, “’ow they feeds you in them _as_-ylums. ’Avin’ never been
+inside one, myself, it’s on’y natural I’d be cur’us.... There was one
+of them institootions near where I was borned—Birming’am, that is. I
+used to see the loonies playin’ in the grounds. I remember _just_ as
+well!... One of ’em and me struck up quite an acquaintance—”
+
+“Naturally he’d take to you on sight.”
+
+“Ow? Strynge ’ow _we_ ’it it off, eigh?... You myke me think of ’im.
+Young chap, ’e was, the livin’ spi’t-’n-himage of you. It don’t happen,
+does it, you’re the same man?”
+
+“Oh, go to the devil!”
+
+“Naughty!” said the captain serenely, wagging a reproving forefinger.
+“Bad, naughty word. You’ll be sorry when you find out wot it means....
+Only ’e was allus plannin’ to run awye and drownd ’is-self.”...
+
+He wore the joke threadbare, even to his own taste, and in the end got
+heavily to his feet, starting for the companionway. “Land you this
+arternoon,” he remarked casually, “come three o’clock or thereabahts.
+Per’aps later. I don’t know, though, as I ’ad ought to let you loose.”
+
+Kirkwood made no answer. Chuckling, Stryker went on deck.
+
+In the course of an hour the American followed him.
+
+Wind and sea alike had gone down wonderfully since daybreak—a
+circumstance undoubtedly in great part due to the fact that they had
+won in under the lee of the mainland and were traversing shallower
+waters. On either hand, like mist upon the horizon, lay a streak of
+gray, a shade darker than the gray of the waters. The _Alethea_ was
+within the wide jaws of the Western Scheldt. As for the wind, it had
+shifted several points to the northwards; the brigantine had it abeam
+and was lying down to it and racing to port with slanting deck and
+singing cordage.
+
+Kirkwood approached the captain, who, acting as his own pilot, was
+standing by the wheel and barking sharp orders to the helmsman.
+
+“Have you a Bradshaw on board?” asked the young man.
+
+“Steady!” This to the man at the wheel; then to Kirkwood: “Wot’s that,
+me lud?”
+
+Kirkwood repeated his question. Stryker eyed him suspiciously for a
+thought.
+
+“Wot d’you want it for?”
+
+“I want to see when I can get a boat back to England.”
+
+“Hmm.... Yes, you’ll find a Bradshaw in the port-locker, near the
+for’ard bulk’ead. Run along now and pl’y—and mind you don’t go tearin’
+out the pyges to myke pyper boatses to go sylin’ in.”
+
+Kirkwood went below. Like its adjacent rooms, the cabin was untenanted;
+the watch was the mate’s, and Stryker a martinet. Kirkwood found the
+designated locker and, opening it, saw first to his hand the familiar
+bulky red volume with its red garter. Taking it out he carried it to a
+chair near the companionway, for a better reading light: the skylight
+being still battened down.
+
+The strap removed, the book opened easily, as if by force of habit, at
+the precise table he had wished to consult; some previous client had
+left a marker between the pages,—and not an ordinary book-mark, by any
+manner of means. Kirkwood gave utterance to a little gasp of amazement,
+and instinctively glanced up at the companionway, to see if he were
+observed.
+
+He was not, but for safety’s sake he moved farther back into the cabin
+and out of the range of vision of any one on deck; a precaution which
+was almost immediately justified by the clumping of heavy feet upon the
+steps as Stryker descended in pursuit of the ever-essential drink.
+
+“’Find it?” he demanded, staring blindly—with eyes not yet focused to
+the change from light to gloom—at the young man, who was sitting with
+the guide open on his knees, a tightly clenched fist resting on the
+transom at either side of him.
+
+In reply he received a monosyllabic affirmative; Kirkwood did not look
+up.
+
+“You must be a howl,” commented the captain, making for the seductive
+locker.
+
+“A—what?”
+
+“A howl, readin’ that fine print there in the dark. W’y don’t you go
+over to the light?... I’ll ’ave to ’ave them shutters tyken off the
+winders.” This was Stryker’s amiable figure of speech, frequently
+employed to indicate the coverings of the skylight.
+
+“I’m all right.” Kirkwood went on studying the book.
+
+Stryker swigged off his rum and wiped his lips with the back of a red
+paw, hesitating a moment to watch his guest.
+
+“Mykes it seem more ’ome-like for you, I expect,” he observed.
+
+“What do you mean?”
+
+“W’y, Bradshaw’s first-cousin to a halmanack, ain’t ’e? Can’t get one,
+take t’other—next best thing. Sorry I didn’t think of it sooner; like
+my passengers to feel comfy.... Now don’t you go trapsein’ off to gay
+Paree and squanderin’ wot money you got left. You ’ear?”
+
+“By the way, Captain!” Kirkwood looked up at this, but Stryker was
+already half-way up the companion.
+
+Cautiously the American opened his right fist and held to the light
+that which had been concealed, close wadded in his grasp,—a square of
+sheer linen edged with lace, crumpled but spotless, and diffusing in
+the unwholesome den a faint, intangible fragrance, the veriest wraith
+of that elusive perfume which he would never again inhale without
+instantly recalling that night ride through London in the intimacy of a
+cab.
+
+He closed his eyes and saw her again, as clearly as though she stood
+before him,—hair of gold massed above the forehead of snow, curling in
+adorable tendrils at the nape of her neck, lips like scarlet splashed
+upon the immaculate whiteness of her skin, head poised audaciously in
+its spirited, youthful allure, dark eyes smiling the least trace sadly
+beneath the level brows.
+
+Unquestionably the handkerchief was hers; if proof other than the
+assurance of his heart were requisite, he had it in the initial
+delicately embroidered in one corner: a D, for Dorothy!... He looked
+again, to make sure; then hastily folded up the treasure-trove and
+slipped it into a breast pocket of his coat.
+
+No; I am not sure that it was not the left-hand pocket.
+
+Quivering with excitement he bent again over the book and studied it
+intently. After all, he had not been wrong! He could assert now,
+without fear of refutation, that Stryker had lied.
+
+Some one had wielded an industrious pencil on the page. It was, taken
+as a whole, fruitful of clues. Its very heading was illuminating:
+
+LONDON to VLISSINGEN (FLUSHING) AND BREDA;
+
+
+which happened to be the quickest and most direct route between London
+and Antwerp. Beneath it, in the second column from the right, the
+pencil had put a check-mark against:
+
+QUEENSBOROUGH ... DEP ... 11a10.
+
+
+And now he saw it clearly—dolt that he had been not to have divined it
+ere this! The _Alethea_ had run in to Queensborough, landing her
+passengers there, that they might make connection with the eleven-ten
+morning boat for Flushing,—the very side-wheel steamer, doubtless,
+which he had noticed beating out in the teeth of the gale just after
+the brigantine had picked him up. Had he not received the passing
+impression that the _Alethea_, when first he caught sight of her, might
+have been coming out of the Medway, on whose eastern shore is situate
+Queensborough Pier? Had not Mrs. Hallam, going upon he knew not what
+information or belief, been bound for Queensborough, with design there
+to intercept the fugitives?
+
+Kirkwood chuckled to recall how, all unwittingly, he had been the means
+of diverting from her chosen course that acute and resourceful lady;
+then again turned his attention to the tables.
+
+A third check had been placed against the train for Amsterdam scheduled
+to leave Antwerp at 6:32 p. m. Momentarily his heart misgave him, when
+he saw this, in fear lest Calendar and Dorothy should have gone on from
+Antwerp the previous evening; but then he rallied, discovering that the
+boat-train from Flushing did not arrive at Antwerp till after ten at
+night; and there was no later train thence for Amsterdam. Were the
+latter truly their purposed destination, they would have stayed
+overnight and be leaving that very evening on the 6:32. On the other
+hand, why should they wait for the latest train, rather than proceed by
+the first available in the morning? Why but because Calendar and
+Mulready were to wait for Stryker to join them on the _Alethea_?
+
+Very well, then; if the wind held and Stryker knew his business, there
+would be another passenger on that train, in addition to the Calendar
+party.
+
+Making mental note of the fact that the boat-train for Flushing and
+London was scheduled to leave Antwerp daily at 8:21 p. m., Kirkwood
+rustled the leaves to find out whether or not other tours had been
+planned, found evidences of none, and carefully restored the guide to
+the locker, lest inadvertently the captain should pick it up and see
+what Kirkwood had seen.
+
+An hour later he went on deck. The skies had blown clear and the
+brigantine was well in land-bound waters and still footing a rattling
+pace. The river-banks had narrowed until, beyond the dikes to right and
+left, the country-side stretched wide and flat, a plain of living green
+embroidered with winding roads and quaint Old-World hamlets whose red
+roofs shone like dull fire between the dark green foliage of dwarfed
+firs.
+
+Down with the Scheldt’s gray shimmering flood were drifting little
+companies of barges, sturdy and snug both fore and aft, tough tanned
+sails burning in the afternoon sunlight. A long string of canal-boats,
+potted plants flowering saucily in their neatly curtained windows,
+proprietors expansively smoking on deck, in the bosoms of their very
+large families, was being mothered up-stream by two funny, clucking
+tugs. Behind the brigantine a travel-worn Atlantic liner was scolding
+itself hoarse about the right of way. Outward bound, empty cattle
+boats, rough and rusty, were swaggering down to the sea, with the
+careless, independent thumbs-in-armholes air of so many navvies off the
+job.
+
+And then lifting suddenly above the level far-off sky-line, there
+appeared a very miracle of beauty; the delicate tracery of the great
+Cathedral’s spire of frozen lace, glowing like a thing of spun gold,
+set against the sapphire velvet of the horizon.
+
+Antwerp was in sight.
+
+A troublesome care stirring in his mind, Kirkwood looked round the
+deck; but Stryker was very busy, entirely too preoccupied with the
+handling of his ship to be interrupted with impunity. Besides, there
+was plenty of time.
+
+More slowly now, the wind falling, the brigantine crept up the river,
+her crew alert with sheets and halyards as the devious windings of the
+stream rendered it necessary to trim the canvas at varying angles to
+catch the wind.
+
+Slowly, too, in the shadow of that Mechlin spire, the horizon grew
+rough and elevated, taking shape in the serrated profile of a thousand
+gables and a hundred towers and cross-crowned steeples.
+
+Once or twice, more and more annoyed as the time of their association
+seemed to grow more brief, Kirkwood approached the captain; but Stryker
+continued to be exhaustively absorbed in the performance of his duties.
+
+Up past the dockyards, where spidery masts stood in dense groves about
+painted funnels, and men swarmed over huge wharves like ants over a
+crust of bread; up and round the final, great sweeping bend of the
+river, the _Alethea_ made her sober way, ever with greater slowness;
+until at length, in the rose glow of a flawless evening, her windlass
+began to clank like a mad thing and her anchor bit the riverbed, near
+the left bank, between old Forts Isabelle and Tête de Flandre, frowned
+upon from the right by the grim pile of the age-old Steen castle.
+
+And again Kirkwood sought Stryker, his carking query ready on his lips.
+But the captain impatiently waved him aside.
+
+“Don’t you bother me now, me lud juke! Wyte until I gets done with the
+custom hofficer.”
+
+Kirkwood acceded, perforce; and bided his time with what tolerance he
+could muster.
+
+A pluttering customs launch bustled up to the _Alethea’s_ side,
+discharged a fussy inspector on the brigantine’s deck, and panted
+impatiently until he, the examination concluded without delay, was
+again aboard.
+
+Stryker, smirking benignly and massaging his lips with the back of his
+hand, followed the official on deck, nodded to Kirkwood an intimation
+that he was prepared to accord him an audience, and strolled forward to
+the waist. The American, mastering his resentment, meekly followed; one
+can not well afford to be haughty when one is asking favors.
+
+Advancing to the rail, the captain whistled in one of the river-boats;
+then, while the waterman waited, faced his passenger.
+
+“Now, yer r’yal ’ighness, wot can I do for you afore you goes ashore?”
+
+“I think you must have forgotten,” said Kirkwood quietly. “I hate to
+trouble you, but—there’s that matter of four pounds.”
+
+Stryker’s face was expressive only of mystified vacuity. “Four quid? I
+dunno _as_ I know just wot you means.”
+
+“You agreed to advance me four pounds on those things of mine....”
+
+“Ow-w!” Illumination overspread the hollow-jowled countenance. Stryker
+smiled cheerfully. “Garn with you!” he chuckled. “You will ’ave yer
+little joke, won’t you now? I declare I never see a loony with such
+affecsh’nit, pl’yful wyes!”
+
+Kirkwood’s eyes narrowed. “Stryker,” he said steadily, “give me the
+four pounds and let’s have no more nonsense; or else hand over my
+things at once.”
+
+“Daffy,” Stryker told vacancy, with conviction. “Lor’ luv me if I sees
+’ow he ever ’ad sense enough to escype. W’y, yer majesty!” and he
+bowed, ironic. “I ’_ave_ given you yer quid.”
+
+“Just about as much as I gave you that pearl pin,” retorted Kirkwood
+hotly. “What the devil do you mean—”
+
+“W’y, yer ludship, four pounds jus pyes yer passyge; I thought you
+understood.”
+
+“My passage! But I can come across by steamer for thirty shillings,
+first-class—”
+
+“Aw, but them steamers! Tricky, they is, and unsyfe ... No, yer gryce,
+the W. Stryker Packet Line Lim’ted, London to Antwerp, charges four
+pounds per passyge and no reduction for return fare.”
+
+Stunned by his effrontery, Kirkwood stared in silence.
+
+“Any complynts,” continued the captain, looking over Kirkwood’s head,
+“must be lyde afore the Board of Directors in writin’ not more’n thirty
+dyes arfter—”
+
+“You damned scoundrel!” interpolated Kirkwood thoughtfully.
+
+Stryker’s mouth closed with a snap; his features froze in a cast of
+wrath; cold rage glinted in his small blue eyes. “W’y,” he bellowed,
+“you bloomin’ loonatic, d’ye think you can sye that to Bill Stryker on
+’is own wessel!”
+
+He hesitated a moment, then launched a heavy fist at Kirkwood’s face.
+Unsurprised, the young man side-stepped, caught the hard, bony wrist as
+the captain lurched by, following his wasted blow, and with a dexterous
+twist laid him flat on his back, with a sounding thump upon the deck.
+And as the infuriated scamp rose—which he did with a bound that placed
+him on his feet and in defensive posture; as though the deck had been a
+spring-board—Kirkwood leaped back, seized a capstan-bar, and faced him
+with a challenge.
+
+“Stand clear, Stryker!” he warned the man tensely, himself livid with
+rage. “If you move a step closer I swear I’ll knock the head off your
+shoulders! Not another inch, you contemptible whelp, or I’ll brain
+you!... That’s better,” he continued as the captain, caving, dropped
+his fists and moved uneasily back. “Now give that boatman money for
+taking me ashore. Yes, I’m going—and if we ever meet again, take the
+other side of the way, Stryker!”
+
+Without response, a grim smile wreathing his thin, hard lips, Stryker
+thrust one hand into his pocket, and withdrawing a coin, tossed it to
+the waiting waterman. Whereupon Kirkwood backed warily to the rail,
+abandoned the capstan-bar and dropped over the side.
+
+Nodding to the boatman, “The Steen landing—quickly,” he said in French.
+
+Stryker, recovering, advanced to the rail and waved him a derisive _bon
+voyage_.
+
+“By-by, yer hexcellency. I ’opes it may soon be my pleasure to meet you
+again. You’ve been a real privilege to know; I’ve henjoyed yer comp’ny
+somethin’ immense. Don’t know as I ever met such a rippin’, Ay Number
+One, all-round, entertynin’ ass, afore!”
+
+He fumbled nervously about his clothing, brought to light a rag of
+cotton, much the worse for service, and ostentatiously wiped from the
+corner of each eye tears of grief at parting. Then, as the boat swung
+toward the farther shore, Kirkwood’s back was to the brigantine, and he
+was little tempted to turn and invite fresh shafts of ridicule.
+
+Rapidly, as he was ferried across the busy Scheldt, the white blaze of
+his passion cooled; but the biting irony of his estate ate, corrosive,
+into his soul. Hollow-eyed he glared vacantly into space, pale lips
+unmoving, his features wasted with despair.
+
+They came to the landing-stage and swung broad-side on. Mechanically
+the American got up and disembarked. As heedless of time and place he
+moved up the Quai to the gangway and so gained the esplanade; where
+pausing he thrust a trembling hand into his trouser pocket.
+
+The hand reappeared, displaying in its outspread palm three big, round,
+brown, British pennies. Staring down at them, Kirkwood’s lips moved.
+
+“Bed rock!” he whispered huskily.
+
+
+
+
+XIII
+A PRIMER OF PROGRESSIVE CRIME
+
+
+Without warning or presage the still evening air was smitten and made
+softly musical by the pealing of a distant chime, calling vespers to
+its brothers in Antwerp’s hundred belfries; and one by one, far and
+near, the responses broke out, until it seemed as if the world must be
+vibrant with silver and brazen melody; until at the last the great
+bells in the Cathedral spire stirred and grumbled drowsily, then woke
+to such ringing resonance as dwarfed all the rest and made it seem as
+nothing.
+
+Like the beating of a mighty heart heard through the rushing clamor of
+the pulses, a single deep-throated bell boomed solemnly six heavy,
+rumbling strokes.
+
+Six o’clock! Kirkwood roused out of his dour brooding. The Amsterdam
+express would leave at 6:32, and he knew not from what station.
+
+Striding swiftly across the promenade, he entered a small tobacco shop
+and made inquiry of the proprietress. His command of French was
+tolerable; he experienced no difficulty in comprehending the good
+woman’s instructions.
+
+Trains for Amsterdam, she said, left from the Gare Centrale, a mile or
+so across the city. M’sieur had plenty of time, and to spare. There was
+the tram line, if m’sieur did not care to take a fiacre. If he would go
+by way of the Vielle Bourse he would discover the tram cars of the Rue
+Kipdorp. M’sieur was most welcome....
+
+Monsieur departed with the more haste since he was unable to repay this
+courtesy with the most trifling purchase; such slight matters annoyed
+Kirkwood intensely. Perhaps it was well for him that he had the long
+walk to help him work off the fit of nervous exasperation into which he
+was plunged every time his thoughts harked back to that jovial
+black-guard, Stryker.... He was quite calm when, after a brisk walk of
+some fifteen minutes, he reached the station.
+
+A public clock reassured him with the information that he had the
+quarter of an hour’s leeway; it was only seventeen minutes past
+eighteen o’clock (Belgian railway time, always confusing). Inquiring
+his way to the Amsterdam train, which was already waiting at the
+platform, he paced its length, peering brazenly in at the coach
+windows, now warm with hope, now shivering with disappointment,
+realizing as he could not but realize that, all else aside, his only
+chance of rehabilitation lay in meeting Calendar. But in none of the
+coaches or carriages did he discover any one even remotely resembling
+the fat adventurer, his daughter, or Mulready.
+
+Satisfied that they had not yet boarded the train, he stood aside,
+tortured with forebodings, while anxiously scrutinizing each individual
+of the throng of intending travelers.... Perhaps they had been
+delayed—by the _Alethea’s_ lateness in making port very likely; perhaps
+they purposed taking not this but a later train; perhaps they had
+already left the city by an earlier, or had returned to England.
+
+On time, the bell clanged its warning; the guards bawled theirs; doors
+were hastily opened and slammed; the trucks began to groan, couplings
+jolting as the engine chafed in constraint. The train and Kirkwood
+moved simultaneously out of opposite ends of the station, the one to
+rattle and hammer round the eastern boundaries of the city and
+straighten out at top speed on the northern route for the Belgian line,
+the other to stroll moodily away, idle hands in empty pockets, bound
+aimlessly anywhere—it didn’t matter!
+
+Nothing whatever mattered in the smallest degree. Ere now the outlook
+had been dark; but this he felt to be the absolute nadir of his
+misfortunes. Presently—after a while—as soon as he could bring himself
+to it—he would ask the way and go to the American Consulate. But just
+now, low as the tide of chance had ebbed, leaving him stranded on the
+flats of vagabondage, low as showed the measure of his self-esteem, he
+could not tolerate the prospect of begging for assistance—help which
+would in all likelihood be refused, since his story was quite too
+preposterous to gain credence in official ears that daily are filled
+with the lamentations of those whose motives do not bear investigation.
+And if he chose to eliminate the strange chain of events which had
+landed him in Antwerp, to base his plea solely on the fact that he was
+a victim of the San Francisco disaster ... he himself was able to
+smile, if sourly, anticipating the incredulous consular smile with
+which he would be shown the door.
+
+No; that he would reserve as a last resort. True, he had already come
+to the Jumping-off Place; to the Court of the Last Resort alone could
+he now appeal. But ... not yet; after a while he could make his
+petition, after he had made a familiar of the thought that he must
+armor himself with callous indifference to rebuff, to say naught of the
+waves of burning shame that would overwhelm him when he came to the
+point of asking charity.
+
+He found himself, neither knowing nor caring how he had won thither, in
+the Place Verte, the vast venerable pile of the Cathedral rising on his
+right, hotels and quaint Old-World dwellings with peaked roofs and
+gables and dormer windows, inclosing the other sides of the square. The
+chimes (he could hear none but those of the Cathedral) were heralding
+the hour of seven. Listless and preoccupied in contemplation of his
+wretched case he wandered purposelessly half round the square, then
+dropped into a bench on its outskirts.
+
+It was some time later that he noticed, with a casual, indifferent eye,
+a porter running out of the Hôtel de Flandre, directly opposite, and
+calling a fiacre in to the carriage block.
+
+As languidly he watched a woman, very becomingly dressed, follow the
+porter down to the curb.
+
+The fiacre swung in, and the woman dismissed the porter before entering
+the vehicle; a proceeding so unusual that it fixed the onlooker’s
+interest. He sat rigid with attention; the woman seemed to be giving
+explicit and lengthy directions to the driver, who nodded and
+gesticulated his comprehension.
+
+The woman was Mrs. Hallam.
+
+The first blush of recognition passed, leaving Kirkwood without any
+amazement. It was an easy matter to account for her being where she
+was. Thrown off the scent by Kirkwood at Sheerness, the previous
+morning, she had missed the day boat, the same which had ferried over
+those whom she pursued. Returning from Sheerness to Queensborough,
+however, she had taken the night boat for Flushing and Antwerp,—and not
+without her plan, who was not a woman to waste her strength aimlessly;
+Kirkwood believed that she had had from the first a very definite
+campaign in view. In that campaign Queensborough Pier had been the
+first strategic move; the journey to Antwerp, apparently, the second;
+and the American was impressed that he was witnessing the inception of
+the third decided step.... The conclusion of this process of reasoning
+was inevitable: Madam would bear watching.
+
+Thus was a magical transformation brought about. Instantaneously
+lassitude and vain repinings were replaced by hopefulness and energy.
+In a twinkling the young man was on his feet, every nerve a-thrill with
+excitement.
+
+Mrs. Hallam, blissfully ignorant of this surveillance over her
+movements, took her place in the fiacre. The driver clucked to his
+horse, cracked his whip, and started off at a slow trot: a pace which
+Kirkwood imitated, keeping himself at a discreet distance to the rear
+of the cab, but prepared to break into a run whenever it should prove
+necessary.
+
+Such exertion, however, was not required of him. Evidently Mrs. Hallam
+was in no great haste to reach her destination; the speed of the fiacre
+remained extremely moderate; Kirkwood found a long, brisk stride fast
+enough to keep it well in sight.
+
+Round the green square, under the beautiful walls of Notre Dame
+d’Anvers, through Grande Place and past the Hôtel de Ville, the cab
+proceeded, dogged by what might plausibly be asserted the most
+persistent and infatuated soul that ever crossed the water; and so on
+into the Quai Van Dyck, turning to the left at the old Steen dungeon
+and, slowing to a walk, moving soberly up the drive.
+
+Beyond the lip of the embankment, the Scheldt flowed, its broad shining
+surface oily, smooth and dark, a mirror for the incandescent glory of
+the skies. Over on the western bank old Tête de Flandre lifted up its
+grim curtains and bastions, sable against the crimson, rampart and
+parapet edged with fire. Busy little side-wheeled ferry steamers
+spanked the waters noisily and smudged the sunset with dark drifting
+trails of smoke; and ever and anon a rowboat would slip out of shadow
+to glide languidly with the current. Otherwise the life of the river
+was gone; and at their moorings the ships swung in great quietness,
+riding lights glimmering like low wan stars.
+
+In the company of the latter the young man marked down the _Alethea_; a
+sight which made him unconsciously clench both fists and teeth,
+reminding him of that rare wag, Stryker....
+
+To his way of thinking the behavior of the fiacre was quite
+unaccountable. Hardly had the horse paced off the length of two blocks
+on the Quai ere it was guided to the edge of the promenade and brought
+to a stop. And the driver twisted the reins round his whip, thrust the
+latter in its socket, turned sidewise on the box, and began to smoke
+and swing his heels, surveying the panorama of river and sunset with
+complacency—a cabby, one would venture, without a care in the world and
+serene in the assurance of a generous _pour-boire_ when he lost his
+fare. But as for the latter, she made no move; the door of the cab
+remained closed,—like its occupant’s mind, a mystery to the watcher.
+
+Twilight shadows lengthened, darkling, over the land; street-lights
+flashed up in long, radiant ranks. Across the promenade hotels and
+shops were lighted up; people began to gather round the tables beneath
+the awnings of an open-air café. In the distance, somewhere, a band
+swung into the dreamy rhythm of a haunting waltz. Scattered couples
+moved slowly, arm in arm, along the riverside walk, drinking in the
+fragrance of the night. Overhead stars popped out in brilliance and
+dropped their reflections to swim lazily on spellbound waters.... And
+still the fiacre lingered in inaction, still the driver lorded it
+aloft, in care-free abandon.
+
+In the course of time this inertia, where he had looked for action,
+this dull suspense when he had forecast interesting developments, wore
+upon the watcher’s nerves and made him at once impatient and
+suspicious. Now that he had begun to doubt, he conceived it as quite
+possible that Mrs. Hallam (who was capable of anything) should have
+stolen out of the cab by the other and, to him, invisible door. To
+resolve the matter, finally, he took advantage of the darkness, turned
+up his coat collar, hunched up his shoulders, hid his hands in pockets,
+pulled the visor of his cap well forward over his eyes, and slouched
+past the fiacre.
+
+Mrs. Hallam sat within. He could see her profile clearly silhouetted
+against the light; she was bending forward and staring fixedly out of
+the window, across the driveway. Mentally he calculated the direction
+of her gaze, then, moved away and followed it with his own eyes; and
+found himself staring at the façade of a third-rate hotel. Above its
+roof the gilded letters of a sign, catching the illumination from
+below, spelled out the title of “Hôtel du Commerce.”
+
+Mrs. Hallam was interested in the Hôtel du Commerce?
+
+Thoughtfully Kirkwood fell back to his former point of observation, now
+the richer by another object of suspicion, the hostelry. Mrs. Hallam
+was waiting and watching for some one to enter or to leave that
+establishment. It seemed a reasonable inference to draw. Well, then, so
+was Kirkwood, no less than the lady; he deemed it quite conceivable
+that their objects were identical.
+
+He started to beguile the time by wondering what she would do, if...
+
+Of a sudden he abandoned this line of speculation, and catching his
+breath, held it, almost afraid to credit the truth that for once his
+anticipations were being realized under his very eyes.
+
+Against the lighted doorway of the Hôtel du Commerce, the figures of
+two men were momentarily sketched, as they came hurriedly forth; and of
+the two, one was short and stout, and even at a distance seemed to bear
+himself with an accent of assertiveness, while the other was tall and
+heavy of shoulder.
+
+Side by side they marched in step across the embankment to the head of
+the Quai gangway, descending without pause to the landing-stage.
+Kirkwood, hanging breathlessly over the guard-rail, could hear their
+footfalls ringing in hollow rhythm on the planks of the inclined
+way,—could even discern Calendar’s unlovely profile in dim relief
+beneath one of the waterside lights; and he recognized unmistakably
+Mulready’s deep voice, grumbling inarticulately.
+
+At the outset he had set after them, with intent to accost Calendar;
+but their pace had been swift and his irresolute. He hung fire on the
+issue, dreading to reveal himself, unable to decide which were the
+better course, to pursue the men, or to wait and discover what Mrs.
+Hallam was about. In the end he waited; and had his disappointment for
+recompense.
+
+For Mrs. Hallam did nothing intelligible. Had she driven over to the
+hotel, hard upon the departure of the men, he would have believed that
+she was seeking Dorothy, and would, furthermore, have elected to crowd
+their interview, if she succeeded in obtaining one with the girl. But
+she did nothing of the sort. For a time the fiacre remained as it had
+been ever since stopping; then, evidently admonished by his fare, the
+driver straightened up, knocked out his pipe, disentangled reins and
+whip, and wheeled the equipage back on the way it had come,
+disappearing in a dark side street leading eastward from the
+embankment.
+
+Kirkwood was, then, to believe that Mrs. Hallam, having taken all that
+trouble and having waited for the two adventurers to appear, had been
+content with sight of them? He could hardly believe that of the woman;
+it wasn’t like her.
+
+He started across the driveway, after the fiacre, but it was lost in a
+tangle of side streets before he could make up his mind whether it was
+worth while chasing or not; and, pondering the woman’s singular action,
+he retraced his steps to the promenade rail.
+
+Presently he told himself he understood. Dorothy was no longer of her
+father’s party; he had a suspicion that Mulready’s attitude had made it
+seem advisable to Calendar either to leave the girl behind, in England,
+or to segregate her from his associates in Antwerp. If not lodged in
+another quarter of the city, or left behind, she was probably traveling
+on ahead, to a destination which he could by no means guess. And Mrs.
+Hallam was looking for the girl; if there were really jewels in that
+gladstone bag, Calendar would naturally have had no hesitation about
+intrusting them to his daughter’s care; and Mrs. Hallam avowedly sought
+nothing else. How the woman had found out that such was the case,
+Kirkwood did not stop to reckon; unless he explained it on the
+proposition that she was a person of remarkable address. It made no
+matter, one way or the other; he had lost Mrs. Hallam; but Calendar and
+Mulready he could put his finger on; they had undoubtedly gone off to
+the _Alethea_ to confer again with Stryker,—that was, unless they
+proposed sailing on the brigantine, possibly at turn of tide that
+night.
+
+Panic gripped his soul and shook it, as a terrier shakes a rat, when he
+conceived this frightful proposition.
+
+In his confusion of mind he evolved spontaneously an entirely new
+hypothesis: Dorothy had already been spirited aboard the vessel;
+Calendar and his confederate, delaying to join her from enigmatic
+motives, were now aboard; and presently the word would be, Up-anchor
+and away!
+
+Were they again to elude him? Not, he swore, if he had to swim for it.
+And he had no wish to swim. The clothes he stood in, with what was left
+of his self-respect, were all that he could call his own on that side
+of the North Sea. Not a boatman on the Scheldt would so much as
+consider accepting three English pennies in exchange for boat-hire. In
+brief, it began to look as if he were either to swim or ... to steal a
+boat.
+
+Upon such slender threads of circumstance depends our boasted moral
+health. In one fleeting minute Kirkwood’s conception of the law of
+_meum et tuum_, its foundations already insidiously undermined by a
+series of cumulative misfortunes, toppled crashing to its fall; and was
+not.
+
+He was wholly unconscious of the change. Beneath him, in a space
+between the quays bridged by the gangway, a number of rowboats, a
+putative score, lay moored for the night and gently rubbing against
+each other with the soundless lift and fall of the river. For all that
+Kirkwood could determine to the contrary, the lot lay at the mercy of
+the public; nowhere about was he able to discern a figure in anything
+resembling a watchman.
+
+Without a quiver of hesitation—moments were invaluable, if what he
+feared were true—he strode to the gangway, passed down, and with
+absolute nonchalance dropped into the nearest boat, stepping from one
+to another until he had gained the outermost. To his joy he found a
+pair of oars stowed beneath the thwarts.
+
+If he had paused to moralize—which he didn’t—upon the discovery, he
+would have laid it all at the door of his lucky star; and would have
+been wrong. We who have never stooped to petty larceny know that the
+oars had been placed there at the direction of his evil genius bent
+upon facilitating his descent into the avernus of crime. Let us, then,
+pity the poor young man without condoning his offense.
+
+Unhitching the painter he set one oar against the gunwale of the next
+boat, and with a powerful thrust sent his own (let us so call it for
+convenience) stern-first out upon the river; then sat him composedly
+down, fitted the oars to their locks, and began to pull straight
+across-stream, trusting to the current to carry him down to the
+_Alethea_. He had already marked down that vessel’s riding-light; and
+that not without a glow of gratitude to see it still aloft and in
+proper juxtaposition to the river-bank; proof that it had not moved.
+
+He pulled a good oar, reckoned his distance prettily, and shipping the
+blades at just the right moment, brought the little boat in under the
+brigantine’s counter with scarce a jar. An element of surprise he held
+essential to the success of his plan, whatever that might turn out to
+be.
+
+Standing up, he caught the brigantine’s after-rail with both hands, one
+of which held the painter of the purloined boat, and lifted his head
+above the deck line. A short survey of the deserted after-deck gave him
+further assurance. The anchor-watch was not in sight; he may have been
+keeping well forward by Stryker’s instructions, or he may have crept
+off for forty winks. Whatever the reason for his absence from the post
+of duty, Kirkwood was relieved not to have him to deal with; and
+drawing himself gently in over the rail, made the painter fast, and
+stepped noiselessly over toward the lighted oblong of the companionway.
+A murmur of voices from below comforted him with the knowledge that he
+had not miscalculated, this time; at last he stood within striking
+distance of his quarry.
+
+The syllables of his surname ringing clearly in his ears and followed
+by Stryker’s fleeting laugh, brought him to a pause. He flushed hotly
+in the darkness; the captain was retailing with relish some of his most
+successful witticisms at Kirkwood’s expense.... “You’d ought to’ve seed
+the wye’e looked at me!” concluded the _raconteur_ in a gale of mirth.
+
+Mulready laughed with him, if a little uncertainly. Calendar’s chuckle
+was not audible, but he broke the pause that followed.
+
+“I don’t know,” he said with doubting emphasis. “You say you landed him
+without a penny in his pocket? I don’t call that a good plan at all. Of
+course, he ain’t a factor, but ... Well, it might’ve been as well to
+give him his fare home. He might make trouble for us, somehow.... I
+don’t mind telling you, Cap’n, that you’re an ass.”
+
+The tensity of certain situations numbs the sensibilities. Kirkwood had
+never in his weirdest dreams thought of himself as an eavesdropper; he
+did not think of himself as such in the present instance; he merely
+listened, edging nearer the skylight, of which the wings were slightly
+raised, and keeping as far as possible in shadow.
+
+“Ow, I sye!” the captain was remonstrating, aggrieved. “’Ow was I to
+know ’e didn’t ’ave it in for you? First off, when ’e comes on board
+(I’ll sye this for ’im, ’e’s as plucky as they myke ’em), I thought ’e
+was from the Yard. Then, when I see wot a bally hinnocent ’e was, I
+mykes up my mind ’e’s just some one you’ve been ply in’ one of your
+little gymes on, and ’oo was lookin’ to square ’is account. So I did
+’im proper.”
+
+“Evidently,” assented Calendar dryly. “You’re a bit of a heavy-handed
+brute, Stryker. Personally I’m kind of sorry for the boy; he wasn’t a
+bad sort, as his kind runs, and he was no fool, from what little I saw
+of him.... I wonder what he wanted.”
+
+“Possibly,” Mulready chimed in suavely, “you can explain what you
+wanted of him, in the first place. How did you come to drag him into
+_this_ business?”
+
+“Oh, that!” Calendar laughed shortly. “That was partly accident, partly
+inspiration. I happened to see his name on the Pless register; he’d put
+himself down as from ’Frisco. I figured it out that he would be next
+door to broke and getting desperate, ready to do anything to get home;
+and thought we might utilize him; to smuggle some of the stuff into the
+States. Once before, if you’ll remember—no; that was before we got
+together, Mulready—I picked up a fellow-countryman on the Strand. He
+was down and out, jumped at the job, and we made a neat little wad on
+it.”
+
+“The more fool you, to take outsiders into your confidence,” grumbled
+Mulready.
+
+“Ow?” interrogated Calendar, mimicking Stryker’s accent inimitably.
+“Well, you’ve got a heap to learn about this game, Mul; about the first
+thing is that you must trust Old Man Know-it-all, which is me. I’ve run
+more diamonds into the States, in one way or another, in my time, than
+you ever pinched out of the shirt-front of a toff on the Empire Prom.,
+before they made the graft too hot for you and you came to take lessons
+from me in the gentle art of living easy.”
+
+“Oh, cut that, cawn’t you?”
+
+“Delighted, dear boy.... One of the first principles, next to profiting
+by the admirable example I set you, is to make the fellows in your own
+line trust you. Now, if this boy had taken on with me, I could have got
+a bunch of the sparklers on my mere say-so, from old Morganthau up on
+Finsbury Pavement. He does a steady business hoodwinking the Customs
+for the benefit of his American clients—and himself. And I’d’ve made a
+neat little profit besides: something to fall back on, if this fell
+through. I don’t mind having two strings to my bow.”
+
+“Yes,” argued Mulready; “but suppose this Kirkwood had taken on with
+you and then peached?”
+
+“That’s another secret; you’ve got to know your man, be able to size
+him up. I called on this chap for that very purpose; but I saw at a
+glance he wasn’t our man. He smelt a nigger in the woodpile and most
+politely told me to go to the devil. But if he _had_ come in, he’d’ve
+died before he squealed. I know the breed; there’s honor among
+gentlemen that knocks the honor of thieves higher’n a kite, the old saw
+to the contrary—nothing doing.... You understand me, I’m sure,
+Mulready?” he concluded with envenomed sweetness.
+
+“I don’t see yet how Kirkwood got anything to do with Dorothy.”
+
+“Miss Calendar to you, _Mister_ Mulready!” snapped Calendar. “There,
+there, now! Don’t get excited.... It was when the Hallam passed me word
+that a man from the Yard was waiting on the altar steps for me, that
+Kirkwood came in. He was dining close by; I went over and worked on his
+feelings until he agreed to take Dorothy off my hands. If I had
+attempted to leave the place with her, they’d’ve spotted me for
+sure.... My compliments to you, Dick Mulready.”
+
+There came the noise of chair legs scraped harshly on the cabin deck.
+Apparently Mulready had leaped to his feet in a rage.
+
+“I’ve told you—” he began in a voice thick with passion.
+
+“Oh, sit down!” Calendar cut in contemptuously. “Sit down, d’you hear?
+That’s all over and done with. We understand each other now, and you
+won’t try any more monkey-shines. It’s a square deal and a square
+divide, so far’s I’m concerned; if we stick together there’ll be profit
+enough for all concerned. Sit down, Mul, and have another slug of the
+captain’s bum rum.”
+
+Although Mulready consented to be pacified, Kirkwood got the impression
+that the man was far gone in drink. A moment later he heard him growl
+“Chin-chin!” antiphonal to the captain’s “Cheer-o!”
+
+“Now, then,” Calendar proposed, “Mr. Kirkwood aside—peace be with
+him!—let’s get down to cases.”
+
+“Wot’s the row?” asked the captain.
+
+“The row, Cap’n, is the Hallam female, who has unexpectedly shown up in
+Antwerp, we have reason to believe with malicious intent and a private
+detective to add to the gaiety of nations.”
+
+“Wot’s the odds? She carn’t ’urt us without lyin’ up trouble for
+’erself.”
+
+“Damn little consolation to us when we’re working it out in Dartmoor.”
+
+“Speak for yourself,” grunted Mulready surlily.
+
+“I do,” returned Calendar easily; “we’re both in the shadow of
+Dartmoor, Mul, my boy; since you choose to take the reference as
+personal. Sing Sing, however, yawns for me alone; it’s going to keep on
+yawning, too, unless I miss my guess. I love my native land most to
+death, _but_ ...”
+
+“Ow, blow that!” interrupted the captain irritably. “Let’s ’ear about
+the ’Allam. Wot’re you afryd of?”
+
+“’Fraid she’ll set up a yell when she finds out we’re planting the
+loot, Cap’n. She’s just that vindictive; you’d think she’d be satisfied
+with her end of the stick, but you don’t know the Hallam. That
+milk-and-water offspring of hers is the apple of her eye, and Freddie’s
+going to collar the whole shooting-match or madam will kick over the
+traces.”
+
+“Well?”
+
+“Well, she’s queered us here. We can’t do anything if my lady is going
+to camp on our trail and tell everybody we’re shady customers, can we?
+The question now before the board is: Where now,—and how?”
+
+“Amsterdam,” Mulready chimed in. “I told you that in the beginning.”
+
+“But how?” argued Calendar. “The Lord knows I’m willing but ... we
+can’t go by rail, thanks to the Hallam. We’ve got to lose her first of
+all.”
+
+“But wot I’m arskin’ is, wot’s the matter with—”
+
+“The _Alethea_, Cap’n? Nothing, so far as Dick and I are concerned. But
+my dutiful daughter is prejudiced; she’s been so long without proper
+paternal discipline,” Calendar laughed, “that she’s rather
+high-spirited. Of course I might overcome her objections, but the
+girl’s no fool, and every ounce of pressure I bring to bear just now
+only helps make her more restless and suspicious.”
+
+“You leave her to me,” Mulready interposed, with a brutal laugh. “I’ll
+guarantee to get her aboard, or...”
+
+“Drop it, Dick!” Calendar advised quietly. “And go a bit easy with that
+bottle for five minutes, can’t you?”
+
+“Well, then,” Stryker resumed, apparently concurring in Calendar’s
+attitude, “w’y don’t one of you tyke the stuff, go off quiet and
+dispose of it to a proper fence, and come back to divide. I don’t see
+w’y that—”
+
+“Naturally you wouldn’t,” chuckled Calendar. “Few people besides the
+two of us understand the depth of affection existing between Dick,
+here, and me. We just can’t bear to get out of sight of each other.
+We’re sure inseparable—since night before last. Odd, isn’t it?”
+
+“You drop it!” snarled Mulready, in accents so ugly that the listener
+was startled. “Enough’s enough and—”
+
+“There, there, Dick! All right; I’ll behave,” Calendar soothed him.
+“We’ll forget and say no more about it.”
+
+“Well, see you don’t.”
+
+“But ’as either of you a plan?” persisted Stryker.
+
+“I have,” replied Mulready; “and it’s the simplest and best, if you
+could only make this long-lost parent here see it.”
+
+“Wot is it?”
+
+Mulready seemed to ignore Calendar and address himself to the captain.
+He articulated with some difficulty, slurring his words to the point of
+indistinctness at times.
+
+“Simple enough,” he propounded solemnly. “We’ve got the gladstone bag
+here; Miss Dolly’s at the hotel—that’s her papa’s bright notion; he
+thinks she’s to be trusted ... Now then, what’s the matter with
+weighing anchor and slipping quietly out to sea?”
+
+“Leavin’ the dootiful darter?”
+
+“Cert’n’y. She’s only a drag any way. ’Better off without her.... Then
+we can wait our time and get highest market prices—”
+
+“You forget, Dick,” Calendar put it, “that there’s a thousand in it for
+each of us if she’s kept out of England for six weeks. A thousand’s
+five thousand in the land I hail from; I can use five thousand in my
+business.”
+
+“Why can’t you be content with what you’ve got?” demanded Mulready
+wrathfully.
+
+“Because I’m a seventh son of a seventh son; I can see an inch or two
+beyond my nose. If Dorothy ever finds her way back to England she’ll
+spoil one of the finest fields of legitimate graft I ever licked my
+lips to look at. The trouble with you, Mul, is you’re too high-toned.
+You want to play the swell mobs-man from post to finish. A quick touch
+and a clean getaway for yours. Now, that’s all right; that has its good
+points, but you don’t want to underestimate the advantages of a good
+blackmailing connection.... If I can keep Dorothy quiet long enough, I
+look to the Hallam and precious Freddie to be a great comfort to me in
+my old age.”
+
+“Then, for God’s sake,” cried Mulready, “go to the hotel, get your brat
+by the scruif of her pretty neck and drag her aboard. Let’s get out of
+this.”
+
+“I won’t,” returned Calendar inflexibly.
+
+The dispute continued, but the listener had heard enough. He had to get
+away and think, could no longer listen; indeed, the voices of the three
+blackguards below came but indistinctly to his ears, as if from a
+distance. He was sick at heart and ablaze with indignation by turns.
+Unconsciously he was trembling violently in every limb; swept by
+alternate waves of heat and cold, feverish one minute, shivering the
+next. All of which phenomena were due solely to the rage that welled
+inside his heart.
+
+Stealthily he crept away to the rail, to stand grasping it and staring
+across the water with unseeing eyes at the gay old city twinkling back
+with her thousand eyes of light. The cool night breeze, sweeping down
+unhindered over the level Netherlands from the bleak North Sea, was
+comforting to his throbbing temples. By degrees his head cleared, his
+rioting pulses subsided, he could think; and he did.
+
+Over there, across the water, in the dingy and disreputable Hôtel du
+Commerce, Dorothy waited in her room, doubtless the prey of unnumbered
+nameless terrors, while aboard the brigantine her fate was being
+decided by a council of three unspeakable scoundrels, one of whom,
+professing himself her father, openly declared his intention of using
+her to further his selfish and criminal ends.
+
+His first and natural thought, to steal away to her and induce her to
+accompany him back to England, Kirkwood perforce discarded. He could
+have wept over the realization of his unqualified impotency. He had no
+money,—not even cab-fare from the hotel to the railway station.
+Something subtler, more crafty, had to be contrived to meet the
+emergency. And there was one way, one only; he could see none other.
+Temporarily he must make himself one of the company of her enemies,
+force himself upon them, ingratiate himself into their good graces,
+gain their confidence, then, when opportunity offered, betray them. And
+the power to make them tolerate him, if not receive him as a fellow,
+the knowledge of them and their plans that they had unwittingly given
+him, was his.
+
+And Dorothy, was waiting....
+
+He swung round and without attempting to muffle his footfalls strode
+toward the companionway. He must pretend he had just come aboard.
+
+Subconsciously he had been aware, during his time of pondering, that
+the voices in the cabin had been steadily gaining in volume, rising
+louder and yet more loud, Mulready’s ominous, drink-blurred accents
+dominating the others. There was a quarrel afoot; as soon as he gave it
+heed, Kirkwood understood that Mulready, in the madness of his inflamed
+brain, was forcing the issue while Calendar sought vainly to calm and
+soothe him.
+
+The American arrived at the head of the companionway at a critical
+juncture. As he moved to descend some low, cool-toned retort of
+Calendar’s seemed to enrage his confederate beyond reason. He yelped
+aloud with wrath, sprang to his feet, knocking over a chair, and
+leaping back toward the foot of the steps, flashed an adroit hand
+behind him and found his revolver.
+
+“I’ve stood enough from you!” he screamed, his voice oddly clear in
+that moment of insanity. “You’ve played with me as long as you will,
+you hulking American hog! And now I’m going to show—”
+
+As he held his fire to permit his denunciation to bite home, Kirkwood,
+appalled to find himself standing on the threshold of a tragedy,
+gathered himself together and launched through the air, straight for
+the madman’s shoulders.
+
+As they went down together, sprawling, Mulready’s head struck against a
+transom and the revolver fell from his limp fingers.
+
+
+
+
+XIV
+STRATAGEMS AND SPOILS
+
+
+Prepared as he had been for the shock, Kirkwood was able to pick
+himself up quickly, uninjured, Mulready’s revolver in his grasp.
+
+On his feet, straddling Mulready’s insentient body, he confronted
+Calendar and Stryker. The face of the latter was a sickly green, the
+gift of his fright. The former seemed coldly composed, already
+recovering from his surprise and bringing his wits to bear upon the new
+factor which had been so unceremoniously injected into the situation.
+
+
+[Illustration: Straddling Mulready’s body, he confronted Calendar and
+Stryker.]
+
+
+Standing, but leaning heavily upon a hand that rested flat on the
+table, in the other he likewise held a revolver, which he had
+apparently drawn in self-defense, at the crisis of Mulready’s frenzy.
+Its muzzle was deflected. He looked Kirkwood over with a cool gray eye,
+the color gradually returning to his fat, clean-shaven cheeks,
+replacing the pardonable pallor which had momentarily rested thereon.
+
+As for Kirkwood, he had covered the fat adventurer before he knew it.
+Stryker, who had been standing immediately in the rear of Calendar,
+immediately cowered and cringed to find himself in the line of fire.
+
+Of the three conscious men in the brigantine’s cabin, Calendar was
+probably the least confused or excited. Stryker was palpably unmanned.
+Kirkwood was tingling with a sense of mastery, but collected and
+rapidly revolving the combinations for the reversed conditions which
+had been brought about by Mulready’s drunken folly. His elation was
+apparent in his shining, boyish eyes, as well as in the bright color
+that glowed in his cheeks. When he decided to speak it was with rapid
+enunciation, but clearly and concisely.
+
+“Calendar,” he began, “if a single shot is fired about this vessel the
+river police will be buzzing round your ears in a brace of shakes.”
+
+The fat adventurer nodded assent, his eyes contracting.
+
+“Very well!” continued Kirkwood brusquely. “You must know that I have
+personally nothing to fear from the police; if arrested, I wouldn’t be
+detained a day. On the other hand, you ... Hand me that pistol,
+Calendar, butt first, please. Look sharp, my man! If you don’t...”
+
+He left the ellipsis to be filled in by the corpulent blackguard’s
+intelligence. The latter, gray eyes still intent on the younger man’s
+face, wavered, plainly impressed, but still wondering.
+
+“Quick! I’m not patient to-night...”
+
+No longer was Calendar of two minds. In the face of Kirkwood’s attitude
+there was but one course to be followed: that of obedience. Calendar
+surrendered an untenable position as gracefully as could be wished.
+
+“I guess you know what you mean by this,” he said, tendering the weapon
+as per instructions; “I’m doggoned if I do.... You’ll allow a certain
+latitude in consideration of my relief; I can’t say we were
+anticipating this—ah—Heaven-sent visitation.”
+
+Accepting the revolver with his left hand and settling his forefinger
+on the trigger, Kirkwood beamed with pure enjoyment. He found the
+deference of the older man, tempered though it was by his indomitable
+swagger, refreshing in the extreme.
+
+“A little appreciation isn’t exactly out of place, come to think of
+it,” he commented, adding, with an eye for the captain: “Stryker, you
+bold, bad butterfly, have you got a gun concealed about your unclean
+person?”
+
+The captain shook visibly with contrition. “No, Mr. Kirkwood,” he
+managed to reply in a voice singularly lacking in his wonted bluster.
+
+“Say ‘sir’!” suggested Kirkwood.
+
+“No, Mr. Kirkwood, sir,” amended Stryker eagerly.
+
+“Now come round here and let’s have a look at you. Please stay where
+you are, Calendar.... Why, Captain, you’re shivering from head to foot!
+Not ill are you, you wag? Step over to the table there, Stryker, and
+turn out your pockets; turn ’em inside out and let’s see what you carry
+in the way of offensive artillery. And, Stryker, don’t be rash; don’t
+do anything you’d be sorry for afterwards.”
+
+“No fear of that,” mumbled the captain, meekly shambling toward the
+table, and, in his anxiety to give no cause for unpleasantness,
+beginning to empty his pockets on the way.
+
+“Don’t forget the ‘sir,’ Stryker. And, Stryker, if you happen to think
+of anything in the line of one of your merry quips or jests, don’t
+strain yourself holding in; get it right off your chest, and you’ll
+feel better.”
+
+Kirkwood chuckled, in high conceit with himself, watching Calendar out
+of the corner of his eye, but with his attention centered on the
+infinitely diverting spectacle afforded by Stryker, whose predacious
+hands were trembling violently as, one by one, they brought to light
+the articles of which he had despoiled his erstwhile victim.
+
+“Come, come, Stryker! Surely you can think of something witty, surely
+you haven’t exhausted the possibilities of that almanac joke! Couldn’t
+you ring another variation on the lunatic wheeze? Don’t hesitate out of
+consideration for me, Captain; I’m joke proof—perhaps you’ve noticed?”
+
+Stryker turned upon him an expression at once ludicrous, piteous and
+hateful. “That’s all, sir,” he snarled, displaying his empty palms in
+token of his absolute tractability.
+
+“Good enough. Now right about face—quick! Your back’s prettier than
+your face, and besides, I want to know whether your hip-pockets are
+empty. I’ve heard it’s the habit of you gentry to pack guns in your
+clothes.... None? That’s all right, then. Now roost on the transom,
+over there in the corner, Stryker, and don’t move. Don’t let me hear a
+word from you. Understand?”
+
+Submissively the captain retired to the indicated spot. Kirkwood turned
+to Calendar; of whose attitude, however, he had not been for an instant
+unmindful.
+
+“Won’t you sit down, Mr. Calendar?” he suggested pleasantly. “Forgive
+me for keeping you waiting.”
+
+For his own part, as the adventurer dropped passively into his chair,
+Kirkwood stepped over Mulready and advanced to the middle of the cabin,
+at the same time thrusting Calendar’s revolver into his own coat
+pocket. The other, Mulready’s, he nursed significantly with both hands,
+while he stood temporarily quiet, surveying the fleshy face of the
+prime factor in the intrigue.
+
+A quaint, grim smile played about the American’s lips, a smile a little
+contemptuous, more than a little inscrutable. In its light Calendar
+grew restive and lost something of his assurance. His feet shifted
+uneasily beneath the table and his dark eyes wavered, evading
+Kirkwood’s. At length he seemed to find the suspense unendurable.
+
+“Well?” he demanded testily. “What d’you want of me?”
+
+“I was just wondering at you, Calendar. In the last few days you’ve
+given me enough cause to wonder, as you’ll admit.”
+
+The adventurer plucked up spirit, deluded by Kirkwood’s pacific tone.
+“I wonder at you, Mr. Kirkwood,” he retorted. “It was good of you to
+save my life and—”
+
+“I’m not so sure of that! Perhaps it had been more humane—”
+
+Calendar owned the touch with a wry grimace. “But I’m damned if I
+understand this high-handed attitude of yours!” he concluded heatedly.
+
+“Don’t you?” Kirkwood’s humor became less apparent, the smile sobering.
+“You will,” he told the man, adding abruptly: “Calendar, where’s your
+daughter?”
+
+The restless eyes sought the companionway.
+
+“Dorothy,” the man lied spontaneously, without a tremor, “is with
+friends in England. Why? Did you want to see her?”
+
+“I rather expected to.”
+
+“Well, I thought it best to leave her home, after all.”
+
+“I’m glad to hear she’s in safe hands,” commented Kirkwood.
+
+The adventurer’s glance analyzed his face. “Ah,” he said slowly, “I
+see. You followed me on Dorothy’s account, Mr. Kirkwood?”
+
+“Partly; partly on my own. Let me put it to you fairly. When you forced
+yourself upon me, back there in London, you offered me some sort of
+employment; when I rejected it, you used me to your advantage for the
+furtherance of your purposes (which I confess I don’t understand), and
+made me miss my steamer. Naturally, when I found myself penniless and
+friendless in a strange country, I thought again of your offer; and
+tried to find you, to accept it.”
+
+“Despite the fact that you’re an honest man, Kirkwood?” The fat lips
+twitched with premature enjoyment.
+
+“I’m a desperate man to-night, whatever I may have been yesterday.” The
+young man’s tone was both earnest and convincing. “I think I’ve shown
+that by my pertinacity in hunting you down.”
+
+“Well—yes.” Calendar’s thick fingers caressed his lips, trying to hide
+the dawning smile.
+
+“Is that offer still open?”
+
+His nonchalance completely restored by the very naïveté of the
+proposition, Calendar laughed openly and with a trace of irony. The
+episode seemed to be turning out better than he had anticipated. Gently
+his mottled fat fingers played about his mouth and chins as he looked
+Kirkwood up and down.
+
+“I’m sorry,” he replied, “that it isn’t—now. You’re too late, Kirkwood;
+I’ve made other arrangements.”
+
+“Too bad.” Kirkwood’s eyes narrowed. “You force me to harsher measures,
+Calendar.”
+
+Genuinely diverted, the adventurer laughed a second time, tipping back
+in his chair, his huge frame shaking with ponderous enjoyment. “Don’t
+do anything you’d be sorry for,” he parroted, sarcastical, the young
+man’s recent admonition to the captain.
+
+“No fear, Calendar. I’m just going to use my advantage, which you won’t
+dispute,”—the pistol described an eloquent circle, gleaming in the
+lamplight—“to levy on you a little legitimate blackmail. Don’t be
+alarmed; I shan’t hit you any harder than I have to.”
+
+“What?” stammered Calendar, astonished. “What in hell _are_ you driving
+at?”
+
+“Recompense for my time and trouble. You’ve cost me a pretty penny,
+first and last, with your nasty little conspiracy—whatever it’s all
+about. Now, needing the money, I purpose getting some of it back. I
+shan’t precisely rob you, but this is a hold-up, all right....
+Stryker,” reproachfully, “I don’t see my pearl pin.”
+
+“I got it ’ere,” responded the sailor hastily, fumbling with his tie.
+
+“Give it me, then.” Kirkwood held out his hand and received the
+trinket. Then, moving over to the table, the young man, while abating
+nothing of his watchfulness, sorted out his belongings from the mass of
+odds and ends Stryker had disgorged. The tale of them was complete; the
+captain had obeyed him faithfully. Kirkwood looked up, pleased.
+
+“Now see here, Calendar; this collection of truck that I was robbed of
+by this resurrected Joe Miller here, cost me upwards of a hundred and
+fifty. I’m going to sell it to you at a bargain—say fifty dollars, two
+hundred and fifty francs.”
+
+“The juice you are!” Calendar’s eyes opened wide, partly in admiration.
+“D’you realize that this is next door to highway robbery, my young
+friend?”
+
+“High-seas piracy, if you prefer,” assented Kirkwood with entire
+equanimity. “I’m going to have the money, and you’re going to give it
+up. The transaction by any name would smell no sweeter, Calendar.
+Come—fork over!”
+
+“And if I refuse?”
+
+“I wouldn’t refuse, if I were you.”
+
+“Why not?”
+
+“The consequences would be too painful.”
+
+“You mean you’d puncture me with that gun?”
+
+“Not unless you attack or attempt to follow me. I mean to say that the
+Belgian police are notoriously a most efficient body, and that I’ll
+make it my duty and pleasure to introduce ’em to you, if you refuse.
+But you won’t,” Kirkwood added soothingly, “will you, Calendar?”
+
+“No.” The adventurer had become suddenly thoughtful. “No, I won’t.
+’Glad to oblige you.”
+
+He tilted his chair still farther back, straightening out his
+elephantine legs, inserted one fat hand into his trouser pocket and
+with some difficulty extracted a combined bill-fold and coin-purse, at
+once heavy with gold and bulky with notes. Moistening thumb and
+forefinger, “How’ll you have it?” he inquired with a lift of his
+cunning eyes; and when Kirkwood had advised him, slowly counted out
+four fifty-franc notes, placed them near the edge of the table, and
+weighted them with five ten-franc pieces. And, “’That all?” he asked,
+replacing the pocket-book.
+
+“That will be about all. I leave you presently to your unholy devices,
+you and that gay dog, over there.” The captain squirmed, reddening.
+“Just by way of precaution, however, I’ll ask you to wait in here till
+I’m off.” Kirkwood stepped backwards to the door of the captain’s room,
+opened it and removed the key from the inside. “Please take Mulready in
+with you,” he continued. “By the time you get out, I’ll be clear of
+Antwerp. Please don’t think of refusing me,—I really mean it!”
+
+The latter clause came sharply as Calendar seemed to hesitate, his
+weary, wary eyes glimmering with doubt. Kirkwood, watching him as a cat
+her prey, intercepted a lightning-swift sidelong glance that shifted
+from his face to the port lockers, forward. But the fat adventurer was
+evidently to a considerable degree deluded by the very child-like
+simplicity of Kirkwood’s attitude. If the possibility that his
+altercation with Mulready had been overheard, crossed his mind,
+Calendar had little choice other than to accept the chance. Either way
+he moved, the risk was great; if he refused to be locked in the
+captain’s room, there was the danger of the police, to which Kirkwood
+had convincingly drawn attention; if he accepted the temporary
+imprisonment, he took a risk with the gladstone bag. On the other hand,
+he had estimated Kirkwood’s honesty as thorough-going, from their first
+interview; he had appraised him as a gentleman and a man of honor. And
+he did not believe the young man knew, after all ... Perplexed, at
+length he chose the smoother way, and with an indulgent lifting of
+eyebrows and fat shoulders, rose and waddled over to Mulready.
+
+“Oh, all right,” he conceded with deep toleration in his tone for the
+idiosyncrasies of youth. “It’s all the same to me, beau.” He laughed a
+nervous laugh. “Come along and lend us a hand, Stryker.”
+
+The latter glanced timidly at Kirkwood, his eyes pleading for leave to
+move; which Kirkwood accorded with an imperative nod and a fine
+flourish of the revolver. Promptly the captain, sprang to Calendar’s
+assistance; and between the two of them, the one taking Mulready’s
+head, the other his feet, they lugged him quickly into the stuffy
+little state-room. Kirkwood, watching and following to the threshold,
+inserted the key.
+
+“One word more,” he counseled, a hand on the knob. “Don’t forget I’ve
+warned you what’ll happen if you try to break even with me.”
+
+“Never fear, little one!” Calendar’s laugh was nervously cheerful. “The
+Lord knows you’re welcome.”
+
+“Thank you ’most to death,” responded Kirkwood politely. “Good-by—and
+good-by to you, Stryker. ’Glad to have humored your desire to meet me
+soon again.”
+
+Kirkwood, turning the key in the lock, withdrew it and dropped it on
+the cabin table; at the same time he swept into his pocket the money he
+had extorted of Calendar. Then he paused an instant, listening; from
+the captain’s room came a sound of murmurs and scuffling. He debated
+what they were about in there—but time pressed. Not improbably they,
+were crowding for place at the keyhole, he reflected, as he crossed to
+the port locker forward.
+
+He had its lid up in a twinkling, and in another had lifted out the
+well-remembered black gladstone bag.
+
+This seems to have been his first compound larceny.
+
+As if stimulated by some such reflection he sprang for the
+companionway, dropping the lid of the locker with a bang which must
+have been excruciatingly edifying to the men in the captain’s room.
+Whatever their emotions, the bang was mocked by a mighty kick, shaking
+the door; which, Kirkwood reflected, opened outward and was held only
+by the frailest kind of a lock: it would not hold long.
+
+Spurred onward by a storm of curses, Stryker’s voice chanting
+infuriated cacophony with Calendar’s, Kirkwood leapt up the
+companionway even as the second tremendous kick threatened to shatter
+the panels. Heart in mouth, a chill shiver of guilt running up and down
+his spine, he gained the deck, cast loose the painter, drew in his
+rowboat, and dropped over the side; then, the gladstone bag nestling
+between his feet, sat down and bent to the oars.
+
+And doubts assailed him, pressing close upon the ebb of his
+excitement—doubts and fears innumerable.
+
+There was no longer a distinction to be drawn between himself and
+Calendar; no more could he esteem himself a better and more honest man
+than that accomplished swindler. He was not advised as to the Belgian
+code, but English law, he understood, made no allowance for the good
+intent of those caught in possession of stolen property; though he was
+acting with the most honorable motives in the world, the law, if he
+came within its cognizance, would undoubtedly place him on Calendar’s
+plane and judge him by the same standard. To all intents and purposes
+he was a thief, and thief he would remain until the gladstone bag with
+its contents should be restored to its rightful owner.
+
+Voluntarily, then, he had stepped from the ranks of the hunters to
+those of the hunted. He now feared police interference as abjectly as
+did Calendar and his set of rogues; and Kirkwood felt wholly warranted
+in assuming that the adventurer, with his keen intelligence, would not
+handicap himself by ignoring this point. Indeed, if he were to be
+judged by what Kirkwood had inferred of his character, Calendar would
+let nothing whatever hinder him, neither fear of bodily hurt nor danger
+of apprehension at the hands of the police, from making a determined
+and savage play to regain possession of his booty.
+
+Well! (Kirkwood set his mouth savagely) Calendar should have a run for
+his money!
+
+For the present he could compliment himself with the knowledge that he
+had outwitted the rogues, had lifted the jewels and probably two-thirds
+of their armament; he had also the start, the knowledge of their
+criminal guilt and intent, and his own plans, to comfort him. As for
+the latter, he did not believe that Calendar would immediately fathom
+them; so he took heart of grace and tugged at the oars with a will,
+pulling directly for the city and permitting the current to drift him
+down-stream at its pleasure. There could be no more inexcusable folly
+than to return to the _Quai Steen_ landing and (possibly) the arms of
+the despoiled boat-owner.
+
+At first he could hear crash after splintering crash sounding dully
+muffled from the cabin of the _Alethea_: a veritable devil’s tattoo
+beaten out by the feet of the prisoners. Evidently the fastening was
+serving him better than he had dared hope. But as the black rushing
+waters widened between boat and brigantine, the clamor aboard the
+latter subsided, indicating that Calendar and Stryker had broken out or
+been released by the crew. In ignorance as to whether he were seen or
+being pursued, Kirkwood pulled on, winning in under the shadow of the
+quais and permitting the boat to drift down to a lonely landing on the
+edge of the dockyard quarter of Antwerp.
+
+Here alighting, he made the boat fast and, soothing his conscience with
+a surmise that its owner would find it there in the morning, strode
+swiftly over to the train line that runs along the embankment, swung
+aboard an adventitious car and broke his first ten-franc piece in order
+to pay his fare.
+
+The car made a leisurely progress up past the old Steen castle and the
+Quai landing, Kirkwood sitting quietly, the gladstone bag under his
+hand, a searching gaze sweeping the waterside. No sign of the
+adventurers rewarded him, but it was now all chance, all hazard. He had
+no more heart for confidence.
+
+They passed the Hôtel du Commerce. Kirkwood stared up at its windows,
+wondering....
+
+A little farther on, a disengaged fiacre, its driver alert for possible
+fares, turned a corner into the esplanade. At sight of it Kirkwood,
+inspired, hopped nimbly off the tram-car and signaled the cabby. The
+latter pulled up and Kirkwood started to charge him with instructions;
+something which he did haltingly, hampered by a slight haziness of
+purpose. While thus engaged, and at rest in the stark glare of the
+street-lamps, with no chance of concealing himself, he was aware of a
+rising tumult in the direction of the landing, and glancing round,
+discovered a number of people running toward him. With no time to
+wonder whether or no he was really the object of the hue-and-cry, he
+tossed the driver three silver francs.
+
+“Gare Centrale!” he cried. “And drive like the devil!”
+
+Diving into the fiacre he shut the door and stuck his head out of the
+window, taking observations. A ragged fringe of silly rabble was
+bearing down upon them, with one or two gendarmes in the forefront, and
+a giant, who might or might not be Stryker, a close second.
+Furthermore, another cab seemed to have been requisitioned for the
+chase. His heart misgave him momentarily; but his driver had taken him
+at his word and generosity, and in a breath the fiacre had turned the
+corner on two wheels, and the glittering reaches of the embankment,
+drive and promenade, were blotted out, as if smudged with lamp-black,
+by the obscurity of a narrow and tortuous side street.
+
+He drew in his head the better to preserve his brains against further
+emergencies.
+
+After a block or two Kirkwood picked up the gladstone bag, gently
+opened the door, and put a foot on the step, pausing to look back. The
+other cab was pelting after him with all the enthusiasm of a hound on a
+fresh trail. He reflected that this mad progress through the
+thoroughfares of a civilized city would not long endure without police
+intervention. So he waited, watching his opportunity. The fiacre
+hurtled onward, the driver leaning forward from his box to urge the
+horse with lash of whip and tongue, entirely unconscious of his fare’s
+intentions.
+
+Between two streets the mouth of a narrow and darksome byway flashed
+into view. Kirkwood threw wide the door, and leaped, trusting to the
+night to hide his stratagem, to luck to save his limbs. Neither failed
+him; in a twinkling he was on all fours in the mouth of the alley, and
+as he picked himself up, the second fiacre passed, Calendar himself
+poking a round bald poll out of the window to incite his driver’s
+cupidity with promises of redoubled fare.
+
+Kirkwood mopped his dripping forehead and whistled low with dismay; it
+seemed that from that instant on it was to be a vendetta with a
+vengeance. Calendar, as he had foreseen, was stopping at nothing.
+
+At a dog trot he sped down the alley to the next street, on which he
+turned back—more sedately—toward the river, debouching on the esplanade
+just one block from the Hôtel du Commerce. As he swung past the serried
+tables of a café, whatever fears he had harbored were banished by the
+discovery that the excitement occasioned by the chase had already
+subsided. Beneath the garish awnings the crowd was laughing and
+chattering, eating and sipping its bock with complete unconcern,
+heedless altogether of the haggard and shabby young man carrying a
+black hand-bag, with the black Shade of Care for company and a blacker
+threat of disaster dogging his footsteps. Without attracting any
+attention whatever, indeed, he mingled with the strolling crowds,
+making his way toward the Hôtel du Commerce. Yet he was not at all at
+ease; his uneasy conscience invested the gladstone bag with a magnetic
+attraction for the public eye. To carry it unconcealed in his hand
+furnished him with a sensation as disturbing as though its worn black
+sides had been stenciled STOLEN! in letters of flame. He felt it
+rendered him a cynosure of public interest, an object of suspicion to
+the wide cold world, that the gaze which lit upon the bag traveled to
+his face only to espy thereon the brand of guilt.
+
+For ease of mind, presently, he turned into a convenient shop and spent
+ten invaluable francs for a hand satchel big enough to hold the
+gladstone bag.
+
+With more courage, now that he had the hateful thing under cover, he
+found and entered the Hôtel du Commerce.
+
+In the little closet which served for an office, over a desk visibly
+groaning with the weight of an enormous and grimy registry book, a
+sleepy, fat, bland and good-natured woman of the Belgian _bourgeoisie_
+presided, a benign and drowsy divinity of even-tempered courtesy. To
+his misleading inquiry for Monsieur Calendar she returned a cheerful
+permission to seek that gentleman for himself.
+
+“Three flights, M’sieu’, in the front; suite seventeen it is. M’sieu’
+does not mind walking up?” she inquired.
+
+M’sieu’ did not in the least, though by no strain of the imagination
+could it, be truthfully said that he walked up those steep and redolent
+stairways of the Hôtel du Commerce d’Anvers. More literally, he flew
+with winged feet, spurning each third padded step with a force that
+raised a tiny cloud of fine white dust from the carpeting.
+
+Breathless, at last he paused at the top of the third flight. His heart
+was hammering, his pulses drumming like wild things; there was a queer
+constriction in his throat, a fire of hope in his heart alternating
+with the ice of doubt. Suppose she were not there! What if he were
+mistaken, what if he had misunderstood, what if Mulready and Calendar
+had referred to another lodging-house?
+
+Pausing, he gripped the balustrade fiercely, forcing his self-control,
+forcing himself to reflect that the girl (presuming, for the sake of
+argument, he were presently to find her) could not be expected to
+understand how ardently he had discounted this moment of meeting, or
+how strangely it affected him. Indeed, he himself was more than a
+little disturbed by the latter phenomenon, though he was no longer
+blind to its cause. But he was not to let her see the evidences of his
+agitation, lest she be frightened.
+
+Slowly schooling himself to assume a masque of illuding self-possession
+and composure, he passed down the corridor to the door whose panels
+wore the painted legend, 17; and there knocked.
+
+Believing that he overheard from within a sudden startled exclamation,
+he smiled patiently, tolerant of her surprise.
+
+Burning with impatience as with a fever, he endured a long minute’s
+wait.
+
+Misgivings were prompting him to knock again and summon her by name,
+when he heard footfalls on the other side of the door, followed by a
+click of the lock. The door was opened grudgingly, a bare six inches.
+
+Of the alarmed expression in the eyes that stared into his, he took no
+account. His face lengthened a little as he stood there, dumb, panting,
+staring; and his heart sank, down, deep down into a gulf of
+disappointment, weighted sorely with chagrin.
+
+Then, of the two the first to recover countenance, he doffed his cap
+and bowed.
+
+“Good evening, Mrs. Hallam,” he said with a rueful smile.
+
+
+
+
+XV
+REFUGEES
+
+
+Now, if Kirkwood’s emotion was poignant, Mrs. Hallam’s astonishment
+paralleled, and her relief transcended it. In order to understand this
+it must be remembered that while Mr. Kirkwood was aware of the lady’s
+presence in Antwerp, on her part she had known nothing of him since he
+had so ungallantly fled her company in Sheerness. She seemed to
+anticipate that either Calendar or one of his fellows would be
+discovered at the door,—to have surmised it without any excessive
+degree of pleasure.
+
+Only briefly she hesitated, while her surprise swayed her; then with a
+hardening of the eyes and a curt little nod, “I’m sorry,” she said with
+decision, “but I am busy and can’t see you now, Mr. Kirkwood”; and
+attempted to shut the door in his face.
+
+Deftly Kirkwood forestalled her intention by inserting both a foot and
+a corner of the newly purchased hand-bag between the door and the jamb.
+He had dared too greatly to be thus dismissed. “Pardon me,” he
+countered, unabashed, “but I wish to speak with Miss Calendar.”
+
+“Dorothy,” returned the lady with spirit, “is engaged....”
+
+She compressed her lips, knitted her brows, and with disconcerting
+suddenness thrust one knee against the obstructing hand-bag; Kirkwood,
+happily, anticipated the movement just in time to reinforce the bag
+with his own knee; it remained in place, the door standing open.
+
+The woman flushed angrily; their glances crossed, her eyes flashing
+with indignation; but Kirkwood’s held them with a level and unyielding
+stare.
+
+“I intend,” he told her quietly, “to see Miss Calendar. It’s useless
+your trying to hinder me. We may as well understand each other, Madam,
+and I’ll tell you now that if you wish to avoid a scene—”
+
+“Dorothy!” the woman called over her shoulder; “ring for the porter.”
+
+“By all means,” assented Kirkwood agreeably. “I’ll send him for a
+gendarme.”
+
+“You insolent puppy!”
+
+“Madam, your wit disarms me—”
+
+“What is the matter, Mrs. Hallam?” interrupted a voice from the other
+side of the door. “Who is it?” “Miss Calendar!” cried Kirkwood hastily,
+raising his voice. “Mr. Kirkwood!” the reply came on the instant. She
+knew his voice! “Please, Mrs. Hallam, I will see Mr. Kirkwood.”
+
+“You have no time to waste with him, Dorothy,” said the woman coldly.
+“I must insist—”
+
+“But you don’t seem to understand; it is Mr. Kirkwood!” argued the
+girl,—as if he were ample excuse for any imprudence!
+
+Kirkwood’s scant store of patience was by this time rapidly becoming
+exhausted. “I should advise you not to interfere any further, Mrs.
+Hallam,” he told her in a tone low, but charged with meaning.
+
+How much did he know? She eyed him an instant longer, in sullen
+suspicion, then swung open the door, yielding with what grace she
+could. “Won’t you come in, Mr. Kirkwood?” she inquired with acidulated
+courtesy. “If you press me,” he returned winningly, “how can I refuse?
+You are too good!”
+
+His impertinence disconcerted even himself; he wondered that she did
+not slap him as he passed her, entering the room; and felt that he
+deserved it, despite her attitude. But such thoughts could not long
+trouble one whose eyes were enchanted by the sight of Dorothy,
+confronting him in the middle of the dingy room, her hands, bristling
+dangerously with hat pins, busy with the adjustment of a small gray
+toque atop the wonder that was her hair. So vivacious and charming she
+seemed, so spirited and bright her welcoming smile, so foreign was she
+altogether to the picture of her, worn and distraught, that he had
+mentally conjured up, that he stopped in an extreme of disconcertion;
+and dropped the hand-bag, smiling sheepishly enough under her ready
+laugh—mirth irresistibly incited by the plainly-read play of expression
+on his mobile countenance.
+
+“You must forgive the unconventionally, Mr. Kirkwood,” she apologized,
+needlessly enough, but to cover his embarrassment. “I am on the point
+of going out with Mrs. Hallam—and of course you are the last person on
+earth I expected to meet here!”
+
+“It’s good to see you, Miss Calendar,” he said simply, remarking with
+much satisfaction that her trim walking costume bore witness to her
+statement that she was prepared for the street.
+
+The girl glanced into a mirror, patted the small, bewitching hat an
+infinitesimal fraction of an inch to one side, and turned to him again,
+her hands free. One of them, small but cordial, rested in his grasp for
+an instant all too brief, the while he gazed earnestly into her face,
+noting with concern what the first glance had not shown him,—the almost
+imperceptible shadows beneath her eyes and cheek-bones, pathetic
+records of the hours the girl had spent, since last he had seen her, in
+company with his own grim familiar, Care.
+
+Not a little of care and distress of mind had seasoned her portion in
+those two weary days. He saw and knew it; and his throat tightened
+inexplicably, again, as it had out there in the corridor. Possibly the
+change in her had passed unchallenged by any eyes other than his, but
+even in the little time that he had spent in her society, the image of
+her had become fixed so indelibly on his memory, that he could not now
+be deceived. She was changed—a little, but changed; she had suffered,
+and was suffering and, forced by suffering, her nascent womanhood was
+stirring in the bud. The child that he had met in London, in Antwerp he
+found grown to woman’s stature and slowly coming to comprehension of
+the nature of the change in herself,—the wonder of it glowing softly in
+her eyes....
+
+The clear understanding of mankind that is an appanage of woman’s
+estate, was now added to the intuitions of a girl’s untroubled heart.
+She could not be blind to the mute adoration of his gaze; nor could she
+resent it. Beneath it she colored and lowered her lashes.
+
+“I was about to go out,” she repeated in confusion. “I—it’s pleasant to
+see you, too.”
+
+“Thank you,” he stammered ineptly; “I—I—”
+
+“If Mr. Kirkwood will excuse us, Dorothy,” Mrs. Hallam’s sharp tones
+struck in discordantly, “we shall be glad to see him when we return to
+London.”
+
+“I am infinitely complimented, Mrs. Hallam,” Kirkwood assured her; and
+of the girl quickly: “You’re going back home?” he asked.
+
+She nodded, with a faint, puzzled smile that included the woman. “After
+a little—not immediately. Mrs. Hallam is so kind—”
+
+“Pardon me,” he interrupted; “but tell me one thing, please: have you
+any one in England to whom you can go without invitation and be
+welcomed and cared for—any friends or relations?”
+
+“Dorothy will be with me,” Mrs. Hallam answered for her, with cold
+defiance.
+
+Deliberately insolent, Kirkwood turned his back to the woman. “Miss
+Calendar, will you answer my question for yourself?” he asked the girl
+pointedly.
+
+“Why—yes; several friends; none in London, but—”
+
+“Dorothy—”
+
+“One moment, Mrs. Hallam,” Kirkwood flung crisply over his shoulder.
+“I’m going to ask you something rather odd, Miss Calendar,” he
+continued, seeking the girl’s eyes. “I hope—”
+
+“Dorothy, I—”
+
+“If you please, Mrs. Hallam,” suggested the girl, with just the right
+shade of independence. “I wish to listen to Mr. Kirkwood. He has been
+very kind to me and has every right....” She turned to him again,
+leaving the woman breathless and speechless with anger.
+
+“You told me once,” Kirkwood continued quickly, and, he felt, brazenly,
+“that you considered me kind, thoughtful and considerate. You know me
+no better to-day than you did then, but I want to beg you to trust me a
+little. Can you trust yourself to my protection until we reach your
+friends in England?”
+
+“Why, I—” the girl faltered, taken by surprise.
+
+“Mr. Kirkwood!” cried Mrs. Hallam angrily, finding her voice.
+
+Kirkwood turned to meet her onslaught with a mien grave, determined,
+unflinching. “Please do not interfere, Madam,” he said quietly.
+
+“You are impertinent, sir! Dorothy, I forbid you to listen to this
+person!”
+
+The girl flushed, lifting her chin a trifle. “Forbid?” she repeated
+wonderingly.
+
+Kirkwood was quick to take advantage of her resentment. “Mrs. Hallam is
+not fitted to advise you,” he insisted, “nor can she control your
+actions. It must already have occurred to you that you’re rather out of
+place in the present circumstances. The men who have brought you
+hither, I believe you already see through, to some extent. Forgive my
+speaking plainly ... But that is why you have accepted Mrs. Hallam’s
+offer of protection. Will you take my word for it, when I tell you she
+has not your right interests at heart, but the reverse? I happen to
+know, Miss Calendar, and I—”
+
+“How dare you, sir?”
+
+Flaming with rage, Mrs. Hallam put herself bodily between them,
+confronting Kirkwood in white-lipped desperation, her small, gloved
+hands clenched and quivering at her sides, her green eyes dangerous.
+
+But Kirkwood could silence her; and he did. “Do you wish me to speak
+frankly, Madam? Do you wish me to tell what I know—and all I know—,”
+with rising emphasis,—“of your social status and your relations with
+Calendar and Mulready? I promise you that if you wish it, or force me
+to it....”
+
+But he had need to say nothing further; the woman’s eyes wavered before
+his and a little sob of terror forced itself between her shut teeth.
+Kirkwood smiled grimly, with a face of brass, impenetrable, inflexible.
+And suddenly she turned from him with indifferent bravado. “As Mr.
+Kirkwood says, Dorothy,” she said in her high, metallic voice, “I have
+no authority over you. But if you’re silly enough to consider for a
+moment this fellow’s insulting suggestion, if you’re fool enough to go
+with him, unchaperoned through Europe and imperil your—”
+
+“Mrs. Hallam!” Kirkwood cut her short with a menacing tone.
+
+“Why, then, I wash my hands of you,” concluded the woman defiantly.
+“Make your choice, my child,” she added with a meaning laugh and moved
+away, humming a snatch from a French _chanson_ which brought the hot
+blood to Kirkwood’s face.
+
+But the girl did not understand; and he was glad of that. “You may
+judge between us,” he appealed to her directly, once more. “I can only
+offer you my word of honor as an American gentleman that you shall be
+landed in England, safe and sound, by the first available steamer—”
+
+“There’s no need to say more, Mr. Kirkwood,” Dorothy informed him
+quietly. “I have already decided. I think I begin to understand some
+things clearly, now.... If you’re ready, we will go.”
+
+From the window, where she stood, holding the curtains back and staring
+out, Mrs. Hallam turned with a curling lip.
+
+
+[Illustration: From the window, Mrs. Hallam turned with a curling lip.]
+
+
+“‘The honor of an American gentleman,’” she quoted with a stinging
+sneer; “I’m sure I wish you comfort of it, child!”
+
+“We must make haste, Miss Calendar,” said Kirkwood, ignoring the
+implication. “Have you a traveling-bag?”
+
+She silently indicated a small valise, closed and strapped, on a table
+by the bed, and immediately passed out into the hall. Kirkwood took the
+case containing the gladstone bag in one hand, the girl’s valise in the
+other, and followed.
+
+As he turned the head of the stairs he looked back. Mrs. Hallam was
+still at the window, her back turned. From her very passiveness he
+received an impression of something ominous and forbidding; if she had
+lost a trick or two of the game she played, she still held cards, was
+not at the end of her resources. She stuck in his imagination for many
+an hour as a force to be reckoned with.
+
+For the present he understood that she was waiting to apprise Calendar
+and Mulready of their flight. With the more haste, then, he followed
+Dorothy down the three flights, through the tiny office, where Madam
+sat sound asleep at her over-burdened desk, and out.
+
+Opposite the door they were fortunate enough to find a fiacre drawn up
+in waiting at the curb. Kirkwood opened the door for the girl to enter.
+
+“Gare du Sud,” he directed the driver. “Drive your fastest—double fare
+for quick time!”
+
+The driver awoke with a start from profound reverie, looked Kirkwood
+over, and bowed with gesticulative palms.
+
+“M’sieu’, I am desolated, but engaged!” he protested.
+
+“Precisely.” Kirkwood deposited the two bags on the forward seat of the
+conveyance, and stood back to convince the man. “Precisely,” said he,
+undismayed. “The lady who engaged you is remaining for a time; I will
+settle her bill.”
+
+“Very well, M’sieu’!” The driver disclaimed responsibility and accepted
+the favor of the gods with a speaking shrug. “M’sieu’ said the Gare du
+Sud? _En voiture_!”
+
+Kirkwood jumped in and shut the door; the vehicle drew slowly away from
+the curb, then with gratifying speed hammered up-stream on the
+embankment. Bending forward, elbows on knees, Kirkwood watched the
+sidewalks narrowly, partly to cover the girl’s constraint, due to Mrs.
+Hallam’s attitude, partly on the lookout for Calendar and his
+confederates. In a few moments they passed a public clock.
+
+“We’ve missed the Flushing boat,” he announced. “I’m making a try for
+the Hoek van Holland line. We may possibly make it. I know that it
+leaves by the Sud Quai, and that’s all I do know,” he concluded with an
+apologetic laugh.
+
+“And if we miss that?” asked the girl, breaking silence for the first
+time since they had left the hotel.
+
+“We’ll take the first train out of Antwerp.”
+
+“Where to?”
+
+“Wherever the first train goes, Miss Calendar.... The main point is to
+get away to-night. That we must do, no matter where we land, or how we
+get there. To-morrow we can plan with more certainty.”
+
+“Yes...” Her assent was more a sigh than a word.
+
+The cab, dashing down the Rue Leopold de Wael, swung into the Place du
+Sud, before the station. Kirkwood, acutely watchful, suddenly thrust
+head and shoulders out of his window (fortunately it was the one away
+from the depot), and called up to the driver.
+
+“Don’t stop! Gare Centrale now—and treble fare!”
+
+“_Oui, M’sieu’! Allons!_”
+
+The whip cracked and the horse swerved sharply round the corner into
+the Avenue du Sud. The young man, with a hushed exclamation, turned in
+his seat, lifting the flap over the little peephole in the back of the
+carriage.
+
+He had not been mistaken. Calendar was standing in front of the
+station; and it was plain to be seen, from his pose, that the madly
+careering fiacre interested him more than slightly. Irresolute,
+perturbed, the man took a step or two after it, changed his mind, and
+returned to his post of observation.
+
+Kirkwood dropped the flap and turned back to find the girl’s wide eyes
+searching his face. He said nothing.
+
+“What was that?” she asked after a patient moment.
+
+“Your father, Miss Calendar,” he returned uncomfortably.
+
+There fell a short pause; then: “Why—will you tell me—is it necessary
+to run away from my father, Mr. Kirkwood?” she demanded, with a moving
+little break in her voice.
+
+Kirkwood hesitated. It were unfeeling to tell her why; yet it was
+essential that she should know, however painful the knowledge might
+prove to her.
+
+And she was insistent; he might not dodge the issue. “Why?” she
+repeated as he paused.
+
+“I wish you wouldn’t press me for an answer just now, Miss Calendar.”
+
+“Don’t you think I had better know?”
+
+Instinctively he inclined his head in assent.
+
+“Then why—?”
+
+Kirkwood bent forward and patted the flank of the satchel that held the
+gladstone bag.
+
+“What does that mean, Mr. Kirkwood?”
+
+“That I have the jewels,” he told her tersely, looking straight ahead.
+
+At his shoulder he heard a low gasp of amazement and incredulity
+commingled.
+
+“But—! How did you get them? My father deposited them in bank this
+morning?”
+
+“He must have taken them out again.... I got them on board the Alethea,
+where your father was conferring with Mulready and Captain Stryker.”
+
+“The Alethea!”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“You took them from those men?—you!... But didn’t my father—?”
+
+“I had to persuade him,” said Kirkwood simply.
+
+“But there were three of them against you!”
+
+“Mulready wasn’t—ah—feeling very well, and Stryker’s a coward. They
+gave me no trouble. I locked them in Stryker’s room, lifted the bag of
+jewels, and came away.... I ought to tell you that they were discussing
+the advisability of sailing away without you—leaving you here,
+friendless and without means. That’s why I considered it my duty to
+take a hand.... I don’t like to tell you this so brutally, but you
+ought to know, and I can’t see how to tone it down,” he concluded
+awkwardly.
+
+“I understand....”
+
+But for some moments she did not speak. He avoided looking at her.
+
+The fiacre, rolling at top speed but smoothly on the broad avenues that
+encircle the ancient city, turned into the Avenue de Keyser, bringing
+into sight the Gare Centrale.
+
+“You don’t—k-know—” began the girl without warning, in a voice gusty
+with sobs.
+
+“Steady on!” said Kirkwood gently. “I do know, but don’t let’s talk
+about it now. We’ll be at the station in a minute, and I’ll get out and
+see what’s to be done about a train, if neither Mulready or Stryker are
+about. You stay in the carriage.... No!” He changed his mind suddenly.
+“I’ll not risk losing you again. It’s a risk we’ll have to run in
+company.”
+
+“Please!” she agreed brokenly.
+
+The fiacre slowed up and stopped.
+
+“Are you all right, Miss Calendar?” Kirkwood asked.
+
+The girl sat up, lifting her head proudly. “I am quite ready,” she
+said, steadying her voice.
+
+Kirkwood reconnoitered through the window, while the driver was
+descending.
+
+“Gare Centrale, M’sieu’,” he said, opening the door.
+
+“No one in sight,” Kirkwood told the girl. “Come, please.”
+
+He got out and gave her his hand, then paid the driver, picked up the
+two bags, and hurried with Dorothy into the station, to find in waiting
+a string of cars into which people were moving at leisurely rate. His
+inquiries at the ticket-window developed the fact that it was the 22:26
+for Brussels, the last train leaving the Gare Centrale that night, and
+due to start in ten minutes.
+
+The information settled their plans for once and all; Kirkwood promptly
+secured through tickets, also purchasing “Reserve” supplementary
+tickets which entitled them to the use of those modern corridor coaches
+which take the place of first-class compartments on the Belgian state
+railways.
+
+“It’s a pleasure,” said Kirkwood lightly, as he followed the girl into
+one of these, “to find one’s self in a common-sense sort of a train
+again. ’Feels like home.” He put their luggage in one of the racks and
+sat down beside her, chattering with simulated cheerfulness in a vain
+endeavor to lighten her evident depression of spirit. “I always feel
+like a traveling anachronism in one of your English trains,” he said.
+“You can’t appreciate—”
+
+The girl smiled bravely.... “And after Brussels?” she inquired.
+
+“First train for the coast,” he said promptly. “Dover, Ostend,
+Boulogne,—whichever proves handiest, no matter which, so long as it
+gets us on English soil without undue delay.”
+
+She said “Yes” abstractedly, resting an elbow on the window-sill and
+her chin in her palm, to stare with serious, sweet brown eyes out into
+the arc-smitten night that hung beneath the echoing roof.
+
+Kirkwood fidgeted in despite of the constraint he placed himself under,
+to be still and not disturb her needlessly. Impatience and apprehension
+of misfortune obsessed his mental processes in equal degree. The ten
+minutes seemed interminable that elapsed ere the grinding couplings
+advertised the imminence of their start.
+
+The guards began to bawl, the doors to slam, belated travelers to dash
+madly for the coaches. The train gave a preliminary lurch ere settling
+down to its league-long inland dash.
+
+Kirkwood, in a fever of hope and an ague of fear, saw a man sprint
+furiously across the platform and throw himself on the forward steps of
+their coach, on the very instant of the start.
+
+Presently he entered by the forward door and walked slowly through,
+narrowly inspecting the various passengers. As he approached the seats
+occupied by Kirkwood and Dorothy Calendar, his eyes encountered the
+young man’s, and he leered evilly. Kirkwood met the look with one that
+was like a kick, and the fellow passed with some haste into the car
+behind.
+
+“Who was that?” demanded the girl, without moving her head.
+
+“How did you know?” he asked, astonished. “You didn’t look—”
+
+“I saw your knuckles whiten beneath the skin.... Who was it?”
+
+“Hobbs,” he acknowledged bitterly; “the mate of the _Alethea_.”
+
+“I know.... And you think—?”
+
+“Yes. He must have been ashore when I was on board the brigantine; he
+certainly wasn’t in the cabin. Evidently they hunted him up, or ran
+across him, and pressed him into service.... You see, they’re watching
+every outlet.... But we’ll win through, never fear!”
+
+
+
+
+XVI
+TRAVELS WITH A CHAPERON
+
+
+The train, escaping the outskirts of the city, remarked the event with
+an exultant shriek, then settled down, droning steadily, to
+night-devouring flight. In the corridor-car the few passengers disposed
+themselves to drowse away the coming hour—the short hour’s ride that,
+in these piping days of frantic traveling, separates Antwerp from the
+capital city of Belgium.
+
+A guard, slamming gustily in through the front door, reeled unsteadily
+down the aisle. Kirkwood, rousing from a profound reverie, detained him
+with a gesture and began to interrogate him in French. When he departed
+presently it transpired that the girl was unaquainted with that tongue.
+
+“I didn’t understand, you know,” she told him with a slow, shy smile.
+
+“I was merely questioning him about the trains from Brussels to-night.
+We daren’t stop, you see; we must go on,—keep Hobbs on the jump and
+lose him, if possible. There’s where our advantage lies—in having only
+Hobbs to deal with. He’s not particularly intellectual; and we’ve two
+heads to his one, besides. If we can prevent him from guessing our
+destination and wiring back to Antwerp, we may win away. You
+understand?”
+
+“Perfectly,” she said, brightening. “And what do you purpose doing
+now?”
+
+“I can’t tell yet. The guard’s gone to get me some information about
+the night trains on other lines. In the meantime, don’t fret about
+Hobbs; I’ll answer for Hobbs.”
+
+“I shan’t be worried,” she said simply, “with you here....”
+
+Whatever answer he would have made he was obliged to postpone because
+of the return of the guard, with a handful of time-tables; and when,
+rewarded with a modest gratuity, the man had gone his way, and Kirkwood
+turned again to the girl, she had withdrawn her attention for the time.
+
+Unconscious of his bold regard, she was dreaming, her thoughts at
+loose-ends, her eyes studying the incalculable depths of blue-black
+night that swirled and eddied beyond the window-glass. The most shadowy
+of smiles touched her lips, the faintest shade of deepened color rested
+on her cheeks.... She was thinking of—him? As long as he dared, the
+young man, his heart in his own eyes, watched her greedily, taking a
+miser’s joy of her youthful beauty, striving with all his soul to
+analyze the enigma of that most inscrutable smile.
+
+It baffled him. He could not say of what she thought; and told himself
+bitterly that it was not for him, a pauper, to presume a place in her
+meditations. He must not forget his circumstances, nor let her
+tolerance render him oblivious to his place, which must be a servant’s,
+not a lover’s.
+
+The better to convince himself of this, he plunged desperately into a
+forlorn attempt to make head or tail of Belgian railway schedule,
+complicated as these of necessity are by the alternation from normal
+time notation to the abnormal system sanctioned by the government, and
+_vice-versa_, with every train that crosses a boundary line of the
+state.
+
+So preoccupied did he become in this pursuit that he was subconsciously
+impressed that the girl had spoken twice, ere he could detach his
+interest from the exasperatingly inconclusive and incoherent cohorts of
+ranked figures.
+
+“Can’t you find out anything?” Dorothy was asking.
+
+“Precious little,” he grumbled. “I’d give my head for a Bradshaw! Only
+it wouldn’t be a fair exchange.... There seems to be an express for
+Bruges leaving the Gare du Nord, Brussels, at fifty-five minutes after
+twenty-three o’clock; and if I’m not mistaken, that’s the latest train
+out of Brussels and the earliest we can catch,... if we _can_ catch it.
+I’ve never been in Brussels, and Heaven only knows how long it would
+take us to cab it from the Gare du Midi to the Nord.”
+
+In this statement, however, Mr. Kirkwood was fortunately mistaken; not
+only Heaven, it appeared, had cognizance of the distance between the
+two stations. While Kirkwood was still debating the question, with
+pessimistic tendencies, the friendly guard had occasion to pass through
+the coach; and, being tapped, yielded the desired information with
+entire tractability.
+
+It would be a cab-ride of perhaps ten minutes. Monsieur, however, would
+serve himself well if he offered the driver an advance tip as an
+incentive to speedy driving. Why? Why because (here the guard consulted
+his watch; and Kirkwood very keenly regretted the loss of his
+own)—because this train, announced to arrive in Brussels some twenty
+minutes prior to the departure of that other, was already late. But
+yes—a matter of some ten minutes. Could that not be made up? Ah,
+Monsieur, but who should say?
+
+The guard departed, doubtless with private views as to the madness of
+all English-speaking travelers.
+
+“And there we are!” commented Kirkwood in factitious resignation. “If
+we’re obliged to stop overnight in Brussels, our friends will be on our
+back before we can get out in the morning, if they have to come by
+motor-car.” He reflected bitterly on the fact that with but a little
+more money at his disposal, he too could hire a motor-car and cry
+defiance to their persecutors. “However,” he amended, with rising
+spirits, “so much the better our chance of losing Mr. Hobbs. We must be
+ready to drop off the instant the train stops.”
+
+He began to unfold another time-table, threatening again to lose
+himself completely; and was thrown into the utmost confusion by the
+touch of the girl’s hand, in appeal placed lightly on his own. And had
+she been observant, she might have seen a second time his knuckles
+whiten beneath the skin as he asserted his self-control—though this
+time not over his temper.
+
+His eyes, dumbly eloquent, turned to meet hers. She was smiling.
+
+“Please!” she iterated, with the least imperative pressure on his hand,
+pushing the folder aside.
+
+“I beg pardon?” he muttered blankly.
+
+“Is it quite necessary, now, to study those schedules? Haven’t you
+decided to try for the Bruges express?”
+
+“Why yes, but—”
+
+“Then please don’t leave me to my thoughts all the time, Mr. Kirkwood.”
+There was a tremor of laughter in her voice, but her eyes were grave
+and earnest. “I’m very weary of thinking round in a circle—and that,”
+she concluded, with a nervous little laugh, “is all I’ve had to do for
+days!”
+
+“I’m afraid I’m very stupid,” he humored her. “This is the second time,
+you know, in the course of a very brief acquaintance, that you have
+found it necessary to remind me to talk to you.”
+
+“Oh-h!” She brightened. “That night, at the Pless? But that was _ages_
+ago!”
+
+“It seems so,” he admitted.
+
+“So much has happened!”
+
+“Yes,” he assented vaguely.
+
+She watched him, a little piqued by his absent-minded mood, for a
+moment; then, and not without a trace of malice: “Must I tell you again
+what to talk about?” she asked.
+
+“Forgive me. I was thinking about, if not talking to, you.... I’ve been
+wondering just why it was that you left the _Alethea_ at Queensborough,
+to go on by steamer.”
+
+And immediately he was sorry that his tactless query had swung the
+conversation to bear upon her father, the thought of whom could not but
+prove painful to her. But it was too late to mend matters; already her
+evanescent flush of amusement had given place to remembrance.
+
+“It was on my father’s account,” she told him in a steady voice, but
+with averted eyes; “he is a very poor sailor, and the promise of a
+rough passage terrified him. I believe there was a difference of
+opinion about it, he disputing with Mr. Mulready and Captain Stryker.
+That was just after we had left the anchorage. They both insisted that
+it was safer to continue by the _Alethea_, but he wouldn’t listen to
+them, and in the end had his way. Captain Stryker ran the brigantine
+into the mouth of the Medway and put us ashore just in time to catch
+the steamer.”
+
+“Were you sorry for the change?”
+
+“I?” She shuddered slightly. “Hardly! I think I hated the ship from the
+moment I set foot on board her. It was a dreadful place; it was all
+night-marish, that night, but it seemed most terrible on the _Alethea_
+with Captain Stryker and that abominable Mr. Hobbs. I think that my
+unhappiness had as much to do with my father’s insistence on the
+change, as anything. He ... he was very thoughtful, most of the time.”
+
+Kirkwood shut his teeth on what he knew of the blackguard.
+
+“I don’t know why,” she continued, wholly without affectation, “but I
+was wretched from the moment you left me in the cab, to wait while you
+went in to see Mrs. Hallam. And when we left you, at Bermondsey Old
+Stairs, after what you had said to me, I felt—I hardly know what to
+say—abandoned, in a way.”
+
+“But you were with your father, in his care—”
+
+“I know, but I was getting confused. Until then the excitement had kept
+me from thinking. But you made me think. I began to wonder, to question
+... But what could I do?” She signified her helplessness with a quick
+and dainty movement of her hands. “He is my father; and I’m not yet of
+age, you know.”
+
+“I thought so,” he confessed, troubled. “It’s very inconsiderate of
+you, you must admit.”
+
+“I don’t understand...”
+
+“Because of the legal complication. I’ve no doubt your father can ‘have
+the law on me’”—Kirkwood laughed uneasily—“for taking you from his
+protection.”
+
+“Protection!” she echoed warmly. “If you call it that!”
+
+“Kidnapping,” he said thoughtfully: “I presume that’d be the charge.”
+
+“Oh!” She laughed the notion to scorn. “Besides, they must catch us
+first, mustn’t they?”
+
+“Of course; and”—with a simulation of confidence sadly deceitful—“they
+shan’t, Mr. Hobbs to the contrary notwithstanding.”
+
+“You make me share your confidence, against my better judgment.”
+
+“I wish your better judgment would counsel you to share your confidence
+with me,” he caught her up. “If you would only tell me what it’s all
+about, as far as you know, I’d be better able to figure out what we
+ought to do.”
+
+Briefly the girl sat silent, staring before her with sweet somber eyes.
+Then, “In the very beginning,” she told him with a conscious
+laugh,—“this sounds very story-bookish, I know—in the very beginning,
+George Burgoyne Calendar, an American, married his cousin a dozen times
+removed, and an Englishwoman, Alice Burgoyne Hallam.”
+
+“Hallam!”
+
+“Wait, please.” She sat up, bending forward and frowning down upon her
+interlacing, gloved fingers; she was finding it difficult to say what
+she must. Kirkwood, watching hungrily the fair drooping head, the
+flawless profile clear and radiant against the night-blackened window,
+saw hot signals of shame burning on her cheek and throat and forehead.
+
+“But never mind,” he began awkwardly.
+
+“No,” she told him with decision. “Please let me go on....” She
+continued, stumbling, trusting to his sympathy to bridge the gaps in
+her narrative. “My father ... There was trouble of some sort.... At all
+events, he disappeared when I was a baby. My mother ... died. I was
+brought up in the home of my great-uncle, Colonel George Burgoyne, of
+the Indian Army—retired. My mother had been his favorite niece, they
+say; I presume that was why he cared for me. I grew up in his home in
+Cornwall; it was my home, just as he was my father in everything but
+fact.
+
+“A year ago he died, leaving me everything,—the town house in Frognall
+Street, his estate in Cornwall: everything was willed to me on
+condition that I must never live with my father, nor in any way
+contribute to his support. If I disobeyed, the entire estate without
+reserve was to go to his nearest of kin.... Colonel Burgoyne was
+unmarried and had no children.”
+
+The girl paused, lifting to Kirkwood’s face her eyes, clear, fearless,
+truthful. “I never was given to understand that there was anybody who
+might have inherited, other than myself,” she declared.
+
+“I see... Last week I received a letter, signed with my father’s name,
+begging me to appoint an interview with him in London. I did so,—guess
+how gladly! I was alone in the world, and he, my father, whom I had
+never thought to see.... We met at his hotel, the Pless. He wanted me
+to come and live with him,—said that he was growing old and lonely and
+needed a daughter’s love and care. He told me that he had made a
+fortune in America and was amply able to provide for us both. As for my
+inheritance, he persuaded me that it was by rights the property of
+Frederick Hallam, Mrs. Hallam’s son.”
+
+“I have met the young gentleman,” interpolated Kirkwood.
+
+“His name was new to me, but my father assured me that he was the next
+of kin mentioned in Colonel Burgoyne’s will, and convinced me that I
+had no real right to the property.... After all, he was my father; I
+agreed; I could not bear the thought of wronging anybody. I was to give
+up everything but my mother’s jewels. It seems,—my father said,—I
+don’t—I can’t believe it now—”
+
+She choked on a little, dry sob. It was some time before she seemed
+able to continue.
+
+“I was told that my great-uncle’s collection of jewels had been my
+mother’s property. He had in life a passion for collecting jewels, and
+it had been his whim to carry them with him, wherever he went. When he
+died in Frognall Street, they were in the safe by the head of his bed.
+I, in my grief, at first forgot them, and then afterwards carelessly
+put off removing them.
+
+“To come back to my father: Night before last we were to call on Mrs.
+Hallam. It was to be our last night in England; we were to sail for the
+Continent on the private yacht of a friend of my father’s, the next
+morning.... This is what I was told—and believed, you understand.
+
+“That night Mrs. Hallam was dining at another table at the Pless, it
+seems. I did not then know her. When leaving, she put a note on our
+table, by my father’s elbow. I was astonished beyond words.... He
+seemed much agitated, told me that he was called away on urgent
+business, a matter of life and death, and begged me to go alone to
+Frognall Street, get the jewels and meet him at Mrs. Hallam’s later....
+I wasn’t altogether a fool, for I began dimly to suspect, then, that
+something was wrong; but I was a fool, for I consented to do as he
+desired. You understand—you know—?”
+
+“I do, indeed,” replied Kirkwood grimly. “I understand a lot of things
+now that I didn’t five minutes ago. Please let me think...”
+
+But the time he took for deliberation was short. He had hoped to find a
+way to spare her, by sparing Calendar; but momentarily he was becoming
+more impressed with the futility of dealing with her save in terms of
+candor, merciful though they might seem harsh.
+
+“I must tell you,” he said, “that you have been outrageously misled,
+swindled and deceived. I have heard from your father’s own lips that
+Mrs. Hallam was to pay him two thousand pounds for keeping you out of
+England and losing you your inheritance. I’m inclined to question,
+furthermore, the assertion that these jewels were your mother’s.
+Frederick Hallam was the man who followed you into the Frognall Street
+house and attacked me on the stairs; Mrs. Hallam admits that he went
+there to get the jewels. But he didn’t want anybody to know it.”
+
+“But that doesn’t prove—”
+
+“Just a minute.” Rapidly and concisely Kirkwood recounted the events
+wherein he had played a part, subsequent to the adventure of Bermondsey
+Old Stairs. He was guilty of but one evasion; on one point only did he
+slur the truth: he conceived it his honorable duty to keep the girl in
+ignorance of his straitened circumstances; she was not to be distressed
+by knowledge of his distress, nor could he tolerate the suggestion of
+seeming to play for her sympathy. It was necessary, then, to invent a
+motive to excuse his return to 9, Frognall Street. I believe he chose
+to exaggerate the inquisitiveness of his nature and threw in for good
+measure a desire to recover a prized trinket of no particular moment,
+esteemed for its associations, and so forth. But whatever the
+fabrication, it passed muster; to the girl his motives seemed less
+important than the discoveries that resulted from them.
+
+“I am afraid,” he concluded the summary of the confabulation he had
+overheard at the skylight of the Alethea’s cabin, “you’d best make up
+your mind that your father—”
+
+“Yes,” whispered the girl huskily; and turned her face to the window, a
+quivering muscle in the firm young throat alone betraying her emotion.
+
+“It’s a bad business,” he pursued relentlessly: “bad all round.
+Mulready, in your father’s pay, tries to have him arrested, the better
+to rob him. Mrs. Hallam, to secure your property for that precious pet,
+Freddie, connives at, if she doesn’t instigate, a kidnapping. Your
+father takes her money to deprive you of yours,—which could profit him
+nothing so long as you remained in lawful possession of it; and at the
+same time he conspires to rob, through you, the rightful owners—if they
+are rightful owners. And if they are, why does Freddie Hallam go like a
+thief in the night to secure property that’s his beyond dispute?... I
+don’t really think you owe your father any further consideration.”
+
+He waited patiently. Eventually, “No-o,” the girl sobbed assent.
+
+“It’s this way: Calendar, counting on your sparing him in the end, is
+going to hound us. He’s doing it now: there’s Hobbs in the next car,
+for proof. Until these jewels are returned, whether to Frognall Street
+or to young Hallam, we’re both in danger, both thieves in the sight of
+the law. And your father knows that, too. There’s no profit to be had
+by discounting the temper of these people; they’re as desperate a gang
+of swindlers as ever lived. They’ll have those jewels if they have to
+go as far as murder—”
+
+“Mr. Kirkwood!” she deprecated, in horror.
+
+He wagged his head stubbornly, ominously. “I’ve seen them in the raw.
+They’re hot on our trail now; ten to one, they’ll be on our backs
+before we can get across the Channel. Once in England we will be
+comparatively safe. Until then ... But I’m a brute—I’m frightening
+you!”
+
+“You are, dreadfully,” she confessed in a tremulous voice.
+
+“Forgive me. If you look at the dark side first, the other seems all
+the brighter. Please don’t worry; we’ll pull through with flying
+colors, or my name’s not Philip Kirkwood!”
+
+“I have every faith in you,” she informed him, flawlessly sincere.
+“When I think of all you’ve done and dared for me, on the mere
+suspicion that I needed your help—”
+
+“We’d best be getting ready,” he interrupted hastily. “Here’s
+Brussels.”
+
+It was so. Lights, in little clusters and long, wheeling lines, were
+leaping out of the darkness and flashing back as the train rumbled
+through the suburbs of the little Paris of the North. Already the other
+passengers were bestirring themselves, gathering together wraps and
+hand luggage, and preparing for the journey’s end.
+
+Rising, Kirkwood took down their two satchels from the overhead rack,
+and waited, in grim abstraction planning and counterplanning against
+the machinations in whose wiles they two had become so perilously
+entangled.
+
+Primarily, there was Hobbs to be dealt with; no easy task, for Kirkwood
+dared not resort to violence nor in any way invite the attention of the
+authorities; and threats would be an idle waste of breath, in the case
+of that corrupt and malignant, little cockney, himself as keen as any
+needle, adept in all the artful resources of the underworld whence he
+had sprung, and further primed for action by that master rogue,
+Calendar.
+
+The train was pulling slowly into the station when he reluctantly
+abandoned his latest unfeasible scheme for shaking off the little
+Englishman, and concluded that their salvation was only to be worked
+out through everlasting vigilance, incessant movement, and the favor of
+the blind goddess, Fortune. There was comfort of a sort in the
+reflection that the divinity of chance is at least blind; her favors
+are impartially distributed; the swing of the wheel of the world is not
+always to the advantage of the wrongdoer and the scamp.
+
+He saw nothing of Hobbs as they alighted and hastened from the station,
+and hardly had time to waste looking for him, since their train had
+failed to make up the precious ten minutes. Consequently he dismissed
+the fellow from his thoughts until—with Brussels lingering in their
+memories a garish vision of brilliant streets and glowing cafés,
+glimpsed furtively from their cab windows during its wild dash over the
+broad mid-city, boulevards—at midnight they settled themselves in a
+carriage of the Bruges express. They were speeding along through the
+open country with a noisy clatter; then a minute’s investigation
+sufficed to discover the mate of the _Alethea_ serenely ensconced in
+the coach behind.
+
+The little man seemed rarely complacent, and impudently greeted
+Kirkwood’s scowling visage, as the latter peered through the window in
+the coach-door, with a smirk and a waggish wave of his hand. The
+American by main strength of will-power mastered an impulse to enter
+and wring his neck, and returned to the girl, more disturbed than he
+cared to let her know.
+
+There resulted from his review of the case but one plan for outwitting
+Mr. Hobbs, and that lay in trusting to his confidence that Kirkwood and
+Dorothy Calendar would proceed as far toward Ostend as the train would
+take them—namely, to the limit of the run, Bruges.
+
+Thus inspired, Kirkwood took counsel with the girl, and when the train
+paused at Ghent, they made an unostentatious exit from their coach,
+finding themselves, when the express had rolled on into the west, upon
+a station platform in a foreign city at nine minutes past one o’clock
+in the morning—but at length without their shadow. Mr. Hobbs had gone
+on to Bruges.
+
+Kirkwood sped his journeyings with an unspoken malediction, and
+collected himself to cope with a situation which was to prove hardly
+more happy for them than the espionage they had just eluded. The primal
+flush of triumph which had saturated the American’s humor on this
+signal success, proved but fictive and transitory when inquiry of the
+station attendants educed the information that the two earliest trains
+to be obtained were the 5:09 for Dunkerque and the 5:37 for Ostend. A
+minimum delay of four hours was to be endured in the face of many
+contingent features singularly unpleasant to contemplate. The station
+waiting-room was on the point of closing for the night, and Kirkwood,
+already alarmed by the rapid ebb of the money he had had of Calendar,
+dared not subject his finances to the strain of a night’s lodging at
+one of Ghent’s hotels. He found himself forced to be cruel to be kind
+to the girl, and Dorothy’s cheerful acquiescence to their sole
+alternative of tramping the street until daybreak did nothing to
+alleviate Kirkwood’s exasperation.
+
+It was permitted them to occupy a bench outside the station. There the
+girl, her head pillowed on the treasure bag, napped uneasily, while
+Kirkwood plodded restlessly to and fro, up and down the platform,
+communing with the Shade of Care and addling his poor, weary wits with
+the problem of the future,—not so much his own as the future of the
+unhappy child for whose welfare he had assumed responsibility. Dark for
+both of them, in his understanding To-morrow loomed darkest for her.
+
+Not until the gray, formless light of the dawn-dusk was wavering over
+the land, did he cease his perambulations. Then a gradual stir of life
+in the city streets, together with the appearance of a station porter
+or two, opening the waiting-rooms and preparing them against the
+traffic of the day, warned him that he must rouse his charge. He paused
+and stood over her, reluctant to disturb her rest, such as it was, his
+heart torn with compassion for her, his soul embittered by the cruel
+irony of their estate.
+
+If what he understood were true, a king’s ransom was secreted within
+the cheap, imitation-leather satchel which served her for a pillow. But
+it availed her nothing for her comfort. If what he believed were true,
+she was absolute mistress of that treasure of jewels; yet that night
+she had been forced to sleep on a hard, uncushioned bench, in the open
+air, and this morning he must waken her to the life of a hunted thing.
+A week ago she had had at her command every luxury known to the
+civilized world; to-day she was friendless, but for his inefficient,
+worthless self, and in a strange land. A week ago,—had he known her
+then,—he had been free to tell her of his love, to offer her the
+protection of his name as well as his devotion; to-day he was an all
+but penniless vagabond, and there could be no dishonor deeper than to
+let her know the nature of his heart’s desire.
+
+Was ever lover hedged from a declaration to his mistress by
+circumstances so hateful, so untoward! He could have raged and railed
+against his fate like any madman. For he desired her greatly, and she
+was very lovely in his sight. If her night’s rest had been broken and
+but a mockery, she showed few signs of it; the faint, wan complexion of
+fatigue seemed only to enhance the beauty of her maidenhood; her lips
+were as fresh and desirous as the dewy petals of a crimson rose;
+beneath her eyes soft shadows lurked where her lashes lay tremulous
+upon her cheeks of satin.... She was to him of all created things the
+most wonderful, the most desirable.
+
+The temptation of his longing seemed more than he could long withstand.
+But resist he must, or part for ever with any title to her
+consideration—or his own. He shut his teeth and knotted his brows in a
+transport of desire to touch, if only with his finger-tips, the woven
+wonder of her hair.
+
+And thus she saw him, when, without warning, she awoke.
+
+Bewilderment at first informed the wide brown eyes; then, as their
+drowsiness vanished, a little laughter, a little tender mirth.
+
+“Good morning, Sir Knight of the Somber Countenance!” she cried,
+standing up. “Am I so utterly disreputable that you find it necessary
+to frown on me so darkly?”
+
+He shook his head, smiling.
+
+“I know I’m a fright,” she asserted vigorously, shaking out the folds
+of her pleated skirt. “And as for my hat, it will never be on
+straight—but then _you_ wouldn’t know.”
+
+“It seems all right,” he replied vacantly.
+
+“Then please to try to look a little happier, since you find me quite
+presentable.”
+
+“I do...”
+
+Without lifting her bended head, she looked up, laughing, not
+ill-pleased. “_You’d_ say so... really?”
+
+Commonplace enough, this banter, this pitiful endeavor to be oblivious
+of their common misery; but like the look she gave him, her words rang
+in his head like potent fumes of wine. He turned away, utterly
+disconcerted for the time, knowing only that he must overcome his
+weakness.
+
+Far down the railway tracks there rose a murmuring, that waxed to a
+rumbling roar. A passing porter answered Kirkwood’s inquiry: it was the
+night boat-train from Ostend. He picked up their bags and drew the girl
+into the waiting-room, troubled by a sickening foreboding.
+
+Through the window they watched the train roll in and stop.
+
+Among others, alighted, smirking, the unspeakable Hobbs.
+
+He lifted his hat and bowed jauntily to the waiting-room window, making
+it plain that his keen eyes had discovered them instantly.
+
+Kirkwood’s heart sank with the hopelessness of it all. If the railway
+directorates of Europe conspired against them, what chance had they? If
+the night boat-train from Ostend had only had the decency to be
+twenty-five minutes late, instead of arriving promptly on the minute of
+4:45 they two might have escaped by the 5:09 for Dunkerque and Calais.
+
+There remained but a single untried ruse in his bag of tricks;
+mercifully it might suffice.
+
+“Miss Calendar,” said Kirkwood from his heart, “just as soon as I get
+you home, safe and sound, I am going to take a day off, hunt up that
+little villain, and flay him alive. In the meantime, I forgot to dine
+last night, and am reminded that we had better forage for breakfast.”
+
+Hobbs dogged them at a safe distance while they sallied forth and in a
+neighboring street discovered an early-bird bakery. Here they were able
+to purchase rolls steaming from the oven, fresh pats of golden butter
+wrapped in clean lettuce leaves, and milk in twin bottles; all of which
+they prosaically carried with them back to the station, lacking leisure
+as they did to partake of the food before train-time.
+
+Without attempting concealment (Hobbs, he knew, was eavesdropping round
+the corner of the door) Kirkwood purchased at the ticket-window
+passages on the Dunkerque train. Mr. Hobbs promptly flattered him by
+imitation; and so jealous of his luck was Kirkwood by this time grown,
+through continual disappointment, that he did not even let the girl
+into his plans until they were aboard the 5:09, in a compartment all to
+themselves. Then, having with his own eyes seen Mr. Hobbs dodge into
+the third compartment in the rear of the same carriage, Kirkwood
+astonished the girl by requesting her to follow him; and together they
+left by the door opposite that by which they had entered.
+
+The engine was running up and down a scale of staccato snorts, in
+preparation for the race, and the cars were on the edge of moving,
+couplings clanking, wheels a-groan, ere Mr. Hobbs condescended to join
+them between the tracks.
+
+Wearily, disheartened, Kirkwood reopened the door, flung the bags in,
+and helped the girl back into their despised compartment; the quicker
+route to England via Ostend was now out of the question. As for
+himself, he waited for a brace of seconds, eying wickedly the
+ubiquitous Hobbs, who had popped back into his compartment, but stood
+ready to pop out again on the least encouragement. In the meantime he
+was pleased to shake a friendly foot at Mr. Kirkwood, thrusting that
+member out through the half-open door.
+
+Only the timely departure of the train, compelling him to rejoin
+Dorothy at once, if at all, prevented the American from adding murder
+to the already noteworthy catalogue of his high crimes and
+misdemeanors.
+
+Their simple meal, consumed to the ultimate drop and crumb while the
+Dunkerque train meandered serenely through a sunny, smiling Flemish
+countryside, somewhat revived their jaded spirits. After all, they were
+young, enviably dowered with youth’s exuberant elasticity of mood; the
+world was bright in the dawning, the night had fled leaving naught but
+an evil memory; best of all things, they were together: tacitly they
+were agreed that somehow the future would take care of itself and all
+be well with them.
+
+For a time they laughed and chattered, pretending that the present held
+no cares or troubles; but soon the girl, nestling her head in a corner
+of the dingy cushions, was smiling ever more drowsily on Kirkwood; and
+presently she slept in good earnest, the warm blood ebbing and flowing
+beneath the exquisite texture of her cheeks, the ghost of an
+unconscious smile quivering about the sensitive scarlet mouth, the
+breeze through the open window at her side wantoning at will in the
+sunlit witchery of her hair. And Kirkwood, worn with sleepless
+watching, dwelt in longing upon the dear innocent allure of her until
+the ache in his heart had grown well-nigh insupportable; then
+instinctively turned his gaze upwards, searching his heart, reading the
+faith and desire of it, so that at length knowledge and understanding
+came to him, of his weakness and strength and the clean love that he
+bore for her, and gladdened he sat dreaming in waking the same clear
+dreams that modeled her unconscious lips secretly for laughter and the
+joy of living.
+
+When Dunkerque halted their progress, they were obliged to alight and
+change cars,—Hobbs a discreetly sinister shadow at the end of the
+platform.
+
+By schedule they were to arrive in Calais about the middle of the
+forenoon, with a wait of three hours to be bridged before the departure
+of the Dover packet. That would be an anxious time; the prospect of it
+rendered both Dorothy and Kirkwood doubly anxious throughout this final
+stage of their flight. In three hours anything could happen, or be
+brought about. Neither could forget that it was quite within the bounds
+of possibilities for Calendar to be awaiting them in Calais. Presuming
+that Hobbs had been acute enough to guess their plans and advise his
+employer by telegraph, the latter could readily have anticipated their
+arrival, whether by sea in the brigantine, or by land, taking the
+direct route via Brussels and Lille. If such proved to be the case, it
+were scarcely sensible to count upon the arch-adventurer contenting
+himself with a waiting rôle like Hobbs’.
+
+With such unhappy apprehensions for a stimulant, between them the man
+and the girl contrived a make-shift counter-stratagem; or it were more
+accurate to say that Kirkwood proposed it, while Dorothy rejected,
+disputed, and at length accepted it, albeit with sad misgivings. For it
+involved a separation that might not prove temporary.
+
+Together they could never escape the surveillance of Mr. Hobbs; parted,
+he would be obliged to follow one or the other. The task of misleading
+the _Alethea’s_ mate, Kirkwood undertook, delegating to the girl the
+duty of escaping when he could provide her the opportunity, of keeping
+under cover until the hour of sailing, and then proceeding to England,
+with the gladstone bag, alone if Kirkwood was unable, or thought it
+inadvisable, to join her on the boat.
+
+In furtherance of this design, a majority of the girl’s belongings were
+transferred from her traveling bag to Kirkwood’s, the gladstone taking
+their place; and the young man provided her with voluminous
+instructions, a revolver which she did not know how to handle and
+declared she would never use for any consideration, and enough money to
+pay for her accommodation at the Terminus Hôtel, near the pier, and for
+two passages to London. It was agreed that she should secure the
+steamer booking, lest Kirkwood be delayed until the last moment.
+
+These arrangements concluded, the pair of blessed idiots sat steeped in
+melancholy silence, avoiding each other’s eyes, until the train drew in
+at the Gare Centrale, Calais.
+
+In profound silence, too, they left their compartment and passed
+through the station, into the quiet, sun-drenched streets of the
+seaport,—Hobbs hovering solicitously in the offing.
+
+Without comment or visible relief of mind they were aware that their
+fears had been without apparent foundation; they saw no sign of
+Calendar, Stryker or Mulready. The circumstance, however, counted for
+nothing; one or all of the adventurers might arrive in Calais at any
+minute.
+
+Momentarily more miserable as the time of parting drew nearer, dumb
+with unhappiness, they turned aside from the main thoroughfares of the
+city, leaving the business section, and gained the sleepier side
+streets, bordered by the residences of the proletariat, where for
+blocks none but children were to be seen, and of them but few—quaint,
+sober little bodies playing almost noiselessly in their dooryards.
+
+At length Kirkwood spoke.
+
+“Let’s make it the corner,” he said, without looking at the girl. “It’s
+a short block to the next street. You hurry to the Terminus and lock
+yourself in your room. Have the management book both passages; don’t
+run the risk of going to the pier yourself. I’ll make things
+interesting for Mr. Hobbs, and join you as soon as I can, _if_ I can.”
+
+“You must,” replied the girl. “I shan’t go without you.”
+
+“But, Dor—Miss Calendar!” he exclaimed, aghast.
+
+“I don’t care—I know I agreed,” she declared mutinously. “But I won’t—I
+can’t. Remember I shall wait for you.”
+
+“But—but perhaps—”
+
+“If you have to stay, it will be because there’s danger—won’t it? And
+what would you think of me if I deserted you then, af-after all
+y-you’ve done?... Please don’t waste time arguing. Whether you come at
+one to-day, to-morrow, or a week from to-morrow, I shall be waiting....
+You may be sure. Good-by.”
+
+They had turned the corner, walking slowly, side by side; Hobbs, for
+the first time caught off his guard, had dropped behind more than half
+a long block. But now Kirkwood’s quick sidelong glance discovered the
+mate in the act of taking alarm and quickening his pace. None the less
+the American was at the time barely conscious of anything other than a
+wholly unexpected furtive pressure of the girl’s gloved fingers on his
+own.
+
+“Good-by,” she whispered.
+
+He caught at her hand, protesting. “Dorothy—!”
+
+“Good-by,” she repeated breathlessly, with a queer little catch in her
+voice. “God be with you, Philip, and—and send you safely back to
+me....”
+
+And she was running away.
+
+Dumfounded with dismay, seeing in a flash how all his plans might be
+set at naught by this her unforeseen insubordination, he took a step or
+two after her; but she was fleet of foot, and, remembering Hobbs, he
+halted.
+
+By this time the mate, too, was running; Kirkwood could hear the heavy
+pounding of his clumsy feet. Already Dorothy had almost gained the
+farther corner; as she whisked round it with a flutter of skirts,
+Kirkwood dodged hastily behind a gate-post. A thought later, Hobbs
+appeared, head down, chest out, eyes straining for sight of his quarry,
+pelting along for dear life.
+
+As, rounding the corner, he stretched out in swifter stride, Kirkwood
+was inspired to put a spoke in his wheel; and a foot thrust suddenly
+out from behind the gate-post accomplished his purpose with more
+success than he had dared anticipate. Stumbling, the mate plunged
+headlong, arms and legs a-sprawl; and the momentum of his pace, though
+checked, carried him along the sidewalk, face downwards, a full yard
+ere he could stay himself.
+
+Kirkwood stepped out of the gateway and sheered off as Hobbs picked
+himself up; something which he did rather slowly, as if in a daze,
+without comprehension of the cause of his misfortune. And for a moment
+he stood pulling his wits together and swaying as though on the point
+of resuming his rudely interrupted chase; when the noise of Kirkwood’s
+heels brought him about face in a twinkling.
+
+“Ow, it’s you, eh!” he snarled in a temper as vicious as his
+countenance; and both of these were much the worse for wear and tear.
+
+“Myself,” admitted Kirkwood fairly; and then, in a gleam of humor:
+“Weren’t you looking for me?”
+
+His rage seemed to take the little Cockney and shake him by the throat;
+he trembled from head to foot, his face shockingly congested, and spat
+out dust and fragments of lurid blasphemy like an infuriated cat.
+
+Of a sudden, “W’ere’s the gel?” he sputtered thickly as his quick
+shifting eyes for the first time noted Dorothy’s absence.
+
+“Miss Calendar has other business—none with you. I’ve taken the liberty
+of stopping you because I have a word or two—”
+
+“Ow, you ’ave, ’ave you? Gawd strike me blind, but I’ve a word for you,
+too!... ’And over that bag—and look nippy, or I’ll myke you pye for
+w’at you’ve done to me ... I’ll myke you pye!” he iterated hoarsely,
+edging closer. “’And it over or—”
+
+“You’ve got another guess—” Kirkwood began, but saved his breath in
+deference to an imperative demand on him for instant defensive action.
+
+To some extent he had underestimated the brute courage of the fellow,
+the violent, desperate courage that is distilled of anger in men of his
+kind. Despising him, deeming him incapable of any overt act of
+villainy, Kirkwood had been a little less wary than he would have been
+with Calendar or Mulready. Hobbs had seemed more of the craven type
+which Stryker graced so conspicuously. But now the American was to be
+taught discrimination, to learn that if Stryker’s nature was like a
+snake’s for low cunning and deviousness, Hobbs’ soul was the soul of a
+viper.
+
+Almost imperceptibly he had advanced upon Kirkwood; almost insensibly
+his right hand had moved toward his chest; now, with a movement
+marvelously deft, it had slipped in and out of his breast pocket. And a
+six-inch blade of tarnished steel was winging toward Kirkwood’s throat
+with the speed of light.
+
+Instinctively he stepped back; as instinctively he guarded with his
+right forearm, lifting the hand that held the satchel. The knife,
+catching in his sleeve, scratched the arm beneath painfully, and
+simultaneously was twisted from the mate’s grasp, while in his surprise
+Kirkwood’s grip on the bag-handle relaxed. It was torn forcibly from
+his fingers just as he received a heavy blow on his chest from the
+mate’s fist. He staggered back.
+
+By the time he had recovered from the shock, Hobbs was a score of feet
+away, the satchel tucked under his arm, his body bent almost double,
+running like a jack-rabbit. Ere Kirkwood could get under way, in
+pursuit, the mate had dodged out of sight round the corner. When the
+American caught sight of him again, he was far down the block, and
+bettering his pace with every jump.
+
+He was approaching, also, some six or eight good citizens of Calais,
+men of the laboring class, at a guess. Their attention attracted by his
+frantic flight, they stopped to wonder. One or two moved as though to
+intercept him, and he doubled out into the middle of the street with
+the quickness of thought; an instant later he shot round another corner
+and disappeared, the natives streaming after in hot chase, electrified
+by the inspiring strains of “Stop, thief!”—or its French equivalent.
+
+Kirkwood, cheering them on with the same wild cry, followed to the
+farther street; and there paused, so winded and weak with laughter that
+he was fain to catch at a fence picket for support. Standing thus he
+saw other denizens of Calais spring as if from the ground miraculously
+to swell the hue and cry; and a dumpling of a gendarme materialized
+from nowhere at all, to fall in behind the rabble, waving his sword
+above his head and screaming at the top of his lungs, the while his fat
+legs twinkled for all the world like thick sausage links marvelously
+animated.
+
+The mob straggled round yet another corner and was gone; its clamor
+diminished on the still Spring air; and Kirkwood, recovering, abandoned
+Mr. Hobbs to the justice of the high gods and the French system of
+jurisprudence (at least, he hoped the latter would take an interest in
+the case, if haply Hobbs were laid by the heels), and went his way
+rejoicing.
+
+As for the scratch on his arm, it was nothing, as he presently
+demonstrated to his complete satisfaction in the seclusion of a
+chance-sent fiacre. Kirkwood, commissioning it to drive him to the
+American Consulate, made his diagnosis _en route_; wound a handkerchief
+round the negligible wound, rolled down his sleeve, and forgot it
+altogether in the joys of picturing to himself Hobbs in the act of
+opening the satchel in expectation of finding therein the gladstone
+bag.
+
+At the consulate door he paid off the driver and dismissed him; the
+fiacre had served his purpose, and he could find his way to the
+Terminus Hôtel at infinitely less expense. He had a considerably harder
+task before him as he ascended the steps to the consular doorway,
+knocked and made known the nature of his errand.
+
+No malicious destiny could have timed the hour of his call more
+appositely; the consul was at home and at the disposal of his
+fellow-citizens—within bounds.
+
+In the course of thirty minutes or so Kirkwood emerged with dignity
+from the consulate, his face crimson to the hair, his soul smarting
+with shame and humiliation; and left an amused official representative
+of his country’s government with the impression of having been
+entertained to the point of ennui by an exceptionally clumsy but
+pertinacious liar.
+
+For the better part of the succeeding hour Kirkwood circumnavigated the
+neighborhood of the steamer pier and the Terminus Hôtel, striving to
+render himself as inconspicuous as he felt insignificant, and keenly on
+the alert for any sign or news of Hobbs. In this pursuit he was
+pleasantly disappointed.
+
+At noon precisely, his suspense grown too onerous for his strength of
+will, throwing caution and their understanding to the winds, he walked
+boldly into the Terminus, and inquired for Miss Calendar.
+
+The assurance he received that she was in safety under its roof did not
+deter him from sending up his name and asking her to receive him in the
+public lounge; he required the testimony of his senses to convince him
+that no harm had come to her in the long hour and a half that had
+elapsed since their separation.
+
+Woman-like, she kept him waiting. Alone in the public rooms of the
+hotel, he suffered excruciating torments. How was he to know that
+Calendar had not arrived and found his way to her?
+
+When at length she appeared on the threshold of the apartment, bringing
+with her the traveling bag and looking wonderfully the better for her
+ninety minutes of complete repose and privacy, the relief he
+experienced was so intense that he remained transfixed in the middle of
+the floor, momentarily able neither to speak nor to move.
+
+On her part, so fagged and distraught did he seem, that at sight of his
+care-worn countenance she hurried to him with outstretched,
+compassionate hands and a low pitiful cry of concern, forgetful
+entirely of that which he himself had forgotten—the emotion she had
+betrayed on parting.
+
+“Oh, nothing wrong,” he hastened to reassure her, with a sorry ghost of
+his familiar grin; “only I have lost Hobbs and the satchel with your
+things; and there’s no sign yet of Mr. Calendar. We can feel pretty
+comfortable now, and—and I thought it time we had something like a
+meal.”
+
+The narrative of his adventure which he delivered over their _déjeuner
+à la fourchette_ contained no mention either of his rebuff at the
+American Consulate or the scratch he had sustained during Hobbs’
+murderous assault; the one could not concern her, the other would seem
+but a bid for her sympathy. He counted it a fortunate thing that the
+mate’s knife had been keen enough to penetrate the cloth of his sleeve
+without tearing it; the slit it had left was barely noticeable. And he
+purposely diverted the girl with flashes of humorous description, so
+that they discussed both meal and episode in a mood of wholesome
+merriment.
+
+It was concluded, all too soon for the taste of either, by the waiter’s
+announcement that the steamer was on the point of sailing.
+
+Outwardly composed, inwardly quaking, they boarded the packet, meeting
+with no misadventure whatever—if we are to except the circumstance
+that, when the restaurant bill was settled and the girl had
+punctiliously surrendered his change with the tickets, Kirkwood found
+himself in possession of precisely one franc and twenty centimes.
+
+He groaned in spirit to think how differently he might have been fixed,
+had he not in his infatuated spirit of honesty been so anxious to give
+Calendar more than ample value for his money!
+
+An inexorable anxiety held them both near the gangway until it was cast
+off and the boat began to draw away from the pier. Then, and not till
+then, did an unimpressive, small figure of a man detach itself from the
+shield of a pile of luggage and advance to the pier-head. No second
+glance was needed to identify Mr. Hobbs; and until the perspective
+dwarfed him indistinguishably, he was to be seen, alternately waving
+Kirkwood ironic farewell and blowing violent kisses to Miss Calendar
+from the tips of his soiled fingers.
+
+So he had escaped arrest....
+
+At first by turns indignant and relieved to realize that thereafter
+they were to move in scenes in which his hateful shadow would not form
+an essentially component part, subsequently Kirkwood fell a prey to
+prophetic terrors. It was not alone fear of retribution that had
+induced Hobbs to relinquish his persecution—or so Kirkwood became
+convinced; if the mate’s calculation had allowed for them the least
+fraction of a chance to escape apprehension on the farther shores of
+the Channel, nor fears nor threats would have prevented him from
+sailing with the fugitives.... Far from having left danger behind them
+on the Continent, Kirkwood believed in his secret heart that they were
+but flying to encounter it beneath the smoky pall of London.
+
+
+
+
+XVII
+ROGUES AND VAGABONDS
+
+
+A westering sun striking down through the drab exhalations of
+ten-thousand sooty chimney-pots, tinted the atmosphere with the hue of
+copper. The glance that wandered purposelessly out through the carriage
+windows, recoiled, repelled by the endless dreary vista of the Surrey
+Side’s unnumbered roofs; or, probing instantaneously the hopeless
+depths of some grim narrow thoroughfare fleetingly disclosed, as the
+evening boat-train from Dover swung on toward Charing Cross, its trucks
+level with the eaves of Southwark’s dwellings, was saddened by the
+thought that in all the world squalor such as this should obtain and
+flourish unrelieved.
+
+For perhaps the tenth time in the course of the journey Kirkwood
+withdrew his gaze from the window and turned to the girl, a question
+ready framed upon his lips.
+
+“Are you quite sure—” he began; and then, alive to the clear and
+penetrating perception in the brown eyes that smiled into his from
+under their level brows, he stammered and left the query uncompleted.
+
+Continuing to regard him steadily and smilingly, Dorothy shook her head
+in playful denial and protest. “Do you know,” she commented, “that this
+is about the fifth repetition of that identical question within the
+last quarter-hour?”
+
+“How do you know what I meant to say?” he demanded, staring.
+
+“I can see it in your eyes. Besides, you’ve talked and thought of
+nothing else since we left the boat. Won’t you believe me, please, when
+I say there’s absolutely not a soul in London to whom I could go and
+ask for shelter? I don’t think it’s very nice of you to be so openly
+anxious to get rid of me.”
+
+This latter was so essentially undeserved and so artlessly insincere,
+that he must needs, of course, treat it with all seriousness.
+
+“That isn’t fair, Miss Calendar. Really it’s not.”
+
+“What am I to think? I’ve told you any number of times that it’s only
+an hour’s ride on to Chiltern, where the Pyrfords will be glad to take
+me in. You may depend upon it,—by eight to-night, at the latest, you’ll
+have me off your hands,—the drag and worry that I’ve been ever since—”
+
+“Don’t!” he pleaded vehemently. “Please!... You _know_ it isn’t that. I
+_don’t_ want you off my hands, ever.... That is to say, I—ah—” Here he
+was smitten with a dumbness, and sat, aghast at the enormity of his
+blunder, entreating her forgiveness with eyes that, very likely,
+pleaded his cause more eloquently than he guessed.
+
+“I mean,” he floundered on presently, in the fatuous belief that he
+would this time be able to control both mind and tongue, “_what_ I mean
+is I’d be glad to go on serving you in any way I might, to the end of
+time, if you’d give me....”
+
+He left the declaration inconclusive—a stroke of diplomacy that would
+have graced an infinitely more adept wooer. But he used it all
+unconsciously. “O Lord!” he groaned in spirit. “Worse and more of it!
+Why in thunder can’t I say the right thing _right_?”
+
+Egotistically absorbed by the problem thus formulated, he was heedless
+of her failure to respond, and remained pensively preoccupied until
+roused by the grinding and jolting of the train, as it slowed to a halt
+preparatory to crossing the bridge.
+
+Then he sought to read his answer in the eyes of Dorothy. But she was
+looking away, staring thoughtfully out over the billowing sea of roofs
+that merged illusively into the haze long ere it reached the horizon;
+and Kirkwood could see the pulsing of the warm blood in her throat and
+cheeks; and the glamorous light that leaped and waned in her eyes, as
+the ruddy evening sunlight warmed them, was something any man might be
+glad to live for and die for.... And he saw that she had understood,
+had grasped the thread of meaning that ran through the clumsy fabric of
+his halting speech and his sudden silences.
+
+She had understood without resentment!
+
+While, incredulous, he wrestled with the wonder of this fond discovery,
+she grew conscious of his gaze, and turned her head to meet it with one
+fearless and sweet, if troubled.
+
+“Dear Mr. Kirkwood,” she said gently, bending forward as if to read
+between the lines anxiety had graven on his countenance, “won’t you
+tell me, please, what it can be that so worries you? Is it possible
+that you still have a fear of my father? But don’t you know that he can
+do nothing now—now that we’re safe? We have only to take a cab to
+Paddington Station, and then—”
+
+“You mustn’t underestimate the resource and ability of Mr. Calendar,”
+he told her gloomily; “we’ve got a chance—no more. It wasn’t....” He
+shut his teeth on his unruly tongue—too late.
+
+Woman-quick she caught him up. “It wasn’t that? Then what was it that
+worried you? If it’s something that affects me, is it kind and right of
+you not to tell me?”
+
+“It—it affects us both,” he conceded drearily. “I—I don’t—”
+
+The wretched embarrassment of the confession befogged his wits; he felt
+unable to frame the words. He appealed speechlessly for tolerance, with
+a face utterly woebegone and eyes piteous.
+
+The train began to move slowly across the Thames to Charing Cross.
+
+Mercilessly the girl persisted. “We’ve only a minute more. Surely you
+can trust me....”
+
+In exasperation he interrupted almost rudely. “It’s only this: I—I’m
+strapped.”
+
+“Strapped?” She knitted her brows over this fresh specimen of American
+slang.
+
+“Flat strapped—busted—broke—on my uppers—down and out,” he reeled off
+synonyms without a smile. “I haven’t enough money to pay cab-fare
+across the town—”
+
+“Oh!” she interpolated, enlightened.
+
+“—to say nothing of taking us to Chiltern. I couldn’t buy you a glass
+of water if you were thirsty. There isn’t a soul on earth, within hail,
+who would trust me with a quarter—I mean a shilling—across London
+Bridge. I’m the original Luckless Wonder and the only genuine Jonah
+extant.”
+
+With a face the hue of fire, he cocked his eyebrows askew and attempted
+to laugh unconcernedly to hide his bitter shame. “I’ve led you out of
+the fryingpan into the fire, and I don’t know what to do! Please call
+me names.”
+
+And in a single instant all that he had consistently tried to avoid
+doing, had been irretrievably done; if, with dawning comprehension,
+dismay flickered in her eyes—such dismay as such a confession can rouse
+only in one who, like Dorothy Calendar, has never known the want of a
+penny—it was swiftly driven out to make place for the truest and most
+gracious and unselfish solicitude.
+
+“Oh, poor Mr. Kirkwood! And it’s all because of me! You’ve beggared
+yourself—”
+
+“Not precisely; I was beggared to begin with.” He hastened to disclaim
+the extravagant generosity of which she accused him. “I had only three
+or four pounds to my name that night we met.... I haven’t told you—I—”
+
+“You’ve told me nothing, nothing whatever about yourself,” she said
+reproachfully.
+
+“I didn’t want to bother you with my troubles; I tried not to talk
+about myself.... You knew I was an American, but I’m worse than that;
+I’m a Californian—from San Francisco.” He tried unsuccessfully to make
+light of it. “I told you I was the Luckless Wonder; if I’d ever had any
+luck I would have stored a little money away. As it was, I lived on my
+income, left my principal in ’Frisco; and when the earthquake came, it
+wiped me out completely.”
+
+“And you were going home that night we made you miss your steamer!”
+
+“It was my own fault, and I’m glad this blessed minute that I did miss
+it. Nice sort I’d have been, to go off and leave you at the mercy—”
+
+“Please! I want to think, I’m trying to remember how much you’ve gone
+through—”
+
+“Precisely what I don’t want you to do. Anyway, I did nothing more than
+any other fellow would’ve! Please don’t give me credit that I don’t
+deserve.”
+
+But she was not listening; and a pause fell, while the train crawled
+warily over the trestle, as if in fear of the foul, muddy flood below.
+
+“And there’s no way I can repay you....”
+
+“There’s nothing to be repaid,” he contended stoutly.
+
+She clasped her hands and let them fall gently in her lap. “I’ve not a
+farthing in the world!... I never dreamed.... I’m so sorry, Mr.
+Kirkwood—terribly, terribly sorry!... But what can we do? I can’t
+consent to be a burden—”
+
+“But you’re not! You’re the one thing that ...” He swerved sharply, at
+an abrupt tangent. “There’s one thing we can do, of course.”
+
+She looked up inquiringly.
+
+“Craven Street is just round the corner.”
+
+“Yes?”—wonderingly.
+
+“I mean we must go to Mrs. Hallam’s house, first off.... It’s too late
+now,—after five, else we could deposit the jewels in some bank.
+Since—since they are no longer yours, the only thing, and the proper
+thing to do is to place them in safety or in the hands of their owner.
+If you take them directly to young Hallam, your hands will be clear....
+And—I never did such a thing in my life, Miss Calendar; but if he’s got
+a spark of gratitude in his make-up, I ought to be able to—er—to borrow
+a pound or so of him.”
+
+“Do you think so?” She shook her head in doubt. “I don’t know; I know
+so little of such things.... You are right; we must take him the
+jewels, but...” Her voice trailed off into a sigh of profound
+perturbation.
+
+He dared not meet her look.
+
+Beneath his wandering gaze a County Council steam-boat darted swiftly
+down-stream from Charing Cross pier, in the shadow of the railway
+bridge. It seemed curious to reflect that from that very floating pier
+he had started first upon his quest of the girl beside him, only—he had
+to count—three nights ago! Three days and three nights! Altogether
+incredible seemed the transformation they had wrought in the complexion
+of the world. Yet nothing material was changed.... He lifted his eyes.
+
+Beyond the river rose the Embankment, crawling with traffic, backed by
+the green of the gardens and the shimmering walls of glass and stone of
+the great hotels, their windows glowing weirdly golden in the late
+sunlight. A little down-stream Cleopatra’s Needle rose, sadly the worse
+for London smoke, flanked by its couchant sphinxes, wearing a nimbus of
+circling, sweeping, swooping, wheeling gulls. Farther down, from the
+foot of that magnificent pile, Somerset House, Waterloo Bridge sprang
+over-stream in its graceful arch.... All as of yesterday; yet all
+changed. Why? Because a woman had entered into his life; because he had
+learned the lesson of love and had looked into the bright face of
+Romance....
+
+With a jar the train started and began to move more swiftly.
+
+Kirkwood lifted the traveling bag to his knees.
+
+“Don’t forget,” he said with some difficulty, “you’re to stick by me,
+whatever happens. You mustn’t desert me.”
+
+“You _know_,” the girl reproved him.
+
+“I know; but there must be no misunderstanding.... Don’t worry; we’ll
+win out yet, I’ve a plan.”
+
+_Splendide mendax_! He had not the glimmering of a plan.
+
+The engine panting, the train drew in beneath the vast sounding dome of
+the station, to an accompaniment of dull thunderings; and stopped
+finally.
+
+Kirkwood got out, not without a qualm of regret at leaving the
+compartment; therein, at least, they had some title to consideration,
+by virtue of their tickets; now they were utterly vagabondish,
+penniless adventurers.
+
+The girl joined him. Slowly, elbow to elbow, the treasure bag between
+them, they made their way down toward the gates, atoms in a tide-rip of
+humanity,—two streams of passengers meeting on the narrow strip of
+platform, the one making for the streets, the other for the suburbs.
+
+Hurried and jostled, the girl clinging tightly to his arm lest they be
+separated in the crush, they came to the ticket-wicket; beyond the
+barrier surged a sea of hats—shining “toppers,” dignified and
+upstanding, the outward and visible manifestation of the sturdy, stodgy
+British spirit of respectability; “bowlers” round and sleek and humble;
+shapeless caps with cloth visors, manufactured of outrageous plaids;
+flower-like miracles of millinery from Bond Street; strangely plumed
+monstrosities from Petticoat Lane and Mile End Road. Beneath any one of
+these might lurk the maleficent brain, the spying eyes of Calendar or
+one of his creatures; beneath all of them that he encountered, Kirkwood
+peered in fearful inquiry.
+
+Yet, when they had passed unhindered the ordeal of the wickets, had run
+the gantlet of those thousand eyes without lighting in any pair a spark
+of recognition, he began to bear himself with more assurance, to be
+sensible to a grateful glow of hope. Perhaps Hobbs’ telegram had not
+reached its destination, for unquestionably the mate would have wired
+his chief; perhaps some accident had befallen the conspirators; perhaps
+the police had apprehended them.... No matter how, one hoped against
+hope that they had been thrown off the trail.
+
+And indeed it seemed as if they must have been misguided in some
+providential manner. On the other hand, it would be the crassest of
+indiscretions to linger about the place an instant longer than
+absolutely necessary.
+
+Outside the building, however, they paused perforce, undergoing the
+cross-fire of the congregated cabbies. It being the first time that he
+had ever felt called upon to leave the station afoot, Kirkwood cast
+about irresolutely, seeking the sidewalk leading to the Strand.
+
+Abruptly he caught the girl by the arm and unceremoniously hurried her
+toward a waiting hansom.
+
+“Quick!” he begged her. “Jump right in—not an instant to spare.—”
+
+She nodded brightly, lips firm with courage, eyes shining.
+
+“My father?”
+
+“Yes.” Kirkwood glanced back over his shoulder. “He hasn’t seen us yet.
+They’ve just driven up. Stryker’s with him. They’re getting down.” And
+to himself, “Oh, the devil!” cried the panic-stricken young man.
+
+He drew back to let the girl precede him into the cab; at the same time
+he kept an eye on Calendar, whose conveyance stood half the length of
+the station-front away.
+
+The fat adventurer had finished paying off the driver, standing on the
+deck of the hansom. Stryker was already out, towering above the mass of
+people, and glaring about him with his hawk-keen vision. Calendar had
+started to alight, his foot was leaving the step when Stryker’s glance
+singled out their quarry. Instantly he turned and spoke to his
+confederate. Calendar wheeled like a flash, peering eagerly in the
+direction indicated by the captain’s index finger, then, snapping
+instructions to his driver, threw himself heavily back on the seat.
+Stryker, awkward on his land-legs, stumbled and fell in an
+ill-calculated attempt to hoist himself hastily back into the vehicle.
+
+To the delay thus occasioned alone Kirkwood and Dorothy owed a respite
+of freedom. Their hansom was already swinging down toward the great
+gates of the yard, the American standing to make the driver comprehend
+the necessity for using the utmost speed in reaching the Craven Street
+address. The man proved both intelligent and obliging; Kirkwood had
+barely time to drop down beside the girl, ere the cab was swinging out
+into the Strand, to the peril of the toes belonging to a number of
+righteously indignant pedestrians.
+
+“Good boy!” commented Kirkwood cheerfully. “That’s the greatest comfort
+of all London, the surprising intellectual strength the average cabby
+displays when you promise him a tip.... Great Heavens!” he cried,
+reading the girl’s dismayed expression. “A tip! I never thought—!” His
+face lengthened dismally, his eyebrows working awry. “Now we are in for
+it!”
+
+Dorothy said nothing.
+
+He turned in the seat, twisting his neck to peep through the small rear
+window. “I don’t see their cab,” he announced. “But of course they’re
+after us. However, Craven Street’s just round the corner; if we get
+there first, I don’t fancy Freddie Hallam will have a cordial reception
+for our pursuers. They must’ve been on watch at Cannon Street, and
+finding we were not coming in that way—of course they were expecting us
+because of Hobbs’ wire—they took cab for Charing Cross. Lucky for
+us.... Or is it lucky?” he added doubtfully, to himself.
+
+The hansom whipped round the corner into Craven Street. Kirkwood sprang
+up, grasping the treasure bag, ready to jump the instant they pulled in
+toward Mrs. Hallam’s dwelling. But as they drew near upon the address
+he drew back with an exclamation of amazement.
+
+The house was closed, showing a blank face to the street—blinds drawn
+close down in the windows, area gate padlocked, an estate-agent’s board
+projecting from above the doorway, advertising the property “To be let,
+furnished.”
+
+Kirkwood looked back, craning his neck round the side of the cab. At
+the moment another hansom was breaking through the rank of humanity on
+the Strand crossing. He saw one or two figures leap desperately from
+beneath the horse’s hoofs. Then the cab shot out swiftly down the
+street.
+
+The American stood up again, catching the cabby’s eye.
+
+“Drive on!” he cried excitedly. “Don’t stop—drive as fast as you dare!”
+
+“W’ere to, sir?”
+
+“See that cab behind? Don’t let it catch us—shake it off, lose it
+somehow, but for the love of Heaven don’t let it catch us! I’ll make it
+worth your while. Do you understand?”
+
+“Yes, sir!” The driver looked briefly over his shoulder and lifted his
+whip. “Don’t worry, sir,” he cried, entering into the spirit of the
+game with gratifying zest. “Shan’t let ’em over’aul you, sir. Mind your
+’ead!”
+
+And as Kirkwood ducked, the whip-lash shot out over the roof with a
+crack like the report of a pistol. Startled, the horse leaped
+indignantly forward. Momentarily the cab seemed to leave the ground,
+then settled down to a pace that carried them round the Avenue Theatre
+and across Northumberland Avenue into Whitehall Place apparently on a
+single wheel.
+
+A glance behind showed Kirkwood that already they had gained, the
+pursuing hansom having lost ground through greater caution in crossing
+the main-traveled thoroughfare.
+
+“Good little horse!” he applauded.
+
+A moment later he was indorsing without reserve the generalship of
+their cabby; the quick westward turn that took them into Whitehall,
+over across from the Horse Guards, likewise placed them in a pocket of
+traffic; a practically impregnable press of vehicles closed in behind
+them ere Calendar’s conveyance could follow out of the side street.
+
+That the same conditions, but slightly modified, hemmed them in ahead,
+went for nothing in Kirkwood’s estimation.
+
+“Good driver!” he approved heartily. “He’s got a head on his
+shoulders!”
+
+The girl found her voice. “How,” she demanded in a breath, face blank
+with consternation, “how did you dare?”
+
+“Dare?” he echoed exultantly; and in his veins excitement was running
+like liquid fire. “What wouldn’t I dare for you, Dorothy?”
+
+“What have you not?” she amended softly, adding with a shade of
+timidity: “Philip...”
+
+The long lashes swept up from her cheeks, like clouds revealing stars,
+unmasking eyes radiant and brave to meet his own; then they fell, even
+as her lips drooped with disappointment. And she sighed.... For he was
+not looking. Man-like, hot with the ardor of the chase, he was deaf and
+blind to all else.
+
+She saw that he had not even heard. Twice within the day she had
+forgotten herself, had overstepped the rigid bounds of her breeding in
+using his Christian name. And twice he had been oblivious to that token
+of their maturing understanding. So she sighed, and sighing, smiled
+again; resting an elbow on the window-sill and flattening one small
+gloved hand against the frame for a brace against the jouncing of the
+hansom. It swept on with unabated speed, up-stream beside the tawny
+reaches of the river; and for a time there was no speech between them,
+the while the girl lost consciousness of self and her most imminent
+peril, surrendering her being to the lingering sweetness of her long,
+dear thoughts....
+
+“I’ve got a scheme!” Kirkwood declared so explosively that she caught
+her breath with the surprise of it. “There’s the Pless; they know me
+there, and my credit’s good. When we shake them off, we can have the
+cabby take us to the hotel. I’ll register and borrow from the
+management enough to pay our way to Chiltern and the tolls for a cable
+to New York. I’ve a friend or two over home who wouldn’t let me want
+for a few miserable pounds.... So you see,” he explained boyishly,
+“we’re at the end of our troubles already!”
+
+She said something inaudible, holding her face averted. He bent nearer
+to her, wondering. “I didn’t understand,” he suggested.
+
+Still looking from him, “I said you were very good to me,” she said in
+a quavering whisper.
+
+“Dorothy!” Without his knowledge or intention before the fact, as
+instinctively as he made use of her given name, intimately, his strong
+fingers dropped and closed upon the little hand that lay beside him.
+“What _is_ the matter, dear?” He leaned still farther forward to peer
+into her face, till glance met glance in the ending and his racing
+pulses tightened with sheer delight of the humid happiness in her
+glistening eyes. “Dorothy, child, don’t worry so. No harm shall come to
+you. It’s all working out—all working out _right_. Only have a little
+faith in me, and I’ll _make_ everything work out right, Dorothy.”
+
+Gently she freed her fingers. “I wasn’t,” she told him in a voice that
+quivered between laughter and tears, “I wasn’t worrying. I was ... You
+wouldn’t understand. Don’t be afraid I shall break down or—or
+anything.”
+
+“I shan’t,” he reassured her; “I know you’re not that sort. Besides,
+you’d have no excuse. We’re moving along famously. That cabby knows his
+business.”
+
+In fact that gentleman was minute by minute demonstrating his peculiar
+fitness for the task he had so cheerfully undertaken. The superior
+horsemanship of the London hackney cabman needs no exploitation, and he
+in whose hands rested the fate of the Calendar treasure was peer of his
+compeers. He was instant to advantage himself of every opening to
+forward his pliant craft, quick to foresee the fortunes of the way and
+govern himself accordingly.
+
+Estimating with practised eye the precise moment when the police
+supervisor of traffic at the junction of Parliament and Bridge Streets,
+would see fit to declare a temporary blockade, he so managed that his
+was the last vehicle to pass ere the official wand, to ignore which
+involves a forfeited license, was lifted; and indeed, so close was his
+calculation that he escaped only with a scowl and word of warning from
+the bobby. A matter of no importance whatever, since his end was gained
+and the pursuing cab had been shut off by the blockade.
+
+In Calendar’s driver, however, he had an adversary of abilities by no
+means to be despised. Precisely how the man contrived it, is a
+question; that he made a detour by way of Derby Street is not
+improbable, unpleasant as it may have been for Stryker and Calendar to
+find themselves in such close proximity to “the Yard.” At all events,
+he evaded the block, and hardly had the chase swung across Bridge
+Street, than the pursuer was nimbly clattering in its wake.
+
+Past the Houses of Parliament, through Old Palace Yard, with the Abbey
+on their left, they swung away into Abingdon Street, whence suddenly
+they dived into the maze of backways, great and mean, which lies to the
+south of Victoria. Doubling and twisting, now this way, now that, the
+driver tooled them through the intricate heart of this labyrinth,
+leading the pursuers a dance that Kirkwood thought calculated to
+dishearten and shake off the pursuit in the first five minutes. Yet
+always, peering back through the little peephole, he saw Calendar’s cab
+pelting doggedly in their rear—a hundred yards behind, no more, no
+less, hanging on with indomitable grit and determination.
+
+By degrees they drew westwards, threading Pimlico, into Chelsea—once
+dashing briefly down the Grosvenor Road, the Thames a tawny flood
+beyond the river wall.
+
+Children cheered them on, and policemen turned to stare, doubting
+whether they should interfere. Minutes rolled into tens, measuring out
+an hour; and still they hammered on, hunted and hunters, playing their
+game of hare-and-hounds through the highways and byways of those staid
+and aged quarters.
+
+In the leading cab there were few words spoken. Kirkwood and Dorothy
+alike sat spellbound with the fascination of the game; if it is
+conceivable that the fox enjoys his part in the day’s sport, then they
+were enjoying themselves. Now one spoke, now another—chiefly in the
+clipped phraseology, of excitement. As—
+
+“We’re gaining?”
+
+“Yes—think so.”
+
+Or, “We’ll tire them out?”
+
+“Sure-ly.”
+
+“They can’t catch us, can they, Philip?”
+
+“Never in the world.”
+
+But he spoke with a confidence that he himself did not feel, for hope
+as he would he could never see that the distance between the two had
+been materially lessened or increased. Their horses seemed most evenly
+matched.
+
+The sun was very low behind the houses of the Surrey Side when Kirkwood
+became aware that their horse was flagging, though (as comparison
+determined) no more so than the one behind.
+
+In grave concern the young man raised his hand, thrusting open the trap
+in the roof. Immediately the square of darkling sky was eclipsed by the
+cabby’s face.
+
+“Yessir?”
+
+“You had better drive as directly as you can to the Hotel Pless,”
+Kirkwood called up. “I’m afraid it’s no use pushing your horse like
+this.”
+
+“I’m sure of it, sir. ’E’s a good ’oss, ’e is, but ’e carn’t keep goin’
+for hever, you know, sir.”
+
+“I know. You’ve done very well; you’ve done your best.”
+
+“Very good, sir. The Pless, you said, sir? Right.”
+
+The trap closed.
+
+Two blocks farther, and their pace had so sensibly moderated that
+Kirkwood was genuinely alarmed. The pursuing cabby was lashing his
+animal without mercy, while, “It aren’t no use my w’ippin’ ’im, sir,”
+dropped through the trap. “’E’s doing orl ’e can.”
+
+“I understand.”
+
+Despondent recklessness tightened Kirkwood’s lips and kindled an
+unpleasant light in his eyes. He touched his side pocket; Calendar’s
+revolver was still there.... Dorothy should win away clear, if—if he
+swung for it.
+
+He bent forward with the traveling bag in his hands.
+
+“What are you going to do?” The girl’s voice was very tremulous.
+
+“Stand a chance, take a losing hazard. Can you run? You’re not too
+tired?”
+
+“I can run—perhaps not far—a little way, at least.”
+
+“And will you do as I say?”
+
+Her eyes met his, unwavering, bespeaking her implicit faith.
+
+“Promise!”
+
+“I promise.”
+
+“We’ll have to drop off in a minute. The horse won’t last.... They’re
+in the same box. Well, I undertake to stand ’em off for a bit; you take
+the bag and run for it. Just as soon as I can convince them, I’ll
+follow, but if there’s any delay, you call the first cab you see and
+drive to the Pless. I’ll join you there.”
+
+He stood up, surveying the neighborhood. Behind him the girl lifted her
+voice in protest.
+
+“No, Philip, no!”
+
+“You’ve promised,” he said sternly, eyes ranging the street.
+
+“I don’t care; I won’t leave you.”
+
+He shook his head in silent contradiction, frowning; but not frowning
+because of the girl’s mutiny. He was a little puzzled by a vague
+impression, and was striving to pin it down for recognition; but was so
+thoroughly bemused with fatigue and despair that only with great
+difficulty could he force his faculties to logical reasoning, his
+memory to respond to his call upon it.
+
+The hansom was traversing a street in Old Brompton—a quaint, prim
+by-way lined with dwellings singularly Old-Worldish, even for London.
+He seemed to know it subjectively, to have retained a memory of it from
+another existence: as the stage setting of a vivid dream, all
+forgotten, will sometimes recur with peculiar and exasperating
+intensity, in broad daylight. The houses, with their sloping, red-tiled
+roofs, unexpected gables, spontaneous dormer windows, glass panes set
+in leaded frames, red brick façades trimmed with green shutters and
+doorsteps of white stone, each sitting back, sedate and
+self-sufficient, in its trim dooryard fenced off from the public
+thoroughfare: all wore an aspect hauntingly familiar, and yet strange.
+
+A corner sign, remarked in passing, had named the spot “Aspen Villas”;
+though he felt he knew the sound of those syllables as well as he did
+the name of the Pless, strive as he might he failed to make them convey
+anything tangible to his intelligence. When had he heard of it? At what
+time had his errant footsteps taken him through this curious survival
+of Eighteenth Century London?
+
+Not that it mattered when. It could have no possible bearing on the
+emergency. He really gave it little thought; the mental processes
+recounted were mostly subconscious, if none the less real. His
+objective attention was wholly preoccupied with the knowledge that
+Calendar’s cab was drawing perilously near. And he was debating whether
+or not they should alight at once and try to make a better pace afoot,
+when the decision was taken wholly out of his hands.
+
+Blindly staggering on, wilted with weariness, the horse stumbled in the
+shafts and plunged forward on its knees. Quick as the driver was to
+pull it up, with a cruel jerk of the bits, Kirkwood was caught
+unprepared; lurching against the dashboard, he lost his footing,
+grasped frantically at the unstable air, and went over, bringing up in
+a sitting position in the gutter, with a solid shock that jarred his
+very teeth.
+
+For a moment dazed he sat there blinking; by the time he got to his
+feet, the girl stood beside him, questioning him with keen solicitude.
+
+“No,” he gasped; “not hurt—only surprised. Wait....”
+
+Their cab had come to a complete standstill; Calendar’s was no more
+than twenty yards behind, and as Kirkwood caught sight of him the fat
+adventurer was in the act of lifting himself ponderously out of the
+seat.
+
+Incontinently the young man turned to the girl and forced the
+traveling-bag into her hands.
+
+“Run for it!” he begged her. “Don’t stop to argue. You promised—run!
+I’ll come....”
+
+“Philip!” she pleaded.
+
+“Dorothy!” he cried in torment.
+
+Perhaps it was his unquestionable distress that weakened her. Suddenly
+she yielded—with whatever reason. He was only hazily aware of the swish
+of her skirts behind him; he had no time to look round and see that she
+got away safely. He had only eyes and thoughts for Calendar and
+Stryker.
+
+They were both afoot, now, and running toward him, the one as awkward
+as the other, but neither yielding a jot of their malignant purpose. He
+held the picture of it oddly graphic in his memory for many a day
+thereafter: Calendar making directly, for him, his heavy-featured face
+a dull red with the exertion, his fat head dropped forward as if too
+heavy for his neck of a bull, his small eyes bright with anger; Stryker
+shying off at a discreet angle, evidently with the intention of
+devoting himself to the capture of the girl; the two cabs with their
+dejected screws, at rest in the middle of the quiet, twilit street. He
+seemed even to see himself, standing stockily prepared, hands in his
+coat pockets, his own head inclined with a suggestion of pugnacity.
+
+To this mental photograph another succeeds, of the same scene an
+instant later; all as it had been before, their relative positions
+unchanged, save that Stryker and Calendar had come to a dead stop, and
+that Kirkwood’s right arm was lifted and extended, pointing at the
+captain.
+
+So forgetful of self was he, that it required a moment’s thought to
+convince him that he was really responsible for the abrupt
+transformation. Incredulously he realized that he had drawn Calendar’s
+revolver and pulled Stryker up short, in mid-stride, by the mute menace
+of it, as much as by his hoarse cry of warning:
+
+“Stryker—not another foot—”
+
+With this there chimed in Dorothy’s voice, ringing bell-clear from a
+little distance:
+
+“Philip!”
+
+Like a flash he wheeled, to add yet another picture to his mental
+gallery.
+
+Perhaps two-score feet up the sidewalk a gate stood open; just outside
+it a man of tall and slender figure, rigged out in a bizarre costume
+consisting mainly of a flowered dressing-gown and slippers, was waiting
+in an attitude of singular impassivity; within it, pausing with a foot
+lifted to the doorstep, bag in hand, her head turned as she looked
+back, was Dorothy.
+
+
+[Illustration: A costume consisting mainly of a flowered
+dressing-gown and slippers.]
+
+
+As he comprehended these essential details of the composition, the man
+in the flowered dressing-gown raised a hand, beckoning to him in a
+manner as imperative as his accompanying words.
+
+“Kirkwood!” he saluted the young man in a clear and vibrant voice, “put
+up that revolver and stop this foolishness.” And, with a jerk of his
+head towards the doorway, in which Dorothy now waited, hesitant: “Come,
+sir—quickly!”
+
+Kirkwood choked on a laugh that was half a sob. “Brentwick!” he cried,
+restoring the weapon to his pocket and running toward his friend. “Of
+all happy accidents!”
+
+“You may call it that,” retorted the elder man with a fleeting smile as
+Kirkwood slipped inside the dooryard. “Come,” he said; “let’s get into
+the house.”
+
+“But you said—I thought you went to Munich,” stammered Kirkwood; and so
+thoroughly impregnated was his mind with this understanding that it was
+hard for him to adjust his perceptions to the truth.
+
+“I was detained—by business,” responded Brentwick briefly. His gaze,
+weary and wistful behind his glasses, rested on the face of the girl on
+the threshold of his home; and the faint, sensitive flush of her face
+deepened. He stopped and honored her with a bow that, for all his
+fantastical attire, would have graced a beau of an earlier decade.
+“Will you be pleased to enter?” he suggested punctiliously. “My house,
+such as it is, is quite at your disposal. And,” he added, with a glance
+over his shoulder, “I fancy that a word or two may presently be passed
+which you would hardly care to hear.”
+
+Dorothy’s hesitation was but transitory; Kirkwood was reassuring her
+with a smile more like his wonted boyish grin than anything he had
+succeeded in conjuring up throughout the day. Her own smile answered
+it, and with a murmured word of gratitude and a little, half timid,
+half distant bow for Brentwick, she passed on into the hallway.
+
+Kirkwood lingered with his friend upon the door-stoop. Calendar,
+recovered from his temporary consternation, was already at the gate,
+bending over it, fat fingers fumbling with the latch, his round red
+face, lifted to the house, darkly working with chagrin.
+
+From his threshold, watching him with a slight contraction of the eyes,
+Brentwick hailed him in tones of cloying courtesy.
+
+“Do you wish to see me, sir?”
+
+The fat adventurer faltered just within the gateway; then, with a
+truculent swagger, “I want my daughter,” he declared vociferously.
+
+Brentwick peered mildly over his glasses, first at Calendar, then at
+Kirkwood. His glance lingered a moment on the young man’s honest eyes,
+and swung back to Calendar.
+
+“My good man,” he said with sublime tolerance, “will you be pleased to
+take yourself off—to the devil if you like? Or shall I take the trouble
+to interest the police?”
+
+He removed one fine and fragile hand from a pocket of the flowered
+dressing-gown, long enough to jerk it significantly toward the nearer
+street-corner.
+
+Thunderstruck, Calendar glanced hastily in the indicated direction. A
+blue-coated bobby was to be seen approaching with measured stride,
+diffusing upon the still evening air an impression of ineffably capable
+self-contentment.
+
+Calendar’s fleshy lips parted and closed without a sound. They
+quivered. Beneath them quivered his assortment of graduated chins. His
+heavy and pendulous cheeks quivered, slowly empurpling with the dark
+tide of his apoplectic wrath. The close-clipped thatch of his iron gray
+mustache, even, seemed to bristle like hairs upon the neck of a
+maddened dog. Beneath him his fat legs trembled, and indeed his whole
+huge carcass shook visibly, in the stress of his restrained wrath.
+
+Suddenly, overwhelmed, he banged the gate behind him and waddled off to
+join the captain; who already, with praiseworthy native prudence, had
+fallen back upon their cab.
+
+From his coign of strategic advantage, the comfortable elevation of his
+box, Kirkwood’s cabby, whose huge enjoyment of the adventurers’
+discomfiture had throughout been noisily demonstrative, entreated
+Calendar with lifted forefinger, bland affability, and expressions of
+heartfelt sympathy.
+
+“Kebsir? ’Ave a kebsir, do! Try a ride be’ind a real ’orse, sir; don’t
+you go on wastin’ time on ’im.” A jerk of a derisive thumb singled out
+the other cabman. “’E aren’t pl’yin’ you fair, sir; I knows ’im,—’e’s a
+hartful g’y deceiver, ’e is. Look at ’is ’orse,—w’ich it aren’t; it’s a
+snyle, that’s w’at it is. Tyke a father’s hadvice, sir, and next time
+yer fairest darter runs awye with the dook in disguise, chyse ’em in a
+real kebsir, not a cheap imitashin.... Kebsir?... Garn, you
+’ard-’arted—”
+
+Here he swooped upwards in a dizzy flight of vituperation best
+unrecorded. Calendar, beyond an absent-minded flirt of one hand by his
+ear, as who should shoo away a buzzing insect, ignored him utterly.
+
+Sullenly extracting money from his pocket, he paid off his driver, and
+in company with Stryker, trudged in morose silence down the street.
+
+Brentwick touched Kirkwood’s arm and drew him into the house.
+
+
+
+
+XVIII
+ADVENTURES’ LUCK
+
+
+As the door closed, Kirkwood swung impulsively to Brentwick, with the
+brief, uneven laugh of fine-drawn nerves.
+
+“Good God, sir!” he cried. “You don’t know—”
+
+“I can surmise,” interrupted the elder man shrewdly.
+
+“You turned up in the nick of time, for all the world like—”
+
+“Harlequin popping through a stage trap?”
+
+“No!—an incarnation of the Providence that watches over children and
+fools.”
+
+Brentwick dropped a calming hand upon his shoulder. “Your simile seems
+singularly happy, Philip. Permit me to suggest that you join the child
+in my study.” He laughed quietly, with a slight nod toward an open door
+at the end of the hallway. “For myself, I’ll be with you in one
+moment.”
+
+A faint, indulgent smile lurking in the shadow of his white mustache,
+he watched the young man wheel and dart through the doorway. “Young
+hearts!” he commented inaudibly—and a trace sadly. “Youth!...”
+
+Beyond the threshold of the study, Kirkwood paused, eager eyes
+searching its somber shadows for a sign of Dorothy.
+
+A long room and deep, it was lighted only by the circumscribed disk of
+illumination thrown on the central desk by a shaded reading-lamp, and
+the flickering glow of a grate-fire set beneath the mantel of a
+side-wall. At the back, heavy velvet portières cloaked the recesses of
+two long windows, closed jealously even against the twilight. Aside
+from the windows, doors and chimney-piece, every foot of wall space was
+occupied by towering bookcases or by shelves crowded to the limit of
+their capacity with an amazing miscellany of objects of art, the fruit
+of years of patient and discriminating collecting. An exotic and heady
+atmosphere, compounded of the faint and intangible exhalations of these
+insentient things, fragrance of sandalwood, myrrh and musk, reminiscent
+whiffs of half-forgotten incense, seemed to intensify the impression of
+gloomy richness and repose...
+
+By the fireplace, a little to one side, stood Dorothy, one small foot
+resting on the brass fender, her figure merging into the dusky
+background, her delicate beauty gaining an effect of elusive and
+ethereal mystery in the waning and waxing ruddy glow upflung from the
+bedded coals.
+
+“Oh, Philip!” She turned swiftly to Kirkwood with extended hands and a
+low, broken cry. “I’m _so_ glad....”
+
+A trace of hysteria in her manner warned him, and he checked himself
+upon the verge of a too dangerous tenderness. “There!” he said
+soothingly, letting her hands rest gently in his palms while he led her
+to a chair. “We can make ourselves easy now.” She sat down and he
+released her hands with a reluctance less evident than actual. “If ever
+I say another word against my luck—”
+
+“Who,” inquired the girl, lowering her voice, “who is the gentleman in
+the flowered dressing-gown?”
+
+“Brentwick—George Silvester Brentwick: an old friend. I’ve known him
+for years,—ever since I came abroad. Curiously enough, however, this is
+the first time I’ve ever been here. I called once, but he wasn’t in,—a
+few days ago,—the day we met. I thought the place looked familiar.
+Stupid of me!”
+
+“Philip,” said the girl with a grave face but a shaking voice, “it
+was.” She laughed provokingly.... “It was so funny, Philip. I don’t
+know why I ran, when you told me to, but I did; and while I ran, I was
+conscious of the front door, here, opening, and this tall man in the
+flowered dressing-gown coming down to the gate as if it were the most
+ordinary thing in the world for him to stroll out, dressed that way, in
+the evening. And he opened the gate, and bowed, and said, ever so
+pleasantly, ‘Won’t you come in, Miss Calendar?’—”
+
+“He did!” exclaimed Kirkwood. “But how—?”
+
+“How can I say?” she expostulated. “At all events, he seemed to know
+me; and when he added something about calling you in, too—he said ‘Mr.
+Kirkwood’—I didn’t hesitate.”
+
+“It’s strange enough, surely—and fortunate. Bless his heart!” said
+Kirkwood.
+
+And, “Hum!” said Mr. Brentwick considerately, entering the study. He
+had discarded the dressing-gown and was now in evening dress.
+
+The girl rose. Kirkwood turned. “Mr. Brentwick—” he began.
+
+But Brentwick begged his patience with an eloquent gesture. “Sir,” he
+said, somewhat austerely, “permit me to put a single question: Have you
+by any chance paid your cabby?”
+
+“Why—” faltered the younger man, with a flaming face. “I—why, no—that
+is—”
+
+The other quietly put his hand upon a bell-pull. A faint jingling sound
+was at once audible, emanating from the basement.
+
+“How much should you say you owe him?”
+
+“I—I haven’t a penny in the world!”
+
+The shrewd eyes flashed their amusement into Kirkwood’s. “Tut, tut!”
+Brentwick chuckled. “Between gentlemen, my dear boy! Dear me! you are
+slow to learn.”
+
+“I’ll never be contented to sponge on my friends,” explained Kirkwood
+in deepest misery. “I can’t tell when—”
+
+“Tut, tut! How much did you say?”
+
+“Ten shillings—or say twelve, would be about right,” stammered the
+American, swayed by conflicting emotions of gratitude and profound
+embarrassment.
+
+A soft-footed butler, impassive as Fate, materialized mysteriously in
+the doorway.
+
+“You rang, sir?” he interrupted frigidly.
+
+“I rang, Wotton.” His master selected a sovereign from his purse and
+handed it to the servant. “For the cabby, Wotton.”
+
+“Yes sir.” The butler swung automatically, on one heel.
+
+“And Wotton!”
+
+“Sir?”
+
+“If any one should ask for me, I’m not at home.”
+
+“Very good, sir.”
+
+“And if you should see a pair of disreputable scoundrels skulking, in
+the neighborhood, one short and stout, the other tall and evidently a
+seafaring man, let me know.”
+
+“Thank you, sir.” A moment later the front door was heard to close.
+
+Brentwick turned with a little bow to the girl. “My dear Miss
+Calendar,” he said, rubbing his thin, fine hands,—“I am old enough, I
+trust, to call you such without offense,—please be seated.”
+
+Complying, the girl rewarded him with a radiant smile. Whereupon,
+striding to the fireplace, their host turned his back to it, clasped
+his hands behind him, and glowered benignly upon the two. “Ah!” he
+observed in accents of extreme personal satisfaction. “Romance!
+Romance!”
+
+“Would you mind telling us how you knew—” began Kirkwood anxiously.
+
+“Not in the least, my dear Philip. It is simple enough: I possess an
+imagination. From my bedroom window, on the floor above, I happen to
+behold two cabs racing down the street, the one doggedly pursuing the
+other. The foremost stops, perforce of a fagged horse. There alights a
+young gentleman looking, if you’ll pardon me, uncommonly seedy; he is
+followed by a young lady, if she will pardon me,” with another little
+bow, “uncommonly pretty. With these two old eyes I observe that the
+gentleman does not pay his cabby. Ergo—I intelligently deduce—he is
+short of money. Eh?”
+
+“You were right,” affirmed Kirkwood, with a rueful and crooked smile.
+“But—”
+
+“So! so!” pursued Brentwick, rising on his toes and dropping back
+again; “so this world of ours wags on to the old, old tune!... And I,
+who in my younger days pursued adventure without success, in dotage
+find myself dragged into a romance by my two ears, whether I will or
+no! Eh? And now you are going to tell me all about it, Philip. There is
+a chair.... Well, Wotton?”
+
+The butler had again appeared noiselessly in the doorway.
+
+“Beg pardon, sir; they’re waiting, sir.”
+
+“The caitiffs, Wotton?”
+
+“Yessir.”
+
+“Where waiting?”
+
+“One at each end of the street, sir.”
+
+“Thank you. You may bring us sherry and biscuit, Wotton.”
+
+“Thank you, sir.”
+
+The servant vanished.
+
+Brentwick removed his glasses, rubbed them, and blinked thoughtfully at
+the girl. “My dear,” he said suddenly, with a peculiar tremor in his
+voice, “you resemble your mother remarkably. Tut—I should know! Time
+was when I was one of her most ardent admirers.”
+
+“You—y-you knew my mother?” cried Dorothy, profoundly moved.
+
+“Did I not know you at sight? My dear, you are your mother reincarnate,
+for the good of an unworthy world. She was a very beautiful woman, my
+dear.”
+
+Wotton entered with a silver serving tray, offering it in turn to
+Dorothy, Kirkwood and his employer. While he was present the three held
+silent—the girl trembling slightly, but with her face aglow; Kirkwood
+half stupefied between his ease from care and his growing astonishment,
+as Brentwick continued to reveal unexpected phases of his personality;
+Brentwick himself outwardly imperturbable and complacent, for all that
+his hand shook as he lifted his wine glass.
+
+“You may go, Wotton—or, wait. Don’t you feel the need of a breath of
+fresh air, Wotton?”
+
+“Yessir, thank you, sir.”
+
+“Then change your coat, Wotton, light your pipe, and stroll out for
+half an hour. You need not leave the street, but if either the tall
+thin blackguard with the seafaring habit, or the short stout rascal
+with the air of mystery should accost you, treat them with all
+courtesy, Wotton. You will be careful not to tell either of them
+anything in particular, although I don’t mind your telling them that
+Mr. Brentwick lives here, if they ask. I am mostly concerned to
+discover if they purpose becoming fixtures on the street-corners,
+Wotton.”
+
+“Quite so, sir.”
+
+“Now you may go.... Wotton,” continued his employer as the butler took
+himself off as softly as a cat, “grows daily a more valuable mechanism.
+He is by no means human in any respect, but I find him extremely handy
+to have round the house.... And now, my dear,” turning to Dorothy,
+“with your permission I desire to drink to the memory of your beautiful
+mother and to the happiness of her beautiful daughter.”
+
+“But you will tell me—”
+
+“A number of interesting things, Miss Calendar, if you’ll be good
+enough to let me choose the time. I beg you to be patient with the
+idiosyncrasies of an old man, who means no harm, who has a reputation
+as an eccentric to sustain before his servants.... And now,” said
+Brentwick, setting aside his glass, “now, my dear boy, for the
+adventure.”
+
+Kirkwood chuckled, infected by his host’s genial humor. “How do you
+know—”
+
+“How can it be otherwise?” countered Brentwick with a trace of
+asperity. “Am I to be denied my adventure? Sir, I refuse without
+equivocation. Your very bearing breathes of Romance. There must be an
+adventure forthcoming, Philip; otherwise my disappointment will be so
+acute that I shall be regretfully obliged seriously to consider my
+right, as a householder, to show you the door.”
+
+“But Mr. Brentwick—!”
+
+“Sit down, sir!” commanded Brentwick with such a peremptory note that
+the young man, who had risen, obeyed out of sheer surprise. Upon which
+his host advanced, indicting him with a long white forefinger. “Would
+you, sir,” he demanded, “again expose this little lady to the
+machinations of that corpulent scoundrel, whom I have just had the
+pleasure of shooing off my premises, because you choose to resent an
+old man’s raillery?”
+
+“I apologize,” Kirkwood humored him.
+
+“I accept the apology in the spirit in which it is offered.... I
+repeat, now for the adventure, Philip. If the story’s long, epitomize.
+We can consider details more at our leisure.”
+
+Kirkwood’s eyes consulted the girl’s face; almost imperceptibly she
+nodded him permission to proceed.
+
+“Briefly, then,” he began haltingly, “the man who followed us to the
+door here, is Miss Calendar’s father.”
+
+“Oh? His name, please?”
+
+“George Burgoyne Calendar.”
+
+“Ah! An American; I remember, now. Continue, please.”
+
+“He is hounding us, sir, with the intention of stealing some property,
+which he caused to be stolen, which we—to put it bluntly—stole from
+him, to which he has no shadow of a title, and which, finally, we’re
+endeavoring to return to its owners.”
+
+“My dear!” interpolated Brentwick gently, looking down at the girl’s
+flushed face and drooping head.
+
+“He ran us to the last ditch,” Kirkwood continued; “I’ve spent my last
+farthing trying to lose him.”
+
+“But why have you not caused his arrest?” Brentwick inquired.
+
+Kirkwood nodded meaningly toward the girl. Brentwick made a sound
+indicating comprehension, a click of the tongue behind closed teeth.
+
+“We came to your door by the merest accident—it might as well have been
+another. I understood you were in Munich, and it never entered my head
+that we’d find you home.”
+
+“A communication from my solicitors detained me,” explained Brentwick.
+“And now, what do you intend to do?”
+
+“Trespass as far on your kindness as you’ll permit. In the first place,
+I—I want the use of a few pounds with which to cable some friends in
+New York, for money; on receipt of which I can repay you.”
+
+“Philip,” observed Brentwood, “you are a most irritating child. But I
+forgive you the faults of youth. You may proceed, bearing in mind, if
+you please, that I am your friend equally with any you may own in
+America.”
+
+“You’re one of the best men in the world,” said Kirkwood.
+
+“Tut, tut! Will you get on?”
+
+“Secondly, I want you to help us to escape Calendar to-night. It is
+necessary that Miss Calendar should go to Chiltern this evening, where
+she has friends who will receive and protect her.”
+
+“Mm-mm,” grumbled their host, meditative. “My faith!” he commented,
+with brightening eyes. “It sounds almost too good to be true! And I’ve
+been growing afraid that the world was getting to be a most humdrum and
+uninteresting planet!... Miss Calendar, I am a widower of so many years
+standing that I had almost forgotten I had ever been anything but a
+bachelor. I fear my house contains little that will be of service to a
+young lady. Yet a room is at your disposal; the parlor-maid shall show
+you the way. And Philip, between you and me, I venture to remark that
+hot water and cold steel would add to the attractiveness of your
+personal appearance; my valet will attend you in my room. Dinner,”
+concluded Brentwick with anticipative relish, “will be served in
+precisely thirty minutes. I shall expect you to entertain me with a
+full and itemized account of every phase of your astonishing adventure.
+Later, we will find a way to Chiltern.”
+
+Again he put a hand upon the bell-pull. Simultaneously Dorothy and
+Kirkwood rose.
+
+“Mr. Brentwick,” said the girl, her eyes starred with tears of
+gratitude, “I don’t, I really don’t know how—”
+
+“My dear,” said the old gentleman, “you will thank me most
+appropriately by continuing, to the best of your ability, to resemble
+your mother more remarkably every minute.”
+
+“But I,” began Kirkwood——.
+
+“You, my dear Philip, can thank me best by permitting me to enjoy
+myself; which I am doing thoroughly at the present moment. My pleasure
+in being invited to interfere in your young affairs is more keen than
+you can well surmise. Moreover,” said Mr. Brentwick, “so long have I
+been an amateur adventurer that I esteem it the rarest privilege to
+find myself thus on the point of graduating into professional ranks.”
+He rubbed his hands, beaming upon them. “And,” he added, as a maid
+appeared at the door, “I have already schemed me a scheme for the
+discomfiture of our friends the enemy: a scheme which we will discuss
+with our dinner, while the heathen rage and imagine a vain thing, in
+the outer darkness.”
+
+Kirkwood would have lingered, but of such inflexible temper was his
+host that he bowed him into the hands of a man servant without
+permitting him another word.
+
+“Not a syllable,” he insisted. “I protest I am devoured with curiosity,
+my dear boy, but I have also bowels of compassion. When we are well on
+with our meal, when you are strengthened with food and drink, then you
+may begin. But now—Dickie,” to the valet, “do your duty!”
+
+Kirkwood, laughing with exasperation, retired at discretion, leaving
+Brentwick the master of the situation: a charming gentleman with a will
+of his own and a way that went with it.
+
+He heard the young man’s footsteps diminish on the stairway; and again
+he smiled the indulgent, melancholy smile of mellow years. “Youth!” he
+whispered softly. “Romance!... And now,” with a brisk change of tone as
+he closed the study door, “now we are ready for this interesting Mr.
+Calendar.”
+
+Sitting down at his desk, he found and consulted a telephone directory;
+but its leaves, at first rustling briskly at the touch of the slender
+and delicate fingers, were presently permitted to lie unturned,—the
+book resting open on his knees the while he stared wistfully into the
+fire.
+
+A suspicion of moisture glimmered in his eyes. “Dorothy!” he whispered
+huskily. And a little later, rising, he proceeded to the telephone....
+
+An hour and a half later Kirkwood, his self-respect something restored
+by a bath, a shave, and a resumption of clothes which had been hastily
+but thoroughly cleansed and pressed by Brentwick’s valet; his
+confidence and courage mounting high under the combined influence of
+generous wine, substantial food, the presence of his heart’s mistress
+and the admiration—which was unconcealed—of his friend, concluded at
+the dinner-table, his narration.
+
+“And that,” he said, looking up from his savory, “is about all.”
+
+“Bravo!” applauded Brentwick; eyes shining with delight.
+
+“All,” interposed Dorothy in warm reproach, “but what he hasn’t told—”
+
+“Which, my dear, is to be accounted for wholly by a very creditable
+modesty, rarely encountered in the young men of the present day. It
+was, of course, altogether different with those of my younger years.
+Yes, Wotton?”
+
+Brentwick sat back in his chair, inclining an attentive ear to a
+communication murmured by the butler.
+
+Kirkwood’s gaze met Dorothy’s across the expanse of shining cloth; he
+deprecated her interruption with a whimsical twist of his eyebrows.
+“Really, you shouldn’t,” he assured her in an undertone. “I’ve done
+nothing to deserve...” But under the spell of her serious sweet eyes,
+he fell silent, and presently looked down, strangely abashed; and
+contemplated the vast enormity of his unworthiness.
+
+Coffee was set before them by Wotton, the impassive, Brentwick refusing
+it with a little sigh. “It is one of the things, as Philip knows,” he
+explained to the girl, “denied me by the physician who makes his life
+happy by making mine a waste. I am allowed but three luxuries; cigars,
+travel in moderation, and the privilege of imposing on my friends. The
+first I propose presently, to enjoy, by your indulgence; and the second
+I shall this evening undertake by virtue of the third, of which I have
+just availed myself.”
+
+Smiling at the involution, he rested his head against the back of the
+chair, eyes roving from the girl’s face to Kirkwood’s. “Inspiration to
+do which,” he proceeded gravely, “came to me from the seafaring
+picaroon (Stryker did you name him?) via the excellent Wotton. While
+you were preparing for dinner, Wotton returned from his constitutional
+with the news that, leaving the corpulent person on watch at the
+corner, Captain Stryker had temporarily, made himself scarce. However,
+we need feel no anxiety concerning his whereabouts, for he reappeared
+in good time and a motor-car. From which it becomes evident that you
+have not overrated their pertinacity; the fiasco of the cab-chase is
+not to be reënacted.”
+
+Resolutely the girl repressed a gasp of dismay. Kirkwood stared moodily
+into his cup.
+
+“These men bore me fearfully,” he commented at last.
+
+“And so,” continued Brentwick, “I bethought me of a counter-stroke. It
+is my good fortune to have a friend whose whim it is to support a
+touring-car, chiefly in innocuous idleness. Accordingly I have
+telephoned him and commandeered the use of this machine—mechanician,
+too.... Though not a betting man, I am willing to risk recklessly a few
+pence in support of my contention, that of the two, Captain Stryker’s
+car and ours, the latter will prove considerably the most speedy....
+
+“In short, I suggest,” he concluded, thoughtfully lacing his long white
+fingers, “that, avoiding the hazards of cab and railway carriage, we
+motor to Chiltern: the night being fine and the road, I am told,
+exceptionally good. Miss Dorothy, what do you think?”
+
+Instinctively the girl looked to Kirkwood; then shifted her glance to
+their host. “I think you are wonderfully thoughtful and kind,” she said
+simply.
+
+“And you, Philip?”
+
+“It’s an inspiration,” the younger man declared. “I can’t think of
+anything better calculated to throw them off, than to distance them by
+motor-car. It would be always possible to trace our journey by rail.”
+
+“Then,” announced Brentwick, making as if to rise, “we had best go. If
+neither my hearing nor Captain Stryker’s car deceives me, our fiery
+chariot is panting at the door.”
+
+A little sobered from the confident spirit of quiet gaiety in which
+they had dined, they left the table. Not that, in their hearts, either
+greatly questioned their ultimate triumph; but they were allowing for
+the element of error so apt to set at naught human calculations.
+Calendar himself had already been proved fallible. Within the bounds of
+possibility, their turn to stumble might now be imminent.
+
+When he let himself dwell upon it, their utter helplessness to give
+Calendar pause by commonplace methods, maddened Kirkwood. With another
+scoundrel it had been so simple a matter to put a period to his
+activities by a word to the police. But he was her father; for that
+reason he must continually be spared ... Even though, in desperate
+extremity, she should give consent to the arrest of the adventurers,
+retaliation would follow, swift and sure. For they might not overlook
+nor gloze the fact that hers had been the hands responsible for the
+theft of the jewels; innocent though she had been in committing that
+larceny, a cat’s-paw guided by an intelligence unscrupulous and malign,
+the law would not hold her guiltless were she once brought within its
+cognizance. Nor, possibly, would the Hallams, mother and son.
+
+Upon their knowledge and their fear of this, undoubtedly Calendar was
+reckoning: witness the barefaced effrontery with which he operated
+against them. His fear of the police might be genuine enough, but he
+was never for an instant disturbed by any doubt lest his daughter
+should turn against him. She would never dare that.
+
+Before they left the house, while Dorothy was above stairs resuming her
+hat and coat, Kirkwood and Brentwick reconnoitered from the
+drawing-room windows, themselves screened from observation by the
+absence of light in the room behind.
+
+Before the door a motor-car waited, engines humming impatiently,
+mechanician ready in his seat, an uncouth shape in goggles and leather
+garments that shone like oilskins under the street lights.
+
+At one corner another and a smaller car stood in waiting, its lamps
+like baleful eyes glaring through the night.
+
+In the shadows across the way, a lengthy shadow lurked: Stryker, beyond
+reasonable question. Otherwise the street was deserted. Not even that
+adventitous bobby of the early evening was now in evidence.
+
+Dorothy presently joining them, Brentwick led the way to the door.
+
+Wotton, apparently nerveless beneath his absolute immobility, let them
+out—and slammed the door behind them with such promptitude as to give
+cause for the suspicion that he was a fraud, a sham, beneath his icy
+exterior desperately afraid lest the house be stormed by the
+adventurers.
+
+Kirkwood to the right, Brentwick to the left of Dorothy, the former
+carrying the treasure bag, they hastened down the walk and through the
+gate to the car.
+
+The watcher across the way was moved to whistle shrilly; the other car
+lunged forward nervously.
+
+Brentwick taking the front seat, beside the mechanician, left the
+tonneau to Kirkwood and Dorothy. As the American slammed the door, the
+car swept smoothly out into the middle of the way, while the pursuing
+car swerved in to the other curb, slowing down to let Stryker jump
+aboard.
+
+Kirkwood put himself in the seat by the girl’s side and for a few
+moments was occupied with the arrangement of the robes. Then, sitting
+back, he found her eyes fixed upon him, pools of inscrutable night in
+the shadow of her hat.
+
+“You aren’t afraid, Dorothy?”
+
+She answered quietly: “I am with you, Philip.”
+
+Beneath the robe their hands met...
+
+Exalted, excited, he turned and looked back. A hundred yards to the
+rear four unwinking eyes trailed them, like some modern Nemesis in
+monstrous guise.
+
+
+
+
+XIX
+I——THE UXBRIDGE ROAD
+
+At a steady gait, now and again checked in deference to the street
+traffic, Brentwick’s motor-car rolled, with resonant humming of the
+engine, down the Cromwell Road, swerved into Warwick Road and swung
+northward through Kensington to Shepherd’s Bush. Behind it Calendar’s
+car clung as if towed by an invisible cable, never gaining, never
+losing, mutely testifying to the adventurer’s unrelenting, grim
+determination to leave them no instant’s freedom from surveillance, to
+keep for ever at their shoulders, watching his chance, biding his time
+with sinister patience until the moment when, wearied, their vigilance
+should relax....
+
+To some extent he reckoned without his motor-car. As long as they
+traveled within the metropolitan limits, constrained to observe a
+decorous pace in view of the prejudices of the County Council, it was a
+matter of no difficulty whatever to maintain his distance. But once
+they had won through Shepherd’s Bush and, paced by huge doubledeck
+trolley trams, were flying through Hammersmith on the Uxbridge Road;
+once they had run through Acton, and knew beyond dispute that now they
+were without the city boundaries, then the complexion of the business
+was suddenly changed.
+
+Not too soon for honest sport; Calendar was to have (Kirkwood would
+have said in lurid American idiom) a run for his money. The scattered
+lights of Southall were winking out behind them before Brentwick chose
+to give the word to the mechanician.
+
+Quietly the latter threw in the clutch for the third speed—and the
+fourth. The car leaped forward like a startled race-horse. The motor
+lilted merrily into its deep-throated song of the open road, its
+contented, silken humming passing into a sonorous and sustained purr.
+
+Kirkwood and the girl were first jarred violently forward, then thrown
+together. She caught his arm to steady herself; it seemed the most
+natural thing imaginable that he should take her hand and pass it
+beneath his arm, holding her so, his fingers closed above her own.
+Before they had recovered, or had time to catch their breath, a mile of
+Middlesex had dropped to the rear.
+
+Not quite so far had they distanced Calendar’s trailing Nemesis of the
+four glaring eyes; the pursuers put forth a gallant effort to hold
+their place. At intervals during the first few minutes a heavy roaring
+and crashing could be heard behind them; gradually it subsided, dying
+on the wings of the free rushing wind that buffeted their faces as mile
+after mile was reeled off and the wide, darkling English countryside
+opened out before them, sweet and wonderful.
+
+Once Kirkwood looked back; in the winking of an eye he saw four faded
+disks of light, pallid with despair, top a distant rise and glide down
+into darkness. When he turned, Dorothy was interrogating him with eyes
+whose melting, shadowed loveliness, revealed to him in the light of the
+far, still stars, seemed to incite him to that madness which he had
+bade himself resist with all his strength.
+
+He shook his head, as if to say: They can not catch us.
+
+His hour was not yet; time enough to think of love and marriage (as if
+he were capable of consecutive thought on any other subject!)—time
+enough to think of them when he had gone back to his place, or rather
+when he should have found it, in the ranks of bread-winners, and so
+have proved his right to mortal happiness; time enough then to lay
+whatever he might have to offer at her feet. Now he could conceive of
+no baser treachery to his soul’s-desire than to advantage himself of
+her gratitude.
+
+Resolutely he turned his face forward, striving with all his will and
+might to forget the temptation of her lips, weary as they were and
+petulant with waiting; and so sat rigid in his time of trial, clinging
+with what strength he could to the standards of his honor, and trying
+to lose his dream in dreaming of the bitter struggle that seemed likely
+to be his future portion.
+
+Perhaps she guessed a little of the fortunes of the battle that was
+being waged within him. Perhaps not. Whatever the trend of her
+thoughts, she did not draw away from him.... Perhaps the breath of
+night, fresh and clean and fragrant with the odor of the fields and
+hedges, sweeping into her face with velvety caress, rendered her
+drowsy. Presently the silken lashes drooped, fluttering upon her
+cheeks, the tired and happy smile hovered about her lips....
+
+In something less than half an hour of this wild driving, Kirkwood
+roused out of his reverie sufficiently to become sensible that the
+speed was slackening. Incoherent snatches of sentences, fragments of
+words and phrases spoken by Brentwick and the mechanician, were flung
+back past his ears by the rushing wind. Shielding his eyes he could see
+dimly that the mechanician was tinkering (apparently) with the driving
+gear. Then, their pace continuing steadily to abate, he heard Brentwick
+fling at the man a sharp-toned and querulously impatient question: What
+was the trouble? His reply came in a single word, not distinguishable.
+
+The girl sat up, opening her eyes, disengaging her arm.
+
+Kirkwood bent forward and touched Brentwick on the shoulder; the latter
+turned to him a face lined with deep concern.
+
+“Trouble,” he announced superfluously. “I fear we have blundered.”
+
+“What is it?” asked Dorothy in a troubled voice.
+
+“Petrol seems to be running low. Charles here” (he referred to the
+mechanician) “says the tank must be leaking. We’ll go on as best we can
+and try to find an inn. Fortunately, most of the inns nowadays keep
+supplies of petrol for just such emergencies.”
+
+“Are we—? Do you think—?”
+
+“Oh, no; not a bit of danger of that,” returned Brentwick hastily.
+“They’ll not catch up with us this night. That is a very inferior car
+they have,—so Charles says, at least; nothing to compare with this. If
+I’m not in error, there’s the Crown and Mitre just ahead; we’ll make
+it, fill our tanks, and be off again before they can make up half their
+loss.”
+
+Dorothy looked anxiously to Kirkwood, her lips forming an unuttered
+query: What did he think?
+
+“Don’t worry; we’ll have no trouble,” he assured her stoutly; “the
+chauffeur knows, undoubtedly.”
+
+None the less he was moved to stand up in the tonneau, conscious of the
+presence of the traveling bag, snug between his feet, as well as of the
+weight of Calendar’s revolver in his pocket, while he stared back along
+the road.
+
+There was nothing to be seen of their persecutors.
+
+The car continued to crawl. Five minutes dragged out tediously.
+Gradually they, drew abreast a tavern standing back a distance from the
+road, embowered in a grove of trees between whose ancient boles the
+tap-room windows shone enticingly, aglow with comfortable light. A
+creaking sign-board, much worn by weather and age, swinging from a
+roadside post, confirmed the accuracy of Brentwick’s surmise,
+announcing that here stood the Crown and Mitre, house of entertainment
+for man and beast.
+
+Sluggishly the car rolled up before it and came to a dead and silent
+halt. Charles, the mechanician, jumping out, ran hastily up the path
+towards the inn. In the car Brentwick turned again, his eyes curiously
+bright in the starlight, his forehead quaintly furrowed, his voice
+apologetic.
+
+“It may take a few minutes,” he said undecidedly, plainly endeavoring
+to cover up his own dark doubts. “My dear,” to the girl, “if I have
+brought trouble upon you in this wise, I shall never earn my own
+forgiveness.”
+
+Kirkwood stood up again, watchful, attentive to the sounds of night;
+but the voice of the pursuing motor-car was not of their company. “I
+hear nothing,” he announced.
+
+“You will forgive me,—won’t you, my dear?—for causing you these few
+moments of needless anxiety?” pleaded the old gentleman, his tone
+tremulous.
+
+“As if you could be blamed!” protested the girl. “You mustn’t think of
+it that way. Fancy, what should we have done without you!”
+
+“I’m afraid I have been very clumsy,” sighed Brentwick, “clumsy and
+impulsive ... Kirkwood, do you hear anything?”
+
+“Not yet, sir.”
+
+“Perhaps,” suggested Brentwick a little later, “perhaps we had better
+alight and go up to the inn. It would be more cosy there, especially if
+the petrol proves hard to obtain, and we have long to wait.”
+
+“I should like that,” assented the girl decidedly.
+
+Kirkwood nodded his approval, opened the door and jumped out to assist
+her; then picked up the bag and followed the pair,—Brentwick leading
+the way with Dorothy on his arm.
+
+At the doorway of the Crown and Mitre, Charles met them evidently
+seriously disturbed. “No petrol to be had here, sir,” he announced
+reluctantly; “but the landlord will send to the next inn, a mile up the
+road, for some. You will have to be patient, I’m afraid, sir.”
+
+“Very well. Get some one to help you push the car in from the road,”
+ordered Brentwick; “we will be waiting in one of the private parlors.”
+
+“Yes, sir; thank you, sir.” The mechanician touched the visor of his
+cap and hurried off.
+
+“Come, Kirkwood.” Gently Brentwick drew the girl in with him.
+
+Kirkwood lingered momentarily on the doorstep, to listen acutely. But
+the wind was blowing into that quarter whence they had come, and he
+could hear naught save the soughing in the trees, together with an
+occasional burst of rude rustic laughter from the tap-room. Lifting his
+shoulders in dumb dismay, and endeavoring to compose his features, he
+entered the tavern.
+
+
+
+
+II——THE CROWN AND MITRE
+
+
+A rosy-cheeked and beaming landlady met him in the corridor and, all
+bows and smiles, ushered him into a private parlor reserved for the
+party, immediately bustling off in a desperate flurry, to secure
+refreshments desired by Brentwick.
+
+The girl had seated herself on one end of an extremely comfortless
+lounge and was making a palpable effort to seem at ease. Brentwick
+stood at one of the windows, shoulders rounded and head bent, hands
+clasped behind his back as he peered out into the night. Kirkwood
+dropped the traveling bag beneath a chair the farthest removed from the
+doorway, and took to pacing the floor.
+
+In a corner of the room a tall grandfather’s clock ticked off ten
+interminable minutes. For some reason unconscionably delaying, the
+landlady did not reappear. Brentwick, abruptly turning from the window,
+remarked the fact querulously, then drew a chair up to a marble-topped
+table in the middle of the floor.
+
+“My dear,” he requested the girl, “will you oblige me by sitting over
+here? And Philip, bring up a chair, if you will. We must not permit
+ourselves to worry, and I have something here which may, perhaps,
+engage your interest for a while.”
+
+To humor him and alleviate his evident distress of mind, they acceded.
+Kirkwood found himself seated opposite Dorothy, Brentwick between them.
+After some hesitation, made the more notable by an air of uneasiness
+which sat oddly on his shoulders, whose composure and confident mien
+had theretofore been so complete and so reassuring, the elder gentleman
+fumbled in an inner coat-pocket and brought to light a small black
+leather wallet. He seemed to be on the point of opening it when hurried
+footfalls sounded in the hallway. Brentwick placed the wallet, still
+with its secret intact, on the table before him, as Charles burst
+unceremoniously in, leaving the door wide open.
+
+“Mr. Brentwick, sir!” he cried gustily. “That other car—”
+
+With a smothered ejaculation Kirkwood leaped to his feet, tugging at
+the weapon in his pocket. In another instant he had the revolver
+exposed. The girl’s cry of alarm, interrupting the machinist, fixed
+Brentwick’s attention on the young man. He, too, stood up, reaching
+over very quickly, to clamp strong supple fingers round Kirkwood’s
+wrist, while with the other hand he laid hold of the revolver and by a
+single twist wrenched it away.
+
+Kirkwood turned upon him in fury. “So!” he cried, shaking with passion.
+“This is what your hospitality meant! You’re going to—”
+
+“My dear young friend,” interrupted Brentwick with a flash of
+impatience, “remember that if I had designed to betray you, I could
+have asked no better opportunity than when you were my guest under my
+own roof.”
+
+“But—hang it all, Brentwick!” expostulated Kirkwood, ashamed and
+contrite, but worked upon by desperate apprehension; “I didn’t mean
+that, but—”
+
+“Would you have bullets flying when she is near?” demanded Brentwick
+scathingly. Hastily he slipped the revolver upon a little shelf beneath
+the table-top. “Sir!” he informed Kirkwood with some heat, “I love you
+as my own son, but you’re a young fool!... as I have been, in my time
+... and as I would to Heaven I might be again! Be advised, Philip,—be
+calm. Can’t you see it’s the only way to save your treasure?”
+
+“Hang the jewels!” retorted Kirkwood warmly. “What—”
+
+“Sir, who said anything about the jewels?”
+
+As Brentwick spoke, Calendar’s corpulent figure filled the doorway;
+Stryker’s weather-worn features loomed over his shoulder, distorted in
+a cheerful leer.
+
+“As to the jewels,” announced the fat adventurer, “I’ve got a word to
+say, if you put it to me that way.”
+
+He paused on the threshold, partly for dramatic effect, partly for his
+own satisfaction, his quick eyes darting from face to face of the four
+people whom he had caught so unexpectedly. A shade of complacency
+colored his expression, and he smiled evilly beneath the coarse short
+thatch of his gray mustache. In his hand a revolver appeared, poised
+for immediate use if there were need.
+
+There was none. Brentwick, at his primal appearance, had dropped a
+peremptory hand on Kirkwood’s shoulder, forcing the young man back to
+his seat; at the same time he resumed his own. The girl had not stirred
+from hers since the first alarm; she sat as if transfixed with terror,
+leaning forward with her elbows on the table, her hands tightly
+clasped, her face, a little blanched, turned to the door. But her
+scarlet lips were set and firm with inflexible purpose, and her brown
+eyes met Calendar’s with a look level and unflinching. Beyond this she
+gave no sign of recognition.
+
+Nearest of the four to the adventurers was Charles, the mechanician,
+paused in affrighted astonishment at sight of the revolver. Calendar,
+choosing to advance suddenly, poked the muzzle of the weapon jocularly
+in the man’s ribs. “Beat it, Four-eyes!” he snapped. “This is your cue
+to duck! Get out of my way.”
+
+The mechanician jumped as if shot, then hastily, retreated to the
+table, his sallow features working beneath the goggle-mask which had
+excited the fat adventurer’s scorn.
+
+“Come right in, Cap’n,” Calendar threw over one shoulder; “come in,
+shut the door and lock it. Let’s all be sociable, and have a nice quiet
+time.” vStryker obeyed, with a derisive grimace for Kirkwood.
+
+Calendar, advancing jauntily to a point within a yard of the table,
+stopped, smiling affably down upon his prospective victims, and airily
+twirling his revolver.
+
+“_Good_ evening, all!” he saluted them blandly. “Dorothy, my child,”
+with assumed concern, “you’re looking a trifle upset; I’m afraid you’ve
+been keeping late hours. Little girls must be careful, you know, or
+they lose the bloom of roses in their cheeks.... Mr. Kirkwood, it’s a
+pleasure to meet you again! Permit me to paraphrase your most sound
+advice, and remind you that pistol-shots are apt to attract undesirable
+attention. It wouldn’t be wise for _you_ to bring the police about our
+ears. I believe that in substance such was your sapient counsel to me
+in the cabin of the _Alethea_; was it not?... And you, sir!”—fixing
+Brentwick with a cold unfriendly eye. “You animated fossil, what d’you
+mean by telling me to go to the devil?... But let that pass; I hold no
+grudge. What might your name be?”
+
+
+[Illustration: “_Good_ evening, all!” he saluted them blandly.]
+
+
+“It might be Brentwick,” said that gentleman placidly.
+
+“Brentwick, eh? Well, I like a man of spirit. But permit me to advise
+you—”
+
+“Gladly,” nodded Brentwick.
+
+“Eh?... Don’t come a second time between father and daughter; another
+man might not be as patient as I, Mister Brentwick. There’s a law in
+the land, if you don’t happen to know it.”
+
+“I congratulate you on your success in evading it,” observed Brentwick,
+undisturbed. “And it was considerate of you not to employ it in this
+instance.” Then, with a sharp change of tone, “Come, sir!” he demanded.
+“You have unwarrantably intruded in this room, which I have engaged for
+my private use. Get through with your business and be off with you.”
+
+“All in my good time, my antediluvian friend. When I’ve wound up my
+business here I’ll go—not before. But, just to oblige you, we’ll get
+down to it.... Kirkwood, you have a revolver of mine. Be good enough to
+return it.”
+
+“I have it here,—under the table,” interrupted Brentwick suavely.
+“Shall I hand it to you?”
+
+“By the muzzle, if you please. Be very careful; this one’s loaded,
+too—apt to explode any minute.”
+
+To Kirkwood’s intense disgust Brentwick quietly slipped one hand
+beneath the table and, placing the revolver on its top, delicately with
+his finger-tips shoved it toward the farther edge. With a grunt of
+approval, Calendar swept the weapon up and into his pocket.
+
+“Any more ordnance?” he inquired briskly, eyes moving alertly from face
+to face. “No matter; you wouldn’t dare use ’em anyway. And I’m about
+done. Dorothy, my dear, it’s high time you returned to your father’s
+protection. Where’s that gladstone bag?”
+
+“In my traveling bag,” the girl told him in a toneless voice.
+
+“Then you may bring it along. You may also say good night to the kind
+gentlemen.”
+
+Dorothy did not move; her pallor grew more intense and Kirkwood saw her
+knuckles tighten beneath the gloves. Otherwise her mouth seemed to grow
+more straight and hard.
+
+“Dorothy!” cried the adventurer with a touch of displeasure. “You heard
+me?”
+
+“I heard you,” she replied a little wearily, more than a little
+contemptuously. “Don’t mind him, please, Mr. Kirkwood!”—with an
+appealing gesture, as Kirkwood, unable to contain himself, moved
+restlessly in his chair, threatening to rise. “Don’t say anything. I
+have no intention whatever of going with this man.”
+
+Calendar’s features twitched nervously; he chewed a corner of his
+mustache, fixing the girl with a black stare. “I presume,” he remarked
+after a moment, with slow deliberation, “you’re aware that, as your
+father, I am in a position to compel you to accompany me.”
+
+“I shall not go with you,” iterated Dorothy in a level tone. “You may
+threaten me, but—I shall not go. Mr. Brentwick and Mr. Kirkwood are
+taking me to—friends, who will give me a home until I can find a way to
+take care of myself. That is all I have to say to you.”
+
+“Bravo, my dear!” cried Brentwick encouragingly.
+
+“Mind your business, sir!” thundered Calendar, his face darkening.
+Then, to Dorothy, “You understand, I trust, what this means?” he
+demanded. “I offer you a home—and a good one. Refuse, and you work for
+your living, my girl! You’ve forfeited your legacy—”
+
+“I know, I know,” she told him in cold disdain. “I am content. Won’t
+you be kind enough to leave me alone?”
+
+For a breath, Calendar glowered over her; then, “I presume,” he
+observed, “that all these heroics are inspired by that whipper-snapper,
+Kirkwood. Do you know that he hasn’t a brass farthing to bless himself
+with?”
+
+“What has that—?” cried the girl indignantly.
+
+“Why, it has everything to do with me, my child. As your doting parent,
+I can’t consent to your marrying nothing-a-year.... For I surmise you
+intend to marry this Mr. Kirkwood, don’t you?”
+
+There followed a little interval of silence, while the warm blood
+flamed in the girl’s face and the red lips trembled as she faced her
+tormentor. Then, with a quaver that escaped her control, “If Mr.
+Kirkwood asks me, I shall,” she stated very simply.
+
+“That,” interposed Kirkwood, “is completely understood.” His gaze
+sought her eyes, but she looked away.
+
+“You forget that I am your father,” sneered Calendar; “and that you are
+a minor. I can refuse my consent.”
+
+“But you won’t,” Kirkwood told him with assurance.
+
+The adventurer stared. “No,” he agreed, after slight hesitation; “no, I
+shan’t interfere. Take her, my boy, if you want her—and a father’s
+blessing into the bargain. The Lord knows I’ve troubles enough; a
+parent’s lot is not what it’s cracked up to be.” He paused, leering,
+ironic. “But,”—deliberately, “there’s still this other matter of the
+gladstone bag. I don’t mind abandoning my parental authority, when my
+child’s happiness is concerned, but as for my property—”
+
+“It is not your property,” interrupted the girl.
+
+“It was your mother’s, dear child. It’s now mine.”
+
+“I dispute that assertion,” Kirkwood put in.
+
+“You may dispute it till the cows come home, my boy: the fact will
+remain that I intend to take my property with me when I leave this
+room, whether you like it or not. Now are you disposed to continue the
+argument, or may I count on your being sensible?”
+
+“You may put away your revolver, if that’s what you mean,” said
+Kirkwood. “We certainly shan’t oppose you with violence, but I warn you
+that Scotland Yard—”
+
+“Oh, that be blowed!” the adventurer snorted in disgust. “I can sail
+circles round any tec. that ever blew out of Scotland Yard! Give me an
+hour’s start, and you’re free to do all the funny business you’ve a
+mind to, with—Scotland Yard!”
+
+“Then you admit,” queried Brentwick civilly, “that you’ve no legal
+title to the jewels in dispute?”
+
+“Look here, my friend,” chuckled Calendar, “when you catch me admitting
+anything, you write it down in your little book and tell the bobby on
+the corner. Just at present I’ve got other business than to stand round
+admitting anything about anything.... Cap’n, let’s have that bag of my
+dutiful daughter’s.”
+
+“’Ere you are.” Stryker spoke for the first time since entering the
+room, taking the valise from beneath the chair and depositing it on the
+table.
+
+“Well, we shan’t take anything that doesn’t belong to us,” laughed
+Calendar, fumbling with the catch; “not even so small a matter as my
+own child’s traveling bag. A small—heavy—gladstone bag,” he grunted,
+opening the valise and plunging in one greedy hand, “will—just—about—do
+for mine!” With which he produced the article mentioned. “This for the
+discard, Cap’n,” he laughed contentedly, pushing the girl’s valise
+aside; and, rumbling with stentorian mirth, stood beaming benignantly
+over the assembled company.
+
+“Why,” he exclaimed, “this moment is worth all it cost me! My children,
+I forgive you freely. Mr. Kirkwood, I felicitate you cordially on
+having secured a most expensive wife. Really—d’you know?—I feel as if I
+ought to do a little something for you both.” Gurgling with delight he
+smote his fat palms together. “I just tell you what,” he resumed, “no
+one yet ever called Georgie Calendar a tight-wad. I just believe I’m
+going to make you kids a handsome wedding present.... The good Lord
+knows there’s enough of this for a fellow to be a little generous and
+never miss it!”
+
+The thick mottled fingers tore nervously at the catch; eventually he
+got the bag open. Those about the table bent forward, all quickened by
+the prospect of for the first time beholding the treasure over which
+they had fought, for which they had suffered, so long....
+
+A heady and luscious fragrance pervaded the atmosphere, exhaling from
+the open mouth of the bag. A silence, indefinitely sustained, impressed
+itself upon the little audience,—a breathless pause ended eventually by
+a sharp snap of Calendar’s teeth. “_Mmm_!” grunted the adventurer in
+bewilderment. He began to pant.
+
+Abruptly his heavy hands delved into the contents of the bag, like the
+paws of a terrier digging in earth. To Kirkwood the air seemed
+temporarily thick with flying objects. Beneath his astonished eyes a
+towel fell upon the table—a crumpled, soiled towel, bearing on its
+dingy hem the inscription in indelible ink: “_Hôtel du Commerce,
+Anvers_.” A tooth-mug of substantial earthenware dropped to the floor
+with a crash. A slimy soap-dish of the same manufacture slid across the
+table and into Brentwick’s lap. A battered alarm clock with never a
+tick left in its abused carcass rang vacuously as it fell by the open
+bag.... The remainder was—oranges: a dozen or more small, round, golden
+globes of ripe fruit, perhaps a shade overripe, therefore the more
+aromatic.
+
+The adventurer ripped out an oath. “Mulready, by the living God!” he
+raged in fury. “Done up, I swear! Done by that infernal sneak—me, blind
+as a bat!”
+
+He fell suddenly silent, the blood congesting in his face; as suddenly
+broke forth again, haranguing the company.
+
+“That’s why he went out and bought those damned oranges, is it? Think
+of it—me sitting in the hotel in Antwerp and him lugging in oranges by
+the bagful because he was fond of fruit! When did he do it? How do I
+know? If I knew, would I be here and him the devil knows where, this
+minute? When my back was turned, of course, the damned snake! That’s
+why he was so hot about picking a fight on the boat, hey? Wanted to get
+thrown off and take to the woods—leaving me with _this_! And that’s why
+he felt so awful done up he wouldn’t take a hand at hunting you two
+down, hey? Well—by—the—Eternal! I’ll camp on his trail for the rest of
+his natural-born days! I’ll have his eye-teeth for this, I’ll—”
+
+He swayed, gibbering with rage, his countenance frightfully contorted,
+his fat hands shaking as he struggled for expression.
+
+And then, while yet their own astonishment held Dorothy, Kirkwood,
+Brentwick and Stryker speechless, Charles, the mechanician, moved
+suddenly upon the adventurer.
+
+There followed two metallic clicks. Calendar’s ravings were abrupted as
+if his tongue had been paralyzed. He fell back a pace, flabby jowls
+pale and shaking, ponderous jaw dropping on his breast, mouth wide and
+eyes crazed as he shook violently before him his thick fleshy
+wrists—securely handcuffed.
+
+Simultaneously the mechanician whirled about, bounded eagerly across
+the floor, and caught Stryker at the door, his dexterous fingers
+twisting in the captain’s collar as he jerked him back and tripped him.
+
+“Mr. Kirkwood!” he cried. “Here, please—one moment. Take this man’s
+gun, from him, will you?”
+
+Kirkwood sprang to his assistance, and without encountering much
+trouble, succeeded in wresting a Webley from Stryker’s limp, flaccid
+fingers.
+
+Roughly the mechanician shook the man, dragging him to his feet. “Now,”
+he ordered sternly, “you march to that corner, stick your nose in it,
+and be good! You can’t get away if you try. I’ve got other men outside,
+waiting for you to come out. Understand?”
+
+Trembling like a whipped cur, Stryker meekly obeyed his instructions to
+the letter.
+
+The mechanician, with a contemptuous laugh leaving him, strode back to
+Calendar, meanwhile whipping off his goggles; and clapped a hearty hand
+upon the adventurer’s quaking shoulders.
+
+“Well!” he cried. “And are you still sailing circles round the men from
+Scotland Yard, Simmons, or Bellows, or Sanderson, or Calendar, or
+Crumbstone, or whatever name you prefer to sail under?”
+
+Calendar glared at him aghast; then heaved a profound sigh, shrugged
+his fat shoulders, and bent his head in thought. An instant later he
+looked up. “You can’t do it,” he informed the detective vehemently;
+“you haven’t got a shred of evidence against me! What’s there? A pile
+of oranges and a peck of trash! What of it?... Besides,” he threatened,
+“if you pinch me, you’ll have to take the girl in, too. I swear that
+whatever stealing was done, she did it. I’ll not be trapped this way by
+her and let her off without a squeal. Take me—take her; d’you hear?”
+
+“I think,” put in the clear, bland accents of Brentwick, “we can
+consider that matter settled. I have here, my man,”—nodding to the
+adventurer as he took up the black leather wallet,—“I have here a
+little matter which may clear up any lingering doubts as to your
+standing, which you may be disposed at present to entertain.”
+
+He extracted a slip of cardboard and, at arm’s length, laid it on the
+table-edge beneath the adventurer’s eyes. The latter, bewildered, bent
+over it for a moment, breathing heavily; then straightened back, shook
+himself, laughed shortly with a mirthless note, and faced the
+detective.
+
+“It’s come with you now, I guess?” he suggested very quietly.
+
+“The Bannister warrant is still out for you,” returned the man.
+“That’ll be enough to hold you on till extradition papers arrive from
+the States.”
+
+“Oh, I’ll waive those; and I won’t give you any trouble, either.... I
+reckon,” mused the adventurer, jingling his manacles thoughtfully, “I’m
+a back-number, anyway. When a half-grown girl, a half-baked boy, a flub
+like Mulready—damn his eyes!—and a club-footed snipe from Scotland Yard
+can put it all over me this way,... why, I guess it’s up to me to go
+home and retire to my country-place up the Hudson.” He sighed wearily.
+
+“Yep; time to cut it out. But I would like to be free long enough to
+get in one good lick at that mutt, Mulready. My friend, you get your
+hands on him, and I’ll squeal on him till I’m blue in the face. That’s
+a promise.”
+
+“You’ll have the chance before long,” replied the detective. “We
+received a telegram from the Amsterdam police late this afternoon,
+saying they’d picked up Mr. Mulready with a woman named Hallam, and
+were holding them on suspicion. It seems,”—turning to Brentwick,—“they
+were opening negotiations for the sale of a lot of stones, and seemed
+in such a precious hurry that the diamond merchant’s suspicions were
+roused. We’re sending over for them, Miss Calendar, so you can make
+your mind easy about your jewels; you’ll have them back in a few days.”
+
+“Thank you,” said the girl with an effort.
+
+“Well,” the adventurer delivered his peroration, “I certainly am blame’
+glad to hear it. ’Twouldn’t ’ve been a square deal, any other way.”
+
+He paused, looking his erstwhile dupes over with a melancholy eye;
+then, with an uncertain nod comprehending the girl, Kirkwood and
+Brentwick, “So long!” he said thickly; and turned, with the detective’s
+hand under his arm and, accompanied by the thoroughly cowed Stryker,
+waddled out of the room.
+
+
+
+
+III——THE JOURNEY’S END
+
+
+Kirkwood, following the exodus, closed the door with elaborate care and
+slowly, deep in thought, returned to the table.
+
+Dorothy seemed not to have moved, save to place her elbows on the
+marble slab, and rest her cheeks between hands that remained clenched,
+as they had been in the greatest stress of her emotion. The color had
+returned to her face, with a slightly enhanced depth of hue to the
+credit of her excitement. Her cheeks were hot, her eyes starlike
+beneath the woven, massy sunlight of her hair. Temporarily unconscious
+of her surroundings she stared steadfastly before her, thoughts astray
+in the irridescent glamour of the dreams that were to come....
+
+Brentwick had slipped down in his chair, resting his silvered head upon
+its back, and was smiling serenely up at the low yellow ceiling. Before
+him on the table his long white fingers were drumming an inaudible
+tune. Presently rousing, he caught Kirkwood’s eye and smiled
+sheepishly, like a child caught in innocent mischief.
+
+The younger man grinned broadly. “And you were responsible for all
+that!” he commented, infinitely amused.
+
+Brentwick nodded, twinkling self-satisfaction. “I contrived it all,” he
+said; “neat, I call it, too.” His old eyes brightened with reminiscent
+enjoyment. “Inspiration!” he crowed softly. “Inspiration, pure and
+simple. I’d been worrying my wits for fully five minutes before Wotton
+settled the matter by telling me about the captain’s hiring of the
+motor-car. Then, in a flash, I had it.... I talked with Charles by
+telephone,—his name is really Charles, by, the bye,—overcame his
+conscientious scruples about playing his fish when they were already
+all but landed, and settled the artistic details.”
+
+He chuckled delightedly. “It’s the instinct,” he declared emphatically,
+“the instinct for adventure. I knew it was in me, latent somewhere, but
+never till this day did it get the opportunity to assert itself. A born
+adventurer—that’s what I am!... You see, it was essential that they
+should believe we were frightened and running from them; that way, they
+would be sure to run after us. Why, we might have baited a dozen traps
+and failed to lure them into my house, after that stout scoundrel knew
+you’d had the chance to tell me the whole yarn... Odd!”
+
+“Weren’t you taking chances, you and Charles?” asked Kirkwood
+curiously.
+
+“Precious few. There was another motor from Scotland Yard trailing
+Captain Stryker’s. If they had run past, or turned aside, they would
+have been overhauled in short order.”
+
+He relapsed into his whimsical reverie; the wistful look returned to
+his eyes, replacing the glow of triumph and pleasure. And he sighed a
+little regretfully.
+
+“What I don’t understand,” contended Kirkwood, “is how you convinced
+Calendar that he couldn’t get revenge by pressing his charge against
+Miss Calendar—Dorothy.”
+
+“Oh-h?” Mr. Brentwick elevated his fine white eyebrows and sat up
+briskly. “My dear boy, that was the most delectable dish on the entire
+menu. I have been reserving it, I don’t mind owning, that I might
+better enjoy the full relish of it.... I may answer you best, perhaps,
+by asking you to scan what I offered to the fat scoundrel’s respectful
+consideration, my dear sir.”
+
+He leveled a forefinger at the card.
+
+At first glance it conveyed nothing to the younger man’s benighted
+intelligence. He puzzled over it, twisting his brows out of alignment.
+An ordinary oblong slip of thin white cardboard, it was engraved in
+fine script as follows:
+
+MR. GEORGE BURGOYNE CALENDAR
+
+
+81, ASPEN VILLAS, S. W.
+
+“Oh!” exclaimed Kirkwood at length, standing up, his face bright with
+understanding. “_You_—!”
+
+“I,” laconically assented the elder man.
+
+Impulsively Kirkwood leaned across the table. “Dorothy,” he said
+tenderly; and when the girl’s happy eyes met his, quietly drew her
+attention to the card.
+
+Then he rose hastily, and went over to stand by the window, staring
+mistily into the blank face of night beyond its unseen panes.
+
+Behind him there was a confusion of little noises; the sound of a chair
+pushed hurriedly aside, a rustle of skirts, a happy sob or two, low
+voices intermingling; sighs.... Out of it finally came the father’s
+accents.
+
+“There, there, my dear! My dearest dear!” protested the old gentleman.
+“Positively I don’t deserve a tithe of this. I—” The young old voice
+quavered and broke, in a happy laugh.... “You must understand,” he
+continued more soberly, “that no consideration of any sort is due me.
+When we married, I was too old for your mother, child; we both knew it,
+both believed it would never matter. But it did. By her wish, I went
+back to America; we were to see what separation would do to heal the
+wounds dissension had caused. It was a very foolish experiment. Your
+mother died before I could return....”
+
+There fell a silence, again broken by the father. “After that I was in
+no haste to return. But some years ago, I came to London to live. I
+communicated with the old colonel, asking permission to see you. It was
+refused in a manner which precluded the subject being reopened by me: I
+was informed that if I persisted in attempting to see you, you would be
+disinherited.... He was very angry with me—justly, I admit.... One must
+grow old before one can see how unforgivably one was wrong in youth....
+So I settled down to a quiet old age, determined not to disturb you in
+your happiness.... Ah—Kirkwood!”
+
+The old gentleman was standing, his arm around his daughter’s
+shoulders, when Kirkwood turned.
+
+“Come here, Philip; I’m explaining to Dorothy, but you should hear....
+The evening I called on you, dear boy, at the Pless, returning home I
+received a message from my solicitors, whom I had instructed to keep an
+eye on Dorothy’s welfare. They informed me that she had disappeared.
+Naturally I canceled my plans to go to Munich, and stayed, employing
+detectives. One of the first things they discovered was that Dorothy
+had run off with an elderly person calling himself George Burgoyne
+Calendar—the name I had discarded when I found that to acknowledge me
+would imperil my daughter’s fortune.... The investigations went deeper;
+Charles—let us continue to call him—had been to see me only this
+afternoon, to inform me of the plot they had discovered. This Hallam
+woman and her son—it seems that they were legitimately in the line of
+inheritance, Dorothy out of the way. But the woman was—ah—a bad lot.
+Somehow she got into communication with this fat rogue and together
+they plotted it out. Charles doesn’t believe that the Hallam woman
+expected to enjoy the Burgoyne estates for very many days. Her plan was
+to step in when Dorothy stepped out, gather up what she could, realize
+on it, and decamp. That is why there was so much excitement about the
+jewels: naturally the most valuable item on her list, the most easy to
+convert into cash.... The man Mulready we do not place; he seems to
+have been a shady character the fat rogue picked up somewhere. The
+latter’s ordinary line of business was diamond smuggling, though he
+would condescend to almost anything in order to turn a dishonest
+penny....
+
+“That seems to exhaust the subject. But one word more.... Dorothy, I am
+old enough and have suffered enough to know the wisdom of seizing one’s
+happiness when one may. My dear, a little while ago, you did a very
+brave deed. Under fire you said a most courageous, womanly, creditable
+thing. And Philip’s rejoinder was only second in nobility to yours....
+I do hope to goodness that you two blessed youngsters won’t let any
+addlepated scruples stand between yourselves and—the prize of Romance,
+your inalienable inheritance!”
+
+Abruptly Brentwick, who was no longer Brentwick, but the actual
+Calendar, released the girl from his embrace and hopped nimbly toward
+the door. “Really, I must see about that petrol!” he cried. “While it’s
+perfectly true that Charles lied about it’s running out, we must be
+getting on. I’ll call you when we’re ready to start.”
+
+And the door crashed to behind him....
+
+Between them was the table. Beyond it the girl stood with head erect,
+dim tears glimmering on the lashes of those eyes with which she met
+Philip’s steady gaze so fearlessly.
+
+Singing about them, the silence deepened. Fascinated, though his heart
+was faint with longing, Kirkwood faltered on the threshold of his
+kingdom.
+
+“Dorothy!... You did mean it, dear?”
+
+She laughed, a little, low, sobbing laugh that had its source deep in
+the hidden sanctuary of her heart of a child.
+
+“I meant it, my dearest.... If you’ll have a girl so bold and forward,
+who can’t wait till she’s asked but throws herself into the arms of the
+man she loves—Philip, I meant it, every word!...”
+
+And as he went to her swiftly, round the table, she turned to meet him,
+arms uplifted, her scarlet lips a-tremble, the brown and bewitching
+lashes drooping over her wondrously lighted eyes....
+
+After a time Philip Kirkwood laughed aloud.
+
+And there was that quality in the ring of his laughter that caused the
+Shade of Care, which had for the past ten minutes been uneasily luffing
+and filling in the offing and, on the whole, steadily diminishing and
+becoming more pale and wan and emaciated and indistinct—there was that
+in the laughter of Philip Kirkwood, I say, which caused the Shade of
+Care to utter a hollow croak of despair as, incontinently, it vanished
+out of his life.
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 9779 ***
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+<title>The Black Bag | Project Gutenberg</title>
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+<body>
+<div>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 9779 ***</div>
+
+<h1>THE BLACK BAG</h1>
+
+<h2 class="no-break">By LOUIS JOSEPH VANCE</h2>
+
+<div class="fig" style="width:100%;">
+<img src="images/cover.jpg" width="600" height="569" alt="[Illustration]" />
+</div>
+
+<h4>WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY THOMAS FOGARTY</h4>
+
+<h5>COPYRIGHT 1908</h5>
+
+<hr />
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p class="center">
+TO MY MOTHER
+</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2>CONTENTS</h2>
+
+<table summary="" style="">
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap01">CHAPTER I. DIVERSIONS OF A RUINED GENTLEMAN</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap02">CHAPTER II. “AND SOME THERE BE WHO HAVE ADVENTURES THRUST UPON THEM”</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap03">CHAPTER III. CALENDAR’S DAUGHTER</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap04">CHAPTER IV. 9 FROGNALL STREET, W. C.</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap05">CHAPTER V. THE MYSTERY OF A FOUR-WHEELER</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap06">CHAPTER VI. “BELOW BRIDGE”</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap07">CHAPTER VII. DIVERSIONS OF A RUINED GENTLEMAN—RESUMED</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap08">CHAPTER VIII. MADAME L’INTRIGANTE</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap09">CHAPTER IX. AGAIN "BELOW BRIDGE"; AND BEYOND</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap10">CHAPTER X. DESPERATE MEASURES</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap11">CHAPTER XI. OFF THE NORE</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap12">CHAPTER XII. PICARESQUE PASSAGES</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap13">CHAPTER XIII. A PRIMER OF PROGRESSIVE CRIME</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap14">CHAPTER XIV. STRATAGEMS AND SPOILS</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap15">CHAPTER XV. REFUGEES</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap16">CHAPTER XVI. TRAVELS WITH A CHAPERON</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap17">CHAPTER XVII. ROGUES AND VAGABONDS</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap18">CHAPTER XVIII. ADVENTURERS’ LUCK</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap19">CHAPTER XIX. i—THE UXBRIDGE ROAD</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap20">ii—THE CROWN AND MITRE</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap21">iii—THE JOURNEY’S END</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+</table>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2>ILLUSTRATIONS</h2>
+
+<table summary="" style="">
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#illus01">Permit me to introduce an old friend.</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#illus02">“I’m awaiting your explanation,” she said coldly.</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#illus03">The boat gathered impetus.</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#illus04">He helped the boy to his feet, and stood waiting.</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#illus05">Eccles</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#illus06">“Hi, matey!” he blustered. “’Ow goes it now?”</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#illus07">Straddling Mulready’s body, he confronted Calendar and Stryker.</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#illus08">From the window, Mrs. Hallam turned with a curling lip.</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#illus09">A costume consisting mainly of a flowered dressing-gown and slippers.</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#illus10">“Good evening, all!” he saluted them blandly.</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+</table>
+
+<hr />
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2>THE BLACK BAG</h2>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap01"></a>I<br/>
+DIVERSIONS OF A RUINED GENTLEMAN</h2>
+
+<p>
+Upon a certain dreary April afternoon in the year of grace, 1906, the
+apprehensions of Philip Kirkwood, Esquire, <i>Artist-peintre</i>, were
+enlivened by the discovery that he was occupying that singularly distressing
+social position, which may be summed up succinctly in a phrase through long
+usage grown proverbial: “Alone in London.” These three words have come to
+connote in our understanding so much of human misery, that to Mr. Kirkwood they
+seemed to epitomize absolutely, if not happily, the various circumstances
+attendant upon the predicament wherein he found himself. Inevitably an
+extremist, because of his youth, (he had just turned twenty-five), he took no
+count of mitigating matters, and would hotly have resented the suggestion that
+his case was anything but altogether deplorable and forlorn.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+That he was not actually at the end of his resources went for nothing; he held
+the distinction a quibble, mockingly immaterial,—like the store of guineas in
+his pocket, too insignificant for mention when contrasted with his needs. And
+his base of supplies, the American city of his nativity, whence—and not without
+a glow of pride in his secret heart—he was wont to register at foreign
+hostelries, had been arbitrarily cut off from him by one of those accidents
+sardonically classified by insurance and express corporations as Acts of God.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Now to one who has lived all his days serenely in accord with the dictates of
+his own sweet will, taking no thought for the morrow, such a situation
+naturally seems both appalling and intolerable, at the first blush. It must be
+confessed that, to begin with, Kirkwood drew a long and disconsolate face over
+his fix. And in that black hour, primitive of its kind in his brief span, he
+became conscious of a sinister apparition taking shape at his elbow—a shade of
+darkness which, clouting him on the back with a skeleton hand, croaked hollow
+salutations in his ear.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Come, Mr. Kirkwood, come!” its mirthless accents rallied him. “Have you no
+welcome for me?—you, who have been permitted to live the quarter of a century
+without making my acquaintance? Surely, now, it’s high time we were learning
+something of one another, you and I!” “But I don’t understand,” returned
+Kirkwood blankly. “I don’t know you—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“True! But you shall: I am the Shade of Care—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Dull Care!” murmured Kirkwood, bewildered and dismayed; for the visitation had
+come upon him with little presage and no invitation whatever.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Dull Care,” the Shade assured him. “Dull Care am I—and Care that’s anything
+but dull, into the bargain: Care that’s like a keen pain in your body, Care
+that lives a horror in your mind, Care that darkens your days and flavors with
+bitter poison all your nights, Care that—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But Kirkwood would not listen further. Courageously submissive to his destiny,
+knowing in his heart that the Shade had come to stay, he yet found spirit to
+shake himself with a dogged air, to lift his chin, set the strong muscles of
+his jaw, and smile that homely wholesome smile which was his peculiarly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Very well,” he accepted the irremediable with grim humor; “what must be, must.
+I don’t pretend to be glad to see you, but—you’re free to stay as long as you
+find the climate agreeable. I warn you I shan’t whine. Lots of men, hundreds
+and hundreds of ’em, have slept tight o’ nights with you for bedfellow; if they
+could grin and bear you, I believe I can.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Now Care mocked him with a sardonic laugh, and sought to tighten upon his
+shoulders its bony grasp; but Kirkwood resolutely shrugged it off and went in
+search of man’s most faithful dumb friend, to wit, his pipe; the which, when
+found and filled, he lighted with a spill twisted from the envelope of a cable
+message which had been vicariously responsible for his introduction to the
+Shade of Care.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It’s about time,” he announced, watching the paper blacken and burn in the
+grate fire, “that I was doing something to prove my title to a living.” And
+this was all his valedictory to a vanished competence. “Anyway,” he added
+hastily, as if fearful lest Care, overhearing, might have read into his tone a
+trace of vain repining, “anyway, I’m a sight better off than those poor devils
+over there! I really have a great deal to be thankful for, now that my
+attention’s drawn to it.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For the ensuing few minutes he thought it all over, soberly but with a stout
+heart; standing at a window of his bedroom in the Hotel Pless, hands deep in
+trouser pockets, pipe fuming voluminously, his gaze wandering out over a
+blurred infinitude of wet shining roofs and sooty chimney-pots: all of London
+that a lowering drizzle would let him see, and withal by no means a cheering
+prospect, nor yet one calculated to offset the disheartening influence of the
+indomitable Shade of Care. But the truth is that Kirkwood’s brain comprehended
+little that his eyes perceived; his thoughts were with his heart, and that was
+half a world away and sick with pity for another and a fairer city, stricken in
+the flower of her loveliness, writhing in Promethean agony upon her storied
+hills.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There came a rapping at the door.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Kirkwood removed the pipe from between his teeth long enough to say “Come in!”
+pleasantly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The knob was turned, the door opened. Kirkwood, swinging on one heel, beheld
+hesitant upon the threshold a diminutive figure in the livery of the Pless
+pages.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Mister Kirkwood?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Kirkwood nodded.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Gentleman to see you, sir.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Kirkwood nodded again, smiling. “Show him up, please,” he said. But before the
+words were fairly out of his mouth a footfall sounded in the corridor, a hand
+was placed upon the shoulder of the page, gently but with decision swinging him
+out of the way, and a man stepped into the room.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Mr. Brentwick!” Kirkwood almost shouted, jumping forward to seize his
+visitor’s hand.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“My dear boy!” replied the latter. “I’m delighted to see you. ’Got your note
+not an hour ago, and came at once—you see!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It was mighty good of you. Sit down, please. Here are cigars.... Why, a moment
+ago I was the most miserable and lonely mortal on the footstool!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I can fancy.” The elder man looked up, smiling at Kirkwood from the depths of
+his arm-chair, as the latter stood above him, resting an elbow on the mantel.
+“The management knows me,” he offered explanation of his unceremonious
+appearance; “so I took the liberty of following on the heels of the bellhop,
+dear boy. And how are you? Why are you in London, enjoying our abominable
+spring weather? And why the anxious undertone I detected in your note?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He continued to stare curiously into Kirkwood’s face. At a glance, this Mr.
+Brentwick was a man of tallish figure and rather slender; with a countenance
+thin and flushed a sensitive pink, out of which his eyes shone, keen, alert,
+humorous, and a trace wistful behind his glasses. His years were indeterminate;
+with the aspect of fifty, the spirit and the verve of thirty assorted oddly.
+But his hands were old, delicate, fine and fragile; and the lips beneath the
+drooping white mustache at times trembled, almost imperceptibly, with the
+generous sentiments that come with mellow age. He held his back straight and
+his head with an air—an air that was not a swagger but the sign-token of
+seasoned experience in the world. The most carping could have found no flaw in
+the quiet taste of his attire. To sum up, Kirkwood’s very good friend—and his
+only one then in London—Mr. Brentwick looked and was an English gentleman.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Why?” he persisted, as the younger man hesitated. “I am here to find out.
+To-night I leave for the Continent. In the meantime ...”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“And at midnight I sail for the States,” added Kirkwood. “That is mainly why I
+wished to see you—to say good-by, for the time.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You’re going home—” A shadow clouded Brentwick’s clear eyes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“To fight it out, shoulder to shoulder with my brethren in adversity.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The cloud lifted. “That is the spirit!” declared the elder man. “For the moment
+I did you the injustice to believe that you were running away. But now I
+understand. Forgive me.... Pardon, too, the stupidity which I must lay at the
+door of my advancing years; to me the thought of you as a Parisian fixture has
+become such a commonplace, Philip, that the news of the disaster hardly stirred
+me. Now I remember that you are a Californian!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I was born in San Francisco,” affirmed Kirkwood a bit sadly. “My father and
+mother were buried there ...”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“And your fortune—?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I inherited my father’s interest in the firm of Kirkwood &amp; Vanderlip; when
+I came over to study painting, I left everything in Vanderlip’s hands. The
+business afforded me a handsome living.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You have heard from Mr. Vanderlip?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Fifteen minutes ago.” Kirkwood took a cable-form, still damp, from his pocket,
+and handed it to his guest. Unfolding it, the latter read:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“<i>Kirkwood, Pless, London. Stay where you are no good coming back everything
+gone no insurance letter follows vanderlip</i>.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“When I got the news in Paris,” Kirkwood volunteered, “I tried the banks; they
+refused to honor my drafts. I had a little money in hand,—enough to see me
+home,—so closed the studio and came across. I’m booked on the
+<i>Minneapolis</i>, sailing from Tilbury at daybreak; the boat-train leaves at
+eleven-thirty. I had hoped you might be able to dine with me and see me off.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In silence Brentwick returned the cable message. Then, with a thoughtful look,
+“You are sure this is wise?” he queried.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It’s the only thing I can see.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“But your partner says—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Naturally he thinks that by this time I should have learned to paint well
+enough to support myself for a few months, until he can get things running
+again. Perhaps I might.” Brentwick supported the presumption with a decided
+gesture. “But have I a right to leave Vanderlip to fight it out alone? For
+Vanderlip has a wife and kiddies to support; I—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Your genius!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“My ability, such as it is—and that only. It can wait.... No; this means simply
+that I must come down from the clouds, plant my feet on solid earth, and get to
+work.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“The sentiment is sound,” admitted Brentwick, “the practice of it, folly. Have
+you stopped to think what part a rising young portrait-painter can contribute
+toward the rebuilding of a devastated city?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“The painting can wait,” reiterated Kirkwood. “I can work like other men.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You can do yourself and your genius grave injustice. And I fear me you will,
+dear boy. It’s in keeping with your heritage of American obstinacy. Now if it
+were a question of money—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Mr. Brentwick!” Kirkwood protested vehemently. “I’ve ample for my present
+needs,” he added.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Of course,” conceded Brentwick with a sigh. “I didn’t really hope you would
+avail yourself of our friendship. Now there’s my home in Aspen Villas.... You
+have seen it?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“In your absence this afternoon your estimable butler, with commendable
+discretion, kept me without the doors,” laughed the young man.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It’s a comfortable home. You would not consent to share it with me until—?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You are more than good; but honestly, I must sail to-night. I wanted only this
+chance to see you before I left. You’ll dine with me, won’t you?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“If you would stay in London, Philip, we would dine together not once but many
+times; as it is, I myself am booked for Munich, to be gone a week, on business.
+I have many affairs needing attention between now and the nine-ten train from
+Victoria. If you will be my guest at Aspen Villas—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Please!” begged Kirkwood, with a little laugh of pleasure because of the
+other’s insistence. “I only wish I could. Another day—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Oh, you will make your million in a year, and return scandalously independent.
+It’s in your American blood.” Frail white fingers tapped an arm of the chair as
+their owner stared gravely into the fire. “I confess I envy you,” he observed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“The opportunity to make a million in a year?” chuckled Kirkwood.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“No. I envy you your Romance.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“The Romance of a Poor Young Man went out of fashion years ago.... No, my dear
+friend; my Romance died a natural death half an hour since.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“There spoke Youth—blind, enviable Youth!... On the contrary, you are but
+turning the leaves of the first chapter of your Romance, Philip.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Romance is dead,” contended the young man stubbornly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Long live the King!” Brentwick laughed quietly, still attentive to the fire.
+“Myself when young,” he said softly, “did seek Romance, but never knew it till
+its day was done. I’m quite sure that is a poor paraphrase of something I have
+read. In age, one’s sight is sharpened—to see Romance in another’s life, at
+least. I say I envy you. You have Youth, unconquerable Youth, and the world
+before you.... I must go.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He rose stiffly, as though suddenly made conscious of his age. The old eyes
+peered more than a trifle wistfully, now, into Kirkwood’s. “You will not fail
+to call on me by cable, dear boy, if you need—anything? I ask it as a favor....
+I’m glad you wished to see me before going out of my life. One learns to value
+the friendship of Youth, Philip. Good-by, and good luck attend you.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Alone once more, Kirkwood returned to his window. The disappointment he felt at
+being robbed of his anticipated pleasure in Brentwick’s company at dinner,
+colored his mood unpleasantly. His musings merged into vacuity, into a dull
+gray mist of hopelessness comparable only to the dismal skies then lowering
+over London-town.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Brentwick was good, but Brentwick was mistaken. There was really nothing for
+Kirkwood to do but to go ahead. But one steamer-trunk remained to be packed;
+the boat-train would leave before midnight, the steamer with the morning tide;
+by the morrow’s noon he would be upon the high seas, within ten days in New
+York and among friends; and then ...
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The problem of that afterwards perplexed Kirkwood more than he cared to own.
+Brentwick had opened his eyes to the fact that he would be practically useless
+in San Francisco; he could not harbor the thought of going back, only to become
+a charge upon Vanderlip. No; he was resolved that thenceforward he must rely
+upon himself, carve out his own destiny. But—would the art that he had
+cultivated with such assiduity, yield him a livelihood if sincerely practised
+with that end in view? Would the mental and physical equipment of a painter,
+heretofore dilettante, enable him to become self-supporting?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Knotting his brows in concentration of effort to divine the future, he doubted
+himself, darkly questioning alike his abilities and his temper under trial;
+neither ere now had ever been put to the test. His eyes became somberly
+wistful, his heart sore with regret of Yesterday—his Yesterday of care-free
+youth and courage, gilded with the ineffable, evanescent glamour of Romance—of
+such Romance, thrice refined of dross, as only he knows who has wooed his Art
+with passion passing the love of woman.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Far away, above the acres of huddled roofs and chimney-pots, the storm-mists
+thinned, lifting transiently; through them, gray, fairy-like, the towers of
+Westminster and the Houses of Parliament bulked monstrous and unreal, fading
+when again the fugitive dun vapors closed down upon the city.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Nearer at hand the Shade of Care nudged Kirkwood’s elbow, whispering subtly.
+Romance was indeed dead; the world was cold and cruel.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The gloom deepened.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the cant of modern metaphysics, the moment was psychological.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There came a rapping at the door.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Kirkwood removed the pipe from between his teeth long enough to say “Come in!”
+pleasantly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The knob was turned, the door opened. Kirkwood, turning on one heel, beheld
+hesitant upon the threshold a diminutive figure in the livery of the Pless
+pages.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Mr. Kirkwood?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Kirkwood nodded.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Gentleman to see you, sir.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Kirkwood nodded again, smiling if somewhat perplexed. Encouraged, the child
+advanced, proffering a silver card-tray at the end of an unnaturally rigid
+forearm. Kirkwood took the card dubiously between thumb and forefinger and
+inspected it without prejudice.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“‘George B. Calendar,’” he read. “‘George B. Calendar!’ But I know no such
+person. Sure there’s no mistake, young man?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The close-cropped, bullet-shaped, British head was agitated in vigorous
+negation, and “Card for Mister Kirkwood!” was mumbled in dispassionate accents
+appropriate to a recitation by rote.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Very well. But before you show him up, ask this Mr. Calendar if he is quite
+sure he wants to see Philip Kirkwood.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yessir.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The child marched out, punctiliously closing the door. Kirkwood tamped down the
+tobacco in his pipe and puffed energetically, dismissing the interruption to
+his reverie as a matter of no consequence—an obvious mistake to be rectified by
+two words with this Mr. Calendar whom he did not know. At the knock he had
+almost hoped it might be Brentwick, returning with a changed mind about the bid
+to dinner.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He regretted Brentwick sincerely. Theirs was a curious sort of
+friendship—extraordinarily close in view of the meagerness of either’s
+information about the other, to say nothing of the disparity between their
+ages. Concerning the elder man Kirkwood knew little more than that they had met
+on shipboard, “coming over”; that Brentwick had spent some years in America;
+that he was an Englishman by birth, a cosmopolitan by habit, by profession a
+gentleman (employing that term in its most uncompromisingly British
+significance), and by inclination a collector of “articles of virtue and
+bigotry,” in pursuit of which he made frequent excursions to the Continent from
+his residence in a quaint quiet street of Old Brompton. It had been during his
+not infrequent, but ordinarily abbreviated, sojourns in Paris that their
+steamer acquaintance had ripened into an affection almost filial on the one
+hand, almost paternal on the other....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There came a rapping at the door.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Kirkwood removed the pipe from between his teeth long enough to say “Come in!”
+pleasantly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The knob was turned, the door opened. Kirkwood, swinging on one heel, beheld
+hesitant upon the threshold a rather rotund figure of medium height, clad in an
+expressionless gray lounge suit, with a brown “bowler” hat held tentatively in
+one hand, an umbrella weeping in the other. A voice, which was unctuous and
+insinuative, emanated from the figure.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Mr. Kirkwood?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Kirkwood nodded, with some effort recalling the name, so detached had been his
+thoughts since the disappearance of the page.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes, Mr. Calendar—?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Are you—ah—busy, Mr. Kirkwood?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Are you, Mr. Calendar?” Kirkwood’s smile robbed the retort of any flavor of
+incivility.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Encouraged, the man entered, premising that he would detain his host but a
+moment, and readily surrendering hat and umbrella. Kirkwood, putting the latter
+aside, invited his caller to the easy chair which Brentwick had occupied by the
+fireplace.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It takes the edge off the dampness,” Kirkwood explained in deference to the
+other’s look of pleased surprise at the cheerful bed of coals. “I’m afraid I
+could never get acclimated to life in a cold, damp room—or a damp cold
+room—such as you Britishers prefer.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It is grateful,” Mr. Calendar agreed, spreading plump and well cared-for hands
+to the warmth. “But you are mistaken; I am as much an American as yourself.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes?” Kirkwood looked the man over with more interest, less matter-of-course
+courtesy.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He proved not unprepossessing, this unclassifiable Mr. Calendar; he was dressed
+with some care, his complexion was good, and the fullness of his girth,
+emphasized as it was by a notable lack of inches, bespoke a nature genial,
+easy-going and sybaritic. His dark eyes, heavy-lidded, were active—curiously,
+at times, with a subdued glitter—in a face large, round, pink, of which the
+other most remarkable features were a mustache, close-trimmed and showing
+streaks of gray, a chubby nose, and duplicate chins. Mr. Calendar was
+furthermore possessed of a polished bald spot, girdled with a tonsure of
+silvered hair—circumstances which lent some factitious distinction to a
+personality otherwise commonplace.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His manner might be best described as uneasy with assurance; as though he
+frequently found it necessary to make up for his unimpressive stature by
+assuming an unnatural habit of authority. And there you have him; beyond these
+points, Kirkwood was conscious of no impressions; the man was apparently
+neutral-tinted of mind as well as of body.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“So you knew I was an American, Mr. Calendar?” suggested Kirkwood.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“’Saw your name on the register; we both hail from the same neck of the woods,
+you know.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I didn’t know it, and—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes; I’m from Frisco, too.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“And I’m sorry.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mr. Calendar passed five fat fingers nervously over his mustache, glanced
+alertly up at Kirkwood, as if momentarily inclined to question his tone, then
+again stared glumly into the fire; for Kirkwood had maintained an attitude
+purposefully colorless. Not to put too fine a point upon it, he believed that
+his caller was lying; the man’s appearance, his mannerisms, his voice and
+enunciation, while they might have been American, seemed all un-Californian. To
+one born and bred in that state, as Kirkwood had been, her sons are
+unmistakably hall-marked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Now no man lies without motive. This one chose to reaffirm, with a show of deep
+feeling: “Yes; I’m from Frisco, too. We’re companions in misfortune.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I hope not altogether,” said Kirkwood politely.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mr. Calendar drew his own inferences from the response and mustered up a show
+of cheerfulness. “Then you’re not completely wiped out?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“To the contrary, I was hoping you were less unhappy.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Oh! Then you are—?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Kirkwood lifted the cable message from the mantel. “I have just heard from my
+partner at home,” he said with a faint smile; and quoted: “‘Everything gone; no
+insurance.’”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mr. Calendar pursed his plump lips, whistling inaudibly. “Too bad, too bad!” he
+murmured sympathetically. “We’re all hard hit, more or less.” He lapsed into
+dejected apathy, from which Kirkwood, growing at length impatient, found it
+necessary to rouse him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You wished to see me about something else, I’m sure?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mr. Calendar started from his reverie. “Eh? ... I was dreaming. I beg pardon.
+It seems hard to realize, Mr. Kirkwood, that this awful catastrophe has
+overtaken our beloved metropolis—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The canting phrases wearied Kirkwood; abruptly he cut in. “Would a sovereign
+help you out, Mr. Calendar? I don’t mind telling you that’s about the limit of
+my present resources.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Pardon <i>me</i>.” Mr. Calendar’s moon-like countenance darkened; he assumed a
+transparent dignity. “You misconstrue my motive, sir.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Then I’m sorry.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I am not here to borrow. On the other hand, quite by accident I discovered
+your name upon the register, down-stairs; a good old Frisco name, if you will
+permit me to say so. I thought to myself that here was a chance to help a
+fellow-countryman.” Calendar paused, interrogative; Kirkwood remained
+interested but silent. “If a passage across would help you, I—I think it might
+be arranged,” stammered Calendar, ill at ease.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It might,” admitted Kirkwood, speculative.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I could fix it so that you could go over—first-class, of course—and pay your
+way, so to speak, by, rendering us, me and my partner, a trifling service.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Ah?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“In fact,” continued Calendar, warming up to his theme, “there might be
+something more in it for you than the passage, if—if you’re the right man, the
+man I’m looking for.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“That, of course, is the question.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Eh?” Calendar pulled up suddenly in a full-winged flight of enthusiasm.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Kirkwood eyed him steadily. “I said that it is a question, Mr. Calendar,
+whether or not I am the man you’re looking for. Between you and me and the
+fire-dogs, I don’t believe I am. Now if you wish to name your <i>quid pro
+quo</i>, this trifling service I’m to render in recognition of your
+benevolence, you may.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Ye-es,” slowly. But the speaker delayed his reply until he had surveyed his
+host from head to foot, with a glance both critical and appreciative.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He saw a man in height rather less than the stock size six-feet so much in
+demand by the manufacturers of modern heroes of fiction; a man a bit
+round-shouldered, too, but otherwise sturdily built, self-contained,
+well-groomed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Kirkwood wears a boy’s honest face; no one has ever called him handsome. A few
+prejudiced persons have decided that he has an interesting countenance; the
+propounders of this verdict have been, for the most part, feminine. Kirkwood
+himself has been heard to declare that his features do not fit; in its essence
+the statement is true, but there is a very real, if undefinable, engaging
+quality in their very irregularity. His eyes are brown, pleasant, set wide
+apart, straightforward of expression.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Now it appeared that, whatever his motive, Mr. Calendar had acted upon impulse
+in sending his card up to Kirkwood. Possibly he had anticipated a very
+different sort of reception from a very different sort of man. Even in the
+light of subsequent events it remains difficult to fathom the mystery of his
+choice. Perhaps Fate directed it; stranger things have happened at the dictates
+of a man’s Destiny.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At all events, this Calendar proved not lacking in penetration; men of his
+stamp are commonly endowed with that quality to an eminent degree. Not slow to
+reckon the caliber of the man before him, the leaven of intuition began to work
+in his adipose intelligence. He owned himself baffled.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Thanks,” he concluded pensively; “I reckon you’re right. You won’t do, after
+all. I’ve wasted your time. Mine, too.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Don’t mention it.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Calendar got heavily out of his chair, reaching for his hat and umbrella.
+“Permit me to apologize for an unwarrantable intrusion, Mr. Kirkwood.” He
+faltered; a worried and calculating look shadowed his small eyes. “I <i>was</i>
+looking for some one to serve me in a certain capacity—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Certain or questionable?” propounded Kirkwood blandly, opening the door.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Pointedly Mr. Calendar ignored the imputation. “Sorry I disturbed you.
+G’dafternoon, Mr. Kirkwood.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Good-by, Mr. Calendar.” A smile twitched the corners of Kirkwood’s too-wide
+mouth.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Calendar stepped hastily out into the hall. As he strode—or rather,
+rolled—away, Kirkwood maliciously feathered a Parthian arrow.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“By the way, Mr. Calendar—?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The sound of retreating footsteps was stilled and “Yes?” came from the gloom of
+the corridor.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Were you ever in San Francisco? Really and truly? Honest Injun, Mr. Calendar?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For a space the quiet was disturbed by harsh breathing; then, in a strained
+voice, “Good day, Mr. Kirkwood”; and again the sound of departing footfalls.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Kirkwood closed the door and the incident simultaneously, with a smart bang of
+finality. Laughing quietly he went back to the window with its dreary outlook,
+now the drearier for lengthening evening shadows.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I wonder what his game is, anyway. An adventurer, of course; the woods are
+full of ’em. A queer fish, even of his kind! And with a trick up his sleeve as
+queer and fishy as himself, no doubt!”
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap02"></a>II<br/>
+“AND SOME THERE BE WHO HAVE ADVENTURES THRUST UPON THEM”</h2>
+
+<p>
+The assumption seems not unwarrantable, that Mr. Calendar figuratively washed
+his hands of Mr. Kirkwood. Unquestionably Mr. Kirkwood considered himself well
+rid of Mr. Calendar. When the latter had gone his way, Kirkwood, mindful of the
+fact that his boat-train would leave St. Pancras at half-after eleven, set
+about his packing and dismissed from his thoughts the incident created by the
+fat <i>chevalier d’industrie</i>; and at six o’clock, or thereabouts, let
+himself out of his room, dressed for the evening, a light rain-coat over one
+arm, in the other hand a cane,—the drizzle having ceased.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A stolid British lift lifted him down to the ground floor of the establishment
+in something short of five minutes. Pausing in the office long enough to settle
+his bill and leave instructions to have his luggage conveyed to the boat-train,
+he received with entire equanimity the affable benediction of the clerk, in
+whose eyes he still figured as that radiant creature, an American millionaire;
+and passed on to the lobby, where he surrendered hat, coat and stick to the
+cloak-room attendant, ere entering the dining-room.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The hour was a trifle early for a London dinner, the handsome room but
+moderately filled with patrons. Kirkwood absorbed the fact unconsciously and
+without displeasure; the earlier, the better: he was determined to consume his
+last civilized meal (as he chose to consider it) at his serene leisure, to live
+fully his ebbing moments in the world to which he was born, to drink to its
+cloying dregs one ultimate draught of luxury.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A benignant waiter bowed him into a chair by a corner table in juxtaposition
+with an open window, through which, swaying imperceptibly the closed hangings,
+were wafted gentle gusts of the London evening’s sweet, damp breath.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Kirkwood settled himself with an inaudible sigh of pleasure. He was dining, for
+the last time in Heaven knew how long, in a first-class restaurant.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+With a deferential flourish the waiter brought him the menu-card. He had served
+in his time many an “American, millionaire”; he had also served this Mr.
+Kirkwood, and respected him as one exalted above the run of his kind, in that
+he comprehended the art of dining.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Fifteen minutes later the waiter departed rejoicing, his order complete.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To distract a conscience whispering of extravagance, Kirkwood lighted a
+cigarette.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The room was gradually filling with later arrivals; it was the most favored
+restaurant in London, and, despite the radiant costumes of the women, its
+atmosphere remained sedate and restful.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A cab clattered down the side street on which the window opened.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At a near-by table a woman laughed, quietly happy. Incuriously Kirkwood glanced
+her way. She was bending forward, smiling, flattering her escort with the
+adoration of her eyes. They were lovers alone in the wilderness of the crowded
+restaurant. They seemed very happy.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Kirkwood was conscious of a strange pang of emotion. It took him some time to
+comprehend that it was envy.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was alone and lonely. For the first time he realized that no woman had ever
+looked upon him as the woman at the adjoining table looked upon her lover. He
+had found time to worship but one mistress—his art.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And he was renouncing her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was painfully conscious of what he had missed, had lost—or had not yet
+found: the love of woman.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The sensation was curious—new, unique in his experience.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His cigarette burned down to his fingers as he sat pondering. Abstractedly, he
+ground its fire out in an ash-tray.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The waiter set before him a silver tureen, covered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He sat up and began to consume his soup, scarce doing it justice. His dream
+troubled him—his dream of the love of woman.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+From a little distance his waiter regarded him, with an air of disappointment.
+In the course of an hour and a half he awoke, to discover the attendant in the
+act of pouring very hot and black coffee from a bright silver pot into a
+demi-tasse of fragile porcelain. Kirkwood slipped a single lump of sugar into
+the cup, gave over his cigar-case to be filled, then leaned back, deliberately
+lighting a long and slender panetela as a preliminary to a last lingering
+appreciation of the scene of which he was a part.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He reviewed it through narrowed eyelids, lazily; yet with some slight surprise,
+seeming to see it with new vision, with eyes from which scales of ignorance had
+dropped.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This long and brilliant dining-hall, with its quiet perfection of proportion
+and appointment, had always gratified his love of the beautiful; to-night it
+pleased him to an unusual degree. Yet it was the same as ever; its walls tinted
+a deep rose, with their hangings of dull cloth-of-gold, its lights
+discriminatingly clustered and discreetly shaded, redoubled in half a hundred
+mirrors, its subdued shimmer of plate and glass, its soberly festive assemblage
+of circumspect men and women splendidly gowned, its decorously muted murmur of
+voices penetrated and interwoven by the strains of a hidden string
+orchestra—caressed his senses as always, yet with a difference. To-night he saw
+it a room populous with lovers, lovers insensibly paired, man unto woman
+attentive, woman of man regardful.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He had never understood this before. This much he had missed in life.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It seemed hard to realize that one must forego it all for ever.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Presently he found himself acutely self-conscious. The sensation puzzled him;
+and without appearing to do so, he traced it from effect to cause; and found
+the cause in a woman—a girl, rather, seated at a table the third removed from
+him, near the farther wall of the room.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Too considerate, and too embarrassed, to return her scrutiny openly, look for
+look, he yet felt sure that, however temporarily, he was become the object of
+her intent interest.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Idly employed with his cigar, he sipped his coffee. In time aware that she had
+turned her attention elsewhere, he looked up.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At first he was conscious of an effect of disappointment. She was nobody that
+he knew, even by reputation. She was simply a young girl, barely out of her
+teens—if as old as that phrase would signify. He wondered what she had found in
+him to make her think him worth so long a study; and looked again, more keenly
+curious.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+With this second glance, appreciation stirred the artistic side of his nature,
+that was already grown impatient of his fretted mood. The slender and girlish
+figure, posed with such absolute lack of intrusion against a screen of rose and
+gilt, moved him to critical admiration. The tinted glow of shaded candles
+caught glistening on the spun gold of her fair hair, and enhanced the fine
+pallor of her young shoulders. He saw promise, and something more than promise,
+in her face, its oval something dimmed by warm shadows that unavailingly sought
+to blend youth and beauty alike into the dull, rich background.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the sheer youth of her (he realized) more than in aught else, lay her
+chiefest charm. She could be little more than a child, indeed, if he were to
+judge her by the purity of her shadowed eyes and the absence of emotion in the
+calm and direct look which presently she turned upon him who sat wondering at
+the level, penciled darkness of her brows.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At length aware that she had surprised his interest, Kirkwood glanced
+aside—coolly deliberate, lest she should detect in his attitude anything more
+than impersonal approval.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A slow color burned his cheeks. In his temples there rose a curious pulsing.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+After a while she drew his gaze again, imperiously—herself all unaware of the
+havoc she was wreaking on his temperament.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He could have fancied her distraught, cloaking an unhappy heart with placid
+brow and gracious demeanor; but such a conception matched strangely her glowing
+youth and spirit. What had she to do with Care? What concern had Black Care,
+whose gaunt shape in sable shrouds had lurked at his shoulder all the evening,
+despite his rigid preoccupation, with a being as charmingly flushed with
+budding womanhood as this girl?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Eighteen?” he hazarded. “Eighteen, or possibly nineteen, dining at the Pless
+in a ravishing dinner-gown, and—unhappy? Oh, hardly—not she!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Yet the impression haunted him, and ere long he was fain to seek confirmation
+or denial of it in the manner of her escort.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The latter sat with back to Kirkwood, cutting a figure as negative as his snug
+evening clothes. One could surmise little from a fleshy thick neck, a round,
+glazed bald spot, a fringe of grizzled hair, and two bright red ears.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Calendar?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Somehow the fellow did suggest Kirkwood’s caller of the afternoon. The young
+man could not have said precisely how, for he was unfamiliar with the aspect of
+that gentleman’s back. None the less the suggestion persisted.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+By now, a few of the guests, theater-bound, for the most part, were leaving.
+Here and there a table stood vacant, that had been filled, cloth tarnished,
+chairs disarranged: in another moment to be transformed into its pristine
+brilliance under the deft attentions of the servitors.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Down an aisle, past the table at which the girl was sitting, came two, making
+toward the lobby; the man, a slight and meager young personality, in the lead.
+Their party had attracted Kirkwood’s notice as they entered; why, he did not
+remember; but it was in his mind that then they had been three. Instinctively
+he looked at the table they had left—one placed at some distance from the girl,
+and hidden from her by an angle in the wall. It appeared that the third member
+had chosen to dally a few moments over his tobacco and a liqueur-brandy.
+Kirkwood could see him plainly, lounging in his chair and fumbling the stem of
+a glass: a heavy man, of somber habit, his black and sullen brows lowering and
+thoughtful above a face boldly handsome.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The woman of the trio was worthy of closer attention. Some paces in the wake of
+her lack-luster esquire, she was making a leisurely progress, trailing the
+skirts of a gown magnificent beyond dispute, half concealed though it was by
+the opera cloak whose soft folds draped her shoulders. Slowly, carrying her
+head high, she approached, insolent eyes reviewing the room from beneath their
+heavy lids; a metallic and mature type of dark beauty, supremely self-confident
+and self-possessed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Men turned involuntarily to look after her, not altogether in undiluted
+admiration.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the act of passing behind the putative Calendar, she paused momentarily,
+bending as if to gather up her train. Presumably the action disturbed her
+balance; she swayed a little, and in the effort to recover, rested the tips of
+her gloved fingers upon the edge of the table. Simultaneously (Kirkwood could
+have sworn) a single word left her lips, a word evidently pitched for the ear
+of the hypothetical Calendar alone. Then she swept on, imperturbable, assured.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To the perplexed observer it was indubitably evident that some communication
+had passed from the woman to the man. Kirkwood saw the fat shoulders of the
+girl’s companion stiffen suddenly as the woman’s hand rested at his elbow; as
+she moved away, a little rippling shiver was plainly visible in the muscles of
+his back, beneath his coat—mute token of relaxing tension. An instant later one
+plump and mottled hand was carelessly placed where the woman’s had been; and
+was at once removed with fingers closed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To the girl, watching her face covertly, Kirkwood turned for clue to the
+incident. He made no doubt that she had observed the passage; proof of that one
+found in her sudden startling pallor (of indignation?) and in her eyes, briefly
+alight with some inscrutable emotion, though quickly veiled by lowered lashes.
+Slowly enough she regained color and composure, while her <i>vis-à-vis</i> sat
+motionless, head inclined as if in thought.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Abruptly the man turned in his chair to summon a waiter, and exposed his
+profile. Kirkwood was in no wise amazed to recognize Calendar—a badly
+frightened Calendar now, however, and hardly to be identified with the sleek,
+glib fellow who had interviewed Kirkwood in the afternoon. His flabby cheeks
+were ashen and trembling, and upon the back of his chair the fat white fingers
+were drumming incessantly an inaudible tattoo of shattered nerves.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Scared silly!” commented Kirkwood. “Why?” Having spoken to his waiter,
+Calendar for some seconds raked the room with quick glances, as if seeking an
+acquaintance. Presumably disappointed, he swung back to face the girl, bending
+forward to reach her ears with accents low-pitched and confidential. She, on
+her part, fell at once attentive, grave and responsive. Perhaps a dozen
+sentences passed between them. At the outset her brows contracted and she shook
+her head in gentle dissent; whereupon Calendar’s manner became more imperative.
+Gradually, unwillingly, she seemed to yield consent. Once she caught her breath
+sharply, and, infected by her companion’s agitation, sat back, color fading
+again in the round young cheeks.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Kirkwood’s waiter put in an inopportune appearance with the bill. The young man
+paid it. When he looked up again Calendar had swung squarely about in his
+chair. His eye encountered Kirkwood’s. He nodded pleasantly. Temporarily
+confused, Kirkwood returned the nod.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In a twinkling he had repented; Calendar had left his chair and was wending his
+way through the tables toward Kirkwood’s. Reaching it, he paused, offering the
+hand of genial fellowship. Kirkwood accepted it half-heartedly (what else was
+he to do?) remarking at the same time that Calendar had recovered much of his
+composure. There was now a normal coloring in the heavily jowled countenance,
+with less glint of fear in the quick, dark eyes; and Calendar’s hand, even if
+moist and cold, no longer trembled. Furthermore it was immediately demonstrated
+that his impudence had not deserted him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Why, Kirkwood, my dear fellow!” he crowed—not so loudly as to attract
+attention, but in a tone assumed to divert suspicion, should he be overheard.
+“This is great luck, you know—to find you here.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Is it?” returned Kirkwood coolly. He disengaged his fingers.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The pink plump face was contorted in a furtive grimace of deprecation. Without
+waiting for permission Calendar dropped into the vacant chair.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“My dear sir,” he proceeded, unabashed, “I throw myself upon your mercy.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“The devil you do!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I must. I’m in the deuce of a hole, and there’s no one I know here besides
+yourself. I—I—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Kirkwood saw fit to lead him on; partly because, out of the corner of his eye,
+he was aware of the girl’s unconcealed suspense. “Go on, please, Mr. Calendar.
+You throw yourself on a total stranger’s mercy because you’re in the deuce of a
+hole; and—?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It’s this way; I’m called away on urgent business imperative business. I must
+go at once. My daughter is with me. My daughter! Think of my embarrassment; I
+can not leave her here, alone, nor can I permit her to go home unprotected.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Calendar paused in anxiety.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“That’s easily remedied, then,” suggested Kirkwood.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“How?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Put her in a cab at the door.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I ... No. The devil! I couldn’t think of it. You won’t understand. I—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I do not understand,—” amended the younger man politely.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Calendar compressed his lips nervously. It was plain that the man was quivering
+with impatience and half-mad with excitement. He held quiet only long enough to
+regain his self-control and take counsel with his prudence.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It is impossible, Mr. Kirkwood. I must ask you to be generous and believe me.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Very well; for the sake of the argument, I do believe you, Mr. Calendar.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Hell!” exploded the elder man in an undertone. Then swiftly, stammering in his
+haste: “I can’t let Dorothy accompany me to the door,” he declared. “She—I—I
+throw myself upon your mercy!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What—again?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“The truth—the truth is, if you will have it, that I am in danger of arrest the
+moment I leave here. If my daughter is with me, she will have to endure the
+shame and humiliation—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Then why place her in such a position?” Kirkwood demanded sharply.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Calendar’s eyes burned, incandescent with resentment. Offended, he offered to
+rise and go, but changed his mind and sat tight in hope.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I beg of you, sir—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“One moment, Mr. Calendar.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Abruptly Kirkwood’s weathercock humor shifted—amusement yielding to intrigued
+interest. After all, why not oblige the fellow? What did anything matter, now?
+What harm could visit him if he yielded to this corpulent adventurer’s
+insistence? Both from experience and observation he knew this for a world
+plentifully peopled by soldiers of fortune, contrivers of snares and pitfalls
+for the feet of the unwary. On the other hand, it is axiomatic that a penniless
+man is perfectly safe anywhere. Besides, there was the girl to be considered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Kirkwood considered her, forthwith. In the process thereof, his eyes sought
+her, perturbed. Their glances clashed. She looked away hastily, crimson to her
+temples.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Instantly the conflict between curiosity and caution, inclination and distrust,
+was at an end. With sudden compliance, the young man rose.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I shall be most happy to be of service to your daughter, Mr. Calendar,” he
+said, placing the emphasis with becoming gravity. And then, the fat adventurer
+leading the way, Kirkwood strode across the room—wondering somewhat at himself,
+if the whole truth is to be disclosed.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap03"></a>III<br/>
+CALENDAR’S DAUGHTER</h2>
+
+<p>
+All but purring with satisfaction and relief, Calendar halted.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Dorothy, my dear, permit me to introduce an old friend—Mr. Kirkwood. Kirkwood,
+this is my daughter.”
+</p>
+
+<div class="fig" style="width:100%;">
+<a name="illus01"></a>
+<img src="images/img01.jpg" width="414" height="600" alt="[Illustration: ]" />
+<p class="caption">Permit me to introduce an old friend.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+“Miss Calendar,” acknowledged Kirkwood.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The girl bowed, her eyes steady upon his own. “Mr. Kirkwood is very kind,” she
+said gravely.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“That’s right!” Calendar exclaimed blandly. “He’s promised to see you home. Now
+both of you will pardon my running away, I know.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes,” assented Kirkwood agreeably.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The elder man turned and hurried toward the main entrance.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Kirkwood took the chair he had vacated. To his disgust he found himself
+temporarily dumb. No flicker of thought illuminated the darkness of his
+confusion. How was he to open a diverting conversation with a young woman whom
+he had met under auspices so extraordinary? Any attempt to gloze the situation,
+he felt, would be futile. And, somehow, he did not care to render himself
+ridiculous in her eyes, little as he knew her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Inanely dumb, he sat watching her, smiling fatuously until it was borne in on
+him that he was staring like a boor and grinning like an idiot. Convinced, he
+blushed for himself; something which served to make him more tongue-tied than
+ever.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As for his involuntary protégée, she exhibited such sweet composure that he
+caught himself wondering if she really appreciated the seriousness of her
+parent’s predicament; if, for that matter, its true nature were known to her at
+all. Calendar, he believed, was capable of prevarication, polite and impolite.
+Had he lied to his daughter? or to Kirkwood? To both, possibly; to the former
+alone, not improbably. That the adventurer had told him the desperate truth,
+Kirkwood was quite convinced; but he now began to believe that the girl had
+been put off with some fictitious explanation. Her tranquillity and
+self-control were remarkable, otherwise; she seemed very young to possess those
+qualities in such eminent degree.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She was looking wearily past him, her gaze probing some unguessed abyss of
+thought. Kirkwood felt himself privileged to stare in wonder. Her naïve
+aloofness of poise gripped his imagination powerfully,—the more so, perhaps,
+since it seemed eloquent of her intention to remain enigmatic,—but by no means
+more powerfully than the unaided appeal of her loveliness.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Presently the girl herself relieved the tension of the situation, fairly
+startling the young man by going straight to the heart of things. Without
+preface or warning, lifting her gaze to his, “My name is really Dorothy
+Calendar,” she observed. And then, noting his astonishment, “You would be
+privileged to doubt, under the circumstances,” she added. “Please let us be
+frank.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Well,” he stammered, “if I didn’t doubt, let’s say I was unprejudiced.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His awkward, well-meant pleasantry, perhaps not conceived in the best of taste,
+sounded in his own ears wretchedly flat and vapid. He regretted it
+spontaneously; the girl ignored it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You are very kind,” she iterated the first words he had heard from her lips.
+“I wish you to understand that I, for one, appreciate it.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Not kind; I have done nothing. I am glad.... One is apt to become interested
+when Romance is injected into a prosaic existence.” Kirkwood allowed himself a
+keen but cheerful glance.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She nodded, with a shadowy smile. He continued, purposefully, to distract her,
+holding her with his honest, friendly eyes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Since it is to be confidences” (this she questioned with an all but
+imperceptible lifting of the eyebrows), “I don’t mind telling you my own name
+is really Philip Kirkwood.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“And you are an old friend of my father’s?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He opened his lips, but only to close them without speaking. The girl moved her
+shoulders with a shiver of disdain.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I knew it wasn’t so.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You know it would be hard for a young man like myself to be a very old
+friend,” he countered lamely.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“How long, then, have you known each other?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Must I answer?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Please.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Between three and four hours.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I thought as much.” She stared past him, troubled. Abruptly she said: “Please
+smoke.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Shall I? If you wish it, of course....”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She repeated: “Please.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“We were to wait ten minutes or so,” she continued.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He produced his cigarette-case.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“If you care to smoke it will seem an excuse.” He lighted his cigarette.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“And then, you may talk to me,” she concluded calmly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I would, gladly, if I could guess what would interest you.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yourself. Tell me about yourself,” she commanded.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It would bore you,” he responded tritely, confused.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“No; you interest me very much.” She made the statement quietly, contemptuous
+of coquetry.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Very well, then; I am Philip Kirkwood, an American.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Nothing more?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Little worth retailing.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I’m sorry.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Why?” he demanded, piqued.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Because you have merely indicated that you are a wealthy American.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Why wealthy?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“If not, you would have some aim in life—a calling or profession.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“And you think I have none?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Unless you consider it your vocation to be a wealthy American.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I don’t. Besides, I’m not wealthy. In point of fact, I ...” He pulled up
+short, on the verge of declaring himself a pauper. “I am a painter.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Her eyes lightened with interest. “An artist?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I hope so. I don’t paint signs—or houses,” he remarked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Amused, she laughed softly. “I suspected it,” she declared.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Not really?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It was your way of looking at—things, that made me guess it: the painter’s
+way. I have often noticed it.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“As if mentally blending colors all the time?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes; that and—seeing flaws.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I have discovered none,” he told her brazenly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But again her secret cares were claiming her thoughts, and the gay,
+inconsequential banter died upon her scarlet lips as a second time her glance
+ranged away, sounding mysterious depths of anxiety.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Provoked, he would have continued the chatter. “I have confessed,” he
+persisted. “You know everything of material interest about me. And yourself?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I am merely Dorothy Calendar,” she answered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Nothing more?” He laughed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“That is all, if you please, for the present.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I am to content myself with the promise of the future?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“The future,” she told him seriously, “is to-morrow; and to-morrow ...” She
+moved restlessly in her chair, eyes and lips pathetic in their distress.
+“Please, we will go now, if you are ready.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I am quite ready, Miss Calendar.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He rose. A waiter brought the girl’s cloak and put it in Kirkwood’s hands. He
+held it until, smoothing the wrists of her long white gloves, she stood up,
+then placed the garment upon her white young shoulders, troubled by the
+indefinable sense of intimacy imparted by the privilege. She permitted him this
+personal service! He felt that she trusted him, that out of her gratitude had
+grown a simple and almost childish faith in his generosity and considerateness.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As she turned to go her eyes thanked him with an unfathomable glance. He was
+again conscious of that esoteric disturbance in his temples. Puzzled, hazily
+analyzing the sensation, he followed her to the lobby.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A page brought him his top-coat, hat and stick; tipping the child from sheer
+force of habit, he desired a gigantic porter, impressively ornate in hotel
+livery, to call a hansom. Together they passed out into the night, he and the
+girl.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Beneath a permanent awning of steel and glass she waited patiently, slender,
+erect, heedless of the attention she attracted from wayfarers.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The night was young, the air mild. Upon the sidewalk, muddied by a million
+feet, two streams of wayfarers flowed incessantly, bound west from Green Park
+or east toward Piccadilly Circus; a well-dressed throng for the most part, with
+here and there a man in evening dress. Between the carriages at the curb and
+the hotel doors moved others, escorting fluttering butterfly women in elaborate
+toilets, heads bare, skirts daintily gathered above their perishable slippers.
+Here and there meaner shapes slipped silently through the crowd, sinister
+shadows of the city’s proletariat, blotting ominously the brilliance of the
+scene.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A cab drew in at the block. The porter clapped an arc of wickerwork over its
+wheel to protect the girl’s skirts. She ascended to the seat.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Kirkwood, dropping sixpence in the porter’s palm, prepared to follow; but a
+hand fell upon his arm, peremptory, inexorable. He faced about, frowning, to
+confront a slight, hatchet-faced man, somewhat under medium height, dressed in
+a sack suit and wearing a derby well forward over eyes that were hard and
+bright.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Mr. Calendar?” said the man tensely. “I presume I needn’t name my business.
+I’m from the Yard—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“My name is <i>not</i> Calendar.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The detective smiled wearily. “Don’t be a fool, Calendar,” he began. But the
+porter’s hand fell upon his shoulder and the giant bent low to bring his mouth
+close to the other’s ear. Kirkwood heard indistinctly his own name followed by
+Calendar’s, and the words: “Never fear. I’ll point him out.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“But the woman?” argued the detective, unconvinced, staring into the cab.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Am I not at liberty to have a lady dine with me in a public restaurant?”
+interposed Kirkwood, without raising his voice.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The hard eyes looked him up and down without favor. Then: “Beg pardon, sir. I
+see my mistake,” said the detective brusquely.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I am glad you do,” returned Kirkwood grimly. “I fancy it will bear
+investigation.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He mounted the step. “Imperial Theater,” he told the driver, giving the first
+address that occurred to him; it could be changed. For the moment the main
+issue was to get the girl out of the range of the detective’s interest.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He slipped into his place as the hansom wheeled into the turgid tide of
+west-bound traffic.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+So Calendar had escaped, after all! Moreover, he had told the truth to
+Kirkwood.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+By his side the girl moved uneasily. “Who was that man?” she inquired.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Kirkwood sought her eyes, and found them wholly ingenuous. It seemed that
+Calendar had not taken her into his confidence, after all. She was, therefore,
+in no way implicated in her father’s affairs. Inexplicably the young man’s
+heart felt lighter. “A mistake; the fellow took me for some one he knew,” he
+told her carelessly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The assurance satisfied her. She rested quietly, wrapped up in personal
+concerns. Her companion pensively contemplated an infinity of arid and
+hansom-less to-morrows. About them the city throbbed in a web of misty
+twilight, the humid farewell of a dismal day. In the air a faint haze swam,
+rendering the distances opalescent. Athwart the western sky the after-glow of a
+drenched sunset lay like a wash of rose-madder. Piccadilly’s asphalt shone like
+watered silk, black and lustrous, reflecting a myriad lights in vibrant ribbons
+of party-colored radiance. On every hand cab-lamps danced like fire-flies; the
+rumble of wheels blended with the hollow pounding of uncounted hoofs, merging
+insensibly into the deep and solemn roar of London-town.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Suddenly Kirkwood was recalled to a sense of duty by a glimpse of Hyde Park
+Corner. He turned to the girl. “I didn’t know where you wished to go—?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She seemed to realize his meaning with surprise, as one, whose thoughts have
+strayed afar, recalled to an imperative world.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Oh, did I forget? Tell him please to drive to Number Nine, Frognall Street,
+Bloomsbury.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Kirkwood poked his cane through the trap, repeating the address. The cab
+wheeled smartly across Piccadilly, swung into Half Moon Street, and thereafter
+made better time, darting briskly down abrupt vistas of shining pavement,
+walled in by blank-visaged houses, or round two sides of one of London’s
+innumerable private parks, wherein spring foliage glowed a tender green in
+artificial light; now and again it crossed brilliant main arteries of travel,
+and eventually emerged from a maze of backways into Oxford Street, to hammer
+eastwards to Tottenham Court Road.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Constraint hung like a curtain between the two; a silence which the young man
+forbore to moderate, finding more delight that he had cared (or dared) confess
+to, in contemplation of the pure girlish profile so close to him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She seemed quite unaware of him, lost in thought, large eyes sober, lips
+serious that were fashioned for laughter, round little chin firm with some
+occult resolution. It was not hard to fancy her nerves keyed to a high pitch of
+courage and determination, nor easy to guess for what reason. Watching always,
+keenly sensitive to the beauty of each salient line betrayed by the flying
+lights, Kirkwood’s own consciousness lost itself in a profitless, even a
+perilous labyrinth of conjecture.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The cab stopped. Both occupants came to their senses with a little start. The
+girl leaned out over; the apron, recognized the house she sought in one swift
+glance, testified to the recognition with a hushed exclamation, and began to
+arrange her skirts. Kirkwood, unheeding her faint-hearted protests, jumped out,
+interposing his cane between her skirts and the wheel. Simultaneously he
+received a vivid mental photograph of the locality.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Frognall Street proved to be one of those by-ways, a short block in length,
+which, hemmed in on all sides by a meaner purlieu, has (even in Bloomsbury!)
+escaped the sordid commercial eye of the keeper of furnished lodgings,
+retaining jealously something of the old-time dignity and reserve that were its
+pride in the days before Society swarmed upon Mayfair and Belgravia.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Its houses loomed tall, with many windows, mostly lightless—materially
+aggravating that air of isolate, cold dignity which distinguishes the
+Englishman’s castle. Here and there stood one less bedraggled than its
+neighbors, though all, without exception, spoke assertively of respectability
+down-at-the-heel but fighting tenaciously for existence. Some, vanguards of
+that imminent day when the boarding-house should reign supreme, wore with
+shamefaced air placards of estate-agents, advertising their susceptibility to
+sale or lease. In the company of the latter was Number 9.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The American noted the circumstance subconsciously, at a moment when Miss
+Calendar’s hand, small as a child’s, warm and compact in its white glove, lay
+in his own. And then she was on the sidewalk, her face, upturned to his,
+vivacious with excitement.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You have been so kind,” she told him warmly, “that one hardly knows how to
+thank you, Mr. Kirkwood.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I have done nothing—nothing at all,” he mumbled, disturbed by a sudden,
+unreasoning alarm for her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She passed quickly to the shelter of the pillared portico. He followed
+clumsily. On the door-step she turned, offering her hand. He took and retained
+it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Good night,” she said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I’m to understand that I’m dismissed, then?” he stammered ruefully.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She evaded his eyes. “I—thank you—I have no further need—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You are quite sure? Won’t you believe me at your service?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She laughed uneasily. “I’m all right now.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I can do nothing more? Sure?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Nothing. But you—you make me almost sorry I can’t impose still further upon
+your good nature.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Please don’t hesitate ...”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Aren’t you very persistent, Mr. Kirkwood?” Her fingers moved in his; burning
+with the reproof, he released them, and turned to her so woebegone a
+countenance that she repented of her severity. “Don’t worry about me, please. I
+am truly safe now. Some day I hope to be able to thank you adequately. Good
+night!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Her pass-key grated in the lock. Opening, the door disclosed a dark and
+uninviting entry-hall, through which there breathed an air heavy with the dank
+and dusty odor of untenanted rooms. Hesitating on the threshold, over her
+shoulder the girl smiled kindly upon her commandeered esquire; and stepped
+within.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He lifted his hat automatically. The door closed with an echoing slam. He
+turned to the waiting cab, fumbling for change.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I’ll walk,” he told the cabby, paying him off.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The hansom swept away to a tune of hammering hoofs; and quiet rested upon the
+street as Kirkwood turned the nearest corner, in an unpleasant temper, puzzled
+and discontented. It seemed hardly fair that he should have been dragged into
+so promising an adventure, by his ears (so to put it), only to be thus
+summarily called upon to write “Finis” beneath the incident.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He rounded the corner and walked half-way to the next street, coming to an
+abrupt and rebellious pause by the entrance to a covered alleyway, of two minds
+as to his proper course of action.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the background of his thoughts Number 9, Frognall Street, reared its
+five-story façade, sinister and forbidding. He reminded himself of its
+unlighted windows; of its sign, “To be let”; of the effluvia of desolation that
+had saluted him when the door swung wide. A deserted house; and the girl alone
+in it!—was it right for him to leave her so?
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap04"></a>IV<br/>
+9 FROGNALL STREET, W. C.</h2>
+
+<p>
+The covered alleyway gave upon Quadrant Mews; or so declared a notice painted
+on the dead wall of the passage.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Overhead, complaining as it swayed in the wind, hung the smirched and
+weather-worn sign-board of the Hog-in-the-Pound public house; wherefrom escaped
+sounds of such revelry by night as is indulged in by the British working-man in
+hours of ease. At the curb in front of the house of entertainment, dejected
+animals drooping between their shafts, two hansoms stood in waiting, until such
+time as the lords of their destinies should see fit to sally forth and inflict
+themselves upon a cab-hungry populace. As Kirkwood turned, a third vehicle
+rumbled up out of the mews.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Kirkwood can close his eyes, even at this late day, and both see and hear it
+all again—even as he can see the unbroken row of dingy dwellings that lined his
+way back from Quadrant Mews to Frognall Street corner: all drab and unkempt,
+all sporting in their fan-lights the legend and lure, “Furnished Apartments.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For, between his curiosity about and his concern for the girl, he was being led
+back to Number 9, by the nose, as it were,—hardly willingly, at best.
+Profoundly stupefied by the contemplation of his own temerity, he yet returned
+unfaltering. He who had for so long plumed himself upon his strict supervision
+of his personal affairs and equally steadfast unconsciousness of his neighbor’s
+businesses, now found himself in the very act of pushing in where he was not
+wanted: as he had been advised in well-nigh as many words. He experienced an
+effect of standing to one side, a witness of his own folly, with rising wonder,
+unable to credit the strength of the infatuation which was placing him so
+conspicuously in the way of a snubbing.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+If perchance he were to meet the girl again as she was leaving Number 9,—what
+then? The contingency dismayed him incredibly, in view of the fact that it did
+not avail to make him pause. To the contrary he disregarded it resolutely; mad,
+impertinent, justified of his unnamed apprehensions, or simply addled,—he held
+on his way.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He turned up Frognall Street with the manner of one out for a leisurely evening
+stroll. Simultaneously, from the farther corner, another pedestrian debouched,
+into the thoroughfare—a mere moving shadow at that distance, brother to blacker
+shadows that skulked in the fenced areas and unlively entries of that poorly
+lighted block. The hush was something beyond belief, when one remembered the
+nearness of blatant Tottenham Court Road.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Kirkwood conceived a wholly senseless curiosity about the other wayfarer. The
+man was walking rapidly, heels ringing with uncouth loudness, cane tapping the
+flagging at brief intervals. Both sounds ceased abruptly as their cause turned
+in beneath one of the porticos. In the emphatic and unnatural quiet that
+followed, Kirkwood, stepping more lightly, fancied that another shadow followed
+the first, noiselessly and with furtive stealth.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Could it be Number 9 into which they had passed? The American’s heart beat a
+livelier tempo at the suggestion. If it had not been Number 9—he was still too
+far away to tell—it was certainly one of the dwellings adjacent thereunto. The
+improbable possibility (But why improbable?) that the girl was being joined by
+her father, or by friends, annoyed him with illogical intensity. He mended his
+own pace, designing to pass whichever house it might be before the door should
+be closed; thought better of this, and slowed up again, anathematizing himself
+with much excuse for being the inquisitive dolt that he was.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Approaching Number 9 with laggard feet, he manufactured a desire to light a
+cigarette, as a cover for his design, were he spied upon by unsuspected eyes.
+Cane under arm, hands cupped to shield a vesta’s flame, he stopped directly
+before the portico, turning his eyes askance to the shadowed doorway; and made
+a discovery sufficiently startling to hold him spellbound and, incidentally, to
+scorch his gloves before he thought to drop the match.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The door of Number 9 stood ajar, a black interval an inch or so in width
+showing between its edge and the jamb.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Suspicion and alarm set his wits a-tingle. More distinctly he recalled the
+jarring bang, accompanied by the metallic click of the latch, when the girl had
+shut herself in—and him out. Now, some person or persons had followed her,
+neglecting the most obvious precaution of a householder. And why? Why but
+because the intruders did not wish the sound of closing to be audible to her—or
+those—within?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He reminded himself that it was all none of his affair, decided to pass on and
+go his ways in peace, and impulsively, swinging about, marched straight away
+for the unclosed door.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“’Old’ard, guvner!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Kirkwood halted on the cry, faltering in indecision. Should he take the plunge,
+or withdraw? Synchronously he was conscious that a man’s figure had detached
+itself from the shadows beneath the nearest portico and was drawing nearer,
+with every indication of haste, to intercept him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“’Ere now, guvner, yer mykin’ a mistyke. You don’t live ’ere.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“How do you know?” demanded Kirkwood crisply, tightening his grip on his stick.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Was this the second shadow he had seemed to see—the confederate of him who had
+entered Number 9; a sentry to forestall interruption? If so, the fellow lacked
+discretion, though his determination that the American should not interfere was
+undeniable. It was with an ugly and truculent manner, if more warily, that the
+man closed in.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“<i>I</i> knows. You clear hout, or—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He flung out a hand with the plausible design of grasping Kirkwood by the
+collar. The latter lifted his stick, deflecting the arm, and incontinently
+landed his other fist forcibly on the fellow’s chest. The man reeled back,
+cursing. Before he could recover Kirkwood calmly crossed the threshold, closed
+the door and put his shoulder to it. In another instant, fumbling in the
+darkness, he found the bolts and drove them home.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And it was done, the transformation accomplished; his inability to refrain from
+interfering had encompassed his downfall, had changed a peaceable and
+law-abiding alien within British shores into a busybody, a trespasser, a
+misdemeanant, a—yes, for all he knew to the contrary, in the estimation of the
+Law, a burglar, prime candidate for a convict’s stripes!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Breathing hard with excitement he turned and laid his back against the panels,
+trembling in every muscle, terrified by the result of his impulsive audacity,
+thunder-struck by a lightning-like foreglimpse of its possible consequences. Of
+what colossal imprudence had he not been guilty?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“The devil!” he whispered. “What an ass, what an utter ass I am!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Behind him the knob was rattled urgently, to an accompaniment of feet shuffling
+on the stone; and immediately—if he were to make a logical deduction from the
+rasping and scraping sound within the door-casing—the bell-pull was violently
+agitated, without, however, educing any response from the bell itself, wherever
+that might be situate. After which, as if in despair, the outsider again
+rattled and jerked the knob.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Be his status what it might, whether servant of the household, its caretaker,
+or a night watchman, the man was palpably determined both to get himself in and
+Kirkwood out, and yet (curious to consider) determined to gain his end without
+attracting undue attention. Kirkwood had expected to hear the knocker’s
+thunder, as soon as the bell failed to give tongue; but it did not sound
+although there <i>was</i> a knocker,—Kirkwood himself had remarked that
+antiquated and rusty bit of ironmongery affixed to the middle panel of the
+door. And it made him feel sure that something surreptitious and lawless was in
+process within those walls, that the confederate without, having failed to
+prevent a stranger from entering, left unemployed a means so certain-sure to
+rouse the occupants.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But his inferential analysis of this phase of the proceedings was summarily
+abrupted by that identical alarm. In a trice the house was filled with flying
+echoes, wakened to sonorous riot by the crash and clamor of the knocker; and
+Kirkwood stood fully two yards away, his heart hammering wildly, his nerves
+a-jingle, much as if the resounding blows had landed upon his own person rather
+than on stout oaken planking.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Ere he had time to wonder, the racket ceased, and from the street filtered
+voices in altercation. Listening, Kirkwood’s pulses quickened, and he laughed
+uncertainly for pure relief, retreating to the door and putting an ear to a
+crack.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The accents of one speaker were new in his hearing, stern, crisp, quick with
+the spirit of authority which animates that most austere and dignified limb of
+the law to be encountered the world over, a London bobby.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Now then, my man, what do you want there? Come now, speak up, and step out
+into the light, where I can see you.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The response came in the sniffling snarl of the London ne’er-do-well, the
+unemployable rogue whose chiefest occupation seems to be to march in the ranks
+of The Unemployed on the occasion of its annual demonstrations.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Le’ me alone, carntcher? Ah’m doin’ no ’arm, officer,—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Didn’t you hear me? Step out here. Ah, that’s better.... No harm, eh? Perhaps
+you’ll explain how there’s no harm breakin’ into unoccupied ’ouses?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Gorblimy, ’ow was I to know? ’Ere’s a toff ’ands me sixpence fer hopenin’ ’is
+cab door to-dye, an’, sezee, ‘My man,’ ’e sez, ‘yer’ve got a ’onest fyce. W’y
+don’cher work?’ sezee. ‘’Ow can I?’ sez I. ‘’Ere’m I hout of a job these six
+months, lookin’ fer work every dye an’ carn’t find it.’ Sezee, ‘Come an’ see me
+this hevenin’ at me home, Noine, Frognall Stryte,’ ’e sez, an’—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“That’ll do for now. You borrow a pencil and paper and write it down and I’ll
+read it when I’ve got more time; I never heard the like of it. This ’ouse
+hasn’t been lived in these two years. Move on, and don’t let me find you round
+’ere again. March, I say!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was more of it—more whining explanations artfully tinctured with abuse,
+more terse commands to depart, the whole concluding with scraping footsteps,
+diminuendo, and another perfunctory, rattle of the knob as the bobby, having
+shoo’d the putative evil-doer off, assured himself that no damage had actually
+been done. Then he, too, departed, satisfied and self-righteous, leaving a
+badly frightened but very grateful amateur criminal to pursue his
+self-appointed career of crime.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He had no choice other than to continue; in point of fact, it had been insanity
+just then to back out, and run the risk of apprehension at the hands of that
+ubiquitous bobby, who (for all he knew) might be lurking not a dozen yards
+distant, watchful for just such a sequel. Still, Kirkwood hesitated with the
+best of excuses. Reassuring as he had found the sentinel’s extemporized
+yarn,—proof positive that the fellow had had no more right to prohibit a
+trespass than Kirkwood to commit one,—at the same time he found himself
+pardonably a prey to emotions of the utmost consternation and alarm. If he
+feared to leave the house he had no warrant whatever to assume that he would be
+permitted to remain many minutes unharmed within its walls of mystery.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The silence of it discomfited him beyond measure; it was, in a word, uncanny.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Before him, as he lingered at the door, vaguely disclosed by a wan illumination
+penetrating a dusty and begrimed fan-light, a broad hall stretched indefinitely
+towards the rear of the building, losing itself in blackness beyond the foot of
+a flight of stairs. Save for a few articles of furniture,—a hall table, an
+umbrella-stand, a tall dumb clock flanked by high-backed chairs,—it was empty.
+Other than Kirkwood’s own restrained respiration not a sound throughout the
+house advertised its inhabitation; not a board creaked beneath the pressure of
+a foot, not a mouse rustled in the wainscoting or beneath the floors, not a
+breath of air stirred sighing in the stillness.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And yet, a tremendous racket had been raised at the front door, within the
+sixty seconds past! And yet, within twenty minutes two persons, at least, had
+preceded Kirkwood into the building! Had they not heard? The speculation seemed
+ridiculous. Or had they heard and, alarmed, been too effectually hobbled by the
+coils of their nefarious designs to dare reveal themselves, to investigate the
+cause of that thunderous summons? Or were they, perhaps, aware of Kirkwood’s
+entrance, and lying <i>perdui</i>, in some dark corner, to ambush him as he
+passed?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+True, that were hardly like the girl. True, on the other hand, it were possible
+that she had stolen away while Kirkwood was hanging in irresolution by the
+passage to Quadrant Mews. Again, the space of time between Kirkwood’s dismissal
+and his return had been exceedingly brief; whatever her errand, she could
+hardly have fulfilled it and escaped. At that moment she might be in the power
+and at the mercy of him who had followed her; providing he were not friendly.
+And in that case, what torment and what peril might not be hers?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Spurred by solicitude, the young man put personal apprehensions in his pocket
+and forgot them, cautiously picking his way through the gloom to the foot of
+the stairs. There, by the newel-post, he paused. Darkness walled him about.
+Overhead the steps vanished in a well of blackness; he could not even see the
+ceiling; his eyes ached with futile effort to fathom the unknown; his ears rang
+with unrewarded strain of listening. The silence hung inviolate, profound.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Slowly he began to ascend, a hand following the balusters, the other with his
+cane exploring the obscurity before him. On the steps, a carpet, thick and
+heavy, muffled his footfalls. He moved noiselessly. Towards the top the
+staircase curved, and presently a foot that groped for a higher level failed to
+find it. Again he halted, acutely distrustful.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Nothing happened.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He went on, guided by the balustrade, passing three doors, all open, through
+which the undefined proportions of a drawing-room and boudoir were barely
+suggested in a ghostly dusk. By each he paused, listening, hearing nothing.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His foot struck with a deadened thud against the bottom step of the second
+flight, and his pulses fluttered wildly for a moment. Two minutes—three—he
+waited in suspense. From above came no sound. He went on, as before, save that
+twice a step yielded, complaining, to his weight. Toward the top the close air,
+like the darkness, seemed to weigh more heavily upon his consciousness; little
+drops of perspiration started out on his forehead, his scalp tingled, his mouth
+was hot and dry, he felt as if stifled.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Again the raised foot found no level higher than its fellows. He stopped and
+held his breath, oppressed by a conviction that some one was near him.
+Confirmation of this came startlingly—an eerie whisper in the night, so close
+to him that he fancied he could feel the disturbed air fanning his face.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“<i>Is it you, Eccles</i>?” He had no answer ready. The voice was masculine, if
+he analyzed it correctly. Dumb and stupid he stood poised upon the point of
+panic.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“<i>Eccles, is it you</i>?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The whisper was both shrill and shaky. As it ceased Kirkwood was half blinded
+by a flash of light, striking him squarely in the eyes. Involuntarily he shrank
+back a pace, to the first step from the top. Instantaneously the light was
+eclipsed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“<i>Halt or—or I fire</i>!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+By now he realized that he had been scrutinized by the aid of an electric
+hand-lamp. The tremulous whisper told him something else—that the speaker
+suffered from nerves as high-strung as his own. The knowledge gave him
+inspiration. He cried at a venture, in a guarded voice, “<i>Hands up</i>!”—and
+struck out smartly with his stick. Its ferrule impinged upon something soft but
+heavy. Simultaneously he heard a low, frightened cry, the cane was swept aside,
+a blow landed glancingly on his shoulder, and he was carried fairly off his
+feet by the weight of a man hurled bodily upon him with staggering force and
+passion. Reeling, he was borne back and down a step or two, and then,—choking
+on an oath,—dropped his cane and with one hand caught the balusters, while the
+other tore ineffectually at wrists of hands that clutched his throat. So, for a
+space, the two hung, panting and struggling.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then endeavoring to swing his shoulders over against the wall, Kirkwood
+released his grip on the hand-rail and stumbled on the stairs, throwing his
+antagonist out of balance. The latter plunged downward, dragging Kirkwood with
+him. Clawing, kicking, grappling, they went to the bottom, jolted violently by
+each step; but long before the last was reached, Kirkwood’s throat was free.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Throwing himself off, he got to his feet and grasped the railing for support;
+then waited, panting, trying to get his bearings. Himself painfully shaken and
+bruised, he shrewdly surmised that his assailant had fared as ill, if not
+worse. And, in point of fact, the man lay with neither move nor moan, still as
+death at the American’s feet.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And once more silence had folded its wings over Number 9, Frognall Street.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+More conscious of that terrifying, motionless presence beneath him, than able
+to distinguish it by power of vision, he endured interminable minutes of
+trembling horror, in a witless daze, before he thought of his match-box.
+Immediately he found it and struck a light. As the wood caught and the bright
+small flame leaped in the pent air, he leaned forward, over the body,
+breathlessly dreading what he must discover.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The man lay quiet, head upon the floor, legs and hips on the stairs. One arm
+had fallen over his face, hiding the upper half. The hand gleamed white and
+delicate as a woman’s. His chin was smooth and round, his lips thin and
+petulant. Beneath his top-coat, evening dress clothed a short and slender
+figure. Nothing whatever of his appearance suggested the burly ruffian, the
+midnight marauder; he seemed little more than a boy old enough to dress for
+dinner. In his attitude there was something pitifully suggestive of a beaten
+child, thrown into a corner.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Conscience-smitten and amazed Kirkwood stared on until, without warning, the
+match flickered and went out. Then, straightening up with an exclamation at
+once of annoyance and concern, he rattled the box; it made no sound,—was empty.
+In disgust he swore it was the devil’s own luck, that he should run out of
+vestas at a time so critical. He could not even say whether the fellow was
+dead, unconscious, or simply shamming. He had little idea of his looks; and to
+be able to identify him might save a deal of trouble at some future time,—since
+he, Kirkwood, seemed so little able to disengage himself from the clutches of
+this insane adventure! And the girl—. what had become of her? How could he
+continue to search for her, without lights or guide, through all those silent
+rooms, whose walls might inclose a hundred hidden dangers in that house of
+mystery?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But he debated only briefly. His blood was young, and it was hot; it was quite
+plain to him that he could not withdraw and retain his self-respect. If the
+girl was there to be found, most assuredly, he must find her. The hand-lamp
+that had dazzled him at the head of the stairs should be his aid, now that he
+thought of it,—and providing he was able to find it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the scramble on the stairs he had lost his hat, but he remembered that the
+vesta’s short-lived light had discovered this on the floor beyond the man’s
+body. Carefully stepping across the latter he recovered his head-gear, and
+then, kneeling, listened with an ear close to the fellow’s face. A softly
+regular beat of breathing reassured him. Half rising, he caught the body
+beneath the armpits, lifting and dragging it off the staircase; and knelt
+again, to feel of each pocket in the man’s clothing, partly as an obvious
+precaution, to relieve him of his advertised revolver against an untimely
+wakening, partly to see if he had the lamp about him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The search proved fruitless. Kirkwood suspected that the weapon, like his own,
+had existed only in his victim’s ready imagination. As for the lamp, in the act
+of rising he struck it with his foot, and picked it up.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It felt like a metal tube a couple of inches in diameter, a foot or so in
+length, passably heavy. He fumbled with it impatiently. “However the dickens,”
+he wondered audibly, “does the infernal machine work?” As it happened, the
+thing worked with disconcerting abruptness as his untrained fingers fell
+hapchance on the spring. A sudden glare again smote him in the face, and at the
+same instant, from a point not a yard away, apparently, an inarticulate cry
+rang out upon the stillness.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Heart in his mouth, he stepped back, lowering the lamp (which impishly went
+out) and lifting a protecting forearm.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Who’s that?” he demanded harshly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A strangled sob of terror answered him, blurred by a swift rush of skirts, and
+in a breath his shattered nerves quieted and a glimmer of common sense
+penetrated the murk anger and fear had bred in his brain. He understood, and
+stepped forward, catching blindly at the darkness with eager hands.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Miss Calendar!” he cried guardedly. “Miss Calendar, it is I—Philip Kirkwood!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was a second sob, of another caliber than the first; timid fingers
+brushed his, and a hand, warm and fragile, closed upon his own in a passion of
+relief and gratitude.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Oh, I am so g-glad!” It was Dorothy Calendar’s voice, beyond mistake. “I—I
+didn’t know what t-to t-think.... When the light struck your face I was sure it
+was you, but when I called, you answered in a voice so strange,—not like yours
+at all! ... Tell me,” she pleaded, with palpable effort to steady herself;
+“what has happened?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I think, perhaps,” said Kirkwood uneasily, again troubled by his racing
+pulses, “perhaps you can do that better than I.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Oh!” said the voice guiltily; her fingers trembled on his, and were gently
+withdrawn. “I was so frightened,” she confessed after a little pause, “so
+frightened that I hardly understand ... But you? How did you—?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I worried about you,” he replied, in a tone absurdly apologetic. “Somehow it
+didn’t seem right. It was none of my business, of course, but ... I couldn’t
+help coming back. This fellow, whoever he is—don’t worry; he’s
+unconscious—slipped into the house in a manner that seemed to me suspicious. I
+hardly know why I followed, except that he left the door an open invitation to
+interference ...”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I can’t be thankful enough,” she told him warmly, “that you did interfere. You
+have indeed saved me from ...”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I don’t know what. If I knew the man—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You don’t <i>know</i> him?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I can’t even guess. The light—?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She paused inquiringly. Kirkwood fumbled with the lamp, but, whether its rude
+handling had impaired some vital part of the mechanism, or whether the
+batteries through much use were worn out, he was able to elicit only one feeble
+glow, which was instantly smothered by the darkness.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It’s no use,” he confessed. “The thing’s gone wrong.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Have you a match?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I used my last before I got hold of this.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Oh,” she commented, discouraged. “Have you any notion what he looks like?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Kirkwood thought briefly. “Raffles,” he replied with a chuckle. “He looks like
+an amateurish and very callow Raffles. He’s in dress clothes, you know.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I wonder!” There was a nuance of profound bewilderment in her exclamation.
+Then: “He knocked against something in the hall—a chair, I presume; at all
+events, I heard that and put out the light. I was ... in the room above the
+drawing-room, you see. I stole down to this floor—was there, in the corner by
+the stairs when he passed within six inches, and never guessed it. Then, when
+he got on the next floor, I started on; but you came in. I slipped into the
+drawing-room and crouched behind a chair. You went on, but I dared not move
+until ... And then I heard some one cry out, and you fell down the stairs
+together. I hope you were not hurt—?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Nothing worth mention; but <i>he</i> must have got a pretty stiff knock, to
+lay him out so completely.” Kirkwood stirred the body with his toe, but the man
+made no sign. “Dead to the world ... And now, Miss Calendar?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+If she answered, he did not hear; for on the heels of his query banged the
+knocker down below; and thereafter crash followed crash, brewing a deep and
+sullen thundering to rouse the echoes and send them rolling, like voices of
+enraged ghosts, through the lonely rooms.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap05"></a>V<br/>
+THE MYSTERY OF A FOUR-WHEELER</h2>
+
+<p>
+“What’s that?” At the first alarm the girl had caught convulsively at
+Kirkwood’s arm. Now, when a pause came in the growling of the knocker, she made
+him hear her voice; and it was broken and vibrant with a threat of hysteria.
+“Oh, what can it mean?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I don’t know.” He laid a hand reassuringly over that which trembled on his
+forearm. “The police, possibly.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Police!” she iterated, aghast. “What makes you think—?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“A man tried to stop me at the door,” he answered quickly. “I got in before he
+could. When he tried the knocker, a bobby came along and stopped him. The
+latter may have been watching the house since then,—it’d be only his duty to
+keep an eye on it; and Heaven knows we raised a racket, coming head-first down
+those stairs! Now we are up against it,” he added brightly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But the girl was tugging at his hand. “Come!” she begged breathlessly. “Come!
+There is a way! Before they break in—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“But this man—?” Kirkwood hung back, troubled.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“They—the police are sure to find and care for him.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“So they will.” He chuckled, “And serve him right! He’d have choked me to
+death, with all the good will in the world!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Oh, do hurry!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Turning, she sped light-footed down the staircase to the lower hall, he at her
+elbow. Here the uproar was loudest—deep enough to drown whatever sounds might
+have been made by two pairs of flying feet. For all that they fled on tiptoe,
+stealthily, guilty shadows in the night; and at the newel-post swung back into
+the unbroken blackness which shrouded the fastnesses backward of the dwelling.
+A sudden access of fury on the part of the alarmist at the knocker, spurred
+them on with quaking hearts. In half a dozen strides, Kirkwood, guided only by
+instinct and the <i>frou-frou</i> of the girl’s skirts as she ran invisible
+before him, stumbled on the uppermost steps of a steep staircase; only a
+hand-rail saved him, and that at the last moment. He stopped short, shocked
+into caution. From below came a contrite whisper: “I’m so sorry! I should have
+warned you.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He pulled himself together, glaring wildly at nothing. “It’s all right—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You’re not hurt, truly? Oh, do come quickly.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She waited for him at the bottom of the flight;—happily for him, for he was all
+at sea.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Here—your hand—let me guide you. This darkness is dreadful ...”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He found her hand, somehow, and tucked his into it, confidingly, and not
+without an uncertain thrill of satisfaction.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Come!” she panted. “Come! If they break in—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Stifled by apprehension, her voice failed her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They went forward, now less impetuously, for it was very black; and the knocker
+had fallen still.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“No fear of that,” he remarked after a time. “They wouldn’t dare break in.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A fluttering whisper answered him: “I don’t know. We dare risk nothing.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They seemed to explore, to penetrate acres of labyrinthine chambers and
+passages, delving deep into the bowels of the earth, like rabbits burrowing in
+a warren, hounded by beagles.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Above stairs the hush continued unbroken; as if the dumb Genius of the Place
+had cast a spell of silence on the knocker, or else, outraged, had smitten the
+noisy disturber with a palsy.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The girl seemed to know her way; whether guided by familiarity or by intuition,
+she led on without hesitation, Kirkwood blundering in her wake, between
+confusion of impression, and dawning dismay conscious of but one tangible
+thing, to which he clung as to his hope of salvation: those firm, friendly
+fingers that clasped his own.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was as if they wandered on for an hour; probably from start to finish their
+flight took up three minutes, no more. Eventually the girl stopped, releasing
+his hand. He could hear her syncopated breathing before him, and gathered that
+something was wrong. He took a step forward.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What is it?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Her full voice broke out of the obscurity startlingly close, in his very ear.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“The door—the bolts—I can’t budge them.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Let me ...”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He pressed forward, brushing her shoulder. She did not draw away, but willingly
+yielded place to his hands at the fastenings; and what had proved impossible to
+her, to his strong fingers was a matter of comparative ease. Yet, not entirely
+consciously, he was not quick. As he tugged at the bolts he was poignantly
+sensitive to the subtle warmth of her at his side; he could hear her soft dry
+sobs of excitement and suspense, punctuating the quiet; and was frightened,
+absolutely, by an impulse, too strong for ridicule, to take her in his arms and
+comfort her with the assurance that, whatever her trouble, he would stand by
+her and protect her.... It were futile to try to laugh it off; he gave over the
+endeavor. Even at this critical moment he found himself repeating over and over
+to his heart the question: “Can this be love? Can this be love? ...”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Could it be love at an hour’s acquaintance? Absurd! But he could not laugh—nor
+render himself insensible to the suggestion.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He found that he had drawn the bolts. The girl tugged and rattled at the knob.
+Reluctantly the door opened inwards. Beyond its threshold stretched ten feet or
+more of covered passageway, whose entrance framed an oblong glimmering with
+light. A draught of fresh air smote their faces. Behind them a door banged.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Where does this open?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“On the mews,” she informed him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“The mews!” He stared in consternation at the pallid oval that stood for her
+face. “The mews! But you, in your evening gown, and I—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“There’s no other way. We must chance it. Are you afraid?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Afraid? ... He stepped aside. She slipped by him and on. He closed the door,
+carefully removing the key and locking it on the outside; then joined the girl
+at the entrance to the mews, where they paused perforce, she as much
+disconcerted as he, his primary objection momentarily waxing in force as they
+surveyed the conditions circumscribing their escape.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Quadrant Mews was busily engaged in enjoying itself. Night had fallen sultry
+and humid, and the walls and doorsteps were well fringed and clustered with
+representatives of that class of London’s population which infests mews through
+habit, taste, or force of circumstance.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+On the stoops men sprawled at easy length, discussing short, foul cutties
+loaded with that rank and odoriferous compound which, under the name and in the
+fame of tobacco, is widely retailed at tuppence the ounce. Their women-folk
+more commonly squatted on the thresholds, cheerfully squabbling; from opposing
+second-story windows, two leaned perilously forth, slanging one another across
+the square briskly in the purest billingsgate; and were impartially applauded
+from below by an audience whose appreciation seemed faintly tinged with envy.
+Squawking and yelling children swarmed over the flags and rude cobblestones
+that paved the ways. Like incense, heavy and pungent, the rich effluvia of
+stable-yards swirled in air made visible by its faint burden of mist.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Over against the entrance wherein Kirkwood and the girl lurked, confounded by
+the problem of escaping undetected through this vivacious scene, a stable-door
+stood wide, exposing a dimly illumined interior. Before it waited a
+four-wheeler, horse already hitched in between the shafts, while its driver, a
+man of leisurely turn of mind, made lingering inspection of straps and buckles,
+and, while Kirkwood watched him, turned attention to the carriage lamps.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The match which he raked spiritedly down his thigh, flared ruddily; the
+succeeding paler glow of the lamp threw into relief a heavy beefy mask, with
+shining bosses for cheeks and nose and chin; through narrow slits two cunning
+eyes glittered like dull gems. Kirkwood appraised him with attention, as one in
+whose gross carcass was embodied their only hope of unannoyed return to the
+streets and normal surroundings of their world. The difficulty lay in
+attracting the man’s attention and engaging him without arousing his suspicions
+or bringing the population about their ears. Though he hesitated long, no
+favorable opportunity presented itself; and in time the Jehu approached the box
+with the ostensible purpose of mounting and driving off. In this critical
+situation the American, forced to recognize that boldness must mark his course,
+took the girl’s fate and his own in his hands, and with a quick word to his
+companion, stepped out of hiding.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The cabby had a foot upon the step when Kirkwood tapped his shoulder.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“My man—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Lor, lumme!” cried the fellow in amaze, pivoting on his heel. Cupidity and
+quick understanding enlivened the eyes which in two glances looked Kirkwood up
+and down, comprehending at once both his badly rumpled hat and patent-leather
+shoes. “S’help me,”—thickly,—“where’d you drop from, guvner?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“That’s my affair,” said Kirkwood briskly. “Are you engaged?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“If you mykes yerself my fare,” returned the cabby shrewdly, “I <i>ham</i>.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Ten shillings, then, if you get us out of here in one minute and to—say—Hyde
+Park Corner in fifteen.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Us?” demanded the fellow aggressively.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Kirkwood motioned toward the passageway. “There’s a lady with me—there. Quick
+now!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Still the man did not move. “Ten bob,” he bargained; “an’ you runnin’ awye with
+th’ stuffy ol’ gent’s fair darter? Come now, guvner, is it gen’rous? Myke it a
+quid an’—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“A pound then. <i>Will</i> you hurry?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+By way of answer the fellow scrambled hastily up to the box and snatched at the
+reins. “<i>Ck</i>! Gee-e hup!” he cried sonorously.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+By now the mews had wakened to the fact of the presence of a “toff” in its
+midst. His light topcoat and silk hat-rendered him as conspicuous as a red
+Indian in war-paint would have been on Rotten Row. A cry of surprise was
+raised, and drowned in a volley of ribald inquiry and chaff.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Fortunately, the cabby was instant to rein in skilfully before the passageway,
+and Kirkwood had the door open before the four-wheeler stopped. The girl,
+hugging her cloak about her, broke cover (whereat the hue and cry redoubled),
+and sprang into the body of the vehicle. Kirkwood followed, shutting the door.
+As the cab lurched forward he leaned over and drew down the window-shade,
+shielding the girl from half a hundred prying eyes. At the same time they
+gathered momentum, banging swiftly, if loudly out of the mews.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+An urchin, leaping on the step to spy in Kirkwood’s window, fell off, yelping,
+as the driver’s whiplash curled about his shanks.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The gloom of the tunnel inclosed them briefly ere the lights of the
+Hog-in-the-Pound flashed by and the wheels began to roll more easily. Kirkwood
+drew back with a sigh of relief.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Thank God!” he said softly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The girl had no words.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Worried by her silence, solicitous lest, the strain ended, she might be on the
+point of fainting, he let up the shade and lowered the window at her side.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She seemed to have collapsed in her corner. Against the dark upholstery her
+hair shone like pale gold in the half-light; her eyes were closed and she held
+a handkerchief to her lips; the other hand lay limp.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Miss Calendar?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She started, and something bulky fell from the seat and thumped heavily on the
+floor. Kirkwood bent to pick it up, and so for the first time was made aware
+that she had brought with her a small black gladstone bag of considerable
+weight. As he placed it on the forward seat their eyes met.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I didn’t know—” he began.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It was to get that,” she hastened to explain, “that my father sent me ...”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes,” he assented in a tone indicating his complete comprehension. “I trust
+...” he added vaguely, and neglected to complete the observation, losing
+himself in a maze of conjecture not wholly agreeable. This was a new phase of
+the adventure. He eyed the bag uneasily. What did it contain? How did he know
+...?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Hastily he abandoned that line of thought. He had no right to infer anything
+whatever, who had thrust himself uninvited into her concerns—uninvited, that
+was to say, in the second instance, having been once definitely given his
+congé. Inevitably, however, a thousand unanswerable questions pestered him;
+just as, at each fresh facet of mystery disclosed by the sequence of the
+adventure, his bewilderment deepened.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The girl stirred restlessly. “I have been thinking,” she volunteered in a
+troubled tone, “that there is absolutely no way I know of, to thank you
+properly.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It is enough if I’ve been useful,” he rose in gallantry to the emergency.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“That,” she commented, “was very prettily said. But then I have never known any
+one more kind and courteous and—and considerate, than you.” There was no savor
+of flattery in the simple and direct statement; indeed, she was looking away
+from him, out of the window, and her face was serious with thought; she seemed
+to be speaking of, rather than to, Kirkwood. “And I have been wondering,” she
+continued with unaffected candor, “what you must be thinking of me.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I? ... What should I think of you, Miss Calendar?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+With the air of a weary child she laid her head against the cushions again,
+face to him, and watched him through lowered lashes, unsmiling.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You might be thinking that an explanation is due you. Even the way we were
+brought together was extraordinary, Mr. Kirkwood. You must be very generous, as
+generous as you have shown yourself brave, not to require some sort of an
+explanation of me.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I don’t see it that way.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I do ... You have made me like you very much, Mr. Kirkwood.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He shot her a covert glance—causelessly, for her <i>naiveté</i> was flawless.
+With a feeling of some slight awe he understood this—a sensation of sincere
+reverence for the unspoiled, candid, child’s heart and mind that were hers.
+“I’m glad,” he said simply; “very glad, if that’s the case, and presupposing I
+deserve it. Personally,” he laughed, “I seem to myself to have been rather
+forward.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“No; only kind and a gentleman.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“But—please!” he protested.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Oh, but I mean it, every word! Why shouldn’t I? In a little while, ten
+minutes, half an hour, we shall have seen the last of each other. Why should I
+not tell you how I appreciate all that you have unselfishly done for me?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“If you put it that way,—I’m sure I don’t know; beyond that it embarrasses me
+horribly to have you overestimate me so. If any courage has been shown this
+night, it is yours ... But I’m forgetting again.” He thought to divert her.
+“Where shall I tell the cabby to go this time, Miss Calendar?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Craven Street, please,” said the girl, and added a house number. “I am to meet
+my father there, with this,”—indicating the gladstone bag.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Kirkwood thrust head and shoulders out the window and instructed the cabby
+accordingly; but his ruse had been ineffectual, as he found when he sat back
+again. Quite composedly the girl took up the thread of conversation where it
+had been broken off.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It’s rather hard to keep silence, when you’ve been so good. I don’t want you
+to think me less generous than yourself, but, truly, I can tell you nothing.”
+She sighed a trace resentfully; or so he thought. “There is little enough in
+this—this wretched affair, that I understand myself; and that little, I may not
+tell ... I want you to know that.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I understand, Miss Calendar.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“There’s one thing I may say, however. I have done nothing wrong to-night, I
+believe,” she added quickly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I’ve never for an instant questioned that,” he returned with a qualm of shame;
+for what he said was not true.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Thank you ...”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The four-wheeler swung out of Oxford Street into Charing Cross Road. Kirkwood
+noted the fact with a feeling of some relief that their ride was to be so
+short; like many of his fellow-sufferers from “the artistic temperament,” he
+was acutely disconcerted by spoken words of praise and gratitude; Miss
+Calendar, unintentionally enough, had succeeded only in rendering him
+self-conscious and ill at ease.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Nor had she fully relieved her mind, nor voiced all that perturbed her.
+“There’s one thing more,” she said presently: “my father. I—I hope you will
+think charitably of him.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Indeed, I’ve no reason or right to think otherwise.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I was afraid—afraid his actions might have seemed peculiar, to-night ...”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“There are lots of things I don’t understand, Miss Calendar. Some day, perhaps,
+it will all clear up,—this trouble of yours. At least, one supposes it is
+trouble, of some sort. And then you will tell me the whole story.... Won’t
+you?” Kirkwood insisted.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I’m afraid not,” she said, with a smile of shadowed sadness. “We are to say
+good night in a moment or two, and—it will be good-by as well. It’s unlikely
+that we shall ever meet again.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I refuse positively to take such a gloomy view of the case!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She shook her head, laughing with him, but with shy regret. “It’s so, none the
+less. We are leaving London this very night, my father and I—leaving England,
+for that matter.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Leaving England?” he echoed. “You’re not by any chance bound for America, are
+you?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I ... can’t tell you.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“But you can tell me this: are you booked on the <i>Minneapolis</i>?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“No—o; it is a—quite another boat.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Of course!” he commented savagely. “It wouldn’t be me to have <i>any</i> sort
+of luck!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She made no reply beyond a low laugh. He stared gloomily out of his window,
+noting indifferently that they were passing the National Gallery. On their left
+Trafalgar Square stretched, broad and bare, a wilderness of sooty stone with an
+air of mutely tolerating its incongruous fountains. Through Charing Cross
+roared a tide-rip of motor-busses and hackney carriages.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Glumly the young man foresaw the passing of his abbreviated romance; their
+destination was near at hand. Brentwick had been right, to some extent, at
+least; it was quite true that the curtain had been rung up that very night,
+upon Kirkwood’s Romance; unhappily, as Brentwick had not foreseen, it was
+immediately to be rung down.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The cab rolled soberly into the Strand.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Since we are to say good-by so very soon,” suggested Kirkwood, “may I ask a
+parting favor, Miss Calendar?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She regarded him with friendly eyes. “You have every right,” she affirmed
+gently.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Then please to tell me frankly: are you going into any further danger?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“And is that the only boon you crave at my hands, Mr. Kirkwood?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Without impertinence ...”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For a little time, waiting for him to conclude his vague phrase, she watched
+him in an expectant silence. But the man was diffident to a degree—At length,
+somewhat unconsciously, “I think not,” she answered. “No; there will be no
+danger awaiting me at Mrs. Hallam’s. You need not fear for me any more—Thank
+you.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He lifted his brows at the unfamiliar name. “Mrs. Hallam—?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I am going to her house in Craven Street.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Your father is to meet you there?”—persistently.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“He promised to.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“But if he shouldn’t?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Why—” Her eyes clouded; she pursed her lips over the conjectural annoyance.
+“Why, in that event, I suppose—It would be very embarrassing. You see, I don’t
+know Mrs. Hallam; I don’t know that she expects me, unless my father is already
+there. They are old friends—I could drive round for a while and come back, I
+suppose.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But she made it plain that the prospect did not please her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Won’t you let me ask if Mr. Calender is there, before you get out, then? I
+don’t like to be dismissed,” he laughed; “and, you know, you shouldn’t go
+wandering round all alone.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The cab drew up. Kirkwood put a hand on the door and awaited her will.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It—it would be very kind ... I hate to impose upon you.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He turned the knob and got out. “If you’ll wait one moment,” he said
+superfluously, as he closed the door.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Pausing only to verify the number, he sprang up the steps and found the
+bell-button.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was a modest little residence, in nothing more remarkable than its
+neighbors, unless it was for a certain air of extra grooming: the area railing
+was sleek with fresh black paint; the doorstep looked the better for vigorous
+stoning; the door itself was immaculate, its brasses shining lustrous against
+red-lacquered woodwork. A soft glow filled the fanlight. Overhead the
+drawing-room windows shone with a cozy, warm radiance.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The door opened, framing the figure of a maid sketched broadly in masses of
+somber black and dead white.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Can you tell me, is Mr. Calendar here?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The servant’s eyes left his face, looked past him at the waiting cab, and
+returned.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I’m not sure, sir. If you will please step in.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Kirkwood hesitated briefly, then acceded. The maid closed the door.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What name shall I say, sir?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Mr. Kirkwood.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“If you will please to wait one moment, sir—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was left in the entry hall, the servant hurrying to the staircase and up.
+Three minutes elapsed; he was on the point of returning to the girl, when the
+maid reappeared.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Mrs. Hallam says, will you kindly step up-stairs, sir.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Disgruntled, he followed her; at the head of the stairs she bowed him into the
+drawing-room and again left him to his own resources.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Nervous, annoyed, he paced the floor from wall to wall, his footfalls silenced
+by heavy rugs. As the delay was prolonged he began to fume with impatience,
+wondering, half regretting that he had left the girl outside, definitely sorry
+that he had failed to name his errand more explicitly to the maid. At another
+time, in another mood, he might have accorded more appreciation to the charm of
+the apartment, which, betraying the feminine touch in every detail of
+arrangement and furnishing, was very handsome in an unconventional way. But he
+was quite heedless of externals.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Wearied, he deposited himself sulkily in an armchair by the hearth.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+From a boudoir on the same floor there came murmurs of two voices, a man’s and
+a woman’s. The latter laughed prettily.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Oh, any time!” snorted the American. “Any time you’re through with your
+confounded flirtation, Mr. George B. Calendar!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The voices rose, approaching. “Good night,” said the woman gaily; “farewell
+and—good luck go with you!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Thank you. Good night,” replied the man more conservatively.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Kirkwood rose, expectant.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was a swish of draperies, and a moment later he was acknowledging the
+totally unlooked-for entrance of the mistress of the house. He had thought to
+see Calendar, presuming him to be the man closeted with Mrs. Hallam; but,
+whoever that had been, he did not accompany the woman. Indeed, as she advanced
+from the doorway, Kirkwood could hear the man’s footsteps on the stairs.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“This is Mr. Kirkwood?” The note of inquiry in the well-trained voice—a very
+alluring voice and one pleasant to listen to, he thought—made it seem as though
+she had asked, point-blank, “Who is Mr. Kirkwood?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He bowed, discovering himself in the presence of an extraordinarily handsome
+and interesting woman; a woman of years which as yet had not told upon her, of
+experience that had not availed to harden her, at least in so far as her
+exterior charm of personality was involved; a woman, in brief, who bore close
+inspection well, despite an elusive effect of maturity, not without its
+attraction for men. Kirkwood was impressed that it would be very easy to learn
+to like Mrs. Hallam more than well—with her approval.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Although he had not anticipated it, he was not at all surprised to recognize in
+her the woman who, if he were not mistaken, had slipped to Calendar that
+warning in the dining-room of the Pless. Kirkwood’s state of mind had come to
+be such, through his experiences of the past few hours, that he would have
+accepted anything, however preposterous, as a commonplace happening. But for
+that matter there was nothing particularly astonishing in this
+<i>rencontre</i>.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I am Mrs. Hallam. You were asking for Mr. Calendar?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“He was to have been here at this hour, I believe,” said Kirkwood.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes?” There was just the right inflection of surprise in her carefully
+controlled tone.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He became aware of an undercurrent of feeling; that the woman was estimating
+him shrewdly with her fine direct eyes. He returned her regard with admiring
+interest; they were gray-green eyes, deep-set but large, a little shallow, a
+little changeable, calling to mind the sea on a windy, cloudy day.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Below stairs a door slammed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I am not a detective, Mrs. Hallam,” announced the young man suddenly. “Mr.
+Calendar required a service of me this evening; I am here in natural
+consequence. If it was Mr. Calendar who left this house just now, I am wasting
+time.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It was not Mr. Calendar.” The fine-lined brows arched in surprise, real or
+pretended, at his first blurted words, and relaxed; amused, the woman laughed
+deliciously. “But I am expecting him any moment; he was to have been here half
+an hour since.... Won’t you wait?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She indicated, with a gracious gesture, a chair, and took for herself one end
+of a davenport. “I’m sure he won’t be long, now.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Thank you, I will return, if I may.” Kirkwood moved toward the door.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“But there’s no necessity—” She seemed insistent on detaining him, possibly
+because she questioned his motive, possibly for her own divertisement.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Kirkwood deprecated his refusal with a smile. “The truth is, Miss Calendar is
+waiting in a cab, outside. I—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Dorothy Calendar!” Mrs. Hallam rose alertly. “But why should she wait there?
+To be sure, we’ve never met; but I have known her father for many years.” Her
+eyes held steadfast to his face; shallow, flawed by her every thought, like the
+sea by a cat’s-paw he found them altogether inscrutable; yet received an
+impression that their owner was now unable to account for him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She swung about quickly, preceding him to the door and down the stairs. “I am
+sure Dorothy will come in to wait, if I ask her,” she told Kirkwood in a high
+sweet voice. “I’m so anxious to know her. It’s quite absurd, really, of her—to
+stand on ceremony with me, when her father made an appointment here. I’ll run
+out and ask—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mrs. Hallam’s slim white fingers turned latch and knob, opening the street
+door, and her voice died away as she stepped out into the night. For a moment,
+to Kirkwood, tagging after her with an uncomfortable sense of having somehow
+done the wrong thing, her figure—full fair shoulders and arms rising out of the
+glittering dinner gown—cut a gorgeous silhouette against the darkness. Then,
+with a sudden, imperative gesture, she half turned towards him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“But,” she exclaimed, perplexed, gazing to right and left, “but the cab, Mr.
+Kirkwood?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was on the stoop a second later. Standing beside her, he stared blankly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To the left the Strand roared, the stream of its night-life in high spate; on
+the right lay the Embankment, comparatively silent and deserted, if brilliant
+with its high-swung lights. Between the two, quiet Craven Street ran, short and
+narrow, and wholly innocent of any form of equipage.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap06"></a>VI<br/>
+“BELOW BRIDGE”</h2>
+
+<p>
+In silence Mrs. Hallam turned to Kirkwood, her pose in itself a question and a
+peremptory one. Her eyes had narrowed; between their lashes the green showed, a
+thin edge like jade, cold and calculating. The firm lines of her mouth and chin
+had hardened.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Temporarily dumb with consternation, he returned her stare as silently.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“<i>Well</i>, Mr.—Kirkwood?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Mrs. Hallam,” he stammered, “I—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She lifted her shoulders impatiently and with a quick movement stepped back
+across the threshold, where she paused, a rounded arm barring the entrance, one
+hand grasping the door-knob, as if to shut him out at any moment.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I’m awaiting your explanation,” she said coldly.
+</p>
+
+<div class="fig" style="width:100%;">
+<a name="illus02"></a>
+<img src="images/img02.jpg" width="391" height="600" alt="[Illustration: ]" />
+<p class="caption">“I’m awaiting your explanation,” she said coldly.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+He grinned with nervousness, striving to penetrate the mental processes of this
+handsome Mrs. Hallam. She seemed to regard him with a suspicion which he
+thought inexcusable. Did she suppose he had spirited Dorothy Calendar away and
+then called to apprise her of the fact? Or that he was some sort of an
+adventurer, who had manufactured a plausible yarn to gain him access to her
+home? Or—harking back to her original theory—that he was an emissary from
+Scotland Yard? ... Probably she distrusted him on the latter hypothesis. The
+reflection left him more at ease.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I am quite as mystified as you, Mrs. Hallam,” he began. “Miss Calendar was
+here, at this door, in a four-wheeler, not ten minutes ago, and—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Then where is she now?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Tell me where Calendar is,” he retorted, inspired, “and I’ll try to answer
+you!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But her eyes were blank. “You mean—?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“That Calendar was in this house when I came; that he left, found his daughter
+in the cab, and drove off with her. It’s clear enough.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You are quite mistaken,” she said thoughtfully. “George Calendar has not been
+here this night.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He wondered that she did not seem to resent his imputation. “I think not—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Listen!” she cried, raising a warning hand; and relaxing her vigilant
+attitude, moved forward once more, to peer down toward the Embankment.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A cab had cut in from that direction and was bearing down upon them with a
+brisk rumble of hoofs. As it approached, Kirkwood’s heart, that had lightened,
+was weighed upon again by disappointment. It was no four-wheeler, but a hansom,
+and the open wings of the apron, disclosing a white triangle of linen
+surmounted by a glowing spot of fire, betrayed the sex of the fare too plainly
+to allow of further hope that it might be the girl returning.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At the door, the cab pulled up sharply and a man tumbled hastily out upon the
+sidewalk.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Here!” he cried throatily, tossing the cabby his fare, and turned toward the
+pair upon the doorstep, evidently surmising that something was amiss. For he
+was Calendar in proper person, and a sight to upset in a twinkling Kirkwood’s
+ingeniously builded castle of suspicion.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Mrs. Hallam!” he cried, out of breath. “’S my daughter here?” And then,
+catching sight of Kirkwood’s countenance: “Why, hello, Kirkwood!” he saluted
+him with a dubious air.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The woman interrupted hastily. “Please come in, Mr. Calendar. This gentleman
+has been inquiring for you, with an astonishing tale about your daughter.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Dorothy!” Calendar’s moon-like visage was momentarily divested of any trace of
+color. “What of her?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You had better come in,” advised Mrs. Hallam brusquely.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The fat adventurer hopped hurriedly across the threshold, Kirkwood following.
+The woman shut the door, and turned with back to it, nodding significantly at
+Kirkwood as her eyes met Calendar’s.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Well, well?” snapped the latter impatiently, turning to the young man.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But Kirkwood was thinking quickly. For the present he contented himself with a
+deliberate statement of fact: “Miss Calendar has disappeared.” It gave him an
+instant’s time ... “There’s something damned fishy!” he told himself. “These
+two are playing at cross-purposes. Calendar’s no fool; he’s evidently a crook,
+to boot. As for the woman, she’s had her eyes open for a number of years. The
+main thing’s Dorothy. She didn’t vanish of her own initiative. And Mrs. Hallam
+knows, or suspects, more than she’s going to tell. I don’t think she wants
+Dorothy found. Calendar does. So do I. Ergo: I’m for Calendar.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Disappeared?” Calendar was barking at him. “How? When? Where?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Within ten minutes,” said Kirkwood. “Here, let’s get it straight.... With her
+permission I brought her here in a four-wheeler.” He was carefully suppressing
+all mention of Frognall Street, and in Calendar’s glance read approval of the
+elision. “She didn’t want to get out, unless you were here. I asked for you.
+The maid showed me up-stairs. I left your daughter in the cab—and by the way, I
+hadn’t paid the driver. That’s funny, too! Perhaps six or seven minutes after I
+came in Mrs. Hallam found out that Miss Calendar was with me and wanted to ask
+her in. When we got to the door—no cab. There you have it all.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Thanks—it’s plenty,” said Calendar dryly. He bent his head in thought for an
+instant, then looked up and fixed Mrs. Hallam with an unprejudiced eye, “I
+say!” he demanded explosively. “There wasn’t any one here that knew—eh?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Her fine eyes wavered and fell before his; and Kirkwood remarked that her under
+lip was curiously drawn in.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I heard a man leave as Mrs. Hallam joined me,” he volunteered helpfully, and
+with a suspicion of malice. “And after that—I paid no attention at the time—it
+seems to me I did hear a cab in the street—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Ow?” interjected Calendar, eying the woman steadfastly and employing an
+exclamation of combined illumination and inquiry more typically British than
+anything Kirkwood had yet heard from the man.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For her part, the look she gave Kirkwood was sharp with fury. It was more; it
+was a mistake, a flaw in her diplomacy; for Calendar intercepted it.
+Unceremoniously he grasped her bare arm with his fat hand.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Tell me who it was,” he demanded in an ugly tone.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She freed herself with a twist, and stepped back, a higher color in her cheeks,
+a flash of anger in her eyes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Mr. Mulready,” she retorted defiantly. “What of that?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I wish I was sure,” declared the fat adventurer, exasperated. “As it is, I bet
+a dollar you’ve put your foot in it, my lady. I warned you of that
+blackguard.... There! The mischief’s done; we won’t row over it. One moment.”
+He begged it with a wave of his hand; stood pondering briefly, fumbled for his
+watch, found and consulted it. “It’s the barest chance,” he muttered. “Perhaps
+we can make it.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What are you going to do?” asked the woman.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Give <i>Mister</i> Mulready a run for his money. Come along, Kirkwood; we
+haven’t a minute. Mrs. Hallam, permit us....” She stepped aside and he brushed
+past her to the door. “Come, Kirkwood!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He seemed to take Kirkwood’s company for granted; and the young man was not
+inclined to argue the point. Meekly enough he fell in with Calendar on the
+sidewalk. Mrs. Hallam followed them out. “You won’t forget?” she called
+tentatively.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I’ll ’phone you if we find out anything.” Calendar jerked the words
+unceremoniously over his shoulder as, linking arms with Kirkwood, he drew him
+swiftly along. They heard her shut the door; instantly Calendar stopped. “Look
+here, did Dorothy have a—a small parcel with her?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“She had a gladstone bag.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Oh, the devil, the devil!” Calendar started on again, muttering distractedly.
+As they reached the corner he disengaged his arm. “We’ve a minute and a half to
+reach Charing Cross Pier; and I think it’s the last boat. You set the pace,
+will you? But remember I’m an oldish man and—and fat.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They began to run, the one easily, the other lumbering after like an
+old-fashioned square-rigged ship paced by a liner.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Beneath the railway bridge, in front of the Underground station, the cab-rank
+cried them on with sardonic view-halloos; and a bobby remarked them with
+suspicion, turning to watch as they plunged round the corner and across the
+wide Embankment.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Thames appeared before them, a river of ink on whose burnished surface
+lights swam in long winding streaks and oily blobs. By the floating pier a
+County Council steamboat strained its hawsers, snoring huskily. Bells were
+jingling in her engine-room as the two gained the head of the sloping gangway.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Kirkwood slapped a shilling down on the ticket-window ledge. “Where to?” he
+cried back to Calendar.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Cherry Gardens Pier,” rasped the winded man. He stumbled after Kirkwood,
+groaning with exhaustion. Only the tolerance of the pier employees gained them
+their end; the steamer was held some seconds for them; as Calendar staggered to
+its deck, the gangway was jerked in, the last hawser cast off. The boat sheered
+wide out on the river, then shot in, arrow-like, to the pier beneath Waterloo
+Bridge.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The deck was crowded and additional passengers embarked at every stop. In the
+circumstances conversation, save on the most impersonal topics, was impossible;
+and even had it been necessary or advisable to discuss the affair which
+occupied their minds, where so many ears could hear, Calendar had breath enough
+neither to answer nor to catechize Kirkwood. They found seats on the forward
+deck and rested there in grim silence, both fretting under the enforced
+restraint, while the boat darted, like some illuminated and exceptionally
+active water insect, from pier to pier.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As it snorted beneath London Bridge, Calendar’s impatience drove him from his
+seat back to the gangway. “Next stop,” he told Kirkwood curtly; and rested his
+heavy bulk against the paddle-box, brooding morosely, until, after an
+uninterrupted run of more than a mile, the steamer swept in, side-wheels
+backing water furiously against the ebbing tide, to Cherry Gardens landing.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Sweet name for a locality unsavory beyond credence! ... As they emerged on the
+street level and turned west on Bermondsey Wall, Kirkwood was fain to tug his
+top-coat over his chest and button it tight, to hide his linen. In a guarded
+tone he counseled his companion to do likewise; and Calendar, after a moment’s
+blank, uncomprehending stare, acknowledged the wisdom of the advice with a
+grunt.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The very air they breathed was rank with fetid odors bred of the gaunt dark
+warehouses that lined their way; the lights were few; beneath the looming
+buildings the shadows were many and dense. Here and there dreary and cheerless
+public houses appeared, with lighted windows conspicuous in a lightless waste.
+From time to time, as they hurried on, they encountered, and made wide detours
+to escape contact with knots of wayfarers—men debased and begrimed, with dreary
+and slatternly women, arm in arm, zigzaging widely across the sidewalks,
+chorusing with sodden voices the burden of some popularized ballad. The
+cheapened, sentimental refrains echoed sadly between benighted walls....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Kirkwood shuddered, sticking close to Calendar’s side. Life’s naked brutalities
+had theretofore been largely out of his ken. He had heard of slums, had even
+ventured to mouth politely moral platitudes on the subject of overcrowding in
+great centers of population, but in the darkest flights of imagination had
+never pictured to himself anything so unspeakably foul and hopeless as this....
+And they were come hither seeking—Dorothy Calendar! He was unable to conceive
+what manner of villainy could be directed against her, that she must be looked
+for in such surroundings.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+After some ten minutes’ steady walking, Calendar turned aside with a muttered
+word, and dived down a covered, dark and evil-smelling passageway that seemed
+to lead toward the river.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mastering his involuntary qualms, Kirkwood followed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Some ten or twelve paces from its entrance the passageway swerved at a right
+angle, continuing three yards or so to end in a blank wall, wherefrom a
+flickering, inadequate gas-lamp jutted. At this point a stone platform, perhaps
+four feet square, was discovered, from the edge of which a flight of worn and
+slimy stone steps led down to a permanent boat-landing, where another gas-light
+flared gustily despite the protection of its frame of begrimed glass.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Good Lord!” exclaimed the young man. “What, in Heaven’s name, Calendar—?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Bermondsey Old Stairs. Come on.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They descended to the landing-stage. Beneath them the Pool slept, a sheet of
+polished ebony, whispering to itself, lapping with small stealthy gurgles
+angles of masonry and ancient piles. On the farther bank tall warehouses reared
+square old-time heads, their uncompromising, rugged profile relieved here and
+there by tapering mastheads. A few, scattering, feeble lights were visible.
+Nothing moved save the river and the wind.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The landing itself they found quite deserted; something which the adventurer
+comprehended with a nod which, like its accompanying, inarticulate ejaculation,
+might have been taken to indicate either satisfaction or disgust. He ignored
+Kirkwood altogether, for the time being, and presently produced a small, bright
+object, which, applied to his lips, proved to be a boatswain’s whistle. He
+sounded two blasts, one long, one brief.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There fell a lull, Kirkwood watching the other and wondering what next would
+happen. Calendar paced restlessly to and fro upon the narrow landing, now
+stopping to incline an ear to catch some anticipated sound, now searching with
+sweeping glances the black reaches of the Pool.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Finally, consulting his watch, “Almost ten,” he announced.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“We’re in time?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Can’t say.... Damn! ... If that infernal boat would only show up—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was lifting the whistle to sound a second summons when a rowboat rounded a
+projecting angle formed by the next warehouse down stream, and with clanking
+oar-locks swung in toward the landing. On her thwarts two figures, dipping and
+rising, labored with the sweeps. As they drew in, the man forward shipped his
+blades, and rising, scrambled to the bows in order to grasp an iron
+mooring-ring set in the wall. The other awkwardly took in his oars and, as the
+current swung the stern downstream, placed a hand palm downward upon the bottom
+step to hold the boat steady.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Calendar waddled to the brink of the stage, grunting with relief.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“The other man?” he asked brusquely. “Has he gone aboard? Or is this the first
+trip to-night?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One of the watermen nodded assent to the latter question, adding gruffly: “Seen
+nawthin’ of ’im, sir.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Very good,” said Calendar, as if he doubted whether it were very good or bad.
+“We’ll wait a bit.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Right-o!” agreed the waterman civilly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Calendar turned back, his small eyes glimmering with satisfaction. Fumbling in
+one coat pocket he brought to light a cigar-case. “Have a smoke?” he suggested
+with a show of friendliness. “By Heaven, I was beginnin’ to get worried!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“As to what?” inquired Kirkwood pointedly, selecting a cigar.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He got no immediate reply, but felt Calendar’s sharp eyes upon him while he
+manoeuvered with matches for a light.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“That’s so,” it came at length. “You don’t know. I kind of forgot for a minute;
+somehow you seemed on the inside.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Kirkwood laughed lightly. “I’ve experienced something of the same sensation in
+the past few hours.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Don’t doubt it.” Calendar was watching him narrowly. “I suppose,” he put it to
+him abruptly, “you haven’t changed your mind?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Changed my mind?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“About coming in with me.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“My dear sir, I can have no mind to change until a plain proposition is laid
+before me.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Hmm!” Calendar puffed vigorously until it occurred to him to change the
+subject. “You won’t mind telling me what happened to you and Dorothy?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Certainly not.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Calendar drew nearer and Kirkwood, lowering his voice, narrated briefly the
+events since he had left the Pless in Dorothy’s company.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Her father followed him intently, interrupting now and again with exclamation
+or pertinent question; as, Had Kirkwood been able to see the face of the man in
+No. 9, Frognall Street? The negative answer seemed to disconcert him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Youngster, you say? Blam’ if I can lay my mind to <i>him</i>! Now if that
+Mulready—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It would have been impossible for Mulready—whoever he is—to recover and get to
+Craven Street before we did,” Kirkwood pointed out.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Well—go on.” But when the tale was told, “It’s that scoundrel, Mulready!” the
+man affirmed with heat. “It’s his hand—I know him. I might have had sense
+enough to see he’d take the first chance to hand me the double-cross. Well,
+this does for <i>him</i>, all right!” Calendar lowered viciously at the river.
+“You’ve been blame’ useful,” he told Kirkwood assertively. “If it hadn’t been
+for you, I don’t know where <i>I’d</i> be now,—nor Dorothy, either,”—an obvious
+afterthought. “There’s no particular way I can show my appreciation, I suppose?
+Money—?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I’ve got enough to last me till I reach New York, thank you.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Well, if the time ever comes, just shout for George B. I won’t be wanting....
+I only wish you were with us; but that’s out of the question.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Doubtless ...”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“No two ways about it. I bet anything you’ve got a conscience concealed about
+your person. What? You’re an honest man, eh?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I don’t want to sound immodest,” returned Kirkwood, amused.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You don’t need to worry about that.... But an honest man’s got no business in
+<i>my</i> line.” He glanced again at his watch. “Damn that Mulready! I wonder
+if he was ’cute enough to take another way? Or did he think ... The fool!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He cut off abruptly, seeming depressed by the thought that he might have been
+outwitted; and, clasping hands behind his back, chewed savagely on his cigar,
+watching the river. Kirkwood found himself somewhat wearied; the uselessness of
+his presence there struck him with added force. He bethought him of his
+boat-train, scheduled to leave a station miles distant, in an hour and a half.
+If he missed it, he would be stranded in a foreign land, penniless and
+practically without friends—Brentwick being away and all the rest of his circle
+of acquaintances on the other side of the Channel. Yet he lingered, in poor
+company, daring fate that he might see the end of the affair. Why?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was only one honest answer to that question. He stayed on because of his
+interest in a girl whom he had known for a matter of three hours, at most. It
+was insensate folly on his part, ridiculous from any point of view. But he made
+no move to go.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The slow minutes lengthened monotonously.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There came a sound from the street level. Calendar held up a hand of warning.
+“Here they come! Steady!” he said tensely. Kirkwood, listening intently,
+interpreted the noise as a clash of hoofs upon cobbles.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Calendar turned to the boat.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Sheer off,” he ordered. “Drop out of sight. I’ll whistle when I want you.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Aye, aye, sir.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The boat slipped noiselessly away with the current and in an instant was lost
+to sight. Calendar plucked at Kirkwood’s sleeve, drawing him into the shadow of
+the steps. “E-easy,” he whispered; “and, I say, lend me a hand, will you, if
+Mulready turns ugly?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Oh, yes,” assented Kirkwood, with a nonchalance not entirely unassumed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The racket drew nearer and ceased; the hush that fell thereafter seemed only
+accentuated by the purling of the river. It was ended by footsteps echoing in
+the covered passageway. Calendar craned his thick neck round the shoulder of
+stone, reconnoitering the landing and stairway.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Thank God!” he said under his breath. “I was right, after all!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A man’s deep tones broke out above. “This way. Mind the steps; they’re a bit
+slippery, Miss Dorothy.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“But my father—?” came the girl’s voice, attuned to doubt.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Oh, he’ll be along—if he isn’t waiting now, in the boat.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They descended, the man leading. At the foot, without a glance to right or
+left, he advanced to the edge of the stage, leaning out over the rail as if
+endeavoring to locate the rowboat. At once the girl appeared, moving to his
+side.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“But, Mr. Mulready—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The girl’s words were drowned by a prolonged blast on the boatswain’s whistle
+at her companion’s lips; the shorter one followed in due course. Calendar edged
+forward from Kirkwood’s side.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“But what shall we do if my father isn’t here? Wait?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“No; best not to; best to get on the <i>Alethea</i> as soon as possible, Miss
+Calendar. We can send the boat back.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“‘Once aboard the lugger the girl is mine’—eh, Mulready?—to say nothing of the
+loot!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+If Calendar’s words were jocular, his tone conveyed a different impression
+entirely. Both man and girl wheeled right about to face him, the one with a
+strangled oath, the other with a low cry.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“The devil!” exclaimed this Mr. Mulready.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Oh! My father!” the girl voiced her recognition of him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Not precisely one and the same person,” commented Calendar suavely.
+“But—er—thanks, just as much.... You see, Mulready, when I make an appointment,
+I keep it.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“We’d begun to get a bit anxious about you—” Mulready began defensively.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“So I surmised, from what Mrs. Hallam and Mr. Kirkwood told me.... Well?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The man found no ready answer. He fell back a pace to the railing, his features
+working with his deep chagrin. The murky flare of the gas-lamp overhead fell
+across a face handsome beyond the ordinary but marred by a sullen humor and
+seamed with indulgence: a face that seemed hauntingly familiar until Kirkwood
+in a flash of visual memory reconstructed the portrait of a man who lingered
+over a dining-table, with two empty chairs for company. This, then, was he whom
+Mrs. Hallam had left at the Pless; a tall, strong man, very heavy about the
+chest and shoulders....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Why, my dear friend,” Calendar was taunting him, “you don’t seem overjoyed to
+see me, for all your wild anxiety! ’Pon my word, you act as if you hadn’t
+expected me—and our engagement so clearly understood, at that! ... Why, you
+fool!”—here the mask of irony was cast. “Did you think for a moment I’d let
+myself be nabbed by that yap from Scotland Yard? Were you banking on that? I
+give you my faith I ambled out under his very nose! ... Dorothy, my dear,”
+turning impatiently from Mulready, “where’s that bag?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The girl withdrew a puzzled gaze from Mulready’s face, (it was apparent to
+Kirkwood that this phase of the affair was no more enigmatic to him than to
+her), and drew aside a corner of her cloak, disclosing the gladstone bag,
+securely grasped in one gloved hand.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I have it, thanks to Mr. Kirkwood,” she said quietly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Kirkwood chose that moment to advance from the shadow. Mulready started and
+fixed him with a troubled and unfriendly stare. The girl greeted him with a
+note of sincere pleasure in her surprise.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Why, Mr. Kirkwood! ... But I left you at Mrs. Hallam’s!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Kirkwood bowed, smiling openly at Mulready’s discomfiture.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“By your father’s grace, I came with him,” he said. “You ran away without
+saying good night, you know, and I’m a jealous creditor.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She laughed excitedly, turning to Calendar. “But <i>you</i> were to meet me at
+Mrs. Hallam’s?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Mulready was good enough to try to save me the trouble, my dear. He’s an
+unselfish soul, Mulready. Fortunately it happened that I came along not five
+minutes after he’d carried you off. How was that, Dorothy?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Her glance wavered uneasily between the two, Mulready and her father. The
+former, shrugging to declare his indifference, turned his back squarely upon
+them. She frowned.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“He came out of Mrs. Hallam’s and got into the four-wheeler, saying you had
+sent him to take your place, and would join us on the <i>Alethea</i>.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“So-o! How about it, Mulready?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The man swung back slowly. “What you choose to think,” he said after a
+deliberate pause.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Well, never mind! We’ll go over the matter at our leisure on the
+<i>Alethea</i>.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was in the adventurer’s tone a menace, bitter and not to be ignored;
+which Mulready saw fit to challenge.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I think not,” he declared; “I think not. I’m weary of your addle-pated
+suspicions. It’d be plain to any one but a fool that I acted for the best
+interests of all concerned in this matter. If you’re not content to see it in
+that light, I’m done.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Oh, if you want to put it that way, I’m <i>not</i> content, Mr. Mulready,”
+retorted Calendar dangerously.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Please yourself. I bid you good evening and—good-by.” The man took a step
+toward the stairs.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Calendar dropped his right hand into his top-coat pocket. “Just a minute,” he
+said sweetly, and Mulready stopped. Abruptly the fat adventurer’s smoldering
+resentment leaped in flame. “That’ll be about all, Mr. Mulready! ’Bout face,
+you hound, and get into that boat! D’you think I’ll temporize with you till
+Doomsday? Then forget it. You’re wrong, dead wrong. Your bluff’s called,
+and”—with an evil chuckle—“I hold a full house, Mulready,—every chamber taken.”
+He lifted meaningly the hand in the coat pocket. “Now, in with you.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+With a grin and a swagger of pure bravado Mulready turned and obeyed. Unnoticed
+of any, save perhaps Calendar himself, the boat had drawn in at the stage a
+moment earlier. Mulready dropped into it and threw himself sullenly upon the
+midships thwart.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Now, Dorothy, in you go, my dear,” continued Calendar, with a self-satisfied
+wag of his head.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Half dazed, to all seeming, she moved toward the boat. With clumsy and
+assertive gallantry her father stepped before her, offering his hand,—his hand
+which she did not touch; for, in the act of descending, she remembered and
+swung impulsively back to Kirkwood.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Good night, Mr. Kirkwood; good night,—I shan’t forget.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He took her hand and bowed above it; but when his head was lifted, he still
+retained her fingers in a lingering clasp.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Good night,” he said reluctantly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The crass incongruity of her in that setting smote him with renewed force.
+Young, beautiful, dainty, brilliant and graceful in her pretty evening gown,
+she figured strangely against the gloomy background of the river, in those dull
+and mean surroundings of dank stone and rusted iron. She was like (he thought
+extravagantly) a whiff of flower-fragrance lost in the miasmatic vapors of a
+slough.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The innocent appeal and allure of her face, upturned to his beneath the
+gas-light, wrought compassionately upon his sensitive and generous heart. He
+was aware of a little surge of blind rage against the conditions that had
+brought her to that spot, and against those whom he held responsible for those
+conditions.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In a sudden flush of daring he turned and nodded coolly to Calendar. “With your
+permission,” he said negligently; and drew the girl aside to the angle of the
+stairway.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Miss Calendar—” he began; but was interrupted.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Here—I say!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Calendar had started toward him angrily.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Kirkwood calmly waved him back. “I want a word in private with your daughter,
+Mr. Calendar,” he announced with quiet dignity. “I don’t think you’ll deny me?
+I’ve saved you some slight trouble to-night.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Disgruntled, the adventurer paused. “Oh—<i>all</i> right,” he grumbled. “I
+don’t see what ...” He returned to the boat.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Forgive me, Miss Calendar,” continued Kirkwood nervously. “I know I’ve no
+right to interfere, but—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes, Mr. Kirkwood?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“—but hasn’t this gone far enough?” he floundered unhappily. “I can’t like the
+look of things. Are you sure—sure that it’s all right—with you, I mean?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She did not answer at once; but her eyes were kind and sympathetic. He plucked
+heart of their tolerance.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It isn’t too late, yet,” he argued. “Let me take you to your friends,—you must
+have friends in the city. But this—this midnight flight down the Thames, this
+atmosphere of stealth and suspicion, this—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“But my place is with my father, Mr. Kirkwood,” she interposed. “I daren’t
+doubt him—dare I?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I ... suppose not.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“So I must go with him.... I’m glad—thank you for caring, dear Mr. Kirkwood.
+And again, good night.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Good luck attend you,” he muttered, following her to the boat.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Calendar helped her in and turned back to Kirkwood with a look of arch triumph;
+Kirkwood wondered if he had overheard. Whether or no, he could afford to be
+magnanimous. Seizing Kirkwood’s hand, he pumped it vigorously.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“My dear boy, you’ve been an angel in disguise! And I guess you think me the
+devil in masquerade.” He chuckled, in high conceit with himself over the turn
+of affairs. “Good night and—and fare thee well!” He dropped into the boat,
+seating himself to face the recalcitrant Mulready. “Cast off, there!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The boat dropped away, the oars lifting and falling. With a weariful sense of
+loneliness and disappointment, Kirkwood hung over the rail to watch them out of
+sight.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A dozen feet of water lay between the stage and the boat. The girl’s dress
+remained a spot of cheerful color; her face was a blur. As the watermen swung
+the bows down-stream, she looked back, lifting an arm spectral in its white
+sheath. Kirkwood raised his hat.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The boat gathered impetus, momentarily diminishing in the night’s illusory
+perspective; presently it was little more than a fugitive blot, gliding swiftly
+in midstream. And then, it was gone entirely, engulfed by the obliterating
+darkness.
+</p>
+
+<div class="fig" style="width:100%;">
+<a name="illus03"></a>
+<img src="images/img03.jpg" width="366" height="600" alt="[Illustration: ]" />
+<p class="caption">The boat gathered impetus.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+Somewhat wearily the young man released the railing and ascended the stairs.
+“And that is the end!” he told himself, struggling with an acute sense of
+personal injury. He had been hardly used. For a few hours his life had been
+lightened by the ineffable glamor of Romance; mystery and adventure had engaged
+him, exorcising for the time the Shade of Care; he had served a fair woman and
+been associated with men whose ways, however questionable, were the ways of
+courage, hedged thickly about with perils.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+All that was at an end. Prosaic and workaday to-morrows confronted him in
+endless and dreary perspective; and he felt again upon his shoulder the bony
+hand of his familiar, Care....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He sighed: “Ah, well!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Disconsolate and aggrieved, he gained the street. He was miles from St.
+Pancras, foot-weary, to all intents and purposes lost.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In this extremity, Chance smiled upon him. The cabby who, at his initial
+instance, had traveled this weary way from Quadrant Mews, after the manner of
+his kind, ere turning back, had sought surcease of fatigue at the nearest
+public; from afar Kirkwood saw the four-wheeler at the curb, and made all haste
+toward it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Entering the gin-mill he found the cabby, soothed him with bitter, and,
+instructing him for St. Pancras with all speed, dropped, limp and listless with
+fatigue, into the conveyance.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As it moved, he closed his eyes; the face of Dorothy Calendar shone out from
+the blank wall of his consciousness, like an illuminated picture cast upon a
+screen. She smiled upon him, her head high, her eyes tender and trustful. And
+he thought that her scarlet lips were sweet with promise and her glance a-brim
+with such a light as he had never dreamed to know.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And now that he knew it and desired it, it was too late; an hour gone he might,
+by a nod of his head, have cast his fortunes with hers for weal or woe. But now
+... Alas and alackaday, that Romance was no more!
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap07"></a>VII<br/>
+DIVERSIONS OF A RUINED GENTLEMAN,—RESUMED</h2>
+
+<p>
+From the commanding elevation of the box, “Three ’n’ six,” enunciated the
+cabby, his tone that of a man prepared for trouble, acquainted with trouble,
+inclined to give trouble a welcome. His bloodshot eyes blinked truculently at
+his alighted fare. “Three ’n’ six,” he iterated aggressively.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+An adjacent but theretofore abstracted policeman pricked up his ears and
+assumed an intelligent expression.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Bermondsey Ol’ Stairs to Sain’ Pancras,” argued the cabby assertively; “seven
+mile by th’ radius; three ’n’ six!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Kirkwood stood on the outer station platform, near the entrance to third-class
+waiting-rooms. Continuing to fumble through his pockets for an elusive
+sovereign purse, he looked up mildly at the man.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“All right, cabby,” he said, with pacific purpose; “you’ll get your fare in
+half a shake.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Three ’n’ six!” croaked the cabby, like a blowsy and vindictive parrot.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The bobby strolled nearer.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes?” said Kirkwood, mildly diverted. “Why not sing it, cabby?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Lor’ lumme!” The cabby exploded with indignation, continuing to give a
+lifelike imitation of a rumpled parrot. “I ’ad trouble enough wif you at
+Bermondsey Ol’ Stairs, hover that quid you promised, didn’t I? Sing it! My
+heye!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Quid, cabby?” And then, remembering that he had promised the fellow a
+sovereign for fast driving from Quadrant Mews, Kirkwood grinned broadly, eyes
+twinkling; for Mulready must have fallen heir to that covenant. “But you got
+the sovereign? You got it, didn’t you, cabby?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The driver affirmed the fact with unnecessary heat and profanity and an
+amendment to the effect that he would have spoiled his fare’s sanguinary conk
+had the outcome been less satisfactory.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The information proved so amusing that Kirkwood, chuckling, forbore to resent
+the manner of its delivery, and, abandoning until a more favorable time the
+chase of the coy sovereign purse, extracted from one trouser pocket half a
+handful of large English small change.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Three shillings, six-pence,” he counted the coins into the cabby’s grimy and
+bloated paw; and added quietly: “The exact distance is rather less than, four
+miles, my man; your fare, precisely two shillings. You may keep the extra
+eighteen pence, for being such a conscientious blackguard,—or talk it over with
+the officer here. Please yourself.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He nodded to the bobby, who, favorably impressed by the silk hat which
+Kirkwood, by diligent application of his sleeve during the cross-town ride, had
+managed to restore to a state somewhat approximating its erstwhile luster,
+smiled at the cabby a cold, hard smile. Whereupon the latter, smirking in
+unabashed triumph, spat on the pavement at Kirkwood’s feet, gathered up the
+reins, and wheeled out.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“A ’ard lot, sir,” commented the policeman, jerking his helmeted head towards
+the vanishing four-wheeler.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Right you are,” agreed Kirkwood amiably, still tickled by the knowledge that
+Mulready had been obliged to pay three times over for the ride that ended in
+his utter discomfiture. Somehow, Kirkwood had conceived no liking whatever for
+the man; Calendar he could, at a pinch, tolerate for his sense of humor, but
+Mulready—! “A surly dog,” he thought him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Acknowledging the policeman’s salute and restoring two shillings and a few fat
+copper pennies to his pocket, he entered the vast and echoing train-shed. In
+the act, his attention was attracted and immediately riveted by the spectacle
+of a burly luggage navvy in a blue jumper in the act of making off with a
+large, folding sign-board, of which the surface was lettered expansively with
+the advice, in red against a white background:
+</p>
+
+<p class="center">
+BOAT-TRAIN LEAVES ON TRACK 3
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Incredulous yet aghast the young man gave instant chase to the navvy,
+overhauling him with no great difficulty. For your horny-handed British
+working-man is apparently born with two golden aphorisms in his mouth: “Look
+before you leap,” and “Haste makes waste.” He looks continually, seldom, if
+ever, leaps, and never is prodigal of his leisure.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Excitedly Kirkwood touched the man’s arm with a detaining hand. “Boat-train?”
+he gasped, pointing at the board.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Left ten minutes ago, thank you, sir.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Wel-l, but...! Of course I can get another train at Tilbury?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“For yer boat? No, sir, thank you, sir. Won’t be another tryne till mornin’,
+sir.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Oh-h!...”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Aimlessly Kirkwood drifted away, his mind a blank.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Sometime later he found himself on the steps outside the station, trying to
+stare out of countenance a glaring electric mineral-water advertisement on the
+farther side of the Euston Road.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was stranded....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Beyond the spiked iron fence that enhedges the incurving drive, the roar of
+traffic, human, wheel and hoof, rose high for all the lateness of the hour:
+sidewalks groaning with the restless contact of hundreds of ill-shod feet; the
+roadway thundering—hansoms, four-wheelers, motor-cars, dwarfed coster-mongers’
+donkey-carts and ponderous, rumbling, C.-P. motor-vans, struggling for place
+and progress. For St. Pancras never sleeps.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The misty air swam luminous with the light of electric signs as with the
+radiance of some lurid and sinister moon. The voice of London sounded in
+Kirkwood’s ears, like the ominous purring of a somnolent brute beast, resting,
+gorged and satiated, ere rising again to devour. To devour—
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Stranded!...
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Distracted, he searched pocket after pocket, locating his watch, cigar- and
+cigarette-cases, match-box, penknife—all the minutiæ of pocket-hardware
+affected by civilized man; with old letters, a card-case, a square envelope
+containing his steamer ticket; but no sovereign purse. His small-change pocket
+held less than three shillings—two and eight, to be exact—and a brass key,
+which he failed to recognize as one of his belongings.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And that was all. At sometime during the night he had lost (or been cunningly
+bereft of?) that little purse of chamois-skin containing the three golden
+sovereigns which he had been husbanding to pay his steamer expenses, and which,
+if only he had them now, would stand between him and starvation and a night in
+the streets.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And, searching his heart, he found it brimming with gratitude to Mulready, for
+having relieved him of the necessity of settling with the cabby.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Vagabond?” said Kirkwood musingly. “Vagabond?” He repeated the word softly a
+number of times, to get the exact flavor of it, and found it little to his
+taste. And yet...
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He thrust both hands deep in his trouser pockets and stared purposelessly into
+space, twisting his eyebrows out of alignment and crookedly protruding his
+lower lip.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+If Brentwick were only in town—But he wasn’t, and wouldn’t be, within the week.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“No good waiting here,” he concluded. Composing his face, he reëntered the
+station. There were his trunks, of course. He couldn’t leave them standing on
+the station platform for ever.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He found the luggage-room and interviewed a mechanically courteous attendant,
+who, as the result of profound deliberation, advised him to try his luck at the
+lost-luggage room, across the station. He accepted the advice; it was a
+foregone conclusion that his effects had not been conveyed to the Tilbury dock;
+they could not have been loaded into the luggage van without his personal
+supervision. Still, anything was liable to happen when his unlucky star was in
+the ascendant.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He found them in the lost-luggage room.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A clerk helped him identify the articles and ultimately clucked with a
+perfunctory note: “Sixpence each, please.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I—ah—pardon?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Sixpence each, the fixed charge, sir. For every twenty-four hours or fraction
+thereof, sixpence per parcel.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Oh, thank you so much,” said Kirkwood sweetly. “I will call to-morrow.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Very good, sir. Thank you, sir.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Five times sixpence is two-and-six,” Kirkwood computed, making his way hastily
+out of the station, lest a worse thing befall him. “No, bless your heart!—not
+while two and eight represents the sum total of my fortune.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He wandered out into the night; he could not linger round the station till
+dawn; and what profit to him if he did? Even were he to ransom his trunks, one
+can scarcely change one’s clothing in a public waiting-room.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Somewhere in the distance a great clock chimed a single stroke, freighted sore
+with melancholy. It knelled the passing of the half-hour after midnight; a
+witching hour, when every public shuts up tight, and gentlemen in top-hats and
+evening dress are doomed to pace the pave till day (barring they have homes or
+visible means of support)—till day, when pawnshops open and such personal
+effects as watches and hammered silver cigar-cases may be hypothecated.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Sable garments fluttering, Care fell into step with Philip Kirkwood; Care the
+inexorable slipped a skeleton arm through his and would not be denied; Care the
+jade clung affectionately to his side, refusing to be jilted.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Ah, you thought you would forget me?” chuckled the fleshless lips by his ear.
+“But no, my boy; I’m with you now, for ever and a day. ‘Misery loves company,’
+and it wouldn’t be pretty of me to desert you in this extremity, would it?
+Come, let us beguile the hours till dawn with conversation. Here’s a sprightly
+subject: What are you going to do, Mr. Kirkwood? <i>What are you going to
+do?</i>”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But Kirkwood merely shook a stubborn head and gazed straight before him,
+walking fast through ways he did not recognize, and pretending not to hear.
+None the less the sense of Care’s solicitous query struck like a pain into his
+consciousness. What was he to do?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+An hour passed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Denied the opportunity to satisfy its beast hunger and thirst, humanity goes
+off to its beds. In that hour London quieted wonderfully; the streets achieved
+an effect of deeper darkness, the skies, lowering, looked down with a blush
+less livid for the shamelessness of man; cab ranks lengthened; solitary
+footsteps added unto themselves loud, alarming, offensive echoes; policemen,
+strolling with lamps blazing on their breasts, became as lightships in a
+trackless sea; each new-found street unfolded its perspective like a canyon of
+mystery, and yet teeming with a hundred masked hazards; the air acquired a
+smell more clear and clean, an effect more volatile; and the night-mist
+thickened until it studded one’s attire with myriads of tiny buttons, bright as
+diamond dust.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Through this long hour Kirkwood walked without a pause.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Another clock, somewhere, clanged resonantly twice.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The world was very still....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And so, wandering foot-loose in a wilderness of ways, turning aimlessly, now
+right, now left, he found himself in a street he knew, yet seemed not to know:
+a silent, black street one brief block in length, walled with dead and
+lightless dwellings, haunted by his errant memory; a street whose atmosphere
+was heavy with impalpable essence of desuetude; in two words, Frognall Street.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Kirkwood identified it with a start and a guilty tremor. He stopped
+stock-still, in an unreasoning state of semi-panic, arrested by a silly impulse
+to turn and fly; as if the bobby, whom he descried approaching him with
+measured stride, pausing now and again to try a door or flash his bull’s-eye
+down an area, were to be expected to identify the man responsible for that
+damnable racket raised ere midnight in vacant Number 9!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Oddly enough, the shock of recognition brought him to his senses,—temporarily.
+He was even able to indulge himself in a quiet, sobering grin at his own folly.
+He passed the policeman with a nod and a cool word in response to the man’s
+good-natured, “Good-night, sir.” Number 9 was on the other side of the street;
+and he favored its blank and dreary elevation with a prolonged and frank
+stare—that profited him nothing, by the way. For a crazy notion popped
+incontinently into his head, and would not be cast forth.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At the corner he swerved and crossed, still possessed of his devil of
+inspiration. It would be unfair to him to say that he did not struggle to
+resist it, for he did, because it was fairly and egregiously asinine; yet
+struggling, his feet trod the path to which it tempted him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Why,” he expostulated feebly, “I might’s well turn back and beat that bobby
+over the head with my cane!...”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But at the moment his hand was in his change pocket, feeling over that same
+brass door-key which earlier he had been unable to account for, and he was
+informing himself how very easy it would have been for the sovereign purse to
+have dropped from his waistcoat pocket while he was sliding on his ear down the
+dark staircase. To recover it meant, at the least, shelter for the night,
+followed by a decent, comfortable and sustaining morning meal. Fortified by
+both he could redeem his luggage, change to clothing more suitable for daylight
+traveling, pawn his valuables, and enter into negotiations with the steamship
+company for permission to exchange his passage, with a sum to boot, for
+transportation on another liner. A most feasible project! A temptation all but
+irresistible!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But then—the risk.... Supposing (for the sake of argument) the customary
+night-watchman to have taken up a transient residence in Number 9; supposing
+the police to have entered with him and found the stunned man on the second
+floor: would the watchman not be vigilant for another nocturnal marauder? would
+not the police now, more than ever, be keeping a wary eye on that house of
+suspicious happenings?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Decidedly, to reënter it would be to incur a deadly risk. And yet, undoubtedly,
+beyond question! his sovereign purse was waiting for him somewhere on the
+second flight of stairs; while as his means of clandestine entry lay warm in
+his fingers—the key to the dark entry, which he had by force of habit pocketed
+after locking the door.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He came to the Hog-in-the-Pound. Its windows were dim with low-turned
+gas-lights. Down the covered alleyway, Quadrant Mews slept in a dusk but
+fitfully relieved by a lamp or two round which the friendly mist clung close
+and thick.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There would be none to see....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Skulking, throat swollen with fear, heart beating like a snare-drum, Kirkwood
+took his chance. Buttoning his overcoat collar up to his chin and cursing the
+fact that his hat must stand out like a chimney-pot on a detached house, he
+sped on tiptoe down the cobbled way and close beneath the house-walls of
+Quadrant Mews. But, half-way in, he stopped, confounded by an unforeseen
+difficulty. How was he to identify the narrow entry of Number 9, whose
+counterparts doubtless communicated with the mews from every residence on four
+sides of the city block?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The low inner tenements were yet high enough to hide the rear elevations of
+Frognall Street houses, and the mist was heavy besides; otherwise he had made
+shift to locate Number 9 by ticking off the dwellings from the corner. If he
+went on, hit or miss, the odds were anything-you-please to one that he would
+blunder into the servant’s quarters of some inhabited house, and—be promptly
+and righteously sat upon by the service-staff, while the bobby was summoned.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Be that as it might—he almost lost his head when he realized this—escape was
+already cut off by the way he had come. Some one, or, rather, some two men were
+entering the alley. He could hear the tramping and shuffle of clumsy feet, and
+voices that muttered indistinctly. One seemed to trip over something, and
+cursed. The other laughed; the voices grew more loud. They were coming his way.
+He dared no longer vacillate.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But—which passage should he choose?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He moved on with more haste than discretion. One heel slipped on a cobble
+time-worn to glassy smoothness; he lurched, caught himself up in time to save a
+fall, lost his hat, recovered it, and was discovered. A voice, maudlin with
+drink, hailed and called upon him to stand and give an account of himself,
+“like a goo’ feller.” Another tempted him with offers of drink and sociable
+confabulation. He yielded not; adamantine to the seductive lure, he picked up
+his heels and ran. Those behind him, remarking with resentment the amazing fact
+that an intimate of the mews should run away from liquor, cursed and made after
+him, veering, staggering, howling like ravening animals.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For all their burden of intoxication, they knew the ground by instinct and from
+long association. They gained on him. Across the way a window-sash went up with
+a bang, and a woman screamed. Through the only other entrance to the mews a
+belated cab was homing; its driver, getting wind of the unusual, pulled up,
+blocking the way, and added his advice to the uproar.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Caught thus between two fires, and with his persecutors hard upon him, Kirkwood
+dived into the nearest black hole of a passageway and in sheer desperation
+flung himself, key in hand, against the door at the end. Mark how his luck
+served him who had forsworn her! He found a keyhole and inserted the key. It
+turned. So did the knob. The door gave inward. He fell in with it, slammed it,
+shot the bolts, and, panting, leaned against its panels, in a pit of
+everlasting night but—saved!—for the time being, at all events.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Outside somebody brushed against one wall, cannoned to the other, brought up
+with a crash against the door, and, perforce at a standstill, swore from his
+heart.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Gorblimy!” he declared feelingly. “I’d ’a’ took my oath I sore’m run in ’ere!”
+And then, in answer to an inaudible question: “No, ’e ain’t. Gorn an’ let the
+fool go to ’ell. ’Oo wants ’im to share goo’ liker? Not I!...”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Joining his companion he departed, leaving behind him a trail of
+sulphur-tainted air. The mews quieted gradually. Indoors Kirkwood faced
+unhappily the enigma of fortuity, wondering: Was this by any possibility Number
+9? The key had fitted; the bolts had been drawn on the inside; and while the
+key had been one of ordinary pattern and would no doubt have proven effectual
+with any one of a hundred common locks, the finger of probability seemed to
+indicate that his luck had brought him back to Number 9. In spite of all this,
+he was sensible of little confidence; though this were truly Number 9, his
+freedom still lay on the knees of the gods, his very life, belike, was poised,
+tottering, on a pinnacle of chance. In the end, taking heart of desperation, he
+stooped and removed his shoes; a precaution which later appealed to his sense
+of the ridiculous, in view of the racket he had raised in entering, but which
+at the moment seemed most natural and in accordance with common sense. Then
+rising, he held his breath, staring and listening. About him the pitch darkness
+was punctuated with fading points of fire, and in his ears was a noise of
+strange whisperings, very creepy—until, gritting his teeth, he controlled his
+nerves and gradually realized that he was alone, the silence undisturbed. He
+went forward gingerly, feeling his way like a blind man on strange ground. Ere
+long he stumbled over a door-sill and found that the walls of the passage had
+fallen away; he had entered a room, a black cavern of indeterminate dimensions.
+Across this he struck at random, walked himself flat against a wall, felt his
+way along to an open door, and passed through to another apartment as dark as
+the first.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Here, endeavoring to make a circuit of the walls, he succeeded in throwing
+himself bodily across a bed, which creaked horribly; and for a full minute lay
+as he had fallen, scarce daring to think. But nothing followed, and he got up
+and found a shut door which let him into yet a third room, wherein he barked
+both shins on a chair; and escaped to a fourth whose atmosphere was highly
+flavored with reluctant odors of bygone cookery, stale water and damp
+plumbing—probably the kitchen. Thence progressing over complaining floors
+through what may have been the servants’ hall, a large room with a table in the
+middle and a number of promiscuous chairs (witness his tortured shins!), he
+finally blundered into the basement hallway.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+By now a little calmer, he felt assured that this was really Number 9, Frognall
+Street, and a little happier about it all, though not even momentarily
+forgetful of the potential police and night-watchman.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+However, he mounted the steps to the ground floor without adventure and found
+himself at last in the same dim and ghostly hall which he had entered some six
+hours before; the mockery of dusk admitted by the fan-light was just strong
+enough to enable him to identify the general lay of the land and arrangement of
+furniture.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+More confidently with each uncontested step, he continued his quest. Elation
+was stirring his spirit when he gained the first floor and moved toward the
+foot of the second flight, approaching the spot whereat he was to begin the
+search for the missing purse. The knowledge that he lacked means of obtaining
+illumination deterred him nothing; he had some hope of finding matches in one
+of the adjacent rooms, but, failing that, was prepared to ascend the stairs on
+all fours, feeling every inch of their surface, if it took hours. Ever an
+optimistic soul, instinctively inclined to father faith with a hope, he felt
+supremely confident that his search would not prove fruitless, that he would
+win early release from his temporary straits.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And thus it fell out that, at the instant he was thinking it time to begin to
+crawl and hunt, his stockinged feet came into contact with something heavy,
+yielding, warm—something that moved, moaned, and caused his hair to bristle and
+his flesh to creep.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+We will make allowances for him; all along he had gone on the assumption that
+his antagonist of the dark stairway would have recovered and made off with all
+expedition, in the course of ten or twenty minutes, at most, from the time of
+his accident. To find him still there was something entirely outside of
+Kirkwood’s reckoning: he would as soon have thought to encounter say,
+Calendar,—would have preferred the latter, indeed. But this fellow whose
+disability was due to his own interference, who was reasonably to be counted
+upon to raise the very deuce and all of a row!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The initial shock, however shattering to his equanimity, soon, lost effect. The
+man evidently remained unconscious, in fact had barely moved; while the moan
+that Kirkwood heard, had been distressingly faint.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Poor devil!” murmured the young man. “He must be in a pretty bad way, for
+sure!” He knelt, compassion gentling his heart, and put one hand to the
+insentient face. A warm sweat moistened his fingers; his palm was fanned by
+steady respiration.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Immeasurably perplexed, the American rose, slipped on his shoes and buttoned
+them, thinking hard the while. What ought he to do? Obviously flight suggested
+itself,—incontinent flight, anticipating the man’s recovery. On the other hand,
+indubitably the latter had sustained such injury that consciousness, when it
+came to him, would hardly be reinforced by much aggressive power. Moreover, it
+was to be remembered that the one was in that house with quite as much warrant
+as the other, unless Kirkwood had drawn a rash inference from the incident of
+the ragged sentry. The two of them were mutual, if antagonistic, trespassers;
+neither would dare bring about the arrest of the other. And then—and this was
+not the least consideration to influence Kirkwood—perhaps the fellow would die
+if he got no attention.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Kirkwood shut his teeth grimly. “I’m no assassin,” he informed himself, “to
+strike and run. If I’ve maimed this poor devil and there are consequences, I’ll
+stand ’em. The Lord knows it doesn’t matter a damn to anybody, not even to me,
+what happens to me; while <i>he</i> may be valuable.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Light upon the subject, actual as well as figurative, seemed to be the first
+essential; his mind composed, Kirkwood set himself in search of it. The floor
+he was on, however, afforded him no assistance; the mantels were guiltless of
+candles and he discovered no matches, either in the wide and silent
+drawing-room, with its ghastly furniture, like mummies in their linen
+swathings, or in the small boudoir at the back. He was to look either above or
+below, it seemed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+After some momentary hesitation, he went up-stairs, his ascent marked by a
+single and grateful accident; half-way to the top he trod on an object that
+clinked underfoot, and, stooping, retrieved the lost purse. Thus was he
+justified of his temerity; the day was saved—that is, to-morrow was.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The rooms of the second-floor were bedchambers, broad, deep, stately, inhabited
+by seven devils of loneliness. In one, on a dresser, Kirkwood found a stump of
+candle in a china candlestick; the two charred ends of matches at its base were
+only an irritating discovery, however—evidence that real matches had been the
+mode in Number 9, at some remote date. Disgusted and oppressed by cumulative
+inquisitiveness, he took the candle-end back to the hall; he would have given
+much for the time and means to make a more detailed investigation into the
+secret of the house.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Perhaps it was mostly his hope of chancing on some clue to the mystery of
+Dorothy Calender—bewitching riddle that she was!—that fascinated his
+imagination so completely. Aside from her altogether, the great house that
+stood untenanted, yet in such complete order, so self-contained in its darkened
+quiet, intrigued him equally with the train of inexplicable events that had
+brought him within its walls. Now—since his latest entrance—his vision had
+adjusted itself to cope with the obscurity to some extent; and the street
+lights, meagerly reflected through the windows from the bosom of a sullen pall
+of cloud, low-swung above the city, had helped him to piece together many a
+detail of decoration and furnishing, alike somber and richly dignified.
+Kirkwood told himself that the owner, whoever he might be, was a man of wealth
+and taste inherited from another age; he had found little of meretricious
+to-day in the dwelling, much that was solid and sedate and homely,
+and—Victorian.... He could have wished for more; a box of early Victorian
+vestas had been highly acceptable.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Making his way down-stairs to the stricken man—who was quite as he had
+been—Kirkwood bent over and thrust rifling fingers into his pockets, regardless
+of the wretched sense of guilt and sneakishness imparted by the action,
+stubbornly heedless of the possibility of the man’s awakening to find himself
+being searched and robbed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the last place he sought, which should (he realized) have been the first, to
+wit, the fob pocket of the white waistcoat, he found a small gold matchbox,
+packed tight with wax vestas; and, berating himself for crass stupidity—he had
+saved a deal of time and trouble by thinking of this before—lighted the candle.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As its golden flame shot up with scarce a tremor, preyed upon by a perfectly
+excusable concern, he bent to examine the man’s countenance.... The arm which
+had partly hidden it had fallen back into a natural position. It was a young
+face that gleamed pallid in the candlelight—a face unlined, a little vapid and
+insignificant, with features regular and neat, betraying few characteristics
+other than the purely negative attributes of a character as yet unformed,
+possibly unformable; much the sort of a face that he might have expected to
+see, remembering those thin and pouting lips that before had impressed him. Its
+owner was probably little more than twenty. In his attire there was a suspicion
+of a fop’s preciseness, aside from its accidental disarray; the cut of his
+waistcoat was the extreme of the then fashion, the white tie (twisted beneath
+one ear) an exaggerated “butterfly,” his collar nearly an inch too tall; and he
+was shod with pumps suitable only for the dancing-floor,—a whim of the
+young-bloods of London of that year.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I can’t make him out at all!” declared Kirkwood. “The son of a gentleman too
+weak to believe that cubs need licking into shape? Reared to man’s estate, so
+sheltered from the wicked world that he never grew a bark?... The sort that
+never had a quarrel in his life, ’cept with his tailor?... Now what the devil
+is <i>this</i> thing doing in this midnight mischief?... Damn!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was most exasperating, the incongruity of the boy’s appearance assorted with
+his double rôle of persecutor of distressed damsels and nocturnal
+house-breaker!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Kirkwood bent closer above the motionless head, with puzzled eyes striving to
+pin down some elusive resemblance that he thought to trace in those vacuous
+features—a resemblance to some one he had seen, or known, at some past time,
+somewhere, somehow.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I give it up. Guess I’m mistaken. Anyhow, five young Englishmen out of every
+ten of his class are just as blond and foolish. Now let’s see how bad he’s
+hurt.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+With hands strong and gentle, he turned the round, light head. Then, “Ah!” he
+commented in the accent of comprehension. For there was an angry looking bump
+at the base of the skull; and, the skin having been broken, possibly in
+collision with the sharp-edged newel-post, a little blood had stained and
+matted the straw-colored hair.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Kirkwood let the head down and took thought. Recalling a bath-room on the floor
+above, thither he went, unselfishly forgetful of his predicament if discovered,
+and, turning on the water, sopped his handkerchief until it dripped. Then,
+returning, he took the boy’s head on his knees, washed the wound, purloined
+another handkerchief (of silk, with a giddy border) from the other’s pocket,
+and of this manufactured a rude but serviceable bandage.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Toward the conclusion of his attentions, the sufferer began to show signs of
+returning animation. He stirred restlessly, whimpered a little, and sighed. And
+Kirkwood, in consternation, got up.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“So!” he commented ruefully. “I guess I am an ass, all right—taking all that
+trouble for you, my friend. If I’ve got a grain of sense left, this is my cue
+to leave you alone in your glory.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was lingering only to restore to the boy’s pockets such articles as he had
+removed in the search for matches,—the match-box, a few silver coins, a bulky
+sovereign purse, a handsome, plain gold watch, and so forth. But ere he
+concluded he was aware that the boy was conscious, that his eyes, open and
+blinking in the candlelight, were upon him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They were blue eyes, blue and shallow as a doll’s, and edged with long, fine
+lashes. Intelligence, of a certain degree, was rapidly informing them. Kirkwood
+returned their questioning glance, transfixed in indecision, his primal impulse
+to cut-and-run for it was gone; he had nothing to fear from this child who
+could not prevent his going whenever he chose to go; while by remaining he
+might perchance worm from him something about the girl.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You’re feeling better?” He was almost surprised to hear his own voice put the
+query.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I—I think so. Ow, my head!... I say, you chap, whoever you are, what’s
+happened?... I want to get up.” The boy added peevishly: “Help a fellow, can’t
+you?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You’ve had a nasty fall,” Kirkwood observed evenly, passing an arm beneath the
+boy’s shoulder and helping him to a sitting position. “Do you remember?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The other snuffled childishly and scrubbed across the floor to rest his back
+against the wall.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Why-y ... I remember fallin’; and then ... I woke up and it was all dark and
+my head achin’ fit to split. I presume I went to sleep again ... I say, what’re
+you, doing here?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Instead of replying, Kirkwood lifted a warning finger.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Hush!” he said tensely, alarmed by noises in the street. “You don’t suppose—?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He had been conscious of a carriage rolling up from the corner, as well as that
+it had drawn up (presumably) before a near-by dwelling. Now the rattle of a key
+in the hall-door was startlingly audible. Before he could move, the door itself
+opened with a slam.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Kirkwood moved toward the stair-head, and drew back with a cry of disgust. “Too
+late!” he told himself bitterly; his escape was cut off. He could run up-stairs
+and hide, of course, but the boy would inform against him and....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He buttoned up his coat, settled his hat on his head, and moved near the
+candle, where it rested on the floor. One glimpse would suffice to show him the
+force of the intruders, and one move of his foot put out the light;
+then—<i>perhaps</i>—he might be able to rush them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Below, a brief pause had followed the noise of the door, as if those entering
+were standing, irresolute, undecided which way to turn; but abruptly enough the
+glimmer of candlelight must have been noticed. Kirkwood heard a hushed
+exclamation, a quick clatter of high heels on the parquetry, pattering feet on
+the stairs, all but drowned by swish and ripple of silken skirts; and a woman
+stood at the head of the flight—to the American an apparition profoundly
+amazing as she paused, the light from the floor casting odd, theatric shadows
+beneath her eyes and over her brows, edging her eyes themselves with brilliant
+light beneath their dark lashes, showing her lips straight and drawn, and
+shimmering upon the spangles of an evening gown, visible beneath the dark cloak
+which had fallen back from her white, beautiful shoulders.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap08"></a>VIII<br/>
+MADAME L’INTRIGANTE</h2>
+
+<p>
+“Mrs. Hallam!” cried Kirkwood, beneath his breath.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The woman ignored his existence. Moving swiftly forward, she dropped on both
+knees by the side of the boy, and caught up one of his hands, clasping it
+passionately in her own.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Fred!” she cried, a curious break in her tone. “My little Freddie! Oh, what
+has happened, dearie?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Oh, hello, Mamma,” grunted that young man, submitting listlessly to her
+caresses and betraying no overwhelming surprise at her appearance there. Indeed
+he seemed more concerned as to what Kirkwood, an older man, would be thinking,
+to see him so endeared and fondled, than moved by any other emotion. Kirkwood
+could see his shamefaced, sidelong glances; and despised him properly for them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But without attending to his response, Mrs. Hallam rattled on in the uneven
+accents of excitement. “I waited until I couldn’t wait any longer, Freddie
+dear. I had to know—had to come. Eccles came home about nine and said that you
+had told him to wait outside, that some one had followed you in here, and that
+a bobby had told him to move on. I didn’t know what—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What’s o’clock now?” her son interrupted.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It’s about three, I think ... Have you hurt yourself, dear? Oh, why
+<i>didn’t</i> you come home? You must’ve known I was dying of anxiety!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Oh, I say! Can’t you see I’m hurt? ’Had a nasty fall and must’ve been asleep
+ever since.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“My precious one! How—?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Can’t say, hardly ... I say, don’t paw a chap so, Mamma ... I brought Eccles
+along and told him to wait because—well, because I didn’t feel so much like
+shuttin’ myself up in this beastly old tomb. So I left the door ajar, and told
+him not to let anybody come in. Then I came up-stairs. There must’ve been
+somebody already in the house; I know I <i>thought</i> there was. It made me
+feel creepy, rather. At any rate, I heard voices down below, and the door
+banged, and somebody began hammerin’ like fun on the knocker.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The boy paused, rolling an embarrassed eye up at the stranger.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes, yes, dear!” Mrs. Hallam urged him on.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Why, I—I made up my mind to cut my stick—let whoever it was pass me on the
+stairs, you know. But he followed me and struck me, and then I jumped at him,
+and we both fell down the whole flight. And that’s all. Besides, my head’s
+achin’ like everything.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“But this man—?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mrs. Hallam looked up at Kirkwood, who bowed silently, struggling to hide both
+his amusement and perplexity. More than ever, now, the case presented a front
+inscrutable to his wits; try as he might, he failed to fit an explanation to
+any incident in which he had figured, while this last development—that his
+antagonist of the dark stairway had been Mrs. Hallam’s son!—seemed the most
+astounding of all, baffling elucidation completely.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He had abandoned all thought of flight and escape. It was too late; in the
+brisk idiom of his mother-tongue, he was “caught with the goods on.” “May as
+well face the music,” he counseled himself, in resignation. From what he had
+seen and surmised of Mrs. Hallam, he shrewdly suspected that the tune would
+prove an exceedingly lively one; she seemed a woman of imagination,
+originality, and an able-bodied temper.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“<i>You</i>, Mr. Kirkwood!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Again he bowed, grinning awry.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She rose suddenly. “You will be good enough to explain your presence here,” she
+informed him with dangerous serenity.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“To be frank with you—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I advise that course, Mr. Kirkwood.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Thanks, awf’ly.... I came here, half an hour ago, looking for a lost purse
+full—well, not <i>quite</i> full of sovereigns. It was my purse, by the way.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Suspicion glinted like foxfire in the cold green eyes beneath her puckered
+brows. “I do not understand,” she said slowly and in level tones.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I didn’t expect you to,” returned Kirkwood; “no more do I.... But, anyway, it
+must be clear to you that I’ve done my best for this gentleman here.” He paused
+with an interrogative lift of his eyebrows.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“‘This gentleman’ is my son, Frederick Hallam.... But you will explain—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Pardon me, Mrs. Hallam; I shall explain nothing, at present. Permit me to
+point out that your position here—like mine—is, to say the least, anomalous.”
+The random stroke told, as he could tell by the instant contraction of her eyes
+of a cat. “It would be best to defer explanations till a more convenient
+time—don’t you think? Then, if you like, we can chant confidences in an
+antiphonal chorus. Just now your—er—son is not enjoying himself apparently, and
+... the attention of the police had best not be called to this house too often
+in one night.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His levity seemed to displease and perturb the woman; she turned from him with
+an impatient movement of her shoulders.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Freddie, dear, do you feel able to walk?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Eh? Oh, I dare say—I don’t know. Wonder would your friend—ah—Mr. Kirkwood,
+lend me an arm?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Charmed,” Kirkwood declared suavely. “If you’ll take the candle, Mrs. Hallam—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He helped the boy to his feet and, while the latter hung upon him and
+complained querulously, stood waiting for the woman to lead the way with the
+light; something which, however, she seemed in no haste to do. The pause at
+length puzzled Kirkwood, and he turned, to find Mrs. Hallam holding the
+candlestick and regarding him steadily, with much the same expression of
+furtive mistrust as that with which she had favored him on her own door-stoop.
+</p>
+
+<div class="fig" style="width:100%;">
+<a name="illus04"></a>
+<img src="images/img04.jpg" width="382" height="600" alt="[Illustration: ]" />
+<p class="caption">He helped the boy to his feet, and stood waiting.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+“One moment,” she interposed in confusion; “I won’t keep you waiting...;” and,
+passing with an averted face, ran quickly up-stairs to the second floor, taking
+the light with her. Its glow faded from the walls above and Kirkwood surmised
+that she had entered the front bedchamber. For some moments he could hear her
+moving about; once, something scraped and bumped on the floor, as if a heavy
+bit of furniture had been moved; again there was a resounding thud that defied
+speculation; and this was presently followed by a dull clang of metal.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His fugitive speculations afforded him little enlightenment; and, meantime,
+young Hallam, leaning partly against the wall and quite heavily on Kirkwood’s
+arm, filled his ears with puerile oaths and lamentations; so that, but for the
+excuse of his really severe shaking-up, Kirkwood had been strongly tempted to
+take the youngster by the shoulders and kick him heartily, for the health of
+his soul.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But eventually—it was not really long—there came the quick rush of Mrs.
+Hallam’s feet along the upper hall, and the woman reappeared, one hand holding
+her skirts clear of her pretty feet as she descended in a rush that caused the
+candle’s flame to flicker perilously.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Half-way down, “Mr. Kirkwood!” she called tempestuously.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Didn’t you find it?” he countered blandly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She stopped jerkily at the bottom, and, after a moment of confusion. “Find
+what, sir?” she asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What you sought, Mrs. Hallam.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Smiling, he bore unflinching the prolonged inspection of her eyes, at once
+somber with doubt of him and flashing with indignation because of his
+impudence.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You knew I wouldn’t find it, then!... Didn’t you?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I may have suspected you wouldn’t.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Now he was sure that she had been searching for the gladstone bag. That,
+evidently, was the bone of contention. Calendar had sent his daughter for it,
+Mrs. Hallam her son; Dorothy had been successful ... But, on the other hand,
+Calendar and Mrs. Hallam were unquestionably allies. Why, then—?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Where is it, Mr. Kirkwood?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Madam, have you the right to know?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Through another lengthening pause, while they faced each other, he marked again
+the curious contraction of her under lip.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I have the right,” she declared steadily. “Where is it?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“How can I be sure?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Then you don’t know—!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Indeed,” he interrupted, “I would be glad to feel that I ought to tell you
+what I know.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What you know!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The exclamation, low-spoken, more an echo of her thoughts than intended for
+Kirkwood, was accompanied by a little shake of the woman’s head, mute evidence
+to the fact that she was bewildered by his finesse. And this delighted the
+young man beyond measure, making him feel himself master of a difficult
+situation. Mysteries had been woven before his eyes so persistently, of late,
+that it was a real pleasure to be able to do a little mystifying on his own
+account. By adopting this reticent and non-committal attitude, he was forcing
+the hand of a woman old enough to be his mother and most evidently a
+past-mistress in the art of misleading. All of which seemed very fascinating to
+the amateur in adventure.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The woman would have led again, but young Hallam cut in, none too courteously.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I say, Mamma, it’s no good standing here, palaverin’ like a lot of flats.
+Besides, I’m awf’ly knocked up. Let’s get home and have it out there.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Instantly his mother softened. “My poor boy!... Of course we’ll go.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Without further demur she swept past and down the stairway before them—slowly,
+for their progress was of necessity slow, and the light most needed. Once they
+were in the main hall, however, she extinguished the candle, placed it on a
+side table, and passed out through the door.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It had been left open, as before; and Kirkwood was not at all surprised to see
+a man waiting on the threshold,—the versatile Eccles, if he erred not. He had
+little chance to identify him, as it happened, for at a word from Mrs. Hallam
+the man bowed and, following her across the sidewalk, opened the door of a
+four-wheeler which, with lamps alight and liveried driver on the box, had been
+waiting at the carriage-block.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As they passed out, Kirkwood shut the door; and at the same moment the little
+party was brought up standing by a gruff and authoritative summons.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Just a minute, please, you there!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Aha!” said Kirkwood to himself. “I thought so.” And he halted, in unfeigned
+respect for the burly and impressive figure, garbed in blue and brass, helmeted
+and truncheoned, bull’s-eye shining on breast like the Law’s unblinking and
+sleepless eye, barring the way to the carriage.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mrs. Hallam showed less deference for the obstructionist. The assumed hauteur
+and impatience of her pose was artfully reflected in her voice as she rounded
+upon the bobby, with an indignant demand: “What is the meaning of this,
+officer?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Precisely what I wants to know, ma’am,” returned the man, unyielding beneath
+his respectful attitude. “I’m obliged to ask you to tell me what you were doing
+in that ’ouse.... And what’s the matter with this ’ere gentleman?” he added,
+with a dubious stare at young Hallam’s bandaged head and rumpled clothing.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Perhaps you don’t understand,” admitted Mrs. Hallam sweetly. “Of course—I
+see—it’s perfectly natural. The house has been shut up for some time and—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Thank you, ma’am; that’s just it. There was something wrong going on early in
+the evening, and I was told to keep an eye on the premises. It’s duty, ma’am;
+I’ve got my report to make.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“The house,” said Mrs. Hallam, with the long-suffering patience of one
+elucidating a perfectly plain proposition to a being of a lower order of
+intelligence, “is the property of my son, Arthur Frederick Burgoyne Hallam, of
+Cornwall. This is—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Beg pardon, ma’am, but I was told Colonel George Burgoyne, of Cornwall—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Colonel Burgoyne died some time ago. My son is his heir. This is my son. He
+came to the house this evening to get some property he desired, and—it
+seems—tripped on the stairs and fell unconscious. I became worried about him
+and drove over, accompanied by my friend, Mr. Kirkwood.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The policeman looked his troubled state of mind, and wagged a doubtful head
+over the case. There was his duty, and there was, opposed to it, the fact that
+all three were garbed in the livery of the well-to-do.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At length, turning to the driver, he demanded, received, and noted in his
+memorandum-book, the license number of the equipage.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It’s a very unusual case, ma’am,” he apologized; “I hopes you won’t ’old it
+against me. I’m only trying to do my duty—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“And safeguard our property. You are perfectly justified, officer.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Thank you, ma’am. And would you mind giving me your cards, please, all of
+you?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Certainly not.” Without hesitation the woman took a little hand-bag from the
+seat of the carriage and produced a card; her son likewise found his case and
+handed the officer an oblong slip.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I’ve no cards with me,” the American told the policeman; “my name, however, is
+Philip Kirkwood, and I’m staying at the Pless.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Very good, sir; thank you.” The man penciled the information in his little
+book. “Thank you, ma’am, and Mr. Hallam, sir. Sorry to have detained you. Good
+morning.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Kirkwood helped young Hallam into the carriage, gave Mrs. Hallam his hand, and
+followed her. The man Eccles shut the door, mounting the box beside the driver.
+Immediately they were in motion.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The American got a final glimpse of the bobby, standing in front of Number 9,
+Frognall Street, and watching them with an air of profound uncertainty. He had
+Kirkwood’s sympathy, therein; but he had little time to feel with him, for Mrs.
+Hallam turned upon him very suddenly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Mr. Kirkwood, will you be good enough to tell me who and what you are?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The young man smiled his homely, candid smile. “I’ll be only too glad, Mrs.
+Hallam, when I feel sure you’ll do as much for yourself.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She gave him no answer; it, was as if she were choosing words. Kirkwood braced
+himself to meet the storm; but none ensued. There was rather a lull, which
+strung itself out indefinitely, to the monotonous music of hoofs and rubber
+tires.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Young Hallam was resting his empty blond head against the cushions, and had
+closed his eyes. He seemed to doze; but, as the carriage rolled past the
+frequent street-lights, Kirkwood could see that the eyes of Mrs. Hallam were
+steadily directed to his face.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His outward composure was tempered by some amusement, by more admiration; the
+woman’s eyes were very handsome, even when hardest and most cold. It was not
+easy to conceive of her as being the mother of a son so immaturely mature. Why,
+she must have been at least thirty-eight or -nine! One wondered; she did not
+look it....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The carriage stopped before a house with lighted windows. Eccles jumped down
+from the box and scurried to open the front door. The radiance of a hall-lamp
+was streaming out into the misty night when he returned to release his
+employers.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They were returned to Craven Street! “One more lap round the track!” mused
+Kirkwood. “Wonder will the next take me back to Bermondsey Old Stairs.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At Mrs. Hallam’s direction, Eccles ushered him into the smoking-room, on the
+ground floor in the rear of the dwelling, there to wait while she helped her
+son up-stairs and to bed. He sighed with pleasure at first glimpse of its
+luxurious but informal comforts, and threw himself carelessly into a heavily
+padded lounging-chair, dropping one knee over the other and lighting the last
+of his expensive cigars, with a sensation of undiluted gratitude; as one coming
+to rest in the shadow of a great rock in a weary land.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Over his shoulder a home-like illumination was cast by an electric reading-lamp
+shaded with red silk. At his feet brass fire-dogs winked sleepily in the
+fluttering blaze of a well-tended stove. The walls were hung with deep red, the
+doors and divans upholstered in the same restful shade. In one corner an old
+clock ticked soberly. The atmosphere would have proved a potent invitation to
+reverie, if not to sleep—he was very sleepy—but for the confusion in the house.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In its chambers, through the halls, on the stairs, there were hurryings and
+scurryings of feet and skirts, confused with murmuring voices. Presently, in an
+adjoining room, Philip Kirkwood heard a maid-servant wrestling hopefully with
+that most exasperating of modern time-saving devices, the telephone as
+countenanced by our English cousins. Her patience and determination won his
+approval, but availed nothing for her purpose; in the outcome the telephone
+triumphed and the maid gave up the unequal contest.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Later, a butler entered the room; a short and sturdy fellow, extremely ill at
+ease. Drawing a small taboret to the side of Kirkwood’s chair, he placed
+thereon a tray, deferentially imparting the information that “Missis ’Allam ’ad
+thought ’ow as Mister Kirkwood might care for a bit of supper.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Please thank Mrs. Hallam for me.” Kirkwood’s gratified eyes ranged the laden
+tray. There were sandwiches, biscuit, cheese, and a pot of black coffee, with
+sugar and cream. “It was very kindly thought of,” he added.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Very good, sir, thank you, sir.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The man turned to go, shuffling soundlessly. Kirkwood was suddenly impressed
+with his evasiveness; ever since he had entered the room, his countenance had
+seemed turned from the guest.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Eccles!” he called sharply, at a venture.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The butler halted, thunderstruck. “Ye-es, s-sir?”
+</p>
+
+<div class="fig" style="width:100%;">
+<a name="illus05"></a>
+<img src="images/img05.jpg" width="335" height="600" alt="[Illustration: ]" />
+<p class="caption">Eccles</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+“Turn round, Eccles; I want a look at you.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Eccles faced him unwillingly, with a stolid front but shifty eyes. Kirkwood
+glanced him up and down, grinning.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Thank you, Eccles; I’ll remember you now. You’ll remember me, too, won’t you?
+You’re a bad actor, aren’t you, Eccles?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes, sir; thank you, sir,” mumbled the man unhappily; and took instant
+advantage of the implied permission to go.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Intensely diverted by the recollection of Eccles’ abortive attempt to stop him
+at the door of Number 9, and wondering—now that he came to think of it—why,
+precisely, young Hallam had deemed it necessary to travel with a body-guard and
+adopt such furtive methods to enter into as well as to obtain what was asserted
+to be his own property, Kirkwood turned active attention to the lunch.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Thoughtfully he poured himself a cup of coffee, swallowing it hot and black as
+it came from the silver pot; then munched the sandwiches.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It <i>was</i> kindly thought of, this early morning repast; Mrs. Hallam seemed
+more and more a remarkable woman with each phase of her character that she
+chose to disclose. At odds with him, she yet took time to think of his creature
+needs!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+What could be her motive,—not in feeding him, but in involving her name and
+fortune in an affair so strangely flavored?... This opened up a desert waste of
+barren speculation. “What’s anybody’s motive, who figures in this thundering
+dime-novel?” demanded the American, almost contemptuously. And—for the
+hundredth time—gave it up; the day should declare it, if so hap he lived to see
+that day: a distant one, he made no doubt. The only clear fact in his befogged
+and bemused mentality was that he was at once “broke” and in this business up
+to his ears. Well, he’d see it through; he’d nothing better to do, and—there
+was the girl:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Dorothy, whose eyes and lips he had but to close his own eyes to see again as
+vividly as though she stood before him; Dorothy, whose unspoiled sweetness
+stood out in vivid relief against this moil and toil of conspiracy, like a star
+of evening shining clear in a stormy sky.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Poetic simile: I’m going fast,” conceded Kirkwood; but he did not smile. It
+was becoming quite too serious a matter for laughter. For her sake, he was in
+the game “for keeps”; especially in view of the fact that everything—his own
+heart’s inclination included—seemed to conspire to keep him in it. Of course he
+hoped for nothing in return; a pauper who turns squire-of-dames with
+matrimonial intent is open to the designation, “penniless adventurer.” No;
+whatever service he might be to the girl would be ample recompense to him for
+his labors. And afterwards, he’d go his way in peace; she’d soon forget him—if
+she hadn’t already. Women (he propounded gravely) are queer: there’s no telling
+anything about them!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One of the most unreadable specimens of the sex on which he pronounced this
+highly original dictum, entered the room just then; and he found himself at
+once out of his chair and his dream, bowing.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Mrs. Hallam.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The woman nodded and smiled graciously. “Eccles has attended to your needs, I
+hope? Please don’t stop smoking.” She sank into an arm-chair on the other side
+of the hearth and, probably by accident, out of the radius of illumination from
+the lamp; sitting sidewise, one knee above the other, her white arms immaculate
+against the somber background of shadowed crimson.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She was very handsome indeed, just then; though a keener light might have
+proved less flattering.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Now, Mr. Kirkwood?” she opened briskly, with a second intimate and friendly
+nod; and paused, her pose receptive.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Kirkwood sat down again, smiling good-natured appreciation of her unprejudiced
+attitude.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Your son, Mrs. Hallam—?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Oh, Freddie’s doing well enough.... Freddie,” she explained, “has a delicate
+constitution and has seen little of the world. Such melodrama as to-night’s is
+apt to shock him severely. We must make allowances, Mr. Kirkwood.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Kirkwood grinned again, a trace unsympathetically; he was unable to simulate
+any enthusiasm on the subject of poor Freddie, whom he had sized up with
+passable acumen as a spoiled and coddled child completely under the thumb of an
+extremely clever mother.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes,” he responded vaguely; “he’ll be quite fit after a night’s sleep, I dare
+say.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The woman was watching him keenly, beneath her lowered lashes. “I think,” she
+said deliberately, “that it is time we came to an understanding.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Kirkwood agreed—“Yes?” affably.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I purpose being perfectly straightforward. To begin with, I don’t place you,
+Mr. Kirkwood. You are an unknown quantity, a new factor. Won’t you please tell
+me what you are and.... Are you a friend of Mr. Calendar’s?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I think I may lay claim to that honor, though”—to Kirkwood’s way of seeing
+things some little frankness on his own part would be essential if they were to
+get on—“I hardly know him, Mrs. Hallam. I had the pleasure of meeting him only
+this afternoon.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She knitted her brows over this statement.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“That, I assure you, is the truth,” he laughed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“But ... I really don’t understand.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Nor I, Mrs. Hallam. Calendar aside, I am Philip Kirkwood, American, resident
+abroad for some years, a native of San Francisco, of a certain age, unmarried,
+by profession a poor painter.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“And—?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Beyond that? I presume I must tell you, though I confess I’m in doubt....” He
+hesitated, weighing candor in the balance with discretion.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“But who are you for? Are you in George Calendar’s pay?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Heaven forfend!”—piously. “My sole interest at the present moment is to
+unravel a most entrancing mystery—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Entitled ‘Dorothy Calendar’! Of course. You’ve known her long?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Eight hours, I believe,” he admitted gravely; “less than that, in fact.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Miss Calendar’s interests will not suffer through anything you may tell me.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Whether they will or no, I see I must swing a looser tongue, or you’ll be
+showing me the door.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The woman shook her head, amused, “Not until,” she told him significantly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Very well, then.” And he launched into an abridged narrative of the night’s
+events, as he understood them, touching lightly on his own circumstances, the
+real poverty which had brought him back to Craven Street by way of Frognall.
+“And there you have it all, Mrs. Hallam.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She sat in silent musing. Now and again he caught the glint of her eyes and
+knew that he was being appraised with such trained acumen as only long
+knowledge of men can give to women. He wondered if he were found wanting....
+Her dark head bended, elbow on knee, chin resting lightly in the cradle of her
+slender, parted fingers, the woman thought profoundly, her reverie ending with
+a brief, curt laugh, musical and mirthless as the sound of breaking glass.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It is so like Calendar!” she exclaimed: “so like him that one sees how foolish
+it was to trust—no, not to trust, but to believe that he could ever be thrown
+off the scent, once he got nose to ground. So, if we suffer, my son and I, I
+shall have only myself to thank!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Kirkwood waited in patient attention till she chose to continue. When she did
+“Now for my side of the case!” cried Mrs. Hallam; and rising, began to pace the
+room, her slender and rounded figure swaying gracefully, the while she talked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“George Calendar is a scoundrel,” she said: “a swindler, gambler,—what I
+believe you Americans call a confidence-man. He is also my late husband’s first
+cousin. Some years since he found it convenient to leave England, likewise his
+wife and daughter. Mrs. Calendar, a country-woman of yours, by the bye, died
+shortly afterwards. Dorothy, by the merest accident, obtained a situation as
+private secretary in the household of the late Colonel Burgoyne, of The Cliffs,
+Cornwall. You follow me?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes, perfectly.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Colonel Burgoyne died, leaving his estates to my son, some time ago. Shortly
+afterwards Dorothy Calendar disappeared. We know now that her father took her
+away, but then the disappearance seemed inexplicable, especially since with her
+vanished a great deal of valuable information. She alone knew of the location
+of certain of the old colonel’s personal effects.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“He was an eccentric. One of his peculiarities involved the secreting of
+valuables in odd places; he had no faith in banks. Among these valuables were
+the Burgoyne family jewels—quite a treasure, believe me, Mr. Kirkwood. We found
+no note of them among the colonel’s papers, and without Dorothy were powerless
+to pursue a search for them. We advertised and employed detectives, with no
+result. It seems that father and daughter were at Monte Carlo at the time.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Beautifully circumstantial, my dear lady,” commented Kirkwood—to his inner
+consciousness. Outwardly he maintained consistently a pose of impassive
+gullibility.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“This afternoon, for the first time, we received news of the Calendars.
+Calendar himself called upon me, to beg a loan. I explained our difficulty and
+he promised that Dorothy should send us the information by the morning’s post.
+When I insisted, he agreed to bring it himself, after dinner, this evening....
+I make it quite clear?” she interrupted, a little anxious.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Quite clear, I assure you,” he assented encouragingly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Strangely enough, he had not been gone ten minutes when my son came in from a
+conference with our solicitors, informing me that at last a memorandum had
+turned up, indicating that the heirlooms would be found in a safe secreted
+behind a dresser in Colonel Burgoyne’s bedroom.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“At Number 9, Frognall Street.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes.... I proposed going there at once, but it was late and we were dining at
+the Pless with an acquaintance, a Mr. Mulready, whom I now recall as a former
+intimate of George Calendar. To our surprise we saw Calendar and his daughter
+at a table not far from ours. Mr. Mulready betrayed some agitation at the sight
+of Calendar, and told me that Scotland Yard had a man out with a warrant for
+Calendar’s arrest, on old charges. For old sake’s sake, Mr. Mulready begged me
+to give Calendar a word of warning. I did so—foolishly, it seems: Calendar was
+at that moment planning to rob us, Mulready aiding and abetting him.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The woman paused before Kirkwood, looking down upon him. “And so,” she
+concluded, “we have been tricked and swindled. I can scarcely believe it of
+Dorothy Calendar.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I, for one, don’t believe it.” Kirkwood spoke quietly, rising. “Whatever the
+culpability of Calendar and Mulready, Dorothy was only their hoodwinked tool.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“But, Mr. Kirkwood, she must have known the jewels were not hers.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes,” he assented passively, but wholly unconvinced.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“And what,” she demanded with a gesture of exasperation, “what would you
+advise?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Scotland Yard,” he told her bluntly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“But it’s a family secret! It must not appear in the papers. Don’t you
+understand—George Calendar is my husband’s cousin!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I can think of nothing else, unless you pursue them in person.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“But—whither?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“That remains to be discovered; I can tell you nothing more than I have.... May
+I thank you for your hospitality, express my regrets that I should unwittingly
+have been made the agent of this disaster, and wish you good night—or, rather,
+good morning, Mrs. Hallam?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For a moment she held him under a calculating glance which he withstood with
+graceless fortitude. Then, realizing that he was determined not by any means to
+be won to her cause, she gave him her hand, with a commonplace wish that he
+might find his affairs in better order than seemed probable; and rang for
+Eccles.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The butler showed him out.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He took away with him two strong impressions; the one visual, of a strikingly
+handsome woman in a wonderful gown, standing under the red glow of a
+reading-lamp, in an attitude of intense mental concentration, her expression
+plainly indicative of a train of thought not guiltless of vindictiveness; the
+other, more mental but as real, he presently voiced to the huge bronze lions
+brooding over desolate Trafalgar Square.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Well,” appreciated Mr. Kirkwood with gusto, “<i>she’s</i> got Ananias and
+Sapphira talked to a standstill, all right!” He ruminated over this for a
+moment. “Calendar can lie some, too; but hardly with her picturesque touch....
+Uncommon ingenious, <i>I</i> call it. All the same, there were only about a
+dozen bits of tiling that didn’t fit into her mosaic a little bit.... I think
+they’re all tarred with the same stick—all but the girl. And there’s something
+afoot a long sight more devilish and crafty than that shilling-shocker of
+madam’s.... Dorothy Calendar’s got about as much active part in it as I have.
+I’m only from California, but they’ve got to show me, before I’ll believe a
+word against her. Those infernal scoundrels!...Somebody’s got to be on the
+girl’s side and I seem to have drawn the lucky straw.... Good Heavens! is it
+possible for a grown man to fall heels over head in love in two short hours? I
+don’t believe it. It’s just interest—nothing more.... And I’ll have to have a
+change of clothes before I can do anything further.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He bowed gratefully to the lions, in view of their tolerant interest in his
+soliloquy, and set off very suddenly round the square and up St. Martin’s Lane,
+striking across town as directly as might be for St. Pancras Station. It would
+undoubtedly be a long walk, but cabs were prohibited by his straitened means,
+and the busses were all abed and wouldn’t be astir for hours.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He strode along rapidly, finding his way more through intuition than by
+observation or familiarity with London’s geography—indeed, was scarce aware of
+his surroundings; for his brain was big with fine imagery, rapt in a glowing
+dream of knighterrantry and chivalric deeds.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Thus is it ever and alway with those who in the purity of young hearts rush in
+where angels fear to tread; if these, Kirkwood and his ilk, be fools, thank God
+for them, for with such foolishness is life savored and made sweet and sound!
+To Kirkwood the warp of the world and the woof of it was Romance, and it
+wrapped him round, a magic mantle to set him apart from all things mean and
+sordid and render him impregnable and invisible to the haunting Shade of Care.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Which, by the same token, presently lost track of him entirely, and wandered
+off to find and bedevil some other poor devil. And Kirkwood, his eyes like his
+spirit elevated, saw that the clouds of night were breaking, the skies
+clearing, that the East pulsed ever more strongly with the dim golden promise
+of the day to come. And this he chose to take for an omen—prematurely, it may
+be.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap09"></a>IX<br/>
+AGAIN “BELOW BRIDGE”; AND BEYOND</h2>
+
+<p>
+Kirkwood wasted little time, who had not much to waste, were he to do that upon
+whose doing he had set his heart. It irked him sore to have to lose the
+invaluable moments demanded by certain imperative arrangements, but his haste
+was such that all was consummated within an hour.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Within the period of a single hour, then, he had ransomed his luggage at St.
+Pancras, caused it to be loaded upon a four-wheeler and transferred to a
+neighboring hotel of evil flavor but moderate tariff, where he engaged a room
+for a week, ordered an immediate breakfast, and retired with his belongings to
+his room; he had shaved and changed his clothes, selecting a serviceable suit
+of heavy tweeds, stout shoes, a fore-and-aft cap and a negligée shirt of a deep
+shade calculated at least to seem clean for a long time; finally, he had
+devoured his bacon and eggs, gulped down his coffee and burned his mouth, and,
+armed with a stout stick, set off hotfoot in the still dim glimmering of early
+day.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+By this time his cash capital had dwindled to the sum of two pounds, ten
+shillings, eight-pence, and would have been much less had he paid for his
+lodging in advance. But he considered his trunks ample security for the bill,
+and dared not wait the hour when shopkeepers begin to take down shutters and it
+becomes possible to realize upon one’s jewelry. Besides which, he had never
+before been called upon to consider the advisability of raising money by
+pledging personal property, and was in considerable doubt as to the right
+course of procedure in such emergency.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At King’s Cross Station on the Underground an acute disappointment awaited him;
+there, likewise, he learned something about London. A sympathetic bobby
+informed him that no trains would be running until after five-thirty, and that,
+furthermore, no busses would begin to ply until half after seven.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It’s tramp it or cab it, then,” mused the young man mournfully, his longing
+gaze seeking a nearby cab-rank—just then occupied by a solitary hansom, driver
+somnolent on the box. “Officer,” he again addressed the policeman, mindful of
+the English axiom: “When in doubt, ask a bobby.”—“Officer, when’s high-tide
+this morning?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The bobby produced a well-worn pocket-almanac, moistened a massive thumb, and
+rippled the pages.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“London Bridge, ’igh tide twenty minutes arfter six, sir,” he announced with a
+glow of satisfaction wholly pardonable in one who combines the functions of
+perambulating almanac, guide-book, encyclopedia, and conserver of the peace.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Kirkwood said something beneath his breath—a word in itself a comfortable
+mouthful and wholesome and emphatic. He glanced again at the cab and groaned:
+“O Lord, I just dassent!” With which, thanking the bureau of information, he
+set off at a quick step down Grey’s Inn Road.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The day had closed down in brilliance upon the city—and the voice of the
+milkman was to be heard in the land—when he trudged, still briskly if a trifle
+wearily, into Holborn, and held on eastward across the Viaduct and down Newgate
+Street; the while addling his weary wits with heart-sickening computations of
+minutes, all going hopelessly to prove that he would be late, far too late even
+presupposing the unlikely. The unlikely, be it known, was that the
+<i>Alethea</i> would not attempt to sail before the turn of the tide.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For this was his mission, to find the <i>Alethea</i> before she sailed.
+Incredible as it may appear, at five o’clock, or maybe earlier, on the morning
+of the twenty-second of April, 1906, A.D., Philip Kirkwood, normally a
+commonplace but likable young American in full possession of his senses, might
+have been seen (and by some was seen) plodding manfully through Cheapside,
+London, England, engaged upon a quest as mad, forlorn, and gallant as any whose
+chronicle ever inspired the pen of a Malory or a Froissart. In brief he
+proposed to lend his arm and courage to be the shield and buckler of one who
+might or might not be a damsel in distress; according as to whether Mrs. Hallam
+had spoken soothly of Dorothy Calendar, or Kirkwood’s own admirable faith in
+the girl were justified of itself.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Proceeding upon the working hypothesis that Mrs. Hallam was a polished liar in
+most respects, but had told the truth, so far as concerned her statement to the
+effect that the gladstone bag contained valuable real property (whose ownership
+remained a moot question, though Kirkwood was definitely committed to the
+belief that it was none of Mrs. Hallam’s or her son’s): he reasoned that the
+two adventurers, with Dorothy and their booty, would attempt to leave London by
+a water route, in the ship, <i>Alethea</i>, whose name had fallen from their
+lips at Bermondsey Old Stairs.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Kirkwood’s initial task, then, would be to find the needle in the haystack—the
+metaphor is poor: more properly, to sort out from the hundreds of vessels, of
+all descriptions, at anchor in midstream, moored to the wharves of ’long-shore
+warehouses, or in the gigantic docks that line the Thames, that one called
+<i>Alethea</i>; of which he was so deeply mired in ignorance that he could not
+say whether she were tramp-steamer, coastwise passenger boat, one of the liners
+that ply between Tilbury and all the world, Channel ferry-boat, private yacht
+(steam or sail), schooner, four-master, square-rigger, barque or brigantine.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A task to stagger the optimism of any but one equipped with the sublime
+impudence of Youth! Even Kirkwood was disturbed by some little awe when he
+contemplated the vast proportions of his undertaking. None the less doggedly he
+plugged ahead, and tried to keep his mind from vain surmises as to what would
+be his portion when eventually he should find himself a passenger, uninvited
+and unwelcome, upon the <i>Alethea</i>....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+London had turned over once or twice, and was pulling the bedclothes over its
+head and grumbling about getting up, but the city was still sound asleep when
+at length he paused for a minute’s rest in front of the Mansion House, and
+realized with a pang of despair that he was completely tuckered out. There was
+a dull, vague throbbing in his head; weights pressed upon his eyeballs until
+they ached; his mouth was hot and tasted of yesterday’s tobacco; his feet were
+numb and heavy; his joints were stiff; he yawned frequently.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+With a sigh he surrendered to the flesh’s frailty. An early cabby, cruising up
+from Cannon Street station on the off-chance of finding some one astir in the
+city, aside from the doves and sparrows, suffered the surprise of his life when
+Kirkwood hailed him. His face was blank with amazement when he reined in, and
+his eyes bulged when the prospective fare, on impulse, explained his urgent
+needs. Happily he turned out a fair representative of his class, an intelligent
+and unfuddled cabby.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Jump in, sir,” he told Kirkwood cheerfully, as soon as he had assimilated the
+latter’s demands. “I knows precisely wotcher wants. Leave it all to me.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The admonition was all but superfluous; Kirkwood was unable, for the time
+being, to do aught else than resign his fate into another’s guidance. Once in
+the cab he slipped insensibly into a nap, and slept soundly on, as reckless of
+the cab’s swift pace and continuous jouncing as of the sunlight glaring full in
+his tired young face.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He may have slept twenty minutes; he awoke faint with drowsiness, tingling from
+head to toe from fatigue, and in distress of a queer qualm in the pit of his
+stomach, to find the hansom at rest and the driver on the step, shaking his
+fare with kindly determination. “Oh, a’ right,” he assented surlily, and by
+sheer force of will made himself climb out to the sidewalk; where, having
+rubbed his eyes, stretched enormously and yawned discourteously in the face of
+the East End, he was once more himself and a hundred times refreshed into the
+bargain. Contentedly he counted three shillings into the cabby’s palm—the fare
+named being one-and-six.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“The shilling over and above the tip’s for finding me the waterman and boat,”
+he stipulated.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Right-o. You’ll mind the ’orse a minute, sir?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Kirkwood nodded. The man touched his hat and disappeared inexplicably.
+Kirkwood, needlessly attaching himself to the reins near the animal’s head,
+pried his sense of observation open and became alive to the fact that he stood
+in a quarter of London as strange to him as had been Bermondsey Wall.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To this day he can not put a name to it; he surmises that it was Wapping.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Ramshackle tenements with sharp gable roofs lined either side of the way.
+Frowsy women draped themselves over the window-sills. Pallid and wasted
+parodies on childhood contested the middle of the street with great, slow
+drays, drawn by enormous horses. On the sidewalks twin streams of masculine
+humanity flowed without rest, both bound in the same direction: dock laborers
+going to their day’s work. Men of every nationality known to the world (he
+thought) passed him in his short five-minute wait by the horse’s head; Britons,
+brown East Indians, blacks from Jamaica, swart Italians, Polaks, Russian Jews,
+wire-drawn Yankees, Spaniards, Portuguese, Greeks, even a Nubian or two:
+uniform in these things only, that their backs were bent with toil, bowed
+beyond mending, and their faces stamped with the blurred type-stamp of the dumb
+laboring brute. A strangely hideous procession, they shambled on, for the most
+part silent, all uncouth and unreal in the clear morning glow.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The outlander was sensible of some relief when his cabby popped hurriedly out
+of the entrance to a tenement, a dull-visaged, broad-shouldered waterman
+ambling more slowly after.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Nevvy of mine, sir,” announced the cabby; “and a fust-ryte waterman; knows the
+river like a book, he do.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The nephew touched his forelock sheepishly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Thank you,” said Kirkwood; and, turning to the man, “Your boat?” he asked with
+the brevity of weariness.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“This wye, sir.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At his guide’s heels Kirkwood threaded the crowd and, entering the tenement,
+stumbled through a gloomy and unsavory passage, to come out at last upon a
+scanty, unrailed veranda overlooking the river. Ten feet below, perhaps, foul
+waters purred and eddied round the piles supporting the rear of the building.
+On one hand a ladder-like flight of rickety steps descended to a floating stage
+to which a heavy rowboat lay moored. In the latter a second waterman was seated
+bailing out bilge with a rusty can.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“’Ere we are, sir,” said the cabman’s nephew, pausing at the head of the steps.
+“Now, where’s it to be?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The American explained tersely that he had a message to deliver a friend, who
+had shipped aboard a vessel known as the <i>Alethea</i>, scheduled to sail at
+floodtide; further than which deponent averred naught.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The waterman scratched his head. “A ’ard job, sir; not knowin’ wot kind of a
+boat she are mykes it ’arder.” He waited hopefully.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Ten shillings,” volunteered Kirkwood promptly; “ten shillings if you get me
+aboard her before she weighs anchor; fifteen if I keep you out more than an
+hour, and still you put me aboard. After that we’ll make other terms.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The man promptly turned his back to hail his mate. “’Arf a quid, Bob, if we
+puts this gent aboard a wessel name o’ <i>Allytheer</i> afore she syles at turn
+o’ tide.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the boat the man with the bailing can turned up an impassive countenance.
+“Coom down,” he clenched the bargain; and set about shipping the sweeps.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Kirkwood crept down the shaky ladder and deposited himself in the stern of the
+boat; the younger boatman settled himself on the midship thwart.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Ready?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Ready,” assented old Bob from the bows. He cast off the painter, placed one
+sweep against the edge of the stage, and with a vigorous thrust pushed off;
+then took his seat.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Bows swinging down-stream, the boat shot out from the shore.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“How’s the tide?” demanded Kirkwood, his impatience growing.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“On th’ turn, sir,” he was told.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For a long moment broadside to the current, the boat responded to the sturdy
+pulling of the port sweeps. Another moment, and it was in full swing, the
+watermen bending lustily to their task. Under their unceasing urge, the
+broad-beamed, heavy craft, aided by the ebbing tide, surged more and more
+rapidly through the water; the banks, grim and unsightly with their towering,
+impassive warehouses broken by toppling wooden tenements, slipped swiftly
+up-stream. Ship after ship was passed, sailing vessels in the majority,
+swinging sluggishly at anchor, drifting slowly with the river, or made fast to
+the goods-stages of the shore; and in keen anxiety lest he should overlook the
+right one, Kirkwood searched their bows and sterns for names, which in more
+than one case proved hardly legible.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The <i>Alethea</i> was not of their number.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the course of some ten minutes, the watermen drove the boat sharply inshore,
+bringing her up alongside another floating stage, in the shadow of another
+tenement.—both so like those from which they had embarked that Kirkwood would
+have been unable to distinguish one from another.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the bows old Bob lifted up a stentorian voice, summoning one William.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Recognizing that there was some design in this, the passenger subdued his
+disapproval of the delay, and sat quiet.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In answer to the third ear-racking hail, a man, clothed simply in dirty shirt
+and disreputable trousers, showed himself in the doorway above, rubbing the
+sleep out of a red, bloated countenance with a mighty and grimy fist.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“’Ello,” he said surlily. “Wot’s th’ row?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“’Oo,” interrogated old Bob, holding the boat steady by grasping the stage,
+“was th’ party wot engyged yer larst night, Bill?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Party name o’ <i>Allytheer</i>,” growled the drowsy one. “W’y?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Party ’ere’s lookin’ for ’im. Where’ll I find this <i>Allytheer?</i>”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Best look sharp ’r yer won’t find ’im,” retorted the one above. “’E <i>was</i>
+at anchor off Bow Creek larst night.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Kirkwood’s heart leaped in hope. “What sort of a vessel was she?” he asked,
+half rising in his eagerness.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Brigantine, sir.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“<i>Thank—you!</i>” replied Kirkwood explosively, resuming his seat with
+uncalculated haste as old Bob, deaf to the amenities of social intercourse in
+an emergency involving as much as ten-bob, shoved off again.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And again the boat was flying down in midstream, the leaden waters, shot with
+gold of the morning sun, parting sullenly beneath its bows.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The air was still, heavy and tepid; the least exertion brought out beaded
+moisture on face and hands. In the east hung a turgid sky, dull with haze,
+through which the mounting sun swam like a plaque of brass; overhead it was
+clear and cloudless, but besmirched as if the polished mirror of the heavens
+had been fouled by the breath of departing night.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+On the right, ahead, Greenwich Naval College loomed up, the great gray-stone
+buildings beyond the embankment impressively dominating the scene, in happy
+relief against the wearisome monotony of the river-banks; it came abreast; and
+ebbed into the backwards of the scene.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The watermen straining at the sweeps, the boat sped into Blackwall Reach,
+Bugsby Marshes a splash of lurid green to port, dreary Cubitt Town and the West
+India Docks to starboard. Here the river ran thick with shipping.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Are we near?” Kirkwood would know; and by way of reply had a grunt of the
+younger waterman.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Again, “Will we make it?” he asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The identical grunt answered him; he was free to interpret it as he would;
+young William—as old Bob named him—had no breath for idle words. Kirkwood
+subsided, controlling his impatience to the best of his ability; the men, he
+told himself again and again, were earning their pay, whether or not they
+gained the goal of his desire.... Their labors were titanic; on their temples
+and foreheads the knotted veins stood out like discolored whip-cord; their
+faces were the shade of raw beef, steaming with sweat; their eyes protruded
+with the strain that set their jaws like vises; their chests heaved and shrank
+like bellows; their backs curved, straightened, and bent again in rhythmic
+unison as tiring to the eye as the swinging of a pendulum.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Hugging the marshy shore, they rounded the Blackwall Point. Young William
+looked to Kirkwood, caught his eye, and nodded.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Here?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Kirkwood rose, balancing himself against the leap and sway of the boat.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Sumwhere’s ... ’long ... o’ ’ere.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+From right to left his eager glance swept the river’s widening reach. Vessels
+were there in abundance, odd, unwieldy, blunt-bowed craft with huge, rakish,
+tawny sails; long strings of flat barges, pyramidal mounds of coal on each,
+lashed to another and convoyed by panting tugs; steam cargo boats, battered,
+worn, rusted sore through their age-old paint; a steel leviathan of the deep
+seas, half cargo, half passenger boat, warping reluctantly into the mouth of
+the Victoria Dock tidal basin,—but no brigantine, no sailing vessel of any
+type.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The young man’s lips checked a cry that was half a sob of bitter
+disappointment. He had entered into the spirit of the chase heart and soul,
+with an enthusiasm that was strange to him, when he came to look back upon the
+time; and to fail, even though failure had been discounted a hundredfold since
+the inception of his mad adventure, seemed hard, very hard.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He sat down suddenly. “She’s gone!” he cried in a hollow gasp.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The boatmen eased upon their oars, and old Bob stood up in the bows, scanning
+the river-scape with keen eyes shielded by a level palm. Young William drooped
+forward suddenly, head upon knees, and breathed convulsively. The boat drifted
+listlessly with the current.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Old Bob panted: “‘Dawn’t—see—nawthin’—o’ ’er.” He resumed his seat.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“There’s no hope, I suppose?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The elder waterman shook his head. “‘Carn’t sye.... Might be round—nex’
+bend—might be—passin’ Purfleet.... ’Point is—me an’ young Wilyum ’ere—carn’t do
+no more—’n we ’as. We be wore out.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes,” Kirkwood assented, disconsolate, “You’ve certainly earned your pay.”
+Then hope revived; he was very young in heart, you know. “Can’t you suggest
+something? I’ve <i>got</i> to catch that ship!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Old Bob wagged his head in slow negation; young William lifted his.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“There’s a rylewye runs by Woolwich,” he ventured. “Yer might tyke tryne an’ go
+to Sheerness, sir. Yer’d be positive o’ passin’ ’er if she didn’t syle afore
+’igh-tide. ’Ire a boat at Sheerness an’ put out an’ look for ’er.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“How far’s Woolwich?” Kirkwood demanded instantly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Mile,” said the elder man. “Tyke yer for five-bob extry.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Done!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Young William dashed the sweat from his eyes, wiped his palms on his hips, and
+fitted the sweeps again to the wooden tholes. Old Bob was as ready. With an
+inarticulate cry they gave way.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap10"></a>X<br/>
+DESPERATE MEASURES</h2>
+
+<p>
+Old Bob seemed something inclined toward optimism, when the boat lay alongside
+a landing-stage at Woolwich, and Kirkwood had clambered ashore.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yer’ll mebbe myke it,” the waterman told him with a weatherwise survey of the
+skies. “Wind’s freshenin’ from the east’rds, an’ that’ll ’old ’er back a bit,
+sir.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Arsk th’ wye to th’ Dorkyard Styshun,” young William volunteered. “’Tis th’
+shortest walk, sir. I ’opes yer catches ’er.... Thanky, sir.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He caught dextrously the sovereign which Kirkwood, in ungrudging liberality,
+spared them of his store of two. The American nodded acknowledgments and
+adieux, with a faded smile deprecating his chances of winning the race, sorely
+handicapped as he was. He was very, very tired, and in his heart suspected that
+he would fail. But, if he did, he would at least be able to comfort himself
+that it was not for lack of trying. He set his teeth on that covenant, in grim
+determination; either there was a strain of the bulldog latent in the Kirkwood
+breed or else his infatuation gripped him more strongly than he guessed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Yet he suspected something of its power; he knew that this was altogether an
+insane proceeding, and that the lure that led him on was Dorothy Calendar. A
+strange dull light glowed in his weary eyes, on the thought of her. He’d go
+through fire and water in her service. She was costing him dear, perhaps was to
+cost him dearer still; and perhaps there’d be for his guerdon no more than a
+“Thank you, Mr. Kirkwood!” at the end of the passage. But that would be no less
+than his deserts; he was not to forget that he was interfering unwarrantably;
+the girl was in her father’s hands, surely safe enough there—to the casual
+mind. If her partnership in her parent’s fortunes were distasteful, she endured
+it passively, without complaint.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He decided that it was his duty to remind himself, from time to time, that his
+main interest must be in the game itself, in the solution of the riddle;
+whatever should befall, he must look for no reward for his gratuitous and
+self-appointed part. Indeed he was all but successful in persuading himself
+that it was the fascination of adventure alone that drew him on.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Whatever the lure, it was inexorable; instead of doing as a sensible person
+would have done—returning to London for a long rest in his hotel room, ere
+striving to retrieve his shattered fortunes—Philip Kirkwood turned up the
+village street, intent only to find the railway station and catch the first
+available train for Sheerness, were that an early one or a late.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A hapchance native whom he presently encountered, furnished minute directions
+for reaching the Dockyard Station of the Southeastern and Chatham Rail-way,
+adding comfortable information to the effect that the next east-bound train
+would pass through in ten minutes; if Kirkwood would mend his pace he could
+make it easily, with time to spare.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Kirkwood mended his pace accordingly, but, contrary to the prediction, had no
+time to spare at all. Even as he stormed the ticket-grating, the train was
+thundering in at the platform. Therefore a nervous ticket agent passed him out
+a first-class ticket instead of the third-class he had asked for; and there was
+no time wherein to have the mistake rectified. Kirkwood planked down the fare,
+swore, and sprinted for the carriages.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The first compartment whose door he jerked violently open, proved to be
+occupied, and was, moreover, not a smoking-car. He received a fleeting
+impression of a woman’s startled eyes, staring into his own through a thin mesh
+of veiling, fell off the running-board, slammed the door, and hurled himself
+to-wards the next compartment. Here happier fortune attended upon his desire;
+the box-like section was untenanted, and a notice blown upon the window-glass
+announced that it was “2nd Class Smoking.” Kirkwood promptly tumbled in; and
+when he turned to shut the door the coaches were moving.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A pipe helped him to bear up while the train was making its two other stops in
+the Borough of Woolwich: a circumstance so maddening to a man in a hurry, that
+it set Kirkwood’s teeth on edge with sheer impatience, and made him long
+fervently for the land of his birth, where they do things differently—where the
+Board of Directors of a railway company doesn’t erect three substantial
+passenger depôts in the course of a mile and a half of overgrown village. It
+consoled him little that none disputed with him his lonely possession of the
+compartment, that he <i>had</i> caught the Sheerness train, or that he was
+really losing no time; a sense of deep dejection had settled down upon his
+consciousness, with a realization of how completely a fool’s errand was this of
+his. He felt foredoomed to failure; he was never to see Dorothy Calendar again;
+and his brain seemed numb with disappointment.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Rattling and swaying, the train left the town behind.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Presently he put aside his pipe and stared blankly out at a reeling landscape,
+the pleasant, homely, smiling countryside of Kent. A deeper melancholy tinted
+his mind: Dorothy Calendar was for ever lost to him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The trucks drummed it out persistently—he thought, vindictively: “<i>Lost!...
+Lost!... For ever lost!...</i>”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And he had made—was then making—a damned fool of himself. The trucks had no
+need to din <i>that</i> into his thick skull by their ceaseless iteration; he
+knew it, would not deny it....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And it was all his own fault. He’d had his chance, Calendar had offered him it.
+If only he had closed with the fat adventurer!...
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Before his eyes field and coppice, hedge and homestead, stream and flowing
+highway, all blurred and ran streakily into one another, like a highly
+impressionistic water-color. He could make neither head nor tail of the flying
+views, and so far as coherent thought was concerned, he could not put two ideas
+together. Without understanding distinctly, he presently did a more wise and
+wholesome thing: which was to topple limply over on the cushions and fall fast
+asleep.
+</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>
+After a long time he seemed to realize rather hazily that the carriage-door had
+been opened to admit somebody. Its smart closing <i>bang</i> shocked him awake.
+He sat up, blinking in confusion, hardly conscious of more, to begin with, than
+that the train had paused and was again in full flight. Then, his senses
+clearing, he became aware that his solitary companion, just entered, was a
+woman. She was seated over across from him, her back to the engine, in an
+attitude which somehow suggested a highly nonchalant frame of mind. She
+laughed, and immediately her speaking voice was high and sweet in his hearing.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Really, you know, Mr. Kirkwood, I simply couldn’t contain my impatience
+another instant.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Kirkwood gasped and tried to re-collect his wits.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Beg pardon—I’ve been asleep,” he said stupidly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes. I’m sorry to have disturbed you, but, you know, you must make allowances
+for a woman’s nerves.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Beneath his breath the bewildered man said: “The deuce!” and above it, in a
+stupefied tone: “Mrs. Hallam!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She nodded in a not unfriendly fashion, smiling brightly. “Myself, Mr.
+Kirkwood! Really, our predestined paths are badly tangled, just now; aren’t
+they? Were you surprised to find me in here, with you? Come now, confess you
+were!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He remarked the smooth, girlish freshness of her cheeks, the sense and humor of
+her mouth, the veiled gleam of excitement in her eyes of the changing sea; and
+saw, as well, that she was dressed for traveling, sensibly but with an air, and
+had brought a small hand-bag with her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Surprised and delighted,” he replied, recovering, with mendacity so
+intentional and obvious that the woman laughed aloud.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I knew you’d be!... You see, I had the carriage ahead, the one you didn’t
+take. I was so disappointed when you flung up to the door and away again! You
+didn’t see me hanging half out the window, to watch where you went, did you?
+That’s how I discovered that your discourtesy was unintentional, that you
+hadn’t recognized me,—by the fact that you took this compartment, right behind
+my own.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She paused invitingly, but Kirkwood, grown wary, contented himself with picking
+up his pipe and carefully knocking out the dottle on the window-ledge.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I was glad to see <i>you</i>,” she affirmed; “but only partly because you were
+you, Mr. Kirkwood. The other and major part was because sight of you confirmed
+my own secret intuition. You see, I’m quite old enough and wise enough to
+question even my own intuitions.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“A woman wise enough for that is an adult prodigy,” he ventured cautiously.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It’s experience and age. I insist upon the age; I the mother of a grown-up
+boy! So I deliberately ran after you, changing when we stopped at Newington.
+You might’ve escaped me if I had waited until We got to Queensborough.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Again she paused in open expectancy. Kirkwood, perplexed, put the pipe in his
+pocket, and assumed a factitious look of resignation, regarding her askance
+with that whimsical twist of his eyebrows.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“For you are going to Queensborough, aren’t you, Mr. Kirkwood?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Queensborough?” he echoed blankly; and, in fact, he was at a loss to follow
+her drift. “No, Mrs. Hallam; I’m not bound there.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Her surprise was apparent; she made no effort to conceal it. “But,” she
+faltered, “if not there—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“’Give you my word, Mrs. Hallam, I have no intention whatever of going to
+Queensborough,” Kirkwood protested.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I don’t understand.” The nervous drumming of a patent-leather covered toe,
+visible beneath the hem of her dress, alone betrayed a rising tide of
+impatience. “Then my intuition <i>was</i> at fault!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“In this instance, if it was at all concerned with my insignificant affairs,
+yes—most decidedly at fault.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She shook her head, regarding him with grave suspicion. “I hardly know: whether
+to believe you. I think....”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Kirkwood’s countenance displayed an added shade of red. After a moment, “I mean
+no discourtesy,” he began stiffly, “but—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“But you don’t care a farthing whether I believe you or not?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He caught her laughing eye, and smiled, the flush subsiding.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Very well, then! Now let us see: Where <i>are</i> you bound?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Kirkwood looked out of the window.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I’m convinced it’s a rendezvous...?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Kirkwood smiled patiently at the landscape.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Is Dorothy Calendar so very, very beautiful, Mr. Kirkwood?”—with a trace of
+malice.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Ostentatiously Kirkwood read the South Eastern and Chatham’s framed card of
+warning, posted just above Mrs. Hallam’s head, to all such incurable lunatics
+as are possessed of a desire to travel on the running-boards of railway
+carriages.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You are going to meet her, aren’t you?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He gracefully concealed a yawn.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The woman’s plan of attack took another form. “Last night, when you told me
+your story, I believed you.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He devoted himself to suppressing the temptingly obvious retort, and succeeded;
+but though he left it unspoken, the humor of it twitched the corners of his
+mouth; and Mrs. Hallam was observant. So that her next attempt to draw him out
+was edged with temper.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I believed you an American but a gentleman; it appears that, if you ever were
+the latter, you’ve fallen so low that you willingly cast your lot with
+thieves.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Having exhausted his repertoire of rudenesses, Kirkwood took to twiddling his
+thumbs.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I want to ask you if you think it fair to me or my son, to leave us in
+ignorance of the place where you are to meet the thieves who stole our—my son’s
+jewels?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Mrs. Hallam,” he said soberly, “if I am going to meet Mr. Calendar or Mr.
+Mulready, I have no assurance of that fact.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was only the briefest of pauses, during which she analyzed this; then,
+quickly, “But you hope to?” she snapped.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He felt that the only adequate retort to this would be a shrug of his
+shoulders; doubted his ability to carry one off; and again took refuge in
+silence.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The woman abandoned a second plan of siege, with a readiness that did credit to
+her knowledge of mankind. She thought out the next very carefully, before
+opening with a masked battery.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Mr. Kirkwood, can’t we be friends—this aside?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Nothing could please me more, Mrs. Hallam!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I’m sorry if I’ve annoyed you—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“And I, too, have been rude.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Last night, when you cut away so suddenly, you prevented my making you a
+proposal, a sort of a business proposition....”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes—?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“To come over to our side—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I thought so. That was why I went.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes; I understood. But this morning, when you’ve had time to think it over—?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I have no choice in the matter, Mrs. Hallam.” The green eyes darkened
+ominously. “You mean—I am to understand, then, that you’re against us, that you
+prefer to side with swindlers and scoundrels, all because of a—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She discovered him eying her with a smile of such inscrutable and sardonic
+intelligence, that the words died on her lips, and she crimsoned, treasonably
+to herself. For he saw it; and the belief he had conceived while attending to
+her tissue of fabrication, earlier that morning, was strengthened to the point
+of conviction that, if anything had been stolen by anybody, Mrs. Hallam and her
+son owned it as little as Calendar.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As for the woman, she felt she had steadily lost, rather than gained, ground;
+and the flash of anger that had colored her cheeks, lit twin beacons in her
+eyes, which she resolutely fought down until they faded to mere gleams of
+resentment and determination. But she forgot to control her lips; and they are
+the truest indices to a woman’s character and temperament; and Kirkwood did not
+overlook the circumstance that their specious sweetness had vanished, leaving
+them straight, set and hard, quite the reverse of attractive.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“So,” she said slowly, after a silent time, “you are not for Queensborough! The
+corollary of that <i>admission</i>, Mr. Kirkwood, is that you are for
+Sheerness.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I believe,” he replied wearily, “that there are no other stations on this
+line, after Newington.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It follows, then, that—that I follow.” And in answer to his perturbed glance,
+she added: “Oh, I’ll grant that intuition is sometimes a poor guide. But if you
+meet George Calendar, so shall I. Nothing can prevent that. You can’t hinder
+me.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Considerably amused, he chuckled. “Let us talk of other things, Mrs. Hallam,”
+he suggested pleasantly. “How is your son?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At this juncture the brakes began to shriek and grind upon the wheels. The
+train slowed; it stopped; and the voice of a guard could be heard admonishing
+passengers for Queensborough Pier to alight and take the branch line. In the
+noise the woman’s response was drowned, and Kirkwood was hardly enough
+concerned for poor Freddie to repeat his question.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When, after a little, the train pulled out of the junction, neither found
+reason to resume the conversation. During the brief balance of the journey Mrs.
+Hallam presumably had food for thought; she frowned, pursed her lips, and with
+one daintily gloved forefinger followed a seam of her tailored skirt; while
+Kirkwood sat watching and wondering how to rid himself of her, if she proved
+really as troublesome as she threatened to be.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Also, he wondered continually what it was all about. Why did Mrs. Hallam
+suspect him of designing to meet Calendar at Queensborough? Had she any
+tangible ground for believing that Calendar could be found in Queensborough?
+Presumably she had, since she was avowedly in pursuit of that gentleman, and,
+Kirkwood inferred, had booked for Queensborough. Was he, then, running away
+from Calendar and his daughter to chase a will-o’-the-wisp of his credulous
+fancy, off Sheerness shore?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Disturbing reflection. He scowled over it, then considered the other side of
+the face. Presuming Mrs. Hallam to have had reasonably dependable assurance
+that Calendar would stop in Queensborough, would she so readily have abandoned
+her design to catch him there, on the mere supposition that Kirkwood might be
+looking for him in Sheerness? That did not seem likely to one who esteemed Mrs.
+Hallam’s acumen as highly as Kirkwood did. He brightened up, forgot that his
+was a fool’s errand, and began again to project strategic plans into a
+problematic future.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A sudden jolt interrupted this pastime, and the warning screech of the brakes
+informed that he had no time to scheme, but had best continue on the plan of
+action that had brought him thus far—that is, trust to his star and accept what
+should befall without repining.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He rose, opened the door, and holding it so, turned.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I regret, Mrs. Hallam,” he announced, smiling his crooked smile, “that a
+pressing engagement is about to prohibit my ’squiring you through the
+ticket-gates. You understand, I’m sure.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His irrepressible humor proved infectious; and Mrs. Hallam’s spirit ran as high
+as his own. She was smiling cheerfully when she, too, rose.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I also am in some haste,” she averred demurely, gathering up her hand-bag and
+umbrella.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A raised platform shot in beside the carriage, and the speed was so sensibly
+moderated that the train seemed to be creeping rather than running. Kirkwood
+flung the door wide open and lowered himself to the running-board. The end of
+the track was in sight and—a man who has been trained to board San Francisco
+cable-cars fears to alight from no moving vehicle. He swung off, got his
+balance, and ran swiftly down the platform.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A cry from a bystander caused him to glance over his shoulder; Mrs. Hallam was
+then in the act of alighting. As he looked the flurry of skirts subsided and
+she fell into stride, pursuing.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Sleepy Sheerness must have been scandalized, that day, and its gossips have
+acquired ground for many, an uncharitable surmise.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Kirkwood, however, was so fortunate as to gain the wicket before the employee
+there awoke to the situation. Otherwise, such is the temper of British petty
+officialdom, he might have detained the fugitive. As it was, Kirkwood
+surrendered his ticket and ran out into the street with his luck still a
+dominant factor in the race. For, looking back, he saw that Mrs. Hallam had
+been held up at the gate, another victim of British red-tape; her ticket read
+for Queensborough, she was attempting to alight one station farther down the
+line, and while undoubtedly she was anxious to pay the excess fare, Heaven
+alone knew when she would succeed in allaying the suspicions and resentment of
+the ticket-taker.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“That’s good for ten minutes’ start!” Kirkwood crowed. “And it never occurred
+to me—!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Before the station he found two hacks in waiting, with little to choose between
+them; neither was of a type that did not seem to advertise its pre-Victorian
+fashioning, and to neither was harnessed an animal that deserved anything but
+the epithet of screw. Kirkwood took the nearest for no other reason than
+because it was the nearest, and all but startled the driver off his box by
+offering double-fare for a brisk pace and a simple service at the end of the
+ride. Succinctly he set forth his wants, jumped into the antiquated
+four-wheeler, and threw himself down upon musty, dusty cushions to hug himself
+over the joke and bless whatever English board of railway, directors it was
+that first ordained that tickets should be taken up at the end instead of the
+outset of a journey.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was promptly made manifest that he had further cause for gratulation. The
+cabby, recovering from his amazement, was plying an indefatigable whip and
+thereby eliciting a degree of speed from his superannuated nag, that his fare
+had by no means hoped for, much less anticipated. The cab rocked and racketed
+through Sheerness’ streets at a pace which is believed to be unprecedented and
+unrivaled; its passenger, dashed from side to side, had all he could do to keep
+from battering the vehicle to pieces with his head; while it was entirely out
+of the question to attempt to determine whether or not he was being pursued. He
+enjoyed it all hugely.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In a period of time surprisingly short, he saw, from fleeting glimpses of the
+scenery to be obtained through the reeling windows, that they were threading
+the outskirts of the town; synchronously, whether by design or through actual
+inability to maintain it, the speed was moderated. And in the course of a few
+more minutes the cab stopped definitely.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Kirkwood clambered painfully out, shook himself together and the bruises out of
+his bones, and looked fearfully back.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Aside from a slowly settling cloud of dust, the road ran clear as far as he
+could see—to the point, in fact, where the town closed in about it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He had won; at all events in so much as to win meant eluding the persevering
+Mrs. Hallam. But to what end?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Abstractedly he tendered his lonely sovereign to the driver, and without even
+looking at it, crammed the heavy weight of change into his pocket; an oversight
+which not only won him the awe-struck admiration of the cabby, but entailed
+consequences (it may be) he little apprehended. It was with an absentminded nod
+that he acquiesced in the man’s announcement that he might arrange about the
+boat for him. Accordingly the cabby disappeared; and Kirkwood continued to
+stare about him, eagerly, hopefully.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He stood on the brink of the Thames estuary, there a possible five miles from
+shore to shore; from his feet, almost, a broad shingle beach sloped gently to
+the water.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+On one hand a dilapidated picket-fence enclosed the door-yard of a fisherman’s
+cottage, or, better, hovel,—if it need be accurately described—at the door of
+which the cabby was knocking.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The morning was now well-advanced. The sun rode high, a sphere of tarnished
+flame in a void of silver-gray, its thin cold radiance striking pallid sparks
+from the leaping crests of wind-whipped waves. In the east a wall of vapor,
+dull and lusterless, had taken body since the dawn, masking the skies and
+shutting down upon the sea like some vast curtain; and out of the heart of this
+a bitter and vicious wind played like a sword.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To the north, Shoeburyness loomed vaguely, like a low-drifted bank of cloud.
+Off to the right the Nore Lightship danced, a tiny fleck of warm crimson in a
+wilderness of slatey-blue waters, plumed with a myriad of vanishing white-caps.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Up the shelving shore, small, puny wavelets dashed in impotent fury, and the
+shingle sang unceasingly its dreary, syncopated monotone. High and dry, a few
+dingy boats lay canted wearily upon their broad, swelling sides,—a couple of
+dories, apparently in daily use; a small sloop yacht, dismantled and plainly
+beyond repair; and an oyster-smack also out of commission. About them the beach
+was strewn with a litter of miscellany,—nets, oars, cork buoys, bits of
+wreckage and driftwood, a few fish too long forgotten and (one assumed)
+responsible in part for the foreign wealth of the atmosphere.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Some little distance offshore a fishing-boat, catrigged and not more than
+twenty-feet over all, swung bobbing at her mooring, keen nose searching into
+the wind; at sight of which Kirkwood gave thanks, for his adventitious guide
+had served him well, if that boat were to be hired by any manner of persuasion.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But it was to the farther reaches of the estuary that he gave more prolonged
+and most anxious heed, scanning narrowly what shipping was there to be seen.
+Far beyond the lightship a liner was riding the waves with serene contempt,
+making for the river’s mouth and Tilbury Dock. Nearer in, a cargo boat was
+standing out upon the long trail, the white of riven waters showing clearly
+against her unclean freeboard. Out to east a little covey of fishing-smacks,
+red sails well reefed, were scudding before the wind like strange affrighted
+water-fowl, and bearing down past a heavy-laden river barge. The latter, with
+tarpaulin battened snugly down over the cockpit and the seas dashing over her
+wash-board until she seemed under water half the time, was forging stodgily
+Londonwards, her bargee at the tiller smoking a placid pipe.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But a single sailing vessel of any notable tonnage was in sight; and when he
+saw her Kirkwood’s heart became buoyant with hope, and he began to tremble with
+nervous eagerness. For he believed her to be the <i>Alethea</i>.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There’s no mistaking a ship brigantine-rigged for any other style of craft that
+sails the seas.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+From her position when first he saw her, Kirkwood could have fancied she was
+tacking out of the mouth of the Medway; but he judged that, leaving the Thames’
+mouth, she had tacked to starboard until well-nigh within hail of Sheerness.
+Now, having presumably, gone about, she was standing out toward the Nore,
+boring doggedly into the wind. He would have given a deal for glasses wherewith
+to read the name upon her bows, but was sensible of no hampering doubts; nor,
+had he harbored any, would they have deterred him. He had set his heart upon
+the winning of his venture, had come too far, risked far too much, to suffer
+anything now to stay his hand and stand between him and Dorothy Calendar.
+Whatever the further risks and hazards, though he should take his life in his
+hands to win to her side, he would struggle on. He recked nothing of personal
+danger; a less selfish passion ran molten in his veins, moving him to madness.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Fascinated, he fixed his gaze upon the reeling brigantine, and for a space it
+was as if by longing he had projected his spirit to her slanting deck, and were
+there, pleading his case with the mistress of his heart....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Voices approaching brought him back to shore. He turned, resuming his mask of
+sanity, the better to confer with the owner of the cottage and boats—a heavy,
+keen-eyed fellow, ungracious and truculent of habit, and chary of his words; as
+he promptly demonstrated.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I’ll hire your boat,” Kirkwood told him, “to put me aboard that brigantine,
+off to leeward. We ought to start at once.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The fisherman shifted his quid of tobacco from cheek to cheek, grunted
+inarticulately, and swung deliberately on his heel, displaying a bull neck
+above a pair of heavy shoulders.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Dirty weather,” he croaked, facing back from his survey of the eastern skies
+before the American found out whether or not he should resent his insolence.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“How much?” Kirkwood demanded curtly, annoyed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The man hesitated, scowling blackly at the heeling vessel, momentarily
+increasing her distance from shore. Then with a crafty smile, “Two pound’,” he
+declared.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The American nodded. “Very well,” he agreed simply. “Get out your boat.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The fisherman turned away to shamble noisily over the shingle, huge booted
+heels crunching, toward one of the dories. To this he set his shoulder, shoving
+it steadily down the beach until only the stern was dry.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Kirkwood looked back, for the last time, up the road to Sheerness. Nothing
+moved upon it. He was rid of Mrs. Hallam, if face to face with a sterner
+problem. He had a few pence over ten shillings in his pocket, and had promised
+to pay the man four times as much. He would have agreed to ten times the sum
+demanded; for the boat he must and would have. But he had neglected to conclude
+his bargain, to come to an understanding as to the method of payment; and he
+felt more than a little dubious as to the reception the fisherman would give
+his proposition, sound as he, Kirkwood, knew it to be.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the background the cabby loitered, gnawed by insatiable curiosity.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The fisherman turned, calling over his shoulder: “If ye’d catch yon vessel,
+come!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+With one final twinge of doubt—the task of placating this surly dog was
+anything but inviting—the American strode to the boat and climbed in, taking
+the stern seat. The fisherman shoved off, wading out thigh-deep in the spiteful
+waves, then threw himself in over the gunwales and shipped the oars. Bows
+swinging offshore, rocking and dancing, the dory began to forge slowly toward
+the anchored boat. In their faces the wind beat gustily, and small, slapping
+waves, breaking against the sides, showered them with fine spray....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In time the dory lay alongside the cat-boat, the fisherman with a gnarled hand
+grasping the latter’s gunwale to hold the two together. With some difficulty
+Kirkwood transhipped himself, landing asprawl in the cockpit, amid a tangle of
+cordage slippery with scales. The skipper followed, with clumsy expertness
+bringing the dory’s painter with him and hitching it to a ring-bolt abaft the
+rudder-head. Then, pausing an instant to stare into the East with somber eyes,
+he shipped the tiller and bent to the halyards. As the sail rattled up,
+flapping wildly, Kirkwood marked with relief—for it meant so much time
+saved—that it was already close reefed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But when at least the boom was thrashing overhead and the halyards had been
+made fast to their cleats, the fisherman again stood erect, peering
+distrustfully at the distant wall of cloud.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then, in two breaths: “Can’t do it,” he decided; “not at the price.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Why?” Kirkwood stared despairingly after the brigantine, that was already
+drawn far ahead.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Danger,” growled the fellow, “—wind.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At a loss completely, Kirkwood found no words. He dropped his head,
+considering.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Not at the price,” the sullen voice iterated; and he looked up to find the
+cunning gaze upon him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“How much, then?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Five poun’ I’ll have—no less, for riskin’ my life this day.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Impossible. I haven’t got it.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In silence the man unshipped the tiller and moved toward the cleats.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Hold on a minute.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Kirkwood unbuttoned his coat and, freeing the chain from his waistcoat
+buttonholes, removed his watch.... As well abandon them altogether; he had
+designed to leave them as security for the two pounds, and had delayed stating
+the terms only for fear lest they be refused. Now, too late as ever, he
+recognized his error. But surely, he thought, it should be apparent even to
+that low intelligence that the timepiece alone was worth more than the boat
+itself.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Will you take these?” he offered. “Take and keep them—only set me aboard that
+ship!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Deliberately the fisherman weighed the watch and chain in his broad, hard palm,
+eyes narrowing to mere slits in his bronzed mask.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“How much?” he asked slowly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Eighty pounds, together; the chain alone cost me twenty.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The shifty, covetous eyes ranged from the treasure in his hand to the
+threatening east. A puff of wind caught the sail and sent the boom
+athwartships, like a mighty flail. Both men ducked instinctively, to escape a
+braining.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“How do I know?” objected the skipper.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I’m telling you. If you’ve got eyes, you can see,” retorted Kirkwood savagely,
+seeing that he had erred in telling the truth; the amount he had named was too
+great to be grasped at once by this crude, cupidous brain.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“How do I know?” the man repeated. Nevertheless he dropped watch and chain into
+his pocket, then with a meaning grimace extended again his horny, greedy palm.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What...?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Hand over th’ two pound’ and we’ll go.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I’ll see you damned first!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A flush of rage blinded the young man. The knowledge that the <i>Alethea</i>
+was minute by minute slipping beyond his reach seemed to madden him.
+White-lipped and ominously quiet he rose from his seat on the combing, as,
+without answer, the fisherman, crawling out on the overhand, began to haul in
+the dory.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Ashore ye go,” he pronounced his ultimatum, motioning Kirkwood to enter the
+boat.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The American turned, looking for the <i>Alethea</i>, or for the vessel that he
+believed bore that name. She was nearing the light-ship when he found her, and
+as he looked a squall blurred the air between them, blotting the brigantine out
+with a smudge of rain. The effect was as if she had vanished, as if she were
+for ever snatched from his grasp; and with Dorothy aboard her—Heaven alone knew
+in what need of him!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mute and blind with despair and wrath, he turned upon the man and caught him by
+the collar, forcing him out over the lip of the overhang. They were unevenly
+matched, Kirkwood far the slighter, but strength came to him in the crisis,
+physical strength and address such as he had not dreamed was at his command.
+And the surprise of his onslaught proved an ally of unguessed potency. Before
+he himself knew it he was standing on the overhang and had shifted his hold to
+seize the fellow about the waist; then, lifting him clear of the deck, and
+aided by a lurch of the cat-boat, he cast him bodily into the dory. The man,
+falling, struck his head against one of the thwarts, a glancing blow that
+stunned him temporarily. Kirkwood himself dropped as if shot, a trailing
+reef-point slapping his cheek until it stung as the boom thrashed overhead. It
+was as close a call as he had known; the knowledge sickened him a little.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Without rising he worked the painter loose and cast the dory adrift; then
+crawled back into the cockpit. No pang of compassion disturbed him as he
+abandoned the fisherman to the mercy of the sea; though the fellow lay still,
+uncouthly distorted, in the bottom of the dory, he was in no danger; the wind
+and waves together would carry the boat ashore.... For that matter, the man was
+even then recovering, struggling to sit up.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Crouching to avoid the boom, Kirkwood went forward to the bows, and, grasping
+the mooring cable, drew it in, slipping back into the cockpit to get a stronger
+purchase with his feet. It was a struggle; the boat pulled sluggishly against
+the wind, the cable inching in jealously. And behind him he could hear a voice
+bellowing inarticulate menaces, and knew that in another moment the fisherman
+would be at his oars. Frantically he tugged and tore at the slimy rope, hauling
+with a will and a prayer. It gave more readily, towards the end, but he seemed
+to have fought with it for ages when at last the anchor tripped and he got it
+in.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Immediately he leaped back to the stern, fitted in the tiller, and seizing the
+mainsheet, drew the boom in till the wind should catch in the canvas. In the
+dory the skipper, bending at his oars, was not two yards astern.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was hard aboard when, the sail filling with a bang, Kirkwood pulled the
+tiller up; and the cat-boat slid away, a dozen feet separating them in a
+breath.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A yell of rage boomed down the wind, but he paid no heed. Careless alike of the
+dangers he had passed and those that yawned before him, he trimmed the sheet
+and stood away on the port tack, heading directly for the Nore Lightship.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap11"></a>XI<br/>
+OFF THE NORE</h2>
+
+<p>
+Kirkwood’s anger cooled apace; at worst it had been a flare of
+passion—incandescent. It was seldom more. His brain clearing, the temperature
+of his judgment quickly regained its mean, and he saw his chances without
+distortion, weighed them without exaggeration.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Leaning against the combing, feet braced upon the slippery and treacherous
+deck, he clung to tiller and mainsheet and peered ahead with anxious eyes, a
+pucker of daring graven deep between his brows.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A mile to westward, three or more ahead, he could see the brigantine standing
+close in under the Essex shore. At times she was invisible; again he could
+catch merely the glint of her canvas, white against the dark loom of the
+littoral, toned by a mist of flying spindrift. He strained his eyes, watching
+for the chance which would take place in the rake of her masts and sails, when
+she should come about.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For the longer that manoeuver was deferred, the better was his chance of
+attaining his object. It was a forlorn hope. But in time the brigantine, to
+escape Maplin Sands, would be forced to tack and stand out past the lightship,
+the wind off her port bows. Then their courses would intersect. It remained to
+be demonstrated whether the cat-boat was speedy enough to arrive at this point
+of contact in advance of, or simultaneously with, the larger vessel. Every
+minute that the putative <i>Alethea</i> put off coming about brought the
+cat-boat nearer that goal, but Kirkwood could do no more than hope and try to
+trust in the fisherman’s implied admission that it could be done. It was all in
+the boat and the way she handled.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He watched her anxiously, quick to approve her merits as she displayed them. He
+had sailed small craft before—frail center-board cat-boats, handy and swift,
+built to serve in summer winds and protected waters: never such an one as this.
+Yet he liked her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Deep bosomed she was, with no center-board, dependent on her draught and heavy
+keel to hold her on the wind; stanch and seaworthy, sheathed with stout plank
+and ribbed with seasoned timber, designed to keep afloat in the wickedest
+weather brewed by the foul-tempered German Ocean. Withal her lines were fine
+and clean; for all her beam she was calculated to nose narrowly into the wind
+and make a pretty pace as well. A good boat: he had the grace to give the
+credit to his luck.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Her disposition was more fully disclosed as they drew away from the beach.
+Inshore with shoaling water, the waves had been choppy and spiteful but lacking
+force of weight. Farther out, as the bottom fell away, the rollers became more
+uniform and powerful; heavy sweeping seas met the cat-boat, from their hollows
+looming mountainous to the man in the tiny cockpit; who was nevertheless aware
+that to a steamer they would be negligible.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His boat breasted them gallantly, toiling sturdily up the steep acclivities,
+poising breathlessly on foam-crested summits for dizzy instants, then plunging
+headlong down the deep green swales; and left a boiling wake behind her,—urging
+ever onward, hugging the wind in her wisp of blood-red sail, and boring into
+it, pulling at the tiller with the mettle of a race-horse slugging at the bit.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Offshore, too, the wind stormed with added strength, or, possibly, had
+freshened. For minutes on end the leeward gunwales would run green, and now and
+again the screaming, pelting squalls that scoured the estuary would heel her
+over until the water cascaded in over the lee combing, and the rudder, lifted
+clear, would hang idle until, smitten by some racing billow, the tiller would
+be all but torn from Kirkwood’s hands. Again and again this happened; and those
+were times of trembling. But always the cat-boat righted, shaking the clinging
+waters from her and swinging her stem into the wind again; and there would
+follow an abbreviated breathing spell, during which Kirkwood was at liberty to
+dash the salt spray from his eyes and search the wind-harried waste for the
+brigantine. Sometimes he found her, sometimes not.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Long after he had expected her to, she went about and they began to close in
+upon each other. He could see that even with shortened canvas she was
+staggering drunkenly under the fierce impacts of the wind. For himself, it was
+nip-and-tuck, now, and no man in his normal sense would have risked a sixpence
+on the boat’s chance to live until she crossed the brigantine’s bows.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Time out of reckoning he was forced to kneel in the swimming cockpit, steering
+with one hand, using the bailing-dish with the other, and keeping his eyes
+religiously turned to the bellying patch of sail. It was heartbreaking toil; he
+began reluctantly to concede that it could not last much longer. And if he
+missed the brigantine he would be lost; mortal strength was not enough to stand
+the unending strain upon every bone, muscle and sinew, required to keep the
+boat upon her course; though for a time it might cope with and solve the
+problems presented by each new, malignant billow and each furious, howling
+squall, the end inevitably must be failure. To struggle on would be but to
+postpone the certain end ... save and except the possibility of his gaining the
+brigantine within the period of time strictly and briefly limited by his powers
+of endurance.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Long since he had become numb with cold from incessant drenchings of icy spray,
+that piled in over the windward counter, keeping the bottom ankle-deep
+regardless of his laborious but intermittent efforts with the bailing dish. And
+the two, brigantine and cockle-shell, were drawing together with appalling
+deliberation.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A dozen times he was on the point of surrender, as often plucked up hope; as
+the minutes wore on and he kept above water, he began to believe that if he
+could stick it out his judgment and seamanship would be justified ... though
+human ingenuity backed by generosity could by no means contrive adequate excuse
+for his foolhardiness.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But that was aside, something irreparable. Wan and grim, he fought it out.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But that his voice stuck in his parched throat, he could have shouted in his
+elation, when eventually he gained the point of intersection an eighth of a
+mile ahead of the brigantine and got sight of her windward freeboard as, most
+slowly, the cat-boat forged across her course.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For all that, the moment of his actual triumph was not yet; he had still to
+carry off successfully a scheme that for sheer audacity of conception and
+contempt for danger, transcended all that had gone before.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Holding the cat-boat on for a time, he brought her about handsomely a little
+way beyond the brigantine’s course, and hung in the eye of the wind, the leach
+flapping and tightening with reports like rifle-shots, and the water sloshing
+about his calves—bailing-dish now altogether out of mind—while he watched the
+oncoming vessel, his eyes glistening with anticipation.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She was footing it smartly, the brigantine—lying down to it and snoring into
+the wind. Beneath her stem waves broke in snow-white showers, whiter than the
+canvas of her bulging jib—broke and, gnashing their teeth in impotent fury,
+swirled and eddied down her sleek dark flanks. Bobbing, courtesying, she
+plunged onward, shortening the interval with mighty, leaping bounds. On her
+bows, with each instant, the golden letters of her name grew larger and more
+legible until—<i>Alethea</i>!—he could read it plain beyond dispute.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Joy welled in his heart. He forgot all that he had undergone in the prospect of
+what he proposed still to do in the name of the only woman the world held for
+him. Unquestioning he had come thus far in her service; unquestioning, by her
+side, he was prepared to go still farther, though all humanity should single
+her out with accusing fingers....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They were watching him, aboard the brigantine; he could see a line of heads
+above her windward rail. Perhaps <i>she</i> was of their number. He waved an
+audacious hand. Some one replied, a great shout shattering itself
+unintelligibly against the gale. He neither understood nor attempted to reply;
+his every faculty was concentrated on the supreme moment now at hand.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Calculating the instant to a nicety, he paid off the sheet and pulled up the
+tiller. The cat-boat pivoted on her heel; with a crack her sail flapped full
+and rigid; then, with the untempered might of the wind behind her, she shot
+like an arrow under the brigantine’s bows, so close that the bowsprit of the
+latter first threatened to impale the sail, next, the bows plunging, crashed
+down a bare two feet behind the cat-boat’s stern.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Working in a frenzy of haste, Kirkwood jammed the tiller hard alee, bringing
+the cat about, and, trimming the mainsheet as best he might, found himself
+racing under the brigantine’s leeward quarter,—water pouring in generously over
+the cat’s.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Luffing, he edged nearer, handling his craft as though intending to ram the
+larger vessel, foot by foot shortening the little interval. When it was four
+feet, he would risk the jump; he crawled out on the overhang, crouching on his
+toes, one hand light upon the tiller, the other touching the deck, ready ...
+ready....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Abruptly the <i>Alethea</i> shut off the wind; the sail flattened and the cat
+dropped back. In a second the distance had doubled. In anguish Kirkwood uttered
+an exceeding bitter cry. Already he was falling far off her counter....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A shout reached him. He was dimly conscious of a dark object hurtling through
+the air. Into the cockpit, splashing, something dropped—a coil of rope. He fell
+forward upon it, into water eighteen inches deep; and for the first time
+realized that, but for that line, he had gone to his drowning in another
+minute. The cat was sinking.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As he scrambled to his feet, clutching the life-line, a heavy wave washed over
+the water-logged craft and left it all but submerged; and a smart tug on the
+rope added point to the advice which, reaching his ears in a bellow like a
+bull’s, penetrated the panic of his wits.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Jump! <i>Jump, you fool</i>!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In an instant of coherence he saw that the brigantine was luffing; none the
+less much of the line had already been paid out, and there was no reckoning
+when the end would be reached. Without time to make it fast, he hitched it
+twice round his waist and chest, once round an arm, and, grasping it above his
+head to ease its constriction when the tug should come, leaped on the combing
+and overboard. A green roaring avalanche swept down upon him and the luckless
+cat-boat, overwhelming both simultaneously.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The agony that was his during the next few minutes can by no means be
+exaggerated. With such crises the human mind is not fitted adequately to cope;
+it retains no record of the supreme moment beyond a vague and incoherent
+impression of poignant, soul-racking suffering. Kirkwood underwent a prolonged
+interval of semi-sentience, his mind dominated and oppressed by a deathly fear
+of drowning and a deadening sense of suffocation, with attendant tortures as of
+being broken on the wheel—limb rending from limb; of compression of his ribs
+that threatened momentarily to crush in his chest; of a world a-welter with dim
+swirling green half-lights alternating with flashes of blinding white; of
+thunderings in his ears like salvoes from a thousand cannon....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And his senses were blotted out in blackness....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then he was breathing once more, the keen clean air stabbing his lungs, the
+while he swam unsupported in an ethereal void of brilliance. His mouth was full
+of something that burned, a liquid hot, acrid, and stinging. He gulped,
+swallowed, slobbered, choked, coughed, attempted to sit up, was aware that he
+was the focal center of a ring of glaring, burning eyes, like eyes of ravening
+beasts; and fainted.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His next conscious impression was of standing up, supported by friendly arms on
+either side, while somebody was asking him if he could walk a step or two.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He lifted his head and let it fall in token of assent, mumbling a yes; and
+looked round him with eyes wherein the light of intelligence burned more clear
+with every second. By degrees he catalogued and comprehended his weirdly
+altered circumstances and surroundings.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was partly seated, partly held up, on the edge of the cabin sky-light, an
+object of interest to some half-dozen men, seafaring fellows all, by their
+habit, clustered round between him and the windward rail. Of their number one
+stood directly before him, dwarfing his companions as much by his air of
+command as by his uncommon height: tall, thin-faced and sallow, with hollow
+weather-worn cheeks, a mouth like a crooked gash from ear to ear, and eyes like
+dying coals, with which he looked the rescued up and down in one grim,
+semi-humorous, semi-speculative glance. In hands both huge and red he fondled
+tenderly a squat brandy flask whose contents had apparently been employed as a
+first aid to the drowning.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As Kirkwood’s gaze encountered his, the man smiled sourly, jerking his head to
+one side with a singularly derisive air.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Hi, matey!” he blustered. “’Ow goes it now? Feelin’ ’appier, eigh?”
+</p>
+
+<div class="fig" style="width:100%;">
+<a name="illus06"></a>
+<img src="images/img06.jpg" width="526" height="600" alt="[Illustration: ]" />
+<p class="caption">“Hi, matey!” he blustered. “’Ow goes it now?”</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+“Some, thank you ... more like a drowned rat.” Kirkwood eyed him sheepishly. “I
+suppose you’re the man who threw me that line? I’ll have to wait till my head
+clears up before I can thank you properly.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Don’t mention it.” He of the lantern jaws stowed the bottle away with jealous
+care in one of his immense coat pockets, and seized Kirkwood’s hand in a grasp
+that made the young man wince. “You’re syfe enough now. My nyme’s Stryker,
+Capt’n Wilyum Stryker.... Wot’s the row? Lookin’ for a friend?” he demanded
+suddenly, as Kirkwood’s attention wandered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For the memory of the errand that had brought him into the hands of Captain
+William Stryker had come to the young man very suddenly; and his eager eyes
+were swiftly roving not along the decks but the wide world besides, for sight
+or sign of his heart’s desire.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+After luffing to pick him up, the brigantine had been again pulled off on the
+port tack. The fury of the gale seemed rather to have waxed than waned, and the
+<i>Alethea</i> was bending low under the relentless fury of its blasts, driving
+hard, with leeward channels awash. Under her port counter, a mile away, the
+crimson light-ship wallowed in a riot of breaking combers. Sheerness lay abeam,
+five miles or more. Ahead the northeast headland of the Isle of Sheppey was
+bulking large and near. The cat-boat had vanished....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+More important still, no one aboard the brigantine resembled in the remotest
+degree either of the Calendars, father or daughter, or even Mulready, the
+black-avised.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I sye, ’re you lookin’ for some one you know?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes—your passengers. I presume they’re below—?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Passengers!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A hush fell upon the group, during which Kirkwood sought Stryker’s eye in
+pitiful pleading; and Stryker looked round him blankly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Where’s Miss Calendar?” the young man demanded sharply. “I must see her at
+once!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The keen and deep-set eyes of the skipper clouded as they returned to
+Kirkwood’s perturbed countenance. “Wot’re you talking about?” he demanded
+brusquely.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I must see Miss Calendar, or Calendar himself, or Mulready.” Kirkwood paused,
+and, getting no reply, grew restive under Stryker’s inscrutable regard.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“That’s why I came aboard,” he amended, blind to the absurdity of the
+statement; “to see—er—Calendar.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Well ... I’m damned!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Stryker managed to infuse into his tone a deal of suspicious contempt.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Why?” insisted Kirkwood, nettled but still uncomprehending.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“D’you mean to tell me you came off from—wherever in ’ell you did come
+from—intendin’ to board this wessel and find a party nymed Calendar?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Certainly I did. Why—?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Well!” cried Mr. Stryker, rubbing his hands together with an air oppressively
+obsequious, “I’m sorry to <i>hin</i>-form you you’ve come to the wrong shop,
+sir; we don’t stock no Calendars. We’re in the ’ardware line, we are. You might
+try next door, or I dessay you’ll find what you want at the stytioner’s, round
+the corner.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A giggle from his audience stimulated him. “If,” he continued acidly, “I’d
+a-guessed you was such a damn’ fool, blimmy if I wouldn’t’ve let you drownd!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Staggered, Kirkwood bore his sarcastic truculence without resentment.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Calendar,” he stammered, trying to explain, “Calendar <i>said</i>—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I carn’t ’elp wot Calendar said. Mebbe ’e <i>did</i> myke an engygement with
+you, an’ you’ve gone and went an’ forgot the dyte. Mebbe it’s larst year’s
+calendar you’re thinkin’ of. You Johnny” (to a lout of a boy in the group of
+seamen), “you run an’ fetch this gentleman Whitaker’s for Nineteen-six. Look
+sharp, now!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“But—!” With an effort Kirkwood mustered up a show of dignity. “Am I to
+understand,” he said, as calmly as he could, “that you deny knowing George B.
+Calendar and his daughter Dorothy and—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I don’t ’ave to. Listen to me, young man.” For the time the fellow discarded
+his clumsy facetiousness. “I’m Wilyum Stryker, Capt’n Stryker, marster and
+’arf-owner of this wessel, and wot I says ’ere is law. We don’t carry no
+passengers. D’ye understand me?”—aggressively. “There ain’t no pusson nymed
+Calendar aboard the <i>Allytheer</i>, an’ never was, an’ never will be!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What name did you say?” Kirkwood inquired.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“This ship? The <i>Allytheer</i>; registered from Liverpool; bound from London
+to Hantwerp, in cargo. Anythink else?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Kirkwood shook his head, turning to scan the seascape with a gloomy gaze. As he
+did so, and remarked how close upon the Sheppey headland the brigantine had
+drawn, the order was given to go about. For the moment he was left alone,
+wretchedly wet, shivering, wan and shrunken visibly with the knowledge that he
+had dared greatly for nothing. But for the necessity of keeping up before
+Stryker and his crew, the young man felt that he could gladly have broken down
+and wept for sheer vexation and disappointment.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Smartly the brigantine luffed and wore about, heeling deep as she spun away on
+the starboard tack.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Kirkwood staggered round the skylight to the windward rail. From this position,
+looking forward, he could see that they were heading for the open sea, Foulness
+low over the port quarter, naught before them but a brawling waste of
+leaden-green and dirty white. Far out one of the sidewheel boats of the
+Queensborough-Antwerp line was heading directly into the wind and making heavy
+weather of it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Some little while later, Stryker again approached him, perhaps swayed by an
+unaccustomed impulse of compassion; which, however, he artfully concealed.
+Blandly ironic, returning to his impersonation of the shopkeeper, “Nothink else
+we can show you, sir?” he inquired.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I presume you couldn’t put me ashore?” Kirkwood replied ingenuously.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In supreme disgust the captain showed him his back. “’Ere, you!” he called to
+one of the crew. “Tyke this awye—tyke ’im below and put ’im to bed; give ’im a
+drink and dry ’is clo’s. Mebbe ’e’ll be better when ’e wykes up. ’E don’t talk
+sense now, that’s sure. If you arsk me, I sye ’e’s balmy and no ’ope for ’im.”
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap12"></a>XII<br/>
+PICARESQUE PASSAGES</h2>
+
+<p>
+Contradictory to the hopeful prognosis of Captain Stryker, his unaccredited
+passenger was not “better” when, after a period of oblivious rest indefinite in
+duration, he awoke. His subsequent assumption of listless resignation, of
+pacific acquiescence in the dictates of his destiny, was purely deceptive—thin
+ice of despair over profound depths of exasperated rebellion.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Blank darkness enveloped him when first he opened eyes to wonder. Then
+gradually as he stared, piecing together unassorted memories and striving to
+quicken drowsy wits, he became aware of a glimmer that waxed and waned, a bar
+of pale bluish light striking across the gloom above his couch; and by dint of
+puzzling divined that this had access by a port. Turning his head upon a stiff
+and unyielding pillow, he could discern a streak of saffron light lining the
+sill of a doorway, near by his side. The one phenomenon taken with the other
+confirmed a theretofore somewhat hazy impression that his dreams were dignified
+by a foundation of fact; that, in brief, he was occupying a cabin-bunk aboard
+the good ship <i>Alethea</i>.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Overhead, on the deck, a heavy thumping of hurrying feet awoke him to keener
+perceptiveness.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Judging from the incessant rolling and pitching of the brigantine, the crashing
+thunder of seas upon her sides, the eldrich shrieking of the gale, as well as
+from the chorused groans and plaints of each individual bolt and timber in the
+frail fabric that housed his fortunes, the wind had strengthened materially
+during his hours of forgetfulness—however many the latter might have been.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He believed, however, that he had slept long, deeply and exhaustively. He felt
+now a little emaciated mentally and somewhat absent-bodied—so he put it to
+himself. A numb languor, not unpleasant, held him passively supine, the while
+he gave himself over to speculative thought.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A wild night, certainly; probably, by that time, the little vessel was in the
+middle of the North Sea ... <i>bound for Antwerp</i>!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Oh-h,” said Kirkwood vindictively, “<i>hell</i>!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+So he was bound for Antwerp! The first color of resentment ebbing from his
+thoughts left him rather interested than excited by the prospect. He found that
+he was neither pleased nor displeased. He presumed that it would be no more
+difficult to raise money on personal belongings in Antwerp than anywhere else;
+it has been observed that the first flower of civilization is the rum-blossom,
+the next, the conventionalized fleur-de-lis of the money-lender. There would be
+pawnshops, then, in Antwerp; and Kirkwood was confident that the sale or pledge
+of his signet-ring, scarf-pin, match-box and cigar-case, would provide him with
+money enough for a return to London, by third-class, at the worst. There ...
+well, all events were on the knees of the gods; he’d squirm out of his
+troubles, somehow. As for the other matter, the Calendar affair, he presumed he
+was well rid of it,—with a sigh of regret. It had been a most enticing mystery,
+you know; and the woman in the case was extraordinary, to say the least.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The memory of Dorothy Calendar made him sigh again, this time more violently: a
+sigh that was own brother to (or at any rate descended in a direct line from)
+the furnace sigh of the lover described by, the melancholy Jaques. And he sat
+up, bumped his head, groped round until his hand fell upon a doorknob, opened
+the door, and looked out into the blowsy emptiness of the ship’s cabin proper,
+whose gloomy confines were made visible only by the rays of a dingy and smoky
+lamp swinging violently in gimbals from a deck-beam.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Kirkwood’s clothing, now rough-dried and warped wretchedly out of shape, had
+been thrown carelessly on a transom near the door. He got up, collected them,
+and returning to his berth, dressed at leisure, thinking heavily,
+disgruntled—in a humor as evil as the after-taste of bad brandy in his mouth.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When dressed he went out into the cabin, closing the door upon his berth, and
+for lack of anything better to do, seated himself on the thwartships transom,
+against the forward bulkhead, behind the table. Above his head a chronometer
+ticked steadily and loudly, and, being consulted, told him that the time of day
+was twenty minutes to four; which meant that he had slept away some eighteen or
+twenty hours. That was a solid spell of a rest, when he came to think of it,
+even allowing that he had been unusually and pardonably fatigued when conducted
+to his berth. He felt stronger now, and bright enough—and enormously hungry
+into the bargain.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Abstractedly, heedless of the fact that his tobacco would be water-soaked and
+ruined, he fumbled in his pockets for pipe and pouch, thinking to soothe the
+pangs of hunger against breakfast-time; which was probably two hours and a
+quarter ahead. But his pockets were empty—every one of them. He assimilated
+this discovery in patience and cast an eye about the room, to locate, if
+possible, the missing property. But naught of his was visible. So he rose and
+began a more painstaking search.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The cabin was at once tiny, low-ceiled, and depressingly gloomy. Its furniture
+consisted entirely in a chair or two, supplementing the transoms and lockers as
+resting-places, and a center-table covered with a cloth of turkey-red, whose
+original aggressiveness had been darkly moderated by libations of liquids,
+principally black coffee, and burnt offerings of grease and tobacco-ash. Aside
+from the companion-way to the deck, four doors opened into the room, two
+probably giving upon the captain’s and the mate’s quarters, the others on
+pseudo state-rooms—one of which he had just vacated—closets large enough to
+contain a small bunk and naught beside. The bulkheads and partitions were badly
+broken out with a rash of pictures from illustrated papers, mostly offensive.
+Kirkwood was interested to read a half-column clipping from a New York yellow
+journal, descriptive of the antics of a drunken British sailor who had somehow
+found his way to the bar-room of the Fifth Avenue Hotel; the paragraph
+exploiting the fact that it had required four policemen in addition to the
+corps of porters to subdue him, was strongly underscored in red ink; and the
+news-story wound up with the information that in police court the man had given
+his name as William Stranger and cheerfully had paid a fine of ten dollars,
+alleging his entertainment to have been cheap at the price.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+While Kirkwood was employed in perusing this illuminating anecdote, eight bells
+sounded, and, from the commotion overhead, the watch changed. A little later
+the companion-way door slammed open and shut, and Captain Stryker—or Stranger;
+whichever you please—fell down, rather than descended, the steps.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Without attention to the American he rolled into the mate’s room and roused
+that personage. Kirkwood heard that the name of the second-in-command was
+’Obbs, as well as that he occupied the starboard state-room aft. After a brief
+exchange of comment and instruction, Mr. ’Obbs appeared in the shape of a
+walking pillar of oil-skins capped by a sou’wester, and went on deck; Stryker,
+following him out of the state-room, shed his own oilers in a clammy heap upon
+the floor, opened a locker from which he brought forth a bottle and a dirty
+glass, and, turning toward the table, for the first time became sensible of
+Kirkwood’s presence.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Ow, there you are, eigh, little bright-eyes!” he exclaimed with surprised
+animation.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Good morning, Captain Stryker,” said Kirkwood, rising. “I want to tell you—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But Stryker waved one great red paw impatiently, with the effect of sweeping
+aside and casting into the discard Kirkwood’s intended speech of thanks; nor
+would he hear him further.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Did you ’ave a nice little nap?” he interrupted. “Come up bright and smilin’,
+eigh? Now I guess”—the emphasis made it clear that the captain believed himself
+to be employing an Americanism; and so successful was he in his own esteem that
+he could not resist the temptation to improve upon the imitation—“Na-ow I guess
+yeou’re abaout right ready, ben’t ye, to hev a drink, sonny?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“No, thank you,” said Kirkwood, smiling tolerantly. “I’ve got any amount of
+appetite...”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“’Ave you, now?” Stryker dropped his mimicry and glanced at the clock.
+“Breakfast,” he announced, “will be served in the myne dinin’ saloon at eyght
+a. m. Passingers is requested not to be lyte at tyble.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Depositing the bottle on the said table, the captain searched until he found
+another glass for Kirkwood, and sat down.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Do you good,” he insinuated, pushing the bottle gently over.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“No, thank you,” reiterated Kirkwood shortly, a little annoyed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Stryker seized his own glass, poured out a strong man’s dose of the fiery
+concoction, gulped it down, and sighed. Then, with a glance at the American’s
+woebegone countenance (Kirkwood was contemplating a four-hour wait for
+breakfast, and, consequently, looking as if he had lost his last friend), the
+captain bent over, placing both hands palm down before him and wagging his head
+earnestly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Please,” he implored,—“Please don’t let me hinterrupt;” and filled his pipe,
+pretending a pensive detachment from his company.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The fumes of burning shag sharpened the tooth of desire. Kirkwood stood it as
+long as he could, then surrendered with an: “If you’ve got any more of that
+tobacco, Captain, I’d be glad of a pipe.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+An intensely contemplative expression crept into the captain’s small blue eyes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I only got one other pyper of this ’ere ’baccy,” he announced at length, “and
+I carn’t get no more till I gets ’ome. I simply couldn’t part with it hunder
+’arf a quid.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Kirkwood settled back with a hopeless lift of his shoulders. Abstractedly
+Stryker puffed the smoke his way until he could endure the deprivation no
+longer.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I had about ten shillings in my pocket when I came aboard, captain, and ... a
+few other articles.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Ow, yes; so you ’ad, now you mention it.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Stryker rose, ambled into his room, and returned with Kirkwood’s possessions
+and a fresh paper of shag. While the young man was hastily filling, lighting,
+and inhaling the first strangling but delectable whiff, the captain solemnly
+counted into his own palm all the loose change except three large pennies. The
+latter he shoved over to Kirkwood in company with a miscellaneous assortment of
+articles, which the American picked up piece by piece and began to bestow about
+his clothing. When through, he sat back, troubled and disgusted. Stryker met
+his regard blandly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Anything I can do?” he inquired, in suave concern.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Why ... there <i>was</i> a black pearl scarfpin—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“W’y, don’t you remember? You gave that to me, ’count of me ’avin syved yer
+life. ’Twas me throwed you that line, you know.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Oh,” commented Kirkwood briefly. The pin had been among the most valuable and
+cherished of his belongings.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes,” nodded the captain in reminiscence. “You don’t remember? Likely ’twas
+the brandy singing in yer ’ead. You pushes it into my ’ands,—almost weepin’,
+you was,—and sez, sez you, ‘Stryker,’ you sez, ‘tyke this in triflin’ toking of
+my gratichood; I wouldn’t hinsult you,’ you sez, ‘by hofferin’ you money, but
+this I can insist on yer acceptin’, and no refusal,’ says you.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Oh,” repeated Kirkwood.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“If I for a ninstant thought you wasn’t sober when you done it.... But no;
+you’re a gent if there ever was one, and I’m not the man to offend you.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Oh, indeed.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The captain let the implication pass, perhaps on the consideration that he
+could afford to ignore it; and said no more. The pause held for several
+minutes, Kirkwood having fallen into a mood of grave distraction. Finally
+Captain Stryker thoughtfully measured out a second drink, limited only by the
+capacity of the tumbler, engulfed it noisily, and got up.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Guess I’ll be turnin’ in,” he volunteered affably, yawning and stretching.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I was about to ask you to do me a service....” began Kirkwood.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes?”—with the rising inflection of mockery.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Kirkwood quietly produced his cigar-case, a gold match-box, gold card-case, and
+slipped a signet ring from his finger. “Will you buy these?” he asked. “Or will
+you lend me five pounds and hold them as security?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Stryker examined the collection with exaggerated interest strongly tinctured
+with mistrust. “I’ll buy ’em,” he offered eventually, looking up.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“That’s kind of you—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Ow, they ain’t much use to me, but Bill Stryker’s allus willin’ to accommodate
+a friend.... Four quid, you said?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Five....”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“They ain’t wuth over four to me.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Very well; make it four,” Kirkwood assented contemptuously.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The captain swept the articles into one capacious fist, pivoted on one heel at
+the peril of his neck, and lumbered unsteadily off to his room. Pausing at the
+door he turned back in inquiry.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I sye, ’ow did you come to get the impression there was a party named Almanack
+aboard this wessel?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Calendar—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“’Ave it yer own wye,” Stryker conceded gracefully.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“There isn’t, is there?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You ’eard me.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Then,” said Kirkwood sweetly, “I’m sure you wouldn’t be interested.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The captain pondered this at leisure. “You seemed pretty keen abaht seein’
+’im,” he remarked conclusively.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I was.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Seems to me I did ’ear the nyme sumw’eres afore.” The captain appeared to
+wrestle with an obdurate memory. “Ow!” he triumphed. “I know. ’E was a chap up
+Manchester wye. Keeper in a loonatic asylum, ’e was. ’That yer party?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“No,” said Kirkwood wearily.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I didn’t know but mebbe ’twas. Excuse me. ’Thought as ’ow mebbe you’d escyped
+from ’is tender care, but, findin’ the world cold, chynged yer mind and wanted
+to gow back.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Without waiting for a reply he lurched into his room and banged the door to.
+Kirkwood, divided between amusement and irritation, heard him stumbling about
+for some time; and then a hush fell, grateful enough while it lasted; which was
+not long. For no sooner did the captain sleep than a penetrating snore added
+itself unto the cacophony of waves and wind and tortured ship.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Kirkwood, comforted at first by the blessed tobacco, lapsed insensibly into
+dreary meditations. Coming after the swift movement and sustained excitement of
+the eighteen hours preceding his long sleep, the monotony of shipboard
+confinement seemed irksome to a maddening degree. There was absolutely nothing
+he could discover to occupy his mind. If there were books aboard, none was in
+evidence; beyond the report of Mr. Stranger’s Manhattan night’s entertainment
+the walls were devoid of reading matter; and a round of the picture gallery
+proved a diversion weariful enough when not purely revolting.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Wherefore Mr. Kirkwood stretched himself out on the transom and smoked and
+reviewed his adventures in detail and seriatim, and was by turns indignant,
+sore, anxious on his own account as well as on Dorothy’s, and out of all
+patience with himself. Mystified he remained throughout, and the edge of his
+curiosity held as keen as ever, you may believe.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Consistently the affair presented itself to his fancy in the guise of a
+puzzle-picture, which, though you study it never so diligently, remains
+incomprehensible, until by chance you view it from an unexpected angle, when it
+reveals itself intelligibly. It had not yet been his good fortune to see it
+from the right viewpoint. To hold the metaphor, he walked endless circles round
+it, patiently seeking, but ever failing to find the proper perspective.... Each
+incident, however insignificant, in connection with it, he handled over and
+over, examining its every facet, bright or dull, as an expert might inspect a
+clever imitation of a diamond; and like a perfect imitation it defied analysis.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Of one or two things he was convinced; for one, that Stryker was a liar worthy
+of classification with Calendar and Mrs. Hallam. Kirkwood had not only the
+testimony of his sense to assure him that the ship’s name, <i>Alethea</i> (not
+a common one, by the bye), had been mentioned by both Calendar and Mulready
+during their altercation on Bermondsey Old Stairs, but he had the confirmatory
+testimony of the sleepy waterman, William, who had directed Old Bob and Young
+William to the anchorage off Bow Creek. That there should have been two vessels
+of the same unusual name at one and the same time in the Port of London, was a
+coincidence too preposterous altogether to find place in his calculations.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His second impregnable conclusion was that those whom he sought had boarded the
+<i>Alethea</i>, but had left her before she tripped her anchor. That they were
+not stowed away aboard her seemed unquestionable. The brigantine was hardly
+large enough for the presence of three persons aboard her to be long kept a
+secret from an inquisitive fourth,—unless, indeed, they lay in hiding in the
+hold; for which, once the ship got under way, there could be scant excuse. And
+Kirkwood did not believe himself a person of sufficient importance in
+Calendar’s eyes, to make that worthy endure the discomforts of a’tween-decks
+imprisonment throughout the voyage, even to escape recognition.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+With every second, then, he was traveling farther from her to whose aid he had
+rushed, impelled by motives so hot-headed, so innately, chivalric, so
+unthinkingly gallant, so exceptionally idiotic!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Idiot! Kirkwood groaned with despair of his inability to fathom the abyss of
+his self-contempt. There seemed to be positively no excuse for <i>him</i>.
+Stryker had befriended him indeed, had he permitted him to drown. Yet he had
+acted for the best, as he saw it. The fault lay in himself: an admirable fault,
+that of harboring and nurturing generous and compassionate instincts. But, of
+course, Kirkwood couldn’t see it that way.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What else could I do?” he defended himself against the indictment of common
+sense. “I couldn’t leave her to the mercies of that set of rogues!... And
+Heaven knows I was given every reason to believe she would be aboard this ship!
+Why, she herself told me that she was sailing ...!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Heaven knew, too, that this folly of his had cost him a pretty penny, first and
+last. His watch was gone beyond recovery, his homeward passage forfeited; he no
+longer harbored illusions as to the steamship company presenting him with
+another berth in lieu of that called for by that water-soaked slip of paper
+then in his pocket—courtesy of Stryker. He had sold for a pittance, a tithe of
+its value, his personal jewelry, and had spent every penny he could call his
+own. With the money Stryker was to give him he would be able to get back to
+London and his third-rate hostelry, but not with enough over to pay that one
+week’s room-rent, or ...
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Oh, the devil!” he groaned, head in hands.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The future loomed wrapped in unspeakable darkness, lightened by no least ray of
+hope. It had been bad enough to lose a comfortable living through a gigantic
+convulsion of Nature; but to think that he had lost all else through his own
+egregious folly, to find himself reduced to the kennels—!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+So Care found him again in those weary hours,—came and sat by his side,
+slipping a grisly hand in his and tightening its grip until he could have cried
+out with the torment of it; the while whispering insidiously subtile, evil
+things in his ear. And he had not even Hope to comfort him; at any previous
+stage he had been able to distil a sort of bitter-sweet satisfaction from the
+thought that he was suffering for the love of his life. But now—now Dorothy was
+lost, gone like the glamour of Romance in the searching light of day.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Stryker, emerging from his room for breakfast, found the passenger with a
+hostile look in his eye and a jaw set in ugly fashion. His eyes, too, were the
+abiding-place of smoldering devils; and the captain, recognizing them,
+considerately forbore to stir them up with any untimely pleasantries. To be
+sure, he was autocrat in his own ship, and Kirkwood’s standing aboard was
+<i>nil</i>; but then there was just enough yellow in the complexion of
+Stryker’s soul to incline him to sidestep trouble whenever feasible. And
+besides, he entertained dark suspicions of his guest—suspicions he scarce dared
+voice even to his inmost heart.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The morning meal, therefore, passed off in constrained silence. The captain ate
+voraciously and vociferously, pushed back his chair, and went on deck to
+relieve the mate. The latter, a stunted little Cockney with a wizened
+countenance and a mind as foul as his tongue, got small change of his attempts
+to engage the passenger in conversation on topics that he considered fit for
+discussion. After the sixth or eighth snubbing he rose in dudgeon, discharged a
+poisonous bit of insolence, and retired to his berth, leaving Kirkwood to
+finish his breakfast in peace; which the latter did literally, to the last
+visible scrap of food and the ultimate drop of coffee, poor as both were in
+quality.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To the tune of a moderating wind, the morning wearied away. Kirkwood went on
+deck once, for distraction from the intolerable monotony of it all, got a sound
+drenching of spray, with a glimpse of a dark line on the eastern horizon, which
+he understood to be the low littoral of Holland, and was glad to dodge below
+once more and dry himself.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He had the pleasure of the mate’s company at dinner, the captain remaining on
+deck until Hobbs had finished and gone up to relieve him; and by that time
+Kirkwood likewise was through.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Stryker blew down with a blustery show of cheer. “Well, well, my little man!”
+(It happened that he topped Kirkwood’s stature by at least five inches.)
+“Enj’yin’ yer sea trip?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“About as much as you’d expect,” snapped Kirkwood.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Ow?” The captain began to shovel food into his face. (The author regrets he
+has at his command no more delicate expression that is literal and
+illustrative.) Kirkwood watched him, fascinated with suspense; it seemed
+impossible that the man could continue so to employ his knife without cutting
+his throat from the inside. But years of such manipulation had made him expert,
+and his guest, keenly disappointed, at length ceased to hope.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Between gobbles Stryker eyed him furtively.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“’Treat you all right?” he demanded abruptly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Kirkwood started out of a brown study. “What? Who? Why, I suppose I ought to
+be—indeed, I <i>am</i> grateful,” he asserted. “Certainly you saved my life,
+and—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Ow, I don’t mean that.” Stryker gathered the imputation into his paw and flung
+it disdainfully to the four winds of Heaven. “Bless yer ’art, you’re welcome; I
+wouldn’t let no dorg drownd, ’f I could ’elp it. No,” he declared, “nor a
+loonatic, neither.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He thrust his plate away and shifted sidewise in his chair. “I ’uz just
+wonderin’,” he pursued, picking his teeth meditatively with a pen-knife, “’ow
+they feeds you in them <i>as</i>-ylums. ’Avin’ never been inside one, myself,
+it’s on’y natural I’d be cur’us.... There was one of them institootions near
+where I was borned—Birming’am, that is. I used to see the loonies playin’ in
+the grounds. I remember <i>just</i> as well!... One of ’em and me struck up
+quite an acquaintance—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Naturally he’d take to you on sight.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Ow? Strynge ’ow <i>we</i> ’it it off, eigh?... You myke me think of ’im. Young
+chap, ’e was, the livin’ spi’t-’n-himage of you. It don’t happen, does it,
+you’re the same man?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Oh, go to the devil!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Naughty!” said the captain serenely, wagging a reproving forefinger. “Bad,
+naughty word. You’ll be sorry when you find out wot it means.... Only ’e was
+allus plannin’ to run awye and drownd ’is-self.”...
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He wore the joke threadbare, even to his own taste, and in the end got heavily
+to his feet, starting for the companionway. “Land you this arternoon,” he
+remarked casually, “come three o’clock or thereabahts. Per’aps later. I don’t
+know, though, as I ’ad ought to let you loose.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Kirkwood made no answer. Chuckling, Stryker went on deck.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the course of an hour the American followed him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Wind and sea alike had gone down wonderfully since daybreak—a circumstance
+undoubtedly in great part due to the fact that they had won in under the lee of
+the mainland and were traversing shallower waters. On either hand, like mist
+upon the horizon, lay a streak of gray, a shade darker than the gray of the
+waters. The <i>Alethea</i> was within the wide jaws of the Western Scheldt. As
+for the wind, it had shifted several points to the northwards; the brigantine
+had it abeam and was lying down to it and racing to port with slanting deck and
+singing cordage.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Kirkwood approached the captain, who, acting as his own pilot, was standing by
+the wheel and barking sharp orders to the helmsman.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Have you a Bradshaw on board?” asked the young man.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Steady!” This to the man at the wheel; then to Kirkwood: “Wot’s that, me lud?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Kirkwood repeated his question. Stryker eyed him suspiciously for a thought.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Wot d’you want it for?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I want to see when I can get a boat back to England.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Hmm.... Yes, you’ll find a Bradshaw in the port-locker, near the for’ard
+bulk’ead. Run along now and pl’y—and mind you don’t go tearin’ out the pyges to
+myke pyper boatses to go sylin’ in.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Kirkwood went below. Like its adjacent rooms, the cabin was untenanted; the
+watch was the mate’s, and Stryker a martinet. Kirkwood found the designated
+locker and, opening it, saw first to his hand the familiar bulky red volume
+with its red garter. Taking it out he carried it to a chair near the
+companionway, for a better reading light: the skylight being still battened
+down.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The strap removed, the book opened easily, as if by force of habit, at the
+precise table he had wished to consult; some previous client had left a marker
+between the pages,—and not an ordinary book-mark, by any manner of means.
+Kirkwood gave utterance to a little gasp of amazement, and instinctively
+glanced up at the companionway, to see if he were observed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was not, but for safety’s sake he moved farther back into the cabin and out
+of the range of vision of any one on deck; a precaution which was almost
+immediately justified by the clumping of heavy feet upon the steps as Stryker
+descended in pursuit of the ever-essential drink.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“’Find it?” he demanded, staring blindly—with eyes not yet focused to the
+change from light to gloom—at the young man, who was sitting with the guide
+open on his knees, a tightly clenched fist resting on the transom at either
+side of him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In reply he received a monosyllabic affirmative; Kirkwood did not look up.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You must be a howl,” commented the captain, making for the seductive locker.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“A—what?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“A howl, readin’ that fine print there in the dark. W’y don’t you go over to
+the light?... I’ll ’ave to ’ave them shutters tyken off the winders.” This was
+Stryker’s amiable figure of speech, frequently employed to indicate the
+coverings of the skylight.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I’m all right.” Kirkwood went on studying the book.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Stryker swigged off his rum and wiped his lips with the back of a red paw,
+hesitating a moment to watch his guest.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Mykes it seem more ’ome-like for you, I expect,” he observed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What do you mean?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“W’y, Bradshaw’s first-cousin to a halmanack, ain’t ’e? Can’t get one, take
+t’other—next best thing. Sorry I didn’t think of it sooner; like my passengers
+to feel comfy.... Now don’t you go trapsein’ off to gay Paree and squanderin’
+wot money you got left. You ’ear?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“By the way, Captain!” Kirkwood looked up at this, but Stryker was already
+half-way up the companion.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Cautiously the American opened his right fist and held to the light that which
+had been concealed, close wadded in his grasp,—a square of sheer linen edged
+with lace, crumpled but spotless, and diffusing in the unwholesome den a faint,
+intangible fragrance, the veriest wraith of that elusive perfume which he would
+never again inhale without instantly recalling that night ride through London
+in the intimacy of a cab.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He closed his eyes and saw her again, as clearly as though she stood before
+him,—hair of gold massed above the forehead of snow, curling in adorable
+tendrils at the nape of her neck, lips like scarlet splashed upon the
+immaculate whiteness of her skin, head poised audaciously in its spirited,
+youthful allure, dark eyes smiling the least trace sadly beneath the level
+brows.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Unquestionably the handkerchief was hers; if proof other than the assurance of
+his heart were requisite, he had it in the initial delicately embroidered in
+one corner: a D, for Dorothy!... He looked again, to make sure; then hastily
+folded up the treasure-trove and slipped it into a breast pocket of his coat.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+No; I am not sure that it was not the left-hand pocket.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Quivering with excitement he bent again over the book and studied it intently.
+After all, he had not been wrong! He could assert now, without fear of
+refutation, that Stryker had lied.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Some one had wielded an industrious pencil on the page. It was, taken as a
+whole, fruitful of clues. Its very heading was illuminating:
+</p>
+
+<p class="center">
+LONDON to VLISSINGEN (FLUSHING) AND BREDA;
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+which happened to be the quickest and most direct route between London and
+Antwerp. Beneath it, in the second column from the right, the pencil had put a
+check-mark against:
+</p>
+
+<p class="center">
+QUEENSBOROUGH ... DEP ... 11a10.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And now he saw it clearly—dolt that he had been not to have divined it ere
+this! The <i>Alethea</i> had run in to Queensborough, landing her passengers
+there, that they might make connection with the eleven-ten morning boat for
+Flushing,—the very side-wheel steamer, doubtless, which he had noticed beating
+out in the teeth of the gale just after the brigantine had picked him up. Had
+he not received the passing impression that the <i>Alethea</i>, when first he
+caught sight of her, might have been coming out of the Medway, on whose eastern
+shore is situate Queensborough Pier? Had not Mrs. Hallam, going upon he knew
+not what information or belief, been bound for Queensborough, with design there
+to intercept the fugitives?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Kirkwood chuckled to recall how, all unwittingly, he had been the means of
+diverting from her chosen course that acute and resourceful lady; then again
+turned his attention to the tables.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A third check had been placed against the train for Amsterdam scheduled to
+leave Antwerp at 6:32 p. m. Momentarily his heart misgave him, when he saw
+this, in fear lest Calendar and Dorothy should have gone on from Antwerp the
+previous evening; but then he rallied, discovering that the boat-train from
+Flushing did not arrive at Antwerp till after ten at night; and there was no
+later train thence for Amsterdam. Were the latter truly their purposed
+destination, they would have stayed overnight and be leaving that very evening
+on the 6:32. On the other hand, why should they wait for the latest train,
+rather than proceed by the first available in the morning? Why but because
+Calendar and Mulready were to wait for Stryker to join them on the
+<i>Alethea</i>?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Very well, then; if the wind held and Stryker knew his business, there would be
+another passenger on that train, in addition to the Calendar party.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Making mental note of the fact that the boat-train for Flushing and London was
+scheduled to leave Antwerp daily at 8:21 p. m., Kirkwood rustled the leaves to
+find out whether or not other tours had been planned, found evidences of none,
+and carefully restored the guide to the locker, lest inadvertently the captain
+should pick it up and see what Kirkwood had seen.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+An hour later he went on deck. The skies had blown clear and the brigantine was
+well in land-bound waters and still footing a rattling pace. The river-banks
+had narrowed until, beyond the dikes to right and left, the country-side
+stretched wide and flat, a plain of living green embroidered with winding roads
+and quaint Old-World hamlets whose red roofs shone like dull fire between the
+dark green foliage of dwarfed firs.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Down with the Scheldt’s gray shimmering flood were drifting little companies of
+barges, sturdy and snug both fore and aft, tough tanned sails burning in the
+afternoon sunlight. A long string of canal-boats, potted plants flowering
+saucily in their neatly curtained windows, proprietors expansively smoking on
+deck, in the bosoms of their very large families, was being mothered up-stream
+by two funny, clucking tugs. Behind the brigantine a travel-worn Atlantic liner
+was scolding itself hoarse about the right of way. Outward bound, empty cattle
+boats, rough and rusty, were swaggering down to the sea, with the careless,
+independent thumbs-in-armholes air of so many navvies off the job.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And then lifting suddenly above the level far-off sky-line, there appeared a
+very miracle of beauty; the delicate tracery of the great Cathedral’s spire of
+frozen lace, glowing like a thing of spun gold, set against the sapphire velvet
+of the horizon.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Antwerp was in sight.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A troublesome care stirring in his mind, Kirkwood looked round the deck; but
+Stryker was very busy, entirely too preoccupied with the handling of his ship
+to be interrupted with impunity. Besides, there was plenty of time.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+More slowly now, the wind falling, the brigantine crept up the river, her crew
+alert with sheets and halyards as the devious windings of the stream rendered
+it necessary to trim the canvas at varying angles to catch the wind.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Slowly, too, in the shadow of that Mechlin spire, the horizon grew rough and
+elevated, taking shape in the serrated profile of a thousand gables and a
+hundred towers and cross-crowned steeples.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Once or twice, more and more annoyed as the time of their association seemed to
+grow more brief, Kirkwood approached the captain; but Stryker continued to be
+exhaustively absorbed in the performance of his duties.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Up past the dockyards, where spidery masts stood in dense groves about painted
+funnels, and men swarmed over huge wharves like ants over a crust of bread; up
+and round the final, great sweeping bend of the river, the <i>Alethea</i> made
+her sober way, ever with greater slowness; until at length, in the rose glow of
+a flawless evening, her windlass began to clank like a mad thing and her anchor
+bit the riverbed, near the left bank, between old Forts Isabelle and Tête de
+Flandre, frowned upon from the right by the grim pile of the age-old Steen
+castle.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And again Kirkwood sought Stryker, his carking query ready on his lips. But the
+captain impatiently waved him aside.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Don’t you bother me now, me lud juke! Wyte until I gets done with the custom
+hofficer.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Kirkwood acceded, perforce; and bided his time with what tolerance he could
+muster.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A pluttering customs launch bustled up to the <i>Alethea’s</i> side, discharged
+a fussy inspector on the brigantine’s deck, and panted impatiently until he,
+the examination concluded without delay, was again aboard.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Stryker, smirking benignly and massaging his lips with the back of his hand,
+followed the official on deck, nodded to Kirkwood an intimation that he was
+prepared to accord him an audience, and strolled forward to the waist. The
+American, mastering his resentment, meekly followed; one can not well afford to
+be haughty when one is asking favors.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Advancing to the rail, the captain whistled in one of the river-boats; then,
+while the waterman waited, faced his passenger.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Now, yer r’yal ’ighness, wot can I do for you afore you goes ashore?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I think you must have forgotten,” said Kirkwood quietly. “I hate to trouble
+you, but—there’s that matter of four pounds.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Stryker’s face was expressive only of mystified vacuity. “Four quid? I dunno
+<i>as</i> I know just wot you means.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You agreed to advance me four pounds on those things of mine....”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Ow-w!” Illumination overspread the hollow-jowled countenance. Stryker smiled
+cheerfully. “Garn with you!” he chuckled. “You will ’ave yer little joke, won’t
+you now? I declare I never see a loony with such affecsh’nit, pl’yful wyes!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Kirkwood’s eyes narrowed. “Stryker,” he said steadily, “give me the four pounds
+and let’s have no more nonsense; or else hand over my things at once.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Daffy,” Stryker told vacancy, with conviction. “Lor’ luv me if I sees ’ow he
+ever ’ad sense enough to escype. W’y, yer majesty!” and he bowed, ironic. “I
+’<i>ave</i> given you yer quid.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Just about as much as I gave you that pearl pin,” retorted Kirkwood hotly.
+“What the devil do you mean—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“W’y, yer ludship, four pounds jus pyes yer passyge; I thought you understood.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“My passage! But I can come across by steamer for thirty shillings,
+first-class—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Aw, but them steamers! Tricky, they is, and unsyfe ... No, yer gryce, the W.
+Stryker Packet Line Lim’ted, London to Antwerp, charges four pounds per passyge
+and no reduction for return fare.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Stunned by his effrontery, Kirkwood stared in silence.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Any complynts,” continued the captain, looking over Kirkwood’s head, “must be
+lyde afore the Board of Directors in writin’ not more’n thirty dyes arfter—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You damned scoundrel!” interpolated Kirkwood thoughtfully.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Stryker’s mouth closed with a snap; his features froze in a cast of wrath; cold
+rage glinted in his small blue eyes. “W’y,” he bellowed, “you bloomin’
+loonatic, d’ye think you can sye that to Bill Stryker on ’is own wessel!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He hesitated a moment, then launched a heavy fist at Kirkwood’s face.
+Unsurprised, the young man side-stepped, caught the hard, bony wrist as the
+captain lurched by, following his wasted blow, and with a dexterous twist laid
+him flat on his back, with a sounding thump upon the deck. And as the
+infuriated scamp rose—which he did with a bound that placed him on his feet and
+in defensive posture; as though the deck had been a spring-board—Kirkwood
+leaped back, seized a capstan-bar, and faced him with a challenge.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Stand clear, Stryker!” he warned the man tensely, himself livid with rage. “If
+you move a step closer I swear I’ll knock the head off your shoulders! Not
+another inch, you contemptible whelp, or I’ll brain you!... That’s better,” he
+continued as the captain, caving, dropped his fists and moved uneasily back.
+“Now give that boatman money for taking me ashore. Yes, I’m going—and if we
+ever meet again, take the other side of the way, Stryker!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Without response, a grim smile wreathing his thin, hard lips, Stryker thrust
+one hand into his pocket, and withdrawing a coin, tossed it to the waiting
+waterman. Whereupon Kirkwood backed warily to the rail, abandoned the
+capstan-bar and dropped over the side.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Nodding to the boatman, “The Steen landing—quickly,” he said in French.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Stryker, recovering, advanced to the rail and waved him a derisive <i>bon
+voyage</i>.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“By-by, yer hexcellency. I ’opes it may soon be my pleasure to meet you again.
+You’ve been a real privilege to know; I’ve henjoyed yer comp’ny somethin’
+immense. Don’t know as I ever met such a rippin’, Ay Number One, all-round,
+entertynin’ ass, afore!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He fumbled nervously about his clothing, brought to light a rag of cotton, much
+the worse for service, and ostentatiously wiped from the corner of each eye
+tears of grief at parting. Then, as the boat swung toward the farther shore,
+Kirkwood’s back was to the brigantine, and he was little tempted to turn and
+invite fresh shafts of ridicule.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Rapidly, as he was ferried across the busy Scheldt, the white blaze of his
+passion cooled; but the biting irony of his estate ate, corrosive, into his
+soul. Hollow-eyed he glared vacantly into space, pale lips unmoving, his
+features wasted with despair.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They came to the landing-stage and swung broad-side on. Mechanically the
+American got up and disembarked. As heedless of time and place he moved up the
+Quai to the gangway and so gained the esplanade; where pausing he thrust a
+trembling hand into his trouser pocket.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The hand reappeared, displaying in its outspread palm three big, round, brown,
+British pennies. Staring down at them, Kirkwood’s lips moved.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Bed rock!” he whispered huskily.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap13"></a>XIII<br/>
+A PRIMER OF PROGRESSIVE CRIME</h2>
+
+<p>
+Without warning or presage the still evening air was smitten and made softly
+musical by the pealing of a distant chime, calling vespers to its brothers in
+Antwerp’s hundred belfries; and one by one, far and near, the responses broke
+out, until it seemed as if the world must be vibrant with silver and brazen
+melody; until at the last the great bells in the Cathedral spire stirred and
+grumbled drowsily, then woke to such ringing resonance as dwarfed all the rest
+and made it seem as nothing.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Like the beating of a mighty heart heard through the rushing clamor of the
+pulses, a single deep-throated bell boomed solemnly six heavy, rumbling
+strokes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Six o’clock! Kirkwood roused out of his dour brooding. The Amsterdam express
+would leave at 6:32, and he knew not from what station.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Striding swiftly across the promenade, he entered a small tobacco shop and made
+inquiry of the proprietress. His command of French was tolerable; he
+experienced no difficulty in comprehending the good woman’s instructions.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Trains for Amsterdam, she said, left from the Gare Centrale, a mile or so
+across the city. M’sieur had plenty of time, and to spare. There was the tram
+line, if m’sieur did not care to take a fiacre. If he would go by way of the
+Vielle Bourse he would discover the tram cars of the Rue Kipdorp. M’sieur was
+most welcome....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Monsieur departed with the more haste since he was unable to repay this
+courtesy with the most trifling purchase; such slight matters annoyed Kirkwood
+intensely. Perhaps it was well for him that he had the long walk to help him
+work off the fit of nervous exasperation into which he was plunged every time
+his thoughts harked back to that jovial black-guard, Stryker.... He was quite
+calm when, after a brisk walk of some fifteen minutes, he reached the station.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A public clock reassured him with the information that he had the quarter of an
+hour’s leeway; it was only seventeen minutes past eighteen o’clock (Belgian
+railway time, always confusing). Inquiring his way to the Amsterdam train,
+which was already waiting at the platform, he paced its length, peering
+brazenly in at the coach windows, now warm with hope, now shivering with
+disappointment, realizing as he could not but realize that, all else aside, his
+only chance of rehabilitation lay in meeting Calendar. But in none of the
+coaches or carriages did he discover any one even remotely resembling the fat
+adventurer, his daughter, or Mulready.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Satisfied that they had not yet boarded the train, he stood aside, tortured
+with forebodings, while anxiously scrutinizing each individual of the throng of
+intending travelers.... Perhaps they had been delayed—by the <i>Alethea’s</i>
+lateness in making port very likely; perhaps they purposed taking not this but
+a later train; perhaps they had already left the city by an earlier, or had
+returned to England.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+On time, the bell clanged its warning; the guards bawled theirs; doors were
+hastily opened and slammed; the trucks began to groan, couplings jolting as the
+engine chafed in constraint. The train and Kirkwood moved simultaneously out of
+opposite ends of the station, the one to rattle and hammer round the eastern
+boundaries of the city and straighten out at top speed on the northern route
+for the Belgian line, the other to stroll moodily away, idle hands in empty
+pockets, bound aimlessly anywhere—it didn’t matter!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Nothing whatever mattered in the smallest degree. Ere now the outlook had been
+dark; but this he felt to be the absolute nadir of his misfortunes.
+Presently—after a while—as soon as he could bring himself to it—he would ask
+the way and go to the American Consulate. But just now, low as the tide of
+chance had ebbed, leaving him stranded on the flats of vagabondage, low as
+showed the measure of his self-esteem, he could not tolerate the prospect of
+begging for assistance—help which would in all likelihood be refused, since his
+story was quite too preposterous to gain credence in official ears that daily
+are filled with the lamentations of those whose motives do not bear
+investigation. And if he chose to eliminate the strange chain of events which
+had landed him in Antwerp, to base his plea solely on the fact that he was a
+victim of the San Francisco disaster ... he himself was able to smile, if
+sourly, anticipating the incredulous consular smile with which he would be
+shown the door.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+No; that he would reserve as a last resort. True, he had already come to the
+Jumping-off Place; to the Court of the Last Resort alone could he now appeal.
+But ... not yet; after a while he could make his petition, after he had made a
+familiar of the thought that he must armor himself with callous indifference to
+rebuff, to say naught of the waves of burning shame that would overwhelm him
+when he came to the point of asking charity.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He found himself, neither knowing nor caring how he had won thither, in the
+Place Verte, the vast venerable pile of the Cathedral rising on his right,
+hotels and quaint Old-World dwellings with peaked roofs and gables and dormer
+windows, inclosing the other sides of the square. The chimes (he could hear
+none but those of the Cathedral) were heralding the hour of seven. Listless and
+preoccupied in contemplation of his wretched case he wandered purposelessly
+half round the square, then dropped into a bench on its outskirts.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was some time later that he noticed, with a casual, indifferent eye, a
+porter running out of the Hôtel de Flandre, directly opposite, and calling a
+fiacre in to the carriage block.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As languidly he watched a woman, very becomingly dressed, follow the porter
+down to the curb.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The fiacre swung in, and the woman dismissed the porter before entering the
+vehicle; a proceeding so unusual that it fixed the onlooker’s interest. He sat
+rigid with attention; the woman seemed to be giving explicit and lengthy
+directions to the driver, who nodded and gesticulated his comprehension.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The woman was Mrs. Hallam.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The first blush of recognition passed, leaving Kirkwood without any amazement.
+It was an easy matter to account for her being where she was. Thrown off the
+scent by Kirkwood at Sheerness, the previous morning, she had missed the day
+boat, the same which had ferried over those whom she pursued. Returning from
+Sheerness to Queensborough, however, she had taken the night boat for Flushing
+and Antwerp,—and not without her plan, who was not a woman to waste her
+strength aimlessly; Kirkwood believed that she had had from the first a very
+definite campaign in view. In that campaign Queensborough Pier had been the
+first strategic move; the journey to Antwerp, apparently, the second; and the
+American was impressed that he was witnessing the inception of the third
+decided step.... The conclusion of this process of reasoning was inevitable:
+Madam would bear watching.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Thus was a magical transformation brought about. Instantaneously lassitude and
+vain repinings were replaced by hopefulness and energy. In a twinkling the
+young man was on his feet, every nerve a-thrill with excitement.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mrs. Hallam, blissfully ignorant of this surveillance over her movements, took
+her place in the fiacre. The driver clucked to his horse, cracked his whip, and
+started off at a slow trot: a pace which Kirkwood imitated, keeping himself at
+a discreet distance to the rear of the cab, but prepared to break into a run
+whenever it should prove necessary.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Such exertion, however, was not required of him. Evidently Mrs. Hallam was in
+no great haste to reach her destination; the speed of the fiacre remained
+extremely moderate; Kirkwood found a long, brisk stride fast enough to keep it
+well in sight.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Round the green square, under the beautiful walls of Notre Dame d’Anvers,
+through Grande Place and past the Hôtel de Ville, the cab proceeded, dogged by
+what might plausibly be asserted the most persistent and infatuated soul that
+ever crossed the water; and so on into the Quai Van Dyck, turning to the left
+at the old Steen dungeon and, slowing to a walk, moving soberly up the drive.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Beyond the lip of the embankment, the Scheldt flowed, its broad shining surface
+oily, smooth and dark, a mirror for the incandescent glory of the skies. Over
+on the western bank old Tête de Flandre lifted up its grim curtains and
+bastions, sable against the crimson, rampart and parapet edged with fire. Busy
+little side-wheeled ferry steamers spanked the waters noisily and smudged the
+sunset with dark drifting trails of smoke; and ever and anon a rowboat would
+slip out of shadow to glide languidly with the current. Otherwise the life of
+the river was gone; and at their moorings the ships swung in great quietness,
+riding lights glimmering like low wan stars.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the company of the latter the young man marked down the <i>Alethea</i>; a
+sight which made him unconsciously clench both fists and teeth, reminding him
+of that rare wag, Stryker....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To his way of thinking the behavior of the fiacre was quite unaccountable.
+Hardly had the horse paced off the length of two blocks on the Quai ere it was
+guided to the edge of the promenade and brought to a stop. And the driver
+twisted the reins round his whip, thrust the latter in its socket, turned
+sidewise on the box, and began to smoke and swing his heels, surveying the
+panorama of river and sunset with complacency—a cabby, one would venture,
+without a care in the world and serene in the assurance of a generous
+<i>pour-boire</i> when he lost his fare. But as for the latter, she made no
+move; the door of the cab remained closed,—like its occupant’s mind, a mystery
+to the watcher.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Twilight shadows lengthened, darkling, over the land; street-lights flashed up
+in long, radiant ranks. Across the promenade hotels and shops were lighted up;
+people began to gather round the tables beneath the awnings of an open-air
+café. In the distance, somewhere, a band swung into the dreamy rhythm of a
+haunting waltz. Scattered couples moved slowly, arm in arm, along the riverside
+walk, drinking in the fragrance of the night. Overhead stars popped out in
+brilliance and dropped their reflections to swim lazily on spellbound
+waters.... And still the fiacre lingered in inaction, still the driver lorded
+it aloft, in care-free abandon.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the course of time this inertia, where he had looked for action, this dull
+suspense when he had forecast interesting developments, wore upon the watcher’s
+nerves and made him at once impatient and suspicious. Now that he had begun to
+doubt, he conceived it as quite possible that Mrs. Hallam (who was capable of
+anything) should have stolen out of the cab by the other and, to him, invisible
+door. To resolve the matter, finally, he took advantage of the darkness, turned
+up his coat collar, hunched up his shoulders, hid his hands in pockets, pulled
+the visor of his cap well forward over his eyes, and slouched past the fiacre.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mrs. Hallam sat within. He could see her profile clearly silhouetted against
+the light; she was bending forward and staring fixedly out of the window,
+across the driveway. Mentally he calculated the direction of her gaze, then,
+moved away and followed it with his own eyes; and found himself staring at the
+façade of a third-rate hotel. Above its roof the gilded letters of a sign,
+catching the illumination from below, spelled out the title of “Hôtel du
+Commerce.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mrs. Hallam was interested in the Hôtel du Commerce?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Thoughtfully Kirkwood fell back to his former point of observation, now the
+richer by another object of suspicion, the hostelry. Mrs. Hallam was waiting
+and watching for some one to enter or to leave that establishment. It seemed a
+reasonable inference to draw. Well, then, so was Kirkwood, no less than the
+lady; he deemed it quite conceivable that their objects were identical.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He started to beguile the time by wondering what she would do, if...
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Of a sudden he abandoned this line of speculation, and catching his breath,
+held it, almost afraid to credit the truth that for once his anticipations were
+being realized under his very eyes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Against the lighted doorway of the Hôtel du Commerce, the figures of two men
+were momentarily sketched, as they came hurriedly forth; and of the two, one
+was short and stout, and even at a distance seemed to bear himself with an
+accent of assertiveness, while the other was tall and heavy of shoulder.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Side by side they marched in step across the embankment to the head of the Quai
+gangway, descending without pause to the landing-stage. Kirkwood, hanging
+breathlessly over the guard-rail, could hear their footfalls ringing in hollow
+rhythm on the planks of the inclined way,—could even discern Calendar’s
+unlovely profile in dim relief beneath one of the waterside lights; and he
+recognized unmistakably Mulready’s deep voice, grumbling inarticulately.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At the outset he had set after them, with intent to accost Calendar; but their
+pace had been swift and his irresolute. He hung fire on the issue, dreading to
+reveal himself, unable to decide which were the better course, to pursue the
+men, or to wait and discover what Mrs. Hallam was about. In the end he waited;
+and had his disappointment for recompense.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For Mrs. Hallam did nothing intelligible. Had she driven over to the hotel,
+hard upon the departure of the men, he would have believed that she was seeking
+Dorothy, and would, furthermore, have elected to crowd their interview, if she
+succeeded in obtaining one with the girl. But she did nothing of the sort. For
+a time the fiacre remained as it had been ever since stopping; then, evidently
+admonished by his fare, the driver straightened up, knocked out his pipe,
+disentangled reins and whip, and wheeled the equipage back on the way it had
+come, disappearing in a dark side street leading eastward from the embankment.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Kirkwood was, then, to believe that Mrs. Hallam, having taken all that trouble
+and having waited for the two adventurers to appear, had been content with
+sight of them? He could hardly believe that of the woman; it wasn’t like her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He started across the driveway, after the fiacre, but it was lost in a tangle
+of side streets before he could make up his mind whether it was worth while
+chasing or not; and, pondering the woman’s singular action, he retraced his
+steps to the promenade rail.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Presently he told himself he understood. Dorothy was no longer of her father’s
+party; he had a suspicion that Mulready’s attitude had made it seem advisable
+to Calendar either to leave the girl behind, in England, or to segregate her
+from his associates in Antwerp. If not lodged in another quarter of the city,
+or left behind, she was probably traveling on ahead, to a destination which he
+could by no means guess. And Mrs. Hallam was looking for the girl; if there
+were really jewels in that gladstone bag, Calendar would naturally have had no
+hesitation about intrusting them to his daughter’s care; and Mrs. Hallam
+avowedly sought nothing else. How the woman had found out that such was the
+case, Kirkwood did not stop to reckon; unless he explained it on the
+proposition that she was a person of remarkable address. It made no matter, one
+way or the other; he had lost Mrs. Hallam; but Calendar and Mulready he could
+put his finger on; they had undoubtedly gone off to the <i>Alethea</i> to
+confer again with Stryker,—that was, unless they proposed sailing on the
+brigantine, possibly at turn of tide that night.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Panic gripped his soul and shook it, as a terrier shakes a rat, when he
+conceived this frightful proposition.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In his confusion of mind he evolved spontaneously an entirely new hypothesis:
+Dorothy had already been spirited aboard the vessel; Calendar and his
+confederate, delaying to join her from enigmatic motives, were now aboard; and
+presently the word would be, Up-anchor and away!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Were they again to elude him? Not, he swore, if he had to swim for it. And he
+had no wish to swim. The clothes he stood in, with what was left of his
+self-respect, were all that he could call his own on that side of the North
+Sea. Not a boatman on the Scheldt would so much as consider accepting three
+English pennies in exchange for boat-hire. In brief, it began to look as if he
+were either to swim or ... to steal a boat.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Upon such slender threads of circumstance depends our boasted moral health. In
+one fleeting minute Kirkwood’s conception of the law of <i>meum et tuum</i>,
+its foundations already insidiously undermined by a series of cumulative
+misfortunes, toppled crashing to its fall; and was not.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was wholly unconscious of the change. Beneath him, in a space between the
+quays bridged by the gangway, a number of rowboats, a putative score, lay
+moored for the night and gently rubbing against each other with the soundless
+lift and fall of the river. For all that Kirkwood could determine to the
+contrary, the lot lay at the mercy of the public; nowhere about was he able to
+discern a figure in anything resembling a watchman.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Without a quiver of hesitation—moments were invaluable, if what he feared were
+true—he strode to the gangway, passed down, and with absolute nonchalance
+dropped into the nearest boat, stepping from one to another until he had gained
+the outermost. To his joy he found a pair of oars stowed beneath the thwarts.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+If he had paused to moralize—which he didn’t—upon the discovery, he would have
+laid it all at the door of his lucky star; and would have been wrong. We who
+have never stooped to petty larceny know that the oars had been placed there at
+the direction of his evil genius bent upon facilitating his descent into the
+avernus of crime. Let us, then, pity the poor young man without condoning his
+offense.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Unhitching the painter he set one oar against the gunwale of the next boat, and
+with a powerful thrust sent his own (let us so call it for convenience)
+stern-first out upon the river; then sat him composedly down, fitted the oars
+to their locks, and began to pull straight across-stream, trusting to the
+current to carry him down to the <i>Alethea</i>. He had already marked down
+that vessel’s riding-light; and that not without a glow of gratitude to see it
+still aloft and in proper juxtaposition to the river-bank; proof that it had
+not moved.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He pulled a good oar, reckoned his distance prettily, and shipping the blades
+at just the right moment, brought the little boat in under the brigantine’s
+counter with scarce a jar. An element of surprise he held essential to the
+success of his plan, whatever that might turn out to be.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Standing up, he caught the brigantine’s after-rail with both hands, one of
+which held the painter of the purloined boat, and lifted his head above the
+deck line. A short survey of the deserted after-deck gave him further
+assurance. The anchor-watch was not in sight; he may have been keeping well
+forward by Stryker’s instructions, or he may have crept off for forty winks.
+Whatever the reason for his absence from the post of duty, Kirkwood was
+relieved not to have him to deal with; and drawing himself gently in over the
+rail, made the painter fast, and stepped noiselessly over toward the lighted
+oblong of the companionway. A murmur of voices from below comforted him with
+the knowledge that he had not miscalculated, this time; at last he stood within
+striking distance of his quarry.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The syllables of his surname ringing clearly in his ears and followed by
+Stryker’s fleeting laugh, brought him to a pause. He flushed hotly in the
+darkness; the captain was retailing with relish some of his most successful
+witticisms at Kirkwood’s expense.... “You’d ought to’ve seed the wye’e looked
+at me!” concluded the <i>raconteur</i> in a gale of mirth.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mulready laughed with him, if a little uncertainly. Calendar’s chuckle was not
+audible, but he broke the pause that followed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I don’t know,” he said with doubting emphasis. “You say you landed him without
+a penny in his pocket? I don’t call that a good plan at all. Of course, he
+ain’t a factor, but ... Well, it might’ve been as well to give him his fare
+home. He might make trouble for us, somehow.... I don’t mind telling you,
+Cap’n, that you’re an ass.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The tensity of certain situations numbs the sensibilities. Kirkwood had never
+in his weirdest dreams thought of himself as an eavesdropper; he did not think
+of himself as such in the present instance; he merely listened, edging nearer
+the skylight, of which the wings were slightly raised, and keeping as far as
+possible in shadow.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Ow, I sye!” the captain was remonstrating, aggrieved. “’Ow was I to know ’e
+didn’t ’ave it in for you? First off, when ’e comes on board (I’ll sye this for
+’im, ’e’s as plucky as they myke ’em), I thought ’e was from the Yard. Then,
+when I see wot a bally hinnocent ’e was, I mykes up my mind ’e’s just some one
+you’ve been ply in’ one of your little gymes on, and ’oo was lookin’ to square
+’is account. So I did ’im proper.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Evidently,” assented Calendar dryly. “You’re a bit of a heavy-handed brute,
+Stryker. Personally I’m kind of sorry for the boy; he wasn’t a bad sort, as his
+kind runs, and he was no fool, from what little I saw of him.... I wonder what
+he wanted.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Possibly,” Mulready chimed in suavely, “you can explain what you wanted of
+him, in the first place. How did you come to drag him into <i>this</i>
+business?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Oh, that!” Calendar laughed shortly. “That was partly accident, partly
+inspiration. I happened to see his name on the Pless register; he’d put himself
+down as from ’Frisco. I figured it out that he would be next door to broke and
+getting desperate, ready to do anything to get home; and thought we might
+utilize him; to smuggle some of the stuff into the States. Once before, if
+you’ll remember—no; that was before we got together, Mulready—I picked up a
+fellow-countryman on the Strand. He was down and out, jumped at the job, and we
+made a neat little wad on it.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“The more fool you, to take outsiders into your confidence,” grumbled Mulready.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Ow?” interrogated Calendar, mimicking Stryker’s accent inimitably. “Well,
+you’ve got a heap to learn about this game, Mul; about the first thing is that
+you must trust Old Man Know-it-all, which is me. I’ve run more diamonds into
+the States, in one way or another, in my time, than you ever pinched out of the
+shirt-front of a toff on the Empire Prom., before they made the graft too hot
+for you and you came to take lessons from me in the gentle art of living easy.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Oh, cut that, cawn’t you?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Delighted, dear boy.... One of the first principles, next to profiting by the
+admirable example I set you, is to make the fellows in your own line trust you.
+Now, if this boy had taken on with me, I could have got a bunch of the
+sparklers on my mere say-so, from old Morganthau up on Finsbury Pavement. He
+does a steady business hoodwinking the Customs for the benefit of his American
+clients—and himself. And I’d’ve made a neat little profit besides: something to
+fall back on, if this fell through. I don’t mind having two strings to my bow.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes,” argued Mulready; “but suppose this Kirkwood had taken on with you and
+then peached?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“That’s another secret; you’ve got to know your man, be able to size him up. I
+called on this chap for that very purpose; but I saw at a glance he wasn’t our
+man. He smelt a nigger in the woodpile and most politely told me to go to the
+devil. But if he <i>had</i> come in, he’d’ve died before he squealed. I know
+the breed; there’s honor among gentlemen that knocks the honor of thieves
+higher’n a kite, the old saw to the contrary—nothing doing.... You understand
+me, I’m sure, Mulready?” he concluded with envenomed sweetness.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I don’t see yet how Kirkwood got anything to do with Dorothy.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Miss Calendar to you, <i>Mister</i> Mulready!” snapped Calendar. “There,
+there, now! Don’t get excited.... It was when the Hallam passed me word that a
+man from the Yard was waiting on the altar steps for me, that Kirkwood came in.
+He was dining close by; I went over and worked on his feelings until he agreed
+to take Dorothy off my hands. If I had attempted to leave the place with her,
+they’d’ve spotted me for sure.... My compliments to you, Dick Mulready.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There came the noise of chair legs scraped harshly on the cabin deck.
+Apparently Mulready had leaped to his feet in a rage.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I’ve told you—” he began in a voice thick with passion.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Oh, sit down!” Calendar cut in contemptuously. “Sit down, d’you hear? That’s
+all over and done with. We understand each other now, and you won’t try any
+more monkey-shines. It’s a square deal and a square divide, so far’s I’m
+concerned; if we stick together there’ll be profit enough for all concerned.
+Sit down, Mul, and have another slug of the captain’s bum rum.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Although Mulready consented to be pacified, Kirkwood got the impression that
+the man was far gone in drink. A moment later he heard him growl “Chin-chin!”
+antiphonal to the captain’s “Cheer-o!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Now, then,” Calendar proposed, “Mr. Kirkwood aside—peace be with him!—let’s
+get down to cases.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Wot’s the row?” asked the captain.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“The row, Cap’n, is the Hallam female, who has unexpectedly shown up in
+Antwerp, we have reason to believe with malicious intent and a private
+detective to add to the gaiety of nations.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Wot’s the odds? She carn’t ’urt us without lyin’ up trouble for ’erself.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Damn little consolation to us when we’re working it out in Dartmoor.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Speak for yourself,” grunted Mulready surlily.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I do,” returned Calendar easily; “we’re both in the shadow of Dartmoor, Mul,
+my boy; since you choose to take the reference as personal. Sing Sing, however,
+yawns for me alone; it’s going to keep on yawning, too, unless I miss my guess.
+I love my native land most to death, <i>but</i> ...”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Ow, blow that!” interrupted the captain irritably. “Let’s ’ear about the
+’Allam. Wot’re you afryd of?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“’Fraid she’ll set up a yell when she finds out we’re planting the loot, Cap’n.
+She’s just that vindictive; you’d think she’d be satisfied with her end of the
+stick, but you don’t know the Hallam. That milk-and-water offspring of hers is
+the apple of her eye, and Freddie’s going to collar the whole shooting-match or
+madam will kick over the traces.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Well?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Well, she’s queered us here. We can’t do anything if my lady is going to camp
+on our trail and tell everybody we’re shady customers, can we? The question now
+before the board is: Where now,—and how?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Amsterdam,” Mulready chimed in. “I told you that in the beginning.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“But how?” argued Calendar. “The Lord knows I’m willing but ... we can’t go by
+rail, thanks to the Hallam. We’ve got to lose her first of all.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“But wot I’m arskin’ is, wot’s the matter with—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“The <i>Alethea</i>, Cap’n? Nothing, so far as Dick and I are concerned. But my
+dutiful daughter is prejudiced; she’s been so long without proper paternal
+discipline,” Calendar laughed, “that she’s rather high-spirited. Of course I
+might overcome her objections, but the girl’s no fool, and every ounce of
+pressure I bring to bear just now only helps make her more restless and
+suspicious.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You leave her to me,” Mulready interposed, with a brutal laugh. “I’ll
+guarantee to get her aboard, or...”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Drop it, Dick!” Calendar advised quietly. “And go a bit easy with that bottle
+for five minutes, can’t you?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Well, then,” Stryker resumed, apparently concurring in Calendar’s attitude,
+“w’y don’t one of you tyke the stuff, go off quiet and dispose of it to a
+proper fence, and come back to divide. I don’t see w’y that—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Naturally you wouldn’t,” chuckled Calendar. “Few people besides the two of us
+understand the depth of affection existing between Dick, here, and me. We just
+can’t bear to get out of sight of each other. We’re sure inseparable—since
+night before last. Odd, isn’t it?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You drop it!” snarled Mulready, in accents so ugly that the listener was
+startled. “Enough’s enough and—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“There, there, Dick! All right; I’ll behave,” Calendar soothed him. “We’ll
+forget and say no more about it.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Well, see you don’t.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“But ’as either of you a plan?” persisted Stryker.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I have,” replied Mulready; “and it’s the simplest and best, if you could only
+make this long-lost parent here see it.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Wot is it?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mulready seemed to ignore Calendar and address himself to the captain. He
+articulated with some difficulty, slurring his words to the point of
+indistinctness at times.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Simple enough,” he propounded solemnly. “We’ve got the gladstone bag here;
+Miss Dolly’s at the hotel—that’s her papa’s bright notion; he thinks she’s to
+be trusted ... Now then, what’s the matter with weighing anchor and slipping
+quietly out to sea?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Leavin’ the dootiful darter?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Cert’n’y. She’s only a drag any way. ’Better off without her.... Then we can
+wait our time and get highest market prices—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You forget, Dick,” Calendar put it, “that there’s a thousand in it for each of
+us if she’s kept out of England for six weeks. A thousand’s five thousand in
+the land I hail from; I can use five thousand in my business.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Why can’t you be content with what you’ve got?” demanded Mulready wrathfully.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Because I’m a seventh son of a seventh son; I can see an inch or two beyond my
+nose. If Dorothy ever finds her way back to England she’ll spoil one of the
+finest fields of legitimate graft I ever licked my lips to look at. The trouble
+with you, Mul, is you’re too high-toned. You want to play the swell mobs-man
+from post to finish. A quick touch and a clean getaway for yours. Now, that’s
+all right; that has its good points, but you don’t want to underestimate the
+advantages of a good blackmailing connection.... If I can keep Dorothy quiet
+long enough, I look to the Hallam and precious Freddie to be a great comfort to
+me in my old age.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Then, for God’s sake,” cried Mulready, “go to the hotel, get your brat by the
+scruif of her pretty neck and drag her aboard. Let’s get out of this.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I won’t,” returned Calendar inflexibly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The dispute continued, but the listener had heard enough. He had to get away
+and think, could no longer listen; indeed, the voices of the three blackguards
+below came but indistinctly to his ears, as if from a distance. He was sick at
+heart and ablaze with indignation by turns. Unconsciously he was trembling
+violently in every limb; swept by alternate waves of heat and cold, feverish
+one minute, shivering the next. All of which phenomena were due solely to the
+rage that welled inside his heart.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Stealthily he crept away to the rail, to stand grasping it and staring across
+the water with unseeing eyes at the gay old city twinkling back with her
+thousand eyes of light. The cool night breeze, sweeping down unhindered over
+the level Netherlands from the bleak North Sea, was comforting to his throbbing
+temples. By degrees his head cleared, his rioting pulses subsided, he could
+think; and he did.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Over there, across the water, in the dingy and disreputable Hôtel du Commerce,
+Dorothy waited in her room, doubtless the prey of unnumbered nameless terrors,
+while aboard the brigantine her fate was being decided by a council of three
+unspeakable scoundrels, one of whom, professing himself her father, openly
+declared his intention of using her to further his selfish and criminal ends.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His first and natural thought, to steal away to her and induce her to accompany
+him back to England, Kirkwood perforce discarded. He could have wept over the
+realization of his unqualified impotency. He had no money,—not even cab-fare
+from the hotel to the railway station. Something subtler, more crafty, had to
+be contrived to meet the emergency. And there was one way, one only; he could
+see none other. Temporarily he must make himself one of the company of her
+enemies, force himself upon them, ingratiate himself into their good graces,
+gain their confidence, then, when opportunity offered, betray them. And the
+power to make them tolerate him, if not receive him as a fellow, the knowledge
+of them and their plans that they had unwittingly given him, was his.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And Dorothy, was waiting....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He swung round and without attempting to muffle his footfalls strode toward the
+companionway. He must pretend he had just come aboard.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Subconsciously he had been aware, during his time of pondering, that the voices
+in the cabin had been steadily gaining in volume, rising louder and yet more
+loud, Mulready’s ominous, drink-blurred accents dominating the others. There
+was a quarrel afoot; as soon as he gave it heed, Kirkwood understood that
+Mulready, in the madness of his inflamed brain, was forcing the issue while
+Calendar sought vainly to calm and soothe him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The American arrived at the head of the companionway at a critical juncture. As
+he moved to descend some low, cool-toned retort of Calendar’s seemed to enrage
+his confederate beyond reason. He yelped aloud with wrath, sprang to his feet,
+knocking over a chair, and leaping back toward the foot of the steps, flashed
+an adroit hand behind him and found his revolver.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I’ve stood enough from you!” he screamed, his voice oddly clear in that moment
+of insanity. “You’ve played with me as long as you will, you hulking American
+hog! And now I’m going to show—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As he held his fire to permit his denunciation to bite home, Kirkwood, appalled
+to find himself standing on the threshold of a tragedy, gathered himself
+together and launched through the air, straight for the madman’s shoulders.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As they went down together, sprawling, Mulready’s head struck against a transom
+and the revolver fell from his limp fingers.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap14"></a>XIV<br/>
+STRATAGEMS AND SPOILS</h2>
+
+<p>
+Prepared as he had been for the shock, Kirkwood was able to pick himself up
+quickly, uninjured, Mulready’s revolver in his grasp.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+On his feet, straddling Mulready’s insentient body, he confronted Calendar and
+Stryker. The face of the latter was a sickly green, the gift of his fright. The
+former seemed coldly composed, already recovering from his surprise and
+bringing his wits to bear upon the new factor which had been so unceremoniously
+injected into the situation.
+</p>
+
+<div class="fig" style="width:100%;">
+<a name="illus07"></a>
+<img src="images/img07.jpg" width="565" height="600" alt="[Illustration: ]" />
+<p class="caption">Straddling Mulready’s body, he confronted Calendar and Stryker.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+Standing, but leaning heavily upon a hand that rested flat on the table, in the
+other he likewise held a revolver, which he had apparently drawn in
+self-defense, at the crisis of Mulready’s frenzy. Its muzzle was deflected. He
+looked Kirkwood over with a cool gray eye, the color gradually returning to his
+fat, clean-shaven cheeks, replacing the pardonable pallor which had momentarily
+rested thereon.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As for Kirkwood, he had covered the fat adventurer before he knew it. Stryker,
+who had been standing immediately in the rear of Calendar, immediately cowered
+and cringed to find himself in the line of fire.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Of the three conscious men in the brigantine’s cabin, Calendar was probably the
+least confused or excited. Stryker was palpably unmanned. Kirkwood was tingling
+with a sense of mastery, but collected and rapidly revolving the combinations
+for the reversed conditions which had been brought about by Mulready’s drunken
+folly. His elation was apparent in his shining, boyish eyes, as well as in the
+bright color that glowed in his cheeks. When he decided to speak it was with
+rapid enunciation, but clearly and concisely.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Calendar,” he began, “if a single shot is fired about this vessel the river
+police will be buzzing round your ears in a brace of shakes.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The fat adventurer nodded assent, his eyes contracting.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Very well!” continued Kirkwood brusquely. “You must know that I have
+personally nothing to fear from the police; if arrested, I wouldn’t be detained
+a day. On the other hand, you ... Hand me that pistol, Calendar, butt first,
+please. Look sharp, my man! If you don’t...”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He left the ellipsis to be filled in by the corpulent blackguard’s
+intelligence. The latter, gray eyes still intent on the younger man’s face,
+wavered, plainly impressed, but still wondering.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Quick! I’m not patient to-night...”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+No longer was Calendar of two minds. In the face of Kirkwood’s attitude there
+was but one course to be followed: that of obedience. Calendar surrendered an
+untenable position as gracefully as could be wished.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I guess you know what you mean by this,” he said, tendering the weapon as per
+instructions; “I’m doggoned if I do.... You’ll allow a certain latitude in
+consideration of my relief; I can’t say we were anticipating
+this—ah—Heaven-sent visitation.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Accepting the revolver with his left hand and settling his forefinger on the
+trigger, Kirkwood beamed with pure enjoyment. He found the deference of the
+older man, tempered though it was by his indomitable swagger, refreshing in the
+extreme.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“A little appreciation isn’t exactly out of place, come to think of it,” he
+commented, adding, with an eye for the captain: “Stryker, you bold, bad
+butterfly, have you got a gun concealed about your unclean person?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The captain shook visibly with contrition. “No, Mr. Kirkwood,” he managed to
+reply in a voice singularly lacking in his wonted bluster.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Say ‘sir’!” suggested Kirkwood.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“No, Mr. Kirkwood, sir,” amended Stryker eagerly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Now come round here and let’s have a look at you. Please stay where you are,
+Calendar.... Why, Captain, you’re shivering from head to foot! Not ill are you,
+you wag? Step over to the table there, Stryker, and turn out your pockets; turn
+’em inside out and let’s see what you carry in the way of offensive artillery.
+And, Stryker, don’t be rash; don’t do anything you’d be sorry for afterwards.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“No fear of that,” mumbled the captain, meekly shambling toward the table, and,
+in his anxiety to give no cause for unpleasantness, beginning to empty his
+pockets on the way.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Don’t forget the ‘sir,’ Stryker. And, Stryker, if you happen to think of
+anything in the line of one of your merry quips or jests, don’t strain yourself
+holding in; get it right off your chest, and you’ll feel better.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Kirkwood chuckled, in high conceit with himself, watching Calendar out of the
+corner of his eye, but with his attention centered on the infinitely diverting
+spectacle afforded by Stryker, whose predacious hands were trembling violently
+as, one by one, they brought to light the articles of which he had despoiled
+his erstwhile victim.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Come, come, Stryker! Surely you can think of something witty, surely you
+haven’t exhausted the possibilities of that almanac joke! Couldn’t you ring
+another variation on the lunatic wheeze? Don’t hesitate out of consideration
+for me, Captain; I’m joke proof—perhaps you’ve noticed?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Stryker turned upon him an expression at once ludicrous, piteous and hateful.
+“That’s all, sir,” he snarled, displaying his empty palms in token of his
+absolute tractability.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Good enough. Now right about face—quick! Your back’s prettier than your face,
+and besides, I want to know whether your hip-pockets are empty. I’ve heard it’s
+the habit of you gentry to pack guns in your clothes.... None? That’s all
+right, then. Now roost on the transom, over there in the corner, Stryker, and
+don’t move. Don’t let me hear a word from you. Understand?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Submissively the captain retired to the indicated spot. Kirkwood turned to
+Calendar; of whose attitude, however, he had not been for an instant unmindful.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Won’t you sit down, Mr. Calendar?” he suggested pleasantly. “Forgive me for
+keeping you waiting.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For his own part, as the adventurer dropped passively into his chair, Kirkwood
+stepped over Mulready and advanced to the middle of the cabin, at the same time
+thrusting Calendar’s revolver into his own coat pocket. The other, Mulready’s,
+he nursed significantly with both hands, while he stood temporarily quiet,
+surveying the fleshy face of the prime factor in the intrigue.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A quaint, grim smile played about the American’s lips, a smile a little
+contemptuous, more than a little inscrutable. In its light Calendar grew
+restive and lost something of his assurance. His feet shifted uneasily beneath
+the table and his dark eyes wavered, evading Kirkwood’s. At length he seemed to
+find the suspense unendurable.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Well?” he demanded testily. “What d’you want of me?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I was just wondering at you, Calendar. In the last few days you’ve given me
+enough cause to wonder, as you’ll admit.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The adventurer plucked up spirit, deluded by Kirkwood’s pacific tone. “I wonder
+at you, Mr. Kirkwood,” he retorted. “It was good of you to save my life and—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I’m not so sure of that! Perhaps it had been more humane—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Calendar owned the touch with a wry grimace. “But I’m damned if I understand
+this high-handed attitude of yours!” he concluded heatedly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Don’t you?” Kirkwood’s humor became less apparent, the smile sobering. “You
+will,” he told the man, adding abruptly: “Calendar, where’s your daughter?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The restless eyes sought the companionway.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Dorothy,” the man lied spontaneously, without a tremor, “is with friends in
+England. Why? Did you want to see her?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I rather expected to.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Well, I thought it best to leave her home, after all.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I’m glad to hear she’s in safe hands,” commented Kirkwood.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The adventurer’s glance analyzed his face. “Ah,” he said slowly, “I see. You
+followed me on Dorothy’s account, Mr. Kirkwood?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Partly; partly on my own. Let me put it to you fairly. When you forced
+yourself upon me, back there in London, you offered me some sort of employment;
+when I rejected it, you used me to your advantage for the furtherance of your
+purposes (which I confess I don’t understand), and made me miss my steamer.
+Naturally, when I found myself penniless and friendless in a strange country, I
+thought again of your offer; and tried to find you, to accept it.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Despite the fact that you’re an honest man, Kirkwood?” The fat lips twitched
+with premature enjoyment.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I’m a desperate man to-night, whatever I may have been yesterday.” The young
+man’s tone was both earnest and convincing. “I think I’ve shown that by my
+pertinacity in hunting you down.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Well—yes.” Calendar’s thick fingers caressed his lips, trying to hide the
+dawning smile.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Is that offer still open?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His nonchalance completely restored by the very naïveté of the proposition,
+Calendar laughed openly and with a trace of irony. The episode seemed to be
+turning out better than he had anticipated. Gently his mottled fat fingers
+played about his mouth and chins as he looked Kirkwood up and down.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I’m sorry,” he replied, “that it isn’t—now. You’re too late, Kirkwood; I’ve
+made other arrangements.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Too bad.” Kirkwood’s eyes narrowed. “You force me to harsher measures,
+Calendar.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Genuinely diverted, the adventurer laughed a second time, tipping back in his
+chair, his huge frame shaking with ponderous enjoyment. “Don’t do anything
+you’d be sorry for,” he parroted, sarcastical, the young man’s recent
+admonition to the captain.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“No fear, Calendar. I’m just going to use my advantage, which you won’t
+dispute,”—the pistol described an eloquent circle, gleaming in the
+lamplight—“to levy on you a little legitimate blackmail. Don’t be alarmed; I
+shan’t hit you any harder than I have to.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What?” stammered Calendar, astonished. “What in hell <i>are</i> you driving
+at?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Recompense for my time and trouble. You’ve cost me a pretty penny, first and
+last, with your nasty little conspiracy—whatever it’s all about. Now, needing
+the money, I purpose getting some of it back. I shan’t precisely rob you, but
+this is a hold-up, all right.... Stryker,” reproachfully, “I don’t see my pearl
+pin.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I got it ’ere,” responded the sailor hastily, fumbling with his tie.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Give it me, then.” Kirkwood held out his hand and received the trinket. Then,
+moving over to the table, the young man, while abating nothing of his
+watchfulness, sorted out his belongings from the mass of odds and ends Stryker
+had disgorged. The tale of them was complete; the captain had obeyed him
+faithfully. Kirkwood looked up, pleased.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Now see here, Calendar; this collection of truck that I was robbed of by this
+resurrected Joe Miller here, cost me upwards of a hundred and fifty. I’m going
+to sell it to you at a bargain—say fifty dollars, two hundred and fifty
+francs.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“The juice you are!” Calendar’s eyes opened wide, partly in admiration. “D’you
+realize that this is next door to highway robbery, my young friend?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“High-seas piracy, if you prefer,” assented Kirkwood with entire equanimity.
+“I’m going to have the money, and you’re going to give it up. The transaction
+by any name would smell no sweeter, Calendar. Come—fork over!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“And if I refuse?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I wouldn’t refuse, if I were you.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Why not?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“The consequences would be too painful.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You mean you’d puncture me with that gun?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Not unless you attack or attempt to follow me. I mean to say that the Belgian
+police are notoriously a most efficient body, and that I’ll make it my duty and
+pleasure to introduce ’em to you, if you refuse. But you won’t,” Kirkwood added
+soothingly, “will you, Calendar?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“No.” The adventurer had become suddenly thoughtful. “No, I won’t. ’Glad to
+oblige you.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He tilted his chair still farther back, straightening out his elephantine legs,
+inserted one fat hand into his trouser pocket and with some difficulty
+extracted a combined bill-fold and coin-purse, at once heavy with gold and
+bulky with notes. Moistening thumb and forefinger, “How’ll you have it?” he
+inquired with a lift of his cunning eyes; and when Kirkwood had advised him,
+slowly counted out four fifty-franc notes, placed them near the edge of the
+table, and weighted them with five ten-franc pieces. And, “’That all?” he
+asked, replacing the pocket-book.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“That will be about all. I leave you presently to your unholy devices, you and
+that gay dog, over there.” The captain squirmed, reddening. “Just by way of
+precaution, however, I’ll ask you to wait in here till I’m off.” Kirkwood
+stepped backwards to the door of the captain’s room, opened it and removed the
+key from the inside. “Please take Mulready in with you,” he continued. “By the
+time you get out, I’ll be clear of Antwerp. Please don’t think of refusing
+me,—I really mean it!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The latter clause came sharply as Calendar seemed to hesitate, his weary, wary
+eyes glimmering with doubt. Kirkwood, watching him as a cat her prey,
+intercepted a lightning-swift sidelong glance that shifted from his face to the
+port lockers, forward. But the fat adventurer was evidently to a considerable
+degree deluded by the very child-like simplicity of Kirkwood’s attitude. If the
+possibility that his altercation with Mulready had been overheard, crossed his
+mind, Calendar had little choice other than to accept the chance. Either way he
+moved, the risk was great; if he refused to be locked in the captain’s room,
+there was the danger of the police, to which Kirkwood had convincingly drawn
+attention; if he accepted the temporary imprisonment, he took a risk with the
+gladstone bag. On the other hand, he had estimated Kirkwood’s honesty as
+thorough-going, from their first interview; he had appraised him as a gentleman
+and a man of honor. And he did not believe the young man knew, after all ...
+Perplexed, at length he chose the smoother way, and with an indulgent lifting
+of eyebrows and fat shoulders, rose and waddled over to Mulready.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Oh, all right,” he conceded with deep toleration in his tone for the
+idiosyncrasies of youth. “It’s all the same to me, beau.” He laughed a nervous
+laugh. “Come along and lend us a hand, Stryker.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The latter glanced timidly at Kirkwood, his eyes pleading for leave to move;
+which Kirkwood accorded with an imperative nod and a fine flourish of the
+revolver. Promptly the captain, sprang to Calendar’s assistance; and between
+the two of them, the one taking Mulready’s head, the other his feet, they
+lugged him quickly into the stuffy little state-room. Kirkwood, watching and
+following to the threshold, inserted the key.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“One word more,” he counseled, a hand on the knob. “Don’t forget I’ve warned
+you what’ll happen if you try to break even with me.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Never fear, little one!” Calendar’s laugh was nervously cheerful. “The Lord
+knows you’re welcome.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Thank you ’most to death,” responded Kirkwood politely. “Good-by—and good-by
+to you, Stryker. ’Glad to have humored your desire to meet me soon again.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Kirkwood, turning the key in the lock, withdrew it and dropped it on the cabin
+table; at the same time he swept into his pocket the money he had extorted of
+Calendar. Then he paused an instant, listening; from the captain’s room came a
+sound of murmurs and scuffling. He debated what they were about in there—but
+time pressed. Not improbably they, were crowding for place at the keyhole, he
+reflected, as he crossed to the port locker forward.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He had its lid up in a twinkling, and in another had lifted out the
+well-remembered black gladstone bag.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This seems to have been his first compound larceny.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As if stimulated by some such reflection he sprang for the companionway,
+dropping the lid of the locker with a bang which must have been excruciatingly
+edifying to the men in the captain’s room. Whatever their emotions, the bang
+was mocked by a mighty kick, shaking the door; which, Kirkwood reflected,
+opened outward and was held only by the frailest kind of a lock: it would not
+hold long.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Spurred onward by a storm of curses, Stryker’s voice chanting infuriated
+cacophony with Calendar’s, Kirkwood leapt up the companionway even as the
+second tremendous kick threatened to shatter the panels. Heart in mouth, a
+chill shiver of guilt running up and down his spine, he gained the deck, cast
+loose the painter, drew in his rowboat, and dropped over the side; then, the
+gladstone bag nestling between his feet, sat down and bent to the oars.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And doubts assailed him, pressing close upon the ebb of his excitement—doubts
+and fears innumerable.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was no longer a distinction to be drawn between himself and Calendar; no
+more could he esteem himself a better and more honest man than that
+accomplished swindler. He was not advised as to the Belgian code, but English
+law, he understood, made no allowance for the good intent of those caught in
+possession of stolen property; though he was acting with the most honorable
+motives in the world, the law, if he came within its cognizance, would
+undoubtedly place him on Calendar’s plane and judge him by the same standard.
+To all intents and purposes he was a thief, and thief he would remain until the
+gladstone bag with its contents should be restored to its rightful owner.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Voluntarily, then, he had stepped from the ranks of the hunters to those of the
+hunted. He now feared police interference as abjectly as did Calendar and his
+set of rogues; and Kirkwood felt wholly warranted in assuming that the
+adventurer, with his keen intelligence, would not handicap himself by ignoring
+this point. Indeed, if he were to be judged by what Kirkwood had inferred of
+his character, Calendar would let nothing whatever hinder him, neither fear of
+bodily hurt nor danger of apprehension at the hands of the police, from making
+a determined and savage play to regain possession of his booty.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Well! (Kirkwood set his mouth savagely) Calendar should have a run for his
+money!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For the present he could compliment himself with the knowledge that he had
+outwitted the rogues, had lifted the jewels and probably two-thirds of their
+armament; he had also the start, the knowledge of their criminal guilt and
+intent, and his own plans, to comfort him. As for the latter, he did not
+believe that Calendar would immediately fathom them; so he took heart of grace
+and tugged at the oars with a will, pulling directly for the city and
+permitting the current to drift him down-stream at its pleasure. There could be
+no more inexcusable folly than to return to the <i>Quai Steen</i> landing and
+(possibly) the arms of the despoiled boat-owner.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At first he could hear crash after splintering crash sounding dully muffled
+from the cabin of the <i>Alethea</i>: a veritable devil’s tattoo beaten out by
+the feet of the prisoners. Evidently the fastening was serving him better than
+he had dared hope. But as the black rushing waters widened between boat and
+brigantine, the clamor aboard the latter subsided, indicating that Calendar and
+Stryker had broken out or been released by the crew. In ignorance as to whether
+he were seen or being pursued, Kirkwood pulled on, winning in under the shadow
+of the quais and permitting the boat to drift down to a lonely landing on the
+edge of the dockyard quarter of Antwerp.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Here alighting, he made the boat fast and, soothing his conscience with a
+surmise that its owner would find it there in the morning, strode swiftly over
+to the train line that runs along the embankment, swung aboard an adventitious
+car and broke his first ten-franc piece in order to pay his fare.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The car made a leisurely progress up past the old Steen castle and the Quai
+landing, Kirkwood sitting quietly, the gladstone bag under his hand, a
+searching gaze sweeping the waterside. No sign of the adventurers rewarded him,
+but it was now all chance, all hazard. He had no more heart for confidence.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They passed the Hôtel du Commerce. Kirkwood stared up at its windows,
+wondering....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A little farther on, a disengaged fiacre, its driver alert for possible fares,
+turned a corner into the esplanade. At sight of it Kirkwood, inspired, hopped
+nimbly off the tram-car and signaled the cabby. The latter pulled up and
+Kirkwood started to charge him with instructions; something which he did
+haltingly, hampered by a slight haziness of purpose. While thus engaged, and at
+rest in the stark glare of the street-lamps, with no chance of concealing
+himself, he was aware of a rising tumult in the direction of the landing, and
+glancing round, discovered a number of people running toward him. With no time
+to wonder whether or no he was really the object of the hue-and-cry, he tossed
+the driver three silver francs.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Gare Centrale!” he cried. “And drive like the devil!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Diving into the fiacre he shut the door and stuck his head out of the window,
+taking observations. A ragged fringe of silly rabble was bearing down upon
+them, with one or two gendarmes in the forefront, and a giant, who might or
+might not be Stryker, a close second. Furthermore, another cab seemed to have
+been requisitioned for the chase. His heart misgave him momentarily; but his
+driver had taken him at his word and generosity, and in a breath the fiacre had
+turned the corner on two wheels, and the glittering reaches of the embankment,
+drive and promenade, were blotted out, as if smudged with lamp-black, by the
+obscurity of a narrow and tortuous side street.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He drew in his head the better to preserve his brains against further
+emergencies.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+After a block or two Kirkwood picked up the gladstone bag, gently opened the
+door, and put a foot on the step, pausing to look back. The other cab was
+pelting after him with all the enthusiasm of a hound on a fresh trail. He
+reflected that this mad progress through the thoroughfares of a civilized city
+would not long endure without police intervention. So he waited, watching his
+opportunity. The fiacre hurtled onward, the driver leaning forward from his box
+to urge the horse with lash of whip and tongue, entirely unconscious of his
+fare’s intentions.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Between two streets the mouth of a narrow and darksome byway flashed into view.
+Kirkwood threw wide the door, and leaped, trusting to the night to hide his
+stratagem, to luck to save his limbs. Neither failed him; in a twinkling he was
+on all fours in the mouth of the alley, and as he picked himself up, the second
+fiacre passed, Calendar himself poking a round bald poll out of the window to
+incite his driver’s cupidity with promises of redoubled fare.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Kirkwood mopped his dripping forehead and whistled low with dismay; it seemed
+that from that instant on it was to be a vendetta with a vengeance. Calendar,
+as he had foreseen, was stopping at nothing.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At a dog trot he sped down the alley to the next street, on which he turned
+back—more sedately—toward the river, debouching on the esplanade just one block
+from the Hôtel du Commerce. As he swung past the serried tables of a café,
+whatever fears he had harbored were banished by the discovery that the
+excitement occasioned by the chase had already subsided. Beneath the garish
+awnings the crowd was laughing and chattering, eating and sipping its bock with
+complete unconcern, heedless altogether of the haggard and shabby young man
+carrying a black hand-bag, with the black Shade of Care for company and a
+blacker threat of disaster dogging his footsteps. Without attracting any
+attention whatever, indeed, he mingled with the strolling crowds, making his
+way toward the Hôtel du Commerce. Yet he was not at all at ease; his uneasy
+conscience invested the gladstone bag with a magnetic attraction for the public
+eye. To carry it unconcealed in his hand furnished him with a sensation as
+disturbing as though its worn black sides had been stenciled STOLEN! in letters
+of flame. He felt it rendered him a cynosure of public interest, an object of
+suspicion to the wide cold world, that the gaze which lit upon the bag traveled
+to his face only to espy thereon the brand of guilt.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For ease of mind, presently, he turned into a convenient shop and spent ten
+invaluable francs for a hand satchel big enough to hold the gladstone bag.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+With more courage, now that he had the hateful thing under cover, he found and
+entered the Hôtel du Commerce.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the little closet which served for an office, over a desk visibly groaning
+with the weight of an enormous and grimy registry book, a sleepy, fat, bland
+and good-natured woman of the Belgian <i>bourgeoisie</i> presided, a benign and
+drowsy divinity of even-tempered courtesy. To his misleading inquiry for
+Monsieur Calendar she returned a cheerful permission to seek that gentleman for
+himself.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Three flights, M’sieu’, in the front; suite seventeen it is. M’sieu’ does not
+mind walking up?” she inquired.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+M’sieu’ did not in the least, though by no strain of the imagination could it,
+be truthfully said that he walked up those steep and redolent stairways of the
+Hôtel du Commerce d’Anvers. More literally, he flew with winged feet, spurning
+each third padded step with a force that raised a tiny cloud of fine white dust
+from the carpeting.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Breathless, at last he paused at the top of the third flight. His heart was
+hammering, his pulses drumming like wild things; there was a queer constriction
+in his throat, a fire of hope in his heart alternating with the ice of doubt.
+Suppose she were not there! What if he were mistaken, what if he had
+misunderstood, what if Mulready and Calendar had referred to another
+lodging-house?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Pausing, he gripped the balustrade fiercely, forcing his self-control, forcing
+himself to reflect that the girl (presuming, for the sake of argument, he were
+presently to find her) could not be expected to understand how ardently he had
+discounted this moment of meeting, or how strangely it affected him. Indeed, he
+himself was more than a little disturbed by the latter phenomenon, though he
+was no longer blind to its cause. But he was not to let her see the evidences
+of his agitation, lest she be frightened.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Slowly schooling himself to assume a masque of illuding self-possession and
+composure, he passed down the corridor to the door whose panels wore the
+painted legend, 17; and there knocked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Believing that he overheard from within a sudden startled exclamation, he
+smiled patiently, tolerant of her surprise.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Burning with impatience as with a fever, he endured a long minute’s wait.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Misgivings were prompting him to knock again and summon her by name, when he
+heard footfalls on the other side of the door, followed by a click of the lock.
+The door was opened grudgingly, a bare six inches.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Of the alarmed expression in the eyes that stared into his, he took no account.
+His face lengthened a little as he stood there, dumb, panting, staring; and his
+heart sank, down, deep down into a gulf of disappointment, weighted sorely with
+chagrin.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then, of the two the first to recover countenance, he doffed his cap and bowed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Good evening, Mrs. Hallam,” he said with a rueful smile.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap15"></a>XV<br/>
+REFUGEES</h2>
+
+<p>
+Now, if Kirkwood’s emotion was poignant, Mrs. Hallam’s astonishment paralleled,
+and her relief transcended it. In order to understand this it must be
+remembered that while Mr. Kirkwood was aware of the lady’s presence in Antwerp,
+on her part she had known nothing of him since he had so ungallantly fled her
+company in Sheerness. She seemed to anticipate that either Calendar or one of
+his fellows would be discovered at the door,—to have surmised it without any
+excessive degree of pleasure.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Only briefly she hesitated, while her surprise swayed her; then with a
+hardening of the eyes and a curt little nod, “I’m sorry,” she said with
+decision, “but I am busy and can’t see you now, Mr. Kirkwood”; and attempted to
+shut the door in his face.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Deftly Kirkwood forestalled her intention by inserting both a foot and a corner
+of the newly purchased hand-bag between the door and the jamb. He had dared too
+greatly to be thus dismissed. “Pardon me,” he countered, unabashed, “but I wish
+to speak with Miss Calendar.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Dorothy,” returned the lady with spirit, “is engaged....”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She compressed her lips, knitted her brows, and with disconcerting suddenness
+thrust one knee against the obstructing hand-bag; Kirkwood, happily,
+anticipated the movement just in time to reinforce the bag with his own knee;
+it remained in place, the door standing open.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The woman flushed angrily; their glances crossed, her eyes flashing with
+indignation; but Kirkwood’s held them with a level and unyielding stare.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I intend,” he told her quietly, “to see Miss Calendar. It’s useless your
+trying to hinder me. We may as well understand each other, Madam, and I’ll tell
+you now that if you wish to avoid a scene—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Dorothy!” the woman called over her shoulder; “ring for the porter.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“By all means,” assented Kirkwood agreeably. “I’ll send him for a gendarme.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You insolent puppy!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Madam, your wit disarms me—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What is the matter, Mrs. Hallam?” interrupted a voice from the other side of
+the door. “Who is it?” “Miss Calendar!” cried Kirkwood hastily, raising his
+voice. “Mr. Kirkwood!” the reply came on the instant. She knew his voice!
+“Please, Mrs. Hallam, I will see Mr. Kirkwood.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You have no time to waste with him, Dorothy,” said the woman coldly. “I must
+insist—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“But you don’t seem to understand; it is Mr. Kirkwood!” argued the girl,—as if
+he were ample excuse for any imprudence!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Kirkwood’s scant store of patience was by this time rapidly becoming exhausted.
+“I should advise you not to interfere any further, Mrs. Hallam,” he told her in
+a tone low, but charged with meaning.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+How much did he know? She eyed him an instant longer, in sullen suspicion, then
+swung open the door, yielding with what grace she could. “Won’t you come in,
+Mr. Kirkwood?” she inquired with acidulated courtesy. “If you press me,” he
+returned winningly, “how can I refuse? You are too good!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His impertinence disconcerted even himself; he wondered that she did not slap
+him as he passed her, entering the room; and felt that he deserved it, despite
+her attitude. But such thoughts could not long trouble one whose eyes were
+enchanted by the sight of Dorothy, confronting him in the middle of the dingy
+room, her hands, bristling dangerously with hat pins, busy with the adjustment
+of a small gray toque atop the wonder that was her hair. So vivacious and
+charming she seemed, so spirited and bright her welcoming smile, so foreign was
+she altogether to the picture of her, worn and distraught, that he had mentally
+conjured up, that he stopped in an extreme of disconcertion; and dropped the
+hand-bag, smiling sheepishly enough under her ready laugh—mirth irresistibly
+incited by the plainly-read play of expression on his mobile countenance.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You must forgive the unconventionally, Mr. Kirkwood,” she apologized,
+needlessly enough, but to cover his embarrassment. “I am on the point of going
+out with Mrs. Hallam—and of course you are the last person on earth I expected
+to meet here!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It’s good to see you, Miss Calendar,” he said simply, remarking with much
+satisfaction that her trim walking costume bore witness to her statement that
+she was prepared for the street.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The girl glanced into a mirror, patted the small, bewitching hat an
+infinitesimal fraction of an inch to one side, and turned to him again, her
+hands free. One of them, small but cordial, rested in his grasp for an instant
+all too brief, the while he gazed earnestly into her face, noting with concern
+what the first glance had not shown him,—the almost imperceptible shadows
+beneath her eyes and cheek-bones, pathetic records of the hours the girl had
+spent, since last he had seen her, in company with his own grim familiar, Care.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Not a little of care and distress of mind had seasoned her portion in those two
+weary days. He saw and knew it; and his throat tightened inexplicably, again,
+as it had out there in the corridor. Possibly the change in her had passed
+unchallenged by any eyes other than his, but even in the little time that he
+had spent in her society, the image of her had become fixed so indelibly on his
+memory, that he could not now be deceived. She was changed—a little, but
+changed; she had suffered, and was suffering and, forced by suffering, her
+nascent womanhood was stirring in the bud. The child that he had met in London,
+in Antwerp he found grown to woman’s stature and slowly coming to comprehension
+of the nature of the change in herself,—the wonder of it glowing softly in her
+eyes....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The clear understanding of mankind that is an appanage of woman’s estate, was
+now added to the intuitions of a girl’s untroubled heart. She could not be
+blind to the mute adoration of his gaze; nor could she resent it. Beneath it
+she colored and lowered her lashes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I was about to go out,” she repeated in confusion. “I—it’s pleasant to see
+you, too.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Thank you,” he stammered ineptly; “I—I—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“If Mr. Kirkwood will excuse us, Dorothy,” Mrs. Hallam’s sharp tones struck in
+discordantly, “we shall be glad to see him when we return to London.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I am infinitely complimented, Mrs. Hallam,” Kirkwood assured her; and of the
+girl quickly: “You’re going back home?” he asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She nodded, with a faint, puzzled smile that included the woman. “After a
+little—not immediately. Mrs. Hallam is so kind—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Pardon me,” he interrupted; “but tell me one thing, please: have you any one
+in England to whom you can go without invitation and be welcomed and cared
+for—any friends or relations?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Dorothy will be with me,” Mrs. Hallam answered for her, with cold defiance.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Deliberately insolent, Kirkwood turned his back to the woman. “Miss Calendar,
+will you answer my question for yourself?” he asked the girl pointedly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Why—yes; several friends; none in London, but—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Dorothy—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“One moment, Mrs. Hallam,” Kirkwood flung crisply over his shoulder. “I’m going
+to ask you something rather odd, Miss Calendar,” he continued, seeking the
+girl’s eyes. “I hope—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Dorothy, I—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“If you please, Mrs. Hallam,” suggested the girl, with just the right shade of
+independence. “I wish to listen to Mr. Kirkwood. He has been very kind to me
+and has every right....” She turned to him again, leaving the woman breathless
+and speechless with anger.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You told me once,” Kirkwood continued quickly, and, he felt, brazenly, “that
+you considered me kind, thoughtful and considerate. You know me no better
+to-day than you did then, but I want to beg you to trust me a little. Can you
+trust yourself to my protection until we reach your friends in England?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Why, I—” the girl faltered, taken by surprise.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Mr. Kirkwood!” cried Mrs. Hallam angrily, finding her voice.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Kirkwood turned to meet her onslaught with a mien grave, determined,
+unflinching. “Please do not interfere, Madam,” he said quietly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You are impertinent, sir! Dorothy, I forbid you to listen to this person!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The girl flushed, lifting her chin a trifle. “Forbid?” she repeated
+wonderingly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Kirkwood was quick to take advantage of her resentment. “Mrs. Hallam is not
+fitted to advise you,” he insisted, “nor can she control your actions. It must
+already have occurred to you that you’re rather out of place in the present
+circumstances. The men who have brought you hither, I believe you already see
+through, to some extent. Forgive my speaking plainly ... But that is why you
+have accepted Mrs. Hallam’s offer of protection. Will you take my word for it,
+when I tell you she has not your right interests at heart, but the reverse? I
+happen to know, Miss Calendar, and I—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“How dare you, sir?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Flaming with rage, Mrs. Hallam put herself bodily between them, confronting
+Kirkwood in white-lipped desperation, her small, gloved hands clenched and
+quivering at her sides, her green eyes dangerous.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But Kirkwood could silence her; and he did. “Do you wish me to speak frankly,
+Madam? Do you wish me to tell what I know—and all I know—,” with rising
+emphasis,—“of your social status and your relations with Calendar and Mulready?
+I promise you that if you wish it, or force me to it....”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But he had need to say nothing further; the woman’s eyes wavered before his and
+a little sob of terror forced itself between her shut teeth. Kirkwood smiled
+grimly, with a face of brass, impenetrable, inflexible. And suddenly she turned
+from him with indifferent bravado. “As Mr. Kirkwood says, Dorothy,” she said in
+her high, metallic voice, “I have no authority over you. But if you’re silly
+enough to consider for a moment this fellow’s insulting suggestion, if you’re
+fool enough to go with him, unchaperoned through Europe and imperil your—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Mrs. Hallam!” Kirkwood cut her short with a menacing tone.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Why, then, I wash my hands of you,” concluded the woman defiantly. “Make your
+choice, my child,” she added with a meaning laugh and moved away, humming a
+snatch from a French <i>chanson</i> which brought the hot blood to Kirkwood’s
+face.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But the girl did not understand; and he was glad of that. “You may judge
+between us,” he appealed to her directly, once more. “I can only offer you my
+word of honor as an American gentleman that you shall be landed in England,
+safe and sound, by the first available steamer—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“There’s no need to say more, Mr. Kirkwood,” Dorothy informed him quietly. “I
+have already decided. I think I begin to understand some things clearly,
+now.... If you’re ready, we will go.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+From the window, where she stood, holding the curtains back and staring out,
+Mrs. Hallam turned with a curling lip.
+</p>
+
+<div class="fig" style="width:100%;">
+<a name="illus08"></a>
+<img src="images/img08.jpg" width="449" height="600" alt="[Illustration: ]" />
+<p class="caption">From the window, Mrs. Hallam turned with a curling lip.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+“‘The honor of an American gentleman,’” she quoted with a stinging sneer; “I’m
+sure I wish you comfort of it, child!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“We must make haste, Miss Calendar,” said Kirkwood, ignoring the implication.
+“Have you a traveling-bag?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She silently indicated a small valise, closed and strapped, on a table by the
+bed, and immediately passed out into the hall. Kirkwood took the case
+containing the gladstone bag in one hand, the girl’s valise in the other, and
+followed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As he turned the head of the stairs he looked back. Mrs. Hallam was still at
+the window, her back turned. From her very passiveness he received an
+impression of something ominous and forbidding; if she had lost a trick or two
+of the game she played, she still held cards, was not at the end of her
+resources. She stuck in his imagination for many an hour as a force to be
+reckoned with.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For the present he understood that she was waiting to apprise Calendar and
+Mulready of their flight. With the more haste, then, he followed Dorothy down
+the three flights, through the tiny office, where Madam sat sound asleep at her
+over-burdened desk, and out.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Opposite the door they were fortunate enough to find a fiacre drawn up in
+waiting at the curb. Kirkwood opened the door for the girl to enter.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Gare du Sud,” he directed the driver. “Drive your fastest—double fare for
+quick time!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The driver awoke with a start from profound reverie, looked Kirkwood over, and
+bowed with gesticulative palms.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“M’sieu’, I am desolated, but engaged!” he protested.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Precisely.” Kirkwood deposited the two bags on the forward seat of the
+conveyance, and stood back to convince the man. “Precisely,” said he,
+undismayed. “The lady who engaged you is remaining for a time; I will settle
+her bill.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Very well, M’sieu’!” The driver disclaimed responsibility and accepted the
+favor of the gods with a speaking shrug. “M’sieu’ said the Gare du Sud? <i>En
+voiture</i>!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Kirkwood jumped in and shut the door; the vehicle drew slowly away from the
+curb, then with gratifying speed hammered up-stream on the embankment. Bending
+forward, elbows on knees, Kirkwood watched the sidewalks narrowly, partly to
+cover the girl’s constraint, due to Mrs. Hallam’s attitude, partly on the
+lookout for Calendar and his confederates. In a few moments they passed a
+public clock.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“We’ve missed the Flushing boat,” he announced. “I’m making a try for the Hoek
+van Holland line. We may possibly make it. I know that it leaves by the Sud
+Quai, and that’s all I do know,” he concluded with an apologetic laugh.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“And if we miss that?” asked the girl, breaking silence for the first time
+since they had left the hotel.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“We’ll take the first train out of Antwerp.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Where to?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Wherever the first train goes, Miss Calendar.... The main point is to get away
+to-night. That we must do, no matter where we land, or how we get there.
+To-morrow we can plan with more certainty.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes...” Her assent was more a sigh than a word.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The cab, dashing down the Rue Leopold de Wael, swung into the Place du Sud,
+before the station. Kirkwood, acutely watchful, suddenly thrust head and
+shoulders out of his window (fortunately it was the one away from the depot),
+and called up to the driver.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Don’t stop! Gare Centrale now—and treble fare!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“<i>Oui, M’sieu’! Allons!</i>”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The whip cracked and the horse swerved sharply round the corner into the Avenue
+du Sud. The young man, with a hushed exclamation, turned in his seat, lifting
+the flap over the little peephole in the back of the carriage.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He had not been mistaken. Calendar was standing in front of the station; and it
+was plain to be seen, from his pose, that the madly careering fiacre interested
+him more than slightly. Irresolute, perturbed, the man took a step or two after
+it, changed his mind, and returned to his post of observation.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Kirkwood dropped the flap and turned back to find the girl’s wide eyes
+searching his face. He said nothing.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What was that?” she asked after a patient moment.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Your father, Miss Calendar,” he returned uncomfortably.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There fell a short pause; then: “Why—will you tell me—is it necessary to run
+away from my father, Mr. Kirkwood?” she demanded, with a moving little break in
+her voice.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Kirkwood hesitated. It were unfeeling to tell her why; yet it was essential
+that she should know, however painful the knowledge might prove to her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And she was insistent; he might not dodge the issue. “Why?” she repeated as he
+paused.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I wish you wouldn’t press me for an answer just now, Miss Calendar.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Don’t you think I had better know?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Instinctively he inclined his head in assent.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Then why—?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Kirkwood bent forward and patted the flank of the satchel that held the
+gladstone bag.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What does that mean, Mr. Kirkwood?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“That I have the jewels,” he told her tersely, looking straight ahead.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At his shoulder he heard a low gasp of amazement and incredulity commingled.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“But—! How did you get them? My father deposited them in bank this morning?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“He must have taken them out again.... I got them on board the Alethea, where
+your father was conferring with Mulready and Captain Stryker.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“The Alethea!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You took them from those men?—you!... But didn’t my father—?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I had to persuade him,” said Kirkwood simply.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“But there were three of them against you!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Mulready wasn’t—ah—feeling very well, and Stryker’s a coward. They gave me no
+trouble. I locked them in Stryker’s room, lifted the bag of jewels, and came
+away.... I ought to tell you that they were discussing the advisability of
+sailing away without you—leaving you here, friendless and without means. That’s
+why I considered it my duty to take a hand.... I don’t like to tell you this so
+brutally, but you ought to know, and I can’t see how to tone it down,” he
+concluded awkwardly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I understand....”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But for some moments she did not speak. He avoided looking at her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The fiacre, rolling at top speed but smoothly on the broad avenues that
+encircle the ancient city, turned into the Avenue de Keyser, bringing into
+sight the Gare Centrale.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You don’t—k-know—” began the girl without warning, in a voice gusty with sobs.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Steady on!” said Kirkwood gently. “I do know, but don’t let’s talk about it
+now. We’ll be at the station in a minute, and I’ll get out and see what’s to be
+done about a train, if neither Mulready or Stryker are about. You stay in the
+carriage.... No!” He changed his mind suddenly. “I’ll not risk losing you
+again. It’s a risk we’ll have to run in company.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Please!” she agreed brokenly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The fiacre slowed up and stopped.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Are you all right, Miss Calendar?” Kirkwood asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The girl sat up, lifting her head proudly. “I am quite ready,” she said,
+steadying her voice.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Kirkwood reconnoitered through the window, while the driver was descending.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Gare Centrale, M’sieu’,” he said, opening the door.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“No one in sight,” Kirkwood told the girl. “Come, please.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He got out and gave her his hand, then paid the driver, picked up the two bags,
+and hurried with Dorothy into the station, to find in waiting a string of cars
+into which people were moving at leisurely rate. His inquiries at the
+ticket-window developed the fact that it was the 22:26 for Brussels, the last
+train leaving the Gare Centrale that night, and due to start in ten minutes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The information settled their plans for once and all; Kirkwood promptly secured
+through tickets, also purchasing “Reserve” supplementary tickets which entitled
+them to the use of those modern corridor coaches which take the place of
+first-class compartments on the Belgian state railways.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It’s a pleasure,” said Kirkwood lightly, as he followed the girl into one of
+these, “to find one’s self in a common-sense sort of a train again. ’Feels like
+home.” He put their luggage in one of the racks and sat down beside her,
+chattering with simulated cheerfulness in a vain endeavor to lighten her
+evident depression of spirit. “I always feel like a traveling anachronism in
+one of your English trains,” he said. “You can’t appreciate—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The girl smiled bravely.... “And after Brussels?” she inquired.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“First train for the coast,” he said promptly. “Dover, Ostend,
+Boulogne,—whichever proves handiest, no matter which, so long as it gets us on
+English soil without undue delay.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She said “Yes” abstractedly, resting an elbow on the window-sill and her chin
+in her palm, to stare with serious, sweet brown eyes out into the arc-smitten
+night that hung beneath the echoing roof.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Kirkwood fidgeted in despite of the constraint he placed himself under, to be
+still and not disturb her needlessly. Impatience and apprehension of misfortune
+obsessed his mental processes in equal degree. The ten minutes seemed
+interminable that elapsed ere the grinding couplings advertised the imminence
+of their start.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The guards began to bawl, the doors to slam, belated travelers to dash madly
+for the coaches. The train gave a preliminary lurch ere settling down to its
+league-long inland dash.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Kirkwood, in a fever of hope and an ague of fear, saw a man sprint furiously
+across the platform and throw himself on the forward steps of their coach, on
+the very instant of the start.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Presently he entered by the forward door and walked slowly through, narrowly
+inspecting the various passengers. As he approached the seats occupied by
+Kirkwood and Dorothy Calendar, his eyes encountered the young man’s, and he
+leered evilly. Kirkwood met the look with one that was like a kick, and the
+fellow passed with some haste into the car behind.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Who was that?” demanded the girl, without moving her head.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“How did you know?” he asked, astonished. “You didn’t look—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I saw your knuckles whiten beneath the skin.... Who was it?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Hobbs,” he acknowledged bitterly; “the mate of the <i>Alethea</i>.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I know.... And you think—?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes. He must have been ashore when I was on board the brigantine; he certainly
+wasn’t in the cabin. Evidently they hunted him up, or ran across him, and
+pressed him into service.... You see, they’re watching every outlet.... But
+we’ll win through, never fear!”
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap16"></a>XVI<br/>
+TRAVELS WITH A CHAPERON</h2>
+
+<p>
+The train, escaping the outskirts of the city, remarked the event with an
+exultant shriek, then settled down, droning steadily, to night-devouring
+flight. In the corridor-car the few passengers disposed themselves to drowse
+away the coming hour—the short hour’s ride that, in these piping days of
+frantic traveling, separates Antwerp from the capital city of Belgium.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A guard, slamming gustily in through the front door, reeled unsteadily down the
+aisle. Kirkwood, rousing from a profound reverie, detained him with a gesture
+and began to interrogate him in French. When he departed presently it
+transpired that the girl was unaquainted with that tongue.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I didn’t understand, you know,” she told him with a slow, shy smile.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I was merely questioning him about the trains from Brussels to-night. We
+daren’t stop, you see; we must go on,—keep Hobbs on the jump and lose him, if
+possible. There’s where our advantage lies—in having only Hobbs to deal with.
+He’s not particularly intellectual; and we’ve two heads to his one, besides. If
+we can prevent him from guessing our destination and wiring back to Antwerp, we
+may win away. You understand?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Perfectly,” she said, brightening. “And what do you purpose doing now?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I can’t tell yet. The guard’s gone to get me some information about the night
+trains on other lines. In the meantime, don’t fret about Hobbs; I’ll answer for
+Hobbs.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I shan’t be worried,” she said simply, “with you here....”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Whatever answer he would have made he was obliged to postpone because of the
+return of the guard, with a handful of time-tables; and when, rewarded with a
+modest gratuity, the man had gone his way, and Kirkwood turned again to the
+girl, she had withdrawn her attention for the time.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Unconscious of his bold regard, she was dreaming, her thoughts at loose-ends,
+her eyes studying the incalculable depths of blue-black night that swirled and
+eddied beyond the window-glass. The most shadowy of smiles touched her lips,
+the faintest shade of deepened color rested on her cheeks.... She was thinking
+of—him? As long as he dared, the young man, his heart in his own eyes, watched
+her greedily, taking a miser’s joy of her youthful beauty, striving with all
+his soul to analyze the enigma of that most inscrutable smile.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It baffled him. He could not say of what she thought; and told himself bitterly
+that it was not for him, a pauper, to presume a place in her meditations. He
+must not forget his circumstances, nor let her tolerance render him oblivious
+to his place, which must be a servant’s, not a lover’s.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The better to convince himself of this, he plunged desperately into a forlorn
+attempt to make head or tail of Belgian railway schedule, complicated as these
+of necessity are by the alternation from normal time notation to the abnormal
+system sanctioned by the government, and <i>vice-versa</i>, with every train
+that crosses a boundary line of the state.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+So preoccupied did he become in this pursuit that he was subconsciously
+impressed that the girl had spoken twice, ere he could detach his interest from
+the exasperatingly inconclusive and incoherent cohorts of ranked figures.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Can’t you find out anything?” Dorothy was asking.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Precious little,” he grumbled. “I’d give my head for a Bradshaw! Only it
+wouldn’t be a fair exchange.... There seems to be an express for Bruges leaving
+the Gare du Nord, Brussels, at fifty-five minutes after twenty-three o’clock;
+and if I’m not mistaken, that’s the latest train out of Brussels and the
+earliest we can catch,... if we <i>can</i> catch it. I’ve never been in
+Brussels, and Heaven only knows how long it would take us to cab it from the
+Gare du Midi to the Nord.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In this statement, however, Mr. Kirkwood was fortunately mistaken; not only
+Heaven, it appeared, had cognizance of the distance between the two stations.
+While Kirkwood was still debating the question, with pessimistic tendencies,
+the friendly guard had occasion to pass through the coach; and, being tapped,
+yielded the desired information with entire tractability.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It would be a cab-ride of perhaps ten minutes. Monsieur, however, would serve
+himself well if he offered the driver an advance tip as an incentive to speedy
+driving. Why? Why because (here the guard consulted his watch; and Kirkwood
+very keenly regretted the loss of his own)—because this train, announced to
+arrive in Brussels some twenty minutes prior to the departure of that other,
+was already late. But yes—a matter of some ten minutes. Could that not be made
+up? Ah, Monsieur, but who should say?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The guard departed, doubtless with private views as to the madness of all
+English-speaking travelers.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“And there we are!” commented Kirkwood in factitious resignation. “If we’re
+obliged to stop overnight in Brussels, our friends will be on our back before
+we can get out in the morning, if they have to come by motor-car.” He reflected
+bitterly on the fact that with but a little more money at his disposal, he too
+could hire a motor-car and cry defiance to their persecutors. “However,” he
+amended, with rising spirits, “so much the better our chance of losing Mr.
+Hobbs. We must be ready to drop off the instant the train stops.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He began to unfold another time-table, threatening again to lose himself
+completely; and was thrown into the utmost confusion by the touch of the girl’s
+hand, in appeal placed lightly on his own. And had she been observant, she
+might have seen a second time his knuckles whiten beneath the skin as he
+asserted his self-control—though this time not over his temper.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His eyes, dumbly eloquent, turned to meet hers. She was smiling.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Please!” she iterated, with the least imperative pressure on his hand, pushing
+the folder aside.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I beg pardon?” he muttered blankly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Is it quite necessary, now, to study those schedules? Haven’t you decided to
+try for the Bruges express?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Why yes, but—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Then please don’t leave me to my thoughts all the time, Mr. Kirkwood.” There
+was a tremor of laughter in her voice, but her eyes were grave and earnest.
+“I’m very weary of thinking round in a circle—and that,” she concluded, with a
+nervous little laugh, “is all I’ve had to do for days!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I’m afraid I’m very stupid,” he humored her. “This is the second time, you
+know, in the course of a very brief acquaintance, that you have found it
+necessary to remind me to talk to you.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Oh-h!” She brightened. “That night, at the Pless? But that was <i>ages</i>
+ago!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It seems so,” he admitted.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“So much has happened!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes,” he assented vaguely.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She watched him, a little piqued by his absent-minded mood, for a moment; then,
+and not without a trace of malice: “Must I tell you again what to talk about?”
+she asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Forgive me. I was thinking about, if not talking to, you.... I’ve been
+wondering just why it was that you left the <i>Alethea</i> at Queensborough, to
+go on by steamer.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And immediately he was sorry that his tactless query had swung the conversation
+to bear upon her father, the thought of whom could not but prove painful to
+her. But it was too late to mend matters; already her evanescent flush of
+amusement had given place to remembrance.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It was on my father’s account,” she told him in a steady voice, but with
+averted eyes; “he is a very poor sailor, and the promise of a rough passage
+terrified him. I believe there was a difference of opinion about it, he
+disputing with Mr. Mulready and Captain Stryker. That was just after we had
+left the anchorage. They both insisted that it was safer to continue by the
+<i>Alethea</i>, but he wouldn’t listen to them, and in the end had his way.
+Captain Stryker ran the brigantine into the mouth of the Medway and put us
+ashore just in time to catch the steamer.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Were you sorry for the change?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I?” She shuddered slightly. “Hardly! I think I hated the ship from the moment
+I set foot on board her. It was a dreadful place; it was all night-marish, that
+night, but it seemed most terrible on the <i>Alethea</i> with Captain Stryker
+and that abominable Mr. Hobbs. I think that my unhappiness had as much to do
+with my father’s insistence on the change, as anything. He ... he was very
+thoughtful, most of the time.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Kirkwood shut his teeth on what he knew of the blackguard.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I don’t know why,” she continued, wholly without affectation, “but I was
+wretched from the moment you left me in the cab, to wait while you went in to
+see Mrs. Hallam. And when we left you, at Bermondsey Old Stairs, after what you
+had said to me, I felt—I hardly know what to say—abandoned, in a way.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“But you were with your father, in his care—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I know, but I was getting confused. Until then the excitement had kept me from
+thinking. But you made me think. I began to wonder, to question ... But what
+could I do?” She signified her helplessness with a quick and dainty movement of
+her hands. “He is my father; and I’m not yet of age, you know.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I thought so,” he confessed, troubled. “It’s very inconsiderate of you, you
+must admit.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I don’t understand...”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Because of the legal complication. I’ve no doubt your father can ‘have the law
+on me’”—Kirkwood laughed uneasily—“for taking you from his protection.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Protection!” she echoed warmly. “If you call it that!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Kidnapping,” he said thoughtfully: “I presume that’d be the charge.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Oh!” She laughed the notion to scorn. “Besides, they must catch us first,
+mustn’t they?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Of course; and”—with a simulation of confidence sadly deceitful—“they shan’t,
+Mr. Hobbs to the contrary notwithstanding.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You make me share your confidence, against my better judgment.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I wish your better judgment would counsel you to share your confidence with
+me,” he caught her up. “If you would only tell me what it’s all about, as far
+as you know, I’d be better able to figure out what we ought to do.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Briefly the girl sat silent, staring before her with sweet somber eyes. Then,
+“In the very beginning,” she told him with a conscious laugh,—“this sounds very
+story-bookish, I know—in the very beginning, George Burgoyne Calendar, an
+American, married his cousin a dozen times removed, and an Englishwoman, Alice
+Burgoyne Hallam.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Hallam!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Wait, please.” She sat up, bending forward and frowning down upon her
+interlacing, gloved fingers; she was finding it difficult to say what she must.
+Kirkwood, watching hungrily the fair drooping head, the flawless profile clear
+and radiant against the night-blackened window, saw hot signals of shame
+burning on her cheek and throat and forehead.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“But never mind,” he began awkwardly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“No,” she told him with decision. “Please let me go on....” She continued,
+stumbling, trusting to his sympathy to bridge the gaps in her narrative. “My
+father ... There was trouble of some sort.... At all events, he disappeared
+when I was a baby. My mother ... died. I was brought up in the home of my
+great-uncle, Colonel George Burgoyne, of the Indian Army—retired. My mother had
+been his favorite niece, they say; I presume that was why he cared for me. I
+grew up in his home in Cornwall; it was my home, just as he was my father in
+everything but fact.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“A year ago he died, leaving me everything,—the town house in Frognall Street,
+his estate in Cornwall: everything was willed to me on condition that I must
+never live with my father, nor in any way contribute to his support. If I
+disobeyed, the entire estate without reserve was to go to his nearest of
+kin.... Colonel Burgoyne was unmarried and had no children.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The girl paused, lifting to Kirkwood’s face her eyes, clear, fearless,
+truthful. “I never was given to understand that there was anybody who might
+have inherited, other than myself,” she declared.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I see... Last week I received a letter, signed with my father’s name, begging
+me to appoint an interview with him in London. I did so,—guess how gladly! I
+was alone in the world, and he, my father, whom I had never thought to see....
+We met at his hotel, the Pless. He wanted me to come and live with him,—said
+that he was growing old and lonely and needed a daughter’s love and care. He
+told me that he had made a fortune in America and was amply able to provide for
+us both. As for my inheritance, he persuaded me that it was by rights the
+property of Frederick Hallam, Mrs. Hallam’s son.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I have met the young gentleman,” interpolated Kirkwood.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“His name was new to me, but my father assured me that he was the next of kin
+mentioned in Colonel Burgoyne’s will, and convinced me that I had no real right
+to the property.... After all, he was my father; I agreed; I could not bear the
+thought of wronging anybody. I was to give up everything but my mother’s
+jewels. It seems,—my father said,—I don’t—I can’t believe it now—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She choked on a little, dry sob. It was some time before she seemed able to
+continue.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I was told that my great-uncle’s collection of jewels had been my mother’s
+property. He had in life a passion for collecting jewels, and it had been his
+whim to carry them with him, wherever he went. When he died in Frognall Street,
+they were in the safe by the head of his bed. I, in my grief, at first forgot
+them, and then afterwards carelessly put off removing them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“To come back to my father: Night before last we were to call on Mrs. Hallam.
+It was to be our last night in England; we were to sail for the Continent on
+the private yacht of a friend of my father’s, the next morning.... This is what
+I was told—and believed, you understand.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“That night Mrs. Hallam was dining at another table at the Pless, it seems. I
+did not then know her. When leaving, she put a note on our table, by my
+father’s elbow. I was astonished beyond words.... He seemed much agitated, told
+me that he was called away on urgent business, a matter of life and death, and
+begged me to go alone to Frognall Street, get the jewels and meet him at Mrs.
+Hallam’s later.... I wasn’t altogether a fool, for I began dimly to suspect,
+then, that something was wrong; but I was a fool, for I consented to do as he
+desired. You understand—you know—?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I do, indeed,” replied Kirkwood grimly. “I understand a lot of things now that
+I didn’t five minutes ago. Please let me think...”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But the time he took for deliberation was short. He had hoped to find a way to
+spare her, by sparing Calendar; but momentarily he was becoming more impressed
+with the futility of dealing with her save in terms of candor, merciful though
+they might seem harsh.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I must tell you,” he said, “that you have been outrageously misled, swindled
+and deceived. I have heard from your father’s own lips that Mrs. Hallam was to
+pay him two thousand pounds for keeping you out of England and losing you your
+inheritance. I’m inclined to question, furthermore, the assertion that these
+jewels were your mother’s. Frederick Hallam was the man who followed you into
+the Frognall Street house and attacked me on the stairs; Mrs. Hallam admits
+that he went there to get the jewels. But he didn’t want anybody to know it.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“But that doesn’t prove—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Just a minute.” Rapidly and concisely Kirkwood recounted the events wherein he
+had played a part, subsequent to the adventure of Bermondsey Old Stairs. He was
+guilty of but one evasion; on one point only did he slur the truth: he
+conceived it his honorable duty to keep the girl in ignorance of his straitened
+circumstances; she was not to be distressed by knowledge of his distress, nor
+could he tolerate the suggestion of seeming to play for her sympathy. It was
+necessary, then, to invent a motive to excuse his return to 9, Frognall Street.
+I believe he chose to exaggerate the inquisitiveness of his nature and threw in
+for good measure a desire to recover a prized trinket of no particular moment,
+esteemed for its associations, and so forth. But whatever the fabrication, it
+passed muster; to the girl his motives seemed less important than the
+discoveries that resulted from them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I am afraid,” he concluded the summary of the confabulation he had overheard
+at the skylight of the Alethea’s cabin, “you’d best make up your mind that your
+father—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes,” whispered the girl huskily; and turned her face to the window, a
+quivering muscle in the firm young throat alone betraying her emotion.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It’s a bad business,” he pursued relentlessly: “bad all round. Mulready, in
+your father’s pay, tries to have him arrested, the better to rob him. Mrs.
+Hallam, to secure your property for that precious pet, Freddie, connives at, if
+she doesn’t instigate, a kidnapping. Your father takes her money to deprive you
+of yours,—which could profit him nothing so long as you remained in lawful
+possession of it; and at the same time he conspires to rob, through you, the
+rightful owners—if they are rightful owners. And if they are, why does Freddie
+Hallam go like a thief in the night to secure property that’s his beyond
+dispute?... I don’t really think you owe your father any further
+consideration.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He waited patiently. Eventually, “No-o,” the girl sobbed assent.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It’s this way: Calendar, counting on your sparing him in the end, is going to
+hound us. He’s doing it now: there’s Hobbs in the next car, for proof. Until
+these jewels are returned, whether to Frognall Street or to young Hallam, we’re
+both in danger, both thieves in the sight of the law. And your father knows
+that, too. There’s no profit to be had by discounting the temper of these
+people; they’re as desperate a gang of swindlers as ever lived. They’ll have
+those jewels if they have to go as far as murder—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Mr. Kirkwood!” she deprecated, in horror.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He wagged his head stubbornly, ominously. “I’ve seen them in the raw. They’re
+hot on our trail now; ten to one, they’ll be on our backs before we can get
+across the Channel. Once in England we will be comparatively safe. Until then
+... But I’m a brute—I’m frightening you!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You are, dreadfully,” she confessed in a tremulous voice.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Forgive me. If you look at the dark side first, the other seems all the
+brighter. Please don’t worry; we’ll pull through with flying colors, or my
+name’s not Philip Kirkwood!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I have every faith in you,” she informed him, flawlessly sincere. “When I
+think of all you’ve done and dared for me, on the mere suspicion that I needed
+your help—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“We’d best be getting ready,” he interrupted hastily. “Here’s Brussels.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was so. Lights, in little clusters and long, wheeling lines, were leaping
+out of the darkness and flashing back as the train rumbled through the suburbs
+of the little Paris of the North. Already the other passengers were bestirring
+themselves, gathering together wraps and hand luggage, and preparing for the
+journey’s end.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Rising, Kirkwood took down their two satchels from the overhead rack, and
+waited, in grim abstraction planning and counterplanning against the
+machinations in whose wiles they two had become so perilously entangled.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Primarily, there was Hobbs to be dealt with; no easy task, for Kirkwood dared
+not resort to violence nor in any way invite the attention of the authorities;
+and threats would be an idle waste of breath, in the case of that corrupt and
+malignant, little cockney, himself as keen as any needle, adept in all the
+artful resources of the underworld whence he had sprung, and further primed for
+action by that master rogue, Calendar.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The train was pulling slowly into the station when he reluctantly abandoned his
+latest unfeasible scheme for shaking off the little Englishman, and concluded
+that their salvation was only to be worked out through everlasting vigilance,
+incessant movement, and the favor of the blind goddess, Fortune. There was
+comfort of a sort in the reflection that the divinity of chance is at least
+blind; her favors are impartially distributed; the swing of the wheel of the
+world is not always to the advantage of the wrongdoer and the scamp.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He saw nothing of Hobbs as they alighted and hastened from the station, and
+hardly had time to waste looking for him, since their train had failed to make
+up the precious ten minutes. Consequently he dismissed the fellow from his
+thoughts until—with Brussels lingering in their memories a garish vision of
+brilliant streets and glowing cafés, glimpsed furtively from their cab windows
+during its wild dash over the broad mid-city, boulevards—at midnight they
+settled themselves in a carriage of the Bruges express. They were speeding
+along through the open country with a noisy clatter; then a minute’s
+investigation sufficed to discover the mate of the <i>Alethea</i> serenely
+ensconced in the coach behind.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The little man seemed rarely complacent, and impudently greeted Kirkwood’s
+scowling visage, as the latter peered through the window in the coach-door,
+with a smirk and a waggish wave of his hand. The American by main strength of
+will-power mastered an impulse to enter and wring his neck, and returned to the
+girl, more disturbed than he cared to let her know.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There resulted from his review of the case but one plan for outwitting Mr.
+Hobbs, and that lay in trusting to his confidence that Kirkwood and Dorothy
+Calendar would proceed as far toward Ostend as the train would take
+them—namely, to the limit of the run, Bruges.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Thus inspired, Kirkwood took counsel with the girl, and when the train paused
+at Ghent, they made an unostentatious exit from their coach, finding
+themselves, when the express had rolled on into the west, upon a station
+platform in a foreign city at nine minutes past one o’clock in the morning—but
+at length without their shadow. Mr. Hobbs had gone on to Bruges.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Kirkwood sped his journeyings with an unspoken malediction, and collected
+himself to cope with a situation which was to prove hardly more happy for them
+than the espionage they had just eluded. The primal flush of triumph which had
+saturated the American’s humor on this signal success, proved but fictive and
+transitory when inquiry of the station attendants educed the information that
+the two earliest trains to be obtained were the 5:09 for Dunkerque and the 5:37
+for Ostend. A minimum delay of four hours was to be endured in the face of many
+contingent features singularly unpleasant to contemplate. The station
+waiting-room was on the point of closing for the night, and Kirkwood, already
+alarmed by the rapid ebb of the money he had had of Calendar, dared not subject
+his finances to the strain of a night’s lodging at one of Ghent’s hotels. He
+found himself forced to be cruel to be kind to the girl, and Dorothy’s cheerful
+acquiescence to their sole alternative of tramping the street until daybreak
+did nothing to alleviate Kirkwood’s exasperation.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was permitted them to occupy a bench outside the station. There the girl,
+her head pillowed on the treasure bag, napped uneasily, while Kirkwood plodded
+restlessly to and fro, up and down the platform, communing with the Shade of
+Care and addling his poor, weary wits with the problem of the future,—not so
+much his own as the future of the unhappy child for whose welfare he had
+assumed responsibility. Dark for both of them, in his understanding To-morrow
+loomed darkest for her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Not until the gray, formless light of the dawn-dusk was wavering over the land,
+did he cease his perambulations. Then a gradual stir of life in the city
+streets, together with the appearance of a station porter or two, opening the
+waiting-rooms and preparing them against the traffic of the day, warned him
+that he must rouse his charge. He paused and stood over her, reluctant to
+disturb her rest, such as it was, his heart torn with compassion for her, his
+soul embittered by the cruel irony of their estate.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+If what he understood were true, a king’s ransom was secreted within the cheap,
+imitation-leather satchel which served her for a pillow. But it availed her
+nothing for her comfort. If what he believed were true, she was absolute
+mistress of that treasure of jewels; yet that night she had been forced to
+sleep on a hard, uncushioned bench, in the open air, and this morning he must
+waken her to the life of a hunted thing. A week ago she had had at her command
+every luxury known to the civilized world; to-day she was friendless, but for
+his inefficient, worthless self, and in a strange land. A week ago,—had he
+known her then,—he had been free to tell her of his love, to offer her the
+protection of his name as well as his devotion; to-day he was an all but
+penniless vagabond, and there could be no dishonor deeper than to let her know
+the nature of his heart’s desire.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Was ever lover hedged from a declaration to his mistress by circumstances so
+hateful, so untoward! He could have raged and railed against his fate like any
+madman. For he desired her greatly, and she was very lovely in his sight. If
+her night’s rest had been broken and but a mockery, she showed few signs of it;
+the faint, wan complexion of fatigue seemed only to enhance the beauty of her
+maidenhood; her lips were as fresh and desirous as the dewy petals of a crimson
+rose; beneath her eyes soft shadows lurked where her lashes lay tremulous upon
+her cheeks of satin.... She was to him of all created things the most
+wonderful, the most desirable.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The temptation of his longing seemed more than he could long withstand. But
+resist he must, or part for ever with any title to her consideration—or his
+own. He shut his teeth and knotted his brows in a transport of desire to touch,
+if only with his finger-tips, the woven wonder of her hair.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And thus she saw him, when, without warning, she awoke.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Bewilderment at first informed the wide brown eyes; then, as their drowsiness
+vanished, a little laughter, a little tender mirth.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Good morning, Sir Knight of the Somber Countenance!” she cried, standing up.
+“Am I so utterly disreputable that you find it necessary to frown on me so
+darkly?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He shook his head, smiling.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I know I’m a fright,” she asserted vigorously, shaking out the folds of her
+pleated skirt. “And as for my hat, it will never be on straight—but then
+<i>you</i> wouldn’t know.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It seems all right,” he replied vacantly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Then please to try to look a little happier, since you find me quite
+presentable.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I do...”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Without lifting her bended head, she looked up, laughing, not ill-pleased.
+“<i>You’d</i> say so... really?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Commonplace enough, this banter, this pitiful endeavor to be oblivious of their
+common misery; but like the look she gave him, her words rang in his head like
+potent fumes of wine. He turned away, utterly disconcerted for the time,
+knowing only that he must overcome his weakness.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Far down the railway tracks there rose a murmuring, that waxed to a rumbling
+roar. A passing porter answered Kirkwood’s inquiry: it was the night boat-train
+from Ostend. He picked up their bags and drew the girl into the waiting-room,
+troubled by a sickening foreboding.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Through the window they watched the train roll in and stop.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Among others, alighted, smirking, the unspeakable Hobbs.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He lifted his hat and bowed jauntily to the waiting-room window, making it
+plain that his keen eyes had discovered them instantly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Kirkwood’s heart sank with the hopelessness of it all. If the railway
+directorates of Europe conspired against them, what chance had they? If the
+night boat-train from Ostend had only had the decency to be twenty-five minutes
+late, instead of arriving promptly on the minute of 4:45 they two might have
+escaped by the 5:09 for Dunkerque and Calais.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There remained but a single untried ruse in his bag of tricks; mercifully it
+might suffice.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Miss Calendar,” said Kirkwood from his heart, “just as soon as I get you home,
+safe and sound, I am going to take a day off, hunt up that little villain, and
+flay him alive. In the meantime, I forgot to dine last night, and am reminded
+that we had better forage for breakfast.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Hobbs dogged them at a safe distance while they sallied forth and in a
+neighboring street discovered an early-bird bakery. Here they were able to
+purchase rolls steaming from the oven, fresh pats of golden butter wrapped in
+clean lettuce leaves, and milk in twin bottles; all of which they prosaically
+carried with them back to the station, lacking leisure as they did to partake
+of the food before train-time.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Without attempting concealment (Hobbs, he knew, was eavesdropping round the
+corner of the door) Kirkwood purchased at the ticket-window passages on the
+Dunkerque train. Mr. Hobbs promptly flattered him by imitation; and so jealous
+of his luck was Kirkwood by this time grown, through continual disappointment,
+that he did not even let the girl into his plans until they were aboard the
+5:09, in a compartment all to themselves. Then, having with his own eyes seen
+Mr. Hobbs dodge into the third compartment in the rear of the same carriage,
+Kirkwood astonished the girl by requesting her to follow him; and together they
+left by the door opposite that by which they had entered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The engine was running up and down a scale of staccato snorts, in preparation
+for the race, and the cars were on the edge of moving, couplings clanking,
+wheels a-groan, ere Mr. Hobbs condescended to join them between the tracks.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Wearily, disheartened, Kirkwood reopened the door, flung the bags in, and
+helped the girl back into their despised compartment; the quicker route to
+England via Ostend was now out of the question. As for himself, he waited for a
+brace of seconds, eying wickedly the ubiquitous Hobbs, who had popped back into
+his compartment, but stood ready to pop out again on the least encouragement.
+In the meantime he was pleased to shake a friendly foot at Mr. Kirkwood,
+thrusting that member out through the half-open door.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Only the timely departure of the train, compelling him to rejoin Dorothy at
+once, if at all, prevented the American from adding murder to the already
+noteworthy catalogue of his high crimes and misdemeanors.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Their simple meal, consumed to the ultimate drop and crumb while the Dunkerque
+train meandered serenely through a sunny, smiling Flemish countryside, somewhat
+revived their jaded spirits. After all, they were young, enviably dowered with
+youth’s exuberant elasticity of mood; the world was bright in the dawning, the
+night had fled leaving naught but an evil memory; best of all things, they were
+together: tacitly they were agreed that somehow the future would take care of
+itself and all be well with them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For a time they laughed and chattered, pretending that the present held no
+cares or troubles; but soon the girl, nestling her head in a corner of the
+dingy cushions, was smiling ever more drowsily on Kirkwood; and presently she
+slept in good earnest, the warm blood ebbing and flowing beneath the exquisite
+texture of her cheeks, the ghost of an unconscious smile quivering about the
+sensitive scarlet mouth, the breeze through the open window at her side
+wantoning at will in the sunlit witchery of her hair. And Kirkwood, worn with
+sleepless watching, dwelt in longing upon the dear innocent allure of her until
+the ache in his heart had grown well-nigh insupportable; then instinctively
+turned his gaze upwards, searching his heart, reading the faith and desire of
+it, so that at length knowledge and understanding came to him, of his weakness
+and strength and the clean love that he bore for her, and gladdened he sat
+dreaming in waking the same clear dreams that modeled her unconscious lips
+secretly for laughter and the joy of living.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When Dunkerque halted their progress, they were obliged to alight and change
+cars,—Hobbs a discreetly sinister shadow at the end of the platform.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+By schedule they were to arrive in Calais about the middle of the forenoon,
+with a wait of three hours to be bridged before the departure of the Dover
+packet. That would be an anxious time; the prospect of it rendered both Dorothy
+and Kirkwood doubly anxious throughout this final stage of their flight. In
+three hours anything could happen, or be brought about. Neither could forget
+that it was quite within the bounds of possibilities for Calendar to be
+awaiting them in Calais. Presuming that Hobbs had been acute enough to guess
+their plans and advise his employer by telegraph, the latter could readily have
+anticipated their arrival, whether by sea in the brigantine, or by land, taking
+the direct route via Brussels and Lille. If such proved to be the case, it were
+scarcely sensible to count upon the arch-adventurer contenting himself with a
+waiting rôle like Hobbs’.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+With such unhappy apprehensions for a stimulant, between them the man and the
+girl contrived a make-shift counter-stratagem; or it were more accurate to say
+that Kirkwood proposed it, while Dorothy rejected, disputed, and at length
+accepted it, albeit with sad misgivings. For it involved a separation that
+might not prove temporary.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Together they could never escape the surveillance of Mr. Hobbs; parted, he
+would be obliged to follow one or the other. The task of misleading the
+<i>Alethea’s</i> mate, Kirkwood undertook, delegating to the girl the duty of
+escaping when he could provide her the opportunity, of keeping under cover
+until the hour of sailing, and then proceeding to England, with the gladstone
+bag, alone if Kirkwood was unable, or thought it inadvisable, to join her on
+the boat.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In furtherance of this design, a majority of the girl’s belongings were
+transferred from her traveling bag to Kirkwood’s, the gladstone taking their
+place; and the young man provided her with voluminous instructions, a revolver
+which she did not know how to handle and declared she would never use for any
+consideration, and enough money to pay for her accommodation at the Terminus
+Hôtel, near the pier, and for two passages to London. It was agreed that she
+should secure the steamer booking, lest Kirkwood be delayed until the last
+moment.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+These arrangements concluded, the pair of blessed idiots sat steeped in
+melancholy silence, avoiding each other’s eyes, until the train drew in at the
+Gare Centrale, Calais.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In profound silence, too, they left their compartment and passed through the
+station, into the quiet, sun-drenched streets of the seaport,—Hobbs hovering
+solicitously in the offing.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Without comment or visible relief of mind they were aware that their fears had
+been without apparent foundation; they saw no sign of Calendar, Stryker or
+Mulready. The circumstance, however, counted for nothing; one or all of the
+adventurers might arrive in Calais at any minute.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Momentarily more miserable as the time of parting drew nearer, dumb with
+unhappiness, they turned aside from the main thoroughfares of the city, leaving
+the business section, and gained the sleepier side streets, bordered by the
+residences of the proletariat, where for blocks none but children were to be
+seen, and of them but few—quaint, sober little bodies playing almost
+noiselessly in their dooryards.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At length Kirkwood spoke.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Let’s make it the corner,” he said, without looking at the girl. “It’s a short
+block to the next street. You hurry to the Terminus and lock yourself in your
+room. Have the management book both passages; don’t run the risk of going to
+the pier yourself. I’ll make things interesting for Mr. Hobbs, and join you as
+soon as I can, <i>if</i> I can.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You must,” replied the girl. “I shan’t go without you.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“But, Dor—Miss Calendar!” he exclaimed, aghast.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I don’t care—I know I agreed,” she declared mutinously. “But I won’t—I can’t.
+Remember I shall wait for you.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“But—but perhaps—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“If you have to stay, it will be because there’s danger—won’t it? And what
+would you think of me if I deserted you then, af-after all y-you’ve done?...
+Please don’t waste time arguing. Whether you come at one to-day, to-morrow, or
+a week from to-morrow, I shall be waiting.... You may be sure. Good-by.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They had turned the corner, walking slowly, side by side; Hobbs, for the first
+time caught off his guard, had dropped behind more than half a long block. But
+now Kirkwood’s quick sidelong glance discovered the mate in the act of taking
+alarm and quickening his pace. None the less the American was at the time
+barely conscious of anything other than a wholly unexpected furtive pressure of
+the girl’s gloved fingers on his own.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Good-by,” she whispered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He caught at her hand, protesting. “Dorothy—!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Good-by,” she repeated breathlessly, with a queer little catch in her voice.
+“God be with you, Philip, and—and send you safely back to me....”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And she was running away.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Dumfounded with dismay, seeing in a flash how all his plans might be set at
+naught by this her unforeseen insubordination, he took a step or two after her;
+but she was fleet of foot, and, remembering Hobbs, he halted.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+By this time the mate, too, was running; Kirkwood could hear the heavy pounding
+of his clumsy feet. Already Dorothy had almost gained the farther corner; as
+she whisked round it with a flutter of skirts, Kirkwood dodged hastily behind a
+gate-post. A thought later, Hobbs appeared, head down, chest out, eyes
+straining for sight of his quarry, pelting along for dear life.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As, rounding the corner, he stretched out in swifter stride, Kirkwood was
+inspired to put a spoke in his wheel; and a foot thrust suddenly out from
+behind the gate-post accomplished his purpose with more success than he had
+dared anticipate. Stumbling, the mate plunged headlong, arms and legs a-sprawl;
+and the momentum of his pace, though checked, carried him along the sidewalk,
+face downwards, a full yard ere he could stay himself.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Kirkwood stepped out of the gateway and sheered off as Hobbs picked himself up;
+something which he did rather slowly, as if in a daze, without comprehension of
+the cause of his misfortune. And for a moment he stood pulling his wits
+together and swaying as though on the point of resuming his rudely interrupted
+chase; when the noise of Kirkwood’s heels brought him about face in a
+twinkling.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Ow, it’s you, eh!” he snarled in a temper as vicious as his countenance; and
+both of these were much the worse for wear and tear.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Myself,” admitted Kirkwood fairly; and then, in a gleam of humor: “Weren’t you
+looking for me?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His rage seemed to take the little Cockney and shake him by the throat; he
+trembled from head to foot, his face shockingly congested, and spat out dust
+and fragments of lurid blasphemy like an infuriated cat.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Of a sudden, “W’ere’s the gel?” he sputtered thickly as his quick shifting eyes
+for the first time noted Dorothy’s absence.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Miss Calendar has other business—none with you. I’ve taken the liberty of
+stopping you because I have a word or two—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Ow, you ’ave, ’ave you? Gawd strike me blind, but I’ve a word for you, too!...
+’And over that bag—and look nippy, or I’ll myke you pye for w’at you’ve done to
+me ... I’ll myke you pye!” he iterated hoarsely, edging closer. “’And it over
+or—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You’ve got another guess—” Kirkwood began, but saved his breath in deference
+to an imperative demand on him for instant defensive action.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To some extent he had underestimated the brute courage of the fellow, the
+violent, desperate courage that is distilled of anger in men of his kind.
+Despising him, deeming him incapable of any overt act of villainy, Kirkwood had
+been a little less wary than he would have been with Calendar or Mulready.
+Hobbs had seemed more of the craven type which Stryker graced so conspicuously.
+But now the American was to be taught discrimination, to learn that if
+Stryker’s nature was like a snake’s for low cunning and deviousness, Hobbs’
+soul was the soul of a viper.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Almost imperceptibly he had advanced upon Kirkwood; almost insensibly his right
+hand had moved toward his chest; now, with a movement marvelously deft, it had
+slipped in and out of his breast pocket. And a six-inch blade of tarnished
+steel was winging toward Kirkwood’s throat with the speed of light.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Instinctively he stepped back; as instinctively he guarded with his right
+forearm, lifting the hand that held the satchel. The knife, catching in his
+sleeve, scratched the arm beneath painfully, and simultaneously was twisted
+from the mate’s grasp, while in his surprise Kirkwood’s grip on the bag-handle
+relaxed. It was torn forcibly from his fingers just as he received a heavy blow
+on his chest from the mate’s fist. He staggered back.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+By the time he had recovered from the shock, Hobbs was a score of feet away,
+the satchel tucked under his arm, his body bent almost double, running like a
+jack-rabbit. Ere Kirkwood could get under way, in pursuit, the mate had dodged
+out of sight round the corner. When the American caught sight of him again, he
+was far down the block, and bettering his pace with every jump.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was approaching, also, some six or eight good citizens of Calais, men of the
+laboring class, at a guess. Their attention attracted by his frantic flight,
+they stopped to wonder. One or two moved as though to intercept him, and he
+doubled out into the middle of the street with the quickness of thought; an
+instant later he shot round another corner and disappeared, the natives
+streaming after in hot chase, electrified by the inspiring strains of “Stop,
+thief!”—or its French equivalent.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Kirkwood, cheering them on with the same wild cry, followed to the farther
+street; and there paused, so winded and weak with laughter that he was fain to
+catch at a fence picket for support. Standing thus he saw other denizens of
+Calais spring as if from the ground miraculously to swell the hue and cry; and
+a dumpling of a gendarme materialized from nowhere at all, to fall in behind
+the rabble, waving his sword above his head and screaming at the top of his
+lungs, the while his fat legs twinkled for all the world like thick sausage
+links marvelously animated.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The mob straggled round yet another corner and was gone; its clamor diminished
+on the still Spring air; and Kirkwood, recovering, abandoned Mr. Hobbs to the
+justice of the high gods and the French system of jurisprudence (at least, he
+hoped the latter would take an interest in the case, if haply Hobbs were laid
+by the heels), and went his way rejoicing.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As for the scratch on his arm, it was nothing, as he presently demonstrated to
+his complete satisfaction in the seclusion of a chance-sent fiacre. Kirkwood,
+commissioning it to drive him to the American Consulate, made his diagnosis
+<i>en route</i>; wound a handkerchief round the negligible wound, rolled down
+his sleeve, and forgot it altogether in the joys of picturing to himself Hobbs
+in the act of opening the satchel in expectation of finding therein the
+gladstone bag.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At the consulate door he paid off the driver and dismissed him; the fiacre had
+served his purpose, and he could find his way to the Terminus Hôtel at
+infinitely less expense. He had a considerably harder task before him as he
+ascended the steps to the consular doorway, knocked and made known the nature
+of his errand.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+No malicious destiny could have timed the hour of his call more appositely; the
+consul was at home and at the disposal of his fellow-citizens—within bounds.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the course of thirty minutes or so Kirkwood emerged with dignity from the
+consulate, his face crimson to the hair, his soul smarting with shame and
+humiliation; and left an amused official representative of his country’s
+government with the impression of having been entertained to the point of ennui
+by an exceptionally clumsy but pertinacious liar.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For the better part of the succeeding hour Kirkwood circumnavigated the
+neighborhood of the steamer pier and the Terminus Hôtel, striving to render
+himself as inconspicuous as he felt insignificant, and keenly on the alert for
+any sign or news of Hobbs. In this pursuit he was pleasantly disappointed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At noon precisely, his suspense grown too onerous for his strength of will,
+throwing caution and their understanding to the winds, he walked boldly into
+the Terminus, and inquired for Miss Calendar.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The assurance he received that she was in safety under its roof did not deter
+him from sending up his name and asking her to receive him in the public
+lounge; he required the testimony of his senses to convince him that no harm
+had come to her in the long hour and a half that had elapsed since their
+separation.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Woman-like, she kept him waiting. Alone in the public rooms of the hotel, he
+suffered excruciating torments. How was he to know that Calendar had not
+arrived and found his way to her?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When at length she appeared on the threshold of the apartment, bringing with
+her the traveling bag and looking wonderfully the better for her ninety minutes
+of complete repose and privacy, the relief he experienced was so intense that
+he remained transfixed in the middle of the floor, momentarily able neither to
+speak nor to move.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+On her part, so fagged and distraught did he seem, that at sight of his
+care-worn countenance she hurried to him with outstretched, compassionate hands
+and a low pitiful cry of concern, forgetful entirely of that which he himself
+had forgotten—the emotion she had betrayed on parting.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Oh, nothing wrong,” he hastened to reassure her, with a sorry ghost of his
+familiar grin; “only I have lost Hobbs and the satchel with your things; and
+there’s no sign yet of Mr. Calendar. We can feel pretty comfortable now,
+and—and I thought it time we had something like a meal.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The narrative of his adventure which he delivered over their <i>déjeuner à la
+fourchette</i> contained no mention either of his rebuff at the American
+Consulate or the scratch he had sustained during Hobbs’ murderous assault; the
+one could not concern her, the other would seem but a bid for her sympathy. He
+counted it a fortunate thing that the mate’s knife had been keen enough to
+penetrate the cloth of his sleeve without tearing it; the slit it had left was
+barely noticeable. And he purposely diverted the girl with flashes of humorous
+description, so that they discussed both meal and episode in a mood of
+wholesome merriment.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was concluded, all too soon for the taste of either, by the waiter’s
+announcement that the steamer was on the point of sailing.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Outwardly composed, inwardly quaking, they boarded the packet, meeting with no
+misadventure whatever—if we are to except the circumstance that, when the
+restaurant bill was settled and the girl had punctiliously surrendered his
+change with the tickets, Kirkwood found himself in possession of precisely one
+franc and twenty centimes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He groaned in spirit to think how differently he might have been fixed, had he
+not in his infatuated spirit of honesty been so anxious to give Calendar more
+than ample value for his money!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+An inexorable anxiety held them both near the gangway until it was cast off and
+the boat began to draw away from the pier. Then, and not till then, did an
+unimpressive, small figure of a man detach itself from the shield of a pile of
+luggage and advance to the pier-head. No second glance was needed to identify
+Mr. Hobbs; and until the perspective dwarfed him indistinguishably, he was to
+be seen, alternately waving Kirkwood ironic farewell and blowing violent kisses
+to Miss Calendar from the tips of his soiled fingers.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+So he had escaped arrest....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At first by turns indignant and relieved to realize that thereafter they were
+to move in scenes in which his hateful shadow would not form an essentially
+component part, subsequently Kirkwood fell a prey to prophetic terrors. It was
+not alone fear of retribution that had induced Hobbs to relinquish his
+persecution—or so Kirkwood became convinced; if the mate’s calculation had
+allowed for them the least fraction of a chance to escape apprehension on the
+farther shores of the Channel, nor fears nor threats would have prevented him
+from sailing with the fugitives.... Far from having left danger behind them on
+the Continent, Kirkwood believed in his secret heart that they were but flying
+to encounter it beneath the smoky pall of London.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap17"></a>XVII<br/>
+ROGUES AND VAGABONDS</h2>
+
+<p>
+A westering sun striking down through the drab exhalations of ten-thousand
+sooty chimney-pots, tinted the atmosphere with the hue of copper. The glance
+that wandered purposelessly out through the carriage windows, recoiled,
+repelled by the endless dreary vista of the Surrey Side’s unnumbered roofs; or,
+probing instantaneously the hopeless depths of some grim narrow thoroughfare
+fleetingly disclosed, as the evening boat-train from Dover swung on toward
+Charing Cross, its trucks level with the eaves of Southwark’s dwellings, was
+saddened by the thought that in all the world squalor such as this should
+obtain and flourish unrelieved.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For perhaps the tenth time in the course of the journey Kirkwood withdrew his
+gaze from the window and turned to the girl, a question ready framed upon his
+lips.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Are you quite sure—” he began; and then, alive to the clear and penetrating
+perception in the brown eyes that smiled into his from under their level brows,
+he stammered and left the query uncompleted.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Continuing to regard him steadily and smilingly, Dorothy shook her head in
+playful denial and protest. “Do you know,” she commented, “that this is about
+the fifth repetition of that identical question within the last quarter-hour?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“How do you know what I meant to say?” he demanded, staring.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I can see it in your eyes. Besides, you’ve talked and thought of nothing else
+since we left the boat. Won’t you believe me, please, when I say there’s
+absolutely not a soul in London to whom I could go and ask for shelter? I don’t
+think it’s very nice of you to be so openly anxious to get rid of me.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This latter was so essentially undeserved and so artlessly insincere, that he
+must needs, of course, treat it with all seriousness.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“That isn’t fair, Miss Calendar. Really it’s not.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What am I to think? I’ve told you any number of times that it’s only an hour’s
+ride on to Chiltern, where the Pyrfords will be glad to take me in. You may
+depend upon it,—by eight to-night, at the latest, you’ll have me off your
+hands,—the drag and worry that I’ve been ever since—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Don’t!” he pleaded vehemently. “Please!... You <i>know</i> it isn’t that. I
+<i>don’t</i> want you off my hands, ever.... That is to say, I—ah—” Here he was
+smitten with a dumbness, and sat, aghast at the enormity of his blunder,
+entreating her forgiveness with eyes that, very likely, pleaded his cause more
+eloquently than he guessed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I mean,” he floundered on presently, in the fatuous belief that he would this
+time be able to control both mind and tongue, “<i>what</i> I mean is I’d be
+glad to go on serving you in any way I might, to the end of time, if you’d give
+me....”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He left the declaration inconclusive—a stroke of diplomacy that would have
+graced an infinitely more adept wooer. But he used it all unconsciously. “O
+Lord!” he groaned in spirit. “Worse and more of it! Why in thunder can’t I say
+the right thing <i>right</i>?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Egotistically absorbed by the problem thus formulated, he was heedless of her
+failure to respond, and remained pensively preoccupied until roused by the
+grinding and jolting of the train, as it slowed to a halt preparatory to
+crossing the bridge.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then he sought to read his answer in the eyes of Dorothy. But she was looking
+away, staring thoughtfully out over the billowing sea of roofs that merged
+illusively into the haze long ere it reached the horizon; and Kirkwood could
+see the pulsing of the warm blood in her throat and cheeks; and the glamorous
+light that leaped and waned in her eyes, as the ruddy evening sunlight warmed
+them, was something any man might be glad to live for and die for.... And he
+saw that she had understood, had grasped the thread of meaning that ran through
+the clumsy fabric of his halting speech and his sudden silences.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She had understood without resentment!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+While, incredulous, he wrestled with the wonder of this fond discovery, she
+grew conscious of his gaze, and turned her head to meet it with one fearless
+and sweet, if troubled.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Dear Mr. Kirkwood,” she said gently, bending forward as if to read between the
+lines anxiety had graven on his countenance, “won’t you tell me, please, what
+it can be that so worries you? Is it possible that you still have a fear of my
+father? But don’t you know that he can do nothing now—now that we’re safe? We
+have only to take a cab to Paddington Station, and then—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You mustn’t underestimate the resource and ability of Mr. Calendar,” he told
+her gloomily; “we’ve got a chance—no more. It wasn’t....” He shut his teeth on
+his unruly tongue—too late.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Woman-quick she caught him up. “It wasn’t that? Then what was it that worried
+you? If it’s something that affects me, is it kind and right of you not to tell
+me?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It—it affects us both,” he conceded drearily. “I—I don’t—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The wretched embarrassment of the confession befogged his wits; he felt unable
+to frame the words. He appealed speechlessly for tolerance, with a face utterly
+woebegone and eyes piteous.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The train began to move slowly across the Thames to Charing Cross.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mercilessly the girl persisted. “We’ve only a minute more. Surely you can trust
+me....”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In exasperation he interrupted almost rudely. “It’s only this: I—I’m strapped.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Strapped?” She knitted her brows over this fresh specimen of American slang.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Flat strapped—busted—broke—on my uppers—down and out,” he reeled off synonyms
+without a smile. “I haven’t enough money to pay cab-fare across the town—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Oh!” she interpolated, enlightened.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“—to say nothing of taking us to Chiltern. I couldn’t buy you a glass of water
+if you were thirsty. There isn’t a soul on earth, within hail, who would trust
+me with a quarter—I mean a shilling—across London Bridge. I’m the original
+Luckless Wonder and the only genuine Jonah extant.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+With a face the hue of fire, he cocked his eyebrows askew and attempted to
+laugh unconcernedly to hide his bitter shame. “I’ve led you out of the
+fryingpan into the fire, and I don’t know what to do! Please call me names.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And in a single instant all that he had consistently tried to avoid doing, had
+been irretrievably done; if, with dawning comprehension, dismay flickered in
+her eyes—such dismay as such a confession can rouse only in one who, like
+Dorothy Calendar, has never known the want of a penny—it was swiftly driven out
+to make place for the truest and most gracious and unselfish solicitude.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Oh, poor Mr. Kirkwood! And it’s all because of me! You’ve beggared yourself—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Not precisely; I was beggared to begin with.” He hastened to disclaim the
+extravagant generosity of which she accused him. “I had only three or four
+pounds to my name that night we met.... I haven’t told you—I—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You’ve told me nothing, nothing whatever about yourself,” she said
+reproachfully.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I didn’t want to bother you with my troubles; I tried not to talk about
+myself.... You knew I was an American, but I’m worse than that; I’m a
+Californian—from San Francisco.” He tried unsuccessfully to make light of it.
+“I told you I was the Luckless Wonder; if I’d ever had any luck I would have
+stored a little money away. As it was, I lived on my income, left my principal
+in ’Frisco; and when the earthquake came, it wiped me out completely.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“And you were going home that night we made you miss your steamer!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It was my own fault, and I’m glad this blessed minute that I did miss it. Nice
+sort I’d have been, to go off and leave you at the mercy—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Please! I want to think, I’m trying to remember how much you’ve gone through—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Precisely what I don’t want you to do. Anyway, I did nothing more than any
+other fellow would’ve! Please don’t give me credit that I don’t deserve.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But she was not listening; and a pause fell, while the train crawled warily
+over the trestle, as if in fear of the foul, muddy flood below.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“And there’s no way I can repay you....”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“There’s nothing to be repaid,” he contended stoutly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She clasped her hands and let them fall gently in her lap. “I’ve not a farthing
+in the world!... I never dreamed.... I’m so sorry, Mr. Kirkwood—terribly,
+terribly sorry!... But what can we do? I can’t consent to be a burden—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“But you’re not! You’re the one thing that ...” He swerved sharply, at an
+abrupt tangent. “There’s one thing we can do, of course.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She looked up inquiringly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Craven Street is just round the corner.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes?”—wonderingly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I mean we must go to Mrs. Hallam’s house, first off.... It’s too late
+now,—after five, else we could deposit the jewels in some bank. Since—since
+they are no longer yours, the only thing, and the proper thing to do is to
+place them in safety or in the hands of their owner. If you take them directly
+to young Hallam, your hands will be clear.... And—I never did such a thing in
+my life, Miss Calendar; but if he’s got a spark of gratitude in his make-up, I
+ought to be able to—er—to borrow a pound or so of him.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Do you think so?” She shook her head in doubt. “I don’t know; I know so little
+of such things.... You are right; we must take him the jewels, but...” Her
+voice trailed off into a sigh of profound perturbation.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He dared not meet her look.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Beneath his wandering gaze a County Council steam-boat darted swiftly
+down-stream from Charing Cross pier, in the shadow of the railway bridge. It
+seemed curious to reflect that from that very floating pier he had started
+first upon his quest of the girl beside him, only—he had to count—three nights
+ago! Three days and three nights! Altogether incredible seemed the
+transformation they had wrought in the complexion of the world. Yet nothing
+material was changed.... He lifted his eyes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Beyond the river rose the Embankment, crawling with traffic, backed by the
+green of the gardens and the shimmering walls of glass and stone of the great
+hotels, their windows glowing weirdly golden in the late sunlight. A little
+down-stream Cleopatra’s Needle rose, sadly the worse for London smoke, flanked
+by its couchant sphinxes, wearing a nimbus of circling, sweeping, swooping,
+wheeling gulls. Farther down, from the foot of that magnificent pile, Somerset
+House, Waterloo Bridge sprang over-stream in its graceful arch.... All as of
+yesterday; yet all changed. Why? Because a woman had entered into his life;
+because he had learned the lesson of love and had looked into the bright face
+of Romance....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+With a jar the train started and began to move more swiftly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Kirkwood lifted the traveling bag to his knees.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Don’t forget,” he said with some difficulty, “you’re to stick by me, whatever
+happens. You mustn’t desert me.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You <i>know</i>,” the girl reproved him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I know; but there must be no misunderstanding.... Don’t worry; we’ll win out
+yet, I’ve a plan.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<i>Splendide mendax</i>! He had not the glimmering of a plan.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The engine panting, the train drew in beneath the vast sounding dome of the
+station, to an accompaniment of dull thunderings; and stopped finally.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Kirkwood got out, not without a qualm of regret at leaving the compartment;
+therein, at least, they had some title to consideration, by virtue of their
+tickets; now they were utterly vagabondish, penniless adventurers.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The girl joined him. Slowly, elbow to elbow, the treasure bag between them,
+they made their way down toward the gates, atoms in a tide-rip of humanity,—two
+streams of passengers meeting on the narrow strip of platform, the one making
+for the streets, the other for the suburbs.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Hurried and jostled, the girl clinging tightly to his arm lest they be
+separated in the crush, they came to the ticket-wicket; beyond the barrier
+surged a sea of hats—shining “toppers,” dignified and upstanding, the outward
+and visible manifestation of the sturdy, stodgy British spirit of
+respectability; “bowlers” round and sleek and humble; shapeless caps with cloth
+visors, manufactured of outrageous plaids; flower-like miracles of millinery
+from Bond Street; strangely plumed monstrosities from Petticoat Lane and Mile
+End Road. Beneath any one of these might lurk the maleficent brain, the spying
+eyes of Calendar or one of his creatures; beneath all of them that he
+encountered, Kirkwood peered in fearful inquiry.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Yet, when they had passed unhindered the ordeal of the wickets, had run the
+gantlet of those thousand eyes without lighting in any pair a spark of
+recognition, he began to bear himself with more assurance, to be sensible to a
+grateful glow of hope. Perhaps Hobbs’ telegram had not reached its destination,
+for unquestionably the mate would have wired his chief; perhaps some accident
+had befallen the conspirators; perhaps the police had apprehended them.... No
+matter how, one hoped against hope that they had been thrown off the trail.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And indeed it seemed as if they must have been misguided in some providential
+manner. On the other hand, it would be the crassest of indiscretions to linger
+about the place an instant longer than absolutely necessary.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Outside the building, however, they paused perforce, undergoing the cross-fire
+of the congregated cabbies. It being the first time that he had ever felt
+called upon to leave the station afoot, Kirkwood cast about irresolutely,
+seeking the sidewalk leading to the Strand.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Abruptly he caught the girl by the arm and unceremoniously hurried her toward a
+waiting hansom.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Quick!” he begged her. “Jump right in—not an instant to spare.—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She nodded brightly, lips firm with courage, eyes shining.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“My father?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes.” Kirkwood glanced back over his shoulder. “He hasn’t seen us yet. They’ve
+just driven up. Stryker’s with him. They’re getting down.” And to himself, “Oh,
+the devil!” cried the panic-stricken young man.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He drew back to let the girl precede him into the cab; at the same time he kept
+an eye on Calendar, whose conveyance stood half the length of the station-front
+away.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The fat adventurer had finished paying off the driver, standing on the deck of
+the hansom. Stryker was already out, towering above the mass of people, and
+glaring about him with his hawk-keen vision. Calendar had started to alight,
+his foot was leaving the step when Stryker’s glance singled out their quarry.
+Instantly he turned and spoke to his confederate. Calendar wheeled like a
+flash, peering eagerly in the direction indicated by the captain’s index
+finger, then, snapping instructions to his driver, threw himself heavily back
+on the seat. Stryker, awkward on his land-legs, stumbled and fell in an
+ill-calculated attempt to hoist himself hastily back into the vehicle.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To the delay thus occasioned alone Kirkwood and Dorothy owed a respite of
+freedom. Their hansom was already swinging down toward the great gates of the
+yard, the American standing to make the driver comprehend the necessity for
+using the utmost speed in reaching the Craven Street address. The man proved
+both intelligent and obliging; Kirkwood had barely time to drop down beside the
+girl, ere the cab was swinging out into the Strand, to the peril of the toes
+belonging to a number of righteously indignant pedestrians.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Good boy!” commented Kirkwood cheerfully. “That’s the greatest comfort of all
+London, the surprising intellectual strength the average cabby displays when
+you promise him a tip.... Great Heavens!” he cried, reading the girl’s dismayed
+expression. “A tip! I never thought—!” His face lengthened dismally, his
+eyebrows working awry. “Now we are in for it!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Dorothy said nothing.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He turned in the seat, twisting his neck to peep through the small rear window.
+“I don’t see their cab,” he announced. “But of course they’re after us.
+However, Craven Street’s just round the corner; if we get there first, I don’t
+fancy Freddie Hallam will have a cordial reception for our pursuers. They
+must’ve been on watch at Cannon Street, and finding we were not coming in that
+way—of course they were expecting us because of Hobbs’ wire—they took cab for
+Charing Cross. Lucky for us.... Or is it lucky?” he added doubtfully, to
+himself.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The hansom whipped round the corner into Craven Street. Kirkwood sprang up,
+grasping the treasure bag, ready to jump the instant they pulled in toward Mrs.
+Hallam’s dwelling. But as they drew near upon the address he drew back with an
+exclamation of amazement.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The house was closed, showing a blank face to the street—blinds drawn close
+down in the windows, area gate padlocked, an estate-agent’s board projecting
+from above the doorway, advertising the property “To be let, furnished.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Kirkwood looked back, craning his neck round the side of the cab. At the moment
+another hansom was breaking through the rank of humanity on the Strand
+crossing. He saw one or two figures leap desperately from beneath the horse’s
+hoofs. Then the cab shot out swiftly down the street.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The American stood up again, catching the cabby’s eye.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Drive on!” he cried excitedly. “Don’t stop—drive as fast as you dare!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“W’ere to, sir?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“See that cab behind? Don’t let it catch us—shake it off, lose it somehow, but
+for the love of Heaven don’t let it catch us! I’ll make it worth your while. Do
+you understand?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes, sir!” The driver looked briefly over his shoulder and lifted his whip.
+“Don’t worry, sir,” he cried, entering into the spirit of the game with
+gratifying zest. “Shan’t let ’em over’aul you, sir. Mind your ’ead!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And as Kirkwood ducked, the whip-lash shot out over the roof with a crack like
+the report of a pistol. Startled, the horse leaped indignantly forward.
+Momentarily the cab seemed to leave the ground, then settled down to a pace
+that carried them round the Avenue Theatre and across Northumberland Avenue
+into Whitehall Place apparently on a single wheel.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A glance behind showed Kirkwood that already they had gained, the pursuing
+hansom having lost ground through greater caution in crossing the main-traveled
+thoroughfare.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Good little horse!” he applauded.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A moment later he was indorsing without reserve the generalship of their cabby;
+the quick westward turn that took them into Whitehall, over across from the
+Horse Guards, likewise placed them in a pocket of traffic; a practically
+impregnable press of vehicles closed in behind them ere Calendar’s conveyance
+could follow out of the side street.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+That the same conditions, but slightly modified, hemmed them in ahead, went for
+nothing in Kirkwood’s estimation.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Good driver!” he approved heartily. “He’s got a head on his shoulders!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The girl found her voice. “How,” she demanded in a breath, face blank with
+consternation, “how did you dare?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Dare?” he echoed exultantly; and in his veins excitement was running like
+liquid fire. “What wouldn’t I dare for you, Dorothy?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What have you not?” she amended softly, adding with a shade of timidity:
+“Philip...”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The long lashes swept up from her cheeks, like clouds revealing stars,
+unmasking eyes radiant and brave to meet his own; then they fell, even as her
+lips drooped with disappointment. And she sighed.... For he was not looking.
+Man-like, hot with the ardor of the chase, he was deaf and blind to all else.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She saw that he had not even heard. Twice within the day she had forgotten
+herself, had overstepped the rigid bounds of her breeding in using his
+Christian name. And twice he had been oblivious to that token of their maturing
+understanding. So she sighed, and sighing, smiled again; resting an elbow on
+the window-sill and flattening one small gloved hand against the frame for a
+brace against the jouncing of the hansom. It swept on with unabated speed,
+up-stream beside the tawny reaches of the river; and for a time there was no
+speech between them, the while the girl lost consciousness of self and her most
+imminent peril, surrendering her being to the lingering sweetness of her long,
+dear thoughts....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I’ve got a scheme!” Kirkwood declared so explosively that she caught her
+breath with the surprise of it. “There’s the Pless; they know me there, and my
+credit’s good. When we shake them off, we can have the cabby take us to the
+hotel. I’ll register and borrow from the management enough to pay our way to
+Chiltern and the tolls for a cable to New York. I’ve a friend or two over home
+who wouldn’t let me want for a few miserable pounds.... So you see,” he
+explained boyishly, “we’re at the end of our troubles already!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She said something inaudible, holding her face averted. He bent nearer to her,
+wondering. “I didn’t understand,” he suggested.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Still looking from him, “I said you were very good to me,” she said in a
+quavering whisper.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Dorothy!” Without his knowledge or intention before the fact, as instinctively
+as he made use of her given name, intimately, his strong fingers dropped and
+closed upon the little hand that lay beside him. “What <i>is</i> the matter,
+dear?” He leaned still farther forward to peer into her face, till glance met
+glance in the ending and his racing pulses tightened with sheer delight of the
+humid happiness in her glistening eyes. “Dorothy, child, don’t worry so. No
+harm shall come to you. It’s all working out—all working out <i>right</i>. Only
+have a little faith in me, and I’ll <i>make</i> everything work out right,
+Dorothy.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Gently she freed her fingers. “I wasn’t,” she told him in a voice that quivered
+between laughter and tears, “I wasn’t worrying. I was ... You wouldn’t
+understand. Don’t be afraid I shall break down or—or anything.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I shan’t,” he reassured her; “I know you’re not that sort. Besides, you’d have
+no excuse. We’re moving along famously. That cabby knows his business.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In fact that gentleman was minute by minute demonstrating his peculiar fitness
+for the task he had so cheerfully undertaken. The superior horsemanship of the
+London hackney cabman needs no exploitation, and he in whose hands rested the
+fate of the Calendar treasure was peer of his compeers. He was instant to
+advantage himself of every opening to forward his pliant craft, quick to
+foresee the fortunes of the way and govern himself accordingly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Estimating with practised eye the precise moment when the police supervisor of
+traffic at the junction of Parliament and Bridge Streets, would see fit to
+declare a temporary blockade, he so managed that his was the last vehicle to
+pass ere the official wand, to ignore which involves a forfeited license, was
+lifted; and indeed, so close was his calculation that he escaped only with a
+scowl and word of warning from the bobby. A matter of no importance whatever,
+since his end was gained and the pursuing cab had been shut off by the
+blockade.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In Calendar’s driver, however, he had an adversary of abilities by no means to
+be despised. Precisely how the man contrived it, is a question; that he made a
+detour by way of Derby Street is not improbable, unpleasant as it may have been
+for Stryker and Calendar to find themselves in such close proximity to “the
+Yard.” At all events, he evaded the block, and hardly had the chase swung
+across Bridge Street, than the pursuer was nimbly clattering in its wake.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Past the Houses of Parliament, through Old Palace Yard, with the Abbey on their
+left, they swung away into Abingdon Street, whence suddenly they dived into the
+maze of backways, great and mean, which lies to the south of Victoria. Doubling
+and twisting, now this way, now that, the driver tooled them through the
+intricate heart of this labyrinth, leading the pursuers a dance that Kirkwood
+thought calculated to dishearten and shake off the pursuit in the first five
+minutes. Yet always, peering back through the little peephole, he saw
+Calendar’s cab pelting doggedly in their rear—a hundred yards behind, no more,
+no less, hanging on with indomitable grit and determination.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+By degrees they drew westwards, threading Pimlico, into Chelsea—once dashing
+briefly down the Grosvenor Road, the Thames a tawny flood beyond the river
+wall.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Children cheered them on, and policemen turned to stare, doubting whether they
+should interfere. Minutes rolled into tens, measuring out an hour; and still
+they hammered on, hunted and hunters, playing their game of hare-and-hounds
+through the highways and byways of those staid and aged quarters.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the leading cab there were few words spoken. Kirkwood and Dorothy alike sat
+spellbound with the fascination of the game; if it is conceivable that the fox
+enjoys his part in the day’s sport, then they were enjoying themselves. Now one
+spoke, now another—chiefly in the clipped phraseology, of excitement. As—
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“We’re gaining?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes—think so.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Or, “We’ll tire them out?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Sure-ly.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“They can’t catch us, can they, Philip?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Never in the world.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But he spoke with a confidence that he himself did not feel, for hope as he
+would he could never see that the distance between the two had been materially
+lessened or increased. Their horses seemed most evenly matched.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The sun was very low behind the houses of the Surrey Side when Kirkwood became
+aware that their horse was flagging, though (as comparison determined) no more
+so than the one behind.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In grave concern the young man raised his hand, thrusting open the trap in the
+roof. Immediately the square of darkling sky was eclipsed by the cabby’s face.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yessir?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You had better drive as directly as you can to the Hotel Pless,” Kirkwood
+called up. “I’m afraid it’s no use pushing your horse like this.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I’m sure of it, sir. ’E’s a good ’oss, ’e is, but ’e carn’t keep goin’ for
+hever, you know, sir.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I know. You’ve done very well; you’ve done your best.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Very good, sir. The Pless, you said, sir? Right.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The trap closed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Two blocks farther, and their pace had so sensibly moderated that Kirkwood was
+genuinely alarmed. The pursuing cabby was lashing his animal without mercy,
+while, “It aren’t no use my w’ippin’ ’im, sir,” dropped through the trap. “’E’s
+doing orl ’e can.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I understand.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Despondent recklessness tightened Kirkwood’s lips and kindled an unpleasant
+light in his eyes. He touched his side pocket; Calendar’s revolver was still
+there.... Dorothy should win away clear, if—if he swung for it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He bent forward with the traveling bag in his hands.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What are you going to do?” The girl’s voice was very tremulous.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Stand a chance, take a losing hazard. Can you run? You’re not too tired?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I can run—perhaps not far—a little way, at least.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“And will you do as I say?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Her eyes met his, unwavering, bespeaking her implicit faith.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Promise!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I promise.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“We’ll have to drop off in a minute. The horse won’t last.... They’re in the
+same box. Well, I undertake to stand ’em off for a bit; you take the bag and
+run for it. Just as soon as I can convince them, I’ll follow, but if there’s
+any delay, you call the first cab you see and drive to the Pless. I’ll join you
+there.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He stood up, surveying the neighborhood. Behind him the girl lifted her voice
+in protest.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“No, Philip, no!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You’ve promised,” he said sternly, eyes ranging the street.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I don’t care; I won’t leave you.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He shook his head in silent contradiction, frowning; but not frowning because
+of the girl’s mutiny. He was a little puzzled by a vague impression, and was
+striving to pin it down for recognition; but was so thoroughly bemused with
+fatigue and despair that only with great difficulty could he force his
+faculties to logical reasoning, his memory to respond to his call upon it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The hansom was traversing a street in Old Brompton—a quaint, prim by-way lined
+with dwellings singularly Old-Worldish, even for London. He seemed to know it
+subjectively, to have retained a memory of it from another existence: as the
+stage setting of a vivid dream, all forgotten, will sometimes recur with
+peculiar and exasperating intensity, in broad daylight. The houses, with their
+sloping, red-tiled roofs, unexpected gables, spontaneous dormer windows, glass
+panes set in leaded frames, red brick façades trimmed with green shutters and
+doorsteps of white stone, each sitting back, sedate and self-sufficient, in its
+trim dooryard fenced off from the public thoroughfare: all wore an aspect
+hauntingly familiar, and yet strange.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A corner sign, remarked in passing, had named the spot “Aspen Villas”; though
+he felt he knew the sound of those syllables as well as he did the name of the
+Pless, strive as he might he failed to make them convey anything tangible to
+his intelligence. When had he heard of it? At what time had his errant
+footsteps taken him through this curious survival of Eighteenth Century London?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Not that it mattered when. It could have no possible bearing on the emergency.
+He really gave it little thought; the mental processes recounted were mostly
+subconscious, if none the less real. His objective attention was wholly
+preoccupied with the knowledge that Calendar’s cab was drawing perilously near.
+And he was debating whether or not they should alight at once and try to make a
+better pace afoot, when the decision was taken wholly out of his hands.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Blindly staggering on, wilted with weariness, the horse stumbled in the shafts
+and plunged forward on its knees. Quick as the driver was to pull it up, with a
+cruel jerk of the bits, Kirkwood was caught unprepared; lurching against the
+dashboard, he lost his footing, grasped frantically at the unstable air, and
+went over, bringing up in a sitting position in the gutter, with a solid shock
+that jarred his very teeth.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For a moment dazed he sat there blinking; by the time he got to his feet, the
+girl stood beside him, questioning him with keen solicitude.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“No,” he gasped; “not hurt—only surprised. Wait....”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Their cab had come to a complete standstill; Calendar’s was no more than twenty
+yards behind, and as Kirkwood caught sight of him the fat adventurer was in the
+act of lifting himself ponderously out of the seat.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Incontinently the young man turned to the girl and forced the traveling-bag
+into her hands.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Run for it!” he begged her. “Don’t stop to argue. You promised—run! I’ll
+come....”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Philip!” she pleaded.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Dorothy!” he cried in torment.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Perhaps it was his unquestionable distress that weakened her. Suddenly she
+yielded—with whatever reason. He was only hazily aware of the swish of her
+skirts behind him; he had no time to look round and see that she got away
+safely. He had only eyes and thoughts for Calendar and Stryker.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They were both afoot, now, and running toward him, the one as awkward as the
+other, but neither yielding a jot of their malignant purpose. He held the
+picture of it oddly graphic in his memory for many a day thereafter: Calendar
+making directly, for him, his heavy-featured face a dull red with the exertion,
+his fat head dropped forward as if too heavy for his neck of a bull, his small
+eyes bright with anger; Stryker shying off at a discreet angle, evidently with
+the intention of devoting himself to the capture of the girl; the two cabs with
+their dejected screws, at rest in the middle of the quiet, twilit street. He
+seemed even to see himself, standing stockily prepared, hands in his coat
+pockets, his own head inclined with a suggestion of pugnacity.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To this mental photograph another succeeds, of the same scene an instant later;
+all as it had been before, their relative positions unchanged, save that
+Stryker and Calendar had come to a dead stop, and that Kirkwood’s right arm was
+lifted and extended, pointing at the captain.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+So forgetful of self was he, that it required a moment’s thought to convince
+him that he was really responsible for the abrupt transformation. Incredulously
+he realized that he had drawn Calendar’s revolver and pulled Stryker up short,
+in mid-stride, by the mute menace of it, as much as by his hoarse cry of
+warning:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Stryker—not another foot—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+With this there chimed in Dorothy’s voice, ringing bell-clear from a little
+distance:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Philip!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Like a flash he wheeled, to add yet another picture to his mental gallery.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Perhaps two-score feet up the sidewalk a gate stood open; just outside it a man
+of tall and slender figure, rigged out in a bizarre costume consisting mainly
+of a flowered dressing-gown and slippers, was waiting in an attitude of
+singular impassivity; within it, pausing with a foot lifted to the doorstep,
+bag in hand, her head turned as she looked back, was Dorothy.
+</p>
+
+<div class="fig" style="width:100%;">
+<a name="illus09"></a>
+<img src="images/img09.jpg" width="413" height="600" alt="[Illustration: ]" />
+<p class="caption">A costume consisting mainly of a flowered dressing-gown and slippers.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+As he comprehended these essential details of the composition, the man in the
+flowered dressing-gown raised a hand, beckoning to him in a manner as
+imperative as his accompanying words.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Kirkwood!” he saluted the young man in a clear and vibrant voice, “put up that
+revolver and stop this foolishness.” And, with a jerk of his head towards the
+doorway, in which Dorothy now waited, hesitant: “Come, sir—quickly!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Kirkwood choked on a laugh that was half a sob. “Brentwick!” he cried,
+restoring the weapon to his pocket and running toward his friend. “Of all happy
+accidents!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You may call it that,” retorted the elder man with a fleeting smile as
+Kirkwood slipped inside the dooryard. “Come,” he said; “let’s get into the
+house.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“But you said—I thought you went to Munich,” stammered Kirkwood; and so
+thoroughly impregnated was his mind with this understanding that it was hard
+for him to adjust his perceptions to the truth.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I was detained—by business,” responded Brentwick briefly. His gaze, weary and
+wistful behind his glasses, rested on the face of the girl on the threshold of
+his home; and the faint, sensitive flush of her face deepened. He stopped and
+honored her with a bow that, for all his fantastical attire, would have graced
+a beau of an earlier decade. “Will you be pleased to enter?” he suggested
+punctiliously. “My house, such as it is, is quite at your disposal. And,” he
+added, with a glance over his shoulder, “I fancy that a word or two may
+presently be passed which you would hardly care to hear.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Dorothy’s hesitation was but transitory; Kirkwood was reassuring her with a
+smile more like his wonted boyish grin than anything he had succeeded in
+conjuring up throughout the day. Her own smile answered it, and with a murmured
+word of gratitude and a little, half timid, half distant bow for Brentwick, she
+passed on into the hallway.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Kirkwood lingered with his friend upon the door-stoop. Calendar, recovered from
+his temporary consternation, was already at the gate, bending over it, fat
+fingers fumbling with the latch, his round red face, lifted to the house,
+darkly working with chagrin.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+From his threshold, watching him with a slight contraction of the eyes,
+Brentwick hailed him in tones of cloying courtesy.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Do you wish to see me, sir?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The fat adventurer faltered just within the gateway; then, with a truculent
+swagger, “I want my daughter,” he declared vociferously.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Brentwick peered mildly over his glasses, first at Calendar, then at Kirkwood.
+His glance lingered a moment on the young man’s honest eyes, and swung back to
+Calendar.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“My good man,” he said with sublime tolerance, “will you be pleased to take
+yourself off—to the devil if you like? Or shall I take the trouble to interest
+the police?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He removed one fine and fragile hand from a pocket of the flowered
+dressing-gown, long enough to jerk it significantly toward the nearer
+street-corner.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Thunderstruck, Calendar glanced hastily in the indicated direction. A
+blue-coated bobby was to be seen approaching with measured stride, diffusing
+upon the still evening air an impression of ineffably capable self-contentment.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Calendar’s fleshy lips parted and closed without a sound. They quivered.
+Beneath them quivered his assortment of graduated chins. His heavy and
+pendulous cheeks quivered, slowly empurpling with the dark tide of his
+apoplectic wrath. The close-clipped thatch of his iron gray mustache, even,
+seemed to bristle like hairs upon the neck of a maddened dog. Beneath him his
+fat legs trembled, and indeed his whole huge carcass shook visibly, in the
+stress of his restrained wrath.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Suddenly, overwhelmed, he banged the gate behind him and waddled off to join
+the captain; who already, with praiseworthy native prudence, had fallen back
+upon their cab.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+From his coign of strategic advantage, the comfortable elevation of his box,
+Kirkwood’s cabby, whose huge enjoyment of the adventurers’ discomfiture had
+throughout been noisily demonstrative, entreated Calendar with lifted
+forefinger, bland affability, and expressions of heartfelt sympathy.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Kebsir? ’Ave a kebsir, do! Try a ride be’ind a real ’orse, sir; don’t you go
+on wastin’ time on ’im.” A jerk of a derisive thumb singled out the other
+cabman. “’E aren’t pl’yin’ you fair, sir; I knows ’im,—’e’s a hartful g’y
+deceiver, ’e is. Look at ’is ’orse,—w’ich it aren’t; it’s a snyle, that’s w’at
+it is. Tyke a father’s hadvice, sir, and next time yer fairest darter runs awye
+with the dook in disguise, chyse ’em in a real kebsir, not a cheap
+imitashin.... Kebsir?... Garn, you ’ard-’arted—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Here he swooped upwards in a dizzy flight of vituperation best unrecorded.
+Calendar, beyond an absent-minded flirt of one hand by his ear, as who should
+shoo away a buzzing insect, ignored him utterly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Sullenly extracting money from his pocket, he paid off his driver, and in
+company with Stryker, trudged in morose silence down the street.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Brentwick touched Kirkwood’s arm and drew him into the house.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap18"></a>XVIII<br/>
+ADVENTURES’ LUCK</h2>
+
+<p>
+As the door closed, Kirkwood swung impulsively to Brentwick, with the brief,
+uneven laugh of fine-drawn nerves.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Good God, sir!” he cried. “You don’t know—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I can surmise,” interrupted the elder man shrewdly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You turned up in the nick of time, for all the world like—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Harlequin popping through a stage trap?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“No!—an incarnation of the Providence that watches over children and fools.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Brentwick dropped a calming hand upon his shoulder. “Your simile seems
+singularly happy, Philip. Permit me to suggest that you join the child in my
+study.” He laughed quietly, with a slight nod toward an open door at the end of
+the hallway. “For myself, I’ll be with you in one moment.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A faint, indulgent smile lurking in the shadow of his white mustache, he
+watched the young man wheel and dart through the doorway. “Young hearts!” he
+commented inaudibly—and a trace sadly. “Youth!...”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Beyond the threshold of the study, Kirkwood paused, eager eyes searching its
+somber shadows for a sign of Dorothy.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A long room and deep, it was lighted only by the circumscribed disk of
+illumination thrown on the central desk by a shaded reading-lamp, and the
+flickering glow of a grate-fire set beneath the mantel of a side-wall. At the
+back, heavy velvet portières cloaked the recesses of two long windows, closed
+jealously even against the twilight. Aside from the windows, doors and
+chimney-piece, every foot of wall space was occupied by towering bookcases or
+by shelves crowded to the limit of their capacity with an amazing miscellany of
+objects of art, the fruit of years of patient and discriminating collecting. An
+exotic and heady atmosphere, compounded of the faint and intangible exhalations
+of these insentient things, fragrance of sandalwood, myrrh and musk,
+reminiscent whiffs of half-forgotten incense, seemed to intensify the
+impression of gloomy richness and repose...
+</p>
+
+<p>
+By the fireplace, a little to one side, stood Dorothy, one small foot resting
+on the brass fender, her figure merging into the dusky background, her delicate
+beauty gaining an effect of elusive and ethereal mystery in the waning and
+waxing ruddy glow upflung from the bedded coals.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Oh, Philip!” She turned swiftly to Kirkwood with extended hands and a low,
+broken cry. “I’m <i>so</i> glad....”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A trace of hysteria in her manner warned him, and he checked himself upon the
+verge of a too dangerous tenderness. “There!” he said soothingly, letting her
+hands rest gently in his palms while he led her to a chair. “We can make
+ourselves easy now.” She sat down and he released her hands with a reluctance
+less evident than actual. “If ever I say another word against my luck—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Who,” inquired the girl, lowering her voice, “who is the gentleman in the
+flowered dressing-gown?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Brentwick—George Silvester Brentwick: an old friend. I’ve known him for
+years,—ever since I came abroad. Curiously enough, however, this is the first
+time I’ve ever been here. I called once, but he wasn’t in,—a few days ago,—the
+day we met. I thought the place looked familiar. Stupid of me!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Philip,” said the girl with a grave face but a shaking voice, “it was.” She
+laughed provokingly.... “It was so funny, Philip. I don’t know why I ran, when
+you told me to, but I did; and while I ran, I was conscious of the front door,
+here, opening, and this tall man in the flowered dressing-gown coming down to
+the gate as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world for him to stroll
+out, dressed that way, in the evening. And he opened the gate, and bowed, and
+said, ever so pleasantly, ‘Won’t you come in, Miss Calendar?’—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“He did!” exclaimed Kirkwood. “But how—?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“How can I say?” she expostulated. “At all events, he seemed to know me; and
+when he added something about calling you in, too—he said ‘Mr. Kirkwood’—I
+didn’t hesitate.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It’s strange enough, surely—and fortunate. Bless his heart!” said Kirkwood.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And, “Hum!” said Mr. Brentwick considerately, entering the study. He had
+discarded the dressing-gown and was now in evening dress.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The girl rose. Kirkwood turned. “Mr. Brentwick—” he began.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But Brentwick begged his patience with an eloquent gesture. “Sir,” he said,
+somewhat austerely, “permit me to put a single question: Have you by any chance
+paid your cabby?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Why—” faltered the younger man, with a flaming face. “I—why, no—that is—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The other quietly put his hand upon a bell-pull. A faint jingling sound was at
+once audible, emanating from the basement.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“How much should you say you owe him?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I—I haven’t a penny in the world!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The shrewd eyes flashed their amusement into Kirkwood’s. “Tut, tut!” Brentwick
+chuckled. “Between gentlemen, my dear boy! Dear me! you are slow to learn.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I’ll never be contented to sponge on my friends,” explained Kirkwood in
+deepest misery. “I can’t tell when—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Tut, tut! How much did you say?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Ten shillings—or say twelve, would be about right,” stammered the American,
+swayed by conflicting emotions of gratitude and profound embarrassment.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A soft-footed butler, impassive as Fate, materialized mysteriously in the
+doorway.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You rang, sir?” he interrupted frigidly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I rang, Wotton.” His master selected a sovereign from his purse and handed it
+to the servant. “For the cabby, Wotton.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes sir.” The butler swung automatically, on one heel.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“And Wotton!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Sir?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“If any one should ask for me, I’m not at home.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Very good, sir.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“And if you should see a pair of disreputable scoundrels skulking, in the
+neighborhood, one short and stout, the other tall and evidently a seafaring
+man, let me know.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Thank you, sir.” A moment later the front door was heard to close.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Brentwick turned with a little bow to the girl. “My dear Miss Calendar,” he
+said, rubbing his thin, fine hands,—“I am old enough, I trust, to call you such
+without offense,—please be seated.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Complying, the girl rewarded him with a radiant smile. Whereupon, striding to
+the fireplace, their host turned his back to it, clasped his hands behind him,
+and glowered benignly upon the two. “Ah!” he observed in accents of extreme
+personal satisfaction. “Romance! Romance!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Would you mind telling us how you knew—” began Kirkwood anxiously.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Not in the least, my dear Philip. It is simple enough: I possess an
+imagination. From my bedroom window, on the floor above, I happen to behold two
+cabs racing down the street, the one doggedly pursuing the other. The foremost
+stops, perforce of a fagged horse. There alights a young gentleman looking, if
+you’ll pardon me, uncommonly seedy; he is followed by a young lady, if she will
+pardon me,” with another little bow, “uncommonly pretty. With these two old
+eyes I observe that the gentleman does not pay his cabby. Ergo—I intelligently
+deduce—he is short of money. Eh?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You were right,” affirmed Kirkwood, with a rueful and crooked smile. “But—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“So! so!” pursued Brentwick, rising on his toes and dropping back again; “so
+this world of ours wags on to the old, old tune!... And I, who in my younger
+days pursued adventure without success, in dotage find myself dragged into a
+romance by my two ears, whether I will or no! Eh? And now you are going to tell
+me all about it, Philip. There is a chair.... Well, Wotton?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The butler had again appeared noiselessly in the doorway.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Beg pardon, sir; they’re waiting, sir.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“The caitiffs, Wotton?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yessir.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Where waiting?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“One at each end of the street, sir.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Thank you. You may bring us sherry and biscuit, Wotton.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Thank you, sir.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The servant vanished.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Brentwick removed his glasses, rubbed them, and blinked thoughtfully at the
+girl. “My dear,” he said suddenly, with a peculiar tremor in his voice, “you
+resemble your mother remarkably. Tut—I should know! Time was when I was one of
+her most ardent admirers.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You—y-you knew my mother?” cried Dorothy, profoundly moved.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Did I not know you at sight? My dear, you are your mother reincarnate, for the
+good of an unworthy world. She was a very beautiful woman, my dear.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Wotton entered with a silver serving tray, offering it in turn to Dorothy,
+Kirkwood and his employer. While he was present the three held silent—the girl
+trembling slightly, but with her face aglow; Kirkwood half stupefied between
+his ease from care and his growing astonishment, as Brentwick continued to
+reveal unexpected phases of his personality; Brentwick himself outwardly
+imperturbable and complacent, for all that his hand shook as he lifted his wine
+glass.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You may go, Wotton—or, wait. Don’t you feel the need of a breath of fresh air,
+Wotton?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yessir, thank you, sir.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Then change your coat, Wotton, light your pipe, and stroll out for half an
+hour. You need not leave the street, but if either the tall thin blackguard
+with the seafaring habit, or the short stout rascal with the air of mystery
+should accost you, treat them with all courtesy, Wotton. You will be careful
+not to tell either of them anything in particular, although I don’t mind your
+telling them that Mr. Brentwick lives here, if they ask. I am mostly concerned
+to discover if they purpose becoming fixtures on the street-corners, Wotton.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Quite so, sir.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Now you may go.... Wotton,” continued his employer as the butler took himself
+off as softly as a cat, “grows daily a more valuable mechanism. He is by no
+means human in any respect, but I find him extremely handy to have round the
+house.... And now, my dear,” turning to Dorothy, “with your permission I desire
+to drink to the memory of your beautiful mother and to the happiness of her
+beautiful daughter.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“But you will tell me—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“A number of interesting things, Miss Calendar, if you’ll be good enough to let
+me choose the time. I beg you to be patient with the idiosyncrasies of an old
+man, who means no harm, who has a reputation as an eccentric to sustain before
+his servants.... And now,” said Brentwick, setting aside his glass, “now, my
+dear boy, for the adventure.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Kirkwood chuckled, infected by his host’s genial humor. “How do you know—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“How can it be otherwise?” countered Brentwick with a trace of asperity. “Am I
+to be denied my adventure? Sir, I refuse without equivocation. Your very
+bearing breathes of Romance. There must be an adventure forthcoming, Philip;
+otherwise my disappointment will be so acute that I shall be regretfully
+obliged seriously to consider my right, as a householder, to show you the
+door.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“But Mr. Brentwick—!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Sit down, sir!” commanded Brentwick with such a peremptory note that the young
+man, who had risen, obeyed out of sheer surprise. Upon which his host advanced,
+indicting him with a long white forefinger. “Would you, sir,” he demanded,
+“again expose this little lady to the machinations of that corpulent scoundrel,
+whom I have just had the pleasure of shooing off my premises, because you
+choose to resent an old man’s raillery?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I apologize,” Kirkwood humored him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I accept the apology in the spirit in which it is offered.... I repeat, now
+for the adventure, Philip. If the story’s long, epitomize. We can consider
+details more at our leisure.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Kirkwood’s eyes consulted the girl’s face; almost imperceptibly she nodded him
+permission to proceed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Briefly, then,” he began haltingly, “the man who followed us to the door here,
+is Miss Calendar’s father.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Oh? His name, please?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“George Burgoyne Calendar.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Ah! An American; I remember, now. Continue, please.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“He is hounding us, sir, with the intention of stealing some property, which he
+caused to be stolen, which we—to put it bluntly—stole from him, to which he has
+no shadow of a title, and which, finally, we’re endeavoring to return to its
+owners.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“My dear!” interpolated Brentwick gently, looking down at the girl’s flushed
+face and drooping head.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“He ran us to the last ditch,” Kirkwood continued; “I’ve spent my last farthing
+trying to lose him.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“But why have you not caused his arrest?” Brentwick inquired.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Kirkwood nodded meaningly toward the girl. Brentwick made a sound indicating
+comprehension, a click of the tongue behind closed teeth.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“We came to your door by the merest accident—it might as well have been
+another. I understood you were in Munich, and it never entered my head that
+we’d find you home.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“A communication from my solicitors detained me,” explained Brentwick. “And
+now, what do you intend to do?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Trespass as far on your kindness as you’ll permit. In the first place, I—I
+want the use of a few pounds with which to cable some friends in New York, for
+money; on receipt of which I can repay you.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Philip,” observed Brentwood, “you are a most irritating child. But I forgive
+you the faults of youth. You may proceed, bearing in mind, if you please, that
+I am your friend equally with any you may own in America.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You’re one of the best men in the world,” said Kirkwood.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Tut, tut! Will you get on?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Secondly, I want you to help us to escape Calendar to-night. It is necessary
+that Miss Calendar should go to Chiltern this evening, where she has friends
+who will receive and protect her.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Mm-mm,” grumbled their host, meditative. “My faith!” he commented, with
+brightening eyes. “It sounds almost too good to be true! And I’ve been growing
+afraid that the world was getting to be a most humdrum and uninteresting
+planet!... Miss Calendar, I am a widower of so many years standing that I had
+almost forgotten I had ever been anything but a bachelor. I fear my house
+contains little that will be of service to a young lady. Yet a room is at your
+disposal; the parlor-maid shall show you the way. And Philip, between you and
+me, I venture to remark that hot water and cold steel would add to the
+attractiveness of your personal appearance; my valet will attend you in my
+room. Dinner,” concluded Brentwick with anticipative relish, “will be served in
+precisely thirty minutes. I shall expect you to entertain me with a full and
+itemized account of every phase of your astonishing adventure. Later, we will
+find a way to Chiltern.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Again he put a hand upon the bell-pull. Simultaneously Dorothy and Kirkwood
+rose.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Mr. Brentwick,” said the girl, her eyes starred with tears of gratitude, “I
+don’t, I really don’t know how—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“My dear,” said the old gentleman, “you will thank me most appropriately by
+continuing, to the best of your ability, to resemble your mother more
+remarkably every minute.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“But I,” began Kirkwood——.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You, my dear Philip, can thank me best by permitting me to enjoy myself; which
+I am doing thoroughly at the present moment. My pleasure in being invited to
+interfere in your young affairs is more keen than you can well surmise.
+Moreover,” said Mr. Brentwick, “so long have I been an amateur adventurer that
+I esteem it the rarest privilege to find myself thus on the point of graduating
+into professional ranks.” He rubbed his hands, beaming upon them. “And,” he
+added, as a maid appeared at the door, “I have already schemed me a scheme for
+the discomfiture of our friends the enemy: a scheme which we will discuss with
+our dinner, while the heathen rage and imagine a vain thing, in the outer
+darkness.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Kirkwood would have lingered, but of such inflexible temper was his host that
+he bowed him into the hands of a man servant without permitting him another
+word.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Not a syllable,” he insisted. “I protest I am devoured with curiosity, my dear
+boy, but I have also bowels of compassion. When we are well on with our meal,
+when you are strengthened with food and drink, then you may begin. But
+now—Dickie,” to the valet, “do your duty!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Kirkwood, laughing with exasperation, retired at discretion, leaving Brentwick
+the master of the situation: a charming gentleman with a will of his own and a
+way that went with it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He heard the young man’s footsteps diminish on the stairway; and again he
+smiled the indulgent, melancholy smile of mellow years. “Youth!” he whispered
+softly. “Romance!... And now,” with a brisk change of tone as he closed the
+study door, “now we are ready for this interesting Mr. Calendar.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Sitting down at his desk, he found and consulted a telephone directory; but its
+leaves, at first rustling briskly at the touch of the slender and delicate
+fingers, were presently permitted to lie unturned,—the book resting open on his
+knees the while he stared wistfully into the fire.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A suspicion of moisture glimmered in his eyes. “Dorothy!” he whispered huskily.
+And a little later, rising, he proceeded to the telephone....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+An hour and a half later Kirkwood, his self-respect something restored by a
+bath, a shave, and a resumption of clothes which had been hastily but
+thoroughly cleansed and pressed by Brentwick’s valet; his confidence and
+courage mounting high under the combined influence of generous wine,
+substantial food, the presence of his heart’s mistress and the admiration—which
+was unconcealed—of his friend, concluded at the dinner-table, his narration.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“And that,” he said, looking up from his savory, “is about all.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Bravo!” applauded Brentwick; eyes shining with delight.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“All,” interposed Dorothy in warm reproach, “but what he hasn’t told—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Which, my dear, is to be accounted for wholly by a very creditable modesty,
+rarely encountered in the young men of the present day. It was, of course,
+altogether different with those of my younger years. Yes, Wotton?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Brentwick sat back in his chair, inclining an attentive ear to a communication
+murmured by the butler.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Kirkwood’s gaze met Dorothy’s across the expanse of shining cloth; he
+deprecated her interruption with a whimsical twist of his eyebrows. “Really,
+you shouldn’t,” he assured her in an undertone. “I’ve done nothing to
+deserve...” But under the spell of her serious sweet eyes, he fell silent, and
+presently looked down, strangely abashed; and contemplated the vast enormity of
+his unworthiness.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Coffee was set before them by Wotton, the impassive, Brentwick refusing it with
+a little sigh. “It is one of the things, as Philip knows,” he explained to the
+girl, “denied me by the physician who makes his life happy by making mine a
+waste. I am allowed but three luxuries; cigars, travel in moderation, and the
+privilege of imposing on my friends. The first I propose presently, to enjoy,
+by your indulgence; and the second I shall this evening undertake by virtue of
+the third, of which I have just availed myself.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Smiling at the involution, he rested his head against the back of the chair,
+eyes roving from the girl’s face to Kirkwood’s. “Inspiration to do which,” he
+proceeded gravely, “came to me from the seafaring picaroon (Stryker did you
+name him?) via the excellent Wotton. While you were preparing for dinner,
+Wotton returned from his constitutional with the news that, leaving the
+corpulent person on watch at the corner, Captain Stryker had temporarily, made
+himself scarce. However, we need feel no anxiety concerning his whereabouts,
+for he reappeared in good time and a motor-car. From which it becomes evident
+that you have not overrated their pertinacity; the fiasco of the cab-chase is
+not to be reënacted.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Resolutely the girl repressed a gasp of dismay. Kirkwood stared moodily into
+his cup.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“These men bore me fearfully,” he commented at last.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“And so,” continued Brentwick, “I bethought me of a counter-stroke. It is my
+good fortune to have a friend whose whim it is to support a touring-car,
+chiefly in innocuous idleness. Accordingly I have telephoned him and
+commandeered the use of this machine—mechanician, too.... Though not a betting
+man, I am willing to risk recklessly a few pence in support of my contention,
+that of the two, Captain Stryker’s car and ours, the latter will prove
+considerably the most speedy....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“In short, I suggest,” he concluded, thoughtfully lacing his long white
+fingers, “that, avoiding the hazards of cab and railway carriage, we motor to
+Chiltern: the night being fine and the road, I am told, exceptionally good.
+Miss Dorothy, what do you think?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Instinctively the girl looked to Kirkwood; then shifted her glance to their
+host. “I think you are wonderfully thoughtful and kind,” she said simply.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“And you, Philip?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It’s an inspiration,” the younger man declared. “I can’t think of anything
+better calculated to throw them off, than to distance them by motor-car. It
+would be always possible to trace our journey by rail.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Then,” announced Brentwick, making as if to rise, “we had best go. If neither
+my hearing nor Captain Stryker’s car deceives me, our fiery chariot is panting
+at the door.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A little sobered from the confident spirit of quiet gaiety in which they had
+dined, they left the table. Not that, in their hearts, either greatly
+questioned their ultimate triumph; but they were allowing for the element of
+error so apt to set at naught human calculations. Calendar himself had already
+been proved fallible. Within the bounds of possibility, their turn to stumble
+might now be imminent.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When he let himself dwell upon it, their utter helplessness to give Calendar
+pause by commonplace methods, maddened Kirkwood. With another scoundrel it had
+been so simple a matter to put a period to his activities by a word to the
+police. But he was her father; for that reason he must continually be spared
+... Even though, in desperate extremity, she should give consent to the arrest
+of the adventurers, retaliation would follow, swift and sure. For they might
+not overlook nor gloze the fact that hers had been the hands responsible for
+the theft of the jewels; innocent though she had been in committing that
+larceny, a cat’s-paw guided by an intelligence unscrupulous and malign, the law
+would not hold her guiltless were she once brought within its cognizance. Nor,
+possibly, would the Hallams, mother and son.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Upon their knowledge and their fear of this, undoubtedly Calendar was
+reckoning: witness the barefaced effrontery with which he operated against
+them. His fear of the police might be genuine enough, but he was never for an
+instant disturbed by any doubt lest his daughter should turn against him. She
+would never dare that.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Before they left the house, while Dorothy was above stairs resuming her hat and
+coat, Kirkwood and Brentwick reconnoitered from the drawing-room windows,
+themselves screened from observation by the absence of light in the room
+behind.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Before the door a motor-car waited, engines humming impatiently, mechanician
+ready in his seat, an uncouth shape in goggles and leather garments that shone
+like oilskins under the street lights.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At one corner another and a smaller car stood in waiting, its lamps like
+baleful eyes glaring through the night.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the shadows across the way, a lengthy shadow lurked: Stryker, beyond
+reasonable question. Otherwise the street was deserted. Not even that
+adventitous bobby of the early evening was now in evidence.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Dorothy presently joining them, Brentwick led the way to the door.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Wotton, apparently nerveless beneath his absolute immobility, let them out—and
+slammed the door behind them with such promptitude as to give cause for the
+suspicion that he was a fraud, a sham, beneath his icy exterior desperately
+afraid lest the house be stormed by the adventurers.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Kirkwood to the right, Brentwick to the left of Dorothy, the former carrying
+the treasure bag, they hastened down the walk and through the gate to the car.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The watcher across the way was moved to whistle shrilly; the other car lunged
+forward nervously.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Brentwick taking the front seat, beside the mechanician, left the tonneau to
+Kirkwood and Dorothy. As the American slammed the door, the car swept smoothly
+out into the middle of the way, while the pursuing car swerved in to the other
+curb, slowing down to let Stryker jump aboard.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Kirkwood put himself in the seat by the girl’s side and for a few moments was
+occupied with the arrangement of the robes. Then, sitting back, he found her
+eyes fixed upon him, pools of inscrutable night in the shadow of her hat.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You aren’t afraid, Dorothy?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She answered quietly: “I am with you, Philip.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Beneath the robe their hands met...
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Exalted, excited, he turned and looked back. A hundred yards to the rear four
+unwinking eyes trailed them, like some modern Nemesis in monstrous guise.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap19"></a>XIX</h2>
+
+<h3>I——THE UXBRIDGE ROAD</h3>
+
+<p>
+At a steady gait, now and again checked in deference to the street traffic,
+Brentwick’s motor-car rolled, with resonant humming of the engine, down the
+Cromwell Road, swerved into Warwick Road and swung northward through Kensington
+to Shepherd’s Bush. Behind it Calendar’s car clung as if towed by an invisible
+cable, never gaining, never losing, mutely testifying to the adventurer’s
+unrelenting, grim determination to leave them no instant’s freedom from
+surveillance, to keep for ever at their shoulders, watching his chance, biding
+his time with sinister patience until the moment when, wearied, their vigilance
+should relax....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To some extent he reckoned without his motor-car. As long as they traveled
+within the metropolitan limits, constrained to observe a decorous pace in view
+of the prejudices of the County Council, it was a matter of no difficulty
+whatever to maintain his distance. But once they had won through Shepherd’s
+Bush and, paced by huge doubledeck trolley trams, were flying through
+Hammersmith on the Uxbridge Road; once they had run through Acton, and knew
+beyond dispute that now they were without the city boundaries, then the
+complexion of the business was suddenly changed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Not too soon for honest sport; Calendar was to have (Kirkwood would have said
+in lurid American idiom) a run for his money. The scattered lights of Southall
+were winking out behind them before Brentwick chose to give the word to the
+mechanician.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Quietly the latter threw in the clutch for the third speed—and the fourth. The
+car leaped forward like a startled race-horse. The motor lilted merrily into
+its deep-throated song of the open road, its contented, silken humming passing
+into a sonorous and sustained purr.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Kirkwood and the girl were first jarred violently forward, then thrown
+together. She caught his arm to steady herself; it seemed the most natural
+thing imaginable that he should take her hand and pass it beneath his arm,
+holding her so, his fingers closed above her own. Before they had recovered, or
+had time to catch their breath, a mile of Middlesex had dropped to the rear.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Not quite so far had they distanced Calendar’s trailing Nemesis of the four
+glaring eyes; the pursuers put forth a gallant effort to hold their place. At
+intervals during the first few minutes a heavy roaring and crashing could be
+heard behind them; gradually it subsided, dying on the wings of the free
+rushing wind that buffeted their faces as mile after mile was reeled off and
+the wide, darkling English countryside opened out before them, sweet and
+wonderful.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Once Kirkwood looked back; in the winking of an eye he saw four faded disks of
+light, pallid with despair, top a distant rise and glide down into darkness.
+When he turned, Dorothy was interrogating him with eyes whose melting, shadowed
+loveliness, revealed to him in the light of the far, still stars, seemed to
+incite him to that madness which he had bade himself resist with all his
+strength.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He shook his head, as if to say: They can not catch us.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His hour was not yet; time enough to think of love and marriage (as if he were
+capable of consecutive thought on any other subject!)—time enough to think of
+them when he had gone back to his place, or rather when he should have found
+it, in the ranks of bread-winners, and so have proved his right to mortal
+happiness; time enough then to lay whatever he might have to offer at her feet.
+Now he could conceive of no baser treachery to his soul’s-desire than to
+advantage himself of her gratitude.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Resolutely he turned his face forward, striving with all his will and might to
+forget the temptation of her lips, weary as they were and petulant with
+waiting; and so sat rigid in his time of trial, clinging with what strength he
+could to the standards of his honor, and trying to lose his dream in dreaming
+of the bitter struggle that seemed likely to be his future portion.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Perhaps she guessed a little of the fortunes of the battle that was being waged
+within him. Perhaps not. Whatever the trend of her thoughts, she did not draw
+away from him.... Perhaps the breath of night, fresh and clean and fragrant
+with the odor of the fields and hedges, sweeping into her face with velvety
+caress, rendered her drowsy. Presently the silken lashes drooped, fluttering
+upon her cheeks, the tired and happy smile hovered about her lips....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In something less than half an hour of this wild driving, Kirkwood roused out
+of his reverie sufficiently to become sensible that the speed was slackening.
+Incoherent snatches of sentences, fragments of words and phrases spoken by
+Brentwick and the mechanician, were flung back past his ears by the rushing
+wind. Shielding his eyes he could see dimly that the mechanician was tinkering
+(apparently) with the driving gear. Then, their pace continuing steadily to
+abate, he heard Brentwick fling at the man a sharp-toned and querulously
+impatient question: What was the trouble? His reply came in a single word, not
+distinguishable.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The girl sat up, opening her eyes, disengaging her arm.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Kirkwood bent forward and touched Brentwick on the shoulder; the latter turned
+to him a face lined with deep concern.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Trouble,” he announced superfluously. “I fear we have blundered.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What is it?” asked Dorothy in a troubled voice.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Petrol seems to be running low. Charles here” (he referred to the mechanician)
+“says the tank must be leaking. We’ll go on as best we can and try to find an
+inn. Fortunately, most of the inns nowadays keep supplies of petrol for just
+such emergencies.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Are we—? Do you think—?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Oh, no; not a bit of danger of that,” returned Brentwick hastily. “They’ll not
+catch up with us this night. That is a very inferior car they have,—so Charles
+says, at least; nothing to compare with this. If I’m not in error, there’s the
+Crown and Mitre just ahead; we’ll make it, fill our tanks, and be off again
+before they can make up half their loss.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Dorothy looked anxiously to Kirkwood, her lips forming an unuttered query: What
+did he think?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Don’t worry; we’ll have no trouble,” he assured her stoutly; “the chauffeur
+knows, undoubtedly.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+None the less he was moved to stand up in the tonneau, conscious of the
+presence of the traveling bag, snug between his feet, as well as of the weight
+of Calendar’s revolver in his pocket, while he stared back along the road.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was nothing to be seen of their persecutors.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The car continued to crawl. Five minutes dragged out tediously. Gradually they,
+drew abreast a tavern standing back a distance from the road, embowered in a
+grove of trees between whose ancient boles the tap-room windows shone
+enticingly, aglow with comfortable light. A creaking sign-board, much worn by
+weather and age, swinging from a roadside post, confirmed the accuracy of
+Brentwick’s surmise, announcing that here stood the Crown and Mitre, house of
+entertainment for man and beast.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Sluggishly the car rolled up before it and came to a dead and silent halt.
+Charles, the mechanician, jumping out, ran hastily up the path towards the inn.
+In the car Brentwick turned again, his eyes curiously bright in the starlight,
+his forehead quaintly furrowed, his voice apologetic.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It may take a few minutes,” he said undecidedly, plainly endeavoring to cover
+up his own dark doubts. “My dear,” to the girl, “if I have brought trouble upon
+you in this wise, I shall never earn my own forgiveness.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Kirkwood stood up again, watchful, attentive to the sounds of night; but the
+voice of the pursuing motor-car was not of their company. “I hear nothing,” he
+announced.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You will forgive me,—won’t you, my dear?—for causing you these few moments of
+needless anxiety?” pleaded the old gentleman, his tone tremulous.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“As if you could be blamed!” protested the girl. “You mustn’t think of it that
+way. Fancy, what should we have done without you!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I’m afraid I have been very clumsy,” sighed Brentwick, “clumsy and impulsive
+... Kirkwood, do you hear anything?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Not yet, sir.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Perhaps,” suggested Brentwick a little later, “perhaps we had better alight
+and go up to the inn. It would be more cosy there, especially if the petrol
+proves hard to obtain, and we have long to wait.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I should like that,” assented the girl decidedly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Kirkwood nodded his approval, opened the door and jumped out to assist her;
+then picked up the bag and followed the pair,—Brentwick leading the way with
+Dorothy on his arm.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At the doorway of the Crown and Mitre, Charles met them evidently seriously
+disturbed. “No petrol to be had here, sir,” he announced reluctantly; “but the
+landlord will send to the next inn, a mile up the road, for some. You will have
+to be patient, I’m afraid, sir.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Very well. Get some one to help you push the car in from the road,” ordered
+Brentwick; “we will be waiting in one of the private parlors.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes, sir; thank you, sir.” The mechanician touched the visor of his cap and
+hurried off.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Come, Kirkwood.” Gently Brentwick drew the girl in with him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Kirkwood lingered momentarily on the doorstep, to listen acutely. But the wind
+was blowing into that quarter whence they had come, and he could hear naught
+save the soughing in the trees, together with an occasional burst of rude
+rustic laughter from the tap-room. Lifting his shoulders in dumb dismay, and
+endeavoring to compose his features, he entered the tavern.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h3><a name="chap20"></a>II——THE CROWN AND MITRE</h3>
+
+<p>
+A rosy-cheeked and beaming landlady met him in the corridor and, all bows and
+smiles, ushered him into a private parlor reserved for the party, immediately
+bustling off in a desperate flurry, to secure refreshments desired by
+Brentwick.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The girl had seated herself on one end of an extremely comfortless lounge and
+was making a palpable effort to seem at ease. Brentwick stood at one of the
+windows, shoulders rounded and head bent, hands clasped behind his back as he
+peered out into the night. Kirkwood dropped the traveling bag beneath a chair
+the farthest removed from the doorway, and took to pacing the floor.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In a corner of the room a tall grandfather’s clock ticked off ten interminable
+minutes. For some reason unconscionably delaying, the landlady did not
+reappear. Brentwick, abruptly turning from the window, remarked the fact
+querulously, then drew a chair up to a marble-topped table in the middle of the
+floor.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“My dear,” he requested the girl, “will you oblige me by sitting over here? And
+Philip, bring up a chair, if you will. We must not permit ourselves to worry,
+and I have something here which may, perhaps, engage your interest for a
+while.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To humor him and alleviate his evident distress of mind, they acceded. Kirkwood
+found himself seated opposite Dorothy, Brentwick between them. After some
+hesitation, made the more notable by an air of uneasiness which sat oddly on
+his shoulders, whose composure and confident mien had theretofore been so
+complete and so reassuring, the elder gentleman fumbled in an inner coat-pocket
+and brought to light a small black leather wallet. He seemed to be on the point
+of opening it when hurried footfalls sounded in the hallway. Brentwick placed
+the wallet, still with its secret intact, on the table before him, as Charles
+burst unceremoniously in, leaving the door wide open.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Mr. Brentwick, sir!” he cried gustily. “That other car—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+With a smothered ejaculation Kirkwood leaped to his feet, tugging at the weapon
+in his pocket. In another instant he had the revolver exposed. The girl’s cry
+of alarm, interrupting the machinist, fixed Brentwick’s attention on the young
+man. He, too, stood up, reaching over very quickly, to clamp strong supple
+fingers round Kirkwood’s wrist, while with the other hand he laid hold of the
+revolver and by a single twist wrenched it away.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Kirkwood turned upon him in fury. “So!” he cried, shaking with passion. “This
+is what your hospitality meant! You’re going to—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“My dear young friend,” interrupted Brentwick with a flash of impatience,
+“remember that if I had designed to betray you, I could have asked no better
+opportunity than when you were my guest under my own roof.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“But—hang it all, Brentwick!” expostulated Kirkwood, ashamed and contrite, but
+worked upon by desperate apprehension; “I didn’t mean that, but—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Would you have bullets flying when she is near?” demanded Brentwick
+scathingly. Hastily he slipped the revolver upon a little shelf beneath the
+table-top. “Sir!” he informed Kirkwood with some heat, “I love you as my own
+son, but you’re a young fool!... as I have been, in my time ... and as I would
+to Heaven I might be again! Be advised, Philip,—be calm. Can’t you see it’s the
+only way to save your treasure?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Hang the jewels!” retorted Kirkwood warmly. “What—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Sir, who said anything about the jewels?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As Brentwick spoke, Calendar’s corpulent figure filled the doorway; Stryker’s
+weather-worn features loomed over his shoulder, distorted in a cheerful leer.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“As to the jewels,” announced the fat adventurer, “I’ve got a word to say, if
+you put it to me that way.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He paused on the threshold, partly for dramatic effect, partly for his own
+satisfaction, his quick eyes darting from face to face of the four people whom
+he had caught so unexpectedly. A shade of complacency colored his expression,
+and he smiled evilly beneath the coarse short thatch of his gray mustache. In
+his hand a revolver appeared, poised for immediate use if there were need.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was none. Brentwick, at his primal appearance, had dropped a peremptory
+hand on Kirkwood’s shoulder, forcing the young man back to his seat; at the
+same time he resumed his own. The girl had not stirred from hers since the
+first alarm; she sat as if transfixed with terror, leaning forward with her
+elbows on the table, her hands tightly clasped, her face, a little blanched,
+turned to the door. But her scarlet lips were set and firm with inflexible
+purpose, and her brown eyes met Calendar’s with a look level and unflinching.
+Beyond this she gave no sign of recognition.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Nearest of the four to the adventurers was Charles, the mechanician, paused in
+affrighted astonishment at sight of the revolver. Calendar, choosing to advance
+suddenly, poked the muzzle of the weapon jocularly in the man’s ribs. “Beat it,
+Four-eyes!” he snapped. “This is your cue to duck! Get out of my way.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The mechanician jumped as if shot, then hastily, retreated to the table, his
+sallow features working beneath the goggle-mask which had excited the fat
+adventurer’s scorn.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Come right in, Cap’n,” Calendar threw over one shoulder; “come in, shut the
+door and lock it. Let’s all be sociable, and have a nice quiet time.” vStryker
+obeyed, with a derisive grimace for Kirkwood.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Calendar, advancing jauntily to a point within a yard of the table, stopped,
+smiling affably down upon his prospective victims, and airily twirling his
+revolver.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“<i>Good</i> evening, all!” he saluted them blandly. “Dorothy, my child,” with
+assumed concern, “you’re looking a trifle upset; I’m afraid you’ve been keeping
+late hours. Little girls must be careful, you know, or they lose the bloom of
+roses in their cheeks.... Mr. Kirkwood, it’s a pleasure to meet you again!
+Permit me to paraphrase your most sound advice, and remind you that
+pistol-shots are apt to attract undesirable attention. It wouldn’t be wise for
+<i>you</i> to bring the police about our ears. I believe that in substance such
+was your sapient counsel to me in the cabin of the <i>Alethea</i>; was it
+not?... And you, sir!”—fixing Brentwick with a cold unfriendly eye. “You
+animated fossil, what d’you mean by telling me to go to the devil?... But let
+that pass; I hold no grudge. What might your name be?”
+</p>
+
+<div class="fig" style="width:100%;">
+<a name="illus10"></a>
+<img src="images/img10.jpg" width="487" height="600" alt="[Illustration: ]" />
+<p class="caption">“<i>Good</i> evening, all!” he saluted them blandly.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+“It might be Brentwick,” said that gentleman placidly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Brentwick, eh? Well, I like a man of spirit. But permit me to advise you—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Gladly,” nodded Brentwick.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Eh?... Don’t come a second time between father and daughter; another man might
+not be as patient as I, Mister Brentwick. There’s a law in the land, if you
+don’t happen to know it.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I congratulate you on your success in evading it,” observed Brentwick,
+undisturbed. “And it was considerate of you not to employ it in this instance.”
+Then, with a sharp change of tone, “Come, sir!” he demanded. “You have
+unwarrantably intruded in this room, which I have engaged for my private use.
+Get through with your business and be off with you.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“All in my good time, my antediluvian friend. When I’ve wound up my business
+here I’ll go—not before. But, just to oblige you, we’ll get down to it....
+Kirkwood, you have a revolver of mine. Be good enough to return it.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I have it here,—under the table,” interrupted Brentwick suavely. “Shall I hand
+it to you?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“By the muzzle, if you please. Be very careful; this one’s loaded, too—apt to
+explode any minute.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To Kirkwood’s intense disgust Brentwick quietly slipped one hand beneath the
+table and, placing the revolver on its top, delicately with his finger-tips
+shoved it toward the farther edge. With a grunt of approval, Calendar swept the
+weapon up and into his pocket.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Any more ordnance?” he inquired briskly, eyes moving alertly from face to
+face. “No matter; you wouldn’t dare use ’em anyway. And I’m about done.
+Dorothy, my dear, it’s high time you returned to your father’s protection.
+Where’s that gladstone bag?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“In my traveling bag,” the girl told him in a toneless voice.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Then you may bring it along. You may also say good night to the kind
+gentlemen.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Dorothy did not move; her pallor grew more intense and Kirkwood saw her
+knuckles tighten beneath the gloves. Otherwise her mouth seemed to grow more
+straight and hard.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Dorothy!” cried the adventurer with a touch of displeasure. “You heard me?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I heard you,” she replied a little wearily, more than a little contemptuously.
+“Don’t mind him, please, Mr. Kirkwood!”—with an appealing gesture, as Kirkwood,
+unable to contain himself, moved restlessly in his chair, threatening to rise.
+“Don’t say anything. I have no intention whatever of going with this man.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Calendar’s features twitched nervously; he chewed a corner of his mustache,
+fixing the girl with a black stare. “I presume,” he remarked after a moment,
+with slow deliberation, “you’re aware that, as your father, I am in a position
+to compel you to accompany me.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I shall not go with you,” iterated Dorothy in a level tone. “You may threaten
+me, but—I shall not go. Mr. Brentwick and Mr. Kirkwood are taking me
+to—friends, who will give me a home until I can find a way to take care of
+myself. That is all I have to say to you.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Bravo, my dear!” cried Brentwick encouragingly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Mind your business, sir!” thundered Calendar, his face darkening. Then, to
+Dorothy, “You understand, I trust, what this means?” he demanded. “I offer you
+a home—and a good one. Refuse, and you work for your living, my girl! You’ve
+forfeited your legacy—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I know, I know,” she told him in cold disdain. “I am content. Won’t you be
+kind enough to leave me alone?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For a breath, Calendar glowered over her; then, “I presume,” he observed, “that
+all these heroics are inspired by that whipper-snapper, Kirkwood. Do you know
+that he hasn’t a brass farthing to bless himself with?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What has that—?” cried the girl indignantly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Why, it has everything to do with me, my child. As your doting parent, I can’t
+consent to your marrying nothing-a-year.... For I surmise you intend to marry
+this Mr. Kirkwood, don’t you?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There followed a little interval of silence, while the warm blood flamed in the
+girl’s face and the red lips trembled as she faced her tormentor. Then, with a
+quaver that escaped her control, “If Mr. Kirkwood asks me, I shall,” she stated
+very simply.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“That,” interposed Kirkwood, “is completely understood.” His gaze sought her
+eyes, but she looked away.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You forget that I am your father,” sneered Calendar; “and that you are a
+minor. I can refuse my consent.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“But you won’t,” Kirkwood told him with assurance.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The adventurer stared. “No,” he agreed, after slight hesitation; “no, I shan’t
+interfere. Take her, my boy, if you want her—and a father’s blessing into the
+bargain. The Lord knows I’ve troubles enough; a parent’s lot is not what it’s
+cracked up to be.” He paused, leering, ironic. “But,”—deliberately, “there’s
+still this other matter of the gladstone bag. I don’t mind abandoning my
+parental authority, when my child’s happiness is concerned, but as for my
+property—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It is not your property,” interrupted the girl.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It was your mother’s, dear child. It’s now mine.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I dispute that assertion,” Kirkwood put in.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You may dispute it till the cows come home, my boy: the fact will remain that
+I intend to take my property with me when I leave this room, whether you like
+it or not. Now are you disposed to continue the argument, or may I count on
+your being sensible?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You may put away your revolver, if that’s what you mean,” said Kirkwood. “We
+certainly shan’t oppose you with violence, but I warn you that Scotland Yard—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Oh, that be blowed!” the adventurer snorted in disgust. “I can sail circles
+round any tec. that ever blew out of Scotland Yard! Give me an hour’s start,
+and you’re free to do all the funny business you’ve a mind to, with—Scotland
+Yard!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Then you admit,” queried Brentwick civilly, “that you’ve no legal title to the
+jewels in dispute?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Look here, my friend,” chuckled Calendar, “when you catch me admitting
+anything, you write it down in your little book and tell the bobby on the
+corner. Just at present I’ve got other business than to stand round admitting
+anything about anything.... Cap’n, let’s have that bag of my dutiful
+daughter’s.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“’Ere you are.” Stryker spoke for the first time since entering the room,
+taking the valise from beneath the chair and depositing it on the table.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Well, we shan’t take anything that doesn’t belong to us,” laughed Calendar,
+fumbling with the catch; “not even so small a matter as my own child’s
+traveling bag. A small—heavy—gladstone bag,” he grunted, opening the valise and
+plunging in one greedy hand, “will—just—about—do for mine!” With which he
+produced the article mentioned. “This for the discard, Cap’n,” he laughed
+contentedly, pushing the girl’s valise aside; and, rumbling with stentorian
+mirth, stood beaming benignantly over the assembled company.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Why,” he exclaimed, “this moment is worth all it cost me! My children, I
+forgive you freely. Mr. Kirkwood, I felicitate you cordially on having secured
+a most expensive wife. Really—d’you know?—I feel as if I ought to do a little
+something for you both.” Gurgling with delight he smote his fat palms together.
+“I just tell you what,” he resumed, “no one yet ever called Georgie Calendar a
+tight-wad. I just believe I’m going to make you kids a handsome wedding
+present.... The good Lord knows there’s enough of this for a fellow to be a
+little generous and never miss it!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The thick mottled fingers tore nervously at the catch; eventually he got the
+bag open. Those about the table bent forward, all quickened by the prospect of
+for the first time beholding the treasure over which they had fought, for which
+they had suffered, so long....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A heady and luscious fragrance pervaded the atmosphere, exhaling from the open
+mouth of the bag. A silence, indefinitely sustained, impressed itself upon the
+little audience,—a breathless pause ended eventually by a sharp snap of
+Calendar’s teeth. “<i>Mmm</i>!” grunted the adventurer in bewilderment. He
+began to pant.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Abruptly his heavy hands delved into the contents of the bag, like the paws of
+a terrier digging in earth. To Kirkwood the air seemed temporarily thick with
+flying objects. Beneath his astonished eyes a towel fell upon the table—a
+crumpled, soiled towel, bearing on its dingy hem the inscription in indelible
+ink: “<i>Hôtel du Commerce, Anvers</i>.” A tooth-mug of substantial earthenware
+dropped to the floor with a crash. A slimy soap-dish of the same manufacture
+slid across the table and into Brentwick’s lap. A battered alarm clock with
+never a tick left in its abused carcass rang vacuously as it fell by the open
+bag.... The remainder was—oranges: a dozen or more small, round, golden globes
+of ripe fruit, perhaps a shade overripe, therefore the more aromatic.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The adventurer ripped out an oath. “Mulready, by the living God!” he raged in
+fury. “Done up, I swear! Done by that infernal sneak—me, blind as a bat!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He fell suddenly silent, the blood congesting in his face; as suddenly broke
+forth again, haranguing the company.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“That’s why he went out and bought those damned oranges, is it? Think of it—me
+sitting in the hotel in Antwerp and him lugging in oranges by the bagful
+because he was fond of fruit! When did he do it? How do I know? If I knew,
+would I be here and him the devil knows where, this minute? When my back was
+turned, of course, the damned snake! That’s why he was so hot about picking a
+fight on the boat, hey? Wanted to get thrown off and take to the woods—leaving
+me with <i>this</i>! And that’s why he felt so awful done up he wouldn’t take a
+hand at hunting you two down, hey? Well—by—the—Eternal! I’ll camp on his trail
+for the rest of his natural-born days! I’ll have his eye-teeth for this, I’ll—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He swayed, gibbering with rage, his countenance frightfully contorted, his fat
+hands shaking as he struggled for expression.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And then, while yet their own astonishment held Dorothy, Kirkwood, Brentwick
+and Stryker speechless, Charles, the mechanician, moved suddenly upon the
+adventurer.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There followed two metallic clicks. Calendar’s ravings were abrupted as if his
+tongue had been paralyzed. He fell back a pace, flabby jowls pale and shaking,
+ponderous jaw dropping on his breast, mouth wide and eyes crazed as he shook
+violently before him his thick fleshy wrists—securely handcuffed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Simultaneously the mechanician whirled about, bounded eagerly across the floor,
+and caught Stryker at the door, his dexterous fingers twisting in the captain’s
+collar as he jerked him back and tripped him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Mr. Kirkwood!” he cried. “Here, please—one moment. Take this man’s gun, from
+him, will you?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Kirkwood sprang to his assistance, and without encountering much trouble,
+succeeded in wresting a Webley from Stryker’s limp, flaccid fingers.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Roughly the mechanician shook the man, dragging him to his feet. “Now,” he
+ordered sternly, “you march to that corner, stick your nose in it, and be good!
+You can’t get away if you try. I’ve got other men outside, waiting for you to
+come out. Understand?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Trembling like a whipped cur, Stryker meekly obeyed his instructions to the
+letter.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The mechanician, with a contemptuous laugh leaving him, strode back to
+Calendar, meanwhile whipping off his goggles; and clapped a hearty hand upon
+the adventurer’s quaking shoulders.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Well!” he cried. “And are you still sailing circles round the men from
+Scotland Yard, Simmons, or Bellows, or Sanderson, or Calendar, or Crumbstone,
+or whatever name you prefer to sail under?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Calendar glared at him aghast; then heaved a profound sigh, shrugged his fat
+shoulders, and bent his head in thought. An instant later he looked up. “You
+can’t do it,” he informed the detective vehemently; “you haven’t got a shred of
+evidence against me! What’s there? A pile of oranges and a peck of trash! What
+of it?... Besides,” he threatened, “if you pinch me, you’ll have to take the
+girl in, too. I swear that whatever stealing was done, she did it. I’ll not be
+trapped this way by her and let her off without a squeal. Take me—take her;
+d’you hear?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I think,” put in the clear, bland accents of Brentwick, “we can consider that
+matter settled. I have here, my man,”—nodding to the adventurer as he took up
+the black leather wallet,—“I have here a little matter which may clear up any
+lingering doubts as to your standing, which you may be disposed at present to
+entertain.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He extracted a slip of cardboard and, at arm’s length, laid it on the
+table-edge beneath the adventurer’s eyes. The latter, bewildered, bent over it
+for a moment, breathing heavily; then straightened back, shook himself, laughed
+shortly with a mirthless note, and faced the detective.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It’s come with you now, I guess?” he suggested very quietly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“The Bannister warrant is still out for you,” returned the man. “That’ll be
+enough to hold you on till extradition papers arrive from the States.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Oh, I’ll waive those; and I won’t give you any trouble, either.... I reckon,”
+mused the adventurer, jingling his manacles thoughtfully, “I’m a back-number,
+anyway. When a half-grown girl, a half-baked boy, a flub like Mulready—damn his
+eyes!—and a club-footed snipe from Scotland Yard can put it all over me this
+way,... why, I guess it’s up to me to go home and retire to my country-place up
+the Hudson.” He sighed wearily.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yep; time to cut it out. But I would like to be free long enough to get in one
+good lick at that mutt, Mulready. My friend, you get your hands on him, and
+I’ll squeal on him till I’m blue in the face. That’s a promise.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You’ll have the chance before long,” replied the detective. “We received a
+telegram from the Amsterdam police late this afternoon, saying they’d picked up
+Mr. Mulready with a woman named Hallam, and were holding them on suspicion. It
+seems,”—turning to Brentwick,—“they were opening negotiations for the sale of a
+lot of stones, and seemed in such a precious hurry that the diamond merchant’s
+suspicions were roused. We’re sending over for them, Miss Calendar, so you can
+make your mind easy about your jewels; you’ll have them back in a few days.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Thank you,” said the girl with an effort.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Well,” the adventurer delivered his peroration, “I certainly am blame’ glad to
+hear it. ’Twouldn’t ’ve been a square deal, any other way.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He paused, looking his erstwhile dupes over with a melancholy eye; then, with
+an uncertain nod comprehending the girl, Kirkwood and Brentwick, “So long!” he
+said thickly; and turned, with the detective’s hand under his arm and,
+accompanied by the thoroughly cowed Stryker, waddled out of the room.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h3><a name="chap21"></a>III——THE JOURNEY’S END</h3>
+
+<p>
+Kirkwood, following the exodus, closed the door with elaborate care and slowly,
+deep in thought, returned to the table.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Dorothy seemed not to have moved, save to place her elbows on the marble slab,
+and rest her cheeks between hands that remained clenched, as they had been in
+the greatest stress of her emotion. The color had returned to her face, with a
+slightly enhanced depth of hue to the credit of her excitement. Her cheeks were
+hot, her eyes starlike beneath the woven, massy sunlight of her hair.
+Temporarily unconscious of her surroundings she stared steadfastly before her,
+thoughts astray in the irridescent glamour of the dreams that were to come....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Brentwick had slipped down in his chair, resting his silvered head upon its
+back, and was smiling serenely up at the low yellow ceiling. Before him on the
+table his long white fingers were drumming an inaudible tune. Presently
+rousing, he caught Kirkwood’s eye and smiled sheepishly, like a child caught in
+innocent mischief.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The younger man grinned broadly. “And you were responsible for all that!” he
+commented, infinitely amused.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Brentwick nodded, twinkling self-satisfaction. “I contrived it all,” he said;
+“neat, I call it, too.” His old eyes brightened with reminiscent enjoyment.
+“Inspiration!” he crowed softly. “Inspiration, pure and simple. I’d been
+worrying my wits for fully five minutes before Wotton settled the matter by
+telling me about the captain’s hiring of the motor-car. Then, in a flash, I had
+it.... I talked with Charles by telephone,—his name is really Charles, by, the
+bye,—overcame his conscientious scruples about playing his fish when they were
+already all but landed, and settled the artistic details.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He chuckled delightedly. “It’s the instinct,” he declared emphatically, “the
+instinct for adventure. I knew it was in me, latent somewhere, but never till
+this day did it get the opportunity to assert itself. A born adventurer—that’s
+what I am!... You see, it was essential that they should believe we were
+frightened and running from them; that way, they would be sure to run after us.
+Why, we might have baited a dozen traps and failed to lure them into my house,
+after that stout scoundrel knew you’d had the chance to tell me the whole
+yarn... Odd!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Weren’t you taking chances, you and Charles?” asked Kirkwood curiously.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Precious few. There was another motor from Scotland Yard trailing Captain
+Stryker’s. If they had run past, or turned aside, they would have been
+overhauled in short order.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He relapsed into his whimsical reverie; the wistful look returned to his eyes,
+replacing the glow of triumph and pleasure. And he sighed a little regretfully.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What I don’t understand,” contended Kirkwood, “is how you convinced Calendar
+that he couldn’t get revenge by pressing his charge against Miss
+Calendar—Dorothy.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Oh-h?” Mr. Brentwick elevated his fine white eyebrows and sat up briskly. “My
+dear boy, that was the most delectable dish on the entire menu. I have been
+reserving it, I don’t mind owning, that I might better enjoy the full relish of
+it.... I may answer you best, perhaps, by asking you to scan what I offered to
+the fat scoundrel’s respectful consideration, my dear sir.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He leveled a forefinger at the card.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At first glance it conveyed nothing to the younger man’s benighted
+intelligence. He puzzled over it, twisting his brows out of alignment. An
+ordinary oblong slip of thin white cardboard, it was engraved in fine script as
+follows:
+</p>
+
+<p class="center">
+MR. GEORGE BURGOYNE CALENDAR
+</p>
+
+<p>
+81, ASPEN VILLAS, S. W.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Oh!” exclaimed Kirkwood at length, standing up, his face bright with
+understanding. “<i>You</i>—!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I,” laconically assented the elder man.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Impulsively Kirkwood leaned across the table. “Dorothy,” he said tenderly; and
+when the girl’s happy eyes met his, quietly drew her attention to the card.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then he rose hastily, and went over to stand by the window, staring mistily
+into the blank face of night beyond its unseen panes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Behind him there was a confusion of little noises; the sound of a chair pushed
+hurriedly aside, a rustle of skirts, a happy sob or two, low voices
+intermingling; sighs.... Out of it finally came the father’s accents.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“There, there, my dear! My dearest dear!” protested the old gentleman.
+“Positively I don’t deserve a tithe of this. I—” The young old voice quavered
+and broke, in a happy laugh.... “You must understand,” he continued more
+soberly, “that no consideration of any sort is due me. When we married, I was
+too old for your mother, child; we both knew it, both believed it would never
+matter. But it did. By her wish, I went back to America; we were to see what
+separation would do to heal the wounds dissension had caused. It was a very
+foolish experiment. Your mother died before I could return....”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There fell a silence, again broken by the father. “After that I was in no haste
+to return. But some years ago, I came to London to live. I communicated with
+the old colonel, asking permission to see you. It was refused in a manner which
+precluded the subject being reopened by me: I was informed that if I persisted
+in attempting to see you, you would be disinherited.... He was very angry with
+me—justly, I admit.... One must grow old before one can see how unforgivably
+one was wrong in youth.... So I settled down to a quiet old age, determined not
+to disturb you in your happiness.... Ah—Kirkwood!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The old gentleman was standing, his arm around his daughter’s shoulders, when
+Kirkwood turned.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Come here, Philip; I’m explaining to Dorothy, but you should hear.... The
+evening I called on you, dear boy, at the Pless, returning home I received a
+message from my solicitors, whom I had instructed to keep an eye on Dorothy’s
+welfare. They informed me that she had disappeared. Naturally I canceled my
+plans to go to Munich, and stayed, employing detectives. One of the first
+things they discovered was that Dorothy had run off with an elderly person
+calling himself George Burgoyne Calendar—the name I had discarded when I found
+that to acknowledge me would imperil my daughter’s fortune.... The
+investigations went deeper; Charles—let us continue to call him—had been to see
+me only this afternoon, to inform me of the plot they had discovered. This
+Hallam woman and her son—it seems that they were legitimately in the line of
+inheritance, Dorothy out of the way. But the woman was—ah—a bad lot. Somehow
+she got into communication with this fat rogue and together they plotted it
+out. Charles doesn’t believe that the Hallam woman expected to enjoy the
+Burgoyne estates for very many days. Her plan was to step in when Dorothy
+stepped out, gather up what she could, realize on it, and decamp. That is why
+there was so much excitement about the jewels: naturally the most valuable item
+on her list, the most easy to convert into cash.... The man Mulready we do not
+place; he seems to have been a shady character the fat rogue picked up
+somewhere. The latter’s ordinary line of business was diamond smuggling, though
+he would condescend to almost anything in order to turn a dishonest penny....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“That seems to exhaust the subject. But one word more.... Dorothy, I am old
+enough and have suffered enough to know the wisdom of seizing one’s happiness
+when one may. My dear, a little while ago, you did a very brave deed. Under
+fire you said a most courageous, womanly, creditable thing. And Philip’s
+rejoinder was only second in nobility to yours.... I do hope to goodness that
+you two blessed youngsters won’t let any addlepated scruples stand between
+yourselves and—the prize of Romance, your inalienable inheritance!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Abruptly Brentwick, who was no longer Brentwick, but the actual Calendar,
+released the girl from his embrace and hopped nimbly toward the door. “Really,
+I must see about that petrol!” he cried. “While it’s perfectly true that
+Charles lied about it’s running out, we must be getting on. I’ll call you when
+we’re ready to start.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And the door crashed to behind him....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Between them was the table. Beyond it the girl stood with head erect, dim tears
+glimmering on the lashes of those eyes with which she met Philip’s steady gaze
+so fearlessly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Singing about them, the silence deepened. Fascinated, though his heart was
+faint with longing, Kirkwood faltered on the threshold of his kingdom.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Dorothy!... You did mean it, dear?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She laughed, a little, low, sobbing laugh that had its source deep in the
+hidden sanctuary of her heart of a child.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I meant it, my dearest.... If you’ll have a girl so bold and forward, who
+can’t wait till she’s asked but throws herself into the arms of the man she
+loves—Philip, I meant it, every word!...”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And as he went to her swiftly, round the table, she turned to meet him, arms
+uplifted, her scarlet lips a-tremble, the brown and bewitching lashes drooping
+over her wondrously lighted eyes....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+After a time Philip Kirkwood laughed aloud.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And there was that quality in the ring of his laughter that caused the Shade of
+Care, which had for the past ten minutes been uneasily luffing and filling in
+the offing and, on the whole, steadily diminishing and becoming more pale and
+wan and emaciated and indistinct—there was that in the laughter of Philip
+Kirkwood, I say, which caused the Shade of Care to utter a hollow croak of
+despair as, incontinently, it vanished out of his life.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 9779 ***</div>
+</body>
+
+</html>
+
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+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
+eBook #9779 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/9779)
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Black Bag, by Louis Joseph Vance
+#3 in our series by Louis Joseph Vance
+
+Copyright laws are changing all over the world. Be sure to check the
+copyright laws for your country before downloading or redistributing
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+**Welcome To The World of Free Plain Vanilla Electronic Texts**
+
+**eBooks Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since 1971**
+
+*****These eBooks Were Prepared By Thousands of Volunteers!*****
+
+
+Title: The Black Bag
+
+Author: Louis Joseph Vance
+
+Release Date: January, 2006 [EBook #9779]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on October 15, 2003]
+
+Edition: 10
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE BLACK BAG ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Suzanne Shell, Leonard Johnson
+and PG Distributed Proofreading.
+
+
+
+
+THE BLACK BAG
+
+
+By LOUIS JOSEPH VANCE
+
+
+
+WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY THOMAS FOGARTY
+
+
+1908
+
+
+
+
+TO MY MOTHER
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+CHAPTER
+
+    I. DIVERSIONS OF A RUINED GENTLEMAN
+
+   II. "AND SOME THERE BE WHO HAVE ADVENTURES THRUST UPON THEM"
+
+  III. CALENDAR'S DAUGHTER
+
+   IV. 9 FROGNALL STREET, W. C.
+
+    V. THE MYSTERY OF A FOUR-WHEELER
+
+   VI. "BELOW BRIDGE"
+
+  VII. DIVERSIONS OF A RUINED GENTLEMAN--RESUMED
+
+ VIII. MADAME L'INTRIGANTE
+
+   IX. AGAIN "BELOW BRIDGE"; AND BEYOND
+
+    X. DESPERATE MEASURES
+
+   XI. OFF THE NORE
+
+  XII. PICARESQUE PASSAGES
+
+ XIII. A PRIMER OF PROGRESSIVE CRIME
+
+  XIV. STRATAGEMS AND SPOILS
+
+   XV. REFUGEES
+
+  XVI. TRAVELS WITH A CHAPERON
+
+ XVII. ROGUES AND VAGABONDS
+
+XVIII. ADVENTURERS' LUCK
+
+  XIX. i--THE UXBRIDGE ROAD
+
+      ii--THE CROWN AND MITRE
+
+     iii--THE JOURNEY'S END
+
+
+THE BLACK BAG
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+
+DIVERSIONS OF A RUINED GENTLEMAN
+
+Upon a certain dreary April afternoon in the year of grace, 1906, the
+apprehensions of Philip Kirkwood, Esquire, _Artist-peintre_, were enlivened
+by the discovery that he was occupying that singularly distressing social
+position, which may be summed up succinctly in a phrase through long usage
+grown proverbial: "Alone in London." These three words have come to connote
+in our understanding so much of human misery, that to Mr. Kirkwood they
+seemed to epitomize absolutely, if not happily, the various circumstances
+attendant upon the predicament wherein he found himself. Inevitably an
+extremist, because of his youth, (he had just turned twenty-five), he
+took no count of mitigating matters, and would hotly have resented the
+suggestion that his case was anything but altogether deplorable and
+forlorn.
+
+That he was not actually at the end of his resources went for nothing; he
+held the distinction a quibble, mockingly immaterial,--like the store of
+guineas in his pocket, too insignificant for mention when contrasted with
+his needs. And his base of supplies, the American city of his nativity,
+whence--and not without a glow of pride in his secret heart--he was wont to
+register at foreign hostelries, had been arbitrarily cut off from him by
+one of those accidents sardonically classified by insurance and express
+corporations as Acts of God.
+
+Now to one who has lived all his days serenely in accord with the dictates
+of his own sweet will, taking no thought for the morrow, such a situation
+naturally seems both appalling and intolerable, at the first blush. It must
+be confessed that, to begin with, Kirkwood drew a long and disconsolate
+face over his fix. And in that black hour, primitive of its kind in his
+brief span, he became conscious of a sinister apparition taking shape at
+his elbow--a shade of darkness which, clouting him on the back with a
+skeleton hand, croaked hollow salutations in his ear.
+
+"Come, Mr. Kirkwood, come!" its mirthless accents rallied him. "Have you
+no welcome for me?--you, who have been permitted to live the quarter of a
+century without making my acquaintance? Surely, now, it's high time we were
+learning something of one another, you and I!" "But I don't understand,"
+returned Kirkwood blankly. "I don't know you--"
+
+"True! But you shall: I am the Shade of Care--"
+
+"Dull Care!" murmured Kirkwood, bewildered and dismayed; for the visitation
+had come upon him with little presage and no invitation whatever.
+
+"Dull Care," the Shade assured him. "Dull Care am I--and Care that's
+anything but dull, into the bargain: Care that's like a keen pain in your
+body, Care that lives a horror in your mind, Care that darkens your days
+and flavors with bitter poison all your nights, Care that--"
+
+But Kirkwood would not listen further. Courageously submissive to his
+destiny, knowing in his heart that the Shade had come to stay, he yet found
+spirit to shake himself with a dogged air, to lift his chin, set the strong
+muscles of his jaw, and smile that homely wholesome smile which was his
+peculiarly.
+
+"Very well," he accepted the irremediable with grim humor; "what must be,
+must. I don't pretend to be glad to see you, but--you're free to stay as
+long as you find the climate agreeable. I warn you I shan't whine. Lots of
+men, hundreds and hundreds of 'em, have slept tight o' nights with you for
+bedfellow; if they could grin and bear you, I believe I can."
+
+Now Care mocked him with a sardonic laugh, and sought to tighten upon his
+shoulders its bony grasp; but Kirkwood resolutely shrugged it off and went
+in search of man's most faithful dumb friend, to wit, his pipe; the which,
+when found and filled, he lighted with a spill twisted from the envelope of
+a cable message which had been vicariously responsible for his introduction
+to the Shade of Care.
+
+"It's about time," he announced, watching the paper blacken and burn in the
+grate fire, "that I was doing something to prove my title to a living." And
+this was all his valedictory to a vanished competence. "Anyway," he added
+hastily, as if fearful lest Care, overhearing, might have read into his
+tone a trace of vain repining, "anyway, I'm a sight better off than those
+poor devils over there! I really have a great deal to be thankful for, now
+that my attention's drawn to it."
+
+For the ensuing few minutes he thought it all over, soberly but with a
+stout heart; standing at a window of his bedroom in the Hotel Pless, hands
+deep in trouser pockets, pipe fuming voluminously, his gaze wandering out
+over a blurred infinitude of wet shining roofs and sooty chimney-pots: all
+of London that a lowering drizzle would let him see, and withal by no means
+a cheering prospect, nor yet one calculated to offset the disheartening
+influence of the indomitable Shade of Care. But the truth is that
+Kirkwood's brain comprehended little that his eyes perceived; his thoughts
+were with his heart, and that was half a world away and sick with pity
+for another and a fairer city, stricken in the flower of her loveliness,
+writhing in Promethean agony upon her storied hills.
+
+There came a rapping at the door.
+
+Kirkwood removed the pipe from between his teeth long enough to say "Come
+in!" pleasantly.
+
+The knob was turned, the door opened. Kirkwood, swinging on one heel,
+beheld hesitant upon the threshold a diminutive figure in the livery of the
+Pless pages.
+
+"Mister Kirkwood?"
+
+Kirkwood nodded.
+
+"Gentleman to see you, sir."
+
+Kirkwood nodded again, smiling. "Show him up, please," he said. But before
+the words were fairly out of his mouth a footfall sounded in the corridor,
+a hand was placed upon the shoulder of the page, gently but with decision
+swinging him out of the way, and a man stepped into the room.
+
+"Mr. Brentwick!" Kirkwood almost shouted, jumping forward to seize his
+visitor's hand.
+
+"My dear boy!" replied the latter. "I'm delighted to see you. 'Got your
+note not an hour ago, and came at once--you see!"
+
+"It was mighty good of you. Sit down, please. Here are cigars.... Why, a
+moment ago I was the most miserable and lonely mortal on the footstool!"
+
+"I can fancy." The elder man looked up, smiling at Kirkwood from the depths
+of his arm-chair, as the latter stood above him, resting an elbow on
+the mantel. "The management knows me," he offered explanation of his
+unceremonious appearance; "so I took the liberty of following on the heels
+of the bellhop, dear boy. And how are you? Why are you in London, enjoying
+our abominable spring weather? And why the anxious undertone I detected in
+your note?"
+
+He continued to stare curiously into Kirkwood's face. At a glance, this
+Mr. Brentwick was a man of tallish figure and rather slender; with a
+countenance thin and flushed a sensitive pink, out of which his eyes shone,
+keen, alert, humorous, and a trace wistful behind his glasses. His years
+were indeterminate; with the aspect of fifty, the spirit and the verve of
+thirty assorted oddly. But his hands were old, delicate, fine and fragile;
+and the lips beneath the drooping white mustache at times trembled, almost
+imperceptibly, with the generous sentiments that come with mellow age. He
+held his back straight and his head with an air--an air that was not a
+swagger but the sign-token of seasoned experience in the world. The most
+carping could have found no flaw in the quiet taste of his attire. To sum
+up, Kirkwood's very good friend--and his only one then in London--Mr.
+Brentwick looked and was an English gentleman.
+
+"Why?" he persisted, as the younger man hesitated. "I am here to find out.
+To-night I leave for the Continent. In the meantime ..."
+
+"And at midnight I sail for the States," added Kirkwood. "That is mainly
+why I wished to see you--to say good-by, for the time."
+
+"You're going home--" A shadow clouded Brentwick's clear eyes.
+
+"To fight it out, shoulder to shoulder with my brethren in adversity."
+
+The cloud lifted. "That is the spirit!" declared the elder man. "For the
+moment I did you the injustice to believe that you were running away. But
+now I understand. Forgive me.... Pardon, too, the stupidity which I must
+lay at the door of my advancing years; to me the thought of you as a
+Parisian fixture has become such a commonplace, Philip, that the news of
+the disaster hardly stirred me. Now I remember that you are a Californian!"
+
+"I was born in San Francisco," affirmed Kirkwood a bit sadly. "My father
+and mother were buried there ..."
+
+"And your fortune--?"
+
+"I inherited my father's interest in the firm of Kirkwood & Vanderlip; when
+I came over to study painting, I left everything in Vanderlip's hands. The
+business afforded me a handsome living."
+
+"You have heard from Mr. Vanderlip?"
+
+"Fifteen minutes ago." Kirkwood took a cable-form, still damp, from his
+pocket, and handed it to his guest. Unfolding it, the latter read:
+
+"_Kirkwood, Pless, London. Stay where you are no good coming back
+everything gone no insurance letter follows vanderlip_."
+
+"When I got the news in Paris," Kirkwood volunteered, "I tried the banks;
+they refused to honor my drafts. I had a little money in hand,--enough
+to see me home,--so closed the studio and came across. I'm booked on the
+_Minneapolis_, sailing from Tilbury at daybreak; the boat-train leaves at
+eleven-thirty. I had hoped you might be able to dine with me and see me
+off."
+
+In silence Brentwick returned the cable message. Then, with a thoughtful
+look, "You are sure this is wise?" he queried.
+
+"It's the only thing I can see."
+
+"But your partner says--"
+
+"Naturally he thinks that by this time I should have learned to paint well
+enough to support myself for a few months, until he can get things running
+again. Perhaps I might." Brentwick supported the presumption with a decided
+gesture. "But have I a right to leave Vanderlip to fight it out alone? For
+Vanderlip has a wife and kiddies to support; I--"
+
+"Your genius!"
+
+"My ability, such as it is--and that only. It can wait.... No; this means
+simply that I must come down from the clouds, plant my feet on solid earth,
+and get to work."
+
+"The sentiment is sound," admitted Brentwick, "the practice of it, folly.
+Have you stopped to think what part a rising young portrait-painter can
+contribute toward the rebuilding of a devastated city?"
+
+"The painting can wait," reiterated Kirkwood. "I can work like other men."
+
+"You can do yourself and your genius grave injustice. And I fear me you
+will, dear boy. It's in keeping with your heritage of American obstinacy.
+Now if it were a question of money--"
+
+"Mr. Brentwick!" Kirkwood protested vehemently. "I've ample for my present
+needs," he added.
+
+"Of course," conceded Brentwick with a sigh. "I didn't really hope you
+would avail yourself of our friendship. Now there's my home in Aspen
+Villas.... You have seen it?"
+
+"In your absence this afternoon your estimable butler, with commendable
+discretion, kept me without the doors," laughed the young man.
+
+"It's a comfortable home. You would not consent to share it with me
+until--?"
+
+"You are more than good; but honestly, I must sail to-night. I wanted only
+this chance to see you before I left. You'll dine with me, won't you?"
+
+"If you would stay in London, Philip, we would dine together not once but
+many times; as it is, I myself am booked for Munich, to be gone a week,
+on business. I have many affairs needing attention between now and the
+nine-ten train from Victoria. If you will be my guest at Aspen Villas--"
+
+"Please!" begged Kirkwood, with a little laugh of pleasure because of the
+other's insistence. "I only wish I could. Another day--"
+
+"Oh, you will make your million in a year, and return scandalously
+independent. It's in your American blood." Frail white fingers tapped an
+arm of the chair as their owner stared gravely into the fire. "I confess I
+envy you," he observed.
+
+"The opportunity to make a million in a year?" chuckled Kirkwood.
+
+"No. I envy you your Romance."
+
+"The Romance of a Poor Young Man went out of fashion years ago.... No, my
+dear friend; my Romance died a natural death half an hour since."
+
+"There spoke Youth--blind, enviable Youth!... On the contrary, you are but
+turning the leaves of the first chapter of your Romance, Philip."
+
+"Romance is dead," contended the young man stubbornly.
+
+"Long live the King!" Brentwick laughed quietly, still attentive to the
+fire. "Myself when young," he said softly, "did seek Romance, but never
+knew it till its day was done. I'm quite sure that is a poor paraphrase of
+something I have read. In age, one's sight is sharpened--to see Romance in
+another's life, at least. I say I envy you. You have Youth, unconquerable
+Youth, and the world before you.... I must go."
+
+He rose stiffly, as though suddenly made conscious of his age. The old eyes
+peered more than a trifle wistfully, now, into Kirkwood's. "You will not
+fail to call on me by cable, dear boy, if you need--anything? I ask it as
+a favor.... I'm glad you wished to see me before going out of my life. One
+learns to value the friendship of Youth, Philip. Good-by, and good luck
+attend you."
+
+Alone once more, Kirkwood returned to his window. The disappointment he
+felt at being robbed of his anticipated pleasure in Brentwick's company at
+dinner, colored his mood unpleasantly. His musings merged into vacuity,
+into a dull gray mist of hopelessness comparable only to the dismal skies
+then lowering over London-town.
+
+Brentwick was good, but Brentwick was mistaken. There was really nothing
+for Kirkwood to do but to go ahead. But one steamer-trunk remained to be
+packed; the boat-train would leave before midnight, the steamer with the
+morning tide; by the morrow's noon he would be upon the high seas, within
+ten days in New York and among friends; and then ...
+
+The problem of that afterwards perplexed Kirkwood more than he cared to
+own. Brentwick had opened his eyes to the fact that he would be practically
+useless in San Francisco; he could not harbor the thought of going
+back, only to become a charge upon Vanderlip. No; he was resolved that
+thenceforward he must rely upon himself, carve out his own destiny.
+But--would the art that he had cultivated with such assiduity, yield him a
+livelihood if sincerely practised with that end in view? Would the mental
+and physical equipment of a painter, heretofore dilettante, enable him to
+become self-supporting?
+
+Knotting his brows in concentration of effort to divine the future, he
+doubted himself, darkly questioning alike his abilities and his temper
+under trial; neither ere now had ever been put to the test. His eyes became
+somberly wistful, his heart sore with regret of Yesterday--his Yesterday of
+care-free youth and courage, gilded with the ineffable, evanescent glamour
+of Romance--of such Romance, thrice refined of dross, as only he knows who
+has wooed his Art with passion passing the love of woman.
+
+Far away, above the acres of huddled roofs and chimney-pots, the
+storm-mists thinned, lifting transiently; through them, gray, fairy-like,
+the towers of Westminster and the Houses of Parliament bulked monstrous
+and unreal, fading when again the fugitive dun vapors closed down upon the
+city.
+
+Nearer at hand the Shade of Care nudged Kirkwood's elbow, whispering
+subtly. Romance was indeed dead; the world was cold and cruel.
+
+The gloom deepened.
+
+In the cant of modern metaphysics, the moment was psychological.
+
+There came a rapping at the door.
+
+Kirkwood removed the pipe from between his teeth long enough to say "Come
+in!" pleasantly.
+
+The knob was turned, the door opened. Kirkwood, turning on one heel, beheld
+hesitant upon the threshold a diminutive figure in the livery of the Pless
+pages.
+
+"Mr. Kirkwood?"
+
+Kirkwood nodded.
+
+"Gentleman to see you, sir."
+
+Kirkwood nodded again, smiling if somewhat perplexed. Encouraged, the child
+advanced, proffering a silver card-tray at the end of an unnaturally rigid
+forearm. Kirkwood took the card dubiously between thumb and forefinger and
+inspected it without prejudice.
+
+"'George B. Calendar,'" he read. "'George B. Calendar!' But I know no such
+person. Sure there's no mistake, young man?"
+
+The close-cropped, bullet-shaped, British head was agitated in vigorous
+negation, and "Card for Mister Kirkwood!" was mumbled in dispassionate
+accents appropriate to a recitation by rote.
+
+"Very well. But before you show him up, ask this Mr. Calendar if he is
+quite sure he wants to see Philip Kirkwood."
+
+"Yessir."
+
+The child marched out, punctiliously closing the door. Kirkwood tamped
+down the tobacco in his pipe and puffed energetically, dismissing the
+interruption to his reverie as a matter of no consequence--an obvious
+mistake to be rectified by two words with this Mr. Calendar whom he did not
+know. At the knock he had almost hoped it might be Brentwick, returning
+with a changed mind about the bid to dinner.
+
+He regretted Brentwick sincerely. Theirs was a curious sort of
+friendship--extraordinarily close in view of the meagerness of either's
+information about the other, to say nothing of the disparity between their
+ages. Concerning the elder man Kirkwood knew little more than that they had
+met on shipboard, "coming over"; that Brentwick had spent some years in
+America; that he was an Englishman by birth, a cosmopolitan by habit, by
+profession a gentleman (employing that term in its most uncompromisingly
+British significance), and by inclination a collector of "articles of
+virtue and bigotry," in pursuit of which he made frequent excursions to the
+Continent from his residence in a quaint quiet street of Old Brompton. It
+had been during his not infrequent, but ordinarily abbreviated, sojourns in
+Paris that their steamer acquaintance had ripened into an affection almost
+filial on the one hand, almost paternal on the other....
+
+There came a rapping at the door.
+
+Kirkwood removed the pipe from between his teeth long enough to say "Come
+in!" pleasantly.
+
+The knob was turned, the door opened. Kirkwood, swinging on one heel,
+beheld hesitant upon the threshold a rather rotund figure of medium height,
+clad in an expressionless gray lounge suit, with a brown "bowler" hat held
+tentatively in one hand, an umbrella weeping in the other. A voice, which
+was unctuous and insinuative, emanated from the figure.
+
+"Mr. Kirkwood?"
+
+Kirkwood nodded, with some effort recalling the name, so detached had been
+his thoughts since the disappearance of the page.
+
+"Yes, Mr. Calendar--?"
+
+"Are you--ah--busy, Mr. Kirkwood?"
+
+"Are you, Mr. Calendar?" Kirkwood's smile robbed the retort of any flavor
+of incivility.
+
+Encouraged, the man entered, premising that he would detain his host but a
+moment, and readily surrendering hat and umbrella. Kirkwood, putting the
+latter aside, invited his caller to the easy chair which Brentwick had
+occupied by the fireplace.
+
+"It takes the edge off the dampness," Kirkwood explained in deference to
+the other's look of pleased surprise at the cheerful bed of coals. "I'm
+afraid I could never get acclimated to life in a cold, damp room--or a damp
+cold room--such as you Britishers prefer."
+
+"It is grateful," Mr. Calendar agreed, spreading plump and well cared-for
+hands to the warmth. "But you are mistaken; I am as much an American as
+yourself."
+
+"Yes?" Kirkwood looked the man over with more interest, less
+matter-of-course courtesy.
+
+He proved not unprepossessing, this unclassifiable Mr. Calendar; he was
+dressed with some care, his complexion was good, and the fullness of his
+girth, emphasized as it was by a notable lack of inches, bespoke a nature
+genial, easy-going and sybaritic. His dark eyes, heavy-lidded, were
+active--curiously, at times, with a subdued glitter--in a face large,
+round, pink, of which the other most remarkable features were a mustache,
+close-trimmed and showing streaks of gray, a chubby nose, and duplicate
+chins. Mr. Calendar was furthermore possessed of a polished bald spot,
+girdled with a tonsure of silvered hair--circumstances which lent some
+factitious distinction to a personality otherwise commonplace.
+
+His manner might be best described as uneasy with assurance; as though he
+frequently found it necessary to make up for his unimpressive stature by
+assuming an unnatural habit of authority. And there you have him; beyond
+these points, Kirkwood was conscious of no impressions; the man was
+apparently neutral-tinted of mind as well as of body.
+
+"So you knew I was an American, Mr. Calendar?" suggested Kirkwood.
+
+"'Saw your name on the register; we both hail from the same neck of the
+woods, you know."
+
+"I didn't know it, and--"
+
+"Yes; I'm from Frisco, too."
+
+"And I'm sorry."
+
+Mr. Calendar passed five fat fingers nervously over his mustache, glanced
+alertly up at Kirkwood, as if momentarily inclined to question his tone,
+then again stared glumly into the fire; for Kirkwood had maintained an
+attitude purposefully colorless. Not to put too fine a point upon it, be
+believed that his caller was lying; the man's appearance, his mannerisms,
+his voice and enunciation, while they might have been American, seemed all
+un-Californian. To one born and bred in that state, as Kirkwood had been,
+her sons are unmistakably hall-marked.
+
+Now no man lies without motive. This one chose to reaffirm, with a show of
+deep feeling: "Yes; I'm from Frisco, too. We're companions in misfortune."
+
+"I hope not altogether," said Kirkwood politely.
+
+Mr. Calendar drew his own inferences from the response and mustered up a
+show of cheerfulness. "Then you're not completely wiped out?"
+
+"To the contrary, I was hoping you were less unhappy."
+
+"Oh! Then you are--?"
+
+Kirkwood lifted the cable message from the mantel. "I have just heard from
+my partner at home," he said with a faint smile; and quoted: "'Everything
+gone; no insurance.'"
+
+Mr. Calendar pursed his plump lips, whistling inaudibly. "Too bad, too
+bad!" he murmured sympathetically. "We're all hard hit, more or less."
+He lapsed into dejected apathy, from which Kirkwood, growing at length
+impatient, found it necessary to rouse him.
+
+"You wished to see me about something else, I'm sure?"
+
+Mr. Calendar started from his reverie. "Eh? ... I was dreaming. I beg
+pardon. It seems hard to realize, Mr. Kirkwood, that this awful catastrophe
+has overtaken our beloved metropolis--"
+
+The canting phrases wearied Kirkwood; abruptly he cut in. "Would a
+sovereign help you out, Mr. Calendar? I don't mind telling you that's about
+the limit of my present resources."
+
+"Pardon _me_." Mr. Calendar's moon-like countenance darkened; he assumed a
+transparent dignity. "You misconstrue my motive, sir."
+
+"Then I'm sorry."
+
+"I am not here to borrow. On the other hand, quite by accident I discovered
+your name upon the register, down-stairs; a good old Frisco name, if you
+will permit me to say so. I thought to myself that here was a chance
+to help a fellow-countryman." Calendar paused, interrogative; Kirkwood
+remained interested but silent. "If a passage across would help you, I--I
+think it might be arranged," stammered Calendar, ill at ease.
+
+"It might," admitted Kirkwood, speculative.
+
+"I could fix it so that you could go over--first-class, of course--and pay
+your way, so to speak, by, rendering us, me and my partner, a trifling
+service."
+
+"Ah?"
+
+"In fact," continued Calendar, warming up to his theme, "there might be
+something more in it for you than the passage, if--if you're the right man,
+the man I'm looking for."
+
+"That, of course, is the question."
+
+"Eh?" Calendar pulled up suddenly in a full-winged flight of enthusiasm.
+
+Kirkwood eyed him steadily. "I said that it is a question, Mr. Calendar,
+whether or not I am the man you're looking for. Between you and me and the
+fire-dogs, I don't believe I am. Now if you wish to name your _quid
+pro quo_, this trifling service I'm to render in recognition of your
+benevolence, you may."
+
+"Ye-es," slowly. But the speaker delayed his reply until he had surveyed
+his host from head to foot, with a glance both critical and appreciative.
+
+He saw a man in height rather less than the stock size six-feet so much
+in demand by the manufacturers of modern heroes of fiction; a man a bit
+round-shouldered, too, but otherwise sturdily built, self-contained,
+well-groomed.
+
+Kirkwood wears a boy's honest face; no one has ever called him handsome. A
+few prejudiced persons have decided that he has an interesting countenance;
+the propounders of this verdict have been, for the most part, feminine.
+Kirkwood himself has been heard to declare that his features do not fit;
+in its essence the statement is true, but there is a very real, if
+undefinable, engaging quality in their very irregularity. His eyes are
+brown, pleasant, set wide apart, straightforward of expression.
+
+Now it appeared that, whatever his motive, Mr. Calendar had acted upon
+impulse in sending his card up to Kirkwood. Possibly he had anticipated a
+very different sort of reception from a very different sort of man. Even in
+the light of subsequent events it remains difficult to fathom the mystery
+of his choice. Perhaps Fate directed it; stranger things have happened at
+the dictates of a man's Destiny.
+
+At all events, this Calendar proved not lacking in penetration; men of his
+stamp are commonly endowed with that quality to an eminent degree. Not slow
+to reckon the caliber of the man before him, the leaven of intuition began
+to work in his adipose intelligence. He owned himself baffled.
+
+"Thanks," he concluded pensively; "I reckon you're right. You won't do,
+after all. I've wasted your time. Mine, too."
+
+"Don't mention it."
+
+Calendar got heavily out of his chair, reaching for his hat and umbrella.
+"Permit me to apologize for an unwarrantable intrusion, Mr. Kirkwood." He
+faltered; a worried and calculating look shadowed his small eyes. "I _was_
+looking for some one to serve me in a certain capacity--"
+
+"Certain or questionable?" propounded Kirkwood blandly, opening the door.
+
+Pointedly Mr. Calendar ignored the imputation. "Sorry I disturbed you.
+G'dafternoon, Mr. Kirkwood."
+
+"Good-by, Mr. Calendar." A smile twitched the corners of Kirkwood's
+too-wide mouth.
+
+Calendar stepped hastily out into the hall. As he strode--or rather,
+rolled--away, Kirkwood maliciously feathered a Parthian arrow.
+
+"By the way, Mr. Calendar--?"
+
+The sound of retreating footsteps was stilled and "Yes?" came from the
+gloom of the corridor.
+
+"Were you ever in San Francisco? Really and truly? Honest Injun, Mr.
+Calendar?"
+
+For a space the quiet was disturbed by harsh breathing; then, in a
+strained voice, "Good day, Mr. Kirkwood"; and again the sound of departing
+footfalls.
+
+Kirkwood closed the door and the incident simultaneously, with a smart bang
+of finality. Laughing quietly he went back to the window with its dreary
+outlook, now the drearier for lengthening evening shadows.
+
+"I wonder what his game is, anyway. An adventurer, of course; the woods are
+full of 'em. A queer fish, even of his kind! And with a trick up his sleeve
+as queer and fishy as himself, no doubt!"
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+"AND SOME THERE BE WHO HAVE ADVENTURES THRUST UPON THEM"
+
+The assumption seems not unwarrantable, that Mr. Calendar figuratively
+washed his hands of Mr. Kirkwood. Unquestionably Mr. Kirkwood considered
+himself well rid of Mr. Calendar. When the latter had gone his way,
+Kirkwood, mindful of the fact that his boat-train would leave St. Paneras
+at half-after eleven, set about his packing and dismissed from his thoughts
+the incident created by the fat _chevalier d'industrie_; and at six
+o'clock, or thereabouts, let himself out of his room, dressed for the
+evening, a light rain-coat over one arm, in the other hand a cane,--the
+drizzle having ceased.
+
+A stolid British lift lifted him down to the ground floor of the
+establishment in something short of five minutes. Pausing in the office
+long enough to settle his bill and leave instructions to have his luggage
+conveyed to the boat-train, he received with entire equanimity the affable
+benediction of the clerk, in whose eyes he still figured as that radiant
+creature, an American millionaire; and passed on to the lobby, where he
+surrendered hat, coat and stick to the cloak-room attendant, ere entering
+the dining-room.
+
+The hour was a trifle early for a London dinner, the handsome room but
+moderately filled with patrons. Kirkwood absorbed the fact unconsciously
+and without displeasure; the earlier, the better: he was determined to
+consume his last civilized meal (as he chose to consider it) at his serene
+leisure, to live fully his ebbing moments in the world to which he was
+born, to drink to its cloying dregs one ultimate draught of luxury.
+
+A benignant waiter bowed him into a chair by a corner table in
+juxtaposition with an open window, through which, swaying imperceptibly the
+closed hangings, were wafted gentle gusts of the London evening's sweet,
+damp breath.
+
+Kirkwood settled himself with an inaudible sigh of pleasure. He was dining,
+for the last time in Heaven knew how long, in a first-class restaurant.
+
+With a deferential flourish the waiter brought him the menu-card. He had
+served in his time many an "American, millionaire"; he had also served this
+Mr. Kirkwood, and respected him as one exalted above the run of his kind,
+in that he comprehended the art of dining.
+
+Fifteen minutes later the waiter departed rejoicing, his order complete.
+
+To distract a conscience whispering of extravagance, Kirkwood lighted a
+cigarette.
+
+The room was gradually filling with later arrivals; it was the most favored
+restaurant in London, and, despite the radiant costumes of the women, its
+atmosphere remained sedate and restful.
+
+A cab clattered down the side street on which the window opened.
+
+At a near-by table a woman laughed, quietly happy. Incuriously Kirkwood
+glanced her way. She was bending forward, smiling, flattering her escort
+with the adoration of her eyes. They were lovers alone in the wilderness of
+the crowded restaurant. They seemed very happy.
+
+Kirkwood was conscious of a strange pang of emotion. It took him some time
+to comprehend that it was envy.
+
+He was alone and lonely. For the first time he realized that no woman had
+ever looked upon him as the woman at the adjoining table looked upon her
+lover. He had found time to worship but one mistress--his art.
+
+And he was renouncing her.
+
+He was painfully conscious of what he had missed, had lost--or had not yet
+found: the love of woman.
+
+The sensation was curious--new, unique in his experience.
+
+His cigarette burned down to his fingers as he sat pondering. Abstractedly,
+he ground its fire out in an ash-tray.
+
+The waiter set before him a silver tureen, covered.
+
+He sat up and began to consume his soup, scarce doing it justice. His dream
+troubled him--his dream of the love of woman.
+
+From a little distance his waiter regarded him, with an air of
+disappointment. In the course of an hour and a half he awoke, to discover
+the attendant in the act of pouring very hot and black coffee from a bright
+silver pot into a demi-tasse of fragile porcelain. Kirkwood slipped a
+single lump of sugar into the cup, gave over his cigar-case to be filled,
+then leaned back, deliberately lighting a long and slender panetela as a
+preliminary to a last lingering appreciation of the scene of which he was a
+part.
+
+He reviewed it through narrowed eyelids, lazily; yet with some slight
+surprise, seeming to see it with new vision, with eyes from which scales of
+ignorance had dropped.
+
+This long and brilliant dining-hall, with its quiet perfection of
+proportion and appointment, had always gratified his love of the beautiful;
+to-night it pleased him to an unusual degree. Yet it was the same as ever;
+its walls tinted a deep rose, with their hangings of dull cloth-of-gold,
+its lights discriminatingly clustered and discreetly shaded, redoubled in
+half a hundred mirrors, its subdued shimmer of plate and glass, its soberly
+festive assemblage of circumspect men and women splendidly gowned, its
+decorously muted murmur of voices penetrated and interwoven by the strains
+of a hidden string orchestra--caressed his senses as always, yet with
+a difference. To-night he saw it a room populous with lovers, lovers
+insensibly paired, man unto woman attentive, woman of man regardful.
+
+He had never understood this before. This much he had missed in life.
+
+It seemed hard to realize that one must forego it all for ever.
+
+Presently he found himself acutely self-conscious. The sensation puzzled
+him; and without appearing to do so, he traced it from effect to cause; and
+found the cause in a woman--a girl, rather, seated at a table the third
+removed from him, near the farther wall of the room.
+
+Too considerate, and too embarrassed, to return her scrutiny openly, look
+for look, he yet felt sure that, however temporarily, he was become the
+object of her intent interest.
+
+Idly employed with his cigar, he sipped his coffee. In time aware that she
+had turned her attention elsewhere, he looked up.
+
+At first he was conscious of an effect of disappointment. She was nobody
+that he knew, even by reputation. She was simply a young girl, barely out
+of her teens--if as old as that phrase would signify. He wondered what she
+had found in him to make her think him worth so long a study; and looked
+again, more keenly curious.
+
+With this second glance, appreciation stirred the artistic side of his
+nature, that was already grown impatient of his fretted mood. The slender
+and girlish figure, posed with such absolute lack of intrusion against a
+screen of rose and gilt, moved him to critical admiration. The tinted glow
+of shaded candles caught glistening on the spun gold of her fair hair,
+and enhanced the fine pallor of her young shoulders. He saw promise, and
+something more than promise, in her face, its oval something dimmed by warm
+shadows that unavailingly sought to blend youth and beauty alike into the
+dull, rich background.
+
+In the sheer youth of her (he realized) more than in aught else, lay her
+chiefest charm. She could be little more than a child, indeed, if he were
+to judge her by the purity of her shadowed eyes and the absence of emotion
+in the calm and direct look which presently she turned upon him who sat
+wondering at the level, penciled darkness of her brows.
+
+At length aware that she had surprised his interest, Kirkwood glanced
+aside--coolly deliberate, lest she should detect in his attitude anything
+more than impersonal approval.
+
+A slow color burned his cheeks. In his temples there rose a curious
+pulsing.
+
+After a while she drew his gaze again, imperiously--herself all unaware of
+the havoc she was wreaking on his temperament.
+
+He could have fancied her distraught, cloaking an unhappy heart with placid
+brow and gracious demeanor; but such a conception matched strangely her
+glowing youth and spirit. What had she to do with Care? What concern had
+Black Care, whose gaunt shape in sable shrouds had lurked at his shoulder
+all the evening, despite his rigid preoccupation, with a being as
+charmingly flushed with budding womanhood as this girl?
+
+"Eighteen?" he hazarded. "Eighteen, or possibly nineteen, dining at the
+Pless in a ravishing dinner-gown, and--unhappy? Oh, hardly--not she!"
+
+Yet the impression haunted him, and ere long he was fain to seek
+confirmation or denial of it in the manner of her escort.
+
+The latter sat with back to Kirkwood, cutting a figure as negative as his
+snug evening clothes. One could surmise little from a fleshy thick neck,
+a round, glazed bald spot, a fringe of grizzled hair, and two bright red
+ears.
+
+Calendar?
+
+Somehow the fellow did suggest Kirkwood's caller of the afternoon. The
+young man could not have said precisely how, for he was unfamiliar with the
+aspect of that gentleman's back. None the less the suggestion persisted.
+
+By now, a few of the guests, theater-bound, for the most part, were
+leaving. Here and there a table stood vacant, that had been filled, cloth
+tarnished, chairs disarranged: in another moment to be transformed into its
+pristine brilliance under the deft attentions of the servitors.
+
+Down an aisle, past the table at which the girl was sitting, came two,
+making toward the lobby; the man, a slight and meager young personality, in
+the lead. Their party had attracted Kirkwood's notice as they entered; why,
+he did not remember; but it was in his mind that then they had been three.
+Instinctively he looked at the table they had left--one placed at some
+distance from the girl, and hidden from her by an angle in the wall. It
+appeared that the third member had chosen to dally a few moments over his
+tobacco and a liqueur-brandy. Kirkwood could see him plainly, lounging in
+his chair and fumbling the stem of a glass: a heavy man, of somber habit,
+his black and sullen brows lowering and thoughtful above a face boldly
+handsome.
+
+The woman of the trio was worthy of closer attention. Some paces in the
+wake of her lack-luster esquire, she was making a leisurely progress,
+trailing the skirts of a gown magnificent beyond dispute, half concealed
+though it was by the opera cloak whose soft folds draped her shoulders.
+Slowly, carrying her head high, she approached, insolent eyes reviewing
+the room from beneath their heavy lids; a metallic and mature type of dark
+beauty, supremely selfconfident and self-possessed.
+
+Men turned involuntarily to look after her, not altogether in undiluted
+admiration.
+
+In the act of passing behind the putative Calendar, she paused momentarily,
+bending as if to gather up her train. Presumably the action disturbed her
+balance; she swayed a little, and in the effort to recover, rested the tips
+of her gloved fingers upon the edge of the table. Simultaneously (Kirkwood
+could have sworn) a single word left her lips, a word evidently pitched
+for the ear of the hypothetical Calendar alone. Then she swept on,
+imperturbable, assured.
+
+To the perplexed observer it was indubitably evident that some
+communication had passed from the woman to the man. Kirkwood saw the fat
+shoulders of the girl's companion stiffen suddenly as the woman's hand
+rested at his elbow; as she moved away, a little rippling shiver was
+plainly visible in the muscles of his back, beneath his coat--mute token
+of relaxing tension. An instant later one plump and mottled hand was
+carelessly placed where the woman's had been; and was at once removed with
+fingers closed.
+
+To the girl, watching her face covertly, Kirkwood turned for clue to the
+incident. He made no doubt that she had observed the passage; proof of that
+one found in her sudden startling pallor (of indignation?) and in her eyes,
+briefly alight with some inscrutable emotion, though quickly veiled by
+lowered lashes. Slowly enough she regained color and composure, while her
+_vis-a-vis_ sat motionless, head inclined as if in thought.
+
+Abruptly the man turned in his chair to summon a waiter, and exposed his
+profile. Kirkwood was in no wise amazed to recognize Calendar--a badly
+frightened Calendar now, however, and hardly to be identified with the
+sleek, glib fellow who had interviewed Kirkwood in the afternoon. His
+flabby cheeks were ashen and trembling, and upon the back of his chair
+the fat white fingers were drumming incessantly an inaudible tattoo of
+shattered nerves.
+
+"Scared silly!" commented Kirkwood. "Why?" Having spoken to his waiter,
+Calendar for some seconds raked the room with quick glances, as if seeking
+an acquaintance. Presumably disappointed, he swung back to face the
+girl, bending forward to reach her ears with accents low-pitched and
+confidential. She, on her part, fell at once attentive, grave and
+responsive. Perhaps a dozen sentences passed between them. At the outset
+her brows contracted and she shook her head in gentle dissent; whereupon
+Calendar's manner became more imperative. Gradually, unwillingly, she
+seemed to yield consent. Once she caught her breath sharply, and, infected
+by her companion's agitation, sat back, color fading again in the round
+young cheeks.
+
+Kirkwood's waiter put in an inopportune appearance with the bill. The young
+man paid it. When he looked up again Calendar had swung squarely about
+in his chair. His eye encountered Kirkwood's. He nodded pleasantly.
+Temporarily confused, Kirkwood returned the nod.
+
+In a twinkling he had repented; Calendar had left his chair and was wending
+his way through the tables toward Kirkwood's. Reaching it, he paused,
+offering the hand of genial fellowship. Kirkwood accepted it half-heartedly
+(what else was he to do?) remarking at the same time that Calendar had
+recovered much of his composure. There was now a normal coloring in the
+heavily jowled countenance, with less glint of fear in the quick, dark
+eyes; and Calendar's hand, even if moist and cold, no longer trembled.
+Furthermore it was immediately demonstrated that his impudence had not
+deserted him.
+
+"Why, Kirkwood, my dear fellow!" he crowed--not so loudly as to attract
+attention, but in a tone assumed to divert suspicion, should he be
+overheard. "This is great luck, you know--to find you here."
+
+"Is it?" returned Kirkwood coolly. He disengaged his fingers.
+
+The pink plump face was contorted in a furtive grimace of deprecation.
+Without waiting for permission Calendar dropped into the vacant chair.
+
+"My dear sir," he proceeded, unabashed, "I throw myself upon your mercy."
+
+"The devil you do!"
+
+"I must. I'm in the deuce of a hole, and there's no one I know here besides
+yourself. I--I--"
+
+Kirkwood saw fit to lead him on; partly because, out of the corner of his
+eye, he was aware of the girl's unconcealed suspense. "Go on, please, Mr.
+Calendar. You throw yourself on a total stranger's mercy because you're in
+the deuce of a hole; and--?"
+
+"It's this way; I'm called away on urgent business imperative business.
+I must go at once. My daughter is with me. My daughter! Think of my
+embarrassment; I can not leave her here, alone, nor can I permit her to go
+home unprotected."
+
+Calendar paused in anxiety.
+
+"That's easily remedied, then," suggested Kirkwood.
+
+"How?"
+
+"Put her in a cab at the door."
+
+"I ... No. The devil! I couldn't think of it. You won't understand. I--"
+
+"I do not understand,--" amended the younger man politely.
+
+Calendar compressed his lips nervously. It was plain that the man was
+quivering with impatience and half-mad with excitement. He held quiet only
+long enough to regain his self-control and take counsel with his prudence.
+
+"It is impossible, Mr. Kirkwood. I must ask you to be generous and believe
+me."
+
+"Very well; for the sake of the argument, I do believe you, Mr. Calendar."
+
+"Hell!" exploded the elder man in an undertone. Then swiftly, stammering
+in his haste: "I can't let Dorothy accompany me to the door," he declared.
+"She--I--I throw myself upon your mercy!"
+
+"What--again?"
+
+"The truth--the truth is, if you will have it, that I am in danger of
+arrest the moment I leave here. If my daughter is with me, she will have to
+endure the shame and humiliation--"
+
+"Then why place her in such a position?" Kirkwood demanded sharply.
+
+Calendar's eyes burned, incandescent with resentment. Offended, he offered
+to rise and go, but changed his mind and sat tight in hope.
+
+"I beg of you, sir--"
+
+"One moment, Mr. Calendar."
+
+Abruptly Kirkwood's weathercock humor shifted--amusement yielding to
+intrigued interest. After all, why not oblige the fellow? What did anything
+matter, now? What harm could visit him if he yielded to this corpulent
+adventurer's insistence? Both from experience and observation he knew this
+for a world plentifully peopled by soldiers of fortune, contrivers of
+snares and pitfalls for the feet of the unwary. On the other hand, it is
+axiomatic that a penniless man is perfectly safe anywhere. Besides, there
+was the girl to be considered.
+
+Kirkwood considered her, forthwith. In the process thereof, his eyes sought
+her, perturbed. Their glances clashed. She looked away hastily, crimson to
+her temples.
+
+Instantly the conflict between curiosity and caution, inclination and
+distrust, was at an end. With sudden compliance, the young man rose.
+
+"I shall be most happy to be of service to your daughter, Mr. Calendar,"
+he said, placing the emphasis with becoming gravity. And then, the fat
+adventurer leading the way, Kirkwood strode across the room--wondering
+somewhat at himself, if the whole truth is to be disclosed.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+CALENDAR'S DAUGHTER
+
+All but purring with satisfaction and relief, Calendar halted.
+
+"Dorothy, my dear, permit me to introduce an old friend--Mr. Kirkwood.
+Kirkwood, this is my daughter."
+
+"Miss Calendar," acknowledged Kirkwood.
+
+The girl bowed, her eyes steady upon his own. "Mr. Kirkwood is very kind,"
+she said gravely.
+
+"That's right!" Calendar exclaimed blandly. "He's promised to see you home.
+Now both of you will pardon my running away, I know."
+
+"Yes," assented Kirkwood agreeably.
+
+The elder man turned and hurried toward the main entrance.
+
+Kirkwood took the chair he had vacated. To his disgust he found himself
+temporarily dumb. No flicker of thought illuminated the darkness of his
+confusion. How was he to open a diverting conversation with a young woman
+whom he had met under auspices so extraordinary? Any attempt to gloze the
+situation, he felt, would be futile. And, somehow, he did not care to
+render himself ridiculous in her eyes, little as he knew her.
+
+Inanely dumb, he sat watching her, smiling fatuously until it was borne
+in on him that he was staring like a boor and grinning like an idiot.
+Convinced, he blushed for himself; something which served to make him more
+tongue-tied than ever.
+
+As for his involuntary protegee, she exhibited such sweet composure that he
+caught himself wondering if she really appreciated the seriousness of her
+parent's predicament; if, for that matter, its true nature were known to
+her at all. Calendar, he believed, was capable of prevarication, polite and
+impolite. Had he lied to his daughter? or to Kirkwood? To both, possibly;
+to the former alone, not improbably. That the adventurer had told him the
+desperate truth, Kirkwood was quite convinced; but he now began to believe
+that the girl had been put off with some fictitious explanation. Her
+tranquillity and self-control were remarkable, otherwise; she seemed very
+young to possess those qualities in such eminent degree.
+
+She was looking wearily past him, her gaze probing some unguessed abyss of
+thought. Kirkwood felt himself privileged to stare in wonder. Her naive
+aloofness of poise gripped his imagination powerfully,--the more
+so, perhaps, since it seemed eloquent of her intention to remain
+enigmatic,--but by no means more powerfully than the unaided appeal of her
+loveliness.
+
+Presently the girl herself relieved the tension of the situation, fairly
+startling the young man by going straight to the heart of things. Without
+preface or warning, lifting her gaze to his, "My name is really Dorothy
+Calendar," she observed. And then, noting his astonishment, "You would be
+privileged to doubt, under the circumstances," she added. "Please let us be
+frank."
+
+"Well," he stammered, "if I didn't doubt, let's say I was unprejudiced."
+
+His awkward, well-meant pleasantry, perhaps not conceived in the best of
+taste, sounded in his own ears wretchedly flat and vapid. He regretted it
+spontaneously; the girl ignored it.
+
+"You are very kind," she iterated the first words he had heard from her
+lips. "I wish you to understand that I, for one, appreciate it."
+
+"Not kind; I have done nothing. I am glad.... One is apt to become
+interested when Romance is injected into a prosaic existence." Kirkwood
+allowed himself a keen but cheerful glance.
+
+She nodded, with a shadowy smile. He continued, purposefully, to distract
+her, holding her with his honest, friendly eyes.
+
+"Since it is to be confidences" (this she questioned with an all but
+imperceptible lifting of the eyebrows), "I don't mind telling you my own
+name is really Philip Kirkwood."
+
+"And you are an old friend of my father's?"
+
+He opened his lips, but only to close them without speaking. The girl moved
+her shoulders with a shiver of disdain.
+
+"I knew it wasn't so."
+
+"You know it would be hard for a young man like myself to be a very old
+friend," he countered lamely.
+
+"How long, then, have you known each other?"
+
+"Must I answer?"
+
+"Please."
+
+"Between three and four hours."
+
+"I thought as much." She stared past him, troubled. Abruptly she said:
+"Please smoke."
+
+"Shall I? If you wish it, of course...."
+
+She repeated: "Please."
+
+"We were to wait ten minutes or so," she continued.
+
+He produced his cigarette-case.
+
+"If you care to smoke it will seem an excuse." He lighted his cigarette.
+"And then, you may talk to me," she concluded calmly.
+
+"I would, gladly, if I could guess what would interest you."
+
+"Yourself. Tell me about yourself," she commanded.
+
+"It would bore you," he responded tritely, confused.
+
+"No; you interest me very much." She made the statement quietly,
+contemptuous of coquetry.
+
+"Very well, then; I am Philip Kirkwood, an American."
+
+"Nothing more?"
+
+"Little worth retailing."
+
+"I'm sorry."
+
+"Why?" he demanded, piqued.
+
+"Because you have merely indicated that you are a wealthy American."
+
+"Why wealthy?"
+
+"If not, you would have some aim in life--a calling or profession."
+
+"And you think I have none?"
+
+"Unless you consider it your vocation to be a wealthy American."
+
+"I don't. Besides, I'm not wealthy. In point of fact, I ..." He pulled up
+short, on the verge of declaring himself a pauper. "I am a painter."
+
+Her eyes lightened with interest. "An artist?"
+
+"I hope so. I don't paint signs--or houses," he remarked.
+
+Amused, she laughed softly. "I suspected it," she declared.
+
+"Not really?"
+
+"It was your way of looking at--things, that made me guess it: the
+painter's way. I have often noticed it."
+
+"As if mentally blending colors all the time?"
+
+"Yes; that and--seeing flaws."
+
+"I have discovered none," he told her brazenly.
+
+But again her secret cares were claiming her thoughts, and the gay,
+inconsequential banter died upon her scarlet lips as a second time her
+glance ranged away, sounding mysterious depths of anxiety.
+
+Provoked, he would have continued the chatter. "I have confessed," he
+persisted. "You know everything of material interest about me. And
+yourself?"
+
+"I am merely Dorothy Calendar," she answered.
+
+"Nothing more?" He laughed.
+
+"That is all, if you please, for the present."
+
+"I am to content myself with the promise of the future?"
+
+"The future," she told him seriously, "is to-morrow; and to-morrow ..." She
+moved restlessly in her chair, eyes and lips pathetic in their distress.
+"Please, we will go now, if you are ready."
+
+"I am quite ready, Miss Calendar."
+
+He rose. A waiter brought the girl's cloak and put it in Kirkwood's hands.
+He held it until, smoothing the wrists of her long white gloves, she stood
+up, then placed the garment upon her white young shoulders, troubled by the
+indefinable sense of intimacy imparted by the privilege. She permitted
+him this personal service! He felt that she trusted him, that out of her
+gratitude had grown a simple and almost childish faith in his generosity
+and considerateness.
+
+As she turned to go her eyes thanked him with an unfathomable glance. He
+was again conscious of that esoteric disturbance in his temples. Puzzled,
+hazily analyzing the sensation, he followed her to the lobby.
+
+A page brought him his top-coat, hat and stick; tipping the child from
+sheer force of habit, he desired a gigantic porter, impressively ornate in
+hotel livery, to call a hansom. Together they passed out into the night, he
+and the girl.
+
+Beneath a permanent awning of steel and glass she waited patiently,
+slender, erect, heedless of the attention she attracted from wayfarers.
+
+The night was young, the air mild. Upon the sidewalk, muddied by a million
+feet, two streams of wayfarers flowed incessantly, bound west from Green
+Park or east toward Piccadilly Circus; a well-dressed throng for the most
+part, with here and there a man in evening dress. Between the carriages at
+the curb and the hotel doors moved others, escorting fluttering butterfly
+women in elaborate toilets, heads bare, skirts daintily gathered above
+their perishable slippers. Here and there meaner shapes slipped silently
+through the crowd, sinister shadows of the city's proletariat, blotting
+ominously the brilliance of the scene.
+
+A cab drew in at the block. The porter clapped an arc of wickerwork over
+its wheel to protect the girl's skirts. She ascended to the seat.
+
+Kirkwood, dropping sixpence in the porter's palm, prepared to follow; but a
+hand fell upon his arm, peremptory, inexorable. He faced about, frowning,
+to confront a slight, hatchet-faced man, somewhat under medium height,
+dressed in a sack suit and wearing a derby well forward over eyes that were
+hard and bright.
+
+"Mr. Calendar?" said the man tensely. "I presume I needn't name my
+business. I'm from the Yard--"
+
+"My name is not Calendar."
+
+The detective smiled wearily. "Don't be a fool, Calendar," he began. But
+the porter's hand fell upon his shoulder and the giant bent low to bring
+his mouth close to the other's ear. Kirkwood heard indistinctly his own
+name followed by Calendar's, and the words: "Never fear. I'll point him
+out."
+
+"But the woman?" argued the detective, unconvinced, staring into the cab.
+
+"Am I not at liberty to have a lady dine with me in a public restaurant?"
+interposed Kirkwood, without raising his voice.
+
+The hard eyes looked him up and down without favor. Then: "Beg pardon, sir.
+I see my mistake," said the detective brusquely.
+
+"I am glad you do," returned Kirkwood grimly. "I fancy it will bear
+investigation."
+
+He mounted the step. "Imperial Theater," he told the driver, giving the
+first address that occurred to him; it could be changed. For the moment
+the main issue was to get the girl out of the range of the detective's
+interest.
+
+He slipped into his place as the hansom wheeled into the turgid tide of
+west-bound traffic.
+
+So Calendar had escaped, after all! Moreover, he had told the truth to
+Kirkwood.
+
+By his side the girl moved uneasily. "Who was that man?" she inquired.
+
+Kirkwood sought her eyes, and found them wholly ingenuous. It seemed
+that Calendar had not taken her into his confidence, after all. She was,
+therefore, in no way implicated in her father's affairs. Inexplicably the
+young man's heart felt lighter. "A mistake; the fellow took me for some one
+he knew," he told her carelessly.
+
+The assurance satisfied her. She rested quietly, wrapped up in personal
+concerns. Her companion pensively contemplated an infinity of arid and
+hansom-less to-morrows. About them the city throbbed in a web of misty
+twilight, the humid farewell of a dismal day. In the air a faint haze swam,
+rendering the distances opalescent. Athwart the western sky the after-glow
+of a drenched sunset lay like a wash of rose-madder. Piccadilly's asphalt
+shone like watered silk, black and lustrous, reflecting a myriad lights in
+vibrant ribbons of party-colored radiance. On every hand cab-lamps danced
+like fire-flies; the rumble of wheels blended with the hollow pounding
+of uncounted hoofs, merging insensibly into the deep and solemn roar of
+London-town.
+
+Suddenly Kirkwood was recalled to a sense of duty by a glimpse of Hyde Park
+Corner. He turned to the girl. "I didn't know where you wished to go--?"
+
+She seemed to realize his meaning with surprise, as one, whose thoughts
+have strayed afar, recalled to an imperative world.
+
+"Oh, did I forget? Tell him please to drive to Number Nine, Frognall
+Street, Bloomsbury."
+
+Kirkwood poked his cane through the trap, repeating the address. The
+cab wheeled smartly across Piccadilly, swung into Half Moon Street, and
+thereafter made better time, darting briskly down abrupt vistas of shining
+pavement, walled in by blank-visaged houses, or round two sides of one of
+London's innumerable private parks, wherein spring foliage glowed a tender
+green in artificial light; now and again it crossed brilliant main arteries
+of travel, and eventually emerged from a maze of backways into Oxford
+Street, to hammer eastwards to Tottenham Court Road.
+
+Constraint hung like a curtain between the two; a silence which the young
+man forbore to moderate, finding more delight that he had cared (or dared)
+confess to, in contemplation of the pure girlish profile so close to him.
+
+She seemed quite unaware of him, lost in thought, large eyes sober, lips
+serious that were fashioned for laughter, round little chin firm with some
+occult resolution. It was not hard to fancy her nerves keyed to a high
+pitch of courage and determination, nor easy to guess for what reason.
+Watching always, keenly sensitive to the beauty of each salient line
+betrayed by the flying lights, Kirkwood's own consciousness lost itself in
+a profitless, even a perilous labyrinth of conjecture.
+
+The cab stopped. Both occupants came to their senses with a little start.
+The girl leaned out over; the apron, recognized the house she sought in one
+swift glance, testified to the recognition with a hushed exclamation,
+and began to arrange her skirts. Kirkwood, unheeding her faint-hearted
+protests, jumped out, interposing his cane between her skirts and the
+wheel. Simultaneously he received a vivid mental photograph of the
+locality.
+
+Frognall Street proved to be one of those by-ways, a short block in
+length, which, hemmed in on all sides by a meaner purlieu, has (even in
+Bloomsbury!) escaped the sordid commercial eye of the keeper of furnished
+lodgings, retaining jealously something of the old-time dignity and reserve
+that were its pride in the days before Society swarmed upon Mayfair and
+Belgravia.
+
+Its houses loomed tall, with many windows, mostly lightless--materially
+aggravating that air of isolate, cold dignity which distinguishes the
+Englishman's castle. Here and there stood one less bedraggled than
+its neighbors, though all, without exception, spoke assertively of
+respectability down-at-the-heel but fighting tenaciously for existence.
+Some, vanguards of that imminent day when the boarding-house should reign
+supreme, wore with shamefaced air placards of estate-agents, advertising
+their susceptibility to sale or lease. In the company of the latter was
+Number 9.
+
+The American noted the circumstance subconsciously, at a moment when Miss
+Calendar's hand, small as a child's, warm and compact in its white glove,
+lay in his own. And then she was on the sidewalk, her face, upturned to
+his, vivacious with excitement.
+
+"You have been so kind," she told him warmly, "that one hardly knows how to
+thank you, Mr. Kirkwood."
+
+"I have done nothing--nothing at all," he mumbled, disturbed by a sudden,
+unreasoning alarm for her.
+
+She passed quickly to the shelter of the pillared portico. He followed
+clumsily. On the door-step she turned, offering her hand. He took and
+retained it.
+
+"Good night," she said.
+
+"I'm to understand that I'm dismissed, then?" he stammered ruefully.
+
+She evaded his eyes. "I--thank you--I have no further need--"
+
+"You are quite sure? Won't you believe me at your service?"
+
+She laughed uneasily. "I'm all right now."
+
+"I can do nothing more? Sure?"
+
+"Nothing. But you--you make me almost sorry I can't impose still further
+upon your good nature."
+
+"Please don't hesitate ..."
+
+"Aren't you very persistent, Mr. Kirkwood?" Her fingers moved in his;
+burning with the reproof, he released them, and turned to her so woebegone
+a countenance that she repented of her severity. "Don't worry about me,
+please. I am truly safe now. Some day I hope to be able to thank you
+adequately. Good night!"
+
+Her pass-key grated in the lock. Opening, the door disclosed a dark and
+uninviting entry-hall, through which there breathed an air heavy with the
+dank and dusty odor of untenanted rooms. Hesitating on the threshold, over
+her shoulder the girl smiled kindly upon her commandeered esquire; and
+stepped within.
+
+He lifted his hat automatically. The door closed with an echoing slam. He
+turned to the waiting cab, fumbling for change.
+
+"I'll walk," he told the cabby, paying him off.
+
+The hansom swept away to a tune of hammering hoofs; and quiet rested upon
+the street as Kirkwood turned the nearest corner, in an unpleasant temper,
+puzzled and discontented. It seemed hardly fair that he should have been
+dragged into so promising an adventure, by his ears (so to put it), only to
+be thus summarily called upon to write "Finis" beneath the incident.
+
+He rounded the corner and walked half-way to the next street, coming to an
+abrupt and rebellious pause by the entrance to a covered alleyway, of two
+minds as to his proper course of action.
+
+In the background of his thoughts Number 9, Frognall Street, reared its
+five-story facade, sinister and forbidding. He reminded himself of its
+unlighted windows; of its sign, "To be let"; of the effluvia of desolation
+that had saluted him when the door swung wide. A deserted house; and the
+girl alone in it!--was it right for him to leave her so?
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+
+9 FROGNALL STREET, W. C.
+
+The covered alleyway gave upon Quadrant Mews; or so declared a notice
+painted on the dead wall of the passage.
+
+Overhead, complaining as it swayed in the wind, hung the smirched and
+weather-worn sign-board of the Hog-in-the-Pound public house; wherefrom
+escaped sounds of such revelry by night as is indulged in by the British
+working-man in hours of ease. At the curb in front of the house of
+entertainment, dejected animals drooping between their shafts, two hansoms
+stood in waiting, until such time as the lords of their destinies should
+see fit to sally forth and inflict themselves upon a cab-hungry populace.
+As Kirkwood turned, a third vehicle rumbled up out of the mews.
+
+Kirkwood can close his eyes, even at this late day, and both see and hear
+it all again--even as he can see the unbroken row of dingy dwellings that
+lined his way back from Quadrant Mews to Frognall Street corner: all
+drab and unkempt, all sporting in their fan-lights the legend and lure,
+"Furnished Apartments."
+
+For, between his curiosity about and his concern for the girl, he was being
+led back to Number 9, by the nose, as it were,--hardly willingly, at best.
+Profoundly stupefied by the contemplation of his own temerity, he yet
+returned unfaltering. He who had for so long plumed himself upon his strict
+supervision of his personal affairs and equally steadfast unconsciousness
+of his neighbor's businesses, now found himself in the very act of pushing
+in where he was not wanted: as he had been advised in well-nigh as many
+words. He experienced an effect of standing to one side, a witness of
+his own folly, with rising wonder, unable to credit the strength of
+the infatuation which was placing him so conspicuously in the way of a
+snubbing.
+
+If perchance he were to meet the girl again as she was leaving Number
+9,--what then? The contingency dismayed him incredibly, in view of the fact
+that it did not avail to make him pause. To the contrary he disregarded it
+resolutely; mad, impertinent, justified of his unnamed apprehensions, or
+simply addled,--he held on his way.
+
+He turned up Frognall Street with the manner of one out for a leisurely
+evening stroll. Simultaneously, from the farther corner, another pedestrian
+debouched, into the thoroughfare--a mere moving shadow at that distance,
+brother to blacker shadows that skulked in the fenced areas and unlively
+entries of that poorly lighted block. The hush was something beyond belief,
+when one remembered the nearness of blatant Tottenham Court Road.
+
+Kirkwood conceived a wholly senseless curiosity about the other wayfarer.
+The man was walking rapidly, heels ringing with uncouth loudness, cane
+tapping the flagging at brief intervals. Both sounds ceased abruptly as
+their cause turned in beneath one of the porticos. In the emphatic and
+unnatural quiet that followed, Kirkwood, stepping more lightly, fancied
+that another shadow followed the first, noiselessly and with furtive
+stealth.
+
+Could it be Number 9 into which they had passed? The American's heart beat
+a livelier tempo at the suggestion. If it had not been Number 9--he was
+still too far away to tell--it was certainly one of the dwellings adjacent
+thereunto. The improbable possibility (But why improbable?) that the girl
+was being joined by her father, or by friends, annoyed him with illogical
+intensity. He mended his own pace, designing to pass whichever house it
+might be before the door should be closed; thought better of this, and
+slowed up again, anathematizing himself with much excuse for being the
+inquisitive dolt that he was.
+
+Approaching Number 9 with laggard feet, he manufactured a desire to light
+a cigarette, as a cover for his design, were he spied upon by unsuspected
+eyes. Cane under arm, hands cupped to shield a vesta's flame, he stopped
+directly before the portico, turning his eyes askance to the shadowed
+doorway; and made a discovery sufficiently startling to hold him spellbound
+and, incidentally, to scorch his gloves before he thought to drop the
+match.
+
+The door of Number 9 stood ajar, a black interval an inch or so in width
+showing between its edge and the jamb.
+
+Suspicion and alarm set his wits a-tingle. More distinctly he recalled the
+jarring bang, accompanied by the metallic click of the latch, when the girl
+had shut herself in--and him out. Now, some person or persons had followed
+her, neglecting the most obvious precaution of a householder. And why? Why
+but because the intruders did not wish the sound of closing to be audible
+to her--or those--within?
+
+He reminded himself that it was all none of his affair, decided to pass on
+and go his ways in peace, and impulsively, swinging about, marched straight
+away for the unclosed door.
+
+"'Old'ard, guvner!"
+
+Kirkwood halted on the cry, faltering in indecision. Should he take the
+plunge, or withdraw? Synchronously he was conscious that a man's figure
+had detached itself from the shadows beneath the nearest portico and was
+drawing nearer, with every indication of haste, to intercept him.
+
+"'Ere now, guvner, yer mykin' a mistyke. You don't live 'ere."
+
+"How do you know?" demanded Kirkwood crisply, tightening his grip on his
+stick.
+
+Was this the second shadow he had seemed to see--the confederate of him who
+had entered Number 9; a sentry to forestall interruption? If so, the fellow
+lacked discretion, though his determination that the American should not
+interfere was undeniable. It was with an ugly and truculent manner, if more
+warily, that the man closed in.
+
+"I knows. You clear hout, or--"
+
+He flung out a hand with the plausible design of grasping Kirkwood by the
+collar. The latter lifted his stick, deflecting the arm, and incontinently
+landed his other fist forcibly on the fellow's chest. The man reeled back,
+cursing. Before he could recover Kirkwood calmly crossed the threshold,
+closed the door and put his shoulder to it. In another instant, fumbling in
+the darkness, he found the bolts and drove them home.
+
+And it was done, the transformation accomplished; his inability to refrain
+from interfering had encompassed his downfall, had changed a peaceable and
+law-abiding alien within British shores into a busybody, a trespasser, a
+misdemeanant, a--yes, for all he knew to the contrary, in the estimation of
+the Law, a burglar, prime candidate for a convict's stripes!
+
+Breathing hard with excitement he turned and laid his back against the
+panels, trembling in every muscle, terrified by the result of his impulsive
+audacity, thunder-struck by a lightning-like foreglimpse of its possible
+consequences. Of what colossal imprudence had he not been guilty?
+
+"The devil!" he whispered. "What an ass, what an utter ass I am!"
+
+Behind him the knob was rattled urgently, to an accompaniment of feet
+shuffling on the stone; and immediately--if he were to make a logical
+deduction from the rasping and scraping sound within the door-casing--the
+bell-pull was violently agitated, without, however, educing any response
+from the bell itself, wherever that might be situate. After which, as if in
+despair, the outsider again rattled and jerked the knob.
+
+Be his status what it might, whether servant of the household, its
+caretaker, or a night watchman, the man was palpably determined both to get
+himself in and Kirkwood out, and yet (curious to consider) determined to
+gain his end without attracting undue attention. Kirkwood had expected to
+hear the knocker's thunder, as soon as the bell failed to give tongue; but
+it did not sound although there _was_ a knocker,--Kirkwood himself had
+remarked that antiquated and rusty bit of ironmongery affixed to the middle
+panel of the door. And it made him feel sure that something surreptitious
+and lawless was in process within those walls, that the confederate
+without, having failed to prevent a stranger from entering, left unemployed
+a means so certain-sure to rouse the occupants.
+
+But his inferential analysis of this phase of the proceedings was summarily
+abrupted by that identical alarm. In a trice the house was filled with
+flying echoes, wakened to sonorous riot by the crash and clamor of the
+knocker; and Kirkwood stood fully two yards away, his heart hammering
+wildly, his nerves a-jingle, much as if the resounding blows had landed
+upon his own person rather than on stout oaken planking.
+
+Ere he had time to wonder, the racket ceased, and from the street filtered
+voices in altercation. Listening, Kirkwood's pulses quickened, and he
+laughed uncertainly for pure relief, retreating to the door and putting an
+ear to a crack.
+
+The accents of one speaker were new in his hearing, stern, crisp, quick
+with the spirit of authority which animates that most austere and dignified
+limb of the law to be encountered the world over, a London bobby.
+
+"Now then, my man, what do you want there? Come now, speak up, and step out
+into the light, where I can see you."
+
+The response came in the sniffling snarl of the London ne'er-do-well, the
+unemployable rogue whose chiefest occupation seems to be to march in the
+ranks of The Unemployed on the occasion of its annual demonstrations.
+
+"Le' me alone, carntcher? Ah'm doin' no 'arm, officer,--"
+
+"Didn't you hear me? Step out here. Ah, that's better.... No harm, eh?
+Perhaps you'll explain how there's no harm breakin' into unoccupied
+'ouses?"
+
+"Gorblimy, 'ow was I to know? 'Ere's a toff 'ands me sixpence fer hopenin'
+'is cab door to-dye, an', sezee, 'My man,' 'e sez, 'yer've got a 'onest
+fyce. W'y don'cher work?' sezee. ''Ow can I?' sez I. ''Ere'm I hout of
+a job these six months, lookin' fer work every dye an' carn't find it.'
+Sezee, 'Come an' see me this hevenin' at me home, Noine, Frognall Stryte,'
+'e sez, an'--"
+
+"That'll do for now. You borrow a pencil and paper and write it down and
+I'll read it when I've got more time; I never heard the like of it. This
+'ouse hasn't been lived in these two years. Move on, and don't let me find
+you round 'ere again. March, I say!"
+
+There was more of it--more whining explanations artfully tinctured with
+abuse, more terse commands to depart, the whole concluding with scraping
+footsteps, diminuendo, and another perfunctory, rattle of the knob as the
+bobby, having shoo'd the putative evil-doer off, assured himself that
+no damage had actually been done. Then he, too, departed, satisfied and
+self-righteous, leaving a badly frightened but very grateful amateur
+criminal to pursue his self-appointed career of crime.
+
+He had no choice other than to continue; in point of fact, it had been
+insanity just then to back out, and run the risk of apprehension at the
+hands of that ubiquitous bobby, who (for all he knew) might be lurking not
+a dozen yards distant, watchful for just such a sequel. Still, Kirkwood
+hesitated with the best of excuses. Reassuring as he had found the
+sentinel's extemporized yarn,--proof positive that the fellow had had no
+more right to prohibit a trespass than Kirkwood to commit one,--at the
+same time he found himself pardonably a prey to emotions of the utmost
+consternation and alarm. If he feared to leave the house he had no warrant
+whatever to assume that he would be permitted to remain many minutes
+unharmed within its walls of mystery.
+
+The silence of it discomfited him beyond measure; it was, in a word,
+uncanny.
+
+Before him, as he lingered at the door, vaguely disclosed by a wan
+illumination penetrating a dusty and begrimed fan-light, a broad hall
+stretched indefinitely towards the rear of the building, losing itself in
+blackness beyond the foot of a flight of stairs. Save for a few articles of
+furniture,--a hall table, an umbrella-stand, a tall dumb clock flanked by
+high-backed chairs,--it was empty. Other than Kirkwood's own restrained
+respiration not a sound throughout the house advertised its inhabitation;
+not a board creaked beneath the pressure of a foot, not a mouse rustled in
+the wainscoting or beneath the floors, not a breath of air stirred sighing
+in the stillness.
+
+And yet, a tremendous racket had been raised at the front door, within the
+sixty seconds past! And yet, within twenty minutes two persons, at
+least, had preceded Kirkwood into the building! Had they not heard? The
+speculation seemed ridiculous. Or had they heard and, alarmed, been too
+effectually hobbled by the coils of their nefarious designs to dare reveal
+themselves, to investigate the cause of that thunderous summons? Or were
+they, perhaps, aware of Kirkwood's entrance, and lying _perdui_, in some
+dark corner, to ambush him as he passed?
+
+True, that were hardly like the girl. True, on the other hand, it
+were possible that she had stolen away while Kirkwood was hanging in
+irresolution by the passage to Quadrant Mews. Again, the space of time
+between Kirkwood's dismissal and his return had been exceedingly brief;
+whatever her errand, she could hardly have fulfilled it and escaped. At
+that moment she might be in the power and at the mercy of him who had
+followed her; providing he were not friendly. And in that case, what
+torment and what peril might not be hers?
+
+Spurred by solicitude, the young man put personal apprehensions in his
+pocket and forgot them, cautiously picking his way through the gloom to the
+foot of the stairs. There, by the newel-post, he paused. Darkness walled
+him about. Overhead the steps vanished in a well of blackness; he could
+not even see the ceiling; his eyes ached with futile effort to fathom the
+unknown; his ears rang with unrewarded strain of listening. The silence
+hung inviolate, profound.
+
+Slowly he began to ascend, a hand following the balusters, the other with
+his cane exploring the obscurity before him. On the steps, a carpet, thick
+and heavy, muffled his footfalls. He moved noiselessly. Towards the top
+the staircase curved, and presently a foot that groped for a higher level
+failed to find it. Again he halted, acutely distrustful.
+
+Nothing happened.
+
+He went on, guided by the balustrade, passing three doors, all open,
+through which the undefined proportions of a drawing-room and boudoir were
+barely suggested in a ghostly dusk. By each he paused, listening, hearing
+nothing.
+
+His foot struck with a deadened thud against the bottom step of the
+second flight, and his pulses fluttered wildly for a moment. Two
+minutes--three--he waited in suspense. From above came no sound. He went
+on, as before, save that twice a step yielded, complaining, to his weight.
+Toward the top the close air, like the darkness, seemed to weigh more
+heavily upon his consciousness; little drops of perspiration started out on
+his forehead, his scalp tingled, his mouth was hot and dry, he felt as if
+stifled.
+
+Again the raised foot found no level higher than its fellows. He stopped
+and held his breath, oppressed by a conviction that some one was near him.
+Confirmation of this came startlingly--an eerie whisper in the night, so
+close to him that he fancied he could feel the disturbed air fanning his
+face.
+
+"_Is it you, Eccles_?"
+
+He had no answer ready. The voice was masculine, if he analyzed it
+correctly. Dumb and stupid he stood poised upon the point of panic.
+
+"_Eccles, is it you_?"
+
+The whisper was both shrill and shaky. As it ceased Kirkwood was
+half blinded by a flash of light, striking him squarely in the eyes.
+Involuntarily he shrank back a pace, to the first step from the top.
+Instantaneously the light was eclipsed.
+
+"_Halt or--or I fire_!"
+
+By now he realized that he had been scrutinized by the aid of an electric
+hand-lamp. The tremulous whisper told him something else--that the speaker
+suffered from nerves as high-strung as his own. The knowledge gave him
+inspiration. He cried at a venture, in a guarded voice, "_Hands up_!"--and
+struck out smartly with his stick. Its ferrule impinged upon something soft
+but heavy. Simultaneously he heard a low, frightened cry, the cane was
+swept aside, a blow landed glancingly on his shoulder, and he was carried
+fairly off his feet by the weight of a man hurled bodily upon him with
+staggering force and passion. Reeling, he was borne back and down a step
+or two, and then,--choking on an oath,--dropped his cane and with one hand
+caught the balusters, while the other tore ineffectually at wrists of
+hands that clutched his throat. So, for a space, the two hung, panting and
+struggling.
+
+Then endeavoring to swing his shoulders over against the wall, Kirkwood
+released his grip on the hand-rail and stumbled on the stairs, throwing his
+antagonist out of balance. The latter plunged downward, dragging Kirkwood
+with him. Clawing, kicking, grappling, they went to the bottom, jolted
+violently by each step; but long before the last was reached, Kirkwood's
+throat was free.
+
+Throwing himself off, he got to his feet and grasped the railing for
+support; then waited, panting, trying to get his bearings. Himself
+painfully shaken and bruised, he shrewdly surmised that his assailant had
+fared as ill, if not worse. And, in point of fact, the man lay with neither
+move nor moan, still as death at the American's feet.
+
+And once more silence had folded its wings over Number 9, Frognall Street.
+
+More conscious of that terrifying, motionless presence beneath him, than
+able to distinguish it by power of vision, he endured interminable minutes
+of trembling horror, in a witless daze, before he thought of his match-box.
+Immediately he found it and struck a light. As the wood caught and the
+bright small flame leaped in the pent air, he leaned forward, over the
+body, breathlessly dreading what he must discover.
+
+The man lay quiet, head upon the floor, legs and hips on the stairs. One
+arm had fallen over his face, hiding the upper half. The hand gleamed white
+and delicate as a woman's. His chin was smooth and round, his lips thin and
+petulant. Beneath his top-coat, evening dress clothed a short and slender
+figure. Nothing whatever of his appearance suggested the burly ruffian, the
+midnight marauder; he seemed little more than a boy old enough to dress
+for dinner. In his attitude there was something pitifully suggestive of a
+beaten child, thrown into a corner.
+
+Conscience-smitten and amazed Kirkwood stared on until, without warning,
+the match flickered and went out. Then, straightening up with an
+exclamation at once of annoyance and concern, he rattled the box; it made
+no sound,--was empty. In disgust he swore it was the devil's own luck, that
+he should run out of vestas at a time so critical. He could not even say
+whether the fellow was dead, unconscious, or simply shamming. He had little
+idea of his looks; and to be able to identify him might save a deal of
+trouble at some future time,--since he, Kirkwood, seemed so little able
+to disengage himself from the clutches of this insane adventure! And the
+girl--. what had become of her? How could he continue to search for her,
+without lights or guide, through all those silent rooms, whose walls might
+inclose a hundred hidden dangers in that house of mystery?
+
+But he debated only briefly. His blood was young, and it was hot; it was
+quite plain to him that he could not withdraw and retain his self-respect.
+If the girl was there to be found, most assuredly, he must find her. The
+hand-lamp that had dazzled him at the head of the stairs should be his aid,
+now that he thought of it,--and providing he was able to find it.
+
+In the scramble on the stairs he had lost his hat, but he remembered that
+the vesta's short-lived light had discovered this on the floor beyond
+the man's body. Carefully stepping across the latter he recovered his
+head-gear, and then, kneeling, listened with an ear close to the fellow's
+face. A softly regular beat of breathing reassured him. Half rising, he
+caught the body beneath the armpits, lifting and dragging it off the
+staircase; and knelt again, to feel of each pocket in the man's clothing,
+partly as an obvious precaution, to relieve him of his advertised revolver
+against an untimely wakening, partly to see if he had the lamp about him.
+
+The search proved fruitless. Kirkwood suspected that the weapon, like his
+own, had existed only in his victim's ready imagination. As for the lamp,
+in the act of rising he struck it with his foot, and picked it up.
+
+It felt like a metal tube a couple of inches in diameter, a foot or so
+in length, passably heavy. He fumbled with it impatiently. "However the
+dickens," he wondered audibly, "does the infernal machine work?" As it
+happened, the thing worked with disconcerting abruptness as his untrained
+fingers fell hapchance on the spring. A sudden glare again smote him in the
+face, and at the same instant, from a point not a yard away, apparently, an
+inarticulate cry rang out upon the stillness.
+
+Heart in his mouth, he stepped back, lowering the lamp (which impishly went
+out) and lifting a protecting forearm.
+
+"Who's that?" he demanded harshly.
+
+A strangled sob of terror answered him, blurred by a swift rush of skirts,
+and in a breath his shattered nerves quieted and a glimmer of common sense
+penetrated the murk anger and fear had bred in his brain. He understood,
+and stepped forward, catching blindly at the darkness with eager hands.
+
+"Miss Calendar!" he cried guardedly. "Miss Calendar, it is I--Philip
+Kirkwood!"
+
+There was a second sob, of another caliber than the first; timid fingers
+brushed his, and a hand, warm and fragile, closed upon his own in a passion
+of relief and gratitude.
+
+"Oh, I am so g-glad!" It was Dorothy Calendar's voice, beyond mistake.
+"I--I didn't know what t-to t-think.... When the light struck your face
+I was sure it was you, but when I called, you answered in a voice so
+strange,--not like yours at all! ... Tell me," she pleaded, with palpable
+effort to steady herself; "what has happened?"
+
+"I think, perhaps," said Kirkwood uneasily, again troubled by his racing
+pulses, "perhaps you can do that better than I."
+
+"Oh!" said the voice guiltily; her fingers trembled on his, and were gently
+withdrawn. "I was so frightened," she confessed after a little pause, "so
+frightened that I hardly understand ... But you? How did you--?"
+
+"I worried about you," he replied, in a tone absurdly apologetic. "Somehow
+it didn't seem right. It was none of my business, of course, but ... I
+couldn't help coming back. This fellow, whoever he is--don't worry;
+he's unconscious--slipped into the house in a manner that seemed to me
+suspicious. I hardly know why I followed, except that he left the door an
+open invitation to interference ..."
+
+"I can't be thankful enough," she told him warmly, "that you did interfere.
+You have indeed saved me from ..."
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"I don't know what. If I knew the man--"
+
+"You don't _know_ him?"
+
+"I can't even guess. The light--?"
+
+She paused inquiringly. Kirkwood fumbled with the lamp, but, whether its
+rude handling had impaired some vital part of the mechanism, or whether the
+batteries through much use were worn out, he was able to elicit only one
+feeble glow, which was instantly smothered by the darkness.
+
+"It's no use," he confessed. "The thing's gone wrong."
+
+"Have you a match?"
+
+"I used my last before I got hold of this."
+
+"Oh," she commented, discouraged. "Have you any notion what he looks like?"
+
+Kirkwood thought briefly. "Raffles," he replied with a chuckle. "He looks
+like an amateurish and very callow Raffles. He's in dress clothes, you
+know."
+
+"I wonder!" There was a nuance of profound bewilderment in her exclamation.
+Then: "He knocked against something in the hall--a chair, I presume; at all
+events, I heard that and put out the light. I was ... in the room above the
+drawing-room, you see. I stole down to this floor--was there, in the corner
+by the stairs when he passed within six inches, and never guessed it. Then,
+when he got on the next floor, I started on; but you came in. I slipped
+into the drawing-room and crouched behind a chair. You went on, but I dared
+not move until ... And then I heard some one cry out, and you fell down the
+stairs together. I hope you were not hurt--?"
+
+"Nothing worth mention; but _he_ must have got a pretty stiff knock, to lay
+him out so completely." Kirkwood stirred the body with his toe, but the man
+made no sign. "Dead to the world ... And now, Miss Calendar?"
+
+If she answered, he did not hear; for on the heels of his query banged the
+knocker down below; and thereafter crash followed crash, brewing a deep and
+sullen thundering to rouse the echoes and send them rolling, like voices of
+enraged ghosts, through the lonely rooms.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+
+THE MYSTERY OF A FOUR-WHEELER
+
+"What's that?" At the first alarm the girl had caught convulsively at
+Kirkwood's arm. Now, when a pause came in the growling of the knocker, she
+made him hear her voice; and it was broken and vibrant with a threat of
+hysteria. "Oh, what can it mean?"
+
+"I don't know." He laid a hand reassuringly over that which trembled on his
+forearm. "The police, possibly."
+
+"Police!" she iterated, aghast. "What makes you think--?"
+
+"A man tried to stop me at the door," he answered quickly. "I got in before
+he could. When he tried the knocker, a bobby came along and stopped him.
+The latter may have been watching the house since then,--it'd be only his
+duty to keep an eye on it; and Heaven knows we raised a racket, coming
+head-first down those stairs! Now we are up against it," he added brightly.
+
+But the girl was tugging at his hand. "Come!" she begged breathlessly.
+"Come! There is a way! Before they break in--"
+
+"But this man--?" Kirkwood hung back, troubled.
+
+"They--the police are sure to find and care for him."
+
+"So they will." He chuckled, "And serve him right! He'd have choked me to
+death, with all the good will in the world!"
+
+"Oh, do hurry!"
+
+Turning, she sped light-footed down the staircase to the lower hall, he
+at her elbow. Here the uproar was loudest--deep enough to drown whatever
+sounds might have been made by two pairs of flying feet. For all that
+they fled on tiptoe, stealthily, guilty shadows in the night; and at the
+newel-post swung back into the unbroken blackness which shrouded the
+fastnesses backward of the dwelling. A sudden access of fury on the part of
+the alarmist at the knocker, spurred them on with quaking hearts. In half a
+dozen strides, Kirkwood, guided only by instinct and the _frou-frou_ of the
+girl's skirts as she ran invisible before him, stumbled on the uppermost
+steps of a steep staircase; only a hand-rail saved him, and that at the
+last moment. He stopped short, shocked into caution. From below came a
+contrite whisper: "I'm so sorry! I should have warned you."
+
+He pulled himself together, glaring wildly at nothing. "It's all right--"
+
+"You're not hurt, truly? Oh, do come quickly."
+
+She waited for him at the bottom of the flight;--happily for him, for he
+was all at sea.
+
+"Here--your hand--let me guide you. This darkness is dreadful ..."
+
+He found her hand, somehow, and tucked his into it, confidingly, and not
+without an uncertain thrill of satisfaction.
+
+"Come!" she panted. "Come! If they break in--"
+
+Stifled by apprehension, her voice failed her.
+
+They went forward, now less impetuously, for it was very black; and the
+knocker had fallen still.
+
+"No fear of that," he remarked after a time. "They wouldn't dare break in."
+
+A fluttering whisper answered him: "I don't know. We dare risk nothing."
+
+They seemed to explore, to penetrate acres of labyrinthine chambers and
+passages, delving deep into the bowels of the earth, like rabbits burrowing
+in a warren, hounded by beagles.
+
+Above stairs the hush continued unbroken; as if the dumb Genius of the
+Place had cast a spell of silence on the knocker, or else, outraged, had
+smitten the noisy disturber with a palsy.
+
+The girl seemed to know her way; whether guided by familiarity or by
+intuition, she led on without hesitation, Kirkwood blundering in her wake,
+between confusion of impression, and dawning dismay conscious of but one
+tangible thing, to which he clung as to his hope of salvation: those firm,
+friendly fingers that clasped his own.
+
+It was as if they wandered on for an hour; probably from start to finish
+their flight took up three minutes, no more. Eventually the girl stopped,
+releasing his hand. He could hear her syncopated breathing before him, and
+gathered that something was wrong. He took a step forward.
+
+"What is it?"
+
+Her full voice broke out of the obscurity startlingly close, in his very
+ear.
+
+"The door--the bolts--I can't budge them."
+
+"Let me ..."
+
+He pressed forward, brushing her shoulder. She did not draw away, but
+willingly yielded place to his hands at the fastenings; and what had proved
+impossible to her, to his strong fingers was a matter of comparative ease.
+Yet, not entirely consciously, he was not quick. As he tugged at the bolts
+he was poignantly sensitive to the subtle warmth of her at his side; he
+could hear her soft dry sobs of excitement and suspense, punctuating the
+quiet; and was frightened, absolutely, by an impulse, too strong for
+ridicule, to take her in his arms and comfort her with the assurance that,
+whatever her trouble, he would stand by her and protect her.... It were
+futile to try to laugh it off; he gave over the endeavor. Even at this
+critical moment he found himself repeating over and over to his heart the
+question: "Can this be love? Can this be love? ..."
+
+Could it be love at an hour's acquaintance? Absurd! But he could not
+laugh--nor render himself insensible to the suggestion.
+
+He found that he had drawn the bolts. The girl tugged and rattled at the
+knob. Reluctantly the door opened inwards. Beyond its threshold stretched
+ten feet or more of covered passageway, whose entrance framed an oblong
+glimmering with light. A draught of fresh air smote their faces. Behind
+them a door banged.
+
+"Where does this open?"
+
+"On the mews," she informed him.
+
+"The mews!" He stared in consternation at the pallid oval that stood for
+her face. "The mews! But you, in your evening gown, and I--"
+
+"There's no other way. We must chance it. Are you afraid?"
+
+Afraid? ... He stepped aside. She slipped by him and on. He closed the
+door, carefully removing the key and locking it on the outside; then joined
+the girl at the entrance to the mews, where they paused perforce, she as
+much disconcerted as he, his primary objection momentarily waxing in force
+as they surveyed the conditions circumscribing their escape.
+
+Quadrant Mews was busily engaged in enjoying itself. Night had fallen
+sultry and humid, and the walls and doorsteps were well fringed and
+clustered with representatives of that class of London's population which
+infests mews through habit, taste, or force of circumstance.
+
+On the stoops men sprawled at easy length, discussing short, foul cutties
+loaded with that rank and odoriferous compound which, under the name and
+in the fame of tobacco, is widely retailed at tuppence the ounce. Their
+women-folk more commonly squatted on the thresholds, cheerfully squabbling;
+from opposing second-story windows, two leaned perilously forth, slanging
+one another across the square briskly in the purest billingsgate; and were
+impartially applauded from below by an audience whose appreciation seemed
+faintly tinged with envy. Squawking and yelling children swarmed over the
+flags and rude cobblestones that paved the ways. Like incense, heavy and
+pungent, the rich effluvia of stable-yards swirled in air made visible by
+its faint burden of mist.
+
+Over against the entrance wherein Kirkwood and the girl lurked, confounded
+by the problem of escaping undetected through this vivacious scene, a
+stable-door stood wide, exposing a dimly illumined interior. Before it
+waited a four-wheeler, horse already hitched in between the shafts, while
+its driver, a man of leisurely turn of mind, made lingering inspection of
+straps and buckles, and, while Kirkwood watched him, turned attention to
+the carriage lamps.
+
+The match which he raked spiritedly down his thigh, flared ruddily; the
+succeeding paler glow of the lamp threw into relief a heavy beefy mask,
+with shining bosses for cheeks and nose and chin; through narrow slits
+two cunning eyes glittered like dull gems. Kirkwood appraised him with
+attention, as one in whose gross carcass was embodied their only hope of
+unannoyed return to the streets and normal surroundings of their world. The
+difficulty lay in attracting the man's attention and engaging him without
+arousing his suspicions or bringing the population about their ears. Though
+he hesitated long, no favorable opportunity presented itself; and in time
+the Jehu approached the box with the ostensible purpose of mounting and
+driving off. In this critical situation the American, forced to recognize
+that boldness must mark his course, took the girl's fate and his own in his
+hands, and with a quick word to his companion, stepped out of hiding.
+
+The cabby had a foot upon the step when Kirkwood tapped his shoulder.
+
+"My man--"
+
+"Lor, lumme!" cried the fellow in amaze, pivoting on his heel. Cupidity and
+quick understanding enlivened the eyes which in two glances looked
+Kirkwood up and down, comprehending at once both his badly rumpled hat
+and patent-leather shoes. "S'help me,"--thickly,--"where'd you drop from,
+guvner?"
+
+"That's my affair," said Kirkwood briskly. "Are you engaged?"
+
+"If you mykes yerself my fare," returned the cabby shrewdly, "I _ham_."
+
+"Ten shillings, then, if you get us out of here in one minute and
+to--say--Hyde Park Corner in fifteen."
+
+"Us?" demanded the fellow aggressively.
+
+Kirkwood motioned toward the passageway. "There's a lady with me--there.
+Quick now!"
+
+Still the man did not move. "Ten bob," he bargained; "an' you runnin' awye
+with th' stuffy ol' gent's fair darter? Come now, guvner, is it gen'rous?
+Myke it a quid an'--"
+
+"A pound then. _Will_ you hurry?"
+
+By way of answer the fellow scrambled hastily up to the box and snatched at
+the reins. "_Ck_! Gee-e hup!" he cried sonorously.
+
+By now the mews had wakened to the fact of the presence of a "toff" in its
+midst. His light topcoat and silk hat-rendered him as conspicuous as a red
+Indian in war-paint would have been on Rotten Row. A cry of surprise was
+raised, and drowned in a volley of ribald inquiry and chaff.
+
+Fortunately, the cabby was instant to rein in skilfully before the
+passageway, and Kirkwood had the door open before the four-wheeler stopped.
+The girl, hugging her cloak about her, broke cover (whereat the hue and cry
+redoubled), and sprang into the body of the vehicle. Kirkwood followed,
+shutting the door. As the cab lurched forward he leaned over and drew down
+the window-shade, shielding the girl from half a hundred prying eyes. At
+the same time they gathered momentum, banging swiftly, if loudly out of the
+mews.
+
+An urchin, leaping on the step to spy in Kirkwood's window, fell off,
+yelping, as the driver's whiplash curled about his shanks.
+
+The gloom of the tunnel inclosed them briefly ere the lights of the
+Hog-in-the-Pound flashed by and the wheels began to roll more easily.
+Kirkwood drew back with a sigh of relief.
+
+"Thank God!" he said softly.
+
+The girl had no words.
+
+Worried by her silence, solicitous lest, the strain ended, she might be on
+the point of fainting, he let up the shade and lowered the window at her
+side.
+
+She seemed to have collapsed in her corner. Against the dark upholstery her
+hair shone like pale gold in the half-light; her eyes were closed and she
+held a handkerchief to her lips; the other hand lay limp.
+
+"Miss Calendar?"
+
+She started, and something bulky fell from the seat and thumped heavily on
+the floor. Kirkwood bent to pick it up, and so for the first time was
+made aware that she had brought with her a small black gladstone bag of
+considerable weight. As he placed it on the forward seat their eyes met.
+
+"I didn't know--" he began.
+
+"It was to get that," she hastened to explain, "that my father sent me ..."
+
+"Yes," he assented in a tone indicating his complete comprehension. "I
+trust ..." he added vaguely, and neglected to complete the observation,
+losing himself in a maze of conjecture not wholly agreeable. This was a new
+phase of the adventure. He eyed the bag uneasily. What did it contain? How
+did he know ...?
+
+Hastily he abandoned that line of thought. He had no right to
+infer anything whatever, who had thrust himself uninvited into her
+concerns--uninvited, that was to say, in the second instance, having
+been once definitely given his conge. Inevitably, however, a thousand
+unanswerable questions pestered him; just as, at each fresh facet of
+mystery disclosed by the sequence of the adventure, his bewilderment
+deepened.
+
+The girl stirred restlessly. "I have been thinking," she volunteered in a
+troubled tone, "that there is absolutely no way I know of, to thank you
+properly."
+
+"It is enough if I've been useful," he rose in gallantry to the emergency.
+
+"That," she commented, "was very prettily said. But then I have never known
+any one more kind and courteous and--and considerate, than you." There was
+no savor of flattery in the simple and direct statement; indeed, she was
+looking away from him, out of the window, and her face was serious with
+thought; she seemed to be speaking of, rather than to, Kirkwood. "And I
+have been wondering," she continued with unaffected candor, "what you must
+be thinking of me."
+
+"I? ... What should I think of you, Miss Calendar?"
+
+With the air of a weary child she laid her head against the cushions again,
+face to him, and watched him through lowered lashes, unsmiling.
+
+"You might be thinking that an explanation is due you. Even the way we
+were brought together was extraordinary, Mr. Kirkwood. You must be very
+generous, as generous as you have shown yourself brave, not to require some
+sort of an explanation of me."
+
+"I don't see it that way."
+
+"I do ... You have made me like you very much, Mr. Kirkwood."
+
+He shot her a covert glance--causelessly, for her _naivete_ was flawless.
+With a feeling of some slight awe he understood this--a sensation of
+sincere reverence for the unspoiled, candid, child's heart and mind that
+were hers. "I'm glad," he said simply; "very glad, if that's the case, and
+presupposing I deserve it. Personally," he laughed, "I seem to myself to
+have been rather forward."
+
+"No; only kind and a gentleman."
+
+"But--please!" he protested.
+
+"Oh, but I mean it, every word! Why shouldn't I? In a little while, ten
+minutes, half an hour, we shall have seen the last of each other. Why
+should I not tell you how I appreciate all that you have unselfishly done
+for me?"
+
+"If you put it that way,--I'm sure I don't know; beyond that it embarrasses
+me horribly to have you overestimate me so. If any courage has been shown
+this night, it is yours ... But I'm forgetting again." He thought to divert
+her. "Where shall I tell the cabby to go this time, Miss Calendar?"
+
+"Craven Street, please," said the girl, and added a house number. "I am to
+meet my father there, with this,"--indicating the gladstone bag.
+
+Kirkwood thrust head and shoulders out the window and instructed the cabby
+accordingly; but his ruse had been ineffectual, as he found when he sat
+back again. Quite composedly the girl took up the thread of conversation
+where it had been broken off.
+
+"It's rather hard to keep silence, when you've been so good. I don't want
+you to think me less generous than yourself, but, truly, I can tell you
+nothing." She sighed a trace resentfully; or so he thought. "There is
+little enough in this--this wretched affair, that I understand myself; and
+that little, I may not tell ... I want you to know that."
+
+"I understand, Miss Calendar."
+
+"There's one thing I may say, however. I have done nothing wrong to-night,
+I believe," she added quickly.
+
+"I've never for an instant questioned that," he returned with a qualm of
+shame; for what he said was not true.
+
+"Thank you ..."
+
+The four-wheeler swung out of Oxford Street into Charing Cross Road.
+Kirkwood noted the fact with a feeling of some relief that their ride
+was to be so short; like many of his fellow-sufferers from "the artistic
+temperament," he was acutely disconcerted by spoken words of praise and
+gratitude; Miss Calendar, unintentionally enough, had succeeded only in
+rendering him self-conscious and ill at ease.
+
+Nor had she fully relieved her mind, nor voiced all that perturbed her.
+"There's one thing more," she said presently: "my father. I--I hope you
+will think charitably of him."
+
+"Indeed, I've no reason or right to think otherwise."
+
+"I was afraid--afraid his actions might have seemed peculiar, to-night ..."
+
+"There are lots of things I don't understand, Miss Calendar. Some day,
+perhaps, it will all clear up,--this trouble of yours. At least, one
+supposes it is trouble, of some sort. And then you will tell me the whole
+story.... Won't you?" Kirkwood insisted.
+
+"I'm afraid not," she said, with a smile of shadowed sadness. "We are to
+say good night in a moment or two, and--it will be good-by as well. It's
+unlikely that we shall ever meet again."
+
+"I refuse positively to take such a gloomy view of the case!"
+
+She shook her head, laughing with him, but with shy regret. "It's so, none
+the less. We are leaving London this very night, my father and I--leaving
+England, for that matter."
+
+"Leaving England?" he echoed. "You're not by any chance bound for America,
+are you?"
+
+"I ... can't tell you."
+
+"But you can tell me this: are you booked on the _Minneapolis_?"
+
+"No--o; it is a--quite another boat."
+
+"Of course!" he commented savagely. "It wouldn't be me to have _any_ sort
+of luck!"
+
+She made no reply beyond a low laugh. He stared gloomily out of his window,
+noting indifferently that they were passing the National Gallery. On their
+left Trafalgar Square stretched, broad and bare, a wilderness of sooty
+stone with an air of mutely tolerating its incongruous fountains. Through
+Charing Cross roared a tide-rip of motor-busses and hackney carriages.
+
+Glumly the young man foresaw the passing of his abbreviated romance; their
+destination was near at hand. Brentwick had been right, to some extent, at
+least; it was quite true that the curtain had been rung up that very night,
+upon Kirkwood's Romance; unhappily, as Brentwick had not foreseen, it was
+immediately to be rung down.
+
+The cab rolled soberly into the Strand.
+
+"Since we are to say good-by so very soon," suggested Kirkwood, "may I ask
+a parting favor, Miss Calendar?"
+
+She regarded him with friendly eyes. "You have every right," she affirmed
+gently.
+
+"Then please to tell me frankly: are you going into any further danger?"
+
+"And is that the only boon you crave at my hands, Mr. Kirkwood?"
+
+"Without impertinence ..."
+
+For a little time, waiting for him to conclude his vague phrase, she
+watched him in an expectant silence. But the man was diffident to a
+degree--At length, somewhat unconsciously, "I think not," she answered.
+"No; there will be no danger awaiting me at Mrs. Hallam's. You need not
+fear for me any more--Thank you."
+
+He lifted his brows at the unfamiliar name. "Mrs. Hallam--?"
+
+"I am going to her house in Craven Street."
+
+"Your father is to meet you there?"--persistently.
+
+"He promised to."
+
+"But if he shouldn't?"
+
+"Why--" Her eyes clouded; she pursed her lips over the conjectural
+annoyance. "Why, in that event, I suppose--It would be very embarrassing.
+You see, I don't know Mrs. Hallam; I don't know that she expects me, unless
+my father is already there. They are old friends--I could drive round for a
+while and come back, I suppose."
+
+But she made it plain that the prospect did not please her.
+
+"Won't you let me ask if Mr. Calender is there, before you get out, then? I
+don't like to be dismissed," he laughed; "and, you know, you shouldn't go
+wandering round all alone."
+
+The cab drew up. Kirkwood put a hand on the door and awaited her will.
+
+"It--it would be very kind ... I hate to impose upon you."
+
+He turned the knob and got out. "If you'll wait one moment," he said
+superfluously, as he closed the door.
+
+Pausing only to verify the number, he sprang up the steps and found the
+bell-button.
+
+It was a modest little residence, in nothing more remarkable than its
+neighbors, unless it was for a certain air of extra grooming: the area
+railing was sleek with fresh black paint; the doorstep looked the better
+for vigorous stoning; the door itself was immaculate, its brasses shining
+lustrous against red-lacquered woodwork. A soft glow filled the fanlight.
+Overhead the drawing-room windows shone with a cozy, warm radiance.
+
+The door opened, framing the figure of a maid sketched broadly in masses of
+somber black and dead white.
+
+"Can you tell me, is Mr. Calendar here?"
+
+The servant's eyes left his face, looked past him at the waiting cab, and
+returned.
+
+"I'm not sure, sir. If you will please step in."
+
+Kirkwood hesitated briefly, then acceded. The maid closed the door.
+
+"What name shall I say, sir?"
+
+"Mr. Kirkwood."
+
+"If you will please to wait one moment, sir--"
+
+He was left in the entry hall, the servant hurrying to the staircase and
+up. Three minutes elapsed; he was on the point of returning to the girl,
+when the maid reappeared.
+
+"Mrs. Hallam says, will you kindly step up-stairs, sir."
+
+Disgruntled, he followed her; at the head of the stairs she bowed him into
+the drawing-room and again left him to his own resources.
+
+Nervous, annoyed, he paced the floor from wall to wall, his footfalls
+silenced by heavy rugs. As the delay was prolonged he began to fume with
+impatience, wondering, half regretting that he had left the girl outside,
+definitely sorry that he had failed to name his errand more explicitly to
+the maid. At another time, in another mood, he might have accorded more
+appreciation to the charm of the apartment, which, betraying the feminine
+touch in every detail of arrangement and furnishing, was very handsome in
+an unconventional way. But he was quite heedless of externals.
+
+Wearied, he deposited himself sulkily in an armchair by the hearth.
+
+From a boudoir on the same floor there came murmurs of two voices, a man's
+and a woman's. The latter laughed prettily.
+
+"Oh, any time!" snorted the American. "Any time you're through with your
+confounded flirtation, Mr. George B. Calendar!"
+
+The voices rose, approaching. "Good night," said the woman gaily; "farewell
+and--good luck go with you!"
+
+"Thank you. Good night," replied the man more conservatively.
+
+Kirkwood rose, expectant.
+
+There was a swish of draperies, and a moment later he was acknowledging the
+totally unlooked-for entrance of the mistress of the house. He had thought
+to see Calendar, presuming him to be the man closeted with Mrs. Hallam;
+but, whoever that had been, he did not accompany the woman. Indeed, as she
+advanced from the doorway, Kirkwood could hear the man's footsteps on the
+stairs.
+
+"This is Mr. Kirkwood?" The note of inquiry in the well-trained voice--a
+very alluring voice and one pleasant to listen to, he thought--made it seem
+as though she had asked, point-blank, "Who is Mr. Kirkwood?"
+
+He bowed, discovering himself in the presence of an extraordinarily
+handsome and interesting woman; a woman of years which as yet had not told
+upon her, of experience that had not availed to harden her, at least in so
+far as her exterior charm of personality was involved; a woman, in brief,
+who bore close inspection well, despite an elusive effect of maturity, not
+without its attraction for men. Kirkwood was impressed that it would be
+very easy to learn to like Mrs. Hallam more than well--with her approval.
+
+Although he had not anticipated it, he was not at all surprised to
+recognize in her the woman who, if he were not mistaken, had slipped to
+Calendar that warning in the dining-room of the Pless. Kirkwood's state of
+mind had come to be such, through his experiences of the past few
+hours, that he would have accepted anything, however preposterous, as a
+commonplace happening. But for that matter there was nothing particularly
+astonishing in this _rencontre_.
+
+"I am Mrs. Hallam. You were asking for Mr. Calendar?"
+
+"He was to have been here at this hour, I believe," said Kirkwood.
+
+"Yes?" There was just the right inflection of surprise in her carefully
+controlled tone.
+
+He became aware of an undercurrent of feeling; that the woman was
+estimating him shrewdly with her fine direct eyes. He returned her regard
+with admiring interest; they were gray-green eyes, deep-set but large, a
+little shallow, a little changeable, calling to mind the sea on a windy,
+cloudy day.
+
+Below stairs a door slammed.
+
+"I am not a detective, Mrs. Hallam," announced the young man suddenly.
+"Mr. Calendar required a service of me this evening; I am here in natural
+consequence. If it was Mr. Calendar who left this house just now, I am
+wasting time."
+
+"It was not Mr. Calendar." The fine-lined brows arched in surprise, real
+or pretended, at his first blurted words, and relaxed; amused, the woman
+laughed deliciously. "But I am expecting him any moment; he was to have
+been here half an hour since.... Won't you wait?"
+
+She indicated, with a gracious gesture, a chair, and took for herself one
+end of a davenport. "I'm sure he won't be long, now."
+
+"Thank you, I will return, if I may." Kirkwood moved toward the door.
+
+"But there's no necessity--" She seemed insistent on detaining him,
+possibly because she questioned his motive, possibly for her own
+divertisement.
+
+Kirkwood deprecated his refusal with a smile. "The truth is, Miss Calendar
+is waiting in a cab, outside. I--"
+
+"Dorothy Calendar!" Mrs. Hallam rose alertly. "But why should she wait
+there? To be sure, we've never met; but I have known her father for many
+years." Her eyes held steadfast to his face; shallow, flawed by her every
+thought, like the sea by a cat's-paw he found them altogether inscrutable;
+yet received an impression that their owner was now unable to account for
+him.
+
+She swung about quickly, preceding him to the door and down the stairs. "I
+am sure Dorothy will come in to wait, if I ask her," she told Kirkwood in a
+high sweet voice. "I'm so anxious to know her. It's quite absurd, really,
+of her--to stand on ceremony with me, when her father made an appointment
+here. I'll run out and ask--"
+
+Mrs. Hallam's slim white fingers turned latch and knob, opening the street
+door, and her voice died away as she stepped out into the night. For a
+moment, to Kirkwood, tagging after her with an uncomfortable sense of
+having somehow done the wrong thing, her figure--full fair shoulders and
+arms rising out of the glittering dinner gown--cut a gorgeous silhouette
+against the darkness. Then, with a sudden, imperative gesture, she half
+turned towards him.
+
+"But," she exclaimed, perplexed, gazing to right and left, "but the cab,
+Mr. Kirkwood?"
+
+He was on the stoop a second later. Standing beside her, he stared blankly.
+
+To the left the Strand roared, the stream of its night-life in high spate;
+on the right lay the Embankment, comparatively silent and deserted, if
+brilliant with its high-swung lights. Between the two, quiet Craven Street
+ran, short and narrow, and wholly innocent of any form of equipage.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+
+"BELOW BRIDGE"
+
+In silence Mrs. Hallam turned to Kirkwood, her pose in itself a question
+and a peremptory one. Her eyes had narrowed; between their lashes the green
+showed, a thin edge like jade, cold and calculating. The firm lines of her
+mouth and chin had hardened.
+
+Temporarily dumb with consternation, he returned her stare as silently.
+
+"_Well_, Mr.--Kirkwood?"
+
+"Mrs. Hallam," he stammered, "I--"
+
+She lifted her shoulders impatiently and with a quick movement stepped back
+across the threshold, where she paused, a rounded arm barring the entrance,
+one hand grasping the door-knob, as if to shut him out at any moment.
+
+"I'm awaiting your explanation," she said coldly.
+
+[Illustration: "I'm waiting your explanation," she said coldly.]
+
+He grinned with nervousness, striving to penetrate the mental processes of
+this handsome Mrs. Hallam. She seemed to regard him with a suspicion which
+he thought inexcusable. Did she suppose he had spirited Dorothy Calendar
+away and then called to apprise her of the fact? Or that he was some sort
+of an adventurer, who had manufactured a plausible yarn to gain him access
+to her home? Or--harking back to her original theory--that he was an
+emissary from Scotland Yard? ... Probably she distrusted him on the latter
+hypothesis. The reflection left him more at ease.
+
+"I am quite as mystified as you, Mrs. Hallam," he began. "Miss Calendar was
+here, at this door, in a four-wheeler, not ten minutes ago, and--"
+
+"Then where is she now?"
+
+"Tell me where Calendar is," he retorted, inspired, "and I'll try to answer
+you!"
+
+But her eyes were blank. "You mean--?"
+
+"That Calendar was in this house when I came; that he left, found his
+daughter in the cab, and drove off with her. It's clear enough."
+
+"You are quite mistaken," she said thoughtfully. "George Calendar has not
+been here this night."
+
+He wondered that she did not seem to resent his imputation. "I think not--"
+
+"Listen!" she cried, raising a warning hand; and relaxing her vigilant
+attitude, moved forward once more, to peer down toward the Embankment.
+
+A cab had cut in from that direction and was bearing down upon them with
+a brisk rumble of hoofs. As it approached, Kirkwood's heart, that
+had lightened, was weighed upon again by disappointment. It was no
+four-wheeler, but a hansom, and the open wings of the apron, disclosing a
+white triangle of linen surmounted by a glowing spot of fire, betrayed the
+sex of the fare too plainly to allow of further hope that it might be the
+girl returning.
+
+At the door, the cab pulled up sharply and a man tumbled hastily out upon
+the sidewalk.
+
+"Here!" he cried throatily, tossing the cabby his fare, and turned toward
+the pair upon the doorstep, evidently surmising that something was amiss.
+For he was Calendar in proper person, and a sight to upset in a twinkling
+Kirkwood's ingeniously builded castle of suspicion.
+
+"Mrs. Hallam!" he cried, out of breath. "'S my daughter here?" And then,
+catching sight of Kirkwood's countenance: "Why, hello, Kirkwood!" he
+saluted him with a dubious air.
+
+The woman interrupted hastily. "Please come in, Mr. Calendar. This
+gentleman has been inquiring for you, with an astonishing tale about your
+daughter."
+
+"Dorothy!" Calendar's moon-like visage was momentarily divested of any
+trace of color. "What of her?"
+
+"You had better come in," advised Mrs. Hallam brusquely.
+
+The fat adventurer hopped hurriedly across the threshold, Kirkwood
+following. The woman shut the door, and turned with back to it, nodding
+significantly at Kirkwood as her eyes met Calendar's.
+
+"Well, well?" snapped the latter impatiently, turning to the young man.
+
+But Kirkwood was thinking quickly. For the present he contented himself
+with a deliberate statement of fact: "Miss Calendar has disappeared." It
+gave him an instant's time ... "There's something damned fishy!" he told
+himself. "These two are playing at cross-purposes. Calendar's no fool; he's
+evidently a crook, to boot. As for the woman, she's had her eyes open for
+a number of years. The main thing's Dorothy. She didn't vanish of her own
+initiative. And Mrs. Hallam knows, or suspects, more than she's going to
+tell. I don't think she wants Dorothy found. Calendar does. So do I. Ergo:
+I'm for Calendar."
+
+"Disappeared?" Calendar was barking at him. "How? When? Where?"
+
+"Within ten minutes," said Kirkwood. "Here, let's get it straight.... With
+her permission I brought her here in a four-wheeler." He was carefully
+suppressing all mention of Frognall Street, and in Calendar's glance read
+approval of the elision. "She didn't want to get out, unless you were here.
+I asked for you. The maid showed me up-stairs. I left your daughter in the
+cab--and by the way, I hadn't paid the driver. That's funny, too! Perhaps
+six or seven minutes after I came in Mrs. Hallam found out that Miss
+Calendar was with me and wanted to ask her in. When we got to the door--no
+cab. There you have it all."
+
+"Thanks--it's plenty," said Calendar dryly. He bent his head in thought for
+an instant, then looked up and fixed Mrs. Hallam with an unprejudiced
+eye, "I say!" he demanded explosively. "There wasn't any one here that
+knew--eh?"
+
+Her fine eyes wavered and fell before his; and Kirkwood remarked that her
+under lip was curiously drawn in.
+
+"I heard a man leave as Mrs. Hallam joined me," he volunteered helpfully,
+and with a suspicion of malice. "And after that--I paid no attention at the
+time--it seems to me I did hear a cab in the street--"
+
+"Ow?" interjected Calendar, eying the woman steadfastly and employing an
+exclamation of combined illumination and inquiry more typically British
+than anything Kirkwood had yet heard from the man.
+
+For her part, the look she gave Kirkwood was sharp with fury. It was more;
+it was a mistake, a flaw in her diplomacy; for Calendar intercepted it.
+Unceremoniously he grasped her bare arm with his fat hand.
+
+"Tell me who it was," he demanded in an ugly tone.
+
+She freed herself with a twist, and stepped back, a higher color in her
+cheeks, a flash of anger in her eyes.
+
+"Mr. Mulready," she retorted defiantly. "What of that?"
+
+"I wish I was sure," declared the fat adventurer, exasperated. "As it is,
+I bet a dollar you've put your foot in it, my lady. I warned you of that
+blackguard.... There! The mischief's done; we won't row over it. One
+moment." He begged it with a wave of his hand; stood pondering briefly,
+fumbled for his watch, found and consulted it. "It's the barest chance," he
+muttered. "Perhaps we can make it."
+
+"What are you going to do?" asked the woman.
+
+"Give _Mister_ Mulready a run for his money. Come along, Kirkwood; we
+haven't a minute. Mrs. Hallam, permit us...." She stepped aside and he
+brushed past her to the door. "Come, Kirkwood!"
+
+He seemed to take Kirkwood's company for granted; and the young man was not
+inclined to argue the point. Meekly enough he fell in with Calendar on the
+sidewalk. Mrs. Hallam followed them out. "You won't forget?" she called
+tentatively.
+
+"I'll 'phone you if we find out anything." Calendar jerked the words
+unceremoniously over his shoulder as, linking arms with Kirkwood, he drew
+him swiftly along. They heard her shut the door; instantly Calendar
+stopped. "Look here, did Dorothy have a--a small parcel with her?"
+
+"She had a gladstone bag."
+
+"Oh, the devil, the devil!" Calendar started on again, muttering
+distractedly. As they reached the corner he disengaged his arm. "We've a
+minute and a half to reach Charing Cross Pier; and I think it's the last
+boat. You set the pace, will you? But remember I'm an oldish man and--and
+fat."
+
+They began to run, the one easily, the other lumbering after like an
+old-fashioned square-rigged ship paced by a liner.
+
+Beneath the railway bridge, in front of the Underground station, the
+cab-rank cried them on with sardonic view-halloos; and a bobby remarked
+them with suspicion, turning to watch as they plunged round the corner and
+across the wide Embankment.
+
+The Thames appeared before them, a river of ink on whose burnished surface
+lights swam in long winding streaks and oily blobs. By the floating pier a
+County Council steamboat strained its hawsers, snoring huskily. Bells were
+jingling in her engine-room as the two gained the head of the sloping
+gangway.
+
+Kirkwood slapped a shilling down on the ticket-window ledge. "Where to?" he
+cried back to Calendar.
+
+"Cherry Gardens Pier," rasped the winded man. He stumbled after Kirkwood,
+groaning with exhaustion. Only the tolerance of the pier employees gained
+them their end; the steamer was held some seconds for them; as Calendar
+staggered to its deck, the gangway was jerked in, the last hawser cast off.
+The boat sheered wide out on the river, then shot in, arrow-like, to the
+pier beneath Waterloo Bridge.
+
+The deck was crowded and additional passengers embarked at every stop. In
+the circumstances conversation, save on the most impersonal topics, was
+impossible; and even had it been necessary or advisable to discuss the
+affair which occupied their minds, where so many ears could hear, Calendar
+had breath enough neither to answer nor to catechize Kirkwood. They found
+seats on the forward deck and rested there in grim silence, both fretting
+under the enforced restraint, while the boat darted, like some illuminated
+and exceptionally active water insect, from pier to pier.
+
+As it snorted beneath London Bridge, Calendar's impatience drove him from
+his seat back to the gangway. "Next stop," he told Kirkwood curtly; and
+rested his heavy bulk against the paddle-box, brooding morosely, until,
+after an uninterrupted run of more than a mile, the steamer swept in,
+side-wheels backing water furiously against the ebbing tide, to Cherry
+Gardens landing.
+
+Sweet name for a locality unsavory beyond credence! ... As they emerged on
+the street level and turned west on Bermondsey Wall, Kirkwood was fain to
+tug his top-coat over his chest and button it tight, to hide his linen. In
+a guarded tone he counseled his companion to do likewise; and Calendar,
+after a moment's blank, uncomprehending stare, acknowledged the wisdom of
+the advice with a grunt.
+
+The very air they breathed was rank with fetid odors bred of the gaunt dark
+warehouses that lined their way; the lights were few; beneath the looming
+buildings the shadows were many and dense. Here and there dreary and
+cheerless public houses appeared, with lighted windows conspicuous in a
+lightless waste. From time to time, as they hurried on, they encountered,
+and made wide detours to escape contact with knots of wayfarers--men
+debased and begrimed, with dreary and slatternly women, arm in arm,
+zigzaging widely across the sidewalks, chorusing with sodden voices the
+burden of some popularized ballad. The cheapened, sentimental refrains
+echoed sadly between benighted walls....
+
+Kirkwood shuddered, sticking close to Calendar's side. Life's naked
+brutalities had theretofore been largely out of his ken. He had heard of
+slums, had even ventured to mouth politely moral platitudes on the subject
+of overcrowding in great centers of population, but in the darkest flights
+of imagination had never pictured to himself anything so unspeakably
+foul and hopeless as this.... And they were come hither seeking--Dorothy
+Calendar! He was unable to conceive what manner of villainy could be
+directed against her, that she must be looked for in such surroundings.
+
+After some ten minutes' steady walking, Calendar turned aside with a
+muttered word, and dived down a covered, dark and evil-smelling passageway
+that seemed to lead toward the river.
+
+Mastering his involuntary qualms, Kirkwood followed.
+
+Some ten or twelve paces from its entrance the passageway swerved at a
+right angle, continuing three yards or so to end in a blank wall, wherefrom
+a flickering, inadequate gas-lamp jutted. At this point a stone platform,
+perhaps four feet square, was discovered, from the edge of which a flight
+of worn and slimy stone steps led down to a permanent boat-landing, where
+another gas-light flared gustily despite the protection of its frame of
+begrimed glass.
+
+"Good Lord!" exclaimed the young man. "What, in Heaven's name, Calendar--?"
+
+"Bermondsey Old Stairs. Come on."
+
+They descended to the landing-stage. Beneath them the Pool slept, a sheet
+of polished ebony, whispering to itself, lapping with small stealthy
+gurgles angles of masonry and ancient piles. On the farther bank tall
+warehouses reared square old-time heads, their uncompromising, rugged
+profile relieved here and there by tapering mastheads. A few, scattering,
+feeble lights were visible. Nothing moved save the river and the wind.
+
+The landing itself they found quite deserted; something which the
+adventurer comprehended with a nod which, like its accompanying,
+inarticulate ejaculation, might have been taken to indicate either
+satisfaction or disgust. He ignored Kirkwood altogether, for the time
+being, and presently produced a small, bright object, which, applied to his
+lips, proved to be a boatswain's whistle. He sounded two blasts, one long,
+one brief.
+
+There fell a lull, Kirkwood watching the other and wondering what next
+would happen. Calendar paced restlessly to and fro upon the narrow landing,
+now stopping to incline an ear to catch some anticipated sound, now
+searching with sweeping glances the black reaches of the Pool.
+
+Finally, consulting his watch, "Almost ten," he announced.
+
+"We're in time?"
+
+"Can't say.... Damn! ... If that infernal boat would only show up--"
+
+He was lifting the whistle to sound a second summons when a rowboat rounded
+a projecting angle formed by the next warehouse down stream, and with
+clanking oar-locks swung in toward the landing. On her thwarts two figures,
+dipping and rising, labored with the sweeps. As they drew in, the man
+forward shipped his blades, and rising, scrambled to the bows in order to
+grasp an iron mooring-ring set in the wall. The other awkwardly took in his
+oars and, as the current swung the stern downstream, placed a hand palm
+downward upon the bottom step to hold the boat steady.
+
+Calendar waddled to the brink of the stage, grunting with relief.
+
+"The other man?" he asked brusquely. "Has he gone aboard? Or is this the
+first trip to-night?"
+
+One of the watermen nodded assent to the latter question, adding gruffly:
+"Seen nawthin' of 'im, sir."
+
+"Very good," said Calendar, as if he doubted whether it were very good or
+bad. "We'll wait a bit."
+
+"Right-o!" agreed the waterman civilly.
+
+Calendar turned back, his small eyes glimmering with satisfaction. Fumbling
+in one coat pocket he brought to light a cigar-case. "Have a smoke?" he
+suggested with a show of friendliness. "By Heaven, I was beginnin' to get
+worried!"
+
+"As to what?" inquired Kirkwood pointedly, selecting a cigar.
+
+He got no immediate reply, but felt Calendar's sharp eyes upon him while he
+manoeuvered with matches for a light.
+
+"That's so," it came at length. "You don't know. I kind of forgot for a
+minute; somehow you seemed on the inside."
+
+Kirkwood laughed lightly. "I've experienced something of the same sensation
+in the past few hours."
+
+"Don't doubt it." Calendar was watching him narrowly. "I suppose," he put
+it to him abruptly, "you haven't changed your mind?"
+
+"Changed my mind?"
+
+"About coming in with me."
+
+"My dear sir, I can have no mind to change until a plain proposition is
+laid before me."
+
+"Hmm!" Calendar puffed vigorously until it occurred to him to change the
+subject. "You won't mind telling me what happened to you and Dorothy?"
+
+"Certainly not."
+
+Calendar drew nearer and Kirkwood, lowering his voice, narrated briefly the
+events since he had left the Pless in Dorothy's company.
+
+Her father followed him intently, interrupting now and again with
+exclamation or pertinent question; as, Had Kirkwood been able to see the
+face of the man in No. 9, Frognall Street? The negative answer seemed to
+disconcert him.
+
+"Youngster, you say? Blam' if I can lay my mind to _him_! Now if that
+Mulready--"
+
+"It would have been impossible for Mulready--whoever he is--to recover and
+get to Craven Street before we did," Kirkwood pointed out.
+
+"Well--go on." But when the tale was told, "It's that scoundrel, Mulready!"
+the man affirmed with heat. "It's his hand--I know him. I might have had
+sense enough to see he'd take the first chance to hand me the double-cross.
+Well, this does for _him_, all right!" Calendar lowered viciously at the
+river. "You've been blame' useful," he told Kirkwood assertively. "If
+it hadn't been for you, I don't know where _I'd_ be now,--nor Dorothy,
+either,"--an obvious afterthought. "There's no particular way I can show my
+appreciation, I suppose? Money--?"
+
+"I've got enough to last me till I reach New York, thank you."
+
+"Well, if the time ever comes, just shout for George B. I won't be
+wanting.... I only wish you were with us; but that's out of the question."
+
+"Doubtless ..."
+
+"No two ways about it. I bet anything you've got a conscience concealed
+about your person. What? You're an honest man, eh?"
+
+"I don't want to sound immodest," returned Kirkwood, amused.
+
+"You don't need to worry about that.... But an honest man's got no business
+in _my_ line." He glanced again at his watch. "Damn that Mulready! I wonder
+if he was 'cute enough to take another way? Or did he think ... The fool!"
+
+He cut off abruptly, seeming depressed by the thought that he might have
+been outwitted; and, clasping hands behind his back, chewed savagely on his
+cigar, watching the river. Kirkwood found himself somewhat wearied; the
+uselessness of his presence there struck him with added force. He bethought
+him of his boat-train, scheduled to leave a station miles distant, in an
+hour and a half. If he missed it, he would be stranded in a foreign land,
+penniless and practically without friends--Brentwick being away and all the
+rest of his circle of acquaintances on the other side of the Channel. Yet
+he lingered, in poor company, daring fate that he might see the end of the
+affair. Why?
+
+There was only one honest answer to that question. He stayed on because of
+his interest in a girl whom he had known for a matter of three hours, at
+most. It was insensate folly on his part, ridiculous from any point of
+view. But he made no move to go.
+
+The slow minutes lengthened monotonously.
+
+There came a sound from the street level. Calendar held up a hand of
+warning. "Here they come! Steady!" he said tensely. Kirkwood, listening
+intently, interpreted the noise as a clash of hoofs upon cobbles.
+
+Calendar turned to the boat.
+
+"Sheer off," he ordered. "Drop out of sight. I'll whistle when I want you."
+
+"Aye, aye, sir."
+
+The boat slipped noiselessly away with the current and in an instant was
+lost to sight. Calendar plucked at Kirkwood's sleeve, drawing him into the
+shadow of the steps. "E-easy," he whispered; "and, I say, lend me a hand,
+will you, if Mulready turns ugly?"
+
+"Oh, yes," assented Kirkwood, with a nonchalance not entirely unassumed.
+
+The racket drew nearer and ceased; the hush that fell thereafter seemed
+only accentuated by the purling of the river. It was ended by footsteps
+echoing in the covered passageway. Calendar craned his thick neck round the
+shoulder of stone, reconnoitering the landing and stairway.
+
+"Thank God!" he said under his breath. "I was right, after all!"
+
+A man's deep tones broke out above. "This way. Mind the steps; they're a
+bit slippery, Miss Dorothy."
+
+"But my father--?" came the girl's voice, attuned to doubt.
+
+"Oh, he'll be along--if he isn't waiting now, in the boat."
+
+They descended, the man leading. At the foot, without a glance to right or
+left, he advanced to the edge of the stage, leaning out over the rail as if
+endeavoring to locate the rowboat. At once the girl appeared, moving to his
+side.
+
+"But, Mr. Mulready--"
+
+The girl's words were drowned by a prolonged blast on the boatswain's
+whistle at her companion's lips; the shorter one followed in due course.
+Calendar edged forward from Kirkwood's side.
+
+"But what shall we do if my father isn't here? Wait?"
+
+"No; best not to; best to get on the _Alethea_ as soon as possible, Miss
+Calendar. We can send the boat back."
+
+"'Once aboard the lugger the girl is mine'--eh, Mulready?--to say nothing
+of the loot!"
+
+If Calendar's words were jocular, his tone conveyed a different impression
+entirely. Both man and girl wheeled right about to face him, the one with a
+strangled oath, the other with a low cry.
+
+"The devil!" exclaimed this Mr. Mulready.
+
+"Oh! My father!" the girl voiced her recognition of him.
+
+"Not precisely one and the same person," commented Calendar suavely.
+"But--er--thanks, just as much.... You see, Mulready, when I make an
+appointment, I keep it."
+
+"We'd begun to get a bit anxious about you--" Mulready began defensively.
+
+"So I surmised, from what Mrs. Hallam and Mr. Kirkwood told me.... Well?"
+
+The man found no ready answer. He fell back a pace to the railing, his
+features working with his deep chagrin. The murky flare of the gas-lamp
+overhead fell across a face handsome beyond the ordinary but marred by a
+sullen humor and seamed with indulgence: a face that seemed hauntingly
+familiar until Kirkwood in a flash of visual memory reconstructed the
+portrait of a man who lingered over a dining-table, with two empty chairs
+for company. This, then, was he whom Mrs. Hallam had left at the Pless; a
+tall, strong man, very heavy about the chest and shoulders....
+
+"Why, my dear friend," Calendar was taunting him, "you don't seem overjoyed
+to see me, for all your wild anxiety! 'Pon my word, you act as if you
+hadn't expected me--and our engagement so clearly understood, at that! ...
+Why, you fool!"--here the mask of irony was cast. "Did you think for a
+moment I'd let myself be nabbed by that yap from Scotland Yard? Were you
+banking on that? I give you my faith I ambled out under his very nose! ...
+Dorothy, my dear," turning impatiently from Mulready, "where's that bag?"
+
+The girl withdrew a puzzled gaze from Mulready's face, (it was apparent to
+Kirkwood that this phase of the affair was no more enigmatic to him than to
+her), and drew aside a corner of her cloak, disclosing the gladstone bag,
+securely grasped in one gloved hand.
+
+"I have it, thanks to Mr. Kirkwood," she said quietly.
+
+Kirkwood chose that moment to advance from the shadow. Mulready started and
+fixed him with a troubled and unfriendly stare. The girl greeted him with a
+note of sincere pleasure in her surprise.
+
+"Why, Mr. Kirkwood! ... But I left you at Mrs. Hallam's!"
+
+Kirkwood bowed, smiling openly at Mulready's discomfiture.
+
+"By your father's grace, I came with him," he said. "You ran away without
+saying good night, you know, and I'm a jealous creditor."
+
+She laughed excitedly, turning to Calendar. "But _you_ were to meet me at
+Mrs. Hallam's?"
+
+"Mulready was good enough to try to save me the trouble, my dear. He's an
+unselfish soul, Mulready. Fortunately it happened that I came along not
+five minutes after he'd carried you off. How was that, Dorothy?"
+
+Her glance wavered uneasily between the two, Mulready and her father. The
+former, shrugging to declare his indifference, turned his back squarely
+upon them. She frowned.
+
+"He came out of Mrs. Hallam's and got into the four-wheeler, saying you had
+sent him to take your place, and would join us on the _Alethea_."
+
+"So-o! How about it, Mulready?"
+
+The man swung back slowly. "What you choose to think," he said after a
+deliberate pause.
+
+"Well, never mind! We'll go over the matter at our leisure on the
+_Alethea_."
+
+There was in the adventurer's tone a menace, bitter and not to be ignored;
+which Mulready saw fit to challenge.
+
+"I think not," he declared; "I think not. I'm weary of your addle-pated
+suspicions. It'd be plain to any one but a fool that I acted for the best
+interests of all concerned in this matter. If you're not content to see it
+in that light, I'm done."
+
+"Oh, if you want to put it that way, I'm _not_ content, Mr. Mulready,"
+retorted Calendar dangerously.
+
+"Please yourself. I bid you good evening and--good-by." The man took a step
+toward the stairs.
+
+Calendar dropped his right hand into his top-coat pocket. "Just a minute,"
+he said sweetly, and Mulready stopped. Abruptly the fat adventurer's
+smoldering resentment leaped in flame. "That'll be about all, Mr. Mulready!
+'Bout face, you hound, and get into that boat! D'you think I'll temporize
+with you till Doomsday? Then forget it. You're wrong, dead wrong. Your
+bluff's called, and"--with an evil chuckle--"I hold a full house,
+Mulready,--every chamber taken." He lifted meaningly the hand in the coat
+pocket. "Now, in with you."
+
+With a grin and a swagger of pure bravado Mulready turned and obeyed.
+Unnoticed of any, save perhaps Calendar himself, the boat had drawn in at
+the stage a moment earlier. Mulready dropped into it and threw himself
+sullenly upon the midships thwart.
+
+"Now, Dorothy, in you go, my dear," continued Calendar, with a
+self-satisfied wag of his head.
+
+Half dazed, to all seeming, she moved toward the boat. With clumsy and
+assertive gallantry her father stepped before her, offering his hand,--his
+hand which she did not touch; for, in the act of descending, she remembered
+and swung impulsively back to Kirkwood.
+
+"Good night, Mr. Kirkwood; good night,--I shan't forget."
+
+He took her hand and bowed above it; but when his head was lifted, he still
+retained her fingers in a lingering clasp.
+
+"Good night," he said reluctantly.
+
+The crass incongruity of her in that setting smote him with renewed force.
+Young, beautiful, dainty, brilliant and graceful in her pretty evening
+gown, she figured strangely against the gloomy background of the river, in
+those dull and mean surroundings of dank stone and rusted iron. She was
+like (he thought extravagantly) a whiff of flower-fragrance lost in the
+miasmatic vapors of a slough.
+
+The innocent appeal and allure of her face, upturned to his beneath the
+gas-light, wrought compassionately upon his sensitive and generous heart.
+He was aware of a little surge of blind rage against the conditions that
+had brought her to that spot, and against those whom he held responsible
+for those conditions.
+
+In a sudden flush of daring he turned and nodded coolly to Calendar. "With
+your permission," he said negligently; and drew the girl aside to the angle
+of the stairway.
+
+"Miss Calendar--" he began; but was interrupted.
+
+"Here--I say!"
+
+Calendar had started toward him angrily.
+
+Kirkwood calmly waved him back. "I want a word in private with your
+daughter, Mr. Calendar," he announced with quiet dignity. "I don't think
+you'll deny me? I've saved you some slight trouble to-night."
+
+Disgruntled, the adventurer paused. "Oh--_all_ right," he grumbled. "I
+don't see what ..." He returned to the boat.
+
+"Forgive me, Miss Calendar," continued Kirkwood nervously. "I know I've no
+right to interfere, but--"
+
+"Yes, Mr. Kirkwood?"
+
+"--but hasn't this gone far enough?" he floundered unhappily. "I can't like
+the look of things. Are you sure--sure that it's all right--with you, I
+mean?"
+
+She did not answer at once; but her eyes were kind and sympathetic. He
+plucked heart of their tolerance.
+
+"It isn't too late, yet," he argued. "Let me take you to your friends,--you
+must have friends in the city. But this--this midnight flight down the
+Thames, this atmosphere of stealth and suspicion, this--"
+
+"But my place is with my father, Mr. Kirkwood," she interposed. "I daren't
+doubt him--dare I?"
+
+"I ... suppose not."
+
+"So I must go with him.... I'm glad--thank you for caring, dear Mr.
+Kirkwood. And again, good night."
+
+"Good luck attend you," he muttered, following her to the boat.
+
+Calendar helped her in and turned back to Kirkwood with a look of arch
+triumph; Kirkwood wondered if he had overheard. Whether or no, he could
+afford to be magnanimous. Seizing Kirkwood's hand, he pumped it vigorously.
+
+"My dear boy, you've been an angel in disguise! And I guess you think me
+the devil in masquerade." He chuckled, in high conceit with himself over
+the turn of affairs. "Good night and--and fare thee well!" He dropped into
+the boat, seating himself to face the recalcitrant Mulready. "Cast off,
+there!"
+
+The boat dropped away, the oars lifting and falling. With a weariful sense
+of loneliness and disappointment, Kirkwood hung over the rail to watch them
+out of sight.
+
+A dozen feet of water lay between the stage and the boat. The girl's dress
+remained a spot of cheerful color; her face was a blur. As the watermen
+swung the bows down-stream, she looked back, lifting an arm spectral in its
+white sheath. Kirkwood raised his hat.
+
+The boat gathered impetus, momentarily diminishing in the night's illusory
+perspective; presently it was little more than a fugitive blot, gliding
+swiftly in midstream. And then, it was gone entirely, engulfed by the
+obliterating darkness.
+
+[Illustration: The boat gathered impetus.]
+
+Somewhat wearily the young man released the railing and ascended the
+stairs. "And that is the end!" he told himself, struggling with an acute
+sense of personal injury. He had been hardly used. For a few hours his
+life had been lightened by the ineffable glamor of Romance; mystery and
+adventure had engaged him, exorcising for the time the Shade of Care; he
+had served a fair woman and been associated with men whose ways, however
+questionable, were the ways of courage, hedged thickly about with perils.
+
+All that was at an end. Prosaic and workaday to-morrows confronted him in
+endless and dreary perspective; and he felt again upon his shoulder the
+bony hand of his familiar, Care....
+
+He sighed: "Ah, well!"
+
+Disconsolate and aggrieved, he gained the street. He was miles from St.
+Pancras, foot-weary, to all intents and purposes lost.
+
+In this extremity, Chance smiled upon him. The cabby who, at his initial
+instance, had traveled this weary way from Quadrant Mews, after the manner
+of his kind, ere turning back, had sought surcease of fatigue at the
+nearest public; from afar Kirkwood saw the four-wheeler at the curb, and
+made all haste toward it.
+
+Entering the gin-mill he found the cabby, soothed him with bitter, and,
+instructing him for St. Pancras with all speed, dropped, limp and listless
+with fatigue, into the conveyance.
+
+As it moved, he closed his eyes; the face of Dorothy Calendar shone out
+from the blank wall of his consciousness, like an illuminated picture cast
+upon a screen. She smiled upon him, her head high, her eyes tender and
+trustful. And he thought that her scarlet lips were sweet with promise and
+her glance a-brim with such a light as he had never dreamed to know.
+
+And now that he knew it and desired it, it was too late; an hour gone he
+might, by a nod of his head, have cast his fortunes with hers for weal or
+woe. But now ...
+
+Alas and alackaday, that Romance was no more!
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+
+DIVERSIONS OF A RUINED GENTLEMAN--RESUMED
+
+From the commanding elevation of the box, "Three 'n' six," enunciated the
+cabby, his tone that of a man prepared for trouble, acquainted with
+trouble, inclined to give trouble a welcome. His bloodshot eyes blinked
+truculently at his alighted fare. "Three 'n' six," he iterated
+aggressively.
+
+An adjacent but theretofore abstracted policeman pricked up his ears and
+assumed an intelligent expression.
+
+"Bermondsey Ol' Stairs to Sain' Pancras," argued the cabby assertively;
+"seven mile by th' radius; three 'n' six!"
+
+Kirkwood stood on the outer station platform, near the entrance to
+third-class waiting-rooms. Continuing to fumble through his pockets for an
+elusive sovereign purse, he looked up mildly at the man.
+
+"All right, cabby," he said, with pacific purpose; "you'll get your fare in
+half a shake."
+
+"Three 'n' six!" croaked the cabby, like a blowsy and vindictive parrot.
+
+The bobby strolled nearer.
+
+"Yes?" said Kirkwood, mildly diverted. "Why not sing it, cabby?"
+
+"Lor' lumme!" The cabby exploded with indignation, continuing to give a
+lifelike imitation of a rumpled parrot. "I 'ad trouble enough wif you at
+Bermondsey Ol' Stairs, hover that quid you promised, didn't I? Sing it! My
+heye!"
+
+"Quid, cabby?" And then, remembering that he had promised the fellow a
+sovereign for fast driving from Quadrant Mews, Kirkwood grinned broadly,
+eyes twinkling; for Mulready must have fallen heir to that covenant. "But
+you got the sovereign? You got it, didn't you, cabby?"
+
+The driver affirmed the fact with unnecessary heat and profanity and an
+amendment to the effect that he would have spoiled his fare's sanguinary
+conk had the outcome been less satisfactory.
+
+The information proved so amusing that Kirkwood, chuckling, forbore to
+resent the manner of its delivery, and, abandoning until a more favorable
+time the chase of the coy sovereign purse, extracted from one trouser
+pocket half a handful of large English small change.
+
+"Three shillings, six-pence," he counted the coins into the cabby's grimy
+and bloated paw; and added quietly: "The exact distance is rather less
+than, four miles, my man; your fare, precisely two shillings. You may keep
+the extra eighteen pence, for being such a conscientious blackguard,--or
+talk it over with the officer here. Please yourself."
+
+He nodded to the bobby, who, favorably impressed by the silk hat which
+Kirkwood, by diligent application of his sleeve during the cross-town ride,
+had managed to restore to a state somewhat approximating its erstwhile
+luster, smiled at the cabby a cold, hard smile. Whereupon the latter,
+smirking in unabashed triumph, spat on the pavement at Kirkwood's feet,
+gathered up the reins, and wheeled out.
+
+"A 'ard lot, sir," commented the policeman, jerking his helmeted head
+towards the vanishing four-wheeler.
+
+"Right you are," agreed Kirkwood amiably, still tickled by the knowledge
+that Mulready had been obliged to pay three times over for the ride that
+ended in his utter discomfiture. Somehow, Kirkwood had conceived no liking
+whatever for the man; Calendar he could, at a pinch, tolerate for his sense
+of humor, but Mulready--! "A surly dog," he thought him.
+
+Acknowledging the policeman's salute and restoring two shillings and a
+few fat copper pennies to his pocket, he entered the vast and echoing
+train-shed. In the act, his attention was attracted and immediately riveted
+by the spectacle of a burly luggage navvy in a blue jumper in the act of
+making off with a large, folding sign-board, of which the surface was
+lettered expansively with the advice, in red against a white background:
+
+BOAT-TRAIN LEAVES ON TRACK 3
+
+Incredulous yet aghast the young man gave instant chase to the navvy,
+overhauling him with no great difficulty. For your horny-handed British
+working-man is apparently born with two golden aphorisms in his mouth:
+"Look before you leap," and "Haste makes waste." He looks continually,
+seldom, if ever, leaps, and never is prodigal of his leisure.
+
+Excitedly Kirkwood touched the man's arm with a detaining hand.
+"Boat-train?" he gasped, pointing at the board.
+
+"Left ten minutes ago, thank you, sir."
+
+"Wel-l, but...! Of course I can get another train at Tilbury?"
+
+"For yer boat? No, sir, thank you, sir. Won't be another tryne till
+mornin', sir."
+
+"Oh-h!..."
+
+Aimlessly Kirkwood drifted away, his mind a blank.
+
+Sometime later he found himself on the steps outside the station, trying to
+stare out of countenance a glaring electric mineral-water advertisement on
+the farther side of the Euston Road.
+
+He was stranded....
+
+Beyond the spiked iron fence that enhedges the incurving drive, the roar of
+traffic, human, wheel and hoof, rose high for all the lateness of the hour:
+sidewalks groaning with the restless contact of hundreds of ill-shod
+feet; the roadway thundering--hansoms, four-wheelers, motor-cars, dwarfed
+coster-mongers' donkey-carts and ponderous, rumbling, C.-P. motor-vans,
+struggling for place and progress. For St. Pancras never sleeps.
+
+The misty air swam luminous with the light of electric signs as with the
+radiance of some lurid and sinister moon. The voice of London sounded in
+Kirkwood's ears, like the ominous purring of a somnolent brute beast,
+resting, gorged and satiated, ere rising again to devour. To devour--
+
+Stranded!...
+
+Distracted, he searched pocket after pocket, locating his watch, cigar- and
+cigarette-cases, match-box, penknife--all the minutiae of pocket-hardware
+affected by civilized man; with old letters, a card-case, a square envelope
+containing his steamer ticket; but no sovereign purse. His small-change
+pocket held less than three shillings--two and eight, to be exact--and a
+brass key, which he failed to recognize as one of his belongings.
+
+And that was all. At sometime during the night he had lost (or been
+cunningly bereft of?) that little purse of chamois-skin containing the
+three golden sovereigns which he had been husbanding to pay his steamer
+expenses, and which, if only he had them now, would stand between him and
+starvation and a night in the streets.
+
+And, searching his heart, he found it brimming with gratitude to Mulready,
+for having relieved him of the necessity of settling with the cabby.
+
+"Vagabond?" said Kirkwood musingly. "Vagabond?" He repeated the word softly
+a number of times, to get the exact flavor of it, and found it little to
+his taste. And yet...
+
+He thrust both hands deep in his trouser pockets and stared purposelessly
+into space, twisting his eyebrows out of alignment and crookedly protruding
+his lower lip.
+
+If Brentwick were only in town--But he wasn't, and wouldn't be, within the
+week.
+
+"No good waiting here," he concluded. Composing his face, he reentered the
+station. There were his trunks, of course. He couldn't leave them standing
+on the station platform for ever.
+
+He found the luggage-room and interviewed a mechanically courteous
+attendant, who, as the result of profound deliberation, advised him to try
+his luck at the lost-luggage room, across the station. He accepted the
+advice; it was a foregone conclusion that his effects had not been conveyed
+to the Tilbury dock; they could not have been loaded into the luggage van
+without his personal supervision. Still, anything was liable to happen when
+his unlucky star was in the ascendant.
+
+He found them in the lost-luggage room.
+
+A clerk helped him identify the articles and ultimately clucked with a
+perfunctory note: "Sixpence each, please."
+
+"I--ah--pardon?"
+
+"Sixpence each, the fixed charge, sir. For every twenty-four hours or
+fraction thereof, sixpence per parcel."
+
+"Oh, thank you so much," said Kirkwood sweetly. "I will call to-morrow."
+
+"Very good, sir. Thank you, sir."
+
+"Five times sixpence is two-and-six," Kirkwood computed, making his way
+hastily out of the station, lest a worse thing befall him. "No, bless your
+heart!--not while two and eight represents the sum total of my fortune."
+
+He wandered out into the night; he could not linger round the station till
+dawn; and what profit to him if he did? Even were he to ransom his trunks,
+one can scarcely change one's clothing in a public waiting-room.
+
+Somewhere in the distance a great clock chimed a single stroke, freighted
+sore with melancholy. It knelled the passing of the half-hour after
+midnight; a witching hour, when every public shuts up tight, and gentlemen
+in top-hats and evening dress are doomed to pace the pave till day (barring
+they have homes or visible means of support)--till day, when pawnshops open
+and such personal effects as watches and hammered silver cigar-cases may be
+hypothecated.
+
+Sable garments fluttering, Care fell into step with Philip Kirkwood; Care
+the inexorable slipped a skeleton arm through his and would not be denied;
+Care the jade clung affectionately to his side, refusing to be jilted.
+
+"Ah, you thought you would forget me?" chuckled the fleshless lips by his
+ear. "But no, my boy; I'm with you now, for ever and a day. 'Misery loves
+company,' and it wouldn't be pretty of me to desert you in this extremity,
+would it? Come, let us beguile the hours till dawn with conversation.
+Here's a sprightly subject: What are you going to do, Mr. Kirkwood? _What
+are you going to do?_"
+
+But Kirkwood merely shook a stubborn head and gazed straight before him,
+walking fast through ways he did not recognize, and pretending not to hear.
+None the less the sense of Care's solicitous query struck like a pain into
+his consciousness. What was he to do?
+
+An hour passed.
+
+Denied the opportunity to satisfy its beast hunger and thirst, humanity
+goes off to its beds. In that hour London quieted wonderfully; the streets
+achieved an effect of deeper darkness, the skies, lowering, looked down
+with a blush less livid for the shamelessness of man; cab ranks lengthened;
+solitary footsteps added unto themselves loud, alarming, offensive echoes;
+policemen, strolling with lamps blazing on their breasts, became as
+lightships in a trackless sea; each new-found street unfolded its
+perspective like a canyon of mystery, and yet teeming with a hundred masked
+hazards; the air acquired a smell more clear and clean, an effect more
+volatile; and the night-mist thickened until it studded one's attire with
+myriads of tiny buttons, bright as diamond dust.
+
+Through this long hour Kirkwood walked without a pause.
+
+Another clock, somewhere, clanged resonantly twice.
+
+The world was very still....
+
+And so, wandering foot-loose in a wilderness of ways, turning aimlessly,
+now right, now left, he found himself in a street he knew, yet seemed not
+to know: a silent, black street one brief block in length, walled with
+dead and lightless dwellings, haunted by his errant memory; a street whose
+atmosphere was heavy with impalpable essence of desuetude; in two words,
+Frognall Street.
+
+Kirkwood identified it with a start and a guilty tremor. He stopped
+stock-still, in an unreasoning state of semi-panic, arrested by a silly
+impulse to turn and fly; as if the bobby, whom he descried approaching him
+with measured stride, pausing new and again to try a door or flash
+his bull's-eye down an area, were to be expected to identify the man
+responsible for that damnable racket raised ere midnight in vacant Number
+9!
+
+Oddly enough, the shock of recognition brought him to his
+senses,--temporarily. He was even able to indulge himself in a quiet,
+sobering grin at his own folly. He passed the policeman with a nod and a
+cool word in response to the man's good-natured, "Good-night, sir." Number
+9 was on the other side of the street; and he favored its blank and dreary
+elevation with a prolonged and frank stare--that profited him nothing, by
+the way. For a crazy notion popped incontinently into his head, and would
+not be cast forth.
+
+At the corner he swerved and crossed, still possessed of his devil of
+inspiration. It would be unfair to him to say that he did not struggle to
+resist it, for he did, because it was fairly and egregiously asinine; yet
+struggling, his feet trod the path to which it tempted him.
+
+"Why," he expostulated feebly, "I might's well turn back and beat that
+bobby over the head with my cane!..."
+
+But at the moment his hand was in his change pocket, feeling over that same
+brass door-key which earlier he had been unable to account for, and he was
+informing himself how very easy it would have been for the sovereign purse
+to have dropped from his waistcoat pocket while he was sliding on his ear
+down the dark staircase. To recover it meant, at the least, shelter for
+the night, followed by a decent, comfortable and sustaining morning meal.
+Fortified by both he could redeem his luggage, change to clothing more
+suitable for daylight traveling, pawn his valuables, and enter into
+negotiations with the steamship company for permission to exchange his
+passage, with a sum to boot, for transportation on another liner. A most
+feasible project! A temptation all but irresistible!
+
+But then--the risk.... Supposing (for the sake of argument) the customary
+night-watchman to have taken up a transient residence in Number 9;
+supposing the police to have entered with him and found the stunned man on
+the second floor: would the watchman not be vigilant for another nocturnal
+marauder? would not the police now, more than ever, be keeping a wary eye
+on that house of suspicious happenings?
+
+Decidedly, to reenter it would be to incur a deadly risk. And yet,
+undoubtedly, beyond question! his sovereign purse was waiting for him
+somewhere on the second flight of stairs; while as his means of clandestine
+entry lay warm in his fingers--the key to the dark entry, which he had by
+force of habit pocketed after locking the door.
+
+He came to the Hog-in-the-Pound. Its windows were dim with low-turned
+gas-lights. Down the covered alleyway, Quadrant Mews slept in a dusk but
+fitfully relieved by a lamp or two round which the friendly mist clung
+close and thick.
+
+There would be none to see....
+
+Skulking, throat swollen with fear, heart beating like a snare-drum,
+Kirkwood took his chance. Buttoning his overcoat collar up to his chin
+and cursing the fact that his hat must stand out like a chimney-pot on a
+detached house, he sped on tiptoe down the cobbled way and close beneath
+the house-walls of Quadrant Mews. But, half-way in, he stopped, confounded
+by an unforeseen difficulty. How was he to identify the narrow entry of
+Number 9, whose counterparts doubtless communicated with the mews from
+every residence on four sides of the city block?
+
+The low inner tenements were yet high enough to hide the rear elevations of
+Frognall Street houses, and the mist was heavy besides; otherwise he had
+made shift to locate Number 9 by ticking off the dwellings from the corner.
+If he went on, hit or miss, the odds were anything-you-please to one that
+he would blunder into the servant's quarters of some inhabited house,
+and--be promptly and righteously sat upon by the service-staff, while the
+bobby was summoned.
+
+Be that as it might--he almost lost his head when he realized this--escape
+was already cut off by the way he had come. Some one, or, rather, some two
+men were entering the alley. He could hear the tramping and shuffle of
+clumsy feet, and voices that muttered indistinctly. One seemed to trip over
+something, and cursed. The other laughed; the voices grew more loud. They
+were coming his way. He dared no longer vacillate.
+
+But--which passage should he choose?
+
+He moved on with more haste than discretion. One heel slipped on a cobble
+time-worn to glassy smoothness; he lurched, caught himself up in time to
+save a fall, lost his hat, recovered it, and was discovered. A voice,
+maudlin with drink, hailed and called upon him to stand and give an account
+of himself, "like a goo' feller." Another tempted him with offers of drink
+and sociable confabulation. He yielded not; adamantine to the seductive
+lure, he picked up his heels and ran. Those behind him, remarking with
+resentment the amazing fact that an intimate of the mews should run away
+from liquor, cursed and made after him, veering, staggering, howling like
+ravening animals.
+
+For all their burden of intoxication, they knew the ground by instinct and
+from long association. They gained on him. Across the way a window-sash
+went up with a bang, and a woman screamed. Through the only other entrance
+to the mews a belated cab was homing; its driver, getting wind of the
+unusual, pulled up, blocking the way, and added his advice to the uproar.
+
+Caught thus between two fires, and with his persecutors hard upon him,
+Kirkwood dived into the nearest black hole of a passageway and in sheer
+desperation flung himself, key in hand, against the door at the end. Mark
+how his luck served him who had forsworn her! He found a keyhole and
+inserted the key. It turned. So did the knob. The door gave inward. He fell
+in with it, slammed it, shot the bolts, and, panting, leaned against its
+panels, in a pit of everlasting night but--saved!--for the time being, at
+all events.
+
+Outside somebody brushed against one wall, cannoned to the other, brought
+up with a crash against the door, and, perforce at a standstill, swore from
+his heart.
+
+"Gorblimy!" he declared feelingly. "I'd 'a' took my oath I sore'm run in
+'ere!" And then, in answer to an inaudible question: "No, 'e ain't. Gorn
+an' let the fool go to 'ell. 'Oo wants 'im to share goo' liker? Not I!..."
+
+Joining his companion he departed, leaving behind him a trail of
+sulphur-tainted air. The mews quieted gradually.
+
+Indoors Kirkwood faced unhappily the enigma of fortuity, wondering: Was
+this by any possibility Number 9?
+
+The key had fitted; the bolts had been drawn on the inside; and while
+the key had been one of ordinary pattern and would no doubt have proven
+effectual with any one of a hundred common locks, the finger of probability
+seemed to indicate that his luck had brought him back to Number 9.
+
+In spite of all this, he was sensible of little confidence; though this
+were truly Number 9, his freedom still lay on the knees of the gods, his
+very life, belike, was poised, tottering, on a pinnacle of chance.
+
+In the end, taking heart of desperation, he stooped and removed his shoes;
+a precaution which later appealed to his sense of the ridiculous, in view
+of the racket he had raised in entering, but which at the moment seemed
+most natural and in accordance with common sense. Then rising, he held his
+breath, staring and listening. About him the pitch darkness was punctuated
+with fading points of fire, and in his ears was a noise of strange
+whisperings, very creepy--until, gritting his teeth, he controlled his
+nerves and gradually realized that he was alone, the silence undisturbed.
+
+He went forward gingerly, feeling his way like a blind man on strange
+ground. Ere long he stumbled over a door-sill and found that the walls
+of the passage had fallen away; he had entered a room, a black cavern of
+indeterminate dimensions. Across this he struck at random, walked himself
+flat against a wall, felt his way along to an open door, and passed through
+to another apartment as dark as the first.
+
+Here, endeavoring to make a circuit of the walls, he succeeded in throwing
+himself bodily across a bed, which creaked horribly; and for a full minute
+lay as he had fallen, scarce daring to think. But nothing followed, and he
+got up and found a shut door which let him into yet a third room, wherein
+he barked both shins on a chair; and escaped to a fourth whose atmosphere
+was highly flavored with reluctant odors of bygone cookery, stale water and
+damp plumbing--probably the kitchen. Thence progressing over complaining
+floors through what may have been the servants' hall, a large room with
+a table in the middle and a number of promiscuous chairs (witness his
+tortured shins!), he finally blundered into the basement hallway.
+
+By now a little calmer, he felt assured that this was really Number 9,
+Frognall Street, and a little happier about it all, though not even
+momentarily forgetful of the potential police and night-watchman.
+
+However, he mounted the steps to the ground floor without adventure and
+found himself at last in the same dim and ghostly hall which he had entered
+some six hours before; the mockery of dusk admitted by the fan-light was
+just strong enough to enable him to identify the general lay of the land
+and arrangement of furniture.
+
+More confidently with each uncontested step, he continued his quest.
+Elation was stirring his spirit when he gained the first floor and moved
+toward the foot of the second flight, approaching the spot whereat he was
+to begin the search for the missing purse. The knowledge that he lacked
+means of obtaining illumination deterred him nothing; he had some hope
+of finding matches in one of the adjacent rooms, but, failing that, was
+prepared to ascend the stairs on all fours, feeling every inch of their
+surface, if it took hours. Ever an optimistic soul, instinctively inclined
+to father faith with a hope, he felt supremely confident that his search
+would not prove fruitless, that he would win early release from his
+temporary straits.
+
+And thus it fell out that, at the instant he was thinking it time to begin
+to crawl and hunt, his stockinged feet came into contact with something
+heavy, yielding, warm--something that moved, moaned, and caused his hair to
+bristle and his flesh to creep.
+
+We will make allowances for him; all along he had gone on the assumption
+that his antagonist of the dark stairway would have recovered and made off
+with all expedition, in the course of ten or twenty minutes, at most, from
+the time of his accident. To find him still there was something entirely
+outside of Kirkwood's reckoning: he would as soon have thought to encounter
+say, Calendar,--would have preferred the latter, indeed. But this fellow
+whose disability was due to his own interference, who was reasonably to be
+counted upon to raise the very deuce and all of a row!
+
+The initial shock, however shattering to his equanimity, soon, lost effect.
+The man evidently remained unconscious, in fact had barely moved; while the
+moan that Kirkwood heard, had been distressingly faint.
+
+"Poor devil!" murmured the young man. "He must be in a pretty bad way, for
+sure!" He knelt, compassion gentling his heart, and put one hand to the
+insentient face. A warm sweat moistened his fingers; his palm was fanned by
+steady respiration.
+
+Immeasurably perplexed, the American rose, slipped on his shoes and
+buttoned them, thinking hard the while. What ought he to do? Obviously
+flight suggested itself,--incontinent flight, anticipating the man's
+recovery. On the other hand, indubitably the latter had sustained such
+injury that consciousness, when it came to him, would hardly be reinforced
+by much aggressive power. Moreover, it was to be remembered that the one
+was in that house with quite as much warrant as the other, unless Kirkwood
+had drawn a rash inference from the incident of the ragged sentry. The two
+of them were mutual, if antagonistic, trespassers; neither would dare
+bring about the arrest of the other. And then--and this was not the least
+consideration to influence Kirkwood--perhaps the fellow would die if he got
+no attention.
+
+Kirkwood shut his teeth grimly. "I'm no assassin," he informed himself, "to
+strike and run. If I've maimed this poor devil and there are consequences,
+I'll stand 'em. The Lord knows it doesn't matter a damn to anybody, not
+even to me, what happens to me; while _he_ may be valuable."
+
+Light upon the subject, actual as well as figurative, seemed to be the
+first essential; his mind composed, Kirkwood set himself in search of it.
+The floor he was on, however, afforded him no assistance; the mantels were
+guiltless of candles and he discovered no matches, either in the wide and
+silent drawing-room, with its ghastly furniture, like mummies in their
+linen swathings, or in the small boudoir at the back. He was to look either
+above or below, it seemed.
+
+After some momentary hesitation, he went up-stairs, his ascent marked by a
+single and grateful accident; half-way to the top he trod on an object that
+clinked underfoot, and, stooping, retrieved the lost purse. Thus was he
+justified of his temerity; the day was saved--that is, to-morrow was.
+
+The rooms of the second-floor were bedchambers, broad, deep, stately,
+inhabited by seven devils of loneliness. In one, on a dresser, Kirkwood
+found a stump of candle in a china candlestick; the two charred ends of
+matches at its base were only an irritating discovery, however--evidence
+that real matches had been the mode in Number 9, at some remote date.
+Disgusted and oppressed by cumulative inquisitiveness, he took the
+candle-end back to the hall; he would have given much for the time and
+means to make a more detailed investigation into the secret of the house.
+
+Perhaps it was mostly his hope of chancing on some clue to the mystery of
+Dorothy Calender--bewitching riddle that she was!--that fascinated his
+imagination so completely. Aside from her altogether, the great house that
+stood untenanted, yet in such complete order, so self-contained in its
+darkened quiet, intrigued him equally with the train of inexplicable events
+that had brought him within its walls. Now--since his latest entrance--his
+vision had adjusted itself to cope with the obscurity to some extent; and
+the street lights, meagerly reflected through the windows from the bosom of
+a sullen pall of cloud, low-swung above the city, had helped him to piece
+together many a detail of decoration and furnishing, alike somber and
+richly dignified. Kirkwood told himself that the owner, whoever he might
+be, was a man of wealth and taste inherited from another age; he had found
+little of meretricious to-day in the dwelling, much that was solid and
+sedate and homely, and--Victorian.... He could have wished for more; a box
+of early Victorian vestas had been highly acceptable.
+
+Making his way down-stairs to the stricken man--who was quite as he had
+been--Kirkwood bent over and thrust rifling fingers into his pockets,
+regardless of the wretched sense of guilt and sneakishness imparted by the
+action, stubbornly heedless of the possibility of the man's awakening to
+find himself being searched and robbed.
+
+In the last place he sought, which should (he realized) have been the
+first, to wit, the fob pocket of the white waistcoat, he found a small gold
+matchbox, packed tight with wax vestas; and, berating himself for crass
+stupidity--he had saved a deal of time and trouble by thinking of this
+before--lighted the candle.
+
+As its golden flame shot up with scarce a tremor, preyed upon by a
+perfectly excusable concern, he bent to examine the man's countenance....
+The arm which had partly hidden it had fallen back into a natural position.
+It was a young face that gleamed pallid in the candlelight--a face unlined,
+a little vapid and insignificant, with features regular and neat, betraying
+few characteristics other than the purely negative attributes of a
+character as yet unformed, possibly unformable; much the sort of a face
+that he might have expected to see, remembering those thin and pouting lips
+that before had impressed him. Its owner was probably little more than
+twenty. In his attire there was a suspicion of a fop's preciseness, aside
+from its accidental disarray; the cut of his waistcoat was the extreme of
+the then fashion, the white tie (twisted beneath one ear) an exaggerated
+"butterfly," his collar nearly an inch too tall; and he was shod with pumps
+suitable only for the dancing-floor,--a whim of the young-bloods of London
+of that year.
+
+"I can't make him out at all!" declared Kirkwood. "The son of a gentleman
+too weak to believe that cubs need licking into shape? Reared to man's
+estate, so sheltered from the wicked world that he never grew a bark?...
+The sort that never had a quarrel in his life, 'cept with his tailor?...
+Now what the devil is _this_ thing doing in this midnight mischief?...
+Damn!"
+
+It was most exasperating, the incongruity of the boy's appearance assorted
+with his double role of persecutor of distressed damsels and nocturnal
+house-breaker!
+
+Kirkwood bent closer above the motionless head, with puzzled eyes striving
+to pin down some elusive resemblance that he thought to trace in those
+vacuous features--a resemblance to some one he had seen, or known, at some
+past time, somewhere, somehow.
+
+"I give it up. Guess I'm mistaken. Anyhow, five young Englishmen out of
+every ten of his class are just as blond and foolish. Now let's see how bad
+he's hurt."
+
+With hands strong and gentle, he turned the round, light head. Then, "Ah!"
+he commented in the accent of comprehension. For there was an angry looking
+bump at the base of the skull; and, the skin having been broken, possibly
+in collision with the sharp-edged newel-post, a little blood had stained
+and matted the straw-colored hair.
+
+Kirkwood let the head down and took thought. Recalling a bath-room on the
+floor above, thither he went, unselfishly forgetful of his predicament if
+discovered, and, turning on the water, sopped his handkerchief until it
+dripped. Then, returning, he took the boy's head on his knees, washed the
+wound, purloined another handkerchief (of silk, with a giddy border)
+from the other's pocket, and of this manufactured a rude but serviceable
+bandage.
+
+Toward the conclusion of his attentions, the sufferer began to show signs
+of returning animation. He stirred restlessly, whimpered a little, and
+sighed. And Kirkwood, in consternation, got up.
+
+"So!" he commented ruefully. "I guess I am an ass, all right--taking all
+that trouble for you, my friend. If I've got a grain of sense left, this is
+my cue to leave you alone in your glory."
+
+He was lingering only to restore to the boy's pockets such articles as he
+had removed in the search for matches,--the match-box, a few silver coins,
+a bulky sovereign purse, a handsome, plain gold watch, and so forth. But
+ere he concluded he was aware that the boy was conscious, that his eyes,
+open and blinking in the candlelight, were upon him.
+
+They were blue eyes, blue and shallow as a doll's, and edged with long,
+fine lashes. Intelligence, of a certain degree, was rapidly informing them.
+Kirkwood returned their questioning glance, transfixed in indecision, his
+primal impulse to cut-and-run for it was gone; he had nothing to fear from
+this child who could not prevent his going whenever he chose to go; while
+by remaining he might perchance worm from him something about the girl.
+
+"You're feeling better?" He was almost surprised to hear his own voice put
+the query.
+
+"I--I think so. Ow, my head!... I say, you chap, whoever you are, what's
+happened?... I want to get up." The boy added peevishly: "Help a fellow,
+can't you?"
+
+"You've had a nasty fall," Kirkwood observed evenly, passing an arm
+beneath the boy's shoulder and helping him to a sitting position. "Do you
+remember?"
+
+The other snuffled childishly and scrubbed across the floor to rest his
+back against the wall.
+
+"Why-y ... I remember fallin'; and then ... I woke up and it was all dark
+and my head achin' fit to split. I presume I went to sleep again ... I say,
+what're you, doing here?"
+
+Instead of replying, Kirkwood lifted a warning finger.
+
+"Hush!" he said tensely, alarmed by noises in the street. "You don't
+suppose--?"
+
+He had been conscious of a carriage rolling up from the corner, as well as
+that it had drawn up (presumably) before a near-by dwelling. Now the rattle
+of a key in the hall-door was startlingly audible. Before he could move,
+the door itself opened with a slam.
+
+Kirkwood moved toward the stair-head, and drew back with a cry of disgust.
+"Too late!" he told himself bitterly; his escape was cut off. He could run
+up-stairs and hide, of course, but the boy would inform against him and....
+
+He buttoned up his coat, settled his hat on his head, and moved near the
+candle, where it rested on the floor. One glimpse would suffice to show him
+the force of the intruders, and one move of his foot put out the light;
+then--_perhaps_--he might be able to rush them.
+
+Below, a brief pause had followed the noise of the door, as if those
+entering were standing, irresolute, undecided which way to turn; but
+abruptly enough the glimmer of candlelight must have been noticed. Kirkwood
+heard a hushed exclamation, a quick clatter of high heels on the parquetry,
+pattering feet on the stairs, all but drowned by swish and ripple of silken
+skirts; and a woman stood at the head of the flight--to the American an
+apparition profoundly amazing as she paused, the light from the floor
+casting odd, theatric shadows beneath her eyes and over her brows, edging
+her eyes themselves with brilliant light beneath their dark lashes, showing
+her lips straight and drawn, and shimmering upon the spangles of an evening
+gown, visible beneath the dark cloak which had fallen back from her white,
+beautiful shoulders.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+
+MADAME L'INTRIGANTE
+
+"Mrs. Hallam!" cried Kirkwood, beneath his breath.
+
+The woman ignored his existence. Moving swiftly forward, she dropped on
+both knees by the side of the boy, and caught up one of his hands, clasping
+it passionately in her own.
+
+"Fred!" she cried, a curious break in her tone. "My little Freddie! Oh,
+what has happened, dearie?"
+
+"Oh, hello, Mamma," grunted that young man, submitting listlessly to her
+caresses and betraying no overwhelming surprise at her appearance there.
+Indeed he seemed more concerned as to what Kirkwood, an older man, would
+be thinking, to see him so endeared and fondled, than moved by any other
+emotion. Kirkwood could see his shamefaced, sidelong glances; and despised
+him properly for them.
+
+But without attending to his response, Mrs. Hallam rattled on in the uneven
+accents of excitement. "I waited until I couldn't wait any longer, Freddie
+dear. I had to know--had to come. Eccles came home about nine and said that
+you had told him to wait outside, that some one had followed you in here,
+and that a bobby had told him to move on. I didn't know what--"
+
+"What's o'clock now?" her son interrupted.
+
+"It's about three, I think ... Have you hurt yourself, dear? Oh, why
+_didn't_ you come home? You must've known I was dying of anxiety!"
+
+"Oh, I say! Can't you see I'm hurt? 'Had a nasty fall and must've been
+asleep ever since."
+
+"My precious one! How--?"
+
+"Can't say, hardly ... I say, don't paw a chap so, Mamma ... I brought
+Eccles along and told him to wait because--well, because I didn't feel so
+much like shuttin' myself up in this beastly old tomb. So I left the door
+ajar, and told him not to let anybody come in. Then I came up-stairs. There
+must've been somebody already in the house; I know I _thought_ there was.
+It made me feel creepy, rather. At any rate, I heard voices down below, and
+the door banged, and somebody began hammerin' like fun on the knocker."
+
+The boy paused, rolling an embarrassed eye up at the stranger.
+
+"Yes, yes, dear!" Mrs. Hallam urged him on.
+
+"Why, I--I made up my mind to cut my stick--let whoever it was pass me on
+the stairs, you know. But he followed me and struck me, and then I jumped
+at him, and we both fell down the whole flight. And that's all. Besides, my
+head's achin' like everything."
+
+"But this man--?"
+
+Mrs. Hallam looked up at Kirkwood, who bowed silently, struggling to hide
+both his amusement and perplexity. More than ever, now, the case presented
+a front inscrutable to his wits; try as he might, he failed to fit an
+explanation to any incident in which he had figured, while this last
+development--that his antagonist of the dark stairway had been Mrs.
+Hallam's son!--seemed the most astounding of all, baffling elucidation
+completely.
+
+He had abandoned all thought of flight and escape. It was too late; in the
+brisk idiom of his mother-tongue, he was "caught with the goods on." "May
+as well face the music," he counseled himself, in resignation. From what he
+had seen and surmised of Mrs. Hallam, he shrewdly suspected that the tune
+would prove an exceedingly lively one; she seemed a woman of imagination,
+originality, and an able-bodied temper.
+
+"_You_, Mr. Kirkwood!"
+
+Again he bowed, grinning awry.
+
+She rose suddenly. "You will be good enough to explain your presence here,"
+she informed him with dangerous serenity.
+
+"To be frank with you--"
+
+"I advise that course, Mr. Kirkwood."
+
+"Thanks, awf'ly.... I came here, half an hour ago, looking for a lost purse
+full--well, not _quite_ full of sovereigns. It was my purse, by the way."
+
+Suspicion glinted like foxfire in the cold green eyes beneath her puckered
+brows. "I do not understand," she said slowly and in level tones.
+
+"I didn't expect you to," returned Kirkwood; "no more do I.... But, anyway,
+it must be clear to you that I've done my best for this gentleman here." He
+paused with an interrogative lift of his eyebrows.
+
+"'This gentleman' is my son, Frederick Hallam.... But you will explain--"
+
+"Pardon me, Mrs. Hallam; I shall explain nothing, at present. Permit me
+to point out that your position here--like mine--is, to say the least,
+anomalous." The random stroke told, as he could tell by the instant
+contraction of her eyes of a cat. "It would be best to defer explanations
+till a more convenient time--don't you think? Then, if you like, we can
+chant confidences in an antiphonal chorus. Just now your--er--son is not
+enjoying himself apparently, and ... the attention of the police had best
+not be called to this house too often in one night."
+
+His levity seemed to displease and perturb the woman; she turned from him
+with an impatient movement of her shoulders.
+
+"Freddie, dear, do you feel able to walk?"
+
+"Eh? Oh, I dare say--I don't know. Wonder would your friend--ah--Mr.
+Kirkwood, lend me an arm?"
+
+"Charmed," Kirkwood declared suavely. "If you'll take the candle, Mrs.
+Hallam--"
+
+He helped the boy to his feet and, while the latter hung upon him and
+complained querulously, stood waiting for the woman to lead the way with
+the light; something which, however, she seemed in no haste to do. The
+pause at length puzzled Kirkwood, and he turned, to find Mrs. Hallam
+holding the candlestick and regarding him steadily, with much the same
+expression of furtive mistrust as that with which she had favored him on
+her own door-stoop.
+
+[Illustration: He helped the boy to his feet, and stood waiting.]
+
+"One moment," she interposed in confusion; "I won't keep you waiting...;"
+and, passing with an averted face, ran quickly up-stairs to the second
+floor, taking the light with her. Its glow faded from the walls above and
+Kirkwood surmised that she had entered the front bedchamber. For some
+moments he could hear her moving about; once, something scraped and bumped
+on the floor, as if a heavy bit of furniture had been moved; again there
+was a resounding thud that defied speculation; and this was presently
+followed by a dull clang of metal.
+
+His fugitive speculations afforded him little enlightenment; and, meantime,
+young Hallam, leaning partly against the wall and quite heavily on
+Kirkwood's arm, filled his ears with puerile oaths and lamentations; so
+that, but for the excuse of his really severe shaking-up, Kirkwood had
+been strongly tempted to take the youngster by the shoulders and kick him
+heartily, for the health of his soul.
+
+But eventually--it was not really long--there came the quick rush of Mrs.
+Hallam's feet along the upper hall, and the woman reappeared, one hand
+holding her skirts clear of her pretty feet as she descended in a rush that
+caused the candle's flame to flicker perilously.
+
+Half-way down, "Mr. Kirkwood!" she called tempestuously.
+
+"Didn't you find it?" he countered blandly.
+
+She stopped jerkily at the bottom, and, after a moment of confusion. "Find
+what, sir?" she asked.
+
+"What you sought, Mrs. Hallam."
+
+Smiling, he bore unflinching the prolonged inspection of her eyes, at once
+somber with doubt of him and flashing with indignation because of his
+impudence.
+
+"You knew I wouldn't find it, then!... Didn't you?"
+
+"I may have suspected you wouldn't."
+
+Now he was sure that she had been searching for the gladstone bag. That,
+evidently, was the bone of contention. Calendar had sent his daughter for
+it, Mrs. Hallam her son; Dorothy had been successful ... But, on the other
+hand, Calendar and Mrs. Hallam were unquestionably allies. Why, then--?
+
+"Where is it, Mr. Kirkwood?"
+
+"Madam, have you the right to know?"
+
+Through another lengthening pause, while they faced each other, he marked
+again the curious contraction of her under lip.
+
+"I have the right," she declared steadily. "Where is it?"
+
+"How can I be sure?"
+
+"Then you don't know--!"
+
+"Indeed," he interrupted, "I would be glad to feel that I ought to tell you
+what I know."
+
+"_What_ you know!"
+
+The exclamation, low-spoken, more an echo of her thoughts than intended
+for Kirkwood, was accompanied by a little shake of the woman's head, mute
+evidence to the fact that she was bewildered by his finesse. And this
+delighted the young man beyond measure, making him feel himself master of
+a difficult situation. Mysteries had been woven before his eyes so
+persistently, of late, that it was a real pleasure to be able to do a
+little mystifying on his own account. By adopting this reticent and
+non-committal attitude, he was forcing the hand of a woman old enough to be
+his mother and most evidently a past-mistress in the art of misleading. All
+of which seemed very fascinating to the amateur in adventure.
+
+The woman would have led again, but young Hallam cut in, none too
+courteously.
+
+"I say, Mamma, it's no good standing here, palaverin' like a lot of flats.
+Besides, I'm awf'ly knocked up. Let's get home and have it out there."
+
+Instantly his mother softened. "My poor boy!... Of course we'll go."
+
+Without further demur she swept past and down the stairway before
+them--slowly, for their progress was of necessity slow, and the light most
+needed. Once they were in the main hall, however, she extinguished the
+candle, placed it on a side table, and passed out through the door.
+
+It had been left open, as before; and Kirkwood was not at all surprised to
+see a man waiting on the threshold,--the versatile Eccles, if he erred not.
+He had little chance to identify him, as it happened, for at a word from
+Mrs. Hallam the man bowed and, following her across the sidewalk, opened
+the door of a four-wheeler which, with lamps alight and liveried driver on
+the box, had been waiting at the carriage-block.
+
+As they passed out, Kirkwood shut the door; and at the same moment the
+little party was brought up standing by a gruff and authoritative summons.
+
+"Just a minute, please, you there!"
+
+"Aha!" said Kirkwood to himself. "I thought so." And he halted, in
+unfeigned respect for the burly and impressive figure, garbed in blue and
+brass, helmeted and truncheoned, bull's-eye shining on breast like the
+Law's unblinking and sleepless eye, barring the way to the carriage.
+
+Mrs. Hallam showed less deference for the obstructionist. The assumed
+hauteur and impatience of her pose was artfully reflected in her voice as
+she rounded upon the bobby, with an indignant demand: "What is the meaning
+of this, officer?"
+
+"Precisely what I wants to know, ma'am," returned the man, unyielding
+beneath his respectful attitude. "I'm obliged to ask you to tell me what
+you were doing in that 'ouse.... And what's the matter with this 'ere
+gentleman?" he added, with a dubious stare at young Hallam's bandaged head
+and rumpled clothing.
+
+"Perhaps you don't understand," admitted Mrs. Hallam sweetly. "Of course--I
+see--it's perfectly natural. The house has been shut up for some time
+and--"
+
+"Thank you, ma'am; that's just it. There was something wrong going on early
+in the evening, and I was told to keep an eye on the premises. It's duty,
+ma'am; I've got my report to make."
+
+"The house," said Mrs. Hallam, with the long-suffering patience of one
+elucidating a perfectly plain proposition to a being of a lower order of
+intelligence, "is the property of my son, Arthur Frederick Burgoyne Hallam,
+of Cornwall. This is--"
+
+"Beg pardon, ma'am, but I was told Colonel George Burgoyne, of Cornwall--"
+
+"Colonel Burgoyne died some time ago. My son is his heir. This is my son.
+He came to the house this evening to get some property he desired, and--it
+seems--tripped on the stairs and fell unconscious. I became worried about
+him and drove over, accompanied by my friend, Mr. Kirkwood."
+
+The policeman looked his troubled state of mind, and wagged a doubtful head
+over the case. There was his duty, and there was, opposed to it, the fact
+that all three were garbed in the livery of the well-to-do.
+
+At length, turning to the driver, he demanded, received, and noted in his
+memorandum-book, the license number of the equipage.
+
+"It's a very unusual case, ma'am," he apologized; "I hopes you won't 'old
+it against me. I'm only trying to do my duty--"
+
+"And safeguard our property. You are perfectly justified, officer."
+
+"Thank you, ma'am. And would you mind giving me your cards, please, all of
+you?"
+
+"Certainly not." Without hesitation the woman took a little hand-bag from
+the seat of the carriage and produced a card; her son likewise found his
+case and handed the officer an oblong slip.
+
+"I've no cards with me," the American told the policeman; "my name,
+however, is Philip Kirkwood, and I'm staying at the Pless."
+
+"Very good, sir; thank you." The man penciled the information in his little
+book. "Thank you, ma'am, and Mr. Hallam, sir. Sorry to have detained you.
+Good morning."
+
+Kirkwood helped young Hallam into the carriage, gave Mrs. Hallam his hand,
+and followed her. The man Eccles shut the door, mounting the box beside the
+driver. Immediately they were in motion.
+
+The American got a final glimpse of the bobby, standing in front of Number
+9, Frognall Street, and watching them with an air of profound uncertainty.
+He had Kirkwood's sympathy, therein; but he had little time to feel with
+him, for Mrs. Hallam turned upon him very suddenly.
+
+"Mr. Kirkwood, will you be good enough to tell me who and what you are?"
+
+The young man smiled his homely, candid smile. "I'll be only too glad, Mrs.
+Hallam, when I feel sure you'll do as much for yourself."
+
+She gave him no answer; it, was as if she were choosing words. Kirkwood
+braced himself to meet the storm; but none ensued. There was rather a lull,
+which strung itself out indefinitely, to the monotonous music of hoofs and
+rubber tires.
+
+Young Hallam was resting his empty blond head against the cushions, and had
+closed his eyes. He seemed to doze; but, as the carriage rolled past the
+frequent street-lights, Kirkwood could see that the eyes of Mrs. Hallam
+were steadily directed to his face.
+
+His outward composure was tempered by some amusement, by more admiration;
+the woman's eyes were very handsome, even when hardest and most cold. It
+was not easy to conceive of her as being the mother of a son so immaturely
+mature. Why, she must have been at least thirty-eight or -nine! One
+wondered; she did not look it....
+
+The carriage stopped before a house with lighted windows. Eccles jumped
+down from the box and scurried to open the front door. The radiance of
+a hall-lamp was streaming out into the misty night when he returned to
+release his employers.
+
+They were returned to Craven Street! "One more lap round the track!" mused
+Kirkwood. "Wonder will the next take me back to Bermondsey Old Stairs."
+
+At Mrs. Hallam's direction, Eccles ushered him into the smoking-room, on
+the ground floor in the rear of the dwelling, there to wait while she
+helped her son up-stairs and to bed. He sighed with pleasure at first
+glimpse of its luxurious but informal comforts, and threw himself
+carelessly into a heavily padded lounging-chair, dropping one knee over the
+other and lighting the last of his expensive cigars, with a sensation of
+undiluted gratitude; as one coming to rest in the shadow of a great rock in
+a weary land.
+
+Over his shoulder a home-like illumination was cast by an electric
+reading-lamp shaded with red silk. At his feet brass fire-dogs winked
+sleepily in the fluttering blaze of a well-tended stove. The walls were
+hung with deep red, the doors and divans upholstered in the same restful
+shade. In one corner an old clock ticked soberly. The atmosphere would
+have proved a potent invitation to reverie, if not to sleep--he was very
+sleepy--but for the confusion in the house.
+
+In its chambers, through the halls, on the stairs, there were hurryings and
+scurryings of feet and skirts, confused with murmuring voices. Presently,
+in an adjoining room, Philip Kirkwood heard a maid-servant wrestling
+hopefully with that most exasperating of modern time-saving devices,
+the telephone as countenanced by our English cousins. Her patience and
+determination won his approval, but availed nothing for her purpose; in the
+outcome the telephone triumphed and the maid gave up the unequal contest.
+
+Later, a butler entered the room; a short and sturdy fellow, extremely ill
+at ease. Drawing a small taboret to the side of Kirkwood's chair, he placed
+thereon a tray, deferentially imparting the information that "Missis 'Allam
+'ad thought 'ow as Mister Kirkwood might care for a bit of supper."
+
+"Please thank Mrs. Hallam for me." Kirkwood's gratified eyes ranged the
+laden tray. There were sandwiches, biscuit, cheese, and a pot of black
+coffee, with sugar and cream. "It was very kindly thought of," he added.
+
+"Very good, sir, thank you, sir."
+
+The man turned to go, shuffling soundlessly. Kirkwood was suddenly
+impressed with his evasiveness; ever since he had entered the room, his
+countenance had seemed turned from the guest.
+
+"Eccles!" he called sharply, at a venture.
+
+The butler halted, thunderstruck. "Ye-es, s-sir?"
+
+[Illustration: Eccles]
+
+"Turn round, Eccles; I want a look at you."
+
+Eccles faced him unwillingly, with a stolid front but shifty eyes. Kirkwood
+glanced him up and down, grinning.
+
+"Thank you, Eccles; I'll remember you now. You'll remember me, too, won't
+you? You're a bad actor, aren't you, Eccles?"
+
+"Yes, sir; thank you, sir," mumbled the man unhappily; and took instant
+advantage of the implied permission to go.
+
+Intensely diverted by the recollection of Eccles' abortive attempt to stop
+him at the door of Number 9, and wondering--now that he came to think of
+it--why, precisely, young Hallam had deemed it necessary to travel with
+a body-guard and adopt such furtive methods to enter into as well as to
+obtain what was asserted to be his own property, Kirkwood turned active
+attention to the lunch.
+
+Thoughtfully he poured himself a cup of coffee, swallowing it hot and black
+as it came from the silver pot; then munched the sandwiches.
+
+It _was_ kindly thought of, this early morning repast; Mrs. Hallam seemed
+more and more a remarkable woman with each phase of her character that she
+chose to disclose. At odds with him, she yet took time to think of his
+creature needs!
+
+What could be her motive,--not in feeding him, but in involving her name
+and fortune in an affair so strangely flavored?... This opened up a desert
+waste of barren speculation. "What's anybody's motive, who figures in this
+thundering dime-novel?" demanded the American, almost contemptuously.
+And--for the hundredth time--gave it up; the day should declare it, if so
+hap he lived to see that day: a distant one, he made no doubt. The only
+clear fact in his befogged and bemused mentality was that he was at once
+"broke" and in this business up to his ears. Well, he'd see it through;
+he'd nothing better to do, and--there was the girl:
+
+Dorothy, whose eyes and lips he had but to close his own eyes to see
+again as vividly as though she stood before him; Dorothy, whose unspoiled
+sweetness stood out in vivid relief against this moil and toil of
+conspiracy, like a star of evening shining clear in a stormy sky.
+
+"Poetic simile: I'm going fast," conceded Kirkwood; but he did not smile.
+It was becoming quite too serious a matter for laughter. For her sake,
+he was in the game "for keeps"; especially in view of the fact that
+everything--his own heart's inclination included--seemed to conspire to
+keep him in it. Of course he hoped for nothing in return; a pauper who
+turns squire-of-dames with matrimonial intent is open to the designation,
+"penniless adventurer." No; whatever service he might be to the girl would
+be ample recompense to him for his labors. And afterwards, he'd go his
+way in peace; she'd soon forget him--if she hadn't already. Women (he
+propounded gravely) are queer: there's no telling anything about them!
+
+One of the most unreadable specimens of the sex on which he pronounced this
+highly original dictum, entered the room just then; and he found himself at
+once out of his chair and his dream, bowing.
+
+"Mrs. Hallam."
+
+The woman nodded and smiled graciously. "Eccles has attended to your needs,
+I hope? Please don't stop smoking." She sank into an arm-chair on the
+other side of the hearth and, probably by accident, out of the radius of
+illumination from the lamp; sitting sidewise, one knee above the other, her
+white arms immaculate against the somber background of shadowed crimson.
+
+She was very handsome indeed, just then; though a keener light might have
+proved less flattering.
+
+"Now, Mr. Kirkwood?" she opened briskly, with a second intimate and
+friendly nod; and paused, her pose receptive.
+
+Kirkwood sat down again, smiling good-natured appreciation of her
+unprejudiced attitude.
+
+"Your son, Mrs. Hallam--?"
+
+"Oh, Freddie's doing well enough.... Freddie," she explained, "has a
+delicate constitution and has seen little of the world. Such melodrama
+as to-night's is apt to shock him severely. We must make allowances, Mr.
+Kirkwood."
+
+Kirkwood grinned again, a trace unsympathetically; he was unable to
+simulate any enthusiasm on the subject of poor Freddie, whom he had sized
+up with passable acumen as a spoiled and coddled child completely under the
+thumb of an extremely clever mother.
+
+"Yes," he responded vaguely; "he'll be quite fit after a night's sleep, I
+dare say."
+
+The woman was watching him keenly, beneath her lowered lashes. "I think,"
+she said deliberately, "that it is time we came to an understanding."
+
+Kirkwood agreed--"Yes?" affably.
+
+"I purpose being perfectly straightforward. To begin with, I don't place
+you, Mr. Kirkwood. You are an unknown quantity, a new factor. Won't you
+please tell me what you are and.... Are you a friend of Mr. Calendar's?"
+
+"I think I may lay claim to that honor, though"--to Kirkwood's way of
+seeing things some little frankness on his own part would be essential if
+they were to get on--"I hardly know him, Mrs. Hallam. I had the pleasure of
+meeting him only this afternoon."
+
+She knitted her brows over this statement.
+
+"That, I assure you, is the truth," he laughed.
+
+"But ... I really don't understand."
+
+"Nor I, Mrs. Hallam. Calendar aside, I am Philip Kirkwood, American,
+resident abroad for some years, a native of San Francisco, of a certain
+age, unmarried, by profession a poor painter."
+
+"And--?"
+
+"Beyond that? I presume I must tell you, though I confess I'm in doubt...."
+He hesitated, weighing candor in the balance with discretion.
+
+"But who are you for? Are you in George Calendar's pay?"
+
+"Heaven forfend!"--piously. "My sole interest at the present moment is to
+unravel a most entrancing mystery--"
+
+"Entitled 'Dorothy Calendar'! Of course. You've known her long?"
+
+"Eight hours, I believe," he admitted gravely; "less than that, in fact."
+
+"Miss Calendar's interests will not suffer through anything you may tell
+me."
+
+"Whether they will or no, I see I must swing a looser tongue, or you'll be
+showing me the door."
+
+The woman shook her head, amused, "Not until," she told him significantly.
+
+"Very well, then." And he launched into an abridged narrative of the
+night's events, as he understood them, touching lightly on his own
+circumstances, the real poverty which had brought him back to Craven Street
+by way of Frognall. "And there you have it all, Mrs. Hallam."
+
+She sat in silent musing. Now and again he caught the glint of her eyes
+and knew that he was being appraised with such trained acumen as only
+long knowledge of men can give to women. He wondered if he were found
+wanting.... Her dark head bended, elbow on knee, chin resting lightly in
+the cradle of her slender, parted fingers, the woman thought profoundly,
+her reverie ending with a brief, curt laugh, musical and mirthless as the
+sound of breaking glass.
+
+"It is so like Calendar!" she exclaimed: "so like him that one sees how
+foolish it was to trust--no, not to trust, but to believe that he could
+ever be thrown off the scent, once he got nose to ground. So, if we suffer,
+my son and I, I shall have only myself to thank!"
+
+Kirkwood waited in patient attention till she chose to continue. When she
+did "Now for my side of the case!" cried Mrs. Hallam; and rising, began to
+pace the room, her slender and rounded figure swaying gracefully, the while
+she talked.
+
+"George Calendar is a scoundrel," she said: "a swindler, gambler,--what I
+believe you Americans call a confidence-man. He is also my late husband's
+first cousin. Some years since he found it convenient to leave England,
+likewise his wife and daughter. Mrs. Calendar, a country-woman of yours, by
+the bye, died shortly afterwards. Dorothy, by the merest accident, obtained
+a situation as private secretary in the household of the late Colonel
+Burgoyne, of The Cliffs, Cornwall. You follow me?"
+
+"Yes, perfectly."
+
+"Colonel Burgoyne died, leaving his estates to my son, some time ago.
+Shortly afterwards Dorothy Calendar disappeared. We know now that her
+father took her away, but then the disappearance seemed inexplicable,
+especially since with her vanished a great deal of valuable information.
+She alone knew of the location of certain of the old colonel's personal
+effects."
+
+"He was an eccentric. One of his peculiarities involved the secreting of
+valuables in odd places; he had no faith in banks. Among these valuables
+were the Burgoyne family jewels--quite a treasure, believe me, Mr.
+Kirkwood. We found no note of them among the colonel's papers, and without
+Dorothy were powerless to pursue a search for them. We advertised and
+employed detectives, with no result. It seems that father and daughter were
+at Monte Carlo at the time."
+
+"Beautifully circumstantial, my dear lady," commented Kirkwood--to his
+inner consciousness. Outwardly he maintained consistently a pose of
+impassive gullibility.
+
+"This afternoon, for the first time, we received news of the Calendars.
+Calendar himself called upon me, to beg a loan. I explained our difficulty
+and he promised that Dorothy should send us the information by the
+morning's post. When I insisted, he agreed to bring it himself, after
+dinner, this evening.... I make it quite clear?" she interrupted, a little
+anxious.
+
+"Quite clear, I assure you," he assented encouragingly.
+
+"Strangely enough, he had not been gone ten minutes when my son came
+in from a conference with our solicitors, informing me that at last a
+memorandum had turned up, indicating that the heirlooms would be found in a
+safe secreted behind a dresser in Colonel Burgoyne's bedroom."
+
+"At Number 9, Frognall Street."
+
+"Yes.... I proposed going there at once, but it was late and we were dining
+at the Pless with an acquaintance, a Mr. Mulready, whom I now recall as a
+former intimate of George Calendar. To our surprise we saw Calendar and his
+daughter at a table not far from ours. Mr. Mulready betrayed some agitation
+at the sight of Calendar, and told me that Scotland Yard had a man out with
+a warrant for Calendar's arrest, on old charges. For old sake's sake, Mr.
+Mulready begged me to give Calendar a word of warning. I did so--foolishly,
+it seems: Calendar was at that moment planning to rob us, Mulready aiding
+and abetting him."
+
+The woman paused before Kirkwood, looking down upon him. "And so," she
+concluded, "we have been tricked and swindled. I can scarcely believe it of
+Dorothy Calendar."
+
+"I, for one, don't believe it." Kirkwood spoke quietly, rising. "Whatever
+the culpability of Calendar and Mulready, Dorothy was only their hoodwinked
+tool."
+
+"But, Mr. Kirkwood, she must have known the jewels were not hers."
+
+"Yes," he assented passively, but wholly unconvinced.
+
+"And what," she demanded with a gesture of exasperation, "what would you
+advise?"
+
+"Scotland Yard," he told her bluntly.
+
+"But it's a family secret! It must not appear in the papers. Don't you
+understand--George Calendar is my husband's cousin!"
+
+"I can think of nothing else, unless you pursue them in person."
+
+"But--whither?"
+
+"That remains to be discovered; I can tell you nothing more than I have....
+May I thank you for your hospitality, express my regrets that I should
+unwittingly have been made the agent of this disaster, and wish you good
+night--or, rather, good morning, Mrs. Hallam?"
+
+For a moment she held him under a calculating glance which he withstood
+with graceless fortitude. Then, realizing that he was determined not by any
+means to be won to her cause, she gave him her hand, with a commonplace
+wish that he might find his affairs in better order than seemed probable;
+and rang for Eccles.
+
+The butler showed him out.
+
+He took away with him two strong impressions; the one visual, of a
+strikingly handsome woman in a wonderful gown, standing under the red glow
+of a reading-lamp, in an attitude of intense mental concentration, her
+expression plainly indicative of a train of thought not guiltless of
+vindictiveness; the other, more mental but as real, he presently voiced to
+the huge bronze lions brooding over desolate Trafalgar Square.
+
+"Well," appreciated Mr. Kirkwood with gusto, "_she's_ got Ananias and
+Sapphira talked to a standstill, all right!" He ruminated over this for
+a moment. "Calendar can lie some, too; but hardly with her picturesque
+touch.... Uncommon ingenious, _I_ call it. All the same, there were only
+about a dozen bits of tiling that didn't fit into her mosaic a little
+bit.... I think they're all tarred with the same stick--all but the girl.
+And there's something afoot a long sight more devilish and crafty than that
+shilling-shocker of madam's.... Dorothy Calendar's got about as much active
+part in it as I have. I'm only from California, but they've got to show
+me, before I'll believe a word against her. Those infernal
+scoundrels!...Somebody's got to be on the girl's side and I seem to have
+drawn the lucky straw.... Good Heavens! is it possible for a grown man to
+fall heels over head in love in two short hours? I don't believe it. It's
+just interest--nothing more.... And I'll have to have a change of clothes
+before I can do anything further."
+
+He bowed gratefully to the lions, in view of their tolerant interest in his
+soliloquy, and set off very suddenly round the square and up St. Martin's
+Lane, striking across town as directly as might be for St. Pancras Station.
+It would undoubtedly be a long walk, but cabs were prohibited by his
+straitened means, and the busses were all abed and wouldn't be astir for
+hours.
+
+He strode along rapidly, finding his way more through intuition than by
+observation or familiarity with London's geography--indeed, was scarce
+aware of his surroundings; for his brain was big with fine imagery, rapt in
+a glowing dream of knighterrantry and chivalric deeds.
+
+Thus is it ever and alway with those who in the purity of young hearts rush
+in where angels fear to tread; if these, Kirkwood and his ilk, be fools,
+thank God for them, for with such foolishness is life savored and made
+sweet and sound! To Kirkwood the warp of the world and the woof of it was
+Romance, and it wrapped him round, a magic mantle to set him apart from
+all things mean and sordid and render him impregnable and invisible to the
+haunting Shade of Care.
+
+Which, by the same token, presently lost track of him entirely, and
+wandered off to find and bedevil some other poor devil. And Kirkwood, his
+eyes like his spirit elevated, saw that the clouds of night were breaking,
+the skies clearing, that the East pulsed ever more strongly with the
+dim golden promise of the day to come. And this he chose to take for an
+omen--prematurely, it may be.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+
+AGAIN "BELOW BRIDGE"; AND BEYOND
+
+Kirkwood wasted little time, who had not much to waste, were he to do that
+upon whose doing he had set his heart. It irked him sore to have to lose
+the invaluable moments demanded by certain imperative arrangements, but his
+haste was such that all was consummated within an hour.
+
+Within the period of a single hour, then, he had ransomed his luggage at
+St. Pancras, caused it to be loaded upon a four-wheeler and transferred to
+a neighboring hotel of evil flavor but moderate tariff, where he engaged
+a room for a week, ordered an immediate breakfast, and retired with his
+belongings to his room; he had shaved and changed his clothes, selecting
+a serviceable suit of heavy tweeds, stout shoes, a fore-and-aft cap and a
+negligee shirt of a deep shade calculated at least to seem clean for a long
+time; finally, he had devoured his bacon and eggs, gulped down his coffee
+and burned his mouth, and, armed with a stout stick, set off hotfoot in the
+still dim glimmering of early day.
+
+By this time his cash capital had dwindled to the sum of two pounds, ten
+shillings, eight-pence, and would have been much less had he paid for his
+lodging in advance. But he considered his trunks ample security for the
+bill, and dared not wait the hour when shopkeepers begin to take down
+shutters and it becomes possible to realize upon one's jewelry. Besides
+which, he had never before been called upon to consider the advisability of
+raising money by pledging personal property, and was in considerable doubt
+as to the right course of procedure in such emergency.
+
+At King's Cross Station on the Underground an acute disappointment awaited
+him; there, likewise, he learned something about London. A sympathetic
+bobby informed him that no trains would be running until after five-thirty,
+and that, furthermore, no busses would begin to ply until half after seven.
+
+"It's tramp it or cab it, then," mused the young man mournfully, his
+longing gaze seeking a nearby cab-rank--just then occupied by a solitary
+hansom, driver somnolent on the box. "Officer," he again addressed
+the policeman, mindful of the English axiom: "When in doubt, ask a
+bobby."--"Officer, when's high-tide this morning?"
+
+The bobby produced a well-worn pocket-almanac, moistened a massive thumb,
+and rippled the pages.
+
+"London Bridge, 'igh tide twenty minutes arfter six, sir," he announced
+with a glow of satisfaction wholly pardonable in one who combines the
+functions of perambulating almanac, guide-book, encyclopedia, and conserver
+of the peace.
+
+Kirkwood said something beneath his breath--a word in itself a comfortable
+mouthful and wholesome and emphatic. He glanced again at the cab and
+groaned: "O Lord, I just dassent!" With which, thanking the bureau of
+information, he set off at a quick step down Grey's Inn Road.
+
+The day had closed down in brilliance upon the city--and the voice of the
+milkman was to be heard in the land--when he trudged, still briskly if a
+trifle wearily, into Holborn, and held on eastward across the Viaduct and
+down Newgate Street; the while addling his weary wits with heart-sickening
+computations of minutes, all going hopelessly to prove that he would be
+late, far too late even presupposing the unlikely. The unlikely, be it
+known, was that the _Alethea_ would not attempt to sail before the turn of
+the tide.
+
+For this was his mission, to find the _Alethea_ before she sailed.
+Incredible as it may appear, at five o'clock, or maybe earlier, on the
+morning of the twenty-second of April, 1906, A.D., Philip Kirkwood,
+normally a commonplace but likable young American in full possession of
+his senses, might have been seen (and by some was seen) plodding manfully
+through Cheapside, London, England, engaged upon a quest as mad, forlorn,
+and gallant as any whose chronicle ever inspired the pen of a Malory or
+a Froissart. In brief he proposed to lend his arm and courage to be the
+shield and buckler of one who might or might not be a damsel in distress;
+according as to whether Mrs. Hallam had spoken soothly of Dorothy Calendar,
+or Kirkwood's own admirable faith in the girl were justified of itself.
+
+Proceeding upon the working hypothesis that Mrs. Hallam was a polished liar
+in most respects, but had told the truth, so far as concerned her statement
+to the effect that the gladstone bag contained valuable real property
+(whose ownership remained a moot question, though Kirkwood was definitely
+committed to the belief that it was none of Mrs. Hallam's or her son's):
+he reasoned that the two adventurers, with Dorothy and their booty, would
+attempt to leave London by a water route, in the ship, _Alethea_, whose
+name had fallen from their lips at Bermondsey Old Stairs.
+
+Kirkwood's initial task, then, would be to find the needle in the
+haystack--the metaphor is poor: more properly, to sort out from the
+hundreds of vessels, of all descriptions, at anchor in midstream, moored to
+the wharves of 'long-shore warehouses, or in the gigantic docks that line
+the Thames, that one called _Alethea_; of which he was so deeply mired in
+ignorance that he could not say whether she were tramp-steamer, coastwise
+passenger boat, one of the liners that ply between Tilbury and all the
+world, Channel ferry-boat, private yacht (steam or sail), schooner,
+four-master, square-rigger, barque or brigantine.
+
+A task to stagger the optimism of any but one equipped with the sublime
+impudence of Youth! Even Kirkwood was disturbed by some little awe when
+he contemplated the vast proportions of his undertaking. None the less
+doggedly he plugged ahead, and tried to keep his mind from vain surmises
+as to what would be his portion when eventually he should find himself a
+passenger, uninvited and unwelcome, upon the _Alethea_....
+
+London had turned over once or twice, and was pulling the bedclothes over
+its head and grumbling about getting up, but the city was still sound
+asleep when at length he paused for a minute's rest in front of the Mansion
+House, and realized with a pang of despair that he was completely tuckered
+out. There was a dull, vague throbbing in his head; weights pressed upon
+his eyeballs until they ached; his mouth was hot and tasted of yesterday's
+tobacco; his feet were numb and heavy; his joints were stiff; he yawned
+frequently.
+
+With a sigh he surrendered to the flesh's frailty. An early cabby, cruising
+up from Cannon Street station on the off-chance of finding some one astir
+in the city, aside from the doves and sparrows, suffered the surprise of
+his life when Kirkwood hailed him. His face was blank with amazement when
+he reined in, and his eyes bulged when the prospective fare, on impulse,
+explained his urgent needs. Happily he turned out a fair representative of
+his class, an intelligent and unfuddled cabby.
+
+"Jump in, sir," he told Kirkwood cheerfully, as soon as he had assimilated
+the latter's demands. "I knows precisely wotcher wants. Leave it all to
+me."
+
+The admonition was all but superfluous; Kirkwood was unable, for the time
+being, to do aught else than resign his fate into another's guidance. Once
+in the cab he slipped insensibly into a nap, and slept soundly on, as
+reckless of the cab's swift pace and continuous jouncing as of the sunlight
+glaring full in his tired young face.
+
+He may have slept twenty minutes; he awoke faint with drowsiness, tingling
+from head to toe from fatigue, and in distress of a queer qualm in the pit
+of his stomach, to find the hansom at rest and the driver on the step,
+shaking his fare with kindly determination. "Oh, a' right," he assented
+surlily, and by sheer force of will made himself climb out to the
+sidewalk; where, having rubbed his eyes, stretched enormously and yawned
+discourteously in the face of the East End, he was once more himself and
+a hundred times refreshed into the bargain. Contentedly he counted three
+shillings into the cabby's palm--the fare named being one-and-six.
+
+"The shilling over and above the tip's for finding me the waterman and
+boat," he stipulated.
+
+"Right-o. You'll mind the 'orse a minute, sir?"
+
+Kirkwood nodded. The man touched his hat and disappeared inexplicably.
+Kirkwood, needlessly attaching himself to the reins near the animal's head,
+pried his sense of observation open and became alive to the fact that he
+stood in a quarter of London as strange to him as had been Bermondsey Wall.
+
+To this day he can not put a name to it; he surmises that it was Wapping.
+
+Ramshackle tenements with sharp gable roofs lined either side of the way.
+Frowsy women draped themselves over the window-sills. Pallid and wasted
+parodies on childhood contested the middle of the street with great, slow
+drays, drawn by enormous horses. On the sidewalks twin streams of masculine
+humanity flowed without rest, both bound in the same direction: dock
+laborers going to their day's work. Men of every nationality known to the
+world (he thought) passed him in his short five-minute wait by the horse's
+head; Britons, brown East Indians, blacks from Jamaica, swart Italians,
+Polaks, Russian Jews, wire-drawn Yankees, Spaniards, Portuguese, Greeks,
+even a Nubian or two: uniform in these things only, that their backs were
+bent with toil, bowed beyond mending, and their faces stamped with the
+blurred type-stamp of the dumb laboring brute. A strangely hideous
+procession, they shambled on, for the most part silent, all uncouth and
+unreal in the clear morning glow.
+
+The outlander was sensible of some relief when his cabby popped hurriedly
+out of the entrance to a tenement, a dull-visaged, broad-shouldered
+waterman ambling more slowly after.
+
+"Nevvy of mine, sir," announced the cabby; "and a fust-ryte waterman; knows
+the river like a book, he do."
+
+The nephew touched his forelock sheepishly.
+
+"Thank you," said Kirkwood; and, turning to the man, "Your boat?" he asked
+with the brevity of weariness.
+
+"This wye, sir."
+
+At his guide's heels Kirkwood threaded the crowd and, entering the
+tenement, stumbled through a gloomy and unsavory passage, to come out at
+last upon a scanty, unrailed veranda overlooking the river. Ten feet below,
+perhaps, foul waters purred and eddied round the piles supporting the
+rear of the building. On one hand a ladder-like flight of rickety steps
+descended to a floating stage to which a heavy rowboat lay moored. In the
+latter a second waterman was seated bailing out bilge with a rusty can.
+
+"'Ere we are, sir," said the cabman's nephew, pausing at the head of the
+steps. "Now, where's it to be?"
+
+The American explained tersely that he had a message to deliver a friend,
+who had shipped aboard a vessel known as the _Alethea_, scheduled to sail
+at floodtide; further than which deponent averred naught.
+
+The waterman scratched his head. "A 'ard job, sir; not knowin' wot kind of
+a boat she are mykes it 'arder." He waited hopefully.
+
+"Ten shillings," volunteered Kirkwood promptly; "ten shillings if you get
+me aboard her before she weighs anchor; fifteen if I keep you out more than
+an hour, and still you put me aboard. After that we'll make other terms."
+
+The man promptly turned his back to hail his mate. "'Arf a quid, Bob, if we
+puts this gent aboard a wessel name o' _Allytheer_ afore she syles at turn
+o' tide."
+
+In the boat the man with the bailing can turned up an impassive
+countenance. "Coom down," he clenched the bargain; and set about shipping
+the sweeps.
+
+Kirkwood crept down the shaky ladder and deposited himself in the stern of
+the boat; the younger boatman settled himself on the midship thwart.
+
+"Ready?"
+
+"Ready," assented old Bob from the bows. He cast off the painter, placed
+one sweep against the edge of the stage, and with a vigorous thrust pushed
+off; then took his seat.
+
+Bows swinging down-stream, the boat shot out from the shore.
+
+"How's the tide?" demanded Kirkwood, his impatience growing.
+
+"On th' turn, sir," he was told.
+
+For a long moment broadside to the current, the boat responded to the
+sturdy pulling of the port sweeps. Another moment, and it was in full
+swing, the watermen bending lustily to their task. Under their unceasing
+urge, the broad-beamed, heavy craft, aided by the ebbing tide, surged more
+and more rapidly through the water; the banks, grim and unsightly with
+their towering, impassive warehouses broken by toppling wooden tenements,
+slipped swiftly up-stream. Ship after ship was passed, sailing vessels
+in the majority, swinging sluggishly at anchor, drifting slowly with the
+river, or made fast to the goods-stages of the shore; and in keen anxiety
+lest he should overlook the right one, Kirkwood searched their bows and
+sterns for names, which in more than one case proved hardly legible.
+
+The _Alethea_ was not of their number.
+
+In the course of some ten minutes, the watermen drove the boat sharply
+inshore, bringing her up alongside another floating stage, in the shadow
+of another tenement.--both so like those from which they had embarked that
+Kirkwood would have been unable to distinguish one from another.
+
+In the bows old Bob lifted up a stentorian voice, summoning one William.
+
+Recognizing that there was some design in this, the passenger subdued his
+disapproval of the delay, and sat quiet.
+
+In answer to the third ear-racking hail, a man, clothed simply in dirty
+shirt and disreputable trousers, showed himself in the doorway above,
+rubbing the sleep out of a red, bloated countenance with a mighty and grimy
+fist.
+
+"'Ello," he said surlily. "Wot's th' row?"
+
+"'Oo," interrogated old Bob, holding the boat steady by grasping the stage,
+"was th' party wot engyged yer larst night, Bill?"
+
+"Party name o' _Allytheer_," growled the drowsy one. "W'y?"
+
+"Party 'ere's lookin' for 'im. Where'll I find this _Allytheer?_"
+
+"Best look sharp 'r yer won't find 'im," retorted the one above. "'E _was_
+at anchor off Bow Creek larst night."
+
+Kirkwood's heart leaped in hope. "What sort of a vessel was she?" he asked,
+half rising in his eagerness.
+
+"Brigantine, sir."
+
+"_Thank--you!_" replied Kirkwood explosively, resuming his seat with
+uncalculated haste as old Bob, deaf to the amenities of social intercourse
+in an emergency involving as much as ten-bob, shoved off again.
+
+And again the boat was flying down in midstream, the leaden waters, shot
+with gold of the morning sun, parting sullenly beneath its bows.
+
+The air was still, heavy and tepid; the least exertion brought out beaded
+moisture on face and hands. In the east hung a turgid sky, dull with haze,
+through which the mounting sun swam like a plaque of brass; overhead it
+was clear and cloudless, but besmirched as if the polished mirror of the
+heavens had been fouled by the breath of departing night.
+
+On the right, ahead, Greenwich Naval College loomed up, the great
+gray-stone buildings beyond the embankment impressively dominating the
+scene, in happy relief against the wearisome monotony of the river-banks;
+it came abreast; and ebbed into the backwards of the scene.
+
+The watermen straining at the sweeps, the boat sped into Blackwall Reach,
+Bugsby Marshes a splash of lurid green to port, dreary Cubitt Town and the
+West India Docks to starboard. Here the river ran thick with shipping.
+
+"Are we near?" Kirkwood would know; and by way of reply had a grunt of the
+younger waterman.
+
+Again, "Will we make it?" he asked.
+
+The identical grunt answered him; he was free to interpret it as he would;
+young William--as old Bob named him--had no breath for idle words. Kirkwood
+subsided, controlling his impatience to the best of his ability; the men,
+he told himself again and again, were earning their pay, whether or not
+they gained the goal of his desire.... Their labors were titanic; on
+their temples and foreheads the knotted veins stood out like discolored
+whip-cord; their faces were the shade of raw beef, steaming with sweat;
+their eyes protruded with the strain that set their jaws like vises; their
+chests heaved and shrank like bellows; their backs curved, straightened,
+and bent again in rhythmic unison as tiring to the eye as the swinging of a
+pendulum.
+
+Hugging the marshy shore, they rounded the Blackwall Point. Young William
+looked to Kirkwood, caught his eye, and nodded.
+
+"Here?"
+
+Kirkwood rose, balancing himself against the leap and sway of the boat.
+
+"Sumwhere's ... 'long ... o' 'ere."
+
+From right to left his eager glance swept the river's widening reach.
+Vessels were there in abundance, odd, unwieldy, blunt-bowed craft with
+huge, rakish, tawny sails; long strings of flat barges, pyramidal mounds of
+coal on each, lashed to another and convoyed by panting tugs; steam cargo
+boats, battered, worn, rusted sore through their age-old paint; a steel
+leviathan of the deep seas, half cargo, half passenger boat, warping
+reluctantly into the mouth of the Victoria Dock tidal basin,--but no
+brigantine, no sailing vessel of any type.
+
+The young man's lips checked a cry that was half a sob of bitter
+disappointment. He had entered into the spirit of the chase heart and soul,
+with an enthusiasm that was strange to him, when he came to look back
+upon the time; and to fail, even though failure had been discounted a
+hundredfold since the inception of his mad adventure, seemed hard, very
+hard.
+
+He sat down suddenly. "She's gone!" he cried in a hollow gasp.
+
+The boatmen eased upon their oars, and old Bob stood up in the bows,
+scanning the river-scape with keen eyes shielded by a level palm.
+Young William drooped forward suddenly, head upon knees, and breathed
+convulsively. The boat drifted listlessly with the current.
+
+Old Bob panted: "'Dawn't--see--nawthin'--o' 'er." He resumed his seat.
+
+"There's no hope, I suppose?"
+
+The elder waterman shook his head. "'Carn't sye.... Might be round--nex'
+bend--might be--passin' Purfleet.... 'Point is--me an' young Wilyum
+'ere--carn't do no more--'n we 'as. We be wore out."
+
+"Yes," Kirkwood assented, disconsolate, "You've certainly earned your pay."
+Then hope revived; he was very young in heart, you know. "Can't you suggest
+something? I've _got_ to catch that ship!"
+
+Old Bob wagged his head in slow negation; young William lifted his.
+
+"There's a rylewye runs by Woolwich," he ventured. "Yer might tyke tryne
+an' go to Sheerness, sir. Yer'd be positive o' passin' 'er if she didn't
+syle afore 'igh-tide. 'Ire a boat at Sheerness an' put out an' look for
+'er."
+
+"How far's Woolwich?" Kirkwood demanded instantly.
+
+"Mile," said the elder man. "Tyke yer for five-bob extry."
+
+"Done!"
+
+Young William dashed the sweat from his eyes, wiped his palms on his hips,
+and fitted the sweeps again to the wooden tholes. Old Bob was as ready.
+With an inarticulate cry they gave way.
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+
+DESPERATE MEASURES
+
+Old Bob seemed something inclined toward optimism, when the boat lay
+alongside a landing-stage at Woolwich, and Kirkwood had clambered ashore.
+
+"Yer'll mebbe myke it," the waterman told him with a weatherwise survey of
+the skies. "Wind's freshenin' from the east'rds, an' that'll 'old 'er back
+a bit, sir."
+
+"Arsk th' wye to th' Dorkyard Styshun," young William volunteered. "'Tis
+th' shortest walk, sir. I 'opes yer catches 'er.... Thanky, sir."
+
+He caught dextrously the sovereign which Kirkwood, in ungrudging
+liberality, spared them of his store of two. The American nodded
+acknowledgments and adieux, with a faded smile deprecating his chances of
+winning the race, sorely handicapped as he was. He was very, very tired,
+and in his heart suspected that he would fail. But, if he did, he would at
+least be able to comfort himself that it was not for lack of trying. He
+set his teeth on that covenant, in grim determination; either there was a
+strain of the bulldog latent in the Kirkwood breed or else his infatuation
+gripped him more strongly than he guessed.
+
+Yet he suspected something of its power; he knew that this was altogether
+an insane proceeding, and that the lure that led him on was Dorothy
+Calendar. A strange dull light glowed in his weary eyes, on the thought of
+her. He'd go through fire and water in her service. She was costing him
+dear, perhaps was to cost him dearer still; and perhaps there'd be for
+his guerdon no more than a "Thank you, Mr. Kirkwood!" at the end of the
+passage. But that would be no less than his deserts; he was not to forget
+that he was interfering unwarrantably; the girl was in her father's hands,
+surely safe enough there--to the casual mind. If her partnership in her
+parent's fortunes were distasteful, she endured it passively, without
+complaint.
+
+He decided that it was his duty to remind himself, from time to time,
+that his main interest must be in the game itself, in the solution of
+the riddle; whatever should befall, he must look for no reward for his
+gratuitous and self-appointed part. Indeed he was all but successful in
+persuading himself that it was the fascination of adventure alone that drew
+him on.
+
+Whatever the lure, it was inexorable; instead of doing as a sensible person
+would have done--returning to London for a long rest in his hotel room, ere
+striving to retrieve his shattered fortunes--Philip Kirkwood turned up the
+village street, intent only to find the railway station and catch the first
+available train for Sheerness, were that an early one or a late.
+
+A hapchance native whom he presently encountered, furnished minute
+directions for reaching the Dockyard Station of the Southeastern and
+Chatham Rail-way, adding comfortable information to the effect that the
+next east-bound train would pass through in ten minutes; if Kirkwood would
+mend his pace he could make it easily, with time to spare.
+
+Kirkwood mended his pace accordingly, but, contrary to the prediction, had
+no time to spare at all. Even as he stormed the ticket-grating, the train
+was thundering in at the platform. Therefore a nervous ticket agent passed
+him out a first-class ticket instead of the third-class he had asked for;
+and there was no time wherein to have the mistake rectified. Kirkwood
+planked down the fare, swore, and sprinted for the carriages.
+
+The first compartment whose door he jerked violently open, proved to be
+occupied, and was, moreover, not a smoking-car. He received a fleeting
+impression of a woman's startled eyes, staring into his own through a thin
+mesh of veiling, fell off the running-board, slammed the door, and hurled
+himself to-wards the next compartment. Here happier fortune attended upon
+his desire; the box-like section was untenanted, and a notice blown upon
+the window-glass announced that it was "2nd Class Smoking." Kirkwood
+promptly tumbled in; and when he turned to shut the door the coaches were
+moving.
+
+A pipe helped him to bear up while the train was making its two other stops
+in the Borough of Woolwich: a circumstance so maddening to a man in a
+hurry, that it set Kirkwood's teeth on edge with sheer impatience, and
+made him long fervently for the land of his birth, where they do things
+differently--where the Board of Directors of a railway company doesn't
+erect three substantial passenger depots in the course of a mile and a half
+of overgrown village. It consoled him little that none disputed with
+him his lonely possession of the compartment, that he _had_ caught the
+Sheerness train, or that he was really losing no time; a sense of deep
+dejection had settled down upon his consciousness, with a realization of
+how completely a fool's errand was this of his. He felt foredoomed to
+failure; he was never to see Dorothy Calendar again; and his brain seemed
+numb with disappointment.
+
+Rattling and swaying, the train left the town behind.
+
+Presently he put aside his pipe and stared blankly out at a reeling
+landscape, the pleasant, homely, smiling countryside of Kent. A deeper
+melancholy tinted his mind: Dorothy Calendar was for ever lost to him.
+
+The trucks drummed it out persistently--he thought, vindictively:
+"_Lost!... Lost!... For ever lost!..._"
+
+And he had made--was then making--a damned fool of himself. The trucks had
+no need to din _that_ into his thick skull by their ceaseless iteration; he
+knew it, would not deny it....
+
+And it was all his own fault. He'd had his chance, Calendar had offered him
+it. If only he had closed with the fat adventurer!...
+
+Before his eyes field and coppice, hedge and homestead, stream and flowing
+highway, all blurred and ran streakily into one another, like a highly
+impressionistic water-color. He could make neither head nor tail of the
+flying views, and so far as coherent thought was concerned, he could not
+put two ideas together. Without understanding distinctly, he presently did
+a more wise and wholesome thing: which was to topple limply over on the
+cushions and fall fast asleep.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+After a long time he seemed to realize rather hazily that the carriage-door
+had been opened to admit somebody. Its smart closing _bang_ shocked him
+awake. He sat up, blinking in confusion, hardly conscious of more, to begin
+with, than that the train had paused and was again in full flight. Then,
+his senses clearing, he became aware that his solitary companion, just
+entered, was a woman. She was seated over across from him, her back to the
+engine, in an attitude which somehow suggested a highly nonchalant frame of
+mind. She laughed, and immediately her speaking voice was high and sweet in
+his hearing.
+
+"Really, you know, Mr. Kirkwood, I simply couldn't contain my impatience
+another instant."
+
+Kirkwood gasped and tried to re-collect his wits.
+
+"Beg pardon--I've been asleep," he said stupidly.
+
+"Yes. I'm sorry to have disturbed you, but, you know, you must make
+allowances for a woman's nerves."
+
+Beneath his breath the bewildered man said: "The deuce!" and above it, in a
+stupefied tone: "Mrs. Hallam!"
+
+She nodded in a not unfriendly fashion, smiling brightly. "Myself, Mr.
+Kirkwood! Really, our predestined paths are badly tangled, just now; aren't
+they? Were you surprised to find me in here, with you? Come now, confess
+you were!"
+
+He remarked the smooth, girlish freshness of her cheeks, the sense and
+humor of her mouth, the veiled gleam of excitement in her eyes of the
+changing sea; and saw, as well, that she was dressed for traveling,
+sensibly but with an air, and had brought a small hand-bag with her.
+
+"Surprised and delighted," he replied, recovering, with mendacity so
+intentional and obvious that the woman laughed aloud.
+
+"I knew you'd be!... You see, I had the carriage ahead, the one you didn't
+take. I was so disappointed when you flung up to the door and away again!
+You didn't see me hanging half out the window, to watch where you went, did
+you? That's how I discovered that your discourtesy was unintentional, that
+you hadn't recognized me,--by the fact that you took this compartment,
+right behind my own."
+
+She paused invitingly, but Kirkwood, grown wary, contented himself
+with picking up his pipe and carefully knocking out the dottle on the
+window-ledge.
+
+"I was glad to see _you_," she affirmed; "but only partly because you
+were you, Mr. Kirkwood. The other and major part was because sight of you
+confirmed my own secret intuition. You see, I'm quite old enough and wise
+enough to question even my own intuitions."
+
+"A woman wise enough for that is an adult prodigy," he ventured cautiously.
+
+"It's experience and age. I insist upon the age; I the mother of a
+grown-up boy! So I deliberately ran after you, changing when we stopped
+at Newington. You might've escaped me if I had waited until We got to
+Queensborough."
+
+Again she paused in open expectancy. Kirkwood, perplexed, put the pipe in
+his pocket, and assumed a factitious look of resignation, regarding her
+askance with that whimsical twist of his eyebrows.
+
+"For you are going to Queensborough, aren't you, Mr. Kirkwood?"
+
+"Queensborough?" he echoed blankly; and, in fact, he was at a loss to
+follow her drift. "No, Mrs. Hallam; I'm not bound there."
+
+Her surprise was apparent; she made no effort to conceal it. "But," she
+faltered, "if not there--"
+
+"'Give you my word, Mrs. Hallam, I have no intention whatever of going to
+Queensborough," Kirkwood protested.
+
+"I don't understand." The nervous drumming of a patent-leather covered
+toe, visible beneath the hem of her dress, alone betrayed a rising tide of
+impatience. "Then my intuition _was_ at fault!"
+
+"In this instance, if it was at all concerned with my insignificant
+affairs, yes--most decidedly at fault."
+
+She shook her head, regarding him with grave suspicion. "I hardly know:
+whether to believe you. I think...."
+
+Kirkwood's countenance displayed an added shade of red. After a moment, "I
+mean no discourtesy," he began stiffly, "but--"
+
+"But you don't care a farthing whether I believe you or not?"
+
+He caught her laughing eye, and smiled, the flush subsiding.
+
+"Very well, then! Now let us see: Where _are_ you bound?"
+
+Kirkwood looked out of the window.
+
+"I'm convinced it's a rendezvous...?"
+
+Kirkwood smiled patiently at the landscape.
+
+"Is Dorothy Calendar so very, very beautiful, Mr. Kirkwood?"--with a trace
+of malice.
+
+Ostentatiously Kirkwood read the South Eastern and Chatham's framed card
+of warning, posted just above Mrs. Hallam's head, to all such incurable
+lunatics as are possessed of a desire to travel on the running-boards of
+railway carriages.
+
+"You are going to meet her, aren't you?"
+
+He gracefully concealed a yawn.
+
+The woman's plan of attack took another form. "Last night, when you told me
+your story, I believed you."
+
+He devoted himself to suppressing the temptingly obvious retort, and
+succeeded; but though he left it unspoken, the humor of it twitched the
+corners of his mouth; and Mrs. Hallam was observant. So that her next
+attempt to draw him out was edged with temper.
+
+"I believed you an American but a gentleman; it appears that, if you ever
+were the latter, you've fallen so low that you willingly cast your lot with
+thieves."
+
+Having exhausted his repertoire of rudenesses, Kirkwood took to twiddling
+his thumbs.
+
+"I want to ask you if you think it fair to me or my son, to leave us in
+ignorance of the place where you are to meet the thieves who stole our--my
+son's jewels?"
+
+"Mrs. Hallam," he said soberly, "if I am going to meet Mr. Calendar or Mr.
+Mulready, I have no assurance of that fact."
+
+There was only the briefest of pauses, during which she analyzed this;
+then, quickly, "But you hope to?" she snapped.
+
+He felt that the only adequate retort to this would be a shrug of his
+shoulders; doubted his ability to carry one off; and again took refuge in
+silence.
+
+The woman abandoned a second plan of siege, with a readiness that did
+credit to her knowledge of mankind. She thought out the next very
+carefully, before opening with a masked battery.
+
+"Mr. Kirkwood, can't we be friends--this aside?"
+
+"Nothing could please me more, Mrs. Hallam!"
+
+"I'm sorry if I've annoyed you--"
+
+"And I, too, have been rude."
+
+"Last night, when you cut away so suddenly, you prevented my making you a
+proposal, a sort of a business proposition...."
+
+"Yes--?"
+
+"To come over to our side--"
+
+"I thought so. That was why I went."
+
+"Yes; I understood. But this morning, when you've had time to think it
+over--?"
+
+"I have no choice in the matter, Mrs. Hallam." The green eyes darkened
+ominously. "You mean--I am to understand, then, that you're against us,
+that you prefer to side with swindlers and scoundrels, all because of a--"
+
+She discovered him eying her with a smile of such inscrutable and sardonic
+intelligence, that the words died on her lips, and she crimsoned,
+treasonably to herself. For he saw it; and the belief he had conceived
+while attending to her tissue of fabrication, earlier that morning, was
+strengthened to the point of conviction that, if anything had been stolen
+by anybody, Mrs. Hallam and her son owned it as little as Calendar.
+
+As for the woman, she felt she had steadily lost, rather than gained,
+ground; and the flash of anger that had colored her cheeks, lit twin
+beacons in her eyes, which she resolutely fought down until they faded to
+mere gleams of resentment and determination. But she forgot to control
+her lips; and they are the truest indices to a woman's character and
+temperament; and Kirkwood did not overlook the circumstance that their
+specious sweetness had vanished, leaving them straight, set and hard, quite
+the reverse of attractive.
+
+"So," she said slowly, after a silent time, "you are not for Queensborough!
+The corollary of that _admission_, Mr. Kirkwood, is that you are for
+Sheerness."
+
+"I believe," he replied wearily, "that there are no other stations on this
+line, after Newington."
+
+"It follows, then, that--that I follow." And in answer to his perturbed
+glance, she added: "Oh, I'll grant that intuition is sometimes a poor
+guide. But if you meet George Calendar, so shall I. Nothing can prevent
+that. You can't hinder me."
+
+Considerably amused, he chuckled. "Let us talk of other things, Mrs.
+Hallam," he suggested pleasantly. "How is your son?"
+
+At this juncture the brakes began to shriek and grind upon the wheels.
+The train slowed; it stopped; and the voice of a guard could be heard
+admonishing passengers for Queensborough Pier to alight and take the branch
+line. In the noise the woman's response was drowned, and Kirkwood was
+hardly enough concerned for poor Freddie to repeat his question.
+
+When, after a little, the train pulled out of the junction, neither found
+reason to resume the conversation. During the brief balance of the journey
+Mrs. Hallam presumably had food for thought; she frowned, pursed her lips,
+and with one daintily gloved forefinger followed a seam of her tailored
+skirt; while Kirkwood sat watching and wondering how to rid himself of her,
+if she proved really as troublesome as she threatened to be.
+
+Also, he wondered continually what it was all about. Why did Mrs. Hallam
+suspect him of designing to meet Calendar at Queensborough? Had she
+any tangible ground for believing that Calendar could be found in
+Queensborough? Presumably she had, since she was avowedly in pursuit of
+that gentleman, and, Kirkwood inferred, had booked for Queensborough.
+Was he, then, running away from Calendar and his daughter to chase a
+will-o'-the-wisp of his credulous fancy, off Sheerness shore?
+
+Disturbing reflection. He scowled over it, then considered the other side
+of the face. Presuming Mrs. Hallam to have had reasonably dependable
+assurance that Calendar would stop in Queensborough, would she so readily
+have abandoned her design to catch him there, on the mere supposition that
+Kirkwood might be looking for him in Sheerness? That did not seem likely
+to one who esteemed Mrs. Hallam's acumen as highly as Kirkwood did. He
+brightened up, forgot that his was a fool's errand, and began again to
+project strategic plans into a problematic future.
+
+A sudden jolt interrupted this pastime, and the warning screech of the
+brakes informed that he had no time to scheme, but had best continue on the
+plan of action that had brought him thus far--that is, trust to his star
+and accept what should befall without repining.
+
+He rose, opened the door, and holding it so, turned.
+
+"I regret, Mrs. Hallam," he announced, smiling his crooked smile, "that
+a pressing engagement is about to prohibit my 'squiring you through the
+ticket-gates. You understand, I'm sure."
+
+His irrepressible humor proved infectious; and Mrs. Hallam's spirit ran as
+high as his own. She was smiling cheerfully when she, too, rose.
+
+"I also am in some haste," she averred demurely, gathering up her hand-bag
+and umbrella.
+
+A raised platform shot in beside the carriage, and the speed was so
+sensibly moderated that the train seemed to be creeping rather than
+running. Kirkwood flung the door wide open and lowered himself to the
+running-board. The end of the track was in sight and--a man who has been
+trained to board San Francisco cable-cars fears to alight from no moving
+vehicle. He swung off, got his balance, and ran swiftly down the platform.
+
+A cry from a bystander caused him to glance over his shoulder; Mrs. Hallam
+was then in the act of alighting. As he looked the flurry of skirts
+subsided and she fell into stride, pursuing.
+
+Sleepy Sheerness must have been scandalized, that day, and its gossips have
+acquired ground for many, an uncharitable surmise.
+
+Kirkwood, however, was so fortunate as to gain the wicket before the
+employee there awoke to the situation. Otherwise, such is the temper of
+British petty officialdom, he might have detained the fugitive. As it was,
+Kirkwood surrendered his ticket and ran out into the street with his luck
+still a dominant factor in the race. For, looking back, he saw that Mrs.
+Hallam had been held up at the gate, another victim of British red-tape;
+her ticket read for Queensborough, she was attempting to alight one station
+farther down the line, and while undoubtedly she was anxious to pay the
+excess fare, Heaven alone knew when she would succeed in allaying the
+suspicions and resentment of the ticket-taker.
+
+"That's good for ten minutes' start!" Kirkwood crowed. "And it never
+occurred to me--!"
+
+Before the station he found two hacks in waiting, with little to choose
+between them; neither was of a type that did not seem to advertise its
+pre-Victorian fashioning, and to neither was harnessed an animal that
+deserved anything but the epithet of screw. Kirkwood took the nearest for
+no other reason than because it was the nearest, and all but startled the
+driver off his box by offering double-fare for a brisk pace and a simple
+service at the end of the ride. Succinctly he set forth his wants, jumped
+into the antiquated four-wheeler, and threw himself down upon musty, dusty
+cushions to hug himself over the joke and bless whatever English board of
+railway, directors it was that first ordained that tickets should be taken
+up at the end instead of the outset of a journey.
+
+It was promptly made manifest that he had further cause for gratulation.
+The cabby, recovering from his amazement, was plying an indefatigable whip
+and thereby eliciting a degree of speed from his superannuated nag, that
+his fare had by no means hoped for, much less anticipated. The cab rocked
+and racketed through Sheerness' streets at a pace which is believed to be
+unprecedented and unrivaled; its passenger, dashed from side to side, had
+all he could do to keep from battering the vehicle to pieces with his head;
+while it was entirely out of the question to attempt to determine whether
+or not he was being pursued. He enjoyed it all hugely.
+
+In a period of time surprisingly short, he saw, from fleeting glimpses of
+the scenery to be obtained through the reeling windows, that they were
+threading the outskirts of the town; synchronously, whether by design or
+through actual inability to maintain it, the speed was moderated. And in
+the course of a few more minutes the cab stopped definitely.
+
+Kirkwood clambered painfully out, shook himself together and the bruises
+out of his bones, and looked fearfully back.
+
+Aside from a slowly settling cloud of dust, the road ran clear as far as he
+could see--to the point, in fact, where the town closed in about it.
+
+He had won; at all events in so much as to win meant eluding the
+persevering Mrs. Hallam. But to what end?
+
+Abstractedly he tendered his lonely sovereign to the driver, and without
+even looking at it, crammed the heavy weight of change into his pocket; an
+oversight which not only won him the awe-struck admiration of the cabby,
+but entailed consequences (it may be) he little apprehended. It was with an
+absentminded nod that he acquiesced in the man's announcement that he might
+arrange about the boat for him. Accordingly the cabby disappeared; and
+Kirkwood continued to stare about him, eagerly, hopefully.
+
+He stood on the brink of the Thames estuary, there a possible five miles
+from shore to shore; from his feet, almost, a broad shingle beach sloped
+gently to the water.
+
+On one hand a dilapidated picket-fence enclosed the door-yard of a
+fisherman's cottage, or, better, hovel,--if it need be accurately
+described--at the door of which the cabby was knocking.
+
+The morning was now well-advanced. The sun rode high, a sphere of tarnished
+flame in a void of silver-gray, its thin cold radiance striking pallid
+sparks from the leaping crests of wind-whipped waves. In the east a wall
+of vapor, dull and lusterless, had taken body since the dawn, masking the
+skies and shutting down upon the sea like some vast curtain; and out of the
+heart of this a bitter and vicious wind played like a sword.
+
+To the north, Shoeburyness loomed vaguely, like a low-drifted bank of
+cloud. Off to the right the Nore Lightship danced, a tiny fleck of warm
+crimson in a wilderness of slatey-blue waters, plumed with a myriad of
+vanishing white-caps.
+
+Up the shelving shore, small, puny wavelets dashed in impotent fury, and
+the shingle sang unceasingly its dreary, syncopated monotone. High and dry,
+a few dingy boats lay canted wearily upon their broad, swelling sides,--a
+couple of dories, apparently in daily use; a small sloop yacht, dismantled
+and plainly beyond repair; and an oyster-smack also out of commission.
+About them the beach was strewn with a litter of miscellany,--nets, oars,
+cork buoys, bits of wreckage and driftwood, a few fish too long forgotten
+and (one assumed) responsible in part for the foreign wealth of the
+atmosphere.
+
+Some little distance offshore a fishing-boat, catrigged and not more than
+twenty-feet over all, swung bobbing at her mooring, keen nose searching
+into the wind; at sight of which Kirkwood gave thanks, for his adventitious
+guide had served him well, if that boat were to be hired by any manner of
+persuasion.
+
+But it was to the farther reaches of the estuary that he gave more
+prolonged and most anxious heed, scanning narrowly what shipping was there
+to be seen. Far beyond the lightship a liner was riding the waves with
+serene contempt, making for the river's mouth and Tilbury Dock. Nearer
+in, a cargo boat was standing out upon the long trail, the white of riven
+waters showing clearly against her unclean freeboard. Out to east a little
+covey of fishing-smacks, red sails well reefed, were scudding before
+the wind like strange affrighted water-fowl, and bearing down past a
+heavy-laden river barge. The latter, with tarpaulin battened snugly down
+over the cockpit and the seas dashing over her wash-board until she seemed
+under water half the time, was forging stodgily Londonwards, her bargee at
+the tiller smoking a placid pipe.
+
+But a single sailing vessel of any notable tonnage was in sight; and when
+he saw her Kirkwood's heart became buoyant with hope, and he began to
+tremble with nervous eagerness. For he believed her to be the _Alethea_.
+
+There's no mistaking a ship brigantine-rigged for any other style of craft
+that sails the seas.
+
+From her position when first he saw her, Kirkwood could have fancied she
+was tacking out of the mouth of the Medway; but he judged that, leaving the
+Thames' mouth, she had tacked to starboard until well-nigh within hail of
+Sheerness. Now, having presumably, gone about, she was standing out toward
+the Nore, boring doggedly into the wind. He would have given a deal for
+glasses wherewith to read the name upon her bows, but was sensible of no
+hampering doubts; nor, had he harbored any, would they have deterred him.
+He had set his heart upon the winning of his venture, had come too far,
+risked far too much, to suffer anything now to stay his hand and stand
+between him and Dorothy Calendar. Whatever the further risks and hazards,
+though he should take his life in his hands to win to her side, he would
+struggle on. He recked nothing of personal danger; a less selfish passion
+ran molten in his veins, moving him to madness.
+
+Fascinated, he fixed his gaze upon the reeling brigantine, and for a space
+it was as if by longing he had projected his spirit to her slanting deck,
+and were there, pleading his case with the mistress of his heart....
+
+Voices approaching brought him back to shore. He turned, resuming his mask
+of sanity, the better to confer with the owner of the cottage and boats--a
+heavy, keen-eyed fellow, ungracious and truculent of habit, and chary of
+his words; as he promptly demonstrated.
+
+"I'll hire your boat," Kirkwood told him, "to put me aboard that
+brigantine, off to leeward. We ought to start at once."
+
+The fisherman shifted his quid of tobacco from cheek to cheek, grunted
+inarticulately, and swung deliberately on his heel, displaying a bull neck
+above a pair of heavy shoulders.
+
+"Dirty weather," he croaked, facing back from his survey of the eastern
+skies before the American found out whether or not he should resent his
+insolence.
+
+"How much?" Kirkwood demanded curtly, annoyed.
+
+The man hesitated, scowling blackly at the heeling vessel, momentarily
+increasing her distance from shore. Then with a crafty smile, "Two pound',"
+he declared.
+
+The American nodded. "Very well," he agreed simply. "Get out your boat."
+
+The fisherman turned away to shamble noisily over the shingle, huge booted
+heels crunching, toward one of the dories. To this he set his shoulder,
+shoving it steadily down the beach until only the stern was dry.
+
+Kirkwood looked back, for the last time, up the road to Sheerness. Nothing
+moved upon it. He was rid of Mrs. Hallam, if face to face with a sterner
+problem. He had a few pence over ten shillings in his pocket, and had
+promised to pay the man four times as much. He would have agreed to ten
+times the sum demanded; for the boat he must and would have. But he had
+neglected to conclude his bargain, to come to an understanding as to
+the method of payment; and he felt more than a little dubious as to the
+reception the fisherman would give his proposition, sound as he, Kirkwood,
+knew it to be.
+
+In the background the cabby loitered, gnawed by insatiable curiosity.
+
+The fisherman turned, calling over his shoulder: "If ye'd catch yon vessel,
+come!"
+
+With one final twinge of doubt--the task of placating this surly dog was
+anything but inviting--the American strode to the boat and climbed in,
+taking the stern seat. The fisherman shoved off, wading out thigh-deep in
+the spiteful waves, then threw himself in over the gunwales and shipped the
+oars. Bows swinging offshore, rocking and dancing, the dory began to forge
+slowly toward the anchored boat. In their faces the wind beat gustily, and
+small, slapping waves, breaking against the sides, showered them with fine
+spray....
+
+In time the dory lay alongside the cat-boat, the fisherman with a gnarled
+hand grasping the latter's gunwale to hold the two together. With some
+difficulty Kirkwood transhipped himself, landing asprawl in the cockpit,
+amid a tangle of cordage slippery with scales. The skipper followed, with
+clumsy expertness bringing the dory's painter with him and hitching it to a
+ring-bolt abaft the rudder-head. Then, pausing an instant to stare into the
+East with somber eyes, he shipped the tiller and bent to the halyards. As
+the sail rattled up, flapping wildly, Kirkwood marked with relief--for it
+meant so much time saved--that it was already close reefed.
+
+But when at least the boom was thrashing overhead and the halyards had
+been made fast to their cleats, the fisherman again stood erect, peering
+distrustfully at the distant wall of cloud.
+
+Then, in two breaths: "Can't do it," he decided; "not at the price."
+
+"Why?" Kirkwood stared despairingly after the brigantine, that was already
+drawn far ahead.
+
+"Danger," growled the fellow, "--wind."
+
+At a loss completely, Kirkwood found no words. He dropped his head,
+considering.
+
+"Not at the price," the sullen voice iterated; and he looked up to find the
+cunning gaze upon him.
+
+"How much, then?"
+
+"Five poun' I'll have--no less, for riskin' my life this day."
+
+"Impossible. I haven't got it."
+
+In silence the man unshipped the tiller and moved toward the cleats.
+
+"Hold on a minute."
+
+Kirkwood unbuttoned his coat and, freeing the chain from his waistcoat
+buttonholes, removed his watch.... As well abandon them altogether; he had
+designed to leave them as security for the two pounds, and had delayed
+stating the terms only for fear lest they be refused. Now, too late as
+ever, he recognized his error. But surely, he thought, it should be
+apparent even to that low intelligence that the timepiece alone was worth
+more than the boat itself.
+
+"Will you take these?" he offered. "Take and keep them--only set me aboard
+that ship!"
+
+Deliberately the fisherman weighed the watch and chain in his broad, hard
+palm, eyes narrowing to mere slits in his bronzed mask.
+
+"How much?" he asked slowly.
+
+"Eighty pounds, together; the chain alone cost me twenty."
+
+The shifty, covetous eyes ranged from the treasure in his hand to the
+threatening east. A puff of wind caught the sail and sent the boom
+athwartships, like a mighty flail. Both men ducked instinctively, to escape
+a braining.
+
+"How do I know?" objected the skipper.
+
+"I'm telling you. If you've got eyes, you can see," retorted Kirkwood
+savagely, seeing that he had erred in telling the truth; the amount he had
+named was too great to be grasped at once by this crude, cupidous brain.
+
+"How do I know?" the man repeated. Nevertheless he dropped watch and chain
+into his pocket, then with a meaning grimace extended again his horny,
+greedy palm.
+
+"What...?"
+
+"Hand over th' two pound' and we'll go."
+
+"I'll see you damned first!"
+
+A flush of rage blinded the young man. The knowledge that the _Alethea_
+was minute by minute slipping beyond his reach seemed to madden him.
+White-lipped and ominously quiet he rose from his seat on the combing, as,
+without answer, the fisherman, crawling out on the overhand, began to haul
+in the dory.
+
+"Ashore ye go," he pronounced his ultimatum, motioning Kirkwood to enter
+the boat.
+
+The American turned, looking for the _Alethea_, or for the vessel that he
+believed bore that name. She was nearing the light-ship when he found
+her, and as he looked a squall blurred the air between them, blotting
+the brigantine out with a smudge of rain. The effect was as if she had
+vanished, as if she were for ever snatched from his grasp; and with Dorothy
+aboard her--Heaven alone knew in what need of him!
+
+Mute and blind with despair and wrath, he turned upon the man and caught
+him by the collar, forcing him out over the lip of the overhang. They were
+unevenly matched, Kirkwood far the slighter, but strength came to him in
+the crisis, physical strength and address such as he had not dreamed was at
+his command. And the surprise of his onslaught proved an ally of unguessed
+potency. Before he himself knew it he was standing on the overhang and had
+shifted his hold to seize the fellow about the waist; then, lifting him
+clear of the deck, and aided by a lurch of the cat-boat, he cast him
+bodily into the dory. The man, falling, struck his head against one of the
+thwarts, a glancing blow that stunned him temporarily. Kirkwood himself
+dropped as if shot, a trailing reef-point slapping his cheek until it stung
+as the boom thrashed overhead. It was as close a call as he had known; the
+knowledge sickened him a little.
+
+Without rising he worked the painter loose and cast the dory adrift; then
+crawled back into the cockpit. No pang of compassion disturbed him as he
+abandoned the fisherman to the mercy of the sea; though the fellow lay
+still, uncouthly distorted, in the bottom of the dory, he was in no danger;
+the wind and waves together would carry the boat ashore.... For that
+matter, the man was even then recovering, struggling to sit up.
+
+Crouching to avoid the boom, Kirkwood went forward to the bows, and,
+grasping the mooring cable, drew it in, slipping back into the cockpit to
+get a stronger purchase with his feet. It was a struggle; the boat pulled
+sluggishly against the wind, the cable inching in jealously. And behind
+him he could hear a voice bellowing inarticulate menaces, and knew that in
+another moment the fisherman would be at his oars.
+
+Frantically he tugged and tore at the slimy rope, hauling with a will and a
+prayer. It gave more readily, towards the end, but he seemed to have fought
+with it for ages when at last the anchor tripped and he got it in.
+
+Immediately he leaped back to the stern, fitted in the tiller, and seizing
+the mainsheet, drew the boom in till the wind should catch in the canvas.
+In the dory the skipper, bending at his oars, was not two yards astern.
+
+He was hard aboard when, the sail filling with a bang, Kirkwood pulled the
+tiller up; and the cat-boat slid away, a dozen feet separating them in a
+breath.
+
+A yell of rage boomed down the wind, but he paid no heed. Careless alike of
+the dangers he had passed and those that yawned before him, he trimmed
+the sheet and stood away on the port tack, heading directly for the Nore
+Lightship.
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+
+OFF THE NORE
+
+Kirkwood's anger cooled apace; at worst it had been a flare of
+passion--incandescent. It was seldom more. His brain clearing, the
+temperature of his judgment quickly regained its mean, and he saw his
+chances without distortion, weighed them without exaggeration.
+
+Leaning against the combing, feet braced upon the slippery and treacherous
+deck, he clung to tiller and mainsheet and peered ahead with anxious eyes,
+a pucker of daring graven deep between his brows.
+
+A mile to westward, three or more ahead, he could see the brigantine
+standing close in under the Essex shore. At times she was invisible; again
+he could catch merely the glint of her canvas, white against the dark loom
+of the littoral, toned by a mist of flying spindrift. He strained his eyes,
+watching for the chance which would take place in the rake of her masts and
+sails, when she should come about.
+
+For the longer that manoeuver was deferred, the better was his chance of
+attaining his object. It was a forlorn hope. But in time the brigantine,
+to escape Maplin Sands, would be forced to tack and stand out past the
+lightship, the wind off her port bows. Then their courses would intersect.
+It remained to be demonstrated whether the cat-boat was speedy enough to
+arrive at this point of contact in advance of, or simultaneously with, the
+larger vessel. Every minute that the putative _Alethea_ put off coming
+about brought the cat-boat nearer that goal, but Kirkwood could do no more
+than hope and try to trust in the fisherman's implied admission that it
+could be done. It was all in the boat and the way she handled.
+
+He watched her anxiously, quick to approve her merits as she displayed
+them. He had sailed small craft before--frail center-board cat-boats, handy
+and swift, built to serve in summer winds and protected waters: never such
+an one as this. Yet he liked her.
+
+Deep bosomed she was, with no center-board, dependent on her draught and
+heavy keel to hold her on the wind; stanch and seaworthy, sheathed with
+stout plank and ribbed with seasoned timber, designed to keep afloat in
+the wickedest weather brewed by the foul-tempered German Ocean. Withal her
+lines were fine and clean; for all her beam she was calculated to nose
+narrowly into the wind and make a pretty pace as well. A good boat: he had
+the grace to give the credit to his luck.
+
+Her disposition was more fully disclosed as they drew away from the beach.
+Inshore with shoaling water, the waves had been choppy and spiteful but
+lacking force of weight. Farther out, as the bottom fell away, the rollers
+became more uniform and powerful; heavy sweeping seas met the cat-boat,
+from their hollows looming mountainous to the man in the tiny cockpit; who
+was nevertheless aware that to a steamer they would be negligible.
+
+His boat breasted them gallantly, toiling sturdily up the steep
+acclivities, poising breathlessly on foam-crested summits for dizzy
+instants, then plunging headlong down the deep green swales; and left a
+boiling wake behind her,--urging ever onward, hugging the wind in her wisp
+of blood-red sail, and boring into it, pulling at the tiller with the
+mettle of a race-horse slugging at the bit.
+
+Offshore, too, the wind stormed with added strength, or, possibly, had
+freshened. For minutes on end the leeward gunwales would run green, and now
+and again the screaming, pelting squalls that scoured the estuary would
+heel her over until the water cascaded in over the lee combing, and the
+rudder, lifted clear, would hang idle until, smitten by some racing billow,
+the tiller would be all but torn from Kirkwood's hands. Again and again
+this happened; and those were times of trembling. But always the cat-boat
+righted, shaking the clinging waters from her and swinging her stem into
+the wind again; and there would follow an abbreviated breathing spell,
+during which Kirkwood was at liberty to dash the salt spray from his eyes
+and search the wind-harried waste for the brigantine. Sometimes he found
+her, sometimes not.
+
+Long after he had expected her to, she went about and they began to close
+in upon each other. He could see that even with shortened canvas she was
+staggering drunkenly under the fierce impacts of the wind. For himself, it
+was nip-and-tuck, now, and no man in his normal sense would have risked a
+sixpence on the boat's chance to live until she crossed the brigantine's
+bows.
+
+Time out of reckoning he was forced to kneel in the swimming cockpit,
+steering with one hand, using the bailing-dish with the other, and
+keeping his eyes religiously turned to the bellying patch of sail. It was
+heartbreaking toil; he began reluctantly to concede that it could not last
+much longer. And if he missed the brigantine he would be lost; mortal
+strength was not enough to stand the unending strain upon every bone,
+muscle and sinew, required to keep the boat upon her course; though for
+a time it might cope with and solve the problems presented by each new,
+malignant billow and each furious, howling squall, the end inevitably must
+be failure. To struggle on would be but to postpone the certain end ...
+save and except the possibility of his gaining the brigantine within the
+period of time strictly and briefly limited by his powers of endurance.
+
+Long since he had become numb with cold from incessant drenchings of
+icy spray, that piled in over the windward counter, keeping the bottom
+ankle-deep regardless of his laborious but intermittent efforts with the
+bailing dish. And the two, brigantine and cockle-shell, were drawing
+together with appalling deliberation.
+
+A dozen times he was on the point of surrender, as often plucked up hope;
+as the minutes wore on and he kept above water, he began to believe that if
+he could stick it out his judgment and seamanship would be justified ...
+though human ingenuity backed by generosity could by no means contrive
+adequate excuse for his foolhardiness.
+
+But that was aside, something irreparable. Wan and grim, he fought it out.
+
+But that his voice stuck in his parched throat, he could have shouted in
+his elation, when eventually he gained the point of intersection an eighth
+of a mile ahead of the brigantine and got sight of her windward freeboard
+as, most slowly, the cat-boat forged across her course.
+
+For all that, the moment of his actual triumph was not yet; he had still to
+carry off successfully a scheme that for sheer audacity of conception and
+contempt for danger, transcended all that had gone before.
+
+Holding the cat-boat on for a time, he brought her about handsomely a
+little way beyond the brigantine's course, and hung in the eye of the wind,
+the leach flapping and tightening with reports like rifle-shots, and
+the water sloshing about his calves--bailing-dish now altogether out of
+mind--while he watched the oncoming vessel, his eyes glistening with
+anticipation.
+
+She was footing it smartly, the brigantine--lying down to it and snoring
+into the wind. Beneath her stem waves broke in snow-white showers, whiter
+than the canvas of her bulging jib--broke and, gnashing their teeth in
+impotent fury, swirled and eddied down her sleek dark flanks. Bobbing,
+courtesying, she plunged onward, shortening the interval with mighty,
+leaping bounds. On her bows, with each instant, the golden letters of her
+name grew larger and more legible until--_Alethea_!--he could read it plain
+beyond dispute.
+
+Joy welled in his heart. He forgot all that he had undergone in the
+prospect of what he proposed still to do in the name of the only woman the
+world held for him. Unquestioning he had come thus far in her service;
+unquestioning, by her side, he was prepared to go still farther, though all
+humanity should single her out with accusing fingers....
+
+They were watching him, aboard the brigantine; he could see a line of heads
+above her windward rail. Perhaps _she_ was of their number. He waved
+an audacious hand. Some one replied, a great shout shattering itself
+unintelligibly against the gale. He neither understood nor attempted to
+reply; his every faculty was concentrated on the supreme moment now at
+hand.
+
+Calculating the instant to a nicety, he paid off the sheet and pulled up
+the tiller. The cat-boat pivoted on her heel; with a crack her sail flapped
+full and rigid; then, with the untempered might of the wind behind her, she
+shot like an arrow under the brigantine's bows, so close that the bowsprit
+of the latter first threatened to impale the sail, next, the bows plunging,
+crashed down a bare two feet behind the cat-boat's stern.
+
+Working in a frenzy of haste, Kirkwood jammed the tiller hard alee,
+bringing the cat about, and, trimming the mainsheet as best he might, found
+himself racing under the brigantine's leeward quarter,--water pouring in
+generously over the cat's.
+
+Luffing, he edged nearer, handling his craft as though intending to ram the
+larger vessel, foot by foot shortening the little interval. When it
+was four feet, he would risk the jump; he crawled out on the overhang,
+crouching on his toes, one hand light upon the tiller, the other touching
+the deck, ready ... ready....
+
+Abruptly the _Alethea_ shut off the wind; the sail flattened and the cat
+dropped back. In a second the distance had doubled. In anguish Kirkwood
+uttered an exceeding bitter cry. Already he was falling far off her
+counter....
+
+A shout reached him. He was dimly conscious of a dark object hurtling
+through the air. Into the cockpit, splashing, something dropped--a coil of
+rope. He fell forward upon it, into water eighteen inches deep; and for the
+first time realized that, but for that line, he had gone to his drowning in
+another minute. The cat was sinking.
+
+As he scrambled to his feet, clutching the life-line, a heavy wave washed
+over the water-logged craft and left it all but submerged; and a smart tug
+on the rope added point to the advice which, reaching his ears in a bellow
+like a bull's, penetrated the panic of his wits.
+
+"Jump! _Jump, you fool_!"
+
+In an instant of coherence he saw that the brigantine was luffing; none the
+less much of the line had already been paid out, and there was no reckoning
+when the end would be reached. Without time to make it fast, he hitched it
+twice round his waist and chest, once round an arm, and, grasping it above
+his head to ease its constriction when the tug should come, leaped on the
+combing and overboard. A green roaring avalanche swept down upon him and
+the luckless cat-boat, overwhelming both simultaneously.
+
+The agony that was his during the next few minutes can by no means be
+exaggerated. With such crises the human mind is not fitted adequately
+to cope; it retains no record of the supreme moment beyond a vague and
+incoherent impression of poignant, soul-racking suffering. Kirkwood
+underwent a prolonged interval of semi-sentience, his mind dominated
+and oppressed by a deathly fear of drowning and a deadening sense of
+suffocation, with attendant tortures as of being broken on the wheel--limb
+rending from limb; of compression of his ribs that threatened momentarily
+to crush in his chest; of a world a-welter with dim swirling green
+half-lights alternating with flashes of blinding white; of thunderings in
+his ears like salvoes from a thousand cannon....
+
+And his senses were blotted out in blackness....
+
+Then he was breathing once more, the keen clean air stabbing his lungs, the
+while he swam unsupported in an ethereal void of brilliance. His mouth
+was full of something that burned, a liquid hot, acrid, and stinging. He
+gulped, swallowed, slobbered, choked, coughed, attempted to sit up, was
+aware that he was the focal center of a ring of glaring, burning eyes, like
+eyes of ravening beasts; and fainted.
+
+His next conscious impression was of standing up, supported by friendly
+arms on either side, while somebody was asking him if he could walk a step
+or two.
+
+He lifted his head and let it fall in token of assent, mumbling a yes; and
+looked round him with eyes wherein the light of intelligence burned more
+clear with every second. By degrees he catalogued and comprehended his
+weirdly altered circumstances and surroundings.
+
+He was partly seated, partly held up, on the edge of the cabin sky-light,
+an object of interest to some half-dozen men, seafaring fellows all, by
+their habit, clustered round between him and the windward rail. Of their
+number one stood directly before him, dwarfing his companions as much by
+his air of command as by his uncommon height: tall, thin-faced and sallow,
+with hollow weather-worn cheeks, a mouth like a crooked gash from ear to
+ear, and eyes like dying coals, with which he looked the rescued up and
+down in one grim, semi-humorous, semi-speculative glance. In hands both
+huge and red he fondled tenderly a squat brandy flask whose contents had
+apparently been employed as a first aid to the drowning.
+
+As Kirkwood's gaze encountered his, the man smiled sourly, jerking his head
+to one side with a singularly derisive air.
+
+"Hi, matey!" he blustered. "'Ow goes it now? Feelin' 'appier, eigh?"
+
+[Illustration: "Hi, matey!" he blustered. "'Ow goes it now?"]
+
+"Some, thank you ... more like a drowned rat." Kirkwood eyed him
+sheepishly. "I suppose you're the man who threw me that line? I'll have to
+wait till my head clears up before I can thank you properly."
+
+"Don't mention it." He of the lantern jaws stowed the bottle away with
+jealous care in one of his immense coat pockets, and seized Kirkwood's
+hand in a grasp that made the young man wince. "You're syfe enough now.
+My nyme's Stryker, Capt'n Wilyum Stryker.... Wot's the row? Lookin' for a
+friend?" he demanded suddenly, as Kirkwood's attention wandered.
+
+For the memory of the errand that had brought him into the hands of Captain
+William Stryker had come to the young man very suddenly; and his eager eyes
+were swiftly roving not along the decks but the wide world besides, for
+sight or sign of his heart's desire.
+
+After luffing to pick him up, the brigantine had been again pulled off on
+the port tack. The fury of the gale seemed rather to have waxed than waned,
+and the _Alethea_ was bending low under the relentless fury of its blasts,
+driving hard, with leeward channels awash. Under her port counter, a mile
+away, the crimson light-ship wallowed in a riot of breaking combers.
+Sheerness lay abeam, five miles or more. Ahead the northeast headland
+of the Isle of Sheppey was bulking large and near. The cat-boat had
+vanished....
+
+More important still, no one aboard the brigantine resembled in the
+remotest degree either of the Calendars, father or daughter, or even
+Mulready, the black-avised.
+
+"I sye, 're you lookin' for some one you know?"
+
+"Yes--your passengers. I presume they're below--?"
+
+"Passengers!"
+
+A hush fell upon the group, during which Kirkwood sought Stryker's eye in
+pitiful pleading; and Stryker looked round him blankly.
+
+"Where's Miss Calendar?" the young man demanded sharply. "I must see her at
+once!"
+
+The keen and deep-set eyes of the skipper clouded as they returned to
+Kirkwood's perturbed countenance. "Wot're you talking about?" he demanded
+brusquely.
+
+"I must see Miss Calendar, or Calendar himself, or Mulready." Kirkwood
+paused, and, getting no reply, grew restive under Stryker's inscrutable
+regard.
+
+"That's why I came aboard," he amended, blind to the absurdity of the
+statement; "to see--er--Calendar."
+
+"Well ... I'm damned!"
+
+Stryker managed to infuse into his tone a deal of suspicious contempt.
+
+"Why?" insisted Kirkwood, nettled but still uncomprehending.
+
+"D'you mean to tell me you came off from--wherever in 'ell you did come
+from--intendin' to board this wessel and find a party nymed Calendar?"
+
+"Certainly I did. Why--?"
+
+"Well!" cried Mr. Stryker, rubbing his hands together with an air
+oppressively obsequious, "I'm sorry to _hin_-form you you've come to the
+wrong shop, sir; we don't stock no Calendars. We're in the 'ardware line,
+we are. You might try next door, or I dessay you'll find what you want at
+the stytioner's, round the corner."
+
+A giggle from his audience stimulated him. "If," he continued acidly,
+"I'd a-guessed you was such a damn' fool, blimmy if I wouldn't've let you
+drownd!"
+
+Staggered, Kirkwood bore his sarcastic truculence without resentment.
+
+"Calendar," he stammered, trying to explain, "Calendar _said_--"
+
+"I carn't 'elp wot Calendar said. Mebbe 'e _did_ myke an engygement with
+you, an' you've gone and went an' forgot the dyte. Mebbe it's larst year's
+calendar you're thinkin' of. You Johnny" (to a lout of a boy in the group
+of seamen), "you run an' fetch this gentleman Whitaker's for Nineteen-six.
+Look sharp, now!"
+
+"But--!" With an effort Kirkwood mustered up a show of dignity. "Am I to
+understand," he said, as calmly as he could, "that you deny knowing George
+B. Calendar and his daughter Dorothy and--"
+
+"I don't 'ave to. Listen to me, young man." For the time the fellow
+discarded his clumsy facetiousness. "I'm Wilyum Stryker, Capt'n Stryker,
+marster and 'arf-owner of this wessel, and wot I says 'ere is law. We don't
+carry no passengers. D'ye understand me?"--aggressively. "There ain't no
+pusson nymed Calendar aboard the _Allytheer_, an' never was, an' never will
+be!"
+
+"What name did you say?" Kirkwood inquired.
+
+"This ship? The _Allytheer_; registered from Liverpool; bound from London
+to Hantwerp, in cargo. Anythink else?"
+
+Kirkwood shook his head, turning to scan the seascape with a gloomy
+gaze. As he did so, and remarked how close upon the Sheppey headland the
+brigantine had drawn, the order was given to go about. For the moment he
+was left alone, wretchedly wet, shivering, wan and shrunken visibly with
+the knowledge that he had dared greatly for nothing. But for the necessity
+of keeping up before Stryker and his crew, the young man felt that he could
+gladly have broken down and wept for sheer vexation and disappointment.
+
+Smartly the brigantine luffed and wore about, heeling deep as she spun away
+on the starboard tack.
+
+Kirkwood staggered round the skylight to the windward rail. From this
+position, looking forward, he could see that they were heading for the open
+sea, Foulness low over the port quarter, naught before them but a brawling
+waste of leaden-green and dirty white. Far out one of the sidewheel boats
+of the Queensborough-Antwerp line was heading directly into the wind and
+making heavy weather of it.
+
+Some little while later, Stryker again approached him, perhaps swayed by an
+unaccustomed impulse of compassion; which, however, he artfully concealed.
+Blandly ironic, returning to his impersonation of the shopkeeper, "Nothink
+else we can show you, sir?" he inquired.
+
+"I presume you couldn't put me ashore?" Kirkwood replied ingenuously.
+
+In supreme disgust the captain showed him his back. "'Ere, you!" he called
+to one of the crew. "Tyke this awye--tyke 'im below and put 'im to bed;
+give 'im a drink and dry 'is clo's. Mebbe 'e'll be better when 'e wykes up.
+'E don't talk sense now, that's sure. If you arsk me, I sye 'e's balmy and
+no 'ope for 'im."
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+
+PICARESQUE PASSAGES
+
+Contradictory to the hopeful prognosis of Captain Stryker, his unaccredited
+passenger was not "better" when, after a period of oblivious rest
+indefinite in duration, he awoke. His subsequent assumption of listless
+resignation, of pacific acquiescence in the dictates of his destiny, was
+purely deceptive--thin ice of despair over profound depths of exasperated
+rebellion.
+
+Blank darkness enveloped him when first he opened eyes to wonder. Then
+gradually as he stared, piecing together unassorted memories and striving
+to quicken drowsy wits, he became aware of a glimmer that waxed and waned,
+a bar of pale bluish light striking across the gloom above his couch; and
+by dint of puzzling divined that this had access by a port. Turning his
+head upon a stiff and unyielding pillow, he could discern a streak of
+saffron light lining the sill of a doorway, near by his side. The one
+phenomenon taken with the other confirmed a theretofore somewhat hazy
+impression that his dreams were dignified by a foundation of fact; that, in
+brief, he was occupying a cabin-bunk aboard the good ship _Alethea_.
+
+Overhead, on the deck, a heavy thumping of hurrying feet awoke him to
+keener perceptiveness.
+
+Judging from the incessant rolling and pitching of the brigantine, the
+crashing thunder of seas upon her sides, the eldrich shrieking of the gale,
+as well as from the chorused groans and plaints of each individual bolt
+and timber in the frail fabric that housed his fortunes, the wind had
+strengthened materially during his hours of forgetfulness--however many the
+latter might have been.
+
+He believed, however, that he had slept long, deeply and exhaustively. He
+felt now a little emaciated mentally and somewhat absent-bodied--so he put
+it to himself. A numb languor, not unpleasant, held him passively supine,
+the while he gave himself over to speculative thought.
+
+A wild night, certainly; probably, by that time, the little vessel was in
+the middle of the North Sea ... _bound for Antwerp_!
+
+"Oh-h," said Kirkwood vindictively, "_hell_!"
+
+So he was bound for Antwerp! The first color of resentment ebbing from his
+thoughts left him rather interested than excited by the prospect. He found
+that he was neither pleased nor displeased. He presumed that it would be
+no more difficult to raise money on personal belongings in Antwerp than
+anywhere else; it has been observed that the first flower of civilization
+is the rum-blossom, the next, the conventionalized fleur-de-lis of the
+money-lender. There would be pawnshops, then, in Antwerp; and Kirkwood was
+confident that the sale or pledge of his signet-ring, scarf-pin, match-box
+and cigar-case, would provide him with money enough for a return to London,
+by third-class, at the worst. There ... well, all events were on the knees
+of the gods; he'd squirm out of his troubles, somehow. As for the other
+matter, the Calendar affair, he presumed he was well rid of it,--with a
+sigh of regret. It had been a most enticing mystery, you know; and the
+woman in the case was extraordinary, to say the least.
+
+The memory of Dorothy Calendar made him sigh again, this time more
+violently: a sigh that was own brother to (or at any rate descended in
+a direct line from) the furnace sigh of the lover described by, the
+melancholy Jaques. And he sat up, bumped his head, groped round until his
+hand fell upon a doorknob, opened the door, and looked out into the blowsy
+emptiness of the ship's cabin proper, whose gloomy confines were made
+visible only by the rays of a dingy and smoky lamp swinging violently in
+gimbals from a deck-beam.
+
+Kirkwood's clothing, now rough-dried and warped wretchedly out of shape,
+had been thrown carelessly on a transom near the door. He got up, collected
+them, and returning to his berth, dressed at leisure, thinking heavily,
+disgruntled--in a humor as evil as the after-taste of bad brandy in his
+mouth.
+
+When dressed he went out into the cabin, closing the door upon his berth,
+and for lack of anything better to do, seated himself on the thwartships
+transom, against the forward bulkhead, behind the table. Above his head a
+chronometer ticked steadily and loudly, and, being consulted, told him that
+the time of day was twenty minutes to four; which meant that he had slept
+away some eighteen or twenty hours. That was a solid spell of a rest,
+when he came to think of it, even allowing that he had been unusually and
+pardonably fatigued when conducted to his berth. He felt stronger now, and
+bright enough--and enormously hungry into the bargain.
+
+Abstractedly, heedless of the fact that his tobacco would be water-soaked
+and ruined, he fumbled in his pockets for pipe and pouch, thinking to
+soothe the pangs of hunger against breakfast-time; which was probably two
+hours and a quarter ahead. But his pockets were empty--every one of them.
+He assimilated this discovery in patience and cast an eye about the room,
+to locate, if possible, the missing property. But naught of his was
+visible. So he rose and began a more painstaking search.
+
+The cabin was at once tiny, low-ceiled, and depressingly gloomy. Its
+furniture consisted entirely in a chair or two, supplementing the transoms
+and lockers as resting-places, and a center-table covered with a cloth of
+turkey-red, whose original aggressiveness had been darkly moderated by
+libations of liquids, principally black coffee, and burnt offerings of
+grease and tobacco-ash. Aside from the companion-way to the deck, four
+doors opened into the room, two probably giving upon the captain's and the
+mate's quarters, the others on pseudo state-rooms--one of which he had just
+vacated--closets large enough to contain a small bunk and naught beside.
+The bulkheads and partitions were badly broken out with a rash of pictures
+from illustrated papers, mostly offensive. Kirkwood was interested to read
+a half-column clipping from a New York yellow journal, descriptive of the
+antics of a drunken British sailor who had somehow found his way to the
+bar-room of the Fifth Avenue Hotel; the paragraph exploiting the fact that
+it had required four policemen in addition to the corps of porters to
+subdue him, was strongly underscored in red ink; and the news-story wound
+up with the information that in police court the man had given his name as
+William Stranger and cheerfully had paid a fine of ten dollars, alleging
+his entertainment to have been cheap at the price.
+
+While Kirkwood was employed in perusing this illuminating anecdote, eight
+bells sounded, and, from the commotion overhead, the watch changed. A
+little later the companion-way door slammed open and shut, and Captain
+Stryker--or Stranger; whichever you please--fell down, rather than
+descended, the steps.
+
+Without attention to the American he rolled into the mate's room and roused
+that personage. Kirkwood heard that the name of the second-in-command was
+'Obbs, as well as that he occupied the starboard state-room aft. After a
+brief exchange of comment and instruction, Mr. 'Obbs appeared in the shape
+of a walking pillar of oil-skins capped by a sou'wester, and went on deck;
+Stryker, following him out of the state-room, shed his own oilers in a
+clammy heap upon the floor, opened a locker from which he brought forth a
+bottle and a dirty glass, and, turning toward the table, for the first time
+became sensible of Kirkwood's presence.
+
+"Ow, there you are, eigh, little bright-eyes!" he exclaimed with surprised
+animation.
+
+"Good morning, Captain Stryker," said Kirkwood, rising. "I want to tell
+you--"
+
+But Stryker waved one great red paw impatiently, with the effect of
+sweeping aside and casting into the discard Kirkwood's intended speech of
+thanks; nor would he hear him further.
+
+"Did you 'ave a nice little nap?" he interrupted. "Come up bright and
+smilin', eigh? Now I guess"--the emphasis made it clear that the captain
+believed himself to be employing an Americanism; and so successful was he
+in his own esteem that he could not resist the temptation to improve upon
+the imitation--"Na-ow I guess yeou're abaout right ready, ben't ye, to hev
+a drink, sonny?"
+
+"No, thank you," said Kirkwood, smiling tolerantly. "I've got any amount of
+appetite..."
+
+"'Ave you, now?" Stryker dropped his mimicry and glanced at the clock.
+"Breakfast," he announced, "will be served in the myne dinin' saloon at
+eyght a. m. Passingers is requested not to be lyte at tyble."
+
+Depositing the bottle on the said table, the captain searched until he
+found another glass for Kirkwood, and sat down.
+
+"Do you good," he insinuated, pushing the bottle gently over.
+
+"No, thank you," reiterated Kirkwood shortly, a little annoyed.
+
+Stryker seized his own glass, poured out a strong man's dose of the
+fiery concoction, gulped it down, and sighed. Then, with a glance at the
+American's woebegone countenance (Kirkwood was contemplating a four-hour
+wait for breakfast, and, consequently, looking as if he had lost his last
+friend), the captain bent over, placing both hands palm down before him and
+wagging his head earnestly.
+
+"Please," he implored,--"Please don't let me hinterrupt;" and filled his
+pipe, pretending a pensive detachment from his company.
+
+The fumes of burning shag sharpened the tooth of desire. Kirkwood stood it
+as long as he could, then surrendered with an: "If you've got any more of
+that tobacco, Captain, I'd be glad of a pipe."
+
+An intensely contemplative expression crept into the captain's small blue
+eyes.
+
+"I only got one other pyper of this 'ere 'baccy," he announced at length,
+"and I carn't get no more till I gets 'ome. I simply couldn't part with it
+hunder 'arf a quid."
+
+Kirkwood settled back with a hopeless lift of his shoulders. Abstractedly
+Stryker puffed the smoke his way until he could endure the deprivation no
+longer.
+
+"I had about ten shillings in my pocket when I came aboard, captain,
+and ... a few other articles."
+
+"Ow, yes; so you 'ad, now you mention it."
+
+Stryker rose, ambled into his room, and returned with Kirkwood's
+possessions and a fresh paper of shag. While the young man was hastily
+filling, lighting, and inhaling the first strangling but delectable whiff,
+the captain solemnly counted into his own palm all the loose change except
+three large pennies. The latter he shoved over to Kirkwood in company with
+a miscellaneous assortment of articles, which the American picked up piece
+by piece and began to bestow about his clothing. When through, he sat back,
+troubled and disgusted. Stryker met his regard blandly.
+
+"Anything I can do?" he inquired, in suave concern.
+
+"Why ... there _was_ a black pearl scarfpin--"
+
+"W'y, don't you remember? You gave that to me, 'count of me 'avin syved yer
+life. 'Twas me throwed you that line, you know."
+
+"Oh," commented Kirkwood briefly. The pin had been among the most valuable
+and cherished of his belongings.
+
+"Yes," nodded the captain in reminiscence. "You don't remember? Likely
+'twas the brandy singing in yer 'ead. You pushes it into my 'ands,--almost
+weepin', you was,--and sez, sez you, 'Stryker,' you sez, 'tyke this in
+triflin' toking of my gratichood; I wouldn't hinsult you,' you sez, 'by
+hofferin' you money, but this I can insist on yer acceptin', and no
+refusal,' says you."
+
+"Oh," repeated Kirkwood.
+
+"If I for a ninstant thought you wasn't sober when you done it.... But no;
+you're a gent if there ever was one, and I'm not the man to offend you."
+
+"Oh, indeed."
+
+The captain let the implication pass, perhaps on the consideration that he
+could afford to ignore it; and said no more. The pause held for several
+minutes, Kirkwood having fallen into a mood of grave distraction. Finally
+Captain Stryker thoughtfully measured out a second drink, limited only by
+the capacity of the tumbler, engulfed it noisily, and got up.
+
+"Guess I'll be turnin' in," he volunteered affably, yawning and stretching.
+
+"I was about to ask you to do me a service...." began Kirkwood.
+
+"Yes?"--with the rising inflection of mockery.
+
+Kirkwood quietly produced his cigar-case, a gold match-box, gold card-case,
+and slipped a signet ring from his finger. "Will you buy these?" he asked.
+"Or will you lend me five pounds and hold them as security?"
+
+Stryker examined the collection with exaggerated interest strongly
+tinctured with mistrust. "I'll buy 'em," he offered eventually, looking up.
+
+"That's kind of you--"
+
+"Ow, they ain't much use to me, but Bill Stryker's allus willin' to
+accommodate a friend.... Four quid, you said?"
+
+"Five...."
+
+"They ain't wuth over four to me."
+
+"Very well; make it four," Kirkwood assented contemptuously.
+
+The captain swept the articles into one capacious fist, pivoted on one heel
+at the peril of his neck, and lumbered unsteadily off to his room. Pausing
+at the door he turned back in inquiry.
+
+"I sye, 'ow did you come to get the impression there was a party named
+Almanack aboard this wessel?"
+
+"Calendar--"
+
+"'Ave it yer own wye," Stryker conceded gracefully.
+
+"There isn't, is there?"
+
+"You 'eard me."
+
+"Then," said Kirkwood sweetly, "I'm sure you wouldn't be interested."
+
+The captain pondered this at leisure. "You seemed pretty keen abaht seein'
+'im," he remarked conclusively.
+
+"I was."
+
+"Seems to me I did 'ear the nyme sumw'eres afore." The captain appeared to
+wrestle with an obdurate memory. "Ow!" he triumphed. "I know. 'E was a chap
+up Manchester wye. Keeper in a loonatic asylum, 'e was. 'That yer party?"
+
+"No," said Kirkwood wearily.
+
+"I didn't know but mebbe 'twas. Excuse me. 'Thought as 'ow mebbe you'd
+escyped from 'is tender care, but, findin' the world cold, chynged yer mind
+and wanted to gow back."
+
+Without waiting for a reply he lurched into his room and banged the door
+to. Kirkwood, divided between amusement and irritation, heard him stumbling
+about for some time; and then a hush fell, grateful enough while it lasted;
+which was not long. For no sooner did the captain sleep than a penetrating
+snore added itself unto the cacophony of waves and wind and tortured ship.
+
+Kirkwood, comforted at first by the blessed tobacco, lapsed insensibly
+into dreary meditations. Coming after the swift movement and sustained
+excitement of the eighteen hours preceding his long sleep, the monotony
+of shipboard confinement seemed irksome to a maddening degree. There was
+absolutely nothing he could discover to occupy his mind. If there were
+books aboard, none was in evidence; beyond the report of Mr. Stranger's
+Manhattan night's entertainment the walls were devoid of reading matter;
+and a round of the picture gallery proved a diversion weariful enough when
+not purely revolting.
+
+Wherefore Mr. Kirkwood stretched himself out on the transom and smoked and
+reviewed his adventures in detail and seriatim, and was by turns indignant,
+sore, anxious on his own account as well as on Dorothy's, and out of all
+patience with himself. Mystified he remained throughout, and the edge of
+his curiosity held as keen as ever, you may believe.
+
+Consistently the affair presented itself to his fancy in the guise of a
+puzzle-picture, which, though you study it never so diligently, remains
+incomprehensible, until by chance you view it from an unexpected angle,
+when it reveals itself intelligibly. It had not yet been his good fortune
+to see it from the right viewpoint. To hold the metaphor, he walked endless
+circles round it, patiently seeking, but ever failing to find the proper
+perspective.... Each incident, however insignificant, in connection with
+it, he handled over and over, examining its every facet, bright or dull, as
+an expert might inspect a clever imitation of a diamond; and like a perfect
+imitation it defied analysis.
+
+Of one or two things he was convinced; for one, that Stryker was a liar
+worthy of classification with Calendar and Mrs. Hallam. Kirkwood had
+not only the testimony of his sense to assure him that the ship's name,
+_Alethea_ (not a common one, by the bye), had been mentioned by both
+Calendar and Mulready during their altercation on Bermondsey Old Stairs,
+but he had the confirmatory testimony of the sleepy waterman, William, who
+had directed Old Bob and Young William to the anchorage off Bow Creek. That
+there should have been two vessels of the same unusual name at one and
+the same time in the Port of London, was a coincidence too preposterous
+altogether to find place in his calculations.
+
+His second impregnable conclusion was that those whom he sought had boarded
+the _Alethea_, but had left her before she tripped her anchor. That they
+were not stowed away aboard her seemed unquestionable. The brigantine was
+hardly large enough for the presence of three persons aboard her to be long
+kept a secret from an inquisitive fourth,--unless, indeed, they lay in
+hiding in the hold; for which, once the ship got under way, there could be
+scant excuse. And Kirkwood did not believe himself a person of sufficient
+importance in Calendar's eyes, to make that worthy endure the discomforts
+of a'tween-decks imprisonment throughout the voyage, even to escape
+recognition.
+
+With every second, then, he was traveling farther from her to whose aid he
+had rushed, impelled by motives so hot-headed, so innately, chivalric, so
+unthinkingly gallant, so exceptionally idiotic!
+
+Idiot! Kirkwood groaned with despair of his inability to fathom the abyss
+of his self-contempt. There seemed to be positively no excuse for _him_.
+Stryker had befriended him indeed, had he permitted him to drown. Yet
+he had acted for the best, as he saw it. The fault lay in himself: an
+admirable fault, that of harboring and nurturing generous and compassionate
+instincts. But, of course, Kirkwood couldn't see it that way.
+
+"What else could I do?" he defended himself against the indictment
+of common sense. "I couldn't leave her to the mercies of that set of
+rogues!... And Heaven knows I was given every reason to believe she would
+be aboard this ship! Why, she herself told me that she was sailing ...!"
+
+Heaven knew, too, that this folly of his had cost him a pretty penny,
+first and last. His watch was gone beyond recovery, his homeward passage
+forfeited; he no longer harbored illusions as to the steamship company
+presenting him with another berth in lieu of that called for by that
+water-soaked slip of paper then in his pocket--courtesy of Stryker. He had
+sold for a pittance, a tithe of its value, his personal jewelry, and had
+spent every penny he could call his own. With the money Stryker was to give
+him he would be able to get back to London and his third-rate hostelry, but
+not with enough over to pay that one week's room-rent, or ...
+
+"Oh, the devil!" he groaned, head in hands.
+
+The future loomed wrapped in unspeakable darkness, lightened by no least
+ray of hope. It had been bad enough to lose a comfortable living through
+a gigantic convulsion of Nature; but to think that he had lost all else
+through his own egregious folly, to find himself reduced to the kennels--!
+
+So Care found him again in those weary hours,--came and sat by his side,
+slipping a grisly hand in his and tightening its grip until he could have
+cried out with the torment of it; the while whispering insidiously subtile,
+evil things in his ear. And he had not even Hope to comfort him; at
+any previous stage he had been able to distil a sort of bitter-sweet
+satisfaction from the thought that he was suffering for the love of his
+life. But now--now Dorothy was lost, gone like the glamour of Romance in
+the searching light of day.
+
+Stryker, emerging from his room for breakfast, found the passenger with a
+hostile look in his eye and a jaw set in ugly fashion. His eyes, too, were
+the abiding-place of smoldering devils; and the captain, recognizing them,
+considerately forbore to stir them up with any untimely pleasantries. To be
+sure, he was autocrat in his own ship, and Kirkwood's standing aboard was
+_nil_; but then there was just enough yellow in the complexion of Stryker's
+soul to incline him to sidestep trouble whenever feasible. And besides, he
+entertained dark suspicions of his guest--suspicions he scarce dared voice
+even to his inmost heart.
+
+The morning meal, therefore, passed off in constrained silence. The captain
+ate voraciously and vociferously, pushed back his chair, and went on deck
+to relieve the mate. The latter, a stunted little Cockney with a wizened
+countenance and a mind as foul as his tongue, got small change of his
+attempts to engage the passenger in conversation on topics that he
+considered fit for discussion. After the sixth or eighth snubbing he rose
+in dudgeon, discharged a poisonous bit of insolence, and retired to his
+berth, leaving Kirkwood to finish his breakfast in peace; which the latter
+did literally, to the last visible scrap of food and the ultimate drop of
+coffee, poor as both were in quality.
+
+To the tune of a moderating wind, the morning wearied away. Kirkwood went
+on deck once, for distraction from the intolerable monotony of it all, got
+a sound drenching of spray, with a glimpse of a dark line on the eastern
+horizon, which he understood to be the low littoral of Holland, and was
+glad to dodge below once more and dry himself.
+
+He had the pleasure of the mate's company at dinner, the captain remaining
+on deck until Hobbs had finished and gone up to relieve him; and by that
+time Kirkwood likewise was through.
+
+Stryker blew down with a blustery show of cheer. "Well, well, my little
+man!" (It happened that he topped Kirkwood's stature by at least five
+inches.) "Enj'yin' yer sea trip?"
+
+"About as much as you'd expect," snapped Kirkwood.
+
+"Ow?" The captain began to shovel food into his face. (The author regrets
+he has at his command no more delicate expression that is literal and
+illustrative.) Kirkwood watched him, fascinated with suspense; it seemed
+impossible that the man could continue so to employ his knife without
+cutting his throat from the inside. But years of such manipulation had made
+him expert, and his guest, keenly disappointed, at length ceased to hope.
+
+Between gobbles Stryker eyed him furtively.
+
+"'Treat you all right?" he demanded abruptly.
+
+Kirkwood started out of a brown study. "What? Who? Why, I suppose I ought
+to be--indeed, I _am_ grateful," he asserted. "Certainly you saved my life,
+and--"
+
+"Ow, I don't mean that." Stryker gathered the imputation into his paw and
+flung it disdainfully to the four winds of Heaven. "Bless yer 'art, you're
+welcome; I wouldn't let no dorg drownd, 'f I could 'elp it. No," he
+declared, "nor a loonatic, neither."
+
+He thrust his plate away and shifted sidewise in his chair. "I 'uz just
+wonderin'," he pursued, picking his teeth meditatively with a pen-knife,
+"'ow they feeds you in them _as_-ylums. 'Avin' never been inside one,
+myself, it's on'y natural I'd be cur'us.... There was one of them
+institootions near where I was borned--Birming'am, that is. I used to see
+the loonies playin' in the grounds. I remember _just_ as well!... One of
+'em and me struck up quite an acquaintance--"
+
+"Naturally he'd take to you on sight."
+
+"Ow? Strynge 'ow _we_ 'it it off, eigh?... You myke me think of 'im. Young
+chap, 'e was, the livin' spi't-'n-himage of you. It don't happen, does it,
+you're the same man?"
+
+"Oh, go to the devil!"
+
+"Naughty!" said the captain serenely, wagging a reproving forefinger. "Bad,
+naughty word. You'll be sorry when you find out wot it means.... Only 'e
+was allus plannin' to run awye and drownd 'is-self."...
+
+He wore the joke threadbare, even to his own taste, and in the end got
+heavily to his feet, starting for the companionway. "Land you this
+arternoon," he remarked casually, "come three o'clock or thereabahts.
+Per'aps later. I don't know, though, as I 'ad ought to let you loose."
+
+Kirkwood made no answer. Chuckling, Stryker went on deck.
+
+In the course of an hour the American followed him.
+
+Wind and sea alike had gone down wonderfully since daybreak--a circumstance
+undoubtedly in great part due to the fact that they had won in under the
+lee of the mainland and were traversing shallower waters. On either hand,
+like mist upon the horizon, lay a streak of gray, a shade darker than the
+gray of the waters. The _Alethea_ was within the wide jaws of the Western
+Scheldt. As for the wind, it had shifted several points to the northwards;
+the brigantine had it abeam and was lying down to it and racing to port
+with slanting deck and singing cordage.
+
+Kirkwood approached the captain, who, acting as his own pilot, was standing
+by the wheel and barking sharp orders to the helmsman.
+
+"Have you a Bradshaw on board?" asked the young man.
+
+"Steady!" This to the man at the wheel; then to Kirkwood: "Wot's that, me
+lud?"
+
+Kirkwood repeated his question. Stryker eyed him suspiciously for a
+thought.
+
+"Wot d'you want it for?"
+
+"I want to see when I can get a boat back to England."
+
+"Hmm.... Yes, you'll find a Bradshaw in the port-locker, near the for'ard
+bulk'ead. Run along now and pl'y--and mind you don't go tearin' out the
+pyges to myke pyper boatses to go sylin' in."
+
+Kirkwood went below. Like its adjacent rooms, the cabin was untenanted; the
+watch was the mate's, and Stryker a martinet. Kirkwood found the designated
+locker and, opening it, saw first to his hand the familiar bulky red volume
+with its red garter. Taking it out he carried it to a chair near the
+companionway, for a better reading light: the skylight being still battened
+down.
+
+The strap removed, the book opened easily, as if by force of habit, at the
+precise table he had wished to consult; some previous client had left a
+marker between the pages,--and not an ordinary book-mark, by any manner
+of means. Kirkwood gave utterance to a little gasp of amazement, and
+instinctively glanced up at the companionway, to see if he were observed.
+
+He was not, but for safety's sake he moved farther back into the cabin
+and out of the range of vision of any one on deck; a precaution which was
+almost immediately justified by the clumping of heavy feet upon the steps
+as Stryker descended in pursuit of the ever-essential drink.
+
+"'Find it?" he demanded, staring blindly--with eyes not yet focused to the
+change from light to gloom--at the young man, who was sitting with the
+guide open on his knees, a tightly clenched fist resting on the transom at
+either side of him.
+
+In reply he received a monosyllabic affirmative; Kirkwood did not look up.
+
+"You must be a howl," commented the captain, making for the seductive
+locker.
+
+"A--what?"
+
+"A howl, readin' that fine print there in the dark. W'y don't you go over
+to the light?... I'll 'ave to 'ave them shutters tyken off the winders."
+This was Stryker's amiable figure of speech, frequently employed to
+indicate the coverings of the skylight.
+
+"I'm all right." Kirkwood went on studying the book.
+
+Stryker swigged off his rum and wiped his lips with the back of a red paw,
+hesitating a moment to watch his guest.
+
+"Mykes it seem more 'ome-like for you, I expect," he observed.
+
+"What do you mean?"
+
+"W'y, Bradshaw's first-cousin to a halmanack, ain't 'e? Can't get one,
+take t'other--next best thing. Sorry I didn't think of it sooner; like my
+passengers to feel comfy.... Now don't you go trapsein' off to gay Paree
+and squanderin' wot money you got left. You 'ear?"
+
+"By the way, Captain!" Kirkwood looked up at this, but Stryker was already
+half-way up the companion.
+
+Cautiously the American opened his right fist and held to the light that
+which had been concealed, close wadded in his grasp,--a square of sheer
+linen edged with lace, crumpled but spotless, and diffusing in the
+unwholesome den a faint, intangible fragrance, the veriest wraith of
+that elusive perfume which he would never again inhale without instantly
+recalling that night ride through London in the intimacy of a cab.
+
+He closed his eyes and saw her again, as clearly as though she stood before
+him,--hair of gold massed above the forehead of snow, curling in adorable
+tendrils at the nape of her neck, lips like scarlet splashed upon the
+immaculate whiteness of her skin, head poised audaciously in its spirited,
+youthful allure, dark eyes smiling the least trace sadly beneath the level
+brows.
+
+Unquestionably the handkerchief was hers; if proof other than the
+assurance of his heart were requisite, he had it in the initial delicately
+embroidered in one corner: a D, for Dorothy!... He looked again, to make
+sure; then hastily folded up the treasure-trove and slipped it into a
+breast pocket of his coat.
+
+No; I am not sure that it was not the left-hand pocket.
+
+Quivering with excitement he bent again over the book and studied it
+intently. After all, he had not been wrong! He could assert now, without
+fear of refutation, that Stryker had lied.
+
+Some one had wielded an industrious pencil on the page. It was, taken as a
+whole, fruitful of clues. Its very heading was illuminating:
+
+LONDON to VLISSINGEN (FLUSHING) AND BREDA;
+
+which happened to be the quickest and most direct route between London and
+Antwerp. Beneath it, in the second column from the right, the pencil had
+put a check-mark against:
+
+QUEENSBOROUGH ... DEP ... 11A10.
+
+And now he saw it clearly--dolt that he had been not to have divined it ere
+this! The _Alethea_ had run in to Queensborough, landing her passengers
+there, that they might make connection with the eleven-ten morning boat for
+Flushing,--the very side-wheel steamer, doubtless, which he had noticed
+beating out in the teeth of the gale just after the brigantine had picked
+him up. Had he not received the passing impression that the _Alethea_, when
+first he caught sight of her, might have been coming out of the Medway, on
+whose eastern shore is situate Queensborough Pier? Had not Mrs. Hallam,
+going upon he knew not what information or belief, been bound for
+Queensborough, with design there to intercept the fugitives?
+
+Kirkwood chuckled to recall how, all unwittingly, he had been the means
+of diverting from her chosen course that acute and resourceful lady; then
+again turned his attention to the tables.
+
+A third check had been placed against the train for Amsterdam scheduled to
+leave Antwerp at 6:32 p. m. Momentarily his heart misgave him, when he saw
+this, in fear lest Calendar and Dorothy should have gone on from Antwerp
+the previous evening; but then he rallied, discovering that the boat-train
+from Flushing did not arrive at Antwerp till after ten at night; and there
+was no later train thence for Amsterdam. Were the latter truly their
+purposed destination, they would have stayed overnight and be leaving that
+very evening on the 6:32. On the other hand, why should they wait for the
+latest train, rather than proceed by the first available in the morning?
+Why but because Calendar and Mulready were to wait for Stryker to join them
+on the _Alethea_?
+
+Very well, then; if the wind held and Stryker knew his business, there
+would be another passenger on that train, in addition to the Calendar
+party.
+
+Making mental note of the fact that the boat-train for Flushing and London
+was scheduled to leave Antwerp daily at 8:21 p. m., Kirkwood rustled the
+leaves to find out whether or not other tours had been planned, found
+evidences of none, and carefully restored the guide to the locker, lest
+inadvertently the captain should pick it up and see what Kirkwood had seen.
+
+An hour later he went on deck. The skies had blown clear and the brigantine
+was well in land-bound waters and still footing a rattling pace. The
+river-banks had narrowed until, beyond the dikes to right and left, the
+country-side stretched wide and flat, a plain of living green embroidered
+with winding roads and quaint Old-World hamlets whose red roofs shone like
+dull fire between the dark green foliage of dwarfed firs.
+
+Down with the Scheldt's gray shimmering flood were drifting little
+companies of barges, sturdy and snug both fore and aft, tough tanned sails
+burning in the afternoon sunlight. A long string of canal-boats, potted
+plants flowering saucily in their neatly curtained windows, proprietors
+expansively smoking on deck, in the bosoms of their very large families,
+was being mothered up-stream by two funny, clucking tugs. Behind the
+brigantine a travel-worn Atlantic liner was scolding itself hoarse about
+the right of way. Outward bound, empty cattle boats, rough and rusty,
+were swaggering down to the sea, with the careless, independent
+thumbs-in-armholes air of so many navvies off the job.
+
+And then lifting suddenly above the level far-off sky-line, there appeared
+a very miracle of beauty; the delicate tracery of the great Cathedral's
+spire of frozen lace, glowing like a thing of spun gold, set against the
+sapphire velvet of the horizon.
+
+Antwerp was in sight.
+
+A troublesome care stirring in his mind, Kirkwood looked round the deck;
+but Stryker was very busy, entirely too preoccupied with the handling of
+his ship to be interrupted with impunity. Besides, there was plenty of
+time.
+
+More slowly now, the wind falling, the brigantine crept up the river, her
+crew alert with sheets and halyards as the devious windings of the stream
+rendered it necessary to trim the canvas at varying angles to catch the
+wind.
+
+Slowly, too, in the shadow of that Mechlin spire, the horizon grew rough
+and elevated, taking shape in the serrated profile of a thousand gables and
+a hundred towers and cross-crowned steeples.
+
+Once or twice, more and more annoyed as the time of their association
+seemed to grow more brief, Kirkwood approached the captain; but Stryker
+continued to be exhaustively absorbed in the performance of his duties.
+
+Up past the dockyards, where spidery masts stood in dense groves about
+painted funnels, and men swarmed over huge wharves like ants over a crust
+of bread; up and round the final, great sweeping bend of the river, the
+_Alethea_ made her sober way, ever with greater slowness; until at length,
+in the rose glow of a flawless evening, her windlass began to clank like a
+mad thing and her anchor bit the riverbed, near the left bank, between old
+Forts Isabelle and Tete de Flandre, frowned upon from the right by the grim
+pile of the age-old Steen castle.
+
+And again Kirkwood sought Stryker, his carking query ready on his lips. But
+the captain impatiently waved him aside.
+
+"Don't you bother me now, me lud juke! Wyte until I gets done with the
+custom hofficer."
+
+Kirkwood acceded, perforce; and bided his time with what tolerance he could
+muster.
+
+A pluttering customs launch bustled up to the _Alethea's_ side, discharged
+a fussy inspector on the brigantine's deck, and panted impatiently until
+he, the examination concluded without delay, was again aboard.
+
+Stryker, smirking benignly and massaging his lips with the back of his
+hand, followed the official on deck, nodded to Kirkwood an intimation that
+he was prepared to accord him an audience, and strolled forward to the
+waist. The American, mastering his resentment, meekly followed; one can not
+well afford to be haughty when one is asking favors.
+
+Advancing to the rail, the captain whistled in one of the river-boats;
+then, while the waterman waited, faced his passenger.
+
+"Now, yer r'yal 'ighness, wot can I do for you afore you goes ashore?"
+
+"I think you must have forgotten," said Kirkwood quietly. "I hate to
+trouble you, but--there's that matter of four pounds."
+
+Stryker's face was expressive only of mystified vacuity. "Four quid? I
+dunno _as_ I know just wot you means."
+
+"You agreed to advance me four pounds on those things of mine...."
+
+"Ow-w!" Illumination overspread the hollow-jowled countenance. Stryker
+smiled cheerfully. "Garn with you!" he chuckled. "You will 'ave yer little
+joke, won't you now? I declare I never see a loony with such affecsh'nit,
+pl'yful wyes!"
+
+Kirkwood's eyes narrowed. "Stryker," he said steadily, "give me the four
+pounds and let's have no more nonsense; or else hand over my things at
+once."
+
+"Daffy," Stryker told vacancy, with conviction. "Lor' luv me if I sees
+'ow he ever 'ad sense enough to escype. W'y, yer majesty!" and he bowed,
+ironic. "I '_ave_ given you yer quid."
+
+"Just about as much as I gave you that pearl pin," retorted Kirkwood hotly.
+"What the devil do you mean--"
+
+"W'y, yer ludship, four pounds jus pyes yer passyge; I thought you
+understood."
+
+"My passage! But I can come across by steamer for thirty shillings,
+first-class--"
+
+"Aw, but them steamers! Tricky, they is, and unsyfe ... No, yer gryce, the
+W. Stryker Packet Line Lim'ted, London to Antwerp, charges four pounds per
+passyge and no reduction for return fare."
+
+Stunned by his effrontery, Kirkwood stared in silence.
+
+"Any complynts," continued the captain, looking over Kirkwood's head, "must
+be lyde afore the Board of Directors in writin' not more'n thirty dyes
+arfter--"
+
+"You damned scoundrel!" interpolated Kirkwood thoughtfully.
+
+Stryker's mouth closed with a snap; his features froze in a cast of wrath;
+cold rage glinted in his small blue eyes. "W'y," he bellowed, "you bloomin'
+loonatic, d'ye think you can sye that to Bill Stryker on 'is own wessel!"
+
+He hesitated a moment, then launched a heavy fist at Kirkwood's face.
+Unsurprised, the young man side-stepped, caught the hard, bony wrist as the
+captain lurched by, following his wasted blow, and with a dexterous twist
+laid him flat on his back, with a sounding thump upon the deck. And as the
+infuriated scamp rose--which he did with a bound that placed him on
+his feet and in defensive posture; as though the deck had been a
+spring-board--Kirkwood leaped back, seized a capstan-bar, and faced him
+with a challenge.
+
+"Stand clear, Stryker!" he warned the man tensely, himself livid with rage.
+"If you move a step closer I swear I'll knock the head off your shoulders!
+Not another inch, you contemptible whelp, or I'll brain you!... That's
+better," he continued as the captain, caving, dropped his fists and moved
+uneasily back. "Now give that boatman money for taking me ashore. Yes, I'm
+going--and if we ever meet again, take the other side of the way, Stryker!"
+
+Without response, a grim smile wreathing his thin, hard lips, Stryker
+thrust one hand into his pocket, and withdrawing a coin, tossed it to the
+waiting waterman. Whereupon Kirkwood backed warily to the rail, abandoned
+the capstan-bar and dropped over the side.
+
+Nodding to the boatman, "The Steen landing--quickly," he said in French.
+
+Stryker, recovering, advanced to the rail and waved him a derisive _bon
+voyage_.
+
+"By-by, yer hexcellency. I 'opes it may soon be my pleasure to meet you
+again. You've been a real privilege to know; I've henjoyed yer comp'ny
+somethin' immense. Don't know as I ever met such a rippin', Ay Number One,
+all-round, entertynin' ass, afore!"
+
+He fumbled nervously about his clothing, brought to light a rag of cotton,
+much the worse for service, and ostentatiously wiped from the corner of
+each eye tears of grief at parting. Then, as the boat swung toward the
+farther shore, Kirkwood's back was to the brigantine, and he was little
+tempted to turn and invite fresh shafts of ridicule.
+
+Rapidly, as he was ferried across the busy Scheldt, the white blaze of his
+passion cooled; but the biting irony of his estate ate, corrosive, into his
+soul. Hollow-eyed he glared vacantly into space, pale lips unmoving, his
+features wasted with despair.
+
+They came to the landing-stage and swung broad-side on. Mechanically the
+American got up and disembarked. As heedless of time and place he moved
+up the Quai to the gangway and so gained the esplanade; where pausing he
+thrust a trembling hand into his trouser pocket.
+
+The hand reappeared, displaying in its outspread palm three big, round,
+brown, British pennies. Staring down at them, Kirkwood's lips moved.
+
+"Bed rock!" he whispered huskily.
+
+
+
+
+XIII
+
+
+A PRIMER OF PROGRESSIVE CRIME
+
+Without warning or presage the still evening air was smitten and made
+softly musical by the pealing of a distant chime, calling vespers to its
+brothers in Antwerp's hundred belfries; and one by one, far and near, the
+responses broke out, until it seemed as if the world must be vibrant
+with silver and brazen melody; until at the last the great bells in the
+Cathedral spire stirred and grumbled drowsily, then woke to such ringing
+resonance as dwarfed all the rest and made it seem as nothing.
+
+Like the beating of a mighty heart heard through the rushing clamor of the
+pulses, a single deep-throated bell boomed solemnly six heavy, rumbling
+strokes.
+
+Six o'clock! Kirkwood roused out of his dour brooding. The Amsterdam
+express would leave at 6:32, and he knew not from what station.
+
+Striding swiftly across the promenade, he entered a small tobacco shop and
+made inquiry of the proprietress. His command of French was tolerable; he
+experienced no difficulty in comprehending the good woman's instructions.
+
+Trains for Amsterdam, she said, left from the Gare Centrale, a mile or so
+across the city. M'sieur had plenty of time, and to spare. There was the
+tram line, if m'sieur did not care to take a fiacre. If he would go by way
+of the Vielle Bourse he would discover the tram cars of the Rue Kipdorp.
+M'sieur was most welcome....
+
+Monsieur departed with the more haste since he was unable to repay this
+courtesy with the most trifling purchase; such slight matters annoyed
+Kirkwood intensely. Perhaps it was well for him that he had the long walk
+to help him work off the fit of nervous exasperation into which he was
+plunged every time his thoughts harked back to that jovial black-guard,
+Stryker.... He was quite calm when, after a brisk walk of some fifteen
+minutes, he reached the station.
+
+A public clock reassured him with the information that he had the quarter
+of an hour's leeway; it was only seventeen minutes past eighteen o'clock
+(Belgian railway time, always confusing). Inquiring his way to the
+Amsterdam train, which was already waiting at the platform, he paced its
+length, peering brazenly in at the coach windows, now warm with hope, now
+shivering with disappointment, realizing as he could not but realize that,
+all else aside, his only chance of rehabilitation lay in meeting Calendar.
+But in none of the coaches or carriages did he discover any one even
+remotely resembling the fat adventurer, his daughter, or Mulready.
+
+Satisfied that they had not yet boarded the train, he stood aside, tortured
+with forebodings, while anxiously scrutinizing each individual of the
+throng of intending travelers.... Perhaps they had been delayed--by the
+_Alethea's_ lateness in making port very likely; perhaps they purposed
+taking not this but a later train; perhaps they had already left the city
+by an earlier, or had returned to England.
+
+On time, the bell clanged its warning; the guards bawled theirs; doors were
+hastily opened and slammed; the trucks began to groan, couplings jolting
+as the engine chafed in constraint. The train and Kirkwood moved
+simultaneously out of opposite ends of the station, the one to rattle and
+hammer round the eastern boundaries of the city and straighten out at top
+speed on the northern route for the Belgian line, the other to stroll
+moodily away, idle hands in empty pockets, bound aimlessly anywhere--it
+didn't matter!
+
+Nothing whatever mattered in the smallest degree. Ere now the outlook had
+been dark; but this he felt to be the absolute nadir of his misfortunes.
+Presently--after a while--as soon as he could bring himself to it--he would
+ask the way and go to the American Consulate. But just now, low as the tide
+of chance had ebbed, leaving him stranded on the flats of vagabondage,
+low as showed the measure of his self-esteem, he could not tolerate the
+prospect of begging for assistance--help which would in all likelihood be
+refused, since his story was quite too preposterous to gain credence in
+official ears that daily are filled with the lamentations of those whose
+motives do not bear investigation. And if he chose to eliminate the strange
+chain of events which had landed him in Antwerp, to base his plea solely on
+the fact that he was a victim of the San Francisco disaster ... he himself
+was able to smile, if sourly, anticipating the incredulous consular smile
+with which he would be shown the door.
+
+No; that he would reserve as a last resort. True, he had already come to
+the Jumping-off Place; to the Court of the Last Resort alone could he now
+appeal. But ... not yet; after a while he could make his petition, after he
+had made a familiar of the thought that he must armor himself with callous
+indifference to rebuff, to say naught of the waves of burning shame that
+would overwhelm him when he came to the point of asking charity.
+
+He found himself, neither knowing nor caring how he had won thither, in the
+Place Verte, the vast venerable pile of the Cathedral rising on his right,
+hotels and quaint Old-World dwellings with peaked roofs and gables and
+dormer windows, inclosing the other sides of the square. The chimes (he
+could hear none but those of the Cathedral) were heralding the hour of
+seven. Listless and preoccupied in contemplation of his wretched case he
+wandered purposelessly half round the square, then dropped into a bench on
+its outskirts.
+
+It was some time later that he noticed, with a casual, indifferent eye, a
+porter running out of the Hotel de Flandre, directly opposite, and calling
+a fiacre in to the carriage block.
+
+As languidly he watched a woman, very becomingly dressed, follow the porter
+down to the curb.
+
+The fiacre swung in, and the woman dismissed the porter before entering the
+vehicle; a proceeding so unusual that it fixed the onlooker's interest.
+He sat rigid with attention; the woman seemed to be giving explicit
+and lengthy directions to the driver, who nodded and gesticulated his
+comprehension.
+
+The woman was Mrs. Hallam.
+
+The first blush of recognition passed, leaving Kirkwood without any
+amazement. It was an easy matter to account for her being where she was.
+Thrown off the scent by Kirkwood at Sheerness, the previous morning, she
+had missed the day boat, the same which had ferried over those whom she
+pursued. Returning from Sheerness to Queensborough, however, she had taken
+the night boat for Flushing and Antwerp,--and not without her plan, who was
+not a woman to waste her strength aimlessly; Kirkwood believed that she
+had had from the first a very definite campaign in view. In that campaign
+Queensborough Pier had been the first strategic move; the journey to
+Antwerp, apparently, the second; and the American was impressed that he was
+witnessing the inception of the third decided step.... The conclusion of
+this process of reasoning was inevitable: Madam would bear watching.
+
+Thus was a magical transformation brought about. Instantaneously lassitude
+and vain repinings were replaced by hopefulness and energy. In a twinkling
+the young man was on his feet, every nerve a-thrill with excitement.
+
+Mrs. Hallam, blissfully ignorant of this surveillance over her movements,
+took her place in the fiacre. The driver clucked to his horse, cracked
+his whip, and started off at a slow trot: a pace which Kirkwood imitated,
+keeping himself at a discreet distance to the rear of the cab, but prepared
+to break into a run whenever it should prove necessary.
+
+Such exertion, however, was not required of him. Evidently Mrs. Hallam
+was in no great haste to reach her destination; the speed of the fiacre
+remained extremely moderate; Kirkwood found a long, brisk stride fast
+enough to keep it well in sight.
+
+Round the green square, under the beautiful walls of Notre Dame d'Anvers,
+through Grande Place and past the Hotel de Ville, the cab proceeded, dogged
+by what might plausibly be asserted the most persistent and infatuated soul
+that ever crossed the water; and so on into the Quai Van Dyck, turning to
+the left at the old Steen dungeon and, slowing to a walk, moving soberly up
+the drive.
+
+Beyond the lip of the embankment, the Scheldt flowed, its broad shining
+surface oily, smooth and dark, a mirror for the incandescent glory of the
+skies. Over on the western bank old Tete de Flandre lifted up its grim
+curtains and bastions, sable against the crimson, rampart and parapet edged
+with fire. Busy little side-wheeled ferry steamers spanked the waters
+noisily and smudged the sunset with dark drifting trails of smoke; and ever
+and anon a rowboat would slip out of shadow to glide languidly with the
+current. Otherwise the life of the river was gone; and at their moorings
+the ships swung in great quietness, riding lights glimmering like low wan
+stars.
+
+In the company of the latter the young man marked down the _Alethea_; a
+sight which made him unconsciously clench both fists and teeth, reminding
+him of that rare wag, Stryker....
+
+To his way of thinking the behavior of the fiacre was quite unaccountable.
+Hardly had the horse paced off the length of two blocks on the Quai ere
+it was guided to the edge of the promenade and brought to a stop. And the
+driver twisted the reins round his whip, thrust the latter in its socket,
+turned sidewise on the box, and began to smoke and swing his heels,
+surveying the panorama of river and sunset with complacency--a cabby, one
+would venture, without a care in the world and serene in the assurance of
+a generous _pour-boire_ when he lost his fare. But as for the latter, she
+made no move; the door of the cab remained closed,--like its occupant's
+mind, a mystery to the watcher.
+
+Twilight shadows lengthened, darkling, over the land; street-lights flashed
+up in long, radiant ranks. Across the promenade hotels and shops were
+lighted up; people began to gather round the tables beneath the awnings of
+an open-air cafe. In the distance, somewhere, a band swung into the dreamy
+rhythm of a haunting waltz. Scattered couples moved slowly, arm in arm,
+along the riverside walk, drinking in the fragrance of the night. Overhead
+stars popped out in brilliance and dropped their reflections to swim lazily
+on spellbound waters.... And still the fiacre lingered in inaction, still
+the driver lorded it aloft, in care-free abandon.
+
+In the course of time this inertia, where he had looked for action, this
+dull suspense when he had forecast interesting developments, wore upon the
+watcher's nerves and made him at once impatient and suspicious. Now that he
+had begun to doubt, he conceived it as quite possible that Mrs. Hallam (who
+was capable of anything) should have stolen out of the cab by the other
+and, to him, invisible door. To resolve the matter, finally, he took
+advantage of the darkness, turned up his coat collar, hunched up his
+shoulders, hid his hands in pockets, pulled the visor of his cap well
+forward over his eyes, and slouched past the fiacre.
+
+Mrs. Hallam sat within. He could see her profile clearly silhouetted
+against the light; she was bending forward and staring fixedly out of the
+window, across the driveway. Mentally he calculated the direction of her
+gaze, then, moved away and followed it with his own eyes; and found himself
+staring at the facade of a third-rate hotel. Above its roof the gilded
+letters of a sign, catching the illumination from below, spelled out the
+title of "Hotel du Commerce."
+
+Mrs. Hallam was interested in the Hotel du Commerce?
+
+Thoughtfully Kirkwood fell back to his former point of observation, now
+the richer by another object of suspicion, the hostelry. Mrs. Hallam was
+waiting and watching for some one to enter or to leave that establishment.
+It seemed a reasonable inference to draw. Well, then, so was Kirkwood, no
+less than the lady; he deemed it quite conceivable that their objects were
+identical.
+
+He started to beguile the time by wondering what she would do, if...
+
+Of a sudden he abandoned this line of speculation, and catching his breath,
+held it, almost afraid to credit the truth that for once his anticipations
+were being realized under his very eyes.
+
+Against the lighted doorway of the Hotel du Commerce, the figures of two
+men were momentarily sketched, as they came hurriedly forth; and of the
+two, one was short and stout, and even at a distance seemed to bear himself
+with an accent of assertiveness, while the other was tall and heavy of
+shoulder.
+
+Side by side they marched in step across the embankment to the head of the
+Quai gangway, descending without pause to the landing-stage. Kirkwood,
+hanging breathlessly over the guard-rail, could hear their footfalls
+ringing in hollow rhythm on the planks of the inclined way,--could even
+discern Calendar's unlovely profile in dim relief beneath one of the
+waterside lights; and he recognized unmistakably Mulready's deep voice,
+grumbling inarticulately.
+
+At the outset he had set after them, with intent to accost Calendar; but
+their pace had been swift and his irresolute. He hung fire on the issue,
+dreading to reveal himself, unable to decide which were the better course,
+to pursue the men, or to wait and discover what Mrs. Hallam was about. In
+the end he waited; and had his disappointment for recompense.
+
+For Mrs. Hallam did nothing intelligible. Had she driven over to the hotel,
+hard upon the departure of the men, he would have believed that she was
+seeking Dorothy, and would, furthermore, have elected to crowd their
+interview, if she succeeded in obtaining one with the girl. But she did
+nothing of the sort. For a time the fiacre remained as it had been ever
+since stopping; then, evidently admonished by his fare, the driver
+straightened up, knocked out his pipe, disentangled reins and whip, and
+wheeled the equipage back on the way it had come, disappearing in a dark
+side street leading eastward from the embankment.
+
+Kirkwood was, then, to believe that Mrs. Hallam, having taken all that
+trouble and having waited for the two adventurers to appear, had been
+content with sight of them? He could hardly believe that of the woman; it
+wasn't like her.
+
+He started across the driveway, after the fiacre, but it was lost in a
+tangle of side streets before he could make up his mind whether it was
+worth while chasing or not; and, pondering the woman's singular action, he
+retraced his steps to the promenade rail.
+
+Presently he told himself he understood. Dorothy was no longer of her
+father's party; he had a suspicion that Mulready's attitude had made it
+seem advisable to Calendar either to leave the girl behind, in England, or
+to segregate her from his associates in Antwerp. If not lodged in another
+quarter of the city, or left behind, she was probably traveling on ahead,
+to a destination which he could by no means guess. And Mrs. Hallam was
+looking for the girl; if there were really jewels in that gladstone bag,
+Calendar would naturally have had no hesitation about intrusting them to
+his daughter's care; and Mrs. Hallam avowedly sought nothing else. How
+the woman had found out that such was the case, Kirkwood did not stop to
+reckon; unless he explained it on the proposition that she was a person of
+remarkable address. It made no matter, one way or the other; he had lost
+Mrs. Hallam; but Calendar and Mulready he could put his finger on; they had
+undoubtedly gone off to the _Alethea_ to confer again with Stryker,--that
+was, unless they proposed sailing on the brigantine, possibly at turn of
+tide that night.
+
+Panic gripped his soul and shook it, as a terrier shakes a rat, when he
+conceived this frightful proposition.
+
+In his confusion of mind he evolved spontaneously an entirely new
+hypothesis: Dorothy had already been spirited aboard the vessel; Calendar
+and his confederate, delaying to join her from enigmatic motives, were now
+aboard; and presently the word would be, Up-anchor and away!
+
+Were they again to elude him? Not, he swore, if he had to swim for it. And
+he had no wish to swim. The clothes he stood in, with what was left of his
+self-respect, were all that he could call his own on that side of the North
+Sea. Not a boatman on the Scheldt would so much as consider accepting three
+English pennies in exchange for boat-hire. In brief, it began to look as if
+he were either to swim or ... to steal a boat.
+
+Upon such slender threads of circumstance depends our boasted moral health.
+In one fleeting minute Kirkwood's conception of the law of _meum et tuum_,
+its foundations already insidiously undermined by a series of cumulative
+misfortunes, toppled crashing to its fall; and was not.
+
+He was wholly unconscious of the change. Beneath him, in a space between
+the quays bridged by the gangway, a number of rowboats, a putative score,
+lay moored for the night and gently rubbing against each other with the
+soundless lift and fall of the river. For all that Kirkwood could determine
+to the contrary, the lot lay at the mercy of the public; nowhere about was
+he able to discern a figure in anything resembling a watchman.
+
+Without a quiver of hesitation--moments were invaluable, if what he feared
+were true--he strode to the gangway, passed down, and with absolute
+nonchalance dropped into the nearest boat, stepping from one to another
+until he had gained the outermost. To his joy he found a pair of oars
+stowed beneath the thwarts.
+
+If he had paused to moralize--which he didn't--upon the discovery, he would
+have laid it all at the door of his lucky star; and would have been wrong.
+We who have never stooped to petty larceny know that the oars had been
+placed there at the direction of his evil genius bent upon facilitating his
+descent into the avernus of crime. Let us, then, pity the poor young man
+without condoning his offense.
+
+Unhitching the painter he set one oar against the gunwale of the next boat,
+and with a powerful thrust sent his own (let us so call it for convenience)
+stern-first out upon the river; then sat him composedly down, fitted the
+oars to their locks, and began to pull straight across-stream, trusting to
+the current to carry him down to the _Alethea_. He had already marked down
+that vessel's riding-light; and that not without a glow of gratitude to see
+it still aloft and in proper juxtaposition to the river-bank; proof that it
+had not moved.
+
+He pulled a good oar, reckoned his distance prettily, and shipping the
+blades at just the right moment, brought the little boat in under the
+brigantine's counter with scarce a jar. An element of surprise he held
+essential to the success of his plan, whatever that might turn out to be.
+
+Standing up, he caught the brigantine's after-rail with both hands, one of
+which held the painter of the purloined boat, and lifted his head above
+the deck line. A short survey of the deserted after-deck gave him further
+assurance. The anchor-watch was not in sight; he may have been keeping
+well forward by Stryker's instructions, or he may have crept off for forty
+winks. Whatever the reason for his absence from the post of duty, Kirkwood
+was relieved not to have him to deal with; and drawing himself gently in
+over the rail, made the painter fast, and stepped noiselessly over toward
+the lighted oblong of the companionway. A murmur of voices from below
+comforted him with the knowledge that he had not miscalculated, this time;
+at last he stood within striking distance of his quarry.
+
+The syllables of his surname ringing clearly in his ears and followed by
+Stryker's fleeting laugh, brought him to a pause. He flushed hotly in the
+darkness; the captain was retailing with relish some of his most successful
+witticisms at Kirkwood's expense.... "You'd ought to've seed the wye'e
+looked at me!" concluded the _raconteur_ in a gale of mirth.
+
+Mulready laughed with him, if a little uncertainly. Calendar's chuckle was
+not audible, but he broke the pause that followed.
+
+"I don't know," he said with doubting emphasis. "You say you landed him
+without a penny in his pocket? I don't call that a good plan at all. Of
+course, he ain't a factor, but ... Well, it might've been as well to give
+him his fare home. He might make trouble for us, somehow.... I don't mind
+telling you, Cap'n, that you're an ass."
+
+The tensity of certain situations numbs the sensibilities. Kirkwood had
+never in his weirdest dreams thought of himself as an eavesdropper; he did
+not think of himself as such in the present instance; he merely listened,
+edging nearer the skylight, of which the wings were slightly raised, and
+keeping as far as possible in shadow.
+
+"Ow, I sye!" the captain was remonstrating, aggrieved. "'Ow was I to know
+'e didn't 'ave it in for you? First off, when 'e comes on board (I'll sye
+this for 'im, 'e's as plucky as they myke 'em), I thought 'e was from the
+Yard. Then, when I see wot a bally hinnocent 'e was, I mykes up my mind
+'e's just some one you've been ply in' one of your little gymes on, and 'oo
+was lookin' to square 'is account. So I did 'im proper."
+
+"Evidently," assented Calendar dryly. "You're a bit of a heavy-handed
+brute, Stryker. Personally I'm kind of sorry for the boy; he wasn't a bad
+sort, as his kind runs, and he was no fool, from what little I saw of
+him.... I wonder what he wanted."
+
+"Possibly," Mulready chimed in suavely, "you can explain what you wanted
+of him, in the first place. How did you come to drag him into _this_
+business?"
+
+"Oh, that!" Calendar laughed shortly. "That was partly accident, partly
+inspiration. I happened to see his name on the Pless register; he'd put
+himself down as from 'Frisco. I figured it out that he would be next door
+to broke and getting desperate, ready to do anything to get home; and
+thought we might utilize him; to smuggle some of the stuff into the States.
+Once before, if you'll remember--no; that was before we got together,
+Mulready--I picked up a fellow-countryman on the Strand. He was down and
+out, jumped at the job, and we made a neat little wad on it."
+
+"The more fool you, to take outsiders into your confidence," grumbled
+Mulready.
+
+"Ow?" interrogated Calendar, mimicking Stryker's accent inimitably. "Well,
+you've got a heap to learn about this game, Mul; about the first thing
+is that you must trust Old Man Know-it-all, which is me. I've run more
+diamonds into the States, in one way or another, in my time, than you ever
+pinched out of the shirt-front of a toff on the Empire Prom., before they
+made the graft too hot for you and you came to take lessons from me in the
+gentle art of living easy."
+
+"Oh, cut that, cawn't you?"
+
+"Delighted, dear boy.... One of the first principles, next to profiting by
+the admirable example I set you, is to make the fellows in your own line
+trust you. Now, if this boy had taken on with me, I could have got a bunch
+of the sparklers on my mere say-so, from old Morganthau up on Finsbury
+Pavement. He does a steady business hoodwinking the Customs for the benefit
+of his American clients--and himself. And I'd've made a neat little profit
+besides: something to fall back on, if this fell through. I don't mind
+having two strings to my bow."
+
+"Yes," argued Mulready; "but suppose this Kirkwood had taken on with you
+and then peached?"
+
+"That's another secret; you've got to know your man, be able to size him
+up. I called on this chap for that very purpose; but I saw at a glance he
+wasn't our man. He smelt a nigger in the woodpile and most politely told
+me to go to the devil. But if he _had_ come in, he'd've died before he
+squealed. I know the breed; there's honor among gentlemen that knocks the
+honor of thieves higher'n a kite, the old saw to the contrary--nothing
+doing.... You understand me, I'm sure, Mulready?" he concluded with
+envenomed sweetness.
+
+"I don't see yet how Kirkwood got anything to do with Dorothy."
+
+"Miss Calendar to you, _Mister_ Mulready!" snapped Calendar. "There, there,
+now! Don't get excited.... It was when the Hallam passed me word that a man
+from the Yard was waiting on the altar steps for me, that Kirkwood came in.
+He was dining close by; I went over and worked on his feelings until he
+agreed to take Dorothy off my hands. If I had attempted to leave the place
+with her, they'd've spotted me for sure.... My compliments to you, Dick
+Mulready."
+
+There came the noise of chair legs scraped harshly on the cabin deck.
+Apparently Mulready had leaped to his feet in a rage.
+
+"I've told you--" he began in a voice thick with passion.
+
+"Oh, sit down!" Calendar cut in contemptuously. "Sit down, d'you hear?
+That's all over and done with. We understand each other now, and you won't
+try any more monkey-shines. It's a square deal and a square divide, so
+far's I'm concerned; if we stick together there'll be profit enough for all
+concerned. Sit down, Mul, and have another slug of the captain's bum rum."
+
+Although Mulready consented to be pacified, Kirkwood got the impression
+that the man was far gone in drink. A moment later he heard him growl
+"Chin-chin!" antiphonal to the captain's "Cheer-o!"
+
+"Now, then," Calendar proposed, "Mr. Kirkwood aside--peace be with
+him!--let's get down to cases."
+
+"Wot's the row?" asked the captain.
+
+"The row, Cap'n, is the Hallam female, who has unexpectedly shown up in
+Antwerp, we have reason to believe with malicious intent and a private
+detective to add to the gaiety of nations."
+
+"Wot's the odds? She carn't 'urt us without lyin' up trouble for 'erself."
+
+"Damn little consolation to us when we're working it out in Dartmoor."
+
+"Speak for yourself," grunted Mulready surlily.
+
+"I do," returned Calendar easily; "we're both in the shadow of Dartmoor,
+Mul, my boy; since you choose to take the reference as personal. Sing Sing,
+however, yawns for me alone; it's going to keep on yawning, too, unless I
+miss my guess. I love my native land most to death, _but_ ..."
+
+"Ow, blow that!" interrupted the captain irritably. "Let's 'ear about the
+'Allam. Wot're you afryd of?"
+
+"'Fraid she'll set up a yell when she finds out we're planting the loot,
+Cap'n. She's just that vindictive; you'd think she'd be satisfied with
+her end of the stick, but you don't know the Hallam. That milk-and-water
+offspring of hers is the apple of her eye, and Freddie's going to collar
+the whole shooting-match or madam will kick over the traces."
+
+"Well?"
+
+"Well, she's queered us here. We can't do anything if my lady is going to
+camp on our trail and tell everybody we're shady customers, can we? The
+question now before the board is: Where now,--and how?"
+
+"Amsterdam," Mulready chimed in. "I told you that in the beginning."
+
+"But how?" argued Calendar. "The Lord knows I'm willing but ... we can't go
+by rail, thanks to the Hallam. We've got to lose her first of all."
+
+"But wot I'm arskin' is, wot's the matter with--"
+
+"The _Alethea_, Cap'n? Nothing, so far as Dick and I are concerned. But my
+dutiful daughter is prejudiced; she's been so long without proper paternal
+discipline," Calendar laughed, "that she's rather high-spirited. Of course
+I might overcome her objections, but the girl's no fool, and every ounce
+of pressure I bring to bear just now only helps make her more restless and
+suspicious."
+
+"You leave her to me," Mulready interposed, with a brutal laugh. "I'll
+guarantee to get her aboard, or..."
+
+"Drop it, Dick!" Calendar advised quietly. "And go a bit easy with that
+bottle for five minutes, can't you?"
+
+"Well, then," Stryker resumed, apparently concurring in Calendar's
+attitude, "w'y don't one of you tyke the stuff, go off quiet and dispose of
+it to a proper fence, and come back to divide. I don't see w'y that--"
+
+"Naturally you wouldn't," chuckled Calendar. "Few people besides the two of
+us understand the depth of affection existing between Dick, here, and
+me. We just can't bear to get out of sight of each other. We're sure
+inseparable--since night before last. Odd, isn't it?"
+
+"You drop it!" snarled Mulready, in accents so ugly that the listener was
+startled. "Enough's enough and--"
+
+"There, there, Dick! All right; I'll behave," Calendar soothed him. "We'll
+forget and say no more about it."
+
+"Well, see you don't."
+
+"But 'as either of you a plan?" persisted Stryker.
+
+"I have," replied Mulready; "and it's the simplest and best, if you could
+only make this long-lost parent here see it."
+
+"Wot is it?"
+
+Mulready seemed to ignore Calendar and address himself to the captain.
+He articulated with some difficulty, slurring his words to the point of
+indistinctness at times.
+
+"Simple enough," he propounded solemnly. "We've got the gladstone bag here;
+Miss Dolly's at the hotel--that's her papa's bright notion; he thinks she's
+to be trusted ... Now then, what's the matter with weighing anchor and
+slipping quietly out to sea?"
+
+"Leavin' the dootiful darter?"
+
+"Cert'n'y. She's only a drag any way. 'Better off without her.... Then we
+can wait our time and get highest market prices--"
+
+"You forget, Dick," Calendar put it, "that there's a thousand in it for
+each of us if she's kept out of England for six weeks. A thousand's five
+thousand in the land I hail from; I can use five thousand in my business."
+
+"Why can't you be content with what you've got?" demanded Mulready
+wrathfully.
+
+"Because I'm a seventh son of a seventh son; I can see an inch or two
+beyond my nose. If Dorothy ever finds her way back to England she'll spoil
+one of the finest fields of legitimate graft I ever licked my lips to look
+at. The trouble with you, Mul, is you're too high-toned. You want to play
+the swell mobs-man from post to finish. A quick touch and a clean getaway
+for yours. Now, that's all right; that has its good points, but you don't
+want to underestimate the advantages of a good blackmailing connection....
+If I can keep Dorothy quiet long enough, I look to the Hallam and precious
+Freddie to be a great comfort to me in my old age."
+
+"Then, for God's sake," cried Mulready, "go to the hotel, get your brat by
+the scruif of her pretty neck and drag her aboard. Let's get out of this."
+
+"I won't," returned Calendar inflexibly.
+
+The dispute continued, but the listener had heard enough. He had to get
+away and think, could no longer listen; indeed, the voices of the three
+blackguards below came but indistinctly to his ears, as if from a distance.
+He was sick at heart and ablaze with indignation by turns. Unconsciously he
+was trembling violently in every limb; swept by alternate waves of heat and
+cold, feverish one minute, shivering the next. All of which phenomena were
+due solely to the rage that welled inside his heart.
+
+Stealthily he crept away to the rail, to stand grasping it and staring
+across the water with unseeing eyes at the gay old city twinkling back with
+her thousand eyes of light. The cool night breeze, sweeping down unhindered
+over the level Netherlands from the bleak North Sea, was comforting to
+his throbbing temples. By degrees his head cleared, his rioting pulses
+subsided, he could think; and he did.
+
+Over there, across the water, in the dingy and disreputable Hotel du
+Commerce, Dorothy waited in her room, doubtless the prey of unnumbered
+nameless terrors, while aboard the brigantine her fate was being decided by
+a council of three unspeakable scoundrels, one of whom, professing himself
+her father, openly declared his intention of using her to further his
+selfish and criminal ends.
+
+His first and natural thought, to steal away to her and induce her to
+accompany him back to England, Kirkwood perforce discarded. He could
+have wept over the realization of his unqualified impotency. He had no
+money,--not even cab-fare from the hotel to the railway station. Something
+subtler, more crafty, had to be contrived to meet the emergency. And there
+was one way, one only; he could see none other. Temporarily he must make
+himself one of the company of her enemies, force himself upon them,
+ingratiate himself into their good graces, gain their confidence, then,
+when opportunity offered, betray them. And the power to make them tolerate
+him, if not receive him as a fellow, the knowledge of them and their plans
+that they had unwittingly given him, was his.
+
+And Dorothy, was waiting....
+
+He swung round and without attempting to muffle his footfalls strode toward
+the companionway. He must pretend he had just come aboard.
+
+Subconsciously he had been aware, during his time of pondering, that the
+voices in the cabin had been steadily gaining in volume, rising louder and
+yet more loud, Mulready's ominous, drink-blurred accents dominating the
+others. There was a quarrel afoot; as soon as he gave it heed, Kirkwood
+understood that Mulready, in the madness of his inflamed brain, was forcing
+the issue while Calendar sought vainly to calm and soothe him.
+
+The American arrived at the head of the companionway at a critical
+juncture. As he moved to descend some low, cool-toned retort of Calendar's
+seemed to enrage his confederate beyond reason. He yelped aloud with wrath,
+sprang to his feet, knocking over a chair, and leaping back toward the foot
+of the steps, flashed an adroit hand behind him and found his revolver.
+
+"I've stood enough from you!" he screamed, his voice oddly clear in that
+moment of insanity. "You've played with me as long as you will, you hulking
+American hog! And now I'm going to show--"
+
+As he held his fire to permit his denunciation to bite home, Kirkwood,
+appalled to find himself standing on the threshold of a tragedy, gathered
+himself together and launched through the air, straight for the madman's
+shoulders.
+
+As they went down together, sprawling, Mulready's head struck against a
+transom and the revolver fell from his limp fingers.
+
+
+
+
+XIV
+
+
+STRATAGEMS AND SPOILS
+
+Prepared as he had been for the shock, Kirkwood was able to pick himself up
+quickly, uninjured, Mulready's revolver in his grasp.
+
+On his feet, straddling Mulready's insentient body, he confronted Calendar
+and Stryker. The face of the latter was a sickly green, the gift of his
+fright. The former seemed coldly composed, already recovering from his
+surprise and bringing his wits to bear upon the new factor which had been
+so unceremoniously injected into the situation.
+
+[Illustration: Straddling Mulready's body, he confronted Calendar and
+Stryker.]
+
+Standing, but leaning heavily upon a hand that rested flat on the table,
+in the other he likewise held a revolver, which he had apparently drawn in
+self-defense, at the crisis of Mulready's frenzy. Its muzzle was deflected.
+He looked Kirkwood over with a cool gray eye, the color gradually returning
+to his fat, clean-shaven cheeks, replacing the pardonable pallor which had
+momentarily rested thereon.
+
+As for Kirkwood, he had covered the fat adventurer before he knew it.
+Stryker, who had been standing immediately in the rear of Calendar,
+immediately cowered and cringed to find himself in the line of fire.
+
+Of the three conscious men in the brigantine's cabin, Calendar was probably
+the least confused or excited. Stryker was palpably unmanned. Kirkwood was
+tingling with a sense of mastery, but collected and rapidly revolving the
+combinations for the reversed conditions which had been brought about by
+Mulready's drunken folly. His elation was apparent in his shining, boyish
+eyes, as well as in the bright color that glowed in his cheeks. When he
+decided to speak it was with rapid enunciation, but clearly and concisely.
+
+"Calendar," he began, "if a single shot is fired about this vessel the
+river police will be buzzing round your ears in a brace of shakes."
+
+The fat adventurer nodded assent, his eyes contracting.
+
+"Very well!" continued Kirkwood brusquely. "You must know that I have
+personally nothing to fear from the police; if arrested, I wouldn't be
+detained a day. On the other hand, you ... Hand me that pistol, Calendar,
+butt first, please. Look sharp, my man! If you don't..."
+
+He left the ellipsis to be filled in by the corpulent blackguard's
+intelligence. The latter, gray eyes still intent on the younger man's face,
+wavered, plainly impressed, but still wondering.
+
+"Quick! I'm not patient to-night..."
+
+No longer was Calendar of two minds. In the face of Kirkwood's attitude
+there was but one course to be followed: that of obedience. Calendar
+surrendered an untenable position as gracefully as could be wished.
+
+"I guess you know what you mean by this," he said, tendering the weapon as
+per instructions; "I'm doggoned if I do.... You'll allow a certain
+latitude in consideration of my relief; I can't say we were anticipating
+this--ah--Heaven-sent visitation."
+
+Accepting the revolver with his left hand and settling his forefinger on
+the trigger, Kirkwood beamed with pure enjoyment. He found the deference
+of the older man, tempered though it was by his indomitable swagger,
+refreshing in the extreme.
+
+"A little appreciation isn't exactly out of place, come to think of it,"
+he commented, adding, with an eye for the captain: "Stryker, you bold, bad
+butterfly, have you got a gun concealed about your unclean person?"
+
+The captain shook visibly with contrition. "No, Mr. Kirkwood," he managed
+to reply in a voice singularly lacking in his wonted bluster.
+
+"Say 'sir'!" suggested Kirkwood.
+
+"No, Mr. Kirkwood, sir," amended Stryker eagerly.
+
+"Now come round here and let's have a look at you. Please stay where you
+are, Calendar.... Why, Captain, you're shivering from head to foot! Not ill
+are you, you wag? Step over to the table there, Stryker, and turn out your
+pockets; turn 'em inside out and let's see what you carry in the way of
+offensive artillery. And, Stryker, don't be rash; don't do anything you'd
+be sorry for afterwards."
+
+"No fear of that," mumbled the captain, meekly shambling toward the table,
+and, in his anxiety to give no cause for unpleasantness, beginning to empty
+his pockets on the way.
+
+"Don't forget the 'sir,' Stryker. And, Stryker, if you happen to think of
+anything in the line of one of your merry quips or jests, don't strain
+yourself holding in; get it right off your chest, and you'll feel better."
+
+Kirkwood chuckled, in high conceit with himself, watching Calendar out of
+the corner of his eye, but with his attention centered on the infinitely
+diverting spectacle afforded by Stryker, whose predacious hands were
+trembling violently as, one by one, they brought to light the articles of
+which he had despoiled his erstwhile victim.
+
+"Come, come, Stryker! Surely you can think of something witty, surely you
+haven't exhausted the possibilities of that almanac joke! Couldn't you
+ring another variation on the lunatic wheeze? Don't hesitate out of
+consideration for me, Captain; I'm joke proof--perhaps you've noticed?"
+
+Stryker turned upon him an expression at once ludicrous, piteous and
+hateful. "That's all, sir," he snarled, displaying his empty palms in token
+of his absolute tractability.
+
+"Good enough. Now right about face--quick! Your back's prettier than your
+face, and besides, I want to know whether your hip-pockets are empty. I've
+heard it's the habit of you gentry to pack guns in your clothes.... None?
+That's all right, then. Now roost on the transom, over there in the corner,
+Stryker, and don't move. Don't let me hear a word from you. Understand?"
+
+Submissively the captain retired to the indicated spot. Kirkwood turned
+to Calendar; of whose attitude, however, he had not been for an instant
+unmindful.
+
+"Won't you sit down, Mr. Calendar?" he suggested pleasantly. "Forgive me
+for keeping you waiting."
+
+For his own part, as the adventurer dropped passively into his chair,
+Kirkwood stepped over Mulready and advanced to the middle of the cabin, at
+the same time thrusting Calendar's revolver into his own coat pocket. The
+other, Mulready's, he nursed significantly with both hands, while he stood
+temporarily quiet, surveying the fleshy face of the prime factor in the
+intrigue.
+
+A quaint, grim smile played about the American's lips, a smile a little
+contemptuous, more than a little inscrutable. In its light Calendar grew
+restive and lost something of his assurance. His feet shifted uneasily
+beneath the table and his dark eyes wavered, evading Kirkwood's. At length
+he seemed to find the suspense unendurable.
+
+"Well?" he demanded testily. "What d'you want of me?"
+
+"I was just wondering at you, Calendar. In the last few days you've given
+me enough cause to wonder, as you'll admit."
+
+The adventurer plucked up spirit, deluded by Kirkwood's pacific tone. "I
+wonder at you, Mr. Kirkwood," he retorted. "It was good of you to save my
+life and--"
+
+"I'm not so sure of that! Perhaps it had been more humane--"
+
+Calendar owned the touch with a wry grimace. "But I'm damned if I
+understand this high-handed attitude of yours!" he concluded heatedly.
+
+"Don't you?" Kirkwood's humor became less apparent, the smile sobering.
+"You will," he told the man, adding abruptly: "Calendar, where's your
+daughter?"
+
+The restless eyes sought the companionway.
+
+"Dorothy," the man lied spontaneously, without a tremor, "is with friends
+in England. Why? Did you want to see her?"
+
+"I rather expected to."
+
+"Well, I thought it best to leave her home, after all."
+
+"I'm glad to hear she's in safe hands," commented Kirkwood.
+
+The adventurer's glance analyzed his face. "Ah," he said slowly, "I see.
+You followed me on Dorothy's account, Mr. Kirkwood?"
+
+"Partly; partly on my own. Let me put it to you fairly. When you forced
+yourself upon me, back there in London, you offered me some sort of
+employment; when I rejected it, you used me to your advantage for the
+furtherance of your purposes (which I confess I don't understand), and made
+me miss my steamer. Naturally, when I found myself penniless and friendless
+in a strange country, I thought again of your offer; and tried to find you,
+to accept it."
+
+"Despite the fact that you're an honest man, Kirkwood?" The fat lips
+twitched with premature enjoyment.
+
+"I'm a desperate man to-night, whatever I may have been yesterday." The
+young man's tone was both earnest and convincing. "I think I've shown that
+by my pertinacity in hunting you down."
+
+"Well--yes." Calendar's thick fingers caressed his lips, trying to hide the
+dawning smile.
+
+"Is that offer still open?"
+
+His nonchalance completely restored by the very naivete of the proposition,
+Calendar laughed openly and with a trace of irony. The episode seemed to be
+turning out better than he had anticipated. Gently his mottled fat fingers
+played about his mouth and chins as he looked Kirkwood up and down.
+
+"I'm sorry," he replied, "that it isn't--now. You're too late, Kirkwood;
+I've made other arrangements."
+
+"Too bad." Kirkwood's eyes narrowed. "You force me to harsher measures,
+Calendar."
+
+Genuinely diverted, the adventurer laughed a second time, tipping back
+in his chair, his huge frame shaking with ponderous enjoyment. "Don't do
+anything you'd be sorry for," he parroted, sarcastical, the young man's
+recent admonition to the captain.
+
+"No fear, Calendar. I'm just going to use my advantage, which you won't
+dispute,"--the pistol described an eloquent circle, gleaming in the
+lamplight--"to levy on you a little legitimate blackmail. Don't be alarmed;
+I shan't hit you any harder than I have to."
+
+"What?" stammered Calendar, astonished. "What in hell _are_ you driving
+at?"
+
+"Recompense for my time and trouble. You've cost me a pretty penny, first
+and last, with your nasty little conspiracy--whatever it's all about. Now,
+needing the money, I purpose getting some of it back. I shan't precisely
+rob you, but this is a hold-up, all right.... Stryker," reproachfully, "I
+don't see my pearl pin."
+
+"I got it 'ere," responded the sailor hastily, fumbling with his tie.
+
+"Give it me, then." Kirkwood held out his hand and received the trinket.
+Then, moving over to the table, the young man, while abating nothing of
+his watchfulness, sorted out his belongings from the mass of odds and ends
+Stryker had disgorged. The tale of them was complete; the captain had
+obeyed him faithfully. Kirkwood looked up, pleased.
+
+"Now see here, Calendar; this collection of truck that I was robbed of by
+this resurrected Joe Miller here, cost me upwards of a hundred and fifty.
+I'm going to sell it to you at a bargain--say fifty dollars, two hundred
+and fifty francs."
+
+"The juice you are!" Calendar's eyes opened wide, partly in admiration.
+"D'you realize that this is next door to highway robbery, my young friend?"
+
+"High-seas piracy, if you prefer," assented Kirkwood with entire
+equanimity. "I'm going to have the money, and you're going to give it up.
+The transaction by any name would smell no sweeter, Calendar. Come--fork
+over!"
+
+"And if I refuse?"
+
+"I wouldn't refuse, if I were you."
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"The consequences would be too painful."
+
+"You mean you'd puncture me with that gun?"
+
+"Not unless you attack or attempt to follow me. I mean to say that the
+Belgian police are notoriously a most efficient body, and that I'll make
+it my duty and pleasure to introduce 'em to you, if you refuse. But you
+won't," Kirkwood added soothingly, "will you, Calendar?"
+
+"No." The adventurer had become suddenly thoughtful. "No, I won't. 'Glad to
+oblige you."
+
+He tilted his chair still farther back, straightening out his elephantine
+legs, inserted one fat hand into his trouser pocket and with some
+difficulty extracted a combined bill-fold and coin-purse, at once heavy
+with gold and bulky with notes. Moistening thumb and forefinger, "How'll
+you have it?" he inquired with a lift of his cunning eyes; and when
+Kirkwood had advised him, slowly counted out four fifty-franc notes, placed
+them near the edge of the table, and weighted them with five ten-franc
+pieces. And, "'That all?" he asked, replacing the pocket-book.
+
+"That will be about all. I leave you presently to your unholy devices, you
+and that gay dog, over there." The captain squirmed, reddening. "Just by
+way of precaution, however, I'll ask you to wait in here till I'm off."
+Kirkwood stepped backwards to the door of the captain's room, opened it and
+removed the key from the inside. "Please take Mulready in with you," he
+continued. "By the time you get out, I'll be clear of Antwerp. Please don't
+think of refusing me,--I really mean it!"
+
+The latter clause came sharply as Calendar seemed to hesitate, his weary,
+wary eyes glimmering with doubt. Kirkwood, watching him as a cat her prey,
+intercepted a lightning-swift sidelong glance that shifted from his face
+to the port lockers, forward. But the fat adventurer was evidently to a
+considerable degree deluded by the very child-like simplicity of Kirkwood's
+attitude. If the possibility that his altercation with Mulready had been
+overheard, crossed his mind, Calendar had little choice other than to
+accept the chance. Either way he moved, the risk was great; if he refused
+to be locked in the captain's room, there was the danger of the police,
+to which Kirkwood had convincingly drawn attention; if he accepted the
+temporary imprisonment, he took a risk with the gladstone bag. On the other
+hand, he had estimated Kirkwood's honesty as thorough-going, from their
+first interview; he had appraised him as a gentleman and a man of honor.
+And he did not believe the young man knew, after all ... Perplexed, at
+length he chose the smoother way, and with an indulgent lifting of eyebrows
+and fat shoulders, rose and waddled over to Mulready.
+
+"Oh, all right," he conceded with deep toleration in his tone for the
+idiosyncrasies of youth. "It's all the same to me, beau." He laughed a
+nervous laugh. "Come along and lend us a hand, Stryker."
+
+The latter glanced timidly at Kirkwood, his eyes pleading for leave to
+move; which Kirkwood accorded with an imperative nod and a fine flourish of
+the revolver. Promptly the captain, sprang to Calendar's assistance; and
+between the two of them, the one taking Mulready's head, the other his
+feet, they lugged him quickly into the stuffy little state-room. Kirkwood,
+watching and following to the threshold, inserted the key.
+
+"One word more," he counseled, a hand on the knob. "Don't forget I've
+warned you what'll happen if you try to break even with me."
+
+"Never fear, little one!" Calendar's laugh was nervously cheerful. "The
+Lord knows you're welcome."
+
+"Thank you 'most to death," responded Kirkwood politely. "Good-by--and
+good-by to you, Stryker. 'Glad to have humored your desire to meet me soon
+again."
+
+Kirkwood, turning the key in the lock, withdrew it and dropped it on the
+cabin table; at the same time he swept into his pocket the money he had
+extorted of Calendar. Then he paused an instant, listening; from the
+captain's room came a sound of murmurs and scuffling. He debated what they
+were about in there--but time pressed. Not improbably they, were crowding
+for place at the keyhole, he reflected, as he crossed to the port locker
+forward.
+
+He had its lid up in a twinkling, and in another had lifted out the
+well-remembered black gladstone bag.
+
+This seems to have been his first compound larceny.
+
+As if stimulated by some such reflection he sprang for the companionway,
+dropping the lid of the locker with a bang which must have been
+excruciatingly edifying to the men in the captain's room. Whatever their
+emotions, the bang was mocked by a mighty kick, shaking the door; which,
+Kirkwood reflected, opened outward and was held only by the frailest kind
+of a lock: it would not hold long.
+
+Spurred onward by a storm of curses, Stryker's voice chanting infuriated
+cacophony with Calendar's, Kirkwood leapt up the companionway even as the
+second tremendous kick threatened to shatter the panels. Heart in mouth, a
+chill shiver of guilt running up and down his spine, he gained the deck,
+cast loose the painter, drew in his rowboat, and dropped over the side;
+then, the gladstone bag nestling between his feet, sat down and bent to the
+oars.
+
+And doubts assailed him, pressing close upon the ebb of his
+excitement--doubts and fears innumerable.
+
+There was no longer a distinction to be drawn between himself and Calendar;
+no more could he esteem himself a better and more honest man than that
+accomplished swindler. He was not advised as to the Belgian code, but
+English law, he understood, made no allowance for the good intent of those
+caught in possession of stolen property; though he was acting with the most
+honorable motives in the world, the law, if he came within its cognizance,
+would undoubtedly place him on Calendar's plane and judge him by the same
+standard. To all intents and purposes he was a thief, and thief he would
+remain until the gladstone bag with its contents should be restored to its
+rightful owner.
+
+Voluntarily, then, he had stepped from the ranks of the hunters to those of
+the hunted. He now feared police interference as abjectly as did Calendar
+and his set of rogues; and Kirkwood felt wholly warranted in assuming that
+the adventurer, with his keen intelligence, would not handicap himself by
+ignoring this point. Indeed, if he were to be judged by what Kirkwood had
+inferred of his character, Calendar would let nothing whatever hinder him,
+neither fear of bodily hurt nor danger of apprehension at the hands of the
+police, from making a determined and savage play to regain possession of
+his booty.
+
+Well! (Kirkwood set his mouth savagely) Calendar should have a run for his
+money!
+
+For the present he could compliment himself with the knowledge that he had
+outwitted the rogues, had lifted the jewels and probably two-thirds of
+their armament; he had also the start, the knowledge of their criminal
+guilt and intent, and his own plans, to comfort him. As for the latter, he
+did not believe that Calendar would immediately fathom them; so he took
+heart of grace and tugged at the oars with a will, pulling directly for the
+city and permitting the current to drift him down-stream at its pleasure.
+There could be no more inexcusable folly than to return to the _Quai Steen_
+landing and (possibly) the arms of the despoiled boat-owner.
+
+At first he could hear crash after splintering crash sounding dully muffled
+from the cabin of the _Alethea_: a veritable devil's tattoo beaten out by
+the feet of the prisoners. Evidently the fastening was serving him better
+than he had dared hope. But as the black rushing waters widened between
+boat and brigantine, the clamor aboard the latter subsided, indicating
+that Calendar and Stryker had broken out or been released by the crew. In
+ignorance as to whether he were seen or being pursued, Kirkwood pulled on,
+winning in under the shadow of the quais and permitting the boat to drift
+down to a lonely landing on the edge of the dockyard quarter of Antwerp.
+
+Here alighting, he made the boat fast and, soothing his conscience with a
+surmise that its owner would find it there in the morning, strode swiftly
+over to the train line that runs along the embankment, swung aboard an
+adventitious car and broke his first ten-franc piece in order to pay his
+fare.
+
+The car made a leisurely progress up past the old Steen castle and the Quai
+landing, Kirkwood sitting quietly, the gladstone bag under his hand, a
+searching gaze sweeping the waterside. No sign of the adventurers rewarded
+him, but it was now all chance, all hazard. He had no more heart for
+confidence.
+
+They passed the Hotel du Commerce. Kirkwood stared up at its windows,
+wondering....
+
+A little farther on, a disengaged fiacre, its driver alert for possible
+fares, turned a corner into the esplanade. At sight of it Kirkwood,
+inspired, hopped nimbly off the tram-car and signaled the cabby. The latter
+pulled up and Kirkwood started to charge him with instructions; something
+which he did haltingly, hampered by a slight haziness of purpose. While
+thus engaged, and at rest in the stark glare of the street-lamps, with
+no chance of concealing himself, he was aware of a rising tumult in the
+direction of the landing, and glancing round, discovered a number of people
+running toward him. With no time to wonder whether or no he was really the
+object of the hue-and-cry, he tossed the driver three silver francs.
+
+"Gare Centrale!" he cried. "And drive like the devil!"
+
+Diving into the fiacre he shut the door and stuck his head out of the
+window, taking observations. A ragged fringe of silly rabble was bearing
+down upon them, with one or two gendarmes in the forefront, and a giant,
+who might or might not be Stryker, a close second. Furthermore, another
+cab seemed to have been requisitioned for the chase. His heart misgave him
+momentarily; but his driver had taken him at his word and generosity,
+and in a breath the fiacre had turned the corner on two wheels, and the
+glittering reaches of the embankment, drive and promenade, were blotted
+out, as if smudged with lamp-black, by the obscurity of a narrow and
+tortuous side street.
+
+He drew in his head the better to preserve his brains against further
+emergencies.
+
+After a block or two Kirkwood picked up the gladstone bag, gently opened
+the door, and put a foot on the step, pausing to look back. The other cab
+was pelting after him with all the enthusiasm of a hound on a fresh
+trail. He reflected that this mad progress through the thoroughfares of a
+civilized city would not long endure without police intervention. So he
+waited, watching his opportunity. The fiacre hurtled onward, the driver
+leaning forward from his box to urge the horse with lash of whip and
+tongue, entirely unconscious of his fare's intentions.
+
+Between two streets the mouth of a narrow and darksome byway flashed into
+view. Kirkwood threw wide the door, and leaped, trusting to the night to
+hide his stratagem, to luck to save his limbs. Neither failed him; in a
+twinkling he was on all fours in the mouth of the alley, and as he picked
+himself up, the second fiacre passed, Calendar himself poking a round bald
+poll out of the window to incite his driver's cupidity with promises of
+redoubled fare.
+
+Kirkwood mopped his dripping forehead and whistled low with dismay; it
+seemed that from that instant on it was to be a vendetta with a vengeance.
+Calendar, as he had foreseen, was stopping at nothing.
+
+At a dog trot he sped down the alley to the next street, on which he turned
+back--more sedately--toward the river, debouching on the esplanade just one
+block from the Hotel du Commerce. As he swung past the serried tables of a
+cafe, whatever fears he had harbored were banished by the discovery that
+the excitement occasioned by the chase had already subsided. Beneath the
+garish awnings the crowd was laughing and chattering, eating and sipping
+its bock with complete unconcern, heedless altogether of the haggard and
+shabby young man carrying a black hand-bag, with the black Shade of Care
+for company and a blacker threat of disaster dogging his footsteps. Without
+attracting any attention whatever, indeed, he mingled with the strolling
+crowds, making his way toward the Hotel du Commerce. Yet he was not at all
+at ease; his uneasy conscience invested the gladstone bag with a magnetic
+attraction for the public eye. To carry it unconcealed in his hand
+furnished him with a sensation as disturbing as though its worn black sides
+had been stenciled STOLEN! in letters of flame. He felt it rendered him a
+cynosure of public interest, an object of suspicion to the wide cold world,
+that the gaze which lit upon the bag traveled to his face only to espy
+thereon the brand of guilt.
+
+For ease of mind, presently, he turned into a convenient shop and spent ten
+invaluable francs for a hand satchel big enough to hold the gladstone bag.
+
+With more courage, now that he had the hateful thing under cover, he found
+and entered the Hotel du Commerce.
+
+In the little closet which served for an office, over a desk visibly
+groaning with the weight of an enormous and grimy registry book, a sleepy,
+fat, bland and good-natured woman of the Belgian _bourgeoisie_ presided,
+a benign and drowsy divinity of even-tempered courtesy. To his misleading
+inquiry for Monsieur Calendar she returned a cheerful permission to seek
+that gentleman for himself.
+
+"Three flights, M'sieu', in the front; suite seventeen it is. M'sieu' does
+not mind walking up?" she inquired.
+
+M'sieu' did not in the least, though by no strain of the imagination could
+it, be truthfully said that he walked up those steep and redolent stairways
+of the Hotel du Commerce d'Anvers. More literally, he flew with winged
+feet, spurning each third padded step with a force that raised a tiny cloud
+of fine white dust from the carpeting.
+
+Breathless, at last he paused at the top of the third flight. His heart
+was hammering, his pulses drumming like wild things; there was a queer
+constriction in his throat, a fire of hope in his heart alternating with
+the ice of doubt. Suppose she were not there! What if he were mistaken,
+what if he had misunderstood, what if Mulready and Calendar had referred to
+another lodging-house?
+
+Pausing, he gripped the balustrade fiercely, forcing his self-control,
+forcing himself to reflect that the girl (presuming, for the sake of
+argument, he were presently to find her) could not be expected to
+understand how ardently he had discounted this moment of meeting, or how
+strangely it affected him. Indeed, he himself was more than a little
+disturbed by the latter phenomenon, though he was no longer blind to its
+cause. But he was not to let her see the evidences of his agitation, lest
+she be frightened.
+
+Slowly schooling himself to assume a masque of illuding self-possession and
+composure, he passed down the corridor to the door whose panels wore the
+painted legend, 17; and there knocked.
+
+Believing that he overheard from within a sudden startled exclamation, he
+smiled patiently, tolerant of her surprise.
+
+Burning with impatience as with a fever, he endured a long minute's wait.
+
+Misgivings were prompting him to knock again and summon her by name, when
+he heard footfalls on the other side of the door, followed by a click of
+the lock. The door was opened grudgingly, a bare six inches.
+
+Of the alarmed expression in the eyes that stared into his, he took no
+account. His face lengthened a little as he stood there, dumb, panting,
+staring; and his heart sank, down, deep down into a gulf of disappointment,
+weighted sorely with chagrin.
+
+Then, of the two the first to recover countenance, he doffed his cap and
+bowed.
+
+"Good evening, Mrs. Hallam," he said with a rueful smile.
+
+
+
+
+XV
+
+
+REFUGEES
+
+Now, if Kirkwood's emotion was poignant, Mrs. Hallam's astonishment
+paralleled, and her relief transcended it. In order to understand this it
+must be remembered that while Mr. Kirkwood was aware of the lady's presence
+in Antwerp, on her part she had known nothing of him since he had so
+ungallantly fled her company in Sheerness. She seemed to anticipate that
+either Calendar or one of his fellows would be discovered at the door,--to
+have surmised it without any excessive degree of pleasure.
+
+Only briefly she hesitated, while her surprise swayed her; then with a
+hardening of the eyes and a curt little nod, "I'm sorry," she said with
+decision, "but I am busy and can't see you now, Mr. Kirkwood"; and
+attempted to shut the door in his face.
+
+Deftly Kirkwood forestalled her intention by inserting both a foot and a
+corner of the newly purchased hand-bag between the door and the jamb. He
+had dared too greatly to be thus dismissed. "Pardon me," he countered,
+unabashed, "but I wish to speak with Miss Calendar."
+
+"Dorothy," returned the lady with spirit, "is engaged...."
+
+She compressed her lips, knitted her brows, and with disconcerting
+suddenness thrust one knee against the obstructing hand-bag; Kirkwood,
+happily, anticipated the movement just in time to reinforce the bag with
+his own knee; it remained in place, the door standing open.
+
+The woman flushed angrily; their glances crossed, her eyes flashing with
+indignation; but Kirkwood's held them with a level and unyielding stare.
+
+"I intend," he told her quietly, "to see Miss Calendar. It's useless your
+trying to hinder me. We may as well understand each other, Madam, and I'll
+tell you now that if you wish to avoid a scene--"
+
+"Dorothy!" the woman called over her shoulder; "ring for the porter."
+
+"By all means," assented Kirkwood agreeably. "I'll send him for a
+gendarme."
+
+"You insolent puppy!"
+
+"Madam, your wit disarms me--"
+
+"What is the matter, Mrs. Hallam?" interrupted a voice from the other side
+of the door. "Who is it?"
+
+"Miss Calendar!" cried Kirkwood hastily, raising his voice.
+
+"Mr. Kirkwood!" the reply came on the instant. She knew his voice! "Please,
+Mrs. Hallam, I will see Mr. Kirkwood."
+
+"You have no time to waste with him, Dorothy," said the woman coldly. "I
+must insist--"
+
+"But you don't seem to understand; it is Mr. Kirkwood!" argued the
+girl,--as if he were ample excuse for any imprudence!
+
+Kirkwood's scant store of patience was by this time rapidly becoming
+exhausted. "I should advise you not to interfere any further, Mrs. Hallam,"
+he told her in a tone low, but charged with meaning.
+
+How much did he know? She eyed him an instant longer, in sullen suspicion,
+then swung open the door, yielding with what grace she could. "Won't you
+come in, Mr. Kirkwood?" she inquired with acidulated courtesy.
+
+"If you press me," he returned winningly, "how can I refuse? You are too
+good!"
+
+His impertinence disconcerted even himself; he wondered that she did not
+slap him as he passed her, entering the room; and felt that he deserved it,
+despite her attitude. But such thoughts could not long trouble one whose
+eyes were enchanted by the sight of Dorothy, confronting him in the middle
+of the dingy room, her hands, bristling dangerously with hat pins, busy
+with the adjustment of a small gray toque atop the wonder that was her
+hair. So vivacious and charming she seemed, so spirited and bright her
+welcoming smile, so foreign was she altogether to the picture of her, worn
+and distraught, that he had mentally conjured up, that he stopped in an
+extreme of disconcertion; and dropped the hand-bag, smiling sheepishly
+enough under her ready laugh--mirth irresistibly incited by the
+plainly-read play of expression on his mobile countenance.
+
+"You must forgive the unconventionally, Mr. Kirkwood," she apologized,
+needlessly enough, but to cover his embarrassment. "I am on the point of
+going out with Mrs. Hallam--and of course you are the last person on earth
+I expected to meet here!"
+
+"It's good to see you, Miss Calendar," he said simply, remarking with much
+satisfaction that her trim walking costume bore witness to her statement
+that she was prepared for the street.
+
+The girl glanced into a mirror, patted the small, bewitching hat an
+infinitesimal fraction of an inch to one side, and turned to him again,
+her hands free. One of them, small but cordial, rested in his grasp for an
+instant all too brief, the while he gazed earnestly into her face,
+noting with concern what the first glance had not shown him,--the almost
+imperceptible shadows beneath her eyes and cheek-bones, pathetic records of
+the hours the girl had spent, since last he had seen her, in company with
+his own grim familiar, Care.
+
+Not a little of care and distress of mind had seasoned her portion in those
+two weary days. He saw and knew it; and his throat tightened inexplicably,
+again, as it had out there in the corridor. Possibly the change in her had
+passed unchallenged by any eyes other than his, but even in the little time
+that he had spent in her society, the image of her had become fixed so
+indelibly on his memory, that he could not now be deceived. She was
+changed--a little, but changed; she had suffered, and was suffering and,
+forced by suffering, her nascent womanhood was stirring in the bud. The
+child that he had met in London, in Antwerp he found grown to woman's
+stature and slowly coming to comprehension of the nature of the change in
+herself,--the wonder of it glowing softly in her eyes....
+
+The clear understanding of mankind that is an appanage of woman's estate,
+was now added to the intuitions of a girl's untroubled heart. She could
+not be blind to the mute adoration of his gaze; nor could she resent it.
+Beneath it she colored and lowered her lashes.
+
+"I was about to go out," she repeated in confusion. "I--it's pleasant to
+see you, too."
+
+"Thank you," he stammered ineptly; "I--I--"
+
+"If Mr. Kirkwood will excuse us, Dorothy," Mrs. Hallam's sharp tones struck
+in discordantly, "we shall be glad to see him when we return to London."
+
+"I am infinitely complimented, Mrs. Hallam," Kirkwood assured her; and of
+the girl quickly: "You're going back home?" he asked.
+
+She nodded, with a faint, puzzled smile that included the woman. "After a
+little--not immediately. Mrs. Hallam is so kind--"
+
+"Pardon me," he interrupted; "but tell me one thing, please: have you any
+one in England to whom you can go without invitation and be welcomed and
+cared for--any friends or relations?"
+
+"Dorothy will be with me," Mrs. Hallam answered for her, with cold
+defiance.
+
+Deliberately insolent, Kirkwood turned his back to the woman. "Miss
+Calendar, will you answer my question for yourself?" he asked the girl
+pointedly.
+
+"Why--yes; several friends; none in London, but--"
+
+"Dorothy--"
+
+"One moment, Mrs. Hallam," Kirkwood flung crisply over his shoulder. "I'm
+going to ask you something rather odd, Miss Calendar," he continued,
+seeking the girl's eyes. "I hope--"
+
+"Dorothy, I--"
+
+"If you please, Mrs. Hallam," suggested the girl, with just the right shade
+of independence. "I wish to listen to Mr. Kirkwood. He has been very kind
+to me and has every right...." She turned to him again, leaving the woman
+breathless and speechless with anger.
+
+"You told me once," Kirkwood continued quickly, and, he felt, brazenly,
+"that you considered me kind, thoughtful and considerate. You know me
+no better to-day than you did then, but I want to beg you to trust me a
+little. Can you trust yourself to my protection until we reach your friends
+in England?"
+
+"Why, I--" the girl faltered, taken by surprise.
+
+"Mr. Kirkwood!" cried Mrs. Hallam angrily, finding her voice.
+
+Kirkwood turned to meet her onslaught with a mien grave, determined,
+unflinching. "Please do not interfere, Madam," he said quietly.
+
+"You are impertinent, sir! Dorothy, I forbid you to listen to this person!"
+
+The girl flushed, lifting her chin a trifle. "Forbid?" she repeated
+wonderingly.
+
+Kirkwood was quick to take advantage of her resentment. "Mrs. Hallam is not
+fitted to advise you," he insisted, "nor can she control your actions. It
+must already have occurred to you that you're rather out of place in the
+present circumstances. The men who have brought you hither, I believe you
+already see through, to some extent. Forgive my speaking plainly ... But
+that is why you have accepted Mrs. Hallam's offer of protection. Will you
+take my word for it, when I tell you she has not your right interests at
+heart, but the reverse? I happen to know, Miss Calendar, and I--"
+
+"How dare you, sir?"
+
+Flaming with rage, Mrs. Hallam put herself bodily between them, confronting
+Kirkwood in white-lipped desperation, her small, gloved hands clenched and
+quivering at her sides, her green eyes dangerous.
+
+But Kirkwood could silence her; and he did. "Do you wish me to speak
+frankly, Madam? Do you wish me to tell what I know--and all I know--," with
+rising emphasis,--"of your social status and your relations with Calendar
+and Mulready? I promise you that if you wish it, or force me to it...."
+
+But he had need to say nothing further; the woman's eyes wavered before his
+and a little sob of terror forced itself between her shut teeth. Kirkwood
+smiled grimly, with a face of brass, impenetrable, inflexible. And suddenly
+she turned from him with indifferent bravado.
+
+"As Mr. Kirkwood says, Dorothy," she said in her high, metallic voice, "I
+have no authority over you. But if you're silly enough to consider for a
+moment this fellow's insulting suggestion, if you're fool enough to go with
+him, unchaperoned through Europe and imperil your--"
+
+"Mrs. Hallam!" Kirkwood cut her short with a menacing tone.
+
+"Why, then, I wash my hands of you," concluded the woman defiantly. "Make
+your choice, my child," she added with a meaning laugh and moved away,
+humming a snatch from a French _chanson_ which brought the hot blood to
+Kirkwood's face.
+
+But the girl did not understand; and he was glad of that. "You may judge
+between us," he appealed to her directly, once more. "I can only offer
+you my word of honor as an American gentleman that you shall be landed in
+England, safe and sound, by the first available steamer--"
+
+"There's no need to say more, Mr. Kirkwood," Dorothy informed him quietly.
+"I have already decided. I think I begin to understand some things clearly,
+now.... If you're ready, we will go."
+
+From the window, where she stood, holding the curtains back and staring
+out, Mrs. Hallam turned with a curling lip.
+
+[Illustration: From the window, Mrs. Hallam turned with a curling lip.]
+
+"'The honor of an American gentleman,'" she quoted with a stinging sneer;
+"I'm sure I wish you comfort of it, child!"
+
+"We must make haste, Miss Calendar," said Kirkwood, ignoring the
+implication. "Have you a traveling-bag?"
+
+She silently indicated a small valise, closed and strapped, on a table by
+the bed, and immediately passed out into the hall. Kirkwood took the case
+containing the gladstone bag in one hand, the girl's valise in the other,
+and followed.
+
+As he turned the head of the stairs he looked back. Mrs. Hallam was still
+at the window, her back turned. From her very passiveness he received an
+impression of something ominous and forbidding; if she had lost a trick or
+two of the game she played, she still held cards, was not at the end of her
+resources. She stuck in his imagination for many an hour as a force to be
+reckoned with.
+
+For the present he understood that she was waiting to apprise Calendar and
+Mulready of their flight. With the more haste, then, he followed Dorothy
+down the three flights, through the tiny office, where Madam sat sound
+asleep at her over-burdened desk, and out.
+
+Opposite the door they were fortunate enough to find a fiacre drawn up in
+waiting at the curb. Kirkwood opened the door for the girl to enter.
+
+"Gare du Sud," he directed the driver. "Drive your fastest--double fare for
+quick time!"
+
+The driver awoke with a start from profound reverie, looked Kirkwood over,
+and bowed with gesticulative palms.
+
+"M'sieu', I am desolated, but engaged!" he protested.
+
+"Precisely." Kirkwood deposited the two bags on the forward seat of the
+conveyance, and stood back to convince the man. "Precisely," said he,
+undismayed. "The lady who engaged you is remaining for a time; I will
+settle her bill."
+
+"Very well, M'sieu'!" The driver disclaimed responsibility and accepted the
+favor of the gods with a speaking shrug. "M'sieu' said the Gare du Sud? _En
+voiture_!"
+
+Kirkwood jumped in and shut the door; the vehicle drew slowly away from
+the curb, then with gratifying speed hammered up-stream on the embankment.
+Bending forward, elbows on knees, Kirkwood watched the sidewalks narrowly,
+partly to cover the girl's constraint, due to Mrs. Hallam's attitude,
+partly on the lookout for Calendar and his confederates. In a few moments
+they passed a public clock.
+
+"We've missed the Flushing boat," he announced. "I'm making a try for the
+Hoek van Holland line. We may possibly make it. I know that it leaves by
+the Sud Quai, and that's all I do know," he concluded with an apologetic
+laugh.
+
+"And if we miss that?" asked the girl, breaking silence for the first time
+since they had left the hotel.
+
+"We'll take the first train out of Antwerp."
+
+"Where to?"
+
+"Wherever the first train goes, Miss Calendar.... The main point is to get
+away to-night. That we must do, no matter where we land, or how we get
+there. To-morrow we can plan with more certainty."
+
+"Yes..." Her assent was more a sigh than a word.
+
+The cab, dashing down the Rue Leopold de Wael, swung into the Place du Sud,
+before the station. Kirkwood, acutely watchful, suddenly thrust head and
+shoulders out of his window (fortunately it was the one away from the
+depot), and called up to the driver.
+
+"Don't stop! Gare Centrale now--and treble fare!"
+
+"_Oui, M'sieu'! Allons!_"
+
+The whip cracked and the horse swerved sharply round the corner into the
+Avenue du Sud. The young man, with a hushed exclamation, turned in his
+seat, lifting the flap over the little peephole in the back of the
+carriage.
+
+He had not been mistaken. Calendar was standing in front of the station;
+and it was plain to be seen, from his pose, that the madly careering fiacre
+interested him more than slightly. Irresolute, perturbed, the man took
+a step or two after it, changed his mind, and returned to his post of
+observation.
+
+Kirkwood dropped the flap and turned back to find the girl's wide eyes
+searching his face. He said nothing.
+
+"What was that?" she asked after a patient moment.
+
+"Your father, Miss Calendar," he returned uncomfortably.
+
+There fell a short pause; then: "Why--will you tell me--is it necessary to
+run away from my father, Mr. Kirkwood?" she demanded, with a moving little
+break in her voice.
+
+Kirkwood hesitated. It were unfeeling to tell her why; yet it was essential
+that she should know, however painful the knowledge might prove to her.
+
+And she was insistent; he might not dodge the issue. "Why?" she repeated as
+he paused.
+
+"I wish you wouldn't press me for an answer just now, Miss Calendar."
+
+"Don't you think I had better know?"
+
+Instinctively he inclined his head in assent.
+
+"Then why--?"
+
+Kirkwood bent forward and patted the flank of the satchel that held the
+gladstone bag.
+
+"What does that mean, Mr. Kirkwood?"
+
+"That I have the jewels," he told her tersely, looking straight ahead.
+
+At his shoulder he heard a low gasp of amazement and incredulity
+commingled.
+
+"But--! How did you get them? My father deposited them in bank this
+morning?"
+
+"He must have taken them out again.... I got them on board the Alethea,
+where your father was conferring with Mulready and Captain Stryker."
+
+"The Alethea!"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"You took them from those men?--you!... But didn't my father--?"
+
+"I had to persuade him," said Kirkwood simply.
+
+"But there were three of them against you!"
+
+"Mulready wasn't--ah--feeling very well, and Stryker's a coward. They gave
+me no trouble. I locked them in Stryker's room, lifted the bag of jewels,
+and came away.... I ought to tell you that they were discussing the
+advisability of sailing away without you--leaving you here, friendless and
+without means. That's why I considered it my duty to take a hand.... I
+don't like to tell you this so brutally, but you ought to know, and I can't
+see how to tone it down," he concluded awkwardly.
+
+"I understand...."
+
+But for some moments she did not speak. He avoided looking at her.
+
+The fiacre, rolling at top speed but smoothly on the broad avenues that
+encircle the ancient city, turned into the Avenue de Keyser, bringing into
+sight the Gare Centrale.
+
+"You don't--k-know--" began the girl without warning, in a voice gusty with
+sobs.
+
+"Steady on!" said Kirkwood gently. "I do know, but don't let's talk about
+it now. We'll be at the station in a minute, and I'll get out and see
+what's to be done about a train, if neither Mulready or Stryker are about.
+You stay in the carriage.... No!" He changed his mind suddenly. "I'll not
+risk losing you again. It's a risk we'll have to run in company."
+
+"Please!" she agreed brokenly.
+
+The fiacre slowed up and stopped.
+
+"Are you all right, Miss Calendar?" Kirkwood asked.
+
+The girl sat up, lifting her head proudly. "I am quite ready," she said,
+steadying her voice.
+
+Kirkwood reconnoitered through the window, while the driver was descending.
+
+"Gare Centrale, M'sieu'," he said, opening the door.
+
+"No one in sight," Kirkwood told the girl. "Come, please."
+
+He got out and gave her his hand, then paid the driver, picked up the two
+bags, and hurried with Dorothy into the station, to find in waiting a
+string of cars into which people were moving at leisurely rate. His
+inquiries at the ticket-window developed the fact that it was the 22:26 for
+Brussels, the last train leaving the Gare Centrale that night, and due to
+start in ten minutes.
+
+The information settled their plans for once and all; Kirkwood promptly
+secured through tickets, also purchasing "Reserve" supplementary tickets
+which entitled them to the use of those modern corridor coaches which take
+the place of first-class compartments on the Belgian state railways.
+
+"It's a pleasure," said Kirkwood lightly, as he followed the girl into one
+of these, "to find one's self in a common-sense sort of a train again.
+'Feels like home." He put their luggage in one of the racks and sat down
+beside her, chattering with simulated cheerfulness in a vain endeavor to
+lighten her evident depression of spirit. "I always feel like a traveling
+anachronism in one of your English trains," he said. "You can't
+appreciate--"
+
+The girl smiled bravely.... "And after Brussels?" she inquired.
+
+"First train for the coast," he said promptly. "Dover, Ostend,
+Boulogne,--whichever proves handiest, no matter which, so long as it gets
+us on English soil without undue delay."
+
+She said "Yes" abstractedly, resting an elbow on the window-sill and her
+chin in her palm, to stare with serious, sweet brown eyes out into the
+arc-smitten night that hung beneath the echoing roof.
+
+Kirkwood fidgeted in despite of the constraint he placed himself under, to
+be still and not disturb her needlessly. Impatience and apprehension of
+misfortune obsessed his mental processes in equal degree. The ten minutes
+seemed interminable that elapsed ere the grinding couplings advertised the
+imminence of their start.
+
+The guards began to bawl, the doors to slam, belated travelers to dash
+madly for the coaches. The train gave a preliminary lurch ere settling down
+to its league-long inland dash.
+
+Kirkwood, in a fever of hope and an ague of fear, saw a man sprint
+furiously across the platform and throw himself on the forward steps of
+their coach, on the very instant of the start.
+
+Presently he entered by the forward door and walked slowly through,
+narrowly inspecting the various passengers. As he approached the seats
+occupied by Kirkwood and Dorothy Calendar, his eyes encountered the young
+man's, and he leered evilly. Kirkwood met the look with one that was like a
+kick, and the fellow passed with some haste into the car behind.
+
+"Who was that?" demanded the girl, without moving her head.
+
+"How did you know?" he asked, astonished. "You didn't look--"
+
+"I saw your knuckles whiten beneath the skin.... Who was it?"
+
+"Hobbs," he acknowledged bitterly; "the mate of the _Alethea_."
+
+"I know.... And you think--?"
+
+"Yes. He must have been ashore when I was on board the brigantine; he
+certainly wasn't in the cabin. Evidently they hunted him up, or ran across
+him, and pressed him into service.... You see, they're watching every
+outlet.... But we'll win through, never fear!"
+
+
+
+
+XVI
+
+
+TRAVELS WITH A CHAPERON
+
+The train, escaping the outskirts of the city, remarked the event with an
+exultant shriek, then settled down, droning steadily, to night-devouring
+flight. In the corridor-car the few passengers disposed themselves to
+drowse away the coming hour--the short hour's ride that, in these piping
+days of frantic traveling, separates Antwerp from the capital city of
+Belgium.
+
+A guard, slamming gustily in through the front door, reeled unsteadily down
+the aisle. Kirkwood, rousing from a profound reverie, detained him with a
+gesture and began to interrogate him in French. When he departed presently
+it transpired that the girl was unaquainted with that tongue.
+
+"I didn't understand, you know," she told him with a slow, shy smile.
+
+"I was merely questioning him about the trains from Brussels to-night. We
+daren't stop, you see; we must go on,--keep Hobbs on the jump and lose him,
+if possible. There's where our advantage lies--in having only Hobbs to deal
+with. He's not particularly intellectual; and we've two heads to his one,
+besides. If we can prevent him from guessing our destination and wiring
+back to Antwerp, we may win away. You understand?"
+
+"Perfectly," she said, brightening. "And what do you purpose doing now?"
+
+"I can't tell yet. The guard's gone to get me some information about the
+night trains on other lines. In the meantime, don't fret about Hobbs; I'll
+answer for Hobbs."
+
+"I shan't be worried," she said simply, "with you here...."
+
+Whatever answer he would have made he was obliged to postpone because of
+the return of the guard, with a handful of time-tables; and when, rewarded
+with a modest gratuity, the man had gone his way, and Kirkwood turned again
+to the girl, she had withdrawn her attention for the time.
+
+Unconscious of his bold regard, she was dreaming, her thoughts at
+loose-ends, her eyes studying the incalculable depths of blue-black night
+that swirled and eddied beyond the window-glass. The most shadowy of smiles
+touched her lips, the faintest shade of deepened color rested on her
+cheeks.... She was thinking of--him? As long as he dared, the young man,
+his heart in his own eyes, watched her greedily, taking a miser's joy of
+her youthful beauty, striving with all his soul to analyze the enigma of
+that most inscrutable smile.
+
+It baffled him. He could not say of what she thought; and told himself
+bitterly that it was not for him, a pauper, to presume a place in her
+meditations. He must not forget his circumstances, nor let her tolerance
+render him oblivious to his place, which must be a servant's, not a
+lover's.
+
+The better to convince himself of this, he plunged desperately into
+a forlorn attempt to make head or tail of Belgian railway schedule,
+complicated as these of necessity are by the alternation from normal
+time notation to the abnormal system sanctioned by the government, and
+_vice-versa_, with every train that crosses a boundary line of the state.
+
+So preoccupied did he become in this pursuit that he was subconsciously
+impressed that the girl had spoken twice, ere he could detach his interest
+from the exasperatingly inconclusive and incoherent cohorts of ranked
+figures.
+
+"Can't you find out anything?" Dorothy was asking.
+
+"Precious little," he grumbled. "I'd give my head for a Bradshaw! Only it
+wouldn't be a fair exchange.... There seems to be an express for
+Bruges leaving the Gare du Nord, Brussels, at fifty-five minutes after
+twenty-three o'clock; and if I'm not mistaken, that's the latest train out
+of Brussels and the earliest we can catch,... if we _can_ catch it. I've
+never been in Brussels, and Heaven only knows how long it would take us to
+cab it from the Gare du Midi to the Nord."
+
+In this statement, however, Mr. Kirkwood was fortunately mistaken; not
+only Heaven, it appeared, had cognizance of the distance between the two
+stations. While Kirkwood was still debating the question, with pessimistic
+tendencies, the friendly guard had occasion to pass through the coach; and,
+being tapped, yielded the desired information with entire tractability.
+
+It would be a cab-ride of perhaps ten minutes. Monsieur, however, would
+serve himself well if he offered the driver an advance tip as an incentive
+to speedy driving. Why? Why because (here the guard consulted his watch;
+and Kirkwood very keenly regretted the loss of his own)--because this
+train, announced to arrive in Brussels some twenty minutes prior to the
+departure of that other, was already late. But yes--a matter of some ten
+minutes. Could that not be made up? Ah, Monsieur, but who should say?
+
+The guard departed, doubtless with private views as to the madness of all
+English-speaking travelers.
+
+"And there we are!" commented Kirkwood in factitious resignation. "If we're
+obliged to stop overnight in Brussels, our friends will be on our back
+before we can get out in the morning, if they have to come by motor-car."
+He reflected bitterly on the fact that with but a little more money at
+his disposal, he too could hire a motor-car and cry defiance to their
+persecutors. "However," he amended, with rising spirits, "so much the
+better our chance of losing Mr. Hobbs. We must be ready to drop off the
+instant the train stops."
+
+He began to unfold another time-table, threatening again to lose himself
+completely; and was thrown into the utmost confusion by the touch of
+the girl's hand, in appeal placed lightly on his own. And had she been
+observant, she might have seen a second time his knuckles whiten beneath
+the skin as he asserted his self-control--though this time not over his
+temper.
+
+His eyes, dumbly eloquent, turned to meet hers. She was smiling.
+
+"Please!" she iterated, with the least imperative pressure on his hand,
+pushing the folder aside.
+
+"I beg pardon?" he muttered blankly.
+
+"Is it quite necessary, now, to study those schedules? Haven't you decided
+to try for the Bruges express?"
+
+"Why yes, but--"
+
+"Then please don't leave me to my thoughts all the time, Mr. Kirkwood."
+There was a tremor of laughter in her voice, but her eyes were grave and
+earnest. "I'm very weary of thinking round in a circle--and that," she
+concluded, with a nervous little laugh, "is all I've had to do for days!"
+
+"I'm afraid I'm very stupid," he humored her. "This is the second time, you
+know, in the course of a very brief acquaintance, that you have found it
+necessary to remind me to talk to you."
+
+"Oh-h!" She brightened. "That night, at the Pless? But that was _ages_
+ago!"
+
+"It seems so," he admitted.
+
+"So much has happened!"
+
+"Yes," he assented vaguely.
+
+She watched him, a little piqued by his absent-minded mood, for a moment;
+then, and not without a trace of malice: "Must I tell you again what to
+talk about?" she asked.
+
+"Forgive me. I was thinking about, if not talking to, you.... I've been
+wondering just why it was that you left the _Alethea_ at Queensborough, to
+go on by steamer."
+
+And immediately he was sorry that his tactless query had swung the
+conversation to bear upon her father, the thought of whom could not but
+prove painful to her. But it was too late to mend matters; already her
+evanescent flush of amusement had given place to remembrance.
+
+"It was on my father's account," she told him in a steady voice, but with
+averted eyes; "he is a very poor sailor, and the promise of a rough passage
+terrified him. I believe there was a difference of opinion about it, he
+disputing with Mr. Mulready and Captain Stryker. That was just after we had
+left the anchorage. They both insisted that it was safer to continue by
+the _Alethea_, but he wouldn't listen to them, and in the end had his way.
+Captain Stryker ran the brigantine into the mouth of the Medway and put us
+ashore just in time to catch the steamer."
+
+"Were you sorry for the change?"
+
+"I?" She shuddered slightly. "Hardly! I think I hated the ship from the
+moment I set foot on board her. It was a dreadful place; it was all
+night-marish, that night, but it seemed most terrible on the _Alethea_ with
+Captain Stryker and that abominable Mr. Hobbs. I think that my unhappiness
+had as much to do with my father's insistence on the change, as anything.
+He ... he was very thoughtful, most of the time."
+
+Kirkwood shut his teeth on what he knew of the blackguard.
+
+"I don't know why," she continued, wholly without affectation, "but I was
+wretched from the moment you left me in the cab, to wait while you went in
+to see Mrs. Hallam. And when we left you, at Bermondsey Old Stairs, after
+what you had said to me, I felt--I hardly know what to say--abandoned, in a
+way."
+
+"But you were with your father, in his care--"
+
+"I know, but I was getting confused. Until then the excitement had kept me
+from thinking. But you made me think. I began to wonder, to question ...
+But what could I do?" She signified her helplessness with a quick and
+dainty movement of her hands. "He is my father; and I'm not yet of age, you
+know."
+
+"I thought so," he confessed, troubled. "It's very inconsiderate of you,
+you must admit."
+
+"I don't understand..."
+
+"Because of the legal complication. I've no doubt your father can 'have
+the law on me'"--Kirkwood laughed uneasily--"for taking you from his
+protection."
+
+"Protection!" she echoed warmly. "If you call it that!"
+
+"Kidnapping," he said thoughtfully: "I presume that'd be the charge."
+
+"Oh!" She laughed the notion to scorn. "Besides, they must catch us first,
+mustn't they?"
+
+"Of course; and"--with a simulation of confidence sadly deceitful--"they
+shan't, Mr. Hobbs to the contrary notwithstanding."
+
+"You make me share your confidence, against my better judgment."
+
+"I wish your better judgment would counsel you to share your confidence
+with me," he caught her up. "If you would only tell me what it's all about,
+as far as you know, I'd be better able to figure out what we ought to do."
+
+Briefly the girl sat silent, staring before her with sweet somber eyes.
+Then, "In the very beginning," she told him with a conscious laugh,--"this
+sounds very story-bookish, I know--in the very beginning, George Burgoyne
+Calendar, an American, married his cousin a dozen times removed, and an
+Englishwoman, Alice Burgoyne Hallam."
+
+"Hallam!"
+
+"Wait, please." She sat up, bending forward and frowning down upon her
+interlacing, gloved fingers; she was finding it difficult to say what she
+must. Kirkwood, watching hungrily the fair drooping head, the flawless
+profile clear and radiant against the night-blackened window, saw hot
+signals of shame burning on her cheek and throat and forehead.
+
+"But never mind," he began awkwardly.
+
+"No," she told him with decision. "Please let me go on...." She continued,
+stumbling, trusting to his sympathy to bridge the gaps in her narrative.
+"My father ... There was trouble of some sort.... At all events, he
+disappeared when I was a baby. My mother ... died. I was brought up in
+the home of my great-uncle, Colonel George Burgoyne, of the Indian
+Army--retired. My mother had been his favorite niece, they say; I presume
+that was why he cared for me. I grew up in his home in Cornwall; it was my
+home, just as he was my father in everything but fact.
+
+"A year ago he died, leaving me everything,--the town house in Frognall
+Street, his estate in Cornwall: everything was willed to me on condition
+that I must never live with my father, nor in any way contribute to his
+support. If I disobeyed, the entire estate without reserve was to go to his
+nearest of kin.... Colonel Burgoyne was unmarried and had no children."
+
+The girl paused, lifting to Kirkwood's face her eyes, clear, fearless,
+truthful. "I never was given to understand that there was anybody who might
+have inherited, other than myself," she declared.
+
+"I see..."
+
+"Last week I received a letter, signed with my father's name, begging me to
+appoint an interview with him in London. I did so,--guess how gladly! I was
+alone in the world, and he, my father, whom I had never thought to see....
+We met at his hotel, the Pless. He wanted me to come and live with
+him,--said that he was growing old and lonely and needed a daughter's love
+and care. He told me that he had made a fortune in America and was amply
+able to provide for us both. As for my inheritance, he persuaded me that it
+was by rights the property of Frederick Hallam, Mrs. Hallam's son."
+
+"I have met the young gentleman," interpolated Kirkwood.
+
+"His name was new to me, but my father assured me that he was the next of
+kin mentioned in Colonel Burgoyne's will, and convinced me that I had no
+real right to the property.... After all, he was my father; I agreed; I
+could not bear the thought of wronging anybody. I was to give up everything
+but my mother's jewels. It seems,--my father said,--I don't--I can't
+believe it now--"
+
+She choked on a little, dry sob. It was some time before she seemed able to
+continue.
+
+"I was told that my great-uncle's collection of jewels had been my mother's
+property. He had in life a passion for collecting jewels, and it had been
+his whim to carry them with him, wherever he went. When he died in Frognall
+Street, they were in the safe by the head of his bed. I, in my grief, at
+first forgot them, and then afterwards carelessly put off removing them.
+
+"To come back to my father: Night before last we were to call on Mrs.
+Hallam. It was to be our last night in England; we were to sail for the
+Continent on the private yacht of a friend of my father's, the next
+morning.... This is what I was told--and believed, you understand.
+
+"That night Mrs. Hallam was dining at another table at the Pless, it seems.
+I did not then know her. When leaving, she put a note on our table, by my
+father's elbow. I was astonished beyond words.... He seemed much agitated,
+told me that he was called away on urgent business, a matter of life and
+death, and begged me to go alone to Frognall Street, get the jewels and
+meet him at Mrs. Hallam's later.... I wasn't altogether a fool, for I began
+dimly to suspect, then, that something was wrong; but I was a fool, for I
+consented to do as he desired. You understand--you know--?"
+
+"I do, indeed," replied Kirkwood grimly. "I understand a lot of things now
+that I didn't five minutes ago. Please let me think..."
+
+But the time he took for deliberation was short. He had hoped to find a way
+to spare her, by sparing Calendar; but momentarily he was becoming more
+impressed with the futility of dealing with her save in terms of candor,
+merciful though they might seem harsh.
+
+"I must tell you," he said, "that you have been outrageously misled,
+swindled and deceived. I have heard from your father's own lips that Mrs.
+Hallam was to pay him two thousand pounds for keeping you out of England
+and losing you your inheritance. I'm inclined to question, furthermore, the
+assertion that these jewels were your mother's. Frederick Hallam was the
+man who followed you into the Frognall Street house and attacked me on the
+stairs; Mrs. Hallam admits that he went there to get the jewels. But he
+didn't want anybody to know it."
+
+"But that doesn't prove--"
+
+"Just a minute." Rapidly and concisely Kirkwood recounted the events
+wherein he had played a part, subsequent to the adventure of Bermondsey Old
+Stairs. He was guilty of but one evasion; on one point only did he slur the
+truth: he conceived it his honorable duty to keep the girl in ignorance of
+his straitened circumstances; she was not to be distressed by knowledge of
+his distress, nor could he tolerate the suggestion of seeming to play for
+her sympathy. It was necessary, then, to invent a motive to excuse his
+return to 9, Frognall Street. I believe he chose to exaggerate the
+inquisitiveness of his nature and threw in for good measure a desire
+to recover a prized trinket of no particular moment, esteemed for its
+associations, and so forth. But whatever the fabrication, it passed muster;
+to the girl his motives seemed less important than the discoveries that
+resulted from them.
+
+"I am afraid," he concluded the summary of the confabulation he had
+overheard at the skylight of the Alethea's cabin, "you'd best make up your
+mind that your father--"
+
+"Yes," whispered the girl huskily; and turned her face to the window, a
+quivering muscle in the firm young throat alone betraying her emotion.
+
+"It's a bad business," he pursued relentlessly: "bad all round. Mulready,
+in your father's pay, tries to have him arrested, the better to rob him.
+Mrs. Hallam, to secure your property for that precious pet, Freddie,
+connives at, if she doesn't instigate, a kidnapping. Your father takes her
+money to deprive you of yours,--which could profit him nothing so long as
+you remained in lawful possession of it; and at the same time he conspires
+to rob, through you, the rightful owners--if they are rightful owners. And
+if they are, why does Freddie Hallam go like a thief in the night to secure
+property that's his beyond dispute?... I don't really think you owe your
+father any further consideration."
+
+He waited patiently. Eventually, "No-o," the girl sobbed assent.
+
+"It's this way: Calendar, counting on your sparing him in the end, is going
+to hound us. He's doing it now: there's Hobbs in the next car, for proof.
+Until these jewels are returned, whether to Frognall Street or to young
+Hallam, we're both in danger, both thieves in the sight of the law. And
+your father knows that, too. There's no profit to be had by discounting the
+temper of these people; they're as desperate a gang of swindlers as ever
+lived. They'll have those jewels if they have to go as far as murder--"
+
+"Mr. Kirkwood!" she deprecated, in horror.
+
+He wagged his head stubbornly, ominously. "I've seen them in the raw.
+They're hot on our trail now; ten to one, they'll be on our backs before we
+can get across the Channel. Once in England we will be comparatively safe.
+Until then ... But I'm a brute--I'm frightening you!"
+
+"You are, dreadfully," she confessed in a tremulous voice.
+
+"Forgive me. If you look at the dark side first, the other seems all the
+brighter. Please don't worry; we'll pull through with flying colors, or my
+name's not Philip Kirkwood!"
+
+"I have every faith in you," she informed him, flawlessly sincere. "When
+I think of all you've done and dared for me, on the mere suspicion that I
+needed your help--"
+
+"We'd best be getting ready," he interrupted hastily. "Here's Brussels."
+
+It was so. Lights, in little clusters and long, wheeling lines, were
+leaping out of the darkness and flashing back as the train rumbled through
+the suburbs of the little Paris of the North. Already the other passengers
+were bestirring themselves, gathering together wraps and hand luggage, and
+preparing for the journey's end.
+
+Rising, Kirkwood took down their two satchels from the overhead rack,
+and waited, in grim abstraction planning and counterplanning against the
+machinations in whose wiles they two had become so perilously entangled.
+
+Primarily, there was Hobbs to be dealt with; no easy task, for Kirkwood
+dared not resort to violence nor in any way invite the attention of the
+authorities; and threats would be an idle waste of breath, in the case of
+that corrupt and malignant, little cockney, himself as keen as any needle,
+adept in all the artful resources of the underworld whence he had sprung,
+and further primed for action by that master rogue, Calendar.
+
+The train was pulling slowly into the station when he reluctantly abandoned
+his latest unfeasible scheme for shaking off the little Englishman,
+and concluded that their salvation was only to be worked out through
+everlasting vigilance, incessant movement, and the favor of the blind
+goddess, Fortune. There was comfort of a sort in the reflection that
+the divinity of chance is at least blind; her favors are impartially
+distributed; the swing of the wheel of the world is not always to the
+advantage of the wrongdoer and the scamp.
+
+He saw nothing of Hobbs as they alighted and hastened from the station, and
+hardly had time to waste looking for him, since their train had failed to
+make up the precious ten minutes. Consequently he dismissed the fellow from
+his thoughts until--with Brussels lingering in their memories a garish
+vision of brilliant streets and glowing cafes, glimpsed furtively
+from their cab windows during its wild dash over the broad mid-city,
+boulevards--at midnight they settled themselves in a carriage of the Bruges
+express. They were speeding along through the open country with a noisy
+clatter; then a minute's investigation sufficed to discover the mate of the
+_Alethea_ serenely ensconced in the coach behind.
+
+The little man seemed rarely complacent, and impudently greeted Kirkwood's
+scowling visage, as the latter peered through the window in the coach-door,
+with a smirk and a waggish wave of his hand. The American by main strength
+of will-power mastered an impulse to enter and wring his neck, and returned
+to the girl, more disturbed than he cared to let her know.
+
+There resulted from his review of the case but one plan for outwitting Mr.
+Hobbs, and that lay in trusting to his confidence that Kirkwood and Dorothy
+Calendar would proceed as far toward Ostend as the train would take
+them--namely, to the limit of the run, Bruges.
+
+Thus inspired, Kirkwood took counsel with the girl, and when the train
+paused at Ghent, they made an unostentatious exit from their coach, finding
+themselves, when the express had rolled on into the west, upon a station
+platform in a foreign city at nine minutes past one o'clock in the
+morning--but at length without their shadow. Mr. Hobbs had gone on to
+Bruges.
+
+Kirkwood sped his journeyings with an unspoken malediction, and collected
+himself to cope with a situation which was to prove hardly more happy for
+them than the espionage they had just eluded. The primal flush of triumph
+which had saturated the American's humor on this signal success, proved but
+fictive and transitory when inquiry of the station attendants educed the
+information that the two earliest trains to be obtained were the 5:09 for
+Dunkerque and the 5:37 for Ostend. A minimum delay of four hours was to be
+endured in the face of many contingent features singularly unpleasant to
+contemplate. The station waiting-room was on the point of closing for the
+night, and Kirkwood, already alarmed by the rapid ebb of the money he had
+had of Calendar, dared not subject his finances to the strain of a night's
+lodging at one of Ghent's hotels. He found himself forced to be cruel to
+be kind to the girl, and Dorothy's cheerful acquiescence to their sole
+alternative of tramping the street until daybreak did nothing to alleviate
+Kirkwood's exasperation.
+
+It was permitted them to occupy a bench outside the station. There the
+girl, her head pillowed on the treasure bag, napped uneasily, while
+Kirkwood plodded restlessly to and fro, up and down the platform, communing
+with the Shade of Care and addling his poor, weary wits with the problem
+of the future,--not so much his own as the future of the unhappy child for
+whose welfare he had assumed responsibility. Dark for both of them, in his
+understanding To-morrow loomed darkest for her.
+
+Not until the gray, formless light of the dawn-dusk was wavering over the
+land, did he cease his perambulations. Then a gradual stir of life in the
+city streets, together with the appearance of a station porter or two,
+opening the waiting-rooms and preparing them against the traffic of the
+day, warned him that he must rouse his charge. He paused and stood over
+her, reluctant to disturb her rest, such as it was, his heart torn with
+compassion for her, his soul embittered by the cruel irony of their estate.
+
+If what he understood were true, a king's ransom was secreted within the
+cheap, imitation-leather satchel which served her for a pillow. But it
+availed her nothing for her comfort. If what he believed were true, she was
+absolute mistress of that treasure of jewels; yet that night she had been
+forced to sleep on a hard, uncushioned bench, in the open air, and this
+morning he must waken her to the life of a hunted thing. A week ago she had
+had at her command every luxury known to the civilized world; to-day she
+was friendless, but for his inefficient, worthless self, and in a strange
+land. A week ago,--had he known her then,--he had been free to tell her of
+his love, to offer her the protection of his name as well as his devotion;
+to-day he was an all but penniless vagabond, and there could be no dishonor
+deeper than to let her know the nature of his heart's desire.
+
+Was ever lover hedged from a declaration to his mistress by circumstances
+so hateful, so untoward! He could have raged and railed against his fate
+like any madman. For he desired her greatly, and she was very lovely in his
+sight. If her night's rest had been broken and but a mockery, she showed
+few signs of it; the faint, wan complexion of fatigue seemed only to
+enhance the beauty of her maidenhood; her lips were as fresh and desirous
+as the dewy petals of a crimson rose; beneath her eyes soft shadows lurked
+where her lashes lay tremulous upon her cheeks of satin.... She was to him
+of all created things the most wonderful, the most desirable.
+
+The temptation of his longing seemed more than he could long withstand. But
+resist he must, or part for ever with any title to her consideration--or
+his own. He shut his teeth and knotted his brows in a transport of desire
+to touch, if only with his finger-tips, the woven wonder of her hair.
+
+And thus she saw him, when, without warning, she awoke.
+
+Bewilderment at first informed the wide brown eyes; then, as their
+drowsiness vanished, a little laughter, a little tender mirth.
+
+"Good morning, Sir Knight of the Somber Countenance!" she cried, standing
+up. "Am I so utterly disreputable that you find it necessary to frown on me
+so darkly?"
+
+He shook his head, smiling.
+
+"I know I'm a fright," she asserted vigorously, shaking out the folds of
+her pleated skirt. "And as for my hat, it will never be on straight--but
+then _you_ wouldn't know."
+
+"It seems all right," he replied vacantly.
+
+"Then please to try to look a little happier, since you find me quite
+presentable."
+
+"I do..."
+
+Without lifting her bended head, she looked up, laughing, not ill-pleased.
+"_You'd_ say so... really?"
+
+Commonplace enough, this banter, this pitiful endeavor to be oblivious of
+their common misery; but like the look she gave him, her words rang in his
+head like potent fumes of wine. He turned away, utterly disconcerted for
+the time, knowing only that he must overcome his weakness.
+
+Far down the railway tracks there rose a murmuring, that waxed to a
+rumbling roar. A passing porter answered Kirkwood's inquiry: it was the
+night boat-train from Ostend. He picked up their bags and drew the girl
+into the waiting-room, troubled by a sickening foreboding.
+
+Through the window they watched the train roll in and stop.
+
+Among others, alighted, smirking, the unspeakable Hobbs.
+
+He lifted his hat and bowed jauntily to the waiting-room window, making it
+plain that his keen eyes had discovered them instantly.
+
+Kirkwood's heart sank with the hopelessness of it all. If the railway
+directorates of Europe conspired against them, what chance had they? If the
+night boat-train from Ostend had only had the decency to be twenty-five
+minutes late, instead of arriving promptly on the minute of 4:45 they two
+might have escaped by the 5:09 for Dunkerque and Calais.
+
+There remained but a single untried ruse in his bag of tricks; mercifully
+it might suffice.
+
+"Miss Calendar," said Kirkwood from his heart, "just as soon as I get you
+home, safe and sound, I am going to take a day off, hunt up that little
+villain, and flay him alive. In the meantime, I forgot to dine last night,
+and am reminded that we had better forage for breakfast."
+
+Hobbs dogged them at a safe distance while they sallied forth and in a
+neighboring street discovered an early-bird bakery. Here they were able to
+purchase rolls steaming from the oven, fresh pats of golden butter wrapped
+in clean lettuce leaves, and milk in twin bottles; all of which they
+prosaically carried with them back to the station, lacking leisure as they
+did to partake of the food before train-time.
+
+Without attempting concealment (Hobbs, he knew, was eavesdropping round the
+corner of the door) Kirkwood purchased at the ticket-window passages on
+the Dunkerque train. Mr. Hobbs promptly flattered him by imitation; and
+so jealous of his luck was Kirkwood by this time grown, through continual
+disappointment, that he did not even let the girl into his plans until they
+were aboard the 5:09, in a compartment all to themselves. Then, having with
+his own eyes seen Mr. Hobbs dodge into the third compartment in the rear of
+the same carriage, Kirkwood astonished the girl by requesting her to follow
+him; and together they left by the door opposite that by which they had
+entered.
+
+The engine was running up and down a scale of staccato snorts, in
+preparation for the race, and the cars were on the edge of moving,
+couplings clanking, wheels a-groan, ere Mr. Hobbs condescended to join them
+between the tracks.
+
+Wearily, disheartened, Kirkwood reopened the door, flung the bags in, and
+helped the girl back into their despised compartment; the quicker route to
+England via Ostend was now out of the question. As for himself, he waited
+for a brace of seconds, eying wickedly the ubiquitous Hobbs, who had popped
+back into his compartment, but stood ready to pop out again on the least
+encouragement. In the meantime he was pleased to shake a friendly foot at
+Mr. Kirkwood, thrusting that member out through the half-open door.
+
+Only the timely departure of the train, compelling him to rejoin Dorothy at
+once, if at all, prevented the American from adding murder to the already
+noteworthy catalogue of his high crimes and misdemeanors.
+
+Their simple meal, consumed to the ultimate drop and crumb while the
+Dunkerque train meandered serenely through a sunny, smiling Flemish
+countryside, somewhat revived their jaded spirits. After all, they were
+young, enviably dowered with youth's exuberant elasticity of mood; the
+world was bright in the dawning, the night had fled leaving naught but an
+evil memory; best of all things, they were together: tacitly they were
+agreed that somehow the future would take care of itself and all be well
+with them.
+
+For a time they laughed and chattered, pretending that the present held no
+cares or troubles; but soon the girl, nestling her head in a corner of the
+dingy cushions, was smiling ever more drowsily on Kirkwood; and presently
+she slept in good earnest, the warm blood ebbing and flowing beneath
+the exquisite texture of her cheeks, the ghost of an unconscious smile
+quivering about the sensitive scarlet mouth, the breeze through the open
+window at her side wantoning at will in the sunlit witchery of her hair.
+And Kirkwood, worn with sleepless watching, dwelt in longing upon the dear
+innocent allure of her until the ache in his heart had grown well-nigh
+insupportable; then instinctively turned his gaze upwards, searching his
+heart, reading the faith and desire of it, so that at length knowledge and
+understanding came to him, of his weakness and strength and the clean love
+that he bore for her, and gladdened he sat dreaming in waking the same
+clear dreams that modeled her unconscious lips secretly for laughter and
+the joy of living.
+
+When Dunkerque halted their progress, they were obliged to alight and
+change cars,--Hobbs a discreetly sinister shadow at the end of the
+platform.
+
+By schedule they were to arrive in Calais about the middle of the forenoon,
+with a wait of three hours to be bridged before the departure of the Dover
+packet. That would be an anxious time; the prospect of it rendered both
+Dorothy and Kirkwood doubly anxious throughout this final stage of their
+flight. In three hours anything could happen, or be brought about. Neither
+could forget that it was quite within the bounds of possibilities for
+Calendar to be awaiting them in Calais. Presuming that Hobbs had been acute
+enough to guess their plans and advise his employer by telegraph, the
+latter could readily have anticipated their arrival, whether by sea in the
+brigantine, or by land, taking the direct route via Brussels and Lille. If
+such proved to be the case, it were scarcely sensible to count upon the
+arch-adventurer contenting himself with a waiting role like Hobbs'.
+
+With such unhappy apprehensions for a stimulant, between them the man and
+the girl contrived a make-shift counter-stratagem; or it were more accurate
+to say that Kirkwood proposed it, while Dorothy rejected, disputed, and
+at length accepted it, albeit with sad misgivings. For it involved a
+separation that might not prove temporary.
+
+Together they could never escape the surveillance of Mr. Hobbs; parted, he
+would be obliged to follow one or the other. The task of misleading the
+_Alethea's_ mate, Kirkwood undertook, delegating to the girl the duty of
+escaping when he could provide her the opportunity, of keeping under
+cover until the hour of sailing, and then proceeding to England, with the
+gladstone bag, alone if Kirkwood was unable, or thought it inadvisable, to
+join her on the boat.
+
+In furtherance of this design, a majority of the girl's belongings were
+transferred from her traveling bag to Kirkwood's, the gladstone taking
+their place; and the young man provided her with voluminous instructions, a
+revolver which she did not know how to handle and declared she would never
+use for any consideration, and enough money to pay for her accommodation at
+the Terminus Hotel, near the pier, and for two passages to London. It was
+agreed that she should secure the steamer booking, lest Kirkwood be delayed
+until the last moment.
+
+These arrangements concluded, the pair of blessed idiots sat steeped in
+melancholy silence, avoiding each other's eyes, until the train drew in at
+the Gare Centrale, Calais.
+
+In profound silence, too, they left their compartment and passed through
+the station, into the quiet, sun-drenched streets of the seaport,--Hobbs
+hovering solicitously in the offing.
+
+Without comment or visible relief of mind they were aware that their fears
+had been without apparent foundation; they saw no sign of Calendar, Stryker
+or Mulready. The circumstance, however, counted for nothing; one or all of
+the adventurers might arrive in Calais at any minute.
+
+Momentarily more miserable as the time of parting drew nearer, dumb with
+unhappiness, they turned aside from the main thoroughfares of the city,
+leaving the business section, and gained the sleepier side streets,
+bordered by the residences of the proletariat, where for blocks none but
+children were to be seen, and of them but few--quaint, sober little bodies
+playing almost noiselessly in their dooryards.
+
+At length Kirkwood spoke.
+
+"Let's make it the corner," he said, without looking at the girl. "It's a
+short block to the next street. You hurry to the Terminus and lock yourself
+in your room. Have the management book both passages; don't run the risk of
+going to the pier yourself. I'll make things interesting for Mr. Hobbs, and
+join you as soon as I can, _if_ I can."
+
+"You must," replied the girl. "I shan't go without you."
+
+"But, Dor--Miss Calendar!" he exclaimed, aghast.
+
+"I don't care--I know I agreed," she declared mutinously. "But I won't--I
+can't. Remember I shall wait for you."
+
+"But--but perhaps--"
+
+"If you have to stay, it will be because there's danger--won't it? And
+what would you think of me if I deserted you then, af-after all y-you've
+done?... Please don't waste time arguing. Whether you come at one to-day,
+to-morrow, or a week from to-morrow, I shall be waiting.... You may be
+sure. Good-by."
+
+They had turned the corner, walking slowly, side by side; Hobbs, for the
+first time caught off his guard, had dropped behind more than half a long
+block. But now Kirkwood's quick sidelong glance discovered the mate in the
+act of taking alarm and quickening his pace. None the less the American was
+at the time barely conscious of anything other than a wholly unexpected
+furtive pressure of the girl's gloved fingers on his own.
+
+"Good-by," she whispered.
+
+He caught at her hand, protesting. "Dorothy--!"
+
+"Good-by," she repeated breathlessly, with a queer little catch in her
+voice. "God be with you, Philip, and--and send you safely back to me...."
+
+And she was running away.
+
+Dumfounded with dismay, seeing in a flash how all his plans might be set at
+naught by this her unforeseen insubordination, he took a step or two after
+her; but she was fleet of foot, and, remembering Hobbs, he halted.
+
+By this time the mate, too, was running; Kirkwood could hear the heavy
+pounding of his clumsy feet. Already Dorothy had almost gained the farther
+corner; as she whisked round it with a flutter of skirts, Kirkwood dodged
+hastily behind a gate-post. A thought later, Hobbs appeared, head down,
+chest out, eyes straining for sight of his quarry, pelting along for dear
+life.
+
+As, rounding the corner, he stretched out in swifter stride, Kirkwood was
+inspired to put a spoke in his wheel; and a foot thrust suddenly out from
+behind the gate-post accomplished his purpose with more success than he
+had dared anticipate. Stumbling, the mate plunged headlong, arms and legs
+a-sprawl; and the momentum of his pace, though checked, carried him along
+the sidewalk, face downwards, a full yard ere he could stay himself.
+
+Kirkwood stepped out of the gateway and sheered off as Hobbs picked
+himself up; something which he did rather slowly, as if in a daze, without
+comprehension of the cause of his misfortune. And for a moment he stood
+pulling his wits together and swaying as though on the point of resuming
+his rudely interrupted chase; when the noise of Kirkwood's heels brought
+him about face in a twinkling.
+
+"Ow, it's you, eh!" he snarled in a temper as vicious as his countenance;
+and both of these were much the worse for wear and tear.
+
+"Myself," admitted Kirkwood fairly; and then, in a gleam of humor: "Weren't
+you looking for me?"
+
+His rage seemed to take the little Cockney and shake him by the throat; he
+trembled from head to foot, his face shockingly congested, and spat out
+dust and fragments of lurid blasphemy like an infuriated cat.
+
+Of a sudden, "W'ere's the gel?" he sputtered thickly as his quick shifting
+eyes for the first time noted Dorothy's absence.
+
+"Miss Calendar has other business--none with you. I've taken the liberty of
+stopping you because I have a word or two--"
+
+"Ow, you 'ave, 'ave you? Gawd strike me blind, but I've a word for you,
+too!... 'And over that bag--and look nippy, or I'll myke you pye for w'at
+you've done to me ... I'll myke you pye!" he iterated hoarsely, edging
+closer. "'And it over or--"
+
+"You've got another guess--" Kirkwood began, but saved his breath in
+deference to an imperative demand on him for instant defensive action.
+
+To some extent he had underestimated the brute courage of the fellow, the
+violent, desperate courage that is distilled of anger in men of his kind.
+Despising him, deeming him incapable of any overt act of villainy, Kirkwood
+had been a little less wary than he would have been with Calendar or
+Mulready. Hobbs had seemed more of the craven type which Stryker graced so
+conspicuously. But now the American was to be taught discrimination, to
+learn that if Stryker's nature was like a snake's for low cunning and
+deviousness, Hobbs' soul was the soul of a viper.
+
+Almost imperceptibly he had advanced upon Kirkwood; almost insensibly his
+right hand had moved toward his chest; now, with a movement marvelously
+deft, it had slipped in and out of his breast pocket. And a six-inch blade
+of tarnished steel was winging toward Kirkwood's throat with the speed of
+light.
+
+Instinctively he stepped back; as instinctively he guarded with his right
+forearm, lifting the hand that held the satchel. The knife, catching in his
+sleeve, scratched the arm beneath painfully, and simultaneously was twisted
+from the mate's grasp, while in his surprise Kirkwood's grip on the
+bag-handle relaxed. It was torn forcibly from his fingers just as he
+received a heavy blow on his chest from the mate's fist. He staggered back.
+
+By the time he had recovered from the shock, Hobbs was a score of feet
+away, the satchel tucked under his arm, his body bent almost double,
+running like a jack-rabbit. Ere Kirkwood could get under way, in pursuit,
+the mate had dodged out of sight round the corner. When the American caught
+sight of him again, he was far down the block, and bettering his pace with
+every jump.
+
+He was approaching, also, some six or eight good citizens of Calais, men of
+the laboring class, at a guess. Their attention attracted by his frantic
+flight, they stopped to wonder. One or two moved as though to intercept
+him, and he doubled out into the middle of the street with the quickness of
+thought; an instant later he shot round another corner and disappeared, the
+natives streaming after in hot chase, electrified by the inspiring strains
+of "Stop, thief!"--or its French equivalent.
+
+Kirkwood, cheering them on with the same wild cry, followed to the farther
+street; and there paused, so winded and weak with laughter that he was fain
+to catch at a fence picket for support. Standing thus he saw other denizens
+of Calais spring as if from the ground miraculously to swell the hue and
+cry; and a dumpling of a gendarme materialized from nowhere at all, to fall
+in behind the rabble, waving his sword above his head and screaming at the
+top of his lungs, the while his fat legs twinkled for all the world like
+thick sausage links marvelously animated.
+
+The mob straggled round yet another corner and was gone; its clamor
+diminished on the still Spring air; and Kirkwood, recovering, abandoned
+Mr. Hobbs to the justice of the high gods and the French system of
+jurisprudence (at least, he hoped the latter would take an interest in the
+case, if haply Hobbs were laid by the heels), and went his way rejoicing.
+
+As for the scratch on his arm, it was nothing, as he presently demonstrated
+to his complete satisfaction in the seclusion of a chance-sent fiacre.
+Kirkwood, commissioning it to drive him to the American Consulate, made
+his diagnosis _en route_; wound a handkerchief round the negligible wound,
+rolled down his sleeve, and forgot it altogether in the joys of picturing
+to himself Hobbs in the act of opening the satchel in expectation of
+finding therein the gladstone bag.
+
+At the consulate door he paid off the driver and dismissed him; the fiacre
+had served his purpose, and he could find his way to the Terminus Hotel at
+infinitely less expense. He had a considerably harder task before him as
+he ascended the steps to the consular doorway, knocked and made known the
+nature of his errand.
+
+No malicious destiny could have timed the hour of his call more appositely;
+the consul was at home and at the disposal of his fellow-citizens--within
+bounds.
+
+In the course of thirty minutes or so Kirkwood emerged with dignity from
+the consulate, his face crimson to the hair, his soul smarting with
+shame and humiliation; and left an amused official representative of his
+country's government with the impression of having been entertained to the
+point of ennui by an exceptionally clumsy but pertinacious liar.
+
+For the better part of the succeeding hour Kirkwood circumnavigated the
+neighborhood of the steamer pier and the Terminus Hotel, striving to render
+himself as inconspicuous as he felt insignificant, and keenly on the
+alert for any sign or news of Hobbs. In this pursuit he was pleasantly
+disappointed.
+
+At noon precisely, his suspense grown too onerous for his strength of will,
+throwing caution and their understanding to the winds, he walked boldly
+into the Terminus, and inquired for Miss Calendar.
+
+The assurance he received that she was in safety under its roof did not
+deter him from sending up his name and asking her to receive him in the
+public lounge; he required the testimony of his senses to convince him that
+no harm had come to her in the long hour and a half that had elapsed since
+their separation.
+
+Woman-like, she kept him waiting. Alone in the public rooms of the hotel,
+he suffered excruciating torments. How was he to know that Calendar had not
+arrived and found his way to her?
+
+When at length she appeared on the threshold of the apartment, bringing
+with her the traveling bag and looking wonderfully the better for her
+ninety minutes of complete repose and privacy, the relief he experienced
+was so intense that he remained transfixed in the middle of the floor,
+momentarily able neither to speak nor to move.
+
+On her part, so fagged and distraught did he seem, that at sight of his
+care-worn countenance she hurried to him with outstretched, compassionate
+hands and a low pitiful cry of concern, forgetful entirely of that which he
+himself had forgotten--the emotion she had betrayed on parting.
+
+"Oh, nothing wrong," he hastened to reassure her, with a sorry ghost of his
+familiar grin; "only I have lost Hobbs and the satchel with your things;
+and there's no sign yet of Mr. Calendar. We can feel pretty comfortable
+now, and--and I thought it time we had something like a meal."
+
+The narrative of his adventure which he delivered over their _dejeuner a
+la fourchette_ contained no mention either of his rebuff at the American
+Consulate or the scratch he had sustained during Hobbs' murderous assault;
+the one could not concern her, the other would seem but a bid for her
+sympathy. He counted it a fortunate thing that the mate's knife had been
+keen enough to penetrate the cloth of his sleeve without tearing it; the
+slit it had left was barely noticeable. And he purposely diverted the girl
+with flashes of humorous description, so that they discussed both meal and
+episode in a mood of wholesome merriment.
+
+It was concluded, all too soon for the taste of either, by the waiter's
+announcement that the steamer was on the point of sailing.
+
+Outwardly composed, inwardly quaking, they boarded the packet, meeting with
+no misadventure whatever--if we are to except the circumstance that, when
+the restaurant bill was settled and the girl had punctiliously surrendered
+his change with the tickets, Kirkwood found himself in possession of
+precisely one franc and twenty centimes.
+
+He groaned in spirit to think how differently he might have been fixed, had
+he not in his infatuated spirit of honesty been so anxious to give Calendar
+more than ample value for his money!
+
+An inexorable anxiety held them both near the gangway until it was cast off
+and the boat began to draw away from the pier. Then, and not till then, did
+an unimpressive, small figure of a man detach itself from the shield of a
+pile of luggage and advance to the pier-head. No second glance was
+needed to identify Mr. Hobbs; and until the perspective dwarfed him
+indistinguishably, he was to be seen, alternately waving Kirkwood ironic
+farewell and blowing violent kisses to Miss Calendar from the tips of his
+soiled fingers.
+
+So he had escaped arrest....
+
+At first by turns indignant and relieved to realize that thereafter they
+were to move in scenes in which his hateful shadow would not form an
+essentially component part, subsequently Kirkwood fell a prey to prophetic
+terrors. It was not alone fear of retribution that had induced Hobbs to
+relinquish his persecution--or so Kirkwood became convinced; if the mate's
+calculation had allowed for them the least fraction of a chance to escape
+apprehension on the farther shores of the Channel, nor fears nor threats
+would have prevented him from sailing with the fugitives.... Far from
+having left danger behind them on the Continent, Kirkwood believed in his
+secret heart that they were but flying to encounter it beneath the smoky
+pall of London.
+
+
+
+
+XVII
+
+
+ROGUES AND VAGABONDS
+
+A westering sun striking down through the drab exhalations of ten-thousand
+sooty chimney-pots, tinted the atmosphere with the hue of copper. The
+glance that wandered purposelessly out through the carriage windows,
+recoiled, repelled by the endless dreary vista of the Surrey Side's
+unnumbered roofs; or, probing instantaneously the hopeless depths of some
+grim narrow thoroughfare fleetingly disclosed, as the evening boat-train
+from Dover swung on toward Charing Cross, its trucks level with the eaves
+of Southwark's dwellings, was saddened by the thought that in all the world
+squalor such as this should obtain and flourish unrelieved.
+
+For perhaps the tenth time in the course of the journey Kirkwood withdrew
+his gaze from the window and turned to the girl, a question ready framed
+upon his lips.
+
+"Are you quite sure--" he began; and then, alive to the clear and
+penetrating perception in the brown eyes that smiled into his from under
+their level brows, he stammered and left the query uncompleted.
+
+Continuing to regard him steadily and smilingly, Dorothy shook her head in
+playful denial and protest. "Do you know," she commented, "that this is
+about the fifth repetition of that identical question within the last
+quarter-hour?"
+
+"How do you know what I meant to say?" he demanded, staring.
+
+"I can see it in your eyes. Besides, you've talked and thought of nothing
+else since we left the boat. Won't you believe me, please, when I say
+there's absolutely not a soul in London to whom I could go and ask for
+shelter? I don't think it's very nice of you to be so openly anxious to get
+rid of me."
+
+This latter was so essentially undeserved and so artlessly insincere, that
+he must needs, of course, treat it with all seriousness.
+
+"That isn't fair, Miss Calendar. Really it's not."
+
+"What am I to think? I've told you any number of times that it's only an
+hour's ride on to Chiltern, where the Pyrfords will be glad to take me in.
+You may depend upon it,--by eight to-night, at the latest, you'll have me
+off your hands,--the drag and worry that I've been ever since--"
+
+"Don't!" he pleaded vehemently. "Please!... You _know_ it isn't that. I
+_don't_ want you off my hands, ever.... That is to say, I--ah--" Here
+he was smitten with a dumbness, and sat, aghast at the enormity of his
+blunder, entreating her forgiveness with eyes that, very likely, pleaded
+his cause more eloquently than he guessed.
+
+"I mean," he floundered on presently, in the fatuous belief that he would
+this time be able to control both mind and tongue, "_what_ I mean is I'd be
+glad to go on serving you in any way I might, to the end of time, if you'd
+give me...."
+
+He left the declaration inconclusive--a stroke of diplomacy that would have
+graced an infinitely more adept wooer. But he used it all unconsciously. "O
+Lord!" he groaned in spirit. "Worse and more of it! Why in thunder can't I
+say the right thing _right_?"
+
+Egotistically absorbed by the problem thus formulated, he was heedless of
+her failure to respond, and remained pensively preoccupied until roused by
+the grinding and jolting of the train, as it slowed to a halt preparatory
+to crossing the bridge.
+
+Then he sought to read his answer in the eyes of Dorothy. But she was
+looking away, staring thoughtfully out over the billowing sea of roofs
+that merged illusively into the haze long ere it reached the horizon; and
+Kirkwood could see the pulsing of the warm blood in her throat and cheeks;
+and the glamorous light that leaped and waned in her eyes, as the ruddy
+evening sunlight warmed them, was something any man might be glad to live
+for and die for.... And he saw that she had understood, had grasped the
+thread of meaning that ran through the clumsy fabric of his halting speech
+and his sudden silences.
+
+She had understood without resentment!
+
+While, incredulous, he wrestled with the wonder of this fond discovery,
+she grew conscious of his gaze, and turned her head to meet it with one
+fearless and sweet, if troubled.
+
+"Dear Mr. Kirkwood," she said gently, bending forward as if to read between
+the lines anxiety had graven on his countenance, "won't you tell me,
+please, what it can be that so worries you? Is it possible that you still
+have a fear of my father? But don't you know that he can do nothing
+now--now that we're safe? We have only to take a cab to Paddington Station,
+and then--"
+
+"You mustn't underestimate the resource and ability of Mr. Calendar," he
+told her gloomily; "we've got a chance--no more. It wasn't...." He shut his
+teeth on his unruly tongue--too late.
+
+Woman-quick she caught him up. "It wasn't that? Then what was it that
+worried you? If it's something that affects me, is it kind and right of you
+not to tell me?"
+
+"It--it affects us both," he conceded drearily. "I--I don't--"
+
+The wretched embarrassment of the confession befogged his wits; he felt
+unable to frame the words. He appealed speechlessly for tolerance, with a
+face utterly woebegone and eyes piteous.
+
+The train began to move slowly across the Thames to Charing Cross.
+
+Mercilessly the girl persisted. "We've only a minute more. Surely you can
+trust me...."
+
+In exasperation he interrupted almost rudely. "It's only this: I--I'm
+strapped."
+
+"Strapped?" She knitted her brows over this fresh specimen of American
+slang.
+
+"Flat strapped--busted--broke--on my uppers--down and out," he reeled off
+synonyms without a smile. "I haven't enough money to pay cab-fare across
+the town--"
+
+"Oh!" she interpolated, enlightened.
+
+"--to say nothing of taking us to Chiltern. I couldn't buy you a glass of
+water if you were thirsty. There isn't a soul on earth, within hail, who
+would trust me with a quarter--I mean a shilling--across London Bridge. I'm
+the original Luckless Wonder and the only genuine Jonah extant."
+
+With a face the hue of fire, he cocked his eyebrows askew and attempted
+to laugh unconcernedly to hide his bitter shame. "I've led you out of
+the fryingpan into the fire, and I don't know what to do! Please call me
+names."
+
+And in a single instant all that he had consistently tried to avoid doing,
+had been irretrievably done; if, with dawning comprehension, dismay
+flickered in her eyes--such dismay as such a confession can rouse only in
+one who, like Dorothy Calendar, has never known the want of a penny--it
+was swiftly driven out to make place for the truest and most gracious and
+unselfish solicitude.
+
+"Oh, poor Mr. Kirkwood! And it's all because of me! You've beggared
+yourself--"
+
+"Not precisely; I was beggared to begin with." He hastened to disclaim the
+extravagant generosity of which she accused him. "I had only three or four
+pounds to my name that night we met.... I haven't told you--I--"
+
+"You've told me nothing, nothing whatever about yourself," she said
+reproachfully.
+
+"I didn't want to bother you with my troubles; I tried not to talk about
+myself.... You knew I was an American, but I'm worse than that; I'm a
+Californian--from San Francisco." He tried unsuccessfully to make light of
+it. "I told you I was the Luckless Wonder; if I'd ever had any luck I would
+have stored a little money away. As it was, I lived on my income, left
+my principal in 'Frisco; and when the earthquake came, it wiped me out
+completely."
+
+"And you were going home that night we made you miss your steamer!"
+
+"It was my own fault, and I'm glad this blessed minute that I did miss it.
+Nice sort I'd have been, to go off and leave you at the mercy--"
+
+"Please! I want to think, I'm trying to remember how much you've gone
+through--"
+
+"Precisely what I don't want you to do. Anyway, I did nothing more than any
+other fellow would've! Please don't give me credit that I don't deserve."
+
+But she was not listening; and a pause fell, while the train crawled warily
+over the trestle, as if in fear of the foul, muddy flood below.
+
+"And there's no way I can repay you...."
+
+"There's nothing to be repaid," he contended stoutly.
+
+She clasped her hands and let them fall gently in her lap. "I've not
+a farthing in the world!... I never dreamed.... I'm so sorry, Mr.
+Kirkwood--terribly, terribly sorry!... But what can we do? I can't consent
+to be a burden--"
+
+"But you're not! You're the one thing that ..." He swerved sharply, at an
+abrupt tangent. "There's one thing we can do, of course."
+
+She looked up inquiringly.
+
+"Craven Street is just round the corner."
+
+"Yes?"--wonderingly.
+
+"I mean we must go to Mrs. Hallam's house, first off.... It's too
+late now,--after five, else we could deposit the jewels in some bank.
+Since--since they are no longer yours, the only thing, and the proper thing
+to do is to place them in safety or in the hands of their owner. If you
+take them directly to young Hallam, your hands will be clear.... And--I
+never did such a thing in my life, Miss Calendar; but if he's got a spark
+of gratitude in his make-up, I ought to be able to--er--to borrow a pound
+or so of him."
+
+"Do you think so?" She shook her head in doubt. "I don't know; I know so
+little of such things.... You are right; we must take him the jewels,
+but..." Her voice trailed off into a sigh of profound perturbation.
+
+He dared not meet her look.
+
+Beneath his wandering gaze a County Council steam-boat darted swiftly
+down-stream from Charing Cross pier, in the shadow of the railway bridge.
+It seemed curious to reflect that from that very floating pier he had
+started first upon his quest of the girl beside him, only--he had to
+count--three nights ago! Three days and three nights! Altogether incredible
+seemed the transformation they had wrought in the complexion of the world.
+Yet nothing material was changed.... He lifted his eyes.
+
+Beyond the river rose the Embankment, crawling with traffic, backed by the
+green of the gardens and the shimmering walls of glass and stone of the
+great hotels, their windows glowing weirdly golden in the late sunlight.
+A little down-stream Cleopatra's Needle rose, sadly the worse for London
+smoke, flanked by its couchant sphinxes, wearing a nimbus of circling,
+sweeping, swooping, wheeling gulls. Farther down, from the foot of that
+magnificent pile, Somerset House, Waterloo Bridge sprang over-stream in
+its graceful arch.... All as of yesterday; yet all changed. Why? Because a
+woman had entered into his life; because he had learned the lesson of love
+and had looked into the bright face of Romance....
+
+With a jar the train started and began to move more swiftly.
+
+Kirkwood lifted the traveling bag to his knees.
+
+"Don't forget," he said with some difficulty, "you're to stick by me,
+whatever happens. You mustn't desert me."
+
+"You _know_," the girl reproved him.
+
+"I know; but there must be no misunderstanding.... Don't worry; we'll win
+out yet, I've a plan."
+
+_Splendide mendax_! He had not the glimmering of a plan.
+
+The engine panting, the train drew in beneath the vast sounding dome of the
+station, to an accompaniment of dull thunderings; and stopped finally.
+
+Kirkwood got out, not without a qualm of regret at leaving the compartment;
+therein, at least, they had some title to consideration, by virtue of their
+tickets; now they were utterly vagabondish, penniless adventurers.
+
+The girl joined him. Slowly, elbow to elbow, the treasure bag between
+them, they made their way down toward the gates, atoms in a tide-rip
+of humanity,--two streams of passengers meeting on the narrow strip of
+platform, the one making for the streets, the other for the suburbs.
+
+Hurried and jostled, the girl clinging tightly to his arm lest they be
+separated in the crush, they came to the ticket-wicket; beyond the barrier
+surged a sea of hats--shining "toppers," dignified and upstanding, the
+outward and visible manifestation of the sturdy, stodgy British spirit of
+respectability; "bowlers" round and sleek and humble; shapeless caps with
+cloth visors, manufactured of outrageous plaids; flower-like miracles of
+millinery from Bond Street; strangely plumed monstrosities from Petticoat
+Lane and Mile End Road. Beneath any one of these might lurk the maleficent
+brain, the spying eyes of Calendar or one of his creatures; beneath all of
+them that he encountered, Kirkwood peered in fearful inquiry.
+
+Yet, when they had passed unhindered the ordeal of the wickets, had run
+the gantlet of those thousand eyes without lighting in any pair a spark of
+recognition, he began to bear himself with more assurance, to be sensible
+to a grateful glow of hope. Perhaps Hobbs' telegram had not reached its
+destination, for unquestionably the mate would have wired his chief;
+perhaps some accident had befallen the conspirators; perhaps the police had
+apprehended them.... No matter how, one hoped against hope that they had
+been thrown off the trail.
+
+And indeed it seemed as if they must have been misguided in some
+providential manner. On the other hand, it would be the crassest of
+indiscretions to linger about the place an instant longer than absolutely
+necessary.
+
+Outside the building, however, they paused perforce, undergoing the
+cross-fire of the congregated cabbies. It being the first time that he
+had ever felt called upon to leave the station afoot, Kirkwood cast about
+irresolutely, seeking the sidewalk leading to the Strand.
+
+Abruptly he caught the girl by the arm and unceremoniously hurried her
+toward a waiting hansom.
+
+"Quick!" he begged her. "Jump right in--not an instant to spare.--"
+
+She nodded brightly, lips firm with courage, eyes shining.
+
+"My father?"
+
+"Yes." Kirkwood glanced back over his shoulder. "He hasn't seen us yet.
+They've just driven up. Stryker's with him. They're getting down." And to
+himself, "Oh, the devil!" cried the panic-stricken young man.
+
+He drew back to let the girl precede him into the cab; at the same time
+he kept an eye on Calendar, whose conveyance stood half the length of the
+station-front away.
+
+The fat adventurer had finished paying off the driver, standing on the deck
+of the hansom. Stryker was already out, towering above the mass of people,
+and glaring about him with his hawk-keen vision. Calendar had started to
+alight, his foot was leaving the step when Stryker's glance singled out
+their quarry. Instantly he turned and spoke to his confederate. Calendar
+wheeled like a flash, peering eagerly in the direction indicated by the
+captain's index finger, then, snapping instructions to his driver, threw
+himself heavily back on the seat. Stryker, awkward on his land-legs,
+stumbled and fell in an ill-calculated attempt to hoist himself hastily
+back into the vehicle.
+
+To the delay thus occasioned alone Kirkwood and Dorothy owed a respite of
+freedom. Their hansom was already swinging down toward the great gates of
+the yard, the American standing to make the driver comprehend the necessity
+for using the utmost speed in reaching the Craven Street address. The man
+proved both intelligent and obliging; Kirkwood had barely time to drop down
+beside the girl, ere the cab was swinging out into the Strand, to the peril
+of the toes belonging to a number of righteously indignant pedestrians.
+
+"Good boy!" commented Kirkwood cheerfully. "That's the greatest comfort of
+all London, the surprising intellectual strength the average cabby displays
+when you promise him a tip.... Great Heavens!" he cried, reading the girl's
+dismayed expression. "A tip! I never thought--!" His face lengthened
+dismally, his eyebrows working awry. "Now we are in for it!"
+
+Dorothy said nothing.
+
+He turned in the seat, twisting his neck to peep through the small rear
+window. "I don't see their cab," he announced. "But of course they're after
+us. However, Craven Street's just round the corner; if we get there
+first, I don't fancy Freddie Hallam will have a cordial reception for our
+pursuers. They must've been on watch at Cannon Street, and finding we were
+not coming in that way--of course they were expecting us because of Hobbs'
+wire--they took cab for Charing Cross. Lucky for us.... Or is it lucky?" he
+added doubtfully, to himself.
+
+The hansom whipped round the corner into Craven Street. Kirkwood sprang up,
+grasping the treasure bag, ready to jump the instant they pulled in toward
+Mrs. Hallam's dwelling. But as they drew near upon the address he drew back
+with an exclamation of amazement.
+
+The house was closed, showing a blank face to the street--blinds drawn
+close down in the windows, area gate padlocked, an estate-agent's board
+projecting from above the doorway, advertising the property "To be let,
+furnished."
+
+Kirkwood looked back, craning his neck round the side of the cab. At the
+moment another hansom was breaking through the rank of humanity on the
+Strand crossing. He saw one or two figures leap desperately from beneath
+the horse's hoofs. Then the cab shot out swiftly down the street.
+
+The American stood up again, catching the cabby's eye.
+
+"Drive on!" he cried excitedly. "Don't stop--drive as fast as you dare!"
+
+"W'ere to, sir?"
+
+"See that cab behind? Don't let it catch us--shake it off, lose it somehow,
+but for the love of Heaven don't let it catch us! I'll make it worth your
+while. Do you understand?"
+
+"Yes, sir!" The driver looked briefly over his shoulder and lifted his
+whip. "Don't worry, sir," he cried, entering into the spirit of the game
+with gratifying zest. "Shan't let 'em over'aul you, sir. Mind your 'ead!"
+
+And as Kirkwood ducked, the whip-lash shot out over the roof with a crack
+like the report of a pistol. Startled, the horse leaped indignantly
+forward. Momentarily the cab seemed to leave the ground, then settled
+down to a pace that carried them round the Avenue Theatre and across
+Northumberland Avenue into Whitehall Place apparently on a single wheel.
+
+A glance behind showed Kirkwood that already they had gained, the pursuing
+hansom having lost ground through greater caution in crossing the
+main-traveled thoroughfare.
+
+"Good little horse!" he applauded.
+
+A moment later he was indorsing without reserve the generalship of their
+cabby; the quick westward turn that took them into Whitehall, over across
+from the Horse Guards, likewise placed them in a pocket of traffic; a
+practically impregnable press of vehicles closed in behind them ere
+Calendar's conveyance could follow out of the side street.
+
+That the same conditions, but slightly modified, hemmed them in ahead, went
+for nothing in Kirkwood's estimation.
+
+"Good driver!" he approved heartily. "He's got a head on his shoulders!"
+
+The girl found her voice. "How," she demanded in a breath, face blank with
+consternation, "how did you dare?"
+
+"Dare?" he echoed exultantly; and in his veins excitement was running like
+liquid fire. "What wouldn't I dare for you, Dorothy?"
+
+"What have you not?" she amended softly, adding with a shade of timidity:
+"Philip..."
+
+The long lashes swept up from her cheeks, like clouds revealing stars,
+unmasking eyes radiant and brave to meet his own; then they fell, even as
+her lips drooped with disappointment. And she sighed.... For he was not
+looking. Man-like, hot with the ardor of the chase, he was deaf and blind
+to all else.
+
+She saw that he had not even heard. Twice within the day she had forgotten
+herself, had overstepped the rigid bounds of her breeding in using his
+Christian name. And twice he had been oblivious to that token of their
+maturing understanding. So she sighed, and sighing, smiled again; resting
+an elbow on the window-sill and flattening one small gloved hand against
+the frame for a brace against the jouncing of the hansom. It swept on with
+unabated speed, up-stream beside the tawny reaches of the river; and for
+a time there was no speech between them, the while the girl lost
+consciousness of self and her most imminent peril, surrendering her being
+to the lingering sweetness of her long, dear thoughts....
+
+"I've got a scheme!" Kirkwood declared so explosively that she caught her
+breath with the surprise of it. "There's the Pless; they know me there, and
+my credit's good. When we shake them off, we can have the cabby take us to
+the hotel. I'll register and borrow from the management enough to pay our
+way to Chiltern and the tolls for a cable to New York. I've a friend or two
+over home who wouldn't let me want for a few miserable pounds.... So you
+see," he explained boyishly, "we're at the end of our troubles already!"
+
+She said something inaudible, holding her face averted. He bent nearer to
+her, wondering. "I didn't understand," he suggested.
+
+Still looking from him, "I said you were very good to me," she said in a
+quavering whisper.
+
+"Dorothy!" Without his knowledge or intention before the fact, as
+instinctively as he made use of her given name, intimately, his strong
+fingers dropped and closed upon the little hand that lay beside him. "What
+_is_ the matter, dear?" He leaned still farther forward to peer into her
+face, till glance met glance in the ending and his racing pulses tightened
+with sheer delight of the humid happiness in her glistening eyes. "Dorothy,
+child, don't worry so. No harm shall come to you. It's all working out--all
+working out _right_. Only have a little faith in me, and I'll _make_
+everything work out right, Dorothy."
+
+Gently she freed her fingers. "I wasn't," she told him in a voice that
+quivered between laughter and tears, "I wasn't worrying. I was ... You
+wouldn't understand. Don't be afraid I shall break down or--or anything."
+
+"I shan't," he reassured her; "I know you're not that sort. Besides,
+you'd have no excuse. We're moving along famously. That cabby knows his
+business."
+
+In fact that gentleman was minute by minute demonstrating his peculiar
+fitness for the task he had so cheerfully undertaken. The superior
+horsemanship of the London hackney cabman needs no exploitation, and he
+in whose hands rested the fate of the Calendar treasure was peer of his
+compeers. He was instant to advantage himself of every opening to forward
+his pliant craft, quick to foresee the fortunes of the way and govern
+himself accordingly.
+
+Estimating with practised eye the precise moment when the police supervisor
+of traffic at the junction of Parliament and Bridge Streets, would see
+fit to declare a temporary blockade, he so managed that his was the last
+vehicle to pass ere the official wand, to ignore which involves a forfeited
+license, was lifted; and indeed, so close was his calculation that he
+escaped only with a scowl and word of warning from the bobby. A matter of
+no importance whatever, since his end was gained and the pursuing cab had
+been shut off by the blockade.
+
+In Calendar's driver, however, he had an adversary of abilities by no means
+to be despised. Precisely how the man contrived it, is a question; that he
+made a detour by way of Derby Street is not improbable, unpleasant as it
+may have been for Stryker and Calendar to find themselves in such close
+proximity to "the Yard." At all events, he evaded the block, and hardly
+had the chase swung across Bridge Street, than the pursuer was nimbly
+clattering in its wake.
+
+Past the Houses of Parliament, through Old Palace Yard, with the Abbey on
+their left, they swung away into Abingdon Street, whence suddenly they
+dived into the maze of backways, great and mean, which lies to the south of
+Victoria. Doubling and twisting, now this way, now that, the driver tooled
+them through the intricate heart of this labyrinth, leading the pursuers
+a dance that Kirkwood thought calculated to dishearten and shake off the
+pursuit in the first five minutes. Yet always, peering back through the
+little peephole, he saw Calendar's cab pelting doggedly in their rear--a
+hundred yards behind, no more, no less, hanging on with indomitable grit
+and determination.
+
+By degrees they drew westwards, threading Pimlico, into Chelsea--once
+dashing briefly down the Grosvenor Road, the Thames a tawny flood beyond
+the river wall.
+
+Children cheered them on, and policemen turned to stare, doubting whether
+they should interfere. Minutes rolled into tens, measuring out an hour;
+and still they hammered on, hunted and hunters, playing their game of
+hare-and-hounds through the highways and byways of those staid and aged
+quarters.
+
+In the leading cab there were few words spoken. Kirkwood and Dorothy alike
+sat spellbound with the fascination of the game; if it is conceivable
+that the fox enjoys his part in the day's sport, then they were enjoying
+themselves. Now one spoke, now another--chiefly in the clipped phraseology,
+of excitement. As--
+
+"We're gaining?"
+
+"Yes--think so."
+
+Or, "We'll tire them out?"
+
+"Sure-ly."
+
+"They can't catch us, can they, Philip?"
+
+"Never in the world."
+
+But he spoke with a confidence that he himself did not feel, for hope as
+he would he could never see that the distance between the two had been
+materially lessened or increased. Their horses seemed most evenly matched.
+
+The sun was very low behind the houses of the Surrey Side when Kirkwood
+became aware that their horse was flagging, though (as comparison
+determined) no more so than the one behind.
+
+In grave concern the young man raised his hand, thrusting open the trap
+in the roof. Immediately the square of darkling sky was eclipsed by the
+cabby's face.
+
+"Yessir?"
+
+"You had better drive as directly as you can to the Hotel Pless," Kirkwood
+called up. "I'm afraid it's no use pushing your horse like this."
+
+"I'm sure of it, sir. 'E's a good 'oss, 'e is, but 'e carn't keep goin' for
+hever, you know, sir."
+
+"I know. You've done very well; you've done your best."
+
+"Very good, sir. The Pless, you said, sir? Right."
+
+The trap closed.
+
+Two blocks farther, and their pace had so sensibly moderated that Kirkwood
+was genuinely alarmed. The pursuing cabby was lashing his animal without
+mercy, while, "It aren't no use my w'ippin' 'im, sir," dropped through the
+trap. "'E's doing orl 'e can."
+
+"I understand."
+
+Despondent recklessness tightened Kirkwood's lips and kindled an unpleasant
+light in his eyes. He touched his side pocket; Calendar's revolver was
+still there.... Dorothy should win away clear, if--if he swung for it.
+
+He bent forward with the traveling bag in his hands.
+
+"What are you going to do?" The girl's voice was very tremulous.
+
+"Stand a chance, take a losing hazard. Can you run? You're not too tired?"
+
+"I can run--perhaps not far--a little way, at least."
+
+"And will you do as I say?"
+
+Her eyes met his, unwavering, bespeaking her implicit faith.
+
+"Promise!"
+
+"I promise."
+
+"We'll have to drop off in a minute. The horse won't last.... They're in
+the same box. Well, I undertake to stand 'em off for a bit; you take the
+bag and run for it. Just as soon as I can convince them, I'll follow, but
+if there's any delay, you call the first cab you see and drive to the
+Pless. I'll join you there."
+
+He stood up, surveying the neighborhood. Behind him the girl lifted her
+voice in protest.
+
+"No, Philip, no!"
+
+"You've promised," he said sternly, eyes ranging the street.
+
+"I don't care; I won't leave you."
+
+He shook his head in silent contradiction, frowning; but not frowning
+because of the girl's mutiny. He was a little puzzled by a vague
+impression, and was striving to pin it down for recognition; but was so
+thoroughly bemused with fatigue and despair that only with great difficulty
+could he force his faculties to logical reasoning, his memory to respond to
+his call upon it.
+
+The hansom was traversing a street in Old Brompton--a quaint, prim by-way
+lined with dwellings singularly Old-Worldish, even for London. He seemed
+to know it subjectively, to have retained a memory of it from another
+existence: as the stage setting of a vivid dream, all forgotten, will
+sometimes recur with peculiar and exasperating intensity, in broad
+daylight. The houses, with their sloping, red-tiled roofs, unexpected
+gables, spontaneous dormer windows, glass panes set in leaded frames, red
+brick facades trimmed with green shutters and doorsteps of white stone,
+each sitting back, sedate and self-sufficient, in its trim dooryard fenced
+off from the public thoroughfare: all wore an aspect hauntingly familiar,
+and yet strange.
+
+A corner sign, remarked in passing, had named the spot "Aspen Villas";
+though he felt he knew the sound of those syllables as well as he did
+the name of the Pless, strive as he might he failed to make them convey
+anything tangible to his intelligence. When had he heard of it? At what
+time had his errant footsteps taken him through this curious survival of
+Eighteenth Century London?
+
+Not that it mattered when. It could have no possible bearing on the
+emergency. He really gave it little thought; the mental processes recounted
+were mostly subconscious, if none the less real. His objective attention
+was wholly preoccupied with the knowledge that Calendar's cab was drawing
+perilously near. And he was debating whether or not they should alight
+at once and try to make a better pace afoot, when the decision was taken
+wholly out of his hands.
+
+Blindly staggering on, wilted with weariness, the horse stumbled in the
+shafts and plunged forward on its knees. Quick as the driver was to pull it
+up, with a cruel jerk of the bits, Kirkwood was caught unprepared; lurching
+against the dashboard, he lost his footing, grasped frantically at the
+unstable air, and went over, bringing up in a sitting position in the
+gutter, with a solid shock that jarred his very teeth.
+
+For a moment dazed he sat there blinking; by the time he got to his feet,
+the girl stood beside him, questioning him with keen solicitude.
+
+"No," he gasped; "not hurt--only surprised. Wait...."
+
+Their cab had come to a complete standstill; Calendar's was no more than
+twenty yards behind, and as Kirkwood caught sight of him the fat adventurer
+was in the act of lifting himself ponderously out of the seat.
+
+Incontinently the young man turned to the girl and forced the traveling-bag
+into her hands.
+
+"Run for it!" he begged her. "Don't stop to argue. You promised--run! I'll
+come...."
+
+"Philip!" she pleaded.
+
+"Dorothy!" he cried in torment.
+
+Perhaps it was his unquestionable distress that weakened her. Suddenly she
+yielded--with whatever reason. He was only hazily aware of the swish of her
+skirts behind him; he had no time to look round and see that she got away
+safely. He had only eyes and thoughts for Calendar and Stryker.
+
+They were both afoot, now, and running toward him, the one as awkward as
+the other, but neither yielding a jot of their malignant purpose. He held
+the picture of it oddly graphic in his memory for many a day thereafter:
+Calendar making directly, for him, his heavy-featured face a dull red with
+the exertion, his fat head dropped forward as if too heavy for his neck of
+a bull, his small eyes bright with anger; Stryker shying off at a discreet
+angle, evidently with the intention of devoting himself to the capture of
+the girl; the two cabs with their dejected screws, at rest in the middle of
+the quiet, twilit street. He seemed even to see himself, standing stockily
+prepared, hands in his coat pockets, his own head inclined with a
+suggestion of pugnacity.
+
+To this mental photograph another succeeds, of the same scene an instant
+later; all as it had been before, their relative positions unchanged, save
+that Stryker and Calendar had come to a dead stop, and that Kirkwood's
+right arm was lifted and extended, pointing at the captain.
+
+So forgetful of self was he, that it required a moment's thought to
+convince him that he was really responsible for the abrupt transformation.
+Incredulously he realized that he had drawn Calendar's revolver and pulled
+Stryker up short, in mid-stride, by the mute menace of it, as much as by
+his hoarse cry of warning:
+
+"Stryker--not another foot--"
+
+With this there chimed in Dorothy's voice, ringing bell-clear from a little
+distance:
+
+"Philip!"
+
+Like a flash he wheeled, to add yet another picture to his mental gallery.
+
+Perhaps two-score feet up the sidewalk a gate stood open; just outside it a
+man of tall and slender figure, rigged out in a bizarre costume consisting
+mainly of a flowered dressing-gown and slippers, was waiting in an attitude
+of singular impassivity; within it, pausing with a foot lifted to the
+doorstep, bag in hand, her head turned as she looked back, was Dorothy.
+
+[Illustration: A costume consisting mainly of a flowered dressing-gown and
+slippers.]
+
+As he comprehended these essential details of the composition, the man in
+the flowered dressing-gown raised a hand, beckoning to him in a manner as
+imperative as his accompanying words.
+
+"Kirkwood!" he saluted the young man in a clear and vibrant voice, "put
+up that revolver and stop this foolishness." And, with a jerk of his
+head towards the doorway, in which Dorothy now waited, hesitant: "Come,
+sir--quickly!"
+
+Kirkwood choked on a laugh that was half a sob. "Brentwick!" he cried,
+restoring the weapon to his pocket and running toward his friend. "Of all
+happy accidents!"
+
+"You may call it that," retorted the elder man with a fleeting smile as
+Kirkwood slipped inside the dooryard. "Come," he said; "let's get into the
+house."
+
+"But you said--I thought you went to Munich," stammered Kirkwood; and so
+thoroughly impregnated was his mind with this understanding that it was
+hard for him to adjust his perceptions to the truth.
+
+"I was detained--by business," responded Brentwick briefly. His gaze, weary
+and wistful behind his glasses, rested on the face of the girl on the
+threshold of his home; and the faint, sensitive flush of her face deepened.
+He stopped and honored her with a bow that, for all his fantastical attire,
+would have graced a beau of an earlier decade. "Will you be pleased to
+enter?" he suggested punctiliously. "My house, such as it is, is quite at
+your disposal. And," he added, with a glance over his shoulder, "I fancy
+that a word or two may presently be passed which you would hardly care to
+hear."
+
+Dorothy's hesitation was but transitory; Kirkwood was reassuring her with
+a smile more like his wonted boyish grin than anything he had succeeded
+in conjuring up throughout the day. Her own smile answered it, and with a
+murmured word of gratitude and a little, half timid, half distant bow for
+Brentwick, she passed on into the hallway.
+
+Kirkwood lingered with his friend upon the door-stoop. Calendar, recovered
+from his temporary consternation, was already at the gate, bending over
+it, fat fingers fumbling with the latch, his round red face, lifted to the
+house, darkly working with chagrin.
+
+From his threshold, watching him with a slight contraction of the eyes,
+Brentwick hailed him in tones of cloying courtesy.
+
+"Do you wish to see me, sir?"
+
+The fat adventurer faltered just within the gateway; then, with a truculent
+swagger, "I want my daughter," he declared vociferously.
+
+Brentwick peered mildly over his glasses, first at Calendar, then at
+Kirkwood. His glance lingered a moment on the young man's honest eyes, and
+swung back to Calendar.
+
+"My good man," he said with sublime tolerance, "will you be pleased to take
+yourself off--to the devil if you like? Or shall I take the trouble to
+interest the police?"
+
+He removed one fine and fragile hand from a pocket of the flowered
+dressing-gown, long enough to jerk it significantly toward the nearer
+street-corner.
+
+Thunderstruck, Calendar glanced hastily in the indicated direction.
+A blue-coated bobby was to be seen approaching with measured stride,
+diffusing upon the still evening air an impression of ineffably capable
+self-contentment.
+
+Calendar's fleshy lips parted and closed without a sound. They quivered.
+Beneath them quivered his assortment of graduated chins. His heavy and
+pendulous cheeks quivered, slowly empurpling with the dark tide of his
+apoplectic wrath. The close-clipped thatch of his iron gray mustache, even,
+seemed to bristle like hairs upon the neck of a maddened dog. Beneath him
+his fat legs trembled, and indeed his whole huge carcass shook visibly, in
+the stress of his restrained wrath.
+
+Suddenly, overwhelmed, he banged the gate behind him and waddled off to
+join the captain; who already, with praiseworthy native prudence, had
+fallen back upon their cab.
+
+From his coign of strategic advantage, the comfortable elevation of
+his box, Kirkwood's cabby, whose huge enjoyment of the adventurers'
+discomfiture had throughout been noisily demonstrative, entreated Calendar
+with lifted forefinger, bland affability, and expressions of heartfelt
+sympathy.
+
+"Kebsir? 'Ave a kebsir, do! Try a ride be'ind a real 'orse, sir; don't you
+go on wastin' time on 'im." A jerk of a derisive thumb singled out the
+other cabman. "'E aren't pl'yin' you fair, sir; I knows 'im,--'e's a
+hartful g'y deceiver, 'e is. Look at 'is 'orse,--w'ich it aren't; it's a
+snyle, that's w'at it is. Tyke a father's hadvice, sir, and next time yer
+fairest darter runs awye with the dook in disguise, chyse 'em in a real
+kebsir, not a cheap imitashin.... Kebsir?... Garn, you 'ard-'arted--"
+
+Here he swooped upwards in a dizzy flight of vituperation best unrecorded.
+Calendar, beyond an absent-minded flirt of one hand by his ear, as who
+should shoo away a buzzing insect, ignored him utterly.
+
+Sullenly extracting money from his pocket, he paid off his driver, and in
+company with Stryker, trudged in morose silence down the street.
+
+Brentwick touched Kirkwood's arm and drew him into the house.
+
+
+
+
+XVIII
+
+
+ADVENTURERS' LUCK
+
+As the door closed, Kirkwood swung impulsively to Brentwick, with the
+brief, uneven laugh of fine-drawn nerves.
+
+"Good God, sir!" he cried. "You don't know--"
+
+"I can surmise," interrupted the elder man shrewdly.
+
+"You turned up in the nick of time, for all the world like--"
+
+"Harlequin popping through a stage trap?"
+
+"No!--an incarnation of the Providence that watches over children and
+fools."
+
+Brentwick dropped a calming hand upon his shoulder. "Your simile seems
+singularly happy, Philip. Permit me to suggest that you join the child in
+my study." He laughed quietly, with a slight nod toward an open door at the
+end of the hallway. "For myself, I'll be with you in one moment."
+
+A faint, indulgent smile lurking in the shadow of his white mustache, he
+watched the young man wheel and dart through the doorway. "Young hearts!"
+he commented inaudibly--and a trace sadly. "Youth!..."
+
+Beyond the threshold of the study, Kirkwood paused, eager eyes searching
+its somber shadows for a sign of Dorothy.
+
+A long room and deep, it was lighted only by the circumscribed disk of
+illumination thrown on the central desk by a shaded reading-lamp, and the
+flickering glow of a grate-fire set beneath the mantel of a side-wall. At
+the back, heavy velvet portieres cloaked the recesses of two long windows,
+closed jealously even against the twilight. Aside from the windows, doors
+and chimney-piece, every foot of wall space was occupied by towering
+bookcases or by shelves crowded to the limit of their capacity with an
+amazing miscellany of objects of art, the fruit of years of patient and
+discriminating collecting. An exotic and heady atmosphere, compounded of
+the faint and intangible exhalations of these insentient things, fragrance
+of sandalwood, myrrh and musk, reminiscent whiffs of half-forgotten
+incense, seemed to intensify the impression of gloomy richness and
+repose...
+
+By the fireplace, a little to one side, stood Dorothy, one small foot
+resting on the brass fender, her figure merging into the dusky background,
+her delicate beauty gaining an effect of elusive and ethereal mystery in
+the waning and waxing ruddy glow upflung from the bedded coals.
+
+"Oh, Philip!" She turned swiftly to Kirkwood with extended hands and a low,
+broken cry. "I'm _so_ glad...."
+
+A trace of hysteria in her manner warned him, and he checked himself upon
+the verge of a too dangerous tenderness. "There!" he said soothingly,
+letting her hands rest gently in his palms while he led her to a chair. "We
+can make ourselves easy now." She sat down and he released her hands with a
+reluctance less evident than actual. "If ever I say another word against my
+luck--"
+
+"Who," inquired the girl, lowering her voice, "who is the gentleman in the
+flowered dressing-gown?"
+
+"Brentwick--George Silvester Brentwick: an old friend. I've known him for
+years,--ever since I came abroad. Curiously enough, however, this is the
+first time I've ever been here. I called once, but he wasn't in,--a few
+days ago,--the day we met. I thought the place looked familiar. Stupid of
+me!"
+
+"Philip," said the girl with a grave face but a shaking voice, "it was."
+She laughed provokingly.... "It was so funny, Philip. I don't know why I
+ran, when you told me to, but I did; and while I ran, I was conscious
+of the front door, here, opening, and this tall man in the flowered
+dressing-gown coming down to the gate as if it were the most ordinary thing
+in the world for him to stroll out, dressed that way, in the evening. And
+he opened the gate, and bowed, and said, ever so pleasantly, 'Won't you
+come in, Miss Calendar?'--"
+
+"He did!" exclaimed Kirkwood. "But how--?"
+
+"How can I say?" she expostulated. "At all events, he seemed to know
+me; and when he added something about calling you in, too--he said 'Mr.
+Kirkwood '--I didn't hesitate."
+
+"It's strange enough, surely--and fortunate. Bless his heart!" said
+Kirkwood.
+
+And, "Hum!" said Mr. Brentwick considerately, entering the study. He had
+discarded the dressing-gown and was now in evening dress.
+
+The girl rose. Kirkwood turned. "Mr. Brentwick--" he began.
+
+But Brentwick begged his patience with an eloquent gesture. "Sir," he said,
+somewhat austerely, "permit me to put a single question: Have you by any
+chance paid your cabby?"
+
+"Why--" faltered the younger man, with a flaming face. "I--why, no--that
+is--"
+
+The other quietly put his hand upon a bell-pull. A faint jingling sound was
+at once audible, emanating from the basement.
+
+"How much should you say you owe him?"
+
+"I--I haven't a penny in the world!"
+
+The shrewd eyes flashed their amusement into Kirkwood's. "Tut, tut!"
+Brentwick chuckled. "Between gentlemen, my dear boy! Dear me! you are slow
+to learn."
+
+"I'll never be contented to sponge on my friends," explained Kirkwood in
+deepest misery. "I can't tell when--"
+
+"Tut, tut! How much did you say?"
+
+"Ten shillings--or say twelve, would be about right," stammered the
+American, swayed by conflicting emotions of gratitude and profound
+embarrassment.
+
+A soft-footed butler, impassive as Fate, materialized mysteriously in the
+doorway.
+
+"You rang, sir?" he interrupted frigidly.
+
+"I rang, Wotton." His master selected a sovereign from his purse and handed
+it to the servant. "For the cabby, Wotton."
+
+"Yes sir." The butler swung automatically, on one heel.
+
+"And Wotton!"
+
+"Sir?"
+
+"If any one should ask for me, I'm not at home."
+
+"Very good, sir."
+
+"And if you should see a pair of disreputable scoundrels skulking, in the
+neighborhood, one short and stout, the other tall and evidently a seafaring
+man, let me know."
+
+"Thank you, sir." A moment later the front door was heard to close.
+
+Brentwick turned with a little bow to the girl. "My dear Miss Calendar," he
+said, rubbing his thin, fine hands,--"I am old enough, I trust, to call you
+such without offense,--please be seated."
+
+Complying, the girl rewarded him with a radiant smile. Whereupon, striding
+to the fireplace, their host turned his back to it, clasped his hands
+behind him, and glowered benignly upon the two. "Ah!" he observed in
+accents of extreme personal satisfaction. "Romance! Romance!"
+
+"Would you mind telling us how you knew--" began Kirkwood anxiously.
+
+"Not in the least, my dear Philip. It is simple enough: I possess an
+imagination. From my bedroom window, on the floor above, I happen to behold
+two cabs racing down the street, the one doggedly pursuing the other. The
+foremost stops, perforce of a fagged horse. There alights a young gentleman
+looking, if you'll pardon me, uncommonly seedy; he is followed by a young
+lady, if she will pardon me," with another little bow, "uncommonly pretty.
+With these two old eyes I observe that the gentleman does not pay his
+cabby. Ergo--I intelligently deduce--he is short of money. Eh?"
+
+"You were right," affirmed Kirkwood, with a rueful and crooked smile.
+"But--"
+
+"So! so!" pursued Brentwick, rising on his toes and dropping back again;
+"so this world of ours wags on to the old, old tune!... And I, who in my
+younger days pursued adventure without success, in dotage find myself
+dragged into a romance by my two ears, whether I will or no! Eh? And now
+you are going to tell me all about it, Philip. There is a chair.... Well,
+Wotton?"
+
+The butler had again appeared noiselessly in the doorway.
+
+"Beg pardon, sir; they're waiting, sir."
+
+"The caitiffs, Wotton?"
+
+"Yessir."
+
+"Where waiting?"
+
+"One at each end of the street, sir."
+
+"Thank you. You may bring us sherry and biscuit, Wotton."
+
+"Thank you, sir."
+
+The servant vanished.
+
+Brentwick removed his glasses, rubbed them, and blinked thoughtfully at the
+girl. "My dear," he said suddenly, with a peculiar tremor in his voice,
+"you resemble your mother remarkably. Tut--I should know! Time was when I
+was one of her most ardent admirers."
+
+"You--y-you knew my mother?" cried Dorothy, profoundly moved.
+
+"Did I not know you at sight? My dear, you are your mother reincarnate, for
+the good of an unworthy world. She was a very beautiful woman, my dear."
+
+Wotton entered with a silver serving tray, offering it in turn to Dorothy,
+Kirkwood and his employer. While he was present the three held silent--the
+girl trembling slightly, but with her face aglow; Kirkwood half stupefied
+between his ease from care and his growing astonishment, as Brentwick
+continued to reveal unexpected phases of his personality; Brentwick himself
+outwardly imperturbable and complacent, for all that his hand shook as he
+lifted his wine glass.
+
+"You may go, Wotton--or, wait. Don't you feel the need of a breath of fresh
+air, Wotton?"
+
+"Yessir, thank you, sir."
+
+"Then change your coat, Wotton, light your pipe, and stroll out for half an
+hour. You need not leave the street, but if either the tall thin blackguard
+with the seafaring habit, or the short stout rascal with the air of mystery
+should accost you, treat them with all courtesy, Wotton. You will be
+careful not to tell either of them anything in particular, although I don't
+mind your telling them that Mr. Brentwick lives here, if they ask. I am
+mostly concerned to discover if they purpose becoming fixtures on the
+street-corners, Wotton."
+
+"Quite so, sir."
+
+"Now you may go.... Wotton," continued his employer as the butler took
+himself off as softly as a cat, "grows daily a more valuable mechanism. He
+is by no means human in any respect, but I find him extremely handy to
+have round the house.... And now, my dear," turning to Dorothy, "with your
+permission I desire to drink to the memory of your beautiful mother and to
+the happiness of her beautiful daughter."
+
+"But you will tell me--"
+
+"A number of interesting things, Miss Calendar, if you'll be good enough to
+let me choose the time. I beg you to be patient with the idiosyncrasies
+of an old man, who means no harm, who has a reputation as an eccentric to
+sustain before his servants.... And now," said Brentwick, setting aside his
+glass, "now, my dear boy, for the adventure."
+
+Kirkwood chuckled, infected by his host's genial humor. "How do you know--"
+
+"How can it be otherwise?" countered Brentwick with a trace of asperity.
+"Am I to be denied my adventure? Sir, I refuse without equivocation. Your
+very bearing breathes of Romance. There must be an adventure forthcoming,
+Philip; otherwise my disappointment will be so acute that I shall be
+regretfully obliged seriously to consider my right, as a householder, to
+show you the door."
+
+"But Mr. Brentwick--!"
+
+"Sit down, sir!" commanded Brentwick with such a peremptory note that the
+young man, who had risen, obeyed out of sheer surprise. Upon which his host
+advanced, indicting him with a long white forefinger. "Would you, sir,"
+he demanded, "again expose this little lady to the machinations of that
+corpulent scoundrel, whom I have just had the pleasure of shooing off my
+premises, because you choose to resent an old man's raillery?"
+
+"I apologize," Kirkwood humored him.
+
+"I accept the apology in the spirit in which it is offered.... I repeat,
+now for the adventure, Philip. If the story's long, epitomize. We can
+consider details more at our leisure."
+
+Kirkwood's eyes consulted the girl's face; almost imperceptibly she nodded
+him permission to proceed.
+
+"Briefly, then," he began haltingly, "the man who followed us to the door
+here, is Miss Calendar's father."
+
+"Oh? His name, please?"
+
+"George Burgoyne Calendar."
+
+"Ah! An American; I remember, now. Continue, please."
+
+"He is hounding us, sir, with the intention of stealing some property,
+which he caused to be stolen, which we--to put it bluntly--stole from him,
+to which he has no shadow of a title, and which, finally, we're endeavoring
+to return to its owners."
+
+"My dear!" interpolated Brentwick gently, looking down at the girl's
+flushed face and drooping head.
+
+"He ran us to the last ditch," Kirkwood continued; "I've spent my last
+farthing trying to lose him."
+
+"But why have you not caused his arrest?" Brentwick inquired.
+
+Kirkwood nodded meaningly toward the girl. Brentwick made a sound
+indicating comprehension, a click of the tongue behind closed teeth.
+
+"We came to your door by the merest accident--it might as well have been
+another. I understood you were in Munich, and it never entered my head that
+we'd find you home."
+
+"A communication from my solicitors detained me," explained Brentwick. "And
+now, what do you intend to do?"
+
+"Trespass as far on your kindness as you'll permit. In the first place,
+I--I want the use of a few pounds with which to cable some friends in New
+York, for money; on receipt of which I can repay you."
+
+"Philip," observed Brentwood, "you are a most irritating child. But I
+forgive you the faults of youth. You may proceed, bearing in mind, if you
+please, that I am your friend equally with any you may own in America."
+
+"You're one of the best men in the world," said Kirkwood.
+
+"Tut, tut! Will you get on?"
+
+"Secondly, I want you to help us to escape Calendar to-night. It is
+necessary that Miss Calendar should go to Chiltern this evening, where she
+has friends who will receive and protect her."
+
+"Mm-mm," grumbled their host, meditative. "My faith!" he commented, with
+brightening eyes. "It sounds almost too good to be true! And I've been
+growing afraid that the world was getting to be a most humdrum and
+uninteresting planet!... Miss Calendar, I am a widower of so many years
+standing that I had almost forgotten I had ever been anything but a
+bachelor. I fear my house contains little that will be of service to a
+young lady. Yet a room is at your disposal; the parlor-maid shall show you
+the way. And Philip, between you and me, I venture to remark that hot water
+and cold steel would add to the attractiveness of your personal appearance;
+my valet will attend you in my room. Dinner," concluded Brentwick with
+anticipative relish, "will be served in precisely thirty minutes. I shall
+expect you to entertain me with a full and itemized account of every phase
+of your astonishing adventure. Later, we will find a way to Chiltern."
+
+Again he put a hand upon the bell-pull. Simultaneously Dorothy and Kirkwood
+rose.
+
+"Mr. Brentwick," said the girl, her eyes starred with tears of gratitude,
+"I don't, I really don't know how--"
+
+"My dear," said the old gentleman, "you will thank me most appropriately
+by continuing, to the best of your ability, to resemble your mother more
+remarkably every minute."
+
+"But I," began Kirkwood----.
+
+"You, my dear Philip, can thank me best by permitting me to enjoy myself;
+which I am doing thoroughly at the present moment. My pleasure in being
+invited to interfere in your young affairs is more keen than you can well
+surmise. Moreover," said Mr. Brentwick, "so long have I been an amateur
+adventurer that I esteem it the rarest privilege to find myself thus on the
+point of graduating into professional ranks." He rubbed his hands, beaming
+upon them. "And," he added, as a maid appeared at the door, "I have already
+schemed me a scheme for the discomfiture of our friends the enemy: a scheme
+which we will discuss with our dinner, while the heathen rage and imagine a
+vain thing, in the outer darkness."
+
+Kirkwood would have lingered, but of such inflexible temper was his host
+that he bowed him into the hands of a man servant without permitting him
+another word.
+
+"Not a syllable," he insisted. "I protest I am devoured with curiosity, my
+dear boy, but I have also bowels of compassion. When we are well on with
+our meal, when you are strengthened with food and drink, then you may
+begin. But now--Dickie," to the valet, "do your duty!"
+
+Kirkwood, laughing with exasperation, retired at discretion, leaving
+Brentwick the master of the situation: a charming gentleman with a will of
+his own and a way that went with it.
+
+He heard the young man's footsteps diminish on the stairway; and again
+he smiled the indulgent, melancholy smile of mellow years. "Youth!" he
+whispered softly. "Romance!... And now," with a brisk change of tone as
+he closed the study door, "now we are ready for this interesting Mr.
+Calendar."
+
+Sitting down at his desk, he found and consulted a telephone directory;
+but its leaves, at first rustling briskly at the touch of the slender and
+delicate fingers, were presently permitted to lie unturned,--the book
+resting open on his knees the while he stared wistfully into the fire.
+
+A suspicion of moisture glimmered in his eyes. "Dorothy!" he whispered
+huskily. And a little later, rising, he proceeded to the telephone....
+
+An hour and a half later Kirkwood, his self-respect something restored by
+a bath, a shave, and a resumption of clothes which had been hastily but
+thoroughly cleansed and pressed by Brentwick's valet; his confidence and
+courage mounting high under the combined influence of generous wine,
+substantial food, the presence of his heart's mistress and the
+admiration--which was unconcealed--of his friend, concluded at the
+dinner-table, his narration.
+
+"And that," he said, looking up from his savory, "is about all."
+
+"Bravo!" applauded Brentwick; eyes shining with delight.
+
+"All," interposed Dorothy in warm reproach, "but what he hasn't told--"
+
+"Which, my dear, is to be accounted for wholly by a very creditable
+modesty, rarely encountered in the young men of the present day. It was, of
+course, altogether different with those of my younger years. Yes, Wotton?"
+
+Brentwick sat back in his chair, inclining an attentive ear to a
+communication murmured by the butler.
+
+Kirkwood's gaze met Dorothy's across the expanse of shining cloth; he
+deprecated her interruption with a whimsical twist of his eyebrows.
+"Really, you shouldn't," he assured her in an undertone. "I've done nothing
+to deserve..." But under the spell of her serious sweet eyes, he fell
+silent, and presently looked down, strangely abashed; and contemplated the
+vast enormity of his unworthiness.
+
+Coffee was set before them by Wotton, the impassive, Brentwick refusing
+it with a little sigh. "It is one of the things, as Philip knows," he
+explained to the girl, "denied me by the physician who makes his life happy
+by making mine a waste. I am allowed but three luxuries; cigars, travel
+in moderation, and the privilege of imposing on my friends. The first I
+propose presently, to enjoy, by your indulgence; and the second I shall
+this evening undertake by virtue of the third, of which I have just availed
+myself."
+
+Smiling at the involution, he rested his head against the back of the
+chair, eyes roving from the girl's face to Kirkwood's. "Inspiration to
+do which," he proceeded gravely, "came to me from the seafaring picaroon
+(Stryker did you name him?) via the excellent Wotton. While you were
+preparing for dinner, Wotton returned from his constitutional with the news
+that, leaving the corpulent person on watch at the corner, Captain Stryker
+had temporarily, made himself scarce. However, we need feel no anxiety
+concerning his whereabouts, for he reappeared in good time and a
+motor-car. From which it becomes evident that you have not overrated their
+pertinacity; the fiasco of the cab-chase is not to be reenacted."
+
+Resolutely the girl repressed a gasp of dismay. Kirkwood stared moodily
+into his cup.
+
+"These men bore me fearfully," he commented at last.
+
+"And so," continued Brentwick, "I bethought me of a counter-stroke. It is
+my good fortune to have a friend whose whim it is to support a touring-car,
+chiefly in innocuous idleness. Accordingly I have telephoned him and
+commandeered the use of this machine--mechanician, too.... Though not a
+betting man, I am willing to risk recklessly a few pence in support of my
+contention, that of the two, Captain Stryker's car and ours, the latter
+will prove considerably the most speedy....
+
+"In short, I suggest," he concluded, thoughtfully lacing his long white
+fingers, "that, avoiding the hazards of cab and railway carriage, we motor
+to Chiltern: the night being fine and the road, I am told, exceptionally
+good. Miss Dorothy, what do you think?"
+
+Instinctively the girl looked to Kirkwood; then shifted her glance to their
+host. "I think you are wonderfully thoughtful and kind," she said simply.
+
+"And you, Philip?"
+
+"It's an inspiration," the younger man declared. "I can't think of anything
+better calculated to throw them off, than to distance them by motor-car. It
+would be always possible to trace our journey by rail."
+
+"Then," announced Brentwick, making as if to rise, "we had best go. If
+neither my hearing nor Captain Stryker's car deceives me, our fiery chariot
+is panting at the door."
+
+A little sobered from the confident spirit of quiet gaiety in which they
+had dined, they left the table. Not that, in their hearts, either greatly
+questioned their ultimate triumph; but they were allowing for the element
+of error so apt to set at naught human calculations. Calendar himself had
+already been proved fallible. Within the bounds of possibility, their turn
+to stumble might now be imminent.
+
+When he let himself dwell upon it, their utter helplessness to give
+Calendar pause by commonplace methods, maddened Kirkwood. With another
+scoundrel it had been so simple a matter to put a period to his activities
+by a word to the police. But he was her father; for that reason he must
+continually be spared ... Even though, in desperate extremity, she should
+give consent to the arrest of the adventurers, retaliation would follow,
+swift and sure. For they might not overlook nor gloze the fact that hers
+had been the hands responsible for the theft of the jewels; innocent
+though she had been in committing that larceny, a cat's-paw guided by an
+intelligence unscrupulous and malign, the law would not hold her guiltless
+were she once brought within its cognizance. Nor, possibly, would the
+Hallams, mother and son.
+
+Upon their knowledge and their fear of this, undoubtedly Calendar was
+reckoning: witness the barefaced effrontery with which he operated against
+them. His fear of the police might be genuine enough, but he was never for
+an instant disturbed by any doubt lest his daughter should turn against
+him. She would never dare that.
+
+Before they left the house, while Dorothy was above stairs resuming her
+hat and coat, Kirkwood and Brentwick reconnoitered from the drawing-room
+windows, themselves screened from observation by the absence of light in
+the room behind.
+
+Before the door a motor-car waited, engines humming impatiently,
+mechanician ready in his seat, an uncouth shape in goggles and leather
+garments that shone like oilskins under the street lights.
+
+At one corner another and a smaller car stood in waiting, its lamps like
+baleful eyes glaring through the night.
+
+In the shadows across the way, a lengthy shadow lurked: Stryker, beyond
+reasonable question. Otherwise the street was deserted. Not even that
+adventitous bobby of the early evening was now in evidence.
+
+Dorothy presently joining them, Brentwick led the way to the door.
+
+Wotton, apparently nerveless beneath his absolute immobility, let them
+out--and slammed the door behind them with such promptitude as to give
+cause for the suspicion that he was a fraud, a sham, beneath his icy
+exterior desperately afraid lest the house be stormed by the adventurers.
+
+Kirkwood to the right, Brentwick to the left of Dorothy, the former
+carrying the treasure bag, they hastened down the walk and through the gate
+to the car.
+
+The watcher across the way was moved to whistle shrilly; the other car
+lunged forward nervously.
+
+Brentwick taking the front seat, beside the mechanician, left the tonneau
+to Kirkwood and Dorothy. As the American slammed the door, the car swept
+smoothly out into the middle of the way, while the pursuing car swerved in
+to the other curb, slowing down to let Stryker jump aboard.
+
+Kirkwood put himself in the seat by the girl's side and for a few moments
+was occupied with the arrangement of the robes. Then, sitting back, he
+found her eyes fixed upon him, pools of inscrutable night in the shadow of
+her hat.
+
+"You aren't afraid, Dorothy?"
+
+She answered quietly: "I am with you, Philip."
+
+Beneath the robe their hands met...
+
+Exalted, excited, he turned and looked back. A hundred yards to the rear
+four unwinking eyes trailed them, like some modern Nemesis in monstrous
+guise.
+
+
+
+
+XIX
+
+I----THE UXBRIDGE ROAD
+
+At a steady gait, now and again checked in deference to the street traffic,
+Brentwick's motor-car rolled, with resonant humming of the engine, down
+the Cromwell Road, swerved into Warwick Road and swung northward through
+Kensington to Shepherd's Bush. Behind it Calendar's car clung as if towed
+by an invisible cable, never gaining, never losing, mutely testifying to
+the adventurer's unrelenting, grim determination to leave them no instant's
+freedom from surveillance, to keep for ever at their shoulders, watching
+his chance, biding his time with sinister patience until the moment when,
+wearied, their vigilance should relax....
+
+To some extent he reckoned without his motor-car. As long as they traveled
+within the metropolitan limits, constrained to observe a decorous pace
+in view of the prejudices of the County Council, it was a matter of no
+difficulty whatever to maintain his distance. But once they had won through
+Shepherd's Bush and, paced by huge doubledeck trolley trams, were flying
+through Hammersmith on the Uxbridge Road; once they had run through Acton,
+and knew beyond dispute that now they were without the city boundaries,
+then the complexion of the business was suddenly changed.
+
+Not too soon for honest sport; Calendar was to have (Kirkwood would have
+said in lurid American idiom) a run for his money. The scattered lights of
+Southall were winking out behind them before Brentwick chose to give the
+word to the mechanician.
+
+Quietly the latter threw in the clutch for the third speed--and the fourth.
+The car leaped forward like a startled race-horse. The motor lilted merrily
+into its deep-throated song of the open road, its contented, silken humming
+passing into a sonorous and sustained purr.
+
+Kirkwood and the girl were first jarred violently forward, then thrown
+together. She caught his arm to steady herself; it seemed the most natural
+thing imaginable that he should take her hand and pass it beneath his
+arm, holding her so, his fingers closed above her own. Before they had
+recovered, or had time to catch their breath, a mile of Middlesex had
+dropped to the rear.
+
+Not quite so far had they distanced Calendar's trailing Nemesis of the four
+glaring eyes; the pursuers put forth a gallant effort to hold their place.
+At intervals during the first few minutes a heavy roaring and crashing
+could be heard behind them; gradually it subsided, dying on the wings of
+the free rushing wind that buffeted their faces as mile after mile was
+reeled off and the wide, darkling English countryside opened out before
+them, sweet and wonderful.
+
+Once Kirkwood looked back; in the winking of an eye he saw four faded disks
+of light, pallid with despair, top a distant rise and glide down into
+darkness. When he turned, Dorothy was interrogating him with eyes whose
+melting, shadowed loveliness, revealed to him in the light of the far,
+still stars, seemed to incite him to that madness which he had bade himself
+resist with all his strength.
+
+He shook his head, as if to say: They can not catch us.
+
+His hour was not yet; time enough to think of love and marriage (as if he
+were capable of consecutive thought on any other subject!)--time enough to
+think of them when he had gene back to his place, or rather when he should
+have found it, in the ranks of bread-winners, and so have proved his right
+to mortal happiness; time enough then to lay whatever he might have to
+offer at her feet. Now he could conceive of no baser treachery to his
+soul's-desire than to advantage himself of her gratitude.
+
+Resolutely he turned his face forward, striving with all his will and might
+to forget the temptation of her lips, weary as they were and petulant with
+waiting; and so sat rigid in his time of trial, clinging with what strength
+he could to the standards of his honor, and trying to lose his dream
+in dreaming of the bitter struggle that seemed likely to be his future
+portion.
+
+Perhaps she guessed a little of the fortunes of the battle that was being
+waged within him. Perhaps not. Whatever the trend of her thoughts, she did
+not draw away from him.... Perhaps the breath of night, fresh and clean and
+fragrant with the odor of the fields and hedges, sweeping into her face
+with velvety caress, rendered her drowsy. Presently the silken lashes
+drooped, fluttering upon her cheeks, the tired and happy smile hovered
+about her lips....
+
+In something less than half an hour of this wild driving, Kirkwood roused
+out of his reverie sufficiently to become sensible that the speed was
+slackening. Incoherent snatches of sentences, fragments of words and
+phrases spoken by Brentwick and the mechanician, were flung back past his
+ears by the rushing wind. Shielding his eyes he could see dimly that the
+mechanician was tinkering (apparently) with the driving gear. Then, their
+pace continuing steadily to abate, he heard Brentwick fling at the man a
+sharp-toned and querulously impatient question: What was the trouble? His
+reply came in a single word, not distinguishable.
+
+The girl sat up, opening her eyes, disengaging her arm.
+
+Kirkwood bent forward and touched Brentwick on the shoulder; the latter
+turned to him a face lined with deep concern.
+
+"Trouble," he announced superfluously. "I fear we have blundered."
+
+"What is it?" asked Dorothy in a troubled voice.
+
+"Petrol seems to be running low. Charles here" (he referred to the
+mechanician) "says the tank must be leaking. We'll go on as best we can and
+try to find an inn. Fortunately, most of the inns nowadays keep supplies of
+petrol for just such emergencies."
+
+"Are we--? Do you think--?"
+
+"Oh, no; not a bit of danger of that," returned Brentwick hastily. "They'll
+not catch up with us this night. That is a very inferior car they have,--so
+Charles says, at least; nothing to compare with this. If I'm not in error,
+there's the Crown and Mitre just ahead; we'll make it, fill our tanks, and
+be off again before they can make up half their loss."
+
+Dorothy looked anxiously to Kirkwood, her lips forming an unuttered query:
+What did he think?
+
+"Don't worry; we'll have no trouble," he assured her stoutly; "the
+chauffeur knows, undoubtedly."
+
+None the less he was moved to stand up in the tonneau, conscious of the
+presence of the traveling bag, snug between his feet, as well as of the
+weight of Calendar's revolver in his pocket, while he stared back along the
+road.
+
+There was nothing to be seen of their persecutors.
+
+The car continued to crawl. Five minutes dragged out tediously. Gradually
+they, drew abreast a tavern standing back a distance from the road,
+embowered in a grove of trees between whose ancient boles the tap-room
+windows shone enticingly, aglow with comfortable light. A creaking
+sign-board, much worn by weather and age, swinging from a roadside post,
+confirmed the accuracy of Brentwick's surmise, announcing that here stood
+the Crown and Mitre, house of entertainment for man and beast.
+
+Sluggishly the car rolled up before it and came to a dead and silent halt.
+Charles, the mechanician, jumping out, ran hastily up the path towards the
+inn. In the car Brentwick turned again, his eyes curiously bright in the
+starlight, his forehead quaintly furrowed, his voice apologetic.
+
+"It may take a few minutes," he said undecidedly, plainly endeavoring to
+cover up his own dark doubts. "My dear," to the girl, "if I have brought
+trouble upon you in this wise, I shall never earn my own forgiveness."
+
+Kirkwood stood up again, watchful, attentive to the sounds of night; but
+the voice of the pursuing motor-car was not of their company. "I hear
+nothing," he announced.
+
+"You will forgive me,--won't you, my dear?--for causing you these few
+moments of needless anxiety?" pleaded the old gentleman, his tone
+tremulous.
+
+"As if you could be blamed!" protested the girl. "You mustn't think of it
+that way. Fancy, what should we have done without you!"
+
+"I'm afraid I have been very clumsy," sighed Brentwick, "clumsy and
+impulsive ... Kirkwood, do you hear anything?"
+
+"Not yet, sir."
+
+"Perhaps," suggested Brentwick a little later, "perhaps we had better
+alight and go up to the inn. It would be more cosy there, especially if the
+petrol proves hard to obtain, and we have long to wait."
+
+"I should like that," assented the girl decidedly.
+
+Kirkwood nodded his approval, opened the door and jumped out to assist her;
+then picked up the bag and followed the pair,--Brentwick leading the way
+with Dorothy on his arm.
+
+At the doorway of the Crown and Mitre, Charles met them evidently seriously
+disturbed. "No petrol to be had here, sir," he announced reluctantly; "but
+the landlord will send to the next inn, a mile up the road, for some. You
+will have to be patient, I'm afraid, sir."
+
+"Very well. Get some one to help you push the car in from the road,"
+ordered Brentwick; "we will be waiting in one of the private parlors."
+
+"Yes, sir; thank you, sir." The mechanician touched the visor of his cap
+and hurried off.
+
+"Come, Kirkwood." Gently Brentwick drew the girl in with him.
+
+Kirkwood lingered momentarily on the doorstep, to listen acutely. But the
+wind was blowing into that quarter whence they had come, and he could hear
+naught save the soughing in the trees, together with an occasional burst
+of rude rustic laughter from the tap-room. Lifting his shoulders in dumb
+dismay, and endeavoring to compose his features, he entered the tavern.
+
+
+
+
+II----THE CROWN AND MITRE
+
+A rosy-cheeked and beaming landlady met him in the corridor and, all bows
+and smiles, ushered him into a private parlor reserved for the party,
+immediately bustling off in a desperate flurry, to secure refreshments
+desired by Brentwick.
+
+The girl had seated herself on one end of an extremely comfortless lounge
+and was making a palpable effort to seem at ease. Brentwick stood at one of
+the windows, shoulders rounded and head bent, hands clasped behind his back
+as he peered out into the night. Kirkwood dropped the traveling bag beneath
+a chair the farthest removed from the doorway, and took to pacing the
+floor.
+
+In a corner of the room a tall grandfather's clock ticked off ten
+interminable minutes. For some reason unconscionably delaying, the landlady
+did not reappear. Brentwick, abruptly turning from the window, remarked
+the fact querulously, then drew a chair up to a marble-topped table in the
+middle of the floor.
+
+"My dear," he requested the girl, "will you oblige me by sitting over here?
+And Philip, bring up a chair, if you will. We must not permit ourselves to
+worry, and I have something here which may, perhaps, engage your interest
+for a while."
+
+To humor him and alleviate his evident distress of mind, they acceded.
+Kirkwood found himself seated opposite Dorothy, Brentwick between them.
+After some hesitation, made the more notable by an air of uneasiness
+which sat oddly on his shoulders, whose composure and confident mien had
+theretofore been so complete and so reassuring, the elder gentleman fumbled
+in an inner coat-pocket and brought to light a small black leather wallet.
+He seemed to be on the point of opening it when hurried footfalls sounded
+in the hallway. Brentwick placed the wallet, still with its secret intact,
+on the table before him, as Charles burst unceremoniously in, leaving the
+door wide open.
+
+"Mr. Brentwick, sir!" he cried gustily. "That other car--"
+
+With a smothered ejaculation Kirkwood leaped to his feet, tugging at the
+weapon in his pocket. In another instant he had the revolver exposed.
+The girl's cry of alarm, interrupting the machinist, fixed Brentwick's
+attention on the young man. He, too, stood up, reaching over very quickly,
+to clamp strong supple fingers round Kirkwood's wrist, while with the other
+hand he laid hold of the revolver and by a single twist wrenched it away.
+
+Kirkwood turned upon him in fury. "So!" he cried, shaking with passion.
+"This is what your hospitality meant! You're going to--"
+
+"My dear young friend," interrupted Brentwick with a flash of impatience,
+"remember that if I had designed to betray you, I could have asked no
+better opportunity than when you were my guest under my own roof."
+
+"But--hang it all, Brentwick!" expostulated Kirkwood, ashamed and contrite,
+but worked upon by desperate apprehension; "I didn't mean that, but--"
+
+"Would you have bullets flying when she is near?" demanded Brentwick
+scathingly. Hastily he slipped the revolver upon a little shelf beneath the
+table-top. "Sir!" he informed Kirkwood with some heat, "I love you as my
+own son, but you're a young fool!... as I have been, in my time ... and as
+I would to Heaven I might be again! Be advised, Philip,--be calm. Can't you
+see it's the only way to save your treasure?"
+
+"Hang the jewels!" retorted Kirkwood warmly. "What--"
+
+"Sir, who said anything about the jewels?"
+
+As Brentwick spoke, Calendar's corpulent figure filled the doorway;
+Stryker's weather-worn features loomed over his shoulder, distorted in a
+cheerful leer.
+
+"As to the jewels," announced the fat adventurer, "I've got a word to say,
+if you put it to me that way."
+
+He paused on the threshold, partly for dramatic effect, partly for his own
+satisfaction, his quick eyes darting from face to face of the four people
+whom he had caught so unexpectedly. A shade of complacency colored his
+expression, and he smiled evilly beneath the coarse short thatch of his
+gray mustache. In his hand a revolver appeared, poised for immediate use if
+there were need.
+
+There was none. Brentwick, at his primal appearance, had dropped a
+peremptory hand on Kirkwood's shoulder, forcing the young man back to his
+seat; at the same time he resumed his own. The girl had not stirred from
+hers since the first alarm; she sat as if transfixed with terror, leaning
+forward with her elbows on the table, her hands tightly clasped, her face,
+a little blanched, turned to the door. But her scarlet lips were set and
+firm with inflexible purpose, and her brown eyes met Calendar's with a look
+level and unflinching. Beyond this she gave no sign of recognition.
+
+Nearest of the four to the adventurers was Charles, the mechanician, paused
+in affrighted astonishment at sight of the revolver. Calendar, choosing to
+advance suddenly, poked the muzzle of the weapon jocularly in the man's
+ribs. "Beat it, Four-eyes!" he snapped. "This is your cue to duck! Get out
+of my way."
+
+The mechanician jumped as if shot, then hastily, retreated to the table,
+his sallow features working beneath the goggle-mask which had excited the
+fat adventurer's scorn.
+
+"Come right in, Cap'n," Calendar threw over one shoulder; "come in, shut
+the door and lock it. Let's all be sociable, and have a nice quiet time."
+
+Stryker obeyed, with a derisive grimace for Kirkwood.
+
+Calendar, advancing jauntily to a point within a yard of the table,
+stopped, smiling affably down upon his prospective victims, and airily
+twirling his revolver.
+
+"_Good_ evening, all!" he saluted them blandly. "Dorothy, my child," with
+assumed concern, "you're looking a trifle upset; I'm afraid you've been
+keeping late hours. Little girls must be careful, you know, or they lose
+the bloom of roses in their cheeks.... Mr. Kirkwood, it's a pleasure to
+meet you again! Permit me to paraphrase your most sound advice, and remind
+you that pistol-shots are apt to attract undesirable attention. It wouldn't
+be wise for _you_ to bring the police about our ears. I believe that
+in substance such was your sapient counsel to me in the cabin of the
+_Alethea_; was it not?... And you, sir!"--fixing Brentwick with a cold
+unfriendly eye. "You animated fossil, what d'you mean by telling me to go
+to the devil?... But let that pass; I hold no grudge. What might your name
+be?"
+
+[Illustration: "_Good_ evening, all!" he saluted them blandly.]
+
+"It might be Brentwick," said that gentleman placidly.
+
+"Brentwick, eh? Well, I like a man of spirit. But permit me to advise
+you--"
+
+"Gladly," nodded Brentwick.
+
+"Eh?... Don't come a second time between father and daughter; another man
+might not be as patient as I, Mister Brentwick. There's a law in the land,
+if you don't happen to know it."
+
+"I congratulate you on your success in evading it," observed Brentwick,
+undisturbed. "And it was considerate of you not to employ it in this
+instance." Then, with a sharp change of tone, "Come, sir!" he demanded.
+"You have unwarrantably intruded in this room, which I have engaged for my
+private use. Get through with your business and be off with you."
+
+"All in my good time, my antediluvian friend. When I've wound up my
+business here I'll go--not before. But, just to oblige you, we'll get down
+to it.... Kirkwood, you have a revolver of mine. Be good enough to return
+it."
+
+"I have it here,--under the table," interrupted Brentwick suavely. "Shall I
+hand it to you?"
+
+"By the muzzle, if you please. Be very careful; this one's loaded, too--apt
+to explode any minute."
+
+To Kirkwood's intense disgust Brentwick quietly slipped one hand beneath
+the table and, placing the revolver on its top, delicately with his
+finger-tips shoved it toward the farther edge. With a grunt of approval,
+Calendar swept the weapon up and into his pocket.
+
+"Any more ordnance?" he inquired briskly, eyes moving alertly from face to
+face. "No matter; you wouldn't dare use 'em anyway. And I'm about done.
+Dorothy, my dear, it's high time you returned to your father's protection.
+Where's that gladstone bag?"
+
+"In my traveling bag," the girl told him in a toneless voice.
+
+"Then you may bring it along. You may also say good night to the kind
+gentlemen."
+
+Dorothy did not move; her pallor grew more intense and Kirkwood saw her
+knuckles tighten beneath the gloves. Otherwise her mouth seemed to grow
+more straight and hard.
+
+"Dorothy!" cried the adventurer with a touch of displeasure. "You heard
+me?"
+
+"I heard you," she replied a little wearily, more than a little
+contemptuously. "Don't mind him, please, Mr. Kirkwood!"--with an appealing
+gesture, as Kirkwood, unable to contain himself, moved restlessly in his
+chair, threatening to rise. "Don't say anything. I have no intention
+whatever of going with this man."
+
+Calendar's features twitched nervously; he chewed a corner of his mustache,
+fixing the girl with a black stare. "I presume," he remarked after a
+moment, with slow deliberation, "you're aware that, as your father, I am in
+a position to compel you to accompany me."
+
+"I shall not go with you," iterated Dorothy in a level tone. "You may
+threaten me, but--I shall not go. Mr. Brentwick and Mr. Kirkwood are taking
+me to--friends, who will give me a home until I can find a way to take care
+of myself. That is all I have to say to you."
+
+"Bravo, my dear!" cried Brentwick encouragingly.
+
+"Mind your business, sir!" thundered Calendar, his face darkening. Then, to
+Dorothy, "You understand, I trust, what this means?" he demanded. "I offer
+you a home--and a good one. Refuse, and you work for your living, my girl!
+You've forfeited your legacy--"
+
+"I know, I know," she told him in cold disdain. "I am content. Won't you be
+kind enough to leave me alone?"
+
+For a breath, Calendar glowered over her; then, "I presume," he observed,
+"that all these heroics are inspired by that whipper-snapper, Kirkwood. Do
+you know that he hasn't a brass farthing to bless himself with?"
+
+"What has that--?" cried the girl indignantly.
+
+"Why, it has everything to do with me, my child. As your doting parent, I
+can't consent to your marrying nothing-a-year.... For I surmise you intend
+to marry this Mr. Kirkwood, don't you?"
+
+There followed a little interval of silence, while the warm blood flamed in
+the girl's face and the red lips trembled as she faced her tormentor. Then,
+with a quaver that escaped her control, "If Mr. Kirkwood asks me, I shall,"
+she stated very simply.
+
+"That," interposed Kirkwood, "is completely understood." His gaze sought
+her eyes, but she looked away.
+
+"You forget that I am your father," sneered Calendar; "and that you are a
+minor. I can refuse my consent."
+
+"But you won't," Kirkwood told him with assurance.
+
+The adventurer stared. "No," he agreed, after slight hesitation; "no,
+I shan't interfere. Take her, my boy, if you want her--and a father's
+blessing into the bargain. The Lord knows I've troubles enough; a parent's
+lot is not what it's cracked up to be." He paused, leering, ironic.
+"But,"--deliberately, "there's still this other matter of the gladstone
+bag. I don't mind abandoning my parental authority, when my child's
+happiness is concerned, but as for my property--"
+
+"It is not your property," interrupted the girl.
+
+"It was your mother's, dear child. It's now mine."
+
+"I dispute that assertion," Kirkwood put in.
+
+"You may dispute it till the cows come home, my boy: the fact will remain
+that I intend to take my property with me when I leave this room, whether
+you like it or not. Now are you disposed to continue the argument, or may I
+count on your being sensible?"
+
+"You may put away your revolver, if that's what you mean," said Kirkwood.
+"We certainly shan't oppose you with violence, but I warn you that Scotland
+Yard--"
+
+"Oh, that be blowed!" the adventurer snorted in disgust. "I can sail
+circles round any tec. that ever blew out of Scotland Yard! Give me an
+hour's start, and you're free to do all the funny business you've a mind
+to, with--Scotland Yard!"
+
+"Then you admit," queried Brentwick civilly, "that you've no legal title to
+the jewels in dispute?"
+
+"Look here, my friend," chuckled Calendar, "when you catch me admitting
+anything, you write it down in your little book and tell the bobby on
+the corner. Just at present I've got other business than to stand round
+admitting anything about anything.... Cap'n, let's have that bag of my
+dutiful daughter's."
+
+"'Ere you are." Stryker spoke for the first time since entering the room,
+taking the valise from beneath the chair and depositing it on the table.
+
+"Well, we shan't take anything that doesn't belong to us," laughed
+Calendar, fumbling with the catch; "not even so small a matter as my own
+child's traveling bag. A small--heavy--gladstone bag," he grunted, opening
+the valise and plunging in one greedy hand, "will--just--about--do for
+mine!" With which he produced the article mentioned. "This for the discard,
+Cap'n," he laughed contentedly, pushing the girl's valise aside; and,
+rumbling with stentorian mirth, stood beaming benignantly over the
+assembled company.
+
+"Why," he exclaimed, "this moment is worth all it cost me! My children,
+I forgive you freely. Mr. Kirkwood, I felicitate you cordially on having
+secured a most expensive wife. Really--d'you know?--I feel as if I ought to
+do a little something for you both." Gurgling with delight he smote his fat
+palms together. "I just tell you what," he resumed, "no one yet ever called
+Georgie Calendar a tight-wad. I just believe I'm going to make you kids a
+handsome wedding present.... The good Lord knows there's enough of this for
+a fellow to be a little generous and never miss it!"
+
+The thick mottled fingers tore nervously at the catch; eventually he got
+the bag open. Those about the table bent forward, all quickened by the
+prospect of for the first time beholding the treasure over which they had
+fought, for which they had suffered, so long....
+
+A heady and luscious fragrance pervaded the atmosphere, exhaling from the
+open mouth of the bag. A silence, indefinitely sustained, impressed itself
+upon the little audience,--a breathless pause ended eventually by a sharp
+snap of Calendar's teeth. "_Mmm_!" grunted the adventurer in bewilderment.
+He began to pant.
+
+Abruptly his heavy hands delved into the contents of the bag, like the paws
+of a terrier digging in earth. To Kirkwood the air seemed temporarily thick
+with flying objects. Beneath his astonished eyes a towel fell upon the
+table--a crumpled, soiled towel, bearing on its dingy hem the inscription
+in indelible ink: "_Hotel du Commerce, Anvers_." A tooth-mug of substantial
+earthenware dropped to the floor with a crash. A slimy soap-dish of the
+same manufacture slid across the table and into Brentwick's lap. A battered
+alarm clock with never a tick left in its abused carcass rang vacuously as
+it fell by the open bag.... The remainder was--oranges: a dozen or more
+small, round, golden globes of ripe fruit, perhaps a shade overripe,
+therefore the more aromatic.
+
+The adventurer ripped out an oath. "Mulready, by the living God!" he raged
+in fury. "Done up, I swear! Done by that infernal sneak--me, blind as a
+bat!"
+
+He fell suddenly silent, the blood congesting in his face; as suddenly
+broke forth again, haranguing the company.
+
+"That's why he went out and bought those damned oranges, is it? Think of
+it--me sitting in the hotel in Antwerp and him lugging in oranges by the
+bagful because he was fond of fruit! When did he do it? How do I know? If I
+knew, would I be here and him the devil knows where, this minute? When my
+back was turned, of course, the damned snake! That's why he was so hot
+about picking a fight on the boat, hey? Wanted to get thrown off and take
+to the woods--leaving me with _this_! And that's why he felt so awful
+done up he wouldn't take a hand at hunting you two down, hey?
+Well--by--the--Eternal! I'll camp on his trail for the rest of his
+natural-born days! I'll have his eye-teeth for this, I'll--"
+
+He swayed, gibbering with rage, his countenance frightfully contorted, his
+fat hands shaking as he struggled for expression.
+
+And then, while yet their own astonishment held Dorothy, Kirkwood,
+Brentwick and Stryker speechless, Charles, the mechanician, moved suddenly
+upon the adventurer.
+
+There followed two metallic clicks. Calendar's ravings were abrupted as if
+his tongue had been paralyzed. He fell back a pace, flabby jowls pale and
+shaking, ponderous jaw dropping on his breast, mouth wide and eyes crazed
+as he shook violently before him his thick fleshy wrists--securely
+handcuffed.
+
+Simultaneously the mechanician whirled about, bounded eagerly across the
+floor, and caught Stryker at the door, his dexterous fingers twisting in
+the captain's collar as he jerked him back and tripped him.
+
+"Mr. Kirkwood!" he cried. "Here, please--one moment. Take this man's gun,
+from him, will you?"
+
+Kirkwood sprang to his assistance, and without encountering much trouble,
+succeeded in wresting a Webley from Stryker's limp, flaccid fingers.
+
+Roughly the mechanician shook the man, dragging him to his feet. "Now," he
+ordered sternly, "you march to that corner, stick your nose in it, and be
+good! You can't get away if you try. I've got other men outside, waiting
+for you to come out. Understand?"
+
+Trembling like a whipped cur, Stryker meekly obeyed his instructions to the
+letter.
+
+The mechanician, with a contemptuous laugh leaving him, strode back to
+Calendar, meanwhile whipping off his goggles; and clapped a hearty hand
+upon the adventurer's quaking shoulders.
+
+"Well!" he cried. "And are you still sailing circles round the men
+from Scotland Yard, Simmons, or Bellows, or Sanderson, or Calendar, or
+Crumbstone, or whatever name you prefer to sail under?"
+
+Calendar glared at him aghast; then heaved a profound sigh, shrugged his
+fat shoulders, and bent his head in thought. An instant later he looked up.
+"You can't do it," he informed the detective vehemently; "you haven't got a
+shred of evidence against me! What's there? A pile of oranges and a peck
+of trash! What of it?... Besides," he threatened, "if you pinch me, you'll
+have to take the girl in, too. I swear that whatever stealing was done,
+she did it. I'll not be trapped this way by her and let her off without a
+squeal. Take me--take her; d'you hear?"
+
+"I think," put in the clear, bland accents of Brentwick, "we can consider
+that matter settled. I have here, my man,"--nodding to the adventurer as he
+took up the black leather wallet,--"I have here a little matter which
+may clear up any lingering doubts as to your standing, which you may be
+disposed at present to entertain."
+
+He extracted a slip of cardboard and, at arm's length, laid it on the
+table-edge beneath the adventurer's eyes. The latter, bewildered, bent over
+it for a moment, breathing heavily; then straightened back, shook himself,
+laughed shortly with a mirthless note, and faced the detective.
+
+"It's come with you now, I guess?" he suggested very quietly.
+
+"The Bannister warrant is still out for you," returned the man. "That'll be
+enough to hold you on till extradition papers arrive from the States."
+
+"Oh, I'll waive those; and I won't give you any trouble, either.... I
+reckon," mused the adventurer, jingling his manacles thoughtfully, "I'm a
+back-number, anyway. When a half-grown girl, a half-baked boy, a flub like
+Mulready--damn his eyes!--and a club-footed snipe from Scotland Yard can
+put it all over me this way,... why, I guess it's up to me to go home and
+retire to my country-place up the Hudson." He sighed wearily.
+
+"Yep; time to cut it out. But I would like to be free long enough to get in
+one good lick at that mutt, Mulready. My friend, you get your hands on him,
+and I'll squeal on him till I'm blue in the face. That's a promise."
+
+"You'll have the chance before long," replied the detective. "We received
+a telegram from the Amsterdam police late this afternoon, saying they'd
+picked up Mr. Mulready with a woman named Hallam, and were holding them
+on suspicion. It seems,"--turning to Brentwick,--"they were opening
+negotiations for the sale of a lot of stones, and seemed in such a precious
+hurry that the diamond merchant's suspicions were roused. We're sending
+over for them, Miss Calendar, so you can make your mind easy about your
+jewels; you'll have them back in a few days."
+
+"Thank you," said the girl with an effort.
+
+"Well," the adventurer delivered his peroration, "I certainly am blame'
+glad to hear it. 'Twouldn't 've been a square deal, any other way."
+
+He paused, looking his erstwhile dupes over with a melancholy eye; then,
+with an uncertain nod comprehending the girl, Kirkwood and Brentwick, "So
+long!" he said thickly; and turned, with the detective's hand under his arm
+and, accompanied by the thoroughly cowed Stryker, waddled out of the room.
+
+III----THE JOURNEY'S END
+
+Kirkwood, following the exodus, closed the door with elaborate care and
+slowly, deep in thought, returned to the table.
+
+Dorothy seemed not to have moved, save to place her elbows on the marble
+slab, and rest her cheeks between hands that remained clenched, as they had
+been in the greatest stress of her emotion. The color had returned to
+her face, with a slightly enhanced depth of hue to the credit of her
+excitement. Her cheeks were hot, her eyes starlike beneath the woven, massy
+sunlight of her hair. Temporarily unconscious of her surroundings she
+stared steadfastly before her, thoughts astray in the irridescent glamour
+of the dreams that were to come....
+
+Brentwick had slipped down in his chair, resting his silvered head upon its
+back, and was smiling serenely up at the low yellow ceiling. Before him on
+the table his long white fingers were drumming an inaudible tune. Presently
+rousing, he caught Kirkwood's eye and smiled sheepishly, like a child
+caught in innocent mischief.
+
+The younger man grinned broadly. "And you were responsible for all that!"
+he commented, infinitely amused.
+
+Brentwick nodded, twinkling self-satisfaction. "I contrived it all," he
+said; "neat, I call it, too." His old eyes brightened with reminiscent
+enjoyment. "Inspiration!" he crowed softly. "Inspiration, pure and simple.
+I'd been worrying my wits for fully five minutes before Wotton settled the
+matter by telling me about the captain's hiring of the motor-car. Then,
+in a flash, I had it.... I talked with Charles by telephone,--his name is
+really Charles, by, the bye,--overcame his conscientious scruples about
+playing his fish when they were already all but landed, and settled the
+artistic details."
+
+He chuckled delightedly. "It's the instinct," he declared emphatically,
+"the instinct for adventure. I knew it was in me, latent somewhere, but
+never till this day did it get the opportunity to assert itself. A born
+adventurer--that's what I am!... You see, it was essential that they should
+believe we were frightened and running from them; that way, they would be
+sure to run after us. Why, we might have baited a dozen traps and failed
+to lure them into my house, after that stout scoundrel knew you'd had the
+chance to tell me the whole yarn... Odd!"
+
+"Weren't you taking chances, you and Charles?" asked Kirkwood curiously.
+
+"Precious few. There was another motor from Scotland Yard trailing Captain
+Stryker's. If they had run past, or turned aside, they would have been
+overhauled in short order."
+
+He relapsed into his whimsical reverie; the wistful look returned to his
+eyes, replacing the glow of triumph and pleasure. And he sighed a little
+regretfully.
+
+"What I don't understand," contended Kirkwood, "is how you convinced
+Calendar that he couldn't get revenge by pressing his charge against Miss
+Calendar--Dorothy."
+
+"Oh-h?" Mr. Brentwick elevated his fine white eyebrows and sat up briskly.
+"My dear boy, that was the most delectable dish on the entire menu. I have
+been reserving it, I don't mind owning, that I might better enjoy the full
+relish of it.... I may answer you best, perhaps, by asking you to scan what
+I offered to the fat scoundrel's respectful consideration, my dear sir."
+
+He leveled a forefinger at the card.
+
+At first glance it conveyed nothing to the younger man's benighted
+intelligence. He puzzled over it, twisting his brows out of alignment.
+An ordinary oblong slip of thin white cardboard, it was engraved in fine
+script as follows:
+
+MR. GEORGE BURGOYNE CALENDAR
+
+81, ASPEN VILLAS, S. W.
+
+"Oh!" exclaimed Kirkwood at length, standing up, his face bright with
+understanding. "_You_--!"
+
+"I," laconically assented the elder man.
+
+Impulsively Kirkwood leaned across the table. "Dorothy," he said tenderly;
+and when the girl's happy eyes met his, quietly drew her attention to the
+card.
+
+Then he rose hastily, and went over to stand by the window, staring mistily
+into the blank face of night beyond its unseen panes.
+
+Behind him there was a confusion of little noises; the sound of a chair
+pushed hurriedly aside, a rustle of skirts, a happy sob or two, low voices
+intermingling; sighs.... Out of it finally came the father's accents.
+
+"There, there, my dear! My dearest dear!" protested the old gentleman.
+"Positively I don't deserve a tithe of this. I--" The young old voice
+quavered and broke, in a happy laugh.... "You must understand," he
+continued more soberly, "that no consideration of any sort is due me. When
+we married, I was too old for your mother, child; we both knew it, both
+believed it would never matter. But it did. By her wish, I went back
+to America; we were to see what separation would do to heal the wounds
+dissension had caused. It was a very foolish experiment. Your mother died
+before I could return...."
+
+There fell a silence, again broken by the father. "After that I was in
+no haste to return. But some years ago, I came to London to live. I
+communicated with the old colonel, asking permission to see you. It was
+refused in a manner which precluded the subject being reopened by me: I
+was informed that if I persisted in attempting to see you, you would be
+disinherited.... He was very angry with me--justly, I admit.... One must
+grow old before one can see how unforgivably one was wrong in youth.... So
+I settled down to a quiet old age, determined not to disturb you in your
+happiness.... Ah--Kirkwood!"
+
+The old gentleman was standing, his arm around his daughter's shoulders,
+when Kirkwood turned.
+
+"Come here, Philip; I'm explaining to Dorothy, but you should hear.... The
+evening I called on you, dear boy, at the Pless, returning home I received
+a message from my solicitors, whom I had instructed to keep an eye on
+Dorothy's welfare. They informed me that she had disappeared. Naturally I
+canceled my plans to go to Munich, and stayed, employing detectives. One
+of the first things they discovered was that Dorothy had run off with an
+elderly person calling himself George Burgoyne Calendar--the name I had
+discarded when I found that to acknowledge me would imperil my daughter's
+fortune.... The investigations went deeper; Charles--let us continue to
+call him--had been to see me only this afternoon, to inform me of the plot
+they had discovered. This Hallam woman and her son--it seems that they were
+legitimately in the line of inheritance, Dorothy out of the way. But the
+woman was--ah--a bad lot. Somehow she got into communication with this fat
+rogue and together they plotted it out. Charles doesn't believe that the
+Hallam woman expected to enjoy the Burgoyne estates for very many days. Her
+plan was to step in when Dorothy stepped out, gather up what she could,
+realize on it, and decamp. That is why there was so much excitement about
+the jewels: naturally the most valuable item on her list, the most easy to
+convert into cash.... The man Mulready we do not place; he seems to have
+been a shady character the fat rogue picked up somewhere. The latter's
+ordinary line of business was diamond smuggling, though he would condescend
+to almost anything in order to turn a dishonest penny....
+
+"That seems to exhaust the subject. But one word more.... Dorothy, I am
+old enough and have suffered enough to know the wisdom of seizing one's
+happiness when one may. My dear, a little while ago, you did a very brave
+deed. Under fire you said a most courageous, womanly, creditable thing. And
+Philip's rejoinder was only second in nobility to yours.... I do hope to
+goodness that you two blessed youngsters won't let any addlepated scruples
+stand between yourselves and--the prize of Romance, your inalienable
+inheritance!"
+
+Abruptly Brentwick, who was no longer Brentwick, but the actual Calendar,
+released the girl from his embrace and hopped nimbly toward the door.
+"Really, I must see about that petrol!" he cried. "While it's perfectly
+true that Charles lied about it's running out, we must be getting on. I'll
+call you when we're ready to start."
+
+And the door crashed to behind him....
+
+Between them was the table. Beyond it the girl stood with head erect, dim
+tears glimmering on the lashes of those eyes with which she met Philip's
+steady gaze so fearlessly.
+
+Singing about them, the silence deepened. Fascinated, though his heart was
+faint with longing, Kirkwood faltered on the threshold of his kingdom.
+
+"Dorothy!... You did mean it, dear?"
+
+She laughed, a little, low, sobbing laugh that had its source deep in the
+hidden sanctuary of her heart of a child.
+
+"I meant it, my dearest.... If you'll have a girl so bold and forward, who
+can't wait till she's asked but throws herself into the arms of the man she
+loves--Philip, I meant it, every word!..."
+
+And as he went to her swiftly, round the table, she turned to meet him,
+arms uplifted, her scarlet lips a-tremble, the brown and bewitching lashes
+drooping over her wondrously lighted eyes....
+
+After a time Philip Kirkwood laughed aloud.
+
+And there was that quality in the ring of his laughter that caused the
+Shade of Care, which had for the past ten minutes been uneasily luffing and
+filling in the offing and, on the whole, steadily diminishing and becoming
+more pale and wan and emaciated and indistinct--there was that in the
+laughter of Philip Kirkwood, I say, which caused the Shade of Care to utter
+a hollow croak of despair as, incontinently, it vanished out of his life.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Black Bag, by Louis Joseph Vance
+
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Black Bag, by Louis Joseph Vance
+#3 in our series by Louis Joseph Vance
+
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+*****These eBooks Were Prepared By Thousands of Volunteers!*****
+
+
+Title: The Black Bag
+
+Author: Louis Joseph Vance
+
+Release Date: January, 2006 [EBook #9779]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on October 15, 2003]
+
+Edition: 10
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE BLACK BAG ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Suzanne Shell, Leonard Johnson
+and PG Distributed Proofreading.
+
+
+
+
+THE BLACK BAG
+
+
+By LOUIS JOSEPH VANCE
+
+
+
+WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY THOMAS FOGARTY
+
+
+1908
+
+
+
+
+TO MY MOTHER
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+CHAPTER
+
+    I. DIVERSIONS OF A RUINED GENTLEMAN
+
+   II. "AND SOME THERE BE WHO HAVE ADVENTURES THRUST UPON THEM"
+
+  III. CALENDAR'S DAUGHTER
+
+   IV. 9 FROGNALL STREET, W. C.
+
+    V. THE MYSTERY OF A FOUR-WHEELER
+
+   VI. "BELOW BRIDGE"
+
+  VII. DIVERSIONS OF A RUINED GENTLEMAN--RESUMED
+
+ VIII. MADAME L'INTRIGANTE
+
+   IX. AGAIN "BELOW BRIDGE"; AND BEYOND
+
+    X. DESPERATE MEASURES
+
+   XI. OFF THE NORE
+
+  XII. PICARESQUE PASSAGES
+
+ XIII. A PRIMER OF PROGRESSIVE CRIME
+
+  XIV. STRATAGEMS AND SPOILS
+
+   XV. REFUGEES
+
+  XVI. TRAVELS WITH A CHAPERON
+
+ XVII. ROGUES AND VAGABONDS
+
+XVIII. ADVENTURERS' LUCK
+
+  XIX. i--THE UXBRIDGE ROAD
+
+      ii--THE CROWN AND MITRE
+
+     iii--THE JOURNEY'S END
+
+
+THE BLACK BAG
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+
+DIVERSIONS OF A RUINED GENTLEMAN
+
+Upon a certain dreary April afternoon in the year of grace, 1906, the
+apprehensions of Philip Kirkwood, Esquire, _Artist-peintre_, were enlivened
+by the discovery that he was occupying that singularly distressing social
+position, which may be summed up succinctly in a phrase through long usage
+grown proverbial: "Alone in London." These three words have come to connote
+in our understanding so much of human misery, that to Mr. Kirkwood they
+seemed to epitomize absolutely, if not happily, the various circumstances
+attendant upon the predicament wherein he found himself. Inevitably an
+extremist, because of his youth, (he had just turned twenty-five), he
+took no count of mitigating matters, and would hotly have resented the
+suggestion that his case was anything but altogether deplorable and
+forlorn.
+
+That he was not actually at the end of his resources went for nothing; he
+held the distinction a quibble, mockingly immaterial,--like the store of
+guineas in his pocket, too insignificant for mention when contrasted with
+his needs. And his base of supplies, the American city of his nativity,
+whence--and not without a glow of pride in his secret heart--he was wont to
+register at foreign hostelries, had been arbitrarily cut off from him by
+one of those accidents sardonically classified by insurance and express
+corporations as Acts of God.
+
+Now to one who has lived all his days serenely in accord with the dictates
+of his own sweet will, taking no thought for the morrow, such a situation
+naturally seems both appalling and intolerable, at the first blush. It must
+be confessed that, to begin with, Kirkwood drew a long and disconsolate
+face over his fix. And in that black hour, primitive of its kind in his
+brief span, he became conscious of a sinister apparition taking shape at
+his elbow--a shade of darkness which, clouting him on the back with a
+skeleton hand, croaked hollow salutations in his ear.
+
+"Come, Mr. Kirkwood, come!" its mirthless accents rallied him. "Have you
+no welcome for me?--you, who have been permitted to live the quarter of a
+century without making my acquaintance? Surely, now, it's high time we were
+learning something of one another, you and I!" "But I don't understand,"
+returned Kirkwood blankly. "I don't know you--"
+
+"True! But you shall: I am the Shade of Care--"
+
+"Dull Care!" murmured Kirkwood, bewildered and dismayed; for the visitation
+had come upon him with little presage and no invitation whatever.
+
+"Dull Care," the Shade assured him. "Dull Care am I--and Care that's
+anything but dull, into the bargain: Care that's like a keen pain in your
+body, Care that lives a horror in your mind, Care that darkens your days
+and flavors with bitter poison all your nights, Care that--"
+
+But Kirkwood would not listen further. Courageously submissive to his
+destiny, knowing in his heart that the Shade had come to stay, he yet found
+spirit to shake himself with a dogged air, to lift his chin, set the strong
+muscles of his jaw, and smile that homely wholesome smile which was his
+peculiarly.
+
+"Very well," he accepted the irremediable with grim humor; "what must be,
+must. I don't pretend to be glad to see you, but--you're free to stay as
+long as you find the climate agreeable. I warn you I shan't whine. Lots of
+men, hundreds and hundreds of 'em, have slept tight o' nights with you for
+bedfellow; if they could grin and bear you, I believe I can."
+
+Now Care mocked him with a sardonic laugh, and sought to tighten upon his
+shoulders its bony grasp; but Kirkwood resolutely shrugged it off and went
+in search of man's most faithful dumb friend, to wit, his pipe; the which,
+when found and filled, he lighted with a spill twisted from the envelope of
+a cable message which had been vicariously responsible for his introduction
+to the Shade of Care.
+
+"It's about time," he announced, watching the paper blacken and burn in the
+grate fire, "that I was doing something to prove my title to a living." And
+this was all his valedictory to a vanished competence. "Anyway," he added
+hastily, as if fearful lest Care, overhearing, might have read into his
+tone a trace of vain repining, "anyway, I'm a sight better off than those
+poor devils over there! I really have a great deal to be thankful for, now
+that my attention's drawn to it."
+
+For the ensuing few minutes he thought it all over, soberly but with a
+stout heart; standing at a window of his bedroom in the Hotel Pless, hands
+deep in trouser pockets, pipe fuming voluminously, his gaze wandering out
+over a blurred infinitude of wet shining roofs and sooty chimney-pots: all
+of London that a lowering drizzle would let him see, and withal by no means
+a cheering prospect, nor yet one calculated to offset the disheartening
+influence of the indomitable Shade of Care. But the truth is that
+Kirkwood's brain comprehended little that his eyes perceived; his thoughts
+were with his heart, and that was half a world away and sick with pity
+for another and a fairer city, stricken in the flower of her loveliness,
+writhing in Promethean agony upon her storied hills.
+
+There came a rapping at the door.
+
+Kirkwood removed the pipe from between his teeth long enough to say "Come
+in!" pleasantly.
+
+The knob was turned, the door opened. Kirkwood, swinging on one heel,
+beheld hesitant upon the threshold a diminutive figure in the livery of the
+Pless pages.
+
+"Mister Kirkwood?"
+
+Kirkwood nodded.
+
+"Gentleman to see you, sir."
+
+Kirkwood nodded again, smiling. "Show him up, please," he said. But before
+the words were fairly out of his mouth a footfall sounded in the corridor,
+a hand was placed upon the shoulder of the page, gently but with decision
+swinging him out of the way, and a man stepped into the room.
+
+"Mr. Brentwick!" Kirkwood almost shouted, jumping forward to seize his
+visitor's hand.
+
+"My dear boy!" replied the latter. "I'm delighted to see you. 'Got your
+note not an hour ago, and came at once--you see!"
+
+"It was mighty good of you. Sit down, please. Here are cigars.... Why, a
+moment ago I was the most miserable and lonely mortal on the footstool!"
+
+"I can fancy." The elder man looked up, smiling at Kirkwood from the depths
+of his arm-chair, as the latter stood above him, resting an elbow on
+the mantel. "The management knows me," he offered explanation of his
+unceremonious appearance; "so I took the liberty of following on the heels
+of the bellhop, dear boy. And how are you? Why are you in London, enjoying
+our abominable spring weather? And why the anxious undertone I detected in
+your note?"
+
+He continued to stare curiously into Kirkwood's face. At a glance, this
+Mr. Brentwick was a man of tallish figure and rather slender; with a
+countenance thin and flushed a sensitive pink, out of which his eyes shone,
+keen, alert, humorous, and a trace wistful behind his glasses. His years
+were indeterminate; with the aspect of fifty, the spirit and the verve of
+thirty assorted oddly. But his hands were old, delicate, fine and fragile;
+and the lips beneath the drooping white mustache at times trembled, almost
+imperceptibly, with the generous sentiments that come with mellow age. He
+held his back straight and his head with an air--an air that was not a
+swagger but the sign-token of seasoned experience in the world. The most
+carping could have found no flaw in the quiet taste of his attire. To sum
+up, Kirkwood's very good friend--and his only one then in London--Mr.
+Brentwick looked and was an English gentleman.
+
+"Why?" he persisted, as the younger man hesitated. "I am here to find out.
+To-night I leave for the Continent. In the meantime ..."
+
+"And at midnight I sail for the States," added Kirkwood. "That is mainly
+why I wished to see you--to say good-by, for the time."
+
+"You're going home--" A shadow clouded Brentwick's clear eyes.
+
+"To fight it out, shoulder to shoulder with my brethren in adversity."
+
+The cloud lifted. "That is the spirit!" declared the elder man. "For the
+moment I did you the injustice to believe that you were running away. But
+now I understand. Forgive me.... Pardon, too, the stupidity which I must
+lay at the door of my advancing years; to me the thought of you as a
+Parisian fixture has become such a commonplace, Philip, that the news of
+the disaster hardly stirred me. Now I remember that you are a Californian!"
+
+"I was born in San Francisco," affirmed Kirkwood a bit sadly. "My father
+and mother were buried there ..."
+
+"And your fortune--?"
+
+"I inherited my father's interest in the firm of Kirkwood & Vanderlip; when
+I came over to study painting, I left everything in Vanderlip's hands. The
+business afforded me a handsome living."
+
+"You have heard from Mr. Vanderlip?"
+
+"Fifteen minutes ago." Kirkwood took a cable-form, still damp, from his
+pocket, and handed it to his guest. Unfolding it, the latter read:
+
+"_Kirkwood, Pless, London. Stay where you are no good coming back
+everything gone no insurance letter follows vanderlip_."
+
+"When I got the news in Paris," Kirkwood volunteered, "I tried the banks;
+they refused to honor my drafts. I had a little money in hand,--enough
+to see me home,--so closed the studio and came across. I'm booked on the
+_Minneapolis_, sailing from Tilbury at daybreak; the boat-train leaves at
+eleven-thirty. I had hoped you might be able to dine with me and see me
+off."
+
+In silence Brentwick returned the cable message. Then, with a thoughtful
+look, "You are sure this is wise?" he queried.
+
+"It's the only thing I can see."
+
+"But your partner says--"
+
+"Naturally he thinks that by this time I should have learned to paint well
+enough to support myself for a few months, until he can get things running
+again. Perhaps I might." Brentwick supported the presumption with a decided
+gesture. "But have I a right to leave Vanderlip to fight it out alone? For
+Vanderlip has a wife and kiddies to support; I--"
+
+"Your genius!"
+
+"My ability, such as it is--and that only. It can wait.... No; this means
+simply that I must come down from the clouds, plant my feet on solid earth,
+and get to work."
+
+"The sentiment is sound," admitted Brentwick, "the practice of it, folly.
+Have you stopped to think what part a rising young portrait-painter can
+contribute toward the rebuilding of a devastated city?"
+
+"The painting can wait," reiterated Kirkwood. "I can work like other men."
+
+"You can do yourself and your genius grave injustice. And I fear me you
+will, dear boy. It's in keeping with your heritage of American obstinacy.
+Now if it were a question of money--"
+
+"Mr. Brentwick!" Kirkwood protested vehemently. "I've ample for my present
+needs," he added.
+
+"Of course," conceded Brentwick with a sigh. "I didn't really hope you
+would avail yourself of our friendship. Now there's my home in Aspen
+Villas.... You have seen it?"
+
+"In your absence this afternoon your estimable butler, with commendable
+discretion, kept me without the doors," laughed the young man.
+
+"It's a comfortable home. You would not consent to share it with me
+until--?"
+
+"You are more than good; but honestly, I must sail to-night. I wanted only
+this chance to see you before I left. You'll dine with me, won't you?"
+
+"If you would stay in London, Philip, we would dine together not once but
+many times; as it is, I myself am booked for Munich, to be gone a week,
+on business. I have many affairs needing attention between now and the
+nine-ten train from Victoria. If you will be my guest at Aspen Villas--"
+
+"Please!" begged Kirkwood, with a little laugh of pleasure because of the
+other's insistence. "I only wish I could. Another day--"
+
+"Oh, you will make your million in a year, and return scandalously
+independent. It's in your American blood." Frail white fingers tapped an
+arm of the chair as their owner stared gravely into the fire. "I confess I
+envy you," he observed.
+
+"The opportunity to make a million in a year?" chuckled Kirkwood.
+
+"No. I envy you your Romance."
+
+"The Romance of a Poor Young Man went out of fashion years ago.... No, my
+dear friend; my Romance died a natural death half an hour since."
+
+"There spoke Youth--blind, enviable Youth!... On the contrary, you are but
+turning the leaves of the first chapter of your Romance, Philip."
+
+"Romance is dead," contended the young man stubbornly.
+
+"Long live the King!" Brentwick laughed quietly, still attentive to the
+fire. "Myself when young," he said softly, "did seek Romance, but never
+knew it till its day was done. I'm quite sure that is a poor paraphrase of
+something I have read. In age, one's sight is sharpened--to see Romance in
+another's life, at least. I say I envy you. You have Youth, unconquerable
+Youth, and the world before you.... I must go."
+
+He rose stiffly, as though suddenly made conscious of his age. The old eyes
+peered more than a trifle wistfully, now, into Kirkwood's. "You will not
+fail to call on me by cable, dear boy, if you need--anything? I ask it as
+a favor.... I'm glad you wished to see me before going out of my life. One
+learns to value the friendship of Youth, Philip. Good-by, and good luck
+attend you."
+
+Alone once more, Kirkwood returned to his window. The disappointment he
+felt at being robbed of his anticipated pleasure in Brentwick's company at
+dinner, colored his mood unpleasantly. His musings merged into vacuity,
+into a dull gray mist of hopelessness comparable only to the dismal skies
+then lowering over London-town.
+
+Brentwick was good, but Brentwick was mistaken. There was really nothing
+for Kirkwood to do but to go ahead. But one steamer-trunk remained to be
+packed; the boat-train would leave before midnight, the steamer with the
+morning tide; by the morrow's noon he would be upon the high seas, within
+ten days in New York and among friends; and then ...
+
+The problem of that afterwards perplexed Kirkwood more than he cared to
+own. Brentwick had opened his eyes to the fact that he would be practically
+useless in San Francisco; he could not harbor the thought of going
+back, only to become a charge upon Vanderlip. No; he was resolved that
+thenceforward he must rely upon himself, carve out his own destiny.
+But--would the art that he had cultivated with such assiduity, yield him a
+livelihood if sincerely practised with that end in view? Would the mental
+and physical equipment of a painter, heretofore dilettante, enable him to
+become self-supporting?
+
+Knotting his brows in concentration of effort to divine the future, he
+doubted himself, darkly questioning alike his abilities and his temper
+under trial; neither ere now had ever been put to the test. His eyes became
+somberly wistful, his heart sore with regret of Yesterday--his Yesterday of
+care-free youth and courage, gilded with the ineffable, evanescent glamour
+of Romance--of such Romance, thrice refined of dross, as only he knows who
+has wooed his Art with passion passing the love of woman.
+
+Far away, above the acres of huddled roofs and chimney-pots, the
+storm-mists thinned, lifting transiently; through them, gray, fairy-like,
+the towers of Westminster and the Houses of Parliament bulked monstrous
+and unreal, fading when again the fugitive dun vapors closed down upon the
+city.
+
+Nearer at hand the Shade of Care nudged Kirkwood's elbow, whispering
+subtly. Romance was indeed dead; the world was cold and cruel.
+
+The gloom deepened.
+
+In the cant of modern metaphysics, the moment was psychological.
+
+There came a rapping at the door.
+
+Kirkwood removed the pipe from between his teeth long enough to say "Come
+in!" pleasantly.
+
+The knob was turned, the door opened. Kirkwood, turning on one heel, beheld
+hesitant upon the threshold a diminutive figure in the livery of the Pless
+pages.
+
+"Mr. Kirkwood?"
+
+Kirkwood nodded.
+
+"Gentleman to see you, sir."
+
+Kirkwood nodded again, smiling if somewhat perplexed. Encouraged, the child
+advanced, proffering a silver card-tray at the end of an unnaturally rigid
+forearm. Kirkwood took the card dubiously between thumb and forefinger and
+inspected it without prejudice.
+
+"'George B. Calendar,'" he read. "'George B. Calendar!' But I know no such
+person. Sure there's no mistake, young man?"
+
+The close-cropped, bullet-shaped, British head was agitated in vigorous
+negation, and "Card for Mister Kirkwood!" was mumbled in dispassionate
+accents appropriate to a recitation by rote.
+
+"Very well. But before you show him up, ask this Mr. Calendar if he is
+quite sure he wants to see Philip Kirkwood."
+
+"Yessir."
+
+The child marched out, punctiliously closing the door. Kirkwood tamped
+down the tobacco in his pipe and puffed energetically, dismissing the
+interruption to his reverie as a matter of no consequence--an obvious
+mistake to be rectified by two words with this Mr. Calendar whom he did not
+know. At the knock he had almost hoped it might be Brentwick, returning
+with a changed mind about the bid to dinner.
+
+He regretted Brentwick sincerely. Theirs was a curious sort of
+friendship--extraordinarily close in view of the meagerness of either's
+information about the other, to say nothing of the disparity between their
+ages. Concerning the elder man Kirkwood knew little more than that they had
+met on shipboard, "coming over"; that Brentwick had spent some years in
+America; that he was an Englishman by birth, a cosmopolitan by habit, by
+profession a gentleman (employing that term in its most uncompromisingly
+British significance), and by inclination a collector of "articles of
+virtue and bigotry," in pursuit of which he made frequent excursions to the
+Continent from his residence in a quaint quiet street of Old Brompton. It
+had been during his not infrequent, but ordinarily abbreviated, sojourns in
+Paris that their steamer acquaintance had ripened into an affection almost
+filial on the one hand, almost paternal on the other....
+
+There came a rapping at the door.
+
+Kirkwood removed the pipe from between his teeth long enough to say "Come
+in!" pleasantly.
+
+The knob was turned, the door opened. Kirkwood, swinging on one heel,
+beheld hesitant upon the threshold a rather rotund figure of medium height,
+clad in an expressionless gray lounge suit, with a brown "bowler" hat held
+tentatively in one hand, an umbrella weeping in the other. A voice, which
+was unctuous and insinuative, emanated from the figure.
+
+"Mr. Kirkwood?"
+
+Kirkwood nodded, with some effort recalling the name, so detached had been
+his thoughts since the disappearance of the page.
+
+"Yes, Mr. Calendar--?"
+
+"Are you--ah--busy, Mr. Kirkwood?"
+
+"Are you, Mr. Calendar?" Kirkwood's smile robbed the retort of any flavor
+of incivility.
+
+Encouraged, the man entered, premising that he would detain his host but a
+moment, and readily surrendering hat and umbrella. Kirkwood, putting the
+latter aside, invited his caller to the easy chair which Brentwick had
+occupied by the fireplace.
+
+"It takes the edge off the dampness," Kirkwood explained in deference to
+the other's look of pleased surprise at the cheerful bed of coals. "I'm
+afraid I could never get acclimated to life in a cold, damp room--or a damp
+cold room--such as you Britishers prefer."
+
+"It is grateful," Mr. Calendar agreed, spreading plump and well cared-for
+hands to the warmth. "But you are mistaken; I am as much an American as
+yourself."
+
+"Yes?" Kirkwood looked the man over with more interest, less
+matter-of-course courtesy.
+
+He proved not unprepossessing, this unclassifiable Mr. Calendar; he was
+dressed with some care, his complexion was good, and the fullness of his
+girth, emphasized as it was by a notable lack of inches, bespoke a nature
+genial, easy-going and sybaritic. His dark eyes, heavy-lidded, were
+active--curiously, at times, with a subdued glitter--in a face large,
+round, pink, of which the other most remarkable features were a mustache,
+close-trimmed and showing streaks of gray, a chubby nose, and duplicate
+chins. Mr. Calendar was furthermore possessed of a polished bald spot,
+girdled with a tonsure of silvered hair--circumstances which lent some
+factitious distinction to a personality otherwise commonplace.
+
+His manner might be best described as uneasy with assurance; as though he
+frequently found it necessary to make up for his unimpressive stature by
+assuming an unnatural habit of authority. And there you have him; beyond
+these points, Kirkwood was conscious of no impressions; the man was
+apparently neutral-tinted of mind as well as of body.
+
+"So you knew I was an American, Mr. Calendar?" suggested Kirkwood.
+
+"'Saw your name on the register; we both hail from the same neck of the
+woods, you know."
+
+"I didn't know it, and--"
+
+"Yes; I'm from Frisco, too."
+
+"And I'm sorry."
+
+Mr. Calendar passed five fat fingers nervously over his mustache, glanced
+alertly up at Kirkwood, as if momentarily inclined to question his tone,
+then again stared glumly into the fire; for Kirkwood had maintained an
+attitude purposefully colorless. Not to put too fine a point upon it, be
+believed that his caller was lying; the man's appearance, his mannerisms,
+his voice and enunciation, while they might have been American, seemed all
+un-Californian. To one born and bred in that state, as Kirkwood had been,
+her sons are unmistakably hall-marked.
+
+Now no man lies without motive. This one chose to reaffirm, with a show of
+deep feeling: "Yes; I'm from Frisco, too. We're companions in misfortune."
+
+"I hope not altogether," said Kirkwood politely.
+
+Mr. Calendar drew his own inferences from the response and mustered up a
+show of cheerfulness. "Then you're not completely wiped out?"
+
+"To the contrary, I was hoping you were less unhappy."
+
+"Oh! Then you are--?"
+
+Kirkwood lifted the cable message from the mantel. "I have just heard from
+my partner at home," he said with a faint smile; and quoted: "'Everything
+gone; no insurance.'"
+
+Mr. Calendar pursed his plump lips, whistling inaudibly. "Too bad, too
+bad!" he murmured sympathetically. "We're all hard hit, more or less."
+He lapsed into dejected apathy, from which Kirkwood, growing at length
+impatient, found it necessary to rouse him.
+
+"You wished to see me about something else, I'm sure?"
+
+Mr. Calendar started from his reverie. "Eh? ... I was dreaming. I beg
+pardon. It seems hard to realize, Mr. Kirkwood, that this awful catastrophe
+has overtaken our beloved metropolis--"
+
+The canting phrases wearied Kirkwood; abruptly he cut in. "Would a
+sovereign help you out, Mr. Calendar? I don't mind telling you that's about
+the limit of my present resources."
+
+"Pardon _me_." Mr. Calendar's moon-like countenance darkened; he assumed a
+transparent dignity. "You misconstrue my motive, sir."
+
+"Then I'm sorry."
+
+"I am not here to borrow. On the other hand, quite by accident I discovered
+your name upon the register, down-stairs; a good old Frisco name, if you
+will permit me to say so. I thought to myself that here was a chance
+to help a fellow-countryman." Calendar paused, interrogative; Kirkwood
+remained interested but silent. "If a passage across would help you, I--I
+think it might be arranged," stammered Calendar, ill at ease.
+
+"It might," admitted Kirkwood, speculative.
+
+"I could fix it so that you could go over--first-class, of course--and pay
+your way, so to speak, by, rendering us, me and my partner, a trifling
+service."
+
+"Ah?"
+
+"In fact," continued Calendar, warming up to his theme, "there might be
+something more in it for you than the passage, if--if you're the right man,
+the man I'm looking for."
+
+"That, of course, is the question."
+
+"Eh?" Calendar pulled up suddenly in a full-winged flight of enthusiasm.
+
+Kirkwood eyed him steadily. "I said that it is a question, Mr. Calendar,
+whether or not I am the man you're looking for. Between you and me and the
+fire-dogs, I don't believe I am. Now if you wish to name your _quid
+pro quo_, this trifling service I'm to render in recognition of your
+benevolence, you may."
+
+"Ye-es," slowly. But the speaker delayed his reply until he had surveyed
+his host from head to foot, with a glance both critical and appreciative.
+
+He saw a man in height rather less than the stock size six-feet so much
+in demand by the manufacturers of modern heroes of fiction; a man a bit
+round-shouldered, too, but otherwise sturdily built, self-contained,
+well-groomed.
+
+Kirkwood wears a boy's honest face; no one has ever called him handsome. A
+few prejudiced persons have decided that he has an interesting countenance;
+the propounders of this verdict have been, for the most part, feminine.
+Kirkwood himself has been heard to declare that his features do not fit;
+in its essence the statement is true, but there is a very real, if
+undefinable, engaging quality in their very irregularity. His eyes are
+brown, pleasant, set wide apart, straightforward of expression.
+
+Now it appeared that, whatever his motive, Mr. Calendar had acted upon
+impulse in sending his card up to Kirkwood. Possibly he had anticipated a
+very different sort of reception from a very different sort of man. Even in
+the light of subsequent events it remains difficult to fathom the mystery
+of his choice. Perhaps Fate directed it; stranger things have happened at
+the dictates of a man's Destiny.
+
+At all events, this Calendar proved not lacking in penetration; men of his
+stamp are commonly endowed with that quality to an eminent degree. Not slow
+to reckon the caliber of the man before him, the leaven of intuition began
+to work in his adipose intelligence. He owned himself baffled.
+
+"Thanks," he concluded pensively; "I reckon you're right. You won't do,
+after all. I've wasted your time. Mine, too."
+
+"Don't mention it."
+
+Calendar got heavily out of his chair, reaching for his hat and umbrella.
+"Permit me to apologize for an unwarrantable intrusion, Mr. Kirkwood." He
+faltered; a worried and calculating look shadowed his small eyes. "I _was_
+looking for some one to serve me in a certain capacity--"
+
+"Certain or questionable?" propounded Kirkwood blandly, opening the door.
+
+Pointedly Mr. Calendar ignored the imputation. "Sorry I disturbed you.
+G'dafternoon, Mr. Kirkwood."
+
+"Good-by, Mr. Calendar." A smile twitched the corners of Kirkwood's
+too-wide mouth.
+
+Calendar stepped hastily out into the hall. As he strode--or rather,
+rolled--away, Kirkwood maliciously feathered a Parthian arrow.
+
+"By the way, Mr. Calendar--?"
+
+The sound of retreating footsteps was stilled and "Yes?" came from the
+gloom of the corridor.
+
+"Were you ever in San Francisco? Really and truly? Honest Injun, Mr.
+Calendar?"
+
+For a space the quiet was disturbed by harsh breathing; then, in a
+strained voice, "Good day, Mr. Kirkwood"; and again the sound of departing
+footfalls.
+
+Kirkwood closed the door and the incident simultaneously, with a smart bang
+of finality. Laughing quietly he went back to the window with its dreary
+outlook, now the drearier for lengthening evening shadows.
+
+"I wonder what his game is, anyway. An adventurer, of course; the woods are
+full of 'em. A queer fish, even of his kind! And with a trick up his sleeve
+as queer and fishy as himself, no doubt!"
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+"AND SOME THERE BE WHO HAVE ADVENTURES THRUST UPON THEM"
+
+The assumption seems not unwarrantable, that Mr. Calendar figuratively
+washed his hands of Mr. Kirkwood. Unquestionably Mr. Kirkwood considered
+himself well rid of Mr. Calendar. When the latter had gone his way,
+Kirkwood, mindful of the fact that his boat-train would leave St. Paneras
+at half-after eleven, set about his packing and dismissed from his thoughts
+the incident created by the fat _chevalier d'industrie_; and at six
+o'clock, or thereabouts, let himself out of his room, dressed for the
+evening, a light rain-coat over one arm, in the other hand a cane,--the
+drizzle having ceased.
+
+A stolid British lift lifted him down to the ground floor of the
+establishment in something short of five minutes. Pausing in the office
+long enough to settle his bill and leave instructions to have his luggage
+conveyed to the boat-train, he received with entire equanimity the affable
+benediction of the clerk, in whose eyes he still figured as that radiant
+creature, an American millionaire; and passed on to the lobby, where he
+surrendered hat, coat and stick to the cloak-room attendant, ere entering
+the dining-room.
+
+The hour was a trifle early for a London dinner, the handsome room but
+moderately filled with patrons. Kirkwood absorbed the fact unconsciously
+and without displeasure; the earlier, the better: he was determined to
+consume his last civilized meal (as he chose to consider it) at his serene
+leisure, to live fully his ebbing moments in the world to which he was
+born, to drink to its cloying dregs one ultimate draught of luxury.
+
+A benignant waiter bowed him into a chair by a corner table in
+juxtaposition with an open window, through which, swaying imperceptibly the
+closed hangings, were wafted gentle gusts of the London evening's sweet,
+damp breath.
+
+Kirkwood settled himself with an inaudible sigh of pleasure. He was dining,
+for the last time in Heaven knew how long, in a first-class restaurant.
+
+With a deferential flourish the waiter brought him the menu-card. He had
+served in his time many an "American, millionaire"; he had also served this
+Mr. Kirkwood, and respected him as one exalted above the run of his kind,
+in that he comprehended the art of dining.
+
+Fifteen minutes later the waiter departed rejoicing, his order complete.
+
+To distract a conscience whispering of extravagance, Kirkwood lighted a
+cigarette.
+
+The room was gradually filling with later arrivals; it was the most favored
+restaurant in London, and, despite the radiant costumes of the women, its
+atmosphere remained sedate and restful.
+
+A cab clattered down the side street on which the window opened.
+
+At a near-by table a woman laughed, quietly happy. Incuriously Kirkwood
+glanced her way. She was bending forward, smiling, flattering her escort
+with the adoration of her eyes. They were lovers alone in the wilderness of
+the crowded restaurant. They seemed very happy.
+
+Kirkwood was conscious of a strange pang of emotion. It took him some time
+to comprehend that it was envy.
+
+He was alone and lonely. For the first time he realized that no woman had
+ever looked upon him as the woman at the adjoining table looked upon her
+lover. He had found time to worship but one mistress--his art.
+
+And he was renouncing her.
+
+He was painfully conscious of what he had missed, had lost--or had not yet
+found: the love of woman.
+
+The sensation was curious--new, unique in his experience.
+
+His cigarette burned down to his fingers as he sat pondering. Abstractedly,
+he ground its fire out in an ash-tray.
+
+The waiter set before him a silver tureen, covered.
+
+He sat up and began to consume his soup, scarce doing it justice. His dream
+troubled him--his dream of the love of woman.
+
+From a little distance his waiter regarded him, with an air of
+disappointment. In the course of an hour and a half he awoke, to discover
+the attendant in the act of pouring very hot and black coffee from a bright
+silver pot into a demi-tasse of fragile porcelain. Kirkwood slipped a
+single lump of sugar into the cup, gave over his cigar-case to be filled,
+then leaned back, deliberately lighting a long and slender panetela as a
+preliminary to a last lingering appreciation of the scene of which he was a
+part.
+
+He reviewed it through narrowed eyelids, lazily; yet with some slight
+surprise, seeming to see it with new vision, with eyes from which scales of
+ignorance had dropped.
+
+This long and brilliant dining-hall, with its quiet perfection of
+proportion and appointment, had always gratified his love of the beautiful;
+to-night it pleased him to an unusual degree. Yet it was the same as ever;
+its walls tinted a deep rose, with their hangings of dull cloth-of-gold,
+its lights discriminatingly clustered and discreetly shaded, redoubled in
+half a hundred mirrors, its subdued shimmer of plate and glass, its soberly
+festive assemblage of circumspect men and women splendidly gowned, its
+decorously muted murmur of voices penetrated and interwoven by the strains
+of a hidden string orchestra--caressed his senses as always, yet with
+a difference. To-night he saw it a room populous with lovers, lovers
+insensibly paired, man unto woman attentive, woman of man regardful.
+
+He had never understood this before. This much he had missed in life.
+
+It seemed hard to realize that one must forego it all for ever.
+
+Presently he found himself acutely self-conscious. The sensation puzzled
+him; and without appearing to do so, he traced it from effect to cause; and
+found the cause in a woman--a girl, rather, seated at a table the third
+removed from him, near the farther wall of the room.
+
+Too considerate, and too embarrassed, to return her scrutiny openly, look
+for look, he yet felt sure that, however temporarily, he was become the
+object of her intent interest.
+
+Idly employed with his cigar, he sipped his coffee. In time aware that she
+had turned her attention elsewhere, he looked up.
+
+At first he was conscious of an effect of disappointment. She was nobody
+that he knew, even by reputation. She was simply a young girl, barely out
+of her teens--if as old as that phrase would signify. He wondered what she
+had found in him to make her think him worth so long a study; and looked
+again, more keenly curious.
+
+With this second glance, appreciation stirred the artistic side of his
+nature, that was already grown impatient of his fretted mood. The slender
+and girlish figure, posed with such absolute lack of intrusion against a
+screen of rose and gilt, moved him to critical admiration. The tinted glow
+of shaded candles caught glistening on the spun gold of her fair hair,
+and enhanced the fine pallor of her young shoulders. He saw promise, and
+something more than promise, in her face, its oval something dimmed by warm
+shadows that unavailingly sought to blend youth and beauty alike into the
+dull, rich background.
+
+In the sheer youth of her (he realized) more than in aught else, lay her
+chiefest charm. She could be little more than a child, indeed, if he were
+to judge her by the purity of her shadowed eyes and the absence of emotion
+in the calm and direct look which presently she turned upon him who sat
+wondering at the level, penciled darkness of her brows.
+
+At length aware that she had surprised his interest, Kirkwood glanced
+aside--coolly deliberate, lest she should detect in his attitude anything
+more than impersonal approval.
+
+A slow color burned his cheeks. In his temples there rose a curious
+pulsing.
+
+After a while she drew his gaze again, imperiously--herself all unaware of
+the havoc she was wreaking on his temperament.
+
+He could have fancied her distraught, cloaking an unhappy heart with placid
+brow and gracious demeanor; but such a conception matched strangely her
+glowing youth and spirit. What had she to do with Care? What concern had
+Black Care, whose gaunt shape in sable shrouds had lurked at his shoulder
+all the evening, despite his rigid preoccupation, with a being as
+charmingly flushed with budding womanhood as this girl?
+
+"Eighteen?" he hazarded. "Eighteen, or possibly nineteen, dining at the
+Pless in a ravishing dinner-gown, and--unhappy? Oh, hardly--not she!"
+
+Yet the impression haunted him, and ere long he was fain to seek
+confirmation or denial of it in the manner of her escort.
+
+The latter sat with back to Kirkwood, cutting a figure as negative as his
+snug evening clothes. One could surmise little from a fleshy thick neck,
+a round, glazed bald spot, a fringe of grizzled hair, and two bright red
+ears.
+
+Calendar?
+
+Somehow the fellow did suggest Kirkwood's caller of the afternoon. The
+young man could not have said precisely how, for he was unfamiliar with the
+aspect of that gentleman's back. None the less the suggestion persisted.
+
+By now, a few of the guests, theater-bound, for the most part, were
+leaving. Here and there a table stood vacant, that had been filled, cloth
+tarnished, chairs disarranged: in another moment to be transformed into its
+pristine brilliance under the deft attentions of the servitors.
+
+Down an aisle, past the table at which the girl was sitting, came two,
+making toward the lobby; the man, a slight and meager young personality, in
+the lead. Their party had attracted Kirkwood's notice as they entered; why,
+he did not remember; but it was in his mind that then they had been three.
+Instinctively he looked at the table they had left--one placed at some
+distance from the girl, and hidden from her by an angle in the wall. It
+appeared that the third member had chosen to dally a few moments over his
+tobacco and a liqueur-brandy. Kirkwood could see him plainly, lounging in
+his chair and fumbling the stem of a glass: a heavy man, of somber habit,
+his black and sullen brows lowering and thoughtful above a face boldly
+handsome.
+
+The woman of the trio was worthy of closer attention. Some paces in the
+wake of her lack-luster esquire, she was making a leisurely progress,
+trailing the skirts of a gown magnificent beyond dispute, half concealed
+though it was by the opera cloak whose soft folds draped her shoulders.
+Slowly, carrying her head high, she approached, insolent eyes reviewing
+the room from beneath their heavy lids; a metallic and mature type of dark
+beauty, supremely selfconfident and self-possessed.
+
+Men turned involuntarily to look after her, not altogether in undiluted
+admiration.
+
+In the act of passing behind the putative Calendar, she paused momentarily,
+bending as if to gather up her train. Presumably the action disturbed her
+balance; she swayed a little, and in the effort to recover, rested the tips
+of her gloved fingers upon the edge of the table. Simultaneously (Kirkwood
+could have sworn) a single word left her lips, a word evidently pitched
+for the ear of the hypothetical Calendar alone. Then she swept on,
+imperturbable, assured.
+
+To the perplexed observer it was indubitably evident that some
+communication had passed from the woman to the man. Kirkwood saw the fat
+shoulders of the girl's companion stiffen suddenly as the woman's hand
+rested at his elbow; as she moved away, a little rippling shiver was
+plainly visible in the muscles of his back, beneath his coat--mute token
+of relaxing tension. An instant later one plump and mottled hand was
+carelessly placed where the woman's had been; and was at once removed with
+fingers closed.
+
+To the girl, watching her face covertly, Kirkwood turned for clue to the
+incident. He made no doubt that she had observed the passage; proof of that
+one found in her sudden startling pallor (of indignation?) and in her eyes,
+briefly alight with some inscrutable emotion, though quickly veiled by
+lowered lashes. Slowly enough she regained color and composure, while her
+_vis-�-vis_ sat motionless, head inclined as if in thought.
+
+Abruptly the man turned in his chair to summon a waiter, and exposed his
+profile. Kirkwood was in no wise amazed to recognize Calendar--a badly
+frightened Calendar now, however, and hardly to be identified with the
+sleek, glib fellow who had interviewed Kirkwood in the afternoon. His
+flabby cheeks were ashen and trembling, and upon the back of his chair
+the fat white fingers were drumming incessantly an inaudible tattoo of
+shattered nerves.
+
+"Scared silly!" commented Kirkwood. "Why?" Having spoken to his waiter,
+Calendar for some seconds raked the room with quick glances, as if seeking
+an acquaintance. Presumably disappointed, he swung back to face the
+girl, bending forward to reach her ears with accents low-pitched and
+confidential. She, on her part, fell at once attentive, grave and
+responsive. Perhaps a dozen sentences passed between them. At the outset
+her brows contracted and she shook her head in gentle dissent; whereupon
+Calendar's manner became more imperative. Gradually, unwillingly, she
+seemed to yield consent. Once she caught her breath sharply, and, infected
+by her companion's agitation, sat back, color fading again in the round
+young cheeks.
+
+Kirkwood's waiter put in an inopportune appearance with the bill. The young
+man paid it. When he looked up again Calendar had swung squarely about
+in his chair. His eye encountered Kirkwood's. He nodded pleasantly.
+Temporarily confused, Kirkwood returned the nod.
+
+In a twinkling he had repented; Calendar had left his chair and was wending
+his way through the tables toward Kirkwood's. Reaching it, he paused,
+offering the hand of genial fellowship. Kirkwood accepted it half-heartedly
+(what else was he to do?) remarking at the same time that Calendar had
+recovered much of his composure. There was now a normal coloring in the
+heavily jowled countenance, with less glint of fear in the quick, dark
+eyes; and Calendar's hand, even if moist and cold, no longer trembled.
+Furthermore it was immediately demonstrated that his impudence had not
+deserted him.
+
+"Why, Kirkwood, my dear fellow!" he crowed--not so loudly as to attract
+attention, but in a tone assumed to divert suspicion, should he be
+overheard. "This is great luck, you know--to find you here."
+
+"Is it?" returned Kirkwood coolly. He disengaged his fingers.
+
+The pink plump face was contorted in a furtive grimace of deprecation.
+Without waiting for permission Calendar dropped into the vacant chair.
+
+"My dear sir," he proceeded, unabashed, "I throw myself upon your mercy."
+
+"The devil you do!"
+
+"I must. I'm in the deuce of a hole, and there's no one I know here besides
+yourself. I--I--"
+
+Kirkwood saw fit to lead him on; partly because, out of the corner of his
+eye, he was aware of the girl's unconcealed suspense. "Go on, please, Mr.
+Calendar. You throw yourself on a total stranger's mercy because you're in
+the deuce of a hole; and--?"
+
+"It's this way; I'm called away on urgent business imperative business.
+I must go at once. My daughter is with me. My daughter! Think of my
+embarrassment; I can not leave her here, alone, nor can I permit her to go
+home unprotected."
+
+Calendar paused in anxiety.
+
+"That's easily remedied, then," suggested Kirkwood.
+
+"How?"
+
+"Put her in a cab at the door."
+
+"I ... No. The devil! I couldn't think of it. You won't understand. I--"
+
+"I do not understand,--" amended the younger man politely.
+
+Calendar compressed his lips nervously. It was plain that the man was
+quivering with impatience and half-mad with excitement. He held quiet only
+long enough to regain his self-control and take counsel with his prudence.
+
+"It is impossible, Mr. Kirkwood. I must ask you to be generous and believe
+me."
+
+"Very well; for the sake of the argument, I do believe you, Mr. Calendar."
+
+"Hell!" exploded the elder man in an undertone. Then swiftly, stammering
+in his haste: "I can't let Dorothy accompany me to the door," he declared.
+"She--I--I throw myself upon your mercy!"
+
+"What--again?"
+
+"The truth--the truth is, if you will have it, that I am in danger of
+arrest the moment I leave here. If my daughter is with me, she will have to
+endure the shame and humiliation--"
+
+"Then why place her in such a position?" Kirkwood demanded sharply.
+
+Calendar's eyes burned, incandescent with resentment. Offended, he offered
+to rise and go, but changed his mind and sat tight in hope.
+
+"I beg of you, sir--"
+
+"One moment, Mr. Calendar."
+
+Abruptly Kirkwood's weathercock humor shifted--amusement yielding to
+intrigued interest. After all, why not oblige the fellow? What did anything
+matter, now? What harm could visit him if he yielded to this corpulent
+adventurer's insistence? Both from experience and observation he knew this
+for a world plentifully peopled by soldiers of fortune, contrivers of
+snares and pitfalls for the feet of the unwary. On the other hand, it is
+axiomatic that a penniless man is perfectly safe anywhere. Besides, there
+was the girl to be considered.
+
+Kirkwood considered her, forthwith. In the process thereof, his eyes sought
+her, perturbed. Their glances clashed. She looked away hastily, crimson to
+her temples.
+
+Instantly the conflict between curiosity and caution, inclination and
+distrust, was at an end. With sudden compliance, the young man rose.
+
+"I shall be most happy to be of service to your daughter, Mr. Calendar,"
+he said, placing the emphasis with becoming gravity. And then, the fat
+adventurer leading the way, Kirkwood strode across the room--wondering
+somewhat at himself, if the whole truth is to be disclosed.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+CALENDAR'S DAUGHTER
+
+All but purring with satisfaction and relief, Calendar halted.
+
+"Dorothy, my dear, permit me to introduce an old friend--Mr. Kirkwood.
+Kirkwood, this is my daughter."
+
+"Miss Calendar," acknowledged Kirkwood.
+
+The girl bowed, her eyes steady upon his own. "Mr. Kirkwood is very kind,"
+she said gravely.
+
+"That's right!" Calendar exclaimed blandly. "He's promised to see you home.
+Now both of you will pardon my running away, I know."
+
+"Yes," assented Kirkwood agreeably.
+
+The elder man turned and hurried toward the main entrance.
+
+Kirkwood took the chair he had vacated. To his disgust he found himself
+temporarily dumb. No flicker of thought illuminated the darkness of his
+confusion. How was he to open a diverting conversation with a young woman
+whom he had met under auspices so extraordinary? Any attempt to gloze the
+situation, he felt, would be futile. And, somehow, he did not care to
+render himself ridiculous in her eyes, little as he knew her.
+
+Inanely dumb, he sat watching her, smiling fatuously until it was borne
+in on him that he was staring like a boor and grinning like an idiot.
+Convinced, he blushed for himself; something which served to make him more
+tongue-tied than ever.
+
+As for his involuntary prot�g�e, she exhibited such sweet composure that he
+caught himself wondering if she really appreciated the seriousness of her
+parent's predicament; if, for that matter, its true nature were known to
+her at all. Calendar, he believed, was capable of prevarication, polite and
+impolite. Had he lied to his daughter? or to Kirkwood? To both, possibly;
+to the former alone, not improbably. That the adventurer had told him the
+desperate truth, Kirkwood was quite convinced; but he now began to believe
+that the girl had been put off with some fictitious explanation. Her
+tranquillity and self-control were remarkable, otherwise; she seemed very
+young to possess those qualities in such eminent degree.
+
+She was looking wearily past him, her gaze probing some unguessed abyss of
+thought. Kirkwood felt himself privileged to stare in wonder. Her na�ve
+aloofness of poise gripped his imagination powerfully,--the more
+so, perhaps, since it seemed eloquent of her intention to remain
+enigmatic,--but by no means more powerfully than the unaided appeal of her
+loveliness.
+
+Presently the girl herself relieved the tension of the situation, fairly
+startling the young man by going straight to the heart of things. Without
+preface or warning, lifting her gaze to his, "My name is really Dorothy
+Calendar," she observed. And then, noting his astonishment, "You would be
+privileged to doubt, under the circumstances," she added. "Please let us be
+frank."
+
+"Well," he stammered, "if I didn't doubt, let's say I was unprejudiced."
+
+His awkward, well-meant pleasantry, perhaps not conceived in the best of
+taste, sounded in his own ears wretchedly flat and vapid. He regretted it
+spontaneously; the girl ignored it.
+
+"You are very kind," she iterated the first words he had heard from her
+lips. "I wish you to understand that I, for one, appreciate it."
+
+"Not kind; I have done nothing. I am glad.... One is apt to become
+interested when Romance is injected into a prosaic existence." Kirkwood
+allowed himself a keen but cheerful glance.
+
+She nodded, with a shadowy smile. He continued, purposefully, to distract
+her, holding her with his honest, friendly eyes.
+
+"Since it is to be confidences" (this she questioned with an all but
+imperceptible lifting of the eyebrows), "I don't mind telling you my own
+name is really Philip Kirkwood."
+
+"And you are an old friend of my father's?"
+
+He opened his lips, but only to close them without speaking. The girl moved
+her shoulders with a shiver of disdain.
+
+"I knew it wasn't so."
+
+"You know it would be hard for a young man like myself to be a very old
+friend," he countered lamely.
+
+"How long, then, have you known each other?"
+
+"Must I answer?"
+
+"Please."
+
+"Between three and four hours."
+
+"I thought as much." She stared past him, troubled. Abruptly she said:
+"Please smoke."
+
+"Shall I? If you wish it, of course...."
+
+She repeated: "Please."
+
+"We were to wait ten minutes or so," she continued.
+
+He produced his cigarette-case.
+
+"If you care to smoke it will seem an excuse." He lighted his cigarette.
+"And then, you may talk to me," she concluded calmly.
+
+"I would, gladly, if I could guess what would interest you."
+
+"Yourself. Tell me about yourself," she commanded.
+
+"It would bore you," he responded tritely, confused.
+
+"No; you interest me very much." She made the statement quietly,
+contemptuous of coquetry.
+
+"Very well, then; I am Philip Kirkwood, an American."
+
+"Nothing more?"
+
+"Little worth retailing."
+
+"I'm sorry."
+
+"Why?" he demanded, piqued.
+
+"Because you have merely indicated that you are a wealthy American."
+
+"Why wealthy?"
+
+"If not, you would have some aim in life--a calling or profession."
+
+"And you think I have none?"
+
+"Unless you consider it your vocation to be a wealthy American."
+
+"I don't. Besides, I'm not wealthy. In point of fact, I ..." He pulled up
+short, on the verge of declaring himself a pauper. "I am a painter."
+
+Her eyes lightened with interest. "An artist?"
+
+"I hope so. I don't paint signs--or houses," he remarked.
+
+Amused, she laughed softly. "I suspected it," she declared.
+
+"Not really?"
+
+"It was your way of looking at--things, that made me guess it: the
+painter's way. I have often noticed it."
+
+"As if mentally blending colors all the time?"
+
+"Yes; that and--seeing flaws."
+
+"I have discovered none," he told her brazenly.
+
+But again her secret cares were claiming her thoughts, and the gay,
+inconsequential banter died upon her scarlet lips as a second time her
+glance ranged away, sounding mysterious depths of anxiety.
+
+Provoked, he would have continued the chatter. "I have confessed," he
+persisted. "You know everything of material interest about me. And
+yourself?"
+
+"I am merely Dorothy Calendar," she answered.
+
+"Nothing more?" He laughed.
+
+"That is all, if you please, for the present."
+
+"I am to content myself with the promise of the future?"
+
+"The future," she told him seriously, "is to-morrow; and to-morrow ..." She
+moved restlessly in her chair, eyes and lips pathetic in their distress.
+"Please, we will go now, if you are ready."
+
+"I am quite ready, Miss Calendar."
+
+He rose. A waiter brought the girl's cloak and put it in Kirkwood's hands.
+He held it until, smoothing the wrists of her long white gloves, she stood
+up, then placed the garment upon her white young shoulders, troubled by the
+indefinable sense of intimacy imparted by the privilege. She permitted
+him this personal service! He felt that she trusted him, that out of her
+gratitude had grown a simple and almost childish faith in his generosity
+and considerateness.
+
+As she turned to go her eyes thanked him with an unfathomable glance. He
+was again conscious of that esoteric disturbance in his temples. Puzzled,
+hazily analyzing the sensation, he followed her to the lobby.
+
+A page brought him his top-coat, hat and stick; tipping the child from
+sheer force of habit, he desired a gigantic porter, impressively ornate in
+hotel livery, to call a hansom. Together they passed out into the night, he
+and the girl.
+
+Beneath a permanent awning of steel and glass she waited patiently,
+slender, erect, heedless of the attention she attracted from wayfarers.
+
+The night was young, the air mild. Upon the sidewalk, muddied by a million
+feet, two streams of wayfarers flowed incessantly, bound west from Green
+Park or east toward Piccadilly Circus; a well-dressed throng for the most
+part, with here and there a man in evening dress. Between the carriages at
+the curb and the hotel doors moved others, escorting fluttering butterfly
+women in elaborate toilets, heads bare, skirts daintily gathered above
+their perishable slippers. Here and there meaner shapes slipped silently
+through the crowd, sinister shadows of the city's proletariat, blotting
+ominously the brilliance of the scene.
+
+A cab drew in at the block. The porter clapped an arc of wickerwork over
+its wheel to protect the girl's skirts. She ascended to the seat.
+
+Kirkwood, dropping sixpence in the porter's palm, prepared to follow; but a
+hand fell upon his arm, peremptory, inexorable. He faced about, frowning,
+to confront a slight, hatchet-faced man, somewhat under medium height,
+dressed in a sack suit and wearing a derby well forward over eyes that were
+hard and bright.
+
+"Mr. Calendar?" said the man tensely. "I presume I needn't name my
+business. I'm from the Yard--"
+
+"My name is not Calendar."
+
+The detective smiled wearily. "Don't be a fool, Calendar," he began. But
+the porter's hand fell upon his shoulder and the giant bent low to bring
+his mouth close to the other's ear. Kirkwood heard indistinctly his own
+name followed by Calendar's, and the words: "Never fear. I'll point him
+out."
+
+"But the woman?" argued the detective, unconvinced, staring into the cab.
+
+"Am I not at liberty to have a lady dine with me in a public restaurant?"
+interposed Kirkwood, without raising his voice.
+
+The hard eyes looked him up and down without favor. Then: "Beg pardon, sir.
+I see my mistake," said the detective brusquely.
+
+"I am glad you do," returned Kirkwood grimly. "I fancy it will bear
+investigation."
+
+He mounted the step. "Imperial Theater," he told the driver, giving the
+first address that occurred to him; it could be changed. For the moment
+the main issue was to get the girl out of the range of the detective's
+interest.
+
+He slipped into his place as the hansom wheeled into the turgid tide of
+west-bound traffic.
+
+So Calendar had escaped, after all! Moreover, he had told the truth to
+Kirkwood.
+
+By his side the girl moved uneasily. "Who was that man?" she inquired.
+
+Kirkwood sought her eyes, and found them wholly ingenuous. It seemed
+that Calendar had not taken her into his confidence, after all. She was,
+therefore, in no way implicated in her father's affairs. Inexplicably the
+young man's heart felt lighter. "A mistake; the fellow took me for some one
+he knew," he told her carelessly.
+
+The assurance satisfied her. She rested quietly, wrapped up in personal
+concerns. Her companion pensively contemplated an infinity of arid and
+hansom-less to-morrows. About them the city throbbed in a web of misty
+twilight, the humid farewell of a dismal day. In the air a faint haze swam,
+rendering the distances opalescent. Athwart the western sky the after-glow
+of a drenched sunset lay like a wash of rose-madder. Piccadilly's asphalt
+shone like watered silk, black and lustrous, reflecting a myriad lights in
+vibrant ribbons of party-colored radiance. On every hand cab-lamps danced
+like fire-flies; the rumble of wheels blended with the hollow pounding
+of uncounted hoofs, merging insensibly into the deep and solemn roar of
+London-town.
+
+Suddenly Kirkwood was recalled to a sense of duty by a glimpse of Hyde Park
+Corner. He turned to the girl. "I didn't know where you wished to go--?"
+
+She seemed to realize his meaning with surprise, as one, whose thoughts
+have strayed afar, recalled to an imperative world.
+
+"Oh, did I forget? Tell him please to drive to Number Nine, Frognall
+Street, Bloomsbury."
+
+Kirkwood poked his cane through the trap, repeating the address. The
+cab wheeled smartly across Piccadilly, swung into Half Moon Street, and
+thereafter made better time, darting briskly down abrupt vistas of shining
+pavement, walled in by blank-visaged houses, or round two sides of one of
+London's innumerable private parks, wherein spring foliage glowed a tender
+green in artificial light; now and again it crossed brilliant main arteries
+of travel, and eventually emerged from a maze of backways into Oxford
+Street, to hammer eastwards to Tottenham Court Road.
+
+Constraint hung like a curtain between the two; a silence which the young
+man forbore to moderate, finding more delight that he had cared (or dared)
+confess to, in contemplation of the pure girlish profile so close to him.
+
+She seemed quite unaware of him, lost in thought, large eyes sober, lips
+serious that were fashioned for laughter, round little chin firm with some
+occult resolution. It was not hard to fancy her nerves keyed to a high
+pitch of courage and determination, nor easy to guess for what reason.
+Watching always, keenly sensitive to the beauty of each salient line
+betrayed by the flying lights, Kirkwood's own consciousness lost itself in
+a profitless, even a perilous labyrinth of conjecture.
+
+The cab stopped. Both occupants came to their senses with a little start.
+The girl leaned out over; the apron, recognized the house she sought in one
+swift glance, testified to the recognition with a hushed exclamation,
+and began to arrange her skirts. Kirkwood, unheeding her faint-hearted
+protests, jumped out, interposing his cane between her skirts and the
+wheel. Simultaneously he received a vivid mental photograph of the
+locality.
+
+Frognall Street proved to be one of those by-ways, a short block in
+length, which, hemmed in on all sides by a meaner purlieu, has (even in
+Bloomsbury!) escaped the sordid commercial eye of the keeper of furnished
+lodgings, retaining jealously something of the old-time dignity and reserve
+that were its pride in the days before Society swarmed upon Mayfair and
+Belgravia.
+
+Its houses loomed tall, with many windows, mostly lightless--materially
+aggravating that air of isolate, cold dignity which distinguishes the
+Englishman's castle. Here and there stood one less bedraggled than
+its neighbors, though all, without exception, spoke assertively of
+respectability down-at-the-heel but fighting tenaciously for existence.
+Some, vanguards of that imminent day when the boarding-house should reign
+supreme, wore with shamefaced air placards of estate-agents, advertising
+their susceptibility to sale or lease. In the company of the latter was
+Number 9.
+
+The American noted the circumstance subconsciously, at a moment when Miss
+Calendar's hand, small as a child's, warm and compact in its white glove,
+lay in his own. And then she was on the sidewalk, her face, upturned to
+his, vivacious with excitement.
+
+"You have been so kind," she told him warmly, "that one hardly knows how to
+thank you, Mr. Kirkwood."
+
+"I have done nothing--nothing at all," he mumbled, disturbed by a sudden,
+unreasoning alarm for her.
+
+She passed quickly to the shelter of the pillared portico. He followed
+clumsily. On the door-step she turned, offering her hand. He took and
+retained it.
+
+"Good night," she said.
+
+"I'm to understand that I'm dismissed, then?" he stammered ruefully.
+
+She evaded his eyes. "I--thank you--I have no further need--"
+
+"You are quite sure? Won't you believe me at your service?"
+
+She laughed uneasily. "I'm all right now."
+
+"I can do nothing more? Sure?"
+
+"Nothing. But you--you make me almost sorry I can't impose still further
+upon your good nature."
+
+"Please don't hesitate ..."
+
+"Aren't you very persistent, Mr. Kirkwood?" Her fingers moved in his;
+burning with the reproof, he released them, and turned to her so woebegone
+a countenance that she repented of her severity. "Don't worry about me,
+please. I am truly safe now. Some day I hope to be able to thank you
+adequately. Good night!"
+
+Her pass-key grated in the lock. Opening, the door disclosed a dark and
+uninviting entry-hall, through which there breathed an air heavy with the
+dank and dusty odor of untenanted rooms. Hesitating on the threshold, over
+her shoulder the girl smiled kindly upon her commandeered esquire; and
+stepped within.
+
+He lifted his hat automatically. The door closed with an echoing slam. He
+turned to the waiting cab, fumbling for change.
+
+"I'll walk," he told the cabby, paying him off.
+
+The hansom swept away to a tune of hammering hoofs; and quiet rested upon
+the street as Kirkwood turned the nearest corner, in an unpleasant temper,
+puzzled and discontented. It seemed hardly fair that he should have been
+dragged into so promising an adventure, by his ears (so to put it), only to
+be thus summarily called upon to write "Finis" beneath the incident.
+
+He rounded the corner and walked half-way to the next street, coming to an
+abrupt and rebellious pause by the entrance to a covered alleyway, of two
+minds as to his proper course of action.
+
+In the background of his thoughts Number 9, Frognall Street, reared its
+five-story fa�ade, sinister and forbidding. He reminded himself of its
+unlighted windows; of its sign, "To be let"; of the effluvia of desolation
+that had saluted him when the door swung wide. A deserted house; and the
+girl alone in it!--was it right for him to leave her so?
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+
+9 FROGNALL STREET, W. C.
+
+The covered alleyway gave upon Quadrant Mews; or so declared a notice
+painted on the dead wall of the passage.
+
+Overhead, complaining as it swayed in the wind, hung the smirched and
+weather-worn sign-board of the Hog-in-the-Pound public house; wherefrom
+escaped sounds of such revelry by night as is indulged in by the British
+working-man in hours of ease. At the curb in front of the house of
+entertainment, dejected animals drooping between their shafts, two hansoms
+stood in waiting, until such time as the lords of their destinies should
+see fit to sally forth and inflict themselves upon a cab-hungry populace.
+As Kirkwood turned, a third vehicle rumbled up out of the mews.
+
+Kirkwood can close his eyes, even at this late day, and both see and hear
+it all again--even as he can see the unbroken row of dingy dwellings that
+lined his way back from Quadrant Mews to Frognall Street corner: all
+drab and unkempt, all sporting in their fan-lights the legend and lure,
+"Furnished Apartments."
+
+For, between his curiosity about and his concern for the girl, he was being
+led back to Number 9, by the nose, as it were,--hardly willingly, at best.
+Profoundly stupefied by the contemplation of his own temerity, he yet
+returned unfaltering. He who had for so long plumed himself upon his strict
+supervision of his personal affairs and equally steadfast unconsciousness
+of his neighbor's businesses, now found himself in the very act of pushing
+in where he was not wanted: as he had been advised in well-nigh as many
+words. He experienced an effect of standing to one side, a witness of
+his own folly, with rising wonder, unable to credit the strength of
+the infatuation which was placing him so conspicuously in the way of a
+snubbing.
+
+If perchance he were to meet the girl again as she was leaving Number
+9,--what then? The contingency dismayed him incredibly, in view of the fact
+that it did not avail to make him pause. To the contrary he disregarded it
+resolutely; mad, impertinent, justified of his unnamed apprehensions, or
+simply addled,--he held on his way.
+
+He turned up Frognall Street with the manner of one out for a leisurely
+evening stroll. Simultaneously, from the farther corner, another pedestrian
+debouched, into the thoroughfare--a mere moving shadow at that distance,
+brother to blacker shadows that skulked in the fenced areas and unlively
+entries of that poorly lighted block. The hush was something beyond belief,
+when one remembered the nearness of blatant Tottenham Court Road.
+
+Kirkwood conceived a wholly senseless curiosity about the other wayfarer.
+The man was walking rapidly, heels ringing with uncouth loudness, cane
+tapping the flagging at brief intervals. Both sounds ceased abruptly as
+their cause turned in beneath one of the porticos. In the emphatic and
+unnatural quiet that followed, Kirkwood, stepping more lightly, fancied
+that another shadow followed the first, noiselessly and with furtive
+stealth.
+
+Could it be Number 9 into which they had passed? The American's heart beat
+a livelier tempo at the suggestion. If it had not been Number 9--he was
+still too far away to tell--it was certainly one of the dwellings adjacent
+thereunto. The improbable possibility (But why improbable?) that the girl
+was being joined by her father, or by friends, annoyed him with illogical
+intensity. He mended his own pace, designing to pass whichever house it
+might be before the door should be closed; thought better of this, and
+slowed up again, anathematizing himself with much excuse for being the
+inquisitive dolt that he was.
+
+Approaching Number 9 with laggard feet, he manufactured a desire to light
+a cigarette, as a cover for his design, were he spied upon by unsuspected
+eyes. Cane under arm, hands cupped to shield a vesta's flame, he stopped
+directly before the portico, turning his eyes askance to the shadowed
+doorway; and made a discovery sufficiently startling to hold him spellbound
+and, incidentally, to scorch his gloves before he thought to drop the
+match.
+
+The door of Number 9 stood ajar, a black interval an inch or so in width
+showing between its edge and the jamb.
+
+Suspicion and alarm set his wits a-tingle. More distinctly he recalled the
+jarring bang, accompanied by the metallic click of the latch, when the girl
+had shut herself in--and him out. Now, some person or persons had followed
+her, neglecting the most obvious precaution of a householder. And why? Why
+but because the intruders did not wish the sound of closing to be audible
+to her--or those--within?
+
+He reminded himself that it was all none of his affair, decided to pass on
+and go his ways in peace, and impulsively, swinging about, marched straight
+away for the unclosed door.
+
+"'Old'ard, guvner!"
+
+Kirkwood halted on the cry, faltering in indecision. Should he take the
+plunge, or withdraw? Synchronously he was conscious that a man's figure
+had detached itself from the shadows beneath the nearest portico and was
+drawing nearer, with every indication of haste, to intercept him.
+
+"'Ere now, guvner, yer mykin' a mistyke. You don't live 'ere."
+
+"How do you know?" demanded Kirkwood crisply, tightening his grip on his
+stick.
+
+Was this the second shadow he had seemed to see--the confederate of him who
+had entered Number 9; a sentry to forestall interruption? If so, the fellow
+lacked discretion, though his determination that the American should not
+interfere was undeniable. It was with an ugly and truculent manner, if more
+warily, that the man closed in.
+
+"I knows. You clear hout, or--"
+
+He flung out a hand with the plausible design of grasping Kirkwood by the
+collar. The latter lifted his stick, deflecting the arm, and incontinently
+landed his other fist forcibly on the fellow's chest. The man reeled back,
+cursing. Before he could recover Kirkwood calmly crossed the threshold,
+closed the door and put his shoulder to it. In another instant, fumbling in
+the darkness, he found the bolts and drove them home.
+
+And it was done, the transformation accomplished; his inability to refrain
+from interfering had encompassed his downfall, had changed a peaceable and
+law-abiding alien within British shores into a busybody, a trespasser, a
+misdemeanant, a--yes, for all he knew to the contrary, in the estimation of
+the Law, a burglar, prime candidate for a convict's stripes!
+
+Breathing hard with excitement he turned and laid his back against the
+panels, trembling in every muscle, terrified by the result of his impulsive
+audacity, thunder-struck by a lightning-like foreglimpse of its possible
+consequences. Of what colossal imprudence had he not been guilty?
+
+"The devil!" he whispered. "What an ass, what an utter ass I am!"
+
+Behind him the knob was rattled urgently, to an accompaniment of feet
+shuffling on the stone; and immediately--if he were to make a logical
+deduction from the rasping and scraping sound within the door-casing--the
+bell-pull was violently agitated, without, however, educing any response
+from the bell itself, wherever that might be situate. After which, as if in
+despair, the outsider again rattled and jerked the knob.
+
+Be his status what it might, whether servant of the household, its
+caretaker, or a night watchman, the man was palpably determined both to get
+himself in and Kirkwood out, and yet (curious to consider) determined to
+gain his end without attracting undue attention. Kirkwood had expected to
+hear the knocker's thunder, as soon as the bell failed to give tongue; but
+it did not sound although there _was_ a knocker,--Kirkwood himself had
+remarked that antiquated and rusty bit of ironmongery affixed to the middle
+panel of the door. And it made him feel sure that something surreptitious
+and lawless was in process within those walls, that the confederate
+without, having failed to prevent a stranger from entering, left unemployed
+a means so certain-sure to rouse the occupants.
+
+But his inferential analysis of this phase of the proceedings was summarily
+abrupted by that identical alarm. In a trice the house was filled with
+flying echoes, wakened to sonorous riot by the crash and clamor of the
+knocker; and Kirkwood stood fully two yards away, his heart hammering
+wildly, his nerves a-jingle, much as if the resounding blows had landed
+upon his own person rather than on stout oaken planking.
+
+Ere he had time to wonder, the racket ceased, and from the street filtered
+voices in altercation. Listening, Kirkwood's pulses quickened, and he
+laughed uncertainly for pure relief, retreating to the door and putting an
+ear to a crack.
+
+The accents of one speaker were new in his hearing, stern, crisp, quick
+with the spirit of authority which animates that most austere and dignified
+limb of the law to be encountered the world over, a London bobby.
+
+"Now then, my man, what do you want there? Come now, speak up, and step out
+into the light, where I can see you."
+
+The response came in the sniffling snarl of the London ne'er-do-well, the
+unemployable rogue whose chiefest occupation seems to be to march in the
+ranks of The Unemployed on the occasion of its annual demonstrations.
+
+"Le' me alone, carntcher? Ah'm doin' no 'arm, officer,--"
+
+"Didn't you hear me? Step out here. Ah, that's better.... No harm, eh?
+Perhaps you'll explain how there's no harm breakin' into unoccupied
+'ouses?"
+
+"Gorblimy, 'ow was I to know? 'Ere's a toff 'ands me sixpence fer hopenin'
+'is cab door to-dye, an', sezee, 'My man,' 'e sez, 'yer've got a 'onest
+fyce. W'y don'cher work?' sezee. ''Ow can I?' sez I. ''Ere'm I hout of
+a job these six months, lookin' fer work every dye an' carn't find it.'
+Sezee, 'Come an' see me this hevenin' at me home, Noine, Frognall Stryte,'
+'e sez, an'--"
+
+"That'll do for now. You borrow a pencil and paper and write it down and
+I'll read it when I've got more time; I never heard the like of it. This
+'ouse hasn't been lived in these two years. Move on, and don't let me find
+you round 'ere again. March, I say!"
+
+There was more of it--more whining explanations artfully tinctured with
+abuse, more terse commands to depart, the whole concluding with scraping
+footsteps, diminuendo, and another perfunctory, rattle of the knob as the
+bobby, having shoo'd the putative evil-doer off, assured himself that
+no damage had actually been done. Then he, too, departed, satisfied and
+self-righteous, leaving a badly frightened but very grateful amateur
+criminal to pursue his self-appointed career of crime.
+
+He had no choice other than to continue; in point of fact, it had been
+insanity just then to back out, and run the risk of apprehension at the
+hands of that ubiquitous bobby, who (for all he knew) might be lurking not
+a dozen yards distant, watchful for just such a sequel. Still, Kirkwood
+hesitated with the best of excuses. Reassuring as he had found the
+sentinel's extemporized yarn,--proof positive that the fellow had had no
+more right to prohibit a trespass than Kirkwood to commit one,--at the
+same time he found himself pardonably a prey to emotions of the utmost
+consternation and alarm. If he feared to leave the house he had no warrant
+whatever to assume that he would be permitted to remain many minutes
+unharmed within its walls of mystery.
+
+The silence of it discomfited him beyond measure; it was, in a word,
+uncanny.
+
+Before him, as he lingered at the door, vaguely disclosed by a wan
+illumination penetrating a dusty and begrimed fan-light, a broad hall
+stretched indefinitely towards the rear of the building, losing itself in
+blackness beyond the foot of a flight of stairs. Save for a few articles of
+furniture,--a hall table, an umbrella-stand, a tall dumb clock flanked by
+high-backed chairs,--it was empty. Other than Kirkwood's own restrained
+respiration not a sound throughout the house advertised its inhabitation;
+not a board creaked beneath the pressure of a foot, not a mouse rustled in
+the wainscoting or beneath the floors, not a breath of air stirred sighing
+in the stillness.
+
+And yet, a tremendous racket had been raised at the front door, within the
+sixty seconds past! And yet, within twenty minutes two persons, at
+least, had preceded Kirkwood into the building! Had they not heard? The
+speculation seemed ridiculous. Or had they heard and, alarmed, been too
+effectually hobbled by the coils of their nefarious designs to dare reveal
+themselves, to investigate the cause of that thunderous summons? Or were
+they, perhaps, aware of Kirkwood's entrance, and lying _perdui_, in some
+dark corner, to ambush him as he passed?
+
+True, that were hardly like the girl. True, on the other hand, it
+were possible that she had stolen away while Kirkwood was hanging in
+irresolution by the passage to Quadrant Mews. Again, the space of time
+between Kirkwood's dismissal and his return had been exceedingly brief;
+whatever her errand, she could hardly have fulfilled it and escaped. At
+that moment she might be in the power and at the mercy of him who had
+followed her; providing he were not friendly. And in that case, what
+torment and what peril might not be hers?
+
+Spurred by solicitude, the young man put personal apprehensions in his
+pocket and forgot them, cautiously picking his way through the gloom to the
+foot of the stairs. There, by the newel-post, he paused. Darkness walled
+him about. Overhead the steps vanished in a well of blackness; he could
+not even see the ceiling; his eyes ached with futile effort to fathom the
+unknown; his ears rang with unrewarded strain of listening. The silence
+hung inviolate, profound.
+
+Slowly he began to ascend, a hand following the balusters, the other with
+his cane exploring the obscurity before him. On the steps, a carpet, thick
+and heavy, muffled his footfalls. He moved noiselessly. Towards the top
+the staircase curved, and presently a foot that groped for a higher level
+failed to find it. Again he halted, acutely distrustful.
+
+Nothing happened.
+
+He went on, guided by the balustrade, passing three doors, all open,
+through which the undefined proportions of a drawing-room and boudoir were
+barely suggested in a ghostly dusk. By each he paused, listening, hearing
+nothing.
+
+His foot struck with a deadened thud against the bottom step of the
+second flight, and his pulses fluttered wildly for a moment. Two
+minutes--three--he waited in suspense. From above came no sound. He went
+on, as before, save that twice a step yielded, complaining, to his weight.
+Toward the top the close air, like the darkness, seemed to weigh more
+heavily upon his consciousness; little drops of perspiration started out on
+his forehead, his scalp tingled, his mouth was hot and dry, he felt as if
+stifled.
+
+Again the raised foot found no level higher than its fellows. He stopped
+and held his breath, oppressed by a conviction that some one was near him.
+Confirmation of this came startlingly--an eerie whisper in the night, so
+close to him that he fancied he could feel the disturbed air fanning his
+face.
+
+"_Is it you, Eccles_?"
+
+He had no answer ready. The voice was masculine, if he analyzed it
+correctly. Dumb and stupid he stood poised upon the point of panic.
+
+"_Eccles, is it you_?"
+
+The whisper was both shrill and shaky. As it ceased Kirkwood was
+half blinded by a flash of light, striking him squarely in the eyes.
+Involuntarily he shrank back a pace, to the first step from the top.
+Instantaneously the light was eclipsed.
+
+"_Halt or--or I fire_!"
+
+By now he realized that he had been scrutinized by the aid of an electric
+hand-lamp. The tremulous whisper told him something else--that the speaker
+suffered from nerves as high-strung as his own. The knowledge gave him
+inspiration. He cried at a venture, in a guarded voice, "_Hands up_!"--and
+struck out smartly with his stick. Its ferrule impinged upon something soft
+but heavy. Simultaneously he heard a low, frightened cry, the cane was
+swept aside, a blow landed glancingly on his shoulder, and he was carried
+fairly off his feet by the weight of a man hurled bodily upon him with
+staggering force and passion. Reeling, he was borne back and down a step
+or two, and then,--choking on an oath,--dropped his cane and with one hand
+caught the balusters, while the other tore ineffectually at wrists of
+hands that clutched his throat. So, for a space, the two hung, panting and
+struggling.
+
+Then endeavoring to swing his shoulders over against the wall, Kirkwood
+released his grip on the hand-rail and stumbled on the stairs, throwing his
+antagonist out of balance. The latter plunged downward, dragging Kirkwood
+with him. Clawing, kicking, grappling, they went to the bottom, jolted
+violently by each step; but long before the last was reached, Kirkwood's
+throat was free.
+
+Throwing himself off, he got to his feet and grasped the railing for
+support; then waited, panting, trying to get his bearings. Himself
+painfully shaken and bruised, he shrewdly surmised that his assailant had
+fared as ill, if not worse. And, in point of fact, the man lay with neither
+move nor moan, still as death at the American's feet.
+
+And once more silence had folded its wings over Number 9, Frognall Street.
+
+More conscious of that terrifying, motionless presence beneath him, than
+able to distinguish it by power of vision, he endured interminable minutes
+of trembling horror, in a witless daze, before he thought of his match-box.
+Immediately he found it and struck a light. As the wood caught and the
+bright small flame leaped in the pent air, he leaned forward, over the
+body, breathlessly dreading what he must discover.
+
+The man lay quiet, head upon the floor, legs and hips on the stairs. One
+arm had fallen over his face, hiding the upper half. The hand gleamed white
+and delicate as a woman's. His chin was smooth and round, his lips thin and
+petulant. Beneath his top-coat, evening dress clothed a short and slender
+figure. Nothing whatever of his appearance suggested the burly ruffian, the
+midnight marauder; he seemed little more than a boy old enough to dress
+for dinner. In his attitude there was something pitifully suggestive of a
+beaten child, thrown into a corner.
+
+Conscience-smitten and amazed Kirkwood stared on until, without warning,
+the match flickered and went out. Then, straightening up with an
+exclamation at once of annoyance and concern, he rattled the box; it made
+no sound,--was empty. In disgust he swore it was the devil's own luck, that
+he should run out of vestas at a time so critical. He could not even say
+whether the fellow was dead, unconscious, or simply shamming. He had little
+idea of his looks; and to be able to identify him might save a deal of
+trouble at some future time,--since he, Kirkwood, seemed so little able
+to disengage himself from the clutches of this insane adventure! And the
+girl--. what had become of her? How could he continue to search for her,
+without lights or guide, through all those silent rooms, whose walls might
+inclose a hundred hidden dangers in that house of mystery?
+
+But he debated only briefly. His blood was young, and it was hot; it was
+quite plain to him that he could not withdraw and retain his self-respect.
+If the girl was there to be found, most assuredly, he must find her. The
+hand-lamp that had dazzled him at the head of the stairs should be his aid,
+now that he thought of it,--and providing he was able to find it.
+
+In the scramble on the stairs he had lost his hat, but he remembered that
+the vesta's short-lived light had discovered this on the floor beyond
+the man's body. Carefully stepping across the latter he recovered his
+head-gear, and then, kneeling, listened with an ear close to the fellow's
+face. A softly regular beat of breathing reassured him. Half rising, he
+caught the body beneath the armpits, lifting and dragging it off the
+staircase; and knelt again, to feel of each pocket in the man's clothing,
+partly as an obvious precaution, to relieve him of his advertised revolver
+against an untimely wakening, partly to see if he had the lamp about him.
+
+The search proved fruitless. Kirkwood suspected that the weapon, like his
+own, had existed only in his victim's ready imagination. As for the lamp,
+in the act of rising he struck it with his foot, and picked it up.
+
+It felt like a metal tube a couple of inches in diameter, a foot or so
+in length, passably heavy. He fumbled with it impatiently. "However the
+dickens," he wondered audibly, "does the infernal machine work?" As it
+happened, the thing worked with disconcerting abruptness as his untrained
+fingers fell hapchance on the spring. A sudden glare again smote him in the
+face, and at the same instant, from a point not a yard away, apparently, an
+inarticulate cry rang out upon the stillness.
+
+Heart in his mouth, he stepped back, lowering the lamp (which impishly went
+out) and lifting a protecting forearm.
+
+"Who's that?" he demanded harshly.
+
+A strangled sob of terror answered him, blurred by a swift rush of skirts,
+and in a breath his shattered nerves quieted and a glimmer of common sense
+penetrated the murk anger and fear had bred in his brain. He understood,
+and stepped forward, catching blindly at the darkness with eager hands.
+
+"Miss Calendar!" he cried guardedly. "Miss Calendar, it is I--Philip
+Kirkwood!"
+
+There was a second sob, of another caliber than the first; timid fingers
+brushed his, and a hand, warm and fragile, closed upon his own in a passion
+of relief and gratitude.
+
+"Oh, I am so g-glad!" It was Dorothy Calendar's voice, beyond mistake.
+"I--I didn't know what t-to t-think.... When the light struck your face
+I was sure it was you, but when I called, you answered in a voice so
+strange,--not like yours at all! ... Tell me," she pleaded, with palpable
+effort to steady herself; "what has happened?"
+
+"I think, perhaps," said Kirkwood uneasily, again troubled by his racing
+pulses, "perhaps you can do that better than I."
+
+"Oh!" said the voice guiltily; her fingers trembled on his, and were gently
+withdrawn. "I was so frightened," she confessed after a little pause, "so
+frightened that I hardly understand ... But you? How did you--?"
+
+"I worried about you," he replied, in a tone absurdly apologetic. "Somehow
+it didn't seem right. It was none of my business, of course, but ... I
+couldn't help coming back. This fellow, whoever he is--don't worry;
+he's unconscious--slipped into the house in a manner that seemed to me
+suspicious. I hardly know why I followed, except that he left the door an
+open invitation to interference ..."
+
+"I can't be thankful enough," she told him warmly, "that you did interfere.
+You have indeed saved me from ..."
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"I don't know what. If I knew the man--"
+
+"You don't _know_ him?"
+
+"I can't even guess. The light--?"
+
+She paused inquiringly. Kirkwood fumbled with the lamp, but, whether its
+rude handling had impaired some vital part of the mechanism, or whether the
+batteries through much use were worn out, he was able to elicit only one
+feeble glow, which was instantly smothered by the darkness.
+
+"It's no use," he confessed. "The thing's gone wrong."
+
+"Have you a match?"
+
+"I used my last before I got hold of this."
+
+"Oh," she commented, discouraged. "Have you any notion what he looks like?"
+
+Kirkwood thought briefly. "Raffles," he replied with a chuckle. "He looks
+like an amateurish and very callow Raffles. He's in dress clothes, you
+know."
+
+"I wonder!" There was a nuance of profound bewilderment in her exclamation.
+Then: "He knocked against something in the hall--a chair, I presume; at all
+events, I heard that and put out the light. I was ... in the room above the
+drawing-room, you see. I stole down to this floor--was there, in the corner
+by the stairs when he passed within six inches, and never guessed it. Then,
+when he got on the next floor, I started on; but you came in. I slipped
+into the drawing-room and crouched behind a chair. You went on, but I dared
+not move until ... And then I heard some one cry out, and you fell down the
+stairs together. I hope you were not hurt--?"
+
+"Nothing worth mention; but _he_ must have got a pretty stiff knock, to lay
+him out so completely." Kirkwood stirred the body with his toe, but the man
+made no sign. "Dead to the world ... And now, Miss Calendar?"
+
+If she answered, he did not hear; for on the heels of his query banged the
+knocker down below; and thereafter crash followed crash, brewing a deep and
+sullen thundering to rouse the echoes and send them rolling, like voices of
+enraged ghosts, through the lonely rooms.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+
+THE MYSTERY OF A FOUR-WHEELER
+
+"What's that?" At the first alarm the girl had caught convulsively at
+Kirkwood's arm. Now, when a pause came in the growling of the knocker, she
+made him hear her voice; and it was broken and vibrant with a threat of
+hysteria. "Oh, what can it mean?"
+
+"I don't know." He laid a hand reassuringly over that which trembled on his
+forearm. "The police, possibly."
+
+"Police!" she iterated, aghast. "What makes you think--?"
+
+"A man tried to stop me at the door," he answered quickly. "I got in before
+he could. When he tried the knocker, a bobby came along and stopped him.
+The latter may have been watching the house since then,--it'd be only his
+duty to keep an eye on it; and Heaven knows we raised a racket, coming
+head-first down those stairs! Now we are up against it," he added brightly.
+
+But the girl was tugging at his hand. "Come!" she begged breathlessly.
+"Come! There is a way! Before they break in--"
+
+"But this man--?" Kirkwood hung back, troubled.
+
+"They--the police are sure to find and care for him."
+
+"So they will." He chuckled, "And serve him right! He'd have choked me to
+death, with all the good will in the world!"
+
+"Oh, do hurry!"
+
+Turning, she sped light-footed down the staircase to the lower hall, he
+at her elbow. Here the uproar was loudest--deep enough to drown whatever
+sounds might have been made by two pairs of flying feet. For all that
+they fled on tiptoe, stealthily, guilty shadows in the night; and at the
+newel-post swung back into the unbroken blackness which shrouded the
+fastnesses backward of the dwelling. A sudden access of fury on the part of
+the alarmist at the knocker, spurred them on with quaking hearts. In half a
+dozen strides, Kirkwood, guided only by instinct and the _frou-frou_ of the
+girl's skirts as she ran invisible before him, stumbled on the uppermost
+steps of a steep staircase; only a hand-rail saved him, and that at the
+last moment. He stopped short, shocked into caution. From below came a
+contrite whisper: "I'm so sorry! I should have warned you."
+
+He pulled himself together, glaring wildly at nothing. "It's all right--"
+
+"You're not hurt, truly? Oh, do come quickly."
+
+She waited for him at the bottom of the flight;--happily for him, for he
+was all at sea.
+
+"Here--your hand--let me guide you. This darkness is dreadful ..."
+
+He found her hand, somehow, and tucked his into it, confidingly, and not
+without an uncertain thrill of satisfaction.
+
+"Come!" she panted. "Come! If they break in--"
+
+Stifled by apprehension, her voice failed her.
+
+They went forward, now less impetuously, for it was very black; and the
+knocker had fallen still.
+
+"No fear of that," he remarked after a time. "They wouldn't dare break in."
+
+A fluttering whisper answered him: "I don't know. We dare risk nothing."
+
+They seemed to explore, to penetrate acres of labyrinthine chambers and
+passages, delving deep into the bowels of the earth, like rabbits burrowing
+in a warren, hounded by beagles.
+
+Above stairs the hush continued unbroken; as if the dumb Genius of the
+Place had cast a spell of silence on the knocker, or else, outraged, had
+smitten the noisy disturber with a palsy.
+
+The girl seemed to know her way; whether guided by familiarity or by
+intuition, she led on without hesitation, Kirkwood blundering in her wake,
+between confusion of impression, and dawning dismay conscious of but one
+tangible thing, to which he clung as to his hope of salvation: those firm,
+friendly fingers that clasped his own.
+
+It was as if they wandered on for an hour; probably from start to finish
+their flight took up three minutes, no more. Eventually the girl stopped,
+releasing his hand. He could hear her syncopated breathing before him, and
+gathered that something was wrong. He took a step forward.
+
+"What is it?"
+
+Her full voice broke out of the obscurity startlingly close, in his very
+ear.
+
+"The door--the bolts--I can't budge them."
+
+"Let me ..."
+
+He pressed forward, brushing her shoulder. She did not draw away, but
+willingly yielded place to his hands at the fastenings; and what had proved
+impossible to her, to his strong fingers was a matter of comparative ease.
+Yet, not entirely consciously, he was not quick. As he tugged at the bolts
+he was poignantly sensitive to the subtle warmth of her at his side; he
+could hear her soft dry sobs of excitement and suspense, punctuating the
+quiet; and was frightened, absolutely, by an impulse, too strong for
+ridicule, to take her in his arms and comfort her with the assurance that,
+whatever her trouble, he would stand by her and protect her.... It were
+futile to try to laugh it off; he gave over the endeavor. Even at this
+critical moment he found himself repeating over and over to his heart the
+question: "Can this be love? Can this be love? ..."
+
+Could it be love at an hour's acquaintance? Absurd! But he could not
+laugh--nor render himself insensible to the suggestion.
+
+He found that he had drawn the bolts. The girl tugged and rattled at the
+knob. Reluctantly the door opened inwards. Beyond its threshold stretched
+ten feet or more of covered passageway, whose entrance framed an oblong
+glimmering with light. A draught of fresh air smote their faces. Behind
+them a door banged.
+
+"Where does this open?"
+
+"On the mews," she informed him.
+
+"The mews!" He stared in consternation at the pallid oval that stood for
+her face. "The mews! But you, in your evening gown, and I--"
+
+"There's no other way. We must chance it. Are you afraid?"
+
+Afraid? ... He stepped aside. She slipped by him and on. He closed the
+door, carefully removing the key and locking it on the outside; then joined
+the girl at the entrance to the mews, where they paused perforce, she as
+much disconcerted as he, his primary objection momentarily waxing in force
+as they surveyed the conditions circumscribing their escape.
+
+Quadrant Mews was busily engaged in enjoying itself. Night had fallen
+sultry and humid, and the walls and doorsteps were well fringed and
+clustered with representatives of that class of London's population which
+infests mews through habit, taste, or force of circumstance.
+
+On the stoops men sprawled at easy length, discussing short, foul cutties
+loaded with that rank and odoriferous compound which, under the name and
+in the fame of tobacco, is widely retailed at tuppence the ounce. Their
+women-folk more commonly squatted on the thresholds, cheerfully squabbling;
+from opposing second-story windows, two leaned perilously forth, slanging
+one another across the square briskly in the purest billingsgate; and were
+impartially applauded from below by an audience whose appreciation seemed
+faintly tinged with envy. Squawking and yelling children swarmed over the
+flags and rude cobblestones that paved the ways. Like incense, heavy and
+pungent, the rich effluvia of stable-yards swirled in air made visible by
+its faint burden of mist.
+
+Over against the entrance wherein Kirkwood and the girl lurked, confounded
+by the problem of escaping undetected through this vivacious scene, a
+stable-door stood wide, exposing a dimly illumined interior. Before it
+waited a four-wheeler, horse already hitched in between the shafts, while
+its driver, a man of leisurely turn of mind, made lingering inspection of
+straps and buckles, and, while Kirkwood watched him, turned attention to
+the carriage lamps.
+
+The match which he raked spiritedly down his thigh, flared ruddily; the
+succeeding paler glow of the lamp threw into relief a heavy beefy mask,
+with shining bosses for cheeks and nose and chin; through narrow slits
+two cunning eyes glittered like dull gems. Kirkwood appraised him with
+attention, as one in whose gross carcass was embodied their only hope of
+unannoyed return to the streets and normal surroundings of their world. The
+difficulty lay in attracting the man's attention and engaging him without
+arousing his suspicions or bringing the population about their ears. Though
+he hesitated long, no favorable opportunity presented itself; and in time
+the Jehu approached the box with the ostensible purpose of mounting and
+driving off. In this critical situation the American, forced to recognize
+that boldness must mark his course, took the girl's fate and his own in his
+hands, and with a quick word to his companion, stepped out of hiding.
+
+The cabby had a foot upon the step when Kirkwood tapped his shoulder.
+
+"My man--"
+
+"Lor, lumme!" cried the fellow in amaze, pivoting on his heel. Cupidity and
+quick understanding enlivened the eyes which in two glances looked
+Kirkwood up and down, comprehending at once both his badly rumpled hat
+and patent-leather shoes. "S'help me,"--thickly,--"where'd you drop from,
+guvner?"
+
+"That's my affair," said Kirkwood briskly. "Are you engaged?"
+
+"If you mykes yerself my fare," returned the cabby shrewdly, "I _ham_."
+
+"Ten shillings, then, if you get us out of here in one minute and
+to--say--Hyde Park Corner in fifteen."
+
+"Us?" demanded the fellow aggressively.
+
+Kirkwood motioned toward the passageway. "There's a lady with me--there.
+Quick now!"
+
+Still the man did not move. "Ten bob," he bargained; "an' you runnin' awye
+with th' stuffy ol' gent's fair darter? Come now, guvner, is it gen'rous?
+Myke it a quid an'--"
+
+"A pound then. _Will_ you hurry?"
+
+By way of answer the fellow scrambled hastily up to the box and snatched at
+the reins. "_Ck_! Gee-e hup!" he cried sonorously.
+
+By now the mews had wakened to the fact of the presence of a "toff" in its
+midst. His light topcoat and silk hat-rendered him as conspicuous as a red
+Indian in war-paint would have been on Rotten Row. A cry of surprise was
+raised, and drowned in a volley of ribald inquiry and chaff.
+
+Fortunately, the cabby was instant to rein in skilfully before the
+passageway, and Kirkwood had the door open before the four-wheeler stopped.
+The girl, hugging her cloak about her, broke cover (whereat the hue and cry
+redoubled), and sprang into the body of the vehicle. Kirkwood followed,
+shutting the door. As the cab lurched forward he leaned over and drew down
+the window-shade, shielding the girl from half a hundred prying eyes. At
+the same time they gathered momentum, banging swiftly, if loudly out of the
+mews.
+
+An urchin, leaping on the step to spy in Kirkwood's window, fell off,
+yelping, as the driver's whiplash curled about his shanks.
+
+The gloom of the tunnel inclosed them briefly ere the lights of the
+Hog-in-the-Pound flashed by and the wheels began to roll more easily.
+Kirkwood drew back with a sigh of relief.
+
+"Thank God!" he said softly.
+
+The girl had no words.
+
+Worried by her silence, solicitous lest, the strain ended, she might be on
+the point of fainting, he let up the shade and lowered the window at her
+side.
+
+She seemed to have collapsed in her corner. Against the dark upholstery her
+hair shone like pale gold in the half-light; her eyes were closed and she
+held a handkerchief to her lips; the other hand lay limp.
+
+"Miss Calendar?"
+
+She started, and something bulky fell from the seat and thumped heavily on
+the floor. Kirkwood bent to pick it up, and so for the first time was
+made aware that she had brought with her a small black gladstone bag of
+considerable weight. As he placed it on the forward seat their eyes met.
+
+"I didn't know--" he began.
+
+"It was to get that," she hastened to explain, "that my father sent me ..."
+
+"Yes," he assented in a tone indicating his complete comprehension. "I
+trust ..." he added vaguely, and neglected to complete the observation,
+losing himself in a maze of conjecture not wholly agreeable. This was a new
+phase of the adventure. He eyed the bag uneasily. What did it contain? How
+did he know ...?
+
+Hastily he abandoned that line of thought. He had no right to
+infer anything whatever, who had thrust himself uninvited into her
+concerns--uninvited, that was to say, in the second instance, having
+been once definitely given his cong�. Inevitably, however, a thousand
+unanswerable questions pestered him; just as, at each fresh facet of
+mystery disclosed by the sequence of the adventure, his bewilderment
+deepened.
+
+The girl stirred restlessly. "I have been thinking," she volunteered in a
+troubled tone, "that there is absolutely no way I know of, to thank you
+properly."
+
+"It is enough if I've been useful," he rose in gallantry to the emergency.
+
+"That," she commented, "was very prettily said. But then I have never known
+any one more kind and courteous and--and considerate, than you." There was
+no savor of flattery in the simple and direct statement; indeed, she was
+looking away from him, out of the window, and her face was serious with
+thought; she seemed to be speaking of, rather than to, Kirkwood. "And I
+have been wondering," she continued with unaffected candor, "what you must
+be thinking of me."
+
+"I? ... What should I think of you, Miss Calendar?"
+
+With the air of a weary child she laid her head against the cushions again,
+face to him, and watched him through lowered lashes, unsmiling.
+
+"You might be thinking that an explanation is due you. Even the way we
+were brought together was extraordinary, Mr. Kirkwood. You must be very
+generous, as generous as you have shown yourself brave, not to require some
+sort of an explanation of me."
+
+"I don't see it that way."
+
+"I do ... You have made me like you very much, Mr. Kirkwood."
+
+He shot her a covert glance--causelessly, for her _naivet�_ was flawless.
+With a feeling of some slight awe he understood this--a sensation of
+sincere reverence for the unspoiled, candid, child's heart and mind that
+were hers. "I'm glad," he said simply; "very glad, if that's the case, and
+presupposing I deserve it. Personally," he laughed, "I seem to myself to
+have been rather forward."
+
+"No; only kind and a gentleman."
+
+"But--please!" he protested.
+
+"Oh, but I mean it, every word! Why shouldn't I? In a little while, ten
+minutes, half an hour, we shall have seen the last of each other. Why
+should I not tell you how I appreciate all that you have unselfishly done
+for me?"
+
+"If you put it that way,--I'm sure I don't know; beyond that it embarrasses
+me horribly to have you overestimate me so. If any courage has been shown
+this night, it is yours ... But I'm forgetting again." He thought to divert
+her. "Where shall I tell the cabby to go this time, Miss Calendar?"
+
+"Craven Street, please," said the girl, and added a house number. "I am to
+meet my father there, with this,"--indicating the gladstone bag.
+
+Kirkwood thrust head and shoulders out the window and instructed the cabby
+accordingly; but his ruse had been ineffectual, as he found when he sat
+back again. Quite composedly the girl took up the thread of conversation
+where it had been broken off.
+
+"It's rather hard to keep silence, when you've been so good. I don't want
+you to think me less generous than yourself, but, truly, I can tell you
+nothing." She sighed a trace resentfully; or so he thought. "There is
+little enough in this--this wretched affair, that I understand myself; and
+that little, I may not tell ... I want you to know that."
+
+"I understand, Miss Calendar."
+
+"There's one thing I may say, however. I have done nothing wrong to-night,
+I believe," she added quickly.
+
+"I've never for an instant questioned that," he returned with a qualm of
+shame; for what he said was not true.
+
+"Thank you ..."
+
+The four-wheeler swung out of Oxford Street into Charing Cross Road.
+Kirkwood noted the fact with a feeling of some relief that their ride
+was to be so short; like many of his fellow-sufferers from "the artistic
+temperament," he was acutely disconcerted by spoken words of praise and
+gratitude; Miss Calendar, unintentionally enough, had succeeded only in
+rendering him self-conscious and ill at ease.
+
+Nor had she fully relieved her mind, nor voiced all that perturbed her.
+"There's one thing more," she said presently: "my father. I--I hope you
+will think charitably of him."
+
+"Indeed, I've no reason or right to think otherwise."
+
+"I was afraid--afraid his actions might have seemed peculiar, to-night ..."
+
+"There are lots of things I don't understand, Miss Calendar. Some day,
+perhaps, it will all clear up,--this trouble of yours. At least, one
+supposes it is trouble, of some sort. And then you will tell me the whole
+story.... Won't you?" Kirkwood insisted.
+
+"I'm afraid not," she said, with a smile of shadowed sadness. "We are to
+say good night in a moment or two, and--it will be good-by as well. It's
+unlikely that we shall ever meet again."
+
+"I refuse positively to take such a gloomy view of the case!"
+
+She shook her head, laughing with him, but with shy regret. "It's so, none
+the less. We are leaving London this very night, my father and I--leaving
+England, for that matter."
+
+"Leaving England?" he echoed. "You're not by any chance bound for America,
+are you?"
+
+"I ... can't tell you."
+
+"But you can tell me this: are you booked on the _Minneapolis_?"
+
+"No--o; it is a--quite another boat."
+
+"Of course!" he commented savagely. "It wouldn't be me to have _any_ sort
+of luck!"
+
+She made no reply beyond a low laugh. He stared gloomily out of his window,
+noting indifferently that they were passing the National Gallery. On their
+left Trafalgar Square stretched, broad and bare, a wilderness of sooty
+stone with an air of mutely tolerating its incongruous fountains. Through
+Charing Cross roared a tide-rip of motor-busses and hackney carriages.
+
+Glumly the young man foresaw the passing of his abbreviated romance; their
+destination was near at hand. Brentwick had been right, to some extent, at
+least; it was quite true that the curtain had been rung up that very night,
+upon Kirkwood's Romance; unhappily, as Brentwick had not foreseen, it was
+immediately to be rung down.
+
+The cab rolled soberly into the Strand.
+
+"Since we are to say good-by so very soon," suggested Kirkwood, "may I ask
+a parting favor, Miss Calendar?"
+
+She regarded him with friendly eyes. "You have every right," she affirmed
+gently.
+
+"Then please to tell me frankly: are you going into any further danger?"
+
+"And is that the only boon you crave at my hands, Mr. Kirkwood?"
+
+"Without impertinence ..."
+
+For a little time, waiting for him to conclude his vague phrase, she
+watched him in an expectant silence. But the man was diffident to a
+degree--At length, somewhat unconsciously, "I think not," she answered.
+"No; there will be no danger awaiting me at Mrs. Hallam's. You need not
+fear for me any more--Thank you."
+
+He lifted his brows at the unfamiliar name. "Mrs. Hallam--?"
+
+"I am going to her house in Craven Street."
+
+"Your father is to meet you there?"--persistently.
+
+"He promised to."
+
+"But if he shouldn't?"
+
+"Why--" Her eyes clouded; she pursed her lips over the conjectural
+annoyance. "Why, in that event, I suppose--It would be very embarrassing.
+You see, I don't know Mrs. Hallam; I don't know that she expects me, unless
+my father is already there. They are old friends--I could drive round for a
+while and come back, I suppose."
+
+But she made it plain that the prospect did not please her.
+
+"Won't you let me ask if Mr. Calender is there, before you get out, then? I
+don't like to be dismissed," he laughed; "and, you know, you shouldn't go
+wandering round all alone."
+
+The cab drew up. Kirkwood put a hand on the door and awaited her will.
+
+"It--it would be very kind ... I hate to impose upon you."
+
+He turned the knob and got out. "If you'll wait one moment," he said
+superfluously, as he closed the door.
+
+Pausing only to verify the number, he sprang up the steps and found the
+bell-button.
+
+It was a modest little residence, in nothing more remarkable than its
+neighbors, unless it was for a certain air of extra grooming: the area
+railing was sleek with fresh black paint; the doorstep looked the better
+for vigorous stoning; the door itself was immaculate, its brasses shining
+lustrous against red-lacquered woodwork. A soft glow filled the fanlight.
+Overhead the drawing-room windows shone with a cozy, warm radiance.
+
+The door opened, framing the figure of a maid sketched broadly in masses of
+somber black and dead white.
+
+"Can you tell me, is Mr. Calendar here?"
+
+The servant's eyes left his face, looked past him at the waiting cab, and
+returned.
+
+"I'm not sure, sir. If you will please step in."
+
+Kirkwood hesitated briefly, then acceded. The maid closed the door.
+
+"What name shall I say, sir?"
+
+"Mr. Kirkwood."
+
+"If you will please to wait one moment, sir--"
+
+He was left in the entry hall, the servant hurrying to the staircase and
+up. Three minutes elapsed; he was on the point of returning to the girl,
+when the maid reappeared.
+
+"Mrs. Hallam says, will you kindly step up-stairs, sir."
+
+Disgruntled, he followed her; at the head of the stairs she bowed him into
+the drawing-room and again left him to his own resources.
+
+Nervous, annoyed, he paced the floor from wall to wall, his footfalls
+silenced by heavy rugs. As the delay was prolonged he began to fume with
+impatience, wondering, half regretting that he had left the girl outside,
+definitely sorry that he had failed to name his errand more explicitly to
+the maid. At another time, in another mood, he might have accorded more
+appreciation to the charm of the apartment, which, betraying the feminine
+touch in every detail of arrangement and furnishing, was very handsome in
+an unconventional way. But he was quite heedless of externals.
+
+Wearied, he deposited himself sulkily in an armchair by the hearth.
+
+From a boudoir on the same floor there came murmurs of two voices, a man's
+and a woman's. The latter laughed prettily.
+
+"Oh, any time!" snorted the American. "Any time you're through with your
+confounded flirtation, Mr. George B. Calendar!"
+
+The voices rose, approaching. "Good night," said the woman gaily; "farewell
+and--good luck go with you!"
+
+"Thank you. Good night," replied the man more conservatively.
+
+Kirkwood rose, expectant.
+
+There was a swish of draperies, and a moment later he was acknowledging the
+totally unlooked-for entrance of the mistress of the house. He had thought
+to see Calendar, presuming him to be the man closeted with Mrs. Hallam;
+but, whoever that had been, he did not accompany the woman. Indeed, as she
+advanced from the doorway, Kirkwood could hear the man's footsteps on the
+stairs.
+
+"This is Mr. Kirkwood?" The note of inquiry in the well-trained voice--a
+very alluring voice and one pleasant to listen to, he thought--made it seem
+as though she had asked, point-blank, "Who is Mr. Kirkwood?"
+
+He bowed, discovering himself in the presence of an extraordinarily
+handsome and interesting woman; a woman of years which as yet had not told
+upon her, of experience that had not availed to harden her, at least in so
+far as her exterior charm of personality was involved; a woman, in brief,
+who bore close inspection well, despite an elusive effect of maturity, not
+without its attraction for men. Kirkwood was impressed that it would be
+very easy to learn to like Mrs. Hallam more than well--with her approval.
+
+Although he had not anticipated it, he was not at all surprised to
+recognize in her the woman who, if he were not mistaken, had slipped to
+Calendar that warning in the dining-room of the Pless. Kirkwood's state of
+mind had come to be such, through his experiences of the past few
+hours, that he would have accepted anything, however preposterous, as a
+commonplace happening. But for that matter there was nothing particularly
+astonishing in this _rencontre_.
+
+"I am Mrs. Hallam. You were asking for Mr. Calendar?"
+
+"He was to have been here at this hour, I believe," said Kirkwood.
+
+"Yes?" There was just the right inflection of surprise in her carefully
+controlled tone.
+
+He became aware of an undercurrent of feeling; that the woman was
+estimating him shrewdly with her fine direct eyes. He returned her regard
+with admiring interest; they were gray-green eyes, deep-set but large, a
+little shallow, a little changeable, calling to mind the sea on a windy,
+cloudy day.
+
+Below stairs a door slammed.
+
+"I am not a detective, Mrs. Hallam," announced the young man suddenly.
+"Mr. Calendar required a service of me this evening; I am here in natural
+consequence. If it was Mr. Calendar who left this house just now, I am
+wasting time."
+
+"It was not Mr. Calendar." The fine-lined brows arched in surprise, real
+or pretended, at his first blurted words, and relaxed; amused, the woman
+laughed deliciously. "But I am expecting him any moment; he was to have
+been here half an hour since.... Won't you wait?"
+
+She indicated, with a gracious gesture, a chair, and took for herself one
+end of a davenport. "I'm sure he won't be long, now."
+
+"Thank you, I will return, if I may." Kirkwood moved toward the door.
+
+"But there's no necessity--" She seemed insistent on detaining him,
+possibly because she questioned his motive, possibly for her own
+divertisement.
+
+Kirkwood deprecated his refusal with a smile. "The truth is, Miss Calendar
+is waiting in a cab, outside. I--"
+
+"Dorothy Calendar!" Mrs. Hallam rose alertly. "But why should she wait
+there? To be sure, we've never met; but I have known her father for many
+years." Her eyes held steadfast to his face; shallow, flawed by her every
+thought, like the sea by a cat's-paw he found them altogether inscrutable;
+yet received an impression that their owner was now unable to account for
+him.
+
+She swung about quickly, preceding him to the door and down the stairs. "I
+am sure Dorothy will come in to wait, if I ask her," she told Kirkwood in a
+high sweet voice. "I'm so anxious to know her. It's quite absurd, really,
+of her--to stand on ceremony with me, when her father made an appointment
+here. I'll run out and ask--"
+
+Mrs. Hallam's slim white fingers turned latch and knob, opening the street
+door, and her voice died away as she stepped out into the night. For a
+moment, to Kirkwood, tagging after her with an uncomfortable sense of
+having somehow done the wrong thing, her figure--full fair shoulders and
+arms rising out of the glittering dinner gown--cut a gorgeous silhouette
+against the darkness. Then, with a sudden, imperative gesture, she half
+turned towards him.
+
+"But," she exclaimed, perplexed, gazing to right and left, "but the cab,
+Mr. Kirkwood?"
+
+He was on the stoop a second later. Standing beside her, he stared blankly.
+
+To the left the Strand roared, the stream of its night-life in high spate;
+on the right lay the Embankment, comparatively silent and deserted, if
+brilliant with its high-swung lights. Between the two, quiet Craven Street
+ran, short and narrow, and wholly innocent of any form of equipage.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+
+"BELOW BRIDGE"
+
+In silence Mrs. Hallam turned to Kirkwood, her pose in itself a question
+and a peremptory one. Her eyes had narrowed; between their lashes the green
+showed, a thin edge like jade, cold and calculating. The firm lines of her
+mouth and chin had hardened.
+
+Temporarily dumb with consternation, he returned her stare as silently.
+
+"_Well_, Mr.--Kirkwood?"
+
+"Mrs. Hallam," he stammered, "I--"
+
+She lifted her shoulders impatiently and with a quick movement stepped back
+across the threshold, where she paused, a rounded arm barring the entrance,
+one hand grasping the door-knob, as if to shut him out at any moment.
+
+"I'm awaiting your explanation," she said coldly.
+
+[Illustration: "I'm waiting your explanation," she said coldly.]
+
+He grinned with nervousness, striving to penetrate the mental processes of
+this handsome Mrs. Hallam. She seemed to regard him with a suspicion which
+he thought inexcusable. Did she suppose he had spirited Dorothy Calendar
+away and then called to apprise her of the fact? Or that he was some sort
+of an adventurer, who had manufactured a plausible yarn to gain him access
+to her home? Or--harking back to her original theory--that he was an
+emissary from Scotland Yard? ... Probably she distrusted him on the latter
+hypothesis. The reflection left him more at ease.
+
+"I am quite as mystified as you, Mrs. Hallam," he began. "Miss Calendar was
+here, at this door, in a four-wheeler, not ten minutes ago, and--"
+
+"Then where is she now?"
+
+"Tell me where Calendar is," he retorted, inspired, "and I'll try to answer
+you!"
+
+But her eyes were blank. "You mean--?"
+
+"That Calendar was in this house when I came; that he left, found his
+daughter in the cab, and drove off with her. It's clear enough."
+
+"You are quite mistaken," she said thoughtfully. "George Calendar has not
+been here this night."
+
+He wondered that she did not seem to resent his imputation. "I think not--"
+
+"Listen!" she cried, raising a warning hand; and relaxing her vigilant
+attitude, moved forward once more, to peer down toward the Embankment.
+
+A cab had cut in from that direction and was bearing down upon them with
+a brisk rumble of hoofs. As it approached, Kirkwood's heart, that
+had lightened, was weighed upon again by disappointment. It was no
+four-wheeler, but a hansom, and the open wings of the apron, disclosing a
+white triangle of linen surmounted by a glowing spot of fire, betrayed the
+sex of the fare too plainly to allow of further hope that it might be the
+girl returning.
+
+At the door, the cab pulled up sharply and a man tumbled hastily out upon
+the sidewalk.
+
+"Here!" he cried throatily, tossing the cabby his fare, and turned toward
+the pair upon the doorstep, evidently surmising that something was amiss.
+For he was Calendar in proper person, and a sight to upset in a twinkling
+Kirkwood's ingeniously builded castle of suspicion.
+
+"Mrs. Hallam!" he cried, out of breath. "'S my daughter here?" And then,
+catching sight of Kirkwood's countenance: "Why, hello, Kirkwood!" he
+saluted him with a dubious air.
+
+The woman interrupted hastily. "Please come in, Mr. Calendar. This
+gentleman has been inquiring for you, with an astonishing tale about your
+daughter."
+
+"Dorothy!" Calendar's moon-like visage was momentarily divested of any
+trace of color. "What of her?"
+
+"You had better come in," advised Mrs. Hallam brusquely.
+
+The fat adventurer hopped hurriedly across the threshold, Kirkwood
+following. The woman shut the door, and turned with back to it, nodding
+significantly at Kirkwood as her eyes met Calendar's.
+
+"Well, well?" snapped the latter impatiently, turning to the young man.
+
+But Kirkwood was thinking quickly. For the present he contented himself
+with a deliberate statement of fact: "Miss Calendar has disappeared." It
+gave him an instant's time ... "There's something damned fishy!" he told
+himself. "These two are playing at cross-purposes. Calendar's no fool; he's
+evidently a crook, to boot. As for the woman, she's had her eyes open for
+a number of years. The main thing's Dorothy. She didn't vanish of her own
+initiative. And Mrs. Hallam knows, or suspects, more than she's going to
+tell. I don't think she wants Dorothy found. Calendar does. So do I. Ergo:
+I'm for Calendar."
+
+"Disappeared?" Calendar was barking at him. "How? When? Where?"
+
+"Within ten minutes," said Kirkwood. "Here, let's get it straight.... With
+her permission I brought her here in a four-wheeler." He was carefully
+suppressing all mention of Frognall Street, and in Calendar's glance read
+approval of the elision. "She didn't want to get out, unless you were here.
+I asked for you. The maid showed me up-stairs. I left your daughter in the
+cab--and by the way, I hadn't paid the driver. That's funny, too! Perhaps
+six or seven minutes after I came in Mrs. Hallam found out that Miss
+Calendar was with me and wanted to ask her in. When we got to the door--no
+cab. There you have it all."
+
+"Thanks--it's plenty," said Calendar dryly. He bent his head in thought for
+an instant, then looked up and fixed Mrs. Hallam with an unprejudiced
+eye, "I say!" he demanded explosively. "There wasn't any one here that
+knew--eh?"
+
+Her fine eyes wavered and fell before his; and Kirkwood remarked that her
+under lip was curiously drawn in.
+
+"I heard a man leave as Mrs. Hallam joined me," he volunteered helpfully,
+and with a suspicion of malice. "And after that--I paid no attention at the
+time--it seems to me I did hear a cab in the street--"
+
+"Ow?" interjected Calendar, eying the woman steadfastly and employing an
+exclamation of combined illumination and inquiry more typically British
+than anything Kirkwood had yet heard from the man.
+
+For her part, the look she gave Kirkwood was sharp with fury. It was more;
+it was a mistake, a flaw in her diplomacy; for Calendar intercepted it.
+Unceremoniously he grasped her bare arm with his fat hand.
+
+"Tell me who it was," he demanded in an ugly tone.
+
+She freed herself with a twist, and stepped back, a higher color in her
+cheeks, a flash of anger in her eyes.
+
+"Mr. Mulready," she retorted defiantly. "What of that?"
+
+"I wish I was sure," declared the fat adventurer, exasperated. "As it is,
+I bet a dollar you've put your foot in it, my lady. I warned you of that
+blackguard.... There! The mischief's done; we won't row over it. One
+moment." He begged it with a wave of his hand; stood pondering briefly,
+fumbled for his watch, found and consulted it. "It's the barest chance," he
+muttered. "Perhaps we can make it."
+
+"What are you going to do?" asked the woman.
+
+"Give _Mister_ Mulready a run for his money. Come along, Kirkwood; we
+haven't a minute. Mrs. Hallam, permit us...." She stepped aside and he
+brushed past her to the door. "Come, Kirkwood!"
+
+He seemed to take Kirkwood's company for granted; and the young man was not
+inclined to argue the point. Meekly enough he fell in with Calendar on the
+sidewalk. Mrs. Hallam followed them out. "You won't forget?" she called
+tentatively.
+
+"I'll 'phone you if we find out anything." Calendar jerked the words
+unceremoniously over his shoulder as, linking arms with Kirkwood, he drew
+him swiftly along. They heard her shut the door; instantly Calendar
+stopped. "Look here, did Dorothy have a--a small parcel with her?"
+
+"She had a gladstone bag."
+
+"Oh, the devil, the devil!" Calendar started on again, muttering
+distractedly. As they reached the corner he disengaged his arm. "We've a
+minute and a half to reach Charing Cross Pier; and I think it's the last
+boat. You set the pace, will you? But remember I'm an oldish man and--and
+fat."
+
+They began to run, the one easily, the other lumbering after like an
+old-fashioned square-rigged ship paced by a liner.
+
+Beneath the railway bridge, in front of the Underground station, the
+cab-rank cried them on with sardonic view-halloos; and a bobby remarked
+them with suspicion, turning to watch as they plunged round the corner and
+across the wide Embankment.
+
+The Thames appeared before them, a river of ink on whose burnished surface
+lights swam in long winding streaks and oily blobs. By the floating pier a
+County Council steamboat strained its hawsers, snoring huskily. Bells were
+jingling in her engine-room as the two gained the head of the sloping
+gangway.
+
+Kirkwood slapped a shilling down on the ticket-window ledge. "Where to?" he
+cried back to Calendar.
+
+"Cherry Gardens Pier," rasped the winded man. He stumbled after Kirkwood,
+groaning with exhaustion. Only the tolerance of the pier employees gained
+them their end; the steamer was held some seconds for them; as Calendar
+staggered to its deck, the gangway was jerked in, the last hawser cast off.
+The boat sheered wide out on the river, then shot in, arrow-like, to the
+pier beneath Waterloo Bridge.
+
+The deck was crowded and additional passengers embarked at every stop. In
+the circumstances conversation, save on the most impersonal topics, was
+impossible; and even had it been necessary or advisable to discuss the
+affair which occupied their minds, where so many ears could hear, Calendar
+had breath enough neither to answer nor to catechize Kirkwood. They found
+seats on the forward deck and rested there in grim silence, both fretting
+under the enforced restraint, while the boat darted, like some illuminated
+and exceptionally active water insect, from pier to pier.
+
+As it snorted beneath London Bridge, Calendar's impatience drove him from
+his seat back to the gangway. "Next stop," he told Kirkwood curtly; and
+rested his heavy bulk against the paddle-box, brooding morosely, until,
+after an uninterrupted run of more than a mile, the steamer swept in,
+side-wheels backing water furiously against the ebbing tide, to Cherry
+Gardens landing.
+
+Sweet name for a locality unsavory beyond credence! ... As they emerged on
+the street level and turned west on Bermondsey Wall, Kirkwood was fain to
+tug his top-coat over his chest and button it tight, to hide his linen. In
+a guarded tone he counseled his companion to do likewise; and Calendar,
+after a moment's blank, uncomprehending stare, acknowledged the wisdom of
+the advice with a grunt.
+
+The very air they breathed was rank with fetid odors bred of the gaunt dark
+warehouses that lined their way; the lights were few; beneath the looming
+buildings the shadows were many and dense. Here and there dreary and
+cheerless public houses appeared, with lighted windows conspicuous in a
+lightless waste. From time to time, as they hurried on, they encountered,
+and made wide detours to escape contact with knots of wayfarers--men
+debased and begrimed, with dreary and slatternly women, arm in arm,
+zigzaging widely across the sidewalks, chorusing with sodden voices the
+burden of some popularized ballad. The cheapened, sentimental refrains
+echoed sadly between benighted walls....
+
+Kirkwood shuddered, sticking close to Calendar's side. Life's naked
+brutalities had theretofore been largely out of his ken. He had heard of
+slums, had even ventured to mouth politely moral platitudes on the subject
+of overcrowding in great centers of population, but in the darkest flights
+of imagination had never pictured to himself anything so unspeakably
+foul and hopeless as this.... And they were come hither seeking--Dorothy
+Calendar! He was unable to conceive what manner of villainy could be
+directed against her, that she must be looked for in such surroundings.
+
+After some ten minutes' steady walking, Calendar turned aside with a
+muttered word, and dived down a covered, dark and evil-smelling passageway
+that seemed to lead toward the river.
+
+Mastering his involuntary qualms, Kirkwood followed.
+
+Some ten or twelve paces from its entrance the passageway swerved at a
+right angle, continuing three yards or so to end in a blank wall, wherefrom
+a flickering, inadequate gas-lamp jutted. At this point a stone platform,
+perhaps four feet square, was discovered, from the edge of which a flight
+of worn and slimy stone steps led down to a permanent boat-landing, where
+another gas-light flared gustily despite the protection of its frame of
+begrimed glass.
+
+"Good Lord!" exclaimed the young man. "What, in Heaven's name, Calendar--?"
+
+"Bermondsey Old Stairs. Come on."
+
+They descended to the landing-stage. Beneath them the Pool slept, a sheet
+of polished ebony, whispering to itself, lapping with small stealthy
+gurgles angles of masonry and ancient piles. On the farther bank tall
+warehouses reared square old-time heads, their uncompromising, rugged
+profile relieved here and there by tapering mastheads. A few, scattering,
+feeble lights were visible. Nothing moved save the river and the wind.
+
+The landing itself they found quite deserted; something which the
+adventurer comprehended with a nod which, like its accompanying,
+inarticulate ejaculation, might have been taken to indicate either
+satisfaction or disgust. He ignored Kirkwood altogether, for the time
+being, and presently produced a small, bright object, which, applied to his
+lips, proved to be a boatswain's whistle. He sounded two blasts, one long,
+one brief.
+
+There fell a lull, Kirkwood watching the other and wondering what next
+would happen. Calendar paced restlessly to and fro upon the narrow landing,
+now stopping to incline an ear to catch some anticipated sound, now
+searching with sweeping glances the black reaches of the Pool.
+
+Finally, consulting his watch, "Almost ten," he announced.
+
+"We're in time?"
+
+"Can't say.... Damn! ... If that infernal boat would only show up--"
+
+He was lifting the whistle to sound a second summons when a rowboat rounded
+a projecting angle formed by the next warehouse down stream, and with
+clanking oar-locks swung in toward the landing. On her thwarts two figures,
+dipping and rising, labored with the sweeps. As they drew in, the man
+forward shipped his blades, and rising, scrambled to the bows in order to
+grasp an iron mooring-ring set in the wall. The other awkwardly took in his
+oars and, as the current swung the stern downstream, placed a hand palm
+downward upon the bottom step to hold the boat steady.
+
+Calendar waddled to the brink of the stage, grunting with relief.
+
+"The other man?" he asked brusquely. "Has he gone aboard? Or is this the
+first trip to-night?"
+
+One of the watermen nodded assent to the latter question, adding gruffly:
+"Seen nawthin' of 'im, sir."
+
+"Very good," said Calendar, as if he doubted whether it were very good or
+bad. "We'll wait a bit."
+
+"Right-o!" agreed the waterman civilly.
+
+Calendar turned back, his small eyes glimmering with satisfaction. Fumbling
+in one coat pocket he brought to light a cigar-case. "Have a smoke?" he
+suggested with a show of friendliness. "By Heaven, I was beginnin' to get
+worried!"
+
+"As to what?" inquired Kirkwood pointedly, selecting a cigar.
+
+He got no immediate reply, but felt Calendar's sharp eyes upon him while he
+manoeuvered with matches for a light.
+
+"That's so," it came at length. "You don't know. I kind of forgot for a
+minute; somehow you seemed on the inside."
+
+Kirkwood laughed lightly. "I've experienced something of the same sensation
+in the past few hours."
+
+"Don't doubt it." Calendar was watching him narrowly. "I suppose," he put
+it to him abruptly, "you haven't changed your mind?"
+
+"Changed my mind?"
+
+"About coming in with me."
+
+"My dear sir, I can have no mind to change until a plain proposition is
+laid before me."
+
+"Hmm!" Calendar puffed vigorously until it occurred to him to change the
+subject. "You won't mind telling me what happened to you and Dorothy?"
+
+"Certainly not."
+
+Calendar drew nearer and Kirkwood, lowering his voice, narrated briefly the
+events since he had left the Pless in Dorothy's company.
+
+Her father followed him intently, interrupting now and again with
+exclamation or pertinent question; as, Had Kirkwood been able to see the
+face of the man in No. 9, Frognall Street? The negative answer seemed to
+disconcert him.
+
+"Youngster, you say? Blam' if I can lay my mind to _him_! Now if that
+Mulready--"
+
+"It would have been impossible for Mulready--whoever he is--to recover and
+get to Craven Street before we did," Kirkwood pointed out.
+
+"Well--go on." But when the tale was told, "It's that scoundrel, Mulready!"
+the man affirmed with heat. "It's his hand--I know him. I might have had
+sense enough to see he'd take the first chance to hand me the double-cross.
+Well, this does for _him_, all right!" Calendar lowered viciously at the
+river. "You've been blame' useful," he told Kirkwood assertively. "If
+it hadn't been for you, I don't know where _I'd_ be now,--nor Dorothy,
+either,"--an obvious afterthought. "There's no particular way I can show my
+appreciation, I suppose? Money--?"
+
+"I've got enough to last me till I reach New York, thank you."
+
+"Well, if the time ever comes, just shout for George B. I won't be
+wanting.... I only wish you were with us; but that's out of the question."
+
+"Doubtless ..."
+
+"No two ways about it. I bet anything you've got a conscience concealed
+about your person. What? You're an honest man, eh?"
+
+"I don't want to sound immodest," returned Kirkwood, amused.
+
+"You don't need to worry about that.... But an honest man's got no business
+in _my_ line." He glanced again at his watch. "Damn that Mulready! I wonder
+if he was 'cute enough to take another way? Or did he think ... The fool!"
+
+He cut off abruptly, seeming depressed by the thought that he might have
+been outwitted; and, clasping hands behind his back, chewed savagely on his
+cigar, watching the river. Kirkwood found himself somewhat wearied; the
+uselessness of his presence there struck him with added force. He bethought
+him of his boat-train, scheduled to leave a station miles distant, in an
+hour and a half. If he missed it, he would be stranded in a foreign land,
+penniless and practically without friends--Brentwick being away and all the
+rest of his circle of acquaintances on the other side of the Channel. Yet
+he lingered, in poor company, daring fate that he might see the end of the
+affair. Why?
+
+There was only one honest answer to that question. He stayed on because of
+his interest in a girl whom he had known for a matter of three hours, at
+most. It was insensate folly on his part, ridiculous from any point of
+view. But he made no move to go.
+
+The slow minutes lengthened monotonously.
+
+There came a sound from the street level. Calendar held up a hand of
+warning. "Here they come! Steady!" he said tensely. Kirkwood, listening
+intently, interpreted the noise as a clash of hoofs upon cobbles.
+
+Calendar turned to the boat.
+
+"Sheer off," he ordered. "Drop out of sight. I'll whistle when I want you."
+
+"Aye, aye, sir."
+
+The boat slipped noiselessly away with the current and in an instant was
+lost to sight. Calendar plucked at Kirkwood's sleeve, drawing him into the
+shadow of the steps. "E-easy," he whispered; "and, I say, lend me a hand,
+will you, if Mulready turns ugly?"
+
+"Oh, yes," assented Kirkwood, with a nonchalance not entirely unassumed.
+
+The racket drew nearer and ceased; the hush that fell thereafter seemed
+only accentuated by the purling of the river. It was ended by footsteps
+echoing in the covered passageway. Calendar craned his thick neck round the
+shoulder of stone, reconnoitering the landing and stairway.
+
+"Thank God!" he said under his breath. "I was right, after all!"
+
+A man's deep tones broke out above. "This way. Mind the steps; they're a
+bit slippery, Miss Dorothy."
+
+"But my father--?" came the girl's voice, attuned to doubt.
+
+"Oh, he'll be along--if he isn't waiting now, in the boat."
+
+They descended, the man leading. At the foot, without a glance to right or
+left, he advanced to the edge of the stage, leaning out over the rail as if
+endeavoring to locate the rowboat. At once the girl appeared, moving to his
+side.
+
+"But, Mr. Mulready--"
+
+The girl's words were drowned by a prolonged blast on the boatswain's
+whistle at her companion's lips; the shorter one followed in due course.
+Calendar edged forward from Kirkwood's side.
+
+"But what shall we do if my father isn't here? Wait?"
+
+"No; best not to; best to get on the _Alethea_ as soon as possible, Miss
+Calendar. We can send the boat back."
+
+"'Once aboard the lugger the girl is mine'--eh, Mulready?--to say nothing
+of the loot!"
+
+If Calendar's words were jocular, his tone conveyed a different impression
+entirely. Both man and girl wheeled right about to face him, the one with a
+strangled oath, the other with a low cry.
+
+"The devil!" exclaimed this Mr. Mulready.
+
+"Oh! My father!" the girl voiced her recognition of him.
+
+"Not precisely one and the same person," commented Calendar suavely.
+"But--er--thanks, just as much.... You see, Mulready, when I make an
+appointment, I keep it."
+
+"We'd begun to get a bit anxious about you--" Mulready began defensively.
+
+"So I surmised, from what Mrs. Hallam and Mr. Kirkwood told me.... Well?"
+
+The man found no ready answer. He fell back a pace to the railing, his
+features working with his deep chagrin. The murky flare of the gas-lamp
+overhead fell across a face handsome beyond the ordinary but marred by a
+sullen humor and seamed with indulgence: a face that seemed hauntingly
+familiar until Kirkwood in a flash of visual memory reconstructed the
+portrait of a man who lingered over a dining-table, with two empty chairs
+for company. This, then, was he whom Mrs. Hallam had left at the Pless; a
+tall, strong man, very heavy about the chest and shoulders....
+
+"Why, my dear friend," Calendar was taunting him, "you don't seem overjoyed
+to see me, for all your wild anxiety! 'Pon my word, you act as if you
+hadn't expected me--and our engagement so clearly understood, at that! ...
+Why, you fool!"--here the mask of irony was cast. "Did you think for a
+moment I'd let myself be nabbed by that yap from Scotland Yard? Were you
+banking on that? I give you my faith I ambled out under his very nose! ...
+Dorothy, my dear," turning impatiently from Mulready, "where's that bag?"
+
+The girl withdrew a puzzled gaze from Mulready's face, (it was apparent to
+Kirkwood that this phase of the affair was no more enigmatic to him than to
+her), and drew aside a corner of her cloak, disclosing the gladstone bag,
+securely grasped in one gloved hand.
+
+"I have it, thanks to Mr. Kirkwood," she said quietly.
+
+Kirkwood chose that moment to advance from the shadow. Mulready started and
+fixed him with a troubled and unfriendly stare. The girl greeted him with a
+note of sincere pleasure in her surprise.
+
+"Why, Mr. Kirkwood! ... But I left you at Mrs. Hallam's!"
+
+Kirkwood bowed, smiling openly at Mulready's discomfiture.
+
+"By your father's grace, I came with him," he said. "You ran away without
+saying good night, you know, and I'm a jealous creditor."
+
+She laughed excitedly, turning to Calendar. "But _you_ were to meet me at
+Mrs. Hallam's?"
+
+"Mulready was good enough to try to save me the trouble, my dear. He's an
+unselfish soul, Mulready. Fortunately it happened that I came along not
+five minutes after he'd carried you off. How was that, Dorothy?"
+
+Her glance wavered uneasily between the two, Mulready and her father. The
+former, shrugging to declare his indifference, turned his back squarely
+upon them. She frowned.
+
+"He came out of Mrs. Hallam's and got into the four-wheeler, saying you had
+sent him to take your place, and would join us on the _Alethea_."
+
+"So-o! How about it, Mulready?"
+
+The man swung back slowly. "What you choose to think," he said after a
+deliberate pause.
+
+"Well, never mind! We'll go over the matter at our leisure on the
+_Alethea_."
+
+There was in the adventurer's tone a menace, bitter and not to be ignored;
+which Mulready saw fit to challenge.
+
+"I think not," he declared; "I think not. I'm weary of your addle-pated
+suspicions. It'd be plain to any one but a fool that I acted for the best
+interests of all concerned in this matter. If you're not content to see it
+in that light, I'm done."
+
+"Oh, if you want to put it that way, I'm _not_ content, Mr. Mulready,"
+retorted Calendar dangerously.
+
+"Please yourself. I bid you good evening and--good-by." The man took a step
+toward the stairs.
+
+Calendar dropped his right hand into his top-coat pocket. "Just a minute,"
+he said sweetly, and Mulready stopped. Abruptly the fat adventurer's
+smoldering resentment leaped in flame. "That'll be about all, Mr. Mulready!
+'Bout face, you hound, and get into that boat! D'you think I'll temporize
+with you till Doomsday? Then forget it. You're wrong, dead wrong. Your
+bluff's called, and"--with an evil chuckle--"I hold a full house,
+Mulready,--every chamber taken." He lifted meaningly the hand in the coat
+pocket. "Now, in with you."
+
+With a grin and a swagger of pure bravado Mulready turned and obeyed.
+Unnoticed of any, save perhaps Calendar himself, the boat had drawn in at
+the stage a moment earlier. Mulready dropped into it and threw himself
+sullenly upon the midships thwart.
+
+"Now, Dorothy, in you go, my dear," continued Calendar, with a
+self-satisfied wag of his head.
+
+Half dazed, to all seeming, she moved toward the boat. With clumsy and
+assertive gallantry her father stepped before her, offering his hand,--his
+hand which she did not touch; for, in the act of descending, she remembered
+and swung impulsively back to Kirkwood.
+
+"Good night, Mr. Kirkwood; good night,--I shan't forget."
+
+He took her hand and bowed above it; but when his head was lifted, he still
+retained her fingers in a lingering clasp.
+
+"Good night," he said reluctantly.
+
+The crass incongruity of her in that setting smote him with renewed force.
+Young, beautiful, dainty, brilliant and graceful in her pretty evening
+gown, she figured strangely against the gloomy background of the river, in
+those dull and mean surroundings of dank stone and rusted iron. She was
+like (he thought extravagantly) a whiff of flower-fragrance lost in the
+miasmatic vapors of a slough.
+
+The innocent appeal and allure of her face, upturned to his beneath the
+gas-light, wrought compassionately upon his sensitive and generous heart.
+He was aware of a little surge of blind rage against the conditions that
+had brought her to that spot, and against those whom he held responsible
+for those conditions.
+
+In a sudden flush of daring he turned and nodded coolly to Calendar. "With
+your permission," he said negligently; and drew the girl aside to the angle
+of the stairway.
+
+"Miss Calendar--" he began; but was interrupted.
+
+"Here--I say!"
+
+Calendar had started toward him angrily.
+
+Kirkwood calmly waved him back. "I want a word in private with your
+daughter, Mr. Calendar," he announced with quiet dignity. "I don't think
+you'll deny me? I've saved you some slight trouble to-night."
+
+Disgruntled, the adventurer paused. "Oh--_all_ right," he grumbled. "I
+don't see what ..." He returned to the boat.
+
+"Forgive me, Miss Calendar," continued Kirkwood nervously. "I know I've no
+right to interfere, but--"
+
+"Yes, Mr. Kirkwood?"
+
+"--but hasn't this gone far enough?" he floundered unhappily. "I can't like
+the look of things. Are you sure--sure that it's all right--with you, I
+mean?"
+
+She did not answer at once; but her eyes were kind and sympathetic. He
+plucked heart of their tolerance.
+
+"It isn't too late, yet," he argued. "Let me take you to your friends,--you
+must have friends in the city. But this--this midnight flight down the
+Thames, this atmosphere of stealth and suspicion, this--"
+
+"But my place is with my father, Mr. Kirkwood," she interposed. "I daren't
+doubt him--dare I?"
+
+"I ... suppose not."
+
+"So I must go with him.... I'm glad--thank you for caring, dear Mr.
+Kirkwood. And again, good night."
+
+"Good luck attend you," he muttered, following her to the boat.
+
+Calendar helped her in and turned back to Kirkwood with a look of arch
+triumph; Kirkwood wondered if he had overheard. Whether or no, he could
+afford to be magnanimous. Seizing Kirkwood's hand, he pumped it vigorously.
+
+"My dear boy, you've been an angel in disguise! And I guess you think me
+the devil in masquerade." He chuckled, in high conceit with himself over
+the turn of affairs. "Good night and--and fare thee well!" He dropped into
+the boat, seating himself to face the recalcitrant Mulready. "Cast off,
+there!"
+
+The boat dropped away, the oars lifting and falling. With a weariful sense
+of loneliness and disappointment, Kirkwood hung over the rail to watch them
+out of sight.
+
+A dozen feet of water lay between the stage and the boat. The girl's dress
+remained a spot of cheerful color; her face was a blur. As the watermen
+swung the bows down-stream, she looked back, lifting an arm spectral in its
+white sheath. Kirkwood raised his hat.
+
+The boat gathered impetus, momentarily diminishing in the night's illusory
+perspective; presently it was little more than a fugitive blot, gliding
+swiftly in midstream. And then, it was gone entirely, engulfed by the
+obliterating darkness.
+
+[Illustration: The boat gathered impetus.]
+
+Somewhat wearily the young man released the railing and ascended the
+stairs. "And that is the end!" he told himself, struggling with an acute
+sense of personal injury. He had been hardly used. For a few hours his
+life had been lightened by the ineffable glamor of Romance; mystery and
+adventure had engaged him, exorcising for the time the Shade of Care; he
+had served a fair woman and been associated with men whose ways, however
+questionable, were the ways of courage, hedged thickly about with perils.
+
+All that was at an end. Prosaic and workaday to-morrows confronted him in
+endless and dreary perspective; and he felt again upon his shoulder the
+bony hand of his familiar, Care....
+
+He sighed: "Ah, well!"
+
+Disconsolate and aggrieved, he gained the street. He was miles from St.
+Pancras, foot-weary, to all intents and purposes lost.
+
+In this extremity, Chance smiled upon him. The cabby who, at his initial
+instance, had traveled this weary way from Quadrant Mews, after the manner
+of his kind, ere turning back, had sought surcease of fatigue at the
+nearest public; from afar Kirkwood saw the four-wheeler at the curb, and
+made all haste toward it.
+
+Entering the gin-mill he found the cabby, soothed him with bitter, and,
+instructing him for St. Pancras with all speed, dropped, limp and listless
+with fatigue, into the conveyance.
+
+As it moved, he closed his eyes; the face of Dorothy Calendar shone out
+from the blank wall of his consciousness, like an illuminated picture cast
+upon a screen. She smiled upon him, her head high, her eyes tender and
+trustful. And he thought that her scarlet lips were sweet with promise and
+her glance a-brim with such a light as he had never dreamed to know.
+
+And now that he knew it and desired it, it was too late; an hour gone he
+might, by a nod of his head, have cast his fortunes with hers for weal or
+woe. But now ...
+
+Alas and alackaday, that Romance was no more!
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+
+DIVERSIONS OF A RUINED GENTLEMAN--RESUMED
+
+From the commanding elevation of the box, "Three 'n' six," enunciated the
+cabby, his tone that of a man prepared for trouble, acquainted with
+trouble, inclined to give trouble a welcome. His bloodshot eyes blinked
+truculently at his alighted fare. "Three 'n' six," he iterated
+aggressively.
+
+An adjacent but theretofore abstracted policeman pricked up his ears and
+assumed an intelligent expression.
+
+"Bermondsey Ol' Stairs to Sain' Pancras," argued the cabby assertively;
+"seven mile by th' radius; three 'n' six!"
+
+Kirkwood stood on the outer station platform, near the entrance to
+third-class waiting-rooms. Continuing to fumble through his pockets for an
+elusive sovereign purse, he looked up mildly at the man.
+
+"All right, cabby," he said, with pacific purpose; "you'll get your fare in
+half a shake."
+
+"Three 'n' six!" croaked the cabby, like a blowsy and vindictive parrot.
+
+The bobby strolled nearer.
+
+"Yes?" said Kirkwood, mildly diverted. "Why not sing it, cabby?"
+
+"Lor' lumme!" The cabby exploded with indignation, continuing to give a
+lifelike imitation of a rumpled parrot. "I 'ad trouble enough wif you at
+Bermondsey Ol' Stairs, hover that quid you promised, didn't I? Sing it! My
+heye!"
+
+"Quid, cabby?" And then, remembering that he had promised the fellow a
+sovereign for fast driving from Quadrant Mews, Kirkwood grinned broadly,
+eyes twinkling; for Mulready must have fallen heir to that covenant. "But
+you got the sovereign? You got it, didn't you, cabby?"
+
+The driver affirmed the fact with unnecessary heat and profanity and an
+amendment to the effect that he would have spoiled his fare's sanguinary
+conk had the outcome been less satisfactory.
+
+The information proved so amusing that Kirkwood, chuckling, forbore to
+resent the manner of its delivery, and, abandoning until a more favorable
+time the chase of the coy sovereign purse, extracted from one trouser
+pocket half a handful of large English small change.
+
+"Three shillings, six-pence," he counted the coins into the cabby's grimy
+and bloated paw; and added quietly: "The exact distance is rather less
+than, four miles, my man; your fare, precisely two shillings. You may keep
+the extra eighteen pence, for being such a conscientious blackguard,--or
+talk it over with the officer here. Please yourself."
+
+He nodded to the bobby, who, favorably impressed by the silk hat which
+Kirkwood, by diligent application of his sleeve during the cross-town ride,
+had managed to restore to a state somewhat approximating its erstwhile
+luster, smiled at the cabby a cold, hard smile. Whereupon the latter,
+smirking in unabashed triumph, spat on the pavement at Kirkwood's feet,
+gathered up the reins, and wheeled out.
+
+"A 'ard lot, sir," commented the policeman, jerking his helmeted head
+towards the vanishing four-wheeler.
+
+"Right you are," agreed Kirkwood amiably, still tickled by the knowledge
+that Mulready had been obliged to pay three times over for the ride that
+ended in his utter discomfiture. Somehow, Kirkwood had conceived no liking
+whatever for the man; Calendar he could, at a pinch, tolerate for his sense
+of humor, but Mulready--! "A surly dog," he thought him.
+
+Acknowledging the policeman's salute and restoring two shillings and a
+few fat copper pennies to his pocket, he entered the vast and echoing
+train-shed. In the act, his attention was attracted and immediately riveted
+by the spectacle of a burly luggage navvy in a blue jumper in the act of
+making off with a large, folding sign-board, of which the surface was
+lettered expansively with the advice, in red against a white background:
+
+BOAT-TRAIN LEAVES ON TRACK 3
+
+Incredulous yet aghast the young man gave instant chase to the navvy,
+overhauling him with no great difficulty. For your horny-handed British
+working-man is apparently born with two golden aphorisms in his mouth:
+"Look before you leap," and "Haste makes waste." He looks continually,
+seldom, if ever, leaps, and never is prodigal of his leisure.
+
+Excitedly Kirkwood touched the man's arm with a detaining hand.
+"Boat-train?" he gasped, pointing at the board.
+
+"Left ten minutes ago, thank you, sir."
+
+"Wel-l, but...! Of course I can get another train at Tilbury?"
+
+"For yer boat? No, sir, thank you, sir. Won't be another tryne till
+mornin', sir."
+
+"Oh-h!..."
+
+Aimlessly Kirkwood drifted away, his mind a blank.
+
+Sometime later he found himself on the steps outside the station, trying to
+stare out of countenance a glaring electric mineral-water advertisement on
+the farther side of the Euston Road.
+
+He was stranded....
+
+Beyond the spiked iron fence that enhedges the incurving drive, the roar of
+traffic, human, wheel and hoof, rose high for all the lateness of the hour:
+sidewalks groaning with the restless contact of hundreds of ill-shod
+feet; the roadway thundering--hansoms, four-wheelers, motor-cars, dwarfed
+coster-mongers' donkey-carts and ponderous, rumbling, C.-P. motor-vans,
+struggling for place and progress. For St. Pancras never sleeps.
+
+The misty air swam luminous with the light of electric signs as with the
+radiance of some lurid and sinister moon. The voice of London sounded in
+Kirkwood's ears, like the ominous purring of a somnolent brute beast,
+resting, gorged and satiated, ere rising again to devour. To devour--
+
+Stranded!...
+
+Distracted, he searched pocket after pocket, locating his watch, cigar- and
+cigarette-cases, match-box, penknife--all the minutiae of pocket-hardware
+affected by civilized man; with old letters, a card-case, a square envelope
+containing his steamer ticket; but no sovereign purse. His small-change
+pocket held less than three shillings--two and eight, to be exact--and a
+brass key, which he failed to recognize as one of his belongings.
+
+And that was all. At sometime during the night he had lost (or been
+cunningly bereft of?) that little purse of chamois-skin containing the
+three golden sovereigns which he had been husbanding to pay his steamer
+expenses, and which, if only he had them now, would stand between him and
+starvation and a night in the streets.
+
+And, searching his heart, he found it brimming with gratitude to Mulready,
+for having relieved him of the necessity of settling with the cabby.
+
+"Vagabond?" said Kirkwood musingly. "Vagabond?" He repeated the word softly
+a number of times, to get the exact flavor of it, and found it little to
+his taste. And yet...
+
+He thrust both hands deep in his trouser pockets and stared purposelessly
+into space, twisting his eyebrows out of alignment and crookedly protruding
+his lower lip.
+
+If Brentwick were only in town--But he wasn't, and wouldn't be, within the
+week.
+
+"No good waiting here," he concluded. Composing his face, he re�ntered the
+station. There were his trunks, of course. He couldn't leave them standing
+on the station platform for ever.
+
+He found the luggage-room and interviewed a mechanically courteous
+attendant, who, as the result of profound deliberation, advised him to try
+his luck at the lost-luggage room, across the station. He accepted the
+advice; it was a foregone conclusion that his effects had not been conveyed
+to the Tilbury dock; they could not have been loaded into the luggage van
+without his personal supervision. Still, anything was liable to happen when
+his unlucky star was in the ascendant.
+
+He found them in the lost-luggage room.
+
+A clerk helped him identify the articles and ultimately clucked with a
+perfunctory note: "Sixpence each, please."
+
+"I--ah--pardon?"
+
+"Sixpence each, the fixed charge, sir. For every twenty-four hours or
+fraction thereof, sixpence per parcel."
+
+"Oh, thank you so much," said Kirkwood sweetly. "I will call to-morrow."
+
+"Very good, sir. Thank you, sir."
+
+"Five times sixpence is two-and-six," Kirkwood computed, making his way
+hastily out of the station, lest a worse thing befall him. "No, bless your
+heart!--not while two and eight represents the sum total of my fortune."
+
+He wandered out into the night; he could not linger round the station till
+dawn; and what profit to him if he did? Even were he to ransom his trunks,
+one can scarcely change one's clothing in a public waiting-room.
+
+Somewhere in the distance a great clock chimed a single stroke, freighted
+sore with melancholy. It knelled the passing of the half-hour after
+midnight; a witching hour, when every public shuts up tight, and gentlemen
+in top-hats and evening dress are doomed to pace the pave till day (barring
+they have homes or visible means of support)--till day, when pawnshops open
+and such personal effects as watches and hammered silver cigar-cases may be
+hypothecated.
+
+Sable garments fluttering, Care fell into step with Philip Kirkwood; Care
+the inexorable slipped a skeleton arm through his and would not be denied;
+Care the jade clung affectionately to his side, refusing to be jilted.
+
+"Ah, you thought you would forget me?" chuckled the fleshless lips by his
+ear. "But no, my boy; I'm with you now, for ever and a day. 'Misery loves
+company,' and it wouldn't be pretty of me to desert you in this extremity,
+would it? Come, let us beguile the hours till dawn with conversation.
+Here's a sprightly subject: What are you going to do, Mr. Kirkwood? _What
+are you going to do?_"
+
+But Kirkwood merely shook a stubborn head and gazed straight before him,
+walking fast through ways he did not recognize, and pretending not to hear.
+None the less the sense of Care's solicitous query struck like a pain into
+his consciousness. What was he to do?
+
+An hour passed.
+
+Denied the opportunity to satisfy its beast hunger and thirst, humanity
+goes off to its beds. In that hour London quieted wonderfully; the streets
+achieved an effect of deeper darkness, the skies, lowering, looked down
+with a blush less livid for the shamelessness of man; cab ranks lengthened;
+solitary footsteps added unto themselves loud, alarming, offensive echoes;
+policemen, strolling with lamps blazing on their breasts, became as
+lightships in a trackless sea; each new-found street unfolded its
+perspective like a canyon of mystery, and yet teeming with a hundred masked
+hazards; the air acquired a smell more clear and clean, an effect more
+volatile; and the night-mist thickened until it studded one's attire with
+myriads of tiny buttons, bright as diamond dust.
+
+Through this long hour Kirkwood walked without a pause.
+
+Another clock, somewhere, clanged resonantly twice.
+
+The world was very still....
+
+And so, wandering foot-loose in a wilderness of ways, turning aimlessly,
+now right, now left, he found himself in a street he knew, yet seemed not
+to know: a silent, black street one brief block in length, walled with
+dead and lightless dwellings, haunted by his errant memory; a street whose
+atmosphere was heavy with impalpable essence of desuetude; in two words,
+Frognall Street.
+
+Kirkwood identified it with a start and a guilty tremor. He stopped
+stock-still, in an unreasoning state of semi-panic, arrested by a silly
+impulse to turn and fly; as if the bobby, whom he descried approaching him
+with measured stride, pausing new and again to try a door or flash
+his bull's-eye down an area, were to be expected to identify the man
+responsible for that damnable racket raised ere midnight in vacant Number
+9!
+
+Oddly enough, the shock of recognition brought him to his
+senses,--temporarily. He was even able to indulge himself in a quiet,
+sobering grin at his own folly. He passed the policeman with a nod and a
+cool word in response to the man's good-natured, "Good-night, sir." Number
+9 was on the other side of the street; and he favored its blank and dreary
+elevation with a prolonged and frank stare--that profited him nothing, by
+the way. For a crazy notion popped incontinently into his head, and would
+not be cast forth.
+
+At the corner he swerved and crossed, still possessed of his devil of
+inspiration. It would be unfair to him to say that he did not struggle to
+resist it, for he did, because it was fairly and egregiously asinine; yet
+struggling, his feet trod the path to which it tempted him.
+
+"Why," he expostulated feebly, "I might's well turn back and beat that
+bobby over the head with my cane!..."
+
+But at the moment his hand was in his change pocket, feeling over that same
+brass door-key which earlier he had been unable to account for, and he was
+informing himself how very easy it would have been for the sovereign purse
+to have dropped from his waistcoat pocket while he was sliding on his ear
+down the dark staircase. To recover it meant, at the least, shelter for
+the night, followed by a decent, comfortable and sustaining morning meal.
+Fortified by both he could redeem his luggage, change to clothing more
+suitable for daylight traveling, pawn his valuables, and enter into
+negotiations with the steamship company for permission to exchange his
+passage, with a sum to boot, for transportation on another liner. A most
+feasible project! A temptation all but irresistible!
+
+But then--the risk.... Supposing (for the sake of argument) the customary
+night-watchman to have taken up a transient residence in Number 9;
+supposing the police to have entered with him and found the stunned man on
+the second floor: would the watchman not be vigilant for another nocturnal
+marauder? would not the police now, more than ever, be keeping a wary eye
+on that house of suspicious happenings?
+
+Decidedly, to re�nter it would be to incur a deadly risk. And yet,
+undoubtedly, beyond question! his sovereign purse was waiting for him
+somewhere on the second flight of stairs; while as his means of clandestine
+entry lay warm in his fingers--the key to the dark entry, which he had by
+force of habit pocketed after locking the door.
+
+He came to the Hog-in-the-Pound. Its windows were dim with low-turned
+gas-lights. Down the covered alleyway, Quadrant Mews slept in a dusk but
+fitfully relieved by a lamp or two round which the friendly mist clung
+close and thick.
+
+There would be none to see....
+
+Skulking, throat swollen with fear, heart beating like a snare-drum,
+Kirkwood took his chance. Buttoning his overcoat collar up to his chin
+and cursing the fact that his hat must stand out like a chimney-pot on a
+detached house, he sped on tiptoe down the cobbled way and close beneath
+the house-walls of Quadrant Mews. But, half-way in, he stopped, confounded
+by an unforeseen difficulty. How was he to identify the narrow entry of
+Number 9, whose counterparts doubtless communicated with the mews from
+every residence on four sides of the city block?
+
+The low inner tenements were yet high enough to hide the rear elevations of
+Frognall Street houses, and the mist was heavy besides; otherwise he had
+made shift to locate Number 9 by ticking off the dwellings from the corner.
+If he went on, hit or miss, the odds were anything-you-please to one that
+he would blunder into the servant's quarters of some inhabited house,
+and--be promptly and righteously sat upon by the service-staff, while the
+bobby was summoned.
+
+Be that as it might--he almost lost his head when he realized this--escape
+was already cut off by the way he had come. Some one, or, rather, some two
+men were entering the alley. He could hear the tramping and shuffle of
+clumsy feet, and voices that muttered indistinctly. One seemed to trip over
+something, and cursed. The other laughed; the voices grew more loud. They
+were coming his way. He dared no longer vacillate.
+
+But--which passage should he choose?
+
+He moved on with more haste than discretion. One heel slipped on a cobble
+time-worn to glassy smoothness; he lurched, caught himself up in time to
+save a fall, lost his hat, recovered it, and was discovered. A voice,
+maudlin with drink, hailed and called upon him to stand and give an account
+of himself, "like a goo' feller." Another tempted him with offers of drink
+and sociable confabulation. He yielded not; adamantine to the seductive
+lure, he picked up his heels and ran. Those behind him, remarking with
+resentment the amazing fact that an intimate of the mews should run away
+from liquor, cursed and made after him, veering, staggering, howling like
+ravening animals.
+
+For all their burden of intoxication, they knew the ground by instinct and
+from long association. They gained on him. Across the way a window-sash
+went up with a bang, and a woman screamed. Through the only other entrance
+to the mews a belated cab was homing; its driver, getting wind of the
+unusual, pulled up, blocking the way, and added his advice to the uproar.
+
+Caught thus between two fires, and with his persecutors hard upon him,
+Kirkwood dived into the nearest black hole of a passageway and in sheer
+desperation flung himself, key in hand, against the door at the end. Mark
+how his luck served him who had forsworn her! He found a keyhole and
+inserted the key. It turned. So did the knob. The door gave inward. He fell
+in with it, slammed it, shot the bolts, and, panting, leaned against its
+panels, in a pit of everlasting night but--saved!--for the time being, at
+all events.
+
+Outside somebody brushed against one wall, cannoned to the other, brought
+up with a crash against the door, and, perforce at a standstill, swore from
+his heart.
+
+"Gorblimy!" he declared feelingly. "I'd 'a' took my oath I sore'm run in
+'ere!" And then, in answer to an inaudible question: "No, 'e ain't. Gorn
+an' let the fool go to 'ell. 'Oo wants 'im to share goo' liker? Not I!..."
+
+Joining his companion he departed, leaving behind him a trail of
+sulphur-tainted air. The mews quieted gradually.
+
+Indoors Kirkwood faced unhappily the enigma of fortuity, wondering: Was
+this by any possibility Number 9?
+
+The key had fitted; the bolts had been drawn on the inside; and while
+the key had been one of ordinary pattern and would no doubt have proven
+effectual with any one of a hundred common locks, the finger of probability
+seemed to indicate that his luck had brought him back to Number 9.
+
+In spite of all this, he was sensible of little confidence; though this
+were truly Number 9, his freedom still lay on the knees of the gods, his
+very life, belike, was poised, tottering, on a pinnacle of chance.
+
+In the end, taking heart of desperation, he stooped and removed his shoes;
+a precaution which later appealed to his sense of the ridiculous, in view
+of the racket he had raised in entering, but which at the moment seemed
+most natural and in accordance with common sense. Then rising, he held his
+breath, staring and listening. About him the pitch darkness was punctuated
+with fading points of fire, and in his ears was a noise of strange
+whisperings, very creepy--until, gritting his teeth, he controlled his
+nerves and gradually realized that he was alone, the silence undisturbed.
+
+He went forward gingerly, feeling his way like a blind man on strange
+ground. Ere long he stumbled over a door-sill and found that the walls
+of the passage had fallen away; he had entered a room, a black cavern of
+indeterminate dimensions. Across this he struck at random, walked himself
+flat against a wall, felt his way along to an open door, and passed through
+to another apartment as dark as the first.
+
+Here, endeavoring to make a circuit of the walls, he succeeded in throwing
+himself bodily across a bed, which creaked horribly; and for a full minute
+lay as he had fallen, scarce daring to think. But nothing followed, and he
+got up and found a shut door which let him into yet a third room, wherein
+he barked both shins on a chair; and escaped to a fourth whose atmosphere
+was highly flavored with reluctant odors of bygone cookery, stale water and
+damp plumbing--probably the kitchen. Thence progressing over complaining
+floors through what may have been the servants' hall, a large room with
+a table in the middle and a number of promiscuous chairs (witness his
+tortured shins!), he finally blundered into the basement hallway.
+
+By now a little calmer, he felt assured that this was really Number 9,
+Frognall Street, and a little happier about it all, though not even
+momentarily forgetful of the potential police and night-watchman.
+
+However, he mounted the steps to the ground floor without adventure and
+found himself at last in the same dim and ghostly hall which he had entered
+some six hours before; the mockery of dusk admitted by the fan-light was
+just strong enough to enable him to identify the general lay of the land
+and arrangement of furniture.
+
+More confidently with each uncontested step, he continued his quest.
+Elation was stirring his spirit when he gained the first floor and moved
+toward the foot of the second flight, approaching the spot whereat he was
+to begin the search for the missing purse. The knowledge that he lacked
+means of obtaining illumination deterred him nothing; he had some hope
+of finding matches in one of the adjacent rooms, but, failing that, was
+prepared to ascend the stairs on all fours, feeling every inch of their
+surface, if it took hours. Ever an optimistic soul, instinctively inclined
+to father faith with a hope, he felt supremely confident that his search
+would not prove fruitless, that he would win early release from his
+temporary straits.
+
+And thus it fell out that, at the instant he was thinking it time to begin
+to crawl and hunt, his stockinged feet came into contact with something
+heavy, yielding, warm--something that moved, moaned, and caused his hair to
+bristle and his flesh to creep.
+
+We will make allowances for him; all along he had gone on the assumption
+that his antagonist of the dark stairway would have recovered and made off
+with all expedition, in the course of ten or twenty minutes, at most, from
+the time of his accident. To find him still there was something entirely
+outside of Kirkwood's reckoning: he would as soon have thought to encounter
+say, Calendar,--would have preferred the latter, indeed. But this fellow
+whose disability was due to his own interference, who was reasonably to be
+counted upon to raise the very deuce and all of a row!
+
+The initial shock, however shattering to his equanimity, soon, lost effect.
+The man evidently remained unconscious, in fact had barely moved; while the
+moan that Kirkwood heard, had been distressingly faint.
+
+"Poor devil!" murmured the young man. "He must be in a pretty bad way, for
+sure!" He knelt, compassion gentling his heart, and put one hand to the
+insentient face. A warm sweat moistened his fingers; his palm was fanned by
+steady respiration.
+
+Immeasurably perplexed, the American rose, slipped on his shoes and
+buttoned them, thinking hard the while. What ought he to do? Obviously
+flight suggested itself,--incontinent flight, anticipating the man's
+recovery. On the other hand, indubitably the latter had sustained such
+injury that consciousness, when it came to him, would hardly be reinforced
+by much aggressive power. Moreover, it was to be remembered that the one
+was in that house with quite as much warrant as the other, unless Kirkwood
+had drawn a rash inference from the incident of the ragged sentry. The two
+of them were mutual, if antagonistic, trespassers; neither would dare
+bring about the arrest of the other. And then--and this was not the least
+consideration to influence Kirkwood--perhaps the fellow would die if he got
+no attention.
+
+Kirkwood shut his teeth grimly. "I'm no assassin," he informed himself, "to
+strike and run. If I've maimed this poor devil and there are consequences,
+I'll stand 'em. The Lord knows it doesn't matter a damn to anybody, not
+even to me, what happens to me; while _he_ may be valuable."
+
+Light upon the subject, actual as well as figurative, seemed to be the
+first essential; his mind composed, Kirkwood set himself in search of it.
+The floor he was on, however, afforded him no assistance; the mantels were
+guiltless of candles and he discovered no matches, either in the wide and
+silent drawing-room, with its ghastly furniture, like mummies in their
+linen swathings, or in the small boudoir at the back. He was to look either
+above or below, it seemed.
+
+After some momentary hesitation, he went up-stairs, his ascent marked by a
+single and grateful accident; half-way to the top he trod on an object that
+clinked underfoot, and, stooping, retrieved the lost purse. Thus was he
+justified of his temerity; the day was saved--that is, to-morrow was.
+
+The rooms of the second-floor were bedchambers, broad, deep, stately,
+inhabited by seven devils of loneliness. In one, on a dresser, Kirkwood
+found a stump of candle in a china candlestick; the two charred ends of
+matches at its base were only an irritating discovery, however--evidence
+that real matches had been the mode in Number 9, at some remote date.
+Disgusted and oppressed by cumulative inquisitiveness, he took the
+candle-end back to the hall; he would have given much for the time and
+means to make a more detailed investigation into the secret of the house.
+
+Perhaps it was mostly his hope of chancing on some clue to the mystery of
+Dorothy Calender--bewitching riddle that she was!--that fascinated his
+imagination so completely. Aside from her altogether, the great house that
+stood untenanted, yet in such complete order, so self-contained in its
+darkened quiet, intrigued him equally with the train of inexplicable events
+that had brought him within its walls. Now--since his latest entrance--his
+vision had adjusted itself to cope with the obscurity to some extent; and
+the street lights, meagerly reflected through the windows from the bosom of
+a sullen pall of cloud, low-swung above the city, had helped him to piece
+together many a detail of decoration and furnishing, alike somber and
+richly dignified. Kirkwood told himself that the owner, whoever he might
+be, was a man of wealth and taste inherited from another age; he had found
+little of meretricious to-day in the dwelling, much that was solid and
+sedate and homely, and--Victorian.... He could have wished for more; a box
+of early Victorian vestas had been highly acceptable.
+
+Making his way down-stairs to the stricken man--who was quite as he had
+been--Kirkwood bent over and thrust rifling fingers into his pockets,
+regardless of the wretched sense of guilt and sneakishness imparted by the
+action, stubbornly heedless of the possibility of the man's awakening to
+find himself being searched and robbed.
+
+In the last place he sought, which should (he realized) have been the
+first, to wit, the fob pocket of the white waistcoat, he found a small gold
+matchbox, packed tight with wax vestas; and, berating himself for crass
+stupidity--he had saved a deal of time and trouble by thinking of this
+before--lighted the candle.
+
+As its golden flame shot up with scarce a tremor, preyed upon by a
+perfectly excusable concern, he bent to examine the man's countenance....
+The arm which had partly hidden it had fallen back into a natural position.
+It was a young face that gleamed pallid in the candlelight--a face unlined,
+a little vapid and insignificant, with features regular and neat, betraying
+few characteristics other than the purely negative attributes of a
+character as yet unformed, possibly unformable; much the sort of a face
+that he might have expected to see, remembering those thin and pouting lips
+that before had impressed him. Its owner was probably little more than
+twenty. In his attire there was a suspicion of a fop's preciseness, aside
+from its accidental disarray; the cut of his waistcoat was the extreme of
+the then fashion, the white tie (twisted beneath one ear) an exaggerated
+"butterfly," his collar nearly an inch too tall; and he was shod with pumps
+suitable only for the dancing-floor,--a whim of the young-bloods of London
+of that year.
+
+"I can't make him out at all!" declared Kirkwood. "The son of a gentleman
+too weak to believe that cubs need licking into shape? Reared to man's
+estate, so sheltered from the wicked world that he never grew a bark?...
+The sort that never had a quarrel in his life, 'cept with his tailor?...
+Now what the devil is _this_ thing doing in this midnight mischief?...
+Damn!"
+
+It was most exasperating, the incongruity of the boy's appearance assorted
+with his double r�le of persecutor of distressed damsels and nocturnal
+house-breaker!
+
+Kirkwood bent closer above the motionless head, with puzzled eyes striving
+to pin down some elusive resemblance that he thought to trace in those
+vacuous features--a resemblance to some one he had seen, or known, at some
+past time, somewhere, somehow.
+
+"I give it up. Guess I'm mistaken. Anyhow, five young Englishmen out of
+every ten of his class are just as blond and foolish. Now let's see how bad
+he's hurt."
+
+With hands strong and gentle, he turned the round, light head. Then, "Ah!"
+he commented in the accent of comprehension. For there was an angry looking
+bump at the base of the skull; and, the skin having been broken, possibly
+in collision with the sharp-edged newel-post, a little blood had stained
+and matted the straw-colored hair.
+
+Kirkwood let the head down and took thought. Recalling a bath-room on the
+floor above, thither he went, unselfishly forgetful of his predicament if
+discovered, and, turning on the water, sopped his handkerchief until it
+dripped. Then, returning, he took the boy's head on his knees, washed the
+wound, purloined another handkerchief (of silk, with a giddy border)
+from the other's pocket, and of this manufactured a rude but serviceable
+bandage.
+
+Toward the conclusion of his attentions, the sufferer began to show signs
+of returning animation. He stirred restlessly, whimpered a little, and
+sighed. And Kirkwood, in consternation, got up.
+
+"So!" he commented ruefully. "I guess I am an ass, all right--taking all
+that trouble for you, my friend. If I've got a grain of sense left, this is
+my cue to leave you alone in your glory."
+
+He was lingering only to restore to the boy's pockets such articles as he
+had removed in the search for matches,--the match-box, a few silver coins,
+a bulky sovereign purse, a handsome, plain gold watch, and so forth. But
+ere he concluded he was aware that the boy was conscious, that his eyes,
+open and blinking in the candlelight, were upon him.
+
+They were blue eyes, blue and shallow as a doll's, and edged with long,
+fine lashes. Intelligence, of a certain degree, was rapidly informing them.
+Kirkwood returned their questioning glance, transfixed in indecision, his
+primal impulse to cut-and-run for it was gone; he had nothing to fear from
+this child who could not prevent his going whenever he chose to go; while
+by remaining he might perchance worm from him something about the girl.
+
+"You're feeling better?" He was almost surprised to hear his own voice put
+the query.
+
+"I--I think so. Ow, my head!... I say, you chap, whoever you are, what's
+happened?... I want to get up." The boy added peevishly: "Help a fellow,
+can't you?"
+
+"You've had a nasty fall," Kirkwood observed evenly, passing an arm
+beneath the boy's shoulder and helping him to a sitting position. "Do you
+remember?"
+
+The other snuffled childishly and scrubbed across the floor to rest his
+back against the wall.
+
+"Why-y ... I remember fallin'; and then ... I woke up and it was all dark
+and my head achin' fit to split. I presume I went to sleep again ... I say,
+what're you, doing here?"
+
+Instead of replying, Kirkwood lifted a warning finger.
+
+"Hush!" he said tensely, alarmed by noises in the street. "You don't
+suppose--?"
+
+He had been conscious of a carriage rolling up from the corner, as well as
+that it had drawn up (presumably) before a near-by dwelling. Now the rattle
+of a key in the hall-door was startlingly audible. Before he could move,
+the door itself opened with a slam.
+
+Kirkwood moved toward the stair-head, and drew back with a cry of disgust.
+"Too late!" he told himself bitterly; his escape was cut off. He could run
+up-stairs and hide, of course, but the boy would inform against him and....
+
+He buttoned up his coat, settled his hat on his head, and moved near the
+candle, where it rested on the floor. One glimpse would suffice to show him
+the force of the intruders, and one move of his foot put out the light;
+then--_perhaps_--he might be able to rush them.
+
+Below, a brief pause had followed the noise of the door, as if those
+entering were standing, irresolute, undecided which way to turn; but
+abruptly enough the glimmer of candlelight must have been noticed. Kirkwood
+heard a hushed exclamation, a quick clatter of high heels on the parquetry,
+pattering feet on the stairs, all but drowned by swish and ripple of silken
+skirts; and a woman stood at the head of the flight--to the American an
+apparition profoundly amazing as she paused, the light from the floor
+casting odd, theatric shadows beneath her eyes and over her brows, edging
+her eyes themselves with brilliant light beneath their dark lashes, showing
+her lips straight and drawn, and shimmering upon the spangles of an evening
+gown, visible beneath the dark cloak which had fallen back from her white,
+beautiful shoulders.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+
+MADAME L'INTRIGANTE
+
+"Mrs. Hallam!" cried Kirkwood, beneath his breath.
+
+The woman ignored his existence. Moving swiftly forward, she dropped on
+both knees by the side of the boy, and caught up one of his hands, clasping
+it passionately in her own.
+
+"Fred!" she cried, a curious break in her tone. "My little Freddie! Oh,
+what has happened, dearie?"
+
+"Oh, hello, Mamma," grunted that young man, submitting listlessly to her
+caresses and betraying no overwhelming surprise at her appearance there.
+Indeed he seemed more concerned as to what Kirkwood, an older man, would
+be thinking, to see him so endeared and fondled, than moved by any other
+emotion. Kirkwood could see his shamefaced, sidelong glances; and despised
+him properly for them.
+
+But without attending to his response, Mrs. Hallam rattled on in the uneven
+accents of excitement. "I waited until I couldn't wait any longer, Freddie
+dear. I had to know--had to come. Eccles came home about nine and said that
+you had told him to wait outside, that some one had followed you in here,
+and that a bobby had told him to move on. I didn't know what--"
+
+"What's o'clock now?" her son interrupted.
+
+"It's about three, I think ... Have you hurt yourself, dear? Oh, why
+_didn't_ you come home? You must've known I was dying of anxiety!"
+
+"Oh, I say! Can't you see I'm hurt? 'Had a nasty fall and must've been
+asleep ever since."
+
+"My precious one! How--?"
+
+"Can't say, hardly ... I say, don't paw a chap so, Mamma ... I brought
+Eccles along and told him to wait because--well, because I didn't feel so
+much like shuttin' myself up in this beastly old tomb. So I left the door
+ajar, and told him not to let anybody come in. Then I came up-stairs. There
+must've been somebody already in the house; I know I _thought_ there was.
+It made me feel creepy, rather. At any rate, I heard voices down below, and
+the door banged, and somebody began hammerin' like fun on the knocker."
+
+The boy paused, rolling an embarrassed eye up at the stranger.
+
+"Yes, yes, dear!" Mrs. Hallam urged him on.
+
+"Why, I--I made up my mind to cut my stick--let whoever it was pass me on
+the stairs, you know. But he followed me and struck me, and then I jumped
+at him, and we both fell down the whole flight. And that's all. Besides, my
+head's achin' like everything."
+
+"But this man--?"
+
+Mrs. Hallam looked up at Kirkwood, who bowed silently, struggling to hide
+both his amusement and perplexity. More than ever, now, the case presented
+a front inscrutable to his wits; try as he might, he failed to fit an
+explanation to any incident in which he had figured, while this last
+development--that his antagonist of the dark stairway had been Mrs.
+Hallam's son!--seemed the most astounding of all, baffling elucidation
+completely.
+
+He had abandoned all thought of flight and escape. It was too late; in the
+brisk idiom of his mother-tongue, he was "caught with the goods on." "May
+as well face the music," he counseled himself, in resignation. From what he
+had seen and surmised of Mrs. Hallam, he shrewdly suspected that the tune
+would prove an exceedingly lively one; she seemed a woman of imagination,
+originality, and an able-bodied temper.
+
+"_You_, Mr. Kirkwood!"
+
+Again he bowed, grinning awry.
+
+She rose suddenly. "You will be good enough to explain your presence here,"
+she informed him with dangerous serenity.
+
+"To be frank with you--"
+
+"I advise that course, Mr. Kirkwood."
+
+"Thanks, awf'ly.... I came here, half an hour ago, looking for a lost purse
+full--well, not _quite_ full of sovereigns. It was my purse, by the way."
+
+Suspicion glinted like foxfire in the cold green eyes beneath her puckered
+brows. "I do not understand," she said slowly and in level tones.
+
+"I didn't expect you to," returned Kirkwood; "no more do I.... But, anyway,
+it must be clear to you that I've done my best for this gentleman here." He
+paused with an interrogative lift of his eyebrows.
+
+"'This gentleman' is my son, Frederick Hallam.... But you will explain--"
+
+"Pardon me, Mrs. Hallam; I shall explain nothing, at present. Permit me
+to point out that your position here--like mine--is, to say the least,
+anomalous." The random stroke told, as he could tell by the instant
+contraction of her eyes of a cat. "It would be best to defer explanations
+till a more convenient time--don't you think? Then, if you like, we can
+chant confidences in an antiphonal chorus. Just now your--er--son is not
+enjoying himself apparently, and ... the attention of the police had best
+not be called to this house too often in one night."
+
+His levity seemed to displease and perturb the woman; she turned from him
+with an impatient movement of her shoulders.
+
+"Freddie, dear, do you feel able to walk?"
+
+"Eh? Oh, I dare say--I don't know. Wonder would your friend--ah--Mr.
+Kirkwood, lend me an arm?"
+
+"Charmed," Kirkwood declared suavely. "If you'll take the candle, Mrs.
+Hallam--"
+
+He helped the boy to his feet and, while the latter hung upon him and
+complained querulously, stood waiting for the woman to lead the way with
+the light; something which, however, she seemed in no haste to do. The
+pause at length puzzled Kirkwood, and he turned, to find Mrs. Hallam
+holding the candlestick and regarding him steadily, with much the same
+expression of furtive mistrust as that with which she had favored him on
+her own door-stoop.
+
+[Illustration: He helped the boy to his feet, and stood waiting.]
+
+"One moment," she interposed in confusion; "I won't keep you waiting...;"
+and, passing with an averted face, ran quickly up-stairs to the second
+floor, taking the light with her. Its glow faded from the walls above and
+Kirkwood surmised that she had entered the front bedchamber. For some
+moments he could hear her moving about; once, something scraped and bumped
+on the floor, as if a heavy bit of furniture had been moved; again there
+was a resounding thud that defied speculation; and this was presently
+followed by a dull clang of metal.
+
+His fugitive speculations afforded him little enlightenment; and, meantime,
+young Hallam, leaning partly against the wall and quite heavily on
+Kirkwood's arm, filled his ears with puerile oaths and lamentations; so
+that, but for the excuse of his really severe shaking-up, Kirkwood had
+been strongly tempted to take the youngster by the shoulders and kick him
+heartily, for the health of his soul.
+
+But eventually--it was not really long--there came the quick rush of Mrs.
+Hallam's feet along the upper hall, and the woman reappeared, one hand
+holding her skirts clear of her pretty feet as she descended in a rush that
+caused the candle's flame to flicker perilously.
+
+Half-way down, "Mr. Kirkwood!" she called tempestuously.
+
+"Didn't you find it?" he countered blandly.
+
+She stopped jerkily at the bottom, and, after a moment of confusion. "Find
+what, sir?" she asked.
+
+"What you sought, Mrs. Hallam."
+
+Smiling, he bore unflinching the prolonged inspection of her eyes, at once
+somber with doubt of him and flashing with indignation because of his
+impudence.
+
+"You knew I wouldn't find it, then!... Didn't you?"
+
+"I may have suspected you wouldn't."
+
+Now he was sure that she had been searching for the gladstone bag. That,
+evidently, was the bone of contention. Calendar had sent his daughter for
+it, Mrs. Hallam her son; Dorothy had been successful ... But, on the other
+hand, Calendar and Mrs. Hallam were unquestionably allies. Why, then--?
+
+"Where is it, Mr. Kirkwood?"
+
+"Madam, have you the right to know?"
+
+Through another lengthening pause, while they faced each other, he marked
+again the curious contraction of her under lip.
+
+"I have the right," she declared steadily. "Where is it?"
+
+"How can I be sure?"
+
+"Then you don't know--!"
+
+"Indeed," he interrupted, "I would be glad to feel that I ought to tell you
+what I know."
+
+"_What_ you know!"
+
+The exclamation, low-spoken, more an echo of her thoughts than intended
+for Kirkwood, was accompanied by a little shake of the woman's head, mute
+evidence to the fact that she was bewildered by his finesse. And this
+delighted the young man beyond measure, making him feel himself master of
+a difficult situation. Mysteries had been woven before his eyes so
+persistently, of late, that it was a real pleasure to be able to do a
+little mystifying on his own account. By adopting this reticent and
+non-committal attitude, he was forcing the hand of a woman old enough to be
+his mother and most evidently a past-mistress in the art of misleading. All
+of which seemed very fascinating to the amateur in adventure.
+
+The woman would have led again, but young Hallam cut in, none too
+courteously.
+
+"I say, Mamma, it's no good standing here, palaverin' like a lot of flats.
+Besides, I'm awf'ly knocked up. Let's get home and have it out there."
+
+Instantly his mother softened. "My poor boy!... Of course we'll go."
+
+Without further demur she swept past and down the stairway before
+them--slowly, for their progress was of necessity slow, and the light most
+needed. Once they were in the main hall, however, she extinguished the
+candle, placed it on a side table, and passed out through the door.
+
+It had been left open, as before; and Kirkwood was not at all surprised to
+see a man waiting on the threshold,--the versatile Eccles, if he erred not.
+He had little chance to identify him, as it happened, for at a word from
+Mrs. Hallam the man bowed and, following her across the sidewalk, opened
+the door of a four-wheeler which, with lamps alight and liveried driver on
+the box, had been waiting at the carriage-block.
+
+As they passed out, Kirkwood shut the door; and at the same moment the
+little party was brought up standing by a gruff and authoritative summons.
+
+"Just a minute, please, you there!"
+
+"Aha!" said Kirkwood to himself. "I thought so." And he halted, in
+unfeigned respect for the burly and impressive figure, garbed in blue and
+brass, helmeted and truncheoned, bull's-eye shining on breast like the
+Law's unblinking and sleepless eye, barring the way to the carriage.
+
+Mrs. Hallam showed less deference for the obstructionist. The assumed
+hauteur and impatience of her pose was artfully reflected in her voice as
+she rounded upon the bobby, with an indignant demand: "What is the meaning
+of this, officer?"
+
+"Precisely what I wants to know, ma'am," returned the man, unyielding
+beneath his respectful attitude. "I'm obliged to ask you to tell me what
+you were doing in that 'ouse.... And what's the matter with this 'ere
+gentleman?" he added, with a dubious stare at young Hallam's bandaged head
+and rumpled clothing.
+
+"Perhaps you don't understand," admitted Mrs. Hallam sweetly. "Of course--I
+see--it's perfectly natural. The house has been shut up for some time
+and--"
+
+"Thank you, ma'am; that's just it. There was something wrong going on early
+in the evening, and I was told to keep an eye on the premises. It's duty,
+ma'am; I've got my report to make."
+
+"The house," said Mrs. Hallam, with the long-suffering patience of one
+elucidating a perfectly plain proposition to a being of a lower order of
+intelligence, "is the property of my son, Arthur Frederick Burgoyne Hallam,
+of Cornwall. This is--"
+
+"Beg pardon, ma'am, but I was told Colonel George Burgoyne, of Cornwall--"
+
+"Colonel Burgoyne died some time ago. My son is his heir. This is my son.
+He came to the house this evening to get some property he desired, and--it
+seems--tripped on the stairs and fell unconscious. I became worried about
+him and drove over, accompanied by my friend, Mr. Kirkwood."
+
+The policeman looked his troubled state of mind, and wagged a doubtful head
+over the case. There was his duty, and there was, opposed to it, the fact
+that all three were garbed in the livery of the well-to-do.
+
+At length, turning to the driver, he demanded, received, and noted in his
+memorandum-book, the license number of the equipage.
+
+"It's a very unusual case, ma'am," he apologized; "I hopes you won't 'old
+it against me. I'm only trying to do my duty--"
+
+"And safeguard our property. You are perfectly justified, officer."
+
+"Thank you, ma'am. And would you mind giving me your cards, please, all of
+you?"
+
+"Certainly not." Without hesitation the woman took a little hand-bag from
+the seat of the carriage and produced a card; her son likewise found his
+case and handed the officer an oblong slip.
+
+"I've no cards with me," the American told the policeman; "my name,
+however, is Philip Kirkwood, and I'm staying at the Pless."
+
+"Very good, sir; thank you." The man penciled the information in his little
+book. "Thank you, ma'am, and Mr. Hallam, sir. Sorry to have detained you.
+Good morning."
+
+Kirkwood helped young Hallam into the carriage, gave Mrs. Hallam his hand,
+and followed her. The man Eccles shut the door, mounting the box beside the
+driver. Immediately they were in motion.
+
+The American got a final glimpse of the bobby, standing in front of Number
+9, Frognall Street, and watching them with an air of profound uncertainty.
+He had Kirkwood's sympathy, therein; but he had little time to feel with
+him, for Mrs. Hallam turned upon him very suddenly.
+
+"Mr. Kirkwood, will you be good enough to tell me who and what you are?"
+
+The young man smiled his homely, candid smile. "I'll be only too glad, Mrs.
+Hallam, when I feel sure you'll do as much for yourself."
+
+She gave him no answer; it, was as if she were choosing words. Kirkwood
+braced himself to meet the storm; but none ensued. There was rather a lull,
+which strung itself out indefinitely, to the monotonous music of hoofs and
+rubber tires.
+
+Young Hallam was resting his empty blond head against the cushions, and had
+closed his eyes. He seemed to doze; but, as the carriage rolled past the
+frequent street-lights, Kirkwood could see that the eyes of Mrs. Hallam
+were steadily directed to his face.
+
+His outward composure was tempered by some amusement, by more admiration;
+the woman's eyes were very handsome, even when hardest and most cold. It
+was not easy to conceive of her as being the mother of a son so immaturely
+mature. Why, she must have been at least thirty-eight or -nine! One
+wondered; she did not look it....
+
+The carriage stopped before a house with lighted windows. Eccles jumped
+down from the box and scurried to open the front door. The radiance of
+a hall-lamp was streaming out into the misty night when he returned to
+release his employers.
+
+They were returned to Craven Street! "One more lap round the track!" mused
+Kirkwood. "Wonder will the next take me back to Bermondsey Old Stairs."
+
+At Mrs. Hallam's direction, Eccles ushered him into the smoking-room, on
+the ground floor in the rear of the dwelling, there to wait while she
+helped her son up-stairs and to bed. He sighed with pleasure at first
+glimpse of its luxurious but informal comforts, and threw himself
+carelessly into a heavily padded lounging-chair, dropping one knee over the
+other and lighting the last of his expensive cigars, with a sensation of
+undiluted gratitude; as one coming to rest in the shadow of a great rock in
+a weary land.
+
+Over his shoulder a home-like illumination was cast by an electric
+reading-lamp shaded with red silk. At his feet brass fire-dogs winked
+sleepily in the fluttering blaze of a well-tended stove. The walls were
+hung with deep red, the doors and divans upholstered in the same restful
+shade. In one corner an old clock ticked soberly. The atmosphere would
+have proved a potent invitation to reverie, if not to sleep--he was very
+sleepy--but for the confusion in the house.
+
+In its chambers, through the halls, on the stairs, there were hurryings and
+scurryings of feet and skirts, confused with murmuring voices. Presently,
+in an adjoining room, Philip Kirkwood heard a maid-servant wrestling
+hopefully with that most exasperating of modern time-saving devices,
+the telephone as countenanced by our English cousins. Her patience and
+determination won his approval, but availed nothing for her purpose; in the
+outcome the telephone triumphed and the maid gave up the unequal contest.
+
+Later, a butler entered the room; a short and sturdy fellow, extremely ill
+at ease. Drawing a small taboret to the side of Kirkwood's chair, he placed
+thereon a tray, deferentially imparting the information that "Missis 'Allam
+'ad thought 'ow as Mister Kirkwood might care for a bit of supper."
+
+"Please thank Mrs. Hallam for me." Kirkwood's gratified eyes ranged the
+laden tray. There were sandwiches, biscuit, cheese, and a pot of black
+coffee, with sugar and cream. "It was very kindly thought of," he added.
+
+"Very good, sir, thank you, sir."
+
+The man turned to go, shuffling soundlessly. Kirkwood was suddenly
+impressed with his evasiveness; ever since he had entered the room, his
+countenance had seemed turned from the guest.
+
+"Eccles!" he called sharply, at a venture.
+
+The butler halted, thunderstruck. "Ye-es, s-sir?"
+
+[Illustration: Eccles]
+
+"Turn round, Eccles; I want a look at you."
+
+Eccles faced him unwillingly, with a stolid front but shifty eyes. Kirkwood
+glanced him up and down, grinning.
+
+"Thank you, Eccles; I'll remember you now. You'll remember me, too, won't
+you? You're a bad actor, aren't you, Eccles?"
+
+"Yes, sir; thank you, sir," mumbled the man unhappily; and took instant
+advantage of the implied permission to go.
+
+Intensely diverted by the recollection of Eccles' abortive attempt to stop
+him at the door of Number 9, and wondering--now that he came to think of
+it--why, precisely, young Hallam had deemed it necessary to travel with
+a body-guard and adopt such furtive methods to enter into as well as to
+obtain what was asserted to be his own property, Kirkwood turned active
+attention to the lunch.
+
+Thoughtfully he poured himself a cup of coffee, swallowing it hot and black
+as it came from the silver pot; then munched the sandwiches.
+
+It _was_ kindly thought of, this early morning repast; Mrs. Hallam seemed
+more and more a remarkable woman with each phase of her character that she
+chose to disclose. At odds with him, she yet took time to think of his
+creature needs!
+
+What could be her motive,--not in feeding him, but in involving her name
+and fortune in an affair so strangely flavored?... This opened up a desert
+waste of barren speculation. "What's anybody's motive, who figures in this
+thundering dime-novel?" demanded the American, almost contemptuously.
+And--for the hundredth time--gave it up; the day should declare it, if so
+hap he lived to see that day: a distant one, he made no doubt. The only
+clear fact in his befogged and bemused mentality was that he was at once
+"broke" and in this business up to his ears. Well, he'd see it through;
+he'd nothing better to do, and--there was the girl:
+
+Dorothy, whose eyes and lips he had but to close his own eyes to see
+again as vividly as though she stood before him; Dorothy, whose unspoiled
+sweetness stood out in vivid relief against this moil and toil of
+conspiracy, like a star of evening shining clear in a stormy sky.
+
+"Poetic simile: I'm going fast," conceded Kirkwood; but he did not smile.
+It was becoming quite too serious a matter for laughter. For her sake,
+he was in the game "for keeps"; especially in view of the fact that
+everything--his own heart's inclination included--seemed to conspire to
+keep him in it. Of course he hoped for nothing in return; a pauper who
+turns squire-of-dames with matrimonial intent is open to the designation,
+"penniless adventurer." No; whatever service he might be to the girl would
+be ample recompense to him for his labors. And afterwards, he'd go his
+way in peace; she'd soon forget him--if she hadn't already. Women (he
+propounded gravely) are queer: there's no telling anything about them!
+
+One of the most unreadable specimens of the sex on which he pronounced this
+highly original dictum, entered the room just then; and he found himself at
+once out of his chair and his dream, bowing.
+
+"Mrs. Hallam."
+
+The woman nodded and smiled graciously. "Eccles has attended to your needs,
+I hope? Please don't stop smoking." She sank into an arm-chair on the
+other side of the hearth and, probably by accident, out of the radius of
+illumination from the lamp; sitting sidewise, one knee above the other, her
+white arms immaculate against the somber background of shadowed crimson.
+
+She was very handsome indeed, just then; though a keener light might have
+proved less flattering.
+
+"Now, Mr. Kirkwood?" she opened briskly, with a second intimate and
+friendly nod; and paused, her pose receptive.
+
+Kirkwood sat down again, smiling good-natured appreciation of her
+unprejudiced attitude.
+
+"Your son, Mrs. Hallam--?"
+
+"Oh, Freddie's doing well enough.... Freddie," she explained, "has a
+delicate constitution and has seen little of the world. Such melodrama
+as to-night's is apt to shock him severely. We must make allowances, Mr.
+Kirkwood."
+
+Kirkwood grinned again, a trace unsympathetically; he was unable to
+simulate any enthusiasm on the subject of poor Freddie, whom he had sized
+up with passable acumen as a spoiled and coddled child completely under the
+thumb of an extremely clever mother.
+
+"Yes," he responded vaguely; "he'll be quite fit after a night's sleep, I
+dare say."
+
+The woman was watching him keenly, beneath her lowered lashes. "I think,"
+she said deliberately, "that it is time we came to an understanding."
+
+Kirkwood agreed--"Yes?" affably.
+
+"I purpose being perfectly straightforward. To begin with, I don't place
+you, Mr. Kirkwood. You are an unknown quantity, a new factor. Won't you
+please tell me what you are and.... Are you a friend of Mr. Calendar's?"
+
+"I think I may lay claim to that honor, though"--to Kirkwood's way of
+seeing things some little frankness on his own part would be essential if
+they were to get on--"I hardly know him, Mrs. Hallam. I had the pleasure of
+meeting him only this afternoon."
+
+She knitted her brows over this statement.
+
+"That, I assure you, is the truth," he laughed.
+
+"But ... I really don't understand."
+
+"Nor I, Mrs. Hallam. Calendar aside, I am Philip Kirkwood, American,
+resident abroad for some years, a native of San Francisco, of a certain
+age, unmarried, by profession a poor painter."
+
+"And--?"
+
+"Beyond that? I presume I must tell you, though I confess I'm in doubt...."
+He hesitated, weighing candor in the balance with discretion.
+
+"But who are you for? Are you in George Calendar's pay?"
+
+"Heaven forfend!"--piously. "My sole interest at the present moment is to
+unravel a most entrancing mystery--"
+
+"Entitled 'Dorothy Calendar'! Of course. You've known her long?"
+
+"Eight hours, I believe," he admitted gravely; "less than that, in fact."
+
+"Miss Calendar's interests will not suffer through anything you may tell
+me."
+
+"Whether they will or no, I see I must swing a looser tongue, or you'll be
+showing me the door."
+
+The woman shook her head, amused, "Not until," she told him significantly.
+
+"Very well, then." And he launched into an abridged narrative of the
+night's events, as he understood them, touching lightly on his own
+circumstances, the real poverty which had brought him back to Craven Street
+by way of Frognall. "And there you have it all, Mrs. Hallam."
+
+She sat in silent musing. Now and again he caught the glint of her eyes
+and knew that he was being appraised with such trained acumen as only
+long knowledge of men can give to women. He wondered if he were found
+wanting.... Her dark head bended, elbow on knee, chin resting lightly in
+the cradle of her slender, parted fingers, the woman thought profoundly,
+her reverie ending with a brief, curt laugh, musical and mirthless as the
+sound of breaking glass.
+
+"It is so like Calendar!" she exclaimed: "so like him that one sees how
+foolish it was to trust--no, not to trust, but to believe that he could
+ever be thrown off the scent, once he got nose to ground. So, if we suffer,
+my son and I, I shall have only myself to thank!"
+
+Kirkwood waited in patient attention till she chose to continue. When she
+did "Now for my side of the case!" cried Mrs. Hallam; and rising, began to
+pace the room, her slender and rounded figure swaying gracefully, the while
+she talked.
+
+"George Calendar is a scoundrel," she said: "a swindler, gambler,--what I
+believe you Americans call a confidence-man. He is also my late husband's
+first cousin. Some years since he found it convenient to leave England,
+likewise his wife and daughter. Mrs. Calendar, a country-woman of yours, by
+the bye, died shortly afterwards. Dorothy, by the merest accident, obtained
+a situation as private secretary in the household of the late Colonel
+Burgoyne, of The Cliffs, Cornwall. You follow me?"
+
+"Yes, perfectly."
+
+"Colonel Burgoyne died, leaving his estates to my son, some time ago.
+Shortly afterwards Dorothy Calendar disappeared. We know now that her
+father took her away, but then the disappearance seemed inexplicable,
+especially since with her vanished a great deal of valuable information.
+She alone knew of the location of certain of the old colonel's personal
+effects."
+
+"He was an eccentric. One of his peculiarities involved the secreting of
+valuables in odd places; he had no faith in banks. Among these valuables
+were the Burgoyne family jewels--quite a treasure, believe me, Mr.
+Kirkwood. We found no note of them among the colonel's papers, and without
+Dorothy were powerless to pursue a search for them. We advertised and
+employed detectives, with no result. It seems that father and daughter were
+at Monte Carlo at the time."
+
+"Beautifully circumstantial, my dear lady," commented Kirkwood--to his
+inner consciousness. Outwardly he maintained consistently a pose of
+impassive gullibility.
+
+"This afternoon, for the first time, we received news of the Calendars.
+Calendar himself called upon me, to beg a loan. I explained our difficulty
+and he promised that Dorothy should send us the information by the
+morning's post. When I insisted, he agreed to bring it himself, after
+dinner, this evening.... I make it quite clear?" she interrupted, a little
+anxious.
+
+"Quite clear, I assure you," he assented encouragingly.
+
+"Strangely enough, he had not been gone ten minutes when my son came
+in from a conference with our solicitors, informing me that at last a
+memorandum had turned up, indicating that the heirlooms would be found in a
+safe secreted behind a dresser in Colonel Burgoyne's bedroom."
+
+"At Number 9, Frognall Street."
+
+"Yes.... I proposed going there at once, but it was late and we were dining
+at the Pless with an acquaintance, a Mr. Mulready, whom I now recall as a
+former intimate of George Calendar. To our surprise we saw Calendar and his
+daughter at a table not far from ours. Mr. Mulready betrayed some agitation
+at the sight of Calendar, and told me that Scotland Yard had a man out with
+a warrant for Calendar's arrest, on old charges. For old sake's sake, Mr.
+Mulready begged me to give Calendar a word of warning. I did so--foolishly,
+it seems: Calendar was at that moment planning to rob us, Mulready aiding
+and abetting him."
+
+The woman paused before Kirkwood, looking down upon him. "And so," she
+concluded, "we have been tricked and swindled. I can scarcely believe it of
+Dorothy Calendar."
+
+"I, for one, don't believe it." Kirkwood spoke quietly, rising. "Whatever
+the culpability of Calendar and Mulready, Dorothy was only their hoodwinked
+tool."
+
+"But, Mr. Kirkwood, she must have known the jewels were not hers."
+
+"Yes," he assented passively, but wholly unconvinced.
+
+"And what," she demanded with a gesture of exasperation, "what would you
+advise?"
+
+"Scotland Yard," he told her bluntly.
+
+"But it's a family secret! It must not appear in the papers. Don't you
+understand--George Calendar is my husband's cousin!"
+
+"I can think of nothing else, unless you pursue them in person."
+
+"But--whither?"
+
+"That remains to be discovered; I can tell you nothing more than I have....
+May I thank you for your hospitality, express my regrets that I should
+unwittingly have been made the agent of this disaster, and wish you good
+night--or, rather, good morning, Mrs. Hallam?"
+
+For a moment she held him under a calculating glance which he withstood
+with graceless fortitude. Then, realizing that he was determined not by any
+means to be won to her cause, she gave him her hand, with a commonplace
+wish that he might find his affairs in better order than seemed probable;
+and rang for Eccles.
+
+The butler showed him out.
+
+He took away with him two strong impressions; the one visual, of a
+strikingly handsome woman in a wonderful gown, standing under the red glow
+of a reading-lamp, in an attitude of intense mental concentration, her
+expression plainly indicative of a train of thought not guiltless of
+vindictiveness; the other, more mental but as real, he presently voiced to
+the huge bronze lions brooding over desolate Trafalgar Square.
+
+"Well," appreciated Mr. Kirkwood with gusto, "_she's_ got Ananias and
+Sapphira talked to a standstill, all right!" He ruminated over this for
+a moment. "Calendar can lie some, too; but hardly with her picturesque
+touch.... Uncommon ingenious, _I_ call it. All the same, there were only
+about a dozen bits of tiling that didn't fit into her mosaic a little
+bit.... I think they're all tarred with the same stick--all but the girl.
+And there's something afoot a long sight more devilish and crafty than that
+shilling-shocker of madam's.... Dorothy Calendar's got about as much active
+part in it as I have. I'm only from California, but they've got to show
+me, before I'll believe a word against her. Those infernal
+scoundrels!...Somebody's got to be on the girl's side and I seem to have
+drawn the lucky straw.... Good Heavens! is it possible for a grown man to
+fall heels over head in love in two short hours? I don't believe it. It's
+just interest--nothing more.... And I'll have to have a change of clothes
+before I can do anything further."
+
+He bowed gratefully to the lions, in view of their tolerant interest in his
+soliloquy, and set off very suddenly round the square and up St. Martin's
+Lane, striking across town as directly as might be for St. Pancras Station.
+It would undoubtedly be a long walk, but cabs were prohibited by his
+straitened means, and the busses were all abed and wouldn't be astir for
+hours.
+
+He strode along rapidly, finding his way more through intuition than by
+observation or familiarity with London's geography--indeed, was scarce
+aware of his surroundings; for his brain was big with fine imagery, rapt in
+a glowing dream of knighterrantry and chivalric deeds.
+
+Thus is it ever and alway with those who in the purity of young hearts rush
+in where angels fear to tread; if these, Kirkwood and his ilk, be fools,
+thank God for them, for with such foolishness is life savored and made
+sweet and sound! To Kirkwood the warp of the world and the woof of it was
+Romance, and it wrapped him round, a magic mantle to set him apart from
+all things mean and sordid and render him impregnable and invisible to the
+haunting Shade of Care.
+
+Which, by the same token, presently lost track of him entirely, and
+wandered off to find and bedevil some other poor devil. And Kirkwood, his
+eyes like his spirit elevated, saw that the clouds of night were breaking,
+the skies clearing, that the East pulsed ever more strongly with the
+dim golden promise of the day to come. And this he chose to take for an
+omen--prematurely, it may be.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+
+AGAIN "BELOW BRIDGE"; AND BEYOND
+
+Kirkwood wasted little time, who had not much to waste, were he to do that
+upon whose doing he had set his heart. It irked him sore to have to lose
+the invaluable moments demanded by certain imperative arrangements, but his
+haste was such that all was consummated within an hour.
+
+Within the period of a single hour, then, he had ransomed his luggage at
+St. Pancras, caused it to be loaded upon a four-wheeler and transferred to
+a neighboring hotel of evil flavor but moderate tariff, where he engaged
+a room for a week, ordered an immediate breakfast, and retired with his
+belongings to his room; he had shaved and changed his clothes, selecting
+a serviceable suit of heavy tweeds, stout shoes, a fore-and-aft cap and a
+neglig�e shirt of a deep shade calculated at least to seem clean for a long
+time; finally, he had devoured his bacon and eggs, gulped down his coffee
+and burned his mouth, and, armed with a stout stick, set off hotfoot in the
+still dim glimmering of early day.
+
+By this time his cash capital had dwindled to the sum of two pounds, ten
+shillings, eight-pence, and would have been much less had he paid for his
+lodging in advance. But he considered his trunks ample security for the
+bill, and dared not wait the hour when shopkeepers begin to take down
+shutters and it becomes possible to realize upon one's jewelry. Besides
+which, he had never before been called upon to consider the advisability of
+raising money by pledging personal property, and was in considerable doubt
+as to the right course of procedure in such emergency.
+
+At King's Cross Station on the Underground an acute disappointment awaited
+him; there, likewise, he learned something about London. A sympathetic
+bobby informed him that no trains would be running until after five-thirty,
+and that, furthermore, no busses would begin to ply until half after seven.
+
+"It's tramp it or cab it, then," mused the young man mournfully, his
+longing gaze seeking a nearby cab-rank--just then occupied by a solitary
+hansom, driver somnolent on the box. "Officer," he again addressed
+the policeman, mindful of the English axiom: "When in doubt, ask a
+bobby."--"Officer, when's high-tide this morning?"
+
+The bobby produced a well-worn pocket-almanac, moistened a massive thumb,
+and rippled the pages.
+
+"London Bridge, 'igh tide twenty minutes arfter six, sir," he announced
+with a glow of satisfaction wholly pardonable in one who combines the
+functions of perambulating almanac, guide-book, encyclopedia, and conserver
+of the peace.
+
+Kirkwood said something beneath his breath--a word in itself a comfortable
+mouthful and wholesome and emphatic. He glanced again at the cab and
+groaned: "O Lord, I just dassent!" With which, thanking the bureau of
+information, he set off at a quick step down Grey's Inn Road.
+
+The day had closed down in brilliance upon the city--and the voice of the
+milkman was to be heard in the land--when he trudged, still briskly if a
+trifle wearily, into Holborn, and held on eastward across the Viaduct and
+down Newgate Street; the while addling his weary wits with heart-sickening
+computations of minutes, all going hopelessly to prove that he would be
+late, far too late even presupposing the unlikely. The unlikely, be it
+known, was that the _Alethea_ would not attempt to sail before the turn of
+the tide.
+
+For this was his mission, to find the _Alethea_ before she sailed.
+Incredible as it may appear, at five o'clock, or maybe earlier, on the
+morning of the twenty-second of April, 1906, A.D., Philip Kirkwood,
+normally a commonplace but likable young American in full possession of
+his senses, might have been seen (and by some was seen) plodding manfully
+through Cheapside, London, England, engaged upon a quest as mad, forlorn,
+and gallant as any whose chronicle ever inspired the pen of a Malory or
+a Froissart. In brief he proposed to lend his arm and courage to be the
+shield and buckler of one who might or might not be a damsel in distress;
+according as to whether Mrs. Hallam had spoken soothly of Dorothy Calendar,
+or Kirkwood's own admirable faith in the girl were justified of itself.
+
+Proceeding upon the working hypothesis that Mrs. Hallam was a polished liar
+in most respects, but had told the truth, so far as concerned her statement
+to the effect that the gladstone bag contained valuable real property
+(whose ownership remained a moot question, though Kirkwood was definitely
+committed to the belief that it was none of Mrs. Hallam's or her son's):
+he reasoned that the two adventurers, with Dorothy and their booty, would
+attempt to leave London by a water route, in the ship, _Alethea_, whose
+name had fallen from their lips at Bermondsey Old Stairs.
+
+Kirkwood's initial task, then, would be to find the needle in the
+haystack--the metaphor is poor: more properly, to sort out from the
+hundreds of vessels, of all descriptions, at anchor in midstream, moored to
+the wharves of 'long-shore warehouses, or in the gigantic docks that line
+the Thames, that one called _Alethea_; of which he was so deeply mired in
+ignorance that he could not say whether she were tramp-steamer, coastwise
+passenger boat, one of the liners that ply between Tilbury and all the
+world, Channel ferry-boat, private yacht (steam or sail), schooner,
+four-master, square-rigger, barque or brigantine.
+
+A task to stagger the optimism of any but one equipped with the sublime
+impudence of Youth! Even Kirkwood was disturbed by some little awe when
+he contemplated the vast proportions of his undertaking. None the less
+doggedly he plugged ahead, and tried to keep his mind from vain surmises
+as to what would be his portion when eventually he should find himself a
+passenger, uninvited and unwelcome, upon the _Alethea_....
+
+London had turned over once or twice, and was pulling the bedclothes over
+its head and grumbling about getting up, but the city was still sound
+asleep when at length he paused for a minute's rest in front of the Mansion
+House, and realized with a pang of despair that he was completely tuckered
+out. There was a dull, vague throbbing in his head; weights pressed upon
+his eyeballs until they ached; his mouth was hot and tasted of yesterday's
+tobacco; his feet were numb and heavy; his joints were stiff; he yawned
+frequently.
+
+With a sigh he surrendered to the flesh's frailty. An early cabby, cruising
+up from Cannon Street station on the off-chance of finding some one astir
+in the city, aside from the doves and sparrows, suffered the surprise of
+his life when Kirkwood hailed him. His face was blank with amazement when
+he reined in, and his eyes bulged when the prospective fare, on impulse,
+explained his urgent needs. Happily he turned out a fair representative of
+his class, an intelligent and unfuddled cabby.
+
+"Jump in, sir," he told Kirkwood cheerfully, as soon as he had assimilated
+the latter's demands. "I knows precisely wotcher wants. Leave it all to
+me."
+
+The admonition was all but superfluous; Kirkwood was unable, for the time
+being, to do aught else than resign his fate into another's guidance. Once
+in the cab he slipped insensibly into a nap, and slept soundly on, as
+reckless of the cab's swift pace and continuous jouncing as of the sunlight
+glaring full in his tired young face.
+
+He may have slept twenty minutes; he awoke faint with drowsiness, tingling
+from head to toe from fatigue, and in distress of a queer qualm in the pit
+of his stomach, to find the hansom at rest and the driver on the step,
+shaking his fare with kindly determination. "Oh, a' right," he assented
+surlily, and by sheer force of will made himself climb out to the
+sidewalk; where, having rubbed his eyes, stretched enormously and yawned
+discourteously in the face of the East End, he was once more himself and
+a hundred times refreshed into the bargain. Contentedly he counted three
+shillings into the cabby's palm--the fare named being one-and-six.
+
+"The shilling over and above the tip's for finding me the waterman and
+boat," he stipulated.
+
+"Right-o. You'll mind the 'orse a minute, sir?"
+
+Kirkwood nodded. The man touched his hat and disappeared inexplicably.
+Kirkwood, needlessly attaching himself to the reins near the animal's head,
+pried his sense of observation open and became alive to the fact that he
+stood in a quarter of London as strange to him as had been Bermondsey Wall.
+
+To this day he can not put a name to it; he surmises that it was Wapping.
+
+Ramshackle tenements with sharp gable roofs lined either side of the way.
+Frowsy women draped themselves over the window-sills. Pallid and wasted
+parodies on childhood contested the middle of the street with great, slow
+drays, drawn by enormous horses. On the sidewalks twin streams of masculine
+humanity flowed without rest, both bound in the same direction: dock
+laborers going to their day's work. Men of every nationality known to the
+world (he thought) passed him in his short five-minute wait by the horse's
+head; Britons, brown East Indians, blacks from Jamaica, swart Italians,
+Polaks, Russian Jews, wire-drawn Yankees, Spaniards, Portuguese, Greeks,
+even a Nubian or two: uniform in these things only, that their backs were
+bent with toil, bowed beyond mending, and their faces stamped with the
+blurred type-stamp of the dumb laboring brute. A strangely hideous
+procession, they shambled on, for the most part silent, all uncouth and
+unreal in the clear morning glow.
+
+The outlander was sensible of some relief when his cabby popped hurriedly
+out of the entrance to a tenement, a dull-visaged, broad-shouldered
+waterman ambling more slowly after.
+
+"Nevvy of mine, sir," announced the cabby; "and a fust-ryte waterman; knows
+the river like a book, he do."
+
+The nephew touched his forelock sheepishly.
+
+"Thank you," said Kirkwood; and, turning to the man, "Your boat?" he asked
+with the brevity of weariness.
+
+"This wye, sir."
+
+At his guide's heels Kirkwood threaded the crowd and, entering the
+tenement, stumbled through a gloomy and unsavory passage, to come out at
+last upon a scanty, unrailed veranda overlooking the river. Ten feet below,
+perhaps, foul waters purred and eddied round the piles supporting the
+rear of the building. On one hand a ladder-like flight of rickety steps
+descended to a floating stage to which a heavy rowboat lay moored. In the
+latter a second waterman was seated bailing out bilge with a rusty can.
+
+"'Ere we are, sir," said the cabman's nephew, pausing at the head of the
+steps. "Now, where's it to be?"
+
+The American explained tersely that he had a message to deliver a friend,
+who had shipped aboard a vessel known as the _Alethea_, scheduled to sail
+at floodtide; further than which deponent averred naught.
+
+The waterman scratched his head. "A 'ard job, sir; not knowin' wot kind of
+a boat she are mykes it 'arder." He waited hopefully.
+
+"Ten shillings," volunteered Kirkwood promptly; "ten shillings if you get
+me aboard her before she weighs anchor; fifteen if I keep you out more than
+an hour, and still you put me aboard. After that we'll make other terms."
+
+The man promptly turned his back to hail his mate. "'Arf a quid, Bob, if we
+puts this gent aboard a wessel name o' _Allytheer_ afore she syles at turn
+o' tide."
+
+In the boat the man with the bailing can turned up an impassive
+countenance. "Coom down," he clenched the bargain; and set about shipping
+the sweeps.
+
+Kirkwood crept down the shaky ladder and deposited himself in the stern of
+the boat; the younger boatman settled himself on the midship thwart.
+
+"Ready?"
+
+"Ready," assented old Bob from the bows. He cast off the painter, placed
+one sweep against the edge of the stage, and with a vigorous thrust pushed
+off; then took his seat.
+
+Bows swinging down-stream, the boat shot out from the shore.
+
+"How's the tide?" demanded Kirkwood, his impatience growing.
+
+"On th' turn, sir," he was told.
+
+For a long moment broadside to the current, the boat responded to the
+sturdy pulling of the port sweeps. Another moment, and it was in full
+swing, the watermen bending lustily to their task. Under their unceasing
+urge, the broad-beamed, heavy craft, aided by the ebbing tide, surged more
+and more rapidly through the water; the banks, grim and unsightly with
+their towering, impassive warehouses broken by toppling wooden tenements,
+slipped swiftly up-stream. Ship after ship was passed, sailing vessels
+in the majority, swinging sluggishly at anchor, drifting slowly with the
+river, or made fast to the goods-stages of the shore; and in keen anxiety
+lest he should overlook the right one, Kirkwood searched their bows and
+sterns for names, which in more than one case proved hardly legible.
+
+The _Alethea_ was not of their number.
+
+In the course of some ten minutes, the watermen drove the boat sharply
+inshore, bringing her up alongside another floating stage, in the shadow
+of another tenement.--both so like those from which they had embarked that
+Kirkwood would have been unable to distinguish one from another.
+
+In the bows old Bob lifted up a stentorian voice, summoning one William.
+
+Recognizing that there was some design in this, the passenger subdued his
+disapproval of the delay, and sat quiet.
+
+In answer to the third ear-racking hail, a man, clothed simply in dirty
+shirt and disreputable trousers, showed himself in the doorway above,
+rubbing the sleep out of a red, bloated countenance with a mighty and grimy
+fist.
+
+"'Ello," he said surlily. "Wot's th' row?"
+
+"'Oo," interrogated old Bob, holding the boat steady by grasping the stage,
+"was th' party wot engyged yer larst night, Bill?"
+
+"Party name o' _Allytheer_," growled the drowsy one. "W'y?"
+
+"Party 'ere's lookin' for 'im. Where'll I find this _Allytheer?_"
+
+"Best look sharp 'r yer won't find 'im," retorted the one above. "'E _was_
+at anchor off Bow Creek larst night."
+
+Kirkwood's heart leaped in hope. "What sort of a vessel was she?" he asked,
+half rising in his eagerness.
+
+"Brigantine, sir."
+
+"_Thank--you!_" replied Kirkwood explosively, resuming his seat with
+uncalculated haste as old Bob, deaf to the amenities of social intercourse
+in an emergency involving as much as ten-bob, shoved off again.
+
+And again the boat was flying down in midstream, the leaden waters, shot
+with gold of the morning sun, parting sullenly beneath its bows.
+
+The air was still, heavy and tepid; the least exertion brought out beaded
+moisture on face and hands. In the east hung a turgid sky, dull with haze,
+through which the mounting sun swam like a plaque of brass; overhead it
+was clear and cloudless, but besmirched as if the polished mirror of the
+heavens had been fouled by the breath of departing night.
+
+On the right, ahead, Greenwich Naval College loomed up, the great
+gray-stone buildings beyond the embankment impressively dominating the
+scene, in happy relief against the wearisome monotony of the river-banks;
+it came abreast; and ebbed into the backwards of the scene.
+
+The watermen straining at the sweeps, the boat sped into Blackwall Reach,
+Bugsby Marshes a splash of lurid green to port, dreary Cubitt Town and the
+West India Docks to starboard. Here the river ran thick with shipping.
+
+"Are we near?" Kirkwood would know; and by way of reply had a grunt of the
+younger waterman.
+
+Again, "Will we make it?" he asked.
+
+The identical grunt answered him; he was free to interpret it as he would;
+young William--as old Bob named him--had no breath for idle words. Kirkwood
+subsided, controlling his impatience to the best of his ability; the men,
+he told himself again and again, were earning their pay, whether or not
+they gained the goal of his desire.... Their labors were titanic; on
+their temples and foreheads the knotted veins stood out like discolored
+whip-cord; their faces were the shade of raw beef, steaming with sweat;
+their eyes protruded with the strain that set their jaws like vises; their
+chests heaved and shrank like bellows; their backs curved, straightened,
+and bent again in rhythmic unison as tiring to the eye as the swinging of a
+pendulum.
+
+Hugging the marshy shore, they rounded the Blackwall Point. Young William
+looked to Kirkwood, caught his eye, and nodded.
+
+"Here?"
+
+Kirkwood rose, balancing himself against the leap and sway of the boat.
+
+"Sumwhere's ... 'long ... o' 'ere."
+
+From right to left his eager glance swept the river's widening reach.
+Vessels were there in abundance, odd, unwieldy, blunt-bowed craft with
+huge, rakish, tawny sails; long strings of flat barges, pyramidal mounds of
+coal on each, lashed to another and convoyed by panting tugs; steam cargo
+boats, battered, worn, rusted sore through their age-old paint; a steel
+leviathan of the deep seas, half cargo, half passenger boat, warping
+reluctantly into the mouth of the Victoria Dock tidal basin,--but no
+brigantine, no sailing vessel of any type.
+
+The young man's lips checked a cry that was half a sob of bitter
+disappointment. He had entered into the spirit of the chase heart and soul,
+with an enthusiasm that was strange to him, when he came to look back
+upon the time; and to fail, even though failure had been discounted a
+hundredfold since the inception of his mad adventure, seemed hard, very
+hard.
+
+He sat down suddenly. "She's gone!" he cried in a hollow gasp.
+
+The boatmen eased upon their oars, and old Bob stood up in the bows,
+scanning the river-scape with keen eyes shielded by a level palm.
+Young William drooped forward suddenly, head upon knees, and breathed
+convulsively. The boat drifted listlessly with the current.
+
+Old Bob panted: "'Dawn't--see--nawthin'--o' 'er." He resumed his seat.
+
+"There's no hope, I suppose?"
+
+The elder waterman shook his head. "'Carn't sye.... Might be round--nex'
+bend--might be--passin' Purfleet.... 'Point is--me an' young Wilyum
+'ere--carn't do no more--'n we 'as. We be wore out."
+
+"Yes," Kirkwood assented, disconsolate, "You've certainly earned your pay."
+Then hope revived; he was very young in heart, you know. "Can't you suggest
+something? I've _got_ to catch that ship!"
+
+Old Bob wagged his head in slow negation; young William lifted his.
+
+"There's a rylewye runs by Woolwich," he ventured. "Yer might tyke tryne
+an' go to Sheerness, sir. Yer'd be positive o' passin' 'er if she didn't
+syle afore 'igh-tide. 'Ire a boat at Sheerness an' put out an' look for
+'er."
+
+"How far's Woolwich?" Kirkwood demanded instantly.
+
+"Mile," said the elder man. "Tyke yer for five-bob extry."
+
+"Done!"
+
+Young William dashed the sweat from his eyes, wiped his palms on his hips,
+and fitted the sweeps again to the wooden tholes. Old Bob was as ready.
+With an inarticulate cry they gave way.
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+
+DESPERATE MEASURES
+
+Old Bob seemed something inclined toward optimism, when the boat lay
+alongside a landing-stage at Woolwich, and Kirkwood had clambered ashore.
+
+"Yer'll mebbe myke it," the waterman told him with a weatherwise survey of
+the skies. "Wind's freshenin' from the east'rds, an' that'll 'old 'er back
+a bit, sir."
+
+"Arsk th' wye to th' Dorkyard Styshun," young William volunteered. "'Tis
+th' shortest walk, sir. I 'opes yer catches 'er.... Thanky, sir."
+
+He caught dextrously the sovereign which Kirkwood, in ungrudging
+liberality, spared them of his store of two. The American nodded
+acknowledgments and adieux, with a faded smile deprecating his chances of
+winning the race, sorely handicapped as he was. He was very, very tired,
+and in his heart suspected that he would fail. But, if he did, he would at
+least be able to comfort himself that it was not for lack of trying. He
+set his teeth on that covenant, in grim determination; either there was a
+strain of the bulldog latent in the Kirkwood breed or else his infatuation
+gripped him more strongly than he guessed.
+
+Yet he suspected something of its power; he knew that this was altogether
+an insane proceeding, and that the lure that led him on was Dorothy
+Calendar. A strange dull light glowed in his weary eyes, on the thought of
+her. He'd go through fire and water in her service. She was costing him
+dear, perhaps was to cost him dearer still; and perhaps there'd be for
+his guerdon no more than a "Thank you, Mr. Kirkwood!" at the end of the
+passage. But that would be no less than his deserts; he was not to forget
+that he was interfering unwarrantably; the girl was in her father's hands,
+surely safe enough there--to the casual mind. If her partnership in her
+parent's fortunes were distasteful, she endured it passively, without
+complaint.
+
+He decided that it was his duty to remind himself, from time to time,
+that his main interest must be in the game itself, in the solution of
+the riddle; whatever should befall, he must look for no reward for his
+gratuitous and self-appointed part. Indeed he was all but successful in
+persuading himself that it was the fascination of adventure alone that drew
+him on.
+
+Whatever the lure, it was inexorable; instead of doing as a sensible person
+would have done--returning to London for a long rest in his hotel room, ere
+striving to retrieve his shattered fortunes--Philip Kirkwood turned up the
+village street, intent only to find the railway station and catch the first
+available train for Sheerness, were that an early one or a late.
+
+A hapchance native whom he presently encountered, furnished minute
+directions for reaching the Dockyard Station of the Southeastern and
+Chatham Rail-way, adding comfortable information to the effect that the
+next east-bound train would pass through in ten minutes; if Kirkwood would
+mend his pace he could make it easily, with time to spare.
+
+Kirkwood mended his pace accordingly, but, contrary to the prediction, had
+no time to spare at all. Even as he stormed the ticket-grating, the train
+was thundering in at the platform. Therefore a nervous ticket agent passed
+him out a first-class ticket instead of the third-class he had asked for;
+and there was no time wherein to have the mistake rectified. Kirkwood
+planked down the fare, swore, and sprinted for the carriages.
+
+The first compartment whose door he jerked violently open, proved to be
+occupied, and was, moreover, not a smoking-car. He received a fleeting
+impression of a woman's startled eyes, staring into his own through a thin
+mesh of veiling, fell off the running-board, slammed the door, and hurled
+himself to-wards the next compartment. Here happier fortune attended upon
+his desire; the box-like section was untenanted, and a notice blown upon
+the window-glass announced that it was "2nd Class Smoking." Kirkwood
+promptly tumbled in; and when he turned to shut the door the coaches were
+moving.
+
+A pipe helped him to bear up while the train was making its two other stops
+in the Borough of Woolwich: a circumstance so maddening to a man in a
+hurry, that it set Kirkwood's teeth on edge with sheer impatience, and
+made him long fervently for the land of his birth, where they do things
+differently--where the Board of Directors of a railway company doesn't
+erect three substantial passenger dep�ts in the course of a mile and a half
+of overgrown village. It consoled him little that none disputed with
+him his lonely possession of the compartment, that he _had_ caught the
+Sheerness train, or that he was really losing no time; a sense of deep
+dejection had settled down upon his consciousness, with a realization of
+how completely a fool's errand was this of his. He felt foredoomed to
+failure; he was never to see Dorothy Calendar again; and his brain seemed
+numb with disappointment.
+
+Rattling and swaying, the train left the town behind.
+
+Presently he put aside his pipe and stared blankly out at a reeling
+landscape, the pleasant, homely, smiling countryside of Kent. A deeper
+melancholy tinted his mind: Dorothy Calendar was for ever lost to him.
+
+The trucks drummed it out persistently--he thought, vindictively:
+"_Lost!... Lost!... For ever lost!..._"
+
+And he had made--was then making--a damned fool of himself. The trucks had
+no need to din _that_ into his thick skull by their ceaseless iteration; he
+knew it, would not deny it....
+
+And it was all his own fault. He'd had his chance, Calendar had offered him
+it. If only he had closed with the fat adventurer!...
+
+Before his eyes field and coppice, hedge and homestead, stream and flowing
+highway, all blurred and ran streakily into one another, like a highly
+impressionistic water-color. He could make neither head nor tail of the
+flying views, and so far as coherent thought was concerned, he could not
+put two ideas together. Without understanding distinctly, he presently did
+a more wise and wholesome thing: which was to topple limply over on the
+cushions and fall fast asleep.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+After a long time he seemed to realize rather hazily that the carriage-door
+had been opened to admit somebody. Its smart closing _bang_ shocked him
+awake. He sat up, blinking in confusion, hardly conscious of more, to begin
+with, than that the train had paused and was again in full flight. Then,
+his senses clearing, he became aware that his solitary companion, just
+entered, was a woman. She was seated over across from him, her back to the
+engine, in an attitude which somehow suggested a highly nonchalant frame of
+mind. She laughed, and immediately her speaking voice was high and sweet in
+his hearing.
+
+"Really, you know, Mr. Kirkwood, I simply couldn't contain my impatience
+another instant."
+
+Kirkwood gasped and tried to re-collect his wits.
+
+"Beg pardon--I've been asleep," he said stupidly.
+
+"Yes. I'm sorry to have disturbed you, but, you know, you must make
+allowances for a woman's nerves."
+
+Beneath his breath the bewildered man said: "The deuce!" and above it, in a
+stupefied tone: "Mrs. Hallam!"
+
+She nodded in a not unfriendly fashion, smiling brightly. "Myself, Mr.
+Kirkwood! Really, our predestined paths are badly tangled, just now; aren't
+they? Were you surprised to find me in here, with you? Come now, confess
+you were!"
+
+He remarked the smooth, girlish freshness of her cheeks, the sense and
+humor of her mouth, the veiled gleam of excitement in her eyes of the
+changing sea; and saw, as well, that she was dressed for traveling,
+sensibly but with an air, and had brought a small hand-bag with her.
+
+"Surprised and delighted," he replied, recovering, with mendacity so
+intentional and obvious that the woman laughed aloud.
+
+"I knew you'd be!... You see, I had the carriage ahead, the one you didn't
+take. I was so disappointed when you flung up to the door and away again!
+You didn't see me hanging half out the window, to watch where you went, did
+you? That's how I discovered that your discourtesy was unintentional, that
+you hadn't recognized me,--by the fact that you took this compartment,
+right behind my own."
+
+She paused invitingly, but Kirkwood, grown wary, contented himself
+with picking up his pipe and carefully knocking out the dottle on the
+window-ledge.
+
+"I was glad to see _you_," she affirmed; "but only partly because you
+were you, Mr. Kirkwood. The other and major part was because sight of you
+confirmed my own secret intuition. You see, I'm quite old enough and wise
+enough to question even my own intuitions."
+
+"A woman wise enough for that is an adult prodigy," he ventured cautiously.
+
+"It's experience and age. I insist upon the age; I the mother of a
+grown-up boy! So I deliberately ran after you, changing when we stopped
+at Newington. You might've escaped me if I had waited until We got to
+Queensborough."
+
+Again she paused in open expectancy. Kirkwood, perplexed, put the pipe in
+his pocket, and assumed a factitious look of resignation, regarding her
+askance with that whimsical twist of his eyebrows.
+
+"For you are going to Queensborough, aren't you, Mr. Kirkwood?"
+
+"Queensborough?" he echoed blankly; and, in fact, he was at a loss to
+follow her drift. "No, Mrs. Hallam; I'm not bound there."
+
+Her surprise was apparent; she made no effort to conceal it. "But," she
+faltered, "if not there--"
+
+"'Give you my word, Mrs. Hallam, I have no intention whatever of going to
+Queensborough," Kirkwood protested.
+
+"I don't understand." The nervous drumming of a patent-leather covered
+toe, visible beneath the hem of her dress, alone betrayed a rising tide of
+impatience. "Then my intuition _was_ at fault!"
+
+"In this instance, if it was at all concerned with my insignificant
+affairs, yes--most decidedly at fault."
+
+She shook her head, regarding him with grave suspicion. "I hardly know:
+whether to believe you. I think...."
+
+Kirkwood's countenance displayed an added shade of red. After a moment, "I
+mean no discourtesy," he began stiffly, "but--"
+
+"But you don't care a farthing whether I believe you or not?"
+
+He caught her laughing eye, and smiled, the flush subsiding.
+
+"Very well, then! Now let us see: Where _are_ you bound?"
+
+Kirkwood looked out of the window.
+
+"I'm convinced it's a rendezvous...?"
+
+Kirkwood smiled patiently at the landscape.
+
+"Is Dorothy Calendar so very, very beautiful, Mr. Kirkwood?"--with a trace
+of malice.
+
+Ostentatiously Kirkwood read the South Eastern and Chatham's framed card
+of warning, posted just above Mrs. Hallam's head, to all such incurable
+lunatics as are possessed of a desire to travel on the running-boards of
+railway carriages.
+
+"You are going to meet her, aren't you?"
+
+He gracefully concealed a yawn.
+
+The woman's plan of attack took another form. "Last night, when you told me
+your story, I believed you."
+
+He devoted himself to suppressing the temptingly obvious retort, and
+succeeded; but though he left it unspoken, the humor of it twitched the
+corners of his mouth; and Mrs. Hallam was observant. So that her next
+attempt to draw him out was edged with temper.
+
+"I believed you an American but a gentleman; it appears that, if you ever
+were the latter, you've fallen so low that you willingly cast your lot with
+thieves."
+
+Having exhausted his repertoire of rudenesses, Kirkwood took to twiddling
+his thumbs.
+
+"I want to ask you if you think it fair to me or my son, to leave us in
+ignorance of the place where you are to meet the thieves who stole our--my
+son's jewels?"
+
+"Mrs. Hallam," he said soberly, "if I am going to meet Mr. Calendar or Mr.
+Mulready, I have no assurance of that fact."
+
+There was only the briefest of pauses, during which she analyzed this;
+then, quickly, "But you hope to?" she snapped.
+
+He felt that the only adequate retort to this would be a shrug of his
+shoulders; doubted his ability to carry one off; and again took refuge in
+silence.
+
+The woman abandoned a second plan of siege, with a readiness that did
+credit to her knowledge of mankind. She thought out the next very
+carefully, before opening with a masked battery.
+
+"Mr. Kirkwood, can't we be friends--this aside?"
+
+"Nothing could please me more, Mrs. Hallam!"
+
+"I'm sorry if I've annoyed you--"
+
+"And I, too, have been rude."
+
+"Last night, when you cut away so suddenly, you prevented my making you a
+proposal, a sort of a business proposition...."
+
+"Yes--?"
+
+"To come over to our side--"
+
+"I thought so. That was why I went."
+
+"Yes; I understood. But this morning, when you've had time to think it
+over--?"
+
+"I have no choice in the matter, Mrs. Hallam." The green eyes darkened
+ominously. "You mean--I am to understand, then, that you're against us,
+that you prefer to side with swindlers and scoundrels, all because of a--"
+
+She discovered him eying her with a smile of such inscrutable and sardonic
+intelligence, that the words died on her lips, and she crimsoned,
+treasonably to herself. For he saw it; and the belief he had conceived
+while attending to her tissue of fabrication, earlier that morning, was
+strengthened to the point of conviction that, if anything had been stolen
+by anybody, Mrs. Hallam and her son owned it as little as Calendar.
+
+As for the woman, she felt she had steadily lost, rather than gained,
+ground; and the flash of anger that had colored her cheeks, lit twin
+beacons in her eyes, which she resolutely fought down until they faded to
+mere gleams of resentment and determination. But she forgot to control
+her lips; and they are the truest indices to a woman's character and
+temperament; and Kirkwood did not overlook the circumstance that their
+specious sweetness had vanished, leaving them straight, set and hard, quite
+the reverse of attractive.
+
+"So," she said slowly, after a silent time, "you are not for Queensborough!
+The corollary of that _admission_, Mr. Kirkwood, is that you are for
+Sheerness."
+
+"I believe," he replied wearily, "that there are no other stations on this
+line, after Newington."
+
+"It follows, then, that--that I follow." And in answer to his perturbed
+glance, she added: "Oh, I'll grant that intuition is sometimes a poor
+guide. But if you meet George Calendar, so shall I. Nothing can prevent
+that. You can't hinder me."
+
+Considerably amused, he chuckled. "Let us talk of other things, Mrs.
+Hallam," he suggested pleasantly. "How is your son?"
+
+At this juncture the brakes began to shriek and grind upon the wheels.
+The train slowed; it stopped; and the voice of a guard could be heard
+admonishing passengers for Queensborough Pier to alight and take the branch
+line. In the noise the woman's response was drowned, and Kirkwood was
+hardly enough concerned for poor Freddie to repeat his question.
+
+When, after a little, the train pulled out of the junction, neither found
+reason to resume the conversation. During the brief balance of the journey
+Mrs. Hallam presumably had food for thought; she frowned, pursed her lips,
+and with one daintily gloved forefinger followed a seam of her tailored
+skirt; while Kirkwood sat watching and wondering how to rid himself of her,
+if she proved really as troublesome as she threatened to be.
+
+Also, he wondered continually what it was all about. Why did Mrs. Hallam
+suspect him of designing to meet Calendar at Queensborough? Had she
+any tangible ground for believing that Calendar could be found in
+Queensborough? Presumably she had, since she was avowedly in pursuit of
+that gentleman, and, Kirkwood inferred, had booked for Queensborough.
+Was he, then, running away from Calendar and his daughter to chase a
+will-o'-the-wisp of his credulous fancy, off Sheerness shore?
+
+Disturbing reflection. He scowled over it, then considered the other side
+of the face. Presuming Mrs. Hallam to have had reasonably dependable
+assurance that Calendar would stop in Queensborough, would she so readily
+have abandoned her design to catch him there, on the mere supposition that
+Kirkwood might be looking for him in Sheerness? That did not seem likely
+to one who esteemed Mrs. Hallam's acumen as highly as Kirkwood did. He
+brightened up, forgot that his was a fool's errand, and began again to
+project strategic plans into a problematic future.
+
+A sudden jolt interrupted this pastime, and the warning screech of the
+brakes informed that he had no time to scheme, but had best continue on the
+plan of action that had brought him thus far--that is, trust to his star
+and accept what should befall without repining.
+
+He rose, opened the door, and holding it so, turned.
+
+"I regret, Mrs. Hallam," he announced, smiling his crooked smile, "that
+a pressing engagement is about to prohibit my 'squiring you through the
+ticket-gates. You understand, I'm sure."
+
+His irrepressible humor proved infectious; and Mrs. Hallam's spirit ran as
+high as his own. She was smiling cheerfully when she, too, rose.
+
+"I also am in some haste," she averred demurely, gathering up her hand-bag
+and umbrella.
+
+A raised platform shot in beside the carriage, and the speed was so
+sensibly moderated that the train seemed to be creeping rather than
+running. Kirkwood flung the door wide open and lowered himself to the
+running-board. The end of the track was in sight and--a man who has been
+trained to board San Francisco cable-cars fears to alight from no moving
+vehicle. He swung off, got his balance, and ran swiftly down the platform.
+
+A cry from a bystander caused him to glance over his shoulder; Mrs. Hallam
+was then in the act of alighting. As he looked the flurry of skirts
+subsided and she fell into stride, pursuing.
+
+Sleepy Sheerness must have been scandalized, that day, and its gossips have
+acquired ground for many, an uncharitable surmise.
+
+Kirkwood, however, was so fortunate as to gain the wicket before the
+employee there awoke to the situation. Otherwise, such is the temper of
+British petty officialdom, he might have detained the fugitive. As it was,
+Kirkwood surrendered his ticket and ran out into the street with his luck
+still a dominant factor in the race. For, looking back, he saw that Mrs.
+Hallam had been held up at the gate, another victim of British red-tape;
+her ticket read for Queensborough, she was attempting to alight one station
+farther down the line, and while undoubtedly she was anxious to pay the
+excess fare, Heaven alone knew when she would succeed in allaying the
+suspicions and resentment of the ticket-taker.
+
+"That's good for ten minutes' start!" Kirkwood crowed. "And it never
+occurred to me--!"
+
+Before the station he found two hacks in waiting, with little to choose
+between them; neither was of a type that did not seem to advertise its
+pre-Victorian fashioning, and to neither was harnessed an animal that
+deserved anything but the epithet of screw. Kirkwood took the nearest for
+no other reason than because it was the nearest, and all but startled the
+driver off his box by offering double-fare for a brisk pace and a simple
+service at the end of the ride. Succinctly he set forth his wants, jumped
+into the antiquated four-wheeler, and threw himself down upon musty, dusty
+cushions to hug himself over the joke and bless whatever English board of
+railway, directors it was that first ordained that tickets should be taken
+up at the end instead of the outset of a journey.
+
+It was promptly made manifest that he had further cause for gratulation.
+The cabby, recovering from his amazement, was plying an indefatigable whip
+and thereby eliciting a degree of speed from his superannuated nag, that
+his fare had by no means hoped for, much less anticipated. The cab rocked
+and racketed through Sheerness' streets at a pace which is believed to be
+unprecedented and unrivaled; its passenger, dashed from side to side, had
+all he could do to keep from battering the vehicle to pieces with his head;
+while it was entirely out of the question to attempt to determine whether
+or not he was being pursued. He enjoyed it all hugely.
+
+In a period of time surprisingly short, he saw, from fleeting glimpses of
+the scenery to be obtained through the reeling windows, that they were
+threading the outskirts of the town; synchronously, whether by design or
+through actual inability to maintain it, the speed was moderated. And in
+the course of a few more minutes the cab stopped definitely.
+
+Kirkwood clambered painfully out, shook himself together and the bruises
+out of his bones, and looked fearfully back.
+
+Aside from a slowly settling cloud of dust, the road ran clear as far as he
+could see--to the point, in fact, where the town closed in about it.
+
+He had won; at all events in so much as to win meant eluding the
+persevering Mrs. Hallam. But to what end?
+
+Abstractedly he tendered his lonely sovereign to the driver, and without
+even looking at it, crammed the heavy weight of change into his pocket; an
+oversight which not only won him the awe-struck admiration of the cabby,
+but entailed consequences (it may be) he little apprehended. It was with an
+absentminded nod that he acquiesced in the man's announcement that he might
+arrange about the boat for him. Accordingly the cabby disappeared; and
+Kirkwood continued to stare about him, eagerly, hopefully.
+
+He stood on the brink of the Thames estuary, there a possible five miles
+from shore to shore; from his feet, almost, a broad shingle beach sloped
+gently to the water.
+
+On one hand a dilapidated picket-fence enclosed the door-yard of a
+fisherman's cottage, or, better, hovel,--if it need be accurately
+described--at the door of which the cabby was knocking.
+
+The morning was now well-advanced. The sun rode high, a sphere of tarnished
+flame in a void of silver-gray, its thin cold radiance striking pallid
+sparks from the leaping crests of wind-whipped waves. In the east a wall
+of vapor, dull and lusterless, had taken body since the dawn, masking the
+skies and shutting down upon the sea like some vast curtain; and out of the
+heart of this a bitter and vicious wind played like a sword.
+
+To the north, Shoeburyness loomed vaguely, like a low-drifted bank of
+cloud. Off to the right the Nore Lightship danced, a tiny fleck of warm
+crimson in a wilderness of slatey-blue waters, plumed with a myriad of
+vanishing white-caps.
+
+Up the shelving shore, small, puny wavelets dashed in impotent fury, and
+the shingle sang unceasingly its dreary, syncopated monotone. High and dry,
+a few dingy boats lay canted wearily upon their broad, swelling sides,--a
+couple of dories, apparently in daily use; a small sloop yacht, dismantled
+and plainly beyond repair; and an oyster-smack also out of commission.
+About them the beach was strewn with a litter of miscellany,--nets, oars,
+cork buoys, bits of wreckage and driftwood, a few fish too long forgotten
+and (one assumed) responsible in part for the foreign wealth of the
+atmosphere.
+
+Some little distance offshore a fishing-boat, catrigged and not more than
+twenty-feet over all, swung bobbing at her mooring, keen nose searching
+into the wind; at sight of which Kirkwood gave thanks, for his adventitious
+guide had served him well, if that boat were to be hired by any manner of
+persuasion.
+
+But it was to the farther reaches of the estuary that he gave more
+prolonged and most anxious heed, scanning narrowly what shipping was there
+to be seen. Far beyond the lightship a liner was riding the waves with
+serene contempt, making for the river's mouth and Tilbury Dock. Nearer
+in, a cargo boat was standing out upon the long trail, the white of riven
+waters showing clearly against her unclean freeboard. Out to east a little
+covey of fishing-smacks, red sails well reefed, were scudding before
+the wind like strange affrighted water-fowl, and bearing down past a
+heavy-laden river barge. The latter, with tarpaulin battened snugly down
+over the cockpit and the seas dashing over her wash-board until she seemed
+under water half the time, was forging stodgily Londonwards, her bargee at
+the tiller smoking a placid pipe.
+
+But a single sailing vessel of any notable tonnage was in sight; and when
+he saw her Kirkwood's heart became buoyant with hope, and he began to
+tremble with nervous eagerness. For he believed her to be the _Alethea_.
+
+There's no mistaking a ship brigantine-rigged for any other style of craft
+that sails the seas.
+
+From her position when first he saw her, Kirkwood could have fancied she
+was tacking out of the mouth of the Medway; but he judged that, leaving the
+Thames' mouth, she had tacked to starboard until well-nigh within hail of
+Sheerness. Now, having presumably, gone about, she was standing out toward
+the Nore, boring doggedly into the wind. He would have given a deal for
+glasses wherewith to read the name upon her bows, but was sensible of no
+hampering doubts; nor, had he harbored any, would they have deterred him.
+He had set his heart upon the winning of his venture, had come too far,
+risked far too much, to suffer anything now to stay his hand and stand
+between him and Dorothy Calendar. Whatever the further risks and hazards,
+though he should take his life in his hands to win to her side, he would
+struggle on. He recked nothing of personal danger; a less selfish passion
+ran molten in his veins, moving him to madness.
+
+Fascinated, he fixed his gaze upon the reeling brigantine, and for a space
+it was as if by longing he had projected his spirit to her slanting deck,
+and were there, pleading his case with the mistress of his heart....
+
+Voices approaching brought him back to shore. He turned, resuming his mask
+of sanity, the better to confer with the owner of the cottage and boats--a
+heavy, keen-eyed fellow, ungracious and truculent of habit, and chary of
+his words; as he promptly demonstrated.
+
+"I'll hire your boat," Kirkwood told him, "to put me aboard that
+brigantine, off to leeward. We ought to start at once."
+
+The fisherman shifted his quid of tobacco from cheek to cheek, grunted
+inarticulately, and swung deliberately on his heel, displaying a bull neck
+above a pair of heavy shoulders.
+
+"Dirty weather," he croaked, facing back from his survey of the eastern
+skies before the American found out whether or not he should resent his
+insolence.
+
+"How much?" Kirkwood demanded curtly, annoyed.
+
+The man hesitated, scowling blackly at the heeling vessel, momentarily
+increasing her distance from shore. Then with a crafty smile, "Two pound',"
+he declared.
+
+The American nodded. "Very well," he agreed simply. "Get out your boat."
+
+The fisherman turned away to shamble noisily over the shingle, huge booted
+heels crunching, toward one of the dories. To this he set his shoulder,
+shoving it steadily down the beach until only the stern was dry.
+
+Kirkwood looked back, for the last time, up the road to Sheerness. Nothing
+moved upon it. He was rid of Mrs. Hallam, if face to face with a sterner
+problem. He had a few pence over ten shillings in his pocket, and had
+promised to pay the man four times as much. He would have agreed to ten
+times the sum demanded; for the boat he must and would have. But he had
+neglected to conclude his bargain, to come to an understanding as to
+the method of payment; and he felt more than a little dubious as to the
+reception the fisherman would give his proposition, sound as he, Kirkwood,
+knew it to be.
+
+In the background the cabby loitered, gnawed by insatiable curiosity.
+
+The fisherman turned, calling over his shoulder: "If ye'd catch yon vessel,
+come!"
+
+With one final twinge of doubt--the task of placating this surly dog was
+anything but inviting--the American strode to the boat and climbed in,
+taking the stern seat. The fisherman shoved off, wading out thigh-deep in
+the spiteful waves, then threw himself in over the gunwales and shipped the
+oars. Bows swinging offshore, rocking and dancing, the dory began to forge
+slowly toward the anchored boat. In their faces the wind beat gustily, and
+small, slapping waves, breaking against the sides, showered them with fine
+spray....
+
+In time the dory lay alongside the cat-boat, the fisherman with a gnarled
+hand grasping the latter's gunwale to hold the two together. With some
+difficulty Kirkwood transhipped himself, landing asprawl in the cockpit,
+amid a tangle of cordage slippery with scales. The skipper followed, with
+clumsy expertness bringing the dory's painter with him and hitching it to a
+ring-bolt abaft the rudder-head. Then, pausing an instant to stare into the
+East with somber eyes, he shipped the tiller and bent to the halyards. As
+the sail rattled up, flapping wildly, Kirkwood marked with relief--for it
+meant so much time saved--that it was already close reefed.
+
+But when at least the boom was thrashing overhead and the halyards had
+been made fast to their cleats, the fisherman again stood erect, peering
+distrustfully at the distant wall of cloud.
+
+Then, in two breaths: "Can't do it," he decided; "not at the price."
+
+"Why?" Kirkwood stared despairingly after the brigantine, that was already
+drawn far ahead.
+
+"Danger," growled the fellow, "--wind."
+
+At a loss completely, Kirkwood found no words. He dropped his head,
+considering.
+
+"Not at the price," the sullen voice iterated; and he looked up to find the
+cunning gaze upon him.
+
+"How much, then?"
+
+"Five poun' I'll have--no less, for riskin' my life this day."
+
+"Impossible. I haven't got it."
+
+In silence the man unshipped the tiller and moved toward the cleats.
+
+"Hold on a minute."
+
+Kirkwood unbuttoned his coat and, freeing the chain from his waistcoat
+buttonholes, removed his watch.... As well abandon them altogether; he had
+designed to leave them as security for the two pounds, and had delayed
+stating the terms only for fear lest they be refused. Now, too late as
+ever, he recognized his error. But surely, he thought, it should be
+apparent even to that low intelligence that the timepiece alone was worth
+more than the boat itself.
+
+"Will you take these?" he offered. "Take and keep them--only set me aboard
+that ship!"
+
+Deliberately the fisherman weighed the watch and chain in his broad, hard
+palm, eyes narrowing to mere slits in his bronzed mask.
+
+"How much?" he asked slowly.
+
+"Eighty pounds, together; the chain alone cost me twenty."
+
+The shifty, covetous eyes ranged from the treasure in his hand to the
+threatening east. A puff of wind caught the sail and sent the boom
+athwartships, like a mighty flail. Both men ducked instinctively, to escape
+a braining.
+
+"How do I know?" objected the skipper.
+
+"I'm telling you. If you've got eyes, you can see," retorted Kirkwood
+savagely, seeing that he had erred in telling the truth; the amount he had
+named was too great to be grasped at once by this crude, cupidous brain.
+
+"How do I know?" the man repeated. Nevertheless he dropped watch and chain
+into his pocket, then with a meaning grimace extended again his horny,
+greedy palm.
+
+"What...?"
+
+"Hand over th' two pound' and we'll go."
+
+"I'll see you damned first!"
+
+A flush of rage blinded the young man. The knowledge that the _Alethea_
+was minute by minute slipping beyond his reach seemed to madden him.
+White-lipped and ominously quiet he rose from his seat on the combing, as,
+without answer, the fisherman, crawling out on the overhand, began to haul
+in the dory.
+
+"Ashore ye go," he pronounced his ultimatum, motioning Kirkwood to enter
+the boat.
+
+The American turned, looking for the _Alethea_, or for the vessel that he
+believed bore that name. She was nearing the light-ship when he found
+her, and as he looked a squall blurred the air between them, blotting
+the brigantine out with a smudge of rain. The effect was as if she had
+vanished, as if she were for ever snatched from his grasp; and with Dorothy
+aboard her--Heaven alone knew in what need of him!
+
+Mute and blind with despair and wrath, he turned upon the man and caught
+him by the collar, forcing him out over the lip of the overhang. They were
+unevenly matched, Kirkwood far the slighter, but strength came to him in
+the crisis, physical strength and address such as he had not dreamed was at
+his command. And the surprise of his onslaught proved an ally of unguessed
+potency. Before he himself knew it he was standing on the overhang and had
+shifted his hold to seize the fellow about the waist; then, lifting him
+clear of the deck, and aided by a lurch of the cat-boat, he cast him
+bodily into the dory. The man, falling, struck his head against one of the
+thwarts, a glancing blow that stunned him temporarily. Kirkwood himself
+dropped as if shot, a trailing reef-point slapping his cheek until it stung
+as the boom thrashed overhead. It was as close a call as he had known; the
+knowledge sickened him a little.
+
+Without rising he worked the painter loose and cast the dory adrift; then
+crawled back into the cockpit. No pang of compassion disturbed him as he
+abandoned the fisherman to the mercy of the sea; though the fellow lay
+still, uncouthly distorted, in the bottom of the dory, he was in no danger;
+the wind and waves together would carry the boat ashore.... For that
+matter, the man was even then recovering, struggling to sit up.
+
+Crouching to avoid the boom, Kirkwood went forward to the bows, and,
+grasping the mooring cable, drew it in, slipping back into the cockpit to
+get a stronger purchase with his feet. It was a struggle; the boat pulled
+sluggishly against the wind, the cable inching in jealously. And behind
+him he could hear a voice bellowing inarticulate menaces, and knew that in
+another moment the fisherman would be at his oars.
+
+Frantically he tugged and tore at the slimy rope, hauling with a will and a
+prayer. It gave more readily, towards the end, but he seemed to have fought
+with it for ages when at last the anchor tripped and he got it in.
+
+Immediately he leaped back to the stern, fitted in the tiller, and seizing
+the mainsheet, drew the boom in till the wind should catch in the canvas.
+In the dory the skipper, bending at his oars, was not two yards astern.
+
+He was hard aboard when, the sail filling with a bang, Kirkwood pulled the
+tiller up; and the cat-boat slid away, a dozen feet separating them in a
+breath.
+
+A yell of rage boomed down the wind, but he paid no heed. Careless alike of
+the dangers he had passed and those that yawned before him, he trimmed
+the sheet and stood away on the port tack, heading directly for the Nore
+Lightship.
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+
+OFF THE NORE
+
+Kirkwood's anger cooled apace; at worst it had been a flare of
+passion--incandescent. It was seldom more. His brain clearing, the
+temperature of his judgment quickly regained its mean, and he saw his
+chances without distortion, weighed them without exaggeration.
+
+Leaning against the combing, feet braced upon the slippery and treacherous
+deck, he clung to tiller and mainsheet and peered ahead with anxious eyes,
+a pucker of daring graven deep between his brows.
+
+A mile to westward, three or more ahead, he could see the brigantine
+standing close in under the Essex shore. At times she was invisible; again
+he could catch merely the glint of her canvas, white against the dark loom
+of the littoral, toned by a mist of flying spindrift. He strained his eyes,
+watching for the chance which would take place in the rake of her masts and
+sails, when she should come about.
+
+For the longer that manoeuver was deferred, the better was his chance of
+attaining his object. It was a forlorn hope. But in time the brigantine,
+to escape Maplin Sands, would be forced to tack and stand out past the
+lightship, the wind off her port bows. Then their courses would intersect.
+It remained to be demonstrated whether the cat-boat was speedy enough to
+arrive at this point of contact in advance of, or simultaneously with, the
+larger vessel. Every minute that the putative _Alethea_ put off coming
+about brought the cat-boat nearer that goal, but Kirkwood could do no more
+than hope and try to trust in the fisherman's implied admission that it
+could be done. It was all in the boat and the way she handled.
+
+He watched her anxiously, quick to approve her merits as she displayed
+them. He had sailed small craft before--frail center-board cat-boats, handy
+and swift, built to serve in summer winds and protected waters: never such
+an one as this. Yet he liked her.
+
+Deep bosomed she was, with no center-board, dependent on her draught and
+heavy keel to hold her on the wind; stanch and seaworthy, sheathed with
+stout plank and ribbed with seasoned timber, designed to keep afloat in
+the wickedest weather brewed by the foul-tempered German Ocean. Withal her
+lines were fine and clean; for all her beam she was calculated to nose
+narrowly into the wind and make a pretty pace as well. A good boat: he had
+the grace to give the credit to his luck.
+
+Her disposition was more fully disclosed as they drew away from the beach.
+Inshore with shoaling water, the waves had been choppy and spiteful but
+lacking force of weight. Farther out, as the bottom fell away, the rollers
+became more uniform and powerful; heavy sweeping seas met the cat-boat,
+from their hollows looming mountainous to the man in the tiny cockpit; who
+was nevertheless aware that to a steamer they would be negligible.
+
+His boat breasted them gallantly, toiling sturdily up the steep
+acclivities, poising breathlessly on foam-crested summits for dizzy
+instants, then plunging headlong down the deep green swales; and left a
+boiling wake behind her,--urging ever onward, hugging the wind in her wisp
+of blood-red sail, and boring into it, pulling at the tiller with the
+mettle of a race-horse slugging at the bit.
+
+Offshore, too, the wind stormed with added strength, or, possibly, had
+freshened. For minutes on end the leeward gunwales would run green, and now
+and again the screaming, pelting squalls that scoured the estuary would
+heel her over until the water cascaded in over the lee combing, and the
+rudder, lifted clear, would hang idle until, smitten by some racing billow,
+the tiller would be all but torn from Kirkwood's hands. Again and again
+this happened; and those were times of trembling. But always the cat-boat
+righted, shaking the clinging waters from her and swinging her stem into
+the wind again; and there would follow an abbreviated breathing spell,
+during which Kirkwood was at liberty to dash the salt spray from his eyes
+and search the wind-harried waste for the brigantine. Sometimes he found
+her, sometimes not.
+
+Long after he had expected her to, she went about and they began to close
+in upon each other. He could see that even with shortened canvas she was
+staggering drunkenly under the fierce impacts of the wind. For himself, it
+was nip-and-tuck, now, and no man in his normal sense would have risked a
+sixpence on the boat's chance to live until she crossed the brigantine's
+bows.
+
+Time out of reckoning he was forced to kneel in the swimming cockpit,
+steering with one hand, using the bailing-dish with the other, and
+keeping his eyes religiously turned to the bellying patch of sail. It was
+heartbreaking toil; he began reluctantly to concede that it could not last
+much longer. And if he missed the brigantine he would be lost; mortal
+strength was not enough to stand the unending strain upon every bone,
+muscle and sinew, required to keep the boat upon her course; though for
+a time it might cope with and solve the problems presented by each new,
+malignant billow and each furious, howling squall, the end inevitably must
+be failure. To struggle on would be but to postpone the certain end ...
+save and except the possibility of his gaining the brigantine within the
+period of time strictly and briefly limited by his powers of endurance.
+
+Long since he had become numb with cold from incessant drenchings of
+icy spray, that piled in over the windward counter, keeping the bottom
+ankle-deep regardless of his laborious but intermittent efforts with the
+bailing dish. And the two, brigantine and cockle-shell, were drawing
+together with appalling deliberation.
+
+A dozen times he was on the point of surrender, as often plucked up hope;
+as the minutes wore on and he kept above water, he began to believe that if
+he could stick it out his judgment and seamanship would be justified ...
+though human ingenuity backed by generosity could by no means contrive
+adequate excuse for his foolhardiness.
+
+But that was aside, something irreparable. Wan and grim, he fought it out.
+
+But that his voice stuck in his parched throat, he could have shouted in
+his elation, when eventually he gained the point of intersection an eighth
+of a mile ahead of the brigantine and got sight of her windward freeboard
+as, most slowly, the cat-boat forged across her course.
+
+For all that, the moment of his actual triumph was not yet; he had still to
+carry off successfully a scheme that for sheer audacity of conception and
+contempt for danger, transcended all that had gone before.
+
+Holding the cat-boat on for a time, he brought her about handsomely a
+little way beyond the brigantine's course, and hung in the eye of the wind,
+the leach flapping and tightening with reports like rifle-shots, and
+the water sloshing about his calves--bailing-dish now altogether out of
+mind--while he watched the oncoming vessel, his eyes glistening with
+anticipation.
+
+She was footing it smartly, the brigantine--lying down to it and snoring
+into the wind. Beneath her stem waves broke in snow-white showers, whiter
+than the canvas of her bulging jib--broke and, gnashing their teeth in
+impotent fury, swirled and eddied down her sleek dark flanks. Bobbing,
+courtesying, she plunged onward, shortening the interval with mighty,
+leaping bounds. On her bows, with each instant, the golden letters of her
+name grew larger and more legible until--_Alethea_!--he could read it plain
+beyond dispute.
+
+Joy welled in his heart. He forgot all that he had undergone in the
+prospect of what he proposed still to do in the name of the only woman the
+world held for him. Unquestioning he had come thus far in her service;
+unquestioning, by her side, he was prepared to go still farther, though all
+humanity should single her out with accusing fingers....
+
+They were watching him, aboard the brigantine; he could see a line of heads
+above her windward rail. Perhaps _she_ was of their number. He waved
+an audacious hand. Some one replied, a great shout shattering itself
+unintelligibly against the gale. He neither understood nor attempted to
+reply; his every faculty was concentrated on the supreme moment now at
+hand.
+
+Calculating the instant to a nicety, he paid off the sheet and pulled up
+the tiller. The cat-boat pivoted on her heel; with a crack her sail flapped
+full and rigid; then, with the untempered might of the wind behind her, she
+shot like an arrow under the brigantine's bows, so close that the bowsprit
+of the latter first threatened to impale the sail, next, the bows plunging,
+crashed down a bare two feet behind the cat-boat's stern.
+
+Working in a frenzy of haste, Kirkwood jammed the tiller hard alee,
+bringing the cat about, and, trimming the mainsheet as best he might, found
+himself racing under the brigantine's leeward quarter,--water pouring in
+generously over the cat's.
+
+Luffing, he edged nearer, handling his craft as though intending to ram the
+larger vessel, foot by foot shortening the little interval. When it
+was four feet, he would risk the jump; he crawled out on the overhang,
+crouching on his toes, one hand light upon the tiller, the other touching
+the deck, ready ... ready....
+
+Abruptly the _Alethea_ shut off the wind; the sail flattened and the cat
+dropped back. In a second the distance had doubled. In anguish Kirkwood
+uttered an exceeding bitter cry. Already he was falling far off her
+counter....
+
+A shout reached him. He was dimly conscious of a dark object hurtling
+through the air. Into the cockpit, splashing, something dropped--a coil of
+rope. He fell forward upon it, into water eighteen inches deep; and for the
+first time realized that, but for that line, he had gone to his drowning in
+another minute. The cat was sinking.
+
+As he scrambled to his feet, clutching the life-line, a heavy wave washed
+over the water-logged craft and left it all but submerged; and a smart tug
+on the rope added point to the advice which, reaching his ears in a bellow
+like a bull's, penetrated the panic of his wits.
+
+"Jump! _Jump, you fool_!"
+
+In an instant of coherence he saw that the brigantine was luffing; none the
+less much of the line had already been paid out, and there was no reckoning
+when the end would be reached. Without time to make it fast, he hitched it
+twice round his waist and chest, once round an arm, and, grasping it above
+his head to ease its constriction when the tug should come, leaped on the
+combing and overboard. A green roaring avalanche swept down upon him and
+the luckless cat-boat, overwhelming both simultaneously.
+
+The agony that was his during the next few minutes can by no means be
+exaggerated. With such crises the human mind is not fitted adequately
+to cope; it retains no record of the supreme moment beyond a vague and
+incoherent impression of poignant, soul-racking suffering. Kirkwood
+underwent a prolonged interval of semi-sentience, his mind dominated
+and oppressed by a deathly fear of drowning and a deadening sense of
+suffocation, with attendant tortures as of being broken on the wheel--limb
+rending from limb; of compression of his ribs that threatened momentarily
+to crush in his chest; of a world a-welter with dim swirling green
+half-lights alternating with flashes of blinding white; of thunderings in
+his ears like salvoes from a thousand cannon....
+
+And his senses were blotted out in blackness....
+
+Then he was breathing once more, the keen clean air stabbing his lungs, the
+while he swam unsupported in an ethereal void of brilliance. His mouth
+was full of something that burned, a liquid hot, acrid, and stinging. He
+gulped, swallowed, slobbered, choked, coughed, attempted to sit up, was
+aware that he was the focal center of a ring of glaring, burning eyes, like
+eyes of ravening beasts; and fainted.
+
+His next conscious impression was of standing up, supported by friendly
+arms on either side, while somebody was asking him if he could walk a step
+or two.
+
+He lifted his head and let it fall in token of assent, mumbling a yes; and
+looked round him with eyes wherein the light of intelligence burned more
+clear with every second. By degrees he catalogued and comprehended his
+weirdly altered circumstances and surroundings.
+
+He was partly seated, partly held up, on the edge of the cabin sky-light,
+an object of interest to some half-dozen men, seafaring fellows all, by
+their habit, clustered round between him and the windward rail. Of their
+number one stood directly before him, dwarfing his companions as much by
+his air of command as by his uncommon height: tall, thin-faced and sallow,
+with hollow weather-worn cheeks, a mouth like a crooked gash from ear to
+ear, and eyes like dying coals, with which he looked the rescued up and
+down in one grim, semi-humorous, semi-speculative glance. In hands both
+huge and red he fondled tenderly a squat brandy flask whose contents had
+apparently been employed as a first aid to the drowning.
+
+As Kirkwood's gaze encountered his, the man smiled sourly, jerking his head
+to one side with a singularly derisive air.
+
+"Hi, matey!" he blustered. "'Ow goes it now? Feelin' 'appier, eigh?"
+
+[Illustration: "Hi, matey!" he blustered. "'Ow goes it now?"]
+
+"Some, thank you ... more like a drowned rat." Kirkwood eyed him
+sheepishly. "I suppose you're the man who threw me that line? I'll have to
+wait till my head clears up before I can thank you properly."
+
+"Don't mention it." He of the lantern jaws stowed the bottle away with
+jealous care in one of his immense coat pockets, and seized Kirkwood's
+hand in a grasp that made the young man wince. "You're syfe enough now.
+My nyme's Stryker, Capt'n Wilyum Stryker.... Wot's the row? Lookin' for a
+friend?" he demanded suddenly, as Kirkwood's attention wandered.
+
+For the memory of the errand that had brought him into the hands of Captain
+William Stryker had come to the young man very suddenly; and his eager eyes
+were swiftly roving not along the decks but the wide world besides, for
+sight or sign of his heart's desire.
+
+After luffing to pick him up, the brigantine had been again pulled off on
+the port tack. The fury of the gale seemed rather to have waxed than waned,
+and the _Alethea_ was bending low under the relentless fury of its blasts,
+driving hard, with leeward channels awash. Under her port counter, a mile
+away, the crimson light-ship wallowed in a riot of breaking combers.
+Sheerness lay abeam, five miles or more. Ahead the northeast headland
+of the Isle of Sheppey was bulking large and near. The cat-boat had
+vanished....
+
+More important still, no one aboard the brigantine resembled in the
+remotest degree either of the Calendars, father or daughter, or even
+Mulready, the black-avised.
+
+"I sye, 're you lookin' for some one you know?"
+
+"Yes--your passengers. I presume they're below--?"
+
+"Passengers!"
+
+A hush fell upon the group, during which Kirkwood sought Stryker's eye in
+pitiful pleading; and Stryker looked round him blankly.
+
+"Where's Miss Calendar?" the young man demanded sharply. "I must see her at
+once!"
+
+The keen and deep-set eyes of the skipper clouded as they returned to
+Kirkwood's perturbed countenance. "Wot're you talking about?" he demanded
+brusquely.
+
+"I must see Miss Calendar, or Calendar himself, or Mulready." Kirkwood
+paused, and, getting no reply, grew restive under Stryker's inscrutable
+regard.
+
+"That's why I came aboard," he amended, blind to the absurdity of the
+statement; "to see--er--Calendar."
+
+"Well ... I'm damned!"
+
+Stryker managed to infuse into his tone a deal of suspicious contempt.
+
+"Why?" insisted Kirkwood, nettled but still uncomprehending.
+
+"D'you mean to tell me you came off from--wherever in 'ell you did come
+from--intendin' to board this wessel and find a party nymed Calendar?"
+
+"Certainly I did. Why--?"
+
+"Well!" cried Mr. Stryker, rubbing his hands together with an air
+oppressively obsequious, "I'm sorry to _hin_-form you you've come to the
+wrong shop, sir; we don't stock no Calendars. We're in the 'ardware line,
+we are. You might try next door, or I dessay you'll find what you want at
+the stytioner's, round the corner."
+
+A giggle from his audience stimulated him. "If," he continued acidly,
+"I'd a-guessed you was such a damn' fool, blimmy if I wouldn't've let you
+drownd!"
+
+Staggered, Kirkwood bore his sarcastic truculence without resentment.
+
+"Calendar," he stammered, trying to explain, "Calendar _said_--"
+
+"I carn't 'elp wot Calendar said. Mebbe 'e _did_ myke an engygement with
+you, an' you've gone and went an' forgot the dyte. Mebbe it's larst year's
+calendar you're thinkin' of. You Johnny" (to a lout of a boy in the group
+of seamen), "you run an' fetch this gentleman Whitaker's for Nineteen-six.
+Look sharp, now!"
+
+"But--!" With an effort Kirkwood mustered up a show of dignity. "Am I to
+understand," he said, as calmly as he could, "that you deny knowing George
+B. Calendar and his daughter Dorothy and--"
+
+"I don't 'ave to. Listen to me, young man." For the time the fellow
+discarded his clumsy facetiousness. "I'm Wilyum Stryker, Capt'n Stryker,
+marster and 'arf-owner of this wessel, and wot I says 'ere is law. We don't
+carry no passengers. D'ye understand me?"--aggressively. "There ain't no
+pusson nymed Calendar aboard the _Allytheer_, an' never was, an' never will
+be!"
+
+"What name did you say?" Kirkwood inquired.
+
+"This ship? The _Allytheer_; registered from Liverpool; bound from London
+to Hantwerp, in cargo. Anythink else?"
+
+Kirkwood shook his head, turning to scan the seascape with a gloomy
+gaze. As he did so, and remarked how close upon the Sheppey headland the
+brigantine had drawn, the order was given to go about. For the moment he
+was left alone, wretchedly wet, shivering, wan and shrunken visibly with
+the knowledge that he had dared greatly for nothing. But for the necessity
+of keeping up before Stryker and his crew, the young man felt that he could
+gladly have broken down and wept for sheer vexation and disappointment.
+
+Smartly the brigantine luffed and wore about, heeling deep as she spun away
+on the starboard tack.
+
+Kirkwood staggered round the skylight to the windward rail. From this
+position, looking forward, he could see that they were heading for the open
+sea, Foulness low over the port quarter, naught before them but a brawling
+waste of leaden-green and dirty white. Far out one of the sidewheel boats
+of the Queensborough-Antwerp line was heading directly into the wind and
+making heavy weather of it.
+
+Some little while later, Stryker again approached him, perhaps swayed by an
+unaccustomed impulse of compassion; which, however, he artfully concealed.
+Blandly ironic, returning to his impersonation of the shopkeeper, "Nothink
+else we can show you, sir?" he inquired.
+
+"I presume you couldn't put me ashore?" Kirkwood replied ingenuously.
+
+In supreme disgust the captain showed him his back. "'Ere, you!" he called
+to one of the crew. "Tyke this awye--tyke 'im below and put 'im to bed;
+give 'im a drink and dry 'is clo's. Mebbe 'e'll be better when 'e wykes up.
+'E don't talk sense now, that's sure. If you arsk me, I sye 'e's balmy and
+no 'ope for 'im."
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+
+PICARESQUE PASSAGES
+
+Contradictory to the hopeful prognosis of Captain Stryker, his unaccredited
+passenger was not "better" when, after a period of oblivious rest
+indefinite in duration, he awoke. His subsequent assumption of listless
+resignation, of pacific acquiescence in the dictates of his destiny, was
+purely deceptive--thin ice of despair over profound depths of exasperated
+rebellion.
+
+Blank darkness enveloped him when first he opened eyes to wonder. Then
+gradually as he stared, piecing together unassorted memories and striving
+to quicken drowsy wits, he became aware of a glimmer that waxed and waned,
+a bar of pale bluish light striking across the gloom above his couch; and
+by dint of puzzling divined that this had access by a port. Turning his
+head upon a stiff and unyielding pillow, he could discern a streak of
+saffron light lining the sill of a doorway, near by his side. The one
+phenomenon taken with the other confirmed a theretofore somewhat hazy
+impression that his dreams were dignified by a foundation of fact; that, in
+brief, he was occupying a cabin-bunk aboard the good ship _Alethea_.
+
+Overhead, on the deck, a heavy thumping of hurrying feet awoke him to
+keener perceptiveness.
+
+Judging from the incessant rolling and pitching of the brigantine, the
+crashing thunder of seas upon her sides, the eldrich shrieking of the gale,
+as well as from the chorused groans and plaints of each individual bolt
+and timber in the frail fabric that housed his fortunes, the wind had
+strengthened materially during his hours of forgetfulness--however many the
+latter might have been.
+
+He believed, however, that he had slept long, deeply and exhaustively. He
+felt now a little emaciated mentally and somewhat absent-bodied--so he put
+it to himself. A numb languor, not unpleasant, held him passively supine,
+the while he gave himself over to speculative thought.
+
+A wild night, certainly; probably, by that time, the little vessel was in
+the middle of the North Sea ... _bound for Antwerp_!
+
+"Oh-h," said Kirkwood vindictively, "_hell_!"
+
+So he was bound for Antwerp! The first color of resentment ebbing from his
+thoughts left him rather interested than excited by the prospect. He found
+that he was neither pleased nor displeased. He presumed that it would be
+no more difficult to raise money on personal belongings in Antwerp than
+anywhere else; it has been observed that the first flower of civilization
+is the rum-blossom, the next, the conventionalized fleur-de-lis of the
+money-lender. There would be pawnshops, then, in Antwerp; and Kirkwood was
+confident that the sale or pledge of his signet-ring, scarf-pin, match-box
+and cigar-case, would provide him with money enough for a return to London,
+by third-class, at the worst. There ... well, all events were on the knees
+of the gods; he'd squirm out of his troubles, somehow. As for the other
+matter, the Calendar affair, he presumed he was well rid of it,--with a
+sigh of regret. It had been a most enticing mystery, you know; and the
+woman in the case was extraordinary, to say the least.
+
+The memory of Dorothy Calendar made him sigh again, this time more
+violently: a sigh that was own brother to (or at any rate descended in
+a direct line from) the furnace sigh of the lover described by, the
+melancholy Jaques. And he sat up, bumped his head, groped round until his
+hand fell upon a doorknob, opened the door, and looked out into the blowsy
+emptiness of the ship's cabin proper, whose gloomy confines were made
+visible only by the rays of a dingy and smoky lamp swinging violently in
+gimbals from a deck-beam.
+
+Kirkwood's clothing, now rough-dried and warped wretchedly out of shape,
+had been thrown carelessly on a transom near the door. He got up, collected
+them, and returning to his berth, dressed at leisure, thinking heavily,
+disgruntled--in a humor as evil as the after-taste of bad brandy in his
+mouth.
+
+When dressed he went out into the cabin, closing the door upon his berth,
+and for lack of anything better to do, seated himself on the thwartships
+transom, against the forward bulkhead, behind the table. Above his head a
+chronometer ticked steadily and loudly, and, being consulted, told him that
+the time of day was twenty minutes to four; which meant that he had slept
+away some eighteen or twenty hours. That was a solid spell of a rest,
+when he came to think of it, even allowing that he had been unusually and
+pardonably fatigued when conducted to his berth. He felt stronger now, and
+bright enough--and enormously hungry into the bargain.
+
+Abstractedly, heedless of the fact that his tobacco would be water-soaked
+and ruined, he fumbled in his pockets for pipe and pouch, thinking to
+soothe the pangs of hunger against breakfast-time; which was probably two
+hours and a quarter ahead. But his pockets were empty--every one of them.
+He assimilated this discovery in patience and cast an eye about the room,
+to locate, if possible, the missing property. But naught of his was
+visible. So he rose and began a more painstaking search.
+
+The cabin was at once tiny, low-ceiled, and depressingly gloomy. Its
+furniture consisted entirely in a chair or two, supplementing the transoms
+and lockers as resting-places, and a center-table covered with a cloth of
+turkey-red, whose original aggressiveness had been darkly moderated by
+libations of liquids, principally black coffee, and burnt offerings of
+grease and tobacco-ash. Aside from the companion-way to the deck, four
+doors opened into the room, two probably giving upon the captain's and the
+mate's quarters, the others on pseudo state-rooms--one of which he had just
+vacated--closets large enough to contain a small bunk and naught beside.
+The bulkheads and partitions were badly broken out with a rash of pictures
+from illustrated papers, mostly offensive. Kirkwood was interested to read
+a half-column clipping from a New York yellow journal, descriptive of the
+antics of a drunken British sailor who had somehow found his way to the
+bar-room of the Fifth Avenue Hotel; the paragraph exploiting the fact that
+it had required four policemen in addition to the corps of porters to
+subdue him, was strongly underscored in red ink; and the news-story wound
+up with the information that in police court the man had given his name as
+William Stranger and cheerfully had paid a fine of ten dollars, alleging
+his entertainment to have been cheap at the price.
+
+While Kirkwood was employed in perusing this illuminating anecdote, eight
+bells sounded, and, from the commotion overhead, the watch changed. A
+little later the companion-way door slammed open and shut, and Captain
+Stryker--or Stranger; whichever you please--fell down, rather than
+descended, the steps.
+
+Without attention to the American he rolled into the mate's room and roused
+that personage. Kirkwood heard that the name of the second-in-command was
+'Obbs, as well as that he occupied the starboard state-room aft. After a
+brief exchange of comment and instruction, Mr. 'Obbs appeared in the shape
+of a walking pillar of oil-skins capped by a sou'wester, and went on deck;
+Stryker, following him out of the state-room, shed his own oilers in a
+clammy heap upon the floor, opened a locker from which he brought forth a
+bottle and a dirty glass, and, turning toward the table, for the first time
+became sensible of Kirkwood's presence.
+
+"Ow, there you are, eigh, little bright-eyes!" he exclaimed with surprised
+animation.
+
+"Good morning, Captain Stryker," said Kirkwood, rising. "I want to tell
+you--"
+
+But Stryker waved one great red paw impatiently, with the effect of
+sweeping aside and casting into the discard Kirkwood's intended speech of
+thanks; nor would he hear him further.
+
+"Did you 'ave a nice little nap?" he interrupted. "Come up bright and
+smilin', eigh? Now I guess"--the emphasis made it clear that the captain
+believed himself to be employing an Americanism; and so successful was he
+in his own esteem that he could not resist the temptation to improve upon
+the imitation--"Na-ow I guess yeou're abaout right ready, ben't ye, to hev
+a drink, sonny?"
+
+"No, thank you," said Kirkwood, smiling tolerantly. "I've got any amount of
+appetite..."
+
+"'Ave you, now?" Stryker dropped his mimicry and glanced at the clock.
+"Breakfast," he announced, "will be served in the myne dinin' saloon at
+eyght a. m. Passingers is requested not to be lyte at tyble."
+
+Depositing the bottle on the said table, the captain searched until he
+found another glass for Kirkwood, and sat down.
+
+"Do you good," he insinuated, pushing the bottle gently over.
+
+"No, thank you," reiterated Kirkwood shortly, a little annoyed.
+
+Stryker seized his own glass, poured out a strong man's dose of the
+fiery concoction, gulped it down, and sighed. Then, with a glance at the
+American's woebegone countenance (Kirkwood was contemplating a four-hour
+wait for breakfast, and, consequently, looking as if he had lost his last
+friend), the captain bent over, placing both hands palm down before him and
+wagging his head earnestly.
+
+"Please," he implored,--"Please don't let me hinterrupt;" and filled his
+pipe, pretending a pensive detachment from his company.
+
+The fumes of burning shag sharpened the tooth of desire. Kirkwood stood it
+as long as he could, then surrendered with an: "If you've got any more of
+that tobacco, Captain, I'd be glad of a pipe."
+
+An intensely contemplative expression crept into the captain's small blue
+eyes.
+
+"I only got one other pyper of this 'ere 'baccy," he announced at length,
+"and I carn't get no more till I gets 'ome. I simply couldn't part with it
+hunder 'arf a quid."
+
+Kirkwood settled back with a hopeless lift of his shoulders. Abstractedly
+Stryker puffed the smoke his way until he could endure the deprivation no
+longer.
+
+"I had about ten shillings in my pocket when I came aboard, captain,
+and ... a few other articles."
+
+"Ow, yes; so you 'ad, now you mention it."
+
+Stryker rose, ambled into his room, and returned with Kirkwood's
+possessions and a fresh paper of shag. While the young man was hastily
+filling, lighting, and inhaling the first strangling but delectable whiff,
+the captain solemnly counted into his own palm all the loose change except
+three large pennies. The latter he shoved over to Kirkwood in company with
+a miscellaneous assortment of articles, which the American picked up piece
+by piece and began to bestow about his clothing. When through, he sat back,
+troubled and disgusted. Stryker met his regard blandly.
+
+"Anything I can do?" he inquired, in suave concern.
+
+"Why ... there _was_ a black pearl scarfpin--"
+
+"W'y, don't you remember? You gave that to me, 'count of me 'avin syved yer
+life. 'Twas me throwed you that line, you know."
+
+"Oh," commented Kirkwood briefly. The pin had been among the most valuable
+and cherished of his belongings.
+
+"Yes," nodded the captain in reminiscence. "You don't remember? Likely
+'twas the brandy singing in yer 'ead. You pushes it into my 'ands,--almost
+weepin', you was,--and sez, sez you, 'Stryker,' you sez, 'tyke this in
+triflin' toking of my gratichood; I wouldn't hinsult you,' you sez, 'by
+hofferin' you money, but this I can insist on yer acceptin', and no
+refusal,' says you."
+
+"Oh," repeated Kirkwood.
+
+"If I for a ninstant thought you wasn't sober when you done it.... But no;
+you're a gent if there ever was one, and I'm not the man to offend you."
+
+"Oh, indeed."
+
+The captain let the implication pass, perhaps on the consideration that he
+could afford to ignore it; and said no more. The pause held for several
+minutes, Kirkwood having fallen into a mood of grave distraction. Finally
+Captain Stryker thoughtfully measured out a second drink, limited only by
+the capacity of the tumbler, engulfed it noisily, and got up.
+
+"Guess I'll be turnin' in," he volunteered affably, yawning and stretching.
+
+"I was about to ask you to do me a service...." began Kirkwood.
+
+"Yes?"--with the rising inflection of mockery.
+
+Kirkwood quietly produced his cigar-case, a gold match-box, gold card-case,
+and slipped a signet ring from his finger. "Will you buy these?" he asked.
+"Or will you lend me five pounds and hold them as security?"
+
+Stryker examined the collection with exaggerated interest strongly
+tinctured with mistrust. "I'll buy 'em," he offered eventually, looking up.
+
+"That's kind of you--"
+
+"Ow, they ain't much use to me, but Bill Stryker's allus willin' to
+accommodate a friend.... Four quid, you said?"
+
+"Five...."
+
+"They ain't wuth over four to me."
+
+"Very well; make it four," Kirkwood assented contemptuously.
+
+The captain swept the articles into one capacious fist, pivoted on one heel
+at the peril of his neck, and lumbered unsteadily off to his room. Pausing
+at the door he turned back in inquiry.
+
+"I sye, 'ow did you come to get the impression there was a party named
+Almanack aboard this wessel?"
+
+"Calendar--"
+
+"'Ave it yer own wye," Stryker conceded gracefully.
+
+"There isn't, is there?"
+
+"You 'eard me."
+
+"Then," said Kirkwood sweetly, "I'm sure you wouldn't be interested."
+
+The captain pondered this at leisure. "You seemed pretty keen abaht seein'
+'im," he remarked conclusively.
+
+"I was."
+
+"Seems to me I did 'ear the nyme sumw'eres afore." The captain appeared to
+wrestle with an obdurate memory. "Ow!" he triumphed. "I know. 'E was a chap
+up Manchester wye. Keeper in a loonatic asylum, 'e was. 'That yer party?"
+
+"No," said Kirkwood wearily.
+
+"I didn't know but mebbe 'twas. Excuse me. 'Thought as 'ow mebbe you'd
+escyped from 'is tender care, but, findin' the world cold, chynged yer mind
+and wanted to gow back."
+
+Without waiting for a reply he lurched into his room and banged the door
+to. Kirkwood, divided between amusement and irritation, heard him stumbling
+about for some time; and then a hush fell, grateful enough while it lasted;
+which was not long. For no sooner did the captain sleep than a penetrating
+snore added itself unto the cacophony of waves and wind and tortured ship.
+
+Kirkwood, comforted at first by the blessed tobacco, lapsed insensibly
+into dreary meditations. Coming after the swift movement and sustained
+excitement of the eighteen hours preceding his long sleep, the monotony
+of shipboard confinement seemed irksome to a maddening degree. There was
+absolutely nothing he could discover to occupy his mind. If there were
+books aboard, none was in evidence; beyond the report of Mr. Stranger's
+Manhattan night's entertainment the walls were devoid of reading matter;
+and a round of the picture gallery proved a diversion weariful enough when
+not purely revolting.
+
+Wherefore Mr. Kirkwood stretched himself out on the transom and smoked and
+reviewed his adventures in detail and seriatim, and was by turns indignant,
+sore, anxious on his own account as well as on Dorothy's, and out of all
+patience with himself. Mystified he remained throughout, and the edge of
+his curiosity held as keen as ever, you may believe.
+
+Consistently the affair presented itself to his fancy in the guise of a
+puzzle-picture, which, though you study it never so diligently, remains
+incomprehensible, until by chance you view it from an unexpected angle,
+when it reveals itself intelligibly. It had not yet been his good fortune
+to see it from the right viewpoint. To hold the metaphor, he walked endless
+circles round it, patiently seeking, but ever failing to find the proper
+perspective.... Each incident, however insignificant, in connection with
+it, he handled over and over, examining its every facet, bright or dull, as
+an expert might inspect a clever imitation of a diamond; and like a perfect
+imitation it defied analysis.
+
+Of one or two things he was convinced; for one, that Stryker was a liar
+worthy of classification with Calendar and Mrs. Hallam. Kirkwood had
+not only the testimony of his sense to assure him that the ship's name,
+_Alethea_ (not a common one, by the bye), had been mentioned by both
+Calendar and Mulready during their altercation on Bermondsey Old Stairs,
+but he had the confirmatory testimony of the sleepy waterman, William, who
+had directed Old Bob and Young William to the anchorage off Bow Creek. That
+there should have been two vessels of the same unusual name at one and
+the same time in the Port of London, was a coincidence too preposterous
+altogether to find place in his calculations.
+
+His second impregnable conclusion was that those whom he sought had boarded
+the _Alethea_, but had left her before she tripped her anchor. That they
+were not stowed away aboard her seemed unquestionable. The brigantine was
+hardly large enough for the presence of three persons aboard her to be long
+kept a secret from an inquisitive fourth,--unless, indeed, they lay in
+hiding in the hold; for which, once the ship got under way, there could be
+scant excuse. And Kirkwood did not believe himself a person of sufficient
+importance in Calendar's eyes, to make that worthy endure the discomforts
+of a'tween-decks imprisonment throughout the voyage, even to escape
+recognition.
+
+With every second, then, he was traveling farther from her to whose aid he
+had rushed, impelled by motives so hot-headed, so innately, chivalric, so
+unthinkingly gallant, so exceptionally idiotic!
+
+Idiot! Kirkwood groaned with despair of his inability to fathom the abyss
+of his self-contempt. There seemed to be positively no excuse for _him_.
+Stryker had befriended him indeed, had he permitted him to drown. Yet
+he had acted for the best, as he saw it. The fault lay in himself: an
+admirable fault, that of harboring and nurturing generous and compassionate
+instincts. But, of course, Kirkwood couldn't see it that way.
+
+"What else could I do?" he defended himself against the indictment
+of common sense. "I couldn't leave her to the mercies of that set of
+rogues!... And Heaven knows I was given every reason to believe she would
+be aboard this ship! Why, she herself told me that she was sailing ...!"
+
+Heaven knew, too, that this folly of his had cost him a pretty penny,
+first and last. His watch was gone beyond recovery, his homeward passage
+forfeited; he no longer harbored illusions as to the steamship company
+presenting him with another berth in lieu of that called for by that
+water-soaked slip of paper then in his pocket--courtesy of Stryker. He had
+sold for a pittance, a tithe of its value, his personal jewelry, and had
+spent every penny he could call his own. With the money Stryker was to give
+him he would be able to get back to London and his third-rate hostelry, but
+not with enough over to pay that one week's room-rent, or ...
+
+"Oh, the devil!" he groaned, head in hands.
+
+The future loomed wrapped in unspeakable darkness, lightened by no least
+ray of hope. It had been bad enough to lose a comfortable living through
+a gigantic convulsion of Nature; but to think that he had lost all else
+through his own egregious folly, to find himself reduced to the kennels--!
+
+So Care found him again in those weary hours,--came and sat by his side,
+slipping a grisly hand in his and tightening its grip until he could have
+cried out with the torment of it; the while whispering insidiously subtile,
+evil things in his ear. And he had not even Hope to comfort him; at
+any previous stage he had been able to distil a sort of bitter-sweet
+satisfaction from the thought that he was suffering for the love of his
+life. But now--now Dorothy was lost, gone like the glamour of Romance in
+the searching light of day.
+
+Stryker, emerging from his room for breakfast, found the passenger with a
+hostile look in his eye and a jaw set in ugly fashion. His eyes, too, were
+the abiding-place of smoldering devils; and the captain, recognizing them,
+considerately forbore to stir them up with any untimely pleasantries. To be
+sure, he was autocrat in his own ship, and Kirkwood's standing aboard was
+_nil_; but then there was just enough yellow in the complexion of Stryker's
+soul to incline him to sidestep trouble whenever feasible. And besides, he
+entertained dark suspicions of his guest--suspicions he scarce dared voice
+even to his inmost heart.
+
+The morning meal, therefore, passed off in constrained silence. The captain
+ate voraciously and vociferously, pushed back his chair, and went on deck
+to relieve the mate. The latter, a stunted little Cockney with a wizened
+countenance and a mind as foul as his tongue, got small change of his
+attempts to engage the passenger in conversation on topics that he
+considered fit for discussion. After the sixth or eighth snubbing he rose
+in dudgeon, discharged a poisonous bit of insolence, and retired to his
+berth, leaving Kirkwood to finish his breakfast in peace; which the latter
+did literally, to the last visible scrap of food and the ultimate drop of
+coffee, poor as both were in quality.
+
+To the tune of a moderating wind, the morning wearied away. Kirkwood went
+on deck once, for distraction from the intolerable monotony of it all, got
+a sound drenching of spray, with a glimpse of a dark line on the eastern
+horizon, which he understood to be the low littoral of Holland, and was
+glad to dodge below once more and dry himself.
+
+He had the pleasure of the mate's company at dinner, the captain remaining
+on deck until Hobbs had finished and gone up to relieve him; and by that
+time Kirkwood likewise was through.
+
+Stryker blew down with a blustery show of cheer. "Well, well, my little
+man!" (It happened that he topped Kirkwood's stature by at least five
+inches.) "Enj'yin' yer sea trip?"
+
+"About as much as you'd expect," snapped Kirkwood.
+
+"Ow?" The captain began to shovel food into his face. (The author regrets
+he has at his command no more delicate expression that is literal and
+illustrative.) Kirkwood watched him, fascinated with suspense; it seemed
+impossible that the man could continue so to employ his knife without
+cutting his throat from the inside. But years of such manipulation had made
+him expert, and his guest, keenly disappointed, at length ceased to hope.
+
+Between gobbles Stryker eyed him furtively.
+
+"'Treat you all right?" he demanded abruptly.
+
+Kirkwood started out of a brown study. "What? Who? Why, I suppose I ought
+to be--indeed, I _am_ grateful," he asserted. "Certainly you saved my life,
+and--"
+
+"Ow, I don't mean that." Stryker gathered the imputation into his paw and
+flung it disdainfully to the four winds of Heaven. "Bless yer 'art, you're
+welcome; I wouldn't let no dorg drownd, 'f I could 'elp it. No," he
+declared, "nor a loonatic, neither."
+
+He thrust his plate away and shifted sidewise in his chair. "I 'uz just
+wonderin'," he pursued, picking his teeth meditatively with a pen-knife,
+"'ow they feeds you in them _as_-ylums. 'Avin' never been inside one,
+myself, it's on'y natural I'd be cur'us.... There was one of them
+institootions near where I was borned--Birming'am, that is. I used to see
+the loonies playin' in the grounds. I remember _just_ as well!... One of
+'em and me struck up quite an acquaintance--"
+
+"Naturally he'd take to you on sight."
+
+"Ow? Strynge 'ow _we_ 'it it off, eigh?... You myke me think of 'im. Young
+chap, 'e was, the livin' spi't-'n-himage of you. It don't happen, does it,
+you're the same man?"
+
+"Oh, go to the devil!"
+
+"Naughty!" said the captain serenely, wagging a reproving forefinger. "Bad,
+naughty word. You'll be sorry when you find out wot it means.... Only 'e
+was allus plannin' to run awye and drownd 'is-self."...
+
+He wore the joke threadbare, even to his own taste, and in the end got
+heavily to his feet, starting for the companionway. "Land you this
+arternoon," he remarked casually, "come three o'clock or thereabahts.
+Per'aps later. I don't know, though, as I 'ad ought to let you loose."
+
+Kirkwood made no answer. Chuckling, Stryker went on deck.
+
+In the course of an hour the American followed him.
+
+Wind and sea alike had gone down wonderfully since daybreak--a circumstance
+undoubtedly in great part due to the fact that they had won in under the
+lee of the mainland and were traversing shallower waters. On either hand,
+like mist upon the horizon, lay a streak of gray, a shade darker than the
+gray of the waters. The _Alethea_ was within the wide jaws of the Western
+Scheldt. As for the wind, it had shifted several points to the northwards;
+the brigantine had it abeam and was lying down to it and racing to port
+with slanting deck and singing cordage.
+
+Kirkwood approached the captain, who, acting as his own pilot, was standing
+by the wheel and barking sharp orders to the helmsman.
+
+"Have you a Bradshaw on board?" asked the young man.
+
+"Steady!" This to the man at the wheel; then to Kirkwood: "Wot's that, me
+lud?"
+
+Kirkwood repeated his question. Stryker eyed him suspiciously for a
+thought.
+
+"Wot d'you want it for?"
+
+"I want to see when I can get a boat back to England."
+
+"Hmm.... Yes, you'll find a Bradshaw in the port-locker, near the for'ard
+bulk'ead. Run along now and pl'y--and mind you don't go tearin' out the
+pyges to myke pyper boatses to go sylin' in."
+
+Kirkwood went below. Like its adjacent rooms, the cabin was untenanted; the
+watch was the mate's, and Stryker a martinet. Kirkwood found the designated
+locker and, opening it, saw first to his hand the familiar bulky red volume
+with its red garter. Taking it out he carried it to a chair near the
+companionway, for a better reading light: the skylight being still battened
+down.
+
+The strap removed, the book opened easily, as if by force of habit, at the
+precise table he had wished to consult; some previous client had left a
+marker between the pages,--and not an ordinary book-mark, by any manner
+of means. Kirkwood gave utterance to a little gasp of amazement, and
+instinctively glanced up at the companionway, to see if he were observed.
+
+He was not, but for safety's sake he moved farther back into the cabin
+and out of the range of vision of any one on deck; a precaution which was
+almost immediately justified by the clumping of heavy feet upon the steps
+as Stryker descended in pursuit of the ever-essential drink.
+
+"'Find it?" he demanded, staring blindly--with eyes not yet focused to the
+change from light to gloom--at the young man, who was sitting with the
+guide open on his knees, a tightly clenched fist resting on the transom at
+either side of him.
+
+In reply he received a monosyllabic affirmative; Kirkwood did not look up.
+
+"You must be a howl," commented the captain, making for the seductive
+locker.
+
+"A--what?"
+
+"A howl, readin' that fine print there in the dark. W'y don't you go over
+to the light?... I'll 'ave to 'ave them shutters tyken off the winders."
+This was Stryker's amiable figure of speech, frequently employed to
+indicate the coverings of the skylight.
+
+"I'm all right." Kirkwood went on studying the book.
+
+Stryker swigged off his rum and wiped his lips with the back of a red paw,
+hesitating a moment to watch his guest.
+
+"Mykes it seem more 'ome-like for you, I expect," he observed.
+
+"What do you mean?"
+
+"W'y, Bradshaw's first-cousin to a halmanack, ain't 'e? Can't get one,
+take t'other--next best thing. Sorry I didn't think of it sooner; like my
+passengers to feel comfy.... Now don't you go trapsein' off to gay Paree
+and squanderin' wot money you got left. You 'ear?"
+
+"By the way, Captain!" Kirkwood looked up at this, but Stryker was already
+half-way up the companion.
+
+Cautiously the American opened his right fist and held to the light that
+which had been concealed, close wadded in his grasp,--a square of sheer
+linen edged with lace, crumpled but spotless, and diffusing in the
+unwholesome den a faint, intangible fragrance, the veriest wraith of
+that elusive perfume which he would never again inhale without instantly
+recalling that night ride through London in the intimacy of a cab.
+
+He closed his eyes and saw her again, as clearly as though she stood before
+him,--hair of gold massed above the forehead of snow, curling in adorable
+tendrils at the nape of her neck, lips like scarlet splashed upon the
+immaculate whiteness of her skin, head poised audaciously in its spirited,
+youthful allure, dark eyes smiling the least trace sadly beneath the level
+brows.
+
+Unquestionably the handkerchief was hers; if proof other than the
+assurance of his heart were requisite, he had it in the initial delicately
+embroidered in one corner: a D, for Dorothy!... He looked again, to make
+sure; then hastily folded up the treasure-trove and slipped it into a
+breast pocket of his coat.
+
+No; I am not sure that it was not the left-hand pocket.
+
+Quivering with excitement he bent again over the book and studied it
+intently. After all, he had not been wrong! He could assert now, without
+fear of refutation, that Stryker had lied.
+
+Some one had wielded an industrious pencil on the page. It was, taken as a
+whole, fruitful of clues. Its very heading was illuminating:
+
+LONDON to VLISSINGEN (FLUSHING) AND BREDA;
+
+which happened to be the quickest and most direct route between London and
+Antwerp. Beneath it, in the second column from the right, the pencil had
+put a check-mark against:
+
+QUEENSBOROUGH ... DEP ... 11A10.
+
+And now he saw it clearly--dolt that he had been not to have divined it ere
+this! The _Alethea_ had run in to Queensborough, landing her passengers
+there, that they might make connection with the eleven-ten morning boat for
+Flushing,--the very side-wheel steamer, doubtless, which he had noticed
+beating out in the teeth of the gale just after the brigantine had picked
+him up. Had he not received the passing impression that the _Alethea_, when
+first he caught sight of her, might have been coming out of the Medway, on
+whose eastern shore is situate Queensborough Pier? Had not Mrs. Hallam,
+going upon he knew not what information or belief, been bound for
+Queensborough, with design there to intercept the fugitives?
+
+Kirkwood chuckled to recall how, all unwittingly, he had been the means
+of diverting from her chosen course that acute and resourceful lady; then
+again turned his attention to the tables.
+
+A third check had been placed against the train for Amsterdam scheduled to
+leave Antwerp at 6:32 p. m. Momentarily his heart misgave him, when he saw
+this, in fear lest Calendar and Dorothy should have gone on from Antwerp
+the previous evening; but then he rallied, discovering that the boat-train
+from Flushing did not arrive at Antwerp till after ten at night; and there
+was no later train thence for Amsterdam. Were the latter truly their
+purposed destination, they would have stayed overnight and be leaving that
+very evening on the 6:32. On the other hand, why should they wait for the
+latest train, rather than proceed by the first available in the morning?
+Why but because Calendar and Mulready were to wait for Stryker to join them
+on the _Alethea_?
+
+Very well, then; if the wind held and Stryker knew his business, there
+would be another passenger on that train, in addition to the Calendar
+party.
+
+Making mental note of the fact that the boat-train for Flushing and London
+was scheduled to leave Antwerp daily at 8:21 p. m., Kirkwood rustled the
+leaves to find out whether or not other tours had been planned, found
+evidences of none, and carefully restored the guide to the locker, lest
+inadvertently the captain should pick it up and see what Kirkwood had seen.
+
+An hour later he went on deck. The skies had blown clear and the brigantine
+was well in land-bound waters and still footing a rattling pace. The
+river-banks had narrowed until, beyond the dikes to right and left, the
+country-side stretched wide and flat, a plain of living green embroidered
+with winding roads and quaint Old-World hamlets whose red roofs shone like
+dull fire between the dark green foliage of dwarfed firs.
+
+Down with the Scheldt's gray shimmering flood were drifting little
+companies of barges, sturdy and snug both fore and aft, tough tanned sails
+burning in the afternoon sunlight. A long string of canal-boats, potted
+plants flowering saucily in their neatly curtained windows, proprietors
+expansively smoking on deck, in the bosoms of their very large families,
+was being mothered up-stream by two funny, clucking tugs. Behind the
+brigantine a travel-worn Atlantic liner was scolding itself hoarse about
+the right of way. Outward bound, empty cattle boats, rough and rusty,
+were swaggering down to the sea, with the careless, independent
+thumbs-in-armholes air of so many navvies off the job.
+
+And then lifting suddenly above the level far-off sky-line, there appeared
+a very miracle of beauty; the delicate tracery of the great Cathedral's
+spire of frozen lace, glowing like a thing of spun gold, set against the
+sapphire velvet of the horizon.
+
+Antwerp was in sight.
+
+A troublesome care stirring in his mind, Kirkwood looked round the deck;
+but Stryker was very busy, entirely too preoccupied with the handling of
+his ship to be interrupted with impunity. Besides, there was plenty of
+time.
+
+More slowly now, the wind falling, the brigantine crept up the river, her
+crew alert with sheets and halyards as the devious windings of the stream
+rendered it necessary to trim the canvas at varying angles to catch the
+wind.
+
+Slowly, too, in the shadow of that Mechlin spire, the horizon grew rough
+and elevated, taking shape in the serrated profile of a thousand gables and
+a hundred towers and cross-crowned steeples.
+
+Once or twice, more and more annoyed as the time of their association
+seemed to grow more brief, Kirkwood approached the captain; but Stryker
+continued to be exhaustively absorbed in the performance of his duties.
+
+Up past the dockyards, where spidery masts stood in dense groves about
+painted funnels, and men swarmed over huge wharves like ants over a crust
+of bread; up and round the final, great sweeping bend of the river, the
+_Alethea_ made her sober way, ever with greater slowness; until at length,
+in the rose glow of a flawless evening, her windlass began to clank like a
+mad thing and her anchor bit the riverbed, near the left bank, between old
+Forts Isabelle and T�te de Flandre, frowned upon from the right by the grim
+pile of the age-old Steen castle.
+
+And again Kirkwood sought Stryker, his carking query ready on his lips. But
+the captain impatiently waved him aside.
+
+"Don't you bother me now, me lud juke! Wyte until I gets done with the
+custom hofficer."
+
+Kirkwood acceded, perforce; and bided his time with what tolerance he could
+muster.
+
+A pluttering customs launch bustled up to the _Alethea's_ side, discharged
+a fussy inspector on the brigantine's deck, and panted impatiently until
+he, the examination concluded without delay, was again aboard.
+
+Stryker, smirking benignly and massaging his lips with the back of his
+hand, followed the official on deck, nodded to Kirkwood an intimation that
+he was prepared to accord him an audience, and strolled forward to the
+waist. The American, mastering his resentment, meekly followed; one can not
+well afford to be haughty when one is asking favors.
+
+Advancing to the rail, the captain whistled in one of the river-boats;
+then, while the waterman waited, faced his passenger.
+
+"Now, yer r'yal 'ighness, wot can I do for you afore you goes ashore?"
+
+"I think you must have forgotten," said Kirkwood quietly. "I hate to
+trouble you, but--there's that matter of four pounds."
+
+Stryker's face was expressive only of mystified vacuity. "Four quid? I
+dunno _as_ I know just wot you means."
+
+"You agreed to advance me four pounds on those things of mine...."
+
+"Ow-w!" Illumination overspread the hollow-jowled countenance. Stryker
+smiled cheerfully. "Garn with you!" he chuckled. "You will 'ave yer little
+joke, won't you now? I declare I never see a loony with such affecsh'nit,
+pl'yful wyes!"
+
+Kirkwood's eyes narrowed. "Stryker," he said steadily, "give me the four
+pounds and let's have no more nonsense; or else hand over my things at
+once."
+
+"Daffy," Stryker told vacancy, with conviction. "Lor' luv me if I sees
+'ow he ever 'ad sense enough to escype. W'y, yer majesty!" and he bowed,
+ironic. "I '_ave_ given you yer quid."
+
+"Just about as much as I gave you that pearl pin," retorted Kirkwood hotly.
+"What the devil do you mean--"
+
+"W'y, yer ludship, four pounds jus pyes yer passyge; I thought you
+understood."
+
+"My passage! But I can come across by steamer for thirty shillings,
+first-class--"
+
+"Aw, but them steamers! Tricky, they is, and unsyfe ... No, yer gryce, the
+W. Stryker Packet Line Lim'ted, London to Antwerp, charges four pounds per
+passyge and no reduction for return fare."
+
+Stunned by his effrontery, Kirkwood stared in silence.
+
+"Any complynts," continued the captain, looking over Kirkwood's head, "must
+be lyde afore the Board of Directors in writin' not more'n thirty dyes
+arfter--"
+
+"You damned scoundrel!" interpolated Kirkwood thoughtfully.
+
+Stryker's mouth closed with a snap; his features froze in a cast of wrath;
+cold rage glinted in his small blue eyes. "W'y," he bellowed, "you bloomin'
+loonatic, d'ye think you can sye that to Bill Stryker on 'is own wessel!"
+
+He hesitated a moment, then launched a heavy fist at Kirkwood's face.
+Unsurprised, the young man side-stepped, caught the hard, bony wrist as the
+captain lurched by, following his wasted blow, and with a dexterous twist
+laid him flat on his back, with a sounding thump upon the deck. And as the
+infuriated scamp rose--which he did with a bound that placed him on
+his feet and in defensive posture; as though the deck had been a
+spring-board--Kirkwood leaped back, seized a capstan-bar, and faced him
+with a challenge.
+
+"Stand clear, Stryker!" he warned the man tensely, himself livid with rage.
+"If you move a step closer I swear I'll knock the head off your shoulders!
+Not another inch, you contemptible whelp, or I'll brain you!... That's
+better," he continued as the captain, caving, dropped his fists and moved
+uneasily back. "Now give that boatman money for taking me ashore. Yes, I'm
+going--and if we ever meet again, take the other side of the way, Stryker!"
+
+Without response, a grim smile wreathing his thin, hard lips, Stryker
+thrust one hand into his pocket, and withdrawing a coin, tossed it to the
+waiting waterman. Whereupon Kirkwood backed warily to the rail, abandoned
+the capstan-bar and dropped over the side.
+
+Nodding to the boatman, "The Steen landing--quickly," he said in French.
+
+Stryker, recovering, advanced to the rail and waved him a derisive _bon
+voyage_.
+
+"By-by, yer hexcellency. I 'opes it may soon be my pleasure to meet you
+again. You've been a real privilege to know; I've henjoyed yer comp'ny
+somethin' immense. Don't know as I ever met such a rippin', Ay Number One,
+all-round, entertynin' ass, afore!"
+
+He fumbled nervously about his clothing, brought to light a rag of cotton,
+much the worse for service, and ostentatiously wiped from the corner of
+each eye tears of grief at parting. Then, as the boat swung toward the
+farther shore, Kirkwood's back was to the brigantine, and he was little
+tempted to turn and invite fresh shafts of ridicule.
+
+Rapidly, as he was ferried across the busy Scheldt, the white blaze of his
+passion cooled; but the biting irony of his estate ate, corrosive, into his
+soul. Hollow-eyed he glared vacantly into space, pale lips unmoving, his
+features wasted with despair.
+
+They came to the landing-stage and swung broad-side on. Mechanically the
+American got up and disembarked. As heedless of time and place he moved
+up the Quai to the gangway and so gained the esplanade; where pausing he
+thrust a trembling hand into his trouser pocket.
+
+The hand reappeared, displaying in its outspread palm three big, round,
+brown, British pennies. Staring down at them, Kirkwood's lips moved.
+
+"Bed rock!" he whispered huskily.
+
+
+
+
+XIII
+
+
+A PRIMER OF PROGRESSIVE CRIME
+
+Without warning or presage the still evening air was smitten and made
+softly musical by the pealing of a distant chime, calling vespers to its
+brothers in Antwerp's hundred belfries; and one by one, far and near, the
+responses broke out, until it seemed as if the world must be vibrant
+with silver and brazen melody; until at the last the great bells in the
+Cathedral spire stirred and grumbled drowsily, then woke to such ringing
+resonance as dwarfed all the rest and made it seem as nothing.
+
+Like the beating of a mighty heart heard through the rushing clamor of the
+pulses, a single deep-throated bell boomed solemnly six heavy, rumbling
+strokes.
+
+Six o'clock! Kirkwood roused out of his dour brooding. The Amsterdam
+express would leave at 6:32, and he knew not from what station.
+
+Striding swiftly across the promenade, he entered a small tobacco shop and
+made inquiry of the proprietress. His command of French was tolerable; he
+experienced no difficulty in comprehending the good woman's instructions.
+
+Trains for Amsterdam, she said, left from the Gare Centrale, a mile or so
+across the city. M'sieur had plenty of time, and to spare. There was the
+tram line, if m'sieur did not care to take a fiacre. If he would go by way
+of the Vielle Bourse he would discover the tram cars of the Rue Kipdorp.
+M'sieur was most welcome....
+
+Monsieur departed with the more haste since he was unable to repay this
+courtesy with the most trifling purchase; such slight matters annoyed
+Kirkwood intensely. Perhaps it was well for him that he had the long walk
+to help him work off the fit of nervous exasperation into which he was
+plunged every time his thoughts harked back to that jovial black-guard,
+Stryker.... He was quite calm when, after a brisk walk of some fifteen
+minutes, he reached the station.
+
+A public clock reassured him with the information that he had the quarter
+of an hour's leeway; it was only seventeen minutes past eighteen o'clock
+(Belgian railway time, always confusing). Inquiring his way to the
+Amsterdam train, which was already waiting at the platform, he paced its
+length, peering brazenly in at the coach windows, now warm with hope, now
+shivering with disappointment, realizing as he could not but realize that,
+all else aside, his only chance of rehabilitation lay in meeting Calendar.
+But in none of the coaches or carriages did he discover any one even
+remotely resembling the fat adventurer, his daughter, or Mulready.
+
+Satisfied that they had not yet boarded the train, he stood aside, tortured
+with forebodings, while anxiously scrutinizing each individual of the
+throng of intending travelers.... Perhaps they had been delayed--by the
+_Alethea's_ lateness in making port very likely; perhaps they purposed
+taking not this but a later train; perhaps they had already left the city
+by an earlier, or had returned to England.
+
+On time, the bell clanged its warning; the guards bawled theirs; doors were
+hastily opened and slammed; the trucks began to groan, couplings jolting
+as the engine chafed in constraint. The train and Kirkwood moved
+simultaneously out of opposite ends of the station, the one to rattle and
+hammer round the eastern boundaries of the city and straighten out at top
+speed on the northern route for the Belgian line, the other to stroll
+moodily away, idle hands in empty pockets, bound aimlessly anywhere--it
+didn't matter!
+
+Nothing whatever mattered in the smallest degree. Ere now the outlook had
+been dark; but this he felt to be the absolute nadir of his misfortunes.
+Presently--after a while--as soon as he could bring himself to it--he would
+ask the way and go to the American Consulate. But just now, low as the tide
+of chance had ebbed, leaving him stranded on the flats of vagabondage,
+low as showed the measure of his self-esteem, he could not tolerate the
+prospect of begging for assistance--help which would in all likelihood be
+refused, since his story was quite too preposterous to gain credence in
+official ears that daily are filled with the lamentations of those whose
+motives do not bear investigation. And if he chose to eliminate the strange
+chain of events which had landed him in Antwerp, to base his plea solely on
+the fact that he was a victim of the San Francisco disaster ... he himself
+was able to smile, if sourly, anticipating the incredulous consular smile
+with which he would be shown the door.
+
+No; that he would reserve as a last resort. True, he had already come to
+the Jumping-off Place; to the Court of the Last Resort alone could he now
+appeal. But ... not yet; after a while he could make his petition, after he
+had made a familiar of the thought that he must armor himself with callous
+indifference to rebuff, to say naught of the waves of burning shame that
+would overwhelm him when he came to the point of asking charity.
+
+He found himself, neither knowing nor caring how he had won thither, in the
+Place Verte, the vast venerable pile of the Cathedral rising on his right,
+hotels and quaint Old-World dwellings with peaked roofs and gables and
+dormer windows, inclosing the other sides of the square. The chimes (he
+could hear none but those of the Cathedral) were heralding the hour of
+seven. Listless and preoccupied in contemplation of his wretched case he
+wandered purposelessly half round the square, then dropped into a bench on
+its outskirts.
+
+It was some time later that he noticed, with a casual, indifferent eye, a
+porter running out of the H�tel de Flandre, directly opposite, and calling
+a fiacre in to the carriage block.
+
+As languidly he watched a woman, very becomingly dressed, follow the porter
+down to the curb.
+
+The fiacre swung in, and the woman dismissed the porter before entering the
+vehicle; a proceeding so unusual that it fixed the onlooker's interest.
+He sat rigid with attention; the woman seemed to be giving explicit
+and lengthy directions to the driver, who nodded and gesticulated his
+comprehension.
+
+The woman was Mrs. Hallam.
+
+The first blush of recognition passed, leaving Kirkwood without any
+amazement. It was an easy matter to account for her being where she was.
+Thrown off the scent by Kirkwood at Sheerness, the previous morning, she
+had missed the day boat, the same which had ferried over those whom she
+pursued. Returning from Sheerness to Queensborough, however, she had taken
+the night boat for Flushing and Antwerp,--and not without her plan, who was
+not a woman to waste her strength aimlessly; Kirkwood believed that she
+had had from the first a very definite campaign in view. In that campaign
+Queensborough Pier had been the first strategic move; the journey to
+Antwerp, apparently, the second; and the American was impressed that he was
+witnessing the inception of the third decided step.... The conclusion of
+this process of reasoning was inevitable: Madam would bear watching.
+
+Thus was a magical transformation brought about. Instantaneously lassitude
+and vain repinings were replaced by hopefulness and energy. In a twinkling
+the young man was on his feet, every nerve a-thrill with excitement.
+
+Mrs. Hallam, blissfully ignorant of this surveillance over her movements,
+took her place in the fiacre. The driver clucked to his horse, cracked
+his whip, and started off at a slow trot: a pace which Kirkwood imitated,
+keeping himself at a discreet distance to the rear of the cab, but prepared
+to break into a run whenever it should prove necessary.
+
+Such exertion, however, was not required of him. Evidently Mrs. Hallam
+was in no great haste to reach her destination; the speed of the fiacre
+remained extremely moderate; Kirkwood found a long, brisk stride fast
+enough to keep it well in sight.
+
+Round the green square, under the beautiful walls of Notre Dame d'Anvers,
+through Grande Place and past the H�tel de Ville, the cab proceeded, dogged
+by what might plausibly be asserted the most persistent and infatuated soul
+that ever crossed the water; and so on into the Quai Van Dyck, turning to
+the left at the old Steen dungeon and, slowing to a walk, moving soberly up
+the drive.
+
+Beyond the lip of the embankment, the Scheldt flowed, its broad shining
+surface oily, smooth and dark, a mirror for the incandescent glory of the
+skies. Over on the western bank old T�te de Flandre lifted up its grim
+curtains and bastions, sable against the crimson, rampart and parapet edged
+with fire. Busy little side-wheeled ferry steamers spanked the waters
+noisily and smudged the sunset with dark drifting trails of smoke; and ever
+and anon a rowboat would slip out of shadow to glide languidly with the
+current. Otherwise the life of the river was gone; and at their moorings
+the ships swung in great quietness, riding lights glimmering like low wan
+stars.
+
+In the company of the latter the young man marked down the _Alethea_; a
+sight which made him unconsciously clench both fists and teeth, reminding
+him of that rare wag, Stryker....
+
+To his way of thinking the behavior of the fiacre was quite unaccountable.
+Hardly had the horse paced off the length of two blocks on the Quai ere
+it was guided to the edge of the promenade and brought to a stop. And the
+driver twisted the reins round his whip, thrust the latter in its socket,
+turned sidewise on the box, and began to smoke and swing his heels,
+surveying the panorama of river and sunset with complacency--a cabby, one
+would venture, without a care in the world and serene in the assurance of
+a generous _pour-boire_ when he lost his fare. But as for the latter, she
+made no move; the door of the cab remained closed,--like its occupant's
+mind, a mystery to the watcher.
+
+Twilight shadows lengthened, darkling, over the land; street-lights flashed
+up in long, radiant ranks. Across the promenade hotels and shops were
+lighted up; people began to gather round the tables beneath the awnings of
+an open-air caf�. In the distance, somewhere, a band swung into the dreamy
+rhythm of a haunting waltz. Scattered couples moved slowly, arm in arm,
+along the riverside walk, drinking in the fragrance of the night. Overhead
+stars popped out in brilliance and dropped their reflections to swim lazily
+on spellbound waters.... And still the fiacre lingered in inaction, still
+the driver lorded it aloft, in care-free abandon.
+
+In the course of time this inertia, where he had looked for action, this
+dull suspense when he had forecast interesting developments, wore upon the
+watcher's nerves and made him at once impatient and suspicious. Now that he
+had begun to doubt, he conceived it as quite possible that Mrs. Hallam (who
+was capable of anything) should have stolen out of the cab by the other
+and, to him, invisible door. To resolve the matter, finally, he took
+advantage of the darkness, turned up his coat collar, hunched up his
+shoulders, hid his hands in pockets, pulled the visor of his cap well
+forward over his eyes, and slouched past the fiacre.
+
+Mrs. Hallam sat within. He could see her profile clearly silhouetted
+against the light; she was bending forward and staring fixedly out of the
+window, across the driveway. Mentally he calculated the direction of her
+gaze, then, moved away and followed it with his own eyes; and found himself
+staring at the fa�ade of a third-rate hotel. Above its roof the gilded
+letters of a sign, catching the illumination from below, spelled out the
+title of "H�tel du Commerce."
+
+Mrs. Hallam was interested in the H�tel du Commerce?
+
+Thoughtfully Kirkwood fell back to his former point of observation, now
+the richer by another object of suspicion, the hostelry. Mrs. Hallam was
+waiting and watching for some one to enter or to leave that establishment.
+It seemed a reasonable inference to draw. Well, then, so was Kirkwood, no
+less than the lady; he deemed it quite conceivable that their objects were
+identical.
+
+He started to beguile the time by wondering what she would do, if...
+
+Of a sudden he abandoned this line of speculation, and catching his breath,
+held it, almost afraid to credit the truth that for once his anticipations
+were being realized under his very eyes.
+
+Against the lighted doorway of the H�tel du Commerce, the figures of two
+men were momentarily sketched, as they came hurriedly forth; and of the
+two, one was short and stout, and even at a distance seemed to bear himself
+with an accent of assertiveness, while the other was tall and heavy of
+shoulder.
+
+Side by side they marched in step across the embankment to the head of the
+Quai gangway, descending without pause to the landing-stage. Kirkwood,
+hanging breathlessly over the guard-rail, could hear their footfalls
+ringing in hollow rhythm on the planks of the inclined way,--could even
+discern Calendar's unlovely profile in dim relief beneath one of the
+waterside lights; and he recognized unmistakably Mulready's deep voice,
+grumbling inarticulately.
+
+At the outset he had set after them, with intent to accost Calendar; but
+their pace had been swift and his irresolute. He hung fire on the issue,
+dreading to reveal himself, unable to decide which were the better course,
+to pursue the men, or to wait and discover what Mrs. Hallam was about. In
+the end he waited; and had his disappointment for recompense.
+
+For Mrs. Hallam did nothing intelligible. Had she driven over to the hotel,
+hard upon the departure of the men, he would have believed that she was
+seeking Dorothy, and would, furthermore, have elected to crowd their
+interview, if she succeeded in obtaining one with the girl. But she did
+nothing of the sort. For a time the fiacre remained as it had been ever
+since stopping; then, evidently admonished by his fare, the driver
+straightened up, knocked out his pipe, disentangled reins and whip, and
+wheeled the equipage back on the way it had come, disappearing in a dark
+side street leading eastward from the embankment.
+
+Kirkwood was, then, to believe that Mrs. Hallam, having taken all that
+trouble and having waited for the two adventurers to appear, had been
+content with sight of them? He could hardly believe that of the woman; it
+wasn't like her.
+
+He started across the driveway, after the fiacre, but it was lost in a
+tangle of side streets before he could make up his mind whether it was
+worth while chasing or not; and, pondering the woman's singular action, he
+retraced his steps to the promenade rail.
+
+Presently he told himself he understood. Dorothy was no longer of her
+father's party; he had a suspicion that Mulready's attitude had made it
+seem advisable to Calendar either to leave the girl behind, in England, or
+to segregate her from his associates in Antwerp. If not lodged in another
+quarter of the city, or left behind, she was probably traveling on ahead,
+to a destination which he could by no means guess. And Mrs. Hallam was
+looking for the girl; if there were really jewels in that gladstone bag,
+Calendar would naturally have had no hesitation about intrusting them to
+his daughter's care; and Mrs. Hallam avowedly sought nothing else. How
+the woman had found out that such was the case, Kirkwood did not stop to
+reckon; unless he explained it on the proposition that she was a person of
+remarkable address. It made no matter, one way or the other; he had lost
+Mrs. Hallam; but Calendar and Mulready he could put his finger on; they had
+undoubtedly gone off to the _Alethea_ to confer again with Stryker,--that
+was, unless they proposed sailing on the brigantine, possibly at turn of
+tide that night.
+
+Panic gripped his soul and shook it, as a terrier shakes a rat, when he
+conceived this frightful proposition.
+
+In his confusion of mind he evolved spontaneously an entirely new
+hypothesis: Dorothy had already been spirited aboard the vessel; Calendar
+and his confederate, delaying to join her from enigmatic motives, were now
+aboard; and presently the word would be, Up-anchor and away!
+
+Were they again to elude him? Not, he swore, if he had to swim for it. And
+he had no wish to swim. The clothes he stood in, with what was left of his
+self-respect, were all that he could call his own on that side of the North
+Sea. Not a boatman on the Scheldt would so much as consider accepting three
+English pennies in exchange for boat-hire. In brief, it began to look as if
+he were either to swim or ... to steal a boat.
+
+Upon such slender threads of circumstance depends our boasted moral health.
+In one fleeting minute Kirkwood's conception of the law of _meum et tuum_,
+its foundations already insidiously undermined by a series of cumulative
+misfortunes, toppled crashing to its fall; and was not.
+
+He was wholly unconscious of the change. Beneath him, in a space between
+the quays bridged by the gangway, a number of rowboats, a putative score,
+lay moored for the night and gently rubbing against each other with the
+soundless lift and fall of the river. For all that Kirkwood could determine
+to the contrary, the lot lay at the mercy of the public; nowhere about was
+he able to discern a figure in anything resembling a watchman.
+
+Without a quiver of hesitation--moments were invaluable, if what he feared
+were true--he strode to the gangway, passed down, and with absolute
+nonchalance dropped into the nearest boat, stepping from one to another
+until he had gained the outermost. To his joy he found a pair of oars
+stowed beneath the thwarts.
+
+If he had paused to moralize--which he didn't--upon the discovery, he would
+have laid it all at the door of his lucky star; and would have been wrong.
+We who have never stooped to petty larceny know that the oars had been
+placed there at the direction of his evil genius bent upon facilitating his
+descent into the avernus of crime. Let us, then, pity the poor young man
+without condoning his offense.
+
+Unhitching the painter he set one oar against the gunwale of the next boat,
+and with a powerful thrust sent his own (let us so call it for convenience)
+stern-first out upon the river; then sat him composedly down, fitted the
+oars to their locks, and began to pull straight across-stream, trusting to
+the current to carry him down to the _Alethea_. He had already marked down
+that vessel's riding-light; and that not without a glow of gratitude to see
+it still aloft and in proper juxtaposition to the river-bank; proof that it
+had not moved.
+
+He pulled a good oar, reckoned his distance prettily, and shipping the
+blades at just the right moment, brought the little boat in under the
+brigantine's counter with scarce a jar. An element of surprise he held
+essential to the success of his plan, whatever that might turn out to be.
+
+Standing up, he caught the brigantine's after-rail with both hands, one of
+which held the painter of the purloined boat, and lifted his head above
+the deck line. A short survey of the deserted after-deck gave him further
+assurance. The anchor-watch was not in sight; he may have been keeping
+well forward by Stryker's instructions, or he may have crept off for forty
+winks. Whatever the reason for his absence from the post of duty, Kirkwood
+was relieved not to have him to deal with; and drawing himself gently in
+over the rail, made the painter fast, and stepped noiselessly over toward
+the lighted oblong of the companionway. A murmur of voices from below
+comforted him with the knowledge that he had not miscalculated, this time;
+at last he stood within striking distance of his quarry.
+
+The syllables of his surname ringing clearly in his ears and followed by
+Stryker's fleeting laugh, brought him to a pause. He flushed hotly in the
+darkness; the captain was retailing with relish some of his most successful
+witticisms at Kirkwood's expense.... "You'd ought to've seed the wye'e
+looked at me!" concluded the _raconteur_ in a gale of mirth.
+
+Mulready laughed with him, if a little uncertainly. Calendar's chuckle was
+not audible, but he broke the pause that followed.
+
+"I don't know," he said with doubting emphasis. "You say you landed him
+without a penny in his pocket? I don't call that a good plan at all. Of
+course, he ain't a factor, but ... Well, it might've been as well to give
+him his fare home. He might make trouble for us, somehow.... I don't mind
+telling you, Cap'n, that you're an ass."
+
+The tensity of certain situations numbs the sensibilities. Kirkwood had
+never in his weirdest dreams thought of himself as an eavesdropper; he did
+not think of himself as such in the present instance; he merely listened,
+edging nearer the skylight, of which the wings were slightly raised, and
+keeping as far as possible in shadow.
+
+"Ow, I sye!" the captain was remonstrating, aggrieved. "'Ow was I to know
+'e didn't 'ave it in for you? First off, when 'e comes on board (I'll sye
+this for 'im, 'e's as plucky as they myke 'em), I thought 'e was from the
+Yard. Then, when I see wot a bally hinnocent 'e was, I mykes up my mind
+'e's just some one you've been ply in' one of your little gymes on, and 'oo
+was lookin' to square 'is account. So I did 'im proper."
+
+"Evidently," assented Calendar dryly. "You're a bit of a heavy-handed
+brute, Stryker. Personally I'm kind of sorry for the boy; he wasn't a bad
+sort, as his kind runs, and he was no fool, from what little I saw of
+him.... I wonder what he wanted."
+
+"Possibly," Mulready chimed in suavely, "you can explain what you wanted
+of him, in the first place. How did you come to drag him into _this_
+business?"
+
+"Oh, that!" Calendar laughed shortly. "That was partly accident, partly
+inspiration. I happened to see his name on the Pless register; he'd put
+himself down as from 'Frisco. I figured it out that he would be next door
+to broke and getting desperate, ready to do anything to get home; and
+thought we might utilize him; to smuggle some of the stuff into the States.
+Once before, if you'll remember--no; that was before we got together,
+Mulready--I picked up a fellow-countryman on the Strand. He was down and
+out, jumped at the job, and we made a neat little wad on it."
+
+"The more fool you, to take outsiders into your confidence," grumbled
+Mulready.
+
+"Ow?" interrogated Calendar, mimicking Stryker's accent inimitably. "Well,
+you've got a heap to learn about this game, Mul; about the first thing
+is that you must trust Old Man Know-it-all, which is me. I've run more
+diamonds into the States, in one way or another, in my time, than you ever
+pinched out of the shirt-front of a toff on the Empire Prom., before they
+made the graft too hot for you and you came to take lessons from me in the
+gentle art of living easy."
+
+"Oh, cut that, cawn't you?"
+
+"Delighted, dear boy.... One of the first principles, next to profiting by
+the admirable example I set you, is to make the fellows in your own line
+trust you. Now, if this boy had taken on with me, I could have got a bunch
+of the sparklers on my mere say-so, from old Morganthau up on Finsbury
+Pavement. He does a steady business hoodwinking the Customs for the benefit
+of his American clients--and himself. And I'd've made a neat little profit
+besides: something to fall back on, if this fell through. I don't mind
+having two strings to my bow."
+
+"Yes," argued Mulready; "but suppose this Kirkwood had taken on with you
+and then peached?"
+
+"That's another secret; you've got to know your man, be able to size him
+up. I called on this chap for that very purpose; but I saw at a glance he
+wasn't our man. He smelt a nigger in the woodpile and most politely told
+me to go to the devil. But if he _had_ come in, he'd've died before he
+squealed. I know the breed; there's honor among gentlemen that knocks the
+honor of thieves higher'n a kite, the old saw to the contrary--nothing
+doing.... You understand me, I'm sure, Mulready?" he concluded with
+envenomed sweetness.
+
+"I don't see yet how Kirkwood got anything to do with Dorothy."
+
+"Miss Calendar to you, _Mister_ Mulready!" snapped Calendar. "There, there,
+now! Don't get excited.... It was when the Hallam passed me word that a man
+from the Yard was waiting on the altar steps for me, that Kirkwood came in.
+He was dining close by; I went over and worked on his feelings until he
+agreed to take Dorothy off my hands. If I had attempted to leave the place
+with her, they'd've spotted me for sure.... My compliments to you, Dick
+Mulready."
+
+There came the noise of chair legs scraped harshly on the cabin deck.
+Apparently Mulready had leaped to his feet in a rage.
+
+"I've told you--" he began in a voice thick with passion.
+
+"Oh, sit down!" Calendar cut in contemptuously. "Sit down, d'you hear?
+That's all over and done with. We understand each other now, and you won't
+try any more monkey-shines. It's a square deal and a square divide, so
+far's I'm concerned; if we stick together there'll be profit enough for all
+concerned. Sit down, Mul, and have another slug of the captain's bum rum."
+
+Although Mulready consented to be pacified, Kirkwood got the impression
+that the man was far gone in drink. A moment later he heard him growl
+"Chin-chin!" antiphonal to the captain's "Cheer-o!"
+
+"Now, then," Calendar proposed, "Mr. Kirkwood aside--peace be with
+him!--let's get down to cases."
+
+"Wot's the row?" asked the captain.
+
+"The row, Cap'n, is the Hallam female, who has unexpectedly shown up in
+Antwerp, we have reason to believe with malicious intent and a private
+detective to add to the gaiety of nations."
+
+"Wot's the odds? She carn't 'urt us without lyin' up trouble for 'erself."
+
+"Damn little consolation to us when we're working it out in Dartmoor."
+
+"Speak for yourself," grunted Mulready surlily.
+
+"I do," returned Calendar easily; "we're both in the shadow of Dartmoor,
+Mul, my boy; since you choose to take the reference as personal. Sing Sing,
+however, yawns for me alone; it's going to keep on yawning, too, unless I
+miss my guess. I love my native land most to death, _but_ ..."
+
+"Ow, blow that!" interrupted the captain irritably. "Let's 'ear about the
+'Allam. Wot're you afryd of?"
+
+"'Fraid she'll set up a yell when she finds out we're planting the loot,
+Cap'n. She's just that vindictive; you'd think she'd be satisfied with
+her end of the stick, but you don't know the Hallam. That milk-and-water
+offspring of hers is the apple of her eye, and Freddie's going to collar
+the whole shooting-match or madam will kick over the traces."
+
+"Well?"
+
+"Well, she's queered us here. We can't do anything if my lady is going to
+camp on our trail and tell everybody we're shady customers, can we? The
+question now before the board is: Where now,--and how?"
+
+"Amsterdam," Mulready chimed in. "I told you that in the beginning."
+
+"But how?" argued Calendar. "The Lord knows I'm willing but ... we can't go
+by rail, thanks to the Hallam. We've got to lose her first of all."
+
+"But wot I'm arskin' is, wot's the matter with--"
+
+"The _Alethea_, Cap'n? Nothing, so far as Dick and I are concerned. But my
+dutiful daughter is prejudiced; she's been so long without proper paternal
+discipline," Calendar laughed, "that she's rather high-spirited. Of course
+I might overcome her objections, but the girl's no fool, and every ounce
+of pressure I bring to bear just now only helps make her more restless and
+suspicious."
+
+"You leave her to me," Mulready interposed, with a brutal laugh. "I'll
+guarantee to get her aboard, or..."
+
+"Drop it, Dick!" Calendar advised quietly. "And go a bit easy with that
+bottle for five minutes, can't you?"
+
+"Well, then," Stryker resumed, apparently concurring in Calendar's
+attitude, "w'y don't one of you tyke the stuff, go off quiet and dispose of
+it to a proper fence, and come back to divide. I don't see w'y that--"
+
+"Naturally you wouldn't," chuckled Calendar. "Few people besides the two of
+us understand the depth of affection existing between Dick, here, and
+me. We just can't bear to get out of sight of each other. We're sure
+inseparable--since night before last. Odd, isn't it?"
+
+"You drop it!" snarled Mulready, in accents so ugly that the listener was
+startled. "Enough's enough and--"
+
+"There, there, Dick! All right; I'll behave," Calendar soothed him. "We'll
+forget and say no more about it."
+
+"Well, see you don't."
+
+"But 'as either of you a plan?" persisted Stryker.
+
+"I have," replied Mulready; "and it's the simplest and best, if you could
+only make this long-lost parent here see it."
+
+"Wot is it?"
+
+Mulready seemed to ignore Calendar and address himself to the captain.
+He articulated with some difficulty, slurring his words to the point of
+indistinctness at times.
+
+"Simple enough," he propounded solemnly. "We've got the gladstone bag here;
+Miss Dolly's at the hotel--that's her papa's bright notion; he thinks she's
+to be trusted ... Now then, what's the matter with weighing anchor and
+slipping quietly out to sea?"
+
+"Leavin' the dootiful darter?"
+
+"Cert'n'y. She's only a drag any way. 'Better off without her.... Then we
+can wait our time and get highest market prices--"
+
+"You forget, Dick," Calendar put it, "that there's a thousand in it for
+each of us if she's kept out of England for six weeks. A thousand's five
+thousand in the land I hail from; I can use five thousand in my business."
+
+"Why can't you be content with what you've got?" demanded Mulready
+wrathfully.
+
+"Because I'm a seventh son of a seventh son; I can see an inch or two
+beyond my nose. If Dorothy ever finds her way back to England she'll spoil
+one of the finest fields of legitimate graft I ever licked my lips to look
+at. The trouble with you, Mul, is you're too high-toned. You want to play
+the swell mobs-man from post to finish. A quick touch and a clean getaway
+for yours. Now, that's all right; that has its good points, but you don't
+want to underestimate the advantages of a good blackmailing connection....
+If I can keep Dorothy quiet long enough, I look to the Hallam and precious
+Freddie to be a great comfort to me in my old age."
+
+"Then, for God's sake," cried Mulready, "go to the hotel, get your brat by
+the scruif of her pretty neck and drag her aboard. Let's get out of this."
+
+"I won't," returned Calendar inflexibly.
+
+The dispute continued, but the listener had heard enough. He had to get
+away and think, could no longer listen; indeed, the voices of the three
+blackguards below came but indistinctly to his ears, as if from a distance.
+He was sick at heart and ablaze with indignation by turns. Unconsciously he
+was trembling violently in every limb; swept by alternate waves of heat and
+cold, feverish one minute, shivering the next. All of which phenomena were
+due solely to the rage that welled inside his heart.
+
+Stealthily he crept away to the rail, to stand grasping it and staring
+across the water with unseeing eyes at the gay old city twinkling back with
+her thousand eyes of light. The cool night breeze, sweeping down unhindered
+over the level Netherlands from the bleak North Sea, was comforting to
+his throbbing temples. By degrees his head cleared, his rioting pulses
+subsided, he could think; and he did.
+
+Over there, across the water, in the dingy and disreputable H�tel du
+Commerce, Dorothy waited in her room, doubtless the prey of unnumbered
+nameless terrors, while aboard the brigantine her fate was being decided by
+a council of three unspeakable scoundrels, one of whom, professing himself
+her father, openly declared his intention of using her to further his
+selfish and criminal ends.
+
+His first and natural thought, to steal away to her and induce her to
+accompany him back to England, Kirkwood perforce discarded. He could
+have wept over the realization of his unqualified impotency. He had no
+money,--not even cab-fare from the hotel to the railway station. Something
+subtler, more crafty, had to be contrived to meet the emergency. And there
+was one way, one only; he could see none other. Temporarily he must make
+himself one of the company of her enemies, force himself upon them,
+ingratiate himself into their good graces, gain their confidence, then,
+when opportunity offered, betray them. And the power to make them tolerate
+him, if not receive him as a fellow, the knowledge of them and their plans
+that they had unwittingly given him, was his.
+
+And Dorothy, was waiting....
+
+He swung round and without attempting to muffle his footfalls strode toward
+the companionway. He must pretend he had just come aboard.
+
+Subconsciously he had been aware, during his time of pondering, that the
+voices in the cabin had been steadily gaining in volume, rising louder and
+yet more loud, Mulready's ominous, drink-blurred accents dominating the
+others. There was a quarrel afoot; as soon as he gave it heed, Kirkwood
+understood that Mulready, in the madness of his inflamed brain, was forcing
+the issue while Calendar sought vainly to calm and soothe him.
+
+The American arrived at the head of the companionway at a critical
+juncture. As he moved to descend some low, cool-toned retort of Calendar's
+seemed to enrage his confederate beyond reason. He yelped aloud with wrath,
+sprang to his feet, knocking over a chair, and leaping back toward the foot
+of the steps, flashed an adroit hand behind him and found his revolver.
+
+"I've stood enough from you!" he screamed, his voice oddly clear in that
+moment of insanity. "You've played with me as long as you will, you hulking
+American hog! And now I'm going to show--"
+
+As he held his fire to permit his denunciation to bite home, Kirkwood,
+appalled to find himself standing on the threshold of a tragedy, gathered
+himself together and launched through the air, straight for the madman's
+shoulders.
+
+As they went down together, sprawling, Mulready's head struck against a
+transom and the revolver fell from his limp fingers.
+
+
+
+
+XIV
+
+
+STRATAGEMS AND SPOILS
+
+Prepared as he had been for the shock, Kirkwood was able to pick himself up
+quickly, uninjured, Mulready's revolver in his grasp.
+
+On his feet, straddling Mulready's insentient body, he confronted Calendar
+and Stryker. The face of the latter was a sickly green, the gift of his
+fright. The former seemed coldly composed, already recovering from his
+surprise and bringing his wits to bear upon the new factor which had been
+so unceremoniously injected into the situation.
+
+[Illustration: Straddling Mulready's body, he confronted Calendar and
+Stryker.]
+
+Standing, but leaning heavily upon a hand that rested flat on the table,
+in the other he likewise held a revolver, which he had apparently drawn in
+self-defense, at the crisis of Mulready's frenzy. Its muzzle was deflected.
+He looked Kirkwood over with a cool gray eye, the color gradually returning
+to his fat, clean-shaven cheeks, replacing the pardonable pallor which had
+momentarily rested thereon.
+
+As for Kirkwood, he had covered the fat adventurer before he knew it.
+Stryker, who had been standing immediately in the rear of Calendar,
+immediately cowered and cringed to find himself in the line of fire.
+
+Of the three conscious men in the brigantine's cabin, Calendar was probably
+the least confused or excited. Stryker was palpably unmanned. Kirkwood was
+tingling with a sense of mastery, but collected and rapidly revolving the
+combinations for the reversed conditions which had been brought about by
+Mulready's drunken folly. His elation was apparent in his shining, boyish
+eyes, as well as in the bright color that glowed in his cheeks. When he
+decided to speak it was with rapid enunciation, but clearly and concisely.
+
+"Calendar," he began, "if a single shot is fired about this vessel the
+river police will be buzzing round your ears in a brace of shakes."
+
+The fat adventurer nodded assent, his eyes contracting.
+
+"Very well!" continued Kirkwood brusquely. "You must know that I have
+personally nothing to fear from the police; if arrested, I wouldn't be
+detained a day. On the other hand, you ... Hand me that pistol, Calendar,
+butt first, please. Look sharp, my man! If you don't..."
+
+He left the ellipsis to be filled in by the corpulent blackguard's
+intelligence. The latter, gray eyes still intent on the younger man's face,
+wavered, plainly impressed, but still wondering.
+
+"Quick! I'm not patient to-night..."
+
+No longer was Calendar of two minds. In the face of Kirkwood's attitude
+there was but one course to be followed: that of obedience. Calendar
+surrendered an untenable position as gracefully as could be wished.
+
+"I guess you know what you mean by this," he said, tendering the weapon as
+per instructions; "I'm doggoned if I do.... You'll allow a certain
+latitude in consideration of my relief; I can't say we were anticipating
+this--ah--Heaven-sent visitation."
+
+Accepting the revolver with his left hand and settling his forefinger on
+the trigger, Kirkwood beamed with pure enjoyment. He found the deference
+of the older man, tempered though it was by his indomitable swagger,
+refreshing in the extreme.
+
+"A little appreciation isn't exactly out of place, come to think of it,"
+he commented, adding, with an eye for the captain: "Stryker, you bold, bad
+butterfly, have you got a gun concealed about your unclean person?"
+
+The captain shook visibly with contrition. "No, Mr. Kirkwood," he managed
+to reply in a voice singularly lacking in his wonted bluster.
+
+"Say 'sir'!" suggested Kirkwood.
+
+"No, Mr. Kirkwood, sir," amended Stryker eagerly.
+
+"Now come round here and let's have a look at you. Please stay where you
+are, Calendar.... Why, Captain, you're shivering from head to foot! Not ill
+are you, you wag? Step over to the table there, Stryker, and turn out your
+pockets; turn 'em inside out and let's see what you carry in the way of
+offensive artillery. And, Stryker, don't be rash; don't do anything you'd
+be sorry for afterwards."
+
+"No fear of that," mumbled the captain, meekly shambling toward the table,
+and, in his anxiety to give no cause for unpleasantness, beginning to empty
+his pockets on the way.
+
+"Don't forget the 'sir,' Stryker. And, Stryker, if you happen to think of
+anything in the line of one of your merry quips or jests, don't strain
+yourself holding in; get it right off your chest, and you'll feel better."
+
+Kirkwood chuckled, in high conceit with himself, watching Calendar out of
+the corner of his eye, but with his attention centered on the infinitely
+diverting spectacle afforded by Stryker, whose predacious hands were
+trembling violently as, one by one, they brought to light the articles of
+which he had despoiled his erstwhile victim.
+
+"Come, come, Stryker! Surely you can think of something witty, surely you
+haven't exhausted the possibilities of that almanac joke! Couldn't you
+ring another variation on the lunatic wheeze? Don't hesitate out of
+consideration for me, Captain; I'm joke proof--perhaps you've noticed?"
+
+Stryker turned upon him an expression at once ludicrous, piteous and
+hateful. "That's all, sir," he snarled, displaying his empty palms in token
+of his absolute tractability.
+
+"Good enough. Now right about face--quick! Your back's prettier than your
+face, and besides, I want to know whether your hip-pockets are empty. I've
+heard it's the habit of you gentry to pack guns in your clothes.... None?
+That's all right, then. Now roost on the transom, over there in the corner,
+Stryker, and don't move. Don't let me hear a word from you. Understand?"
+
+Submissively the captain retired to the indicated spot. Kirkwood turned
+to Calendar; of whose attitude, however, he had not been for an instant
+unmindful.
+
+"Won't you sit down, Mr. Calendar?" he suggested pleasantly. "Forgive me
+for keeping you waiting."
+
+For his own part, as the adventurer dropped passively into his chair,
+Kirkwood stepped over Mulready and advanced to the middle of the cabin, at
+the same time thrusting Calendar's revolver into his own coat pocket. The
+other, Mulready's, he nursed significantly with both hands, while he stood
+temporarily quiet, surveying the fleshy face of the prime factor in the
+intrigue.
+
+A quaint, grim smile played about the American's lips, a smile a little
+contemptuous, more than a little inscrutable. In its light Calendar grew
+restive and lost something of his assurance. His feet shifted uneasily
+beneath the table and his dark eyes wavered, evading Kirkwood's. At length
+he seemed to find the suspense unendurable.
+
+"Well?" he demanded testily. "What d'you want of me?"
+
+"I was just wondering at you, Calendar. In the last few days you've given
+me enough cause to wonder, as you'll admit."
+
+The adventurer plucked up spirit, deluded by Kirkwood's pacific tone. "I
+wonder at you, Mr. Kirkwood," he retorted. "It was good of you to save my
+life and--"
+
+"I'm not so sure of that! Perhaps it had been more humane--"
+
+Calendar owned the touch with a wry grimace. "But I'm damned if I
+understand this high-handed attitude of yours!" he concluded heatedly.
+
+"Don't you?" Kirkwood's humor became less apparent, the smile sobering.
+"You will," he told the man, adding abruptly: "Calendar, where's your
+daughter?"
+
+The restless eyes sought the companionway.
+
+"Dorothy," the man lied spontaneously, without a tremor, "is with friends
+in England. Why? Did you want to see her?"
+
+"I rather expected to."
+
+"Well, I thought it best to leave her home, after all."
+
+"I'm glad to hear she's in safe hands," commented Kirkwood.
+
+The adventurer's glance analyzed his face. "Ah," he said slowly, "I see.
+You followed me on Dorothy's account, Mr. Kirkwood?"
+
+"Partly; partly on my own. Let me put it to you fairly. When you forced
+yourself upon me, back there in London, you offered me some sort of
+employment; when I rejected it, you used me to your advantage for the
+furtherance of your purposes (which I confess I don't understand), and made
+me miss my steamer. Naturally, when I found myself penniless and friendless
+in a strange country, I thought again of your offer; and tried to find you,
+to accept it."
+
+"Despite the fact that you're an honest man, Kirkwood?" The fat lips
+twitched with premature enjoyment.
+
+"I'm a desperate man to-night, whatever I may have been yesterday." The
+young man's tone was both earnest and convincing. "I think I've shown that
+by my pertinacity in hunting you down."
+
+"Well--yes." Calendar's thick fingers caressed his lips, trying to hide the
+dawning smile.
+
+"Is that offer still open?"
+
+His nonchalance completely restored by the very na�vet� of the proposition,
+Calendar laughed openly and with a trace of irony. The episode seemed to be
+turning out better than he had anticipated. Gently his mottled fat fingers
+played about his mouth and chins as he looked Kirkwood up and down.
+
+"I'm sorry," he replied, "that it isn't--now. You're too late, Kirkwood;
+I've made other arrangements."
+
+"Too bad." Kirkwood's eyes narrowed. "You force me to harsher measures,
+Calendar."
+
+Genuinely diverted, the adventurer laughed a second time, tipping back
+in his chair, his huge frame shaking with ponderous enjoyment. "Don't do
+anything you'd be sorry for," he parroted, sarcastical, the young man's
+recent admonition to the captain.
+
+"No fear, Calendar. I'm just going to use my advantage, which you won't
+dispute,"--the pistol described an eloquent circle, gleaming in the
+lamplight--"to levy on you a little legitimate blackmail. Don't be alarmed;
+I shan't hit you any harder than I have to."
+
+"What?" stammered Calendar, astonished. "What in hell _are_ you driving
+at?"
+
+"Recompense for my time and trouble. You've cost me a pretty penny, first
+and last, with your nasty little conspiracy--whatever it's all about. Now,
+needing the money, I purpose getting some of it back. I shan't precisely
+rob you, but this is a hold-up, all right.... Stryker," reproachfully, "I
+don't see my pearl pin."
+
+"I got it 'ere," responded the sailor hastily, fumbling with his tie.
+
+"Give it me, then." Kirkwood held out his hand and received the trinket.
+Then, moving over to the table, the young man, while abating nothing of
+his watchfulness, sorted out his belongings from the mass of odds and ends
+Stryker had disgorged. The tale of them was complete; the captain had
+obeyed him faithfully. Kirkwood looked up, pleased.
+
+"Now see here, Calendar; this collection of truck that I was robbed of by
+this resurrected Joe Miller here, cost me upwards of a hundred and fifty.
+I'm going to sell it to you at a bargain--say fifty dollars, two hundred
+and fifty francs."
+
+"The juice you are!" Calendar's eyes opened wide, partly in admiration.
+"D'you realize that this is next door to highway robbery, my young friend?"
+
+"High-seas piracy, if you prefer," assented Kirkwood with entire
+equanimity. "I'm going to have the money, and you're going to give it up.
+The transaction by any name would smell no sweeter, Calendar. Come--fork
+over!"
+
+"And if I refuse?"
+
+"I wouldn't refuse, if I were you."
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"The consequences would be too painful."
+
+"You mean you'd puncture me with that gun?"
+
+"Not unless you attack or attempt to follow me. I mean to say that the
+Belgian police are notoriously a most efficient body, and that I'll make
+it my duty and pleasure to introduce 'em to you, if you refuse. But you
+won't," Kirkwood added soothingly, "will you, Calendar?"
+
+"No." The adventurer had become suddenly thoughtful. "No, I won't. 'Glad to
+oblige you."
+
+He tilted his chair still farther back, straightening out his elephantine
+legs, inserted one fat hand into his trouser pocket and with some
+difficulty extracted a combined bill-fold and coin-purse, at once heavy
+with gold and bulky with notes. Moistening thumb and forefinger, "How'll
+you have it?" he inquired with a lift of his cunning eyes; and when
+Kirkwood had advised him, slowly counted out four fifty-franc notes, placed
+them near the edge of the table, and weighted them with five ten-franc
+pieces. And, "'That all?" he asked, replacing the pocket-book.
+
+"That will be about all. I leave you presently to your unholy devices, you
+and that gay dog, over there." The captain squirmed, reddening. "Just by
+way of precaution, however, I'll ask you to wait in here till I'm off."
+Kirkwood stepped backwards to the door of the captain's room, opened it and
+removed the key from the inside. "Please take Mulready in with you," he
+continued. "By the time you get out, I'll be clear of Antwerp. Please don't
+think of refusing me,--I really mean it!"
+
+The latter clause came sharply as Calendar seemed to hesitate, his weary,
+wary eyes glimmering with doubt. Kirkwood, watching him as a cat her prey,
+intercepted a lightning-swift sidelong glance that shifted from his face
+to the port lockers, forward. But the fat adventurer was evidently to a
+considerable degree deluded by the very child-like simplicity of Kirkwood's
+attitude. If the possibility that his altercation with Mulready had been
+overheard, crossed his mind, Calendar had little choice other than to
+accept the chance. Either way he moved, the risk was great; if he refused
+to be locked in the captain's room, there was the danger of the police,
+to which Kirkwood had convincingly drawn attention; if he accepted the
+temporary imprisonment, he took a risk with the gladstone bag. On the other
+hand, he had estimated Kirkwood's honesty as thorough-going, from their
+first interview; he had appraised him as a gentleman and a man of honor.
+And he did not believe the young man knew, after all ... Perplexed, at
+length he chose the smoother way, and with an indulgent lifting of eyebrows
+and fat shoulders, rose and waddled over to Mulready.
+
+"Oh, all right," he conceded with deep toleration in his tone for the
+idiosyncrasies of youth. "It's all the same to me, beau." He laughed a
+nervous laugh. "Come along and lend us a hand, Stryker."
+
+The latter glanced timidly at Kirkwood, his eyes pleading for leave to
+move; which Kirkwood accorded with an imperative nod and a fine flourish of
+the revolver. Promptly the captain, sprang to Calendar's assistance; and
+between the two of them, the one taking Mulready's head, the other his
+feet, they lugged him quickly into the stuffy little state-room. Kirkwood,
+watching and following to the threshold, inserted the key.
+
+"One word more," he counseled, a hand on the knob. "Don't forget I've
+warned you what'll happen if you try to break even with me."
+
+"Never fear, little one!" Calendar's laugh was nervously cheerful. "The
+Lord knows you're welcome."
+
+"Thank you 'most to death," responded Kirkwood politely. "Good-by--and
+good-by to you, Stryker. 'Glad to have humored your desire to meet me soon
+again."
+
+Kirkwood, turning the key in the lock, withdrew it and dropped it on the
+cabin table; at the same time he swept into his pocket the money he had
+extorted of Calendar. Then he paused an instant, listening; from the
+captain's room came a sound of murmurs and scuffling. He debated what they
+were about in there--but time pressed. Not improbably they, were crowding
+for place at the keyhole, he reflected, as he crossed to the port locker
+forward.
+
+He had its lid up in a twinkling, and in another had lifted out the
+well-remembered black gladstone bag.
+
+This seems to have been his first compound larceny.
+
+As if stimulated by some such reflection he sprang for the companionway,
+dropping the lid of the locker with a bang which must have been
+excruciatingly edifying to the men in the captain's room. Whatever their
+emotions, the bang was mocked by a mighty kick, shaking the door; which,
+Kirkwood reflected, opened outward and was held only by the frailest kind
+of a lock: it would not hold long.
+
+Spurred onward by a storm of curses, Stryker's voice chanting infuriated
+cacophony with Calendar's, Kirkwood leapt up the companionway even as the
+second tremendous kick threatened to shatter the panels. Heart in mouth, a
+chill shiver of guilt running up and down his spine, he gained the deck,
+cast loose the painter, drew in his rowboat, and dropped over the side;
+then, the gladstone bag nestling between his feet, sat down and bent to the
+oars.
+
+And doubts assailed him, pressing close upon the ebb of his
+excitement--doubts and fears innumerable.
+
+There was no longer a distinction to be drawn between himself and Calendar;
+no more could he esteem himself a better and more honest man than that
+accomplished swindler. He was not advised as to the Belgian code, but
+English law, he understood, made no allowance for the good intent of those
+caught in possession of stolen property; though he was acting with the most
+honorable motives in the world, the law, if he came within its cognizance,
+would undoubtedly place him on Calendar's plane and judge him by the same
+standard. To all intents and purposes he was a thief, and thief he would
+remain until the gladstone bag with its contents should be restored to its
+rightful owner.
+
+Voluntarily, then, he had stepped from the ranks of the hunters to those of
+the hunted. He now feared police interference as abjectly as did Calendar
+and his set of rogues; and Kirkwood felt wholly warranted in assuming that
+the adventurer, with his keen intelligence, would not handicap himself by
+ignoring this point. Indeed, if he were to be judged by what Kirkwood had
+inferred of his character, Calendar would let nothing whatever hinder him,
+neither fear of bodily hurt nor danger of apprehension at the hands of the
+police, from making a determined and savage play to regain possession of
+his booty.
+
+Well! (Kirkwood set his mouth savagely) Calendar should have a run for his
+money!
+
+For the present he could compliment himself with the knowledge that he had
+outwitted the rogues, had lifted the jewels and probably two-thirds of
+their armament; he had also the start, the knowledge of their criminal
+guilt and intent, and his own plans, to comfort him. As for the latter, he
+did not believe that Calendar would immediately fathom them; so he took
+heart of grace and tugged at the oars with a will, pulling directly for the
+city and permitting the current to drift him down-stream at its pleasure.
+There could be no more inexcusable folly than to return to the _Quai Steen_
+landing and (possibly) the arms of the despoiled boat-owner.
+
+At first he could hear crash after splintering crash sounding dully muffled
+from the cabin of the _Alethea_: a veritable devil's tattoo beaten out by
+the feet of the prisoners. Evidently the fastening was serving him better
+than he had dared hope. But as the black rushing waters widened between
+boat and brigantine, the clamor aboard the latter subsided, indicating
+that Calendar and Stryker had broken out or been released by the crew. In
+ignorance as to whether he were seen or being pursued, Kirkwood pulled on,
+winning in under the shadow of the quais and permitting the boat to drift
+down to a lonely landing on the edge of the dockyard quarter of Antwerp.
+
+Here alighting, he made the boat fast and, soothing his conscience with a
+surmise that its owner would find it there in the morning, strode swiftly
+over to the train line that runs along the embankment, swung aboard an
+adventitious car and broke his first ten-franc piece in order to pay his
+fare.
+
+The car made a leisurely progress up past the old Steen castle and the Quai
+landing, Kirkwood sitting quietly, the gladstone bag under his hand, a
+searching gaze sweeping the waterside. No sign of the adventurers rewarded
+him, but it was now all chance, all hazard. He had no more heart for
+confidence.
+
+They passed the H�tel du Commerce. Kirkwood stared up at its windows,
+wondering....
+
+A little farther on, a disengaged fiacre, its driver alert for possible
+fares, turned a corner into the esplanade. At sight of it Kirkwood,
+inspired, hopped nimbly off the tram-car and signaled the cabby. The latter
+pulled up and Kirkwood started to charge him with instructions; something
+which he did haltingly, hampered by a slight haziness of purpose. While
+thus engaged, and at rest in the stark glare of the street-lamps, with
+no chance of concealing himself, he was aware of a rising tumult in the
+direction of the landing, and glancing round, discovered a number of people
+running toward him. With no time to wonder whether or no he was really the
+object of the hue-and-cry, he tossed the driver three silver francs.
+
+"Gare Centrale!" he cried. "And drive like the devil!"
+
+Diving into the fiacre he shut the door and stuck his head out of the
+window, taking observations. A ragged fringe of silly rabble was bearing
+down upon them, with one or two gendarmes in the forefront, and a giant,
+who might or might not be Stryker, a close second. Furthermore, another
+cab seemed to have been requisitioned for the chase. His heart misgave him
+momentarily; but his driver had taken him at his word and generosity,
+and in a breath the fiacre had turned the corner on two wheels, and the
+glittering reaches of the embankment, drive and promenade, were blotted
+out, as if smudged with lamp-black, by the obscurity of a narrow and
+tortuous side street.
+
+He drew in his head the better to preserve his brains against further
+emergencies.
+
+After a block or two Kirkwood picked up the gladstone bag, gently opened
+the door, and put a foot on the step, pausing to look back. The other cab
+was pelting after him with all the enthusiasm of a hound on a fresh
+trail. He reflected that this mad progress through the thoroughfares of a
+civilized city would not long endure without police intervention. So he
+waited, watching his opportunity. The fiacre hurtled onward, the driver
+leaning forward from his box to urge the horse with lash of whip and
+tongue, entirely unconscious of his fare's intentions.
+
+Between two streets the mouth of a narrow and darksome byway flashed into
+view. Kirkwood threw wide the door, and leaped, trusting to the night to
+hide his stratagem, to luck to save his limbs. Neither failed him; in a
+twinkling he was on all fours in the mouth of the alley, and as he picked
+himself up, the second fiacre passed, Calendar himself poking a round bald
+poll out of the window to incite his driver's cupidity with promises of
+redoubled fare.
+
+Kirkwood mopped his dripping forehead and whistled low with dismay; it
+seemed that from that instant on it was to be a vendetta with a vengeance.
+Calendar, as he had foreseen, was stopping at nothing.
+
+At a dog trot he sped down the alley to the next street, on which he turned
+back--more sedately--toward the river, debouching on the esplanade just one
+block from the H�tel du Commerce. As he swung past the serried tables of a
+caf�, whatever fears he had harbored were banished by the discovery that
+the excitement occasioned by the chase had already subsided. Beneath the
+garish awnings the crowd was laughing and chattering, eating and sipping
+its bock with complete unconcern, heedless altogether of the haggard and
+shabby young man carrying a black hand-bag, with the black Shade of Care
+for company and a blacker threat of disaster dogging his footsteps. Without
+attracting any attention whatever, indeed, he mingled with the strolling
+crowds, making his way toward the H�tel du Commerce. Yet he was not at all
+at ease; his uneasy conscience invested the gladstone bag with a magnetic
+attraction for the public eye. To carry it unconcealed in his hand
+furnished him with a sensation as disturbing as though its worn black sides
+had been stenciled STOLEN! in letters of flame. He felt it rendered him a
+cynosure of public interest, an object of suspicion to the wide cold world,
+that the gaze which lit upon the bag traveled to his face only to espy
+thereon the brand of guilt.
+
+For ease of mind, presently, he turned into a convenient shop and spent ten
+invaluable francs for a hand satchel big enough to hold the gladstone bag.
+
+With more courage, now that he had the hateful thing under cover, he found
+and entered the H�tel du Commerce.
+
+In the little closet which served for an office, over a desk visibly
+groaning with the weight of an enormous and grimy registry book, a sleepy,
+fat, bland and good-natured woman of the Belgian _bourgeoisie_ presided,
+a benign and drowsy divinity of even-tempered courtesy. To his misleading
+inquiry for Monsieur Calendar she returned a cheerful permission to seek
+that gentleman for himself.
+
+"Three flights, M'sieu', in the front; suite seventeen it is. M'sieu' does
+not mind walking up?" she inquired.
+
+M'sieu' did not in the least, though by no strain of the imagination could
+it, be truthfully said that he walked up those steep and redolent stairways
+of the H�tel du Commerce d'Anvers. More literally, he flew with winged
+feet, spurning each third padded step with a force that raised a tiny cloud
+of fine white dust from the carpeting.
+
+Breathless, at last he paused at the top of the third flight. His heart
+was hammering, his pulses drumming like wild things; there was a queer
+constriction in his throat, a fire of hope in his heart alternating with
+the ice of doubt. Suppose she were not there! What if he were mistaken,
+what if he had misunderstood, what if Mulready and Calendar had referred to
+another lodging-house?
+
+Pausing, he gripped the balustrade fiercely, forcing his self-control,
+forcing himself to reflect that the girl (presuming, for the sake of
+argument, he were presently to find her) could not be expected to
+understand how ardently he had discounted this moment of meeting, or how
+strangely it affected him. Indeed, he himself was more than a little
+disturbed by the latter phenomenon, though he was no longer blind to its
+cause. But he was not to let her see the evidences of his agitation, lest
+she be frightened.
+
+Slowly schooling himself to assume a masque of illuding self-possession and
+composure, he passed down the corridor to the door whose panels wore the
+painted legend, 17; and there knocked.
+
+Believing that he overheard from within a sudden startled exclamation, he
+smiled patiently, tolerant of her surprise.
+
+Burning with impatience as with a fever, he endured a long minute's wait.
+
+Misgivings were prompting him to knock again and summon her by name, when
+he heard footfalls on the other side of the door, followed by a click of
+the lock. The door was opened grudgingly, a bare six inches.
+
+Of the alarmed expression in the eyes that stared into his, he took no
+account. His face lengthened a little as he stood there, dumb, panting,
+staring; and his heart sank, down, deep down into a gulf of disappointment,
+weighted sorely with chagrin.
+
+Then, of the two the first to recover countenance, he doffed his cap and
+bowed.
+
+"Good evening, Mrs. Hallam," he said with a rueful smile.
+
+
+
+
+XV
+
+
+REFUGEES
+
+Now, if Kirkwood's emotion was poignant, Mrs. Hallam's astonishment
+paralleled, and her relief transcended it. In order to understand this it
+must be remembered that while Mr. Kirkwood was aware of the lady's presence
+in Antwerp, on her part she had known nothing of him since he had so
+ungallantly fled her company in Sheerness. She seemed to anticipate that
+either Calendar or one of his fellows would be discovered at the door,--to
+have surmised it without any excessive degree of pleasure.
+
+Only briefly she hesitated, while her surprise swayed her; then with a
+hardening of the eyes and a curt little nod, "I'm sorry," she said with
+decision, "but I am busy and can't see you now, Mr. Kirkwood"; and
+attempted to shut the door in his face.
+
+Deftly Kirkwood forestalled her intention by inserting both a foot and a
+corner of the newly purchased hand-bag between the door and the jamb. He
+had dared too greatly to be thus dismissed. "Pardon me," he countered,
+unabashed, "but I wish to speak with Miss Calendar."
+
+"Dorothy," returned the lady with spirit, "is engaged...."
+
+She compressed her lips, knitted her brows, and with disconcerting
+suddenness thrust one knee against the obstructing hand-bag; Kirkwood,
+happily, anticipated the movement just in time to reinforce the bag with
+his own knee; it remained in place, the door standing open.
+
+The woman flushed angrily; their glances crossed, her eyes flashing with
+indignation; but Kirkwood's held them with a level and unyielding stare.
+
+"I intend," he told her quietly, "to see Miss Calendar. It's useless your
+trying to hinder me. We may as well understand each other, Madam, and I'll
+tell you now that if you wish to avoid a scene--"
+
+"Dorothy!" the woman called over her shoulder; "ring for the porter."
+
+"By all means," assented Kirkwood agreeably. "I'll send him for a
+gendarme."
+
+"You insolent puppy!"
+
+"Madam, your wit disarms me--"
+
+"What is the matter, Mrs. Hallam?" interrupted a voice from the other side
+of the door. "Who is it?"
+
+"Miss Calendar!" cried Kirkwood hastily, raising his voice.
+
+"Mr. Kirkwood!" the reply came on the instant. She knew his voice! "Please,
+Mrs. Hallam, I will see Mr. Kirkwood."
+
+"You have no time to waste with him, Dorothy," said the woman coldly. "I
+must insist--"
+
+"But you don't seem to understand; it is Mr. Kirkwood!" argued the
+girl,--as if he were ample excuse for any imprudence!
+
+Kirkwood's scant store of patience was by this time rapidly becoming
+exhausted. "I should advise you not to interfere any further, Mrs. Hallam,"
+he told her in a tone low, but charged with meaning.
+
+How much did he know? She eyed him an instant longer, in sullen suspicion,
+then swung open the door, yielding with what grace she could. "Won't you
+come in, Mr. Kirkwood?" she inquired with acidulated courtesy.
+
+"If you press me," he returned winningly, "how can I refuse? You are too
+good!"
+
+His impertinence disconcerted even himself; he wondered that she did not
+slap him as he passed her, entering the room; and felt that he deserved it,
+despite her attitude. But such thoughts could not long trouble one whose
+eyes were enchanted by the sight of Dorothy, confronting him in the middle
+of the dingy room, her hands, bristling dangerously with hat pins, busy
+with the adjustment of a small gray toque atop the wonder that was her
+hair. So vivacious and charming she seemed, so spirited and bright her
+welcoming smile, so foreign was she altogether to the picture of her, worn
+and distraught, that he had mentally conjured up, that he stopped in an
+extreme of disconcertion; and dropped the hand-bag, smiling sheepishly
+enough under her ready laugh--mirth irresistibly incited by the
+plainly-read play of expression on his mobile countenance.
+
+"You must forgive the unconventionally, Mr. Kirkwood," she apologized,
+needlessly enough, but to cover his embarrassment. "I am on the point of
+going out with Mrs. Hallam--and of course you are the last person on earth
+I expected to meet here!"
+
+"It's good to see you, Miss Calendar," he said simply, remarking with much
+satisfaction that her trim walking costume bore witness to her statement
+that she was prepared for the street.
+
+The girl glanced into a mirror, patted the small, bewitching hat an
+infinitesimal fraction of an inch to one side, and turned to him again,
+her hands free. One of them, small but cordial, rested in his grasp for an
+instant all too brief, the while he gazed earnestly into her face,
+noting with concern what the first glance had not shown him,--the almost
+imperceptible shadows beneath her eyes and cheek-bones, pathetic records of
+the hours the girl had spent, since last he had seen her, in company with
+his own grim familiar, Care.
+
+Not a little of care and distress of mind had seasoned her portion in those
+two weary days. He saw and knew it; and his throat tightened inexplicably,
+again, as it had out there in the corridor. Possibly the change in her had
+passed unchallenged by any eyes other than his, but even in the little time
+that he had spent in her society, the image of her had become fixed so
+indelibly on his memory, that he could not now be deceived. She was
+changed--a little, but changed; she had suffered, and was suffering and,
+forced by suffering, her nascent womanhood was stirring in the bud. The
+child that he had met in London, in Antwerp he found grown to woman's
+stature and slowly coming to comprehension of the nature of the change in
+herself,--the wonder of it glowing softly in her eyes....
+
+The clear understanding of mankind that is an appanage of woman's estate,
+was now added to the intuitions of a girl's untroubled heart. She could
+not be blind to the mute adoration of his gaze; nor could she resent it.
+Beneath it she colored and lowered her lashes.
+
+"I was about to go out," she repeated in confusion. "I--it's pleasant to
+see you, too."
+
+"Thank you," he stammered ineptly; "I--I--"
+
+"If Mr. Kirkwood will excuse us, Dorothy," Mrs. Hallam's sharp tones struck
+in discordantly, "we shall be glad to see him when we return to London."
+
+"I am infinitely complimented, Mrs. Hallam," Kirkwood assured her; and of
+the girl quickly: "You're going back home?" he asked.
+
+She nodded, with a faint, puzzled smile that included the woman. "After a
+little--not immediately. Mrs. Hallam is so kind--"
+
+"Pardon me," he interrupted; "but tell me one thing, please: have you any
+one in England to whom you can go without invitation and be welcomed and
+cared for--any friends or relations?"
+
+"Dorothy will be with me," Mrs. Hallam answered for her, with cold
+defiance.
+
+Deliberately insolent, Kirkwood turned his back to the woman. "Miss
+Calendar, will you answer my question for yourself?" he asked the girl
+pointedly.
+
+"Why--yes; several friends; none in London, but--"
+
+"Dorothy--"
+
+"One moment, Mrs. Hallam," Kirkwood flung crisply over his shoulder. "I'm
+going to ask you something rather odd, Miss Calendar," he continued,
+seeking the girl's eyes. "I hope--"
+
+"Dorothy, I--"
+
+"If you please, Mrs. Hallam," suggested the girl, with just the right shade
+of independence. "I wish to listen to Mr. Kirkwood. He has been very kind
+to me and has every right...." She turned to him again, leaving the woman
+breathless and speechless with anger.
+
+"You told me once," Kirkwood continued quickly, and, he felt, brazenly,
+"that you considered me kind, thoughtful and considerate. You know me
+no better to-day than you did then, but I want to beg you to trust me a
+little. Can you trust yourself to my protection until we reach your friends
+in England?"
+
+"Why, I--" the girl faltered, taken by surprise.
+
+"Mr. Kirkwood!" cried Mrs. Hallam angrily, finding her voice.
+
+Kirkwood turned to meet her onslaught with a mien grave, determined,
+unflinching. "Please do not interfere, Madam," he said quietly.
+
+"You are impertinent, sir! Dorothy, I forbid you to listen to this person!"
+
+The girl flushed, lifting her chin a trifle. "Forbid?" she repeated
+wonderingly.
+
+Kirkwood was quick to take advantage of her resentment. "Mrs. Hallam is not
+fitted to advise you," he insisted, "nor can she control your actions. It
+must already have occurred to you that you're rather out of place in the
+present circumstances. The men who have brought you hither, I believe you
+already see through, to some extent. Forgive my speaking plainly ... But
+that is why you have accepted Mrs. Hallam's offer of protection. Will you
+take my word for it, when I tell you she has not your right interests at
+heart, but the reverse? I happen to know, Miss Calendar, and I--"
+
+"How dare you, sir?"
+
+Flaming with rage, Mrs. Hallam put herself bodily between them, confronting
+Kirkwood in white-lipped desperation, her small, gloved hands clenched and
+quivering at her sides, her green eyes dangerous.
+
+But Kirkwood could silence her; and he did. "Do you wish me to speak
+frankly, Madam? Do you wish me to tell what I know--and all I know--," with
+rising emphasis,--"of your social status and your relations with Calendar
+and Mulready? I promise you that if you wish it, or force me to it...."
+
+But he had need to say nothing further; the woman's eyes wavered before his
+and a little sob of terror forced itself between her shut teeth. Kirkwood
+smiled grimly, with a face of brass, impenetrable, inflexible. And suddenly
+she turned from him with indifferent bravado.
+
+"As Mr. Kirkwood says, Dorothy," she said in her high, metallic voice, "I
+have no authority over you. But if you're silly enough to consider for a
+moment this fellow's insulting suggestion, if you're fool enough to go with
+him, unchaperoned through Europe and imperil your--"
+
+"Mrs. Hallam!" Kirkwood cut her short with a menacing tone.
+
+"Why, then, I wash my hands of you," concluded the woman defiantly. "Make
+your choice, my child," she added with a meaning laugh and moved away,
+humming a snatch from a French _chanson_ which brought the hot blood to
+Kirkwood's face.
+
+But the girl did not understand; and he was glad of that. "You may judge
+between us," he appealed to her directly, once more. "I can only offer
+you my word of honor as an American gentleman that you shall be landed in
+England, safe and sound, by the first available steamer--"
+
+"There's no need to say more, Mr. Kirkwood," Dorothy informed him quietly.
+"I have already decided. I think I begin to understand some things clearly,
+now.... If you're ready, we will go."
+
+From the window, where she stood, holding the curtains back and staring
+out, Mrs. Hallam turned with a curling lip.
+
+[Illustration: From the window, Mrs. Hallam turned with a curling lip.]
+
+"'The honor of an American gentleman,'" she quoted with a stinging sneer;
+"I'm sure I wish you comfort of it, child!"
+
+"We must make haste, Miss Calendar," said Kirkwood, ignoring the
+implication. "Have you a traveling-bag?"
+
+She silently indicated a small valise, closed and strapped, on a table by
+the bed, and immediately passed out into the hall. Kirkwood took the case
+containing the gladstone bag in one hand, the girl's valise in the other,
+and followed.
+
+As he turned the head of the stairs he looked back. Mrs. Hallam was still
+at the window, her back turned. From her very passiveness he received an
+impression of something ominous and forbidding; if she had lost a trick or
+two of the game she played, she still held cards, was not at the end of her
+resources. She stuck in his imagination for many an hour as a force to be
+reckoned with.
+
+For the present he understood that she was waiting to apprise Calendar and
+Mulready of their flight. With the more haste, then, he followed Dorothy
+down the three flights, through the tiny office, where Madam sat sound
+asleep at her over-burdened desk, and out.
+
+Opposite the door they were fortunate enough to find a fiacre drawn up in
+waiting at the curb. Kirkwood opened the door for the girl to enter.
+
+"Gare du Sud," he directed the driver. "Drive your fastest--double fare for
+quick time!"
+
+The driver awoke with a start from profound reverie, looked Kirkwood over,
+and bowed with gesticulative palms.
+
+"M'sieu', I am desolated, but engaged!" he protested.
+
+"Precisely." Kirkwood deposited the two bags on the forward seat of the
+conveyance, and stood back to convince the man. "Precisely," said he,
+undismayed. "The lady who engaged you is remaining for a time; I will
+settle her bill."
+
+"Very well, M'sieu'!" The driver disclaimed responsibility and accepted the
+favor of the gods with a speaking shrug. "M'sieu' said the Gare du Sud? _En
+voiture_!"
+
+Kirkwood jumped in and shut the door; the vehicle drew slowly away from
+the curb, then with gratifying speed hammered up-stream on the embankment.
+Bending forward, elbows on knees, Kirkwood watched the sidewalks narrowly,
+partly to cover the girl's constraint, due to Mrs. Hallam's attitude,
+partly on the lookout for Calendar and his confederates. In a few moments
+they passed a public clock.
+
+"We've missed the Flushing boat," he announced. "I'm making a try for the
+Hoek van Holland line. We may possibly make it. I know that it leaves by
+the Sud Quai, and that's all I do know," he concluded with an apologetic
+laugh.
+
+"And if we miss that?" asked the girl, breaking silence for the first time
+since they had left the hotel.
+
+"We'll take the first train out of Antwerp."
+
+"Where to?"
+
+"Wherever the first train goes, Miss Calendar.... The main point is to get
+away to-night. That we must do, no matter where we land, or how we get
+there. To-morrow we can plan with more certainty."
+
+"Yes..." Her assent was more a sigh than a word.
+
+The cab, dashing down the Rue Leopold de Wael, swung into the Place du Sud,
+before the station. Kirkwood, acutely watchful, suddenly thrust head and
+shoulders out of his window (fortunately it was the one away from the
+depot), and called up to the driver.
+
+"Don't stop! Gare Centrale now--and treble fare!"
+
+"_Oui, M'sieu'! Allons!_"
+
+The whip cracked and the horse swerved sharply round the corner into the
+Avenue du Sud. The young man, with a hushed exclamation, turned in his
+seat, lifting the flap over the little peephole in the back of the
+carriage.
+
+He had not been mistaken. Calendar was standing in front of the station;
+and it was plain to be seen, from his pose, that the madly careering fiacre
+interested him more than slightly. Irresolute, perturbed, the man took
+a step or two after it, changed his mind, and returned to his post of
+observation.
+
+Kirkwood dropped the flap and turned back to find the girl's wide eyes
+searching his face. He said nothing.
+
+"What was that?" she asked after a patient moment.
+
+"Your father, Miss Calendar," he returned uncomfortably.
+
+There fell a short pause; then: "Why--will you tell me--is it necessary to
+run away from my father, Mr. Kirkwood?" she demanded, with a moving little
+break in her voice.
+
+Kirkwood hesitated. It were unfeeling to tell her why; yet it was essential
+that she should know, however painful the knowledge might prove to her.
+
+And she was insistent; he might not dodge the issue. "Why?" she repeated as
+he paused.
+
+"I wish you wouldn't press me for an answer just now, Miss Calendar."
+
+"Don't you think I had better know?"
+
+Instinctively he inclined his head in assent.
+
+"Then why--?"
+
+Kirkwood bent forward and patted the flank of the satchel that held the
+gladstone bag.
+
+"What does that mean, Mr. Kirkwood?"
+
+"That I have the jewels," he told her tersely, looking straight ahead.
+
+At his shoulder he heard a low gasp of amazement and incredulity
+commingled.
+
+"But--! How did you get them? My father deposited them in bank this
+morning?"
+
+"He must have taken them out again.... I got them on board the Alethea,
+where your father was conferring with Mulready and Captain Stryker."
+
+"The Alethea!"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"You took them from those men?--you!... But didn't my father--?"
+
+"I had to persuade him," said Kirkwood simply.
+
+"But there were three of them against you!"
+
+"Mulready wasn't--ah--feeling very well, and Stryker's a coward. They gave
+me no trouble. I locked them in Stryker's room, lifted the bag of jewels,
+and came away.... I ought to tell you that they were discussing the
+advisability of sailing away without you--leaving you here, friendless and
+without means. That's why I considered it my duty to take a hand.... I
+don't like to tell you this so brutally, but you ought to know, and I can't
+see how to tone it down," he concluded awkwardly.
+
+"I understand...."
+
+But for some moments she did not speak. He avoided looking at her.
+
+The fiacre, rolling at top speed but smoothly on the broad avenues that
+encircle the ancient city, turned into the Avenue de Keyser, bringing into
+sight the Gare Centrale.
+
+"You don't--k-know--" began the girl without warning, in a voice gusty with
+sobs.
+
+"Steady on!" said Kirkwood gently. "I do know, but don't let's talk about
+it now. We'll be at the station in a minute, and I'll get out and see
+what's to be done about a train, if neither Mulready or Stryker are about.
+You stay in the carriage.... No!" He changed his mind suddenly. "I'll not
+risk losing you again. It's a risk we'll have to run in company."
+
+"Please!" she agreed brokenly.
+
+The fiacre slowed up and stopped.
+
+"Are you all right, Miss Calendar?" Kirkwood asked.
+
+The girl sat up, lifting her head proudly. "I am quite ready," she said,
+steadying her voice.
+
+Kirkwood reconnoitered through the window, while the driver was descending.
+
+"Gare Centrale, M'sieu'," he said, opening the door.
+
+"No one in sight," Kirkwood told the girl. "Come, please."
+
+He got out and gave her his hand, then paid the driver, picked up the two
+bags, and hurried with Dorothy into the station, to find in waiting a
+string of cars into which people were moving at leisurely rate. His
+inquiries at the ticket-window developed the fact that it was the 22:26 for
+Brussels, the last train leaving the Gare Centrale that night, and due to
+start in ten minutes.
+
+The information settled their plans for once and all; Kirkwood promptly
+secured through tickets, also purchasing "Reserve" supplementary tickets
+which entitled them to the use of those modern corridor coaches which take
+the place of first-class compartments on the Belgian state railways.
+
+"It's a pleasure," said Kirkwood lightly, as he followed the girl into one
+of these, "to find one's self in a common-sense sort of a train again.
+'Feels like home." He put their luggage in one of the racks and sat down
+beside her, chattering with simulated cheerfulness in a vain endeavor to
+lighten her evident depression of spirit. "I always feel like a traveling
+anachronism in one of your English trains," he said. "You can't
+appreciate--"
+
+The girl smiled bravely.... "And after Brussels?" she inquired.
+
+"First train for the coast," he said promptly. "Dover, Ostend,
+Boulogne,--whichever proves handiest, no matter which, so long as it gets
+us on English soil without undue delay."
+
+She said "Yes" abstractedly, resting an elbow on the window-sill and her
+chin in her palm, to stare with serious, sweet brown eyes out into the
+arc-smitten night that hung beneath the echoing roof.
+
+Kirkwood fidgeted in despite of the constraint he placed himself under, to
+be still and not disturb her needlessly. Impatience and apprehension of
+misfortune obsessed his mental processes in equal degree. The ten minutes
+seemed interminable that elapsed ere the grinding couplings advertised the
+imminence of their start.
+
+The guards began to bawl, the doors to slam, belated travelers to dash
+madly for the coaches. The train gave a preliminary lurch ere settling down
+to its league-long inland dash.
+
+Kirkwood, in a fever of hope and an ague of fear, saw a man sprint
+furiously across the platform and throw himself on the forward steps of
+their coach, on the very instant of the start.
+
+Presently he entered by the forward door and walked slowly through,
+narrowly inspecting the various passengers. As he approached the seats
+occupied by Kirkwood and Dorothy Calendar, his eyes encountered the young
+man's, and he leered evilly. Kirkwood met the look with one that was like a
+kick, and the fellow passed with some haste into the car behind.
+
+"Who was that?" demanded the girl, without moving her head.
+
+"How did you know?" he asked, astonished. "You didn't look--"
+
+"I saw your knuckles whiten beneath the skin.... Who was it?"
+
+"Hobbs," he acknowledged bitterly; "the mate of the _Alethea_."
+
+"I know.... And you think--?"
+
+"Yes. He must have been ashore when I was on board the brigantine; he
+certainly wasn't in the cabin. Evidently they hunted him up, or ran across
+him, and pressed him into service.... You see, they're watching every
+outlet.... But we'll win through, never fear!"
+
+
+
+
+XVI
+
+
+TRAVELS WITH A CHAPERON
+
+The train, escaping the outskirts of the city, remarked the event with an
+exultant shriek, then settled down, droning steadily, to night-devouring
+flight. In the corridor-car the few passengers disposed themselves to
+drowse away the coming hour--the short hour's ride that, in these piping
+days of frantic traveling, separates Antwerp from the capital city of
+Belgium.
+
+A guard, slamming gustily in through the front door, reeled unsteadily down
+the aisle. Kirkwood, rousing from a profound reverie, detained him with a
+gesture and began to interrogate him in French. When he departed presently
+it transpired that the girl was unaquainted with that tongue.
+
+"I didn't understand, you know," she told him with a slow, shy smile.
+
+"I was merely questioning him about the trains from Brussels to-night. We
+daren't stop, you see; we must go on,--keep Hobbs on the jump and lose him,
+if possible. There's where our advantage lies--in having only Hobbs to deal
+with. He's not particularly intellectual; and we've two heads to his one,
+besides. If we can prevent him from guessing our destination and wiring
+back to Antwerp, we may win away. You understand?"
+
+"Perfectly," she said, brightening. "And what do you purpose doing now?"
+
+"I can't tell yet. The guard's gone to get me some information about the
+night trains on other lines. In the meantime, don't fret about Hobbs; I'll
+answer for Hobbs."
+
+"I shan't be worried," she said simply, "with you here...."
+
+Whatever answer he would have made he was obliged to postpone because of
+the return of the guard, with a handful of time-tables; and when, rewarded
+with a modest gratuity, the man had gone his way, and Kirkwood turned again
+to the girl, she had withdrawn her attention for the time.
+
+Unconscious of his bold regard, she was dreaming, her thoughts at
+loose-ends, her eyes studying the incalculable depths of blue-black night
+that swirled and eddied beyond the window-glass. The most shadowy of smiles
+touched her lips, the faintest shade of deepened color rested on her
+cheeks.... She was thinking of--him? As long as he dared, the young man,
+his heart in his own eyes, watched her greedily, taking a miser's joy of
+her youthful beauty, striving with all his soul to analyze the enigma of
+that most inscrutable smile.
+
+It baffled him. He could not say of what she thought; and told himself
+bitterly that it was not for him, a pauper, to presume a place in her
+meditations. He must not forget his circumstances, nor let her tolerance
+render him oblivious to his place, which must be a servant's, not a
+lover's.
+
+The better to convince himself of this, he plunged desperately into
+a forlorn attempt to make head or tail of Belgian railway schedule,
+complicated as these of necessity are by the alternation from normal
+time notation to the abnormal system sanctioned by the government, and
+_vice-versa_, with every train that crosses a boundary line of the state.
+
+So preoccupied did he become in this pursuit that he was subconsciously
+impressed that the girl had spoken twice, ere he could detach his interest
+from the exasperatingly inconclusive and incoherent cohorts of ranked
+figures.
+
+"Can't you find out anything?" Dorothy was asking.
+
+"Precious little," he grumbled. "I'd give my head for a Bradshaw! Only it
+wouldn't be a fair exchange.... There seems to be an express for
+Bruges leaving the Gare du Nord, Brussels, at fifty-five minutes after
+twenty-three o'clock; and if I'm not mistaken, that's the latest train out
+of Brussels and the earliest we can catch,... if we _can_ catch it. I've
+never been in Brussels, and Heaven only knows how long it would take us to
+cab it from the Gare du Midi to the Nord."
+
+In this statement, however, Mr. Kirkwood was fortunately mistaken; not
+only Heaven, it appeared, had cognizance of the distance between the two
+stations. While Kirkwood was still debating the question, with pessimistic
+tendencies, the friendly guard had occasion to pass through the coach; and,
+being tapped, yielded the desired information with entire tractability.
+
+It would be a cab-ride of perhaps ten minutes. Monsieur, however, would
+serve himself well if he offered the driver an advance tip as an incentive
+to speedy driving. Why? Why because (here the guard consulted his watch;
+and Kirkwood very keenly regretted the loss of his own)--because this
+train, announced to arrive in Brussels some twenty minutes prior to the
+departure of that other, was already late. But yes--a matter of some ten
+minutes. Could that not be made up? Ah, Monsieur, but who should say?
+
+The guard departed, doubtless with private views as to the madness of all
+English-speaking travelers.
+
+"And there we are!" commented Kirkwood in factitious resignation. "If we're
+obliged to stop overnight in Brussels, our friends will be on our back
+before we can get out in the morning, if they have to come by motor-car."
+He reflected bitterly on the fact that with but a little more money at
+his disposal, he too could hire a motor-car and cry defiance to their
+persecutors. "However," he amended, with rising spirits, "so much the
+better our chance of losing Mr. Hobbs. We must be ready to drop off the
+instant the train stops."
+
+He began to unfold another time-table, threatening again to lose himself
+completely; and was thrown into the utmost confusion by the touch of
+the girl's hand, in appeal placed lightly on his own. And had she been
+observant, she might have seen a second time his knuckles whiten beneath
+the skin as he asserted his self-control--though this time not over his
+temper.
+
+His eyes, dumbly eloquent, turned to meet hers. She was smiling.
+
+"Please!" she iterated, with the least imperative pressure on his hand,
+pushing the folder aside.
+
+"I beg pardon?" he muttered blankly.
+
+"Is it quite necessary, now, to study those schedules? Haven't you decided
+to try for the Bruges express?"
+
+"Why yes, but--"
+
+"Then please don't leave me to my thoughts all the time, Mr. Kirkwood."
+There was a tremor of laughter in her voice, but her eyes were grave and
+earnest. "I'm very weary of thinking round in a circle--and that," she
+concluded, with a nervous little laugh, "is all I've had to do for days!"
+
+"I'm afraid I'm very stupid," he humored her. "This is the second time, you
+know, in the course of a very brief acquaintance, that you have found it
+necessary to remind me to talk to you."
+
+"Oh-h!" She brightened. "That night, at the Pless? But that was _ages_
+ago!"
+
+"It seems so," he admitted.
+
+"So much has happened!"
+
+"Yes," he assented vaguely.
+
+She watched him, a little piqued by his absent-minded mood, for a moment;
+then, and not without a trace of malice: "Must I tell you again what to
+talk about?" she asked.
+
+"Forgive me. I was thinking about, if not talking to, you.... I've been
+wondering just why it was that you left the _Alethea_ at Queensborough, to
+go on by steamer."
+
+And immediately he was sorry that his tactless query had swung the
+conversation to bear upon her father, the thought of whom could not but
+prove painful to her. But it was too late to mend matters; already her
+evanescent flush of amusement had given place to remembrance.
+
+"It was on my father's account," she told him in a steady voice, but with
+averted eyes; "he is a very poor sailor, and the promise of a rough passage
+terrified him. I believe there was a difference of opinion about it, he
+disputing with Mr. Mulready and Captain Stryker. That was just after we had
+left the anchorage. They both insisted that it was safer to continue by
+the _Alethea_, but he wouldn't listen to them, and in the end had his way.
+Captain Stryker ran the brigantine into the mouth of the Medway and put us
+ashore just in time to catch the steamer."
+
+"Were you sorry for the change?"
+
+"I?" She shuddered slightly. "Hardly! I think I hated the ship from the
+moment I set foot on board her. It was a dreadful place; it was all
+night-marish, that night, but it seemed most terrible on the _Alethea_ with
+Captain Stryker and that abominable Mr. Hobbs. I think that my unhappiness
+had as much to do with my father's insistence on the change, as anything.
+He ... he was very thoughtful, most of the time."
+
+Kirkwood shut his teeth on what he knew of the blackguard.
+
+"I don't know why," she continued, wholly without affectation, "but I was
+wretched from the moment you left me in the cab, to wait while you went in
+to see Mrs. Hallam. And when we left you, at Bermondsey Old Stairs, after
+what you had said to me, I felt--I hardly know what to say--abandoned, in a
+way."
+
+"But you were with your father, in his care--"
+
+"I know, but I was getting confused. Until then the excitement had kept me
+from thinking. But you made me think. I began to wonder, to question ...
+But what could I do?" She signified her helplessness with a quick and
+dainty movement of her hands. "He is my father; and I'm not yet of age, you
+know."
+
+"I thought so," he confessed, troubled. "It's very inconsiderate of you,
+you must admit."
+
+"I don't understand..."
+
+"Because of the legal complication. I've no doubt your father can 'have
+the law on me'"--Kirkwood laughed uneasily--"for taking you from his
+protection."
+
+"Protection!" she echoed warmly. "If you call it that!"
+
+"Kidnapping," he said thoughtfully: "I presume that'd be the charge."
+
+"Oh!" She laughed the notion to scorn. "Besides, they must catch us first,
+mustn't they?"
+
+"Of course; and"--with a simulation of confidence sadly deceitful--"they
+shan't, Mr. Hobbs to the contrary notwithstanding."
+
+"You make me share your confidence, against my better judgment."
+
+"I wish your better judgment would counsel you to share your confidence
+with me," he caught her up. "If you would only tell me what it's all about,
+as far as you know, I'd be better able to figure out what we ought to do."
+
+Briefly the girl sat silent, staring before her with sweet somber eyes.
+Then, "In the very beginning," she told him with a conscious laugh,--"this
+sounds very story-bookish, I know--in the very beginning, George Burgoyne
+Calendar, an American, married his cousin a dozen times removed, and an
+Englishwoman, Alice Burgoyne Hallam."
+
+"Hallam!"
+
+"Wait, please." She sat up, bending forward and frowning down upon her
+interlacing, gloved fingers; she was finding it difficult to say what she
+must. Kirkwood, watching hungrily the fair drooping head, the flawless
+profile clear and radiant against the night-blackened window, saw hot
+signals of shame burning on her cheek and throat and forehead.
+
+"But never mind," he began awkwardly.
+
+"No," she told him with decision. "Please let me go on...." She continued,
+stumbling, trusting to his sympathy to bridge the gaps in her narrative.
+"My father ... There was trouble of some sort.... At all events, he
+disappeared when I was a baby. My mother ... died. I was brought up in
+the home of my great-uncle, Colonel George Burgoyne, of the Indian
+Army--retired. My mother had been his favorite niece, they say; I presume
+that was why he cared for me. I grew up in his home in Cornwall; it was my
+home, just as he was my father in everything but fact.
+
+"A year ago he died, leaving me everything,--the town house in Frognall
+Street, his estate in Cornwall: everything was willed to me on condition
+that I must never live with my father, nor in any way contribute to his
+support. If I disobeyed, the entire estate without reserve was to go to his
+nearest of kin.... Colonel Burgoyne was unmarried and had no children."
+
+The girl paused, lifting to Kirkwood's face her eyes, clear, fearless,
+truthful. "I never was given to understand that there was anybody who might
+have inherited, other than myself," she declared.
+
+"I see..."
+
+"Last week I received a letter, signed with my father's name, begging me to
+appoint an interview with him in London. I did so,--guess how gladly! I was
+alone in the world, and he, my father, whom I had never thought to see....
+We met at his hotel, the Pless. He wanted me to come and live with
+him,--said that he was growing old and lonely and needed a daughter's love
+and care. He told me that he had made a fortune in America and was amply
+able to provide for us both. As for my inheritance, he persuaded me that it
+was by rights the property of Frederick Hallam, Mrs. Hallam's son."
+
+"I have met the young gentleman," interpolated Kirkwood.
+
+"His name was new to me, but my father assured me that he was the next of
+kin mentioned in Colonel Burgoyne's will, and convinced me that I had no
+real right to the property.... After all, he was my father; I agreed; I
+could not bear the thought of wronging anybody. I was to give up everything
+but my mother's jewels. It seems,--my father said,--I don't--I can't
+believe it now--"
+
+She choked on a little, dry sob. It was some time before she seemed able to
+continue.
+
+"I was told that my great-uncle's collection of jewels had been my mother's
+property. He had in life a passion for collecting jewels, and it had been
+his whim to carry them with him, wherever he went. When he died in Frognall
+Street, they were in the safe by the head of his bed. I, in my grief, at
+first forgot them, and then afterwards carelessly put off removing them.
+
+"To come back to my father: Night before last we were to call on Mrs.
+Hallam. It was to be our last night in England; we were to sail for the
+Continent on the private yacht of a friend of my father's, the next
+morning.... This is what I was told--and believed, you understand.
+
+"That night Mrs. Hallam was dining at another table at the Pless, it seems.
+I did not then know her. When leaving, she put a note on our table, by my
+father's elbow. I was astonished beyond words.... He seemed much agitated,
+told me that he was called away on urgent business, a matter of life and
+death, and begged me to go alone to Frognall Street, get the jewels and
+meet him at Mrs. Hallam's later.... I wasn't altogether a fool, for I began
+dimly to suspect, then, that something was wrong; but I was a fool, for I
+consented to do as he desired. You understand--you know--?"
+
+"I do, indeed," replied Kirkwood grimly. "I understand a lot of things now
+that I didn't five minutes ago. Please let me think..."
+
+But the time he took for deliberation was short. He had hoped to find a way
+to spare her, by sparing Calendar; but momentarily he was becoming more
+impressed with the futility of dealing with her save in terms of candor,
+merciful though they might seem harsh.
+
+"I must tell you," he said, "that you have been outrageously misled,
+swindled and deceived. I have heard from your father's own lips that Mrs.
+Hallam was to pay him two thousand pounds for keeping you out of England
+and losing you your inheritance. I'm inclined to question, furthermore, the
+assertion that these jewels were your mother's. Frederick Hallam was the
+man who followed you into the Frognall Street house and attacked me on the
+stairs; Mrs. Hallam admits that he went there to get the jewels. But he
+didn't want anybody to know it."
+
+"But that doesn't prove--"
+
+"Just a minute." Rapidly and concisely Kirkwood recounted the events
+wherein he had played a part, subsequent to the adventure of Bermondsey Old
+Stairs. He was guilty of but one evasion; on one point only did he slur the
+truth: he conceived it his honorable duty to keep the girl in ignorance of
+his straitened circumstances; she was not to be distressed by knowledge of
+his distress, nor could he tolerate the suggestion of seeming to play for
+her sympathy. It was necessary, then, to invent a motive to excuse his
+return to 9, Frognall Street. I believe he chose to exaggerate the
+inquisitiveness of his nature and threw in for good measure a desire
+to recover a prized trinket of no particular moment, esteemed for its
+associations, and so forth. But whatever the fabrication, it passed muster;
+to the girl his motives seemed less important than the discoveries that
+resulted from them.
+
+"I am afraid," he concluded the summary of the confabulation he had
+overheard at the skylight of the Alethea's cabin, "you'd best make up your
+mind that your father--"
+
+"Yes," whispered the girl huskily; and turned her face to the window, a
+quivering muscle in the firm young throat alone betraying her emotion.
+
+"It's a bad business," he pursued relentlessly: "bad all round. Mulready,
+in your father's pay, tries to have him arrested, the better to rob him.
+Mrs. Hallam, to secure your property for that precious pet, Freddie,
+connives at, if she doesn't instigate, a kidnapping. Your father takes her
+money to deprive you of yours,--which could profit him nothing so long as
+you remained in lawful possession of it; and at the same time he conspires
+to rob, through you, the rightful owners--if they are rightful owners. And
+if they are, why does Freddie Hallam go like a thief in the night to secure
+property that's his beyond dispute?... I don't really think you owe your
+father any further consideration."
+
+He waited patiently. Eventually, "No-o," the girl sobbed assent.
+
+"It's this way: Calendar, counting on your sparing him in the end, is going
+to hound us. He's doing it now: there's Hobbs in the next car, for proof.
+Until these jewels are returned, whether to Frognall Street or to young
+Hallam, we're both in danger, both thieves in the sight of the law. And
+your father knows that, too. There's no profit to be had by discounting the
+temper of these people; they're as desperate a gang of swindlers as ever
+lived. They'll have those jewels if they have to go as far as murder--"
+
+"Mr. Kirkwood!" she deprecated, in horror.
+
+He wagged his head stubbornly, ominously. "I've seen them in the raw.
+They're hot on our trail now; ten to one, they'll be on our backs before we
+can get across the Channel. Once in England we will be comparatively safe.
+Until then ... But I'm a brute--I'm frightening you!"
+
+"You are, dreadfully," she confessed in a tremulous voice.
+
+"Forgive me. If you look at the dark side first, the other seems all the
+brighter. Please don't worry; we'll pull through with flying colors, or my
+name's not Philip Kirkwood!"
+
+"I have every faith in you," she informed him, flawlessly sincere. "When
+I think of all you've done and dared for me, on the mere suspicion that I
+needed your help--"
+
+"We'd best be getting ready," he interrupted hastily. "Here's Brussels."
+
+It was so. Lights, in little clusters and long, wheeling lines, were
+leaping out of the darkness and flashing back as the train rumbled through
+the suburbs of the little Paris of the North. Already the other passengers
+were bestirring themselves, gathering together wraps and hand luggage, and
+preparing for the journey's end.
+
+Rising, Kirkwood took down their two satchels from the overhead rack,
+and waited, in grim abstraction planning and counterplanning against the
+machinations in whose wiles they two had become so perilously entangled.
+
+Primarily, there was Hobbs to be dealt with; no easy task, for Kirkwood
+dared not resort to violence nor in any way invite the attention of the
+authorities; and threats would be an idle waste of breath, in the case of
+that corrupt and malignant, little cockney, himself as keen as any needle,
+adept in all the artful resources of the underworld whence he had sprung,
+and further primed for action by that master rogue, Calendar.
+
+The train was pulling slowly into the station when he reluctantly abandoned
+his latest unfeasible scheme for shaking off the little Englishman,
+and concluded that their salvation was only to be worked out through
+everlasting vigilance, incessant movement, and the favor of the blind
+goddess, Fortune. There was comfort of a sort in the reflection that
+the divinity of chance is at least blind; her favors are impartially
+distributed; the swing of the wheel of the world is not always to the
+advantage of the wrongdoer and the scamp.
+
+He saw nothing of Hobbs as they alighted and hastened from the station, and
+hardly had time to waste looking for him, since their train had failed to
+make up the precious ten minutes. Consequently he dismissed the fellow from
+his thoughts until--with Brussels lingering in their memories a garish
+vision of brilliant streets and glowing caf�s, glimpsed furtively
+from their cab windows during its wild dash over the broad mid-city,
+boulevards--at midnight they settled themselves in a carriage of the Bruges
+express. They were speeding along through the open country with a noisy
+clatter; then a minute's investigation sufficed to discover the mate of the
+_Alethea_ serenely ensconced in the coach behind.
+
+The little man seemed rarely complacent, and impudently greeted Kirkwood's
+scowling visage, as the latter peered through the window in the coach-door,
+with a smirk and a waggish wave of his hand. The American by main strength
+of will-power mastered an impulse to enter and wring his neck, and returned
+to the girl, more disturbed than he cared to let her know.
+
+There resulted from his review of the case but one plan for outwitting Mr.
+Hobbs, and that lay in trusting to his confidence that Kirkwood and Dorothy
+Calendar would proceed as far toward Ostend as the train would take
+them--namely, to the limit of the run, Bruges.
+
+Thus inspired, Kirkwood took counsel with the girl, and when the train
+paused at Ghent, they made an unostentatious exit from their coach, finding
+themselves, when the express had rolled on into the west, upon a station
+platform in a foreign city at nine minutes past one o'clock in the
+morning--but at length without their shadow. Mr. Hobbs had gone on to
+Bruges.
+
+Kirkwood sped his journeyings with an unspoken malediction, and collected
+himself to cope with a situation which was to prove hardly more happy for
+them than the espionage they had just eluded. The primal flush of triumph
+which had saturated the American's humor on this signal success, proved but
+fictive and transitory when inquiry of the station attendants educed the
+information that the two earliest trains to be obtained were the 5:09 for
+Dunkerque and the 5:37 for Ostend. A minimum delay of four hours was to be
+endured in the face of many contingent features singularly unpleasant to
+contemplate. The station waiting-room was on the point of closing for the
+night, and Kirkwood, already alarmed by the rapid ebb of the money he had
+had of Calendar, dared not subject his finances to the strain of a night's
+lodging at one of Ghent's hotels. He found himself forced to be cruel to
+be kind to the girl, and Dorothy's cheerful acquiescence to their sole
+alternative of tramping the street until daybreak did nothing to alleviate
+Kirkwood's exasperation.
+
+It was permitted them to occupy a bench outside the station. There the
+girl, her head pillowed on the treasure bag, napped uneasily, while
+Kirkwood plodded restlessly to and fro, up and down the platform, communing
+with the Shade of Care and addling his poor, weary wits with the problem
+of the future,--not so much his own as the future of the unhappy child for
+whose welfare he had assumed responsibility. Dark for both of them, in his
+understanding To-morrow loomed darkest for her.
+
+Not until the gray, formless light of the dawn-dusk was wavering over the
+land, did he cease his perambulations. Then a gradual stir of life in the
+city streets, together with the appearance of a station porter or two,
+opening the waiting-rooms and preparing them against the traffic of the
+day, warned him that he must rouse his charge. He paused and stood over
+her, reluctant to disturb her rest, such as it was, his heart torn with
+compassion for her, his soul embittered by the cruel irony of their estate.
+
+If what he understood were true, a king's ransom was secreted within the
+cheap, imitation-leather satchel which served her for a pillow. But it
+availed her nothing for her comfort. If what he believed were true, she was
+absolute mistress of that treasure of jewels; yet that night she had been
+forced to sleep on a hard, uncushioned bench, in the open air, and this
+morning he must waken her to the life of a hunted thing. A week ago she had
+had at her command every luxury known to the civilized world; to-day she
+was friendless, but for his inefficient, worthless self, and in a strange
+land. A week ago,--had he known her then,--he had been free to tell her of
+his love, to offer her the protection of his name as well as his devotion;
+to-day he was an all but penniless vagabond, and there could be no dishonor
+deeper than to let her know the nature of his heart's desire.
+
+Was ever lover hedged from a declaration to his mistress by circumstances
+so hateful, so untoward! He could have raged and railed against his fate
+like any madman. For he desired her greatly, and she was very lovely in his
+sight. If her night's rest had been broken and but a mockery, she showed
+few signs of it; the faint, wan complexion of fatigue seemed only to
+enhance the beauty of her maidenhood; her lips were as fresh and desirous
+as the dewy petals of a crimson rose; beneath her eyes soft shadows lurked
+where her lashes lay tremulous upon her cheeks of satin.... She was to him
+of all created things the most wonderful, the most desirable.
+
+The temptation of his longing seemed more than he could long withstand. But
+resist he must, or part for ever with any title to her consideration--or
+his own. He shut his teeth and knotted his brows in a transport of desire
+to touch, if only with his finger-tips, the woven wonder of her hair.
+
+And thus she saw him, when, without warning, she awoke.
+
+Bewilderment at first informed the wide brown eyes; then, as their
+drowsiness vanished, a little laughter, a little tender mirth.
+
+"Good morning, Sir Knight of the Somber Countenance!" she cried, standing
+up. "Am I so utterly disreputable that you find it necessary to frown on me
+so darkly?"
+
+He shook his head, smiling.
+
+"I know I'm a fright," she asserted vigorously, shaking out the folds of
+her pleated skirt. "And as for my hat, it will never be on straight--but
+then _you_ wouldn't know."
+
+"It seems all right," he replied vacantly.
+
+"Then please to try to look a little happier, since you find me quite
+presentable."
+
+"I do..."
+
+Without lifting her bended head, she looked up, laughing, not ill-pleased.
+"_You'd_ say so... really?"
+
+Commonplace enough, this banter, this pitiful endeavor to be oblivious of
+their common misery; but like the look she gave him, her words rang in his
+head like potent fumes of wine. He turned away, utterly disconcerted for
+the time, knowing only that he must overcome his weakness.
+
+Far down the railway tracks there rose a murmuring, that waxed to a
+rumbling roar. A passing porter answered Kirkwood's inquiry: it was the
+night boat-train from Ostend. He picked up their bags and drew the girl
+into the waiting-room, troubled by a sickening foreboding.
+
+Through the window they watched the train roll in and stop.
+
+Among others, alighted, smirking, the unspeakable Hobbs.
+
+He lifted his hat and bowed jauntily to the waiting-room window, making it
+plain that his keen eyes had discovered them instantly.
+
+Kirkwood's heart sank with the hopelessness of it all. If the railway
+directorates of Europe conspired against them, what chance had they? If the
+night boat-train from Ostend had only had the decency to be twenty-five
+minutes late, instead of arriving promptly on the minute of 4:45 they two
+might have escaped by the 5:09 for Dunkerque and Calais.
+
+There remained but a single untried ruse in his bag of tricks; mercifully
+it might suffice.
+
+"Miss Calendar," said Kirkwood from his heart, "just as soon as I get you
+home, safe and sound, I am going to take a day off, hunt up that little
+villain, and flay him alive. In the meantime, I forgot to dine last night,
+and am reminded that we had better forage for breakfast."
+
+Hobbs dogged them at a safe distance while they sallied forth and in a
+neighboring street discovered an early-bird bakery. Here they were able to
+purchase rolls steaming from the oven, fresh pats of golden butter wrapped
+in clean lettuce leaves, and milk in twin bottles; all of which they
+prosaically carried with them back to the station, lacking leisure as they
+did to partake of the food before train-time.
+
+Without attempting concealment (Hobbs, he knew, was eavesdropping round the
+corner of the door) Kirkwood purchased at the ticket-window passages on
+the Dunkerque train. Mr. Hobbs promptly flattered him by imitation; and
+so jealous of his luck was Kirkwood by this time grown, through continual
+disappointment, that he did not even let the girl into his plans until they
+were aboard the 5:09, in a compartment all to themselves. Then, having with
+his own eyes seen Mr. Hobbs dodge into the third compartment in the rear of
+the same carriage, Kirkwood astonished the girl by requesting her to follow
+him; and together they left by the door opposite that by which they had
+entered.
+
+The engine was running up and down a scale of staccato snorts, in
+preparation for the race, and the cars were on the edge of moving,
+couplings clanking, wheels a-groan, ere Mr. Hobbs condescended to join them
+between the tracks.
+
+Wearily, disheartened, Kirkwood reopened the door, flung the bags in, and
+helped the girl back into their despised compartment; the quicker route to
+England via Ostend was now out of the question. As for himself, he waited
+for a brace of seconds, eying wickedly the ubiquitous Hobbs, who had popped
+back into his compartment, but stood ready to pop out again on the least
+encouragement. In the meantime he was pleased to shake a friendly foot at
+Mr. Kirkwood, thrusting that member out through the half-open door.
+
+Only the timely departure of the train, compelling him to rejoin Dorothy at
+once, if at all, prevented the American from adding murder to the already
+noteworthy catalogue of his high crimes and misdemeanors.
+
+Their simple meal, consumed to the ultimate drop and crumb while the
+Dunkerque train meandered serenely through a sunny, smiling Flemish
+countryside, somewhat revived their jaded spirits. After all, they were
+young, enviably dowered with youth's exuberant elasticity of mood; the
+world was bright in the dawning, the night had fled leaving naught but an
+evil memory; best of all things, they were together: tacitly they were
+agreed that somehow the future would take care of itself and all be well
+with them.
+
+For a time they laughed and chattered, pretending that the present held no
+cares or troubles; but soon the girl, nestling her head in a corner of the
+dingy cushions, was smiling ever more drowsily on Kirkwood; and presently
+she slept in good earnest, the warm blood ebbing and flowing beneath
+the exquisite texture of her cheeks, the ghost of an unconscious smile
+quivering about the sensitive scarlet mouth, the breeze through the open
+window at her side wantoning at will in the sunlit witchery of her hair.
+And Kirkwood, worn with sleepless watching, dwelt in longing upon the dear
+innocent allure of her until the ache in his heart had grown well-nigh
+insupportable; then instinctively turned his gaze upwards, searching his
+heart, reading the faith and desire of it, so that at length knowledge and
+understanding came to him, of his weakness and strength and the clean love
+that he bore for her, and gladdened he sat dreaming in waking the same
+clear dreams that modeled her unconscious lips secretly for laughter and
+the joy of living.
+
+When Dunkerque halted their progress, they were obliged to alight and
+change cars,--Hobbs a discreetly sinister shadow at the end of the
+platform.
+
+By schedule they were to arrive in Calais about the middle of the forenoon,
+with a wait of three hours to be bridged before the departure of the Dover
+packet. That would be an anxious time; the prospect of it rendered both
+Dorothy and Kirkwood doubly anxious throughout this final stage of their
+flight. In three hours anything could happen, or be brought about. Neither
+could forget that it was quite within the bounds of possibilities for
+Calendar to be awaiting them in Calais. Presuming that Hobbs had been acute
+enough to guess their plans and advise his employer by telegraph, the
+latter could readily have anticipated their arrival, whether by sea in the
+brigantine, or by land, taking the direct route via Brussels and Lille. If
+such proved to be the case, it were scarcely sensible to count upon the
+arch-adventurer contenting himself with a waiting r�le like Hobbs'.
+
+With such unhappy apprehensions for a stimulant, between them the man and
+the girl contrived a make-shift counter-stratagem; or it were more accurate
+to say that Kirkwood proposed it, while Dorothy rejected, disputed, and
+at length accepted it, albeit with sad misgivings. For it involved a
+separation that might not prove temporary.
+
+Together they could never escape the surveillance of Mr. Hobbs; parted, he
+would be obliged to follow one or the other. The task of misleading the
+_Alethea's_ mate, Kirkwood undertook, delegating to the girl the duty of
+escaping when he could provide her the opportunity, of keeping under
+cover until the hour of sailing, and then proceeding to England, with the
+gladstone bag, alone if Kirkwood was unable, or thought it inadvisable, to
+join her on the boat.
+
+In furtherance of this design, a majority of the girl's belongings were
+transferred from her traveling bag to Kirkwood's, the gladstone taking
+their place; and the young man provided her with voluminous instructions, a
+revolver which she did not know how to handle and declared she would never
+use for any consideration, and enough money to pay for her accommodation at
+the Terminus H�tel, near the pier, and for two passages to London. It was
+agreed that she should secure the steamer booking, lest Kirkwood be delayed
+until the last moment.
+
+These arrangements concluded, the pair of blessed idiots sat steeped in
+melancholy silence, avoiding each other's eyes, until the train drew in at
+the Gare Centrale, Calais.
+
+In profound silence, too, they left their compartment and passed through
+the station, into the quiet, sun-drenched streets of the seaport,--Hobbs
+hovering solicitously in the offing.
+
+Without comment or visible relief of mind they were aware that their fears
+had been without apparent foundation; they saw no sign of Calendar, Stryker
+or Mulready. The circumstance, however, counted for nothing; one or all of
+the adventurers might arrive in Calais at any minute.
+
+Momentarily more miserable as the time of parting drew nearer, dumb with
+unhappiness, they turned aside from the main thoroughfares of the city,
+leaving the business section, and gained the sleepier side streets,
+bordered by the residences of the proletariat, where for blocks none but
+children were to be seen, and of them but few--quaint, sober little bodies
+playing almost noiselessly in their dooryards.
+
+At length Kirkwood spoke.
+
+"Let's make it the corner," he said, without looking at the girl. "It's a
+short block to the next street. You hurry to the Terminus and lock yourself
+in your room. Have the management book both passages; don't run the risk of
+going to the pier yourself. I'll make things interesting for Mr. Hobbs, and
+join you as soon as I can, _if_ I can."
+
+"You must," replied the girl. "I shan't go without you."
+
+"But, Dor--Miss Calendar!" he exclaimed, aghast.
+
+"I don't care--I know I agreed," she declared mutinously. "But I won't--I
+can't. Remember I shall wait for you."
+
+"But--but perhaps--"
+
+"If you have to stay, it will be because there's danger--won't it? And
+what would you think of me if I deserted you then, af-after all y-you've
+done?... Please don't waste time arguing. Whether you come at one to-day,
+to-morrow, or a week from to-morrow, I shall be waiting.... You may be
+sure. Good-by."
+
+They had turned the corner, walking slowly, side by side; Hobbs, for the
+first time caught off his guard, had dropped behind more than half a long
+block. But now Kirkwood's quick sidelong glance discovered the mate in the
+act of taking alarm and quickening his pace. None the less the American was
+at the time barely conscious of anything other than a wholly unexpected
+furtive pressure of the girl's gloved fingers on his own.
+
+"Good-by," she whispered.
+
+He caught at her hand, protesting. "Dorothy--!"
+
+"Good-by," she repeated breathlessly, with a queer little catch in her
+voice. "God be with you, Philip, and--and send you safely back to me...."
+
+And she was running away.
+
+Dumfounded with dismay, seeing in a flash how all his plans might be set at
+naught by this her unforeseen insubordination, he took a step or two after
+her; but she was fleet of foot, and, remembering Hobbs, he halted.
+
+By this time the mate, too, was running; Kirkwood could hear the heavy
+pounding of his clumsy feet. Already Dorothy had almost gained the farther
+corner; as she whisked round it with a flutter of skirts, Kirkwood dodged
+hastily behind a gate-post. A thought later, Hobbs appeared, head down,
+chest out, eyes straining for sight of his quarry, pelting along for dear
+life.
+
+As, rounding the corner, he stretched out in swifter stride, Kirkwood was
+inspired to put a spoke in his wheel; and a foot thrust suddenly out from
+behind the gate-post accomplished his purpose with more success than he
+had dared anticipate. Stumbling, the mate plunged headlong, arms and legs
+a-sprawl; and the momentum of his pace, though checked, carried him along
+the sidewalk, face downwards, a full yard ere he could stay himself.
+
+Kirkwood stepped out of the gateway and sheered off as Hobbs picked
+himself up; something which he did rather slowly, as if in a daze, without
+comprehension of the cause of his misfortune. And for a moment he stood
+pulling his wits together and swaying as though on the point of resuming
+his rudely interrupted chase; when the noise of Kirkwood's heels brought
+him about face in a twinkling.
+
+"Ow, it's you, eh!" he snarled in a temper as vicious as his countenance;
+and both of these were much the worse for wear and tear.
+
+"Myself," admitted Kirkwood fairly; and then, in a gleam of humor: "Weren't
+you looking for me?"
+
+His rage seemed to take the little Cockney and shake him by the throat; he
+trembled from head to foot, his face shockingly congested, and spat out
+dust and fragments of lurid blasphemy like an infuriated cat.
+
+Of a sudden, "W'ere's the gel?" he sputtered thickly as his quick shifting
+eyes for the first time noted Dorothy's absence.
+
+"Miss Calendar has other business--none with you. I've taken the liberty of
+stopping you because I have a word or two--"
+
+"Ow, you 'ave, 'ave you? Gawd strike me blind, but I've a word for you,
+too!... 'And over that bag--and look nippy, or I'll myke you pye for w'at
+you've done to me ... I'll myke you pye!" he iterated hoarsely, edging
+closer. "'And it over or--"
+
+"You've got another guess--" Kirkwood began, but saved his breath in
+deference to an imperative demand on him for instant defensive action.
+
+To some extent he had underestimated the brute courage of the fellow, the
+violent, desperate courage that is distilled of anger in men of his kind.
+Despising him, deeming him incapable of any overt act of villainy, Kirkwood
+had been a little less wary than he would have been with Calendar or
+Mulready. Hobbs had seemed more of the craven type which Stryker graced so
+conspicuously. But now the American was to be taught discrimination, to
+learn that if Stryker's nature was like a snake's for low cunning and
+deviousness, Hobbs' soul was the soul of a viper.
+
+Almost imperceptibly he had advanced upon Kirkwood; almost insensibly his
+right hand had moved toward his chest; now, with a movement marvelously
+deft, it had slipped in and out of his breast pocket. And a six-inch blade
+of tarnished steel was winging toward Kirkwood's throat with the speed of
+light.
+
+Instinctively he stepped back; as instinctively he guarded with his right
+forearm, lifting the hand that held the satchel. The knife, catching in his
+sleeve, scratched the arm beneath painfully, and simultaneously was twisted
+from the mate's grasp, while in his surprise Kirkwood's grip on the
+bag-handle relaxed. It was torn forcibly from his fingers just as he
+received a heavy blow on his chest from the mate's fist. He staggered back.
+
+By the time he had recovered from the shock, Hobbs was a score of feet
+away, the satchel tucked under his arm, his body bent almost double,
+running like a jack-rabbit. Ere Kirkwood could get under way, in pursuit,
+the mate had dodged out of sight round the corner. When the American caught
+sight of him again, he was far down the block, and bettering his pace with
+every jump.
+
+He was approaching, also, some six or eight good citizens of Calais, men of
+the laboring class, at a guess. Their attention attracted by his frantic
+flight, they stopped to wonder. One or two moved as though to intercept
+him, and he doubled out into the middle of the street with the quickness of
+thought; an instant later he shot round another corner and disappeared, the
+natives streaming after in hot chase, electrified by the inspiring strains
+of "Stop, thief!"--or its French equivalent.
+
+Kirkwood, cheering them on with the same wild cry, followed to the farther
+street; and there paused, so winded and weak with laughter that he was fain
+to catch at a fence picket for support. Standing thus he saw other denizens
+of Calais spring as if from the ground miraculously to swell the hue and
+cry; and a dumpling of a gendarme materialized from nowhere at all, to fall
+in behind the rabble, waving his sword above his head and screaming at the
+top of his lungs, the while his fat legs twinkled for all the world like
+thick sausage links marvelously animated.
+
+The mob straggled round yet another corner and was gone; its clamor
+diminished on the still Spring air; and Kirkwood, recovering, abandoned
+Mr. Hobbs to the justice of the high gods and the French system of
+jurisprudence (at least, he hoped the latter would take an interest in the
+case, if haply Hobbs were laid by the heels), and went his way rejoicing.
+
+As for the scratch on his arm, it was nothing, as he presently demonstrated
+to his complete satisfaction in the seclusion of a chance-sent fiacre.
+Kirkwood, commissioning it to drive him to the American Consulate, made
+his diagnosis _en route_; wound a handkerchief round the negligible wound,
+rolled down his sleeve, and forgot it altogether in the joys of picturing
+to himself Hobbs in the act of opening the satchel in expectation of
+finding therein the gladstone bag.
+
+At the consulate door he paid off the driver and dismissed him; the fiacre
+had served his purpose, and he could find his way to the Terminus H�tel at
+infinitely less expense. He had a considerably harder task before him as
+he ascended the steps to the consular doorway, knocked and made known the
+nature of his errand.
+
+No malicious destiny could have timed the hour of his call more appositely;
+the consul was at home and at the disposal of his fellow-citizens--within
+bounds.
+
+In the course of thirty minutes or so Kirkwood emerged with dignity from
+the consulate, his face crimson to the hair, his soul smarting with
+shame and humiliation; and left an amused official representative of his
+country's government with the impression of having been entertained to the
+point of ennui by an exceptionally clumsy but pertinacious liar.
+
+For the better part of the succeeding hour Kirkwood circumnavigated the
+neighborhood of the steamer pier and the Terminus H�tel, striving to render
+himself as inconspicuous as he felt insignificant, and keenly on the
+alert for any sign or news of Hobbs. In this pursuit he was pleasantly
+disappointed.
+
+At noon precisely, his suspense grown too onerous for his strength of will,
+throwing caution and their understanding to the winds, he walked boldly
+into the Terminus, and inquired for Miss Calendar.
+
+The assurance he received that she was in safety under its roof did not
+deter him from sending up his name and asking her to receive him in the
+public lounge; he required the testimony of his senses to convince him that
+no harm had come to her in the long hour and a half that had elapsed since
+their separation.
+
+Woman-like, she kept him waiting. Alone in the public rooms of the hotel,
+he suffered excruciating torments. How was he to know that Calendar had not
+arrived and found his way to her?
+
+When at length she appeared on the threshold of the apartment, bringing
+with her the traveling bag and looking wonderfully the better for her
+ninety minutes of complete repose and privacy, the relief he experienced
+was so intense that he remained transfixed in the middle of the floor,
+momentarily able neither to speak nor to move.
+
+On her part, so fagged and distraught did he seem, that at sight of his
+care-worn countenance she hurried to him with outstretched, compassionate
+hands and a low pitiful cry of concern, forgetful entirely of that which he
+himself had forgotten--the emotion she had betrayed on parting.
+
+"Oh, nothing wrong," he hastened to reassure her, with a sorry ghost of his
+familiar grin; "only I have lost Hobbs and the satchel with your things;
+and there's no sign yet of Mr. Calendar. We can feel pretty comfortable
+now, and--and I thought it time we had something like a meal."
+
+The narrative of his adventure which he delivered over their _d�jeuner �
+la fourchette_ contained no mention either of his rebuff at the American
+Consulate or the scratch he had sustained during Hobbs' murderous assault;
+the one could not concern her, the other would seem but a bid for her
+sympathy. He counted it a fortunate thing that the mate's knife had been
+keen enough to penetrate the cloth of his sleeve without tearing it; the
+slit it had left was barely noticeable. And he purposely diverted the girl
+with flashes of humorous description, so that they discussed both meal and
+episode in a mood of wholesome merriment.
+
+It was concluded, all too soon for the taste of either, by the waiter's
+announcement that the steamer was on the point of sailing.
+
+Outwardly composed, inwardly quaking, they boarded the packet, meeting with
+no misadventure whatever--if we are to except the circumstance that, when
+the restaurant bill was settled and the girl had punctiliously surrendered
+his change with the tickets, Kirkwood found himself in possession of
+precisely one franc and twenty centimes.
+
+He groaned in spirit to think how differently he might have been fixed, had
+he not in his infatuated spirit of honesty been so anxious to give Calendar
+more than ample value for his money!
+
+An inexorable anxiety held them both near the gangway until it was cast off
+and the boat began to draw away from the pier. Then, and not till then, did
+an unimpressive, small figure of a man detach itself from the shield of a
+pile of luggage and advance to the pier-head. No second glance was
+needed to identify Mr. Hobbs; and until the perspective dwarfed him
+indistinguishably, he was to be seen, alternately waving Kirkwood ironic
+farewell and blowing violent kisses to Miss Calendar from the tips of his
+soiled fingers.
+
+So he had escaped arrest....
+
+At first by turns indignant and relieved to realize that thereafter they
+were to move in scenes in which his hateful shadow would not form an
+essentially component part, subsequently Kirkwood fell a prey to prophetic
+terrors. It was not alone fear of retribution that had induced Hobbs to
+relinquish his persecution--or so Kirkwood became convinced; if the mate's
+calculation had allowed for them the least fraction of a chance to escape
+apprehension on the farther shores of the Channel, nor fears nor threats
+would have prevented him from sailing with the fugitives.... Far from
+having left danger behind them on the Continent, Kirkwood believed in his
+secret heart that they were but flying to encounter it beneath the smoky
+pall of London.
+
+
+
+
+XVII
+
+
+ROGUES AND VAGABONDS
+
+A westering sun striking down through the drab exhalations of ten-thousand
+sooty chimney-pots, tinted the atmosphere with the hue of copper. The
+glance that wandered purposelessly out through the carriage windows,
+recoiled, repelled by the endless dreary vista of the Surrey Side's
+unnumbered roofs; or, probing instantaneously the hopeless depths of some
+grim narrow thoroughfare fleetingly disclosed, as the evening boat-train
+from Dover swung on toward Charing Cross, its trucks level with the eaves
+of Southwark's dwellings, was saddened by the thought that in all the world
+squalor such as this should obtain and flourish unrelieved.
+
+For perhaps the tenth time in the course of the journey Kirkwood withdrew
+his gaze from the window and turned to the girl, a question ready framed
+upon his lips.
+
+"Are you quite sure--" he began; and then, alive to the clear and
+penetrating perception in the brown eyes that smiled into his from under
+their level brows, he stammered and left the query uncompleted.
+
+Continuing to regard him steadily and smilingly, Dorothy shook her head in
+playful denial and protest. "Do you know," she commented, "that this is
+about the fifth repetition of that identical question within the last
+quarter-hour?"
+
+"How do you know what I meant to say?" he demanded, staring.
+
+"I can see it in your eyes. Besides, you've talked and thought of nothing
+else since we left the boat. Won't you believe me, please, when I say
+there's absolutely not a soul in London to whom I could go and ask for
+shelter? I don't think it's very nice of you to be so openly anxious to get
+rid of me."
+
+This latter was so essentially undeserved and so artlessly insincere, that
+he must needs, of course, treat it with all seriousness.
+
+"That isn't fair, Miss Calendar. Really it's not."
+
+"What am I to think? I've told you any number of times that it's only an
+hour's ride on to Chiltern, where the Pyrfords will be glad to take me in.
+You may depend upon it,--by eight to-night, at the latest, you'll have me
+off your hands,--the drag and worry that I've been ever since--"
+
+"Don't!" he pleaded vehemently. "Please!... You _know_ it isn't that. I
+_don't_ want you off my hands, ever.... That is to say, I--ah--" Here
+he was smitten with a dumbness, and sat, aghast at the enormity of his
+blunder, entreating her forgiveness with eyes that, very likely, pleaded
+his cause more eloquently than he guessed.
+
+"I mean," he floundered on presently, in the fatuous belief that he would
+this time be able to control both mind and tongue, "_what_ I mean is I'd be
+glad to go on serving you in any way I might, to the end of time, if you'd
+give me...."
+
+He left the declaration inconclusive--a stroke of diplomacy that would have
+graced an infinitely more adept wooer. But he used it all unconsciously. "O
+Lord!" he groaned in spirit. "Worse and more of it! Why in thunder can't I
+say the right thing _right_?"
+
+Egotistically absorbed by the problem thus formulated, he was heedless of
+her failure to respond, and remained pensively preoccupied until roused by
+the grinding and jolting of the train, as it slowed to a halt preparatory
+to crossing the bridge.
+
+Then he sought to read his answer in the eyes of Dorothy. But she was
+looking away, staring thoughtfully out over the billowing sea of roofs
+that merged illusively into the haze long ere it reached the horizon; and
+Kirkwood could see the pulsing of the warm blood in her throat and cheeks;
+and the glamorous light that leaped and waned in her eyes, as the ruddy
+evening sunlight warmed them, was something any man might be glad to live
+for and die for.... And he saw that she had understood, had grasped the
+thread of meaning that ran through the clumsy fabric of his halting speech
+and his sudden silences.
+
+She had understood without resentment!
+
+While, incredulous, he wrestled with the wonder of this fond discovery,
+she grew conscious of his gaze, and turned her head to meet it with one
+fearless and sweet, if troubled.
+
+"Dear Mr. Kirkwood," she said gently, bending forward as if to read between
+the lines anxiety had graven on his countenance, "won't you tell me,
+please, what it can be that so worries you? Is it possible that you still
+have a fear of my father? But don't you know that he can do nothing
+now--now that we're safe? We have only to take a cab to Paddington Station,
+and then--"
+
+"You mustn't underestimate the resource and ability of Mr. Calendar," he
+told her gloomily; "we've got a chance--no more. It wasn't...." He shut his
+teeth on his unruly tongue--too late.
+
+Woman-quick she caught him up. "It wasn't that? Then what was it that
+worried you? If it's something that affects me, is it kind and right of you
+not to tell me?"
+
+"It--it affects us both," he conceded drearily. "I--I don't--"
+
+The wretched embarrassment of the confession befogged his wits; he felt
+unable to frame the words. He appealed speechlessly for tolerance, with a
+face utterly woebegone and eyes piteous.
+
+The train began to move slowly across the Thames to Charing Cross.
+
+Mercilessly the girl persisted. "We've only a minute more. Surely you can
+trust me...."
+
+In exasperation he interrupted almost rudely. "It's only this: I--I'm
+strapped."
+
+"Strapped?" She knitted her brows over this fresh specimen of American
+slang.
+
+"Flat strapped--busted--broke--on my uppers--down and out," he reeled off
+synonyms without a smile. "I haven't enough money to pay cab-fare across
+the town--"
+
+"Oh!" she interpolated, enlightened.
+
+"--to say nothing of taking us to Chiltern. I couldn't buy you a glass of
+water if you were thirsty. There isn't a soul on earth, within hail, who
+would trust me with a quarter--I mean a shilling--across London Bridge. I'm
+the original Luckless Wonder and the only genuine Jonah extant."
+
+With a face the hue of fire, he cocked his eyebrows askew and attempted
+to laugh unconcernedly to hide his bitter shame. "I've led you out of
+the fryingpan into the fire, and I don't know what to do! Please call me
+names."
+
+And in a single instant all that he had consistently tried to avoid doing,
+had been irretrievably done; if, with dawning comprehension, dismay
+flickered in her eyes--such dismay as such a confession can rouse only in
+one who, like Dorothy Calendar, has never known the want of a penny--it
+was swiftly driven out to make place for the truest and most gracious and
+unselfish solicitude.
+
+"Oh, poor Mr. Kirkwood! And it's all because of me! You've beggared
+yourself--"
+
+"Not precisely; I was beggared to begin with." He hastened to disclaim the
+extravagant generosity of which she accused him. "I had only three or four
+pounds to my name that night we met.... I haven't told you--I--"
+
+"You've told me nothing, nothing whatever about yourself," she said
+reproachfully.
+
+"I didn't want to bother you with my troubles; I tried not to talk about
+myself.... You knew I was an American, but I'm worse than that; I'm a
+Californian--from San Francisco." He tried unsuccessfully to make light of
+it. "I told you I was the Luckless Wonder; if I'd ever had any luck I would
+have stored a little money away. As it was, I lived on my income, left
+my principal in 'Frisco; and when the earthquake came, it wiped me out
+completely."
+
+"And you were going home that night we made you miss your steamer!"
+
+"It was my own fault, and I'm glad this blessed minute that I did miss it.
+Nice sort I'd have been, to go off and leave you at the mercy--"
+
+"Please! I want to think, I'm trying to remember how much you've gone
+through--"
+
+"Precisely what I don't want you to do. Anyway, I did nothing more than any
+other fellow would've! Please don't give me credit that I don't deserve."
+
+But she was not listening; and a pause fell, while the train crawled warily
+over the trestle, as if in fear of the foul, muddy flood below.
+
+"And there's no way I can repay you...."
+
+"There's nothing to be repaid," he contended stoutly.
+
+She clasped her hands and let them fall gently in her lap. "I've not
+a farthing in the world!... I never dreamed.... I'm so sorry, Mr.
+Kirkwood--terribly, terribly sorry!... But what can we do? I can't consent
+to be a burden--"
+
+"But you're not! You're the one thing that ..." He swerved sharply, at an
+abrupt tangent. "There's one thing we can do, of course."
+
+She looked up inquiringly.
+
+"Craven Street is just round the corner."
+
+"Yes?"--wonderingly.
+
+"I mean we must go to Mrs. Hallam's house, first off.... It's too
+late now,--after five, else we could deposit the jewels in some bank.
+Since--since they are no longer yours, the only thing, and the proper thing
+to do is to place them in safety or in the hands of their owner. If you
+take them directly to young Hallam, your hands will be clear.... And--I
+never did such a thing in my life, Miss Calendar; but if he's got a spark
+of gratitude in his make-up, I ought to be able to--er--to borrow a pound
+or so of him."
+
+"Do you think so?" She shook her head in doubt. "I don't know; I know so
+little of such things.... You are right; we must take him the jewels,
+but..." Her voice trailed off into a sigh of profound perturbation.
+
+He dared not meet her look.
+
+Beneath his wandering gaze a County Council steam-boat darted swiftly
+down-stream from Charing Cross pier, in the shadow of the railway bridge.
+It seemed curious to reflect that from that very floating pier he had
+started first upon his quest of the girl beside him, only--he had to
+count--three nights ago! Three days and three nights! Altogether incredible
+seemed the transformation they had wrought in the complexion of the world.
+Yet nothing material was changed.... He lifted his eyes.
+
+Beyond the river rose the Embankment, crawling with traffic, backed by the
+green of the gardens and the shimmering walls of glass and stone of the
+great hotels, their windows glowing weirdly golden in the late sunlight.
+A little down-stream Cleopatra's Needle rose, sadly the worse for London
+smoke, flanked by its couchant sphinxes, wearing a nimbus of circling,
+sweeping, swooping, wheeling gulls. Farther down, from the foot of that
+magnificent pile, Somerset House, Waterloo Bridge sprang over-stream in
+its graceful arch.... All as of yesterday; yet all changed. Why? Because a
+woman had entered into his life; because he had learned the lesson of love
+and had looked into the bright face of Romance....
+
+With a jar the train started and began to move more swiftly.
+
+Kirkwood lifted the traveling bag to his knees.
+
+"Don't forget," he said with some difficulty, "you're to stick by me,
+whatever happens. You mustn't desert me."
+
+"You _know_," the girl reproved him.
+
+"I know; but there must be no misunderstanding.... Don't worry; we'll win
+out yet, I've a plan."
+
+_Splendide mendax_! He had not the glimmering of a plan.
+
+The engine panting, the train drew in beneath the vast sounding dome of the
+station, to an accompaniment of dull thunderings; and stopped finally.
+
+Kirkwood got out, not without a qualm of regret at leaving the compartment;
+therein, at least, they had some title to consideration, by virtue of their
+tickets; now they were utterly vagabondish, penniless adventurers.
+
+The girl joined him. Slowly, elbow to elbow, the treasure bag between
+them, they made their way down toward the gates, atoms in a tide-rip
+of humanity,--two streams of passengers meeting on the narrow strip of
+platform, the one making for the streets, the other for the suburbs.
+
+Hurried and jostled, the girl clinging tightly to his arm lest they be
+separated in the crush, they came to the ticket-wicket; beyond the barrier
+surged a sea of hats--shining "toppers," dignified and upstanding, the
+outward and visible manifestation of the sturdy, stodgy British spirit of
+respectability; "bowlers" round and sleek and humble; shapeless caps with
+cloth visors, manufactured of outrageous plaids; flower-like miracles of
+millinery from Bond Street; strangely plumed monstrosities from Petticoat
+Lane and Mile End Road. Beneath any one of these might lurk the maleficent
+brain, the spying eyes of Calendar or one of his creatures; beneath all of
+them that he encountered, Kirkwood peered in fearful inquiry.
+
+Yet, when they had passed unhindered the ordeal of the wickets, had run
+the gantlet of those thousand eyes without lighting in any pair a spark of
+recognition, he began to bear himself with more assurance, to be sensible
+to a grateful glow of hope. Perhaps Hobbs' telegram had not reached its
+destination, for unquestionably the mate would have wired his chief;
+perhaps some accident had befallen the conspirators; perhaps the police had
+apprehended them.... No matter how, one hoped against hope that they had
+been thrown off the trail.
+
+And indeed it seemed as if they must have been misguided in some
+providential manner. On the other hand, it would be the crassest of
+indiscretions to linger about the place an instant longer than absolutely
+necessary.
+
+Outside the building, however, they paused perforce, undergoing the
+cross-fire of the congregated cabbies. It being the first time that he
+had ever felt called upon to leave the station afoot, Kirkwood cast about
+irresolutely, seeking the sidewalk leading to the Strand.
+
+Abruptly he caught the girl by the arm and unceremoniously hurried her
+toward a waiting hansom.
+
+"Quick!" he begged her. "Jump right in--not an instant to spare.--"
+
+She nodded brightly, lips firm with courage, eyes shining.
+
+"My father?"
+
+"Yes." Kirkwood glanced back over his shoulder. "He hasn't seen us yet.
+They've just driven up. Stryker's with him. They're getting down." And to
+himself, "Oh, the devil!" cried the panic-stricken young man.
+
+He drew back to let the girl precede him into the cab; at the same time
+he kept an eye on Calendar, whose conveyance stood half the length of the
+station-front away.
+
+The fat adventurer had finished paying off the driver, standing on the deck
+of the hansom. Stryker was already out, towering above the mass of people,
+and glaring about him with his hawk-keen vision. Calendar had started to
+alight, his foot was leaving the step when Stryker's glance singled out
+their quarry. Instantly he turned and spoke to his confederate. Calendar
+wheeled like a flash, peering eagerly in the direction indicated by the
+captain's index finger, then, snapping instructions to his driver, threw
+himself heavily back on the seat. Stryker, awkward on his land-legs,
+stumbled and fell in an ill-calculated attempt to hoist himself hastily
+back into the vehicle.
+
+To the delay thus occasioned alone Kirkwood and Dorothy owed a respite of
+freedom. Their hansom was already swinging down toward the great gates of
+the yard, the American standing to make the driver comprehend the necessity
+for using the utmost speed in reaching the Craven Street address. The man
+proved both intelligent and obliging; Kirkwood had barely time to drop down
+beside the girl, ere the cab was swinging out into the Strand, to the peril
+of the toes belonging to a number of righteously indignant pedestrians.
+
+"Good boy!" commented Kirkwood cheerfully. "That's the greatest comfort of
+all London, the surprising intellectual strength the average cabby displays
+when you promise him a tip.... Great Heavens!" he cried, reading the girl's
+dismayed expression. "A tip! I never thought--!" His face lengthened
+dismally, his eyebrows working awry. "Now we are in for it!"
+
+Dorothy said nothing.
+
+He turned in the seat, twisting his neck to peep through the small rear
+window. "I don't see their cab," he announced. "But of course they're after
+us. However, Craven Street's just round the corner; if we get there
+first, I don't fancy Freddie Hallam will have a cordial reception for our
+pursuers. They must've been on watch at Cannon Street, and finding we were
+not coming in that way--of course they were expecting us because of Hobbs'
+wire--they took cab for Charing Cross. Lucky for us.... Or is it lucky?" he
+added doubtfully, to himself.
+
+The hansom whipped round the corner into Craven Street. Kirkwood sprang up,
+grasping the treasure bag, ready to jump the instant they pulled in toward
+Mrs. Hallam's dwelling. But as they drew near upon the address he drew back
+with an exclamation of amazement.
+
+The house was closed, showing a blank face to the street--blinds drawn
+close down in the windows, area gate padlocked, an estate-agent's board
+projecting from above the doorway, advertising the property "To be let,
+furnished."
+
+Kirkwood looked back, craning his neck round the side of the cab. At the
+moment another hansom was breaking through the rank of humanity on the
+Strand crossing. He saw one or two figures leap desperately from beneath
+the horse's hoofs. Then the cab shot out swiftly down the street.
+
+The American stood up again, catching the cabby's eye.
+
+"Drive on!" he cried excitedly. "Don't stop--drive as fast as you dare!"
+
+"W'ere to, sir?"
+
+"See that cab behind? Don't let it catch us--shake it off, lose it somehow,
+but for the love of Heaven don't let it catch us! I'll make it worth your
+while. Do you understand?"
+
+"Yes, sir!" The driver looked briefly over his shoulder and lifted his
+whip. "Don't worry, sir," he cried, entering into the spirit of the game
+with gratifying zest. "Shan't let 'em over'aul you, sir. Mind your 'ead!"
+
+And as Kirkwood ducked, the whip-lash shot out over the roof with a crack
+like the report of a pistol. Startled, the horse leaped indignantly
+forward. Momentarily the cab seemed to leave the ground, then settled
+down to a pace that carried them round the Avenue Theatre and across
+Northumberland Avenue into Whitehall Place apparently on a single wheel.
+
+A glance behind showed Kirkwood that already they had gained, the pursuing
+hansom having lost ground through greater caution in crossing the
+main-traveled thoroughfare.
+
+"Good little horse!" he applauded.
+
+A moment later he was indorsing without reserve the generalship of their
+cabby; the quick westward turn that took them into Whitehall, over across
+from the Horse Guards, likewise placed them in a pocket of traffic; a
+practically impregnable press of vehicles closed in behind them ere
+Calendar's conveyance could follow out of the side street.
+
+That the same conditions, but slightly modified, hemmed them in ahead, went
+for nothing in Kirkwood's estimation.
+
+"Good driver!" he approved heartily. "He's got a head on his shoulders!"
+
+The girl found her voice. "How," she demanded in a breath, face blank with
+consternation, "how did you dare?"
+
+"Dare?" he echoed exultantly; and in his veins excitement was running like
+liquid fire. "What wouldn't I dare for you, Dorothy?"
+
+"What have you not?" she amended softly, adding with a shade of timidity:
+"Philip..."
+
+The long lashes swept up from her cheeks, like clouds revealing stars,
+unmasking eyes radiant and brave to meet his own; then they fell, even as
+her lips drooped with disappointment. And she sighed.... For he was not
+looking. Man-like, hot with the ardor of the chase, he was deaf and blind
+to all else.
+
+She saw that he had not even heard. Twice within the day she had forgotten
+herself, had overstepped the rigid bounds of her breeding in using his
+Christian name. And twice he had been oblivious to that token of their
+maturing understanding. So she sighed, and sighing, smiled again; resting
+an elbow on the window-sill and flattening one small gloved hand against
+the frame for a brace against the jouncing of the hansom. It swept on with
+unabated speed, up-stream beside the tawny reaches of the river; and for
+a time there was no speech between them, the while the girl lost
+consciousness of self and her most imminent peril, surrendering her being
+to the lingering sweetness of her long, dear thoughts....
+
+"I've got a scheme!" Kirkwood declared so explosively that she caught her
+breath with the surprise of it. "There's the Pless; they know me there, and
+my credit's good. When we shake them off, we can have the cabby take us to
+the hotel. I'll register and borrow from the management enough to pay our
+way to Chiltern and the tolls for a cable to New York. I've a friend or two
+over home who wouldn't let me want for a few miserable pounds.... So you
+see," he explained boyishly, "we're at the end of our troubles already!"
+
+She said something inaudible, holding her face averted. He bent nearer to
+her, wondering. "I didn't understand," he suggested.
+
+Still looking from him, "I said you were very good to me," she said in a
+quavering whisper.
+
+"Dorothy!" Without his knowledge or intention before the fact, as
+instinctively as he made use of her given name, intimately, his strong
+fingers dropped and closed upon the little hand that lay beside him. "What
+_is_ the matter, dear?" He leaned still farther forward to peer into her
+face, till glance met glance in the ending and his racing pulses tightened
+with sheer delight of the humid happiness in her glistening eyes. "Dorothy,
+child, don't worry so. No harm shall come to you. It's all working out--all
+working out _right_. Only have a little faith in me, and I'll _make_
+everything work out right, Dorothy."
+
+Gently she freed her fingers. "I wasn't," she told him in a voice that
+quivered between laughter and tears, "I wasn't worrying. I was ... You
+wouldn't understand. Don't be afraid I shall break down or--or anything."
+
+"I shan't," he reassured her; "I know you're not that sort. Besides,
+you'd have no excuse. We're moving along famously. That cabby knows his
+business."
+
+In fact that gentleman was minute by minute demonstrating his peculiar
+fitness for the task he had so cheerfully undertaken. The superior
+horsemanship of the London hackney cabman needs no exploitation, and he
+in whose hands rested the fate of the Calendar treasure was peer of his
+compeers. He was instant to advantage himself of every opening to forward
+his pliant craft, quick to foresee the fortunes of the way and govern
+himself accordingly.
+
+Estimating with practised eye the precise moment when the police supervisor
+of traffic at the junction of Parliament and Bridge Streets, would see
+fit to declare a temporary blockade, he so managed that his was the last
+vehicle to pass ere the official wand, to ignore which involves a forfeited
+license, was lifted; and indeed, so close was his calculation that he
+escaped only with a scowl and word of warning from the bobby. A matter of
+no importance whatever, since his end was gained and the pursuing cab had
+been shut off by the blockade.
+
+In Calendar's driver, however, he had an adversary of abilities by no means
+to be despised. Precisely how the man contrived it, is a question; that he
+made a detour by way of Derby Street is not improbable, unpleasant as it
+may have been for Stryker and Calendar to find themselves in such close
+proximity to "the Yard." At all events, he evaded the block, and hardly
+had the chase swung across Bridge Street, than the pursuer was nimbly
+clattering in its wake.
+
+Past the Houses of Parliament, through Old Palace Yard, with the Abbey on
+their left, they swung away into Abingdon Street, whence suddenly they
+dived into the maze of backways, great and mean, which lies to the south of
+Victoria. Doubling and twisting, now this way, now that, the driver tooled
+them through the intricate heart of this labyrinth, leading the pursuers
+a dance that Kirkwood thought calculated to dishearten and shake off the
+pursuit in the first five minutes. Yet always, peering back through the
+little peephole, he saw Calendar's cab pelting doggedly in their rear--a
+hundred yards behind, no more, no less, hanging on with indomitable grit
+and determination.
+
+By degrees they drew westwards, threading Pimlico, into Chelsea--once
+dashing briefly down the Grosvenor Road, the Thames a tawny flood beyond
+the river wall.
+
+Children cheered them on, and policemen turned to stare, doubting whether
+they should interfere. Minutes rolled into tens, measuring out an hour;
+and still they hammered on, hunted and hunters, playing their game of
+hare-and-hounds through the highways and byways of those staid and aged
+quarters.
+
+In the leading cab there were few words spoken. Kirkwood and Dorothy alike
+sat spellbound with the fascination of the game; if it is conceivable
+that the fox enjoys his part in the day's sport, then they were enjoying
+themselves. Now one spoke, now another--chiefly in the clipped phraseology,
+of excitement. As--
+
+"We're gaining?"
+
+"Yes--think so."
+
+Or, "We'll tire them out?"
+
+"Sure-ly."
+
+"They can't catch us, can they, Philip?"
+
+"Never in the world."
+
+But he spoke with a confidence that he himself did not feel, for hope as
+he would he could never see that the distance between the two had been
+materially lessened or increased. Their horses seemed most evenly matched.
+
+The sun was very low behind the houses of the Surrey Side when Kirkwood
+became aware that their horse was flagging, though (as comparison
+determined) no more so than the one behind.
+
+In grave concern the young man raised his hand, thrusting open the trap
+in the roof. Immediately the square of darkling sky was eclipsed by the
+cabby's face.
+
+"Yessir?"
+
+"You had better drive as directly as you can to the Hotel Pless," Kirkwood
+called up. "I'm afraid it's no use pushing your horse like this."
+
+"I'm sure of it, sir. 'E's a good 'oss, 'e is, but 'e carn't keep goin' for
+hever, you know, sir."
+
+"I know. You've done very well; you've done your best."
+
+"Very good, sir. The Pless, you said, sir? Right."
+
+The trap closed.
+
+Two blocks farther, and their pace had so sensibly moderated that Kirkwood
+was genuinely alarmed. The pursuing cabby was lashing his animal without
+mercy, while, "It aren't no use my w'ippin' 'im, sir," dropped through the
+trap. "'E's doing orl 'e can."
+
+"I understand."
+
+Despondent recklessness tightened Kirkwood's lips and kindled an unpleasant
+light in his eyes. He touched his side pocket; Calendar's revolver was
+still there.... Dorothy should win away clear, if--if he swung for it.
+
+He bent forward with the traveling bag in his hands.
+
+"What are you going to do?" The girl's voice was very tremulous.
+
+"Stand a chance, take a losing hazard. Can you run? You're not too tired?"
+
+"I can run--perhaps not far--a little way, at least."
+
+"And will you do as I say?"
+
+Her eyes met his, unwavering, bespeaking her implicit faith.
+
+"Promise!"
+
+"I promise."
+
+"We'll have to drop off in a minute. The horse won't last.... They're in
+the same box. Well, I undertake to stand 'em off for a bit; you take the
+bag and run for it. Just as soon as I can convince them, I'll follow, but
+if there's any delay, you call the first cab you see and drive to the
+Pless. I'll join you there."
+
+He stood up, surveying the neighborhood. Behind him the girl lifted her
+voice in protest.
+
+"No, Philip, no!"
+
+"You've promised," he said sternly, eyes ranging the street.
+
+"I don't care; I won't leave you."
+
+He shook his head in silent contradiction, frowning; but not frowning
+because of the girl's mutiny. He was a little puzzled by a vague
+impression, and was striving to pin it down for recognition; but was so
+thoroughly bemused with fatigue and despair that only with great difficulty
+could he force his faculties to logical reasoning, his memory to respond to
+his call upon it.
+
+The hansom was traversing a street in Old Brompton--a quaint, prim by-way
+lined with dwellings singularly Old-Worldish, even for London. He seemed
+to know it subjectively, to have retained a memory of it from another
+existence: as the stage setting of a vivid dream, all forgotten, will
+sometimes recur with peculiar and exasperating intensity, in broad
+daylight. The houses, with their sloping, red-tiled roofs, unexpected
+gables, spontaneous dormer windows, glass panes set in leaded frames, red
+brick fa�ades trimmed with green shutters and doorsteps of white stone,
+each sitting back, sedate and self-sufficient, in its trim dooryard fenced
+off from the public thoroughfare: all wore an aspect hauntingly familiar,
+and yet strange.
+
+A corner sign, remarked in passing, had named the spot "Aspen Villas";
+though he felt he knew the sound of those syllables as well as he did
+the name of the Pless, strive as he might he failed to make them convey
+anything tangible to his intelligence. When had he heard of it? At what
+time had his errant footsteps taken him through this curious survival of
+Eighteenth Century London?
+
+Not that it mattered when. It could have no possible bearing on the
+emergency. He really gave it little thought; the mental processes recounted
+were mostly subconscious, if none the less real. His objective attention
+was wholly preoccupied with the knowledge that Calendar's cab was drawing
+perilously near. And he was debating whether or not they should alight
+at once and try to make a better pace afoot, when the decision was taken
+wholly out of his hands.
+
+Blindly staggering on, wilted with weariness, the horse stumbled in the
+shafts and plunged forward on its knees. Quick as the driver was to pull it
+up, with a cruel jerk of the bits, Kirkwood was caught unprepared; lurching
+against the dashboard, he lost his footing, grasped frantically at the
+unstable air, and went over, bringing up in a sitting position in the
+gutter, with a solid shock that jarred his very teeth.
+
+For a moment dazed he sat there blinking; by the time he got to his feet,
+the girl stood beside him, questioning him with keen solicitude.
+
+"No," he gasped; "not hurt--only surprised. Wait...."
+
+Their cab had come to a complete standstill; Calendar's was no more than
+twenty yards behind, and as Kirkwood caught sight of him the fat adventurer
+was in the act of lifting himself ponderously out of the seat.
+
+Incontinently the young man turned to the girl and forced the traveling-bag
+into her hands.
+
+"Run for it!" he begged her. "Don't stop to argue. You promised--run! I'll
+come...."
+
+"Philip!" she pleaded.
+
+"Dorothy!" he cried in torment.
+
+Perhaps it was his unquestionable distress that weakened her. Suddenly she
+yielded--with whatever reason. He was only hazily aware of the swish of her
+skirts behind him; he had no time to look round and see that she got away
+safely. He had only eyes and thoughts for Calendar and Stryker.
+
+They were both afoot, now, and running toward him, the one as awkward as
+the other, but neither yielding a jot of their malignant purpose. He held
+the picture of it oddly graphic in his memory for many a day thereafter:
+Calendar making directly, for him, his heavy-featured face a dull red with
+the exertion, his fat head dropped forward as if too heavy for his neck of
+a bull, his small eyes bright with anger; Stryker shying off at a discreet
+angle, evidently with the intention of devoting himself to the capture of
+the girl; the two cabs with their dejected screws, at rest in the middle of
+the quiet, twilit street. He seemed even to see himself, standing stockily
+prepared, hands in his coat pockets, his own head inclined with a
+suggestion of pugnacity.
+
+To this mental photograph another succeeds, of the same scene an instant
+later; all as it had been before, their relative positions unchanged, save
+that Stryker and Calendar had come to a dead stop, and that Kirkwood's
+right arm was lifted and extended, pointing at the captain.
+
+So forgetful of self was he, that it required a moment's thought to
+convince him that he was really responsible for the abrupt transformation.
+Incredulously he realized that he had drawn Calendar's revolver and pulled
+Stryker up short, in mid-stride, by the mute menace of it, as much as by
+his hoarse cry of warning:
+
+"Stryker--not another foot--"
+
+With this there chimed in Dorothy's voice, ringing bell-clear from a little
+distance:
+
+"Philip!"
+
+Like a flash he wheeled, to add yet another picture to his mental gallery.
+
+Perhaps two-score feet up the sidewalk a gate stood open; just outside it a
+man of tall and slender figure, rigged out in a bizarre costume consisting
+mainly of a flowered dressing-gown and slippers, was waiting in an attitude
+of singular impassivity; within it, pausing with a foot lifted to the
+doorstep, bag in hand, her head turned as she looked back, was Dorothy.
+
+[Illustration: A costume consisting mainly of a flowered dressing-gown and
+slippers.]
+
+As he comprehended these essential details of the composition, the man in
+the flowered dressing-gown raised a hand, beckoning to him in a manner as
+imperative as his accompanying words.
+
+"Kirkwood!" he saluted the young man in a clear and vibrant voice, "put
+up that revolver and stop this foolishness." And, with a jerk of his
+head towards the doorway, in which Dorothy now waited, hesitant: "Come,
+sir--quickly!"
+
+Kirkwood choked on a laugh that was half a sob. "Brentwick!" he cried,
+restoring the weapon to his pocket and running toward his friend. "Of all
+happy accidents!"
+
+"You may call it that," retorted the elder man with a fleeting smile as
+Kirkwood slipped inside the dooryard. "Come," he said; "let's get into the
+house."
+
+"But you said--I thought you went to Munich," stammered Kirkwood; and so
+thoroughly impregnated was his mind with this understanding that it was
+hard for him to adjust his perceptions to the truth.
+
+"I was detained--by business," responded Brentwick briefly. His gaze, weary
+and wistful behind his glasses, rested on the face of the girl on the
+threshold of his home; and the faint, sensitive flush of her face deepened.
+He stopped and honored her with a bow that, for all his fantastical attire,
+would have graced a beau of an earlier decade. "Will you be pleased to
+enter?" he suggested punctiliously. "My house, such as it is, is quite at
+your disposal. And," he added, with a glance over his shoulder, "I fancy
+that a word or two may presently be passed which you would hardly care to
+hear."
+
+Dorothy's hesitation was but transitory; Kirkwood was reassuring her with
+a smile more like his wonted boyish grin than anything he had succeeded
+in conjuring up throughout the day. Her own smile answered it, and with a
+murmured word of gratitude and a little, half timid, half distant bow for
+Brentwick, she passed on into the hallway.
+
+Kirkwood lingered with his friend upon the door-stoop. Calendar, recovered
+from his temporary consternation, was already at the gate, bending over
+it, fat fingers fumbling with the latch, his round red face, lifted to the
+house, darkly working with chagrin.
+
+From his threshold, watching him with a slight contraction of the eyes,
+Brentwick hailed him in tones of cloying courtesy.
+
+"Do you wish to see me, sir?"
+
+The fat adventurer faltered just within the gateway; then, with a truculent
+swagger, "I want my daughter," he declared vociferously.
+
+Brentwick peered mildly over his glasses, first at Calendar, then at
+Kirkwood. His glance lingered a moment on the young man's honest eyes, and
+swung back to Calendar.
+
+"My good man," he said with sublime tolerance, "will you be pleased to take
+yourself off--to the devil if you like? Or shall I take the trouble to
+interest the police?"
+
+He removed one fine and fragile hand from a pocket of the flowered
+dressing-gown, long enough to jerk it significantly toward the nearer
+street-corner.
+
+Thunderstruck, Calendar glanced hastily in the indicated direction.
+A blue-coated bobby was to be seen approaching with measured stride,
+diffusing upon the still evening air an impression of ineffably capable
+self-contentment.
+
+Calendar's fleshy lips parted and closed without a sound. They quivered.
+Beneath them quivered his assortment of graduated chins. His heavy and
+pendulous cheeks quivered, slowly empurpling with the dark tide of his
+apoplectic wrath. The close-clipped thatch of his iron gray mustache, even,
+seemed to bristle like hairs upon the neck of a maddened dog. Beneath him
+his fat legs trembled, and indeed his whole huge carcass shook visibly, in
+the stress of his restrained wrath.
+
+Suddenly, overwhelmed, he banged the gate behind him and waddled off to
+join the captain; who already, with praiseworthy native prudence, had
+fallen back upon their cab.
+
+From his coign of strategic advantage, the comfortable elevation of
+his box, Kirkwood's cabby, whose huge enjoyment of the adventurers'
+discomfiture had throughout been noisily demonstrative, entreated Calendar
+with lifted forefinger, bland affability, and expressions of heartfelt
+sympathy.
+
+"Kebsir? 'Ave a kebsir, do! Try a ride be'ind a real 'orse, sir; don't you
+go on wastin' time on 'im." A jerk of a derisive thumb singled out the
+other cabman. "'E aren't pl'yin' you fair, sir; I knows 'im,--'e's a
+hartful g'y deceiver, 'e is. Look at 'is 'orse,--w'ich it aren't; it's a
+snyle, that's w'at it is. Tyke a father's hadvice, sir, and next time yer
+fairest darter runs awye with the dook in disguise, chyse 'em in a real
+kebsir, not a cheap imitashin.... Kebsir?... Garn, you 'ard-'arted--"
+
+Here he swooped upwards in a dizzy flight of vituperation best unrecorded.
+Calendar, beyond an absent-minded flirt of one hand by his ear, as who
+should shoo away a buzzing insect, ignored him utterly.
+
+Sullenly extracting money from his pocket, he paid off his driver, and in
+company with Stryker, trudged in morose silence down the street.
+
+Brentwick touched Kirkwood's arm and drew him into the house.
+
+
+
+
+XVIII
+
+
+ADVENTURERS' LUCK
+
+As the door closed, Kirkwood swung impulsively to Brentwick, with the
+brief, uneven laugh of fine-drawn nerves.
+
+"Good God, sir!" he cried. "You don't know--"
+
+"I can surmise," interrupted the elder man shrewdly.
+
+"You turned up in the nick of time, for all the world like--"
+
+"Harlequin popping through a stage trap?"
+
+"No!--an incarnation of the Providence that watches over children and
+fools."
+
+Brentwick dropped a calming hand upon his shoulder. "Your simile seems
+singularly happy, Philip. Permit me to suggest that you join the child in
+my study." He laughed quietly, with a slight nod toward an open door at the
+end of the hallway. "For myself, I'll be with you in one moment."
+
+A faint, indulgent smile lurking in the shadow of his white mustache, he
+watched the young man wheel and dart through the doorway. "Young hearts!"
+he commented inaudibly--and a trace sadly. "Youth!..."
+
+Beyond the threshold of the study, Kirkwood paused, eager eyes searching
+its somber shadows for a sign of Dorothy.
+
+A long room and deep, it was lighted only by the circumscribed disk of
+illumination thrown on the central desk by a shaded reading-lamp, and the
+flickering glow of a grate-fire set beneath the mantel of a side-wall. At
+the back, heavy velvet porti�res cloaked the recesses of two long windows,
+closed jealously even against the twilight. Aside from the windows, doors
+and chimney-piece, every foot of wall space was occupied by towering
+bookcases or by shelves crowded to the limit of their capacity with an
+amazing miscellany of objects of art, the fruit of years of patient and
+discriminating collecting. An exotic and heady atmosphere, compounded of
+the faint and intangible exhalations of these insentient things, fragrance
+of sandalwood, myrrh and musk, reminiscent whiffs of half-forgotten
+incense, seemed to intensify the impression of gloomy richness and
+repose...
+
+By the fireplace, a little to one side, stood Dorothy, one small foot
+resting on the brass fender, her figure merging into the dusky background,
+her delicate beauty gaining an effect of elusive and ethereal mystery in
+the waning and waxing ruddy glow upflung from the bedded coals.
+
+"Oh, Philip!" She turned swiftly to Kirkwood with extended hands and a low,
+broken cry. "I'm _so_ glad...."
+
+A trace of hysteria in her manner warned him, and he checked himself upon
+the verge of a too dangerous tenderness. "There!" he said soothingly,
+letting her hands rest gently in his palms while he led her to a chair. "We
+can make ourselves easy now." She sat down and he released her hands with a
+reluctance less evident than actual. "If ever I say another word against my
+luck--"
+
+"Who," inquired the girl, lowering her voice, "who is the gentleman in the
+flowered dressing-gown?"
+
+"Brentwick--George Silvester Brentwick: an old friend. I've known him for
+years,--ever since I came abroad. Curiously enough, however, this is the
+first time I've ever been here. I called once, but he wasn't in,--a few
+days ago,--the day we met. I thought the place looked familiar. Stupid of
+me!"
+
+"Philip," said the girl with a grave face but a shaking voice, "it was."
+She laughed provokingly.... "It was so funny, Philip. I don't know why I
+ran, when you told me to, but I did; and while I ran, I was conscious
+of the front door, here, opening, and this tall man in the flowered
+dressing-gown coming down to the gate as if it were the most ordinary thing
+in the world for him to stroll out, dressed that way, in the evening. And
+he opened the gate, and bowed, and said, ever so pleasantly, 'Won't you
+come in, Miss Calendar?'--"
+
+"He did!" exclaimed Kirkwood. "But how--?"
+
+"How can I say?" she expostulated. "At all events, he seemed to know
+me; and when he added something about calling you in, too--he said 'Mr.
+Kirkwood '--I didn't hesitate."
+
+"It's strange enough, surely--and fortunate. Bless his heart!" said
+Kirkwood.
+
+And, "Hum!" said Mr. Brentwick considerately, entering the study. He had
+discarded the dressing-gown and was now in evening dress.
+
+The girl rose. Kirkwood turned. "Mr. Brentwick--" he began.
+
+But Brentwick begged his patience with an eloquent gesture. "Sir," he said,
+somewhat austerely, "permit me to put a single question: Have you by any
+chance paid your cabby?"
+
+"Why--" faltered the younger man, with a flaming face. "I--why, no--that
+is--"
+
+The other quietly put his hand upon a bell-pull. A faint jingling sound was
+at once audible, emanating from the basement.
+
+"How much should you say you owe him?"
+
+"I--I haven't a penny in the world!"
+
+The shrewd eyes flashed their amusement into Kirkwood's. "Tut, tut!"
+Brentwick chuckled. "Between gentlemen, my dear boy! Dear me! you are slow
+to learn."
+
+"I'll never be contented to sponge on my friends," explained Kirkwood in
+deepest misery. "I can't tell when--"
+
+"Tut, tut! How much did you say?"
+
+"Ten shillings--or say twelve, would be about right," stammered the
+American, swayed by conflicting emotions of gratitude and profound
+embarrassment.
+
+A soft-footed butler, impassive as Fate, materialized mysteriously in the
+doorway.
+
+"You rang, sir?" he interrupted frigidly.
+
+"I rang, Wotton." His master selected a sovereign from his purse and handed
+it to the servant. "For the cabby, Wotton."
+
+"Yes sir." The butler swung automatically, on one heel.
+
+"And Wotton!"
+
+"Sir?"
+
+"If any one should ask for me, I'm not at home."
+
+"Very good, sir."
+
+"And if you should see a pair of disreputable scoundrels skulking, in the
+neighborhood, one short and stout, the other tall and evidently a seafaring
+man, let me know."
+
+"Thank you, sir." A moment later the front door was heard to close.
+
+Brentwick turned with a little bow to the girl. "My dear Miss Calendar," he
+said, rubbing his thin, fine hands,--"I am old enough, I trust, to call you
+such without offense,--please be seated."
+
+Complying, the girl rewarded him with a radiant smile. Whereupon, striding
+to the fireplace, their host turned his back to it, clasped his hands
+behind him, and glowered benignly upon the two. "Ah!" he observed in
+accents of extreme personal satisfaction. "Romance! Romance!"
+
+"Would you mind telling us how you knew--" began Kirkwood anxiously.
+
+"Not in the least, my dear Philip. It is simple enough: I possess an
+imagination. From my bedroom window, on the floor above, I happen to behold
+two cabs racing down the street, the one doggedly pursuing the other. The
+foremost stops, perforce of a fagged horse. There alights a young gentleman
+looking, if you'll pardon me, uncommonly seedy; he is followed by a young
+lady, if she will pardon me," with another little bow, "uncommonly pretty.
+With these two old eyes I observe that the gentleman does not pay his
+cabby. Ergo--I intelligently deduce--he is short of money. Eh?"
+
+"You were right," affirmed Kirkwood, with a rueful and crooked smile.
+"But--"
+
+"So! so!" pursued Brentwick, rising on his toes and dropping back again;
+"so this world of ours wags on to the old, old tune!... And I, who in my
+younger days pursued adventure without success, in dotage find myself
+dragged into a romance by my two ears, whether I will or no! Eh? And now
+you are going to tell me all about it, Philip. There is a chair.... Well,
+Wotton?"
+
+The butler had again appeared noiselessly in the doorway.
+
+"Beg pardon, sir; they're waiting, sir."
+
+"The caitiffs, Wotton?"
+
+"Yessir."
+
+"Where waiting?"
+
+"One at each end of the street, sir."
+
+"Thank you. You may bring us sherry and biscuit, Wotton."
+
+"Thank you, sir."
+
+The servant vanished.
+
+Brentwick removed his glasses, rubbed them, and blinked thoughtfully at the
+girl. "My dear," he said suddenly, with a peculiar tremor in his voice,
+"you resemble your mother remarkably. Tut--I should know! Time was when I
+was one of her most ardent admirers."
+
+"You--y-you knew my mother?" cried Dorothy, profoundly moved.
+
+"Did I not know you at sight? My dear, you are your mother reincarnate, for
+the good of an unworthy world. She was a very beautiful woman, my dear."
+
+Wotton entered with a silver serving tray, offering it in turn to Dorothy,
+Kirkwood and his employer. While he was present the three held silent--the
+girl trembling slightly, but with her face aglow; Kirkwood half stupefied
+between his ease from care and his growing astonishment, as Brentwick
+continued to reveal unexpected phases of his personality; Brentwick himself
+outwardly imperturbable and complacent, for all that his hand shook as he
+lifted his wine glass.
+
+"You may go, Wotton--or, wait. Don't you feel the need of a breath of fresh
+air, Wotton?"
+
+"Yessir, thank you, sir."
+
+"Then change your coat, Wotton, light your pipe, and stroll out for half an
+hour. You need not leave the street, but if either the tall thin blackguard
+with the seafaring habit, or the short stout rascal with the air of mystery
+should accost you, treat them with all courtesy, Wotton. You will be
+careful not to tell either of them anything in particular, although I don't
+mind your telling them that Mr. Brentwick lives here, if they ask. I am
+mostly concerned to discover if they purpose becoming fixtures on the
+street-corners, Wotton."
+
+"Quite so, sir."
+
+"Now you may go.... Wotton," continued his employer as the butler took
+himself off as softly as a cat, "grows daily a more valuable mechanism. He
+is by no means human in any respect, but I find him extremely handy to
+have round the house.... And now, my dear," turning to Dorothy, "with your
+permission I desire to drink to the memory of your beautiful mother and to
+the happiness of her beautiful daughter."
+
+"But you will tell me--"
+
+"A number of interesting things, Miss Calendar, if you'll be good enough to
+let me choose the time. I beg you to be patient with the idiosyncrasies
+of an old man, who means no harm, who has a reputation as an eccentric to
+sustain before his servants.... And now," said Brentwick, setting aside his
+glass, "now, my dear boy, for the adventure."
+
+Kirkwood chuckled, infected by his host's genial humor. "How do you know--"
+
+"How can it be otherwise?" countered Brentwick with a trace of asperity.
+"Am I to be denied my adventure? Sir, I refuse without equivocation. Your
+very bearing breathes of Romance. There must be an adventure forthcoming,
+Philip; otherwise my disappointment will be so acute that I shall be
+regretfully obliged seriously to consider my right, as a householder, to
+show you the door."
+
+"But Mr. Brentwick--!"
+
+"Sit down, sir!" commanded Brentwick with such a peremptory note that the
+young man, who had risen, obeyed out of sheer surprise. Upon which his host
+advanced, indicting him with a long white forefinger. "Would you, sir,"
+he demanded, "again expose this little lady to the machinations of that
+corpulent scoundrel, whom I have just had the pleasure of shooing off my
+premises, because you choose to resent an old man's raillery?"
+
+"I apologize," Kirkwood humored him.
+
+"I accept the apology in the spirit in which it is offered.... I repeat,
+now for the adventure, Philip. If the story's long, epitomize. We can
+consider details more at our leisure."
+
+Kirkwood's eyes consulted the girl's face; almost imperceptibly she nodded
+him permission to proceed.
+
+"Briefly, then," he began haltingly, "the man who followed us to the door
+here, is Miss Calendar's father."
+
+"Oh? His name, please?"
+
+"George Burgoyne Calendar."
+
+"Ah! An American; I remember, now. Continue, please."
+
+"He is hounding us, sir, with the intention of stealing some property,
+which he caused to be stolen, which we--to put it bluntly--stole from him,
+to which he has no shadow of a title, and which, finally, we're endeavoring
+to return to its owners."
+
+"My dear!" interpolated Brentwick gently, looking down at the girl's
+flushed face and drooping head.
+
+"He ran us to the last ditch," Kirkwood continued; "I've spent my last
+farthing trying to lose him."
+
+"But why have you not caused his arrest?" Brentwick inquired.
+
+Kirkwood nodded meaningly toward the girl. Brentwick made a sound
+indicating comprehension, a click of the tongue behind closed teeth.
+
+"We came to your door by the merest accident--it might as well have been
+another. I understood you were in Munich, and it never entered my head that
+we'd find you home."
+
+"A communication from my solicitors detained me," explained Brentwick. "And
+now, what do you intend to do?"
+
+"Trespass as far on your kindness as you'll permit. In the first place,
+I--I want the use of a few pounds with which to cable some friends in New
+York, for money; on receipt of which I can repay you."
+
+"Philip," observed Brentwood, "you are a most irritating child. But I
+forgive you the faults of youth. You may proceed, bearing in mind, if you
+please, that I am your friend equally with any you may own in America."
+
+"You're one of the best men in the world," said Kirkwood.
+
+"Tut, tut! Will you get on?"
+
+"Secondly, I want you to help us to escape Calendar to-night. It is
+necessary that Miss Calendar should go to Chiltern this evening, where she
+has friends who will receive and protect her."
+
+"Mm-mm," grumbled their host, meditative. "My faith!" he commented, with
+brightening eyes. "It sounds almost too good to be true! And I've been
+growing afraid that the world was getting to be a most humdrum and
+uninteresting planet!... Miss Calendar, I am a widower of so many years
+standing that I had almost forgotten I had ever been anything but a
+bachelor. I fear my house contains little that will be of service to a
+young lady. Yet a room is at your disposal; the parlor-maid shall show you
+the way. And Philip, between you and me, I venture to remark that hot water
+and cold steel would add to the attractiveness of your personal appearance;
+my valet will attend you in my room. Dinner," concluded Brentwick with
+anticipative relish, "will be served in precisely thirty minutes. I shall
+expect you to entertain me with a full and itemized account of every phase
+of your astonishing adventure. Later, we will find a way to Chiltern."
+
+Again he put a hand upon the bell-pull. Simultaneously Dorothy and Kirkwood
+rose.
+
+"Mr. Brentwick," said the girl, her eyes starred with tears of gratitude,
+"I don't, I really don't know how--"
+
+"My dear," said the old gentleman, "you will thank me most appropriately
+by continuing, to the best of your ability, to resemble your mother more
+remarkably every minute."
+
+"But I," began Kirkwood----.
+
+"You, my dear Philip, can thank me best by permitting me to enjoy myself;
+which I am doing thoroughly at the present moment. My pleasure in being
+invited to interfere in your young affairs is more keen than you can well
+surmise. Moreover," said Mr. Brentwick, "so long have I been an amateur
+adventurer that I esteem it the rarest privilege to find myself thus on the
+point of graduating into professional ranks." He rubbed his hands, beaming
+upon them. "And," he added, as a maid appeared at the door, "I have already
+schemed me a scheme for the discomfiture of our friends the enemy: a scheme
+which we will discuss with our dinner, while the heathen rage and imagine a
+vain thing, in the outer darkness."
+
+Kirkwood would have lingered, but of such inflexible temper was his host
+that he bowed him into the hands of a man servant without permitting him
+another word.
+
+"Not a syllable," he insisted. "I protest I am devoured with curiosity, my
+dear boy, but I have also bowels of compassion. When we are well on with
+our meal, when you are strengthened with food and drink, then you may
+begin. But now--Dickie," to the valet, "do your duty!"
+
+Kirkwood, laughing with exasperation, retired at discretion, leaving
+Brentwick the master of the situation: a charming gentleman with a will of
+his own and a way that went with it.
+
+He heard the young man's footsteps diminish on the stairway; and again
+he smiled the indulgent, melancholy smile of mellow years. "Youth!" he
+whispered softly. "Romance!... And now," with a brisk change of tone as
+he closed the study door, "now we are ready for this interesting Mr.
+Calendar."
+
+Sitting down at his desk, he found and consulted a telephone directory;
+but its leaves, at first rustling briskly at the touch of the slender and
+delicate fingers, were presently permitted to lie unturned,--the book
+resting open on his knees the while he stared wistfully into the fire.
+
+A suspicion of moisture glimmered in his eyes. "Dorothy!" he whispered
+huskily. And a little later, rising, he proceeded to the telephone....
+
+An hour and a half later Kirkwood, his self-respect something restored by
+a bath, a shave, and a resumption of clothes which had been hastily but
+thoroughly cleansed and pressed by Brentwick's valet; his confidence and
+courage mounting high under the combined influence of generous wine,
+substantial food, the presence of his heart's mistress and the
+admiration--which was unconcealed--of his friend, concluded at the
+dinner-table, his narration.
+
+"And that," he said, looking up from his savory, "is about all."
+
+"Bravo!" applauded Brentwick; eyes shining with delight.
+
+"All," interposed Dorothy in warm reproach, "but what he hasn't told--"
+
+"Which, my dear, is to be accounted for wholly by a very creditable
+modesty, rarely encountered in the young men of the present day. It was, of
+course, altogether different with those of my younger years. Yes, Wotton?"
+
+Brentwick sat back in his chair, inclining an attentive ear to a
+communication murmured by the butler.
+
+Kirkwood's gaze met Dorothy's across the expanse of shining cloth; he
+deprecated her interruption with a whimsical twist of his eyebrows.
+"Really, you shouldn't," he assured her in an undertone. "I've done nothing
+to deserve..." But under the spell of her serious sweet eyes, he fell
+silent, and presently looked down, strangely abashed; and contemplated the
+vast enormity of his unworthiness.
+
+Coffee was set before them by Wotton, the impassive, Brentwick refusing
+it with a little sigh. "It is one of the things, as Philip knows," he
+explained to the girl, "denied me by the physician who makes his life happy
+by making mine a waste. I am allowed but three luxuries; cigars, travel
+in moderation, and the privilege of imposing on my friends. The first I
+propose presently, to enjoy, by your indulgence; and the second I shall
+this evening undertake by virtue of the third, of which I have just availed
+myself."
+
+Smiling at the involution, he rested his head against the back of the
+chair, eyes roving from the girl's face to Kirkwood's. "Inspiration to
+do which," he proceeded gravely, "came to me from the seafaring picaroon
+(Stryker did you name him?) via the excellent Wotton. While you were
+preparing for dinner, Wotton returned from his constitutional with the news
+that, leaving the corpulent person on watch at the corner, Captain Stryker
+had temporarily, made himself scarce. However, we need feel no anxiety
+concerning his whereabouts, for he reappeared in good time and a
+motor-car. From which it becomes evident that you have not overrated their
+pertinacity; the fiasco of the cab-chase is not to be re�nacted."
+
+Resolutely the girl repressed a gasp of dismay. Kirkwood stared moodily
+into his cup.
+
+"These men bore me fearfully," he commented at last.
+
+"And so," continued Brentwick, "I bethought me of a counter-stroke. It is
+my good fortune to have a friend whose whim it is to support a touring-car,
+chiefly in innocuous idleness. Accordingly I have telephoned him and
+commandeered the use of this machine--mechanician, too.... Though not a
+betting man, I am willing to risk recklessly a few pence in support of my
+contention, that of the two, Captain Stryker's car and ours, the latter
+will prove considerably the most speedy....
+
+"In short, I suggest," he concluded, thoughtfully lacing his long white
+fingers, "that, avoiding the hazards of cab and railway carriage, we motor
+to Chiltern: the night being fine and the road, I am told, exceptionally
+good. Miss Dorothy, what do you think?"
+
+Instinctively the girl looked to Kirkwood; then shifted her glance to their
+host. "I think you are wonderfully thoughtful and kind," she said simply.
+
+"And you, Philip?"
+
+"It's an inspiration," the younger man declared. "I can't think of anything
+better calculated to throw them off, than to distance them by motor-car. It
+would be always possible to trace our journey by rail."
+
+"Then," announced Brentwick, making as if to rise, "we had best go. If
+neither my hearing nor Captain Stryker's car deceives me, our fiery chariot
+is panting at the door."
+
+A little sobered from the confident spirit of quiet gaiety in which they
+had dined, they left the table. Not that, in their hearts, either greatly
+questioned their ultimate triumph; but they were allowing for the element
+of error so apt to set at naught human calculations. Calendar himself had
+already been proved fallible. Within the bounds of possibility, their turn
+to stumble might now be imminent.
+
+When he let himself dwell upon it, their utter helplessness to give
+Calendar pause by commonplace methods, maddened Kirkwood. With another
+scoundrel it had been so simple a matter to put a period to his activities
+by a word to the police. But he was her father; for that reason he must
+continually be spared ... Even though, in desperate extremity, she should
+give consent to the arrest of the adventurers, retaliation would follow,
+swift and sure. For they might not overlook nor gloze the fact that hers
+had been the hands responsible for the theft of the jewels; innocent
+though she had been in committing that larceny, a cat's-paw guided by an
+intelligence unscrupulous and malign, the law would not hold her guiltless
+were she once brought within its cognizance. Nor, possibly, would the
+Hallams, mother and son.
+
+Upon their knowledge and their fear of this, undoubtedly Calendar was
+reckoning: witness the barefaced effrontery with which he operated against
+them. His fear of the police might be genuine enough, but he was never for
+an instant disturbed by any doubt lest his daughter should turn against
+him. She would never dare that.
+
+Before they left the house, while Dorothy was above stairs resuming her
+hat and coat, Kirkwood and Brentwick reconnoitered from the drawing-room
+windows, themselves screened from observation by the absence of light in
+the room behind.
+
+Before the door a motor-car waited, engines humming impatiently,
+mechanician ready in his seat, an uncouth shape in goggles and leather
+garments that shone like oilskins under the street lights.
+
+At one corner another and a smaller car stood in waiting, its lamps like
+baleful eyes glaring through the night.
+
+In the shadows across the way, a lengthy shadow lurked: Stryker, beyond
+reasonable question. Otherwise the street was deserted. Not even that
+adventitous bobby of the early evening was now in evidence.
+
+Dorothy presently joining them, Brentwick led the way to the door.
+
+Wotton, apparently nerveless beneath his absolute immobility, let them
+out--and slammed the door behind them with such promptitude as to give
+cause for the suspicion that he was a fraud, a sham, beneath his icy
+exterior desperately afraid lest the house be stormed by the adventurers.
+
+Kirkwood to the right, Brentwick to the left of Dorothy, the former
+carrying the treasure bag, they hastened down the walk and through the gate
+to the car.
+
+The watcher across the way was moved to whistle shrilly; the other car
+lunged forward nervously.
+
+Brentwick taking the front seat, beside the mechanician, left the tonneau
+to Kirkwood and Dorothy. As the American slammed the door, the car swept
+smoothly out into the middle of the way, while the pursuing car swerved in
+to the other curb, slowing down to let Stryker jump aboard.
+
+Kirkwood put himself in the seat by the girl's side and for a few moments
+was occupied with the arrangement of the robes. Then, sitting back, he
+found her eyes fixed upon him, pools of inscrutable night in the shadow of
+her hat.
+
+"You aren't afraid, Dorothy?"
+
+She answered quietly: "I am with you, Philip."
+
+Beneath the robe their hands met...
+
+Exalted, excited, he turned and looked back. A hundred yards to the rear
+four unwinking eyes trailed them, like some modern Nemesis in monstrous
+guise.
+
+
+
+
+XIX
+
+I----THE UXBRIDGE ROAD
+
+At a steady gait, now and again checked in deference to the street traffic,
+Brentwick's motor-car rolled, with resonant humming of the engine, down
+the Cromwell Road, swerved into Warwick Road and swung northward through
+Kensington to Shepherd's Bush. Behind it Calendar's car clung as if towed
+by an invisible cable, never gaining, never losing, mutely testifying to
+the adventurer's unrelenting, grim determination to leave them no instant's
+freedom from surveillance, to keep for ever at their shoulders, watching
+his chance, biding his time with sinister patience until the moment when,
+wearied, their vigilance should relax....
+
+To some extent he reckoned without his motor-car. As long as they traveled
+within the metropolitan limits, constrained to observe a decorous pace
+in view of the prejudices of the County Council, it was a matter of no
+difficulty whatever to maintain his distance. But once they had won through
+Shepherd's Bush and, paced by huge doubledeck trolley trams, were flying
+through Hammersmith on the Uxbridge Road; once they had run through Acton,
+and knew beyond dispute that now they were without the city boundaries,
+then the complexion of the business was suddenly changed.
+
+Not too soon for honest sport; Calendar was to have (Kirkwood would have
+said in lurid American idiom) a run for his money. The scattered lights of
+Southall were winking out behind them before Brentwick chose to give the
+word to the mechanician.
+
+Quietly the latter threw in the clutch for the third speed--and the fourth.
+The car leaped forward like a startled race-horse. The motor lilted merrily
+into its deep-throated song of the open road, its contented, silken humming
+passing into a sonorous and sustained purr.
+
+Kirkwood and the girl were first jarred violently forward, then thrown
+together. She caught his arm to steady herself; it seemed the most natural
+thing imaginable that he should take her hand and pass it beneath his
+arm, holding her so, his fingers closed above her own. Before they had
+recovered, or had time to catch their breath, a mile of Middlesex had
+dropped to the rear.
+
+Not quite so far had they distanced Calendar's trailing Nemesis of the four
+glaring eyes; the pursuers put forth a gallant effort to hold their place.
+At intervals during the first few minutes a heavy roaring and crashing
+could be heard behind them; gradually it subsided, dying on the wings of
+the free rushing wind that buffeted their faces as mile after mile was
+reeled off and the wide, darkling English countryside opened out before
+them, sweet and wonderful.
+
+Once Kirkwood looked back; in the winking of an eye he saw four faded disks
+of light, pallid with despair, top a distant rise and glide down into
+darkness. When he turned, Dorothy was interrogating him with eyes whose
+melting, shadowed loveliness, revealed to him in the light of the far,
+still stars, seemed to incite him to that madness which he had bade himself
+resist with all his strength.
+
+He shook his head, as if to say: They can not catch us.
+
+His hour was not yet; time enough to think of love and marriage (as if he
+were capable of consecutive thought on any other subject!)--time enough to
+think of them when he had gene back to his place, or rather when he should
+have found it, in the ranks of bread-winners, and so have proved his right
+to mortal happiness; time enough then to lay whatever he might have to
+offer at her feet. Now he could conceive of no baser treachery to his
+soul's-desire than to advantage himself of her gratitude.
+
+Resolutely he turned his face forward, striving with all his will and might
+to forget the temptation of her lips, weary as they were and petulant with
+waiting; and so sat rigid in his time of trial, clinging with what strength
+he could to the standards of his honor, and trying to lose his dream
+in dreaming of the bitter struggle that seemed likely to be his future
+portion.
+
+Perhaps she guessed a little of the fortunes of the battle that was being
+waged within him. Perhaps not. Whatever the trend of her thoughts, she did
+not draw away from him.... Perhaps the breath of night, fresh and clean and
+fragrant with the odor of the fields and hedges, sweeping into her face
+with velvety caress, rendered her drowsy. Presently the silken lashes
+drooped, fluttering upon her cheeks, the tired and happy smile hovered
+about her lips....
+
+In something less than half an hour of this wild driving, Kirkwood roused
+out of his reverie sufficiently to become sensible that the speed was
+slackening. Incoherent snatches of sentences, fragments of words and
+phrases spoken by Brentwick and the mechanician, were flung back past his
+ears by the rushing wind. Shielding his eyes he could see dimly that the
+mechanician was tinkering (apparently) with the driving gear. Then, their
+pace continuing steadily to abate, he heard Brentwick fling at the man a
+sharp-toned and querulously impatient question: What was the trouble? His
+reply came in a single word, not distinguishable.
+
+The girl sat up, opening her eyes, disengaging her arm.
+
+Kirkwood bent forward and touched Brentwick on the shoulder; the latter
+turned to him a face lined with deep concern.
+
+"Trouble," he announced superfluously. "I fear we have blundered."
+
+"What is it?" asked Dorothy in a troubled voice.
+
+"Petrol seems to be running low. Charles here" (he referred to the
+mechanician) "says the tank must be leaking. We'll go on as best we can and
+try to find an inn. Fortunately, most of the inns nowadays keep supplies of
+petrol for just such emergencies."
+
+"Are we--? Do you think--?"
+
+"Oh, no; not a bit of danger of that," returned Brentwick hastily. "They'll
+not catch up with us this night. That is a very inferior car they have,--so
+Charles says, at least; nothing to compare with this. If I'm not in error,
+there's the Crown and Mitre just ahead; we'll make it, fill our tanks, and
+be off again before they can make up half their loss."
+
+Dorothy looked anxiously to Kirkwood, her lips forming an unuttered query:
+What did he think?
+
+"Don't worry; we'll have no trouble," he assured her stoutly; "the
+chauffeur knows, undoubtedly."
+
+None the less he was moved to stand up in the tonneau, conscious of the
+presence of the traveling bag, snug between his feet, as well as of the
+weight of Calendar's revolver in his pocket, while he stared back along the
+road.
+
+There was nothing to be seen of their persecutors.
+
+The car continued to crawl. Five minutes dragged out tediously. Gradually
+they, drew abreast a tavern standing back a distance from the road,
+embowered in a grove of trees between whose ancient boles the tap-room
+windows shone enticingly, aglow with comfortable light. A creaking
+sign-board, much worn by weather and age, swinging from a roadside post,
+confirmed the accuracy of Brentwick's surmise, announcing that here stood
+the Crown and Mitre, house of entertainment for man and beast.
+
+Sluggishly the car rolled up before it and came to a dead and silent halt.
+Charles, the mechanician, jumping out, ran hastily up the path towards the
+inn. In the car Brentwick turned again, his eyes curiously bright in the
+starlight, his forehead quaintly furrowed, his voice apologetic.
+
+"It may take a few minutes," he said undecidedly, plainly endeavoring to
+cover up his own dark doubts. "My dear," to the girl, "if I have brought
+trouble upon you in this wise, I shall never earn my own forgiveness."
+
+Kirkwood stood up again, watchful, attentive to the sounds of night; but
+the voice of the pursuing motor-car was not of their company. "I hear
+nothing," he announced.
+
+"You will forgive me,--won't you, my dear?--for causing you these few
+moments of needless anxiety?" pleaded the old gentleman, his tone
+tremulous.
+
+"As if you could be blamed!" protested the girl. "You mustn't think of it
+that way. Fancy, what should we have done without you!"
+
+"I'm afraid I have been very clumsy," sighed Brentwick, "clumsy and
+impulsive ... Kirkwood, do you hear anything?"
+
+"Not yet, sir."
+
+"Perhaps," suggested Brentwick a little later, "perhaps we had better
+alight and go up to the inn. It would be more cosy there, especially if the
+petrol proves hard to obtain, and we have long to wait."
+
+"I should like that," assented the girl decidedly.
+
+Kirkwood nodded his approval, opened the door and jumped out to assist her;
+then picked up the bag and followed the pair,--Brentwick leading the way
+with Dorothy on his arm.
+
+At the doorway of the Crown and Mitre, Charles met them evidently seriously
+disturbed. "No petrol to be had here, sir," he announced reluctantly; "but
+the landlord will send to the next inn, a mile up the road, for some. You
+will have to be patient, I'm afraid, sir."
+
+"Very well. Get some one to help you push the car in from the road,"
+ordered Brentwick; "we will be waiting in one of the private parlors."
+
+"Yes, sir; thank you, sir." The mechanician touched the visor of his cap
+and hurried off.
+
+"Come, Kirkwood." Gently Brentwick drew the girl in with him.
+
+Kirkwood lingered momentarily on the doorstep, to listen acutely. But the
+wind was blowing into that quarter whence they had come, and he could hear
+naught save the soughing in the trees, together with an occasional burst
+of rude rustic laughter from the tap-room. Lifting his shoulders in dumb
+dismay, and endeavoring to compose his features, he entered the tavern.
+
+
+
+
+II----THE CROWN AND MITRE
+
+A rosy-cheeked and beaming landlady met him in the corridor and, all bows
+and smiles, ushered him into a private parlor reserved for the party,
+immediately bustling off in a desperate flurry, to secure refreshments
+desired by Brentwick.
+
+The girl had seated herself on one end of an extremely comfortless lounge
+and was making a palpable effort to seem at ease. Brentwick stood at one of
+the windows, shoulders rounded and head bent, hands clasped behind his back
+as he peered out into the night. Kirkwood dropped the traveling bag beneath
+a chair the farthest removed from the doorway, and took to pacing the
+floor.
+
+In a corner of the room a tall grandfather's clock ticked off ten
+interminable minutes. For some reason unconscionably delaying, the landlady
+did not reappear. Brentwick, abruptly turning from the window, remarked
+the fact querulously, then drew a chair up to a marble-topped table in the
+middle of the floor.
+
+"My dear," he requested the girl, "will you oblige me by sitting over here?
+And Philip, bring up a chair, if you will. We must not permit ourselves to
+worry, and I have something here which may, perhaps, engage your interest
+for a while."
+
+To humor him and alleviate his evident distress of mind, they acceded.
+Kirkwood found himself seated opposite Dorothy, Brentwick between them.
+After some hesitation, made the more notable by an air of uneasiness
+which sat oddly on his shoulders, whose composure and confident mien had
+theretofore been so complete and so reassuring, the elder gentleman fumbled
+in an inner coat-pocket and brought to light a small black leather wallet.
+He seemed to be on the point of opening it when hurried footfalls sounded
+in the hallway. Brentwick placed the wallet, still with its secret intact,
+on the table before him, as Charles burst unceremoniously in, leaving the
+door wide open.
+
+"Mr. Brentwick, sir!" he cried gustily. "That other car--"
+
+With a smothered ejaculation Kirkwood leaped to his feet, tugging at the
+weapon in his pocket. In another instant he had the revolver exposed.
+The girl's cry of alarm, interrupting the machinist, fixed Brentwick's
+attention on the young man. He, too, stood up, reaching over very quickly,
+to clamp strong supple fingers round Kirkwood's wrist, while with the other
+hand he laid hold of the revolver and by a single twist wrenched it away.
+
+Kirkwood turned upon him in fury. "So!" he cried, shaking with passion.
+"This is what your hospitality meant! You're going to--"
+
+"My dear young friend," interrupted Brentwick with a flash of impatience,
+"remember that if I had designed to betray you, I could have asked no
+better opportunity than when you were my guest under my own roof."
+
+"But--hang it all, Brentwick!" expostulated Kirkwood, ashamed and contrite,
+but worked upon by desperate apprehension; "I didn't mean that, but--"
+
+"Would you have bullets flying when she is near?" demanded Brentwick
+scathingly. Hastily he slipped the revolver upon a little shelf beneath the
+table-top. "Sir!" he informed Kirkwood with some heat, "I love you as my
+own son, but you're a young fool!... as I have been, in my time ... and as
+I would to Heaven I might be again! Be advised, Philip,--be calm. Can't you
+see it's the only way to save your treasure?"
+
+"Hang the jewels!" retorted Kirkwood warmly. "What--"
+
+"Sir, who said anything about the jewels?"
+
+As Brentwick spoke, Calendar's corpulent figure filled the doorway;
+Stryker's weather-worn features loomed over his shoulder, distorted in a
+cheerful leer.
+
+"As to the jewels," announced the fat adventurer, "I've got a word to say,
+if you put it to me that way."
+
+He paused on the threshold, partly for dramatic effect, partly for his own
+satisfaction, his quick eyes darting from face to face of the four people
+whom he had caught so unexpectedly. A shade of complacency colored his
+expression, and he smiled evilly beneath the coarse short thatch of his
+gray mustache. In his hand a revolver appeared, poised for immediate use if
+there were need.
+
+There was none. Brentwick, at his primal appearance, had dropped a
+peremptory hand on Kirkwood's shoulder, forcing the young man back to his
+seat; at the same time he resumed his own. The girl had not stirred from
+hers since the first alarm; she sat as if transfixed with terror, leaning
+forward with her elbows on the table, her hands tightly clasped, her face,
+a little blanched, turned to the door. But her scarlet lips were set and
+firm with inflexible purpose, and her brown eyes met Calendar's with a look
+level and unflinching. Beyond this she gave no sign of recognition.
+
+Nearest of the four to the adventurers was Charles, the mechanician, paused
+in affrighted astonishment at sight of the revolver. Calendar, choosing to
+advance suddenly, poked the muzzle of the weapon jocularly in the man's
+ribs. "Beat it, Four-eyes!" he snapped. "This is your cue to duck! Get out
+of my way."
+
+The mechanician jumped as if shot, then hastily, retreated to the table,
+his sallow features working beneath the goggle-mask which had excited the
+fat adventurer's scorn.
+
+"Come right in, Cap'n," Calendar threw over one shoulder; "come in, shut
+the door and lock it. Let's all be sociable, and have a nice quiet time."
+
+Stryker obeyed, with a derisive grimace for Kirkwood.
+
+Calendar, advancing jauntily to a point within a yard of the table,
+stopped, smiling affably down upon his prospective victims, and airily
+twirling his revolver.
+
+"_Good_ evening, all!" he saluted them blandly. "Dorothy, my child," with
+assumed concern, "you're looking a trifle upset; I'm afraid you've been
+keeping late hours. Little girls must be careful, you know, or they lose
+the bloom of roses in their cheeks.... Mr. Kirkwood, it's a pleasure to
+meet you again! Permit me to paraphrase your most sound advice, and remind
+you that pistol-shots are apt to attract undesirable attention. It wouldn't
+be wise for _you_ to bring the police about our ears. I believe that
+in substance such was your sapient counsel to me in the cabin of the
+_Alethea_; was it not?... And you, sir!"--fixing Brentwick with a cold
+unfriendly eye. "You animated fossil, what d'you mean by telling me to go
+to the devil?... But let that pass; I hold no grudge. What might your name
+be?"
+
+[Illustration: "_Good_ evening, all!" he saluted them blandly.]
+
+"It might be Brentwick," said that gentleman placidly.
+
+"Brentwick, eh? Well, I like a man of spirit. But permit me to advise
+you--"
+
+"Gladly," nodded Brentwick.
+
+"Eh?... Don't come a second time between father and daughter; another man
+might not be as patient as I, Mister Brentwick. There's a law in the land,
+if you don't happen to know it."
+
+"I congratulate you on your success in evading it," observed Brentwick,
+undisturbed. "And it was considerate of you not to employ it in this
+instance." Then, with a sharp change of tone, "Come, sir!" he demanded.
+"You have unwarrantably intruded in this room, which I have engaged for my
+private use. Get through with your business and be off with you."
+
+"All in my good time, my antediluvian friend. When I've wound up my
+business here I'll go--not before. But, just to oblige you, we'll get down
+to it.... Kirkwood, you have a revolver of mine. Be good enough to return
+it."
+
+"I have it here,--under the table," interrupted Brentwick suavely. "Shall I
+hand it to you?"
+
+"By the muzzle, if you please. Be very careful; this one's loaded, too--apt
+to explode any minute."
+
+To Kirkwood's intense disgust Brentwick quietly slipped one hand beneath
+the table and, placing the revolver on its top, delicately with his
+finger-tips shoved it toward the farther edge. With a grunt of approval,
+Calendar swept the weapon up and into his pocket.
+
+"Any more ordnance?" he inquired briskly, eyes moving alertly from face to
+face. "No matter; you wouldn't dare use 'em anyway. And I'm about done.
+Dorothy, my dear, it's high time you returned to your father's protection.
+Where's that gladstone bag?"
+
+"In my traveling bag," the girl told him in a toneless voice.
+
+"Then you may bring it along. You may also say good night to the kind
+gentlemen."
+
+Dorothy did not move; her pallor grew more intense and Kirkwood saw her
+knuckles tighten beneath the gloves. Otherwise her mouth seemed to grow
+more straight and hard.
+
+"Dorothy!" cried the adventurer with a touch of displeasure. "You heard
+me?"
+
+"I heard you," she replied a little wearily, more than a little
+contemptuously. "Don't mind him, please, Mr. Kirkwood!"--with an appealing
+gesture, as Kirkwood, unable to contain himself, moved restlessly in his
+chair, threatening to rise. "Don't say anything. I have no intention
+whatever of going with this man."
+
+Calendar's features twitched nervously; he chewed a corner of his mustache,
+fixing the girl with a black stare. "I presume," he remarked after a
+moment, with slow deliberation, "you're aware that, as your father, I am in
+a position to compel you to accompany me."
+
+"I shall not go with you," iterated Dorothy in a level tone. "You may
+threaten me, but--I shall not go. Mr. Brentwick and Mr. Kirkwood are taking
+me to--friends, who will give me a home until I can find a way to take care
+of myself. That is all I have to say to you."
+
+"Bravo, my dear!" cried Brentwick encouragingly.
+
+"Mind your business, sir!" thundered Calendar, his face darkening. Then, to
+Dorothy, "You understand, I trust, what this means?" he demanded. "I offer
+you a home--and a good one. Refuse, and you work for your living, my girl!
+You've forfeited your legacy--"
+
+"I know, I know," she told him in cold disdain. "I am content. Won't you be
+kind enough to leave me alone?"
+
+For a breath, Calendar glowered over her; then, "I presume," he observed,
+"that all these heroics are inspired by that whipper-snapper, Kirkwood. Do
+you know that he hasn't a brass farthing to bless himself with?"
+
+"What has that--?" cried the girl indignantly.
+
+"Why, it has everything to do with me, my child. As your doting parent, I
+can't consent to your marrying nothing-a-year.... For I surmise you intend
+to marry this Mr. Kirkwood, don't you?"
+
+There followed a little interval of silence, while the warm blood flamed in
+the girl's face and the red lips trembled as she faced her tormentor. Then,
+with a quaver that escaped her control, "If Mr. Kirkwood asks me, I shall,"
+she stated very simply.
+
+"That," interposed Kirkwood, "is completely understood." His gaze sought
+her eyes, but she looked away.
+
+"You forget that I am your father," sneered Calendar; "and that you are a
+minor. I can refuse my consent."
+
+"But you won't," Kirkwood told him with assurance.
+
+The adventurer stared. "No," he agreed, after slight hesitation; "no,
+I shan't interfere. Take her, my boy, if you want her--and a father's
+blessing into the bargain. The Lord knows I've troubles enough; a parent's
+lot is not what it's cracked up to be." He paused, leering, ironic.
+"But,"--deliberately, "there's still this other matter of the gladstone
+bag. I don't mind abandoning my parental authority, when my child's
+happiness is concerned, but as for my property--"
+
+"It is not your property," interrupted the girl.
+
+"It was your mother's, dear child. It's now mine."
+
+"I dispute that assertion," Kirkwood put in.
+
+"You may dispute it till the cows come home, my boy: the fact will remain
+that I intend to take my property with me when I leave this room, whether
+you like it or not. Now are you disposed to continue the argument, or may I
+count on your being sensible?"
+
+"You may put away your revolver, if that's what you mean," said Kirkwood.
+"We certainly shan't oppose you with violence, but I warn you that Scotland
+Yard--"
+
+"Oh, that be blowed!" the adventurer snorted in disgust. "I can sail
+circles round any tec. that ever blew out of Scotland Yard! Give me an
+hour's start, and you're free to do all the funny business you've a mind
+to, with--Scotland Yard!"
+
+"Then you admit," queried Brentwick civilly, "that you've no legal title to
+the jewels in dispute?"
+
+"Look here, my friend," chuckled Calendar, "when you catch me admitting
+anything, you write it down in your little book and tell the bobby on
+the corner. Just at present I've got other business than to stand round
+admitting anything about anything.... Cap'n, let's have that bag of my
+dutiful daughter's."
+
+"'Ere you are." Stryker spoke for the first time since entering the room,
+taking the valise from beneath the chair and depositing it on the table.
+
+"Well, we shan't take anything that doesn't belong to us," laughed
+Calendar, fumbling with the catch; "not even so small a matter as my own
+child's traveling bag. A small--heavy--gladstone bag," he grunted, opening
+the valise and plunging in one greedy hand, "will--just--about--do for
+mine!" With which he produced the article mentioned. "This for the discard,
+Cap'n," he laughed contentedly, pushing the girl's valise aside; and,
+rumbling with stentorian mirth, stood beaming benignantly over the
+assembled company.
+
+"Why," he exclaimed, "this moment is worth all it cost me! My children,
+I forgive you freely. Mr. Kirkwood, I felicitate you cordially on having
+secured a most expensive wife. Really--d'you know?--I feel as if I ought to
+do a little something for you both." Gurgling with delight he smote his fat
+palms together. "I just tell you what," he resumed, "no one yet ever called
+Georgie Calendar a tight-wad. I just believe I'm going to make you kids a
+handsome wedding present.... The good Lord knows there's enough of this for
+a fellow to be a little generous and never miss it!"
+
+The thick mottled fingers tore nervously at the catch; eventually he got
+the bag open. Those about the table bent forward, all quickened by the
+prospect of for the first time beholding the treasure over which they had
+fought, for which they had suffered, so long....
+
+A heady and luscious fragrance pervaded the atmosphere, exhaling from the
+open mouth of the bag. A silence, indefinitely sustained, impressed itself
+upon the little audience,--a breathless pause ended eventually by a sharp
+snap of Calendar's teeth. "_Mmm_!" grunted the adventurer in bewilderment.
+He began to pant.
+
+Abruptly his heavy hands delved into the contents of the bag, like the paws
+of a terrier digging in earth. To Kirkwood the air seemed temporarily thick
+with flying objects. Beneath his astonished eyes a towel fell upon the
+table--a crumpled, soiled towel, bearing on its dingy hem the inscription
+in indelible ink: "_H�tel du Commerce, Anvers_." A tooth-mug of substantial
+earthenware dropped to the floor with a crash. A slimy soap-dish of the
+same manufacture slid across the table and into Brentwick's lap. A battered
+alarm clock with never a tick left in its abused carcass rang vacuously as
+it fell by the open bag.... The remainder was--oranges: a dozen or more
+small, round, golden globes of ripe fruit, perhaps a shade overripe,
+therefore the more aromatic.
+
+The adventurer ripped out an oath. "Mulready, by the living God!" he raged
+in fury. "Done up, I swear! Done by that infernal sneak--me, blind as a
+bat!"
+
+He fell suddenly silent, the blood congesting in his face; as suddenly
+broke forth again, haranguing the company.
+
+"That's why he went out and bought those damned oranges, is it? Think of
+it--me sitting in the hotel in Antwerp and him lugging in oranges by the
+bagful because he was fond of fruit! When did he do it? How do I know? If I
+knew, would I be here and him the devil knows where, this minute? When my
+back was turned, of course, the damned snake! That's why he was so hot
+about picking a fight on the boat, hey? Wanted to get thrown off and take
+to the woods--leaving me with _this_! And that's why he felt so awful
+done up he wouldn't take a hand at hunting you two down, hey?
+Well--by--the--Eternal! I'll camp on his trail for the rest of his
+natural-born days! I'll have his eye-teeth for this, I'll--"
+
+He swayed, gibbering with rage, his countenance frightfully contorted, his
+fat hands shaking as he struggled for expression.
+
+And then, while yet their own astonishment held Dorothy, Kirkwood,
+Brentwick and Stryker speechless, Charles, the mechanician, moved suddenly
+upon the adventurer.
+
+There followed two metallic clicks. Calendar's ravings were abrupted as if
+his tongue had been paralyzed. He fell back a pace, flabby jowls pale and
+shaking, ponderous jaw dropping on his breast, mouth wide and eyes crazed
+as he shook violently before him his thick fleshy wrists--securely
+handcuffed.
+
+Simultaneously the mechanician whirled about, bounded eagerly across the
+floor, and caught Stryker at the door, his dexterous fingers twisting in
+the captain's collar as he jerked him back and tripped him.
+
+"Mr. Kirkwood!" he cried. "Here, please--one moment. Take this man's gun,
+from him, will you?"
+
+Kirkwood sprang to his assistance, and without encountering much trouble,
+succeeded in wresting a Webley from Stryker's limp, flaccid fingers.
+
+Roughly the mechanician shook the man, dragging him to his feet. "Now," he
+ordered sternly, "you march to that corner, stick your nose in it, and be
+good! You can't get away if you try. I've got other men outside, waiting
+for you to come out. Understand?"
+
+Trembling like a whipped cur, Stryker meekly obeyed his instructions to the
+letter.
+
+The mechanician, with a contemptuous laugh leaving him, strode back to
+Calendar, meanwhile whipping off his goggles; and clapped a hearty hand
+upon the adventurer's quaking shoulders.
+
+"Well!" he cried. "And are you still sailing circles round the men
+from Scotland Yard, Simmons, or Bellows, or Sanderson, or Calendar, or
+Crumbstone, or whatever name you prefer to sail under?"
+
+Calendar glared at him aghast; then heaved a profound sigh, shrugged his
+fat shoulders, and bent his head in thought. An instant later he looked up.
+"You can't do it," he informed the detective vehemently; "you haven't got a
+shred of evidence against me! What's there? A pile of oranges and a peck
+of trash! What of it?... Besides," he threatened, "if you pinch me, you'll
+have to take the girl in, too. I swear that whatever stealing was done,
+she did it. I'll not be trapped this way by her and let her off without a
+squeal. Take me--take her; d'you hear?"
+
+"I think," put in the clear, bland accents of Brentwick, "we can consider
+that matter settled. I have here, my man,"--nodding to the adventurer as he
+took up the black leather wallet,--"I have here a little matter which
+may clear up any lingering doubts as to your standing, which you may be
+disposed at present to entertain."
+
+He extracted a slip of cardboard and, at arm's length, laid it on the
+table-edge beneath the adventurer's eyes. The latter, bewildered, bent over
+it for a moment, breathing heavily; then straightened back, shook himself,
+laughed shortly with a mirthless note, and faced the detective.
+
+"It's come with you now, I guess?" he suggested very quietly.
+
+"The Bannister warrant is still out for you," returned the man. "That'll be
+enough to hold you on till extradition papers arrive from the States."
+
+"Oh, I'll waive those; and I won't give you any trouble, either.... I
+reckon," mused the adventurer, jingling his manacles thoughtfully, "I'm a
+back-number, anyway. When a half-grown girl, a half-baked boy, a flub like
+Mulready--damn his eyes!--and a club-footed snipe from Scotland Yard can
+put it all over me this way,... why, I guess it's up to me to go home and
+retire to my country-place up the Hudson." He sighed wearily.
+
+"Yep; time to cut it out. But I would like to be free long enough to get in
+one good lick at that mutt, Mulready. My friend, you get your hands on him,
+and I'll squeal on him till I'm blue in the face. That's a promise."
+
+"You'll have the chance before long," replied the detective. "We received
+a telegram from the Amsterdam police late this afternoon, saying they'd
+picked up Mr. Mulready with a woman named Hallam, and were holding them
+on suspicion. It seems,"--turning to Brentwick,--"they were opening
+negotiations for the sale of a lot of stones, and seemed in such a precious
+hurry that the diamond merchant's suspicions were roused. We're sending
+over for them, Miss Calendar, so you can make your mind easy about your
+jewels; you'll have them back in a few days."
+
+"Thank you," said the girl with an effort.
+
+"Well," the adventurer delivered his peroration, "I certainly am blame'
+glad to hear it. 'Twouldn't 've been a square deal, any other way."
+
+He paused, looking his erstwhile dupes over with a melancholy eye; then,
+with an uncertain nod comprehending the girl, Kirkwood and Brentwick, "So
+long!" he said thickly; and turned, with the detective's hand under his arm
+and, accompanied by the thoroughly cowed Stryker, waddled out of the room.
+
+III----THE JOURNEY'S END
+
+Kirkwood, following the exodus, closed the door with elaborate care and
+slowly, deep in thought, returned to the table.
+
+Dorothy seemed not to have moved, save to place her elbows on the marble
+slab, and rest her cheeks between hands that remained clenched, as they had
+been in the greatest stress of her emotion. The color had returned to
+her face, with a slightly enhanced depth of hue to the credit of her
+excitement. Her cheeks were hot, her eyes starlike beneath the woven, massy
+sunlight of her hair. Temporarily unconscious of her surroundings she
+stared steadfastly before her, thoughts astray in the irridescent glamour
+of the dreams that were to come....
+
+Brentwick had slipped down in his chair, resting his silvered head upon its
+back, and was smiling serenely up at the low yellow ceiling. Before him on
+the table his long white fingers were drumming an inaudible tune. Presently
+rousing, he caught Kirkwood's eye and smiled sheepishly, like a child
+caught in innocent mischief.
+
+The younger man grinned broadly. "And you were responsible for all that!"
+he commented, infinitely amused.
+
+Brentwick nodded, twinkling self-satisfaction. "I contrived it all," he
+said; "neat, I call it, too." His old eyes brightened with reminiscent
+enjoyment. "Inspiration!" he crowed softly. "Inspiration, pure and simple.
+I'd been worrying my wits for fully five minutes before Wotton settled the
+matter by telling me about the captain's hiring of the motor-car. Then,
+in a flash, I had it.... I talked with Charles by telephone,--his name is
+really Charles, by, the bye,--overcame his conscientious scruples about
+playing his fish when they were already all but landed, and settled the
+artistic details."
+
+He chuckled delightedly. "It's the instinct," he declared emphatically,
+"the instinct for adventure. I knew it was in me, latent somewhere, but
+never till this day did it get the opportunity to assert itself. A born
+adventurer--that's what I am!... You see, it was essential that they should
+believe we were frightened and running from them; that way, they would be
+sure to run after us. Why, we might have baited a dozen traps and failed
+to lure them into my house, after that stout scoundrel knew you'd had the
+chance to tell me the whole yarn... Odd!"
+
+"Weren't you taking chances, you and Charles?" asked Kirkwood curiously.
+
+"Precious few. There was another motor from Scotland Yard trailing Captain
+Stryker's. If they had run past, or turned aside, they would have been
+overhauled in short order."
+
+He relapsed into his whimsical reverie; the wistful look returned to his
+eyes, replacing the glow of triumph and pleasure. And he sighed a little
+regretfully.
+
+"What I don't understand," contended Kirkwood, "is how you convinced
+Calendar that he couldn't get revenge by pressing his charge against Miss
+Calendar--Dorothy."
+
+"Oh-h?" Mr. Brentwick elevated his fine white eyebrows and sat up briskly.
+"My dear boy, that was the most delectable dish on the entire menu. I have
+been reserving it, I don't mind owning, that I might better enjoy the full
+relish of it.... I may answer you best, perhaps, by asking you to scan what
+I offered to the fat scoundrel's respectful consideration, my dear sir."
+
+He leveled a forefinger at the card.
+
+At first glance it conveyed nothing to the younger man's benighted
+intelligence. He puzzled over it, twisting his brows out of alignment.
+An ordinary oblong slip of thin white cardboard, it was engraved in fine
+script as follows:
+
+MR. GEORGE BURGOYNE CALENDAR
+
+81, ASPEN VILLAS, S. W.
+
+"Oh!" exclaimed Kirkwood at length, standing up, his face bright with
+understanding. "_You_--!"
+
+"I," laconically assented the elder man.
+
+Impulsively Kirkwood leaned across the table. "Dorothy," he said tenderly;
+and when the girl's happy eyes met his, quietly drew her attention to the
+card.
+
+Then he rose hastily, and went over to stand by the window, staring mistily
+into the blank face of night beyond its unseen panes.
+
+Behind him there was a confusion of little noises; the sound of a chair
+pushed hurriedly aside, a rustle of skirts, a happy sob or two, low voices
+intermingling; sighs.... Out of it finally came the father's accents.
+
+"There, there, my dear! My dearest dear!" protested the old gentleman.
+"Positively I don't deserve a tithe of this. I--" The young old voice
+quavered and broke, in a happy laugh.... "You must understand," he
+continued more soberly, "that no consideration of any sort is due me. When
+we married, I was too old for your mother, child; we both knew it, both
+believed it would never matter. But it did. By her wish, I went back
+to America; we were to see what separation would do to heal the wounds
+dissension had caused. It was a very foolish experiment. Your mother died
+before I could return...."
+
+There fell a silence, again broken by the father. "After that I was in
+no haste to return. But some years ago, I came to London to live. I
+communicated with the old colonel, asking permission to see you. It was
+refused in a manner which precluded the subject being reopened by me: I
+was informed that if I persisted in attempting to see you, you would be
+disinherited.... He was very angry with me--justly, I admit.... One must
+grow old before one can see how unforgivably one was wrong in youth.... So
+I settled down to a quiet old age, determined not to disturb you in your
+happiness.... Ah--Kirkwood!"
+
+The old gentleman was standing, his arm around his daughter's shoulders,
+when Kirkwood turned.
+
+"Come here, Philip; I'm explaining to Dorothy, but you should hear.... The
+evening I called on you, dear boy, at the Pless, returning home I received
+a message from my solicitors, whom I had instructed to keep an eye on
+Dorothy's welfare. They informed me that she had disappeared. Naturally I
+canceled my plans to go to Munich, and stayed, employing detectives. One
+of the first things they discovered was that Dorothy had run off with an
+elderly person calling himself George Burgoyne Calendar--the name I had
+discarded when I found that to acknowledge me would imperil my daughter's
+fortune.... The investigations went deeper; Charles--let us continue to
+call him--had been to see me only this afternoon, to inform me of the plot
+they had discovered. This Hallam woman and her son--it seems that they were
+legitimately in the line of inheritance, Dorothy out of the way. But the
+woman was--ah--a bad lot. Somehow she got into communication with this fat
+rogue and together they plotted it out. Charles doesn't believe that the
+Hallam woman expected to enjoy the Burgoyne estates for very many days. Her
+plan was to step in when Dorothy stepped out, gather up what she could,
+realize on it, and decamp. That is why there was so much excitement about
+the jewels: naturally the most valuable item on her list, the most easy to
+convert into cash.... The man Mulready we do not place; he seems to have
+been a shady character the fat rogue picked up somewhere. The latter's
+ordinary line of business was diamond smuggling, though he would condescend
+to almost anything in order to turn a dishonest penny....
+
+"That seems to exhaust the subject. But one word more.... Dorothy, I am
+old enough and have suffered enough to know the wisdom of seizing one's
+happiness when one may. My dear, a little while ago, you did a very brave
+deed. Under fire you said a most courageous, womanly, creditable thing. And
+Philip's rejoinder was only second in nobility to yours.... I do hope to
+goodness that you two blessed youngsters won't let any addlepated scruples
+stand between yourselves and--the prize of Romance, your inalienable
+inheritance!"
+
+Abruptly Brentwick, who was no longer Brentwick, but the actual Calendar,
+released the girl from his embrace and hopped nimbly toward the door.
+"Really, I must see about that petrol!" he cried. "While it's perfectly
+true that Charles lied about it's running out, we must be getting on. I'll
+call you when we're ready to start."
+
+And the door crashed to behind him....
+
+Between them was the table. Beyond it the girl stood with head erect, dim
+tears glimmering on the lashes of those eyes with which she met Philip's
+steady gaze so fearlessly.
+
+Singing about them, the silence deepened. Fascinated, though his heart was
+faint with longing, Kirkwood faltered on the threshold of his kingdom.
+
+"Dorothy!... You did mean it, dear?"
+
+She laughed, a little, low, sobbing laugh that had its source deep in the
+hidden sanctuary of her heart of a child.
+
+"I meant it, my dearest.... If you'll have a girl so bold and forward, who
+can't wait till she's asked but throws herself into the arms of the man she
+loves--Philip, I meant it, every word!..."
+
+And as he went to her swiftly, round the table, she turned to meet him,
+arms uplifted, her scarlet lips a-tremble, the brown and bewitching lashes
+drooping over her wondrously lighted eyes....
+
+After a time Philip Kirkwood laughed aloud.
+
+And there was that quality in the ring of his laughter that caused the
+Shade of Care, which had for the past ten minutes been uneasily luffing and
+filling in the offing and, on the whole, steadily diminishing and becoming
+more pale and wan and emaciated and indistinct--there was that in the
+laughter of Philip Kirkwood, I say, which caused the Shade of Care to utter
+a hollow croak of despair as, incontinently, it vanished out of his life.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Black Bag, by Louis Joseph Vance
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE BLACK BAG ***
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+<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">
+
+<html>
+<head>
+    <title>The Black Bag</title>
+    <meta name="Generator"
+          content="Microsoft FrontPage 4.0">
+    <meta name="Author"
+          content="LOUIS JOSEPH VANCE">
+    <meta name="Keywords"
+          content="">
+    <meta name="Description"
+          content="">
+<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
+    <style type="text/css">
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+Title: The Black Bag
+
+Author: Louis Joseph Vance
+
+Release Date: January, 2006 [EBook #9779]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on October 15, 2003]
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+
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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE BLACK BAG ***
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+
+
+Produced by Suzanne Shell, Leonard Johnson and PG Distributed Proofreading.
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+    <center>
+        <h1><a name="THE BLACK BAG">THE BLACK BAG</a></h1>
+
+        <h3>By LOUIS JOSEPH VANCE</h3>
+
+        <p><img border="2"
+             src="covers.jpg"
+             alt="Book Cover"></p>
+
+        <h4>WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY THOMAS FOGARTY</h4>
+
+        &nbsp;
+
+        <h5>COPYRIGHT 1908&nbsp;</h5>
+
+        <hr width="50%" size="1">
+
+        <h5>JANUARY</h5>
+        <hr>
+
+        <p>TO MY MOTHER</p>
+    </center>
+    <hr>
+
+    <h3 align="center">CONTENTS</h3>
+
+    <h4>CHAPTER</h4>
+
+    <table border="0"
+           width="100%"
+           >
+        <tr>
+            <td width="9%"
+                height="19" align="right">
+                <p>I.&nbsp;</p>
+            </td>
+
+            <td width="3%"
+                height="19">
+            </td>
+
+            <td width="102%"
+                height="19"><a href="#I">DIVERSIONS OF A RUINED
+                GENTLEMAN</a></td>
+        </tr>
+
+        <tr>
+            <td width="1%"
+                height="19" align="right">
+                <p>II.</p>
+            </td>
+
+            <td width="1%"
+                height="19">
+            </td>
+
+            <td width="102%"
+                height="19"><a href="#II">"AND SOME THERE BE WHO
+                HAVE ADVENTURES THRUST UPON THEM"</a></td>
+        </tr>
+
+        <tr>
+            <td width="9%"
+                height="19" align="right">III.</td>
+
+            <td width="3%"
+                height="19"></td>
+
+            <td width="102%"
+                height="19"><a href="#III">CALENDAR'S
+                DAUGHTER</a></td>
+        </tr>
+
+        <tr>
+            <td width="9%"
+                height="19" align="right">IV.</td>
+
+            <td width="3%"
+                height="19"></td>
+
+            <td width="102%"
+                height="19"><a href="#IV">9 FROGNALL STREET, W.
+                C.</a></td>
+        </tr>
+
+        <tr>
+            <td width="9%"
+                height="19" align="right">V.</td>
+
+            <td width="3%"
+                height="19"></td>
+
+            <td width="102%"
+                height="19"><a href="#V">THE MYSTERY OF A
+                FOUR-WHEELER</a></td>
+        </tr>
+
+        <tr>
+            <td width="9%"
+                height="19" align="right">VI.</td>
+
+            <td width="3%"
+                height="19"></td>
+
+            <td width="102%"
+                height="19"><a href="#VI">"BELOW BRIDGE"</a></td>
+        </tr>
+
+        <tr>
+            <td width="9%"
+                height="19" align="right">VII.</td>
+
+            <td width="3%"
+                height="19"></td>
+
+            <td width="102%"
+                height="19"><a href="#VII">DIVERSIONS OF A RUINED
+                GENTLEMAN&#8212RESUMED</a></td>
+        </tr>
+
+        <tr>
+            <td width="9%"
+                height="19" align="right">VIII.</td>
+
+            <td width="3%"
+                height="19"></td>
+
+            <td width="102%"
+                height="19"><a href="#VIII">MADAME
+                L'INTRIGANTE</a></td>
+        </tr>
+
+        <tr>
+            <td width="9%"
+                height="19" align="right">IX.</td>
+
+            <td width="3%"
+                height="19"></td>
+
+            <td width="102%"
+                height="19"><a href="#IX">AGAIN "BELOW BRIDGE"; AND
+                BEYOND</a></td>
+        </tr>
+
+        <tr>
+            <td width="9%"
+                height="19" align="right">X.</td>
+
+            <td width="3%"
+                height="19"></td>
+
+            <td width="102%"
+                height="19"><a href="#X">DESPERATE
+                MEASURES</a></td>
+        </tr>
+
+        <tr>
+            <td width="9%"
+                height="19" align="right">XI.</td>
+
+            <td width="3%"
+                height="19"></td>
+
+            <td width="102%"
+                height="19"><a href="#XI">OFF THE NORE</a></td>
+        </tr>
+
+        <tr>
+            <td width="9%"
+                height="19" align="right">XII.</td>
+
+            <td width="3%"
+                height="19"></td>
+
+            <td width="102%"
+                height="19"><a href="#XII">PICARESQUE
+                PASSAGES</a></td>
+        </tr>
+
+        <tr>
+            <td width="9%"
+                height="19" align="right">XIII.</td>
+
+            <td width="3%"
+                height="19"></td>
+
+            <td width="102%"
+                height="19"><a href="#XIII">A PRIMER OF PROGRESSIVE
+                CRIME</a></td>
+        </tr>
+
+        <tr>
+            <td width="9%"
+                height="19" align="right">
+                <p>&nbsp;XIV.</p>
+            </td>
+
+            <td width="3%"
+                height="19">
+            </td>
+
+            <td width="102%"
+                height="19"><a href="#XIV">STRATAGEMS AND
+                SPOILS</a></td>
+        </tr>
+
+        <tr>
+            <td width="9%"
+                height="19" align="right">XV.</td>
+
+            <td width="3%"
+                height="19"></td>
+
+            <td width="102%"
+                height="19"><a href="#XV">REFUGEES</a></td>
+        </tr>
+
+        <tr>
+            <td width="9%"
+                height="19" align="right">XVI.</td>
+
+            <td width="3%"
+                height="19"></td>
+
+            <td width="102%"
+                height="19"><a href="#XVI">TRAVELS WITH A
+                CHAPERON</a></td>
+        </tr>
+
+        <tr>
+            <td width="9%"
+                height="19" align="right">XVII.</td>
+
+            <td width="3%"
+                height="19"></td>
+
+            <td width="102%"
+                height="19"><a href="#XVII">ROGUES AND
+                VAGABONDS</a></td>
+        </tr>
+
+        <tr>
+            <td width="9%"
+                height="19" align="right">XVIII.</td>
+
+            <td width="3%"
+                height="19"></td>
+
+            <td width="102%"
+                height="19"><a href="#XVIII">ADVENTURERS'
+                LUCK</a></td>
+        </tr>
+
+        <tr>
+            <td width="9%"
+                height="19" align="right">XIX.</td>
+
+            <td width="3%"
+                height="19"></td>
+
+            <td width="102%"
+                height="19"><a href="#XIX">i&#8212THE UXBRIDGE
+                ROAD</a></td>
+        </tr>
+
+        <tr>
+            <td width="9%"
+                height="19" align="right"></td>
+
+            <td width="3%"
+                height="19"></td>
+
+            <td width="102%"
+                height="19"><a href=
+                "#II--THE%20CROWN%20AND%20MITRE">ii&#8212THE CROWN
+                AND MITRE</a></td>
+        </tr>
+
+        <tr>
+            <td width="9%"
+                height="19" align="right"></td>
+
+            <td width="3%"
+                height="19"></td>
+
+            <td width="102%"
+                height="19"><a href=
+                "#III--THE%20JOURNEY'S%20END">iii&#8212THE JOURNEY'S
+                END</a></td>
+        </tr>
+    </table>
+    <hr>
+
+    <center>
+        <h2><a href="#I">THE BLACK BAG</a></h2>
+
+        <h2><a name="I">I</a></h2>
+
+        <h3>DIVERSIONS OF A RUINED GENTLEMAN</h3>
+    </center>
+
+    <p>Upon a certain dreary April afternoon in the year of grace,
+    1906, the apprehensions of Philip Kirkwood, Esquire,
+    <i>Artist-peintre</i>, were enlivened by the discovery that he
+    was occupying that singularly distressing social position,
+    which may be summed up succinctly in a phrase through long
+    usage grown proverbial: "Alone in London." These three words
+    have come to connote in our understanding so much of human
+    misery, that to Mr. Kirkwood they seemed to epitomize
+    absolutely, if not happily, the various circumstances attendant
+    upon the predicament wherein he found himself. Inevitably an
+    extremist, because of his youth, (he had just turned
+    twenty-five), he took no count of mitigating matters, and would
+    hotly have resented the suggestion that his case was anything
+    but altogether deplorable and forlorn.</p>
+
+    <p>That he was not actually at the end of his resources went
+    for nothing; he held the distinction a quibble, mockingly
+    immaterial,&#8212like the store of guineas in his pocket, too
+    insignificant for mention when contrasted with his needs. And
+    his base of supplies, the American city of his nativity,
+    whence&#8212and not without a glow of pride in his secret heart&#8212he
+    was wont to register at foreign hostelries, had been
+    arbitrarily cut off from him by one of those accidents
+    sardonically classified by insurance and express corporations
+    as Acts of God.</p>
+
+    <p>Now to one who has lived all his days serenely in accord
+    with the dictates of his own sweet will, taking no thought for
+    the morrow, such a situation naturally seems both appalling and
+    intolerable, at the first blush. It must be confessed that, to
+    begin with, Kirkwood drew a long and disconsolate face over his
+    fix. And in that black hour, primitive of its kind in his brief
+    span, he became conscious of a sinister apparition taking shape
+    at his elbow&#8212a shade of darkness which, clouting him on the
+    back with a skeleton hand, croaked hollow salutations in his
+    ear.</p>
+
+    <p>"Come, Mr. Kirkwood, come!" its mirthless accents rallied
+    him. "Have you no welcome for me?&#8212you, who have been permitted
+    to live the quarter of a century without making my
+    acquaintance? Surely, now, it's high time we were learning
+    something of one another, you and I!" "But I don't understand,"
+    returned Kirkwood blankly. "I don't know you&#8212"</p>
+
+    <p>"True! But you shall: I am the Shade of Care&#8212"</p>
+
+    <p>"Dull Care!" murmured Kirkwood, bewildered and dismayed; for
+    the visitation had come upon him with little presage and no
+    invitation whatever.</p>
+
+    <p>"Dull Care," the Shade assured him. "Dull Care am I&#8212and
+    Care that's anything but dull, into the bargain: Care that's
+    like a keen pain in your body, Care that lives a horror in your
+    mind, Care that darkens your days and flavors with bitter
+    poison all your nights, Care that&#8212"</p>
+
+    <p>But Kirkwood would not listen further. Courageously
+    submissive to his destiny, knowing in his heart that the Shade
+    had come to stay, he yet found spirit to shake himself with a
+    dogged air, to lift his chin, set the strong muscles of his
+    jaw, and smile that homely wholesome smile which was his
+    peculiarly.</p>
+
+    <p>"Very well," he accepted the irremediable with grim humor;
+    "what must be, must. I don't pretend to be glad to see you,
+    but&#8212you're free to stay as long as you find the climate
+    agreeable. I warn you I shan't whine. Lots of men, hundreds and
+    hundreds of 'em, have slept tight o' nights with you for
+    bedfellow; if they could grin and bear you, I believe I
+    can."</p>
+
+    <p>Now Care mocked him with a sardonic laugh, and sought to
+    tighten upon his shoulders its bony grasp; but Kirkwood
+    resolutely shrugged it off and went in search of man's most
+    faithful dumb friend, to wit, his pipe; the which, when found
+    and filled, he lighted with a spill twisted from the envelope
+    of a cable message which had been vicariously responsible for
+    his introduction to the Shade of Care.</p>
+
+    <p>"It's about time," he announced, watching the paper blacken
+    and burn in the grate fire, "that I was doing something to
+    prove my title to a living." And this was all his valedictory
+    to a vanished competence. "Anyway," he added hastily, as if
+    fearful lest Care, overhearing, might have read into his tone a
+    trace of vain repining, "anyway, I'm a sight better off than
+    those poor devils over there! I really have a great deal to be
+    thankful for, now that my attention's drawn to it."</p>
+
+    <p>For the ensuing few minutes he thought it all over, soberly
+    but with a stout heart; standing at a window of his bedroom in
+    the Hotel Pless, hands deep in trouser pockets, pipe fuming
+    voluminously, his gaze wandering out over a blurred infinitude
+    of wet shining roofs and sooty chimney-pots: all of London that
+    a lowering drizzle would let him see, and withal by no means a
+    cheering prospect, nor yet one calculated to offset the
+    disheartening influence of the indomitable Shade of Care. But
+    the truth is that Kirkwood's brain comprehended little that his
+    eyes perceived; his thoughts were with his heart, and that was
+    half a world away and sick with pity for another and a fairer
+    city, stricken in the flower of her loveliness, writhing in
+    Promethean agony upon her storied hills.</p>
+
+    <p>There came a rapping at the door.</p>
+
+    <p>Kirkwood removed the pipe from between his teeth long enough
+    to say "Come in!" pleasantly.</p>
+
+    <p>The knob was turned, the door opened. Kirkwood, swinging on
+    one heel, beheld hesitant upon the threshold a diminutive
+    figure in the livery of the Pless pages.</p>
+
+    <p>"Mister Kirkwood?"</p>
+
+    <p>Kirkwood nodded.</p>
+
+    <p>"Gentleman to see you, sir."</p>
+
+    <p>Kirkwood nodded again, smiling. "Show him up, please," he
+    said. But before the words were fairly out of his mouth a
+    footfall sounded in the corridor, a hand was placed upon the
+    shoulder of the page, gently but with decision swinging him out
+    of the way, and a man stepped into the room.</p>
+
+    <p>"Mr. Brentwick!" Kirkwood almost shouted, jumping forward to
+    seize his visitor's hand.</p>
+
+    <p>"My dear boy!" replied the latter. "I'm delighted to see
+    you. 'Got your note not an hour ago, and came at once&#8212you
+    see!"</p>
+
+    <p>"It was mighty good of you. Sit down, please. Here are
+    cigars.... Why, a moment ago I was the most miserable and
+    lonely mortal on the footstool!"</p>
+
+    <p>"I can fancy." The elder man looked up, smiling at Kirkwood
+    from the depths of his arm-chair, as the latter stood above
+    him, resting an elbow on the mantel. "The management knows me,"
+    he offered explanation of his unceremonious appearance; "so I
+    took the liberty of following on the heels of the bellhop, dear
+    boy. And how are you? Why are you in London, enjoying our
+    abominable spring weather? And why the anxious undertone I
+    detected in your note?"</p>
+
+    <p>He continued to stare curiously into Kirkwood's face. At a
+    glance, this Mr. Brentwick was a man of tallish figure and
+    rather slender; with a countenance thin and flushed a sensitive
+    pink, out of which his eyes shone, keen, alert, humorous, and a
+    trace wistful behind his glasses. His years were indeterminate;
+    with the aspect of fifty, the spirit and the verve of thirty
+    assorted oddly. But his hands were old, delicate, fine and
+    fragile; and the lips beneath the drooping white mustache at
+    times trembled, almost imperceptibly, with the generous
+    sentiments that come with mellow age. He held his back straight
+    and his head with an air&#8212an air that was not a swagger but the
+    sign-token of seasoned experience in the world. The most
+    carping could have found no flaw in the quiet taste of his
+    attire. To sum up, Kirkwood's very good friend&#8212and his only
+    one then in London&#8212Mr. Brentwick looked and was an English
+    gentleman.</p>
+
+    <p>"Why?" he persisted, as the younger man hesitated. "I am
+    here to find out. To-night I leave for the Continent. In the
+    meantime ..."</p>
+
+    <p>"And at midnight I sail for the States," added Kirkwood.
+    "That is mainly why I wished to see you&#8212to say good-by, for
+    the time."</p>
+
+    <p>"You're going home&#8212" A shadow clouded Brentwick's clear
+    eyes.</p>
+
+    <p>"To fight it out, shoulder to shoulder with my brethren in
+    adversity."</p>
+
+    <p>The cloud lifted. "That is the spirit!" declared the elder
+    man. "For the moment I did you the injustice to believe that
+    you were running away. But now I understand. Forgive me....
+    Pardon, too, the stupidity which I must lay at the door of my
+    advancing years; to me the thought of you as a Parisian fixture
+    has become such a commonplace, Philip, that the news of the
+    disaster hardly stirred me. Now I remember that you are a
+    Californian!"</p>
+
+    <p>"I was born in San Francisco," affirmed Kirkwood a bit
+    sadly. "My father and mother were buried there ..."</p>
+
+    <p>"And your fortune&#8212?"</p>
+
+    <p>"I inherited my father's interest in the firm of Kirkwood
+    &amp; Vanderlip; when I came over to study painting, I left
+    everything in Vanderlip's hands. The business afforded me a
+    handsome living."</p>
+
+    <p>"You have heard from Mr. Vanderlip?"</p>
+
+    <p>"Fifteen minutes ago." Kirkwood took a cable-form, still
+    damp, from his pocket, and handed it to his guest. Unfolding
+    it, the latter read:</p>
+
+    <p>"<i>Kirkwood, Pless, London. Stay where you are no good
+    coming back everything gone no insurance letter follows
+    vanderlip</i>."</p>
+
+    <p>"When I got the news in Paris," Kirkwood volunteered, "I
+    tried the banks; they refused to honor my drafts. I had a
+    little money in hand,&#8212enough to see me home,&#8212so closed the
+    studio and came across. I'm booked on the <i>Minneapolis</i>,
+    sailing from Tilbury at daybreak; the boat-train leaves at
+    eleven-thirty. I had hoped you might be able to dine with me
+    and see me off."</p>
+
+    <p>In silence Brentwick returned the cable message. Then, with
+    a thoughtful look, "You are sure this is wise?" he queried.</p>
+
+    <p>"It's the only thing I can see."</p>
+
+    <p>"But your partner says&#8212"</p>
+
+    <p>"Naturally he thinks that by this time I should have learned
+    to paint well enough to support myself for a few months, until
+    he can get things running again. Perhaps I might." Brentwick
+    supported the presumption with a decided gesture. "But have I a
+    right to leave Vanderlip to fight it out alone? For Vanderlip
+    has a wife and kiddies to support; I&#8212"</p>
+
+    <p>"Your genius!"</p>
+
+    <p>"My ability, such as it is&#8212and that only. It can wait....
+    No; this means simply that I must come down from the clouds,
+    plant my feet on solid earth, and get to work."</p>
+
+    <p>"The sentiment is sound," admitted Brentwick, "the practice
+    of it, folly. Have you stopped to think what part a rising
+    young portrait-painter can contribute toward the rebuilding of
+    a devastated city?"</p>
+
+    <p>"The painting can wait," reiterated Kirkwood. "I can work
+    like other men."</p>
+
+    <p>"You can do yourself and your genius grave injustice. And I
+    fear me you will, dear boy. It's in keeping with your heritage
+    of American obstinacy. Now if it were a question of
+    money&#8212"</p>
+
+    <p>"Mr. Brentwick!" Kirkwood protested vehemently. "I've ample
+    for my present needs," he added.</p>
+
+    <p>"Of course," conceded Brentwick with a sigh. "I didn't
+    really hope you would avail yourself of our friendship. Now
+    there's my home in Aspen Villas.... You have seen it?"</p>
+
+    <p>"In your absence this afternoon your estimable butler, with
+    commendable discretion, kept me without the doors," laughed the
+    young man.</p>
+
+    <p>"It's a comfortable home. You would not consent to share it
+    with me until&#8212?"</p>
+
+    <p>"You are more than good; but honestly, I must sail to-night.
+    I wanted only this chance to see you before I left. You'll dine
+    with me, won't you?"</p>
+
+    <p>"If you would stay in London, Philip, we would dine together
+    not once but many times; as it is, I myself am booked for
+    Munich, to be gone a week, on business. I have many affairs
+    needing attention between now and the nine-ten train from
+    Victoria. If you will be my guest at Aspen Villas&#8212"</p>
+
+    <p>"Please!" begged Kirkwood, with a little laugh of pleasure
+    because of the other's insistence. "I only wish I could.
+    Another day&#8212"</p>
+
+    <p>"Oh, you will make your million in a year, and return
+    scandalously independent. It's in your American blood." Frail
+    white fingers tapped an arm of the chair as their owner stared
+    gravely into the fire. "I confess I envy you," he observed.</p>
+
+    <p>"The opportunity to make a million in a year?" chuckled
+    Kirkwood.</p>
+
+    <p>"No. I envy you your Romance."</p>
+
+    <p>"The Romance of a Poor Young Man went out of fashion years
+    ago.... No, my dear friend; my Romance died a natural death
+    half an hour since."</p>
+
+    <p>"There spoke Youth&#8212blind, enviable Youth!... On the
+    contrary, you are but turning the leaves of the first chapter
+    of your Romance, Philip."</p>
+
+    <p>"Romance is dead," contended the young man stubbornly.</p>
+
+    <p>"Long live the King!" Brentwick laughed quietly, still
+    attentive to the fire. "Myself when young," he said softly,
+    "did seek Romance, but never knew it till its day was done. I'm
+    quite sure that is a poor paraphrase of something I have read.
+    In age, one's sight is sharpened&#8212to see Romance in another's
+    life, at least. I say I envy you. You have Youth, unconquerable
+    Youth, and the world before you.... I must go."</p>
+
+    <p>He rose stiffly, as though suddenly made conscious of his
+    age. The old eyes peered more than a trifle wistfully, now,
+    into Kirkwood's. "You will not fail to call on me by cable,
+    dear boy, if you need&#8212anything? I ask it as a favor.... I'm
+    glad you wished to see me before going out of my life. One
+    learns to value the friendship of Youth, Philip. Good-by, and
+    good luck attend you."</p>
+
+    <p>Alone once more, Kirkwood returned to his window. The
+    disappointment he felt at being robbed of his anticipated
+    pleasure in Brentwick's company at dinner, colored his mood
+    unpleasantly. His musings merged into vacuity, into a dull gray
+    mist of hopelessness comparable only to the dismal skies then
+    lowering over London-town.</p>
+
+    <p>Brentwick was good, but Brentwick was mistaken. There was
+    really nothing for Kirkwood to do but to go ahead. But one
+    steamer-trunk remained to be packed; the boat-train would leave
+    before midnight, the steamer with the morning tide; by the
+    morrow's noon he would be upon the high seas, within ten days
+    in New York and among friends; and then ...</p>
+
+    <p>The problem of that afterwards perplexed Kirkwood more than
+    he cared to own. Brentwick had opened his eyes to the fact that
+    he would be practically useless in San Francisco; he could not
+    harbor the thought of going back, only to become a charge upon
+    Vanderlip. No; he was resolved that thenceforward he must rely
+    upon himself, carve out his own destiny. But&#8212would the art
+    that he had cultivated with such assiduity, yield him a
+    livelihood if sincerely practised with that end in view? Would
+    the mental and physical equipment of a painter, heretofore
+    dilettante, enable him to become self-supporting?</p>
+
+    <p>Knotting his brows in concentration of effort to divine the
+    future, he doubted himself, darkly questioning alike his
+    abilities and his temper under trial; neither ere now had ever
+    been put to the test. His eyes became somberly wistful, his
+    heart sore with regret of Yesterday&#8212his Yesterday of care-free
+    youth and courage, gilded with the ineffable, evanescent
+    glamour of Romance&#8212of such Romance, thrice refined of dross,
+    as only he knows who has wooed his Art with passion passing the
+    love of woman.</p>
+
+    <p>Far away, above the acres of huddled roofs and chimney-pots,
+    the storm-mists thinned, lifting transiently; through them,
+    gray, fairy-like, the towers of Westminster and the Houses of
+    Parliament bulked monstrous and unreal, fading when again the
+    fugitive dun vapors closed down upon the city.</p>
+
+    <p>Nearer at hand the Shade of Care nudged Kirkwood's elbow,
+    whispering subtly. Romance was indeed dead; the world was cold
+    and cruel.</p>
+
+    <p>The gloom deepened.</p>
+
+    <p>In the cant of modern metaphysics, the moment was
+    psychological.</p>
+
+    <p>There came a rapping at the door.</p>
+
+    <p>Kirkwood removed the pipe from between his teeth long enough
+    to say "Come in!" pleasantly.</p>
+
+    <p>The knob was turned, the door opened. Kirkwood, turning on
+    one heel, beheld hesitant upon the threshold a diminutive
+    figure in the livery of the Pless pages.</p>
+
+    <p>"Mr. Kirkwood?"</p>
+
+    <p>Kirkwood nodded.</p>
+
+    <p>"Gentleman to see you, sir."</p>
+
+    <p>Kirkwood nodded again, smiling if somewhat perplexed.
+    Encouraged, the child advanced, proffering a silver card-tray
+    at the end of an unnaturally rigid forearm. Kirkwood took the
+    card dubiously between thumb and forefinger and inspected it
+    without prejudice.</p>
+
+    <p>"'George B. Calendar,'" he read. "'George B. Calendar!' But
+    I know no such person. Sure there's no mistake, young man?"</p>
+
+    <p>The close-cropped, bullet-shaped, British head was agitated
+    in vigorous negation, and "Card for Mister Kirkwood!" was
+    mumbled in dispassionate accents appropriate to a recitation by
+    rote.</p>
+
+    <p>"Very well. But before you show him up, ask this Mr.
+    Calendar if he is quite sure he wants to see Philip
+    Kirkwood."</p>
+
+    <p>"Yessir."</p>
+
+    <p>The child marched out, punctiliously closing the door.
+    Kirkwood tamped down the tobacco in his pipe and puffed
+    energetically, dismissing the interruption to his reverie as a
+    matter of no consequence&#8212an obvious mistake to be rectified by
+    two words with this Mr. Calendar whom he did not know. At the
+    knock he had almost hoped it might be Brentwick, returning with
+    a changed mind about the bid to dinner.</p>
+
+    <p>He regretted Brentwick sincerely. Theirs was a curious sort
+    of friendship&#8212extraordinarily close in view of the meagerness
+    of either's information about the other, to say nothing of the
+    disparity between their ages. Concerning the elder man Kirkwood
+    knew little more than that they had met on shipboard, "coming
+    over"; that Brentwick had spent some years in America; that he
+    was an Englishman by birth, a cosmopolitan by habit, by
+    profession a gentleman (employing that term in its most
+    uncompromisingly British significance), and by inclination a
+    collector of "articles of virtue and bigotry," in pursuit of
+    which he made frequent excursions to the Continent from his
+    residence in a quaint quiet street of Old Brompton. It had been
+    during his not infrequent, but ordinarily abbreviated, sojourns
+    in Paris that their steamer acquaintance had ripened into an
+    affection almost filial on the one hand, almost paternal on the
+    other....</p>
+
+    <p>There came a rapping at the door.</p>
+
+    <p>Kirkwood removed the pipe from between his teeth long enough
+    to say "Come in!" pleasantly.</p>
+
+    <p>The knob was turned, the door opened. Kirkwood, swinging on
+    one heel, beheld hesitant upon the threshold a rather rotund
+    figure of medium height, clad in an expressionless gray lounge
+    suit, with a brown "bowler" hat held tentatively in one hand,
+    an umbrella weeping in the other. A voice, which was unctuous
+    and insinuative, emanated from the figure.</p>
+
+    <p>"Mr. Kirkwood?"</p>
+
+    <p>Kirkwood nodded, with some effort recalling the name, so
+    detached had been his thoughts since the disappearance of the
+    page.</p>
+
+    <p>"Yes, Mr. Calendar&#8212?"</p>
+
+    <p>"Are you&#8212ah&#8212busy, Mr. Kirkwood?"</p>
+
+    <p>"Are you, Mr. Calendar?" Kirkwood's smile robbed the retort
+    of any flavor of incivility.</p>
+
+    <p>Encouraged, the man entered, premising that he would detain
+    his host but a moment, and readily surrendering hat and
+    umbrella. Kirkwood, putting the latter aside, invited his
+    caller to the easy chair which Brentwick had occupied by the
+    fireplace.</p>
+
+    <p>"It takes the edge off the dampness," Kirkwood explained in
+    deference to the other's look of pleased surprise at the
+    cheerful bed of coals. "I'm afraid I could never get acclimated
+    to life in a cold, damp room&#8212or a damp cold room&#8212such as you
+    Britishers prefer."</p>
+
+    <p>"It is grateful," Mr. Calendar agreed, spreading plump and
+    well cared-for hands to the warmth. "But you are mistaken; I am
+    as much an American as yourself."</p>
+
+    <p>"Yes?" Kirkwood looked the man over with more interest, less
+    matter-of-course courtesy.</p>
+
+    <p>He proved not unprepossessing, this unclassifiable Mr.
+    Calendar; he was dressed with some care, his complexion was
+    good, and the fullness of his girth, emphasized as it was by a
+    notable lack of inches, bespoke a nature genial, easy-going and
+    sybaritic. His dark eyes, heavy-lidded, were active&#8212curiously,
+    at times, with a subdued glitter&#8212in a face large, round, pink,
+    of which the other most remarkable features were a mustache,
+    close-trimmed and showing streaks of gray, a chubby nose, and
+    duplicate chins. Mr. Calendar was furthermore possessed of a
+    polished bald spot, girdled with a tonsure of silvered
+    hair&#8212circumstances which lent some factitious distinction to a
+    personality otherwise commonplace.</p>
+
+    <p>His manner might be best described as uneasy with assurance;
+    as though he frequently found it necessary to make up for his
+    unimpressive stature by assuming an unnatural habit of
+    authority. And there you have him; beyond these points,
+    Kirkwood was conscious of no impressions; the man was
+    apparently neutral-tinted of mind as well as of body.</p>
+
+    <p>"So you knew I was an American, Mr. Calendar?" suggested
+    Kirkwood.</p>
+
+    <p>"'Saw your name on the register; we both hail from the same
+    neck of the woods, you know."</p>
+
+    <p>"I didn't know it, and&#8212"</p>
+
+    <p>"Yes; I'm from Frisco, too."</p>
+
+    <p>"And I'm sorry."</p>
+
+    <p>Mr. Calendar passed five fat fingers nervously over his
+    mustache, glanced alertly up at Kirkwood, as if momentarily
+    inclined to question his tone, then again stared glumly into
+    the fire; for Kirkwood had maintained an attitude purposefully
+    colorless. Not to put too fine a point upon it, be believed
+    that his caller was lying; the man's appearance, his
+    mannerisms, his voice and enunciation, while they might have
+    been American, seemed all un-Californian. To one born and bred
+    in that state, as Kirkwood had been, her sons are unmistakably
+    hall-marked.</p>
+
+    <p>Now no man lies without motive. This one chose to reaffirm,
+    with a show of deep feeling: "Yes; I'm from Frisco, too. We're
+    companions in misfortune."</p>
+
+    <p>"I hope not altogether," said Kirkwood politely.</p>
+
+    <p>Mr. Calendar drew his own inferences from the response and
+    mustered up a show of cheerfulness. "Then you're not completely
+    wiped out?"</p>
+
+    <p>"To the contrary, I was hoping you were less unhappy."</p>
+
+    <p>"Oh! Then you are&#8212?"</p>
+
+    <p>Kirkwood lifted the cable message from the mantel. "I have
+    just heard from my partner at home," he said with a faint
+    smile; and quoted: "'Everything gone; no insurance.'"</p>
+
+    <p>Mr. Calendar pursed his plump lips, whistling inaudibly.
+    "Too bad, too bad!" he murmured sympathetically. "We're all
+    hard hit, more or less." He lapsed into dejected apathy, from
+    which Kirkwood, growing at length impatient, found it necessary
+    to rouse him.</p>
+
+    <p>"You wished to see me about something else, I'm sure?"</p>
+
+    <p>Mr. Calendar started from his reverie. "Eh? ... I was
+    dreaming. I beg pardon. It seems hard to realize, Mr. Kirkwood,
+    that this awful catastrophe has overtaken our beloved
+    metropolis&#8212"</p>
+
+    <p>The canting phrases wearied Kirkwood; abruptly he cut in.
+    "Would a sovereign help you out, Mr. Calendar? I don't mind
+    telling you that's about the limit of my present
+    resources."</p>
+
+    <p>"Pardon <i>me</i>." Mr. Calendar's moon-like countenance
+    darkened; he assumed a transparent dignity. "You misconstrue my
+    motive, sir."</p>
+
+    <p>"Then I'm sorry."</p>
+
+    <p>"I am not here to borrow. On the other hand, quite by
+    accident I discovered your name upon the register, down-stairs;
+    a good old Frisco name, if you will permit me to say so. I
+    thought to myself that here was a chance to help a
+    fellow-countryman." Calendar paused, interrogative; Kirkwood
+    remained interested but silent. "If a passage across would help
+    you, I&#8212I think it might be arranged," stammered Calendar, ill
+    at ease.</p>
+
+    <p>"It might," admitted Kirkwood, speculative.</p>
+
+    <p>"I could fix it so that you could go over&#8212first-class, of
+    course&#8212and pay your way, so to speak, by, rendering us, me and
+    my partner, a trifling service."</p>
+
+    <p>"Ah?"</p>
+
+    <p>"In fact," continued Calendar, warming up to his theme,
+    "there might be something more in it for you than the passage,
+    if&#8212if you're the right man, the man I'm looking for."</p>
+
+    <p>"That, of course, is the question."</p>
+
+    <p>"Eh?" Calendar pulled up suddenly in a full-winged flight of
+    enthusiasm.</p>
+
+    <p>Kirkwood eyed him steadily. "I said that it is a question,
+    Mr. Calendar, whether or not I am the man you're looking for.
+    Between you and me and the fire-dogs, I don't believe I am. Now
+    if you wish to name your <i>quid pro quo</i>, this trifling
+    service I'm to render in recognition of your benevolence, you
+    may."</p>
+
+    <p>"Ye-es," slowly. But the speaker delayed his reply until he
+    had surveyed his host from head to foot, with a glance both
+    critical and appreciative.</p>
+
+    <p>He saw a man in height rather less than the stock size
+    six-feet so much in demand by the manufacturers of modern
+    heroes of fiction; a man a bit round-shouldered, too, but
+    otherwise sturdily built, self-contained, well-groomed.</p>
+
+    <p>Kirkwood wears a boy's honest face; no one has ever called
+    him handsome. A few prejudiced persons have decided that he has
+    an interesting countenance; the propounders of this verdict
+    have been, for the most part, feminine. Kirkwood himself has
+    been heard to declare that his features do not fit; in its
+    essence the statement is true, but there is a very real, if
+    undefinable, engaging quality in their very irregularity. His
+    eyes are brown, pleasant, set wide apart, straightforward of
+    expression.</p>
+
+    <p>Now it appeared that, whatever his motive, Mr. Calendar had
+    acted upon impulse in sending his card up to Kirkwood. Possibly
+    he had anticipated a very different sort of reception from a
+    very different sort of man. Even in the light of subsequent
+    events it remains difficult to fathom the mystery of his
+    choice. Perhaps Fate directed it; stranger things have happened
+    at the dictates of a man's Destiny.</p>
+
+    <p>At all events, this Calendar proved not lacking in
+    penetration; men of his stamp are commonly endowed with that
+    quality to an eminent degree. Not slow to reckon the caliber of
+    the man before him, the leaven of intuition began to work in
+    his adipose intelligence. He owned himself baffled.</p>
+
+    <p>"Thanks," he concluded pensively; "I reckon you're right.
+    You won't do, after all. I've wasted your time. Mine, too."</p>
+
+    <p>"Don't mention it."</p>
+
+    <p>Calendar got heavily out of his chair, reaching for his hat
+    and umbrella. "Permit me to apologize for an unwarrantable
+    intrusion, Mr. Kirkwood." He faltered; a worried and
+    calculating look shadowed his small eyes. "I <i>was</i> looking
+    for some one to serve me in a certain capacity&#8212"</p>
+
+    <p>"Certain or questionable?" propounded Kirkwood blandly,
+    opening the door.</p>
+
+    <p>Pointedly Mr. Calendar ignored the imputation. "Sorry I
+    disturbed you. G'dafternoon, Mr. Kirkwood."</p>
+
+    <p>"Good-by, Mr. Calendar." A smile twitched the corners of
+    Kirkwood's too-wide mouth.</p>
+
+    <p>Calendar stepped hastily out into the hall. As he strode&#8212or
+    rather, rolled&#8212away, Kirkwood maliciously feathered a Parthian
+    arrow.</p>
+
+    <p>"By the way, Mr. Calendar&#8212?"</p>
+
+    <p>The sound of retreating footsteps was stilled and "Yes?"
+    came from the gloom of the corridor.</p>
+
+    <p>"Were you ever in San Francisco? Really and truly? Honest
+    Injun, Mr. Calendar?"</p>
+
+    <p>For a space the quiet was disturbed by harsh breathing;
+    then, in a strained voice, "Good day, Mr. Kirkwood"; and again
+    the sound of departing footfalls.</p>
+
+    <p>Kirkwood closed the door and the incident simultaneously,
+    with a smart bang of finality. Laughing quietly he went back to
+    the window with its dreary outlook, now the drearier for
+    lengthening evening shadows.</p>
+
+    <p>"I wonder what his game is, anyway. An adventurer, of
+    course; the woods are full of 'em. A queer fish, even of his
+    kind! And with a trick up his sleeve as queer and fishy as
+    himself, no doubt!"</p>
+
+    <h2 align="center"><a name="II">II</a></h2>
+
+    <h3 align="center">"AND SOME THERE BE WHO HAVE ADVENTURES
+    THRUST UPON THEM"</h3>
+
+    <p>The assumption seems not unwarrantable, that Mr. Calendar
+    figuratively washed his hands of Mr. Kirkwood. Unquestionably
+    Mr. Kirkwood considered himself well rid of Mr. Calendar. When
+    the latter had gone his way, Kirkwood, mindful of the fact that
+    his boat-train would leave St. Paneras at half-after eleven,
+    set about his packing and dismissed from his thoughts the
+    incident created by the fat <i>chevalier d'industrie</i>; and
+    at six o'clock, or thereabouts, let himself out of his room,
+    dressed for the evening, a light rain-coat over one arm, in the
+    other hand a cane,&#8212the drizzle having ceased.</p>
+
+    <p>A stolid British lift lifted him down to the ground floor of
+    the establishment in something short of five minutes. Pausing
+    in the office long enough to settle his bill and leave
+    instructions to have his luggage conveyed to the boat-train, he
+    received with entire equanimity the affable benediction of the
+    clerk, in whose eyes he still figured as that radiant creature,
+    an American millionaire; and passed on to the lobby, where he
+    surrendered hat, coat and stick to the cloak-room attendant,
+    ere entering the dining-room.</p>
+
+    <p>The hour was a trifle early for a London dinner, the
+    handsome room but moderately filled with patrons. Kirkwood
+    absorbed the fact unconsciously and without displeasure; the
+    earlier, the better: he was determined to consume his last
+    civilized meal (as he chose to consider it) at his serene
+    leisure, to live fully his ebbing moments in the world to which
+    he was born, to drink to its cloying dregs one ultimate draught
+    of luxury.</p>
+
+    <p>A benignant waiter bowed him into a chair by a corner table
+    in juxtaposition with an open window, through which, swaying
+    imperceptibly the closed hangings, were wafted gentle gusts of
+    the London evening's sweet, damp breath.</p>
+
+    <p>Kirkwood settled himself with an inaudible sigh of pleasure.
+    He was dining, for the last time in Heaven knew how long, in a
+    first-class restaurant.</p>
+
+    <p>With a deferential flourish the waiter brought him the
+    menu-card. He had served in his time many an "American,
+    millionaire"; he had also served this Mr. Kirkwood, and
+    respected him as one exalted above the run of his kind, in that
+    he comprehended the art of dining.</p>
+
+    <p>Fifteen minutes later the waiter departed rejoicing, his
+    order complete.</p>
+
+    <p>To distract a conscience whispering of extravagance,
+    Kirkwood lighted a cigarette.</p>
+
+    <p>The room was gradually filling with later arrivals; it was
+    the most favored restaurant in London, and, despite the radiant
+    costumes of the women, its atmosphere remained sedate and
+    restful.</p>
+
+    <p>A cab clattered down the side street on which the window
+    opened.</p>
+
+    <p>At a near-by table a woman laughed, quietly happy.
+    Incuriously Kirkwood glanced her way. She was bending forward,
+    smiling, flattering her escort with the adoration of her eyes.
+    They were lovers alone in the wilderness of the crowded
+    restaurant. They seemed very happy.</p>
+
+    <p>Kirkwood was conscious of a strange pang of emotion. It took
+    him some time to comprehend that it was envy.</p>
+
+    <p>He was alone and lonely. For the first time he realized that
+    no woman had ever looked upon him as the woman at the adjoining
+    table looked upon her lover. He had found time to worship but
+    one mistress&#8212his art.</p>
+
+    <p>And he was renouncing her.</p>
+
+    <p>He was painfully conscious of what he had missed, had
+    lost&#8212or had not yet found: the love of woman.</p>
+
+    <p>The sensation was curious&#8212new, unique in his
+    experience.</p>
+
+    <p>His cigarette burned down to his fingers as he sat
+    pondering. Abstractedly, he ground its fire out in an
+    ash-tray.</p>
+
+    <p>The waiter set before him a silver tureen, covered.</p>
+
+    <p>He sat up and began to consume his soup, scarce doing it
+    justice. His dream troubled him&#8212his dream of the love of
+    woman.</p>
+
+    <p>From a little distance his waiter regarded him, with an air
+    of disappointment. In the course of an hour and a half he
+    awoke, to discover the attendant in the act of pouring very hot
+    and black coffee from a bright silver pot into a demi-tasse of
+    fragile porcelain. Kirkwood slipped a single lump of sugar into
+    the cup, gave over his cigar-case to be filled, then leaned
+    back, deliberately lighting a long and slender panetela as a
+    preliminary to a last lingering appreciation of the scene of
+    which he was a part.</p>
+
+    <p>He reviewed it through narrowed eyelids, lazily; yet with
+    some slight surprise, seeming to see it with new vision, with
+    eyes from which scales of ignorance had dropped.</p>
+
+    <p>This long and brilliant dining-hall, with its quiet
+    perfection of proportion and appointment, had always gratified
+    his love of the beautiful; to-night it pleased him to an
+    unusual degree. Yet it was the same as ever; its walls tinted a
+    deep rose, with their hangings of dull cloth-of-gold, its
+    lights discriminatingly clustered and discreetly shaded,
+    redoubled in half a hundred mirrors, its subdued shimmer of
+    plate and glass, its soberly festive assemblage of circumspect
+    men and women splendidly gowned, its decorously muted murmur of
+    voices penetrated and interwoven by the strains of a hidden
+    string orchestra&#8212caressed his senses as always, yet with a
+    difference. To-night he saw it a room populous with lovers,
+    lovers insensibly paired, man unto woman attentive, woman of
+    man regardful.</p>
+
+    <p>He had never understood this before. This much he had missed
+    in life.</p>
+
+    <p>It seemed hard to realize that one must forego it all for
+    ever.</p>
+
+    <p>Presently he found himself acutely self-conscious. The
+    sensation puzzled him; and without appearing to do so, he
+    traced it from effect to cause; and found the cause in a
+    woman&#8212a girl, rather, seated at a table the third removed from
+    him, near the farther wall of the room.</p>
+
+    <p>Too considerate, and too embarrassed, to return her scrutiny
+    openly, look for look, he yet felt sure that, however
+    temporarily, he was become the object of her intent
+    interest.</p>
+
+    <p>Idly employed with his cigar, he sipped his coffee. In time
+    aware that she had turned her attention elsewhere, he looked
+    up.</p>
+
+    <p>At first he was conscious of an effect of disappointment.
+    She was nobody that he knew, even by reputation. She was simply
+    a young girl, barely out of her teens&#8212if as old as that phrase
+    would signify. He wondered what she had found in him to make
+    her think him worth so long a study; and looked again, more
+    keenly curious.</p>
+
+    <p>With this second glance, appreciation stirred the artistic
+    side of his nature, that was already grown impatient of his
+    fretted mood. The slender and girlish figure, posed with such
+    absolute lack of intrusion against a screen of rose and gilt,
+    moved him to critical admiration. The tinted glow of shaded
+    candles caught glistening on the spun gold of her fair hair,
+    and enhanced the fine pallor of her young shoulders. He saw
+    promise, and something more than promise, in her face, its oval
+    something dimmed by warm shadows that unavailingly sought to
+    blend youth and beauty alike into the dull, rich
+    background.</p>
+
+    <p>In the sheer youth of her (he realized) more than in aught
+    else, lay her chiefest charm. She could be little more than a
+    child, indeed, if he were to judge her by the purity of her
+    shadowed eyes and the absence of emotion in the calm and direct
+    look which presently she turned upon him who sat wondering at
+    the level, penciled darkness of her brows.</p>
+
+    <p>At length aware that she had surprised his interest,
+    Kirkwood glanced aside&#8212coolly deliberate, lest she should
+    detect in his attitude anything more than impersonal
+    approval.</p>
+
+    <p>A slow color burned his cheeks. In his temples there rose a
+    curious pulsing.</p>
+
+    <p>After a while she drew his gaze again, imperiously&#8212herself
+    all unaware of the havoc she was wreaking on his
+    temperament.</p>
+
+    <p>He could have fancied her distraught, cloaking an unhappy
+    heart with placid brow and gracious demeanor; but such a
+    conception matched strangely her glowing youth and spirit. What
+    had she to do with Care? What concern had Black Care, whose
+    gaunt shape in sable shrouds had lurked at his shoulder all the
+    evening, despite his rigid preoccupation, with a being as
+    charmingly flushed with budding womanhood as this girl?</p>
+
+    <p>"Eighteen?" he hazarded. "Eighteen, or possibly nineteen,
+    dining at the Pless in a ravishing dinner-gown, and&#8212unhappy?
+    Oh, hardly&#8212not she!"</p>
+
+    <p>Yet the impression haunted him, and ere long he was fain to
+    seek confirmation or denial of it in the manner of her
+    escort.</p>
+
+    <p>The latter sat with back to Kirkwood, cutting a figure as
+    negative as his snug evening clothes. One could surmise little
+    from a fleshy thick neck, a round, glazed bald spot, a fringe
+    of grizzled hair, and two bright red ears.</p>
+
+    <p>Calendar?</p>
+
+    <p>Somehow the fellow did suggest Kirkwood's caller of the
+    afternoon. The young man could not have said precisely how, for
+    he was unfamiliar with the aspect of that gentleman's back.
+    None the less the suggestion persisted.</p>
+
+    <p>By now, a few of the guests, theater-bound, for the most
+    part, were leaving. Here and there a table stood vacant, that
+    had been filled, cloth tarnished, chairs disarranged: in
+    another moment to be transformed into its pristine brilliance
+    under the deft attentions of the servitors.</p>
+
+    <p>Down an aisle, past the table at which the girl was sitting,
+    came two, making toward the lobby; the man, a slight and meager
+    young personality, in the lead. Their party had attracted
+    Kirkwood's notice as they entered; why, he did not remember;
+    but it was in his mind that then they had been three.
+    Instinctively he looked at the table they had left&#8212one placed
+    at some distance from the girl, and hidden from her by an angle
+    in the wall. It appeared that the third member had chosen to
+    dally a few moments over his tobacco and a liqueur-brandy.
+    Kirkwood could see him plainly, lounging in his chair and
+    fumbling the stem of a glass: a heavy man, of somber habit, his
+    black and sullen brows lowering and thoughtful above a face
+    boldly handsome.</p>
+
+    <p>The woman of the trio was worthy of closer attention. Some
+    paces in the wake of her lack-luster esquire, she was making a
+    leisurely progress, trailing the skirts of a gown magnificent
+    beyond dispute, half concealed though it was by the opera cloak
+    whose soft folds draped her shoulders. Slowly, carrying her
+    head high, she approached, insolent eyes reviewing the room
+    from beneath their heavy lids; a metallic and mature type of
+    dark beauty, supremely selfconfident and self-possessed.</p>
+
+    <p>Men turned involuntarily to look after her, not altogether
+    in undiluted admiration.</p>
+
+    <p>In the act of passing behind the putative Calendar, she
+    paused momentarily, bending as if to gather up her train.
+    Presumably the action disturbed her balance; she swayed a
+    little, and in the effort to recover, rested the tips of her
+    gloved fingers upon the edge of the table. Simultaneously
+    (Kirkwood could have sworn) a single word left her lips, a word
+    evidently pitched for the ear of the hypothetical Calendar
+    alone. Then she swept on, imperturbable, assured.</p>
+
+    <p>To the perplexed observer it was indubitably evident that
+    some communication had passed from the woman to the man.
+    Kirkwood saw the fat shoulders of the girl's companion stiffen
+    suddenly as the woman's hand rested at his elbow; as she moved
+    away, a little rippling shiver was plainly visible in the
+    muscles of his back, beneath his coat&#8212mute token of relaxing
+    tension. An instant later one plump and mottled hand was
+    carelessly placed where the woman's had been; and was at once
+    removed with fingers closed.</p>
+
+    <p>To the girl, watching her face covertly, Kirkwood turned for
+    clue to the incident. He made no doubt that she had observed
+    the passage; proof of that one found in her sudden startling
+    pallor (of indignation?) and in her eyes, briefly alight with
+    some inscrutable emotion, though quickly veiled by lowered
+    lashes. Slowly enough she regained color and composure, while
+    her <i>vis-&#224;-vis</i> sat motionless, head inclined as if
+    in thought.</p>
+
+    <p>Abruptly the man turned in his chair to summon a waiter, and
+    exposed his profile. Kirkwood was in no wise amazed to
+    recognize Calendar&#8212a badly frightened Calendar now, however,
+    and hardly to be identified with the sleek, glib fellow who had
+    interviewed Kirkwood in the afternoon. His flabby cheeks were
+    ashen and trembling, and upon the back of his chair the fat
+    white fingers were drumming incessantly an inaudible tattoo of
+    shattered nerves.</p>
+
+    <p>"Scared silly!" commented Kirkwood. "Why?" Having spoken to
+    his waiter, Calendar for some seconds raked the room with quick
+    glances, as if seeking an acquaintance. Presumably
+    disappointed, he swung back to face the girl, bending forward
+    to reach her ears with accents low-pitched and confidential.
+    She, on her part, fell at once attentive, grave and responsive.
+    Perhaps a dozen sentences passed between them. At the outset
+    her brows contracted and she shook her head in gentle dissent;
+    whereupon Calendar's manner became more imperative. Gradually,
+    unwillingly, she seemed to yield consent. Once she caught her
+    breath sharply, and, infected by her companion's agitation, sat
+    back, color fading again in the round young cheeks.</p>
+
+    <p>Kirkwood's waiter put in an inopportune appearance with the
+    bill. The young man paid it. When he looked up again Calendar
+    had swung squarely about in his chair. His eye encountered
+    Kirkwood's. He nodded pleasantly. Temporarily confused,
+    Kirkwood returned the nod.</p>
+
+    <p>In a twinkling he had repented; Calendar had left his chair
+    and was wending his way through the tables toward Kirkwood's.
+    Reaching it, he paused, offering the hand of genial fellowship.
+    Kirkwood accepted it half-heartedly (what else was he to do?)
+    remarking at the same time that Calendar had recovered much of
+    his composure. There was now a normal coloring in the heavily
+    jowled countenance, with less glint of fear in the quick, dark
+    eyes; and Calendar's hand, even if moist and cold, no longer
+    trembled. Furthermore it was immediately demonstrated that his
+    impudence had not deserted him.</p>
+
+    <p>"Why, Kirkwood, my dear fellow!" he crowed&#8212not so loudly as
+    to attract attention, but in a tone assumed to divert
+    suspicion, should he be overheard. "This is great luck, you
+    know&#8212to find you here."</p>
+
+    <p>"Is it?" returned Kirkwood coolly. He disengaged his
+    fingers.</p>
+
+    <p>The pink plump face was contorted in a furtive grimace of
+    deprecation. Without waiting for permission Calendar dropped
+    into the vacant chair.</p>
+
+    <p>"My dear sir," he proceeded, unabashed, "I throw myself upon
+    your mercy."</p>
+
+    <p>"The devil you do!"</p>
+
+    <p>"I must. I'm in the deuce of a hole, and there's no one I
+    know here besides yourself. I&#8212I&#8212"</p>
+
+    <p>Kirkwood saw fit to lead him on; partly because, out of the
+    corner of his eye, he was aware of the girl's unconcealed
+    suspense. "Go on, please, Mr. Calendar. You throw yourself on a
+    total stranger's mercy because you're in the deuce of a hole;
+    and&#8212?"</p>
+
+    <p>"It's this way; I'm called away on urgent business
+    imperative business. I must go at once. My daughter is with me.
+    My daughter! Think of my embarrassment; I can not leave her
+    here, alone, nor can I permit her to go home unprotected."</p>
+
+    <p>Calendar paused in anxiety.</p>
+
+    <p>"That's easily remedied, then," suggested Kirkwood.</p>
+
+    <p>"How?"</p>
+
+    <p>"Put her in a cab at the door."</p>
+
+    <p>"I ... No. The devil! I couldn't think of it. You won't
+    understand. I&#8212"</p>
+
+    <p>"I do not understand,&#8212" amended the younger man
+    politely.</p>
+
+    <p>Calendar compressed his lips nervously. It was plain that
+    the man was quivering with impatience and half-mad with
+    excitement. He held quiet only long enough to regain his
+    self-control and take counsel with his prudence.</p>
+
+    <p>"It is impossible, Mr. Kirkwood. I must ask you to be
+    generous and believe me."</p>
+
+    <p>"Very well; for the sake of the argument, I do believe you,
+    Mr. Calendar."</p>
+
+    <p>"Hell!" exploded the elder man in an undertone. Then
+    swiftly, stammering in his haste: "I can't let Dorothy
+    accompany me to the door," he declared. "She&#8212I&#8212I throw myself
+    upon your mercy!"</p>
+
+    <p>"What&#8212again?"</p>
+
+    <p>"The truth&#8212the truth is, if you will have it, that I am in
+    danger of arrest the moment I leave here. If my daughter is
+    with me, she will have to endure the shame and
+    humiliation&#8212"</p>
+
+    <p>"Then why place her in such a position?" Kirkwood demanded
+    sharply.</p>
+
+    <p>Calendar's eyes burned, incandescent with resentment.
+    Offended, he offered to rise and go, but changed his mind and
+    sat tight in hope.</p>
+
+    <p>"I beg of you, sir&#8212"</p>
+
+    <p>"One moment, Mr. Calendar."</p>
+
+    <p>Abruptly Kirkwood's weathercock humor shifted&#8212amusement
+    yielding to intrigued interest. After all, why not oblige the
+    fellow? What did anything matter, now? What harm could visit
+    him if he yielded to this corpulent adventurer's insistence?
+    Both from experience and observation he knew this for a world
+    plentifully peopled by soldiers of fortune, contrivers of
+    snares and pitfalls for the feet of the unwary. On the other
+    hand, it is axiomatic that a penniless man is perfectly safe
+    anywhere. Besides, there was the girl to be considered.</p>
+
+    <p>Kirkwood considered her, forthwith. In the process thereof,
+    his eyes sought her, perturbed. Their glances clashed. She
+    looked away hastily, crimson to her temples.</p>
+
+    <p>Instantly the conflict between curiosity and caution,
+    inclination and distrust, was at an end. With sudden
+    compliance, the young man rose.</p>
+
+    <p>"I shall be most happy to be of service to your daughter,
+    Mr. Calendar," he said, placing the emphasis with becoming
+    gravity. And then, the fat adventurer leading the way, Kirkwood
+    strode across the room&#8212wondering somewhat at himself, if the
+    whole truth is to be disclosed.</p>
+
+    <h2 align="center"><a name="III">III</a></h2>
+
+    <h3 align="center">CALENDAR'S DAUGHTER</h3>
+
+    <p>All but purring with satisfaction and relief, Calendar
+    halted.</p>
+
+    <p>"Dorothy, my dear, permit me to introduce an old friend&#8212Mr.
+    Kirkwood. Kirkwood, this is my daughter."</p>
+
+    <p>"Miss Calendar," acknowledged Kirkwood.</p>
+
+    <p>The girl bowed, her eyes steady upon his own. "Mr. Kirkwood
+    is very kind," she said gravely.</p>
+
+    <p>"That's right!" Calendar exclaimed blandly. "He's promised
+    to see you home. Now both of you will pardon my running away, I
+    know."</p>
+
+    <p>"Yes," assented Kirkwood agreeably.</p>
+
+    <p>The elder man turned and hurried toward the main
+    entrance.</p>
+
+    <p>Kirkwood took the chair he had vacated. To his disgust he
+    found himself temporarily dumb. No flicker of thought
+    illuminated the darkness of his confusion. How was he to open a
+    diverting conversation with a young woman whom he had met under
+    auspices so extraordinary? Any attempt to gloze the situation,
+    he felt, would be futile. And, somehow, he did not care to
+    render himself ridiculous in her eyes, little as he knew
+    her.</p>
+
+    <p>Inanely dumb, he sat watching her, smiling fatuously until
+    it was borne in on him that he was staring like a boor and
+    grinning like an idiot. Convinced, he blushed for himself;
+    something which served to make him more tongue-tied than
+    ever.</p>
+
+    <p>As for his involuntary prot&#233;g&#233;e, she exhibited
+    such sweet composure that he caught himself wondering if she
+    really appreciated the seriousness of her parent's predicament;
+    if, for that matter, its true nature were known to her at all.
+    Calendar, he believed, was capable of prevarication, polite and
+    impolite. Had he lied to his daughter? or to Kirkwood? To both,
+    possibly; to the former alone, not improbably. That the
+    adventurer had told him the desperate truth, Kirkwood was quite
+    convinced; but he now began to believe that the girl had been
+    put off with some fictitious explanation. Her tranquillity and
+    self-control were remarkable, otherwise; she seemed very young
+    to possess those qualities in such eminent degree.</p>
+
+    <p>She was looking wearily past him, her gaze probing some
+    unguessed abyss of thought. Kirkwood felt himself privileged to
+    stare in wonder. Her na&#239;ve aloofness of poise gripped his
+    imagination powerfully,&#8212the more so, perhaps, since it seemed
+    eloquent of her intention to remain enigmatic,&#8212but by no means
+    more powerfully than the unaided appeal of her loveliness.</p>
+
+    <p>Presently the girl herself relieved the tension of the
+    situation, fairly startling the young man by going straight to
+    the heart of things. Without preface or warning, lifting her
+    gaze to his, "My name is really Dorothy Calendar," she
+    observed. And then, noting his astonishment, "You would be
+    privileged to doubt, under the circumstances," she added.
+    "Please let us be frank."</p>
+
+    <p>"Well," he stammered, "if I didn't doubt, let's say I was
+    unprejudiced."</p>
+
+    <p>His awkward, well-meant pleasantry, perhaps not conceived in
+    the best of taste, sounded in his own ears wretchedly flat and
+    vapid. He regretted it spontaneously; the girl ignored it.</p>
+
+    <p>"You are very kind," she iterated the first words he had
+    heard from her lips. "I wish you to understand that I, for one,
+    appreciate it."</p>
+
+    <p>"Not kind; I have done nothing. I am glad.... One is apt to
+    become interested when Romance is injected into a prosaic
+    existence." Kirkwood allowed himself a keen but cheerful
+    glance.</p>
+
+    <p>She nodded, with a shadowy smile. He continued,
+    purposefully, to distract her, holding her with his honest,
+    friendly eyes.</p>
+
+    <p>"Since it is to be confidences" (this she questioned with an
+    all but imperceptible lifting of the eyebrows), "I don't mind
+    telling you my own name is really Philip Kirkwood."</p>
+
+    <p>"And you are an old friend of my father's?"</p>
+
+    <p>He opened his lips, but only to close them without speaking.
+    The girl moved her shoulders with a shiver of disdain.</p>
+
+    <p>"I knew it wasn't so."</p>
+
+    <p>"You know it would be hard for a young man like myself to be
+    a very old friend," he countered lamely.</p>
+
+    <p>"How long, then, have you known each other?"</p>
+
+    <p>"Must I answer?"</p>
+
+    <p>"Please."</p>
+
+    <p>"Between three and four hours."</p>
+
+    <p>"I thought as much." She stared past him, troubled. Abruptly
+    she said: "Please smoke."</p>
+
+    <p>"Shall I? If you wish it, of course...."&nbsp;</p>
+
+    <p>She repeated: "Please."</p>
+
+    <p>"We were to wait ten minutes or so," she continued.</p>
+
+    <p>He produced his cigarette-case.</p>
+
+    <p>"If you care to smoke it will seem an excuse." He lighted
+    his cigarette.</p>
+
+    <p>"And then, you may talk to me," she concluded calmly.</p>
+
+    <p>"I would, gladly, if I could guess what would interest
+    you."</p>
+
+    <p>"Yourself. Tell me about yourself," she commanded.</p>
+
+    <p>"It would bore you," he responded tritely, confused.</p>
+
+    <p>"No; you interest me very much." She made the statement
+    quietly, contemptuous of coquetry.</p>
+
+    <p>"Very well, then; I am Philip Kirkwood, an American."</p>
+
+    <p>"Nothing more?"</p>
+
+    <p>"Little worth retailing."</p>
+
+    <p>"I'm sorry."</p>
+
+    <p>"Why?" he demanded, piqued.</p>
+
+    <p>"Because you have merely indicated that you are a wealthy
+    American."</p>
+
+    <p>"Why wealthy?"</p>
+
+    <p>"If not, you would have some aim in life&#8212a calling or
+    profession."</p>
+
+    <p>"And you think I have none?"</p>
+
+    <p>"Unless you consider it your vocation to be a wealthy
+    American."</p>
+
+    <p>"I don't. Besides, I'm not wealthy. In point of fact, I ..."
+    He pulled up short, on the verge of declaring himself a pauper.
+    "I am a painter."</p>
+
+    <p>Her eyes lightened with interest. "An artist?"</p>
+
+    <p>"I hope so. I don't paint signs&#8212or houses," he
+    remarked.</p>
+
+    <p>Amused, she laughed softly. "I suspected it," she
+    declared.</p>
+
+    <p>"Not really?"</p>
+
+    <p>"It was your way of looking at&#8212things, that made me guess
+    it: the painter's way. I have often noticed it."</p>
+
+    <p>"As if mentally blending colors all the time?"</p>
+
+    <p>"Yes; that and&#8212seeing flaws."</p>
+
+    <p>"I have discovered none," he told her brazenly.</p>
+
+    <p>But again her secret cares were claiming her thoughts, and
+    the gay, inconsequential banter died upon her scarlet lips as a
+    second time her glance ranged away, sounding mysterious depths
+    of anxiety.</p>
+
+    <p>Provoked, he would have continued the chatter. "I have
+    confessed," he persisted. "You know everything of material
+    interest about me. And yourself?"</p>
+
+    <p>"I am merely Dorothy Calendar," she answered.</p>
+
+    <p>"Nothing more?" He laughed.</p>
+
+    <p>"That is all, if you please, for the present."</p>
+
+    <p>"I am to content myself with the promise of the future?"</p>
+
+    <p>"The future," she told him seriously, "is to-morrow; and
+    to-morrow ..." She moved restlessly in her chair, eyes and lips
+    pathetic in their distress. "Please, we will go now, if you are
+    ready."</p>
+
+    <p>"I am quite ready, Miss Calendar."</p>
+
+    <p>He rose. A waiter brought the girl's cloak and put it in
+    Kirkwood's hands. He held it until, smoothing the wrists of her
+    long white gloves, she stood up, then placed the garment upon
+    her white young shoulders, troubled by the indefinable sense of
+    intimacy imparted by the privilege. She permitted him this
+    personal service! He felt that she trusted him, that out of her
+    gratitude had grown a simple and almost childish faith in his
+    generosity and considerateness.</p>
+
+    <p>As she turned to go her eyes thanked him with an
+    unfathomable glance. He was again conscious of that esoteric
+    disturbance in his temples. Puzzled, hazily analyzing the
+    sensation, he followed her to the lobby.</p>
+
+    <p>A page brought him his top-coat, hat and stick; tipping the
+    child from sheer force of habit, he desired a gigantic porter,
+    impressively ornate in hotel livery, to call a hansom. Together
+    they passed out into the night, he and the girl.</p>
+
+    <p>Beneath a permanent awning of steel and glass she waited
+    patiently, slender, erect, heedless of the attention she
+    attracted from wayfarers.</p>
+
+    <p>The night was young, the air mild. Upon the sidewalk,
+    muddied by a million feet, two streams of wayfarers flowed
+    incessantly, bound west from Green Park or east toward
+    Piccadilly Circus; a well-dressed throng for the most part,
+    with here and there a man in evening dress. Between the
+    carriages at the curb and the hotel doors moved others,
+    escorting fluttering butterfly women in elaborate toilets,
+    heads bare, skirts daintily gathered above their perishable
+    slippers. Here and there meaner shapes slipped silently through
+    the crowd, sinister shadows of the city's proletariat, blotting
+    ominously the brilliance of the scene.</p>
+
+    <p>A cab drew in at the block. The porter clapped an arc of
+    wickerwork over its wheel to protect the girl's skirts. She
+    ascended to the seat.</p>
+
+    <p>Kirkwood, dropping sixpence in the porter's palm, prepared
+    to follow; but a hand fell upon his arm, peremptory,
+    inexorable. He faced about, frowning, to confront a slight,
+    hatchet-faced man, somewhat under medium height, dressed in a
+    sack suit and wearing a derby well forward over eyes that were
+    hard and bright.</p>
+
+    <p>"Mr. Calendar?" said the man tensely. "I presume I needn't
+    name my business. I'm from the Yard&#8212"</p>
+
+    <p>"My name is <i>not</i> Calendar."&nbsp;</p>
+
+    <p>The detective smiled wearily. "Don't be a fool, Calendar,"
+    he began. But the porter's hand fell upon his shoulder and the
+    giant bent low to bring his mouth close to the other's ear.
+    Kirkwood heard indistinctly his own name followed by
+    Calendar's, and the words: "Never fear. I'll point him
+    out."</p>
+
+    <p>"But the woman?" argued the detective, unconvinced, staring
+    into the cab.</p>
+
+    <p>"Am I not at liberty to have a lady dine with me in a public
+    restaurant?" interposed Kirkwood, without raising his
+    voice.</p>
+
+    <p>The hard eyes looked him up and down without favor. Then:
+    "Beg pardon, sir. I see my mistake," said the detective
+    brusquely.</p>
+
+    <p>"I am glad you do," returned Kirkwood grimly. "I fancy it
+    will bear investigation."</p>
+
+    <p>He mounted the step. "Imperial Theater," he told the driver,
+    giving the first address that occurred to him; it could be
+    changed. For the moment the main issue was to get the girl out
+    of the range of the detective's interest.</p>
+
+    <p>He slipped into his place as the hansom wheeled into the
+    turgid tide of west-bound traffic.</p>
+
+    <p>So Calendar had escaped, after all! Moreover, he had told
+    the truth to Kirkwood.</p>
+
+    <p>By his side the girl moved uneasily. "Who was that man?" she
+    inquired.</p>
+
+    <p>Kirkwood sought her eyes, and found them wholly ingenuous.
+    It seemed that Calendar had not taken her into his confidence,
+    after all. She was, therefore, in no way implicated in her
+    father's affairs. Inexplicably the young man's heart felt
+    lighter. "A mistake; the fellow took me for some one he knew,"
+    he told her carelessly.</p>
+
+    <p>The assurance satisfied her. She rested quietly, wrapped up
+    in personal concerns. Her companion pensively contemplated an
+    infinity of arid and hansom-less to-morrows. About them the
+    city throbbed in a web of misty twilight, the humid farewell of
+    a dismal day. In the air a faint haze swam, rendering the
+    distances opalescent. Athwart the western sky the after-glow of
+    a drenched sunset lay like a wash of rose-madder. Piccadilly's
+    asphalt shone like watered silk, black and lustrous, reflecting
+    a myriad lights in vibrant ribbons of party-colored radiance.
+    On every hand cab-lamps danced like fire-flies; the rumble of
+    wheels blended with the hollow pounding of uncounted hoofs,
+    merging insensibly into the deep and solemn roar of
+    London-town.</p>
+
+    <p>Suddenly Kirkwood was recalled to a sense of duty by a
+    glimpse of Hyde Park Corner. He turned to the girl. "I didn't
+    know where you wished to go&#8212?"</p>
+
+    <p>She seemed to realize his meaning with surprise, as one,
+    whose thoughts have strayed afar, recalled to an imperative
+    world.</p>
+
+    <p>"Oh, did I forget? Tell him please to drive to Number Nine,
+    Frognall Street, Bloomsbury."</p>
+
+    <p>Kirkwood poked his cane through the trap, repeating the
+    address. The cab wheeled smartly across Piccadilly, swung into
+    Half Moon Street, and thereafter made better time, darting
+    briskly down abrupt vistas of shining pavement, walled in by
+    blank-visaged houses, or round two sides of one of London's
+    innumerable private parks, wherein spring foliage glowed a
+    tender green in artificial light; now and again it crossed
+    brilliant main arteries of travel, and eventually emerged from
+    a maze of backways into Oxford Street, to hammer eastwards to
+    Tottenham Court Road.</p>
+
+    <p>Constraint hung like a curtain between the two; a silence
+    which the young man forbore to moderate, finding more delight
+    that he had cared (or dared) confess to, in contemplation of
+    the pure girlish profile so close to him.</p>
+
+    <p>She seemed quite unaware of him, lost in thought, large eyes
+    sober, lips serious that were fashioned for laughter, round
+    little chin firm with some occult resolution. It was not hard
+    to fancy her nerves keyed to a high pitch of courage and
+    determination, nor easy to guess for what reason. Watching
+    always, keenly sensitive to the beauty of each salient line
+    betrayed by the flying lights, Kirkwood's own consciousness
+    lost itself in a profitless, even a perilous labyrinth of
+    conjecture.</p>
+
+    <p>The cab stopped. Both occupants came to their senses with a
+    little start. The girl leaned out over; the apron, recognized
+    the house she sought in one swift glance, testified to the
+    recognition with a hushed exclamation, and began to arrange her
+    skirts. Kirkwood, unheeding her faint-hearted protests, jumped
+    out, interposing his cane between her skirts and the wheel.
+    Simultaneously he received a vivid mental photograph of the
+    locality.</p>
+
+    <p>Frognall Street proved to be one of those by-ways, a short
+    block in length, which, hemmed in on all sides by a meaner
+    purlieu, has (even in Bloomsbury!) escaped the sordid
+    commercial eye of the keeper of furnished lodgings, retaining
+    jealously something of the old-time dignity and reserve that
+    were its pride in the days before Society swarmed upon Mayfair
+    and Belgravia.</p>
+
+    <p>Its houses loomed tall, with many windows, mostly
+    lightless&#8212materially aggravating that air of isolate, cold
+    dignity which distinguishes the Englishman's castle. Here and
+    there stood one less bedraggled than its neighbors, though all,
+    without exception, spoke assertively of respectability
+    down-at-the-heel but fighting tenaciously for existence. Some,
+    vanguards of that imminent day when the boarding-house should
+    reign supreme, wore with shamefaced air placards of
+    estate-agents, advertising their susceptibility to sale or
+    lease. In the company of the latter was Number 9.</p>
+
+    <p>The American noted the circumstance subconsciously, at a
+    moment when Miss Calendar's hand, small as a child's, warm and
+    compact in its white glove, lay in his own. And then she was on
+    the sidewalk, her face, upturned to his, vivacious with
+    excitement.</p>
+
+    <p>"You have been so kind," she told him warmly, "that one
+    hardly knows how to thank you, Mr. Kirkwood."</p>
+
+    <p>"I have done nothing&#8212nothing at all," he mumbled, disturbed
+    by a sudden, unreasoning alarm for her.</p>
+
+    <p>She passed quickly to the shelter of the pillared portico.
+    He followed clumsily. On the door-step she turned, offering her
+    hand. He took and retained it.</p>
+
+    <p>"Good night," she said.</p>
+
+    <p>"I'm to understand that I'm dismissed, then?" he stammered
+    ruefully.</p>
+
+    <p>She evaded his eyes. "I&#8212thank you&#8212I have no further
+    need&#8212"</p>
+
+    <p>"You are quite sure? Won't you believe me at your
+    service?"</p>
+
+    <p>She laughed uneasily. "I'm all right now."</p>
+
+    <p>"I can do nothing more? Sure?"</p>
+
+    <p>"Nothing. But you&#8212you make me almost sorry I can't impose
+    still further upon your good nature."</p>
+
+    <p>"Please don't hesitate ..."</p>
+
+    <p>"Aren't you very persistent, Mr. Kirkwood?" Her fingers
+    moved in his; burning with the reproof, he released them, and
+    turned to her so woebegone a countenance that she repented of
+    her severity. "Don't worry about me, please. I am truly safe
+    now. Some day I hope to be able to thank you adequately. Good
+    night!"</p>
+
+    <p>Her pass-key grated in the lock. Opening, the door disclosed
+    a dark and uninviting entry-hall, through which there breathed
+    an air heavy with the dank and dusty odor of untenanted rooms.
+    Hesitating on the threshold, over her shoulder the girl smiled
+    kindly upon her commandeered esquire; and stepped within.</p>
+
+    <p>He lifted his hat automatically. The door closed with an
+    echoing slam. He turned to the waiting cab, fumbling for
+    change.</p>
+
+    <p>"I'll walk," he told the cabby, paying him off.</p>
+
+    <p>The hansom swept away to a tune of hammering hoofs; and
+    quiet rested upon the street as Kirkwood turned the nearest
+    corner, in an unpleasant temper, puzzled and discontented. It
+    seemed hardly fair that he should have been dragged into so
+    promising an adventure, by his ears (so to put it), only to be
+    thus summarily called upon to write "Finis" beneath the
+    incident.</p>
+
+    <p>He rounded the corner and walked half-way to the next
+    street, coming to an abrupt and rebellious pause by the
+    entrance to a covered alleyway, of two minds as to his proper
+    course of action.</p>
+
+    <p>In the background of his thoughts Number 9, Frognall Street,
+    reared its five-story fa&#231;ade, sinister and forbidding. He
+    reminded himself of its unlighted windows; of its sign, "To be
+    let"; of the effluvia of desolation that had saluted him when
+    the door swung wide. A deserted house; and the girl alone in
+    it!&#8212was it right for him to leave her so?</p>
+
+    <h2 align="center"><a name="IV">IV</a></h2>
+
+    <h3 align="center">9 FROGNALL STREET, W. C.</h3>
+
+    <p>The covered alleyway gave upon Quadrant Mews; or so declared
+    a notice painted on the dead wall of the passage.</p>
+
+    <p>Overhead, complaining as it swayed in the wind, hung the
+    smirched and weather-worn sign-board of the Hog-in-the-Pound
+    public house; wherefrom escaped sounds of such revelry by night
+    as is indulged in by the British working-man in hours of ease.
+    At the curb in front of the house of entertainment, dejected
+    animals drooping between their shafts, two hansoms stood in
+    waiting, until such time as the lords of their destinies should
+    see fit to sally forth and inflict themselves upon a cab-hungry
+    populace. As Kirkwood turned, a third vehicle rumbled up out of
+    the mews.</p>
+
+    <p>Kirkwood can close his eyes, even at this late day, and both
+    see and hear it all again&#8212even as he can see the unbroken row
+    of dingy dwellings that lined his way back from Quadrant Mews
+    to Frognall Street corner: all drab and unkempt, all sporting
+    in their fan-lights the legend and lure, "Furnished
+    Apartments."</p>
+
+    <p>For, between his curiosity about and his concern for the
+    girl, he was being led back to Number 9, by the nose, as it
+    were,&#8212hardly willingly, at best. Profoundly stupefied by the
+    contemplation of his own temerity, he yet returned unfaltering.
+    He who had for so long plumed himself upon his strict
+    supervision of his personal affairs and equally steadfast
+    unconsciousness of his neighbor's businesses, now found himself
+    in the very act of pushing in where he was not wanted: as he
+    had been advised in well-nigh as many words. He experienced an
+    effect of standing to one side, a witness of his own folly,
+    with rising wonder, unable to credit the strength of the
+    infatuation which was placing him so conspicuously in the way
+    of a snubbing.</p>
+
+    <p>If perchance he were to meet the girl again as she was
+    leaving Number 9,&#8212what then? The contingency dismayed him
+    incredibly, in view of the fact that it did not avail to make
+    him pause. To the contrary he disregarded it resolutely; mad,
+    impertinent, justified of his unnamed apprehensions, or simply
+    addled,&#8212he held on his way.</p>
+
+    <p>He turned up Frognall Street with the manner of one out for
+    a leisurely evening stroll. Simultaneously, from the farther
+    corner, another pedestrian debouched, into the thoroughfare&#8212a
+    mere moving shadow at that distance, brother to blacker shadows
+    that skulked in the fenced areas and unlively entries of that
+    poorly lighted block. The hush was something beyond belief,
+    when one remembered the nearness of blatant Tottenham Court
+    Road.</p>
+
+    <p>Kirkwood conceived a wholly senseless curiosity about the
+    other wayfarer. The man was walking rapidly, heels ringing with
+    uncouth loudness, cane tapping the flagging at brief intervals.
+    Both sounds ceased abruptly as their cause turned in beneath
+    one of the porticos. In the emphatic and unnatural quiet that
+    followed, Kirkwood, stepping more lightly, fancied that another
+    shadow followed the first, noiselessly and with furtive
+    stealth.</p>
+
+    <p>Could it be Number 9 into which they had passed? The
+    American's heart beat a livelier tempo at the suggestion. If it
+    had not been Number 9&#8212he was still too far away to tell&#8212it
+    was certainly one of the dwellings adjacent thereunto. The
+    improbable possibility (But why improbable?) that the girl was
+    being joined by her father, or by friends, annoyed him with
+    illogical intensity. He mended his own pace, designing to pass
+    whichever house it might be before the door should be closed;
+    thought better of this, and slowed up again, anathematizing
+    himself with much excuse for being the inquisitive dolt that he
+    was.</p>
+
+    <p>Approaching Number 9 with laggard feet, he manufactured a
+    desire to light a cigarette, as a cover for his design, were he
+    spied upon by unsuspected eyes. Cane under arm, hands cupped to
+    shield a vesta's flame, he stopped directly before the portico,
+    turning his eyes askance to the shadowed doorway; and made a
+    discovery sufficiently startling to hold him spellbound and,
+    incidentally, to scorch his gloves before he thought to drop
+    the match.</p>
+
+    <p>The door of Number 9 stood ajar, a black interval an inch or
+    so in width showing between its edge and the jamb.</p>
+
+    <p>Suspicion and alarm set his wits a-tingle. More distinctly
+    he recalled the jarring bang, accompanied by the metallic click
+    of the latch, when the girl had shut herself in&#8212and him out.
+    Now, some person or persons had followed her, neglecting the
+    most obvious precaution of a householder. And why? Why but
+    because the intruders did not wish the sound of closing to be
+    audible to her&#8212or those&#8212within?</p>
+
+    <p>He reminded himself that it was all none of his affair,
+    decided to pass on and go his ways in peace, and impulsively,
+    swinging about, marched straight away for the unclosed
+    door.</p>
+
+    <p>"'Old'ard, guvner!"</p>
+
+    <p>Kirkwood halted on the cry, faltering in indecision. Should
+    he take the plunge, or withdraw? Synchronously he was conscious
+    that a man's figure had detached itself from the shadows
+    beneath the nearest portico and was drawing nearer, with every
+    indication of haste, to intercept him.</p>
+
+    <p>"'Ere now, guvner, yer mykin' a mistyke. You don't live
+    'ere."</p>
+
+    <p>"How do you know?" demanded Kirkwood crisply, tightening his
+    grip on his stick.</p>
+
+    <p>Was this the second shadow he had seemed to see&#8212the
+    confederate of him who had entered Number 9; a sentry to
+    forestall interruption? If so, the fellow lacked discretion,
+    though his determination that the American should not interfere
+    was undeniable. It was with an ugly and truculent manner, if
+    more warily, that the man closed in.</p>
+
+    <p>"I knows. You clear hout, or&#8212"</p>
+
+    <p>He flung out a hand with the plausible design of grasping
+    Kirkwood by the collar. The latter lifted his stick, deflecting
+    the arm, and incontinently landed his other fist forcibly on
+    the fellow's chest. The man reeled back, cursing. Before he
+    could recover Kirkwood calmly crossed the threshold, closed the
+    door and put his shoulder to it. In another instant, fumbling
+    in the darkness, he found the bolts and drove them home.</p>
+
+    <p>And it was done, the transformation accomplished; his
+    inability to refrain from interfering had encompassed his
+    downfall, had changed a peaceable and law-abiding alien within
+    British shores into a busybody, a trespasser, a misdemeanant,
+    a&#8212yes, for all he knew to the contrary, in the estimation of
+    the Law, a burglar, prime candidate for a convict's
+    stripes!</p>
+
+    <p>Breathing hard with excitement he turned and laid his back
+    against the panels, trembling in every muscle, terrified by the
+    result of his impulsive audacity, thunder-struck by a
+    lightning-like foreglimpse of its possible consequences. Of
+    what colossal imprudence had he not been guilty?</p>
+
+    <p>"The devil!" he whispered. "What an ass, what an utter ass I
+    am!"</p>
+
+    <p>Behind him the knob was rattled urgently, to an
+    accompaniment of feet shuffling on the stone; and
+    immediately&#8212if he were to make a logical deduction from the
+    rasping and scraping sound within the door-casing&#8212the
+    bell-pull was violently agitated, without, however, educing any
+    response from the bell itself, wherever that might be situate.
+    After which, as if in despair, the outsider again rattled and
+    jerked the knob.</p>
+
+    <p>Be his status what it might, whether servant of the
+    household, its caretaker, or a night watchman, the man was
+    palpably determined both to get himself in and Kirkwood out,
+    and yet (curious to consider) determined to gain his end
+    without attracting undue attention. Kirkwood had expected to
+    hear the knocker's thunder, as soon as the bell failed to give
+    tongue; but it did not sound although there <i>was</i> a
+    knocker,&#8212Kirkwood himself had remarked that antiquated and
+    rusty bit of ironmongery affixed to the middle panel of the
+    door. And it made him feel sure that something surreptitious
+    and lawless was in process within those walls, that the
+    confederate without, having failed to prevent a stranger from
+    entering, left unemployed a means so certain-sure to rouse the
+    occupants.</p>
+
+    <p>But his inferential analysis of this phase of the
+    proceedings was summarily abrupted by that identical alarm. In
+    a trice the house was filled with flying echoes, wakened to
+    sonorous riot by the crash and clamor of the knocker; and
+    Kirkwood stood fully two yards away, his heart hammering
+    wildly, his nerves a-jingle, much as if the resounding blows
+    had landed upon his own person rather than on stout oaken
+    planking.</p>
+
+    <p>Ere he had time to wonder, the racket ceased, and from the
+    street filtered voices in altercation. Listening, Kirkwood's
+    pulses quickened, and he laughed uncertainly for pure relief,
+    retreating to the door and putting an ear to a crack.</p>
+
+    <p>The accents of one speaker were new in his hearing, stern,
+    crisp, quick with the spirit of authority which animates that
+    most austere and dignified limb of the law to be encountered
+    the world over, a London bobby.</p>
+
+    <p>"Now then, my man, what do you want there? Come now, speak
+    up, and step out into the light, where I can see you."</p>
+
+    <p>The response came in the sniffling snarl of the London
+    ne'er-do-well, the unemployable rogue whose chiefest occupation
+    seems to be to march in the ranks of The Unemployed on the
+    occasion of its annual demonstrations.</p>
+
+    <p>"Le' me alone, carntcher? Ah'm doin' no 'arm,
+    officer,&#8212"</p>
+
+    <p>"Didn't you hear me? Step out here. Ah, that's better.... No
+    harm, eh? Perhaps you'll explain how there's no harm breakin'
+    into unoccupied 'ouses?"</p>
+
+    <p>"Gorblimy, 'ow was I to know? 'Ere's a toff 'ands me
+    sixpence fer hopenin' 'is cab door to-dye, an', sezee, 'My
+    man,' 'e sez, 'yer've got a 'onest fyce. W'y don'cher work?'
+    sezee. ''Ow can I?' sez I. ''Ere'm I hout of a job these six
+    months, lookin' fer work every dye an' carn't find it.' Sezee,
+    'Come an' see me this hevenin' at me home, Noine, Frognall
+    Stryte,' 'e sez, an'&#8212"</p>
+
+    <p>"That'll do for now. You borrow a pencil and paper and write
+    it down and I'll read it when I've got more time; I never heard
+    the like of it. This 'ouse hasn't been lived in these two
+    years. Move on, and don't let me find you round 'ere again.
+    March, I say!"</p>
+
+    <p>There was more of it&#8212more whining explanations artfully
+    tinctured with abuse, more terse commands to depart, the whole
+    concluding with scraping footsteps, diminuendo, and another
+    perfunctory, rattle of the knob as the bobby, having shoo'd the
+    putative evil-doer off, assured himself that no damage had
+    actually been done. Then he, too, departed, satisfied and
+    self-righteous, leaving a badly frightened but very grateful
+    amateur criminal to pursue his self-appointed career of
+    crime.</p>
+
+    <p>He had no choice other than to continue; in point of fact,
+    it had been insanity just then to back out, and run the risk of
+    apprehension at the hands of that ubiquitous bobby, who (for
+    all he knew) might be lurking not a dozen yards distant,
+    watchful for just such a sequel. Still, Kirkwood hesitated with
+    the best of excuses. Reassuring as he had found the sentinel's
+    extemporized yarn,&#8212proof positive that the fellow had had no
+    more right to prohibit a trespass than Kirkwood to commit
+    one,&#8212at the same time he found himself pardonably a prey to
+    emotions of the utmost consternation and alarm. If he feared to
+    leave the house he had no warrant whatever to assume that he
+    would be permitted to remain many minutes unharmed within its
+    walls of mystery.</p>
+
+    <p>The silence of it discomfited him beyond measure; it was, in
+    a word, uncanny.</p>
+
+    <p>Before him, as he lingered at the door, vaguely disclosed by
+    a wan illumination penetrating a dusty and begrimed fan-light,
+    a broad hall stretched indefinitely towards the rear of the
+    building, losing itself in blackness beyond the foot of a
+    flight of stairs. Save for a few articles of furniture,&#8212a hall
+    table, an umbrella-stand, a tall dumb clock flanked by
+    high-backed chairs,&#8212it was empty. Other than Kirkwood's own
+    restrained respiration not a sound throughout the house
+    advertised its inhabitation; not a board creaked beneath the
+    pressure of a foot, not a mouse rustled in the wainscoting or
+    beneath the floors, not a breath of air stirred sighing in the
+    stillness.</p>
+
+    <p>And yet, a tremendous racket had been raised at the front
+    door, within the sixty seconds past! And yet, within twenty
+    minutes two persons, at least, had preceded Kirkwood into the
+    building! Had they not heard? The speculation seemed
+    ridiculous. Or had they heard and, alarmed, been too
+    effectually hobbled by the coils of their nefarious designs to
+    dare reveal themselves, to investigate the cause of that
+    thunderous summons? Or were they, perhaps, aware of Kirkwood's
+    entrance, and lying <i>perdui</i>, in some dark corner, to
+    ambush him as he passed?</p>
+
+    <p>True, that were hardly like the girl. True, on the other
+    hand, it were possible that she had stolen away while Kirkwood
+    was hanging in irresolution by the passage to Quadrant Mews.
+    Again, the space of time between Kirkwood's dismissal and his
+    return had been exceedingly brief; whatever her errand, she
+    could hardly have fulfilled it and escaped. At that moment she
+    might be in the power and at the mercy of him who had followed
+    her; providing he were not friendly. And in that case, what
+    torment and what peril might not be hers?</p>
+
+    <p>Spurred by solicitude, the young man put personal
+    apprehensions in his pocket and forgot them, cautiously picking
+    his way through the gloom to the foot of the stairs. There, by
+    the newel-post, he paused. Darkness walled him about. Overhead
+    the steps vanished in a well of blackness; he could not even
+    see the ceiling; his eyes ached with futile effort to fathom
+    the unknown; his ears rang with unrewarded strain of listening.
+    The silence hung inviolate, profound.</p>
+
+    <p>Slowly he began to ascend, a hand following the balusters,
+    the other with his cane exploring the obscurity before him. On
+    the steps, a carpet, thick and heavy, muffled his footfalls. He
+    moved noiselessly. Towards the top the staircase curved, and
+    presently a foot that groped for a higher level failed to find
+    it. Again he halted, acutely distrustful.</p>
+
+    <p>Nothing happened.</p>
+
+    <p>He went on, guided by the balustrade, passing three doors,
+    all open, through which the undefined proportions of a
+    drawing-room and boudoir were barely suggested in a ghostly
+    dusk. By each he paused, listening, hearing nothing.</p>
+
+    <p>His foot struck with a deadened thud against the bottom step
+    of the second flight, and his pulses fluttered wildly for a
+    moment. Two minutes&#8212three&#8212he waited in suspense. From above
+    came no sound. He went on, as before, save that twice a step
+    yielded, complaining, to his weight. Toward the top the close
+    air, like the darkness, seemed to weigh more heavily upon his
+    consciousness; little drops of perspiration started out on his
+    forehead, his scalp tingled, his mouth was hot and dry, he felt
+    as if stifled.</p>
+
+    <p>Again the raised foot found no level higher than its
+    fellows. He stopped and held his breath, oppressed by a
+    conviction that some one was near him. Confirmation of this
+    came startlingly&#8212an eerie whisper in the night, so close to
+    him that he fancied he could feel the disturbed air fanning his
+    face.</p>
+
+    <p>"<i>Is it you, Eccles</i>?" He had no answer ready. The
+    voice was masculine, if he analyzed it correctly. Dumb and
+    stupid he stood poised upon the point of panic.</p>
+
+    <p>"<i>Eccles, is it you</i>?"</p>
+
+    <p>The whisper was both shrill and shaky. As it ceased Kirkwood
+    was half blinded by a flash of light, striking him squarely in
+    the eyes. Involuntarily he shrank back a pace, to the first
+    step from the top. Instantaneously the light was eclipsed.</p>
+
+    <p>"<i>Halt or&#8212or I fire</i>!"</p>
+
+    <p>By now he realized that he had been scrutinized by the aid
+    of an electric hand-lamp. The tremulous whisper told him
+    something else&#8212that the speaker suffered from nerves as
+    high-strung as his own. The knowledge gave him inspiration. He
+    cried at a venture, in a guarded voice, "<i>Hands up</i>!"&#8212and
+    struck out smartly with his stick. Its ferrule impinged upon
+    something soft but heavy. Simultaneously he heard a low,
+    frightened cry, the cane was swept aside, a blow landed
+    glancingly on his shoulder, and he was carried fairly off his
+    feet by the weight of a man hurled bodily upon him with
+    staggering force and passion. Reeling, he was borne back and
+    down a step or two, and then,&#8212choking on an oath,&#8212dropped his
+    cane and with one hand caught the balusters, while the other
+    tore ineffectually at wrists of hands that clutched his throat.
+    So, for a space, the two hung, panting and struggling.</p>
+
+    <p>Then endeavoring to swing his shoulders over against the
+    wall, Kirkwood released his grip on the hand-rail and stumbled
+    on the stairs, throwing his antagonist out of balance. The
+    latter plunged downward, dragging Kirkwood with him. Clawing,
+    kicking, grappling, they went to the bottom, jolted violently
+    by each step; but long before the last was reached, Kirkwood's
+    throat was free.</p>
+
+    <p>Throwing himself off, he got to his feet and grasped the
+    railing for support; then waited, panting, trying to get his
+    bearings. Himself painfully shaken and bruised, he shrewdly
+    surmised that his assailant had fared as ill, if not worse.
+    And, in point of fact, the man lay with neither move nor moan,
+    still as death at the American's feet.</p>
+
+    <p>And once more silence had folded its wings over Number 9,
+    Frognall Street.</p>
+
+    <p>More conscious of that terrifying, motionless presence
+    beneath him, than able to distinguish it by power of vision, he
+    endured interminable minutes of trembling horror, in a witless
+    daze, before he thought of his match-box. Immediately he found
+    it and struck a light. As the wood caught and the bright small
+    flame leaped in the pent air, he leaned forward, over the body,
+    breathlessly dreading what he must discover.</p>
+
+    <p>The man lay quiet, head upon the floor, legs and hips on the
+    stairs. One arm had fallen over his face, hiding the upper
+    half. The hand gleamed white and delicate as a woman's. His
+    chin was smooth and round, his lips thin and petulant. Beneath
+    his top-coat, evening dress clothed a short and slender figure.
+    Nothing whatever of his appearance suggested the burly ruffian,
+    the midnight marauder; he seemed little more than a boy old
+    enough to dress for dinner. In his attitude there was something
+    pitifully suggestive of a beaten child, thrown into a
+    corner.</p>
+
+    <p>Conscience-smitten and amazed Kirkwood stared on until,
+    without warning, the match flickered and went out. Then,
+    straightening up with an exclamation at once of annoyance and
+    concern, he rattled the box; it made no sound,&#8212was empty. In
+    disgust he swore it was the devil's own luck, that he should
+    run out of vestas at a time so critical. He could not even say
+    whether the fellow was dead, unconscious, or simply shamming.
+    He had little idea of his looks; and to be able to identify him
+    might save a deal of trouble at some future time,&#8212since he,
+    Kirkwood, seemed so little able to disengage himself from the
+    clutches of this insane adventure! And the girl&#8212. what had
+    become of her? How could he continue to search for her, without
+    lights or guide, through all those silent rooms, whose walls
+    might inclose a hundred hidden dangers in that house of
+    mystery?</p>
+
+    <p>But he debated only briefly. His blood was young, and it was
+    hot; it was quite plain to him that he could not withdraw and
+    retain his self-respect. If the girl was there to be found,
+    most assuredly, he must find her. The hand-lamp that had
+    dazzled him at the head of the stairs should be his aid, now
+    that he thought of it,&#8212and providing he was able to find
+    it.</p>
+
+    <p>In the scramble on the stairs he had lost his hat, but he
+    remembered that the vesta's short-lived light had discovered
+    this on the floor beyond the man's body. Carefully stepping
+    across the latter he recovered his head-gear, and then,
+    kneeling, listened with an ear close to the fellow's face. A
+    softly regular beat of breathing reassured him. Half rising, he
+    caught the body beneath the armpits, lifting and dragging it
+    off the staircase; and knelt again, to feel of each pocket in
+    the man's clothing, partly as an obvious precaution, to relieve
+    him of his advertised revolver against an untimely wakening,
+    partly to see if he had the lamp about him.</p>
+
+    <p>The search proved fruitless. Kirkwood suspected that the
+    weapon, like his own, had existed only in his victim's ready
+    imagination. As for the lamp, in the act of rising he struck it
+    with his foot, and picked it up.</p>
+
+    <p>It felt like a metal tube a couple of inches in diameter, a
+    foot or so in length, passably heavy. He fumbled with it
+    impatiently. "However the dickens," he wondered audibly, "does
+    the infernal machine work?" As it happened, the thing worked
+    with disconcerting abruptness as his untrained fingers fell
+    hapchance on the spring. A sudden glare again smote him in the
+    face, and at the same instant, from a point not a yard away,
+    apparently, an inarticulate cry rang out upon the
+    stillness.</p>
+
+    <p>Heart in his mouth, he stepped back, lowering the lamp
+    (which impishly went out) and lifting a protecting forearm.</p>
+
+    <p>"Who's that?" he demanded harshly.</p>
+
+    <p>A strangled sob of terror answered him, blurred by a swift
+    rush of skirts, and in a breath his shattered nerves quieted
+    and a glimmer of common sense penetrated the murk anger and
+    fear had bred in his brain. He understood, and stepped forward,
+    catching blindly at the darkness with eager hands.</p>
+
+    <p>"Miss Calendar!" he cried guardedly. "Miss Calendar, it is
+    I&#8212Philip Kirkwood!"</p>
+
+    <p>There was a second sob, of another caliber than the first;
+    timid fingers brushed his, and a hand, warm and fragile, closed
+    upon his own in a passion of relief and gratitude.</p>
+
+    <p>"Oh, I am so g-glad!" It was Dorothy Calendar's voice,
+    beyond mistake. "I&#8212I didn't know what t-to t-think.... When
+    the light struck your face I was sure it was you, but when I
+    called, you answered in a voice so strange,&#8212not like yours at
+    all! ... Tell me," she pleaded, with palpable effort to steady
+    herself; "what has happened?"</p>
+
+    <p>"I think, perhaps," said Kirkwood uneasily, again troubled
+    by his racing pulses, "perhaps you can do that better than
+    I."</p>
+
+    <p>"Oh!" said the voice guiltily; her fingers trembled on his,
+    and were gently withdrawn. "I was so frightened," she confessed
+    after a little pause, "so frightened that I hardly understand
+    ... But you? How did you&#8212?"</p>
+
+    <p>"I worried about you," he replied, in a tone absurdly
+    apologetic. "Somehow it didn't seem right. It was none of my
+    business, of course, but ... I couldn't help coming back. This
+    fellow, whoever he is&#8212don't worry; he's unconscious&#8212slipped
+    into the house in a manner that seemed to me suspicious. I
+    hardly know why I followed, except that he left the door an
+    open invitation to interference ..."</p>
+
+    <p>"I can't be thankful enough," she told him warmly, "that you
+    did interfere. You have indeed saved me from ..."</p>
+
+    <p>"Yes?"</p>
+
+    <p>"I don't know what. If I knew the man&#8212"</p>
+
+    <p>"You don't <i>know</i> him?"</p>
+
+    <p>"I can't even guess. The light&#8212?"</p>
+
+    <p>She paused inquiringly. Kirkwood fumbled with the lamp, but,
+    whether its rude handling had impaired some vital part of the
+    mechanism, or whether the batteries through much use were worn
+    out, he was able to elicit only one feeble glow, which was
+    instantly smothered by the darkness.</p>
+
+    <p>"It's no use," he confessed. "The thing's gone wrong."</p>
+
+    <p>"Have you a match?"</p>
+
+    <p>"I used my last before I got hold of this."</p>
+
+    <p>"Oh," she commented, discouraged. "Have you any notion what
+    he looks like?"</p>
+
+    <p>Kirkwood thought briefly. "Raffles," he replied with a
+    chuckle. "He looks like an amateurish and very callow Raffles.
+    He's in dress clothes, you know."</p>
+
+    <p>"I wonder!" There was a nuance of profound bewilderment in
+    her exclamation. Then: "He knocked against something in the
+    hall&#8212a chair, I presume; at all events, I heard that and put
+    out the light. I was ... in the room above the drawing-room,
+    you see. I stole down to this floor&#8212was there, in the corner
+    by the stairs when he passed within six inches, and never
+    guessed it. Then, when he got on the next floor, I started on;
+    but you came in. I slipped into the drawing-room and crouched
+    behind a chair. You went on, but I dared not move until ... And
+    then I heard some one cry out, and you fell down the stairs
+    together. I hope you were not hurt&#8212?"</p>
+
+    <p>"Nothing worth mention; but <i>he</i> must have got a pretty
+    stiff knock, to lay him out so completely." Kirkwood stirred
+    the body with his toe, but the man made no sign. "Dead to the
+    world ... And now, Miss Calendar?"</p>
+
+    <p>If she answered, he did not hear; for on the heels of his
+    query banged the knocker down below; and thereafter crash
+    followed crash, brewing a deep and sullen thundering to rouse
+    the echoes and send them rolling, like voices of enraged
+    ghosts, through the lonely rooms.</p>
+
+    <h2 align="center"><a name="V">V</a></h2>
+
+    <h3 align="center">THE MYSTERY OF A FOUR-WHEELER</h3>
+
+    <p>"What's that?" At the first alarm the girl had caught
+    convulsively at Kirkwood's arm. Now, when a pause came in the
+    growling of the knocker, she made him hear her voice; and it
+    was broken and vibrant with a threat of hysteria. "Oh, what can
+    it mean?"</p>
+
+    <p>"I don't know." He laid a hand reassuringly over that which
+    trembled on his forearm. "The police, possibly."</p>
+
+    <p>"Police!" she iterated, aghast. "What makes you
+    think&#8212?"</p>
+
+    <p>"A man tried to stop me at the door," he answered quickly.
+    "I got in before he could. When he tried the knocker, a bobby
+    came along and stopped him. The latter may have been watching
+    the house since then,&#8212it'd be only his duty to keep an eye on
+    it; and Heaven knows we raised a racket, coming head-first down
+    those stairs! Now we are up against it," he added brightly.</p>
+
+    <p>But the girl was tugging at his hand. "Come!" she begged
+    breathlessly. "Come! There is a way! Before they break
+    in&#8212"</p>
+
+    <p>"But this man&#8212?" Kirkwood hung back, troubled.</p>
+
+    <p>"They&#8212the police are sure to find and care for him."</p>
+
+    <p>"So they will." He chuckled, "And serve him right! He'd have
+    choked me to death, with all the good will in the world!"</p>
+
+    <p>"Oh, do hurry!"</p>
+
+    <p>Turning, she sped light-footed down the staircase to the
+    lower hall, he at her elbow. Here the uproar was loudest&#8212deep
+    enough to drown whatever sounds might have been made by two
+    pairs of flying feet. For all that they fled on tiptoe,
+    stealthily, guilty shadows in the night; and at the newel-post
+    swung back into the unbroken blackness which shrouded the
+    fastnesses backward of the dwelling. A sudden access of fury on
+    the part of the alarmist at the knocker, spurred them on with
+    quaking hearts. In half a dozen strides, Kirkwood, guided only
+    by instinct and the <i>frou-frou</i> of the girl's skirts as
+    she ran invisible before him, stumbled on the uppermost steps
+    of a steep staircase; only a hand-rail saved him, and that at
+    the last moment. He stopped short, shocked into caution. From
+    below came a contrite whisper: "I'm so sorry! I should have
+    warned you."</p>
+
+    <p>He pulled himself together, glaring wildly at nothing. "It's
+    all right&#8212"</p>
+
+    <p>"You're not hurt, truly? Oh, do come quickly."</p>
+
+    <p>She waited for him at the bottom of the flight;&#8212happily for
+    him, for he was all at sea.</p>
+
+    <p>"Here&#8212your hand&#8212let me guide you. This darkness is
+    dreadful ..."</p>
+
+    <p>He found her hand, somehow, and tucked his into it,
+    confidingly, and not without an uncertain thrill of
+    satisfaction.</p>
+
+    <p>"Come!" she panted. "Come! If they break in&#8212"</p>
+
+    <p>Stifled by apprehension, her voice failed her.</p>
+
+    <p>They went forward, now less impetuously, for it was very
+    black; and the knocker had fallen still.</p>
+
+    <p>"No fear of that," he remarked after a time. "They wouldn't
+    dare break in."</p>
+
+    <p>A fluttering whisper answered him: "I don't know. We dare
+    risk nothing."</p>
+
+    <p>They seemed to explore, to penetrate acres of labyrinthine
+    chambers and passages, delving deep into the bowels of the
+    earth, like rabbits burrowing in a warren, hounded by
+    beagles.</p>
+
+    <p>Above stairs the hush continued unbroken; as if the dumb
+    Genius of the Place had cast a spell of silence on the knocker,
+    or else, outraged, had smitten the noisy disturber with a
+    palsy.</p>
+
+    <p>The girl seemed to know her way; whether guided by
+    familiarity or by intuition, she led on without hesitation,
+    Kirkwood blundering in her wake, between confusion of
+    impression, and dawning dismay conscious of but one tangible
+    thing, to which he clung as to his hope of salvation: those
+    firm, friendly fingers that clasped his own.</p>
+
+    <p>It was as if they wandered on for an hour; probably from
+    start to finish their flight took up three minutes, no more.
+    Eventually the girl stopped, releasing his hand. He could hear
+    her syncopated breathing before him, and gathered that
+    something was wrong. He took a step forward.</p>
+
+    <p>"What is it?"</p>
+
+    <p>Her full voice broke out of the obscurity startlingly close,
+    in his very ear.</p>
+
+    <p>"The door&#8212the bolts&#8212I can't budge them."</p>
+
+    <p>"Let me ..."</p>
+
+    <p>He pressed forward, brushing her shoulder. She did not draw
+    away, but willingly yielded place to his hands at the
+    fastenings; and what had proved impossible to her, to his
+    strong fingers was a matter of comparative ease. Yet, not
+    entirely consciously, he was not quick. As he tugged at the
+    bolts he was poignantly sensitive to the subtle warmth of her
+    at his side; he could hear her soft dry sobs of excitement and
+    suspense, punctuating the quiet; and was frightened,
+    absolutely, by an impulse, too strong for ridicule, to take her
+    in his arms and comfort her with the assurance that, whatever
+    her trouble, he would stand by her and protect her.... It were
+    futile to try to laugh it off; he gave over the endeavor. Even
+    at this critical moment he found himself repeating over and
+    over to his heart the question: "Can this be love? Can this be
+    love? ..."</p>
+
+    <p>Could it be love at an hour's acquaintance? Absurd! But he
+    could not laugh&#8212nor render himself insensible to the
+    suggestion.</p>
+
+    <p>He found that he had drawn the bolts. The girl tugged and
+    rattled at the knob. Reluctantly the door opened inwards.
+    Beyond its threshold stretched ten feet or more of covered
+    passageway, whose entrance framed an oblong glimmering with
+    light. A draught of fresh air smote their faces. Behind them a
+    door banged.</p>
+
+    <p>"Where does this open?"</p>
+
+    <p>"On the mews," she informed him.</p>
+
+    <p>"The mews!" He stared in consternation at the pallid oval
+    that stood for her face. "The mews! But you, in your evening
+    gown, and I&#8212"</p>
+
+    <p>"There's no other way. We must chance it. Are you
+    afraid?"</p>
+
+    <p>Afraid? ... He stepped aside. She slipped by him and on. He
+    closed the door, carefully removing the key and locking it on
+    the outside; then joined the girl at the entrance to the mews,
+    where they paused perforce, she as much disconcerted as he, his
+    primary objection momentarily waxing in force as they surveyed
+    the conditions circumscribing their escape.</p>
+
+    <p>Quadrant Mews was busily engaged in enjoying itself. Night
+    had fallen sultry and humid, and the walls and doorsteps were
+    well fringed and clustered with representatives of that class
+    of London's population which infests mews through habit, taste,
+    or force of circumstance.</p>
+
+    <p>On the stoops men sprawled at easy length, discussing short,
+    foul cutties loaded with that rank and odoriferous compound
+    which, under the name and in the fame of tobacco, is widely
+    retailed at tuppence the ounce. Their women-folk more commonly
+    squatted on the thresholds, cheerfully squabbling; from
+    opposing second-story windows, two leaned perilously forth,
+    slanging one another across the square briskly in the purest
+    billingsgate; and were impartially applauded from below by an
+    audience whose appreciation seemed faintly tinged with envy.
+    Squawking and yelling children swarmed over the flags and rude
+    cobblestones that paved the ways. Like incense, heavy and
+    pungent, the rich effluvia of stable-yards swirled in air made
+    visible by its faint burden of mist.</p>
+
+    <p>Over against the entrance wherein Kirkwood and the girl
+    lurked, confounded by the problem of escaping undetected
+    through this vivacious scene, a stable-door stood wide,
+    exposing a dimly illumined interior. Before it waited a
+    four-wheeler, horse already hitched in between the shafts,
+    while its driver, a man of leisurely turn of mind, made
+    lingering inspection of straps and buckles, and, while Kirkwood
+    watched him, turned attention to the carriage lamps.</p>
+
+    <p>The match which he raked spiritedly down his thigh, flared
+    ruddily; the succeeding paler glow of the lamp threw into
+    relief a heavy beefy mask, with shining bosses for cheeks and
+    nose and chin; through narrow slits two cunning eyes glittered
+    like dull gems. Kirkwood appraised him with attention, as one
+    in whose gross carcass was embodied their only hope of
+    unannoyed return to the streets and normal surroundings of
+    their world. The difficulty lay in attracting the man's
+    attention and engaging him without arousing his suspicions or
+    bringing the population about their ears. Though he hesitated
+    long, no favorable opportunity presented itself; and in time
+    the Jehu approached the box with the ostensible purpose of
+    mounting and driving off. In this critical situation the
+    American, forced to recognize that boldness must mark his
+    course, took the girl's fate and his own in his hands, and with
+    a quick word to his companion, stepped out of hiding.</p>
+
+    <p>The cabby had a foot upon the step when Kirkwood tapped his
+    shoulder.</p>
+
+    <p>"My man&#8212"</p>
+
+    <p>"Lor, lumme!" cried the fellow in amaze, pivoting on his
+    heel. Cupidity and quick understanding enlivened the eyes which
+    in two glances looked Kirkwood up and down, comprehending at
+    once both his badly rumpled hat and patent-leather shoes.
+    "S'help me,"&#8212thickly,&#8212"where'd you drop from, guvner?"</p>
+
+    <p>"That's my affair," said Kirkwood briskly. "Are you
+    engaged?"</p>
+
+    <p>"If you mykes yerself my fare," returned the cabby shrewdly,
+    "I <i>ham</i>."</p>
+
+    <p>"Ten shillings, then, if you get us out of here in one
+    minute and to&#8212say&#8212Hyde Park Corner in fifteen."</p>
+
+    <p>"Us?" demanded the fellow aggressively.</p>
+
+    <p>Kirkwood motioned toward the passageway. "There's a lady
+    with me&#8212there. Quick now!"</p>
+
+    <p>Still the man did not move. "Ten bob," he bargained; "an'
+    you runnin' awye with th' stuffy ol' gent's fair darter? Come
+    now, guvner, is it gen'rous? Myke it a quid an'&#8212"</p>
+
+    <p>"A pound then. <i>Will</i> you hurry?"</p>
+
+    <p>By way of answer the fellow scrambled hastily up to the box
+    and snatched at the reins. "<i>Ck</i>! Gee-e hup!" he cried
+    sonorously.</p>
+
+    <p>By now the mews had wakened to the fact of the presence of a
+    "toff" in its midst. His light topcoat and silk hat-rendered
+    him as conspicuous as a red Indian in war-paint would have been
+    on Rotten Row. A cry of surprise was raised, and drowned in a
+    volley of ribald inquiry and chaff.</p>
+
+    <p>Fortunately, the cabby was instant to rein in skilfully
+    before the passageway, and Kirkwood had the door open before
+    the four-wheeler stopped. The girl, hugging her cloak about
+    her, broke cover (whereat the hue and cry redoubled), and
+    sprang into the body of the vehicle. Kirkwood followed,
+    shutting the door. As the cab lurched forward he leaned over
+    and drew down the window-shade, shielding the girl from half a
+    hundred prying eyes. At the same time they gathered momentum,
+    banging swiftly, if loudly out of the mews.</p>
+
+    <p>An urchin, leaping on the step to spy in Kirkwood's window,
+    fell off, yelping, as the driver's whiplash curled about his
+    shanks.</p>
+
+    <p>The gloom of the tunnel inclosed them briefly ere the lights
+    of the Hog-in-the-Pound flashed by and the wheels began to roll
+    more easily. Kirkwood drew back with a sigh of relief.</p>
+
+    <p>"Thank God!" he said softly.</p>
+
+    <p>The girl had no words.</p>
+
+    <p>Worried by her silence, solicitous lest, the strain ended,
+    she might be on the point of fainting, he let up the shade and
+    lowered the window at her side.</p>
+
+    <p>She seemed to have collapsed in her corner. Against the dark
+    upholstery her hair shone like pale gold in the half-light; her
+    eyes were closed and she held a handkerchief to her lips; the
+    other hand lay limp.</p>
+
+    <p>"Miss Calendar?"</p>
+
+    <p>She started, and something bulky fell from the seat and
+    thumped heavily on the floor. Kirkwood bent to pick it up, and
+    so for the first time was made aware that she had brought with
+    her a small black gladstone bag of considerable weight. As he
+    placed it on the forward seat their eyes met.</p>
+
+    <p>"I didn't know&#8212" he began.</p>
+
+    <p>"It was to get that," she hastened to explain, "that my
+    father sent me ..."</p>
+
+    <p>"Yes," he assented in a tone indicating his complete
+    comprehension. "I trust ..." he added vaguely, and neglected to
+    complete the observation, losing himself in a maze of
+    conjecture not wholly agreeable. This was a new phase of the
+    adventure. He eyed the bag uneasily. What did it contain? How
+    did he know ...?</p>
+
+    <p>Hastily he abandoned that line of thought. He had no right
+    to infer anything whatever, who had thrust himself uninvited
+    into her concerns&#8212uninvited, that was to say, in the second
+    instance, having been once definitely given his cong&#233;.
+    Inevitably, however, a thousand unanswerable questions pestered
+    him; just as, at each fresh facet of mystery disclosed by the
+    sequence of the adventure, his bewilderment deepened.</p>
+
+    <p>The girl stirred restlessly. "I have been thinking," she
+    volunteered in a troubled tone, "that there is absolutely no
+    way I know of, to thank you properly."</p>
+
+    <p>"It is enough if I've been useful," he rose in gallantry to
+    the emergency.</p>
+
+    <p>"That," she commented, "was very prettily said. But then I
+    have never known any one more kind and courteous and&#8212and
+    considerate, than you." There was no savor of flattery in the
+    simple and direct statement; indeed, she was looking away from
+    him, out of the window, and her face was serious with thought;
+    she seemed to be speaking of, rather than to, Kirkwood. "And I
+    have been wondering," she continued with unaffected candor,
+    "what you must be thinking of me."</p>
+
+    <p>"I? ... What should I think of you, Miss Calendar?"</p>
+
+    <p>With the air of a weary child she laid her head against the
+    cushions again, face to him, and watched him through lowered
+    lashes, unsmiling.</p>
+
+    <p>"You might be thinking that an explanation is due you. Even
+    the way we were brought together was extraordinary, Mr.
+    Kirkwood. You must be very generous, as generous as you have
+    shown yourself brave, not to require some sort of an
+    explanation of me."</p>
+
+    <p>"I don't see it that way."</p>
+
+    <p>"I do ... You have made me like you very much, Mr.
+    Kirkwood."</p>
+
+    <p>He shot her a covert glance&#8212causelessly, for her
+    <i>naivet&#233;</i> was flawless. With a feeling of some slight
+    awe he understood this&#8212a sensation of sincere reverence for
+    the unspoiled, candid, child's heart and mind that were hers.
+    "I'm glad," he said simply; "very glad, if that's the case, and
+    presupposing I deserve it. Personally," he laughed, "I seem to
+    myself to have been rather forward."</p>
+
+    <p>"No; only kind and a gentleman."</p>
+
+    <p>"But&#8212please!" he protested.</p>
+
+    <p>"Oh, but I mean it, every word! Why shouldn't I? In a little
+    while, ten minutes, half an hour, we shall have seen the last
+    of each other. Why should I not tell you how I appreciate all
+    that you have unselfishly done for me?"</p>
+
+    <p>"If you put it that way,&#8212I'm sure I don't know; beyond that
+    it embarrasses me horribly to have you overestimate me so. If
+    any courage has been shown this night, it is yours ... But I'm
+    forgetting again." He thought to divert her. "Where shall I
+    tell the cabby to go this time, Miss Calendar?"</p>
+
+    <p>"Craven Street, please," said the girl, and added a house
+    number. "I am to meet my father there, with this,"&#8212indicating
+    the gladstone bag.</p>
+
+    <p>Kirkwood thrust head and shoulders out the window and
+    instructed the cabby accordingly; but his ruse had been
+    ineffectual, as he found when he sat back again. Quite
+    composedly the girl took up the thread of conversation where it
+    had been broken off.</p>
+
+    <p>"It's rather hard to keep silence, when you've been so good.
+    I don't want you to think me less generous than yourself, but,
+    truly, I can tell you nothing." She sighed a trace resentfully;
+    or so he thought. "There is little enough in this&#8212this
+    wretched affair, that I understand myself; and that little, I
+    may not tell ... I want you to know that."</p>
+
+    <p>"I understand, Miss Calendar."</p>
+
+    <p>"There's one thing I may say, however. I have done nothing
+    wrong to-night, I believe," she added quickly.</p>
+
+    <p>"I've never for an instant questioned that," he returned
+    with a qualm of shame; for what he said was not true.</p>
+
+    <p>"Thank you ..."</p>
+
+    <p>The four-wheeler swung out of Oxford Street into Charing
+    Cross Road. Kirkwood noted the fact with a feeling of some
+    relief that their ride was to be so short; like many of his
+    fellow-sufferers from "the artistic temperament," he was
+    acutely disconcerted by spoken words of praise and gratitude;
+    Miss Calendar, unintentionally enough, had succeeded only in
+    rendering him self-conscious and ill at ease.</p>
+
+    <p>Nor had she fully relieved her mind, nor voiced all that
+    perturbed her. "There's one thing more," she said presently:
+    "my father. I&#8212I hope you will think charitably of him."</p>
+
+    <p>"Indeed, I've no reason or right to think otherwise."</p>
+
+    <p>"I was afraid&#8212afraid his actions might have seemed
+    peculiar, to-night ..."</p>
+
+    <p>"There are lots of things I don't understand, Miss Calendar.
+    Some day, perhaps, it will all clear up,&#8212this trouble of
+    yours. At least, one supposes it is trouble, of some sort. And
+    then you will tell me the whole story.... Won't you?" Kirkwood
+    insisted.</p>
+
+    <p>"I'm afraid not," she said, with a smile of shadowed
+    sadness. "We are to say good night in a moment or two, and&#8212it
+    will be good-by as well. It's unlikely that we shall ever meet
+    again."</p>
+
+    <p>"I refuse positively to take such a gloomy view of the
+    case!"</p>
+
+    <p>She shook her head, laughing with him, but with shy regret.
+    "It's so, none the less. We are leaving London this very night,
+    my father and I&#8212leaving England, for that matter."</p>
+
+    <p>"Leaving England?" he echoed. "You're not by any chance
+    bound for America, are you?"</p>
+
+    <p>"I ... can't tell you."</p>
+
+    <p>"But you can tell me this: are you booked on the
+    <i>Minneapolis</i>?"</p>
+
+    <p>"No&#8212o; it is a&#8212quite another boat."</p>
+
+    <p>"Of course!" he commented savagely. "It wouldn't be me to
+    have <i>any</i> sort of luck!"</p>
+
+    <p>She made no reply beyond a low laugh. He stared gloomily out
+    of his window, noting indifferently that they were passing the
+    National Gallery. On their left Trafalgar Square stretched,
+    broad and bare, a wilderness of sooty stone with an air of
+    mutely tolerating its incongruous fountains. Through Charing
+    Cross roared a tide-rip of motor-busses and hackney
+    carriages.</p>
+
+    <p>Glumly the young man foresaw the passing of his abbreviated
+    romance; their destination was near at hand. Brentwick had been
+    right, to some extent, at least; it was quite true that the
+    curtain had been rung up that very night, upon Kirkwood's
+    Romance; unhappily, as Brentwick had not foreseen, it was
+    immediately to be rung down.</p>
+
+    <p>The cab rolled soberly into the Strand.</p>
+
+    <p>"Since we are to say good-by so very soon," suggested
+    Kirkwood, "may I ask a parting favor, Miss Calendar?"</p>
+
+    <p>She regarded him with friendly eyes. "You have every right,"
+    she affirmed gently.</p>
+
+    <p>"Then please to tell me frankly: are you going into any
+    further danger?"</p>
+
+    <p>"And is that the only boon you crave at my hands, Mr.
+    Kirkwood?"</p>
+
+    <p>"Without impertinence ..."</p>
+
+    <p>For a little time, waiting for him to conclude his vague
+    phrase, she watched him in an expectant silence. But the man
+    was diffident to a degree&#8212At length, somewhat unconsciously,
+    "I think not," she answered. "No; there will be no danger
+    awaiting me at Mrs. Hallam's. You need not fear for me any
+    more&#8212Thank you."</p>
+
+    <p>He lifted his brows at the unfamiliar name. "Mrs.
+    Hallam&#8212?"</p>
+
+    <p>"I am going to her house in Craven Street."</p>
+
+    <p>"Your father is to meet you there?"&#8212persistently.</p>
+
+    <p>"He promised to."</p>
+
+    <p>"But if he shouldn't?"</p>
+
+    <p>"Why&#8212" Her eyes clouded; she pursed her lips over the
+    conjectural annoyance. "Why, in that event, I suppose&#8212It would
+    be very embarrassing. You see, I don't know Mrs. Hallam; I
+    don't know that she expects me, unless my father is already
+    there. They are old friends&#8212I could drive round for a while
+    and come back, I suppose."</p>
+
+    <p>But she made it plain that the prospect did not please
+    her.</p>
+
+    <p>"Won't you let me ask if Mr. Calender is there, before you
+    get out, then? I don't like to be dismissed," he laughed; "and,
+    you know, you shouldn't go wandering round all alone."</p>
+
+    <p>The cab drew up. Kirkwood put a hand on the door and awaited
+    her will.</p>
+
+    <p>"It&#8212it would be very kind ... I hate to impose upon
+    you."</p>
+
+    <p>He turned the knob and got out. "If you'll wait one moment,"
+    he said superfluously, as he closed the door.</p>
+
+    <p>Pausing only to verify the number, he sprang up the steps
+    and found the bell-button.</p>
+
+    <p>It was a modest little residence, in nothing more remarkable
+    than its neighbors, unless it was for a certain air of extra
+    grooming: the area railing was sleek with fresh black paint;
+    the doorstep looked the better for vigorous stoning; the door
+    itself was immaculate, its brasses shining lustrous against
+    red-lacquered woodwork. A soft glow filled the fanlight.
+    Overhead the drawing-room windows shone with a cozy, warm
+    radiance.</p>
+
+    <p>The door opened, framing the figure of a maid sketched
+    broadly in masses of somber black and dead white.</p>
+
+    <p>"Can you tell me, is Mr. Calendar here?"</p>
+
+    <p>The servant's eyes left his face, looked past him at the
+    waiting cab, and returned.</p>
+
+    <p>"I'm not sure, sir. If you will please step in."</p>
+
+    <p>Kirkwood hesitated briefly, then acceded. The maid closed
+    the door.</p>
+
+    <p>"What name shall I say, sir?"</p>
+
+    <p>"Mr. Kirkwood."</p>
+
+    <p>"If you will please to wait one moment, sir&#8212"</p>
+
+    <p>He was left in the entry hall, the servant hurrying to the
+    staircase and up. Three minutes elapsed; he was on the point of
+    returning to the girl, when the maid reappeared.</p>
+
+    <p>"Mrs. Hallam says, will you kindly step up-stairs, sir."</p>
+
+    <p>Disgruntled, he followed her; at the head of the stairs she
+    bowed him into the drawing-room and again left him to his own
+    resources.</p>
+
+    <p>Nervous, annoyed, he paced the floor from wall to wall, his
+    footfalls silenced by heavy rugs. As the delay was prolonged he
+    began to fume with impatience, wondering, half regretting that
+    he had left the girl outside, definitely sorry that he had
+    failed to name his errand more explicitly to the maid. At
+    another time, in another mood, he might have accorded more
+    appreciation to the charm of the apartment, which, betraying
+    the feminine touch in every detail of arrangement and
+    furnishing, was very handsome in an unconventional way. But he
+    was quite heedless of externals.</p>
+
+    <p>Wearied, he deposited himself sulkily in an armchair by the
+    hearth.</p>
+
+    <p>From a boudoir on the same floor there came murmurs of two
+    voices, a man's and a woman's. The latter laughed prettily.</p>
+
+    <p>"Oh, any time!" snorted the American. "Any time you're
+    through with your confounded flirtation, Mr. George B.
+    Calendar!"</p>
+
+    <p>The voices rose, approaching. "Good night," said the woman
+    gaily; "farewell and&#8212good luck go with you!"</p>
+
+    <p>"Thank you. Good night," replied the man more
+    conservatively.</p>
+
+    <p>Kirkwood rose, expectant.</p>
+
+    <p>There was a swish of draperies, and a moment later he was
+    acknowledging the totally unlooked-for entrance of the mistress
+    of the house. He had thought to see Calendar, presuming him to
+    be the man closeted with Mrs. Hallam; but, whoever that had
+    been, he did not accompany the woman. Indeed, as she advanced
+    from the doorway, Kirkwood could hear the man's footsteps on
+    the stairs.</p>
+
+    <p>"This is Mr. Kirkwood?" The note of inquiry in the
+    well-trained voice&#8212a very alluring voice and one pleasant to
+    listen to, he thought&#8212made it seem as though she had asked,
+    point-blank, "Who is Mr. Kirkwood?"</p>
+
+    <p>He bowed, discovering himself in the presence of an
+    extraordinarily handsome and interesting woman; a woman of
+    years which as yet had not told upon her, of experience that
+    had not availed to harden her, at least in so far as her
+    exterior charm of personality was involved; a woman, in brief,
+    who bore close inspection well, despite an elusive effect of
+    maturity, not without its attraction for men. Kirkwood was
+    impressed that it would be very easy to learn to like Mrs.
+    Hallam more than well&#8212with her approval.</p>
+
+    <p>Although he had not anticipated it, he was not at all
+    surprised to recognize in her the woman who, if he were not
+    mistaken, had slipped to Calendar that warning in the
+    dining-room of the Pless. Kirkwood's state of mind had come to
+    be such, through his experiences of the past few hours, that he
+    would have accepted anything, however preposterous, as a
+    commonplace happening. But for that matter there was nothing
+    particularly astonishing in this <i>rencontre</i>.</p>
+
+    <p>"I am Mrs. Hallam. You were asking for Mr. Calendar?"</p>
+
+    <p>"He was to have been here at this hour, I believe," said
+    Kirkwood.</p>
+
+    <p>"Yes?" There was just the right inflection of surprise in
+    her carefully controlled tone.</p>
+
+    <p>He became aware of an undercurrent of feeling; that the
+    woman was estimating him shrewdly with her fine direct eyes. He
+    returned her regard with admiring interest; they were
+    gray-green eyes, deep-set but large, a little shallow, a little
+    changeable, calling to mind the sea on a windy, cloudy day.</p>
+
+    <p>Below stairs a door slammed.</p>
+
+    <p>"I am not a detective, Mrs. Hallam," announced the young man
+    suddenly. "Mr. Calendar required a service of me this evening;
+    I am here in natural consequence. If it was Mr. Calendar who
+    left this house just now, I am wasting time."</p>
+
+    <p>"It was not Mr. Calendar." The fine-lined brows arched in
+    surprise, real or pretended, at his first blurted words, and
+    relaxed; amused, the woman laughed deliciously. "But I am
+    expecting him any moment; he was to have been here half an hour
+    since.... Won't you wait?"</p>
+
+    <p>She indicated, with a gracious gesture, a chair, and took
+    for herself one end of a davenport. "I'm sure he won't be long,
+    now."</p>
+
+    <p>"Thank you, I will return, if I may." Kirkwood moved toward
+    the door.</p>
+
+    <p>"But there's no necessity&#8212" She seemed insistent on
+    detaining him, possibly because she questioned his motive,
+    possibly for her own divertisement.</p>
+
+    <p>Kirkwood deprecated his refusal with a smile. "The truth is,
+    Miss Calendar is waiting in a cab, outside. I&#8212"</p>
+
+    <p>"Dorothy Calendar!" Mrs. Hallam rose alertly. "But why
+    should she wait there? To be sure, we've never met; but I have
+    known her father for many years." Her eyes held steadfast to
+    his face; shallow, flawed by her every thought, like the sea by
+    a cat's-paw he found them altogether inscrutable; yet received
+    an impression that their owner was now unable to account for
+    him.</p>
+
+    <p>She swung about quickly, preceding him to the door and down
+    the stairs. "I am sure Dorothy will come in to wait, if I ask
+    her," she told Kirkwood in a high sweet voice. "I'm so anxious
+    to know her. It's quite absurd, really, of her&#8212to stand on
+    ceremony with me, when her father made an appointment here.
+    I'll run out and ask&#8212"</p>
+
+    <p>Mrs. Hallam's slim white fingers turned latch and knob,
+    opening the street door, and her voice died away as she stepped
+    out into the night. For a moment, to Kirkwood, tagging after
+    her with an uncomfortable sense of having somehow done the
+    wrong thing, her figure&#8212full fair shoulders and arms rising
+    out of the glittering dinner gown&#8212cut a gorgeous silhouette
+    against the darkness. Then, with a sudden, imperative gesture,
+    she half turned towards him.</p>
+
+    <p>"But," she exclaimed, perplexed, gazing to right and left,
+    "but the cab, Mr. Kirkwood?"</p>
+
+    <p>He was on the stoop a second later. Standing beside her, he
+    stared blankly.</p>
+
+    <p>To the left the Strand roared, the stream of its night-life
+    in high spate; on the right lay the Embankment, comparatively
+    silent and deserted, if brilliant with its high-swung lights.
+    Between the two, quiet Craven Street ran, short and narrow, and
+    wholly innocent of any form of equipage.</p>
+
+    <h2 align="center"><a name="VI">VI</a></h2>
+
+    <h3 align="center">"BELOW BRIDGE"</h3>
+
+    <p>In silence Mrs. Hallam turned to Kirkwood, her pose in
+    itself a question and a peremptory one. Her eyes had narrowed;
+    between their lashes the green showed, a thin edge like jade,
+    cold and calculating. The firm lines of her mouth and chin had
+    hardened.</p>
+
+    <p>Temporarily dumb with consternation, he returned her stare
+    as silently.</p>
+
+    <p>"<i>Well</i>, Mr.&#8212Kirkwood?"</p>
+
+    <p>"Mrs. Hallam," he stammered, "I&#8212"</p>
+
+    <p>She lifted her shoulders impatiently and with a quick
+    movement stepped back across the threshold, where she paused, a
+    rounded arm barring the entrance, one hand grasping the
+    door-knob, as if to shut him out at any moment.</p>
+
+    <p>"I'm awaiting your explanation," she said coldly.</p>
+
+    <p><br>
+    <br>
+    <br>
+    <img src="frontis2s.jpg"
+         alt=
+         "&quot;I'm waiting your explanation,&quot; she said coldly."
+         align="middle"></p>
+
+    <p>He grinned with nervousness, striving to penetrate the
+    mental processes of this handsome Mrs. Hallam. She seemed to
+    regard him with a suspicion which he thought inexcusable. Did
+    she suppose he had spirited Dorothy Calendar away and then
+    called to apprise her of the fact? Or that he was some sort of
+    an adventurer, who had manufactured a plausible yarn to gain
+    him access to her home? Or&#8212harking back to her original
+    theory&#8212that he was an emissary from Scotland Yard? ...
+    Probably she distrusted him on the latter hypothesis. The
+    reflection left him more at ease.</p>
+
+    <p>"I am quite as mystified as you, Mrs. Hallam," he began.
+    "Miss Calendar was here, at this door, in a four-wheeler, not
+    ten minutes ago, and&#8212"</p>
+
+    <p>"Then where is she now?"</p>
+
+    <p>"Tell me where Calendar is," he retorted, inspired, "and
+    I'll try to answer you!"</p>
+
+    <p>But her eyes were blank. "You mean&#8212?"</p>
+
+    <p>"That Calendar was in this house when I came; that he left,
+    found his daughter in the cab, and drove off with her. It's
+    clear enough."</p>
+
+    <p>"You are quite mistaken," she said thoughtfully. "George
+    Calendar has not been here this night."</p>
+
+    <p>He wondered that she did not seem to resent his imputation.
+    "I think not&#8212"</p>
+
+    <p>"Listen!" she cried, raising a warning hand; and relaxing
+    her vigilant attitude, moved forward once more, to peer down
+    toward the Embankment.</p>
+
+    <p>A cab had cut in from that direction and was bearing down
+    upon them with a brisk rumble of hoofs. As it approached,
+    Kirkwood's heart, that had lightened, was weighed upon again by
+    disappointment. It was no four-wheeler, but a hansom, and the
+    open wings of the apron, disclosing a white triangle of linen
+    surmounted by a glowing spot of fire, betrayed the sex of the
+    fare too plainly to allow of further hope that it might be the
+    girl returning.</p>
+
+    <p>At the door, the cab pulled up sharply and a man tumbled
+    hastily out upon the sidewalk.</p>
+
+    <p>"Here!" he cried throatily, tossing the cabby his fare, and
+    turned toward the pair upon the doorstep, evidently surmising
+    that something was amiss. For he was Calendar in proper person,
+    and a sight to upset in a twinkling Kirkwood's ingeniously
+    builded castle of suspicion.</p>
+
+    <p>"Mrs. Hallam!" he cried, out of breath. "'S my daughter
+    here?" And then, catching sight of Kirkwood's countenance:
+    "Why, hello, Kirkwood!" he saluted him with a dubious air.</p>
+
+    <p>The woman interrupted hastily. "Please come in, Mr.
+    Calendar. This gentleman has been inquiring for you, with an
+    astonishing tale about your daughter."</p>
+
+    <p>"Dorothy!" Calendar's moon-like visage was momentarily
+    divested of any trace of color. "What of her?"</p>
+
+    <p>"You had better come in," advised Mrs. Hallam brusquely.</p>
+
+    <p>The fat adventurer hopped hurriedly across the threshold,
+    Kirkwood following. The woman shut the door, and turned with
+    back to it, nodding significantly at Kirkwood as her eyes met
+    Calendar's.</p>
+
+    <p>"Well, well?" snapped the latter impatiently, turning to the
+    young man.</p>
+
+    <p>But Kirkwood was thinking quickly. For the present he
+    contented himself with a deliberate statement of fact: "Miss
+    Calendar has disappeared." It gave him an instant's time ...
+    "There's something damned fishy!" he told himself. "These two
+    are playing at cross-purposes. Calendar's no fool; he's
+    evidently a crook, to boot. As for the woman, she's had her
+    eyes open for a number of years. The main thing's Dorothy. She
+    didn't vanish of her own initiative. And Mrs. Hallam knows, or
+    suspects, more than she's going to tell. I don't think she
+    wants Dorothy found. Calendar does. So do I. Ergo: I'm for
+    Calendar."</p>
+
+    <p>"Disappeared?" Calendar was barking at him. "How? When?
+    Where?"</p>
+
+    <p>"Within ten minutes," said Kirkwood. "Here, let's get it
+    straight.... With her permission I brought her here in a
+    four-wheeler." He was carefully suppressing all mention of
+    Frognall Street, and in Calendar's glance read approval of the
+    elision. "She didn't want to get out, unless you were here. I
+    asked for you. The maid showed me up-stairs. I left your
+    daughter in the cab&#8212and by the way, I hadn't paid the driver.
+    That's funny, too! Perhaps six or seven minutes after I came in
+    Mrs. Hallam found out that Miss Calendar was with me and wanted
+    to ask her in. When we got to the door&#8212no cab. There you have
+    it all."</p>
+
+    <p>"Thanks&#8212it's plenty," said Calendar dryly. He bent his head
+    in thought for an instant, then looked up and fixed Mrs. Hallam
+    with an unprejudiced eye, "I say!" he demanded explosively.
+    "There wasn't any one here that knew&#8212eh?"</p>
+
+    <p>Her fine eyes wavered and fell before his; and Kirkwood
+    remarked that her under lip was curiously drawn in.</p>
+
+    <p>"I heard a man leave as Mrs. Hallam joined me," he
+    volunteered helpfully, and with a suspicion of malice. "And
+    after that&#8212I paid no attention at the time&#8212it seems to me I
+    did hear a cab in the street&#8212"</p>
+
+    <p>"Ow?" interjected Calendar, eying the woman steadfastly and
+    employing an exclamation of combined illumination and inquiry
+    more typically British than anything Kirkwood had yet heard
+    from the man.</p>
+
+    <p>For her part, the look she gave Kirkwood was sharp with
+    fury. It was more; it was a mistake, a flaw in her diplomacy;
+    for Calendar intercepted it. Unceremoniously he grasped her
+    bare arm with his fat hand.</p>
+
+    <p>"Tell me who it was," he demanded in an ugly tone.</p>
+
+    <p>She freed herself with a twist, and stepped back, a higher
+    color in her cheeks, a flash of anger in her eyes.</p>
+
+    <p>"Mr. Mulready," she retorted defiantly. "What of that?"</p>
+
+    <p>"I wish I was sure," declared the fat adventurer,
+    exasperated. "As it is, I bet a dollar you've put your foot in
+    it, my lady. I warned you of that blackguard.... There! The
+    mischief's done; we won't row over it. One moment." He begged
+    it with a wave of his hand; stood pondering briefly, fumbled
+    for his watch, found and consulted it. "It's the barest
+    chance," he muttered. "Perhaps we can make it."</p>
+
+    <p>"What are you going to do?" asked the woman.</p>
+
+    <p>"Give <i>Mister</i> Mulready a run for his money. Come
+    along, Kirkwood; we haven't a minute. Mrs. Hallam, permit
+    us...." She stepped aside and he brushed past her to the door.
+    "Come, Kirkwood!"</p>
+
+    <p>He seemed to take Kirkwood's company for granted; and the
+    young man was not inclined to argue the point. Meekly enough he
+    fell in with Calendar on the sidewalk. Mrs. Hallam followed
+    them out. "You won't forget?" she called tentatively.</p>
+
+    <p>"I'll 'phone you if we find out anything." Calendar jerked
+    the words unceremoniously over his shoulder as, linking arms
+    with Kirkwood, he drew him swiftly along. They heard her shut
+    the door; instantly Calendar stopped. "Look here, did Dorothy
+    have a&#8212a small parcel with her?"</p>
+
+    <p>"She had a gladstone bag."</p>
+
+    <p>"Oh, the devil, the devil!" Calendar started on again,
+    muttering distractedly. As they reached the corner he
+    disengaged his arm. "We've a minute and a half to reach Charing
+    Cross Pier; and I think it's the last boat. You set the pace,
+    will you? But remember I'm an oldish man and&#8212and fat."</p>
+
+    <p>They began to run, the one easily, the other lumbering after
+    like an old-fashioned square-rigged ship paced by a liner.</p>
+
+    <p>Beneath the railway bridge, in front of the Underground
+    station, the cab-rank cried them on with sardonic view-halloos;
+    and a bobby remarked them with suspicion, turning to watch as
+    they plunged round the corner and across the wide
+    Embankment.</p>
+
+    <p>The Thames appeared before them, a river of ink on whose
+    burnished surface lights swam in long winding streaks and oily
+    blobs. By the floating pier a County Council steamboat strained
+    its hawsers, snoring huskily. Bells were jingling in her
+    engine-room as the two gained the head of the sloping
+    gangway.</p>
+
+    <p>Kirkwood slapped a shilling down on the ticket-window ledge.
+    "Where to?" he cried back to Calendar.</p>
+
+    <p>"Cherry Gardens Pier," rasped the winded man. He stumbled
+    after Kirkwood, groaning with exhaustion. Only the tolerance of
+    the pier employees gained them their end; the steamer was held
+    some seconds for them; as Calendar staggered to its deck, the
+    gangway was jerked in, the last hawser cast off. The boat
+    sheered wide out on the river, then shot in, arrow-like, to the
+    pier beneath Waterloo Bridge.</p>
+
+    <p>The deck was crowded and additional passengers embarked at
+    every stop. In the circumstances conversation, save on the most
+    impersonal topics, was impossible; and even had it been
+    necessary or advisable to discuss the affair which occupied
+    their minds, where so many ears could hear, Calendar had breath
+    enough neither to answer nor to catechize Kirkwood. They found
+    seats on the forward deck and rested there in grim silence,
+    both fretting under the enforced restraint, while the boat
+    darted, like some illuminated and exceptionally active water
+    insect, from pier to pier.</p>
+
+    <p>As it snorted beneath London Bridge, Calendar's impatience
+    drove him from his seat back to the gangway. "Next stop," he
+    told Kirkwood curtly; and rested his heavy bulk against the
+    paddle-box, brooding morosely, until, after an uninterrupted
+    run of more than a mile, the steamer swept in, side-wheels
+    backing water furiously against the ebbing tide, to Cherry
+    Gardens landing.</p>
+
+    <p>Sweet name for a locality unsavory beyond credence! ... As
+    they emerged on the street level and turned west on Bermondsey
+    Wall, Kirkwood was fain to tug his top-coat over his chest and
+    button it tight, to hide his linen. In a guarded tone he
+    counseled his companion to do likewise; and Calendar, after a
+    moment's blank, uncomprehending stare, acknowledged the wisdom
+    of the advice with a grunt.</p>
+
+    <p>The very air they breathed was rank with fetid odors bred of
+    the gaunt dark warehouses that lined their way; the lights were
+    few; beneath the looming buildings the shadows were many and
+    dense. Here and there dreary and cheerless public houses
+    appeared, with lighted windows conspicuous in a lightless
+    waste. From time to time, as they hurried on, they encountered,
+    and made wide detours to escape contact with knots of
+    wayfarers&#8212men debased and begrimed, with dreary and slatternly
+    women, arm in arm, zigzaging widely across the sidewalks,
+    chorusing with sodden voices the burden of some popularized
+    ballad. The cheapened, sentimental refrains echoed sadly
+    between benighted walls....</p>
+
+    <p>Kirkwood shuddered, sticking close to Calendar's side.
+    Life's naked brutalities had theretofore been largely out of
+    his ken. He had heard of slums, had even ventured to mouth
+    politely moral platitudes on the subject of overcrowding in
+    great centers of population, but in the darkest flights of
+    imagination had never pictured to himself anything so
+    unspeakably foul and hopeless as this.... And they were come
+    hither seeking&#8212Dorothy Calendar! He was unable to conceive
+    what manner of villainy could be directed against her, that she
+    must be looked for in such surroundings.</p>
+
+    <p>After some ten minutes' steady walking, Calendar turned
+    aside with a muttered word, and dived down a covered, dark and
+    evil-smelling passageway that seemed to lead toward the
+    river.</p>
+
+    <p>Mastering his involuntary qualms, Kirkwood followed.</p>
+
+    <p>Some ten or twelve paces from its entrance the passageway
+    swerved at a right angle, continuing three yards or so to end
+    in a blank wall, wherefrom a flickering, inadequate gas-lamp
+    jutted. At this point a stone platform, perhaps four feet
+    square, was discovered, from the edge of which a flight of worn
+    and slimy stone steps led down to a permanent boat-landing,
+    where another gas-light flared gustily despite the protection
+    of its frame of begrimed glass.</p>
+
+    <p>"Good Lord!" exclaimed the young man. "What, in Heaven's
+    name, Calendar&#8212?"</p>
+
+    <p>"Bermondsey Old Stairs. Come on."</p>
+
+    <p>They descended to the landing-stage. Beneath them the Pool
+    slept, a sheet of polished ebony, whispering to itself, lapping
+    with small stealthy gurgles angles of masonry and ancient
+    piles. On the farther bank tall warehouses reared square
+    old-time heads, their uncompromising, rugged profile relieved
+    here and there by tapering mastheads. A few, scattering, feeble
+    lights were visible. Nothing moved save the river and the
+    wind.</p>
+
+    <p>The landing itself they found quite deserted; something
+    which the adventurer comprehended with a nod which, like its
+    accompanying, inarticulate ejaculation, might have been taken
+    to indicate either satisfaction or disgust. He ignored Kirkwood
+    altogether, for the time being, and presently produced a small,
+    bright object, which, applied to his lips, proved to be a
+    boatswain's whistle. He sounded two blasts, one long, one
+    brief.</p>
+
+    <p>There fell a lull, Kirkwood watching the other and wondering
+    what next would happen. Calendar paced restlessly to and fro
+    upon the narrow landing, now stopping to incline an ear to
+    catch some anticipated sound, now searching with sweeping
+    glances the black reaches of the Pool.</p>
+
+    <p>Finally, consulting his watch, "Almost ten," he
+    announced.</p>
+
+    <p>"We're in time?"</p>
+
+    <p>"Can't say.... Damn! ... If that infernal boat would only
+    show up&#8212"</p>
+
+    <p>He was lifting the whistle to sound a second summons when a
+    rowboat rounded a projecting angle formed by the next warehouse
+    down stream, and with clanking oar-locks swung in toward the
+    landing. On her thwarts two figures, dipping and rising,
+    labored with the sweeps. As they drew in, the man forward
+    shipped his blades, and rising, scrambled to the bows in order
+    to grasp an iron mooring-ring set in the wall. The other
+    awkwardly took in his oars and, as the current swung the stern
+    downstream, placed a hand palm downward upon the bottom step to
+    hold the boat steady.</p>
+
+    <p>Calendar waddled to the brink of the stage, grunting with
+    relief.</p>
+
+    <p>"The other man?" he asked brusquely. "Has he gone aboard? Or
+    is this the first trip to-night?"</p>
+
+    <p>One of the watermen nodded assent to the latter question,
+    adding gruffly: "Seen nawthin' of 'im, sir."</p>
+
+    <p>"Very good," said Calendar, as if he doubted whether it were
+    very good or bad. "We'll wait a bit."</p>
+
+    <p>"Right-o!" agreed the waterman civilly.</p>
+
+    <p>Calendar turned back, his small eyes glimmering with
+    satisfaction. Fumbling in one coat pocket he brought to light a
+    cigar-case. "Have a smoke?" he suggested with a show of
+    friendliness. "By Heaven, I was beginnin' to get worried!"</p>
+
+    <p>"As to what?" inquired Kirkwood pointedly, selecting a
+    cigar.</p>
+
+    <p>He got no immediate reply, but felt Calendar's sharp eyes
+    upon him while he manoeuvered with matches for a light.</p>
+
+    <p>"That's so," it came at length. "You don't know. I kind of
+    forgot for a minute; somehow you seemed on the inside."</p>
+
+    <p>Kirkwood laughed lightly. "I've experienced something of the
+    same sensation in the past few hours."</p>
+
+    <p>"Don't doubt it." Calendar was watching him narrowly. "I
+    suppose," he put it to him abruptly, "you haven't changed your
+    mind?"</p>
+
+    <p>"Changed my mind?"</p>
+
+    <p>"About coming in with me."</p>
+
+    <p>"My dear sir, I can have no mind to change until a plain
+    proposition is laid before me."</p>
+
+    <p>"Hmm!" Calendar puffed vigorously until it occurred to him
+    to change the subject. "You won't mind telling me what happened
+    to you and Dorothy?"</p>
+
+    <p>"Certainly not."</p>
+
+    <p>Calendar drew nearer and Kirkwood, lowering his voice,
+    narrated briefly the events since he had left the Pless in
+    Dorothy's company.</p>
+
+    <p>Her father followed him intently, interrupting now and again
+    with exclamation or pertinent question; as, Had Kirkwood been
+    able to see the face of the man in No. 9, Frognall Street? The
+    negative answer seemed to disconcert him.</p>
+
+    <p>"Youngster, you say? Blam' if I can lay my mind to
+    <i>him</i>! Now if that Mulready&#8212"</p>
+
+    <p>"It would have been impossible for Mulready&#8212whoever he
+    is&#8212to recover and get to Craven Street before we did,"
+    Kirkwood pointed out.</p>
+
+    <p>"Well&#8212go on." But when the tale was told, "It's that
+    scoundrel, Mulready!" the man affirmed with heat. "It's his
+    hand&#8212I know him. I might have had sense enough to see he'd
+    take the first chance to hand me the double-cross. Well, this
+    does for <i>him</i>, all right!" Calendar lowered viciously at
+    the river. "You've been blame' useful," he told Kirkwood
+    assertively. "If it hadn't been for you, I don't know where
+    <i>I'd</i> be now,&#8212nor Dorothy, either,"&#8212an obvious
+    afterthought. "There's no particular way I can show my
+    appreciation, I suppose? Money&#8212?"</p>
+
+    <p>"I've got enough to last me till I reach New York, thank
+    you."</p>
+
+    <p>"Well, if the time ever comes, just shout for George B. I
+    won't be wanting.... I only wish you were with us; but that's
+    out of the question."</p>
+
+    <p>"Doubtless ..."</p>
+
+    <p>"No two ways about it. I bet anything you've got a
+    conscience concealed about your person. What? You're an honest
+    man, eh?"</p>
+
+    <p>"I don't want to sound immodest," returned Kirkwood,
+    amused.</p>
+
+    <p>"You don't need to worry about that.... But an honest man's
+    got no business in <i>my</i> line." He glanced again at his
+    watch. "Damn that Mulready! I wonder if he was 'cute enough to
+    take another way? Or did he think ... The fool!"</p>
+
+    <p>He cut off abruptly, seeming depressed by the thought that
+    he might have been outwitted; and, clasping hands behind his
+    back, chewed savagely on his cigar, watching the river.
+    Kirkwood found himself somewhat wearied; the uselessness of his
+    presence there struck him with added force. He bethought him of
+    his boat-train, scheduled to leave a station miles distant, in
+    an hour and a half. If he missed it, he would be stranded in a
+    foreign land, penniless and practically without
+    friends&#8212Brentwick being away and all the rest of his circle of
+    acquaintances on the other side of the Channel. Yet he
+    lingered, in poor company, daring fate that he might see the
+    end of the affair. Why?</p>
+
+    <p>There was only one honest answer to that question. He stayed
+    on because of his interest in a girl whom he had known for a
+    matter of three hours, at most. It was insensate folly on his
+    part, ridiculous from any point of view. But he made no move to
+    go.</p>
+
+    <p>The slow minutes lengthened monotonously.</p>
+
+    <p>There came a sound from the street level. Calendar held up a
+    hand of warning. "Here they come! Steady!" he said tensely.
+    Kirkwood, listening intently, interpreted the noise as a clash
+    of hoofs upon cobbles.</p>
+
+    <p>Calendar turned to the boat.</p>
+
+    <p>"Sheer off," he ordered. "Drop out of sight. I'll whistle
+    when I want you."</p>
+
+    <p>"Aye, aye, sir."</p>
+
+    <p>The boat slipped noiselessly away with the current and in an
+    instant was lost to sight. Calendar plucked at Kirkwood's
+    sleeve, drawing him into the shadow of the steps. "E-easy," he
+    whispered; "and, I say, lend me a hand, will you, if Mulready
+    turns ugly?"</p>
+
+    <p>"Oh, yes," assented Kirkwood, with a nonchalance not
+    entirely unassumed.</p>
+
+    <p>The racket drew nearer and ceased; the hush that fell
+    thereafter seemed only accentuated by the purling of the river.
+    It was ended by footsteps echoing in the covered passageway.
+    Calendar craned his thick neck round the shoulder of stone,
+    reconnoitering the landing and stairway.</p>
+
+    <p>"Thank God!" he said under his breath. "I was right, after
+    all!"</p>
+
+    <p>A man's deep tones broke out above. "This way. Mind the
+    steps; they're a bit slippery, Miss Dorothy."</p>
+
+    <p>"But my father&#8212?" came the girl's voice, attuned to
+    doubt.</p>
+
+    <p>"Oh, he'll be along&#8212if he isn't waiting now, in the
+    boat."</p>
+
+    <p>They descended, the man leading. At the foot, without a
+    glance to right or left, he advanced to the edge of the stage,
+    leaning out over the rail as if endeavoring to locate the
+    rowboat. At once the girl appeared, moving to his side.</p>
+
+    <p>"But, Mr. Mulready&#8212"</p>
+
+    <p>The girl's words were drowned by a prolonged blast on the
+    boatswain's whistle at her companion's lips; the shorter one
+    followed in due course. Calendar edged forward from Kirkwood's
+    side.</p>
+
+    <p>"But what shall we do if my father isn't here? Wait?"</p>
+
+    <p>"No; best not to; best to get on the <i>Alethea</i> as soon
+    as possible, Miss Calendar. We can send the boat back."</p>
+
+    <p>"'Once aboard the lugger the girl is mine'&#8212eh,
+    Mulready?&#8212to say nothing of the loot!"</p>
+
+    <p>If Calendar's words were jocular, his tone conveyed a
+    different impression entirely. Both man and girl wheeled right
+    about to face him, the one with a strangled oath, the other
+    with a low cry.</p>
+
+    <p>"The devil!" exclaimed this Mr. Mulready.</p>
+
+    <p>"Oh! My father!" the girl voiced her recognition of him.</p>
+
+    <p>"Not precisely one and the same person," commented Calendar
+    suavely. "But&#8212er&#8212thanks, just as much.... You see, Mulready,
+    when I make an appointment, I keep it."</p>
+
+    <p>"We'd begun to get a bit anxious about you&#8212" Mulready began
+    defensively.</p>
+
+    <p>"So I surmised, from what Mrs. Hallam and Mr. Kirkwood told
+    me.... Well?"</p>
+
+    <p>The man found no ready answer. He fell back a pace to the
+    railing, his features working with his deep chagrin. The murky
+    flare of the gas-lamp overhead fell across a face handsome
+    beyond the ordinary but marred by a sullen humor and seamed
+    with indulgence: a face that seemed hauntingly familiar until
+    Kirkwood in a flash of visual memory reconstructed the portrait
+    of a man who lingered over a dining-table, with two empty
+    chairs for company. This, then, was he whom Mrs. Hallam had
+    left at the Pless; a tall, strong man, very heavy about the
+    chest and shoulders....</p>
+
+    <p>"Why, my dear friend," Calendar was taunting him, "you don't
+    seem overjoyed to see me, for all your wild anxiety! 'Pon my
+    word, you act as if you hadn't expected me&#8212and our engagement
+    so clearly understood, at that! ... Why, you fool!"&#8212here the
+    mask of irony was cast. "Did you think for a moment I'd let
+    myself be nabbed by that yap from Scotland Yard? Were you
+    banking on that? I give you my faith I ambled out under his
+    very nose! ... Dorothy, my dear," turning impatiently from
+    Mulready, "where's that bag?"</p>
+
+    <p>The girl withdrew a puzzled gaze from Mulready's face, (it
+    was apparent to Kirkwood that this phase of the affair was no
+    more enigmatic to him than to her), and drew aside a corner of
+    her cloak, disclosing the gladstone bag, securely grasped in
+    one gloved hand.</p>
+
+    <p>"I have it, thanks to Mr. Kirkwood," she said quietly.</p>
+
+    <p>Kirkwood chose that moment to advance from the shadow.
+    Mulready started and fixed him with a troubled and unfriendly
+    stare. The girl greeted him with a note of sincere pleasure in
+    her surprise.</p>
+
+    <p>"Why, Mr. Kirkwood! ... But I left you at Mrs.
+    Hallam's!"</p>
+
+    <p>Kirkwood bowed, smiling openly at Mulready's
+    discomfiture.</p>
+
+    <p>"By your father's grace, I came with him," he said. "You ran
+    away without saying good night, you know, and I'm a jealous
+    creditor."</p>
+
+    <p>She laughed excitedly, turning to Calendar. "But <i>you</i>
+    were to meet me at Mrs. Hallam's?"</p>
+
+    <p>"Mulready was good enough to try to save me the trouble, my
+    dear. He's an unselfish soul, Mulready. Fortunately it happened
+    that I came along not five minutes after he'd carried you off.
+    How was that, Dorothy?"</p>
+
+    <p>Her glance wavered uneasily between the two, Mulready and
+    her father. The former, shrugging to declare his indifference,
+    turned his back squarely upon them. She frowned.</p>
+
+    <p>"He came out of Mrs. Hallam's and got into the four-wheeler,
+    saying you had sent him to take your place, and would join us
+    on the <i>Alethea</i>."</p>
+
+    <p>"So-o! How about it, Mulready?"</p>
+
+    <p>The man swung back slowly. "What you choose to think," he
+    said after a deliberate pause.</p>
+
+    <p>"Well, never mind! We'll go over the matter at our leisure
+    on the <i>Alethea</i>."</p>
+
+    <p>There was in the adventurer's tone a menace, bitter and not
+    to be ignored; which Mulready saw fit to challenge.</p>
+
+    <p>"I think not," he declared; "I think not. I'm weary of your
+    addle-pated suspicions. It'd be plain to any one but a fool
+    that I acted for the best interests of all concerned in this
+    matter. If you're not content to see it in that light, I'm
+    done."</p>
+
+    <p>"Oh, if you want to put it that way, I'm <i>not</i> content,
+    Mr. Mulready," retorted Calendar dangerously.</p>
+
+    <p>"Please yourself. I bid you good evening and&#8212good-by." The
+    man took a step toward the stairs.</p>
+
+    <p>Calendar dropped his right hand into his top-coat pocket.
+    "Just a minute," he said sweetly, and Mulready stopped.
+    Abruptly the fat adventurer's smoldering resentment leaped in
+    flame. "That'll be about all, Mr. Mulready! 'Bout face, you
+    hound, and get into that boat! D'you think I'll temporize with
+    you till Doomsday? Then forget it. You're wrong, dead wrong.
+    Your bluff's called, and"&#8212with an evil chuckle&#8212"I hold a full
+    house, Mulready,&#8212every chamber taken." He lifted meaningly the
+    hand in the coat pocket. "Now, in with you."</p>
+
+    <p>With a grin and a swagger of pure bravado Mulready turned
+    and obeyed. Unnoticed of any, save perhaps Calendar himself,
+    the boat had drawn in at the stage a moment earlier. Mulready
+    dropped into it and threw himself sullenly upon the midships
+    thwart.</p>
+
+    <p>"Now, Dorothy, in you go, my dear," continued Calendar, with
+    a self-satisfied wag of his head.</p>
+
+    <p>Half dazed, to all seeming, she moved toward the boat. With
+    clumsy and assertive gallantry her father stepped before her,
+    offering his hand,&#8212his hand which she did not touch; for, in
+    the act of descending, she remembered and swung impulsively
+    back to Kirkwood.</p>
+
+    <p>"Good night, Mr. Kirkwood; good night,&#8212I shan't
+    forget."</p>
+
+    <p>He took her hand and bowed above it; but when his head was
+    lifted, he still retained her fingers in a lingering clasp.</p>
+
+    <p>"Good night," he said reluctantly.</p>
+
+    <p>The crass incongruity of her in that setting smote him with
+    renewed force. Young, beautiful, dainty, brilliant and graceful
+    in her pretty evening gown, she figured strangely against the
+    gloomy background of the river, in those dull and mean
+    surroundings of dank stone and rusted iron. She was like (he
+    thought extravagantly) a whiff of flower-fragrance lost in the
+    miasmatic vapors of a slough.</p>
+
+    <p>The innocent appeal and allure of her face, upturned to his
+    beneath the gas-light, wrought compassionately upon his
+    sensitive and generous heart. He was aware of a little surge of
+    blind rage against the conditions that had brought her to that
+    spot, and against those whom he held responsible for those
+    conditions.</p>
+
+    <p>In a sudden flush of daring he turned and nodded coolly to
+    Calendar. "With your permission," he said negligently; and drew
+    the girl aside to the angle of the stairway.</p>
+
+    <p>"Miss Calendar&#8212" he began; but was interrupted.</p>
+
+    <p>"Here&#8212I say!"</p>
+
+    <p>Calendar had started toward him angrily.</p>
+
+    <p>Kirkwood calmly waved him back. "I want a word in private
+    with your daughter, Mr. Calendar," he announced with quiet
+    dignity. "I don't think you'll deny me? I've saved you some
+    slight trouble to-night."</p>
+
+    <p>Disgruntled, the adventurer paused. "Oh&#8212<i>all</i> right,"
+    he grumbled. "I don't see what ..." He returned to the
+    boat.</p>
+
+    <p>"Forgive me, Miss Calendar," continued Kirkwood nervously.
+    "I know I've no right to interfere, but&#8212"</p>
+
+    <p>"Yes, Mr. Kirkwood?"</p>
+
+    <p>"&#8212but hasn't this gone far enough?" he floundered
+    unhappily. "I can't like the look of things. Are you sure&#8212sure
+    that it's all right&#8212with you, I mean?"</p>
+
+    <p>She did not answer at once; but her eyes were kind and
+    sympathetic. He plucked heart of their tolerance.</p>
+
+    <p>"It isn't too late, yet," he argued. "Let me take you to
+    your friends,&#8212you must have friends in the city. But
+    this&#8212this midnight flight down the Thames, this atmosphere of
+    stealth and suspicion, this&#8212"</p>
+
+    <p>"But my place is with my father, Mr. Kirkwood," she
+    interposed. "I daren't doubt him&#8212dare I?"</p>
+
+    <p>"I ... suppose not."</p>
+
+    <p>"So I must go with him.... I'm glad&#8212thank you for caring,
+    dear Mr. Kirkwood. And again, good night."</p>
+
+    <p>"Good luck attend you," he muttered, following her to the
+    boat.</p>
+
+    <p>Calendar helped her in and turned back to Kirkwood with a
+    look of arch triumph; Kirkwood wondered if he had overheard.
+    Whether or no, he could afford to be magnanimous. Seizing
+    Kirkwood's hand, he pumped it vigorously.</p>
+
+    <p>"My dear boy, you've been an angel in disguise! And I guess
+    you think me the devil in masquerade." He chuckled, in high
+    conceit with himself over the turn of affairs. "Good night
+    and&#8212and fare thee well!" He dropped into the boat, seating
+    himself to face the recalcitrant Mulready. "Cast off,
+    there!"</p>
+
+    <p>The boat dropped away, the oars lifting and falling. With a
+    weariful sense of loneliness and disappointment, Kirkwood hung
+    over the rail to watch them out of sight.</p>
+
+    <p>A dozen feet of water lay between the stage and the boat.
+    The girl's dress remained a spot of cheerful color; her face
+    was a blur. As the watermen swung the bows down-stream, she
+    looked back, lifting an arm spectral in its white sheath.
+    Kirkwood raised his hat.</p>
+
+    <p>The boat gathered impetus, momentarily diminishing in the
+    night's illusory perspective; presently it was little more than
+    a fugitive blot, gliding swiftly in midstream. And then, it was
+    gone entirely, engulfed by the obliterating darkness.<br>
+    <br>
+    <img src="illp115s.jpg"
+         width="462"
+         height="800"
+         border="0"
+         alt="The boat gathered impetus."></p>
+
+    <p>Somewhat wearily the young man released the railing and
+    ascended the stairs. "And that is the end!" he told himself,
+    struggling with an acute sense of personal injury. He had been
+    hardly used. For a few hours his life had been lightened by the
+    ineffable glamor of Romance; mystery and adventure had engaged
+    him, exorcising for the time the Shade of Care; he had served a
+    fair woman and been associated with men whose ways, however
+    questionable, were the ways of courage, hedged thickly about
+    with perils.</p>
+
+    <p>All that was at an end. Prosaic and workaday to-morrows
+    confronted him in endless and dreary perspective; and he felt
+    again upon his shoulder the bony hand of his familiar,
+    Care....</p>
+
+    <p>He sighed: "Ah, well!"</p>
+
+    <p>Disconsolate and aggrieved, he gained the street. He was
+    miles from St. Pancras, foot-weary, to all intents and purposes
+    lost.</p>
+
+    <p>In this extremity, Chance smiled upon him. The cabby who, at
+    his initial instance, had traveled this weary way from Quadrant
+    Mews, after the manner of his kind, ere turning back, had
+    sought surcease of fatigue at the nearest public; from afar
+    Kirkwood saw the four-wheeler at the curb, and made all haste
+    toward it.</p>
+
+    <p>Entering the gin-mill he found the cabby, soothed him with
+    bitter, and, instructing him for St. Pancras with all speed,
+    dropped, limp and listless with fatigue, into the
+    conveyance.</p>
+
+    <p>As it moved, he closed his eyes; the face of Dorothy
+    Calendar shone out from the blank wall of his consciousness,
+    like an illuminated picture cast upon a screen. She smiled upon
+    him, her head high, her eyes tender and trustful. And he
+    thought that her scarlet lips were sweet with promise and her
+    glance a-brim with such a light as he had never dreamed to
+    know.</p>
+
+    <p>And now that he knew it and desired it, it was too late; an
+    hour gone he might, by a nod of his head, have cast his
+    fortunes with hers for weal or woe. But now ... Alas and
+    alackaday, that Romance was no more!</p>
+
+    <center>
+        <h2><a name="VII">VII</a></h2>
+
+        <h3>DIVERSIONS OF A RUINED GENTLEMAN,&#8212RESUMED</h3>
+    </center>
+
+    <p>From the commanding elevation of the box, "Three 'n' six,"
+    enunciated the cabby, his tone that of a man prepared for
+    trouble, acquainted with trouble, inclined to give trouble a
+    welcome. His bloodshot eyes blinked truculently at his alighted
+    fare. "Three 'n' six," he iterated aggressively.</p>
+
+    <p>An adjacent but theretofore abstracted policeman pricked up
+    his ears and assumed an intelligent expression.</p>
+
+    <p>"Bermondsey Ol' Stairs to Sain' Pancras," argued the cabby
+    assertively; "seven mile by th' radius; three 'n' six!"</p>
+
+    <p>Kirkwood stood on the outer station platform, near the
+    entrance to third-class waiting-rooms. Continuing to fumble
+    through his pockets for an elusive sovereign purse, he looked
+    up mildly at the man.</p>
+
+    <p>"All right, cabby," he said, with pacific purpose; "you'll
+    get your fare in half a shake."</p>
+
+    <p>"Three 'n' six!" croaked the cabby, like a blowsy and
+    vindictive parrot.</p>
+
+    <p>The bobby strolled nearer.</p>
+
+    <p>"Yes?" said Kirkwood, mildly diverted. "Why not sing it,
+    cabby?"</p>
+
+    <p>"Lor' lumme!" The cabby exploded with indignation,
+    continuing to give a lifelike imitation of a rumpled parrot. "I
+    'ad trouble enough wif you at Bermondsey Ol' Stairs, hover that
+    quid you promised, didn't I? Sing it! My heye!"</p>
+
+    <p>"Quid, cabby?" And then, remembering that he had promised
+    the fellow a sovereign for fast driving from Quadrant Mews,
+    Kirkwood grinned broadly, eyes twinkling; for Mulready must
+    have fallen heir to that covenant. "But you got the sovereign?
+    You got it, didn't you, cabby?"</p>
+
+    <p>The driver affirmed the fact with unnecessary heat and
+    profanity and an amendment to the effect that he would have
+    spoiled his fare's sanguinary conk had the outcome been less
+    satisfactory.</p>
+
+    <p>The information proved so amusing that Kirkwood, chuckling,
+    forbore to resent the manner of its delivery, and, abandoning
+    until a more favorable time the chase of the coy sovereign
+    purse, extracted from one trouser pocket half a handful of
+    large English small change.</p>
+
+    <p>"Three shillings, six-pence," he counted the coins into the
+    cabby's grimy and bloated paw; and added quietly: "The exact
+    distance is rather less than, four miles, my man; your fare,
+    precisely two shillings. You may keep the extra eighteen pence,
+    for being such a conscientious blackguard,&#8212or talk it over
+    with the officer here. Please yourself."</p>
+
+    <p>He nodded to the bobby, who, favorably impressed by the silk
+    hat which Kirkwood, by diligent application of his sleeve
+    during the cross-town ride, had managed to restore to a state
+    somewhat approximating its erstwhile luster, smiled at the
+    cabby a cold, hard smile. Whereupon the latter, smirking in
+    unabashed triumph, spat on the pavement at Kirkwood's feet,
+    gathered up the reins, and wheeled out.</p>
+
+    <p>"A 'ard lot, sir," commented the policeman, jerking his
+    helmeted head towards the vanishing four-wheeler.</p>
+
+    <p>"Right you are," agreed Kirkwood amiably, still tickled by
+    the knowledge that Mulready had been obliged to pay three times
+    over for the ride that ended in his utter discomfiture.
+    Somehow, Kirkwood had conceived no liking whatever for the man;
+    Calendar he could, at a pinch, tolerate for his sense of humor,
+    but Mulready&#8212! "A surly dog," he thought him.</p>
+
+    <p>Acknowledging the policeman's salute and restoring two
+    shillings and a few fat copper pennies to his pocket, he
+    entered the vast and echoing train-shed. In the act, his
+    attention was attracted and immediately riveted by the
+    spectacle of a burly luggage navvy in a blue jumper in the act
+    of making off with a large, folding sign-board, of which the
+    surface was lettered expansively with the advice, in red
+    against a white background:</p>
+
+    <p>BOAT-TRAIN LEAVES ON TRACK 3</p>
+
+    <p>Incredulous yet aghast the young man gave instant chase to
+    the navvy, overhauling him with no great difficulty. For your
+    horny-handed British working-man is apparently born with two
+    golden aphorisms in his mouth: "Look before you leap," and
+    "Haste makes waste." He looks continually, seldom, if ever,
+    leaps, and never is prodigal of his leisure.</p>
+
+    <p>Excitedly Kirkwood touched the man's arm with a detaining
+    hand. "Boat-train?" he gasped, pointing at the board.</p>
+
+    <p>"Left ten minutes ago, thank you, sir."</p>
+
+    <p>"Wel-l, but...! Of course I can get another train at
+    Tilbury?"</p>
+
+    <p>"For yer boat? No, sir, thank you, sir. Won't be another
+    tryne till mornin', sir."</p>
+
+    <p>"Oh-h!..."</p>
+
+    <p>Aimlessly Kirkwood drifted away, his mind a blank.</p>
+
+    <p>Sometime later he found himself on the steps outside the
+    station, trying to stare out of countenance a glaring electric
+    mineral-water advertisement on the farther side of the Euston
+    Road.</p>
+
+    <p>He was stranded....</p>
+
+    <p>Beyond the spiked iron fence that enhedges the incurving
+    drive, the roar of traffic, human, wheel and hoof, rose high
+    for all the lateness of the hour: sidewalks groaning with the
+    restless contact of hundreds of ill-shod feet; the roadway
+    thundering&#8212hansoms, four-wheelers, motor-cars, dwarfed
+    coster-mongers' donkey-carts and ponderous, rumbling, C.-P.
+    motor-vans, struggling for place and progress. For St. Pancras
+    never sleeps.</p>
+
+    <p>The misty air swam luminous with the light of electric signs
+    as with the radiance of some lurid and sinister moon. The voice
+    of London sounded in Kirkwood's ears, like the ominous purring
+    of a somnolent brute beast, resting, gorged and satiated, ere
+    rising again to devour. To devour&#8212</p>
+
+    <p>Stranded!...</p>
+
+    <p>Distracted, he searched pocket after pocket, locating his
+    watch, cigar- and cigarette-cases, match-box, penknife&#8212all the
+    minuti&#230; of pocket-hardware affected by civilized man; with
+    old letters, a card-case, a square envelope containing his
+    steamer ticket; but no sovereign purse. His small-change pocket
+    held less than three shillings&#8212two and eight, to be exact&#8212and
+    a brass key, which he failed to recognize as one of his
+    belongings.</p>
+
+    <p>And that was all. At sometime during the night he had lost
+    (or been cunningly bereft of?) that little purse of
+    chamois-skin containing the three golden sovereigns which he
+    had been husbanding to pay his steamer expenses, and which, if
+    only he had them now, would stand between him and starvation
+    and a night in the streets.</p>
+
+    <p>And, searching his heart, he found it brimming with
+    gratitude to Mulready, for having relieved him of the necessity
+    of settling with the cabby.</p>
+
+    <p>"Vagabond?" said Kirkwood musingly. "Vagabond?" He repeated
+    the word softly a number of times, to get the exact flavor of
+    it, and found it little to his taste. And yet...</p>
+
+    <p>He thrust both hands deep in his trouser pockets and stared
+    purposelessly into space, twisting his eyebrows out of
+    alignment and crookedly protruding his lower lip.</p>
+
+    <p>If Brentwick were only in town&#8212But he wasn't, and wouldn't
+    be, within the week.</p>
+
+    <p>"No good waiting here," he concluded. Composing his face, he
+    re&#235;ntered the station. There were his trunks, of course.
+    He couldn't leave them standing on the station platform for
+    ever.</p>
+
+    <p>He found the luggage-room and interviewed a mechanically
+    courteous attendant, who, as the result of profound
+    deliberation, advised him to try his luck at the lost-luggage
+    room, across the station. He accepted the advice; it was a
+    foregone conclusion that his effects had not been conveyed to
+    the Tilbury dock; they could not have been loaded into the
+    luggage van without his personal supervision. Still, anything
+    was liable to happen when his unlucky star was in the
+    ascendant.</p>
+
+    <p>He found them in the lost-luggage room.</p>
+
+    <p>A clerk helped him identify the articles and ultimately
+    clucked with a perfunctory note: "Sixpence each, please."</p>
+
+    <p>"I&#8212ah&#8212pardon?"</p>
+
+    <p>"Sixpence each, the fixed charge, sir. For every twenty-four
+    hours or fraction thereof, sixpence per parcel."</p>
+
+    <p>"Oh, thank you so much," said Kirkwood sweetly. "I will call
+    to-morrow."</p>
+
+    <p>"Very good, sir. Thank you, sir."</p>
+
+    <p>"Five times sixpence is two-and-six," Kirkwood computed,
+    making his way hastily out of the station, lest a worse thing
+    befall him. "No, bless your heart!&#8212not while two and eight
+    represents the sum total of my fortune."</p>
+
+    <p>He wandered out into the night; he could not linger round
+    the station till dawn; and what profit to him if he did? Even
+    were he to ransom his trunks, one can scarcely change one's
+    clothing in a public waiting-room.</p>
+
+    <p>Somewhere in the distance a great clock chimed a single
+    stroke, freighted sore with melancholy. It knelled the passing
+    of the half-hour after midnight; a witching hour, when every
+    public shuts up tight, and gentlemen in top-hats and evening
+    dress are doomed to pace the pave till day (barring they have
+    homes or visible means of support)&#8212till day, when pawnshops
+    open and such personal effects as watches and hammered silver
+    cigar-cases may be hypothecated.</p>
+
+    <p>Sable garments fluttering, Care fell into step with Philip
+    Kirkwood; Care the inexorable slipped a skeleton arm through
+    his and would not be denied; Care the jade clung affectionately
+    to his side, refusing to be jilted.</p>
+
+    <p>"Ah, you thought you would forget me?" chuckled the
+    fleshless lips by his ear. "But no, my boy; I'm with you now,
+    for ever and a day. 'Misery loves company,' and it wouldn't be
+    pretty of me to desert you in this extremity, would it? Come,
+    let us beguile the hours till dawn with conversation. Here's a
+    sprightly subject: What are you going to do, Mr. Kirkwood?
+    <i>What are you going to do?</i>"</p>
+
+    <p>But Kirkwood merely shook a stubborn head and gazed straight
+    before him, walking fast through ways he did not recognize, and
+    pretending not to hear. None the less the sense of Care's
+    solicitous query struck like a pain into his consciousness.
+    What was he to do?</p>
+
+    <p>An hour passed.</p>
+
+    <p>Denied the opportunity to satisfy its beast hunger and
+    thirst, humanity goes off to its beds. In that hour London
+    quieted wonderfully; the streets achieved an effect of deeper
+    darkness, the skies, lowering, looked down with a blush less
+    livid for the shamelessness of man; cab ranks lengthened;
+    solitary footsteps added unto themselves loud, alarming,
+    offensive echoes; policemen, strolling with lamps blazing on
+    their breasts, became as lightships in a trackless sea; each
+    new-found street unfolded its perspective like a canyon of
+    mystery, and yet teeming with a hundred masked hazards; the air
+    acquired a smell more clear and clean, an effect more volatile;
+    and the night-mist thickened until it studded one's attire with
+    myriads of tiny buttons, bright as diamond dust.</p>
+
+    <p>Through this long hour Kirkwood walked without a pause.</p>
+
+    <p>Another clock, somewhere, clanged resonantly twice.</p>
+
+    <p>The world was very still....</p>
+
+    <p>And so, wandering foot-loose in a wilderness of ways,
+    turning aimlessly, now right, now left, he found himself in a
+    street he knew, yet seemed not to know: a silent, black street
+    one brief block in length, walled with dead and lightless
+    dwellings, haunted by his errant memory; a street whose
+    atmosphere was heavy with impalpable essence of desuetude; in
+    two words, Frognall Street.</p>
+
+    <p>Kirkwood identified it with a start and a guilty tremor. He
+    stopped stock-still, in an unreasoning state of semi-panic,
+    arrested by a silly impulse to turn and fly; as if the bobby,
+    whom he descried approaching him with measured stride, pausing
+    new and again to try a door or flash his bull's-eye down an
+    area, were to be expected to identify the man responsible for
+    that damnable racket raised ere midnight in vacant Number
+    9!</p>
+
+    <p>Oddly enough, the shock of recognition brought him to his
+    senses,&#8212temporarily. He was even able to indulge himself in a
+    quiet, sobering grin at his own folly. He passed the policeman
+    with a nod and a cool word in response to the man's
+    good-natured, "Good-night, sir." Number 9 was on the other side
+    of the street; and he favored its blank and dreary elevation
+    with a prolonged and frank stare&#8212that profited him nothing, by
+    the way. For a crazy notion popped incontinently into his head,
+    and would not be cast forth.</p>
+
+    <p>At the corner he swerved and crossed, still possessed of his
+    devil of inspiration. It would be unfair to him to say that he
+    did not struggle to resist it, for he did, because it was
+    fairly and egregiously asinine; yet struggling, his feet trod
+    the path to which it tempted him.</p>
+
+    <p>"Why," he expostulated feebly, "I might's well turn back and
+    beat that bobby over the head with my cane!..."</p>
+
+    <p>But at the moment his hand was in his change pocket, feeling
+    over that same brass door-key which earlier he had been unable
+    to account for, and he was informing himself how very easy it
+    would have been for the sovereign purse to have dropped from
+    his waistcoat pocket while he was sliding on his ear down the
+    dark staircase. To recover it meant, at the least, shelter for
+    the night, followed by a decent, comfortable and sustaining
+    morning meal. Fortified by both he could redeem his luggage,
+    change to clothing more suitable for daylight traveling, pawn
+    his valuables, and enter into negotiations with the steamship
+    company for permission to exchange his passage, with a sum to
+    boot, for transportation on another liner. A most feasible
+    project! A temptation all but irresistible!</p>
+
+    <p>But then&#8212the risk.... Supposing (for the sake of argument)
+    the customary night-watchman to have taken up a transient
+    residence in Number 9; supposing the police to have entered
+    with him and found the stunned man on the second floor: would
+    the watchman not be vigilant for another nocturnal marauder?
+    would not the police now, more than ever, be keeping a wary eye
+    on that house of suspicious happenings?</p>
+
+    <p>Decidedly, to re&#235;nter it would be to incur a deadly
+    risk. And yet, undoubtedly, beyond question! his sovereign
+    purse was waiting for him somewhere on the second flight of
+    stairs; while as his means of clandestine entry lay warm in his
+    fingers&#8212the key to the dark entry, which he had by force of
+    habit pocketed after locking the door.</p>
+
+    <p>He came to the Hog-in-the-Pound. Its windows were dim with
+    low-turned gas-lights. Down the covered alleyway, Quadrant Mews
+    slept in a dusk but fitfully relieved by a lamp or two round
+    which the friendly mist clung close and thick.</p>
+
+    <p>There would be none to see....</p>
+
+    <p>Skulking, throat swollen with fear, heart beating like a
+    snare-drum, Kirkwood took his chance. Buttoning his overcoat
+    collar up to his chin and cursing the fact that his hat must
+    stand out like a chimney-pot on a detached house, he sped on
+    tiptoe down the cobbled way and close beneath the house-walls
+    of Quadrant Mews. But, half-way in, he stopped, confounded by
+    an unforeseen difficulty. How was he to identify the narrow
+    entry of Number 9, whose counterparts doubtless communicated
+    with the mews from every residence on four sides of the city
+    block?</p>
+
+    <p>The low inner tenements were yet high enough to hide the
+    rear elevations of Frognall Street houses, and the mist was
+    heavy besides; otherwise he had made shift to locate Number 9
+    by ticking off the dwellings from the corner. If he went on,
+    hit or miss, the odds were anything-you-please to one that he
+    would blunder into the servant's quarters of some inhabited
+    house, and&#8212be promptly and righteously sat upon by the
+    service-staff, while the bobby was summoned.</p>
+
+    <p>Be that as it might&#8212he almost lost his head when he
+    realized this&#8212escape was already cut off by the way he had
+    come. Some one, or, rather, some two men were entering the
+    alley. He could hear the tramping and shuffle of clumsy feet,
+    and voices that muttered indistinctly. One seemed to trip over
+    something, and cursed. The other laughed; the voices grew more
+    loud. They were coming his way. He dared no longer
+    vacillate.</p>
+
+    <p>But&#8212which passage should he choose?</p>
+
+    <p>He moved on with more haste than discretion. One heel
+    slipped on a cobble time-worn to glassy smoothness; he lurched,
+    caught himself up in time to save a fall, lost his hat,
+    recovered it, and was discovered. A voice, maudlin with drink,
+    hailed and called upon him to stand and give an account of
+    himself, "like a goo' feller." Another tempted him with offers
+    of drink and sociable confabulation. He yielded not; adamantine
+    to the seductive lure, he picked up his heels and ran. Those
+    behind him, remarking with resentment the amazing fact that an
+    intimate of the mews should run away from liquor, cursed and
+    made after him, veering, staggering, howling like ravening
+    animals.</p>
+
+    <p>For all their burden of intoxication, they knew the ground
+    by instinct and from long association. They gained on him.
+    Across the way a window-sash went up with a bang, and a woman
+    screamed. Through the only other entrance to the mews a belated
+    cab was homing; its driver, getting wind of the unusual, pulled
+    up, blocking the way, and added his advice to the uproar.</p>
+
+    <p>Caught thus between two fires, and with his persecutors hard
+    upon him, Kirkwood dived into the nearest black hole of a
+    passageway and in sheer desperation flung himself, key in hand,
+    against the door at the end. Mark how his luck served him who
+    had forsworn her! He found a keyhole and inserted the key. It
+    turned. So did the knob. The door gave inward. He fell in with
+    it, slammed it, shot the bolts, and, panting, leaned against
+    its panels, in a pit of everlasting night but&#8212saved!&#8212for the
+    time being, at all events.</p>
+
+    <p>Outside somebody brushed against one wall, cannoned to the
+    other, brought up with a crash against the door, and, perforce
+    at a standstill, swore from his heart.</p>
+
+    <p>"Gorblimy!" he declared feelingly. "I'd 'a' took my oath I
+    sore'm run in 'ere!" And then, in answer to an inaudible
+    question: "No, 'e ain't. Gorn an' let the fool go to 'ell. 'Oo
+    wants 'im to share goo' liker? Not I!..."</p>
+
+    <p>Joining his companion he departed, leaving behind him a
+    trail of sulphur-tainted air. The mews quieted gradually.
+    Indoors Kirkwood faced unhappily the enigma of fortuity,
+    wondering: Was this by any possibility Number 9? The key had
+    fitted; the bolts had been drawn on the inside; and while the
+    key had been one of ordinary pattern and would no doubt have
+    proven effectual with any one of a hundred common locks, the
+    finger of probability seemed to indicate that his luck had
+    brought him back to Number 9. In spite of all this, he was
+    sensible of little confidence; though this were truly Number 9,
+    his freedom still lay on the knees of the gods, his very life,
+    belike, was poised, tottering, on a pinnacle of chance. In the
+    end, taking heart of desperation, he stooped and removed his
+    shoes; a precaution which later appealed to his sense of the
+    ridiculous, in view of the racket he had raised in entering,
+    but which at the moment seemed most natural and in accordance
+    with common sense. Then rising, he held his breath, staring and
+    listening. About him the pitch darkness was punctuated with
+    fading points of fire, and in his ears was a noise of strange
+    whisperings, very creepy&#8212until, gritting his teeth, he
+    controlled his nerves and gradually realized that he was alone,
+    the silence undisturbed. He went forward gingerly, feeling his
+    way like a blind man on strange ground. Ere long he stumbled
+    over a door-sill and found that the walls of the passage had
+    fallen away; he had entered a room, a black cavern of
+    indeterminate dimensions. Across this he struck at random,
+    walked himself flat against a wall, felt his way along to an
+    open door, and passed through to another apartment as dark as
+    the first.</p>
+
+    <p>Here, endeavoring to make a circuit of the walls, he
+    succeeded in throwing himself bodily across a bed, which
+    creaked horribly; and for a full minute lay as he had fallen,
+    scarce daring to think. But nothing followed, and he got up and
+    found a shut door which let him into yet a third room, wherein
+    he barked both shins on a chair; and escaped to a fourth whose
+    atmosphere was highly flavored with reluctant odors of bygone
+    cookery, stale water and damp plumbing&#8212probably the kitchen.
+    Thence progressing over complaining floors through what may
+    have been the servants' hall, a large room with a table in the
+    middle and a number of promiscuous chairs (witness his tortured
+    shins!), he finally blundered into the basement hallway.</p>
+
+    <p>By now a little calmer, he felt assured that this was really
+    Number 9, Frognall Street, and a little happier about it all,
+    though not even momentarily forgetful of the potential police
+    and night-watchman.</p>
+
+    <p>However, he mounted the steps to the ground floor without
+    adventure and found himself at last in the same dim and ghostly
+    hall which he had entered some six hours before; the mockery of
+    dusk admitted by the fan-light was just strong enough to enable
+    him to identify the general lay of the land and arrangement of
+    furniture.</p>
+
+    <p>More confidently with each uncontested step, he continued
+    his quest. Elation was stirring his spirit when he gained the
+    first floor and moved toward the foot of the second flight,
+    approaching the spot whereat he was to begin the search for the
+    missing purse. The knowledge that he lacked means of obtaining
+    illumination deterred him nothing; he had some hope of finding
+    matches in one of the adjacent rooms, but, failing that, was
+    prepared to ascend the stairs on all fours, feeling every inch
+    of their surface, if it took hours. Ever an optimistic soul,
+    instinctively inclined to father faith with a hope, he felt
+    supremely confident that his search would not prove fruitless,
+    that he would win early release from his temporary straits.</p>
+
+    <p>And thus it fell out that, at the instant he was thinking it
+    time to begin to crawl and hunt, his stockinged feet came into
+    contact with something heavy, yielding, warm&#8212something that
+    moved, moaned, and caused his hair to bristle and his flesh to
+    creep.</p>
+
+    <p>We will make allowances for him; all along he had gone on
+    the assumption that his antagonist of the dark stairway would
+    have recovered and made off with all expedition, in the course
+    of ten or twenty minutes, at most, from the time of his
+    accident. To find him still there was something entirely
+    outside of Kirkwood's reckoning: he would as soon have thought
+    to encounter say, Calendar,&#8212would have preferred the latter,
+    indeed. But this fellow whose disability was due to his own
+    interference, who was reasonably to be counted upon to raise
+    the very deuce and all of a row!</p>
+
+    <p>The initial shock, however shattering to his equanimity,
+    soon, lost effect. The man evidently remained unconscious, in
+    fact had barely moved; while the moan that Kirkwood heard, had
+    been distressingly faint.</p>
+
+    <p>"Poor devil!" murmured the young man. "He must be in a
+    pretty bad way, for sure!" He knelt, compassion gentling his
+    heart, and put one hand to the insentient face. A warm sweat
+    moistened his fingers; his palm was fanned by steady
+    respiration.</p>
+
+    <p>Immeasurably perplexed, the American rose, slipped on his
+    shoes and buttoned them, thinking hard the while. What ought he
+    to do? Obviously flight suggested itself,&#8212incontinent flight,
+    anticipating the man's recovery. On the other hand, indubitably
+    the latter had sustained such injury that consciousness, when
+    it came to him, would hardly be reinforced by much aggressive
+    power. Moreover, it was to be remembered that the one was in
+    that house with quite as much warrant as the other, unless
+    Kirkwood had drawn a rash inference from the incident of the
+    ragged sentry. The two of them were mutual, if antagonistic,
+    trespassers; neither would dare bring about the arrest of the
+    other. And then&#8212and this was not the least consideration to
+    influence Kirkwood&#8212perhaps the fellow would die if he got no
+    attention.</p>
+
+    <p>Kirkwood shut his teeth grimly. "I'm no assassin," he
+    informed himself, "to strike and run. If I've maimed this poor
+    devil and there are consequences, I'll stand 'em. The Lord
+    knows it doesn't matter a damn to anybody, not even to me, what
+    happens to me; while <i>he</i> may be valuable."</p>
+
+    <p>Light upon the subject, actual as well as figurative, seemed
+    to be the first essential; his mind composed, Kirkwood set
+    himself in search of it. The floor he was on, however, afforded
+    him no assistance; the mantels were guiltless of candles and he
+    discovered no matches, either in the wide and silent
+    drawing-room, with its ghastly furniture, like mummies in their
+    linen swathings, or in the small boudoir at the back. He was to
+    look either above or below, it seemed.</p>
+
+    <p>After some momentary hesitation, he went up-stairs, his
+    ascent marked by a single and grateful accident; half-way to
+    the top he trod on an object that clinked underfoot, and,
+    stooping, retrieved the lost purse. Thus was he justified of
+    his temerity; the day was saved&#8212that is, to-morrow was.</p>
+
+    <p>The rooms of the second-floor were bedchambers, broad, deep,
+    stately, inhabited by seven devils of loneliness. In one, on a
+    dresser, Kirkwood found a stump of candle in a china
+    candlestick; the two charred ends of matches at its base were
+    only an irritating discovery, however&#8212evidence that real
+    matches had been the mode in Number 9, at some remote date.
+    Disgusted and oppressed by cumulative inquisitiveness, he took
+    the candle-end back to the hall; he would have given much for
+    the time and means to make a more detailed investigation into
+    the secret of the house.</p>
+
+    <p>Perhaps it was mostly his hope of chancing on some clue to
+    the mystery of Dorothy Calender&#8212bewitching riddle that she
+    was!&#8212that fascinated his imagination so completely. Aside from
+    her altogether, the great house that stood untenanted, yet in
+    such complete order, so self-contained in its darkened quiet,
+    intrigued him equally with the train of inexplicable events
+    that had brought him within its walls. Now&#8212since his latest
+    entrance&#8212his vision had adjusted itself to cope with the
+    obscurity to some extent; and the street lights, meagerly
+    reflected through the windows from the bosom of a sullen pall
+    of cloud, low-swung above the city, had helped him to piece
+    together many a detail of decoration and furnishing, alike
+    somber and richly dignified. Kirkwood told himself that the
+    owner, whoever he might be, was a man of wealth and taste
+    inherited from another age; he had found little of meretricious
+    to-day in the dwelling, much that was solid and sedate and
+    homely, and&#8212Victorian.... He could have wished for more; a box
+    of early Victorian vestas had been highly acceptable.</p>
+
+    <p>Making his way down-stairs to the stricken man&#8212who was
+    quite as he had been&#8212Kirkwood bent over and thrust rifling
+    fingers into his pockets, regardless of the wretched sense of
+    guilt and sneakishness imparted by the action, stubbornly
+    heedless of the possibility of the man's awakening to find
+    himself being searched and robbed.</p>
+
+    <p>In the last place he sought, which should (he realized) have
+    been the first, to wit, the fob pocket of the white waistcoat,
+    he found a small gold matchbox, packed tight with wax vestas;
+    and, berating himself for crass stupidity&#8212he had saved a deal
+    of time and trouble by thinking of this before&#8212lighted the
+    candle.</p>
+
+    <p>As its golden flame shot up with scarce a tremor, preyed
+    upon by a perfectly excusable concern, he bent to examine the
+    man's countenance.... The arm which had partly hidden it had
+    fallen back into a natural position. It was a young face that
+    gleamed pallid in the candlelight&#8212a face unlined, a little
+    vapid and insignificant, with features regular and neat,
+    betraying few characteristics other than the purely negative
+    attributes of a character as yet unformed, possibly unformable;
+    much the sort of a face that he might have expected to see,
+    remembering those thin and pouting lips that before had
+    impressed him. Its owner was probably little more than twenty.
+    In his attire there was a suspicion of a fop's preciseness,
+    aside from its accidental disarray; the cut of his waistcoat
+    was the extreme of the then fashion, the white tie (twisted
+    beneath one ear) an exaggerated "butterfly," his collar nearly
+    an inch too tall; and he was shod with pumps suitable only for
+    the dancing-floor,&#8212a whim of the young-bloods of London of
+    that year.</p>
+
+    <p>"I can't make him out at all!" declared Kirkwood. "The son
+    of a gentleman too weak to believe that cubs need licking into
+    shape? Reared to man's estate, so sheltered from the wicked
+    world that he never grew a bark?... The sort that never had a
+    quarrel in his life, 'cept with his tailor?... Now what the
+    devil is <i>this</i> thing doing in this midnight mischief?...
+    Damn!"</p>
+
+    <p>It was most exasperating, the incongruity of the boy's
+    appearance assorted with his double r&#244;le of persecutor of
+    distressed damsels and nocturnal house-breaker!</p>
+
+    <p>Kirkwood bent closer above the motionless head, with puzzled
+    eyes striving to pin down some elusive resemblance that he
+    thought to trace in those vacuous features&#8212a resemblance to
+    some one he had seen, or known, at some past time, somewhere,
+    somehow.</p>
+
+    <p>"I give it up. Guess I'm mistaken. Anyhow, five young
+    Englishmen out of every ten of his class are just as blond and
+    foolish. Now let's see how bad he's hurt."</p>
+
+    <p>With hands strong and gentle, he turned the round, light
+    head. Then, "Ah!" he commented in the accent of comprehension.
+    For there was an angry looking bump at the base of the skull;
+    and, the skin having been broken, possibly in collision with
+    the sharp-edged newel-post, a little blood had stained and
+    matted the straw-colored hair.</p>
+
+    <p>Kirkwood let the head down and took thought. Recalling a
+    bath-room on the floor above, thither he went, unselfishly
+    forgetful of his predicament if discovered, and, turning on the
+    water, sopped his handkerchief until it dripped. Then,
+    returning, he took the boy's head on his knees, washed the
+    wound, purloined another handkerchief (of silk, with a giddy
+    border) from the other's pocket, and of this manufactured a
+    rude but serviceable bandage.</p>
+
+    <p>Toward the conclusion of his attentions, the sufferer began
+    to show signs of returning animation. He stirred restlessly,
+    whimpered a little, and sighed. And Kirkwood, in consternation,
+    got up.</p>
+
+    <p>"So!" he commented ruefully. "I guess I am an ass, all
+    right&#8212taking all that trouble for you, my friend. If I've got
+    a grain of sense left, this is my cue to leave you alone in
+    your glory."</p>
+
+    <p>He was lingering only to restore to the boy's pockets such
+    articles as he had removed in the search for matches,&#8212the
+    match-box, a few silver coins, a bulky sovereign purse, a
+    handsome, plain gold watch, and so forth. But ere he concluded
+    he was aware that the boy was conscious, that his eyes, open
+    and blinking in the candlelight, were upon him.</p>
+
+    <p>They were blue eyes, blue and shallow as a doll's, and edged
+    with long, fine lashes. Intelligence, of a certain degree, was
+    rapidly informing them. Kirkwood returned their questioning
+    glance, transfixed in indecision, his primal impulse to
+    cut-and-run for it was gone; he had nothing to fear from this
+    child who could not prevent his going whenever he chose to go;
+    while by remaining he might perchance worm from him something
+    about the girl.</p>
+
+    <p>"You're feeling better?" He was almost surprised to hear his
+    own voice put the query.</p>
+
+    <p>"I&#8212I think so. Ow, my head!... I say, you chap, whoever you
+    are, what's happened?... I want to get up." The boy added
+    peevishly: "Help a fellow, can't you?"</p>
+
+    <p>"You've had a nasty fall," Kirkwood observed evenly, passing
+    an arm beneath the boy's shoulder and helping him to a sitting
+    position. "Do you remember?"</p>
+
+    <p>The other snuffled childishly and scrubbed across the floor
+    to rest his back against the wall.</p>
+
+    <p>"Why-y ... I remember fallin'; and then ... I woke up and it
+    was all dark and my head achin' fit to split. I presume I went
+    to sleep again ... I say, what're you, doing here?"</p>
+
+    <p>Instead of replying, Kirkwood lifted a warning finger.</p>
+
+    <p>"Hush!" he said tensely, alarmed by noises in the street.
+    "You don't suppose&#8212?"</p>
+
+    <p>He had been conscious of a carriage rolling up from the
+    corner, as well as that it had drawn up (presumably) before a
+    near-by dwelling. Now the rattle of a key in the hall-door was
+    startlingly audible. Before he could move, the door itself
+    opened with a slam.</p>
+
+    <p>Kirkwood moved toward the stair-head, and drew back with a
+    cry of disgust. "Too late!" he told himself bitterly; his
+    escape was cut off. He could run up-stairs and hide, of course,
+    but the boy would inform against him and....</p>
+
+    <p>He buttoned up his coat, settled his hat on his head, and
+    moved near the candle, where it rested on the floor. One
+    glimpse would suffice to show him the force of the intruders,
+    and one move of his foot put out the light;
+    then&#8212<i>perhaps</i>&#8212he might be able to rush them.</p>
+
+    <p>Below, a brief pause had followed the noise of the door, as
+    if those entering were standing, irresolute, undecided which
+    way to turn; but abruptly enough the glimmer of candlelight
+    must have been noticed. Kirkwood heard a hushed exclamation, a
+    quick clatter of high heels on the parquetry, pattering feet on
+    the stairs, all but drowned by swish and ripple of silken
+    skirts; and a woman stood at the head of the flight&#8212to the
+    American an apparition profoundly amazing as she paused, the
+    light from the floor casting odd, theatric shadows beneath her
+    eyes and over her brows, edging her eyes themselves with
+    brilliant light beneath their dark lashes, showing her lips
+    straight and drawn, and shimmering upon the spangles of an
+    evening gown, visible beneath the dark cloak which had fallen
+    back from her white, beautiful shoulders.</p>
+
+    <center>
+        <h2><a name="VIII">VIII</a></h2>
+
+        <h3>MADAME L'INTRIGANTE</h3>
+    </center>
+
+    <p>"Mrs. Hallam!" cried Kirkwood, beneath his breath.</p>
+
+    <p>The woman ignored his existence. Moving swiftly forward, she
+    dropped on both knees by the side of the boy, and caught up one
+    of his hands, clasping it passionately in her own.</p>
+
+    <p>"Fred!" she cried, a curious break in her tone. "My little
+    Freddie! Oh, what has happened, dearie?"</p>
+
+    <p>"Oh, hello, Mamma," grunted that young man, submitting
+    listlessly to her caresses and betraying no overwhelming
+    surprise at her appearance there. Indeed he seemed more
+    concerned as to what Kirkwood, an older man, would be thinking,
+    to see him so endeared and fondled, than moved by any other
+    emotion. Kirkwood could see his shamefaced, sidelong glances;
+    and despised him properly for them.</p>
+
+    <p>But without attending to his response, Mrs. Hallam rattled
+    on in the uneven accents of excitement. "I waited until I
+    couldn't wait any longer, Freddie dear. I had to know&#8212had to
+    come. Eccles came home about nine and said that you had told
+    him to wait outside, that some one had followed you in here,
+    and that a bobby had told him to move on. I didn't know
+    what&#8212"</p>
+
+    <p>"What's o'clock now?" her son interrupted.</p>
+
+    <p>"It's about three, I think ... Have you hurt yourself, dear?
+    Oh, why <i>didn't</i> you come home? You must've known I was
+    dying of anxiety!"</p>
+
+    <p>"Oh, I say! Can't you see I'm hurt? 'Had a nasty fall and
+    must've been asleep ever since."</p>
+
+    <p>"My precious one! How&#8212?"</p>
+
+    <p>"Can't say, hardly ... I say, don't paw a chap so, Mamma ...
+    I brought Eccles along and told him to wait because&#8212well,
+    because I didn't feel so much like shuttin' myself up in this
+    beastly old tomb. So I left the door ajar, and told him not to
+    let anybody come in. Then I came up-stairs. There must've been
+    somebody already in the house; I know I <i>thought</i> there
+    was. It made me feel creepy, rather. At any rate, I heard
+    voices down below, and the door banged, and somebody began
+    hammerin' like fun on the knocker."</p>
+
+    <p>The boy paused, rolling an embarrassed eye up at the
+    stranger.</p>
+
+    <p>"Yes, yes, dear!" Mrs. Hallam urged him on.</p>
+
+    <p>"Why, I&#8212I made up my mind to cut my stick&#8212let whoever it
+    was pass me on the stairs, you know. But he followed me and
+    struck me, and then I jumped at him, and we both fell down the
+    whole flight. And that's all. Besides, my head's achin' like
+    everything."</p>
+
+    <p>"But this man&#8212?"</p>
+
+    <p>Mrs. Hallam looked up at Kirkwood, who bowed silently,
+    struggling to hide both his amusement and perplexity. More than
+    ever, now, the case presented a front inscrutable to his wits;
+    try as he might, he failed to fit an explanation to any
+    incident in which he had figured, while this last
+    development&#8212that his antagonist of the dark stairway had been
+    Mrs. Hallam's son!&#8212seemed the most astounding of all, baffling
+    elucidation completely.</p>
+
+    <p>He had abandoned all thought of flight and escape. It was
+    too late; in the brisk idiom of his mother-tongue, he was
+    "caught with the goods on." "May as well face the music," he
+    counseled himself, in resignation. From what he had seen and
+    surmised of Mrs. Hallam, he shrewdly suspected that the tune
+    would prove an exceedingly lively one; she seemed a woman of
+    imagination, originality, and an able-bodied temper.</p>
+
+    <p>"<i>You</i>, Mr. Kirkwood!"</p>
+
+    <p>Again he bowed, grinning awry.</p>
+
+    <p>She rose suddenly. "You will be good enough to explain your
+    presence here," she informed him with dangerous serenity.</p>
+
+    <p>"To be frank with you&#8212"</p>
+
+    <p>"I advise that course, Mr. Kirkwood."</p>
+
+    <p>"Thanks, awf'ly.... I came here, half an hour ago, looking
+    for a lost purse full&#8212well, not <i>quite</i> full of
+    sovereigns. It was my purse, by the way."</p>
+
+    <p>Suspicion glinted like foxfire in the cold green eyes
+    beneath her puckered brows. "I do not understand," she said
+    slowly and in level tones.</p>
+
+    <p>"I didn't expect you to," returned Kirkwood; "no more do
+    I.... But, anyway, it must be clear to you that I've done my
+    best for this gentleman here." He paused with an interrogative
+    lift of his eyebrows.</p>
+
+    <p>"'This gentleman' is my son, Frederick Hallam.... But you
+    will explain&#8212"</p>
+
+    <p>"Pardon me, Mrs. Hallam; I shall explain nothing, at
+    present. Permit me to point out that your position here&#8212like
+    mine&#8212is, to say the least, anomalous." The random stroke told,
+    as he could tell by the instant contraction of her eyes of a
+    cat. "It would be best to defer explanations till a more
+    convenient time&#8212don't you think? Then, if you like, we can
+    chant confidences in an antiphonal chorus. Just now
+    your&#8212er&#8212son is not enjoying himself apparently, and ... the
+    attention of the police had best not be called to this house
+    too often in one night."</p>
+
+    <p>His levity seemed to displease and perturb the woman; she
+    turned from him with an impatient movement of her
+    shoulders.</p>
+
+    <p>"Freddie, dear, do you feel able to walk?"</p>
+
+    <p>"Eh? Oh, I dare say&#8212I don't know. Wonder would your
+    friend&#8212ah&#8212Mr. Kirkwood, lend me an arm?"</p>
+
+    <p>"Charmed," Kirkwood declared suavely. "If you'll take the
+    candle, Mrs. Hallam&#8212"</p>
+
+    <p>He helped the boy to his feet and, while the latter hung
+    upon him and complained querulously, stood waiting for the
+    woman to lead the way with the light; something which, however,
+    she seemed in no haste to do. The pause at length puzzled
+    Kirkwood, and he turned, to find Mrs. Hallam holding the
+    candlestick and regarding him steadily, with much the same
+    expression of furtive mistrust as that with which she had
+    favored him on her own door-stoop.</p>
+
+    <p><img border="0"
+         src="illp148s.jpg"
+         alt="He helped the boy to his feet, and stood waiting."
+         width="506"
+         height="800"></p>
+
+    <p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+    <p>"One moment," she interposed in confusion; "I won't keep you
+    waiting...;" and, passing with an averted face, ran quickly
+    up-stairs to the second floor, taking the light with her. Its
+    glow faded from the walls above and Kirkwood surmised that she
+    had entered the front bedchamber. For some moments he could
+    hear her moving about; once, something scraped and bumped on
+    the floor, as if a heavy bit of furniture had been moved; again
+    there was a resounding thud that defied speculation; and this
+    was presently followed by a dull clang of metal.</p>
+
+    <p>His fugitive speculations afforded him little enlightenment;
+    and, meantime, young Hallam, leaning partly against the wall
+    and quite heavily on Kirkwood's arm, filled his ears with
+    puerile oaths and lamentations; so that, but for the excuse of
+    his really severe shaking-up, Kirkwood had been strongly
+    tempted to take the youngster by the shoulders and kick him
+    heartily, for the health of his soul.</p>
+
+    <p>But eventually&#8212it was not really long&#8212there came the quick
+    rush of Mrs. Hallam's feet along the upper hall, and the woman
+    reappeared, one hand holding her skirts clear of her pretty
+    feet as she descended in a rush that caused the candle's flame
+    to flicker perilously.</p>
+
+    <p>Half-way down, "Mr. Kirkwood!" she called tempestuously.</p>
+
+    <p>"Didn't you find it?" he countered blandly.</p>
+
+    <p>She stopped jerkily at the bottom, and, after a moment of
+    confusion. "Find what, sir?" she asked.</p>
+
+    <p>"What you sought, Mrs. Hallam."</p>
+
+    <p>Smiling, he bore unflinching the prolonged inspection of her
+    eyes, at once somber with doubt of him and flashing with
+    indignation because of his impudence.</p>
+
+    <p>"You knew I wouldn't find it, then!... Didn't you?"</p>
+
+    <p>"I may have suspected you wouldn't."</p>
+
+    <p>Now he was sure that she had been searching for the
+    gladstone bag. That, evidently, was the bone of contention.
+    Calendar had sent his daughter for it, Mrs. Hallam her son;
+    Dorothy had been successful ... But, on the other hand,
+    Calendar and Mrs. Hallam were unquestionably allies. Why,
+    then&#8212?</p>
+
+    <p>"Where is it, Mr. Kirkwood?"</p>
+
+    <p>"Madam, have you the right to know?"</p>
+
+    <p>Through another lengthening pause, while they faced each
+    other, he marked again the curious contraction of her under
+    lip.</p>
+
+    <p>"I have the right," she declared steadily. "Where is
+    it?"</p>
+
+    <p>"How can I be sure?"</p>
+
+    <p>"Then you don't know&#8212!"</p>
+
+    <p>"Indeed," he interrupted, "I would be glad to feel that I
+    ought to tell you what I know."</p>
+
+    <p>"What you know!"</p>
+
+    <p>The exclamation, low-spoken, more an echo of her thoughts
+    than intended for Kirkwood, was accompanied by a little shake
+    of the woman's head, mute evidence to the fact that she was
+    bewildered by his finesse. And this delighted the young man
+    beyond measure, making him feel himself master of a difficult
+    situation. Mysteries had been woven before his eyes so
+    persistently, of late, that it was a real pleasure to be able
+    to do a little mystifying on his own account. By adopting this
+    reticent and non-committal attitude, he was forcing the hand of
+    a woman old enough to be his mother and most evidently a
+    past-mistress in the art of misleading. All of which seemed
+    very fascinating to the amateur in adventure.</p>
+
+    <p>The woman would have led again, but young Hallam cut in,
+    none too courteously.</p>
+
+    <p>"I say, Mamma, it's no good standing here, palaverin' like a
+    lot of flats. Besides, I'm awf'ly knocked up. Let's get home
+    and have it out there."</p>
+
+    <p>Instantly his mother softened. "My poor boy!... Of course
+    we'll go."</p>
+
+    <p>Without further demur she swept past and down the stairway
+    before them&#8212slowly, for their progress was of necessity slow,
+    and the light most needed. Once they were in the main hall,
+    however, she extinguished the candle, placed it on a side
+    table, and passed out through the door.</p>
+
+    <p>It had been left open, as before; and Kirkwood was not at
+    all surprised to see a man waiting on the threshold,&#8212the
+    versatile Eccles, if he erred not. He had little chance to
+    identify him, as it happened, for at a word from Mrs. Hallam
+    the man bowed and, following her across the sidewalk, opened
+    the door of a four-wheeler which, with lamps alight and
+    liveried driver on the box, had been waiting at the
+    carriage-block.</p>
+
+    <p>As they passed out, Kirkwood shut the door; and at the same
+    moment the little party was brought up standing by a gruff and
+    authoritative summons.</p>
+
+    <p>"Just a minute, please, you there!"</p>
+
+    <p>"Aha!" said Kirkwood to himself. "I thought so." And he
+    halted, in unfeigned respect for the burly and impressive
+    figure, garbed in blue and brass, helmeted and truncheoned,
+    bull's-eye shining on breast like the Law's unblinking and
+    sleepless eye, barring the way to the carriage.</p>
+
+    <p>Mrs. Hallam showed less deference for the obstructionist.
+    The assumed hauteur and impatience of her pose was artfully
+    reflected in her voice as she rounded upon the bobby, with an
+    indignant demand: "What is the meaning of this, officer?"</p>
+
+    <p>"Precisely what I wants to know, ma'am," returned the man,
+    unyielding beneath his respectful attitude. "I'm obliged to ask
+    you to tell me what you were doing in that 'ouse.... And what's
+    the matter with this 'ere gentleman?" he added, with a dubious
+    stare at young Hallam's bandaged head and rumpled clothing.</p>
+
+    <p>"Perhaps you don't understand," admitted Mrs. Hallam
+    sweetly. "Of course&#8212I see&#8212it's perfectly natural. The house
+    has been shut up for some time and&#8212"</p>
+
+    <p>"Thank you, ma'am; that's just it. There was something wrong
+    going on early in the evening, and I was told to keep an eye on
+    the premises. It's duty, ma'am; I've got my report to
+    make."</p>
+
+    <p>"The house," said Mrs. Hallam, with the long-suffering
+    patience of one elucidating a perfectly plain proposition to a
+    being of a lower order of intelligence, "is the property of my
+    son, Arthur Frederick Burgoyne Hallam, of Cornwall. This
+    is&#8212"</p>
+
+    <p>"Beg pardon, ma'am, but I was told Colonel George Burgoyne,
+    of Cornwall&#8212"</p>
+
+    <p>"Colonel Burgoyne died some time ago. My son is his heir.
+    This is my son. He came to the house this evening to get some
+    property he desired, and&#8212it seems&#8212tripped on the stairs and
+    fell unconscious. I became worried about him and drove over,
+    accompanied by my friend, Mr. Kirkwood."</p>
+
+    <p>The policeman looked his troubled state of mind, and wagged
+    a doubtful head over the case. There was his duty, and there
+    was, opposed to it, the fact that all three were garbed in the
+    livery of the well-to-do.</p>
+
+    <p>At length, turning to the driver, he demanded, received, and
+    noted in his memorandum-book, the license number of the
+    equipage.</p>
+
+    <p>"It's a very unusual case, ma'am," he apologized; "I hopes
+    you won't 'old it against me. I'm only trying to do my
+    duty&#8212"</p>
+
+    <p>"And safeguard our property. You are perfectly justified,
+    officer."</p>
+
+    <p>"Thank you, ma'am. And would you mind giving me your cards,
+    please, all of you?"</p>
+
+    <p>"Certainly not." Without hesitation the woman took a little
+    hand-bag from the seat of the carriage and produced a card; her
+    son likewise found his case and handed the officer an oblong
+    slip.</p>
+
+    <p>"I've no cards with me," the American told the policeman;
+    "my name, however, is Philip Kirkwood, and I'm staying at the
+    Pless."</p>
+
+    <p>"Very good, sir; thank you." The man penciled the
+    information in his little book. "Thank you, ma'am, and Mr.
+    Hallam, sir. Sorry to have detained you. Good morning."</p>
+
+    <p>Kirkwood helped young Hallam into the carriage, gave Mrs.
+    Hallam his hand, and followed her. The man Eccles shut the
+    door, mounting the box beside the driver. Immediately they were
+    in motion.</p>
+
+    <p>The American got a final glimpse of the bobby, standing in
+    front of Number 9, Frognall Street, and watching them with an
+    air of profound uncertainty. He had Kirkwood's sympathy,
+    therein; but he had little time to feel with him, for Mrs.
+    Hallam turned upon him very suddenly.</p>
+
+    <p>"Mr. Kirkwood, will you be good enough to tell me who and
+    what you are?"</p>
+
+    <p>The young man smiled his homely, candid smile. "I'll be only
+    too glad, Mrs. Hallam, when I feel sure you'll do as much for
+    yourself."</p>
+
+    <p>She gave him no answer; it, was as if she were choosing
+    words. Kirkwood braced himself to meet the storm; but none
+    ensued. There was rather a lull, which strung itself out
+    indefinitely, to the monotonous music of hoofs and rubber
+    tires.</p>
+
+    <p>Young Hallam was resting his empty blond head against the
+    cushions, and had closed his eyes. He seemed to doze; but, as
+    the carriage rolled past the frequent street-lights, Kirkwood
+    could see that the eyes of Mrs. Hallam were steadily directed
+    to his face.</p>
+
+    <p>His outward composure was tempered by some amusement, by
+    more admiration; the woman's eyes were very handsome, even when
+    hardest and most cold. It was not easy to conceive of her as
+    being the mother of a son so immaturely mature. Why, she must
+    have been at least thirty-eight or -nine! One wondered; she did
+    not look it....</p>
+
+    <p>The carriage stopped before a house with lighted windows.
+    Eccles jumped down from the box and scurried to open the front
+    door. The radiance of a hall-lamp was streaming out into the
+    misty night when he returned to release his employers.</p>
+
+    <p>They were returned to Craven Street! "One more lap round the
+    track!" mused Kirkwood. "Wonder will the next take me back to
+    Bermondsey Old Stairs."</p>
+
+    <p>At Mrs. Hallam's direction, Eccles ushered him into the
+    smoking-room, on the ground floor in the rear of the dwelling,
+    there to wait while she helped her son up-stairs and to bed. He
+    sighed with pleasure at first glimpse of its luxurious but
+    informal comforts, and threw himself carelessly into a heavily
+    padded lounging-chair, dropping one knee over the other and
+    lighting the last of his expensive cigars, with a sensation of
+    undiluted gratitude; as one coming to rest in the shadow of a
+    great rock in a weary land.</p>
+
+    <p>Over his shoulder a home-like illumination was cast by an
+    electric reading-lamp shaded with red silk. At his feet brass
+    fire-dogs winked sleepily in the fluttering blaze of a
+    well-tended stove. The walls were hung with deep red, the doors
+    and divans upholstered in the same restful shade. In one corner
+    an old clock ticked soberly. The atmosphere would have proved a
+    potent invitation to reverie, if not to sleep&#8212he was very
+    sleepy&#8212but for the confusion in the house.</p>
+
+    <p>In its chambers, through the halls, on the stairs, there
+    were hurryings and scurryings of feet and skirts, confused with
+    murmuring voices. Presently, in an adjoining room, Philip
+    Kirkwood heard a maid-servant wrestling hopefully with that
+    most exasperating of modern time-saving devices, the telephone
+    as countenanced by our English cousins. Her patience and
+    determination won his approval, but availed nothing for her
+    purpose; in the outcome the telephone triumphed and the maid
+    gave up the unequal contest.</p>
+
+    <p>Later, a butler entered the room; a short and sturdy fellow,
+    extremely ill at ease. Drawing a small taboret to the side of
+    Kirkwood's chair, he placed thereon a tray, deferentially
+    imparting the information that "Missis 'Allam 'ad thought 'ow
+    as Mister Kirkwood might care for a bit of supper."</p>
+
+    <p>"Please thank Mrs. Hallam for me." Kirkwood's gratified eyes
+    ranged the laden tray. There were sandwiches, biscuit, cheese,
+    and a pot of black coffee, with sugar and cream. "It was very
+    kindly thought of," he added.</p>
+
+    <p>"Very good, sir, thank you, sir."</p>
+
+    <p>The man turned to go, shuffling soundlessly. Kirkwood was
+    suddenly impressed with his evasiveness; ever since he had
+    entered the room, his countenance had seemed turned from the
+    guest.</p>
+
+    <p>"Eccles!" he called sharply, at a venture.</p>
+
+    <p>The butler halted, thunderstruck. "Ye-es, s-sir?"</p>
+
+    <p><img border="0"
+         src="illp158s.jpg"
+         alt="Eccles"
+         width="418"
+         height="800"></p>
+
+    <p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+    <p>"Turn round, Eccles; I want a look at you."</p>
+
+    <p>Eccles faced him unwillingly, with a stolid front but shifty
+    eyes. Kirkwood glanced him up and down, grinning.</p>
+
+    <p>"Thank you, Eccles; I'll remember you now. You'll remember
+    me, too, won't you? You're a bad actor, aren't you,
+    Eccles?"</p>
+
+    <p>"Yes, sir; thank you, sir," mumbled the man unhappily; and
+    took instant advantage of the implied permission to go.</p>
+
+    <p>Intensely diverted by the recollection of Eccles' abortive
+    attempt to stop him at the door of Number 9, and wondering&#8212now
+    that he came to think of it&#8212why, precisely, young Hallam had
+    deemed it necessary to travel with a body-guard and adopt such
+    furtive methods to enter into as well as to obtain what was
+    asserted to be his own property, Kirkwood turned active
+    attention to the lunch.</p>
+
+    <p>Thoughtfully he poured himself a cup of coffee, swallowing
+    it hot and black as it came from the silver pot; then munched
+    the sandwiches.</p>
+
+    <p>It <i>was</i> kindly thought of, this early morning repast;
+    Mrs. Hallam seemed more and more a remarkable woman with each
+    phase of her character that she chose to disclose. At odds with
+    him, she yet took time to think of his creature needs!</p>
+
+    <p>What could be her motive,&#8212not in feeding him, but in
+    involving her name and fortune in an affair so strangely
+    flavored?... This opened up a desert waste of barren
+    speculation. "What's anybody's motive, who figures in this
+    thundering dime-novel?" demanded the American, almost
+    contemptuously. And&#8212for the hundredth time&#8212gave it up; the
+    day should declare it, if so hap he lived to see that day: a
+    distant one, he made no doubt. The only clear fact in his
+    befogged and bemused mentality was that he was at once "broke"
+    and in this business up to his ears. Well, he'd see it through;
+    he'd nothing better to do, and&#8212there was the girl:</p>
+
+    <p>Dorothy, whose eyes and lips he had but to close his own
+    eyes to see again as vividly as though she stood before him;
+    Dorothy, whose unspoiled sweetness stood out in vivid relief
+    against this moil and toil of conspiracy, like a star of
+    evening shining clear in a stormy sky.</p>
+
+    <p>"Poetic simile: I'm going fast," conceded Kirkwood; but he
+    did not smile. It was becoming quite too serious a matter for
+    laughter. For her sake, he was in the game "for keeps";
+    especially in view of the fact that everything&#8212his own heart's
+    inclination included&#8212seemed to conspire to keep him in it. Of
+    course he hoped for nothing in return; a pauper who turns
+    squire-of-dames with matrimonial intent is open to the
+    designation, "penniless adventurer." No; whatever service he
+    might be to the girl would be ample recompense to him for his
+    labors. And afterwards, he'd go his way in peace; she'd soon
+    forget him&#8212if she hadn't already. Women (he propounded
+    gravely) are queer: there's no telling anything about them!</p>
+
+    <p>One of the most unreadable specimens of the sex on which he
+    pronounced this highly original dictum, entered the room just
+    then; and he found himself at once out of his chair and his
+    dream, bowing.</p>
+
+    <p>"Mrs. Hallam."</p>
+
+    <p>The woman nodded and smiled graciously. "Eccles has attended
+    to your needs, I hope? Please don't stop smoking." She sank
+    into an arm-chair on the other side of the hearth and, probably
+    by accident, out of the radius of illumination from the lamp;
+    sitting sidewise, one knee above the other, her white arms
+    immaculate against the somber background of shadowed
+    crimson.</p>
+
+    <p>She was very handsome indeed, just then; though a keener
+    light might have proved less flattering.</p>
+
+    <p>"Now, Mr. Kirkwood?" she opened briskly, with a second
+    intimate and friendly nod; and paused, her pose receptive.</p>
+
+    <p>Kirkwood sat down again, smiling good-natured appreciation
+    of her unprejudiced attitude.</p>
+
+    <p>"Your son, Mrs. Hallam&#8212?"</p>
+
+    <p>"Oh, Freddie's doing well enough.... Freddie," she
+    explained, "has a delicate constitution and has seen little of
+    the world. Such melodrama as to-night's is apt to shock him
+    severely. We must make allowances, Mr. Kirkwood."</p>
+
+    <p>Kirkwood grinned again, a trace unsympathetically; he was
+    unable to simulate any enthusiasm on the subject of poor
+    Freddie, whom he had sized up with passable acumen as a spoiled
+    and coddled child completely under the thumb of an extremely
+    clever mother.</p>
+
+    <p>"Yes," he responded vaguely; "he'll be quite fit after a
+    night's sleep, I dare say."</p>
+
+    <p>The woman was watching him keenly, beneath her lowered
+    lashes. "I think," she said deliberately, "that it is time we
+    came to an understanding."</p>
+
+    <p>Kirkwood agreed&#8212"Yes?" affably.</p>
+
+    <p>"I purpose being perfectly straightforward. To begin with, I
+    don't place you, Mr. Kirkwood. You are an unknown quantity, a
+    new factor. Won't you please tell me what you are and.... Are
+    you a friend of Mr. Calendar's?"</p>
+
+    <p>"I think I may lay claim to that honor, though"&#8212to
+    Kirkwood's way of seeing things some little frankness on his
+    own part would be essential if they were to get on&#8212"I hardly
+    know him, Mrs. Hallam. I had the pleasure of meeting him only
+    this afternoon."</p>
+
+    <p>She knitted her brows over this statement.</p>
+
+    <p>"That, I assure you, is the truth," he laughed.</p>
+
+    <p>"But ... I really don't understand."</p>
+
+    <p>"Nor I, Mrs. Hallam. Calendar aside, I am Philip Kirkwood,
+    American, resident abroad for some years, a native of San
+    Francisco, of a certain age, unmarried, by profession a poor
+    painter."</p>
+
+    <p>"And&#8212?"</p>
+
+    <p>"Beyond that? I presume I must tell you, though I confess
+    I'm in doubt...." He hesitated, weighing candor in the balance
+    with discretion.</p>
+
+    <p>"But who are you for? Are you in George Calendar's pay?"</p>
+
+    <p>"Heaven forfend!"&#8212piously. "My sole interest at the present
+    moment is to unravel a most entrancing mystery&#8212"</p>
+
+    <p>"Entitled 'Dorothy Calendar'! Of course. You've known her
+    long?"</p>
+
+    <p>"Eight hours, I believe," he admitted gravely; "less than
+    that, in fact."</p>
+
+    <p>"Miss Calendar's interests will not suffer through anything
+    you may tell me."</p>
+
+    <p>"Whether they will or no, I see I must swing a looser
+    tongue, or you'll be showing me the door."</p>
+
+    <p>The woman shook her head, amused, "Not until," she told him
+    significantly.</p>
+
+    <p>"Very well, then." And he launched into an abridged
+    narrative of the night's events, as he understood them,
+    touching lightly on his own circumstances, the real poverty
+    which had brought him back to Craven Street by way of Frognall.
+    "And there you have it all, Mrs. Hallam."</p>
+
+    <p>She sat in silent musing. Now and again he caught the glint
+    of her eyes and knew that he was being appraised with such
+    trained acumen as only long knowledge of men can give to women.
+    He wondered if he were found wanting.... Her dark head bended,
+    elbow on knee, chin resting lightly in the cradle of her
+    slender, parted fingers, the woman thought profoundly, her
+    reverie ending with a brief, curt laugh, musical and mirthless
+    as the sound of breaking glass.</p>
+
+    <p>"It is so like Calendar!" she exclaimed: "so like him that
+    one sees how foolish it was to trust&#8212no, not to trust, but to
+    believe that he could ever be thrown off the scent, once he got
+    nose to ground. So, if we suffer, my son and I, I shall have
+    only myself to thank!"</p>
+
+    <p>Kirkwood waited in patient attention till she chose to
+    continue. When she did "Now for my side of the case!" cried
+    Mrs. Hallam; and rising, began to pace the room, her slender
+    and rounded figure swaying gracefully, the while she
+    talked.</p>
+
+    <p>"George Calendar is a scoundrel," she said: "a swindler,
+    gambler,&#8212what I believe you Americans call a confidence-man.
+    He is also my late husband's first cousin. Some years since he
+    found it convenient to leave England, likewise his wife and
+    daughter. Mrs. Calendar, a country-woman of yours, by the bye,
+    died shortly afterwards. Dorothy, by the merest accident,
+    obtained a situation as private secretary in the household of
+    the late Colonel Burgoyne, of The Cliffs, Cornwall. You follow
+    me?"</p>
+
+    <p>"Yes, perfectly."</p>
+
+    <p>"Colonel Burgoyne died, leaving his estates to my son, some
+    time ago. Shortly afterwards Dorothy Calendar disappeared. We
+    know now that her father took her away, but then the
+    disappearance seemed inexplicable, especially since with her
+    vanished a great deal of valuable information. She alone knew
+    of the location of certain of the old colonel's personal
+    effects."</p>
+
+    <p>"He was an eccentric. One of his peculiarities involved the
+    secreting of valuables in odd places; he had no faith in banks.
+    Among these valuables were the Burgoyne family jewels&#8212quite a
+    treasure, believe me, Mr. Kirkwood. We found no note of them
+    among the colonel's papers, and without Dorothy were powerless
+    to pursue a search for them. We advertised and employed
+    detectives, with no result. It seems that father and daughter
+    were at Monte Carlo at the time."</p>
+
+    <p>"Beautifully circumstantial, my dear lady," commented
+    Kirkwood&#8212to his inner consciousness. Outwardly he maintained
+    consistently a pose of impassive gullibility.</p>
+
+    <p>"This afternoon, for the first time, we received news of the
+    Calendars. Calendar himself called upon me, to beg a loan. I
+    explained our difficulty and he promised that Dorothy should
+    send us the information by the morning's post. When I insisted,
+    he agreed to bring it himself, after dinner, this evening.... I
+    make it quite clear?" she interrupted, a little anxious.</p>
+
+    <p>"Quite clear, I assure you," he assented encouragingly.</p>
+
+    <p>"Strangely enough, he had not been gone ten minutes when my
+    son came in from a conference with our solicitors, informing me
+    that at last a memorandum had turned up, indicating that the
+    heirlooms would be found in a safe secreted behind a dresser in
+    Colonel Burgoyne's bedroom."</p>
+
+    <p>"At Number 9, Frognall Street."</p>
+
+    <p>"Yes.... I proposed going there at once, but it was late and
+    we were dining at the Pless with an acquaintance, a Mr.
+    Mulready, whom I now recall as a former intimate of George
+    Calendar. To our surprise we saw Calendar and his daughter at a
+    table not far from ours. Mr. Mulready betrayed some agitation
+    at the sight of Calendar, and told me that Scotland Yard had a
+    man out with a warrant for Calendar's arrest, on old charges.
+    For old sake's sake, Mr. Mulready begged me to give Calendar a
+    word of warning. I did so&#8212foolishly, it seems: Calendar was at
+    that moment planning to rob us, Mulready aiding and abetting
+    him."</p>
+
+    <p>The woman paused before Kirkwood, looking down upon him.
+    "And so," she concluded, "we have been tricked and swindled. I
+    can scarcely believe it of Dorothy Calendar."</p>
+
+    <p>"I, for one, don't believe it." Kirkwood spoke quietly,
+    rising. "Whatever the culpability of Calendar and Mulready,
+    Dorothy was only their hoodwinked tool."</p>
+
+    <p>"But, Mr. Kirkwood, she must have known the jewels were not
+    hers."</p>
+
+    <p>"Yes," he assented passively, but wholly unconvinced.</p>
+
+    <p>"And what," she demanded with a gesture of exasperation,
+    "what would you advise?"</p>
+
+    <p>"Scotland Yard," he told her bluntly.</p>
+
+    <p>"But it's a family secret! It must not appear in the papers.
+    Don't you understand&#8212George Calendar is my husband's
+    cousin!"</p>
+
+    <p>"I can think of nothing else, unless you pursue them in
+    person."</p>
+
+    <p>"But&#8212whither?"</p>
+
+    <p>"That remains to be discovered; I can tell you nothing more
+    than I have.... May I thank you for your hospitality, express
+    my regrets that I should unwittingly have been made the agent
+    of this disaster, and wish you good night&#8212or, rather, good
+    morning, Mrs. Hallam?"</p>
+
+    <p>For a moment she held him under a calculating glance which
+    he withstood with graceless fortitude. Then, realizing that he
+    was determined not by any means to be won to her cause, she
+    gave him her hand, with a commonplace wish that he might find
+    his affairs in better order than seemed probable; and rang for
+    Eccles.</p>
+
+    <p>The butler showed him out.</p>
+
+    <p>He took away with him two strong impressions; the one
+    visual, of a strikingly handsome woman in a wonderful gown,
+    standing under the red glow of a reading-lamp, in an attitude
+    of intense mental concentration, her expression plainly
+    indicative of a train of thought not guiltless of
+    vindictiveness; the other, more mental but as real, he
+    presently voiced to the huge bronze lions brooding over
+    desolate Trafalgar Square.</p>
+
+    <p>"Well," appreciated Mr. Kirkwood with gusto, "<i>she's</i>
+    got Ananias and Sapphira talked to a standstill, all right!" He
+    ruminated over this for a moment. "Calendar can lie some, too;
+    but hardly with her picturesque touch.... Uncommon ingenious,
+    <i>I</i> call it. All the same, there were only about a dozen
+    bits of tiling that didn't fit into her mosaic a little bit....
+    I think they're all tarred with the same stick&#8212all but the
+    girl. And there's something afoot a long sight more devilish
+    and crafty than that shilling-shocker of madam's.... Dorothy
+    Calendar's got about as much active part in it as I have. I'm
+    only from California, but they've got to show me, before I'll
+    believe a word against her. Those infernal
+    scoundrels!...Somebody's got to be on the girl's side and I
+    seem to have drawn the lucky straw.... Good Heavens! is it
+    possible for a grown man to fall heels over head in love in two
+    short hours? I don't believe it. It's just interest&#8212nothing
+    more.... And I'll have to have a change of clothes before I can
+    do anything further."</p>
+
+    <p>He bowed gratefully to the lions, in view of their tolerant
+    interest in his soliloquy, and set off very suddenly round the
+    square and up St. Martin's Lane, striking across town as
+    directly as might be for St. Pancras Station. It would
+    undoubtedly be a long walk, but cabs were prohibited by his
+    straitened means, and the busses were all abed and wouldn't be
+    astir for hours.</p>
+
+    <p>He strode along rapidly, finding his way more through
+    intuition than by observation or familiarity with London's
+    geography&#8212indeed, was scarce aware of his surroundings; for
+    his brain was big with fine imagery, rapt in a glowing dream of
+    knighterrantry and chivalric deeds.</p>
+
+    <p>Thus is it ever and alway with those who in the purity of
+    young hearts rush in where angels fear to tread; if these,
+    Kirkwood and his ilk, be fools, thank God for them, for with
+    such foolishness is life savored and made sweet and sound! To
+    Kirkwood the warp of the world and the woof of it was Romance,
+    and it wrapped him round, a magic mantle to set him apart from
+    all things mean and sordid and render him impregnable and
+    invisible to the haunting Shade of Care.</p>
+
+    <p>Which, by the same token, presently lost track of him
+    entirely, and wandered off to find and bedevil some other poor
+    devil. And Kirkwood, his eyes like his spirit elevated, saw
+    that the clouds of night were breaking, the skies clearing,
+    that the East pulsed ever more strongly with the dim golden
+    promise of the day to come. And this he chose to take for an
+    omen&#8212prematurely, it may be.</p>
+
+    <center>
+        <h2><a name="IX">IX</a></h2>
+
+        <h3>AGAIN "BELOW BRIDGE"; AND BEYOND</h3>
+    </center>
+
+    <p>Kirkwood wasted little time, who had not much to waste, were
+    he to do that upon whose doing he had set his heart. It irked
+    him sore to have to lose the invaluable moments demanded by
+    certain imperative arrangements, but his haste was such that
+    all was consummated within an hour.</p>
+
+    <p>Within the period of a single hour, then, he had ransomed
+    his luggage at St. Pancras, caused it to be loaded upon a
+    four-wheeler and transferred to a neighboring hotel of evil
+    flavor but moderate tariff, where he engaged a room for a week,
+    ordered an immediate breakfast, and retired with his belongings
+    to his room; he had shaved and changed his clothes, selecting a
+    serviceable suit of heavy tweeds, stout shoes, a fore-and-aft
+    cap and a neglig&#233;e shirt of a deep shade calculated at
+    least to seem clean for a long time; finally, he had devoured
+    his bacon and eggs, gulped down his coffee and burned his
+    mouth, and, armed with a stout stick, set off hotfoot in the
+    still dim glimmering of early day.</p>
+
+    <p>By this time his cash capital had dwindled to the sum of two
+    pounds, ten shillings, eight-pence, and would have been much
+    less had he paid for his lodging in advance. But he considered
+    his trunks ample security for the bill, and dared not wait the
+    hour when shopkeepers begin to take down shutters and it
+    becomes possible to realize upon one's jewelry. Besides which,
+    he had never before been called upon to consider the
+    advisability of raising money by pledging personal property,
+    and was in considerable doubt as to the right course of
+    procedure in such emergency.</p>
+
+    <p>At King's Cross Station on the Underground an acute
+    disappointment awaited him; there, likewise, he learned
+    something about London. A sympathetic bobby informed him that
+    no trains would be running until after five-thirty, and that,
+    furthermore, no busses would begin to ply until half after
+    seven.</p>
+
+    <p>"It's tramp it or cab it, then," mused the young man
+    mournfully, his longing gaze seeking a nearby cab-rank&#8212just
+    then occupied by a solitary hansom, driver somnolent on the
+    box. "Officer," he again addressed the policeman, mindful of
+    the English axiom: "When in doubt, ask a bobby."&#8212"Officer,
+    when's high-tide this morning?"</p>
+
+    <p>The bobby produced a well-worn pocket-almanac, moistened a
+    massive thumb, and rippled the pages.</p>
+
+    <p>"London Bridge, 'igh tide twenty minutes arfter six, sir,"
+    he announced with a glow of satisfaction wholly pardonable in
+    one who combines the functions of perambulating almanac,
+    guide-book, encyclopedia, and conserver of the peace.</p>
+
+    <p>Kirkwood said something beneath his breath&#8212a word in itself
+    a comfortable mouthful and wholesome and emphatic. He glanced
+    again at the cab and groaned: "O Lord, I just dassent!" With
+    which, thanking the bureau of information, he set off at a
+    quick step down Grey's Inn Road.</p>
+
+    <p>The day had closed down in brilliance upon the city&#8212and the
+    voice of the milkman was to be heard in the land&#8212when he
+    trudged, still briskly if a trifle wearily, into Holborn, and
+    held on eastward across the Viaduct and down Newgate Street;
+    the while addling his weary wits with heart-sickening
+    computations of minutes, all going hopelessly to prove that he
+    would be late, far too late even presupposing the unlikely. The
+    unlikely, be it known, was that the <i>Alethea</i> would not
+    attempt to sail before the turn of the tide.</p>
+
+    <p>For this was his mission, to find the <i>Alethea</i> before
+    she sailed. Incredible as it may appear, at five o'clock, or
+    maybe earlier, on the morning of the twenty-second of April,
+    1906, A.D., Philip Kirkwood, normally a commonplace but likable
+    young American in full possession of his senses, might have
+    been seen (and by some was seen) plodding manfully through
+    Cheapside, London, England, engaged upon a quest as mad,
+    forlorn, and gallant as any whose chronicle ever inspired the
+    pen of a Malory or a Froissart. In brief he proposed to lend
+    his arm and courage to be the shield and buckler of one who
+    might or might not be a damsel in distress; according as to
+    whether Mrs. Hallam had spoken soothly of Dorothy Calendar, or
+    Kirkwood's own admirable faith in the girl were justified of
+    itself.</p>
+
+    <p>Proceeding upon the working hypothesis that Mrs. Hallam was
+    a polished liar in most respects, but had told the truth, so
+    far as concerned her statement to the effect that the gladstone
+    bag contained valuable real property (whose ownership remained
+    a moot question, though Kirkwood was definitely committed to
+    the belief that it was none of Mrs. Hallam's or her son's): he
+    reasoned that the two adventurers, with Dorothy and their
+    booty, would attempt to leave London by a water route, in the
+    ship, <i>Alethea</i>, whose name had fallen from their lips at
+    Bermondsey Old Stairs.</p>
+
+    <p>Kirkwood's initial task, then, would be to find the needle
+    in the haystack&#8212the metaphor is poor: more properly, to sort
+    out from the hundreds of vessels, of all descriptions, at
+    anchor in midstream, moored to the wharves of 'long-shore
+    warehouses, or in the gigantic docks that line the Thames, that
+    one called <i>Alethea</i>; of which he was so deeply mired in
+    ignorance that he could not say whether she were tramp-steamer,
+    coastwise passenger boat, one of the liners that ply between
+    Tilbury and all the world, Channel ferry-boat, private yacht
+    (steam or sail), schooner, four-master, square-rigger, barque
+    or brigantine.</p>
+
+    <p>A task to stagger the optimism of any but one equipped with
+    the sublime impudence of Youth! Even Kirkwood was disturbed by
+    some little awe when he contemplated the vast proportions of
+    his undertaking. None the less doggedly he plugged ahead, and
+    tried to keep his mind from vain surmises as to what would be
+    his portion when eventually he should find himself a passenger,
+    uninvited and unwelcome, upon the <i>Alethea</i>....</p>
+
+    <p>London had turned over once or twice, and was pulling the
+    bedclothes over its head and grumbling about getting up, but
+    the city was still sound asleep when at length he paused for a
+    minute's rest in front of the Mansion House, and realized with
+    a pang of despair that he was completely tuckered out. There
+    was a dull, vague throbbing in his head; weights pressed upon
+    his eyeballs until they ached; his mouth was hot and tasted of
+    yesterday's tobacco; his feet were numb and heavy; his joints
+    were stiff; he yawned frequently.</p>
+
+    <p>With a sigh he surrendered to the flesh's frailty. An early
+    cabby, cruising up from Cannon Street station on the off-chance
+    of finding some one astir in the city, aside from the doves and
+    sparrows, suffered the surprise of his life when Kirkwood
+    hailed him. His face was blank with amazement when he reined
+    in, and his eyes bulged when the prospective fare, on impulse,
+    explained his urgent needs. Happily he turned out a fair
+    representative of his class, an intelligent and unfuddled
+    cabby.</p>
+
+    <p>"Jump in, sir," he told Kirkwood cheerfully, as soon as he
+    had assimilated the latter's demands. "I knows precisely
+    wotcher wants. Leave it all to me."</p>
+
+    <p>The admonition was all but superfluous; Kirkwood was unable,
+    for the time being, to do aught else than resign his fate into
+    another's guidance. Once in the cab he slipped insensibly into
+    a nap, and slept soundly on, as reckless of the cab's swift
+    pace and continuous jouncing as of the sunlight glaring full in
+    his tired young face.</p>
+
+    <p>He may have slept twenty minutes; he awoke faint with
+    drowsiness, tingling from head to toe from fatigue, and in
+    distress of a queer qualm in the pit of his stomach, to find
+    the hansom at rest and the driver on the step, shaking his fare
+    with kindly determination. "Oh, a' right," he assented surlily,
+    and by sheer force of will made himself climb out to the
+    sidewalk; where, having rubbed his eyes, stretched enormously
+    and yawned discourteously in the face of the East End, he was
+    once more himself and a hundred times refreshed into the
+    bargain. Contentedly he counted three shillings into the
+    cabby's palm&#8212the fare named being one-and-six.</p>
+
+    <p>"The shilling over and above the tip's for finding me the
+    waterman and boat," he stipulated.</p>
+
+    <p>"Right-o. You'll mind the 'orse a minute, sir?"</p>
+
+    <p>Kirkwood nodded. The man touched his hat and disappeared
+    inexplicably. Kirkwood, needlessly attaching himself to the
+    reins near the animal's head, pried his sense of observation
+    open and became alive to the fact that he stood in a quarter of
+    London as strange to him as had been Bermondsey Wall.</p>
+
+    <p>To this day he can not put a name to it; he surmises that it
+    was Wapping.</p>
+
+    <p>Ramshackle tenements with sharp gable roofs lined either
+    side of the way. Frowsy women draped themselves over the
+    window-sills. Pallid and wasted parodies on childhood contested
+    the middle of the street with great, slow drays, drawn by
+    enormous horses. On the sidewalks twin streams of masculine
+    humanity flowed without rest, both bound in the same direction:
+    dock laborers going to their day's work. Men of every
+    nationality known to the world (he thought) passed him in his
+    short five-minute wait by the horse's head; Britons, brown East
+    Indians, blacks from Jamaica, swart Italians, Polaks, Russian
+    Jews, wire-drawn Yankees, Spaniards, Portuguese, Greeks, even a
+    Nubian or two: uniform in these things only, that their backs
+    were bent with toil, bowed beyond mending, and their faces
+    stamped with the blurred type-stamp of the dumb laboring brute.
+    A strangely hideous procession, they shambled on, for the most
+    part silent, all uncouth and unreal in the clear morning
+    glow.</p>
+
+    <p>The outlander was sensible of some relief when his cabby
+    popped hurriedly out of the entrance to a tenement, a
+    dull-visaged, broad-shouldered waterman ambling more slowly
+    after.</p>
+
+    <p>"Nevvy of mine, sir," announced the cabby; "and a fust-ryte
+    waterman; knows the river like a book, he do."</p>
+
+    <p>The nephew touched his forelock sheepishly.</p>
+
+    <p>"Thank you," said Kirkwood; and, turning to the man, "Your
+    boat?" he asked with the brevity of weariness.</p>
+
+    <p>"This wye, sir."</p>
+
+    <p>At his guide's heels Kirkwood threaded the crowd and,
+    entering the tenement, stumbled through a gloomy and unsavory
+    passage, to come out at last upon a scanty, unrailed veranda
+    overlooking the river. Ten feet below, perhaps, foul waters
+    purred and eddied round the piles supporting the rear of the
+    building. On one hand a ladder-like flight of rickety steps
+    descended to a floating stage to which a heavy rowboat lay
+    moored. In the latter a second waterman was seated bailing out
+    bilge with a rusty can.</p>
+
+    <p>"'Ere we are, sir," said the cabman's nephew, pausing at the
+    head of the steps. "Now, where's it to be?"</p>
+
+    <p>The American explained tersely that he had a message to
+    deliver a friend, who had shipped aboard a vessel known as the
+    <i>Alethea</i>, scheduled to sail at floodtide; further than
+    which deponent averred naught.</p>
+
+    <p>The waterman scratched his head. "A 'ard job, sir; not
+    knowin' wot kind of a boat she are mykes it 'arder." He waited
+    hopefully.</p>
+
+    <p>"Ten shillings," volunteered Kirkwood promptly; "ten
+    shillings if you get me aboard her before she weighs anchor;
+    fifteen if I keep you out more than an hour, and still you put
+    me aboard. After that we'll make other terms."</p>
+
+    <p>The man promptly turned his back to hail his mate. "'Arf a
+    quid, Bob, if we puts this gent aboard a wessel name o'
+    <i>Allytheer</i> afore she syles at turn o' tide."</p>
+
+    <p>In the boat the man with the bailing can turned up an
+    impassive countenance. "Coom down," he clenched the bargain;
+    and set about shipping the sweeps.</p>
+
+    <p>Kirkwood crept down the shaky ladder and deposited himself
+    in the stern of the boat; the younger boatman settled himself
+    on the midship thwart.</p>
+
+    <p>"Ready?"</p>
+
+    <p>"Ready," assented old Bob from the bows. He cast off the
+    painter, placed one sweep against the edge of the stage, and
+    with a vigorous thrust pushed off; then took his seat.</p>
+
+    <p>Bows swinging down-stream, the boat shot out from the
+    shore.</p>
+
+    <p>"How's the tide?" demanded Kirkwood, his impatience
+    growing.</p>
+
+    <p>"On th' turn, sir," he was told.</p>
+
+    <p>For a long moment broadside to the current, the boat
+    responded to the sturdy pulling of the port sweeps. Another
+    moment, and it was in full swing, the watermen bending lustily
+    to their task. Under their unceasing urge, the broad-beamed,
+    heavy craft, aided by the ebbing tide, surged more and more
+    rapidly through the water; the banks, grim and unsightly with
+    their towering, impassive warehouses broken by toppling wooden
+    tenements, slipped swiftly up-stream. Ship after ship was
+    passed, sailing vessels in the majority, swinging sluggishly at
+    anchor, drifting slowly with the river, or made fast to the
+    goods-stages of the shore; and in keen anxiety lest he should
+    overlook the right one, Kirkwood searched their bows and sterns
+    for names, which in more than one case proved hardly
+    legible.</p>
+
+    <p>The <i>Alethea</i> was not of their number.</p>
+
+    <p>In the course of some ten minutes, the watermen drove the
+    boat sharply inshore, bringing her up alongside another
+    floating stage, in the shadow of another tenement.&#8212both so
+    like those from which they had embarked that Kirkwood would
+    have been unable to distinguish one from another.</p>
+
+    <p>In the bows old Bob lifted up a stentorian voice, summoning
+    one William.</p>
+
+    <p>Recognizing that there was some design in this, the
+    passenger subdued his disapproval of the delay, and sat
+    quiet.</p>
+
+    <p>In answer to the third ear-racking hail, a man, clothed
+    simply in dirty shirt and disreputable trousers, showed himself
+    in the doorway above, rubbing the sleep out of a red, bloated
+    countenance with a mighty and grimy fist.</p>
+
+    <p>"'Ello," he said surlily. "Wot's th' row?"</p>
+
+    <p>"'Oo," interrogated old Bob, holding the boat steady by
+    grasping the stage, "was th' party wot engyged yer larst night,
+    Bill?"</p>
+
+    <p>"Party name o' <i>Allytheer</i>," growled the drowsy one.
+    "W'y?"</p>
+
+    <p>"Party 'ere's lookin' for 'im. Where'll I find this
+    <i>Allytheer?</i>"</p>
+
+    <p>"Best look sharp 'r yer won't find 'im," retorted the one
+    above. "'E <i>was</i> at anchor off Bow Creek larst night."</p>
+
+    <p>Kirkwood's heart leaped in hope. "What sort of a vessel was
+    she?" he asked, half rising in his eagerness.</p>
+
+    <p>"Brigantine, sir."</p>
+
+    <p>"<i>Thank&#8212you!</i>" replied Kirkwood explosively, resuming
+    his seat with uncalculated haste as old Bob, deaf to the
+    amenities of social intercourse in an emergency involving as
+    much as ten-bob, shoved off again.</p>
+
+    <p>And again the boat was flying down in midstream, the leaden
+    waters, shot with gold of the morning sun, parting sullenly
+    beneath its bows.</p>
+
+    <p>The air was still, heavy and tepid; the least exertion
+    brought out beaded moisture on face and hands. In the east hung
+    a turgid sky, dull with haze, through which the mounting sun
+    swam like a plaque of brass; overhead it was clear and
+    cloudless, but besmirched as if the polished mirror of the
+    heavens had been fouled by the breath of departing night.</p>
+
+    <p>On the right, ahead, Greenwich Naval College loomed up, the
+    great gray-stone buildings beyond the embankment impressively
+    dominating the scene, in happy relief against the wearisome
+    monotony of the river-banks; it came abreast; and ebbed into
+    the backwards of the scene.</p>
+
+    <p>The watermen straining at the sweeps, the boat sped into
+    Blackwall Reach, Bugsby Marshes a splash of lurid green to
+    port, dreary Cubitt Town and the West India Docks to starboard.
+    Here the river ran thick with shipping.</p>
+
+    <p>"Are we near?" Kirkwood would know; and by way of reply had
+    a grunt of the younger waterman.</p>
+
+    <p>Again, "Will we make it?" he asked.</p>
+
+    <p>The identical grunt answered him; he was free to interpret
+    it as he would; young William&#8212as old Bob named him&#8212had no
+    breath for idle words. Kirkwood subsided, controlling his
+    impatience to the best of his ability; the men, he told himself
+    again and again, were earning their pay, whether or not they
+    gained the goal of his desire.... Their labors were titanic; on
+    their temples and foreheads the knotted veins stood out like
+    discolored whip-cord; their faces were the shade of raw beef,
+    steaming with sweat; their eyes protruded with the strain that
+    set their jaws like vises; their chests heaved and shrank like
+    bellows; their backs curved, straightened, and bent again in
+    rhythmic unison as tiring to the eye as the swinging of a
+    pendulum.</p>
+
+    <p>Hugging the marshy shore, they rounded the Blackwall Point.
+    Young William looked to Kirkwood, caught his eye, and
+    nodded.</p>
+
+    <p>"Here?"</p>
+
+    <p>Kirkwood rose, balancing himself against the leap and sway
+    of the boat.</p>
+
+    <p>"Sumwhere's ... 'long ... o' 'ere."</p>
+
+    <p>From right to left his eager glance swept the river's
+    widening reach. Vessels were there in abundance, odd, unwieldy,
+    blunt-bowed craft with huge, rakish, tawny sails; long strings
+    of flat barges, pyramidal mounds of coal on each, lashed to
+    another and convoyed by panting tugs; steam cargo boats,
+    battered, worn, rusted sore through their age-old paint; a
+    steel leviathan of the deep seas, half cargo, half passenger
+    boat, warping reluctantly into the mouth of the Victoria Dock
+    tidal basin,&#8212but no brigantine, no sailing vessel of any
+    type.</p>
+
+    <p>The young man's lips checked a cry that was half a sob of
+    bitter disappointment. He had entered into the spirit of the
+    chase heart and soul, with an enthusiasm that was strange to
+    him, when he came to look back upon the time; and to fail, even
+    though failure had been discounted a hundredfold since the
+    inception of his mad adventure, seemed hard, very hard.</p>
+
+    <p>He sat down suddenly. "She's gone!" he cried in a hollow
+    gasp.</p>
+
+    <p>The boatmen eased upon their oars, and old Bob stood up in
+    the bows, scanning the river-scape with keen eyes shielded by a
+    level palm. Young William drooped forward suddenly, head upon
+    knees, and breathed convulsively. The boat drifted listlessly
+    with the current.</p>
+
+    <p>Old Bob panted: "'Dawn't&#8212see&#8212nawthin'&#8212o' 'er." He resumed
+    his seat.</p>
+
+    <p>"There's no hope, I suppose?"</p>
+
+    <p>The elder waterman shook his head. "'Carn't sye.... Might be
+    round&#8212nex' bend&#8212might be&#8212passin' Purfleet.... 'Point is&#8212me
+    an' young Wilyum 'ere&#8212carn't do no more&#8212'n we 'as. We be wore
+    out."</p>
+
+    <p>"Yes," Kirkwood assented, disconsolate, "You've certainly
+    earned your pay." Then hope revived; he was very young in
+    heart, you know. "Can't you suggest something? I've <i>got</i>
+    to catch that ship!"</p>
+
+    <p>Old Bob wagged his head in slow negation; young William
+    lifted his.</p>
+
+    <p>"There's a rylewye runs by Woolwich," he ventured. "Yer
+    might tyke tryne an' go to Sheerness, sir. Yer'd be positive o'
+    passin' 'er if she didn't syle afore 'igh-tide. 'Ire a boat at
+    Sheerness an' put out an' look for 'er."</p>
+
+    <p>"How far's Woolwich?" Kirkwood demanded instantly.</p>
+
+    <p>"Mile," said the elder man. "Tyke yer for five-bob
+    extry."</p>
+
+    <p>"Done!"</p>
+
+    <p>Young William dashed the sweat from his eyes, wiped his
+    palms on his hips, and fitted the sweeps again to the wooden
+    tholes. Old Bob was as ready. With an inarticulate cry they
+    gave way.</p>
+
+    <center>
+        <h2><a name="X">X</a></h2>
+
+        <h3>DESPERATE MEASURES</h3>
+    </center>
+
+    <p>Old Bob seemed something inclined toward optimism, when the
+    boat lay alongside a landing-stage at Woolwich, and Kirkwood
+    had clambered ashore.</p>
+
+    <p>"Yer'll mebbe myke it," the waterman told him with a
+    weatherwise survey of the skies. "Wind's freshenin' from the
+    east'rds, an' that'll 'old 'er back a bit, sir."</p>
+
+    <p>"Arsk th' wye to th' Dorkyard Styshun," young William
+    volunteered. "'Tis th' shortest walk, sir. I 'opes yer catches
+    'er.... Thanky, sir."</p>
+
+    <p>He caught dextrously the sovereign which Kirkwood, in
+    ungrudging liberality, spared them of his store of two. The
+    American nodded acknowledgments and adieux, with a faded smile
+    deprecating his chances of winning the race, sorely handicapped
+    as he was. He was very, very tired, and in his heart suspected
+    that he would fail. But, if he did, he would at least be able
+    to comfort himself that it was not for lack of trying. He set
+    his teeth on that covenant, in grim determination; either there
+    was a strain of the bulldog latent in the Kirkwood breed or
+    else his infatuation gripped him more strongly than he
+    guessed.</p>
+
+    <p>Yet he suspected something of its power; he knew that this
+    was altogether an insane proceeding, and that the lure that led
+    him on was Dorothy Calendar. A strange dull light glowed in his
+    weary eyes, on the thought of her. He'd go through fire and
+    water in her service. She was costing him dear, perhaps was to
+    cost him dearer still; and perhaps there'd be for his guerdon
+    no more than a "Thank you, Mr. Kirkwood!" at the end of the
+    passage. But that would be no less than his deserts; he was not
+    to forget that he was interfering unwarrantably; the girl was
+    in her father's hands, surely safe enough there&#8212to the casual
+    mind. If her partnership in her parent's fortunes were
+    distasteful, she endured it passively, without complaint.</p>
+
+    <p>He decided that it was his duty to remind himself, from time
+    to time, that his main interest must be in the game itself, in
+    the solution of the riddle; whatever should befall, he must
+    look for no reward for his gratuitous and self-appointed part.
+    Indeed he was all but successful in persuading himself that it
+    was the fascination of adventure alone that drew him on.</p>
+
+    <p>Whatever the lure, it was inexorable; instead of doing as a
+    sensible person would have done&#8212returning to London for a long
+    rest in his hotel room, ere striving to retrieve his shattered
+    fortunes&#8212Philip Kirkwood turned up the village street, intent
+    only to find the railway station and catch the first available
+    train for Sheerness, were that an early one or a late.</p>
+
+    <p>A hapchance native whom he presently encountered, furnished
+    minute directions for reaching the Dockyard Station of the
+    Southeastern and Chatham Rail-way, adding comfortable
+    information to the effect that the next east-bound train would
+    pass through in ten minutes; if Kirkwood would mend his pace he
+    could make it easily, with time to spare.</p>
+
+    <p>Kirkwood mended his pace accordingly, but, contrary to the
+    prediction, had no time to spare at all. Even as he stormed the
+    ticket-grating, the train was thundering in at the platform.
+    Therefore a nervous ticket agent passed him out a first-class
+    ticket instead of the third-class he had asked for; and there
+    was no time wherein to have the mistake rectified. Kirkwood
+    planked down the fare, swore, and sprinted for the
+    carriages.</p>
+
+    <p>The first compartment whose door he jerked violently open,
+    proved to be occupied, and was, moreover, not a smoking-car. He
+    received a fleeting impression of a woman's startled eyes,
+    staring into his own through a thin mesh of veiling, fell off
+    the running-board, slammed the door, and hurled himself
+    to-wards the next compartment. Here happier fortune attended
+    upon his desire; the box-like section was untenanted, and a
+    notice blown upon the window-glass announced that it was "2nd
+    Class Smoking." Kirkwood promptly tumbled in; and when he
+    turned to shut the door the coaches were moving.</p>
+
+    <p>A pipe helped him to bear up while the train was making its
+    two other stops in the Borough of Woolwich: a circumstance so
+    maddening to a man in a hurry, that it set Kirkwood's teeth on
+    edge with sheer impatience, and made him long fervently for the
+    land of his birth, where they do things differently&#8212where the
+    Board of Directors of a railway company doesn't erect three
+    substantial passenger dep&#244;ts in the course of a mile and a
+    half of overgrown village. It consoled him little that none
+    disputed with him his lonely possession of the compartment,
+    that he <i>had</i> caught the Sheerness train, or that he was
+    really losing no time; a sense of deep dejection had settled
+    down upon his consciousness, with a realization of how
+    completely a fool's errand was this of his. He felt foredoomed
+    to failure; he was never to see Dorothy Calendar again; and his
+    brain seemed numb with disappointment.</p>
+
+    <p>Rattling and swaying, the train left the town behind.</p>
+
+    <p>Presently he put aside his pipe and stared blankly out at a
+    reeling landscape, the pleasant, homely, smiling countryside of
+    Kent. A deeper melancholy tinted his mind: Dorothy Calendar was
+    for ever lost to him.</p>
+
+    <p>The trucks drummed it out persistently&#8212he thought,
+    vindictively: "<i>Lost!... Lost!... For ever lost!...</i>"</p>
+
+    <p>And he had made&#8212was then making&#8212a damned fool of himself.
+    The trucks had no need to din <i>that</i> into his thick skull
+    by their ceaseless iteration; he knew it, would not deny
+    it....</p>
+
+    <p>And it was all his own fault. He'd had his chance, Calendar
+    had offered him it. If only he had closed with the fat
+    adventurer!...</p>
+
+    <p>Before his eyes field and coppice, hedge and homestead,
+    stream and flowing highway, all blurred and ran streakily into
+    one another, like a highly impressionistic water-color. He
+    could make neither head nor tail of the flying views, and so
+    far as coherent thought was concerned, he could not put two
+    ideas together. Without understanding distinctly, he presently
+    did a more wise and wholesome thing: which was to topple limply
+    over on the cushions and fall fast asleep.</p>
+
+    <HR width="50%" align="center">
+
+    <p>After a long time he seemed to realize rather hazily that
+    the carriage-door had been opened to admit somebody. Its smart
+    closing <i>bang</i> shocked him awake. He sat up, blinking in
+    confusion, hardly conscious of more, to begin with, than that
+    the train had paused and was again in full flight. Then, his
+    senses clearing, he became aware that his solitary companion,
+    just entered, was a woman. She was seated over across from him,
+    her back to the engine, in an attitude which somehow suggested
+    a highly nonchalant frame of mind. She laughed, and immediately
+    her speaking voice was high and sweet in his hearing.</p>
+
+    <p>"Really, you know, Mr. Kirkwood, I simply couldn't contain
+    my impatience another instant."</p>
+
+    <p>Kirkwood gasped and tried to re-collect his wits.</p>
+
+    <p>"Beg pardon&#8212I've been asleep," he said stupidly.</p>
+
+    <p>"Yes. I'm sorry to have disturbed you, but, you know, you
+    must make allowances for a woman's nerves."</p>
+
+    <p>Beneath his breath the bewildered man said: "The deuce!" and
+    above it, in a stupefied tone: "Mrs. Hallam!"</p>
+
+    <p>She nodded in a not unfriendly fashion, smiling brightly.
+    "Myself, Mr. Kirkwood! Really, our predestined paths are badly
+    tangled, just now; aren't they? Were you surprised to find me
+    in here, with you? Come now, confess you were!"</p>
+
+    <p>He remarked the smooth, girlish freshness of her cheeks, the
+    sense and humor of her mouth, the veiled gleam of excitement in
+    her eyes of the changing sea; and saw, as well, that she was
+    dressed for traveling, sensibly but with an air, and had
+    brought a small hand-bag with her.</p>
+
+    <p>"Surprised and delighted," he replied, recovering, with
+    mendacity so intentional and obvious that the woman laughed
+    aloud.</p>
+
+    <p>"I knew you'd be!... You see, I had the carriage ahead, the
+    one you didn't take. I was so disappointed when you flung up to
+    the door and away again! You didn't see me hanging half out the
+    window, to watch where you went, did you? That's how I
+    discovered that your discourtesy was unintentional, that you
+    hadn't recognized me,&#8212by the fact that you took this
+    compartment, right behind my own."</p>
+
+    <p>She paused invitingly, but Kirkwood, grown wary, contented
+    himself with picking up his pipe and carefully knocking out the
+    dottle on the window-ledge.</p>
+
+    <p>"I was glad to see <i>you</i>," she affirmed; "but only
+    partly because you were you, Mr. Kirkwood. The other and major
+    part was because sight of you confirmed my own secret
+    intuition. You see, I'm quite old enough and wise enough to
+    question even my own intuitions."</p>
+
+    <p>"A woman wise enough for that is an adult prodigy," he
+    ventured cautiously.</p>
+
+    <p>"It's experience and age. I insist upon the age; I the
+    mother of a grown-up boy! So I deliberately ran after you,
+    changing when we stopped at Newington. You might've escaped me
+    if I had waited until We got to Queensborough."</p>
+
+    <p>Again she paused in open expectancy. Kirkwood, perplexed,
+    put the pipe in his pocket, and assumed a factitious look of
+    resignation, regarding her askance with that whimsical twist of
+    his eyebrows.</p>
+
+    <p>"For you are going to Queensborough, aren't you, Mr.
+    Kirkwood?"</p>
+
+    <p>"Queensborough?" he echoed blankly; and, in fact, he was at
+    a loss to follow her drift. "No, Mrs. Hallam; I'm not bound
+    there."</p>
+
+    <p>Her surprise was apparent; she made no effort to conceal it.
+    "But," she faltered, "if not there&#8212"</p>
+
+    <p>"'Give you my word, Mrs. Hallam, I have no intention
+    whatever of going to Queensborough," Kirkwood protested.</p>
+
+    <p>"I don't understand." The nervous drumming of a
+    patent-leather covered toe, visible beneath the hem of her
+    dress, alone betrayed a rising tide of impatience. "Then my
+    intuition <i>was</i> at fault!"</p>
+
+    <p>"In this instance, if it was at all concerned with my
+    insignificant affairs, yes&#8212most decidedly at fault."</p>
+
+    <p>She shook her head, regarding him with grave suspicion. "I
+    hardly know: whether to believe you. I think...."</p>
+
+    <p>Kirkwood's countenance displayed an added shade of red.
+    After a moment, "I mean no discourtesy," he began stiffly,
+    "but&#8212"</p>
+
+    <p>"But you don't care a farthing whether I believe you or
+    not?"</p>
+
+    <p>He caught her laughing eye, and smiled, the flush
+    subsiding.</p>
+
+    <p>"Very well, then! Now let us see: Where <i>are</i> you
+    bound?"</p>
+
+    <p>Kirkwood looked out of the window.</p>
+
+    <p>"I'm convinced it's a rendezvous...?"</p>
+
+    <p>Kirkwood smiled patiently at the landscape.</p>
+
+    <p>"Is Dorothy Calendar so very, very beautiful, Mr.
+    Kirkwood?"&#8212with a trace of malice.</p>
+
+    <p>Ostentatiously Kirkwood read the South Eastern and Chatham's
+    framed card of warning, posted just above Mrs. Hallam's head,
+    to all such incurable lunatics as are possessed of a desire to
+    travel on the running-boards of railway carriages.</p>
+
+    <p>"You are going to meet her, aren't you?"</p>
+
+    <p>He gracefully concealed a yawn.</p>
+
+    <p>The woman's plan of attack took another form. "Last night,
+    when you told me your story, I believed you."</p>
+
+    <p>He devoted himself to suppressing the temptingly obvious
+    retort, and succeeded; but though he left it unspoken, the
+    humor of it twitched the corners of his mouth; and Mrs. Hallam
+    was observant. So that her next attempt to draw him out was
+    edged with temper.</p>
+
+    <p>"I believed you an American but a gentleman; it appears
+    that, if you ever were the latter, you've fallen so low that
+    you willingly cast your lot with thieves."</p>
+
+    <p>Having exhausted his repertoire of rudenesses, Kirkwood took
+    to twiddling his thumbs.</p>
+
+    <p>"I want to ask you if you think it fair to me or my son, to
+    leave us in ignorance of the place where you are to meet the
+    thieves who stole our&#8212my son's jewels?"</p>
+
+    <p>"Mrs. Hallam," he said soberly, "if I am going to meet Mr.
+    Calendar or Mr. Mulready, I have no assurance of that
+    fact."</p>
+
+    <p>There was only the briefest of pauses, during which she
+    analyzed this; then, quickly, "But you hope to?" she
+    snapped.</p>
+
+    <p>He felt that the only adequate retort to this would be a
+    shrug of his shoulders; doubted his ability to carry one off;
+    and again took refuge in silence.</p>
+
+    <p>The woman abandoned a second plan of siege, with a readiness
+    that did credit to her knowledge of mankind. She thought out
+    the next very carefully, before opening with a masked
+    battery.</p>
+
+    <p>"Mr. Kirkwood, can't we be friends&#8212this aside?"</p>
+
+    <p>"Nothing could please me more, Mrs. Hallam!"</p>
+
+    <p>"I'm sorry if I've annoyed you&#8212"</p>
+
+    <p>"And I, too, have been rude."</p>
+
+    <p>"Last night, when you cut away so suddenly, you prevented my
+    making you a proposal, a sort of a business
+    proposition...."</p>
+
+    <p>"Yes&#8212?"</p>
+
+    <p>"To come over to our side&#8212"</p>
+
+    <p>"I thought so. That was why I went."</p>
+
+    <p>"Yes; I understood. But this morning, when you've had time
+    to think it over&#8212?"</p>
+
+    <p>"I have no choice in the matter, Mrs. Hallam." The green
+    eyes darkened ominously. "You mean&#8212I am to understand, then,
+    that you're against us, that you prefer to side with swindlers
+    and scoundrels, all because of a&#8212"</p>
+
+    <p>She discovered him eying her with a smile of such
+    inscrutable and sardonic intelligence, that the words died on
+    her lips, and she crimsoned, treasonably to herself. For he saw
+    it; and the belief he had conceived while attending to her
+    tissue of fabrication, earlier that morning, was strengthened
+    to the point of conviction that, if anything had been stolen by
+    anybody, Mrs. Hallam and her son owned it as little as
+    Calendar.</p>
+
+    <p>As for the woman, she felt she had steadily lost, rather
+    than gained, ground; and the flash of anger that had colored
+    her cheeks, lit twin beacons in her eyes, which she resolutely
+    fought down until they faded to mere gleams of resentment and
+    determination. But she forgot to control her lips; and they are
+    the truest indices to a woman's character and temperament; and
+    Kirkwood did not overlook the circumstance that their specious
+    sweetness had vanished, leaving them straight, set and hard,
+    quite the reverse of attractive.</p>
+
+    <p>"So," she said slowly, after a silent time, "you are not for
+    Queensborough! The corollary of that <i>admission</i>, Mr.
+    Kirkwood, is that you are for Sheerness."</p>
+
+    <p>"I believe," he replied wearily, "that there are no other
+    stations on this line, after Newington."</p>
+
+    <p>"It follows, then, that&#8212that I follow." And in answer to
+    his perturbed glance, she added: "Oh, I'll grant that intuition
+    is sometimes a poor guide. But if you meet George Calendar, so
+    shall I. Nothing can prevent that. You can't hinder me."</p>
+
+    <p>Considerably amused, he chuckled. "Let us talk of other
+    things, Mrs. Hallam," he suggested pleasantly. "How is your
+    son?"</p>
+
+    <p>At this juncture the brakes began to shriek and grind upon
+    the wheels. The train slowed; it stopped; and the voice of a
+    guard could be heard admonishing passengers for Queensborough
+    Pier to alight and take the branch line. In the noise the
+    woman's response was drowned, and Kirkwood was hardly enough
+    concerned for poor Freddie to repeat his question.</p>
+
+    <p>When, after a little, the train pulled out of the junction,
+    neither found reason to resume the conversation. During the
+    brief balance of the journey Mrs. Hallam presumably had food
+    for thought; she frowned, pursed her lips, and with one
+    daintily gloved forefinger followed a seam of her tailored
+    skirt; while Kirkwood sat watching and wondering how to rid
+    himself of her, if she proved really as troublesome as she
+    threatened to be.</p>
+
+    <p>Also, he wondered continually what it was all about. Why did
+    Mrs. Hallam suspect him of designing to meet Calendar at
+    Queensborough? Had she any tangible ground for believing that
+    Calendar could be found in Queensborough? Presumably she had,
+    since she was avowedly in pursuit of that gentleman, and,
+    Kirkwood inferred, had booked for Queensborough. Was he, then,
+    running away from Calendar and his daughter to chase a
+    will-o'-the-wisp of his credulous fancy, off Sheerness
+    shore?</p>
+
+    <p>Disturbing reflection. He scowled over it, then considered
+    the other side of the face. Presuming Mrs. Hallam to have had
+    reasonably dependable assurance that Calendar would stop in
+    Queensborough, would she so readily have abandoned her design
+    to catch him there, on the mere supposition that Kirkwood might
+    be looking for him in Sheerness? That did not seem likely to
+    one who esteemed Mrs. Hallam's acumen as highly as Kirkwood
+    did. He brightened up, forgot that his was a fool's errand, and
+    began again to project strategic plans into a problematic
+    future.</p>
+
+    <p>A sudden jolt interrupted this pastime, and the warning
+    screech of the brakes informed that he had no time to scheme,
+    but had best continue on the plan of action that had brought
+    him thus far&#8212that is, trust to his star and accept what should
+    befall without repining.</p>
+
+    <p>He rose, opened the door, and holding it so, turned.</p>
+
+    <p>"I regret, Mrs. Hallam," he announced, smiling his crooked
+    smile, "that a pressing engagement is about to prohibit my
+    'squiring you through the ticket-gates. You understand, I'm
+    sure."</p>
+
+    <p>His irrepressible humor proved infectious; and Mrs. Hallam's
+    spirit ran as high as his own. She was smiling cheerfully when
+    she, too, rose.</p>
+
+    <p>"I also am in some haste," she averred demurely, gathering
+    up her hand-bag and umbrella.</p>
+
+    <p>A raised platform shot in beside the carriage, and the speed
+    was so sensibly moderated that the train seemed to be creeping
+    rather than running. Kirkwood flung the door wide open and
+    lowered himself to the running-board. The end of the track was
+    in sight and&#8212a man who has been trained to board San Francisco
+    cable-cars fears to alight from no moving vehicle. He swung
+    off, got his balance, and ran swiftly down the platform.</p>
+
+    <p>A cry from a bystander caused him to glance over his
+    shoulder; Mrs. Hallam was then in the act of alighting. As he
+    looked the flurry of skirts subsided and she fell into stride,
+    pursuing.</p>
+
+    <p>Sleepy Sheerness must have been scandalized, that day, and
+    its gossips have acquired ground for many, an uncharitable
+    surmise.</p>
+
+    <p>Kirkwood, however, was so fortunate as to gain the wicket
+    before the employee there awoke to the situation. Otherwise,
+    such is the temper of British petty officialdom, he might have
+    detained the fugitive. As it was, Kirkwood surrendered his
+    ticket and ran out into the street with his luck still a
+    dominant factor in the race. For, looking back, he saw that
+    Mrs. Hallam had been held up at the gate, another victim of
+    British red-tape; her ticket read for Queensborough, she was
+    attempting to alight one station farther down the line, and
+    while undoubtedly she was anxious to pay the excess fare,
+    Heaven alone knew when she would succeed in allaying the
+    suspicions and resentment of the ticket-taker.</p>
+
+    <p>"That's good for ten minutes' start!" Kirkwood crowed. "And
+    it never occurred to me&#8212!"</p>
+
+    <p>Before the station he found two hacks in waiting, with
+    little to choose between them; neither was of a type that did
+    not seem to advertise its pre-Victorian fashioning, and to
+    neither was harnessed an animal that deserved anything but the
+    epithet of screw. Kirkwood took the nearest for no other reason
+    than because it was the nearest, and all but startled the
+    driver off his box by offering double-fare for a brisk pace and
+    a simple service at the end of the ride. Succinctly he set
+    forth his wants, jumped into the antiquated four-wheeler, and
+    threw himself down upon musty, dusty cushions to hug himself
+    over the joke and bless whatever English board of railway,
+    directors it was that first ordained that tickets should be
+    taken up at the end instead of the outset of a journey.</p>
+
+    <p>It was promptly made manifest that he had further cause for
+    gratulation. The cabby, recovering from his amazement, was
+    plying an indefatigable whip and thereby eliciting a degree of
+    speed from his superannuated nag, that his fare had by no means
+    hoped for, much less anticipated. The cab rocked and racketed
+    through Sheerness' streets at a pace which is believed to be
+    unprecedented and unrivaled; its passenger, dashed from side to
+    side, had all he could do to keep from battering the vehicle to
+    pieces with his head; while it was entirely out of the question
+    to attempt to determine whether or not he was being pursued. He
+    enjoyed it all hugely.</p>
+
+    <p>In a period of time surprisingly short, he saw, from
+    fleeting glimpses of the scenery to be obtained through the
+    reeling windows, that they were threading the outskirts of the
+    town; synchronously, whether by design or through actual
+    inability to maintain it, the speed was moderated. And in the
+    course of a few more minutes the cab stopped definitely.</p>
+
+    <p>Kirkwood clambered painfully out, shook himself together and
+    the bruises out of his bones, and looked fearfully back.</p>
+
+    <p>Aside from a slowly settling cloud of dust, the road ran
+    clear as far as he could see&#8212to the point, in fact, where the
+    town closed in about it.</p>
+
+    <p>He had won; at all events in so much as to win meant eluding
+    the persevering Mrs. Hallam. But to what end?</p>
+
+    <p>Abstractedly he tendered his lonely sovereign to the driver,
+    and without even looking at it, crammed the heavy weight of
+    change into his pocket; an oversight which not only won him the
+    awe-struck admiration of the cabby, but entailed consequences
+    (it may be) he little apprehended. It was with an absentminded
+    nod that he acquiesced in the man's announcement that he might
+    arrange about the boat for him. Accordingly the cabby
+    disappeared; and Kirkwood continued to stare about him,
+    eagerly, hopefully.</p>
+
+    <p>He stood on the brink of the Thames estuary, there a
+    possible five miles from shore to shore; from his feet, almost,
+    a broad shingle beach sloped gently to the water.</p>
+
+    <p>On one hand a dilapidated picket-fence enclosed the
+    door-yard of a fisherman's cottage, or, better, hovel,&#8212if it
+    need be accurately described&#8212at the door of which the cabby
+    was knocking.</p>
+
+    <p>The morning was now well-advanced. The sun rode high, a
+    sphere of tarnished flame in a void of silver-gray, its thin
+    cold radiance striking pallid sparks from the leaping crests of
+    wind-whipped waves. In the east a wall of vapor, dull and
+    lusterless, had taken body since the dawn, masking the skies
+    and shutting down upon the sea like some vast curtain; and out
+    of the heart of this a bitter and vicious wind played like a
+    sword.</p>
+
+    <p>To the north, Shoeburyness loomed vaguely, like a
+    low-drifted bank of cloud. Off to the right the Nore Lightship
+    danced, a tiny fleck of warm crimson in a wilderness of
+    slatey-blue waters, plumed with a myriad of vanishing
+    white-caps.</p>
+
+    <p>Up the shelving shore, small, puny wavelets dashed in
+    impotent fury, and the shingle sang unceasingly its dreary,
+    syncopated monotone. High and dry, a few dingy boats lay canted
+    wearily upon their broad, swelling sides,&#8212a couple of dories,
+    apparently in daily use; a small sloop yacht, dismantled and
+    plainly beyond repair; and an oyster-smack also out of
+    commission. About them the beach was strewn with a litter of
+    miscellany,&#8212nets, oars, cork buoys, bits of wreckage and
+    driftwood, a few fish too long forgotten and (one assumed)
+    responsible in part for the foreign wealth of the
+    atmosphere.</p>
+
+    <p>Some little distance offshore a fishing-boat, catrigged and
+    not more than twenty-feet over all, swung bobbing at her
+    mooring, keen nose searching into the wind; at sight of which
+    Kirkwood gave thanks, for his adventitious guide had served him
+    well, if that boat were to be hired by any manner of
+    persuasion.</p>
+
+    <p>But it was to the farther reaches of the estuary that he
+    gave more prolonged and most anxious heed, scanning narrowly
+    what shipping was there to be seen. Far beyond the lightship a
+    liner was riding the waves with serene contempt, making for the
+    river's mouth and Tilbury Dock. Nearer in, a cargo boat was
+    standing out upon the long trail, the white of riven waters
+    showing clearly against her unclean freeboard. Out to east a
+    little covey of fishing-smacks, red sails well reefed, were
+    scudding before the wind like strange affrighted water-fowl,
+    and bearing down past a heavy-laden river barge. The latter,
+    with tarpaulin battened snugly down over the cockpit and the
+    seas dashing over her wash-board until she seemed under water
+    half the time, was forging stodgily Londonwards, her bargee at
+    the tiller smoking a placid pipe.</p>
+
+    <p>But a single sailing vessel of any notable tonnage was in
+    sight; and when he saw her Kirkwood's heart became buoyant with
+    hope, and he began to tremble with nervous eagerness. For he
+    believed her to be the <i>Alethea</i>.</p>
+
+    <p>There's no mistaking a ship brigantine-rigged for any other
+    style of craft that sails the seas.</p>
+
+    <p>From her position when first he saw her, Kirkwood could have
+    fancied she was tacking out of the mouth of the Medway; but he
+    judged that, leaving the Thames' mouth, she had tacked to
+    starboard until well-nigh within hail of Sheerness. Now, having
+    presumably, gone about, she was standing out toward the Nore,
+    boring doggedly into the wind. He would have given a deal for
+    glasses wherewith to read the name upon her bows, but was
+    sensible of no hampering doubts; nor, had he harbored any,
+    would they have deterred him. He had set his heart upon the
+    winning of his venture, had come too far, risked far too much,
+    to suffer anything now to stay his hand and stand between him
+    and Dorothy Calendar. Whatever the further risks and hazards,
+    though he should take his life in his hands to win to her side,
+    he would struggle on. He recked nothing of personal danger; a
+    less selfish passion ran molten in his veins, moving him to
+    madness.</p>
+
+    <p>Fascinated, he fixed his gaze upon the reeling brigantine,
+    and for a space it was as if by longing he had projected his
+    spirit to her slanting deck, and were there, pleading his case
+    with the mistress of his heart....</p>
+
+    <p>Voices approaching brought him back to shore. He turned,
+    resuming his mask of sanity, the better to confer with the
+    owner of the cottage and boats&#8212a heavy, keen-eyed fellow,
+    ungracious and truculent of habit, and chary of his words; as
+    he promptly demonstrated.</p>
+
+    <p>"I'll hire your boat," Kirkwood told him, "to put me aboard
+    that brigantine, off to leeward. We ought to start at
+    once."</p>
+
+    <p>The fisherman shifted his quid of tobacco from cheek to
+    cheek, grunted inarticulately, and swung deliberately on his
+    heel, displaying a bull neck above a pair of heavy
+    shoulders.</p>
+
+    <p>"Dirty weather," he croaked, facing back from his survey of
+    the eastern skies before the American found out whether or not
+    he should resent his insolence.</p>
+
+    <p>"How much?" Kirkwood demanded curtly, annoyed.</p>
+
+    <p>The man hesitated, scowling blackly at the heeling vessel,
+    momentarily increasing her distance from shore. Then with a
+    crafty smile, "Two pound'," he declared.</p>
+
+    <p>The American nodded. "Very well," he agreed simply. "Get out
+    your boat."</p>
+
+    <p>The fisherman turned away to shamble noisily over the
+    shingle, huge booted heels crunching, toward one of the dories.
+    To this he set his shoulder, shoving it steadily down the beach
+    until only the stern was dry.</p>
+
+    <p>Kirkwood looked back, for the last time, up the road to
+    Sheerness. Nothing moved upon it. He was rid of Mrs. Hallam, if
+    face to face with a sterner problem. He had a few pence over
+    ten shillings in his pocket, and had promised to pay the man
+    four times as much. He would have agreed to ten times the sum
+    demanded; for the boat he must and would have. But he had
+    neglected to conclude his bargain, to come to an understanding
+    as to the method of payment; and he felt more than a little
+    dubious as to the reception the fisherman would give his
+    proposition, sound as he, Kirkwood, knew it to be.</p>
+
+    <p>In the background the cabby loitered, gnawed by insatiable
+    curiosity.</p>
+
+    <p>The fisherman turned, calling over his shoulder: "If ye'd
+    catch yon vessel, come!"</p>
+
+    <p>With one final twinge of doubt&#8212the task of placating this
+    surly dog was anything but inviting&#8212the American strode to the
+    boat and climbed in, taking the stern seat. The fisherman
+    shoved off, wading out thigh-deep in the spiteful waves, then
+    threw himself in over the gunwales and shipped the oars. Bows
+    swinging offshore, rocking and dancing, the dory began to forge
+    slowly toward the anchored boat. In their faces the wind beat
+    gustily, and small, slapping waves, breaking against the sides,
+    showered them with fine spray....</p>
+
+    <p>In time the dory lay alongside the cat-boat, the fisherman
+    with a gnarled hand grasping the latter's gunwale to hold the
+    two together. With some difficulty Kirkwood transhipped
+    himself, landing asprawl in the cockpit, amid a tangle of
+    cordage slippery with scales. The skipper followed, with clumsy
+    expertness bringing the dory's painter with him and hitching it
+    to a ring-bolt abaft the rudder-head. Then, pausing an instant
+    to stare into the East with somber eyes, he shipped the tiller
+    and bent to the halyards. As the sail rattled up, flapping
+    wildly, Kirkwood marked with relief&#8212for it meant so much time
+    saved&#8212that it was already close reefed.</p>
+
+    <p>But when at least the boom was thrashing overhead and the
+    halyards had been made fast to their cleats, the fisherman
+    again stood erect, peering distrustfully at the distant wall of
+    cloud.</p>
+
+    <p>Then, in two breaths: "Can't do it," he decided; "not at the
+    price."</p>
+
+    <p>"Why?" Kirkwood stared despairingly after the brigantine,
+    that was already drawn far ahead.</p>
+
+    <p>"Danger," growled the fellow, "&#8212wind."</p>
+
+    <p>At a loss completely, Kirkwood found no words. He dropped
+    his head, considering.</p>
+
+    <p>"Not at the price," the sullen voice iterated; and he looked
+    up to find the cunning gaze upon him.</p>
+
+    <p>"How much, then?"</p>
+
+    <p>"Five poun' I'll have&#8212no less, for riskin' my life this
+    day."</p>
+
+    <p>"Impossible. I haven't got it."</p>
+
+    <p>In silence the man unshipped the tiller and moved toward the
+    cleats.</p>
+
+    <p>"Hold on a minute."</p>
+
+    <p>Kirkwood unbuttoned his coat and, freeing the chain from his
+    waistcoat buttonholes, removed his watch.... As well abandon
+    them altogether; he had designed to leave them as security for
+    the two pounds, and had delayed stating the terms only for fear
+    lest they be refused. Now, too late as ever, he recognized his
+    error. But surely, he thought, it should be apparent even to
+    that low intelligence that the timepiece alone was worth more
+    than the boat itself.</p>
+
+    <p>"Will you take these?" he offered. "Take and keep them&#8212only
+    set me aboard that ship!"</p>
+
+    <p>Deliberately the fisherman weighed the watch and chain in
+    his broad, hard palm, eyes narrowing to mere slits in his
+    bronzed mask.</p>
+
+    <p>"How much?" he asked slowly.</p>
+
+    <p>"Eighty pounds, together; the chain alone cost me
+    twenty."</p>
+
+    <p>The shifty, covetous eyes ranged from the treasure in his
+    hand to the threatening east. A puff of wind caught the sail
+    and sent the boom athwartships, like a mighty flail. Both men
+    ducked instinctively, to escape a braining.</p>
+
+    <p>"How do I know?" objected the skipper.</p>
+
+    <p>"I'm telling you. If you've got eyes, you can see," retorted
+    Kirkwood savagely, seeing that he had erred in telling the
+    truth; the amount he had named was too great to be grasped at
+    once by this crude, cupidous brain.</p>
+
+    <p>"How do I know?" the man repeated. Nevertheless he dropped
+    watch and chain into his pocket, then with a meaning grimace
+    extended again his horny, greedy palm.</p>
+
+    <p>"What...?"</p>
+
+    <p>"Hand over th' two pound' and we'll go."</p>
+
+    <p>"I'll see you damned first!"</p>
+
+    <p>A flush of rage blinded the young man. The knowledge that
+    the <i>Alethea</i> was minute by minute slipping beyond his
+    reach seemed to madden him. White-lipped and ominously quiet he
+    rose from his seat on the combing, as, without answer, the
+    fisherman, crawling out on the overhand, began to haul in the
+    dory.</p>
+
+    <p>"Ashore ye go," he pronounced his ultimatum, motioning
+    Kirkwood to enter the boat.</p>
+
+    <p>The American turned, looking for the <i>Alethea</i>, or for
+    the vessel that he believed bore that name. She was nearing the
+    light-ship when he found her, and as he looked a squall blurred
+    the air between them, blotting the brigantine out with a smudge
+    of rain. The effect was as if she had vanished, as if she were
+    for ever snatched from his grasp; and with Dorothy aboard
+    her&#8212Heaven alone knew in what need of him!</p>
+
+    <p>Mute and blind with despair and wrath, he turned upon the
+    man and caught him by the collar, forcing him out over the lip
+    of the overhang. They were unevenly matched, Kirkwood far the
+    slighter, but strength came to him in the crisis, physical
+    strength and address such as he had not dreamed was at his
+    command. And the surprise of his onslaught proved an ally of
+    unguessed potency. Before he himself knew it he was standing on
+    the overhang and had shifted his hold to seize the fellow about
+    the waist; then, lifting him clear of the deck, and aided by a
+    lurch of the cat-boat, he cast him bodily into the dory. The
+    man, falling, struck his head against one of the thwarts, a
+    glancing blow that stunned him temporarily. Kirkwood himself
+    dropped as if shot, a trailing reef-point slapping his cheek
+    until it stung as the boom thrashed overhead. It was as close a
+    call as he had known; the knowledge sickened him a little.</p>
+
+    <p>Without rising he worked the painter loose and cast the dory
+    adrift; then crawled back into the cockpit. No pang of
+    compassion disturbed him as he abandoned the fisherman to the
+    mercy of the sea; though the fellow lay still, uncouthly
+    distorted, in the bottom of the dory, he was in no danger; the
+    wind and waves together would carry the boat ashore.... For
+    that matter, the man was even then recovering, struggling to
+    sit up.</p>
+
+    <p>Crouching to avoid the boom, Kirkwood went forward to the
+    bows, and, grasping the mooring cable, drew it in, slipping
+    back into the cockpit to get a stronger purchase with his feet.
+    It was a struggle; the boat pulled sluggishly against the wind,
+    the cable inching in jealously. And behind him he could hear a
+    voice bellowing inarticulate menaces, and knew that in another
+    moment the fisherman would be at his oars. Frantically he
+    tugged and tore at the slimy rope, hauling with a will and a
+    prayer. It gave more readily, towards the end, but he seemed to
+    have fought with it for ages when at last the anchor tripped
+    and he got it in.</p>
+
+    <p>Immediately he leaped back to the stern, fitted in the
+    tiller, and seizing the mainsheet, drew the boom in till the
+    wind should catch in the canvas. In the dory the skipper,
+    bending at his oars, was not two yards astern.</p>
+
+    <p>He was hard aboard when, the sail filling with a bang,
+    Kirkwood pulled the tiller up; and the cat-boat slid away, a
+    dozen feet separating them in a breath.</p>
+
+    <p>A yell of rage boomed down the wind, but he paid no heed.
+    Careless alike of the dangers he had passed and those that
+    yawned before him, he trimmed the sheet and stood away on the
+    port tack, heading directly for the Nore Lightship.</p>
+
+    <center>
+        <h2><a name="XI">XI</a></h2>
+
+        <h3>OFF THE NORE</h3>
+    </center>
+
+    <p>Kirkwood's anger cooled apace; at worst it had been a flare
+    of passion&#8212incandescent. It was seldom more. His brain
+    clearing, the temperature of his judgment quickly regained its
+    mean, and he saw his chances without distortion, weighed them
+    without exaggeration.</p>
+
+    <p>Leaning against the combing, feet braced upon the slippery
+    and treacherous deck, he clung to tiller and mainsheet and
+    peered ahead with anxious eyes, a pucker of daring graven deep
+    between his brows.</p>
+
+    <p>A mile to westward, three or more ahead, he could see the
+    brigantine standing close in under the Essex shore. At times
+    she was invisible; again he could catch merely the glint of her
+    canvas, white against the dark loom of the littoral, toned by a
+    mist of flying spindrift. He strained his eyes, watching for
+    the chance which would take place in the rake of her masts and
+    sails, when she should come about.</p>
+
+    <p>For the longer that manoeuver was deferred, the better was
+    his chance of attaining his object. It was a forlorn hope. But
+    in time the brigantine, to escape Maplin Sands, would be forced
+    to tack and stand out past the lightship, the wind off her port
+    bows. Then their courses would intersect. It remained to be
+    demonstrated whether the cat-boat was speedy enough to arrive
+    at this point of contact in advance of, or simultaneously with,
+    the larger vessel. Every minute that the putative
+    <i>Alethea</i> put off coming about brought the cat-boat nearer
+    that goal, but Kirkwood could do no more than hope and try to
+    trust in the fisherman's implied admission that it could be
+    done. It was all in the boat and the way she handled.</p>
+
+    <p>He watched her anxiously, quick to approve her merits as she
+    displayed them. He had sailed small craft before&#8212frail
+    center-board cat-boats, handy and swift, built to serve in
+    summer winds and protected waters: never such an one as this.
+    Yet he liked her.</p>
+
+    <p>Deep bosomed she was, with no center-board, dependent on her
+    draught and heavy keel to hold her on the wind; stanch and
+    seaworthy, sheathed with stout plank and ribbed with seasoned
+    timber, designed to keep afloat in the wickedest weather brewed
+    by the foul-tempered German Ocean. Withal her lines were fine
+    and clean; for all her beam she was calculated to nose narrowly
+    into the wind and make a pretty pace as well. A good boat: he
+    had the grace to give the credit to his luck.</p>
+
+    <p>Her disposition was more fully disclosed as they drew away
+    from the beach. Inshore with shoaling water, the waves had been
+    choppy and spiteful but lacking force of weight. Farther out,
+    as the bottom fell away, the rollers became more uniform and
+    powerful; heavy sweeping seas met the cat-boat, from their
+    hollows looming mountainous to the man in the tiny cockpit; who
+    was nevertheless aware that to a steamer they would be
+    negligible.</p>
+
+    <p>His boat breasted them gallantly, toiling sturdily up the
+    steep acclivities, poising breathlessly on foam-crested summits
+    for dizzy instants, then plunging headlong down the deep green
+    swales; and left a boiling wake behind her,&#8212urging ever
+    onward, hugging the wind in her wisp of blood-red sail, and
+    boring into it, pulling at the tiller with the mettle of a
+    race-horse slugging at the bit.</p>
+
+    <p>Offshore, too, the wind stormed with added strength, or,
+    possibly, had freshened. For minutes on end the leeward
+    gunwales would run green, and now and again the screaming,
+    pelting squalls that scoured the estuary would heel her over
+    until the water cascaded in over the lee combing, and the
+    rudder, lifted clear, would hang idle until, smitten by some
+    racing billow, the tiller would be all but torn from Kirkwood's
+    hands. Again and again this happened; and those were times of
+    trembling. But always the cat-boat righted, shaking the
+    clinging waters from her and swinging her stem into the wind
+    again; and there would follow an abbreviated breathing spell,
+    during which Kirkwood was at liberty to dash the salt spray
+    from his eyes and search the wind-harried waste for the
+    brigantine. Sometimes he found her, sometimes not.</p>
+
+    <p>Long after he had expected her to, she went about and they
+    began to close in upon each other. He could see that even with
+    shortened canvas she was staggering drunkenly under the fierce
+    impacts of the wind. For himself, it was nip-and-tuck, now, and
+    no man in his normal sense would have risked a sixpence on the
+    boat's chance to live until she crossed the brigantine's
+    bows.</p>
+
+    <p>Time out of reckoning he was forced to kneel in the swimming
+    cockpit, steering with one hand, using the bailing-dish with
+    the other, and keeping his eyes religiously turned to the
+    bellying patch of sail. It was heartbreaking toil; he began
+    reluctantly to concede that it could not last much longer. And
+    if he missed the brigantine he would be lost; mortal strength
+    was not enough to stand the unending strain upon every bone,
+    muscle and sinew, required to keep the boat upon her course;
+    though for a time it might cope with and solve the problems
+    presented by each new, malignant billow and each furious,
+    howling squall, the end inevitably must be failure. To struggle
+    on would be but to postpone the certain end ... save and except
+    the possibility of his gaining the brigantine within the period
+    of time strictly and briefly limited by his powers of
+    endurance.</p>
+
+    <p>Long since he had become numb with cold from incessant
+    drenchings of icy spray, that piled in over the windward
+    counter, keeping the bottom ankle-deep regardless of his
+    laborious but intermittent efforts with the bailing dish. And
+    the two, brigantine and cockle-shell, were drawing together
+    with appalling deliberation.</p>
+
+    <p>A dozen times he was on the point of surrender, as often
+    plucked up hope; as the minutes wore on and he kept above
+    water, he began to believe that if he could stick it out his
+    judgment and seamanship would be justified ... though human
+    ingenuity backed by generosity could by no means contrive
+    adequate excuse for his foolhardiness.</p>
+
+    <p>But that was aside, something irreparable. Wan and grim, he
+    fought it out.</p>
+
+    <p>But that his voice stuck in his parched throat, he could
+    have shouted in his elation, when eventually he gained the
+    point of intersection an eighth of a mile ahead of the
+    brigantine and got sight of her windward freeboard as, most
+    slowly, the cat-boat forged across her course.</p>
+
+    <p>For all that, the moment of his actual triumph was not yet;
+    he had still to carry off successfully a scheme that for sheer
+    audacity of conception and contempt for danger, transcended all
+    that had gone before.</p>
+
+    <p>Holding the cat-boat on for a time, he brought her about
+    handsomely a little way beyond the brigantine's course, and
+    hung in the eye of the wind, the leach flapping and tightening
+    with reports like rifle-shots, and the water sloshing about his
+    calves&#8212bailing-dish now altogether out of mind&#8212while he
+    watched the oncoming vessel, his eyes glistening with
+    anticipation.</p>
+
+    <p>She was footing it smartly, the brigantine&#8212lying down to it
+    and snoring into the wind. Beneath her stem waves broke in
+    snow-white showers, whiter than the canvas of her bulging
+    jib&#8212broke and, gnashing their teeth in impotent fury, swirled
+    and eddied down her sleek dark flanks. Bobbing, courtesying,
+    she plunged onward, shortening the interval with mighty,
+    leaping bounds. On her bows, with each instant, the golden
+    letters of her name grew larger and more legible
+    until&#8212<i>Alethea</i>!&#8212he could read it plain beyond
+    dispute.</p>
+
+    <p>Joy welled in his heart. He forgot all that he had undergone
+    in the prospect of what he proposed still to do in the name of
+    the only woman the world held for him. Unquestioning he had
+    come thus far in her service; unquestioning, by her side, he
+    was prepared to go still farther, though all humanity should
+    single her out with accusing fingers....</p>
+
+    <p>They were watching him, aboard the brigantine; he could see
+    a line of heads above her windward rail. Perhaps <i>she</i> was
+    of their number. He waved an audacious hand. Some one replied,
+    a great shout shattering itself unintelligibly against the
+    gale. He neither understood nor attempted to reply; his every
+    faculty was concentrated on the supreme moment now at hand.</p>
+
+    <p>Calculating the instant to a nicety, he paid off the sheet
+    and pulled up the tiller. The cat-boat pivoted on her heel;
+    with a crack her sail flapped full and rigid; then, with the
+    untempered might of the wind behind her, she shot like an arrow
+    under the brigantine's bows, so close that the bowsprit of the
+    latter first threatened to impale the sail, next, the bows
+    plunging, crashed down a bare two feet behind the cat-boat's
+    stern.</p>
+
+    <p>Working in a frenzy of haste, Kirkwood jammed the tiller
+    hard alee, bringing the cat about, and, trimming the mainsheet
+    as best he might, found himself racing under the brigantine's
+    leeward quarter,&#8212water pouring in generously over the
+    cat's.</p>
+
+    <p>Luffing, he edged nearer, handling his craft as though
+    intending to ram the larger vessel, foot by foot shortening the
+    little interval. When it was four feet, he would risk the jump;
+    he crawled out on the overhang, crouching on his toes, one hand
+    light upon the tiller, the other touching the deck, ready ...
+    ready....</p>
+
+    <p>Abruptly the <i>Alethea</i> shut off the wind; the sail
+    flattened and the cat dropped back. In a second the distance
+    had doubled. In anguish Kirkwood uttered an exceeding bitter
+    cry. Already he was falling far off her counter....</p>
+
+    <p>A shout reached him. He was dimly conscious of a dark object
+    hurtling through the air. Into the cockpit, splashing,
+    something dropped&#8212a coil of rope. He fell forward upon it,
+    into water eighteen inches deep; and for the first time
+    realized that, but for that line, he had gone to his drowning
+    in another minute. The cat was sinking.</p>
+
+    <p>As he scrambled to his feet, clutching the life-line, a
+    heavy wave washed over the water-logged craft and left it all
+    but submerged; and a smart tug on the rope added point to the
+    advice which, reaching his ears in a bellow like a bull's,
+    penetrated the panic of his wits.</p>
+
+    <p>"Jump! <i>Jump, you fool</i>!"</p>
+
+    <p>In an instant of coherence he saw that the brigantine was
+    luffing; none the less much of the line had already been paid
+    out, and there was no reckoning when the end would be reached.
+    Without time to make it fast, he hitched it twice round his
+    waist and chest, once round an arm, and, grasping it above his
+    head to ease its constriction when the tug should come, leaped
+    on the combing and overboard. A green roaring avalanche swept
+    down upon him and the luckless cat-boat, overwhelming both
+    simultaneously.</p>
+
+    <p>The agony that was his during the next few minutes can by no
+    means be exaggerated. With such crises the human mind is not
+    fitted adequately to cope; it retains no record of the supreme
+    moment beyond a vague and incoherent impression of poignant,
+    soul-racking suffering. Kirkwood underwent a prolonged interval
+    of semi-sentience, his mind dominated and oppressed by a
+    deathly fear of drowning and a deadening sense of suffocation,
+    with attendant tortures as of being broken on the wheel&#8212limb
+    rending from limb; of compression of his ribs that threatened
+    momentarily to crush in his chest; of a world a-welter with dim
+    swirling green half-lights alternating with flashes of blinding
+    white; of thunderings in his ears like salvoes from a thousand
+    cannon....</p>
+
+    <p>And his senses were blotted out in blackness....</p>
+
+    <p>Then he was breathing once more, the keen clean air stabbing
+    his lungs, the while he swam unsupported in an ethereal void of
+    brilliance. His mouth was full of something that burned, a
+    liquid hot, acrid, and stinging. He gulped, swallowed,
+    slobbered, choked, coughed, attempted to sit up, was aware that
+    he was the focal center of a ring of glaring, burning eyes,
+    like eyes of ravening beasts; and fainted.</p>
+
+    <p>His next conscious impression was of standing up, supported
+    by friendly arms on either side, while somebody was asking him
+    if he could walk a step or two.</p>
+
+    <p>He lifted his head and let it fall in token of assent,
+    mumbling a yes; and looked round him with eyes wherein the
+    light of intelligence burned more clear with every second. By
+    degrees he catalogued and comprehended his weirdly altered
+    circumstances and surroundings.</p>
+
+    <p>He was partly seated, partly held up, on the edge of the
+    cabin sky-light, an object of interest to some half-dozen men,
+    seafaring fellows all, by their habit, clustered round between
+    him and the windward rail. Of their number one stood directly
+    before him, dwarfing his companions as much by his air of
+    command as by his uncommon height: tall, thin-faced and sallow,
+    with hollow weather-worn cheeks, a mouth like a crooked gash
+    from ear to ear, and eyes like dying coals, with which he
+    looked the rescued up and down in one grim, semi-humorous,
+    semi-speculative glance. In hands both huge and red he fondled
+    tenderly a squat brandy flask whose contents had apparently
+    been employed as a first aid to the drowning.</p>
+
+    <p>As Kirkwood's gaze encountered his, the man smiled sourly,
+    jerking his head to one side with a singularly derisive
+    air.</p>
+
+    <p>"Hi, matey!" he blustered. "'Ow goes it now? Feelin'
+    'appier, eigh?"</p>
+
+    <p><img src="illp222s.jpg"
+         width="600"
+         height="725"
+         border="0"
+         alt="'Hi, matey!' he blustered. ''Ow goes it now?'">
+
+<p>"Some, thank you ... more like a drowned rat." Kirkwood eyed him
+sheepishly. "I suppose you're the man who threw me that line? I'll have to
+wait till my head clears up before I can thank you properly."</p>
+
+    <p>"Don't mention it." He of the lantern jaws stowed the bottle
+    away with jealous care in one of his immense coat pockets, and
+    seized Kirkwood's hand in a grasp that made the young man
+    wince. "You're syfe enough now. My nyme's Stryker, Capt'n
+    Wilyum Stryker.... Wot's the row? Lookin' for a friend?" he
+    demanded suddenly, as Kirkwood's attention wandered.</p>
+
+    <p>For the memory of the errand that had brought him into the
+    hands of Captain William Stryker had come to the young man very
+    suddenly; and his eager eyes were swiftly roving not along the
+    decks but the wide world besides, for sight or sign of his
+    heart's desire.</p>
+
+    <p>After luffing to pick him up, the brigantine had been again
+    pulled off on the port tack. The fury of the gale seemed rather
+    to have waxed than waned, and the <i>Alethea</i> was bending
+    low under the relentless fury of its blasts, driving hard, with
+    leeward channels awash. Under her port counter, a mile away,
+    the crimson light-ship wallowed in a riot of breaking combers.
+    Sheerness lay abeam, five miles or more. Ahead the northeast
+    headland of the Isle of Sheppey was bulking large and near. The
+    cat-boat had vanished....</p>
+
+    <p>More important still, no one aboard the brigantine resembled
+    in the remotest degree either of the Calendars, father or
+    daughter, or even Mulready, the black-avised.</p>
+
+    <p>"I sye, 're you lookin' for some one you know?"</p>
+
+    <p>"Yes&#8212your passengers. I presume they're below&#8212?"</p>
+
+    <p>"Passengers!"</p>
+
+    <p>A hush fell upon the group, during which Kirkwood sought
+    Stryker's eye in pitiful pleading; and Stryker looked round him
+    blankly.</p>
+
+    <p>"Where's Miss Calendar?" the young man demanded sharply. "I
+    must see her at once!"</p>
+
+    <p>The keen and deep-set eyes of the skipper clouded as they
+    returned to Kirkwood's perturbed countenance. "Wot're you
+    talking about?" he demanded brusquely.</p>
+
+    <p>"I must see Miss Calendar, or Calendar himself, or
+    Mulready." Kirkwood paused, and, getting no reply, grew restive
+    under Stryker's inscrutable regard.</p>
+
+    <p>"That's why I came aboard," he amended, blind to the
+    absurdity of the statement; "to see&#8212er&#8212Calendar."</p>
+
+    <p>"Well ... I'm damned!"</p>
+
+    <p>Stryker managed to infuse into his tone a deal of suspicious
+    contempt.</p>
+
+    <p>"Why?" insisted Kirkwood, nettled but still
+    uncomprehending.</p>
+
+    <p>"D'you mean to tell me you came off from&#8212wherever in 'ell
+    you did come from&#8212intendin' to board this wessel and find a
+    party nymed Calendar?"</p>
+
+    <p>"Certainly I did. Why&#8212?"</p>
+
+    <p>"Well!" cried Mr. Stryker, rubbing his hands together with
+    an air oppressively obsequious, "I'm sorry to <i>hin</i>-form
+    you you've come to the wrong shop, sir; we don't stock no
+    Calendars. We're in the 'ardware line, we are. You might try
+    next door, or I dessay you'll find what you want at the
+    stytioner's, round the corner."</p>
+
+    <p>A giggle from his audience stimulated him. "If," he
+    continued acidly, "I'd a-guessed you was such a damn' fool,
+    blimmy if I wouldn't've let you drownd!"</p>
+
+    <p>Staggered, Kirkwood bore his sarcastic truculence without
+    resentment.</p>
+
+    <p>"Calendar," he stammered, trying to explain, "Calendar
+    <i>said</i>&#8212"</p>
+
+    <p>"I carn't 'elp wot Calendar said. Mebbe 'e <i>did</i> myke
+    an engygement with you, an' you've gone and went an' forgot the
+    dyte. Mebbe it's larst year's calendar you're thinkin' of. You
+    Johnny" (to a lout of a boy in the group of seamen), "you run
+    an' fetch this gentleman Whitaker's for Nineteen-six. Look
+    sharp, now!"</p>
+
+    <p>"But&#8212!" With an effort Kirkwood mustered up a show of
+    dignity. "Am I to understand," he said, as calmly as he could,
+    "that you deny knowing George B. Calendar and his daughter
+    Dorothy and&#8212"</p>
+
+    <p>"I don't 'ave to. Listen to me, young man." For the time the
+    fellow discarded his clumsy facetiousness. "I'm Wilyum Stryker,
+    Capt'n Stryker, marster and 'arf-owner of this wessel, and wot
+    I says 'ere is law. We don't carry no passengers. D'ye
+    understand me?"&#8212aggressively. "There ain't no pusson nymed
+    Calendar aboard the <i>Allytheer</i>, an' never was, an' never
+    will be!"</p>
+
+    <p>"What name did you say?" Kirkwood inquired.</p>
+
+    <p>"This ship? The <i>Allytheer</i>; registered from Liverpool;
+    bound from London to Hantwerp, in cargo. Anythink else?"</p>
+
+    <p>Kirkwood shook his head, turning to scan the seascape with a
+    gloomy gaze. As he did so, and remarked how close upon the
+    Sheppey headland the brigantine had drawn, the order was given
+    to go about. For the moment he was left alone, wretchedly wet,
+    shivering, wan and shrunken visibly with the knowledge that he
+    had dared greatly for nothing. But for the necessity of keeping
+    up before Stryker and his crew, the young man felt that he
+    could gladly have broken down and wept for sheer vexation and
+    disappointment.</p>
+
+    <p>Smartly the brigantine luffed and wore about, heeling deep
+    as she spun away on the starboard tack.</p>
+
+    <p>Kirkwood staggered round the skylight to the windward rail.
+    From this position, looking forward, he could see that they
+    were heading for the open sea, Foulness low over the port
+    quarter, naught before them but a brawling waste of
+    leaden-green and dirty white. Far out one of the sidewheel
+    boats of the Queensborough-Antwerp line was heading directly
+    into the wind and making heavy weather of it.</p>
+
+    <p>Some little while later, Stryker again approached him,
+    perhaps swayed by an unaccustomed impulse of compassion; which,
+    however, he artfully concealed. Blandly ironic, returning to
+    his impersonation of the shopkeeper, "Nothink else we can show
+    you, sir?" he inquired.</p>
+
+    <p>"I presume you couldn't put me ashore?" Kirkwood replied
+    ingenuously.</p>
+
+    <p>In supreme disgust the captain showed him his back. "'Ere,
+    you!" he called to one of the crew. "Tyke this awye&#8212tyke 'im
+    below and put 'im to bed; give 'im a drink and dry 'is clo's.
+    Mebbe 'e'll be better when 'e wykes up. 'E don't talk sense
+    now, that's sure. If you arsk me, I sye 'e's balmy and no 'ope
+    for 'im."</p>
+
+    <center>
+        <h2><a name="XII">XII</a></h2>
+
+        <h3>PICARESQUE PASSAGES</h3>
+    </center>
+
+    <p>Contradictory to the hopeful prognosis of Captain Stryker,
+    his unaccredited passenger was not "better" when, after a
+    period of oblivious rest indefinite in duration, he awoke. His
+    subsequent assumption of listless resignation, of pacific
+    acquiescence in the dictates of his destiny, was purely
+    deceptive&#8212thin ice of despair over profound depths of
+    exasperated rebellion.</p>
+
+    <p>Blank darkness enveloped him when first he opened eyes to
+    wonder. Then gradually as he stared, piecing together
+    unassorted memories and striving to quicken drowsy wits, he
+    became aware of a glimmer that waxed and waned, a bar of pale
+    bluish light striking across the gloom above his couch; and by
+    dint of puzzling divined that this had access by a port.
+    Turning his head upon a stiff and unyielding pillow, he could
+    discern a streak of saffron light lining the sill of a doorway,
+    near by his side. The one phenomenon taken with the other
+    confirmed a theretofore somewhat hazy impression that his
+    dreams were dignified by a foundation of fact; that, in brief,
+    he was occupying a cabin-bunk aboard the good ship
+    <i>Alethea</i>.</p>
+
+    <p>Overhead, on the deck, a heavy thumping of hurrying feet
+    awoke him to keener perceptiveness.</p>
+
+    <p>Judging from the incessant rolling and pitching of the
+    brigantine, the crashing thunder of seas upon her sides, the
+    eldrich shrieking of the gale, as well as from the chorused
+    groans and plaints of each individual bolt and timber in the
+    frail fabric that housed his fortunes, the wind had
+    strengthened materially during his hours of
+    forgetfulness&#8212however many the latter might have been.</p>
+
+    <p>He believed, however, that he had slept long, deeply and
+    exhaustively. He felt now a little emaciated mentally and
+    somewhat absent-bodied&#8212so he put it to himself. A numb
+    languor, not unpleasant, held him passively supine, the while
+    he gave himself over to speculative thought.</p>
+
+    <p>A wild night, certainly; probably, by that time, the little
+    vessel was in the middle of the North Sea ... <i>bound for
+    Antwerp</i>!</p>
+
+    <p>"Oh-h," said Kirkwood vindictively, "<i>hell</i>!"</p>
+
+    <p>So he was bound for Antwerp! The first color of resentment
+    ebbing from his thoughts left him rather interested than
+    excited by the prospect. He found that he was neither pleased
+    nor displeased. He presumed that it would be no more difficult
+    to raise money on personal belongings in Antwerp than anywhere
+    else; it has been observed that the first flower of
+    civilization is the rum-blossom, the next, the conventionalized
+    fleur-de-lis of the money-lender. There would be pawnshops,
+    then, in Antwerp; and Kirkwood was confident that the sale or
+    pledge of his signet-ring, scarf-pin, match-box and cigar-case,
+    would provide him with money enough for a return to London, by
+    third-class, at the worst. There ... well, all events were on
+    the knees of the gods; he'd squirm out of his troubles,
+    somehow. As for the other matter, the Calendar affair, he
+    presumed he was well rid of it,&#8212with a sigh of regret. It had
+    been a most enticing mystery, you know; and the woman in the
+    case was extraordinary, to say the least.</p>
+
+    <p>The memory of Dorothy Calendar made him sigh again, this
+    time more violently: a sigh that was own brother to (or at any
+    rate descended in a direct line from) the furnace sigh of the
+    lover described by, the melancholy Jaques. And he sat up,
+    bumped his head, groped round until his hand fell upon a
+    doorknob, opened the door, and looked out into the blowsy
+    emptiness of the ship's cabin proper, whose gloomy confines
+    were made visible only by the rays of a dingy and smoky lamp
+    swinging violently in gimbals from a deck-beam.</p>
+
+    <p>Kirkwood's clothing, now rough-dried and warped wretchedly
+    out of shape, had been thrown carelessly on a transom near the
+    door. He got up, collected them, and returning to his berth,
+    dressed at leisure, thinking heavily, disgruntled&#8212in a humor
+    as evil as the after-taste of bad brandy in his mouth.</p>
+
+    <p>When dressed he went out into the cabin, closing the door
+    upon his berth, and for lack of anything better to do, seated
+    himself on the thwartships transom, against the forward
+    bulkhead, behind the table. Above his head a chronometer ticked
+    steadily and loudly, and, being consulted, told him that the
+    time of day was twenty minutes to four; which meant that he had
+    slept away some eighteen or twenty hours. That was a solid
+    spell of a rest, when he came to think of it, even allowing
+    that he had been unusually and pardonably fatigued when
+    conducted to his berth. He felt stronger now, and bright
+    enough&#8212and enormously hungry into the bargain.</p>
+
+    <p>Abstractedly, heedless of the fact that his tobacco would be
+    water-soaked and ruined, he fumbled in his pockets for pipe and
+    pouch, thinking to soothe the pangs of hunger against
+    breakfast-time; which was probably two hours and a quarter
+    ahead. But his pockets were empty&#8212every one of them. He
+    assimilated this discovery in patience and cast an eye about
+    the room, to locate, if possible, the missing property. But
+    naught of his was visible. So he rose and began a more
+    painstaking search.</p>
+
+    <p>The cabin was at once tiny, low-ceiled, and depressingly
+    gloomy. Its furniture consisted entirely in a chair or two,
+    supplementing the transoms and lockers as resting-places, and a
+    center-table covered with a cloth of turkey-red, whose original
+    aggressiveness had been darkly moderated by libations of
+    liquids, principally black coffee, and burnt offerings of
+    grease and tobacco-ash. Aside from the companion-way to the
+    deck, four doors opened into the room, two probably giving upon
+    the captain's and the mate's quarters, the others on pseudo
+    state-rooms&#8212one of which he had just vacated&#8212closets large
+    enough to contain a small bunk and naught beside. The bulkheads
+    and partitions were badly broken out with a rash of pictures
+    from illustrated papers, mostly offensive. Kirkwood was
+    interested to read a half-column clipping from a New York
+    yellow journal, descriptive of the antics of a drunken British
+    sailor who had somehow found his way to the bar-room of the
+    Fifth Avenue Hotel; the paragraph exploiting the fact that it
+    had required four policemen in addition to the corps of porters
+    to subdue him, was strongly underscored in red ink; and the
+    news-story wound up with the information that in police court
+    the man had given his name as William Stranger and cheerfully
+    had paid a fine of ten dollars, alleging his entertainment to
+    have been cheap at the price.</p>
+
+    <p>While Kirkwood was employed in perusing this illuminating
+    anecdote, eight bells sounded, and, from the commotion
+    overhead, the watch changed. A little later the companion-way
+    door slammed open and shut, and Captain Stryker&#8212or Stranger;
+    whichever you please&#8212fell down, rather than descended, the
+    steps.</p>
+
+    <p>Without attention to the American he rolled into the mate's
+    room and roused that personage. Kirkwood heard that the name of
+    the second-in-command was 'Obbs, as well as that he occupied
+    the starboard state-room aft. After a brief exchange of comment
+    and instruction, Mr. 'Obbs appeared in the shape of a walking
+    pillar of oil-skins capped by a sou'wester, and went on deck;
+    Stryker, following him out of the state-room, shed his own
+    oilers in a clammy heap upon the floor, opened a locker from
+    which he brought forth a bottle and a dirty glass, and, turning
+    toward the table, for the first time became sensible of
+    Kirkwood's presence.</p>
+
+    <p>"Ow, there you are, eigh, little bright-eyes!" he exclaimed
+    with surprised animation.</p>
+
+    <p>"Good morning, Captain Stryker," said Kirkwood, rising. "I
+    want to tell you&#8212"</p>
+
+    <p>But Stryker waved one great red paw impatiently, with the
+    effect of sweeping aside and casting into the discard
+    Kirkwood's intended speech of thanks; nor would he hear him
+    further.</p>
+
+    <p>"Did you 'ave a nice little nap?" he interrupted. "Come up
+    bright and smilin', eigh? Now I guess"&#8212the emphasis made it
+    clear that the captain believed himself to be employing an
+    Americanism; and so successful was he in his own esteem that he
+    could not resist the temptation to improve upon the
+    imitation&#8212"Na-ow I guess yeou're abaout right ready, ben't ye,
+    to hev a drink, sonny?"</p>
+
+    <p>"No, thank you," said Kirkwood, smiling tolerantly. "I've
+    got any amount of appetite..."</p>
+
+    <p>"'Ave you, now?" Stryker dropped his mimicry and glanced at
+    the clock. "Breakfast," he announced, "will be served in the
+    myne dinin' saloon at eyght a. m. Passingers is requested not
+    to be lyte at tyble."</p>
+
+    <p>Depositing the bottle on the said table, the captain
+    searched until he found another glass for Kirkwood, and sat
+    down.</p>
+
+    <p>"Do you good," he insinuated, pushing the bottle gently
+    over.</p>
+
+    <p>"No, thank you," reiterated Kirkwood shortly, a little
+    annoyed.</p>
+
+    <p>Stryker seized his own glass, poured out a strong man's dose
+    of the fiery concoction, gulped it down, and sighed. Then, with
+    a glance at the American's woebegone countenance (Kirkwood was
+    contemplating a four-hour wait for breakfast, and,
+    consequently, looking as if he had lost his last friend), the
+    captain bent over, placing both hands palm down before him and
+    wagging his head earnestly.</p>
+
+    <p>"Please," he implored,&#8212"Please don't let me hinterrupt;"
+    and filled his pipe, pretending a pensive detachment from his
+    company.</p>
+
+    <p>The fumes of burning shag sharpened the tooth of desire.
+    Kirkwood stood it as long as he could, then surrendered with
+    an: "If you've got any more of that tobacco, Captain, I'd be
+    glad of a pipe."</p>
+
+    <p>An intensely contemplative expression crept into the
+    captain's small blue eyes.</p>
+
+    <p>"I only got one other pyper of this 'ere 'baccy," he
+    announced at length, "and I carn't get no more till I gets
+    'ome. I simply couldn't part with it hunder 'arf a quid."</p>
+
+    <p>Kirkwood settled back with a hopeless lift of his shoulders.
+    Abstractedly Stryker puffed the smoke his way until he could
+    endure the deprivation no longer.</p>
+
+    <p>"I had about ten shillings in my pocket when I came aboard,
+    captain, and ... a few other articles."</p>
+
+    <p>"Ow, yes; so you 'ad, now you mention it."</p>
+
+    <p>Stryker rose, ambled into his room, and returned with
+    Kirkwood's possessions and a fresh paper of shag. While the
+    young man was hastily filling, lighting, and inhaling the first
+    strangling but delectable whiff, the captain solemnly counted
+    into his own palm all the loose change except three large
+    pennies. The latter he shoved over to Kirkwood in company with
+    a miscellaneous assortment of articles, which the American
+    picked up piece by piece and began to bestow about his
+    clothing. When through, he sat back, troubled and disgusted.
+    Stryker met his regard blandly.</p>
+
+    <p>"Anything I can do?" he inquired, in suave concern.</p>
+
+    <p>"Why ... there <i>was</i> a black pearl scarfpin&#8212"</p>
+
+    <p>"W'y, don't you remember? You gave that to me, 'count of me
+    'avin syved yer life. 'Twas me throwed you that line, you
+    know."</p>
+
+    <p>"Oh," commented Kirkwood briefly. The pin had been among the
+    most valuable and cherished of his belongings.</p>
+
+    <p>"Yes," nodded the captain in reminiscence. "You don't
+    remember? Likely 'twas the brandy singing in yer 'ead. You
+    pushes it into my 'ands,&#8212almost weepin', you was,&#8212and sez,
+    sez you, 'Stryker,' you sez, 'tyke this in triflin' toking of
+    my gratichood; I wouldn't hinsult you,' you sez, 'by hofferin'
+    you money, but this I can insist on yer acceptin', and no
+    refusal,' says you."</p>
+
+    <p>"Oh," repeated Kirkwood.</p>
+
+    <p>"If I for a ninstant thought you wasn't sober when you done
+    it.... But no; you're a gent if there ever was one, and I'm not
+    the man to offend you."</p>
+
+    <p>"Oh, indeed."</p>
+
+    <p>The captain let the implication pass, perhaps on the
+    consideration that he could afford to ignore it; and said no
+    more. The pause held for several minutes, Kirkwood having
+    fallen into a mood of grave distraction. Finally Captain
+    Stryker thoughtfully measured out a second drink, limited only
+    by the capacity of the tumbler, engulfed it noisily, and got
+    up.</p>
+
+    <p>"Guess I'll be turnin' in," he volunteered affably, yawning
+    and stretching.</p>
+
+    <p>"I was about to ask you to do me a service...." began
+    Kirkwood.</p>
+
+    <p>"Yes?"&#8212with the rising inflection of mockery.</p>
+
+    <p>Kirkwood quietly produced his cigar-case, a gold match-box,
+    gold card-case, and slipped a signet ring from his finger.
+    "Will you buy these?" he asked. "Or will you lend me five
+    pounds and hold them as security?"</p>
+
+    <p>Stryker examined the collection with exaggerated interest
+    strongly tinctured with mistrust. "I'll buy 'em," he offered
+    eventually, looking up.</p>
+
+    <p>"That's kind of you&#8212"</p>
+
+    <p>"Ow, they ain't much use to me, but Bill Stryker's allus
+    willin' to accommodate a friend.... Four quid, you said?"</p>
+
+    <p>"Five...."</p>
+
+    <p>"They ain't wuth over four to me."</p>
+
+    <p>"Very well; make it four," Kirkwood assented
+    contemptuously.</p>
+
+    <p>The captain swept the articles into one capacious fist,
+    pivoted on one heel at the peril of his neck, and lumbered
+    unsteadily off to his room. Pausing at the door he turned back
+    in inquiry.</p>
+
+    <p>"I sye, 'ow did you come to get the impression there was a
+    party named Almanack aboard this wessel?"</p>
+
+    <p>"Calendar&#8212"</p>
+
+    <p>"'Ave it yer own wye," Stryker conceded gracefully.</p>
+
+    <p>"There isn't, is there?"</p>
+
+    <p>"You 'eard me."</p>
+
+    <p>"Then," said Kirkwood sweetly, "I'm sure you wouldn't be
+    interested."</p>
+
+    <p>The captain pondered this at leisure. "You seemed pretty
+    keen abaht seein' 'im," he remarked conclusively.</p>
+
+    <p>"I was."</p>
+
+    <p>"Seems to me I did 'ear the nyme sumw'eres afore." The
+    captain appeared to wrestle with an obdurate memory. "Ow!" he
+    triumphed. "I know. 'E was a chap up Manchester wye. Keeper in
+    a loonatic asylum, 'e was. 'That yer party?"</p>
+
+    <p>"No," said Kirkwood wearily.</p>
+
+    <p>"I didn't know but mebbe 'twas. Excuse me. 'Thought as 'ow
+    mebbe you'd escyped from 'is tender care, but, findin' the
+    world cold, chynged yer mind and wanted to gow back."</p>
+
+    <p>Without waiting for a reply he lurched into his room and
+    banged the door to. Kirkwood, divided between amusement and
+    irritation, heard him stumbling about for some time; and then a
+    hush fell, grateful enough while it lasted; which was not long.
+    For no sooner did the captain sleep than a penetrating snore
+    added itself unto the cacophony of waves and wind and tortured
+    ship.</p>
+
+    <p>Kirkwood, comforted at first by the blessed tobacco, lapsed
+    insensibly into dreary meditations. Coming after the swift
+    movement and sustained excitement of the eighteen hours
+    preceding his long sleep, the monotony of shipboard confinement
+    seemed irksome to a maddening degree. There was absolutely
+    nothing he could discover to occupy his mind. If there were
+    books aboard, none was in evidence; beyond the report of Mr.
+    Stranger's Manhattan night's entertainment the walls were
+    devoid of reading matter; and a round of the picture gallery
+    proved a diversion weariful enough when not purely
+    revolting.</p>
+
+    <p>Wherefore Mr. Kirkwood stretched himself out on the transom
+    and smoked and reviewed his adventures in detail and seriatim,
+    and was by turns indignant, sore, anxious on his own account as
+    well as on Dorothy's, and out of all patience with himself.
+    Mystified he remained throughout, and the edge of his curiosity
+    held as keen as ever, you may believe.</p>
+
+    <p>Consistently the affair presented itself to his fancy in the
+    guise of a puzzle-picture, which, though you study it never so
+    diligently, remains incomprehensible, until by chance you view
+    it from an unexpected angle, when it reveals itself
+    intelligibly. It had not yet been his good fortune to see it
+    from the right viewpoint. To hold the metaphor, he walked
+    endless circles round it, patiently seeking, but ever failing
+    to find the proper perspective.... Each incident, however
+    insignificant, in connection with it, he handled over and over,
+    examining its every facet, bright or dull, as an expert might
+    inspect a clever imitation of a diamond; and like a perfect
+    imitation it defied analysis.</p>
+
+    <p>Of one or two things he was convinced; for one, that Stryker
+    was a liar worthy of classification with Calendar and Mrs.
+    Hallam. Kirkwood had not only the testimony of his sense to
+    assure him that the ship's name, <i>Alethea</i> (not a common
+    one, by the bye), had been mentioned by both Calendar and
+    Mulready during their altercation on Bermondsey Old Stairs, but
+    he had the confirmatory testimony of the sleepy waterman,
+    William, who had directed Old Bob and Young William to the
+    anchorage off Bow Creek. That there should have been two
+    vessels of the same unusual name at one and the same time in
+    the Port of London, was a coincidence too preposterous
+    altogether to find place in his calculations.</p>
+
+    <p>His second impregnable conclusion was that those whom he
+    sought had boarded the <i>Alethea</i>, but had left her before
+    she tripped her anchor. That they were not stowed away aboard
+    her seemed unquestionable. The brigantine was hardly large
+    enough for the presence of three persons aboard her to be long
+    kept a secret from an inquisitive fourth,&#8212unless, indeed, they
+    lay in hiding in the hold; for which, once the ship got under
+    way, there could be scant excuse. And Kirkwood did not believe
+    himself a person of sufficient importance in Calendar's eyes,
+    to make that worthy endure the discomforts of a'tween-decks
+    imprisonment throughout the voyage, even to escape
+    recognition.</p>
+
+    <p>With every second, then, he was traveling farther from her
+    to whose aid he had rushed, impelled by motives so hot-headed,
+    so innately, chivalric, so unthinkingly gallant, so
+    exceptionally idiotic!</p>
+
+    <p>Idiot! Kirkwood groaned with despair of his inability to
+    fathom the abyss of his self-contempt. There seemed to be
+    positively no excuse for <i>him</i>. Stryker had befriended him
+    indeed, had he permitted him to drown. Yet he had acted for the
+    best, as he saw it. The fault lay in himself: an admirable
+    fault, that of harboring and nurturing generous and
+    compassionate instincts. But, of course, Kirkwood couldn't see
+    it that way.</p>
+
+    <p>"What else could I do?" he defended himself against the
+    indictment of common sense. "I couldn't leave her to the
+    mercies of that set of rogues!... And Heaven knows I was given
+    every reason to believe she would be aboard this ship! Why, she
+    herself told me that she was sailing ...!"</p>
+
+    <p>Heaven knew, too, that this folly of his had cost him a
+    pretty penny, first and last. His watch was gone beyond
+    recovery, his homeward passage forfeited; he no longer harbored
+    illusions as to the steamship company presenting him with
+    another berth in lieu of that called for by that water-soaked
+    slip of paper then in his pocket&#8212courtesy of Stryker. He had
+    sold for a pittance, a tithe of its value, his personal
+    jewelry, and had spent every penny he could call his own. With
+    the money Stryker was to give him he would be able to get back
+    to London and his third-rate hostelry, but not with enough over
+    to pay that one week's room-rent, or ...</p>
+
+    <p>"Oh, the devil!" he groaned, head in hands.</p>
+
+    <p>The future loomed wrapped in unspeakable darkness, lightened
+    by no least ray of hope. It had been bad enough to lose a
+    comfortable living through a gigantic convulsion of Nature; but
+    to think that he had lost all else through his own egregious
+    folly, to find himself reduced to the kennels&#8212!</p>
+
+    <p>So Care found him again in those weary hours,&#8212came and sat
+    by his side, slipping a grisly hand in his and tightening its
+    grip until he could have cried out with the torment of it; the
+    while whispering insidiously subtile, evil things in his ear.
+    And he had not even Hope to comfort him; at any previous stage
+    he had been able to distil a sort of bitter-sweet satisfaction
+    from the thought that he was suffering for the love of his
+    life. But now&#8212now Dorothy was lost, gone like the glamour of
+    Romance in the searching light of day.</p>
+
+    <p>Stryker, emerging from his room for breakfast, found the
+    passenger with a hostile look in his eye and a jaw set in ugly
+    fashion. His eyes, too, were the abiding-place of smoldering
+    devils; and the captain, recognizing them, considerately
+    forbore to stir them up with any untimely pleasantries. To be
+    sure, he was autocrat in his own ship, and Kirkwood's standing
+    aboard was <i>nil</i>; but then there was just enough yellow in
+    the complexion of Stryker's soul to incline him to sidestep
+    trouble whenever feasible. And besides, he entertained dark
+    suspicions of his guest&#8212suspicions he scarce dared voice even
+    to his inmost heart.</p>
+
+    <p>The morning meal, therefore, passed off in constrained
+    silence. The captain ate voraciously and vociferously, pushed
+    back his chair, and went on deck to relieve the mate. The
+    latter, a stunted little Cockney with a wizened countenance and
+    a mind as foul as his tongue, got small change of his attempts
+    to engage the passenger in conversation on topics that he
+    considered fit for discussion. After the sixth or eighth
+    snubbing he rose in dudgeon, discharged a poisonous bit of
+    insolence, and retired to his berth, leaving Kirkwood to finish
+    his breakfast in peace; which the latter did literally, to the
+    last visible scrap of food and the ultimate drop of coffee,
+    poor as both were in quality.</p>
+
+    <p>To the tune of a moderating wind, the morning wearied away.
+    Kirkwood went on deck once, for distraction from the
+    intolerable monotony of it all, got a sound drenching of spray,
+    with a glimpse of a dark line on the eastern horizon, which he
+    understood to be the low littoral of Holland, and was glad to
+    dodge below once more and dry himself.</p>
+
+    <p>He had the pleasure of the mate's company at dinner, the
+    captain remaining on deck until Hobbs had finished and gone up
+    to relieve him; and by that time Kirkwood likewise was
+    through.</p>
+
+    <p>Stryker blew down with a blustery show of cheer. "Well,
+    well, my little man!" (It happened that he topped Kirkwood's
+    stature by at least five inches.) "Enj'yin' yer sea trip?"</p>
+
+    <p>"About as much as you'd expect," snapped Kirkwood.</p>
+
+    <p>"Ow?" The captain began to shovel food into his face. (The
+    author regrets he has at his command no more delicate
+    expression that is literal and illustrative.) Kirkwood watched
+    him, fascinated with suspense; it seemed impossible that the
+    man could continue so to employ his knife without cutting his
+    throat from the inside. But years of such manipulation had made
+    him expert, and his guest, keenly disappointed, at length
+    ceased to hope.</p>
+
+    <p>Between gobbles Stryker eyed him furtively.</p>
+
+    <p>"'Treat you all right?" he demanded abruptly.</p>
+
+    <p>Kirkwood started out of a brown study. "What? Who? Why, I
+    suppose I ought to be&#8212indeed, I <i>am</i> grateful," he
+    asserted. "Certainly you saved my life, and&#8212"</p>
+
+    <p>"Ow, I don't mean that." Stryker gathered the imputation
+    into his paw and flung it disdainfully to the four winds of
+    Heaven. "Bless yer 'art, you're welcome; I wouldn't let no dorg
+    drownd, 'f I could 'elp it. No," he declared, "nor a loonatic,
+    neither."</p>
+
+    <p>He thrust his plate away and shifted sidewise in his chair.
+    "I 'uz just wonderin'," he pursued, picking his teeth
+    meditatively with a pen-knife, "'ow they feeds you in them
+    <i>as</i>-ylums. 'Avin' never been inside one, myself, it's
+    on'y natural I'd be cur'us.... There was one of them
+    institootions near where I was borned&#8212Birming'am, that is. I
+    used to see the loonies playin' in the grounds. I remember
+    <i>just</i> as well!... One of 'em and me struck up quite an
+    acquaintance&#8212"</p>
+
+    <p>"Naturally he'd take to you on sight."</p>
+
+    <p>"Ow? Strynge 'ow <i>we</i> 'it it off, eigh?... You myke me
+    think of 'im. Young chap, 'e was, the livin' spi't-'n-himage of
+    you. It don't happen, does it, you're the same man?"</p>
+
+    <p>"Oh, go to the devil!"</p>
+
+    <p>"Naughty!" said the captain serenely, wagging a reproving
+    forefinger. "Bad, naughty word. You'll be sorry when you find
+    out wot it means.... Only 'e was allus plannin' to run awye and
+    drownd 'is-self."...</p>
+
+    <p>He wore the joke threadbare, even to his own taste, and in
+    the end got heavily to his feet, starting for the companionway.
+    "Land you this arternoon," he remarked casually, "come three
+    o'clock or thereabahts. Per'aps later. I don't know, though, as
+    I 'ad ought to let you loose."</p>
+
+    <p>Kirkwood made no answer. Chuckling, Stryker went on
+    deck.</p>
+
+    <p>In the course of an hour the American followed him.</p>
+
+    <p>Wind and sea alike had gone down wonderfully since
+    daybreak&#8212a circumstance undoubtedly in great part due to the
+    fact that they had won in under the lee of the mainland and
+    were traversing shallower waters. On either hand, like mist
+    upon the horizon, lay a streak of gray, a shade darker than the
+    gray of the waters. The <i>Alethea</i> was within the wide jaws
+    of the Western Scheldt. As for the wind, it had shifted several
+    points to the northwards; the brigantine had it abeam and was
+    lying down to it and racing to port with slanting deck and
+    singing cordage.</p>
+
+    <p>Kirkwood approached the captain, who, acting as his own
+    pilot, was standing by the wheel and barking sharp orders to
+    the helmsman.</p>
+
+    <p>"Have you a Bradshaw on board?" asked the young man.</p>
+
+    <p>"Steady!" This to the man at the wheel; then to Kirkwood:
+    "Wot's that, me lud?"</p>
+
+    <p>Kirkwood repeated his question. Stryker eyed him
+    suspiciously for a thought.</p>
+
+    <p>"Wot d'you want it for?"</p>
+
+    <p>"I want to see when I can get a boat back to England."</p>
+
+    <p>"Hmm.... Yes, you'll find a Bradshaw in the port-locker,
+    near the for'ard bulk'ead. Run along now and pl'y&#8212and mind you
+    don't go tearin' out the pyges to myke pyper boatses to go
+    sylin' in."</p>
+
+    <p>Kirkwood went below. Like its adjacent rooms, the cabin was
+    untenanted; the watch was the mate's, and Stryker a martinet.
+    Kirkwood found the designated locker and, opening it, saw first
+    to his hand the familiar bulky red volume with its red garter.
+    Taking it out he carried it to a chair near the companionway,
+    for a better reading light: the skylight being still battened
+    down.</p>
+
+    <p>The strap removed, the book opened easily, as if by force of
+    habit, at the precise table he had wished to consult; some
+    previous client had left a marker between the pages,&#8212and not
+    an ordinary book-mark, by any manner of means. Kirkwood gave
+    utterance to a little gasp of amazement, and instinctively
+    glanced up at the companionway, to see if he were observed.</p>
+
+    <p>He was not, but for safety's sake he moved farther back into
+    the cabin and out of the range of vision of any one on deck; a
+    precaution which was almost immediately justified by the
+    clumping of heavy feet upon the steps as Stryker descended in
+    pursuit of the ever-essential drink.</p>
+
+    <p>"'Find it?" he demanded, staring blindly&#8212with eyes not yet
+    focused to the change from light to gloom&#8212at the young man,
+    who was sitting with the guide open on his knees, a tightly
+    clenched fist resting on the transom at either side of him.</p>
+
+    <p>In reply he received a monosyllabic affirmative; Kirkwood
+    did not look up.</p>
+
+    <p>"You must be a howl," commented the captain, making for the
+    seductive locker.</p>
+
+    <p>"A&#8212what?"</p>
+
+    <p>"A howl, readin' that fine print there in the dark. W'y
+    don't you go over to the light?... I'll 'ave to 'ave them
+    shutters tyken off the winders." This was Stryker's amiable
+    figure of speech, frequently employed to indicate the coverings
+    of the skylight.</p>
+
+    <p>"I'm all right." Kirkwood went on studying the book.</p>
+
+    <p>Stryker swigged off his rum and wiped his lips with the back
+    of a red paw, hesitating a moment to watch his guest.</p>
+
+    <p>"Mykes it seem more 'ome-like for you, I expect," he
+    observed.</p>
+
+    <p>"What do you mean?"</p>
+
+    <p>"W'y, Bradshaw's first-cousin to a halmanack, ain't 'e?
+    Can't get one, take t'other&#8212next best thing. Sorry I didn't
+    think of it sooner; like my passengers to feel comfy.... Now
+    don't you go trapsein' off to gay Paree and squanderin' wot
+    money you got left. You 'ear?"</p>
+
+    <p>"By the way, Captain!" Kirkwood looked up at this, but
+    Stryker was already half-way up the companion.</p>
+
+    <p>Cautiously the American opened his right fist and held to
+    the light that which had been concealed, close wadded in his
+    grasp,&#8212a square of sheer linen edged with lace, crumpled but
+    spotless, and diffusing in the unwholesome den a faint,
+    intangible fragrance, the veriest wraith of that elusive
+    perfume which he would never again inhale without instantly
+    recalling that night ride through London in the intimacy of a
+    cab.</p>
+
+    <p>He closed his eyes and saw her again, as clearly as though
+    she stood before him,&#8212hair of gold massed above the forehead
+    of snow, curling in adorable tendrils at the nape of her neck,
+    lips like scarlet splashed upon the immaculate whiteness of her
+    skin, head poised audaciously in its spirited, youthful allure,
+    dark eyes smiling the least trace sadly beneath the level
+    brows.</p>
+
+    <p>Unquestionably the handkerchief was hers; if proof other
+    than the assurance of his heart were requisite, he had it in
+    the initial delicately embroidered in one corner: a D, for
+    Dorothy!... He looked again, to make sure; then hastily folded
+    up the treasure-trove and slipped it into a breast pocket of
+    his coat.</p>
+
+    <p>No; I am not sure that it was not the left-hand pocket.</p>
+
+    <p>Quivering with excitement he bent again over the book and
+    studied it intently. After all, he had not been wrong! He could
+    assert now, without fear of refutation, that Stryker had
+    lied.</p>
+
+    <p>Some one had wielded an industrious pencil on the page. It
+    was, taken as a whole, fruitful of clues. Its very heading was
+    illuminating:</p>
+
+    <p>LONDON to VLISSINGEN (FLUSHING) AND BREDA;</p>
+
+    <p>which happened to be the quickest and most direct route
+    between London and Antwerp. Beneath it, in the second column
+    from the right, the pencil had put a check-mark against:</p>
+
+    <p>QUEENSBOROUGH ... DEP ... 11a10.</p>
+
+    <p>And now he saw it clearly&#8212dolt that he had been not to have
+    divined it ere this! The <i>Alethea</i> had run in to
+    Queensborough, landing her passengers there, that they might
+    make connection with the eleven-ten morning boat for
+    Flushing,&#8212the very side-wheel steamer, doubtless, which he had
+    noticed beating out in the teeth of the gale just after the
+    brigantine had picked him up. Had he not received the passing
+    impression that the <i>Alethea</i>, when first he caught sight
+    of her, might have been coming out of the Medway, on whose
+    eastern shore is situate Queensborough Pier? Had not Mrs.
+    Hallam, going upon he knew not what information or belief, been
+    bound for Queensborough, with design there to intercept the
+    fugitives?</p>
+
+    <p>Kirkwood chuckled to recall how, all unwittingly, he had
+    been the means of diverting from her chosen course that acute
+    and resourceful lady; then again turned his attention to the
+    tables.</p>
+
+    <p>A third check had been placed against the train for
+    Amsterdam scheduled to leave Antwerp at 6:32 p. m. Momentarily
+    his heart misgave him, when he saw this, in fear lest Calendar
+    and Dorothy should have gone on from Antwerp the previous
+    evening; but then he rallied, discovering that the boat-train
+    from Flushing did not arrive at Antwerp till after ten at
+    night; and there was no later train thence for Amsterdam. Were
+    the latter truly their purposed destination, they would have
+    stayed overnight and be leaving that very evening on the 6:32.
+    On the other hand, why should they wait for the latest train,
+    rather than proceed by the first available in the morning? Why
+    but because Calendar and Mulready were to wait for Stryker to
+    join them on the <i>Alethea</i>?</p>
+
+    <p>Very well, then; if the wind held and Stryker knew his
+    business, there would be another passenger on that train, in
+    addition to the Calendar party.</p>
+
+    <p>Making mental note of the fact that the boat-train for
+    Flushing and London was scheduled to leave Antwerp daily at
+    8:21 p. m., Kirkwood rustled the leaves to find out whether or
+    not other tours had been planned, found evidences of none, and
+    carefully restored the guide to the locker, lest inadvertently
+    the captain should pick it up and see what Kirkwood had
+    seen.</p>
+
+    <p>An hour later he went on deck. The skies had blown clear and
+    the brigantine was well in land-bound waters and still footing
+    a rattling pace. The river-banks had narrowed until, beyond the
+    dikes to right and left, the country-side stretched wide and
+    flat, a plain of living green embroidered with winding roads
+    and quaint Old-World hamlets whose red roofs shone like dull
+    fire between the dark green foliage of dwarfed firs.</p>
+
+    <p>Down with the Scheldt's gray shimmering flood were drifting
+    little companies of barges, sturdy and snug both fore and aft,
+    tough tanned sails burning in the afternoon sunlight. A long
+    string of canal-boats, potted plants flowering saucily in their
+    neatly curtained windows, proprietors expansively smoking on
+    deck, in the bosoms of their very large families, was being
+    mothered up-stream by two funny, clucking tugs. Behind the
+    brigantine a travel-worn Atlantic liner was scolding itself
+    hoarse about the right of way. Outward bound, empty cattle
+    boats, rough and rusty, were swaggering down to the sea, with
+    the careless, independent thumbs-in-armholes air of so many
+    navvies off the job.</p>
+
+    <p>And then lifting suddenly above the level far-off sky-line,
+    there appeared a very miracle of beauty; the delicate tracery
+    of the great Cathedral's spire of frozen lace, glowing like a
+    thing of spun gold, set against the sapphire velvet of the
+    horizon.</p>
+
+    <p>Antwerp was in sight.</p>
+
+    <p>A troublesome care stirring in his mind, Kirkwood looked
+    round the deck; but Stryker was very busy, entirely too
+    preoccupied with the handling of his ship to be interrupted
+    with impunity. Besides, there was plenty of time.</p>
+
+    <p>More slowly now, the wind falling, the brigantine crept up
+    the river, her crew alert with sheets and halyards as the
+    devious windings of the stream rendered it necessary to trim
+    the canvas at varying angles to catch the wind.</p>
+
+    <p>Slowly, too, in the shadow of that Mechlin spire, the
+    horizon grew rough and elevated, taking shape in the serrated
+    profile of a thousand gables and a hundred towers and
+    cross-crowned steeples.</p>
+
+    <p>Once or twice, more and more annoyed as the time of their
+    association seemed to grow more brief, Kirkwood approached the
+    captain; but Stryker continued to be exhaustively absorbed in
+    the performance of his duties.</p>
+
+    <p>Up past the dockyards, where spidery masts stood in dense
+    groves about painted funnels, and men swarmed over huge wharves
+    like ants over a crust of bread; up and round the final, great
+    sweeping bend of the river, the <i>Alethea</i> made her sober
+    way, ever with greater slowness; until at length, in the rose
+    glow of a flawless evening, her windlass began to clank like a
+    mad thing and her anchor bit the riverbed, near the left bank,
+    between old Forts Isabelle and T&#234;te de Flandre, frowned
+    upon from the right by the grim pile of the age-old Steen
+    castle.</p>
+
+    <p>And again Kirkwood sought Stryker, his carking query ready
+    on his lips. But the captain impatiently waved him aside.</p>
+
+    <p>"Don't you bother me now, me lud juke! Wyte until I gets
+    done with the custom hofficer."</p>
+
+    <p>Kirkwood acceded, perforce; and bided his time with what
+    tolerance he could muster.</p>
+
+    <p>A pluttering customs launch bustled up to the
+    <i>Alethea's</i> side, discharged a fussy inspector on the
+    brigantine's deck, and panted impatiently until he, the
+    examination concluded without delay, was again aboard.</p>
+
+    <p>Stryker, smirking benignly and massaging his lips with the
+    back of his hand, followed the official on deck, nodded to
+    Kirkwood an intimation that he was prepared to accord him an
+    audience, and strolled forward to the waist. The American,
+    mastering his resentment, meekly followed; one can not well
+    afford to be haughty when one is asking favors.</p>
+
+    <p>Advancing to the rail, the captain whistled in one of the
+    river-boats; then, while the waterman waited, faced his
+    passenger.</p>
+
+    <p>"Now, yer r'yal 'ighness, wot can I do for you afore you
+    goes ashore?"</p>
+
+    <p>"I think you must have forgotten," said Kirkwood quietly. "I
+    hate to trouble you, but&#8212there's that matter of four
+    pounds."</p>
+
+    <p>Stryker's face was expressive only of mystified vacuity.
+    "Four quid? I dunno <i>as</i> I know just wot you means."</p>
+
+    <p>"You agreed to advance me four pounds on those things of
+    mine...."</p>
+
+    <p>"Ow-w!" Illumination overspread the hollow-jowled
+    countenance. Stryker smiled cheerfully. "Garn with you!" he
+    chuckled. "You will 'ave yer little joke, won't you now? I
+    declare I never see a loony with such affecsh'nit, pl'yful
+    wyes!"</p>
+
+    <p>Kirkwood's eyes narrowed. "Stryker," he said steadily, "give
+    me the four pounds and let's have no more nonsense; or else
+    hand over my things at once."</p>
+
+    <p>"Daffy," Stryker told vacancy, with conviction. "Lor' luv me
+    if I sees 'ow he ever 'ad sense enough to escype. W'y, yer
+    majesty!" and he bowed, ironic. "I '<i>ave</i> given you yer
+    quid."</p>
+
+    <p>"Just about as much as I gave you that pearl pin," retorted
+    Kirkwood hotly. "What the devil do you mean&#8212"</p>
+
+    <p>"W'y, yer ludship, four pounds jus pyes yer passyge; I
+    thought you understood."</p>
+
+    <p>"My passage! But I can come across by steamer for thirty
+    shillings, first-class&#8212"</p>
+
+    <p>"Aw, but them steamers! Tricky, they is, and unsyfe ... No,
+    yer gryce, the W. Stryker Packet Line Lim'ted, London to
+    Antwerp, charges four pounds per passyge and no reduction for
+    return fare."</p>
+
+    <p>Stunned by his effrontery, Kirkwood stared in silence.</p>
+
+    <p>"Any complynts," continued the captain, looking over
+    Kirkwood's head, "must be lyde afore the Board of Directors in
+    writin' not more'n thirty dyes arfter&#8212"</p>
+
+    <p>"You damned scoundrel!" interpolated Kirkwood
+    thoughtfully.</p>
+
+    <p>Stryker's mouth closed with a snap; his features froze in a
+    cast of wrath; cold rage glinted in his small blue eyes. "W'y,"
+    he bellowed, "you bloomin' loonatic, d'ye think you can sye
+    that to Bill Stryker on 'is own wessel!"</p>
+
+    <p>He hesitated a moment, then launched a heavy fist at
+    Kirkwood's face. Unsurprised, the young man side-stepped,
+    caught the hard, bony wrist as the captain lurched by,
+    following his wasted blow, and with a dexterous twist laid him
+    flat on his back, with a sounding thump upon the deck. And as
+    the infuriated scamp rose&#8212which he did with a bound that
+    placed him on his feet and in defensive posture; as though the
+    deck had been a spring-board&#8212Kirkwood leaped back, seized a
+    capstan-bar, and faced him with a challenge.</p>
+
+    <p>"Stand clear, Stryker!" he warned the man tensely, himself
+    livid with rage. "If you move a step closer I swear I'll knock
+    the head off your shoulders! Not another inch, you contemptible
+    whelp, or I'll brain you!... That's better," he continued as
+    the captain, caving, dropped his fists and moved uneasily back.
+    "Now give that boatman money for taking me ashore. Yes, I'm
+    going&#8212and if we ever meet again, take the other side of the
+    way, Stryker!"</p>
+
+    <p>Without response, a grim smile wreathing his thin, hard
+    lips, Stryker thrust one hand into his pocket, and withdrawing
+    a coin, tossed it to the waiting waterman. Whereupon Kirkwood
+    backed warily to the rail, abandoned the capstan-bar and
+    dropped over the side.</p>
+
+    <p>Nodding to the boatman, "The Steen landing&#8212quickly," he
+    said in French.</p>
+
+    <p>Stryker, recovering, advanced to the rail and waved him a
+    derisive <i>bon voyage</i>.</p>
+
+    <p>"By-by, yer hexcellency. I 'opes it may soon be my pleasure
+    to meet you again. You've been a real privilege to know; I've
+    henjoyed yer comp'ny somethin' immense. Don't know as I ever
+    met such a rippin', Ay Number One, all-round, entertynin' ass,
+    afore!"</p>
+
+    <p>He fumbled nervously about his clothing, brought to light a
+    rag of cotton, much the worse for service, and ostentatiously
+    wiped from the corner of each eye tears of grief at parting.
+    Then, as the boat swung toward the farther shore, Kirkwood's
+    back was to the brigantine, and he was little tempted to turn
+    and invite fresh shafts of ridicule.</p>
+
+    <p>Rapidly, as he was ferried across the busy Scheldt, the
+    white blaze of his passion cooled; but the biting irony of his
+    estate ate, corrosive, into his soul. Hollow-eyed he glared
+    vacantly into space, pale lips unmoving, his features wasted
+    with despair.</p>
+
+    <p>They came to the landing-stage and swung broad-side on.
+    Mechanically the American got up and disembarked. As heedless
+    of time and place he moved up the Quai to the gangway and so
+    gained the esplanade; where pausing he thrust a trembling hand
+    into his trouser pocket.</p>
+
+    <p>The hand reappeared, displaying in its outspread palm three
+    big, round, brown, British pennies. Staring down at them,
+    Kirkwood's lips moved.</p>
+
+    <p>"Bed rock!" he whispered huskily.</p>
+
+    <center>
+        <h2><a name="XIII">XIII</a></h2>
+
+        <h3>A PRIMER OF PROGRESSIVE CRIME</h3>
+    </center>
+
+    <p>Without warning or presage the still evening air was smitten
+    and made softly musical by the pealing of a distant chime,
+    calling vespers to its brothers in Antwerp's hundred belfries;
+    and one by one, far and near, the responses broke out, until it
+    seemed as if the world must be vibrant with silver and brazen
+    melody; until at the last the great bells in the Cathedral
+    spire stirred and grumbled drowsily, then woke to such ringing
+    resonance as dwarfed all the rest and made it seem as
+    nothing.</p>
+
+    <p>Like the beating of a mighty heart heard through the rushing
+    clamor of the pulses, a single deep-throated bell boomed
+    solemnly six heavy, rumbling strokes.</p>
+
+    <p>Six o'clock! Kirkwood roused out of his dour brooding. The
+    Amsterdam express would leave at 6:32, and he knew not from
+    what station.</p>
+
+    <p>Striding swiftly across the promenade, he entered a small
+    tobacco shop and made inquiry of the proprietress. His command
+    of French was tolerable; he experienced no difficulty in
+    comprehending the good woman's instructions.</p>
+
+    <p>Trains for Amsterdam, she said, left from the Gare Centrale,
+    a mile or so across the city. M'sieur had plenty of time, and
+    to spare. There was the tram line, if m'sieur did not care to
+    take a fiacre. If he would go by way of the Vielle Bourse he
+    would discover the tram cars of the Rue Kipdorp. M'sieur was
+    most welcome....</p>
+
+    <p>Monsieur departed with the more haste since he was unable to
+    repay this courtesy with the most trifling purchase; such
+    slight matters annoyed Kirkwood intensely. Perhaps it was well
+    for him that he had the long walk to help him work off the fit
+    of nervous exasperation into which he was plunged every time
+    his thoughts harked back to that jovial black-guard,
+    Stryker.... He was quite calm when, after a brisk walk of some
+    fifteen minutes, he reached the station.</p>
+
+    <p>A public clock reassured him with the information that he
+    had the quarter of an hour's leeway; it was only seventeen
+    minutes past eighteen o'clock (Belgian railway time, always
+    confusing). Inquiring his way to the Amsterdam train, which was
+    already waiting at the platform, he paced its length, peering
+    brazenly in at the coach windows, now warm with hope, now
+    shivering with disappointment, realizing as he could not but
+    realize that, all else aside, his only chance of rehabilitation
+    lay in meeting Calendar. But in none of the coaches or
+    carriages did he discover any one even remotely resembling the
+    fat adventurer, his daughter, or Mulready.</p>
+
+    <p>Satisfied that they had not yet boarded the train, he stood
+    aside, tortured with forebodings, while anxiously scrutinizing
+    each individual of the throng of intending travelers....
+    Perhaps they had been delayed&#8212by the <i>Alethea's</i> lateness
+    in making port very likely; perhaps they purposed taking not
+    this but a later train; perhaps they had already left the city
+    by an earlier, or had returned to England.</p>
+
+    <p>On time, the bell clanged its warning; the guards bawled
+    theirs; doors were hastily opened and slammed; the trucks began
+    to groan, couplings jolting as the engine chafed in constraint.
+    The train and Kirkwood moved simultaneously out of opposite
+    ends of the station, the one to rattle and hammer round the
+    eastern boundaries of the city and straighten out at top speed
+    on the northern route for the Belgian line, the other to stroll
+    moodily away, idle hands in empty pockets, bound aimlessly
+    anywhere&#8212it didn't matter!</p>
+
+    <p>Nothing whatever mattered in the smallest degree. Ere now
+    the outlook had been dark; but this he felt to be the absolute
+    nadir of his misfortunes. Presently&#8212after a while&#8212as soon as
+    he could bring himself to it&#8212he would ask the way and go to
+    the American Consulate. But just now, low as the tide of chance
+    had ebbed, leaving him stranded on the flats of vagabondage,
+    low as showed the measure of his self-esteem, he could not
+    tolerate the prospect of begging for assistance&#8212help which
+    would in all likelihood be refused, since his story was quite
+    too preposterous to gain credence in official ears that daily
+    are filled with the lamentations of those whose motives do not
+    bear investigation. And if he chose to eliminate the strange
+    chain of events which had landed him in Antwerp, to base his
+    plea solely on the fact that he was a victim of the San
+    Francisco disaster ... he himself was able to smile, if sourly,
+    anticipating the incredulous consular smile with which he would
+    be shown the door.</p>
+
+    <p>No; that he would reserve as a last resort. True, he had
+    already come to the Jumping-off Place; to the Court of the Last
+    Resort alone could he now appeal. But ... not yet; after a
+    while he could make his petition, after he had made a familiar
+    of the thought that he must armor himself with callous
+    indifference to rebuff, to say naught of the waves of burning
+    shame that would overwhelm him when he came to the point of
+    asking charity.</p>
+
+    <p>He found himself, neither knowing nor caring how he had won
+    thither, in the Place Verte, the vast venerable pile of the
+    Cathedral rising on his right, hotels and quaint Old-World
+    dwellings with peaked roofs and gables and dormer windows,
+    inclosing the other sides of the square. The chimes (he could
+    hear none but those of the Cathedral) were heralding the hour
+    of seven. Listless and preoccupied in contemplation of his
+    wretched case he wandered purposelessly half round the square,
+    then dropped into a bench on its outskirts.</p>
+
+    <p>It was some time later that he noticed, with a casual,
+    indifferent eye, a porter running out of the H&#244;tel de
+    Flandre, directly opposite, and calling a fiacre in to the
+    carriage block.</p>
+
+    <p>As languidly he watched a woman, very becomingly dressed,
+    follow the porter down to the curb.</p>
+
+    <p>The fiacre swung in, and the woman dismissed the porter
+    before entering the vehicle; a proceeding so unusual that it
+    fixed the onlooker's interest. He sat rigid with attention; the
+    woman seemed to be giving explicit and lengthy directions to
+    the driver, who nodded and gesticulated his comprehension.</p>
+
+    <p>The woman was Mrs. Hallam.</p>
+
+    <p>The first blush of recognition passed, leaving Kirkwood
+    without any amazement. It was an easy matter to account for her
+    being where she was. Thrown off the scent by Kirkwood at
+    Sheerness, the previous morning, she had missed the day boat,
+    the same which had ferried over those whom she pursued.
+    Returning from Sheerness to Queensborough, however, she had
+    taken the night boat for Flushing and Antwerp,&#8212and not without
+    her plan, who was not a woman to waste her strength aimlessly;
+    Kirkwood believed that she had had from the first a very
+    definite campaign in view. In that campaign Queensborough Pier
+    had been the first strategic move; the journey to Antwerp,
+    apparently, the second; and the American was impressed that he
+    was witnessing the inception of the third decided step.... The
+    conclusion of this process of reasoning was inevitable: Madam
+    would bear watching.</p>
+
+    <p>Thus was a magical transformation brought about.
+    Instantaneously lassitude and vain repinings were replaced by
+    hopefulness and energy. In a twinkling the young man was on his
+    feet, every nerve a-thrill with excitement.</p>
+
+    <p>Mrs. Hallam, blissfully ignorant of this surveillance over
+    her movements, took her place in the fiacre. The driver clucked
+    to his horse, cracked his whip, and started off at a slow trot:
+    a pace which Kirkwood imitated, keeping himself at a discreet
+    distance to the rear of the cab, but prepared to break into a
+    run whenever it should prove necessary.</p>
+
+    <p>Such exertion, however, was not required of him. Evidently
+    Mrs. Hallam was in no great haste to reach her destination; the
+    speed of the fiacre remained extremely moderate; Kirkwood found
+    a long, brisk stride fast enough to keep it well in sight.</p>
+
+    <p>Round the green square, under the beautiful walls of Notre
+    Dame d'Anvers, through Grande Place and past the H&#244;tel de
+    Ville, the cab proceeded, dogged by what might plausibly be
+    asserted the most persistent and infatuated soul that ever
+    crossed the water; and so on into the Quai Van Dyck, turning to
+    the left at the old Steen dungeon and, slowing to a walk,
+    moving soberly up the drive.</p>
+
+    <p>Beyond the lip of the embankment, the Scheldt flowed, its
+    broad shining surface oily, smooth and dark, a mirror for the
+    incandescent glory of the skies. Over on the western bank old
+    T&#234;te de Flandre lifted up its grim curtains and bastions,
+    sable against the crimson, rampart and parapet edged with fire.
+    Busy little side-wheeled ferry steamers spanked the waters
+    noisily and smudged the sunset with dark drifting trails of
+    smoke; and ever and anon a rowboat would slip out of shadow to
+    glide languidly with the current. Otherwise the life of the
+    river was gone; and at their moorings the ships swung in great
+    quietness, riding lights glimmering like low wan stars.</p>
+
+    <p>In the company of the latter the young man marked down the
+    <i>Alethea</i>; a sight which made him unconsciously clench
+    both fists and teeth, reminding him of that rare wag,
+    Stryker....</p>
+
+    <p>To his way of thinking the behavior of the fiacre was quite
+    unaccountable. Hardly had the horse paced off the length of two
+    blocks on the Quai ere it was guided to the edge of the
+    promenade and brought to a stop. And the driver twisted the
+    reins round his whip, thrust the latter in its socket, turned
+    sidewise on the box, and began to smoke and swing his heels,
+    surveying the panorama of river and sunset with complacency&#8212a
+    cabby, one would venture, without a care in the world and
+    serene in the assurance of a generous <i>pour-boire</i> when he
+    lost his fare. But as for the latter, she made no move; the
+    door of the cab remained closed,&#8212like its occupant's mind, a
+    mystery to the watcher.</p>
+
+    <p>Twilight shadows lengthened, darkling, over the land;
+    street-lights flashed up in long, radiant ranks. Across the
+    promenade hotels and shops were lighted up; people began to
+    gather round the tables beneath the awnings of an open-air
+    caf&#233;. In the distance, somewhere, a band swung into the
+    dreamy rhythm of a haunting waltz. Scattered couples moved
+    slowly, arm in arm, along the riverside walk, drinking in the
+    fragrance of the night. Overhead stars popped out in brilliance
+    and dropped their reflections to swim lazily on spellbound
+    waters.... And still the fiacre lingered in inaction, still the
+    driver lorded it aloft, in care-free abandon.</p>
+
+    <p>In the course of time this inertia, where he had looked for
+    action, this dull suspense when he had forecast interesting
+    developments, wore upon the watcher's nerves and made him at
+    once impatient and suspicious. Now that he had begun to doubt,
+    he conceived it as quite possible that Mrs. Hallam (who was
+    capable of anything) should have stolen out of the cab by the
+    other and, to him, invisible door. To resolve the matter,
+    finally, he took advantage of the darkness, turned up his coat
+    collar, hunched up his shoulders, hid his hands in pockets,
+    pulled the visor of his cap well forward over his eyes, and
+    slouched past the fiacre.</p>
+
+    <p>Mrs. Hallam sat within. He could see her profile clearly
+    silhouetted against the light; she was bending forward and
+    staring fixedly out of the window, across the driveway.
+    Mentally he calculated the direction of her gaze, then, moved
+    away and followed it with his own eyes; and found himself
+    staring at the fa&#231;ade of a third-rate hotel. Above its
+    roof the gilded letters of a sign, catching the illumination
+    from below, spelled out the title of "H&#244;tel du
+    Commerce."</p>
+
+    <p>Mrs. Hallam was interested in the H&#244;tel du
+    Commerce?</p>
+
+    <p>Thoughtfully Kirkwood fell back to his former point of
+    observation, now the richer by another object of suspicion, the
+    hostelry. Mrs. Hallam was waiting and watching for some one to
+    enter or to leave that establishment. It seemed a reasonable
+    inference to draw. Well, then, so was Kirkwood, no less than
+    the lady; he deemed it quite conceivable that their objects
+    were identical.</p>
+
+    <p>He started to beguile the time by wondering what she would
+    do, if...</p>
+
+    <p>Of a sudden he abandoned this line of speculation, and
+    catching his breath, held it, almost afraid to credit the truth
+    that for once his anticipations were being realized under his
+    very eyes.</p>
+
+    <p>Against the lighted doorway of the H&#244;tel du Commerce,
+    the figures of two men were momentarily sketched, as they came
+    hurriedly forth; and of the two, one was short and stout, and
+    even at a distance seemed to bear himself with an accent of
+    assertiveness, while the other was tall and heavy of
+    shoulder.</p>
+
+    <p>Side by side they marched in step across the embankment to
+    the head of the Quai gangway, descending without pause to the
+    landing-stage. Kirkwood, hanging breathlessly over the
+    guard-rail, could hear their footfalls ringing in hollow rhythm
+    on the planks of the inclined way,&#8212could even discern
+    Calendar's unlovely profile in dim relief beneath one of the
+    waterside lights; and he recognized unmistakably Mulready's
+    deep voice, grumbling inarticulately.</p>
+
+    <p>At the outset he had set after them, with intent to accost
+    Calendar; but their pace had been swift and his irresolute. He
+    hung fire on the issue, dreading to reveal himself, unable to
+    decide which were the better course, to pursue the men, or to
+    wait and discover what Mrs. Hallam was about. In the end he
+    waited; and had his disappointment for recompense.</p>
+
+    <p>For Mrs. Hallam did nothing intelligible. Had she driven
+    over to the hotel, hard upon the departure of the men, he would
+    have believed that she was seeking Dorothy, and would,
+    furthermore, have elected to crowd their interview, if she
+    succeeded in obtaining one with the girl. But she did nothing
+    of the sort. For a time the fiacre remained as it had been ever
+    since stopping; then, evidently admonished by his fare, the
+    driver straightened up, knocked out his pipe, disentangled
+    reins and whip, and wheeled the equipage back on the way it had
+    come, disappearing in a dark side street leading eastward from
+    the embankment.</p>
+
+    <p>Kirkwood was, then, to believe that Mrs. Hallam, having
+    taken all that trouble and having waited for the two
+    adventurers to appear, had been content with sight of them? He
+    could hardly believe that of the woman; it wasn't like her.</p>
+
+    <p>He started across the driveway, after the fiacre, but it was
+    lost in a tangle of side streets before he could make up his
+    mind whether it was worth while chasing or not; and, pondering
+    the woman's singular action, he retraced his steps to the
+    promenade rail.</p>
+
+    <p>Presently he told himself he understood. Dorothy was no
+    longer of her father's party; he had a suspicion that
+    Mulready's attitude had made it seem advisable to Calendar
+    either to leave the girl behind, in England, or to segregate
+    her from his associates in Antwerp. If not lodged in another
+    quarter of the city, or left behind, she was probably traveling
+    on ahead, to a destination which he could by no means guess.
+    And Mrs. Hallam was looking for the girl; if there were really
+    jewels in that gladstone bag, Calendar would naturally have had
+    no hesitation about intrusting them to his daughter's care; and
+    Mrs. Hallam avowedly sought nothing else. How the woman had
+    found out that such was the case, Kirkwood did not stop to
+    reckon; unless he explained it on the proposition that she was
+    a person of remarkable address. It made no matter, one way or
+    the other; he had lost Mrs. Hallam; but Calendar and Mulready
+    he could put his finger on; they had undoubtedly gone off to
+    the <i>Alethea</i> to confer again with Stryker,&#8212that was,
+    unless they proposed sailing on the brigantine, possibly at
+    turn of tide that night.</p>
+
+    <p>Panic gripped his soul and shook it, as a terrier shakes a
+    rat, when he conceived this frightful proposition.</p>
+
+    <p>In his confusion of mind he evolved spontaneously an
+    entirely new hypothesis: Dorothy had already been spirited
+    aboard the vessel; Calendar and his confederate, delaying to
+    join her from enigmatic motives, were now aboard; and presently
+    the word would be, Up-anchor and away!</p>
+
+    <p>Were they again to elude him? Not, he swore, if he had to
+    swim for it. And he had no wish to swim. The clothes he stood
+    in, with what was left of his self-respect, were all that he
+    could call his own on that side of the North Sea. Not a boatman
+    on the Scheldt would so much as consider accepting three
+    English pennies in exchange for boat-hire. In brief, it began
+    to look as if he were either to swim or ... to steal a
+    boat.</p>
+
+    <p>Upon such slender threads of circumstance depends our
+    boasted moral health. In one fleeting minute Kirkwood's
+    conception of the law of <i>meum et tuum</i>, its foundations
+    already insidiously undermined by a series of cumulative
+    misfortunes, toppled crashing to its fall; and was not.</p>
+
+    <p>He was wholly unconscious of the change. Beneath him, in a
+    space between the quays bridged by the gangway, a number of
+    rowboats, a putative score, lay moored for the night and gently
+    rubbing against each other with the soundless lift and fall of
+    the river. For all that Kirkwood could determine to the
+    contrary, the lot lay at the mercy of the public; nowhere about
+    was he able to discern a figure in anything resembling a
+    watchman.</p>
+
+    <p>Without a quiver of hesitation&#8212moments were invaluable, if
+    what he feared were true&#8212he strode to the gangway, passed
+    down, and with absolute nonchalance dropped into the nearest
+    boat, stepping from one to another until he had gained the
+    outermost. To his joy he found a pair of oars stowed beneath
+    the thwarts.</p>
+
+    <p>If he had paused to moralize&#8212which he didn't&#8212upon the
+    discovery, he would have laid it all at the door of his lucky
+    star; and would have been wrong. We who have never stooped to
+    petty larceny know that the oars had been placed there at the
+    direction of his evil genius bent upon facilitating his descent
+    into the avernus of crime. Let us, then, pity the poor young
+    man without condoning his offense.</p>
+
+    <p>Unhitching the painter he set one oar against the gunwale of
+    the next boat, and with a powerful thrust sent his own (let us
+    so call it for convenience) stern-first out upon the river;
+    then sat him composedly down, fitted the oars to their locks,
+    and began to pull straight across-stream, trusting to the
+    current to carry him down to the <i>Alethea</i>. He had already
+    marked down that vessel's riding-light; and that not without a
+    glow of gratitude to see it still aloft and in proper
+    juxtaposition to the river-bank; proof that it had not
+    moved.</p>
+
+    <p>He pulled a good oar, reckoned his distance prettily, and
+    shipping the blades at just the right moment, brought the
+    little boat in under the brigantine's counter with scarce a
+    jar. An element of surprise he held essential to the success of
+    his plan, whatever that might turn out to be.</p>
+
+    <p>Standing up, he caught the brigantine's after-rail with both
+    hands, one of which held the painter of the purloined boat, and
+    lifted his head above the deck line. A short survey of the
+    deserted after-deck gave him further assurance. The
+    anchor-watch was not in sight; he may have been keeping well
+    forward by Stryker's instructions, or he may have crept off for
+    forty winks. Whatever the reason for his absence from the post
+    of duty, Kirkwood was relieved not to have him to deal with;
+    and drawing himself gently in over the rail, made the painter
+    fast, and stepped noiselessly over toward the lighted oblong of
+    the companionway. A murmur of voices from below comforted him
+    with the knowledge that he had not miscalculated, this time; at
+    last he stood within striking distance of his quarry.</p>
+
+    <p>The syllables of his surname ringing clearly in his ears and
+    followed by Stryker's fleeting laugh, brought him to a pause.
+    He flushed hotly in the darkness; the captain was retailing
+    with relish some of his most successful witticisms at
+    Kirkwood's expense.... "You'd ought to've seed the wye'e looked
+    at me!" concluded the <i>raconteur</i> in a gale of mirth.</p>
+
+    <p>Mulready laughed with him, if a little uncertainly.
+    Calendar's chuckle was not audible, but he broke the pause that
+    followed.</p>
+
+    <p>"I don't know," he said with doubting emphasis. "You say you
+    landed him without a penny in his pocket? I don't call that a
+    good plan at all. Of course, he ain't a factor, but ... Well,
+    it might've been as well to give him his fare home. He might
+    make trouble for us, somehow.... I don't mind telling you,
+    Cap'n, that you're an ass."</p>
+
+    <p>The tensity of certain situations numbs the sensibilities.
+    Kirkwood had never in his weirdest dreams thought of himself as
+    an eavesdropper; he did not think of himself as such in the
+    present instance; he merely listened, edging nearer the
+    skylight, of which the wings were slightly raised, and keeping
+    as far as possible in shadow.</p>
+
+    <p>"Ow, I sye!" the captain was remonstrating, aggrieved. "'Ow
+    was I to know 'e didn't 'ave it in for you? First off, when 'e
+    comes on board (I'll sye this for 'im, 'e's as plucky as they
+    myke 'em), I thought 'e was from the Yard. Then, when I see wot
+    a bally hinnocent 'e was, I mykes up my mind 'e's just some one
+    you've been ply in' one of your little gymes on, and 'oo was
+    lookin' to square 'is account. So I did 'im proper."</p>
+
+    <p>"Evidently," assented Calendar dryly. "You're a bit of a
+    heavy-handed brute, Stryker. Personally I'm kind of sorry for
+    the boy; he wasn't a bad sort, as his kind runs, and he was no
+    fool, from what little I saw of him.... I wonder what he
+    wanted."</p>
+
+    <p>"Possibly," Mulready chimed in suavely, "you can explain
+    what you wanted of him, in the first place. How did you come to
+    drag him into <i>this</i> business?"</p>
+
+    <p>"Oh, that!" Calendar laughed shortly. "That was partly
+    accident, partly inspiration. I happened to see his name on the
+    Pless register; he'd put himself down as from 'Frisco. I
+    figured it out that he would be next door to broke and getting
+    desperate, ready to do anything to get home; and thought we
+    might utilize him; to smuggle some of the stuff into the
+    States. Once before, if you'll remember&#8212no; that was before we
+    got together, Mulready&#8212I picked up a fellow-countryman on the
+    Strand. He was down and out, jumped at the job, and we made a
+    neat little wad on it."</p>
+
+    <p>"The more fool you, to take outsiders into your confidence,"
+    grumbled Mulready.</p>
+
+    <p>"Ow?" interrogated Calendar, mimicking Stryker's accent
+    inimitably. "Well, you've got a heap to learn about this game,
+    Mul; about the first thing is that you must trust Old Man
+    Know-it-all, which is me. I've run more diamonds into the
+    States, in one way or another, in my time, than you ever
+    pinched out of the shirt-front of a toff on the Empire Prom.,
+    before they made the graft too hot for you and you came to take
+    lessons from me in the gentle art of living easy."</p>
+
+    <p>"Oh, cut that, cawn't you?"</p>
+
+    <p>"Delighted, dear boy.... One of the first principles, next
+    to profiting by the admirable example I set you, is to make the
+    fellows in your own line trust you. Now, if this boy had taken
+    on with me, I could have got a bunch of the sparklers on my
+    mere say-so, from old Morganthau up on Finsbury Pavement. He
+    does a steady business hoodwinking the Customs for the benefit
+    of his American clients&#8212and himself. And I'd've made a neat
+    little profit besides: something to fall back on, if this fell
+    through. I don't mind having two strings to my bow."</p>
+
+    <p>"Yes," argued Mulready; "but suppose this Kirkwood had taken
+    on with you and then peached?"</p>
+
+    <p>"That's another secret; you've got to know your man, be able
+    to size him up. I called on this chap for that very purpose;
+    but I saw at a glance he wasn't our man. He smelt a nigger in
+    the woodpile and most politely told me to go to the devil. But
+    if he <i>had</i> come in, he'd've died before he squealed. I
+    know the breed; there's honor among gentlemen that knocks the
+    honor of thieves higher'n a kite, the old saw to the
+    contrary&#8212nothing doing.... You understand me, I'm sure,
+    Mulready?" he concluded with envenomed sweetness.</p>
+
+    <p>"I don't see yet how Kirkwood got anything to do with
+    Dorothy."</p>
+
+    <p>"Miss Calendar to you, <i>Mister</i> Mulready!" snapped
+    Calendar. "There, there, now! Don't get excited.... It was when
+    the Hallam passed me word that a man from the Yard was waiting
+    on the altar steps for me, that Kirkwood came in. He was dining
+    close by; I went over and worked on his feelings until he
+    agreed to take Dorothy off my hands. If I had attempted to
+    leave the place with her, they'd've spotted me for sure.... My
+    compliments to you, Dick Mulready."</p>
+
+    <p>There came the noise of chair legs scraped harshly on the
+    cabin deck. Apparently Mulready had leaped to his feet in a
+    rage.</p>
+
+    <p>"I've told you&#8212" he began in a voice thick with
+    passion.</p>
+
+    <p>"Oh, sit down!" Calendar cut in contemptuously. "Sit down,
+    d'you hear? That's all over and done with. We understand each
+    other now, and you won't try any more monkey-shines. It's a
+    square deal and a square divide, so far's I'm concerned; if we
+    stick together there'll be profit enough for all concerned. Sit
+    down, Mul, and have another slug of the captain's bum rum."</p>
+
+    <p>Although Mulready consented to be pacified, Kirkwood got the
+    impression that the man was far gone in drink. A moment later
+    he heard him growl "Chin-chin!" antiphonal to the captain's
+    "Cheer-o!"</p>
+
+    <p>"Now, then," Calendar proposed, "Mr. Kirkwood aside&#8212peace
+    be with him!&#8212let's get down to cases."</p>
+
+    <p>"Wot's the row?" asked the captain.</p>
+
+    <p>"The row, Cap'n, is the Hallam female, who has unexpectedly
+    shown up in Antwerp, we have reason to believe with malicious
+    intent and a private detective to add to the gaiety of
+    nations."</p>
+
+    <p>"Wot's the odds? She carn't 'urt us without lyin' up trouble
+    for 'erself."</p>
+
+    <p>"Damn little consolation to us when we're working it out in
+    Dartmoor."</p>
+
+    <p>"Speak for yourself," grunted Mulready surlily.</p>
+
+    <p>"I do," returned Calendar easily; "we're both in the shadow
+    of Dartmoor, Mul, my boy; since you choose to take the
+    reference as personal. Sing Sing, however, yawns for me alone;
+    it's going to keep on yawning, too, unless I miss my guess. I
+    love my native land most to death, <i>but</i> ..."</p>
+
+    <p>"Ow, blow that!" interrupted the captain irritably. "Let's
+    'ear about the 'Allam. Wot're you afryd of?"</p>
+
+    <p>"'Fraid she'll set up a yell when she finds out we're
+    planting the loot, Cap'n. She's just that vindictive; you'd
+    think she'd be satisfied with her end of the stick, but you
+    don't know the Hallam. That milk-and-water offspring of hers is
+    the apple of her eye, and Freddie's going to collar the whole
+    shooting-match or madam will kick over the traces."</p>
+
+    <p>"Well?"</p>
+
+    <p>"Well, she's queered us here. We can't do anything if my
+    lady is going to camp on our trail and tell everybody we're
+    shady customers, can we? The question now before the board is:
+    Where now,&#8212and how?"</p>
+
+    <p>"Amsterdam," Mulready chimed in. "I told you that in the
+    beginning."</p>
+
+    <p>"But how?" argued Calendar. "The Lord knows I'm willing but
+    ... we can't go by rail, thanks to the Hallam. We've got to
+    lose her first of all."</p>
+
+    <p>"But wot I'm arskin' is, wot's the matter with&#8212"</p>
+
+    <p>"The <i>Alethea</i>, Cap'n? Nothing, so far as Dick and I
+    are concerned. But my dutiful daughter is prejudiced; she's
+    been so long without proper paternal discipline," Calendar
+    laughed, "that she's rather high-spirited. Of course I might
+    overcome her objections, but the girl's no fool, and every
+    ounce of pressure I bring to bear just now only helps make her
+    more restless and suspicious."</p>
+
+    <p>"You leave her to me," Mulready interposed, with a brutal
+    laugh. "I'll guarantee to get her aboard, or..."</p>
+
+    <p>"Drop it, Dick!" Calendar advised quietly. "And go a bit
+    easy with that bottle for five minutes, can't you?"</p>
+
+    <p>"Well, then," Stryker resumed, apparently concurring in
+    Calendar's attitude, "w'y don't one of you tyke the stuff, go
+    off quiet and dispose of it to a proper fence, and come back to
+    divide. I don't see w'y that&#8212"</p>
+
+    <p>"Naturally you wouldn't," chuckled Calendar. "Few people
+    besides the two of us understand the depth of affection
+    existing between Dick, here, and me. We just can't bear to get
+    out of sight of each other. We're sure inseparable&#8212since night
+    before last. Odd, isn't it?"</p>
+
+    <p>"You drop it!" snarled Mulready, in accents so ugly that the
+    listener was startled. "Enough's enough and&#8212"</p>
+
+    <p>"There, there, Dick! All right; I'll behave," Calendar
+    soothed him. "We'll forget and say no more about it."</p>
+
+    <p>"Well, see you don't."</p>
+
+    <p>"But 'as either of you a plan?" persisted Stryker.</p>
+
+    <p>"I have," replied Mulready; "and it's the simplest and best,
+    if you could only make this long-lost parent here see it."</p>
+
+    <p>"Wot is it?"</p>
+
+    <p>Mulready seemed to ignore Calendar and address himself to
+    the captain. He articulated with some difficulty, slurring his
+    words to the point of indistinctness at times.</p>
+
+    <p>"Simple enough," he propounded solemnly. "We've got the
+    gladstone bag here; Miss Dolly's at the hotel&#8212that's her
+    papa's bright notion; he thinks she's to be trusted ... Now
+    then, what's the matter with weighing anchor and slipping
+    quietly out to sea?"</p>
+
+    <p>"Leavin' the dootiful darter?"</p>
+
+    <p>"Cert'n'y. She's only a drag any way. 'Better off without
+    her.... Then we can wait our time and get highest market
+    prices&#8212"</p>
+
+    <p>"You forget, Dick," Calendar put it, "that there's a
+    thousand in it for each of us if she's kept out of England for
+    six weeks. A thousand's five thousand in the land I hail from;
+    I can use five thousand in my business."</p>
+
+    <p>"Why can't you be content with what you've got?" demanded
+    Mulready wrathfully.</p>
+
+    <p>"Because I'm a seventh son of a seventh son; I can see an
+    inch or two beyond my nose. If Dorothy ever finds her way back
+    to England she'll spoil one of the finest fields of legitimate
+    graft I ever licked my lips to look at. The trouble with you,
+    Mul, is you're too high-toned. You want to play the swell
+    mobs-man from post to finish. A quick touch and a clean getaway
+    for yours. Now, that's all right; that has its good points, but
+    you don't want to underestimate the advantages of a good
+    blackmailing connection.... If I can keep Dorothy quiet long
+    enough, I look to the Hallam and precious Freddie to be a great
+    comfort to me in my old age."</p>
+
+    <p>"Then, for God's sake," cried Mulready, "go to the hotel,
+    get your brat by the scruif of her pretty neck and drag her
+    aboard. Let's get out of this."</p>
+
+    <p>"I won't," returned Calendar inflexibly.</p>
+
+    <p>The dispute continued, but the listener had heard enough. He
+    had to get away and think, could no longer listen; indeed, the
+    voices of the three blackguards below came but indistinctly to
+    his ears, as if from a distance. He was sick at heart and
+    ablaze with indignation by turns. Unconsciously he was
+    trembling violently in every limb; swept by alternate waves of
+    heat and cold, feverish one minute, shivering the next. All of
+    which phenomena were due solely to the rage that welled inside
+    his heart.</p>
+
+    <p>Stealthily he crept away to the rail, to stand grasping it
+    and staring across the water with unseeing eyes at the gay old
+    city twinkling back with her thousand eyes of light. The cool
+    night breeze, sweeping down unhindered over the level
+    Netherlands from the bleak North Sea, was comforting to his
+    throbbing temples. By degrees his head cleared, his rioting
+    pulses subsided, he could think; and he did.</p>
+
+    <p>Over there, across the water, in the dingy and disreputable
+    H&#244;tel du Commerce, Dorothy waited in her room, doubtless
+    the prey of unnumbered nameless terrors, while aboard the
+    brigantine her fate was being decided by a council of three
+    unspeakable scoundrels, one of whom, professing himself her
+    father, openly declared his intention of using her to further
+    his selfish and criminal ends.</p>
+
+    <p>His first and natural thought, to steal away to her and
+    induce her to accompany him back to England, Kirkwood perforce
+    discarded. He could have wept over the realization of his
+    unqualified impotency. He had no money,&#8212not even cab-fare from
+    the hotel to the railway station. Something subtler, more
+    crafty, had to be contrived to meet the emergency. And there
+    was one way, one only; he could see none other. Temporarily he
+    must make himself one of the company of her enemies, force
+    himself upon them, ingratiate himself into their good graces,
+    gain their confidence, then, when opportunity offered, betray
+    them. And the power to make them tolerate him, if not receive
+    him as a fellow, the knowledge of them and their plans that
+    they had unwittingly given him, was his.</p>
+
+    <p>And Dorothy, was waiting....</p>
+
+    <p>He swung round and without attempting to muffle his
+    footfalls strode toward the companionway. He must pretend he
+    had just come aboard.</p>
+
+    <p>Subconsciously he had been aware, during his time of
+    pondering, that the voices in the cabin had been steadily
+    gaining in volume, rising louder and yet more loud, Mulready's
+    ominous, drink-blurred accents dominating the others. There was
+    a quarrel afoot; as soon as he gave it heed, Kirkwood
+    understood that Mulready, in the madness of his inflamed brain,
+    was forcing the issue while Calendar sought vainly to calm and
+    soothe him.</p>
+
+    <p>The American arrived at the head of the companionway at a
+    critical juncture. As he moved to descend some low, cool-toned
+    retort of Calendar's seemed to enrage his confederate beyond
+    reason. He yelped aloud with wrath, sprang to his feet,
+    knocking over a chair, and leaping back toward the foot of the
+    steps, flashed an adroit hand behind him and found his
+    revolver.</p>
+
+    <p>"I've stood enough from you!" he screamed, his voice oddly
+    clear in that moment of insanity. "You've played with me as
+    long as you will, you hulking American hog! And now I'm going
+    to show&#8212"</p>
+
+    <p>As he held his fire to permit his denunciation to bite home,
+    Kirkwood, appalled to find himself standing on the threshold of
+    a tragedy, gathered himself together and launched through the
+    air, straight for the madman's shoulders.</p>
+
+    <p>As they went down together, sprawling, Mulready's head
+    struck against a transom and the revolver fell from his limp
+    fingers.</p>
+
+    <center>
+        <h2><a name="XIV">XIV</a></h2>
+
+        <h3>STRATAGEMS AND SPOILS</h3>
+    </center>
+
+    <p>Prepared as he had been for the shock, Kirkwood was able to
+    pick himself up quickly, uninjured, Mulready's revolver in his
+    grasp.</p>
+
+    <p>On his feet, straddling Mulready's insentient body, he
+    confronted Calendar and Stryker. The face of the latter was a
+    sickly green, the gift of his fright. The former seemed coldly
+    composed, already recovering from his surprise and bringing his
+    wits to bear upon the new factor which had been so
+    unceremoniously injected into the situation.</p>
+
+    <p><img src="illp285s.jpg"
+         width="600"
+         height="716"
+         border="0"
+         alt=
+         "Straddling Mulready's body, he confronted Calendar and Stryker.">
+    </p>
+
+    <p>Standing, but leaning heavily upon a hand that rested flat
+    on the table, in the other he likewise held a revolver, which
+    he had apparently drawn in self-defense, at the crisis of
+    Mulready's frenzy. Its muzzle was deflected. He looked Kirkwood
+    over with a cool gray eye, the color gradually returning to his
+    fat, clean-shaven cheeks, replacing the pardonable pallor which
+    had momentarily rested thereon.</p>
+
+    <p>As for Kirkwood, he had covered the fat adventurer before he
+    knew it. Stryker, who had been standing immediately in the rear
+    of Calendar, immediately cowered and cringed to find himself in
+    the line of fire.</p>
+
+    <p>Of the three conscious men in the brigantine's cabin,
+    Calendar was probably the least confused or excited. Stryker
+    was palpably unmanned. Kirkwood was tingling with a sense of
+    mastery, but collected and rapidly revolving the combinations
+    for the reversed conditions which had been brought about by
+    Mulready's drunken folly. His elation was apparent in his
+    shining, boyish eyes, as well as in the bright color that
+    glowed in his cheeks. When he decided to speak it was with
+    rapid enunciation, but clearly and concisely.</p>
+
+    <p>"Calendar," he began, "if a single shot is fired about this
+    vessel the river police will be buzzing round your ears in a
+    brace of shakes."</p>
+
+    <p>The fat adventurer nodded assent, his eyes contracting.</p>
+
+    <p>"Very well!" continued Kirkwood brusquely. "You must know
+    that I have personally nothing to fear from the police; if
+    arrested, I wouldn't be detained a day. On the other hand, you
+    ... Hand me that pistol, Calendar, butt first, please. Look
+    sharp, my man! If you don't..."</p>
+
+    <p>He left the ellipsis to be filled in by the corpulent
+    blackguard's intelligence. The latter, gray eyes still intent
+    on the younger man's face, wavered, plainly impressed, but
+    still wondering.</p>
+
+    <p>"Quick! I'm not patient to-night..."</p>
+
+    <p>No longer was Calendar of two minds. In the face of
+    Kirkwood's attitude there was but one course to be followed:
+    that of obedience. Calendar surrendered an untenable position
+    as gracefully as could be wished.</p>
+
+    <p>"I guess you know what you mean by this," he said, tendering
+    the weapon as per instructions; "I'm doggoned if I do....
+    You'll allow a certain latitude in consideration of my relief;
+    I can't say we were anticipating this&#8212ah&#8212Heaven-sent
+    visitation."</p>
+
+    <p>Accepting the revolver with his left hand and settling his
+    forefinger on the trigger, Kirkwood beamed with pure enjoyment.
+    He found the deference of the older man, tempered though it was
+    by his indomitable swagger, refreshing in the extreme.</p>
+
+    <p>"A little appreciation isn't exactly out of place, come to
+    think of it," he commented, adding, with an eye for the
+    captain: "Stryker, you bold, bad butterfly, have you got a gun
+    concealed about your unclean person?"</p>
+
+    <p>The captain shook visibly with contrition. "No, Mr.
+    Kirkwood," he managed to reply in a voice singularly lacking in
+    his wonted bluster.</p>
+
+    <p>"Say 'sir'!" suggested Kirkwood.</p>
+
+    <p>"No, Mr. Kirkwood, sir," amended Stryker eagerly.</p>
+
+    <p>"Now come round here and let's have a look at you. Please
+    stay where you are, Calendar.... Why, Captain, you're shivering
+    from head to foot! Not ill are you, you wag? Step over to the
+    table there, Stryker, and turn out your pockets; turn 'em
+    inside out and let's see what you carry in the way of offensive
+    artillery. And, Stryker, don't be rash; don't do anything you'd
+    be sorry for afterwards."</p>
+
+    <p>"No fear of that," mumbled the captain, meekly shambling
+    toward the table, and, in his anxiety to give no cause for
+    unpleasantness, beginning to empty his pockets on the way.</p>
+
+    <p>"Don't forget the 'sir,' Stryker. And, Stryker, if you
+    happen to think of anything in the line of one of your merry
+    quips or jests, don't strain yourself holding in; get it right
+    off your chest, and you'll feel better."</p>
+
+    <p>Kirkwood chuckled, in high conceit with himself, watching
+    Calendar out of the corner of his eye, but with his attention
+    centered on the infinitely diverting spectacle afforded by
+    Stryker, whose predacious hands were trembling violently as,
+    one by one, they brought to light the articles of which he had
+    despoiled his erstwhile victim.</p>
+
+    <p>"Come, come, Stryker! Surely you can think of something
+    witty, surely you haven't exhausted the possibilities of that
+    almanac joke! Couldn't you ring another variation on the
+    lunatic wheeze? Don't hesitate out of consideration for me,
+    Captain; I'm joke proof&#8212perhaps you've noticed?"</p>
+
+    <p>Stryker turned upon him an expression at once ludicrous,
+    piteous and hateful. "That's all, sir," he snarled, displaying
+    his empty palms in token of his absolute tractability.</p>
+
+    <p>"Good enough. Now right about face&#8212quick! Your back's
+    prettier than your face, and besides, I want to know whether
+    your hip-pockets are empty. I've heard it's the habit of you
+    gentry to pack guns in your clothes.... None? That's all right,
+    then. Now roost on the transom, over there in the corner,
+    Stryker, and don't move. Don't let me hear a word from you.
+    Understand?"</p>
+
+    <p>Submissively the captain retired to the indicated spot.
+    Kirkwood turned to Calendar; of whose attitude, however, he had
+    not been for an instant unmindful.</p>
+
+    <p>"Won't you sit down, Mr. Calendar?" he suggested pleasantly.
+    "Forgive me for keeping you waiting."</p>
+
+    <p>For his own part, as the adventurer dropped passively into
+    his chair, Kirkwood stepped over Mulready and advanced to the
+    middle of the cabin, at the same time thrusting Calendar's
+    revolver into his own coat pocket. The other, Mulready's, he
+    nursed significantly with both hands, while he stood
+    temporarily quiet, surveying the fleshy face of the prime
+    factor in the intrigue.</p>
+
+    <p>A quaint, grim smile played about the American's lips, a
+    smile a little contemptuous, more than a little inscrutable. In
+    its light Calendar grew restive and lost something of his
+    assurance. His feet shifted uneasily beneath the table and his
+    dark eyes wavered, evading Kirkwood's. At length he seemed to
+    find the suspense unendurable.</p>
+
+    <p>"Well?" he demanded testily. "What d'you want of me?"</p>
+
+    <p>"I was just wondering at you, Calendar. In the last few days
+    you've given me enough cause to wonder, as you'll admit."</p>
+
+    <p>The adventurer plucked up spirit, deluded by Kirkwood's
+    pacific tone. "I wonder at you, Mr. Kirkwood," he retorted. "It
+    was good of you to save my life and&#8212"</p>
+
+    <p>"I'm not so sure of that! Perhaps it had been more
+    humane&#8212"</p>
+
+    <p>Calendar owned the touch with a wry grimace. "But I'm damned
+    if I understand this high-handed attitude of yours!" he
+    concluded heatedly.</p>
+
+    <p>"Don't you?" Kirkwood's humor became less apparent, the
+    smile sobering. "You will," he told the man, adding abruptly:
+    "Calendar, where's your daughter?"</p>
+
+    <p>The restless eyes sought the companionway.</p>
+
+    <p>"Dorothy," the man lied spontaneously, without a tremor, "is
+    with friends in England. Why? Did you want to see her?"</p>
+
+    <p>"I rather expected to."</p>
+
+    <p>"Well, I thought it best to leave her home, after all."</p>
+
+    <p>"I'm glad to hear she's in safe hands," commented
+    Kirkwood.</p>
+
+    <p>The adventurer's glance analyzed his face. "Ah," he said
+    slowly, "I see. You followed me on Dorothy's account, Mr.
+    Kirkwood?"</p>
+
+    <p>"Partly; partly on my own. Let me put it to you fairly. When
+    you forced yourself upon me, back there in London, you offered
+    me some sort of employment; when I rejected it, you used me to
+    your advantage for the furtherance of your purposes (which I
+    confess I don't understand), and made me miss my steamer.
+    Naturally, when I found myself penniless and friendless in a
+    strange country, I thought again of your offer; and tried to
+    find you, to accept it."</p>
+
+    <p>"Despite the fact that you're an honest man, Kirkwood?" The
+    fat lips twitched with premature enjoyment.</p>
+
+    <p>"I'm a desperate man to-night, whatever I may have been
+    yesterday." The young man's tone was both earnest and
+    convincing. "I think I've shown that by my pertinacity in
+    hunting you down."</p>
+
+    <p>"Well&#8212yes." Calendar's thick fingers caressed his lips,
+    trying to hide the dawning smile.</p>
+
+    <p>"Is that offer still open?"</p>
+
+    <p>His nonchalance completely restored by the very
+    na&#239;vet&#233; of the proposition, Calendar laughed openly
+    and with a trace of irony. The episode seemed to be turning out
+    better than he had anticipated. Gently his mottled fat fingers
+    played about his mouth and chins as he looked Kirkwood up and
+    down.</p>
+
+    <p>"I'm sorry," he replied, "that it isn't&#8212now. You're too
+    late, Kirkwood; I've made other arrangements."</p>
+
+    <p>"Too bad." Kirkwood's eyes narrowed. "You force me to
+    harsher measures, Calendar."</p>
+
+    <p>Genuinely diverted, the adventurer laughed a second time,
+    tipping back in his chair, his huge frame shaking with
+    ponderous enjoyment. "Don't do anything you'd be sorry for," he
+    parroted, sarcastical, the young man's recent admonition to the
+    captain.</p>
+
+    <p>"No fear, Calendar. I'm just going to use my advantage,
+    which you won't dispute,"&#8212the pistol described an eloquent
+    circle, gleaming in the lamplight&#8212"to levy on you a little
+    legitimate blackmail. Don't be alarmed; I shan't hit you any
+    harder than I have to."</p>
+
+    <p>"What?" stammered Calendar, astonished. "What in hell
+    <i>are</i> you driving at?"</p>
+
+    <p>"Recompense for my time and trouble. You've cost me a pretty
+    penny, first and last, with your nasty little
+    conspiracy&#8212whatever it's all about. Now, needing the money, I
+    purpose getting some of it back. I shan't precisely rob you,
+    but this is a hold-up, all right.... Stryker," reproachfully,
+    "I don't see my pearl pin."</p>
+
+    <p>"I got it 'ere," responded the sailor hastily, fumbling with
+    his tie.</p>
+
+    <p>"Give it me, then." Kirkwood held out his hand and received
+    the trinket. Then, moving over to the table, the young man,
+    while abating nothing of his watchfulness, sorted out his
+    belongings from the mass of odds and ends Stryker had
+    disgorged. The tale of them was complete; the captain had
+    obeyed him faithfully. Kirkwood looked up, pleased.</p>
+
+    <p>"Now see here, Calendar; this collection of truck that I was
+    robbed of by this resurrected Joe Miller here, cost me upwards
+    of a hundred and fifty. I'm going to sell it to you at a
+    bargain&#8212say fifty dollars, two hundred and fifty francs."</p>
+
+    <p>"The juice you are!" Calendar's eyes opened wide, partly in
+    admiration. "D'you realize that this is next door to highway
+    robbery, my young friend?"</p>
+
+    <p>"High-seas piracy, if you prefer," assented Kirkwood with
+    entire equanimity. "I'm going to have the money, and you're
+    going to give it up. The transaction by any name would smell no
+    sweeter, Calendar. Come&#8212fork over!"</p>
+
+    <p>"And if I refuse?"</p>
+
+    <p>"I wouldn't refuse, if I were you."</p>
+
+    <p>"Why not?"</p>
+
+    <p>"The consequences would be too painful."</p>
+
+    <p>"You mean you'd puncture me with that gun?"</p>
+
+    <p>"Not unless you attack or attempt to follow me. I mean to
+    say that the Belgian police are notoriously a most efficient
+    body, and that I'll make it my duty and pleasure to introduce
+    'em to you, if you refuse. But you won't," Kirkwood added
+    soothingly, "will you, Calendar?"</p>
+
+    <p>"No." The adventurer had become suddenly thoughtful. "No, I
+    won't. 'Glad to oblige you."</p>
+
+    <p>He tilted his chair still farther back, straightening out
+    his elephantine legs, inserted one fat hand into his trouser
+    pocket and with some difficulty extracted a combined bill-fold
+    and coin-purse, at once heavy with gold and bulky with notes.
+    Moistening thumb and forefinger, "How'll you have it?" he
+    inquired with a lift of his cunning eyes; and when Kirkwood had
+    advised him, slowly counted out four fifty-franc notes, placed
+    them near the edge of the table, and weighted them with five
+    ten-franc pieces. And, "'That all?" he asked, replacing the
+    pocket-book.</p>
+
+    <p>"That will be about all. I leave you presently to your
+    unholy devices, you and that gay dog, over there." The captain
+    squirmed, reddening. "Just by way of precaution, however, I'll
+    ask you to wait in here till I'm off." Kirkwood stepped
+    backwards to the door of the captain's room, opened it and
+    removed the key from the inside. "Please take Mulready in with
+    you," he continued. "By the time you get out, I'll be clear of
+    Antwerp. Please don't think of refusing me,&#8212I really mean
+    it!"</p>
+
+    <p>The latter clause came sharply as Calendar seemed to
+    hesitate, his weary, wary eyes glimmering with doubt. Kirkwood,
+    watching him as a cat her prey, intercepted a lightning-swift
+    sidelong glance that shifted from his face to the port lockers,
+    forward. But the fat adventurer was evidently to a considerable
+    degree deluded by the very child-like simplicity of Kirkwood's
+    attitude. If the possibility that his altercation with Mulready
+    had been overheard, crossed his mind, Calendar had little
+    choice other than to accept the chance. Either way he moved,
+    the risk was great; if he refused to be locked in the captain's
+    room, there was the danger of the police, to which Kirkwood had
+    convincingly drawn attention; if he accepted the temporary
+    imprisonment, he took a risk with the gladstone bag. On the
+    other hand, he had estimated Kirkwood's honesty as
+    thorough-going, from their first interview; he had appraised
+    him as a gentleman and a man of honor. And he did not believe
+    the young man knew, after all ... Perplexed, at length he chose
+    the smoother way, and with an indulgent lifting of eyebrows and
+    fat shoulders, rose and waddled over to Mulready.</p>
+
+    <p>"Oh, all right," he conceded with deep toleration in his
+    tone for the idiosyncrasies of youth. "It's all the same to me,
+    beau." He laughed a nervous laugh. "Come along and lend us a
+    hand, Stryker."</p>
+
+    <p>The latter glanced timidly at Kirkwood, his eyes pleading
+    for leave to move; which Kirkwood accorded with an imperative
+    nod and a fine flourish of the revolver. Promptly the captain,
+    sprang to Calendar's assistance; and between the two of them,
+    the one taking Mulready's head, the other his feet, they lugged
+    him quickly into the stuffy little state-room. Kirkwood,
+    watching and following to the threshold, inserted the key.</p>
+
+    <p>"One word more," he counseled, a hand on the knob. "Don't
+    forget I've warned you what'll happen if you try to break even
+    with me."</p>
+
+    <p>"Never fear, little one!" Calendar's laugh was nervously
+    cheerful. "The Lord knows you're welcome."</p>
+
+    <p>"Thank you 'most to death," responded Kirkwood politely.
+    "Good-by&#8212and good-by to you, Stryker. 'Glad to have humored
+    your desire to meet me soon again."</p>
+
+    <p>Kirkwood, turning the key in the lock, withdrew it and
+    dropped it on the cabin table; at the same time he swept into
+    his pocket the money he had extorted of Calendar. Then he
+    paused an instant, listening; from the captain's room came a
+    sound of murmurs and scuffling. He debated what they were about
+    in there&#8212but time pressed. Not improbably they, were crowding
+    for place at the keyhole, he reflected, as he crossed to the
+    port locker forward.</p>
+
+    <p>He had its lid up in a twinkling, and in another had lifted
+    out the well-remembered black gladstone bag.</p>
+
+    <p>This seems to have been his first compound larceny.</p>
+
+    <p>As if stimulated by some such reflection he sprang for the
+    companionway, dropping the lid of the locker with a bang which
+    must have been excruciatingly edifying to the men in the
+    captain's room. Whatever their emotions, the bang was mocked by
+    a mighty kick, shaking the door; which, Kirkwood reflected,
+    opened outward and was held only by the frailest kind of a
+    lock: it would not hold long.</p>
+
+    <p>Spurred onward by a storm of curses, Stryker's voice
+    chanting infuriated cacophony with Calendar's, Kirkwood leapt
+    up the companionway even as the second tremendous kick
+    threatened to shatter the panels. Heart in mouth, a chill
+    shiver of guilt running up and down his spine, he gained the
+    deck, cast loose the painter, drew in his rowboat, and dropped
+    over the side; then, the gladstone bag nestling between his
+    feet, sat down and bent to the oars.</p>
+
+    <p>And doubts assailed him, pressing close upon the ebb of his
+    excitement&#8212doubts and fears innumerable.</p>
+
+    <p>There was no longer a distinction to be drawn between
+    himself and Calendar; no more could he esteem himself a better
+    and more honest man than that accomplished swindler. He was not
+    advised as to the Belgian code, but English law, he understood,
+    made no allowance for the good intent of those caught in
+    possession of stolen property; though he was acting with the
+    most honorable motives in the world, the law, if he came within
+    its cognizance, would undoubtedly place him on Calendar's plane
+    and judge him by the same standard. To all intents and purposes
+    he was a thief, and thief he would remain until the gladstone
+    bag with its contents should be restored to its rightful
+    owner.</p>
+
+    <p>Voluntarily, then, he had stepped from the ranks of the
+    hunters to those of the hunted. He now feared police
+    interference as abjectly as did Calendar and his set of rogues;
+    and Kirkwood felt wholly warranted in assuming that the
+    adventurer, with his keen intelligence, would not handicap
+    himself by ignoring this point. Indeed, if he were to be judged
+    by what Kirkwood had inferred of his character, Calendar would
+    let nothing whatever hinder him, neither fear of bodily hurt
+    nor danger of apprehension at the hands of the police, from
+    making a determined and savage play to regain possession of his
+    booty.</p>
+
+    <p>Well! (Kirkwood set his mouth savagely) Calendar should have
+    a run for his money!</p>
+
+    <p>For the present he could compliment himself with the
+    knowledge that he had outwitted the rogues, had lifted the
+    jewels and probably two-thirds of their armament; he had also
+    the start, the knowledge of their criminal guilt and intent,
+    and his own plans, to comfort him. As for the latter, he did
+    not believe that Calendar would immediately fathom them; so he
+    took heart of grace and tugged at the oars with a will, pulling
+    directly for the city and permitting the current to drift him
+    down-stream at its pleasure. There could be no more inexcusable
+    folly than to return to the <i>Quai Steen</i> landing and
+    (possibly) the arms of the despoiled boat-owner.</p>
+
+    <p>At first he could hear crash after splintering crash
+    sounding dully muffled from the cabin of the <i>Alethea</i>: a
+    veritable devil's tattoo beaten out by the feet of the
+    prisoners. Evidently the fastening was serving him better than
+    he had dared hope. But as the black rushing waters widened
+    between boat and brigantine, the clamor aboard the latter
+    subsided, indicating that Calendar and Stryker had broken out
+    or been released by the crew. In ignorance as to whether he
+    were seen or being pursued, Kirkwood pulled on, winning in
+    under the shadow of the quais and permitting the boat to drift
+    down to a lonely landing on the edge of the dockyard quarter of
+    Antwerp.</p>
+
+    <p>Here alighting, he made the boat fast and, soothing his
+    conscience with a surmise that its owner would find it there in
+    the morning, strode swiftly over to the train line that runs
+    along the embankment, swung aboard an adventitious car and
+    broke his first ten-franc piece in order to pay his fare.</p>
+
+    <p>The car made a leisurely progress up past the old Steen
+    castle and the Quai landing, Kirkwood sitting quietly, the
+    gladstone bag under his hand, a searching gaze sweeping the
+    waterside. No sign of the adventurers rewarded him, but it was
+    now all chance, all hazard. He had no more heart for
+    confidence.</p>
+
+    <p>They passed the H&#244;tel du Commerce. Kirkwood stared up
+    at its windows, wondering....</p>
+
+    <p>A little farther on, a disengaged fiacre, its driver alert
+    for possible fares, turned a corner into the esplanade. At
+    sight of it Kirkwood, inspired, hopped nimbly off the tram-car
+    and signaled the cabby. The latter pulled up and Kirkwood
+    started to charge him with instructions; something which he did
+    haltingly, hampered by a slight haziness of purpose. While thus
+    engaged, and at rest in the stark glare of the street-lamps,
+    with no chance of concealing himself, he was aware of a rising
+    tumult in the direction of the landing, and glancing round,
+    discovered a number of people running toward him. With no time
+    to wonder whether or no he was really the object of the
+    hue-and-cry, he tossed the driver three silver francs.</p>
+
+    <p>"Gare Centrale!" he cried. "And drive like the devil!"</p>
+
+    <p>Diving into the fiacre he shut the door and stuck his head
+    out of the window, taking observations. A ragged fringe of
+    silly rabble was bearing down upon them, with one or two
+    gendarmes in the forefront, and a giant, who might or might not
+    be Stryker, a close second. Furthermore, another cab seemed to
+    have been requisitioned for the chase. His heart misgave him
+    momentarily; but his driver had taken him at his word and
+    generosity, and in a breath the fiacre had turned the corner on
+    two wheels, and the glittering reaches of the embankment, drive
+    and promenade, were blotted out, as if smudged with lamp-black,
+    by the obscurity of a narrow and tortuous side street.</p>
+
+    <p>He drew in his head the better to preserve his brains
+    against further emergencies.</p>
+
+    <p>After a block or two Kirkwood picked up the gladstone bag,
+    gently opened the door, and put a foot on the step, pausing to
+    look back. The other cab was pelting after him with all the
+    enthusiasm of a hound on a fresh trail. He reflected that this
+    mad progress through the thoroughfares of a civilized city
+    would not long endure without police intervention. So he
+    waited, watching his opportunity. The fiacre hurtled onward,
+    the driver leaning forward from his box to urge the horse with
+    lash of whip and tongue, entirely unconscious of his fare's
+    intentions.</p>
+
+    <p>Between two streets the mouth of a narrow and darksome byway
+    flashed into view. Kirkwood threw wide the door, and leaped,
+    trusting to the night to hide his stratagem, to luck to save
+    his limbs. Neither failed him; in a twinkling he was on all
+    fours in the mouth of the alley, and as he picked himself up,
+    the second fiacre passed, Calendar himself poking a round bald
+    poll out of the window to incite his driver's cupidity with
+    promises of redoubled fare.</p>
+
+    <p>Kirkwood mopped his dripping forehead and whistled low with
+    dismay; it seemed that from that instant on it was to be a
+    vendetta with a vengeance. Calendar, as he had foreseen, was
+    stopping at nothing.</p>
+
+    <p>At a dog trot he sped down the alley to the next street, on
+    which he turned back&#8212more sedately&#8212toward the river,
+    debouching on the esplanade just one block from the H&#244;tel
+    du Commerce. As he swung past the serried tables of a
+    caf&#233;, whatever fears he had harbored were banished by the
+    discovery that the excitement occasioned by the chase had
+    already subsided. Beneath the garish awnings the crowd was
+    laughing and chattering, eating and sipping its bock with
+    complete unconcern, heedless altogether of the haggard and
+    shabby young man carrying a black hand-bag, with the black
+    Shade of Care for company and a blacker threat of disaster
+    dogging his footsteps. Without attracting any attention
+    whatever, indeed, he mingled with the strolling crowds, making
+    his way toward the H&#244;tel du Commerce. Yet he was not at
+    all at ease; his uneasy conscience invested the gladstone bag
+    with a magnetic attraction for the public eye. To carry it
+    unconcealed in his hand furnished him with a sensation as
+    disturbing as though its worn black sides had been stenciled
+    STOLEN! in letters of flame. He felt it rendered him a cynosure
+    of public interest, an object of suspicion to the wide cold
+    world, that the gaze which lit upon the bag traveled to his
+    face only to espy thereon the brand of guilt.</p>
+
+    <p>For ease of mind, presently, he turned into a convenient
+    shop and spent ten invaluable francs for a hand satchel big
+    enough to hold the gladstone bag.</p>
+
+    <p>With more courage, now that he had the hateful thing under
+    cover, he found and entered the H&#244;tel du Commerce.</p>
+
+    <p>In the little closet which served for an office, over a desk
+    visibly groaning with the weight of an enormous and grimy
+    registry book, a sleepy, fat, bland and good-natured woman of
+    the Belgian <i>bourgeoisie</i> presided, a benign and drowsy
+    divinity of even-tempered courtesy. To his misleading inquiry
+    for Monsieur Calendar she returned a cheerful permission to
+    seek that gentleman for himself.</p>
+
+    <p>"Three flights, M'sieu', in the front; suite seventeen it
+    is. M'sieu' does not mind walking up?" she inquired.</p>
+
+    <p>M'sieu' did not in the least, though by no strain of the
+    imagination could it, be truthfully said that he walked up
+    those steep and redolent stairways of the H&#244;tel du
+    Commerce d'Anvers. More literally, he flew with winged feet,
+    spurning each third padded step with a force that raised a tiny
+    cloud of fine white dust from the carpeting.</p>
+
+    <p>Breathless, at last he paused at the top of the third
+    flight. His heart was hammering, his pulses drumming like wild
+    things; there was a queer constriction in his throat, a fire of
+    hope in his heart alternating with the ice of doubt. Suppose
+    she were not there! What if he were mistaken, what if he had
+    misunderstood, what if Mulready and Calendar had referred to
+    another lodging-house?</p>
+
+    <p>Pausing, he gripped the balustrade fiercely, forcing his
+    self-control, forcing himself to reflect that the girl
+    (presuming, for the sake of argument, he were presently to find
+    her) could not be expected to understand how ardently he had
+    discounted this moment of meeting, or how strangely it affected
+    him. Indeed, he himself was more than a little disturbed by the
+    latter phenomenon, though he was no longer blind to its cause.
+    But he was not to let her see the evidences of his agitation,
+    lest she be frightened.</p>
+
+    <p>Slowly schooling himself to assume a masque of illuding
+    self-possession and composure, he passed down the corridor to
+    the door whose panels wore the painted legend, 17; and there
+    knocked.</p>
+
+    <p>Believing that he overheard from within a sudden startled
+    exclamation, he smiled patiently, tolerant of her surprise.</p>
+
+    <p>Burning with impatience as with a fever, he endured a long
+    minute's wait.</p>
+
+    <p>Misgivings were prompting him to knock again and summon her
+    by name, when he heard footfalls on the other side of the door,
+    followed by a click of the lock. The door was opened
+    grudgingly, a bare six inches.</p>
+
+    <p>Of the alarmed expression in the eyes that stared into his,
+    he took no account. His face lengthened a little as he stood
+    there, dumb, panting, staring; and his heart sank, down, deep
+    down into a gulf of disappointment, weighted sorely with
+    chagrin.</p>
+
+    <p>Then, of the two the first to recover countenance, he doffed
+    his cap and bowed.</p>
+
+    <p>"Good evening, Mrs. Hallam," he said with a rueful
+    smile.</p>
+
+    <h2 align="center"><a name="XV">XV</a></h2>
+
+    <h3 align="center">REFUGEES</h3>
+
+    <p>Now, if Kirkwood's emotion was poignant, Mrs. Hallam's
+    astonishment paralleled, and her relief transcended it. In
+    order to understand this it must be remembered that while Mr.
+    Kirkwood was aware of the lady's presence in Antwerp, on her
+    part she had known nothing of him since he had so ungallantly
+    fled her company in Sheerness. She seemed to anticipate that
+    either Calendar or one of his fellows would be discovered at
+    the door,&#8212to have surmised it without any excessive degree of
+    pleasure.</p>
+
+    <p>Only briefly she hesitated, while her surprise swayed her;
+    then with a hardening of the eyes and a curt little nod, "I'm
+    sorry," she said with decision, "but I am busy and can't see
+    you now, Mr. Kirkwood"; and attempted to shut the door in his
+    face.</p>
+
+    <p>Deftly Kirkwood forestalled her intention by inserting both
+    a foot and a corner of the newly purchased hand-bag between the
+    door and the jamb. He had dared too greatly to be thus
+    dismissed. "Pardon me," he countered, unabashed, "but I wish to
+    speak with Miss Calendar."</p>
+
+    <p>"Dorothy," returned the lady with spirit, "is
+    engaged...."</p>
+
+    <p>She compressed her lips, knitted her brows, and with
+    disconcerting suddenness thrust one knee against the
+    obstructing hand-bag; Kirkwood, happily, anticipated the
+    movement just in time to reinforce the bag with his own knee;
+    it remained in place, the door standing open.</p>
+
+    <p>The woman flushed angrily; their glances crossed, her eyes
+    flashing with indignation; but Kirkwood's held them with a
+    level and unyielding stare.</p>
+
+    <p>"I intend," he told her quietly, "to see Miss Calendar. It's
+    useless your trying to hinder me. We may as well understand
+    each other, Madam, and I'll tell you now that if you wish to
+    avoid a scene&#8212"</p>
+
+    <p>"Dorothy!" the woman called over her shoulder; "ring for the
+    porter."</p>
+
+    <p>"By all means," assented Kirkwood agreeably. "I'll send him
+    for a gendarme."</p>
+
+    <p>"You insolent puppy!"</p>
+
+    <p>"Madam, your wit disarms me&#8212"</p>
+
+    <p>"What is the matter, Mrs. Hallam?" interrupted a voice from
+    the other side of the door. "Who is it?" v"Miss Calendar!"
+    cried Kirkwood hastily, raising his voice. v"Mr. Kirkwood!" the
+    reply came on the instant. She knew his voice! "Please, Mrs.
+    Hallam, I will see Mr. Kirkwood."</p>
+
+    <p>"You have no time to waste with him, Dorothy," said the
+    woman coldly. "I must insist&#8212"</p>
+
+    <p>"But you don't seem to understand; it is Mr. Kirkwood!"
+    argued the girl,&#8212as if he were ample excuse for any
+    imprudence!</p>
+
+    <p>Kirkwood's scant store of patience was by this time rapidly
+    becoming exhausted. "I should advise you not to interfere any
+    further, Mrs. Hallam," he told her in a tone low, but charged
+    with meaning.</p>
+
+    <p>How much did he know? She eyed him an instant longer, in
+    sullen suspicion, then swung open the door, yielding with what
+    grace she could. "Won't you come in, Mr. Kirkwood?" she
+    inquired with acidulated courtesy. v"If you press me," he
+    returned winningly, "how can I refuse? You are too good!"</p>
+
+    <p>His impertinence disconcerted even himself; he wondered that
+    she did not slap him as he passed her, entering the room; and
+    felt that he deserved it, despite her attitude. But such
+    thoughts could not long trouble one whose eyes were enchanted
+    by the sight of Dorothy, confronting him in the middle of the
+    dingy room, her hands, bristling dangerously with hat pins,
+    busy with the adjustment of a small gray toque atop the wonder
+    that was her hair. So vivacious and charming she seemed, so
+    spirited and bright her welcoming smile, so foreign was she
+    altogether to the picture of her, worn and distraught, that he
+    had mentally conjured up, that he stopped in an extreme of
+    disconcertion; and dropped the hand-bag, smiling sheepishly
+    enough under her ready laugh&#8212mirth irresistibly incited by the
+    plainly-read play of expression on his mobile countenance.</p>
+
+    <p>"You must forgive the unconventionally, Mr. Kirkwood," she
+    apologized, needlessly enough, but to cover his embarrassment.
+    "I am on the point of going out with Mrs. Hallam&#8212and of course
+    you are the last person on earth I expected to meet here!"</p>
+
+    <p>"It's good to see you, Miss Calendar," he said simply,
+    remarking with much satisfaction that her trim walking costume
+    bore witness to her statement that she was prepared for the
+    street.</p>
+
+    <p>The girl glanced into a mirror, patted the small, bewitching
+    hat an infinitesimal fraction of an inch to one side, and
+    turned to him again, her hands free. One of them, small but
+    cordial, rested in his grasp for an instant all too brief, the
+    while he gazed earnestly into her face, noting with concern
+    what the first glance had not shown him,&#8212the almost
+    imperceptible shadows beneath her eyes and cheek-bones,
+    pathetic records of the hours the girl had spent, since last he
+    had seen her, in company with his own grim familiar, Care.</p>
+
+    <p>Not a little of care and distress of mind had seasoned her
+    portion in those two weary days. He saw and knew it; and his
+    throat tightened inexplicably, again, as it had out there in
+    the corridor. Possibly the change in her had passed
+    unchallenged by any eyes other than his, but even in the little
+    time that he had spent in her society, the image of her had
+    become fixed so indelibly on his memory, that he could not now
+    be deceived. She was changed&#8212a little, but changed; she had
+    suffered, and was suffering and, forced by suffering, her
+    nascent womanhood was stirring in the bud. The child that he
+    had met in London, in Antwerp he found grown to woman's stature
+    and slowly coming to comprehension of the nature of the change
+    in herself,&#8212the wonder of it glowing softly in her
+    eyes....</p>
+
+    <p>The clear understanding of mankind that is an appanage of
+    woman's estate, was now added to the intuitions of a girl's
+    untroubled heart. She could not be blind to the mute adoration
+    of his gaze; nor could she resent it. Beneath it she colored
+    and lowered her lashes.</p>
+
+    <p>"I was about to go out," she repeated in confusion. "I&#8212it's
+    pleasant to see you, too."</p>
+
+    <p>"Thank you," he stammered ineptly; "I&#8212I&#8212"</p>
+
+    <p>"If Mr. Kirkwood will excuse us, Dorothy," Mrs. Hallam's
+    sharp tones struck in discordantly, "we shall be glad to see
+    him when we return to London."</p>
+
+    <p>"I am infinitely complimented, Mrs. Hallam," Kirkwood
+    assured her; and of the girl quickly: "You're going back home?"
+    he asked.</p>
+
+    <p>She nodded, with a faint, puzzled smile that included the
+    woman. "After a little&#8212not immediately. Mrs. Hallam is so
+    kind&#8212"</p>
+
+    <p>"Pardon me," he interrupted; "but tell me one thing, please:
+    have you any one in England to whom you can go without
+    invitation and be welcomed and cared for&#8212any friends or
+    relations?"</p>
+
+    <p>"Dorothy will be with me," Mrs. Hallam answered for her,
+    with cold defiance.</p>
+
+    <p>Deliberately insolent, Kirkwood turned his back to the
+    woman. "Miss Calendar, will you answer my question for
+    yourself?" he asked the girl pointedly.</p>
+
+    <p>"Why&#8212yes; several friends; none in London, but&#8212"</p>
+
+    <p>"Dorothy&#8212"</p>
+
+    <p>"One moment, Mrs. Hallam," Kirkwood flung crisply over his
+    shoulder. "I'm going to ask you something rather odd, Miss
+    Calendar," he continued, seeking the girl's eyes. "I
+    hope&#8212"</p>
+
+    <p>"Dorothy, I&#8212"</p>
+
+    <p>"If you please, Mrs. Hallam," suggested the girl, with just
+    the right shade of independence. "I wish to listen to Mr.
+    Kirkwood. He has been very kind to me and has every right...."
+    She turned to him again, leaving the woman breathless and
+    speechless with anger.</p>
+
+    <p>"You told me once," Kirkwood continued quickly, and, he
+    felt, brazenly, "that you considered me kind, thoughtful and
+    considerate. You know me no better to-day than you did then,
+    but I want to beg you to trust me a little. Can you trust
+    yourself to my protection until we reach your friends in
+    England?"</p>
+
+    <p>"Why, I&#8212" the girl faltered, taken by surprise.</p>
+
+    <p>"Mr. Kirkwood!" cried Mrs. Hallam angrily, finding her
+    voice.</p>
+
+    <p>Kirkwood turned to meet her onslaught with a mien grave,
+    determined, unflinching. "Please do not interfere, Madam," he
+    said quietly.</p>
+
+    <p>"You are impertinent, sir! Dorothy, I forbid you to listen
+    to this person!"</p>
+
+    <p>The girl flushed, lifting her chin a trifle. "Forbid?" she
+    repeated wonderingly.</p>
+
+    <p>Kirkwood was quick to take advantage of her resentment.
+    "Mrs. Hallam is not fitted to advise you," he insisted, "nor
+    can she control your actions. It must already have occurred to
+    you that you're rather out of place in the present
+    circumstances. The men who have brought you hither, I believe
+    you already see through, to some extent. Forgive my speaking
+    plainly ... But that is why you have accepted Mrs. Hallam's
+    offer of protection. Will you take my word for it, when I tell
+    you she has not your right interests at heart, but the reverse?
+    I happen to know, Miss Calendar, and I&#8212"</p>
+
+    <p>"How dare you, sir?"</p>
+
+    <p>Flaming with rage, Mrs. Hallam put herself bodily between
+    them, confronting Kirkwood in white-lipped desperation, her
+    small, gloved hands clenched and quivering at her sides, her
+    green eyes dangerous.</p>
+
+    <p>But Kirkwood could silence her; and he did. "Do you wish me
+    to speak frankly, Madam? Do you wish me to tell what I
+    know&#8212and all I know&#8212," with rising emphasis,&#8212"of your social
+    status and your relations with Calendar and Mulready? I promise
+    you that if you wish it, or force me to it...."</p>
+
+    <p>But he had need to say nothing further; the woman's eyes
+    wavered before his and a little sob of terror forced itself
+    between her shut teeth. Kirkwood smiled grimly, with a face of
+    brass, impenetrable, inflexible. And suddenly she turned from
+    him with indifferent bravado. v"As Mr. Kirkwood says, Dorothy,"
+    she said in her high, metallic voice, "I have no authority over
+    you. But if you're silly enough to consider for a moment this
+    fellow's insulting suggestion, if you're fool enough to go with
+    him, unchaperoned through Europe and imperil your&#8212"</p>
+
+    <p>"Mrs. Hallam!" Kirkwood cut her short with a menacing
+    tone.</p>
+
+    <p>"Why, then, I wash my hands of you," concluded the woman
+    defiantly. "Make your choice, my child," she added with a
+    meaning laugh and moved away, humming a snatch from a French
+    <i>chanson</i> which brought the hot blood to Kirkwood's
+    face.</p>
+
+    <p>But the girl did not understand; and he was glad of that.
+    "You may judge between us," he appealed to her directly, once
+    more. "I can only offer you my word of honor as an American
+    gentleman that you shall be landed in England, safe and sound,
+    by the first available steamer&#8212"</p>
+
+    <p>"There's no need to say more, Mr. Kirkwood," Dorothy
+    informed him quietly. "I have already decided. I think I begin
+    to understand some things clearly, now.... If you're ready, we
+    will go."</p>
+
+    <p>From the window, where she stood, holding the curtains back
+    and staring out, Mrs. Hallam turned with a curling lip.</p>
+
+    <p>&nbsp; <img src="illp314s.jpg"
+         width="528"
+         height="800"
+         border="0"
+         alt=
+         "From the window, Mrs. Hallam turned with a curling lip."></p>
+
+    <p>"'The honor of an American gentleman,'" she quoted with a
+    stinging sneer; "I'm sure I wish you comfort of it, child!"</p>
+
+    <p>"We must make haste, Miss Calendar," said Kirkwood, ignoring
+    the implication. "Have you a traveling-bag?"</p>
+
+    <p>She silently indicated a small valise, closed and strapped,
+    on a table by the bed, and immediately passed out into the
+    hall. Kirkwood took the case containing the gladstone bag in
+    one hand, the girl's valise in the other, and followed.</p>
+
+    <p>As he turned the head of the stairs he looked back. Mrs.
+    Hallam was still at the window, her back turned. From her very
+    passiveness he received an impression of something ominous and
+    forbidding; if she had lost a trick or two of the game she
+    played, she still held cards, was not at the end of her
+    resources. She stuck in his imagination for many an hour as a
+    force to be reckoned with.</p>
+
+    <p>For the present he understood that she was waiting to
+    apprise Calendar and Mulready of their flight. With the more
+    haste, then, he followed Dorothy down the three flights,
+    through the tiny office, where Madam sat sound asleep at her
+    over-burdened desk, and out.</p>
+
+    <p>Opposite the door they were fortunate enough to find a
+    fiacre drawn up in waiting at the curb. Kirkwood opened the
+    door for the girl to enter.</p>
+
+    <p>"Gare du Sud," he directed the driver. "Drive your
+    fastest&#8212double fare for quick time!"</p>
+
+    <p>The driver awoke with a start from profound reverie, looked
+    Kirkwood over, and bowed with gesticulative palms.</p>
+
+    <p>"M'sieu', I am desolated, but engaged!" he protested.</p>
+
+    <p>"Precisely." Kirkwood deposited the two bags on the forward
+    seat of the conveyance, and stood back to convince the man.
+    "Precisely," said he, undismayed. "The lady who engaged you is
+    remaining for a time; I will settle her bill."</p>
+
+    <p>"Very well, M'sieu'!" The driver disclaimed responsibility
+    and accepted the favor of the gods with a speaking shrug.
+    "M'sieu' said the Gare du Sud? <i>En voiture</i>!"</p>
+
+    <p>Kirkwood jumped in and shut the door; the vehicle drew
+    slowly away from the curb, then with gratifying speed hammered
+    up-stream on the embankment. Bending forward, elbows on knees,
+    Kirkwood watched the sidewalks narrowly, partly to cover the
+    girl's constraint, due to Mrs. Hallam's attitude, partly on the
+    lookout for Calendar and his confederates. In a few moments
+    they passed a public clock.</p>
+
+    <p>"We've missed the Flushing boat," he announced. "I'm making
+    a try for the Hoek van Holland line. We may possibly make it. I
+    know that it leaves by the Sud Quai, and that's all I do know,"
+    he concluded with an apologetic laugh.</p>
+
+    <p>"And if we miss that?" asked the girl, breaking silence for
+    the first time since they had left the hotel.</p>
+
+    <p>"We'll take the first train out of Antwerp."</p>
+
+    <p>"Where to?"</p>
+
+    <p>"Wherever the first train goes, Miss Calendar.... The main
+    point is to get away to-night. That we must do, no matter where
+    we land, or how we get there. To-morrow we can plan with more
+    certainty."</p>
+
+    <p>"Yes..." Her assent was more a sigh than a word.</p>
+
+    <p>The cab, dashing down the Rue Leopold de Wael, swung into
+    the Place du Sud, before the station. Kirkwood, acutely
+    watchful, suddenly thrust head and shoulders out of his window
+    (fortunately it was the one away from the depot), and called up
+    to the driver.</p>
+
+    <p>"Don't stop! Gare Centrale now&#8212and treble fare!"</p>
+
+    <p>"<i>Oui, M'sieu'! Allons!</i>"</p>
+
+    <p>The whip cracked and the horse swerved sharply round the
+    corner into the Avenue du Sud. The young man, with a hushed
+    exclamation, turned in his seat, lifting the flap over the
+    little peephole in the back of the carriage.</p>
+
+    <p>He had not been mistaken. Calendar was standing in front of
+    the station; and it was plain to be seen, from his pose, that
+    the madly careering fiacre interested him more than slightly.
+    Irresolute, perturbed, the man took a step or two after it,
+    changed his mind, and returned to his post of observation.</p>
+
+    <p>Kirkwood dropped the flap and turned back to find the girl's
+    wide eyes searching his face. He said nothing.</p>
+
+    <p>"What was that?" she asked after a patient moment.</p>
+
+    <p>"Your father, Miss Calendar," he returned uncomfortably.</p>
+
+    <p>There fell a short pause; then: "Why&#8212will you tell me&#8212is
+    it necessary to run away from my father, Mr. Kirkwood?" she
+    demanded, with a moving little break in her voice.</p>
+
+    <p>Kirkwood hesitated. It were unfeeling to tell her why; yet
+    it was essential that she should know, however painful the
+    knowledge might prove to her.</p>
+
+    <p>And she was insistent; he might not dodge the issue. "Why?"
+    she repeated as he paused.</p>
+
+    <p>"I wish you wouldn't press me for an answer just now, Miss
+    Calendar."</p>
+
+    <p>"Don't you think I had better know?"</p>
+
+    <p>Instinctively he inclined his head in assent.</p>
+
+    <p>"Then why&#8212?"</p>
+
+    <p>Kirkwood bent forward and patted the flank of the satchel
+    that held the gladstone bag.</p>
+
+    <p>"What does that mean, Mr. Kirkwood?"</p>
+
+    <p>"That I have the jewels," he told her tersely, looking
+    straight ahead.</p>
+
+    <p>At his shoulder he heard a low gasp of amazement and
+    incredulity commingled.</p>
+
+    <p>"But&#8212! How did you get them? My father deposited them in
+    bank this morning?"</p>
+
+    <p>"He must have taken them out again.... I got them on board
+    the Alethea, where your father was conferring with Mulready and
+    Captain Stryker."</p>
+
+    <p>"The Alethea!"</p>
+
+    <p>"Yes."</p>
+
+    <p>"You took them from those men?&#8212you!... But didn't my
+    father&#8212?"</p>
+
+    <p>"I had to persuade him," said Kirkwood simply.</p>
+
+    <p>"But there were three of them against you!"</p>
+
+    <p>"Mulready wasn't&#8212ah&#8212feeling very well, and Stryker's a
+    coward. They gave me no trouble. I locked them in Stryker's
+    room, lifted the bag of jewels, and came away.... I ought to
+    tell you that they were discussing the advisability of sailing
+    away without you&#8212leaving you here, friendless and without
+    means. That's why I considered it my duty to take a hand.... I
+    don't like to tell you this so brutally, but you ought to know,
+    and I can't see how to tone it down," he concluded
+    awkwardly.</p>
+
+    <p>"I understand...."</p>
+
+    <p>But for some moments she did not speak. He avoided looking
+    at her.</p>
+
+    <p>The fiacre, rolling at top speed but smoothly on the broad
+    avenues that encircle the ancient city, turned into the Avenue
+    de Keyser, bringing into sight the Gare Centrale.</p>
+
+    <p>"You don't&#8212k-know&#8212" began the girl without warning, in a
+    voice gusty with sobs.</p>
+
+    <p>"Steady on!" said Kirkwood gently. "I do know, but don't
+    let's talk about it now. We'll be at the station in a minute,
+    and I'll get out and see what's to be done about a train, if
+    neither Mulready or Stryker are about. You stay in the
+    carriage.... No!" He changed his mind suddenly. "I'll not risk
+    losing you again. It's a risk we'll have to run in
+    company."</p>
+
+    <p>"Please!" she agreed brokenly.</p>
+
+    <p>The fiacre slowed up and stopped.</p>
+
+    <p>"Are you all right, Miss Calendar?" Kirkwood asked.</p>
+
+    <p>The girl sat up, lifting her head proudly. "I am quite
+    ready," she said, steadying her voice.</p>
+
+    <p>Kirkwood reconnoitered through the window, while the driver
+    was descending.</p>
+
+    <p>"Gare Centrale, M'sieu'," he said, opening the door.</p>
+
+    <p>"No one in sight," Kirkwood told the girl. "Come,
+    please."</p>
+
+    <p>He got out and gave her his hand, then paid the driver,
+    picked up the two bags, and hurried with Dorothy into the
+    station, to find in waiting a string of cars into which people
+    were moving at leisurely rate. His inquiries at the
+    ticket-window developed the fact that it was the 22:26 for
+    Brussels, the last train leaving the Gare Centrale that night,
+    and due to start in ten minutes.</p>
+
+    <p>The information settled their plans for once and all;
+    Kirkwood promptly secured through tickets, also purchasing
+    "Reserve" supplementary tickets which entitled them to the use
+    of those modern corridor coaches which take the place of
+    first-class compartments on the Belgian state railways.</p>
+
+    <p>"It's a pleasure," said Kirkwood lightly, as he followed the
+    girl into one of these, "to find one's self in a common-sense
+    sort of a train again. 'Feels like home." He put their luggage
+    in one of the racks and sat down beside her, chattering with
+    simulated cheerfulness in a vain endeavor to lighten her
+    evident depression of spirit. "I always feel like a traveling
+    anachronism in one of your English trains," he said. "You can't
+    appreciate&#8212"</p>
+
+    <p>The girl smiled bravely.... "And after Brussels?" she
+    inquired.</p>
+
+    <p>"First train for the coast," he said promptly. "Dover,
+    Ostend, Boulogne,&#8212whichever proves handiest, no matter which,
+    so long as it gets us on English soil without undue delay."</p>
+
+    <p>She said "Yes" abstractedly, resting an elbow on the
+    window-sill and her chin in her palm, to stare with serious,
+    sweet brown eyes out into the arc-smitten night that hung
+    beneath the echoing roof.</p>
+
+    <p>Kirkwood fidgeted in despite of the constraint he placed
+    himself under, to be still and not disturb her needlessly.
+    Impatience and apprehension of misfortune obsessed his mental
+    processes in equal degree. The ten minutes seemed interminable
+    that elapsed ere the grinding couplings advertised the
+    imminence of their start.</p>
+
+    <p>The guards began to bawl, the doors to slam, belated
+    travelers to dash madly for the coaches. The train gave a
+    preliminary lurch ere settling down to its league-long inland
+    dash.</p>
+
+    <p>Kirkwood, in a fever of hope and an ague of fear, saw a man
+    sprint furiously across the platform and throw himself on the
+    forward steps of their coach, on the very instant of the
+    start.</p>
+
+    <p>Presently he entered by the forward door and walked slowly
+    through, narrowly inspecting the various passengers. As he
+    approached the seats occupied by Kirkwood and Dorothy Calendar,
+    his eyes encountered the young man's, and he leered evilly.
+    Kirkwood met the look with one that was like a kick, and the
+    fellow passed with some haste into the car behind.</p>
+
+    <p>"Who was that?" demanded the girl, without moving her
+    head.</p>
+
+    <p>"How did you know?" he asked, astonished. "You didn't
+    look&#8212"</p>
+
+    <p>"I saw your knuckles whiten beneath the skin.... Who was
+    it?"</p>
+
+    <p>"Hobbs," he acknowledged bitterly; "the mate of the
+    <i>Alethea</i>."</p>
+
+    <p>"I know.... And you think&#8212?"</p>
+
+    <p>"Yes. He must have been ashore when I was on board the
+    brigantine; he certainly wasn't in the cabin. Evidently they
+    hunted him up, or ran across him, and pressed him into
+    service.... You see, they're watching every outlet.... But
+    we'll win through, never fear!"</p>
+
+    <center>
+        <h2><a name="XVI">XVI</a></h2>
+
+        <h3>TRAVELS WITH A CHAPERON</h3>
+    </center>
+
+    <p>The train, escaping the outskirts of the city, remarked the
+    event with an exultant shriek, then settled down, droning
+    steadily, to night-devouring flight. In the corridor-car the
+    few passengers disposed themselves to drowse away the coming
+    hour&#8212the short hour's ride that, in these piping days of
+    frantic traveling, separates Antwerp from the capital city of
+    Belgium.</p>
+
+    <p>A guard, slamming gustily in through the front door, reeled
+    unsteadily down the aisle. Kirkwood, rousing from a profound
+    reverie, detained him with a gesture and began to interrogate
+    him in French. When he departed presently it transpired that
+    the girl was unaquainted with that tongue.</p>
+
+    <p>"I didn't understand, you know," she told him with a slow,
+    shy smile.</p>
+
+    <p>"I was merely questioning him about the trains from Brussels
+    to-night. We daren't stop, you see; we must go on,&#8212keep Hobbs
+    on the jump and lose him, if possible. There's where our
+    advantage lies&#8212in having only Hobbs to deal with. He's not
+    particularly intellectual; and we've two heads to his one,
+    besides. If we can prevent him from guessing our destination
+    and wiring back to Antwerp, we may win away. You
+    understand?"</p>
+
+    <p>"Perfectly," she said, brightening. "And what do you purpose
+    doing now?"</p>
+
+    <p>"I can't tell yet. The guard's gone to get me some
+    information about the night trains on other lines. In the
+    meantime, don't fret about Hobbs; I'll answer for Hobbs."</p>
+
+    <p>"I shan't be worried," she said simply, "with you
+    here...."</p>
+
+    <p>Whatever answer he would have made he was obliged to
+    postpone because of the return of the guard, with a handful of
+    time-tables; and when, rewarded with a modest gratuity, the man
+    had gone his way, and Kirkwood turned again to the girl, she
+    had withdrawn her attention for the time.</p>
+
+    <p>Unconscious of his bold regard, she was dreaming, her
+    thoughts at loose-ends, her eyes studying the incalculable
+    depths of blue-black night that swirled and eddied beyond the
+    window-glass. The most shadowy of smiles touched her lips, the
+    faintest shade of deepened color rested on her cheeks.... She
+    was thinking of&#8212him? As long as he dared, the young man, his
+    heart in his own eyes, watched her greedily, taking a miser's
+    joy of her youthful beauty, striving with all his soul to
+    analyze the enigma of that most inscrutable smile.</p>
+
+    <p>It baffled him. He could not say of what she thought; and
+    told himself bitterly that it was not for him, a pauper, to
+    presume a place in her meditations. He must not forget his
+    circumstances, nor let her tolerance render him oblivious to
+    his place, which must be a servant's, not a lover's.</p>
+
+    <p>The better to convince himself of this, he plunged
+    desperately into a forlorn attempt to make head or tail of
+    Belgian railway schedule, complicated as these of necessity are
+    by the alternation from normal time notation to the abnormal
+    system sanctioned by the government, and <i>vice-versa</i>,
+    with every train that crosses a boundary line of the state.</p>
+
+    <p>So preoccupied did he become in this pursuit that he was
+    subconsciously impressed that the girl had spoken twice, ere he
+    could detach his interest from the exasperatingly inconclusive
+    and incoherent cohorts of ranked figures.</p>
+
+    <p>"Can't you find out anything?" Dorothy was asking.</p>
+
+    <p>"Precious little," he grumbled. "I'd give my head for a
+    Bradshaw! Only it wouldn't be a fair exchange.... There seems
+    to be an express for Bruges leaving the Gare du Nord, Brussels,
+    at fifty-five minutes after twenty-three o'clock; and if I'm
+    not mistaken, that's the latest train out of Brussels and the
+    earliest we can catch,... if we <i>can</i> catch it. I've never
+    been in Brussels, and Heaven only knows how long it would take
+    us to cab it from the Gare du Midi to the Nord."</p>
+
+    <p>In this statement, however, Mr. Kirkwood was fortunately
+    mistaken; not only Heaven, it appeared, had cognizance of the
+    distance between the two stations. While Kirkwood was still
+    debating the question, with pessimistic tendencies, the
+    friendly guard had occasion to pass through the coach; and,
+    being tapped, yielded the desired information with entire
+    tractability.</p>
+
+    <p>It would be a cab-ride of perhaps ten minutes. Monsieur,
+    however, would serve himself well if he offered the driver an
+    advance tip as an incentive to speedy driving. Why? Why because
+    (here the guard consulted his watch; and Kirkwood very keenly
+    regretted the loss of his own)&#8212because this train, announced
+    to arrive in Brussels some twenty minutes prior to the
+    departure of that other, was already late. But yes&#8212a matter of
+    some ten minutes. Could that not be made up? Ah, Monsieur, but
+    who should say?</p>
+
+    <p>The guard departed, doubtless with private views as to the
+    madness of all English-speaking travelers.</p>
+
+    <p>"And there we are!" commented Kirkwood in factitious
+    resignation. "If we're obliged to stop overnight in Brussels,
+    our friends will be on our back before we can get out in the
+    morning, if they have to come by motor-car." He reflected
+    bitterly on the fact that with but a little more money at his
+    disposal, he too could hire a motor-car and cry defiance to
+    their persecutors. "However," he amended, with rising spirits,
+    "so much the better our chance of losing Mr. Hobbs. We must be
+    ready to drop off the instant the train stops."</p>
+
+    <p>He began to unfold another time-table, threatening again to
+    lose himself completely; and was thrown into the utmost
+    confusion by the touch of the girl's hand, in appeal placed
+    lightly on his own. And had she been observant, she might have
+    seen a second time his knuckles whiten beneath the skin as he
+    asserted his self-control&#8212though this time not over his
+    temper.</p>
+
+    <p>His eyes, dumbly eloquent, turned to meet hers. She was
+    smiling.</p>
+
+    <p>"Please!" she iterated, with the least imperative pressure
+    on his hand, pushing the folder aside.</p>
+
+    <p>"I beg pardon?" he muttered blankly.</p>
+
+    <p>"Is it quite necessary, now, to study those schedules?
+    Haven't you decided to try for the Bruges express?"</p>
+
+    <p>"Why yes, but&#8212"</p>
+
+    <p>"Then please don't leave me to my thoughts all the time, Mr.
+    Kirkwood." There was a tremor of laughter in her voice, but her
+    eyes were grave and earnest. "I'm very weary of thinking round
+    in a circle&#8212and that," she concluded, with a nervous little
+    laugh, "is all I've had to do for days!"</p>
+
+    <p>"I'm afraid I'm very stupid," he humored her. "This is the
+    second time, you know, in the course of a very brief
+    acquaintance, that you have found it necessary to remind me to
+    talk to you."</p>
+
+    <p>"Oh-h!" She brightened. "That night, at the Pless? But that
+    was <i>ages</i> ago!"</p>
+
+    <p>"It seems so," he admitted.</p>
+
+    <p>"So much has happened!"</p>
+
+    <p>"Yes," he assented vaguely.</p>
+
+    <p>She watched him, a little piqued by his absent-minded mood,
+    for a moment; then, and not without a trace of malice: "Must I
+    tell you again what to talk about?" she asked.</p>
+
+    <p>"Forgive me. I was thinking about, if not talking to,
+    you.... I've been wondering just why it was that you left the
+    <i>Alethea</i> at Queensborough, to go on by steamer."</p>
+
+    <p>And immediately he was sorry that his tactless query had
+    swung the conversation to bear upon her father, the thought of
+    whom could not but prove painful to her. But it was too late to
+    mend matters; already her evanescent flush of amusement had
+    given place to remembrance.</p>
+
+    <p>"It was on my father's account," she told him in a steady
+    voice, but with averted eyes; "he is a very poor sailor, and
+    the promise of a rough passage terrified him. I believe there
+    was a difference of opinion about it, he disputing with Mr.
+    Mulready and Captain Stryker. That was just after we had left
+    the anchorage. They both insisted that it was safer to continue
+    by the <i>Alethea</i>, but he wouldn't listen to them, and in
+    the end had his way. Captain Stryker ran the brigantine into
+    the mouth of the Medway and put us ashore just in time to catch
+    the steamer."</p>
+
+    <p>"Were you sorry for the change?"</p>
+
+    <p>"I?" She shuddered slightly. "Hardly! I think I hated the
+    ship from the moment I set foot on board her. It was a dreadful
+    place; it was all night-marish, that night, but it seemed most
+    terrible on the <i>Alethea</i> with Captain Stryker and that
+    abominable Mr. Hobbs. I think that my unhappiness had as much
+    to do with my father's insistence on the change, as anything.
+    He ... he was very thoughtful, most of the time."</p>
+
+    <p>Kirkwood shut his teeth on what he knew of the
+    blackguard.</p>
+
+    <p>"I don't know why," she continued, wholly without
+    affectation, "but I was wretched from the moment you left me in
+    the cab, to wait while you went in to see Mrs. Hallam. And when
+    we left you, at Bermondsey Old Stairs, after what you had said
+    to me, I felt&#8212I hardly know what to say&#8212abandoned, in a
+    way."</p>
+
+    <p>"But you were with your father, in his care&#8212"</p>
+
+    <p>"I know, but I was getting confused. Until then the
+    excitement had kept me from thinking. But you made me think. I
+    began to wonder, to question ... But what could I do?" She
+    signified her helplessness with a quick and dainty movement of
+    her hands. "He is my father; and I'm not yet of age, you
+    know."</p>
+
+    <p>"I thought so," he confessed, troubled. "It's very
+    inconsiderate of you, you must admit."</p>
+
+    <p>"I don't understand..."</p>
+
+    <p>"Because of the legal complication. I've no doubt your
+    father can 'have the law on me'"&#8212Kirkwood laughed
+    uneasily&#8212"for taking you from his protection."</p>
+
+    <p>"Protection!" she echoed warmly. "If you call it that!"</p>
+
+    <p>"Kidnapping," he said thoughtfully: "I presume that'd be the
+    charge."</p>
+
+    <p>"Oh!" She laughed the notion to scorn. "Besides, they must
+    catch us first, mustn't they?"</p>
+
+    <p>"Of course; and"&#8212with a simulation of confidence sadly
+    deceitful&#8212"they shan't, Mr. Hobbs to the contrary
+    notwithstanding."</p>
+
+    <p>"You make me share your confidence, against my better
+    judgment."</p>
+
+    <p>"I wish your better judgment would counsel you to share your
+    confidence with me," he caught her up. "If you would only tell
+    me what it's all about, as far as you know, I'd be better able
+    to figure out what we ought to do."</p>
+
+    <p>Briefly the girl sat silent, staring before her with sweet
+    somber eyes. Then, "In the very beginning," she told him with a
+    conscious laugh,&#8212"this sounds very story-bookish, I know&#8212in
+    the very beginning, George Burgoyne Calendar, an American,
+    married his cousin a dozen times removed, and an Englishwoman,
+    Alice Burgoyne Hallam."</p>
+
+    <p>"Hallam!"</p>
+
+    <p>"Wait, please." She sat up, bending forward and frowning
+    down upon her interlacing, gloved fingers; she was finding it
+    difficult to say what she must. Kirkwood, watching hungrily the
+    fair drooping head, the flawless profile clear and radiant
+    against the night-blackened window, saw hot signals of shame
+    burning on her cheek and throat and forehead.</p>
+
+    <p>"But never mind," he began awkwardly.</p>
+
+    <p>"No," she told him with decision. "Please let me go on...."
+    She continued, stumbling, trusting to his sympathy to bridge
+    the gaps in her narrative. "My father ... There was trouble of
+    some sort.... At all events, he disappeared when I was a baby.
+    My mother ... died. I was brought up in the home of my
+    great-uncle, Colonel George Burgoyne, of the Indian
+    Army&#8212retired. My mother had been his favorite niece, they say;
+    I presume that was why he cared for me. I grew up in his home
+    in Cornwall; it was my home, just as he was my father in
+    everything but fact.</p>
+
+    <p>"A year ago he died, leaving me everything,&#8212the town house
+    in Frognall Street, his estate in Cornwall: everything was
+    willed to me on condition that I must never live with my
+    father, nor in any way contribute to his support. If I
+    disobeyed, the entire estate without reserve was to go to his
+    nearest of kin.... Colonel Burgoyne was unmarried and had no
+    children."</p>
+
+    <p>The girl paused, lifting to Kirkwood's face her eyes, clear,
+    fearless, truthful. "I never was given to understand that there
+    was anybody who might have inherited, other than myself," she
+    declared.</p>
+
+    <p>"I see..." v"Last week I received a letter, signed with my
+    father's name, begging me to appoint an interview with him in
+    London. I did so,&#8212guess how gladly! I was alone in the world,
+    and he, my father, whom I had never thought to see.... We met
+    at his hotel, the Pless. He wanted me to come and live with
+    him,&#8212said that he was growing old and lonely and needed a
+    daughter's love and care. He told me that he had made a fortune
+    in America and was amply able to provide for us both. As for my
+    inheritance, he persuaded me that it was by rights the property
+    of Frederick Hallam, Mrs. Hallam's son."</p>
+
+    <p>"I have met the young gentleman," interpolated Kirkwood.</p>
+
+    <p>"His name was new to me, but my father assured me that he
+    was the next of kin mentioned in Colonel Burgoyne's will, and
+    convinced me that I had no real right to the property.... After
+    all, he was my father; I agreed; I could not bear the thought
+    of wronging anybody. I was to give up everything but my
+    mother's jewels. It seems,&#8212my father said,&#8212I don't&#8212I can't
+    believe it now&#8212"</p>
+
+    <p>She choked on a little, dry sob. It was some time before she
+    seemed able to continue.</p>
+
+    <p>"I was told that my great-uncle's collection of jewels had
+    been my mother's property. He had in life a passion for
+    collecting jewels, and it had been his whim to carry them with
+    him, wherever he went. When he died in Frognall Street, they
+    were in the safe by the head of his bed. I, in my grief, at
+    first forgot them, and then afterwards carelessly put off
+    removing them.</p>
+
+    <p>"To come back to my father: Night before last we were to
+    call on Mrs. Hallam. It was to be our last night in England; we
+    were to sail for the Continent on the private yacht of a friend
+    of my father's, the next morning.... This is what I was
+    told&#8212and believed, you understand.</p>
+
+    <p>"That night Mrs. Hallam was dining at another table at the
+    Pless, it seems. I did not then know her. When leaving, she put
+    a note on our table, by my father's elbow. I was astonished
+    beyond words.... He seemed much agitated, told me that he was
+    called away on urgent business, a matter of life and death, and
+    begged me to go alone to Frognall Street, get the jewels and
+    meet him at Mrs. Hallam's later.... I wasn't altogether a fool,
+    for I began dimly to suspect, then, that something was wrong;
+    but I was a fool, for I consented to do as he desired. You
+    understand&#8212you know&#8212?"</p>
+
+    <p>"I do, indeed," replied Kirkwood grimly. "I understand a lot
+    of things now that I didn't five minutes ago. Please let me
+    think..."</p>
+
+    <p>But the time he took for deliberation was short. He had
+    hoped to find a way to spare her, by sparing Calendar; but
+    momentarily he was becoming more impressed with the futility of
+    dealing with her save in terms of candor, merciful though they
+    might seem harsh.</p>
+
+    <p>"I must tell you," he said, "that you have been outrageously
+    misled, swindled and deceived. I have heard from your father's
+    own lips that Mrs. Hallam was to pay him two thousand pounds
+    for keeping you out of England and losing you your inheritance.
+    I'm inclined to question, furthermore, the assertion that these
+    jewels were your mother's. Frederick Hallam was the man who
+    followed you into the Frognall Street house and attacked me on
+    the stairs; Mrs. Hallam admits that he went there to get the
+    jewels. But he didn't want anybody to know it."</p>
+
+    <p>"But that doesn't prove&#8212"</p>
+
+    <p>"Just a minute." Rapidly and concisely Kirkwood recounted
+    the events wherein he had played a part, subsequent to the
+    adventure of Bermondsey Old Stairs. He was guilty of but one
+    evasion; on one point only did he slur the truth: he conceived
+    it his honorable duty to keep the girl in ignorance of his
+    straitened circumstances; she was not to be distressed by
+    knowledge of his distress, nor could he tolerate the suggestion
+    of seeming to play for her sympathy. It was necessary, then, to
+    invent a motive to excuse his return to 9, Frognall Street. I
+    believe he chose to exaggerate the inquisitiveness of his
+    nature and threw in for good measure a desire to recover a
+    prized trinket of no particular moment, esteemed for its
+    associations, and so forth. But whatever the fabrication, it
+    passed muster; to the girl his motives seemed less important
+    than the discoveries that resulted from them.</p>
+
+    <p>"I am afraid," he concluded the summary of the confabulation
+    he had overheard at the skylight of the Alethea's cabin, "you'd
+    best make up your mind that your father&#8212"</p>
+
+    <p>"Yes," whispered the girl huskily; and turned her face to
+    the window, a quivering muscle in the firm young throat alone
+    betraying her emotion.</p>
+
+    <p>"It's a bad business," he pursued relentlessly: "bad all
+    round. Mulready, in your father's pay, tries to have him
+    arrested, the better to rob him. Mrs. Hallam, to secure your
+    property for that precious pet, Freddie, connives at, if she
+    doesn't instigate, a kidnapping. Your father takes her money to
+    deprive you of yours,&#8212which could profit him nothing so long
+    as you remained in lawful possession of it; and at the same
+    time he conspires to rob, through you, the rightful owners&#8212if
+    they are rightful owners. And if they are, why does Freddie
+    Hallam go like a thief in the night to secure property that's
+    his beyond dispute?... I don't really think you owe your father
+    any further consideration."</p>
+
+    <p>He waited patiently. Eventually, "No-o," the girl sobbed
+    assent.</p>
+
+    <p>"It's this way: Calendar, counting on your sparing him in
+    the end, is going to hound us. He's doing it now: there's Hobbs
+    in the next car, for proof. Until these jewels are returned,
+    whether to Frognall Street or to young Hallam, we're both in
+    danger, both thieves in the sight of the law. And your father
+    knows that, too. There's no profit to be had by discounting the
+    temper of these people; they're as desperate a gang of
+    swindlers as ever lived. They'll have those jewels if they have
+    to go as far as murder&#8212"</p>
+
+    <p>"Mr. Kirkwood!" she deprecated, in horror.</p>
+
+    <p>He wagged his head stubbornly, ominously. "I've seen them in
+    the raw. They're hot on our trail now; ten to one, they'll be
+    on our backs before we can get across the Channel. Once in
+    England we will be comparatively safe. Until then ... But I'm a
+    brute&#8212I'm frightening you!"</p>
+
+    <p>"You are, dreadfully," she confessed in a tremulous
+    voice.</p>
+
+    <p>"Forgive me. If you look at the dark side first, the other
+    seems all the brighter. Please don't worry; we'll pull through
+    with flying colors, or my name's not Philip Kirkwood!"</p>
+
+    <p>"I have every faith in you," she informed him, flawlessly
+    sincere. "When I think of all you've done and dared for me, on
+    the mere suspicion that I needed your help&#8212"</p>
+
+    <p>"We'd best be getting ready," he interrupted hastily.
+    "Here's Brussels."</p>
+
+    <p>It was so. Lights, in little clusters and long, wheeling
+    lines, were leaping out of the darkness and flashing back as
+    the train rumbled through the suburbs of the little Paris of
+    the North. Already the other passengers were bestirring
+    themselves, gathering together wraps and hand luggage, and
+    preparing for the journey's end.</p>
+
+    <p>Rising, Kirkwood took down their two satchels from the
+    overhead rack, and waited, in grim abstraction planning and
+    counterplanning against the machinations in whose wiles they
+    two had become so perilously entangled.</p>
+
+    <p>Primarily, there was Hobbs to be dealt with; no easy task,
+    for Kirkwood dared not resort to violence nor in any way invite
+    the attention of the authorities; and threats would be an idle
+    waste of breath, in the case of that corrupt and malignant,
+    little cockney, himself as keen as any needle, adept in all the
+    artful resources of the underworld whence he had sprung, and
+    further primed for action by that master rogue, Calendar.</p>
+
+    <p>The train was pulling slowly into the station when he
+    reluctantly abandoned his latest unfeasible scheme for shaking
+    off the little Englishman, and concluded that their salvation
+    was only to be worked out through everlasting vigilance,
+    incessant movement, and the favor of the blind goddess,
+    Fortune. There was comfort of a sort in the reflection that the
+    divinity of chance is at least blind; her favors are
+    impartially distributed; the swing of the wheel of the world is
+    not always to the advantage of the wrongdoer and the scamp.</p>
+
+    <p>He saw nothing of Hobbs as they alighted and hastened from
+    the station, and hardly had time to waste looking for him,
+    since their train had failed to make up the precious ten
+    minutes. Consequently he dismissed the fellow from his thoughts
+    until&#8212with Brussels lingering in their memories a garish
+    vision of brilliant streets and glowing caf&#233;s, glimpsed
+    furtively from their cab windows during its wild dash over the
+    broad mid-city, boulevards&#8212at midnight they settled themselves
+    in a carriage of the Bruges express. They were speeding along
+    through the open country with a noisy clatter; then a minute's
+    investigation sufficed to discover the mate of the
+    <i>Alethea</i> serenely ensconced in the coach behind.</p>
+
+    <p>The little man seemed rarely complacent, and impudently
+    greeted Kirkwood's scowling visage, as the latter peered
+    through the window in the coach-door, with a smirk and a
+    waggish wave of his hand. The American by main strength of
+    will-power mastered an impulse to enter and wring his neck, and
+    returned to the girl, more disturbed than he cared to let her
+    know.</p>
+
+    <p>There resulted from his review of the case but one plan for
+    outwitting Mr. Hobbs, and that lay in trusting to his
+    confidence that Kirkwood and Dorothy Calendar would proceed as
+    far toward Ostend as the train would take them&#8212namely, to the
+    limit of the run, Bruges.</p>
+
+    <p>Thus inspired, Kirkwood took counsel with the girl, and when
+    the train paused at Ghent, they made an unostentatious exit
+    from their coach, finding themselves, when the express had
+    rolled on into the west, upon a station platform in a foreign
+    city at nine minutes past one o'clock in the morning&#8212but at
+    length without their shadow. Mr. Hobbs had gone on to
+    Bruges.</p>
+
+    <p>Kirkwood sped his journeyings with an unspoken malediction,
+    and collected himself to cope with a situation which was to
+    prove hardly more happy for them than the espionage they had
+    just eluded. The primal flush of triumph which had saturated
+    the American's humor on this signal success, proved but fictive
+    and transitory when inquiry of the station attendants educed
+    the information that the two earliest trains to be obtained
+    were the 5:09 for Dunkerque and the 5:37 for Ostend. A minimum
+    delay of four hours was to be endured in the face of many
+    contingent features singularly unpleasant to contemplate. The
+    station waiting-room was on the point of closing for the night,
+    and Kirkwood, already alarmed by the rapid ebb of the money he
+    had had of Calendar, dared not subject his finances to the
+    strain of a night's lodging at one of Ghent's hotels. He found
+    himself forced to be cruel to be kind to the girl, and
+    Dorothy's cheerful acquiescence to their sole alternative of
+    tramping the street until daybreak did nothing to alleviate
+    Kirkwood's exasperation.</p>
+
+    <p>It was permitted them to occupy a bench outside the station.
+    There the girl, her head pillowed on the treasure bag, napped
+    uneasily, while Kirkwood plodded restlessly to and fro, up and
+    down the platform, communing with the Shade of Care and addling
+    his poor, weary wits with the problem of the future,&#8212not so
+    much his own as the future of the unhappy child for whose
+    welfare he had assumed responsibility. Dark for both of them,
+    in his understanding To-morrow loomed darkest for her.</p>
+
+    <p>Not until the gray, formless light of the dawn-dusk was
+    wavering over the land, did he cease his perambulations. Then a
+    gradual stir of life in the city streets, together with the
+    appearance of a station porter or two, opening the
+    waiting-rooms and preparing them against the traffic of the
+    day, warned him that he must rouse his charge. He paused and
+    stood over her, reluctant to disturb her rest, such as it was,
+    his heart torn with compassion for her, his soul embittered by
+    the cruel irony of their estate.</p>
+
+    <p>If what he understood were true, a king's ransom was
+    secreted within the cheap, imitation-leather satchel which
+    served her for a pillow. But it availed her nothing for her
+    comfort. If what he believed were true, she was absolute
+    mistress of that treasure of jewels; yet that night she had
+    been forced to sleep on a hard, uncushioned bench, in the open
+    air, and this morning he must waken her to the life of a hunted
+    thing. A week ago she had had at her command every luxury known
+    to the civilized world; to-day she was friendless, but for his
+    inefficient, worthless self, and in a strange land. A week
+    ago,&#8212had he known her then,&#8212he had been free to tell her of
+    his love, to offer her the protection of his name as well as
+    his devotion; to-day he was an all but penniless vagabond, and
+    there could be no dishonor deeper than to let her know the
+    nature of his heart's desire.</p>
+
+    <p>Was ever lover hedged from a declaration to his mistress by
+    circumstances so hateful, so untoward! He could have raged and
+    railed against his fate like any madman. For he desired her
+    greatly, and she was very lovely in his sight. If her night's
+    rest had been broken and but a mockery, she showed few signs of
+    it; the faint, wan complexion of fatigue seemed only to enhance
+    the beauty of her maidenhood; her lips were as fresh and
+    desirous as the dewy petals of a crimson rose; beneath her eyes
+    soft shadows lurked where her lashes lay tremulous upon her
+    cheeks of satin.... She was to him of all created things the
+    most wonderful, the most desirable.</p>
+
+    <p>The temptation of his longing seemed more than he could long
+    withstand. But resist he must, or part for ever with any title
+    to her consideration&#8212or his own. He shut his teeth and knotted
+    his brows in a transport of desire to touch, if only with his
+    finger-tips, the woven wonder of her hair.</p>
+
+    <p>And thus she saw him, when, without warning, she awoke.</p>
+
+    <p>Bewilderment at first informed the wide brown eyes; then, as
+    their drowsiness vanished, a little laughter, a little tender
+    mirth.</p>
+
+    <p>"Good morning, Sir Knight of the Somber Countenance!" she
+    cried, standing up. "Am I so utterly disreputable that you find
+    it necessary to frown on me so darkly?"</p>
+
+    <p>He shook his head, smiling.</p>
+
+    <p>"I know I'm a fright," she asserted vigorously, shaking out
+    the folds of her pleated skirt. "And as for my hat, it will
+    never be on straight&#8212but then <i>you</i> wouldn't know."</p>
+
+    <p>"It seems all right," he replied vacantly.</p>
+
+    <p>"Then please to try to look a little happier, since you find
+    me quite presentable."</p>
+
+    <p>"I do..."</p>
+
+    <p>Without lifting her bended head, she looked up, laughing,
+    not ill-pleased. "<i>You'd</i> say so... really?"</p>
+
+    <p>Commonplace enough, this banter, this pitiful endeavor to be
+    oblivious of their common misery; but like the look she gave
+    him, her words rang in his head like potent fumes of wine. He
+    turned away, utterly disconcerted for the time, knowing only
+    that he must overcome his weakness.</p>
+
+    <p>Far down the railway tracks there rose a murmuring, that
+    waxed to a rumbling roar. A passing porter answered Kirkwood's
+    inquiry: it was the night boat-train from Ostend. He picked up
+    their bags and drew the girl into the waiting-room, troubled by
+    a sickening foreboding.</p>
+
+    <p>Through the window they watched the train roll in and
+    stop.</p>
+
+    <p>Among others, alighted, smirking, the unspeakable Hobbs.</p>
+
+    <p>He lifted his hat and bowed jauntily to the waiting-room
+    window, making it plain that his keen eyes had discovered them
+    instantly.</p>
+
+    <p>Kirkwood's heart sank with the hopelessness of it all. If
+    the railway directorates of Europe conspired against them, what
+    chance had they? If the night boat-train from Ostend had only
+    had the decency to be twenty-five minutes late, instead of
+    arriving promptly on the minute of 4:45 they two might have
+    escaped by the 5:09 for Dunkerque and Calais.</p>
+
+    <p>There remained but a single untried ruse in his bag of
+    tricks; mercifully it might suffice.</p>
+
+    <p>"Miss Calendar," said Kirkwood from his heart, "just as soon
+    as I get you home, safe and sound, I am going to take a day
+    off, hunt up that little villain, and flay him alive. In the
+    meantime, I forgot to dine last night, and am reminded that we
+    had better forage for breakfast."</p>
+
+    <p>Hobbs dogged them at a safe distance while they sallied
+    forth and in a neighboring street discovered an early-bird
+    bakery. Here they were able to purchase rolls steaming from the
+    oven, fresh pats of golden butter wrapped in clean lettuce
+    leaves, and milk in twin bottles; all of which they prosaically
+    carried with them back to the station, lacking leisure as they
+    did to partake of the food before train-time.</p>
+
+    <p>Without attempting concealment (Hobbs, he knew, was
+    eavesdropping round the corner of the door) Kirkwood purchased
+    at the ticket-window passages on the Dunkerque train. Mr. Hobbs
+    promptly flattered him by imitation; and so jealous of his luck
+    was Kirkwood by this time grown, through continual
+    disappointment, that he did not even let the girl into his
+    plans until they were aboard the 5:09, in a compartment all to
+    themselves. Then, having with his own eyes seen Mr. Hobbs dodge
+    into the third compartment in the rear of the same carriage,
+    Kirkwood astonished the girl by requesting her to follow him;
+    and together they left by the door opposite that by which they
+    had entered.</p>
+
+    <p>The engine was running up and down a scale of staccato
+    snorts, in preparation for the race, and the cars were on the
+    edge of moving, couplings clanking, wheels a-groan, ere Mr.
+    Hobbs condescended to join them between the tracks.</p>
+
+    <p>Wearily, disheartened, Kirkwood reopened the door, flung the
+    bags in, and helped the girl back into their despised
+    compartment; the quicker route to England via Ostend was now
+    out of the question. As for himself, he waited for a brace of
+    seconds, eying wickedly the ubiquitous Hobbs, who had popped
+    back into his compartment, but stood ready to pop out again on
+    the least encouragement. In the meantime he was pleased to
+    shake a friendly foot at Mr. Kirkwood, thrusting that member
+    out through the half-open door.</p>
+
+    <p>Only the timely departure of the train, compelling him to
+    rejoin Dorothy at once, if at all, prevented the American from
+    adding murder to the already noteworthy catalogue of his high
+    crimes and misdemeanors.</p>
+
+    <p>Their simple meal, consumed to the ultimate drop and crumb
+    while the Dunkerque train meandered serenely through a sunny,
+    smiling Flemish countryside, somewhat revived their jaded
+    spirits. After all, they were young, enviably dowered with
+    youth's exuberant elasticity of mood; the world was bright in
+    the dawning, the night had fled leaving naught but an evil
+    memory; best of all things, they were together: tacitly they
+    were agreed that somehow the future would take care of itself
+    and all be well with them.</p>
+
+    <p>For a time they laughed and chattered, pretending that the
+    present held no cares or troubles; but soon the girl, nestling
+    her head in a corner of the dingy cushions, was smiling ever
+    more drowsily on Kirkwood; and presently she slept in good
+    earnest, the warm blood ebbing and flowing beneath the
+    exquisite texture of her cheeks, the ghost of an unconscious
+    smile quivering about the sensitive scarlet mouth, the breeze
+    through the open window at her side wantoning at will in the
+    sunlit witchery of her hair. And Kirkwood, worn with sleepless
+    watching, dwelt in longing upon the dear innocent allure of her
+    until the ache in his heart had grown well-nigh insupportable;
+    then instinctively turned his gaze upwards, searching his
+    heart, reading the faith and desire of it, so that at length
+    knowledge and understanding came to him, of his weakness and
+    strength and the clean love that he bore for her, and gladdened
+    he sat dreaming in waking the same clear dreams that modeled
+    her unconscious lips secretly for laughter and the joy of
+    living.</p>
+
+    <p>When Dunkerque halted their progress, they were obliged to
+    alight and change cars,&#8212Hobbs a discreetly sinister shadow at
+    the end of the platform.</p>
+
+    <p>By schedule they were to arrive in Calais about the middle
+    of the forenoon, with a wait of three hours to be bridged
+    before the departure of the Dover packet. That would be an
+    anxious time; the prospect of it rendered both Dorothy and
+    Kirkwood doubly anxious throughout this final stage of their
+    flight. In three hours anything could happen, or be brought
+    about. Neither could forget that it was quite within the bounds
+    of possibilities for Calendar to be awaiting them in Calais.
+    Presuming that Hobbs had been acute enough to guess their plans
+    and advise his employer by telegraph, the latter could readily
+    have anticipated their arrival, whether by sea in the
+    brigantine, or by land, taking the direct route via Brussels
+    and Lille. If such proved to be the case, it were scarcely
+    sensible to count upon the arch-adventurer contenting himself
+    with a waiting r&#244;le like Hobbs'.</p>
+
+    <p>With such unhappy apprehensions for a stimulant, between
+    them the man and the girl contrived a make-shift
+    counter-stratagem; or it were more accurate to say that
+    Kirkwood proposed it, while Dorothy rejected, disputed, and at
+    length accepted it, albeit with sad misgivings. For it involved
+    a separation that might not prove temporary.</p>
+
+    <p>Together they could never escape the surveillance of Mr.
+    Hobbs; parted, he would be obliged to follow one or the other.
+    The task of misleading the <i>Alethea's</i> mate, Kirkwood
+    undertook, delegating to the girl the duty of escaping when he
+    could provide her the opportunity, of keeping under cover until
+    the hour of sailing, and then proceeding to England, with the
+    gladstone bag, alone if Kirkwood was unable, or thought it
+    inadvisable, to join her on the boat.</p>
+
+    <p>In furtherance of this design, a majority of the girl's
+    belongings were transferred from her traveling bag to
+    Kirkwood's, the gladstone taking their place; and the young man
+    provided her with voluminous instructions, a revolver which she
+    did not know how to handle and declared she would never use for
+    any consideration, and enough money to pay for her
+    accommodation at the Terminus H&#244;tel, near the pier, and
+    for two passages to London. It was agreed that she should
+    secure the steamer booking, lest Kirkwood be delayed until the
+    last moment.</p>
+
+    <p>These arrangements concluded, the pair of blessed idiots sat
+    steeped in melancholy silence, avoiding each other's eyes,
+    until the train drew in at the Gare Centrale, Calais.</p>
+
+    <p>In profound silence, too, they left their compartment and
+    passed through the station, into the quiet, sun-drenched
+    streets of the seaport,&#8212Hobbs hovering solicitously in the
+    offing.</p>
+
+    <p>Without comment or visible relief of mind they were aware
+    that their fears had been without apparent foundation; they saw
+    no sign of Calendar, Stryker or Mulready. The circumstance,
+    however, counted for nothing; one or all of the adventurers
+    might arrive in Calais at any minute.</p>
+
+    <p>Momentarily more miserable as the time of parting drew
+    nearer, dumb with unhappiness, they turned aside from the main
+    thoroughfares of the city, leaving the business section, and
+    gained the sleepier side streets, bordered by the residences of
+    the proletariat, where for blocks none but children were to be
+    seen, and of them but few&#8212quaint, sober little bodies playing
+    almost noiselessly in their dooryards.</p>
+
+    <p>At length Kirkwood spoke.</p>
+
+    <p>"Let's make it the corner," he said, without looking at the
+    girl. "It's a short block to the next street. You hurry to the
+    Terminus and lock yourself in your room. Have the management
+    book both passages; don't run the risk of going to the pier
+    yourself. I'll make things interesting for Mr. Hobbs, and join
+    you as soon as I can, <i>if</i> I can."</p>
+
+    <p>"You must," replied the girl. "I shan't go without you."</p>
+
+    <p>"But, Dor&#8212Miss Calendar!" he exclaimed, aghast.</p>
+
+    <p>"I don't care&#8212I know I agreed," she declared mutinously.
+    "But I won't&#8212I can't. Remember I shall wait for you."</p>
+
+    <p>"But&#8212but perhaps&#8212"</p>
+
+    <p>"If you have to stay, it will be because there's
+    danger&#8212won't it? And what would you think of me if I deserted
+    you then, af-after all y-you've done?... Please don't waste
+    time arguing. Whether you come at one to-day, to-morrow, or a
+    week from to-morrow, I shall be waiting.... You may be sure.
+    Good-by."</p>
+
+    <p>They had turned the corner, walking slowly, side by side;
+    Hobbs, for the first time caught off his guard, had dropped
+    behind more than half a long block. But now Kirkwood's quick
+    sidelong glance discovered the mate in the act of taking alarm
+    and quickening his pace. None the less the American was at the
+    time barely conscious of anything other than a wholly
+    unexpected furtive pressure of the girl's gloved fingers on his
+    own.</p>
+
+    <p>"Good-by," she whispered.</p>
+
+    <p>He caught at her hand, protesting. "Dorothy&#8212!"</p>
+
+    <p>"Good-by," she repeated breathlessly, with a queer little
+    catch in her voice. "God be with you, Philip, and&#8212and send you
+    safely back to me...."</p>
+
+    <p>And she was running away.</p>
+
+    <p>Dumfounded with dismay, seeing in a flash how all his plans
+    might be set at naught by this her unforeseen insubordination,
+    he took a step or two after her; but she was fleet of foot,
+    and, remembering Hobbs, he halted.</p>
+
+    <p>By this time the mate, too, was running; Kirkwood could hear
+    the heavy pounding of his clumsy feet. Already Dorothy had
+    almost gained the farther corner; as she whisked round it with
+    a flutter of skirts, Kirkwood dodged hastily behind a
+    gate-post. A thought later, Hobbs appeared, head down, chest
+    out, eyes straining for sight of his quarry, pelting along for
+    dear life.</p>
+
+    <p>As, rounding the corner, he stretched out in swifter stride,
+    Kirkwood was inspired to put a spoke in his wheel; and a foot
+    thrust suddenly out from behind the gate-post accomplished his
+    purpose with more success than he had dared anticipate.
+    Stumbling, the mate plunged headlong, arms and legs a-sprawl;
+    and the momentum of his pace, though checked, carried him along
+    the sidewalk, face downwards, a full yard ere he could stay
+    himself.</p>
+
+    <p>Kirkwood stepped out of the gateway and sheered off as Hobbs
+    picked himself up; something which he did rather slowly, as if
+    in a daze, without comprehension of the cause of his
+    misfortune. And for a moment he stood pulling his wits together
+    and swaying as though on the point of resuming his rudely
+    interrupted chase; when the noise of Kirkwood's heels brought
+    him about face in a twinkling.</p>
+
+    <p>"Ow, it's you, eh!" he snarled in a temper as vicious as his
+    countenance; and both of these were much the worse for wear and
+    tear.</p>
+
+    <p>"Myself," admitted Kirkwood fairly; and then, in a gleam of
+    humor: "Weren't you looking for me?"</p>
+
+    <p>His rage seemed to take the little Cockney and shake him by
+    the throat; he trembled from head to foot, his face shockingly
+    congested, and spat out dust and fragments of lurid blasphemy
+    like an infuriated cat.</p>
+
+    <p>Of a sudden, "W'ere's the gel?" he sputtered thickly as his
+    quick shifting eyes for the first time noted Dorothy's
+    absence.</p>
+
+    <p>"Miss Calendar has other business&#8212none with you. I've taken
+    the liberty of stopping you because I have a word or two&#8212"</p>
+
+    <p>"Ow, you 'ave, 'ave you? Gawd strike me blind, but I've a
+    word for you, too!... 'And over that bag&#8212and look nippy, or
+    I'll myke you pye for w'at you've done to me ... I'll myke you
+    pye!" he iterated hoarsely, edging closer. "'And it over
+    or&#8212"</p>
+
+    <p>"You've got another guess&#8212" Kirkwood began, but saved his
+    breath in deference to an imperative demand on him for instant
+    defensive action.</p>
+
+    <p>To some extent he had underestimated the brute courage of
+    the fellow, the violent, desperate courage that is distilled of
+    anger in men of his kind. Despising him, deeming him incapable
+    of any overt act of villainy, Kirkwood had been a little less
+    wary than he would have been with Calendar or Mulready. Hobbs
+    had seemed more of the craven type which Stryker graced so
+    conspicuously. But now the American was to be taught
+    discrimination, to learn that if Stryker's nature was like a
+    snake's for low cunning and deviousness, Hobbs' soul was the
+    soul of a viper.</p>
+
+    <p>Almost imperceptibly he had advanced upon Kirkwood; almost
+    insensibly his right hand had moved toward his chest; now, with
+    a movement marvelously deft, it had slipped in and out of his
+    breast pocket. And a six-inch blade of tarnished steel was
+    winging toward Kirkwood's throat with the speed of light.</p>
+
+    <p>Instinctively he stepped back; as instinctively he guarded
+    with his right forearm, lifting the hand that held the satchel.
+    The knife, catching in his sleeve, scratched the arm beneath
+    painfully, and simultaneously was twisted from the mate's
+    grasp, while in his surprise Kirkwood's grip on the bag-handle
+    relaxed. It was torn forcibly from his fingers just as he
+    received a heavy blow on his chest from the mate's fist. He
+    staggered back.</p>
+
+    <p>By the time he had recovered from the shock, Hobbs was a
+    score of feet away, the satchel tucked under his arm, his body
+    bent almost double, running like a jack-rabbit. Ere Kirkwood
+    could get under way, in pursuit, the mate had dodged out of
+    sight round the corner. When the American caught sight of him
+    again, he was far down the block, and bettering his pace with
+    every jump.</p>
+
+    <p>He was approaching, also, some six or eight good citizens of
+    Calais, men of the laboring class, at a guess. Their attention
+    attracted by his frantic flight, they stopped to wonder. One or
+    two moved as though to intercept him, and he doubled out into
+    the middle of the street with the quickness of thought; an
+    instant later he shot round another corner and disappeared, the
+    natives streaming after in hot chase, electrified by the
+    inspiring strains of "Stop, thief!"&#8212or its French
+    equivalent.</p>
+
+    <p>Kirkwood, cheering them on with the same wild cry, followed
+    to the farther street; and there paused, so winded and weak
+    with laughter that he was fain to catch at a fence picket for
+    support. Standing thus he saw other denizens of Calais spring
+    as if from the ground miraculously to swell the hue and cry;
+    and a dumpling of a gendarme materialized from nowhere at all,
+    to fall in behind the rabble, waving his sword above his head
+    and screaming at the top of his lungs, the while his fat legs
+    twinkled for all the world like thick sausage links marvelously
+    animated.</p>
+
+    <p>The mob straggled round yet another corner and was gone; its
+    clamor diminished on the still Spring air; and Kirkwood,
+    recovering, abandoned Mr. Hobbs to the justice of the high gods
+    and the French system of jurisprudence (at least, he hoped the
+    latter would take an interest in the case, if haply Hobbs were
+    laid by the heels), and went his way rejoicing.</p>
+
+    <p>As for the scratch on his arm, it was nothing, as he
+    presently demonstrated to his complete satisfaction in the
+    seclusion of a chance-sent fiacre. Kirkwood, commissioning it
+    to drive him to the American Consulate, made his diagnosis
+    <i>en route</i>; wound a handkerchief round the negligible
+    wound, rolled down his sleeve, and forgot it altogether in the
+    joys of picturing to himself Hobbs in the act of opening the
+    satchel in expectation of finding therein the gladstone
+    bag.</p>
+
+    <p>At the consulate door he paid off the driver and dismissed
+    him; the fiacre had served his purpose, and he could find his
+    way to the Terminus H&#244;tel at infinitely less expense. He
+    had a considerably harder task before him as he ascended the
+    steps to the consular doorway, knocked and made known the
+    nature of his errand.</p>
+
+    <p>No malicious destiny could have timed the hour of his call
+    more appositely; the consul was at home and at the disposal of
+    his fellow-citizens&#8212within bounds.</p>
+
+    <p>In the course of thirty minutes or so Kirkwood emerged with
+    dignity from the consulate, his face crimson to the hair, his
+    soul smarting with shame and humiliation; and left an amused
+    official representative of his country's government with the
+    impression of having been entertained to the point of ennui by
+    an exceptionally clumsy but pertinacious liar.</p>
+
+    <p>For the better part of the succeeding hour Kirkwood
+    circumnavigated the neighborhood of the steamer pier and the
+    Terminus H&#244;tel, striving to render himself as
+    inconspicuous as he felt insignificant, and keenly on the alert
+    for any sign or news of Hobbs. In this pursuit he was
+    pleasantly disappointed.</p>
+
+    <p>At noon precisely, his suspense grown too onerous for his
+    strength of will, throwing caution and their understanding to
+    the winds, he walked boldly into the Terminus, and inquired for
+    Miss Calendar.</p>
+
+    <p>The assurance he received that she was in safety under its
+    roof did not deter him from sending up his name and asking her
+    to receive him in the public lounge; he required the testimony
+    of his senses to convince him that no harm had come to her in
+    the long hour and a half that had elapsed since their
+    separation.</p>
+
+    <p>Woman-like, she kept him waiting. Alone in the public rooms
+    of the hotel, he suffered excruciating torments. How was he to
+    know that Calendar had not arrived and found his way to
+    her?</p>
+
+    <p>When at length she appeared on the threshold of the
+    apartment, bringing with her the traveling bag and looking
+    wonderfully the better for her ninety minutes of complete
+    repose and privacy, the relief he experienced was so intense
+    that he remained transfixed in the middle of the floor,
+    momentarily able neither to speak nor to move.</p>
+
+    <p>On her part, so fagged and distraught did he seem, that at
+    sight of his care-worn countenance she hurried to him with
+    outstretched, compassionate hands and a low pitiful cry of
+    concern, forgetful entirely of that which he himself had
+    forgotten&#8212the emotion she had betrayed on parting.</p>
+
+    <p>"Oh, nothing wrong," he hastened to reassure her, with a
+    sorry ghost of his familiar grin; "only I have lost Hobbs and
+    the satchel with your things; and there's no sign yet of Mr.
+    Calendar. We can feel pretty comfortable now, and&#8212and I
+    thought it time we had something like a meal."</p>
+
+    <p>The narrative of his adventure which he delivered over their
+    <i>d&#233;jeuner &#224; la fourchette</i> contained no mention
+    either of his rebuff at the American Consulate or the scratch
+    he had sustained during Hobbs' murderous assault; the one could
+    not concern her, the other would seem but a bid for her
+    sympathy. He counted it a fortunate thing that the mate's knife
+    had been keen enough to penetrate the cloth of his sleeve
+    without tearing it; the slit it had left was barely noticeable.
+    And he purposely diverted the girl with flashes of humorous
+    description, so that they discussed both meal and episode in a
+    mood of wholesome merriment.</p>
+
+    <p>It was concluded, all too soon for the taste of either, by
+    the waiter's announcement that the steamer was on the point of
+    sailing.</p>
+
+    <p>Outwardly composed, inwardly quaking, they boarded the
+    packet, meeting with no misadventure whatever&#8212if we are to
+    except the circumstance that, when the restaurant bill was
+    settled and the girl had punctiliously surrendered his change
+    with the tickets, Kirkwood found himself in possession of
+    precisely one franc and twenty centimes.</p>
+
+    <p>He groaned in spirit to think how differently he might have
+    been fixed, had he not in his infatuated spirit of honesty been
+    so anxious to give Calendar more than ample value for his
+    money!</p>
+
+    <p>An inexorable anxiety held them both near the gangway until
+    it was cast off and the boat began to draw away from the pier.
+    Then, and not till then, did an unimpressive, small figure of a
+    man detach itself from the shield of a pile of luggage and
+    advance to the pier-head. No second glance was needed to
+    identify Mr. Hobbs; and until the perspective dwarfed him
+    indistinguishably, he was to be seen, alternately waving
+    Kirkwood ironic farewell and blowing violent kisses to Miss
+    Calendar from the tips of his soiled fingers.</p>
+
+    <p>So he had escaped arrest....</p>
+
+    <p>At first by turns indignant and relieved to realize that
+    thereafter they were to move in scenes in which his hateful
+    shadow would not form an essentially component part,
+    subsequently Kirkwood fell a prey to prophetic terrors. It was
+    not alone fear of retribution that had induced Hobbs to
+    relinquish his persecution&#8212or so Kirkwood became convinced; if
+    the mate's calculation had allowed for them the least fraction
+    of a chance to escape apprehension on the farther shores of the
+    Channel, nor fears nor threats would have prevented him from
+    sailing with the fugitives.... Far from having left danger
+    behind them on the Continent, Kirkwood believed in his secret
+    heart that they were but flying to encounter it beneath the
+    smoky pall of London.</p>
+
+    <center>
+        <h2><a name="XVII">XVII</a></h2>
+
+        <h3>ROGUES AND VAGABONDS</h3>
+    </center>
+
+    <p>A westering sun striking down through the drab exhalations
+    of ten-thousand sooty chimney-pots, tinted the atmosphere with
+    the hue of copper. The glance that wandered purposelessly out
+    through the carriage windows, recoiled, repelled by the endless
+    dreary vista of the Surrey Side's unnumbered roofs; or, probing
+    instantaneously the hopeless depths of some grim narrow
+    thoroughfare fleetingly disclosed, as the evening boat-train
+    from Dover swung on toward Charing Cross, its trucks level with
+    the eaves of Southwark's dwellings, was saddened by the thought
+    that in all the world squalor such as this should obtain and
+    flourish unrelieved.</p>
+
+    <p>For perhaps the tenth time in the course of the journey
+    Kirkwood withdrew his gaze from the window and turned to the
+    girl, a question ready framed upon his lips.</p>
+
+    <p>"Are you quite sure&#8212" he began; and then, alive to the
+    clear and penetrating perception in the brown eyes that smiled
+    into his from under their level brows, he stammered and left
+    the query uncompleted.</p>
+
+    <p>Continuing to regard him steadily and smilingly, Dorothy
+    shook her head in playful denial and protest. "Do you know,"
+    she commented, "that this is about the fifth repetition of that
+    identical question within the last quarter-hour?"</p>
+
+    <p>"How do you know what I meant to say?" he demanded,
+    staring.</p>
+
+    <p>"I can see it in your eyes. Besides, you've talked and
+    thought of nothing else since we left the boat. Won't you
+    believe me, please, when I say there's absolutely not a soul in
+    London to whom I could go and ask for shelter? I don't think
+    it's very nice of you to be so openly anxious to get rid of
+    me."</p>
+
+    <p>This latter was so essentially undeserved and so artlessly
+    insincere, that he must needs, of course, treat it with all
+    seriousness.</p>
+
+    <p>"That isn't fair, Miss Calendar. Really it's not."</p>
+
+    <p>"What am I to think? I've told you any number of times that
+    it's only an hour's ride on to Chiltern, where the Pyrfords
+    will be glad to take me in. You may depend upon it,&#8212by eight
+    to-night, at the latest, you'll have me off your hands,&#8212the
+    drag and worry that I've been ever since&#8212"</p>
+
+    <p>"Don't!" he pleaded vehemently. "Please!... You <i>know</i>
+    it isn't that. I <i>don't</i> want you off my hands, ever....
+    That is to say, I&#8212ah&#8212" Here he was smitten with a dumbness,
+    and sat, aghast at the enormity of his blunder, entreating her
+    forgiveness with eyes that, very likely, pleaded his cause more
+    eloquently than he guessed.</p>
+
+    <p>"I mean," he floundered on presently, in the fatuous belief
+    that he would this time be able to control both mind and
+    tongue, "<i>what</i> I mean is I'd be glad to go on serving you
+    in any way I might, to the end of time, if you'd give
+    me...."</p>
+
+    <p>He left the declaration inconclusive&#8212a stroke of diplomacy
+    that would have graced an infinitely more adept wooer. But he
+    used it all unconsciously. "O Lord!" he groaned in spirit.
+    "Worse and more of it! Why in thunder can't I say the right
+    thing <i>right</i>?"</p>
+
+    <p>Egotistically absorbed by the problem thus formulated, he
+    was heedless of her failure to respond, and remained pensively
+    preoccupied until roused by the grinding and jolting of the
+    train, as it slowed to a halt preparatory to crossing the
+    bridge.</p>
+
+    <p>Then he sought to read his answer in the eyes of Dorothy.
+    But she was looking away, staring thoughtfully out over the
+    billowing sea of roofs that merged illusively into the haze
+    long ere it reached the horizon; and Kirkwood could see the
+    pulsing of the warm blood in her throat and cheeks; and the
+    glamorous light that leaped and waned in her eyes, as the ruddy
+    evening sunlight warmed them, was something any man might be
+    glad to live for and die for.... And he saw that she had
+    understood, had grasped the thread of meaning that ran through
+    the clumsy fabric of his halting speech and his sudden
+    silences.</p>
+
+    <p>She had understood without resentment!</p>
+
+    <p>While, incredulous, he wrestled with the wonder of this fond
+    discovery, she grew conscious of his gaze, and turned her head
+    to meet it with one fearless and sweet, if troubled.</p>
+
+    <p>"Dear Mr. Kirkwood," she said gently, bending forward as if
+    to read between the lines anxiety had graven on his
+    countenance, "won't you tell me, please, what it can be that so
+    worries you? Is it possible that you still have a fear of my
+    father? But don't you know that he can do nothing now&#8212now that
+    we're safe? We have only to take a cab to Paddington Station,
+    and then&#8212"</p>
+
+    <p>"You mustn't underestimate the resource and ability of Mr.
+    Calendar," he told her gloomily; "we've got a chance&#8212no more.
+    It wasn't...." He shut his teeth on his unruly tongue&#8212too
+    late.</p>
+
+    <p>Woman-quick she caught him up. "It wasn't that? Then what
+    was it that worried you? If it's something that affects me, is
+    it kind and right of you not to tell me?"</p>
+
+    <p>"It&#8212it affects us both," he conceded drearily. "I&#8212I
+    don't&#8212"</p>
+
+    <p>The wretched embarrassment of the confession befogged his
+    wits; he felt unable to frame the words. He appealed
+    speechlessly for tolerance, with a face utterly woebegone and
+    eyes piteous.</p>
+
+    <p>The train began to move slowly across the Thames to Charing
+    Cross.</p>
+
+    <p>Mercilessly the girl persisted. "We've only a minute more.
+    Surely you can trust me...."</p>
+
+    <p>In exasperation he interrupted almost rudely. "It's only
+    this: I&#8212I'm strapped."</p>
+
+    <p>"Strapped?" She knitted her brows over this fresh specimen
+    of American slang.</p>
+
+    <p>"Flat strapped&#8212busted&#8212broke&#8212on my uppers&#8212down and out,"
+    he reeled off synonyms without a smile. "I haven't enough money
+    to pay cab-fare across the town&#8212"</p>
+
+    <p>"Oh!" she interpolated, enlightened.</p>
+
+    <p>"&#8212to say nothing of taking us to Chiltern. I couldn't buy
+    you a glass of water if you were thirsty. There isn't a soul on
+    earth, within hail, who would trust me with a quarter&#8212I mean a
+    shilling&#8212across London Bridge. I'm the original Luckless
+    Wonder and the only genuine Jonah extant."</p>
+
+    <p>With a face the hue of fire, he cocked his eyebrows askew
+    and attempted to laugh unconcernedly to hide his bitter shame.
+    "I've led you out of the fryingpan into the fire, and I don't
+    know what to do! Please call me names."</p>
+
+    <p>And in a single instant all that he had consistently tried
+    to avoid doing, had been irretrievably done; if, with dawning
+    comprehension, dismay flickered in her eyes&#8212such dismay as
+    such a confession can rouse only in one who, like Dorothy
+    Calendar, has never known the want of a penny&#8212it was swiftly
+    driven out to make place for the truest and most gracious and
+    unselfish solicitude.</p>
+
+    <p>"Oh, poor Mr. Kirkwood! And it's all because of me! You've
+    beggared yourself&#8212"</p>
+
+    <p>"Not precisely; I was beggared to begin with." He hastened
+    to disclaim the extravagant generosity of which she accused
+    him. "I had only three or four pounds to my name that night we
+    met.... I haven't told you&#8212I&#8212"</p>
+
+    <p>"You've told me nothing, nothing whatever about yourself,"
+    she said reproachfully.</p>
+
+    <p>"I didn't want to bother you with my troubles; I tried not
+    to talk about myself.... You knew I was an American, but I'm
+    worse than that; I'm a Californian&#8212from San Francisco." He
+    tried unsuccessfully to make light of it. "I told you I was the
+    Luckless Wonder; if I'd ever had any luck I would have stored a
+    little money away. As it was, I lived on my income, left my
+    principal in 'Frisco; and when the earthquake came, it wiped me
+    out completely."</p>
+
+    <p>"And you were going home that night we made you miss your
+    steamer!"</p>
+
+    <p>"It was my own fault, and I'm glad this blessed minute that
+    I did miss it. Nice sort I'd have been, to go off and leave you
+    at the mercy&#8212"</p>
+
+    <p>"Please! I want to think, I'm trying to remember how much
+    you've gone through&#8212"</p>
+
+    <p>"Precisely what I don't want you to do. Anyway, I did
+    nothing more than any other fellow would've! Please don't give
+    me credit that I don't deserve."</p>
+
+    <p>But she was not listening; and a pause fell, while the train
+    crawled warily over the trestle, as if in fear of the foul,
+    muddy flood below.</p>
+
+    <p>"And there's no way I can repay you...."</p>
+
+    <p>"There's nothing to be repaid," he contended stoutly.</p>
+
+    <p>She clasped her hands and let them fall gently in her lap.
+    "I've not a farthing in the world!... I never dreamed.... I'm
+    so sorry, Mr. Kirkwood&#8212terribly, terribly sorry!... But what
+    can we do? I can't consent to be a burden&#8212"</p>
+
+    <p>"But you're not! You're the one thing that ..." He swerved
+    sharply, at an abrupt tangent. "There's one thing we can do, of
+    course."</p>
+
+    <p>She looked up inquiringly.</p>
+
+    <p>"Craven Street is just round the corner."</p>
+
+    <p>"Yes?"&#8212wonderingly.</p>
+
+    <p>"I mean we must go to Mrs. Hallam's house, first off....
+    It's too late now,&#8212after five, else we could deposit the
+    jewels in some bank. Since&#8212since they are no longer yours, the
+    only thing, and the proper thing to do is to place them in
+    safety or in the hands of their owner. If you take them
+    directly to young Hallam, your hands will be clear.... And&#8212I
+    never did such a thing in my life, Miss Calendar; but if he's
+    got a spark of gratitude in his make-up, I ought to be able
+    to&#8212er&#8212to borrow a pound or so of him."</p>
+
+    <p>"Do you think so?" She shook her head in doubt. "I don't
+    know; I know so little of such things.... You are right; we
+    must take him the jewels, but..." Her voice trailed off into a
+    sigh of profound perturbation.</p>
+
+    <p>He dared not meet her look.</p>
+
+    <p>Beneath his wandering gaze a County Council steam-boat
+    darted swiftly down-stream from Charing Cross pier, in the
+    shadow of the railway bridge. It seemed curious to reflect that
+    from that very floating pier he had started first upon his
+    quest of the girl beside him, only&#8212he had to count&#8212three
+    nights ago! Three days and three nights! Altogether incredible
+    seemed the transformation they had wrought in the complexion of
+    the world. Yet nothing material was changed.... He lifted his
+    eyes.</p>
+
+    <p>Beyond the river rose the Embankment, crawling with traffic,
+    backed by the green of the gardens and the shimmering walls of
+    glass and stone of the great hotels, their windows glowing
+    weirdly golden in the late sunlight. A little down-stream
+    Cleopatra's Needle rose, sadly the worse for London smoke,
+    flanked by its couchant sphinxes, wearing a nimbus of circling,
+    sweeping, swooping, wheeling gulls. Farther down, from the foot
+    of that magnificent pile, Somerset House, Waterloo Bridge
+    sprang over-stream in its graceful arch.... All as of
+    yesterday; yet all changed. Why? Because a woman had entered
+    into his life; because he had learned the lesson of love and
+    had looked into the bright face of Romance....</p>
+
+    <p>With a jar the train started and began to move more
+    swiftly.</p>
+
+    <p>Kirkwood lifted the traveling bag to his knees.</p>
+
+    <p>"Don't forget," he said with some difficulty, "you're to
+    stick by me, whatever happens. You mustn't desert me."</p>
+
+    <p>"You <i>know</i>," the girl reproved him.</p>
+
+    <p>"I know; but there must be no misunderstanding.... Don't
+    worry; we'll win out yet, I've a plan."</p>
+
+    <p><i>Splendide mendax</i>! He had not the glimmering of a
+    plan.</p>
+
+    <p>The engine panting, the train drew in beneath the vast
+    sounding dome of the station, to an accompaniment of dull
+    thunderings; and stopped finally.</p>
+
+    <p>Kirkwood got out, not without a qualm of regret at leaving
+    the compartment; therein, at least, they had some title to
+    consideration, by virtue of their tickets; now they were
+    utterly vagabondish, penniless adventurers.</p>
+
+    <p>The girl joined him. Slowly, elbow to elbow, the treasure
+    bag between them, they made their way down toward the gates,
+    atoms in a tide-rip of humanity,&#8212two streams of passengers
+    meeting on the narrow strip of platform, the one making for the
+    streets, the other for the suburbs.</p>
+
+    <p>Hurried and jostled, the girl clinging tightly to his arm
+    lest they be separated in the crush, they came to the
+    ticket-wicket; beyond the barrier surged a sea of hats&#8212shining
+    "toppers," dignified and upstanding, the outward and visible
+    manifestation of the sturdy, stodgy British spirit of
+    respectability; "bowlers" round and sleek and humble; shapeless
+    caps with cloth visors, manufactured of outrageous plaids;
+    flower-like miracles of millinery from Bond Street; strangely
+    plumed monstrosities from Petticoat Lane and Mile End Road.
+    Beneath any one of these might lurk the maleficent brain, the
+    spying eyes of Calendar or one of his creatures; beneath all of
+    them that he encountered, Kirkwood peered in fearful
+    inquiry.</p>
+
+    <p>Yet, when they had passed unhindered the ordeal of the
+    wickets, had run the gantlet of those thousand eyes without
+    lighting in any pair a spark of recognition, he began to bear
+    himself with more assurance, to be sensible to a grateful glow
+    of hope. Perhaps Hobbs' telegram had not reached its
+    destination, for unquestionably the mate would have wired his
+    chief; perhaps some accident had befallen the conspirators;
+    perhaps the police had apprehended them.... No matter how, one
+    hoped against hope that they had been thrown off the trail.</p>
+
+    <p>And indeed it seemed as if they must have been misguided in
+    some providential manner. On the other hand, it would be the
+    crassest of indiscretions to linger about the place an instant
+    longer than absolutely necessary.</p>
+
+    <p>Outside the building, however, they paused perforce,
+    undergoing the cross-fire of the congregated cabbies. It being
+    the first time that he had ever felt called upon to leave the
+    station afoot, Kirkwood cast about irresolutely, seeking the
+    sidewalk leading to the Strand.</p>
+
+    <p>Abruptly he caught the girl by the arm and unceremoniously
+    hurried her toward a waiting hansom.</p>
+
+    <p>"Quick!" he begged her. "Jump right in&#8212not an instant to
+    spare.&#8212"</p>
+
+    <p>She nodded brightly, lips firm with courage, eyes
+    shining.</p>
+
+    <p>"My father?"</p>
+
+    <p>"Yes." Kirkwood glanced back over his shoulder. "He hasn't
+    seen us yet. They've just driven up. Stryker's with him.
+    They're getting down." And to himself, "Oh, the devil!" cried
+    the panic-stricken young man.</p>
+
+    <p>He drew back to let the girl precede him into the cab; at
+    the same time he kept an eye on Calendar, whose conveyance
+    stood half the length of the station-front away.</p>
+
+    <p>The fat adventurer had finished paying off the driver,
+    standing on the deck of the hansom. Stryker was already out,
+    towering above the mass of people, and glaring about him with
+    his hawk-keen vision. Calendar had started to alight, his foot
+    was leaving the step when Stryker's glance singled out their
+    quarry. Instantly he turned and spoke to his confederate.
+    Calendar wheeled like a flash, peering eagerly in the direction
+    indicated by the captain's index finger, then, snapping
+    instructions to his driver, threw himself heavily back on the
+    seat. Stryker, awkward on his land-legs, stumbled and fell in
+    an ill-calculated attempt to hoist himself hastily back into
+    the vehicle.</p>
+
+    <p>To the delay thus occasioned alone Kirkwood and Dorothy owed
+    a respite of freedom. Their hansom was already swinging down
+    toward the great gates of the yard, the American standing to
+    make the driver comprehend the necessity for using the utmost
+    speed in reaching the Craven Street address. The man proved
+    both intelligent and obliging; Kirkwood had barely time to drop
+    down beside the girl, ere the cab was swinging out into the
+    Strand, to the peril of the toes belonging to a number of
+    righteously indignant pedestrians.</p>
+
+    <p>"Good boy!" commented Kirkwood cheerfully. "That's the
+    greatest comfort of all London, the surprising intellectual
+    strength the average cabby displays when you promise him a
+    tip.... Great Heavens!" he cried, reading the girl's dismayed
+    expression. "A tip! I never thought&#8212!" His face lengthened
+    dismally, his eyebrows working awry. "Now we are in for
+    it!"</p>
+
+    <p>Dorothy said nothing.</p>
+
+    <p>He turned in the seat, twisting his neck to peep through the
+    small rear window. "I don't see their cab," he announced. "But
+    of course they're after us. However, Craven Street's just round
+    the corner; if we get there first, I don't fancy Freddie Hallam
+    will have a cordial reception for our pursuers. They must've
+    been on watch at Cannon Street, and finding we were not coming
+    in that way&#8212of course they were expecting us because of Hobbs'
+    wire&#8212they took cab for Charing Cross. Lucky for us.... Or is
+    it lucky?" he added doubtfully, to himself.</p>
+
+    <p>The hansom whipped round the corner into Craven Street.
+    Kirkwood sprang up, grasping the treasure bag, ready to jump
+    the instant they pulled in toward Mrs. Hallam's dwelling. But
+    as they drew near upon the address he drew back with an
+    exclamation of amazement.</p>
+
+    <p>The house was closed, showing a blank face to the
+    street&#8212blinds drawn close down in the windows, area gate
+    padlocked, an estate-agent's board projecting from above the
+    doorway, advertising the property "To be let, furnished."</p>
+
+    <p>Kirkwood looked back, craning his neck round the side of the
+    cab. At the moment another hansom was breaking through the rank
+    of humanity on the Strand crossing. He saw one or two figures
+    leap desperately from beneath the horse's hoofs. Then the cab
+    shot out swiftly down the street.</p>
+
+    <p>The American stood up again, catching the cabby's eye.</p>
+
+    <p>"Drive on!" he cried excitedly. "Don't stop&#8212drive as fast
+    as you dare!"</p>
+
+    <p>"W'ere to, sir?"</p>
+
+    <p>"See that cab behind? Don't let it catch us&#8212shake it off,
+    lose it somehow, but for the love of Heaven don't let it catch
+    us! I'll make it worth your while. Do you understand?"</p>
+
+    <p>"Yes, sir!" The driver looked briefly over his shoulder and
+    lifted his whip. "Don't worry, sir," he cried, entering into
+    the spirit of the game with gratifying zest. "Shan't let 'em
+    over'aul you, sir. Mind your 'ead!"</p>
+
+    <p>And as Kirkwood ducked, the whip-lash shot out over the roof
+    with a crack like the report of a pistol. Startled, the horse
+    leaped indignantly forward. Momentarily the cab seemed to leave
+    the ground, then settled down to a pace that carried them round
+    the Avenue Theatre and across Northumberland Avenue into
+    Whitehall Place apparently on a single wheel.</p>
+
+    <p>A glance behind showed Kirkwood that already they had
+    gained, the pursuing hansom having lost ground through greater
+    caution in crossing the main-traveled thoroughfare.</p>
+
+    <p>"Good little horse!" he applauded.</p>
+
+    <p>A moment later he was indorsing without reserve the
+    generalship of their cabby; the quick westward turn that took
+    them into Whitehall, over across from the Horse Guards,
+    likewise placed them in a pocket of traffic; a practically
+    impregnable press of vehicles closed in behind them ere
+    Calendar's conveyance could follow out of the side street.</p>
+
+    <p>That the same conditions, but slightly modified, hemmed them
+    in ahead, went for nothing in Kirkwood's estimation.</p>
+
+    <p>"Good driver!" he approved heartily. "He's got a head on his
+    shoulders!"</p>
+
+    <p>The girl found her voice. "How," she demanded in a breath,
+    face blank with consternation, "how did you dare?"</p>
+
+    <p>"Dare?" he echoed exultantly; and in his veins excitement
+    was running like liquid fire. "What wouldn't I dare for you,
+    Dorothy?"</p>
+
+    <p>"What have you not?" she amended softly, adding with a shade
+    of timidity: "Philip..."</p>
+
+    <p>The long lashes swept up from her cheeks, like clouds
+    revealing stars, unmasking eyes radiant and brave to meet his
+    own; then they fell, even as her lips drooped with
+    disappointment. And she sighed.... For he was not looking.
+    Man-like, hot with the ardor of the chase, he was deaf and
+    blind to all else.</p>
+
+    <p>She saw that he had not even heard. Twice within the day she
+    had forgotten herself, had overstepped the rigid bounds of her
+    breeding in using his Christian name. And twice he had been
+    oblivious to that token of their maturing understanding. So she
+    sighed, and sighing, smiled again; resting an elbow on the
+    window-sill and flattening one small gloved hand against the
+    frame for a brace against the jouncing of the hansom. It swept
+    on with unabated speed, up-stream beside the tawny reaches of
+    the river; and for a time there was no speech between them, the
+    while the girl lost consciousness of self and her most imminent
+    peril, surrendering her being to the lingering sweetness of her
+    long, dear thoughts....</p>
+
+    <p>"I've got a scheme!" Kirkwood declared so explosively that
+    she caught her breath with the surprise of it. "There's the
+    Pless; they know me there, and my credit's good. When we shake
+    them off, we can have the cabby take us to the hotel. I'll
+    register and borrow from the management enough to pay our way
+    to Chiltern and the tolls for a cable to New York. I've a
+    friend or two over home who wouldn't let me want for a few
+    miserable pounds.... So you see," he explained boyishly, "we're
+    at the end of our troubles already!"</p>
+
+    <p>She said something inaudible, holding her face averted. He
+    bent nearer to her, wondering. "I didn't understand," he
+    suggested.</p>
+
+    <p>Still looking from him, "I said you were very good to me,"
+    she said in a quavering whisper.</p>
+
+    <p>"Dorothy!" Without his knowledge or intention before the
+    fact, as instinctively as he made use of her given name,
+    intimately, his strong fingers dropped and closed upon the
+    little hand that lay beside him. "What <i>is</i> the matter,
+    dear?" He leaned still farther forward to peer into her face,
+    till glance met glance in the ending and his racing pulses
+    tightened with sheer delight of the humid happiness in her
+    glistening eyes. "Dorothy, child, don't worry so. No harm shall
+    come to you. It's all working out&#8212all working out
+    <i>right</i>. Only have a little faith in me, and I'll
+    <i>make</i> everything work out right, Dorothy."</p>
+
+    <p>Gently she freed her fingers. "I wasn't," she told him in a
+    voice that quivered between laughter and tears, "I wasn't
+    worrying. I was ... You wouldn't understand. Don't be afraid I
+    shall break down or&#8212or anything."</p>
+
+    <p>"I shan't," he reassured her; "I know you're not that sort.
+    Besides, you'd have no excuse. We're moving along famously.
+    That cabby knows his business."</p>
+
+    <p>In fact that gentleman was minute by minute demonstrating
+    his peculiar fitness for the task he had so cheerfully
+    undertaken. The superior horsemanship of the London hackney
+    cabman needs no exploitation, and he in whose hands rested the
+    fate of the Calendar treasure was peer of his compeers. He was
+    instant to advantage himself of every opening to forward his
+    pliant craft, quick to foresee the fortunes of the way and
+    govern himself accordingly.</p>
+
+    <p>Estimating with practised eye the precise moment when the
+    police supervisor of traffic at the junction of Parliament and
+    Bridge Streets, would see fit to declare a temporary blockade,
+    he so managed that his was the last vehicle to pass ere the
+    official wand, to ignore which involves a forfeited license,
+    was lifted; and indeed, so close was his calculation that he
+    escaped only with a scowl and word of warning from the bobby. A
+    matter of no importance whatever, since his end was gained and
+    the pursuing cab had been shut off by the blockade.</p>
+
+    <p>In Calendar's driver, however, he had an adversary of
+    abilities by no means to be despised. Precisely how the man
+    contrived it, is a question; that he made a detour by way of
+    Derby Street is not improbable, unpleasant as it may have been
+    for Stryker and Calendar to find themselves in such close
+    proximity to "the Yard." At all events, he evaded the block,
+    and hardly had the chase swung across Bridge Street, than the
+    pursuer was nimbly clattering in its wake.</p>
+
+    <p>Past the Houses of Parliament, through Old Palace Yard, with
+    the Abbey on their left, they swung away into Abingdon Street,
+    whence suddenly they dived into the maze of backways, great and
+    mean, which lies to the south of Victoria. Doubling and
+    twisting, now this way, now that, the driver tooled them
+    through the intricate heart of this labyrinth, leading the
+    pursuers a dance that Kirkwood thought calculated to dishearten
+    and shake off the pursuit in the first five minutes. Yet
+    always, peering back through the little peephole, he saw
+    Calendar's cab pelting doggedly in their rear&#8212a hundred yards
+    behind, no more, no less, hanging on with indomitable grit and
+    determination.</p>
+
+    <p>By degrees they drew westwards, threading Pimlico, into
+    Chelsea&#8212once dashing briefly down the Grosvenor Road, the
+    Thames a tawny flood beyond the river wall.</p>
+
+    <p>Children cheered them on, and policemen turned to stare,
+    doubting whether they should interfere. Minutes rolled into
+    tens, measuring out an hour; and still they hammered on, hunted
+    and hunters, playing their game of hare-and-hounds through the
+    highways and byways of those staid and aged quarters.</p>
+
+    <p>In the leading cab there were few words spoken. Kirkwood and
+    Dorothy alike sat spellbound with the fascination of the game;
+    if it is conceivable that the fox enjoys his part in the day's
+    sport, then they were enjoying themselves. Now one spoke, now
+    another&#8212chiefly in the clipped phraseology, of excitement.
+    As&#8212</p>
+
+    <p>"We're gaining?"</p>
+
+    <p>"Yes&#8212think so."</p>
+
+    <p>Or, "We'll tire them out?"</p>
+
+    <p>"Sure-ly."</p>
+
+    <p>"They can't catch us, can they, Philip?"</p>
+
+    <p>"Never in the world."</p>
+
+    <p>But he spoke with a confidence that he himself did not feel,
+    for hope as he would he could never see that the distance
+    between the two had been materially lessened or increased.
+    Their horses seemed most evenly matched.</p>
+
+    <p>The sun was very low behind the houses of the Surrey Side
+    when Kirkwood became aware that their horse was flagging,
+    though (as comparison determined) no more so than the one
+    behind.</p>
+
+    <p>In grave concern the young man raised his hand, thrusting
+    open the trap in the roof. Immediately the square of darkling
+    sky was eclipsed by the cabby's face.</p>
+
+    <p>"Yessir?"</p>
+
+    <p>"You had better drive as directly as you can to the Hotel
+    Pless," Kirkwood called up. "I'm afraid it's no use pushing
+    your horse like this."</p>
+
+    <p>"I'm sure of it, sir. 'E's a good 'oss, 'e is, but 'e carn't
+    keep goin' for hever, you know, sir."</p>
+
+    <p>"I know. You've done very well; you've done your best."</p>
+
+    <p>"Very good, sir. The Pless, you said, sir? Right."</p>
+
+    <p>The trap closed.</p>
+
+    <p>Two blocks farther, and their pace had so sensibly moderated
+    that Kirkwood was genuinely alarmed. The pursuing cabby was
+    lashing his animal without mercy, while, "It aren't no use my
+    w'ippin' 'im, sir," dropped through the trap. "'E's doing orl
+    'e can."</p>
+
+    <p>"I understand."</p>
+
+    <p>Despondent recklessness tightened Kirkwood's lips and
+    kindled an unpleasant light in his eyes. He touched his side
+    pocket; Calendar's revolver was still there.... Dorothy should
+    win away clear, if&#8212if he swung for it.</p>
+
+    <p>He bent forward with the traveling bag in his hands.</p>
+
+    <p>"What are you going to do?" The girl's voice was very
+    tremulous.</p>
+
+    <p>"Stand a chance, take a losing hazard. Can you run? You're
+    not too tired?"</p>
+
+    <p>"I can run&#8212perhaps not far&#8212a little way, at least."</p>
+
+    <p>"And will you do as I say?"</p>
+
+    <p>Her eyes met his, unwavering, bespeaking her implicit
+    faith.</p>
+
+    <p>"Promise!"</p>
+
+    <p>"I promise."</p>
+
+    <p>"We'll have to drop off in a minute. The horse won't
+    last.... They're in the same box. Well, I undertake to stand
+    'em off for a bit; you take the bag and run for it. Just as
+    soon as I can convince them, I'll follow, but if there's any
+    delay, you call the first cab you see and drive to the Pless.
+    I'll join you there."</p>
+
+    <p>He stood up, surveying the neighborhood. Behind him the girl
+    lifted her voice in protest.</p>
+
+    <p>"No, Philip, no!"</p>
+
+    <p>"You've promised," he said sternly, eyes ranging the
+    street.</p>
+
+    <p>"I don't care; I won't leave you."</p>
+
+    <p>He shook his head in silent contradiction, frowning; but not
+    frowning because of the girl's mutiny. He was a little puzzled
+    by a vague impression, and was striving to pin it down for
+    recognition; but was so thoroughly bemused with fatigue and
+    despair that only with great difficulty could he force his
+    faculties to logical reasoning, his memory to respond to his
+    call upon it.</p>
+
+    <p>The hansom was traversing a street in Old Brompton&#8212a
+    quaint, prim by-way lined with dwellings singularly
+    Old-Worldish, even for London. He seemed to know it
+    subjectively, to have retained a memory of it from another
+    existence: as the stage setting of a vivid dream, all
+    forgotten, will sometimes recur with peculiar and exasperating
+    intensity, in broad daylight. The houses, with their sloping,
+    red-tiled roofs, unexpected gables, spontaneous dormer windows,
+    glass panes set in leaded frames, red brick fa&#231;ades
+    trimmed with green shutters and doorsteps of white stone, each
+    sitting back, sedate and self-sufficient, in its trim dooryard
+    fenced off from the public thoroughfare: all wore an aspect
+    hauntingly familiar, and yet strange.</p>
+
+    <p>A corner sign, remarked in passing, had named the spot
+    "Aspen Villas"; though he felt he knew the sound of those
+    syllables as well as he did the name of the Pless, strive as he
+    might he failed to make them convey anything tangible to his
+    intelligence. When had he heard of it? At what time had his
+    errant footsteps taken him through this curious survival of
+    Eighteenth Century London?</p>
+
+    <p>Not that it mattered when. It could have no possible bearing
+    on the emergency. He really gave it little thought; the mental
+    processes recounted were mostly subconscious, if none the less
+    real. His objective attention was wholly preoccupied with the
+    knowledge that Calendar's cab was drawing perilously near. And
+    he was debating whether or not they should alight at once and
+    try to make a better pace afoot, when the decision was taken
+    wholly out of his hands.</p>
+
+    <p>Blindly staggering on, wilted with weariness, the horse
+    stumbled in the shafts and plunged forward on its knees. Quick
+    as the driver was to pull it up, with a cruel jerk of the bits,
+    Kirkwood was caught unprepared; lurching against the dashboard,
+    he lost his footing, grasped frantically at the unstable air,
+    and went over, bringing up in a sitting position in the gutter,
+    with a solid shock that jarred his very teeth.</p>
+
+    <p>For a moment dazed he sat there blinking; by the time he got
+    to his feet, the girl stood beside him, questioning him with
+    keen solicitude.</p>
+
+    <p>"No," he gasped; "not hurt&#8212only surprised. Wait...."</p>
+
+    <p>Their cab had come to a complete standstill; Calendar's was
+    no more than twenty yards behind, and as Kirkwood caught sight
+    of him the fat adventurer was in the act of lifting himself
+    ponderously out of the seat.</p>
+
+    <p>Incontinently the young man turned to the girl and forced
+    the traveling-bag into her hands.</p>
+
+    <p>"Run for it!" he begged her. "Don't stop to argue. You
+    promised&#8212run! I'll come...."</p>
+
+    <p>"Philip!" she pleaded.</p>
+
+    <p>"Dorothy!" he cried in torment.</p>
+
+    <p>Perhaps it was his unquestionable distress that weakened
+    her. Suddenly she yielded&#8212with whatever reason. He was only
+    hazily aware of the swish of her skirts behind him; he had no
+    time to look round and see that she got away safely. He had
+    only eyes and thoughts for Calendar and Stryker.</p>
+
+    <p>They were both afoot, now, and running toward him, the one
+    as awkward as the other, but neither yielding a jot of their
+    malignant purpose. He held the picture of it oddly graphic in
+    his memory for many a day thereafter: Calendar making directly,
+    for him, his heavy-featured face a dull red with the exertion,
+    his fat head dropped forward as if too heavy for his neck of a
+    bull, his small eyes bright with anger; Stryker shying off at a
+    discreet angle, evidently with the intention of devoting
+    himself to the capture of the girl; the two cabs with their
+    dejected screws, at rest in the middle of the quiet, twilit
+    street. He seemed even to see himself, standing stockily
+    prepared, hands in his coat pockets, his own head inclined with
+    a suggestion of pugnacity.</p>
+
+    <p>To this mental photograph another succeeds, of the same
+    scene an instant later; all as it had been before, their
+    relative positions unchanged, save that Stryker and Calendar
+    had come to a dead stop, and that Kirkwood's right arm was
+    lifted and extended, pointing at the captain.</p>
+
+    <p>So forgetful of self was he, that it required a moment's
+    thought to convince him that he was really responsible for the
+    abrupt transformation. Incredulously he realized that he had
+    drawn Calendar's revolver and pulled Stryker up short, in
+    mid-stride, by the mute menace of it, as much as by his hoarse
+    cry of warning:</p>
+
+    <p>"Stryker&#8212not another foot&#8212"</p>
+
+    <p>With this there chimed in Dorothy's voice, ringing
+    bell-clear from a little distance:</p>
+
+    <p>"Philip!"</p>
+
+    <p>Like a flash he wheeled, to add yet another picture to his
+    mental gallery.</p>
+
+    <p>Perhaps two-score feet up the sidewalk a gate stood open;
+    just outside it a man of tall and slender figure, rigged out in
+    a bizarre costume consisting mainly of a flowered dressing-gown
+    and slippers, was waiting in an attitude of singular
+    impassivity; within it, pausing with a foot lifted to the
+    doorstep, bag in hand, her head turned as she looked back, was
+    Dorothy.</p>
+
+    <p><img src="illp385s.jpg"
+         width="516"
+         height="800"
+         border="0"
+         alt=
+         "A costume consisting mainly of a flowered dressing-gown and slippers.">
+    </p>
+
+    <p>As he comprehended these essential details of the
+    composition, the man in the flowered dressing-gown raised a
+    hand, beckoning to him in a manner as imperative as his
+    accompanying words.</p>
+
+    <p>"Kirkwood!" he saluted the young man in a clear and vibrant
+    voice, "put up that revolver and stop this foolishness." And,
+    with a jerk of his head towards the doorway, in which Dorothy
+    now waited, hesitant: "Come, sir&#8212quickly!"</p>
+
+    <p>Kirkwood choked on a laugh that was half a sob. "Brentwick!"
+    he cried, restoring the weapon to his pocket and running toward
+    his friend. "Of all happy accidents!"</p>
+
+    <p>"You may call it that," retorted the elder man with a
+    fleeting smile as Kirkwood slipped inside the dooryard. "Come,"
+    he said; "let's get into the house."</p>
+
+    <p>"But you said&#8212I thought you went to Munich," stammered
+    Kirkwood; and so thoroughly impregnated was his mind with this
+    understanding that it was hard for him to adjust his
+    perceptions to the truth.</p>
+
+    <p>"I was detained&#8212by business," responded Brentwick briefly.
+    His gaze, weary and wistful behind his glasses, rested on the
+    face of the girl on the threshold of his home; and the faint,
+    sensitive flush of her face deepened. He stopped and honored
+    her with a bow that, for all his fantastical attire, would have
+    graced a beau of an earlier decade. "Will you be pleased to
+    enter?" he suggested punctiliously. "My house, such as it is,
+    is quite at your disposal. And," he added, with a glance over
+    his shoulder, "I fancy that a word or two may presently be
+    passed which you would hardly care to hear."</p>
+
+    <p>Dorothy's hesitation was but transitory; Kirkwood was
+    reassuring her with a smile more like his wonted boyish grin
+    than anything he had succeeded in conjuring up throughout the
+    day. Her own smile answered it, and with a murmured word of
+    gratitude and a little, half timid, half distant bow for
+    Brentwick, she passed on into the hallway.</p>
+
+    <p>Kirkwood lingered with his friend upon the door-stoop.
+    Calendar, recovered from his temporary consternation, was
+    already at the gate, bending over it, fat fingers fumbling with
+    the latch, his round red face, lifted to the house, darkly
+    working with chagrin.</p>
+
+    <p>From his threshold, watching him with a slight contraction
+    of the eyes, Brentwick hailed him in tones of cloying
+    courtesy.</p>
+
+    <p>"Do you wish to see me, sir?"</p>
+
+    <p>The fat adventurer faltered just within the gateway; then,
+    with a truculent swagger, "I want my daughter," he declared
+    vociferously.</p>
+
+    <p>Brentwick peered mildly over his glasses, first at Calendar,
+    then at Kirkwood. His glance lingered a moment on the young
+    man's honest eyes, and swung back to Calendar.</p>
+
+    <p>"My good man," he said with sublime tolerance, "will you be
+    pleased to take yourself off&#8212to the devil if you like? Or
+    shall I take the trouble to interest the police?"</p>
+
+    <p>He removed one fine and fragile hand from a pocket of the
+    flowered dressing-gown, long enough to jerk it significantly
+    toward the nearer street-corner.</p>
+
+    <p>Thunderstruck, Calendar glanced hastily in the indicated
+    direction. A blue-coated bobby was to be seen approaching with
+    measured stride, diffusing upon the still evening air an
+    impression of ineffably capable self-contentment.</p>
+
+    <p>Calendar's fleshy lips parted and closed without a sound.
+    They quivered. Beneath them quivered his assortment of
+    graduated chins. His heavy and pendulous cheeks quivered,
+    slowly empurpling with the dark tide of his apoplectic wrath.
+    The close-clipped thatch of his iron gray mustache, even,
+    seemed to bristle like hairs upon the neck of a maddened dog.
+    Beneath him his fat legs trembled, and indeed his whole huge
+    carcass shook visibly, in the stress of his restrained
+    wrath.</p>
+
+    <p>Suddenly, overwhelmed, he banged the gate behind him and
+    waddled off to join the captain; who already, with praiseworthy
+    native prudence, had fallen back upon their cab.</p>
+
+    <p>From his coign of strategic advantage, the comfortable
+    elevation of his box, Kirkwood's cabby, whose huge enjoyment of
+    the adventurers' discomfiture had throughout been noisily
+    demonstrative, entreated Calendar with lifted forefinger, bland
+    affability, and expressions of heartfelt sympathy.</p>
+
+    <p>"Kebsir? 'Ave a kebsir, do! Try a ride be'ind a real 'orse,
+    sir; don't you go on wastin' time on 'im." A jerk of a derisive
+    thumb singled out the other cabman. "'E aren't pl'yin' you
+    fair, sir; I knows 'im,&#8212'e's a hartful g'y deceiver, 'e is.
+    Look at 'is 'orse,&#8212w'ich it aren't; it's a snyle, that's w'at
+    it is. Tyke a father's hadvice, sir, and next time yer fairest
+    darter runs awye with the dook in disguise, chyse 'em in a real
+    kebsir, not a cheap imitashin.... Kebsir?... Garn, you
+    'ard-'arted&#8212"</p>
+
+    <p>Here he swooped upwards in a dizzy flight of vituperation
+    best unrecorded. Calendar, beyond an absent-minded flirt of one
+    hand by his ear, as who should shoo away a buzzing insect,
+    ignored him utterly.</p>
+
+    <p>Sullenly extracting money from his pocket, he paid off his
+    driver, and in company with Stryker, trudged in morose silence
+    down the street.</p>
+
+    <p>Brentwick touched Kirkwood's arm and drew him into the
+    house.</p>
+
+    <center>
+        <h2><a name="XVIII">XVIII</a></h2>
+
+        <h3>ADVENTURES' LUCK</h3>
+    </center>
+
+    <p>As the door closed, Kirkwood swung impulsively to Brentwick,
+    with the brief, uneven laugh of fine-drawn nerves.</p>
+
+    <p>"Good God, sir!" he cried. "You don't know&#8212"</p>
+
+    <p>"I can surmise," interrupted the elder man shrewdly.</p>
+
+    <p>"You turned up in the nick of time, for all the world
+    like&#8212"</p>
+
+    <p>"Harlequin popping through a stage trap?"</p>
+
+    <p>"No!&#8212an incarnation of the Providence that watches over
+    children and fools."</p>
+
+    <p>Brentwick dropped a calming hand upon his shoulder. "Your
+    simile seems singularly happy, Philip. Permit me to suggest
+    that you join the child in my study." He laughed quietly, with
+    a slight nod toward an open door at the end of the hallway.
+    "For myself, I'll be with you in one moment."</p>
+
+    <p>A faint, indulgent smile lurking in the shadow of his white
+    mustache, he watched the young man wheel and dart through the
+    doorway. "Young hearts!" he commented inaudibly&#8212and a trace
+    sadly. "Youth!..."</p>
+
+    <p>Beyond the threshold of the study, Kirkwood paused, eager
+    eyes searching its somber shadows for a sign of Dorothy.</p>
+
+    <p>A long room and deep, it was lighted only by the
+    circumscribed disk of illumination thrown on the central desk
+    by a shaded reading-lamp, and the flickering glow of a
+    grate-fire set beneath the mantel of a side-wall. At the back,
+    heavy velvet porti&#232;res cloaked the recesses of two long
+    windows, closed jealously even against the twilight. Aside from
+    the windows, doors and chimney-piece, every foot of wall space
+    was occupied by towering bookcases or by shelves crowded to the
+    limit of their capacity with an amazing miscellany of objects
+    of art, the fruit of years of patient and discriminating
+    collecting. An exotic and heady atmosphere, compounded of the
+    faint and intangible exhalations of these insentient things,
+    fragrance of sandalwood, myrrh and musk, reminiscent whiffs of
+    half-forgotten incense, seemed to intensify the impression of
+    gloomy richness and repose...</p>
+
+    <p>By the fireplace, a little to one side, stood Dorothy, one
+    small foot resting on the brass fender, her figure merging into
+    the dusky background, her delicate beauty gaining an effect of
+    elusive and ethereal mystery in the waning and waxing ruddy
+    glow upflung from the bedded coals.</p>
+
+    <p>"Oh, Philip!" She turned swiftly to Kirkwood with extended
+    hands and a low, broken cry. "I'm <i>so</i> glad...."</p>
+
+    <p>A trace of hysteria in her manner warned him, and he checked
+    himself upon the verge of a too dangerous tenderness. "There!"
+    he said soothingly, letting her hands rest gently in his palms
+    while he led her to a chair. "We can make ourselves easy now."
+    She sat down and he released her hands with a reluctance less
+    evident than actual. "If ever I say another word against my
+    luck&#8212"</p>
+
+    <p>"Who," inquired the girl, lowering her voice, "who is the
+    gentleman in the flowered dressing-gown?"</p>
+
+    <p>"Brentwick&#8212George Silvester Brentwick: an old friend. I've
+    known him for years,&#8212ever since I came abroad. Curiously
+    enough, however, this is the first time I've ever been here. I
+    called once, but he wasn't in,&#8212a few days ago,&#8212the day we
+    met. I thought the place looked familiar. Stupid of me!"</p>
+
+    <p>"Philip," said the girl with a grave face but a shaking
+    voice, "it was." She laughed provokingly.... "It was so funny,
+    Philip. I don't know why I ran, when you told me to, but I did;
+    and while I ran, I was conscious of the front door, here,
+    opening, and this tall man in the flowered dressing-gown coming
+    down to the gate as if it were the most ordinary thing in the
+    world for him to stroll out, dressed that way, in the evening.
+    And he opened the gate, and bowed, and said, ever so
+    pleasantly, 'Won't you come in, Miss Calendar?'&#8212"</p>
+
+    <p>"He did!" exclaimed Kirkwood. "But how&#8212?"</p>
+
+    <p>"How can I say?" she expostulated. "At all events, he seemed
+    to know me; and when he added something about calling you in,
+    too&#8212he said 'Mr. Kirkwood '&#8212I didn't hesitate."</p>
+
+    <p>"It's strange enough, surely&#8212and fortunate. Bless his
+    heart!" said Kirkwood.</p>
+
+    <p>And, "Hum!" said Mr. Brentwick considerately, entering the
+    study. He had discarded the dressing-gown and was now in
+    evening dress.</p>
+
+    <p>The girl rose. Kirkwood turned. "Mr. Brentwick&#8212" he
+    began.</p>
+
+    <p>But Brentwick begged his patience with an eloquent gesture.
+    "Sir," he said, somewhat austerely, "permit me to put a single
+    question: Have you by any chance paid your cabby?"</p>
+
+    <p>"Why&#8212" faltered the younger man, with a flaming face.
+    "I&#8212why, no&#8212that is&#8212"</p>
+
+    <p>The other quietly put his hand upon a bell-pull. A faint
+    jingling sound was at once audible, emanating from the
+    basement.</p>
+
+    <p>"How much should you say you owe him?"</p>
+
+    <p>"I&#8212I haven't a penny in the world!"</p>
+
+    <p>The shrewd eyes flashed their amusement into Kirkwood's.
+    "Tut, tut!" Brentwick chuckled. "Between gentlemen, my dear
+    boy! Dear me! you are slow to learn."</p>
+
+    <p>"I'll never be contented to sponge on my friends," explained
+    Kirkwood in deepest misery. "I can't tell when&#8212"</p>
+
+    <p>"Tut, tut! How much did you say?"</p>
+
+    <p>"Ten shillings&#8212or say twelve, would be about right,"
+    stammered the American, swayed by conflicting emotions of
+    gratitude and profound embarrassment.</p>
+
+    <p>A soft-footed butler, impassive as Fate, materialized
+    mysteriously in the doorway.</p>
+
+    <p>"You rang, sir?" he interrupted frigidly.</p>
+
+    <p>"I rang, Wotton." His master selected a sovereign from his
+    purse and handed it to the servant. "For the cabby,
+    Wotton."</p>
+
+    <p>"Yes sir." The butler swung automatically, on one heel.</p>
+
+    <p>"And Wotton!"</p>
+
+    <p>"Sir?"</p>
+
+    <p>"If any one should ask for me, I'm not at home."</p>
+
+    <p>"Very good, sir."</p>
+
+    <p>"And if you should see a pair of disreputable scoundrels
+    skulking, in the neighborhood, one short and stout, the other
+    tall and evidently a seafaring man, let me know."</p>
+
+    <p>"Thank you, sir." A moment later the front door was heard to
+    close.</p>
+
+    <p>Brentwick turned with a little bow to the girl. "My dear
+    Miss Calendar," he said, rubbing his thin, fine hands,&#8212"I am
+    old enough, I trust, to call you such without offense,&#8212please
+    be seated."</p>
+
+    <p>Complying, the girl rewarded him with a radiant smile.
+    Whereupon, striding to the fireplace, their host turned his
+    back to it, clasped his hands behind him, and glowered benignly
+    upon the two. "Ah!" he observed in accents of extreme personal
+    satisfaction. "Romance! Romance!"</p>
+
+    <p>"Would you mind telling us how you knew&#8212" began Kirkwood
+    anxiously.</p>
+
+    <p>"Not in the least, my dear Philip. It is simple enough: I
+    possess an imagination. From my bedroom window, on the floor
+    above, I happen to behold two cabs racing down the street, the
+    one doggedly pursuing the other. The foremost stops, perforce
+    of a fagged horse. There alights a young gentleman looking, if
+    you'll pardon me, uncommonly seedy; he is followed by a young
+    lady, if she will pardon me," with another little bow,
+    "uncommonly pretty. With these two old eyes I observe that the
+    gentleman does not pay his cabby. Ergo&#8212I intelligently
+    deduce&#8212he is short of money. Eh?"</p>
+
+    <p>"You were right," affirmed Kirkwood, with a rueful and
+    crooked smile. "But&#8212"</p>
+
+    <p>"So! so!" pursued Brentwick, rising on his toes and dropping
+    back again; "so this world of ours wags on to the old, old
+    tune!... And I, who in my younger days pursued adventure
+    without success, in dotage find myself dragged into a romance
+    by my two ears, whether I will or no! Eh? And now you are going
+    to tell me all about it, Philip. There is a chair.... Well,
+    Wotton?"</p>
+
+    <p>The butler had again appeared noiselessly in the
+    doorway.</p>
+
+    <p>"Beg pardon, sir; they're waiting, sir."</p>
+
+    <p>"The caitiffs, Wotton?"</p>
+
+    <p>"Yessir."</p>
+
+    <p>"Where waiting?"</p>
+
+    <p>"One at each end of the street, sir."</p>
+
+    <p>"Thank you. You may bring us sherry and biscuit,
+    Wotton."</p>
+
+    <p>"Thank you, sir."</p>
+
+    <p>The servant vanished.</p>
+
+    <p>Brentwick removed his glasses, rubbed them, and blinked
+    thoughtfully at the girl. "My dear," he said suddenly, with a
+    peculiar tremor in his voice, "you resemble your mother
+    remarkably. Tut&#8212I should know! Time was when I was one of her
+    most ardent admirers."</p>
+
+    <p>"You&#8212y-you knew my mother?" cried Dorothy, profoundly
+    moved.</p>
+
+    <p>"Did I not know you at sight? My dear, you are your mother
+    reincarnate, for the good of an unworthy world. She was a very
+    beautiful woman, my dear."</p>
+
+    <p>Wotton entered with a silver serving tray, offering it in
+    turn to Dorothy, Kirkwood and his employer. While he was
+    present the three held silent&#8212the girl trembling slightly, but
+    with her face aglow; Kirkwood half stupefied between his ease
+    from care and his growing astonishment, as Brentwick continued
+    to reveal unexpected phases of his personality; Brentwick
+    himself outwardly imperturbable and complacent, for all that
+    his hand shook as he lifted his wine glass.</p>
+
+    <p>"You may go, Wotton&#8212or, wait. Don't you feel the need of a
+    breath of fresh air, Wotton?"</p>
+
+    <p>"Yessir, thank you, sir."</p>
+
+    <p>"Then change your coat, Wotton, light your pipe, and stroll
+    out for half an hour. You need not leave the street, but if
+    either the tall thin blackguard with the seafaring habit, or
+    the short stout rascal with the air of mystery should accost
+    you, treat them with all courtesy, Wotton. You will be careful
+    not to tell either of them anything in particular, although I
+    don't mind your telling them that Mr. Brentwick lives here, if
+    they ask. I am mostly concerned to discover if they purpose
+    becoming fixtures on the street-corners, Wotton."</p>
+
+    <p>"Quite so, sir."</p>
+
+    <p>"Now you may go.... Wotton," continued his employer as the
+    butler took himself off as softly as a cat, "grows daily a more
+    valuable mechanism. He is by no means human in any respect, but
+    I find him extremely handy to have round the house.... And now,
+    my dear," turning to Dorothy, "with your permission I desire to
+    drink to the memory of your beautiful mother and to the
+    happiness of her beautiful daughter."</p>
+
+    <p>"But you will tell me&#8212"</p>
+
+    <p>"A number of interesting things, Miss Calendar, if you'll be
+    good enough to let me choose the time. I beg you to be patient
+    with the idiosyncrasies of an old man, who means no harm, who
+    has a reputation as an eccentric to sustain before his
+    servants.... And now," said Brentwick, setting aside his glass,
+    "now, my dear boy, for the adventure."</p>
+
+    <p>Kirkwood chuckled, infected by his host's genial humor. "How
+    do you know&#8212"</p>
+
+    <p>"How can it be otherwise?" countered Brentwick with a trace
+    of asperity. "Am I to be denied my adventure? Sir, I refuse
+    without equivocation. Your very bearing breathes of Romance.
+    There must be an adventure forthcoming, Philip; otherwise my
+    disappointment will be so acute that I shall be regretfully
+    obliged seriously to consider my right, as a householder, to
+    show you the door."</p>
+
+    <p>"But Mr. Brentwick&#8212!"</p>
+
+    <p>"Sit down, sir!" commanded Brentwick with such a peremptory
+    note that the young man, who had risen, obeyed out of sheer
+    surprise. Upon which his host advanced, indicting him with a
+    long white forefinger. "Would you, sir," he demanded, "again
+    expose this little lady to the machinations of that corpulent
+    scoundrel, whom I have just had the pleasure of shooing off my
+    premises, because you choose to resent an old man's
+    raillery?"</p>
+
+    <p>"I apologize," Kirkwood humored him.</p>
+
+    <p>"I accept the apology in the spirit in which it is
+    offered.... I repeat, now for the adventure, Philip. If the
+    story's long, epitomize. We can consider details more at our
+    leisure."</p>
+
+    <p>Kirkwood's eyes consulted the girl's face; almost
+    imperceptibly she nodded him permission to proceed.</p>
+
+    <p>"Briefly, then," he began haltingly, "the man who followed
+    us to the door here, is Miss Calendar's father."</p>
+
+    <p>"Oh? His name, please?"</p>
+
+    <p>"George Burgoyne Calendar."</p>
+
+    <p>"Ah! An American; I remember, now. Continue, please."</p>
+
+    <p>"He is hounding us, sir, with the intention of stealing some
+    property, which he caused to be stolen, which we&#8212to put it
+    bluntly&#8212stole from him, to which he has no shadow of a title,
+    and which, finally, we're endeavoring to return to its
+    owners."</p>
+
+    <p>"My dear!" interpolated Brentwick gently, looking down at
+    the girl's flushed face and drooping head.</p>
+
+    <p>"He ran us to the last ditch," Kirkwood continued; "I've
+    spent my last farthing trying to lose him."</p>
+
+    <p>"But why have you not caused his arrest?" Brentwick
+    inquired.</p>
+
+    <p>Kirkwood nodded meaningly toward the girl. Brentwick made a
+    sound indicating comprehension, a click of the tongue behind
+    closed teeth.</p>
+
+    <p>"We came to your door by the merest accident&#8212it might as
+    well have been another. I understood you were in Munich, and it
+    never entered my head that we'd find you home."</p>
+
+    <p>"A communication from my solicitors detained me," explained
+    Brentwick. "And now, what do you intend to do?"</p>
+
+    <p>"Trespass as far on your kindness as you'll permit. In the
+    first place, I&#8212I want the use of a few pounds with which to
+    cable some friends in New York, for money; on receipt of which
+    I can repay you."</p>
+
+    <p>"Philip," observed Brentwood, "you are a most irritating
+    child. But I forgive you the faults of youth. You may proceed,
+    bearing in mind, if you please, that I am your friend equally
+    with any you may own in America."</p>
+
+    <p>"You're one of the best men in the world," said
+    Kirkwood.</p>
+
+    <p>"Tut, tut! Will you get on?"</p>
+
+    <p>"Secondly, I want you to help us to escape Calendar
+    to-night. It is necessary that Miss Calendar should go to
+    Chiltern this evening, where she has friends who will receive
+    and protect her."</p>
+
+    <p>"Mm-mm," grumbled their host, meditative. "My faith!" he
+    commented, with brightening eyes. "It sounds almost too good to
+    be true! And I've been growing afraid that the world was
+    getting to be a most humdrum and uninteresting planet!... Miss
+    Calendar, I am a widower of so many years standing that I had
+    almost forgotten I had ever been anything but a bachelor. I
+    fear my house contains little that will be of service to a
+    young lady. Yet a room is at your disposal; the parlor-maid
+    shall show you the way. And Philip, between you and me, I
+    venture to remark that hot water and cold steel would add to
+    the attractiveness of your personal appearance; my valet will
+    attend you in my room. Dinner," concluded Brentwick with
+    anticipative relish, "will be served in precisely thirty
+    minutes. I shall expect you to entertain me with a full and
+    itemized account of every phase of your astonishing adventure.
+    Later, we will find a way to Chiltern."</p>
+
+    <p>Again he put a hand upon the bell-pull. Simultaneously
+    Dorothy and Kirkwood rose.</p>
+
+    <p>"Mr. Brentwick," said the girl, her eyes starred with tears
+    of gratitude, "I don't, I really don't know how&#8212"</p>
+
+    <p>"My dear," said the old gentleman, "you will thank me most
+    appropriately by continuing, to the best of your ability, to
+    resemble your mother more remarkably every minute."</p>
+
+    <p>"But I," began Kirkwood&#8212&#8212.</p>
+
+    <p>"You, my dear Philip, can thank me best by permitting me to
+    enjoy myself; which I am doing thoroughly at the present
+    moment. My pleasure in being invited to interfere in your young
+    affairs is more keen than you can well surmise. Moreover," said
+    Mr. Brentwick, "so long have I been an amateur adventurer that
+    I esteem it the rarest privilege to find myself thus on the
+    point of graduating into professional ranks." He rubbed his
+    hands, beaming upon them. "And," he added, as a maid appeared
+    at the door, "I have already schemed me a scheme for the
+    discomfiture of our friends the enemy: a scheme which we will
+    discuss with our dinner, while the heathen rage and imagine a
+    vain thing, in the outer darkness."</p>
+
+    <p>Kirkwood would have lingered, but of such inflexible temper
+    was his host that he bowed him into the hands of a man servant
+    without permitting him another word.</p>
+
+    <p>"Not a syllable," he insisted. "I protest I am devoured with
+    curiosity, my dear boy, but I have also bowels of compassion.
+    When we are well on with our meal, when you are strengthened
+    with food and drink, then you may begin. But now&#8212Dickie," to
+    the valet, "do your duty!"</p>
+
+    <p>Kirkwood, laughing with exasperation, retired at discretion,
+    leaving Brentwick the master of the situation: a charming
+    gentleman with a will of his own and a way that went with
+    it.</p>
+
+    <p>He heard the young man's footsteps diminish on the stairway;
+    and again he smiled the indulgent, melancholy smile of mellow
+    years. "Youth!" he whispered softly. "Romance!... And now,"
+    with a brisk change of tone as he closed the study door, "now
+    we are ready for this interesting Mr. Calendar."</p>
+
+    <p>Sitting down at his desk, he found and consulted a telephone
+    directory; but its leaves, at first rustling briskly at the
+    touch of the slender and delicate fingers, were presently
+    permitted to lie unturned,&#8212the book resting open on his knees
+    the while he stared wistfully into the fire.</p>
+
+    <p>A suspicion of moisture glimmered in his eyes. "Dorothy!" he
+    whispered huskily. And a little later, rising, he proceeded to
+    the telephone....</p>
+
+    <p>An hour and a half later Kirkwood, his self-respect
+    something restored by a bath, a shave, and a resumption of
+    clothes which had been hastily but thoroughly cleansed and
+    pressed by Brentwick's valet; his confidence and courage
+    mounting high under the combined influence of generous wine,
+    substantial food, the presence of his heart's mistress and the
+    admiration&#8212which was unconcealed&#8212of his friend, concluded at
+    the dinner-table, his narration.</p>
+
+    <p>"And that," he said, looking up from his savory, "is about
+    all."</p>
+
+    <p>"Bravo!" applauded Brentwick; eyes shining with delight.</p>
+
+    <p>"All," interposed Dorothy in warm reproach, "but what he
+    hasn't told&#8212"</p>
+
+    <p>"Which, my dear, is to be accounted for wholly by a very
+    creditable modesty, rarely encountered in the young men of the
+    present day. It was, of course, altogether different with those
+    of my younger years. Yes, Wotton?"</p>
+
+    <p>Brentwick sat back in his chair, inclining an attentive ear
+    to a communication murmured by the butler.</p>
+
+    <p>Kirkwood's gaze met Dorothy's across the expanse of shining
+    cloth; he deprecated her interruption with a whimsical twist of
+    his eyebrows. "Really, you shouldn't," he assured her in an
+    undertone. "I've done nothing to deserve..." But under the
+    spell of her serious sweet eyes, he fell silent, and presently
+    looked down, strangely abashed; and contemplated the vast
+    enormity of his unworthiness.</p>
+
+    <p>Coffee was set before them by Wotton, the impassive,
+    Brentwick refusing it with a little sigh. "It is one of the
+    things, as Philip knows," he explained to the girl, "denied me
+    by the physician who makes his life happy by making mine a
+    waste. I am allowed but three luxuries; cigars, travel in
+    moderation, and the privilege of imposing on my friends. The
+    first I propose presently, to enjoy, by your indulgence; and
+    the second I shall this evening undertake by virtue of the
+    third, of which I have just availed myself."</p>
+
+    <p>Smiling at the involution, he rested his head against the
+    back of the chair, eyes roving from the girl's face to
+    Kirkwood's. "Inspiration to do which," he proceeded gravely,
+    "came to me from the seafaring picaroon (Stryker did you name
+    him?) via the excellent Wotton. While you were preparing for
+    dinner, Wotton returned from his constitutional with the news
+    that, leaving the corpulent person on watch at the corner,
+    Captain Stryker had temporarily, made himself scarce. However,
+    we need feel no anxiety concerning his whereabouts, for he
+    reappeared in good time and a motor-car. From which it becomes
+    evident that you have not overrated their pertinacity; the
+    fiasco of the cab-chase is not to be re&#235;nacted."</p>
+
+    <p>Resolutely the girl repressed a gasp of dismay. Kirkwood
+    stared moodily into his cup.</p>
+
+    <p>"These men bore me fearfully," he commented at last.</p>
+
+    <p>"And so," continued Brentwick, "I bethought me of a
+    counter-stroke. It is my good fortune to have a friend whose
+    whim it is to support a touring-car, chiefly in innocuous
+    idleness. Accordingly I have telephoned him and commandeered
+    the use of this machine&#8212mechanician, too.... Though not a
+    betting man, I am willing to risk recklessly a few pence in
+    support of my contention, that of the two, Captain Stryker's
+    car and ours, the latter will prove considerably the most
+    speedy....</p>
+
+    <p>"In short, I suggest," he concluded, thoughtfully lacing his
+    long white fingers, "that, avoiding the hazards of cab and
+    railway carriage, we motor to Chiltern: the night being fine
+    and the road, I am told, exceptionally good. Miss Dorothy, what
+    do you think?"</p>
+
+    <p>Instinctively the girl looked to Kirkwood; then shifted her
+    glance to their host. "I think you are wonderfully thoughtful
+    and kind," she said simply.</p>
+
+    <p>"And you, Philip?"</p>
+
+    <p>"It's an inspiration," the younger man declared. "I can't
+    think of anything better calculated to throw them off, than to
+    distance them by motor-car. It would be always possible to
+    trace our journey by rail."</p>
+
+    <p>"Then," announced Brentwick, making as if to rise, "we had
+    best go. If neither my hearing nor Captain Stryker's car
+    deceives me, our fiery chariot is panting at the door."</p>
+
+    <p>A little sobered from the confident spirit of quiet gaiety
+    in which they had dined, they left the table. Not that, in
+    their hearts, either greatly questioned their ultimate triumph;
+    but they were allowing for the element of error so apt to set
+    at naught human calculations. Calendar himself had already been
+    proved fallible. Within the bounds of possibility, their turn
+    to stumble might now be imminent.</p>
+
+    <p>When he let himself dwell upon it, their utter helplessness
+    to give Calendar pause by commonplace methods, maddened
+    Kirkwood. With another scoundrel it had been so simple a matter
+    to put a period to his activities by a word to the police. But
+    he was her father; for that reason he must continually be
+    spared ... Even though, in desperate extremity, she should give
+    consent to the arrest of the adventurers, retaliation would
+    follow, swift and sure. For they might not overlook nor gloze
+    the fact that hers had been the hands responsible for the theft
+    of the jewels; innocent though she had been in committing that
+    larceny, a cat's-paw guided by an intelligence unscrupulous and
+    malign, the law would not hold her guiltless were she once
+    brought within its cognizance. Nor, possibly, would the
+    Hallams, mother and son.</p>
+
+    <p>Upon their knowledge and their fear of this, undoubtedly
+    Calendar was reckoning: witness the barefaced effrontery with
+    which he operated against them. His fear of the police might be
+    genuine enough, but he was never for an instant disturbed by
+    any doubt lest his daughter should turn against him. She would
+    never dare that.</p>
+
+    <p>Before they left the house, while Dorothy was above stairs
+    resuming her hat and coat, Kirkwood and Brentwick reconnoitered
+    from the drawing-room windows, themselves screened from
+    observation by the absence of light in the room behind.</p>
+
+    <p>Before the door a motor-car waited, engines humming
+    impatiently, mechanician ready in his seat, an uncouth shape in
+    goggles and leather garments that shone like oilskins under the
+    street lights.</p>
+
+    <p>At one corner another and a smaller car stood in waiting,
+    its lamps like baleful eyes glaring through the night.</p>
+
+    <p>In the shadows across the way, a lengthy shadow lurked:
+    Stryker, beyond reasonable question. Otherwise the street was
+    deserted. Not even that adventitous bobby of the early evening
+    was now in evidence.</p>
+
+    <p>Dorothy presently joining them, Brentwick led the way to the
+    door.</p>
+
+    <p>Wotton, apparently nerveless beneath his absolute
+    immobility, let them out&#8212and slammed the door behind them with
+    such promptitude as to give cause for the suspicion that he was
+    a fraud, a sham, beneath his icy exterior desperately afraid
+    lest the house be stormed by the adventurers.</p>
+
+    <p>Kirkwood to the right, Brentwick to the left of Dorothy, the
+    former carrying the treasure bag, they hastened down the walk
+    and through the gate to the car.</p>
+
+    <p>The watcher across the way was moved to whistle shrilly; the
+    other car lunged forward nervously.</p>
+
+    <p>Brentwick taking the front seat, beside the mechanician,
+    left the tonneau to Kirkwood and Dorothy. As the American
+    slammed the door, the car swept smoothly out into the middle of
+    the way, while the pursuing car swerved in to the other curb,
+    slowing down to let Stryker jump aboard.</p>
+
+    <p>Kirkwood put himself in the seat by the girl's side and for
+    a few moments was occupied with the arrangement of the robes.
+    Then, sitting back, he found her eyes fixed upon him, pools of
+    inscrutable night in the shadow of her hat.</p>
+
+    <p>"You aren't afraid, Dorothy?"</p>
+
+    <p>She answered quietly: "I am with you, Philip."</p>
+
+    <p>Beneath the robe their hands met...</p>
+
+    <p>Exalted, excited, he turned and looked back. A hundred yards
+    to the rear four unwinking eyes trailed them, like some modern
+    Nemesis in monstrous guise.</p>
+
+    <center>
+        <h2><a name="XIX">XIX</a></h2>
+
+        <h4>I&#8212&#8212THE UXBRIDGE ROAD</h4>
+    </center>
+
+    <p>At a steady gait, now and again checked in deference to the
+    street traffic, Brentwick's motor-car rolled, with resonant
+    humming of the engine, down the Cromwell Road, swerved into
+    Warwick Road and swung northward through Kensington to
+    Shepherd's Bush. Behind it Calendar's car clung as if towed by
+    an invisible cable, never gaining, never losing, mutely
+    testifying to the adventurer's unrelenting, grim determination
+    to leave them no instant's freedom from surveillance, to keep
+    for ever at their shoulders, watching his chance, biding his
+    time with sinister patience until the moment when, wearied,
+    their vigilance should relax....</p>
+
+    <p>To some extent he reckoned without his motor-car. As long as
+    they traveled within the metropolitan limits, constrained to
+    observe a decorous pace in view of the prejudices of the County
+    Council, it was a matter of no difficulty whatever to maintain
+    his distance. But once they had won through Shepherd's Bush
+    and, paced by huge doubledeck trolley trams, were flying
+    through Hammersmith on the Uxbridge Road; once they had run
+    through Acton, and knew beyond dispute that now they were
+    without the city boundaries, then the complexion of the
+    business was suddenly changed.</p>
+
+    <p>Not too soon for honest sport; Calendar was to have
+    (Kirkwood would have said in lurid American idiom) a run for
+    his money. The scattered lights of Southall were winking out
+    behind them before Brentwick chose to give the word to the
+    mechanician.</p>
+
+    <p>Quietly the latter threw in the clutch for the third
+    speed&#8212and the fourth. The car leaped forward like a startled
+    race-horse. The motor lilted merrily into its deep-throated
+    song of the open road, its contented, silken humming passing
+    into a sonorous and sustained purr.</p>
+
+    <p>Kirkwood and the girl were first jarred violently forward,
+    then thrown together. She caught his arm to steady herself; it
+    seemed the most natural thing imaginable that he should take
+    her hand and pass it beneath his arm, holding her so, his
+    fingers closed above her own. Before they had recovered, or had
+    time to catch their breath, a mile of Middlesex had dropped to
+    the rear.</p>
+
+    <p>Not quite so far had they distanced Calendar's trailing
+    Nemesis of the four glaring eyes; the pursuers put forth a
+    gallant effort to hold their place. At intervals during the
+    first few minutes a heavy roaring and crashing could be heard
+    behind them; gradually it subsided, dying on the wings of the
+    free rushing wind that buffeted their faces as mile after mile
+    was reeled off and the wide, darkling English countryside
+    opened out before them, sweet and wonderful.</p>
+
+    <p>Once Kirkwood looked back; in the winking of an eye he saw
+    four faded disks of light, pallid with despair, top a distant
+    rise and glide down into darkness. When he turned, Dorothy was
+    interrogating him with eyes whose melting, shadowed loveliness,
+    revealed to him in the light of the far, still stars, seemed to
+    incite him to that madness which he had bade himself resist
+    with all his strength.</p>
+
+    <p>He shook his head, as if to say: They can not catch us.</p>
+
+    <p>His hour was not yet; time enough to think of love and
+    marriage (as if he were capable of consecutive thought on any
+    other subject!)&#8212time enough to think of them when he had gene
+    back to his place, or rather when he should have found it, in
+    the ranks of bread-winners, and so have proved his right to
+    mortal happiness; time enough then to lay whatever he might
+    have to offer at her feet. Now he could conceive of no baser
+    treachery to his soul's-desire than to advantage himself of her
+    gratitude.</p>
+
+    <p>Resolutely he turned his face forward, striving with all his
+    will and might to forget the temptation of her lips, weary as
+    they were and petulant with waiting; and so sat rigid in his
+    time of trial, clinging with what strength he could to the
+    standards of his honor, and trying to lose his dream in
+    dreaming of the bitter struggle that seemed likely to be his
+    future portion.</p>
+
+    <p>Perhaps she guessed a little of the fortunes of the battle
+    that was being waged within him. Perhaps not. Whatever the
+    trend of her thoughts, she did not draw away from him....
+    Perhaps the breath of night, fresh and clean and fragrant with
+    the odor of the fields and hedges, sweeping into her face with
+    velvety caress, rendered her drowsy. Presently the silken
+    lashes drooped, fluttering upon her cheeks, the tired and happy
+    smile hovered about her lips....</p>
+
+    <p>In something less than half an hour of this wild driving,
+    Kirkwood roused out of his reverie sufficiently to become
+    sensible that the speed was slackening. Incoherent snatches of
+    sentences, fragments of words and phrases spoken by Brentwick
+    and the mechanician, were flung back past his ears by the
+    rushing wind. Shielding his eyes he could see dimly that the
+    mechanician was tinkering (apparently) with the driving gear.
+    Then, their pace continuing steadily to abate, he heard
+    Brentwick fling at the man a sharp-toned and querulously
+    impatient question: What was the trouble? His reply came in a
+    single word, not distinguishable.</p>
+
+    <p>The girl sat up, opening her eyes, disengaging her arm.</p>
+
+    <p>Kirkwood bent forward and touched Brentwick on the shoulder;
+    the latter turned to him a face lined with deep concern.</p>
+
+    <p>"Trouble," he announced superfluously. "I fear we have
+    blundered."</p>
+
+    <p>"What is it?" asked Dorothy in a troubled voice.</p>
+
+    <p>"Petrol seems to be running low. Charles here" (he referred
+    to the mechanician) "says the tank must be leaking. We'll go on
+    as best we can and try to find an inn. Fortunately, most of the
+    inns nowadays keep supplies of petrol for just such
+    emergencies."</p>
+
+    <p>"Are we&#8212? Do you think&#8212?"</p>
+
+    <p>"Oh, no; not a bit of danger of that," returned Brentwick
+    hastily. "They'll not catch up with us this night. That is a
+    very inferior car they have,&#8212so Charles says, at least;
+    nothing to compare with this. If I'm not in error, there's the
+    Crown and Mitre just ahead; we'll make it, fill our tanks, and
+    be off again before they can make up half their loss."</p>
+
+    <p>Dorothy looked anxiously to Kirkwood, her lips forming an
+    unuttered query: What did he think?</p>
+
+    <p>"Don't worry; we'll have no trouble," he assured her
+    stoutly; "the chauffeur knows, undoubtedly."</p>
+
+    <p>None the less he was moved to stand up in the tonneau,
+    conscious of the presence of the traveling bag, snug between
+    his feet, as well as of the weight of Calendar's revolver in
+    his pocket, while he stared back along the road.</p>
+
+    <p>There was nothing to be seen of their persecutors.</p>
+
+    <p>The car continued to crawl. Five minutes dragged out
+    tediously. Gradually they, drew abreast a tavern standing back
+    a distance from the road, embowered in a grove of trees between
+    whose ancient boles the tap-room windows shone enticingly,
+    aglow with comfortable light. A creaking sign-board, much worn
+    by weather and age, swinging from a roadside post, confirmed
+    the accuracy of Brentwick's surmise, announcing that here stood
+    the Crown and Mitre, house of entertainment for man and
+    beast.</p>
+
+    <p>Sluggishly the car rolled up before it and came to a dead
+    and silent halt. Charles, the mechanician, jumping out, ran
+    hastily up the path towards the inn. In the car Brentwick
+    turned again, his eyes curiously bright in the starlight, his
+    forehead quaintly furrowed, his voice apologetic.</p>
+
+    <p>"It may take a few minutes," he said undecidedly, plainly
+    endeavoring to cover up his own dark doubts. "My dear," to the
+    girl, "if I have brought trouble upon you in this wise, I shall
+    never earn my own forgiveness."</p>
+
+    <p>Kirkwood stood up again, watchful, attentive to the sounds
+    of night; but the voice of the pursuing motor-car was not of
+    their company. "I hear nothing," he announced.</p>
+
+    <p>"You will forgive me,&#8212won't you, my dear?&#8212for causing you
+    these few moments of needless anxiety?" pleaded the old
+    gentleman, his tone tremulous.</p>
+
+    <p>"As if you could be blamed!" protested the girl. "You
+    mustn't think of it that way. Fancy, what should we have done
+    without you!"</p>
+
+    <p>"I'm afraid I have been very clumsy," sighed Brentwick,
+    "clumsy and impulsive ... Kirkwood, do you hear anything?"</p>
+
+    <p>"Not yet, sir."</p>
+
+    <p>"Perhaps," suggested Brentwick a little later, "perhaps we
+    had better alight and go up to the inn. It would be more cosy
+    there, especially if the petrol proves hard to obtain, and we
+    have long to wait."</p>
+
+    <p>"I should like that," assented the girl decidedly.</p>
+
+    <p>Kirkwood nodded his approval, opened the door and jumped out
+    to assist her; then picked up the bag and followed the
+    pair,&#8212Brentwick leading the way with Dorothy on his arm.</p>
+
+    <p>At the doorway of the Crown and Mitre, Charles met them
+    evidently seriously disturbed. "No petrol to be had here, sir,"
+    he announced reluctantly; "but the landlord will send to the
+    next inn, a mile up the road, for some. You will have to be
+    patient, I'm afraid, sir."</p>
+
+    <p>"Very well. Get some one to help you push the car in from
+    the road," ordered Brentwick; "we will be waiting in one of the
+    private parlors."</p>
+
+    <p>"Yes, sir; thank you, sir." The mechanician touched the
+    visor of his cap and hurried off.</p>
+
+    <p>"Come, Kirkwood." Gently Brentwick drew the girl in with
+    him.</p>
+
+    <p>Kirkwood lingered momentarily on the doorstep, to listen
+    acutely. But the wind was blowing into that quarter whence they
+    had come, and he could hear naught save the soughing in the
+    trees, together with an occasional burst of rude rustic
+    laughter from the tap-room. Lifting his shoulders in dumb
+    dismay, and endeavoring to compose his features, he entered the
+    tavern.</p>
+
+    <h4 align="center"><a name=
+    "II&#8212&#8212THE%20CROWN%20AND%20MITRE">II&#8212&#8212THE CROWN AND MITRE</a></h4>
+
+    <p>A rosy-cheeked and beaming landlady met him in the corridor
+    and, all bows and smiles, ushered him into a private parlor
+    reserved for the party, immediately bustling off in a desperate
+    flurry, to secure refreshments desired by Brentwick.</p>
+
+    <p>The girl had seated herself on one end of an extremely
+    comfortless lounge and was making a palpable effort to seem at
+    ease. Brentwick stood at one of the windows, shoulders rounded
+    and head bent, hands clasped behind his back as he peered out
+    into the night. Kirkwood dropped the traveling bag beneath a
+    chair the farthest removed from the doorway, and took to pacing
+    the floor.</p>
+
+    <p>In a corner of the room a tall grandfather's clock ticked
+    off ten interminable minutes. For some reason unconscionably
+    delaying, the landlady did not reappear. Brentwick, abruptly
+    turning from the window, remarked the fact querulously, then
+    drew a chair up to a marble-topped table in the middle of the
+    floor.</p>
+
+    <p>"My dear," he requested the girl, "will you oblige me by
+    sitting over here? And Philip, bring up a chair, if you will.
+    We must not permit ourselves to worry, and I have something
+    here which may, perhaps, engage your interest for a while."</p>
+
+    <p>To humor him and alleviate his evident distress of mind,
+    they acceded. Kirkwood found himself seated opposite Dorothy,
+    Brentwick between them. After some hesitation, made the more
+    notable by an air of uneasiness which sat oddly on his
+    shoulders, whose composure and confident mien had theretofore
+    been so complete and so reassuring, the elder gentleman fumbled
+    in an inner coat-pocket and brought to light a small black
+    leather wallet. He seemed to be on the point of opening it when
+    hurried footfalls sounded in the hallway. Brentwick placed the
+    wallet, still with its secret intact, on the table before him,
+    as Charles burst unceremoniously in, leaving the door wide
+    open.</p>
+
+    <p>"Mr. Brentwick, sir!" he cried gustily. "That other
+    car&#8212"</p>
+
+    <p>With a smothered ejaculation Kirkwood leaped to his feet,
+    tugging at the weapon in his pocket. In another instant he had
+    the revolver exposed. The girl's cry of alarm, interrupting the
+    machinist, fixed Brentwick's attention on the young man. He,
+    too, stood up, reaching over very quickly, to clamp strong
+    supple fingers round Kirkwood's wrist, while with the other
+    hand he laid hold of the revolver and by a single twist
+    wrenched it away.</p>
+
+    <p>Kirkwood turned upon him in fury. "So!" he cried, shaking
+    with passion. "This is what your hospitality meant! You're
+    going to&#8212"</p>
+
+    <p>"My dear young friend," interrupted Brentwick with a flash
+    of impatience, "remember that if I had designed to betray you,
+    I could have asked no better opportunity than when you were my
+    guest under my own roof."</p>
+
+    <p>"But&#8212hang it all, Brentwick!" expostulated Kirkwood,
+    ashamed and contrite, but worked upon by desperate
+    apprehension; "I didn't mean that, but&#8212"</p>
+
+    <p>"Would you have bullets flying when she is near?" demanded
+    Brentwick scathingly. Hastily he slipped the revolver upon a
+    little shelf beneath the table-top. "Sir!" he informed Kirkwood
+    with some heat, "I love you as my own son, but you're a young
+    fool!... as I have been, in my time ... and as I would to
+    Heaven I might be again! Be advised, Philip,&#8212be calm. Can't
+    you see it's the only way to save your treasure?"</p>
+
+    <p>"Hang the jewels!" retorted Kirkwood warmly. "What&#8212"</p>
+
+    <p>"Sir, who said anything about the jewels?"</p>
+
+    <p>As Brentwick spoke, Calendar's corpulent figure filled the
+    doorway; Stryker's weather-worn features loomed over his
+    shoulder, distorted in a cheerful leer.</p>
+
+    <p>"As to the jewels," announced the fat adventurer, "I've got
+    a word to say, if you put it to me that way."</p>
+
+    <p>He paused on the threshold, partly for dramatic effect,
+    partly for his own satisfaction, his quick eyes darting from
+    face to face of the four people whom he had caught so
+    unexpectedly. A shade of complacency colored his expression,
+    and he smiled evilly beneath the coarse short thatch of his
+    gray mustache. In his hand a revolver appeared, poised for
+    immediate use if there were need.</p>
+
+    <p>There was none. Brentwick, at his primal appearance, had
+    dropped a peremptory hand on Kirkwood's shoulder, forcing the
+    young man back to his seat; at the same time he resumed his
+    own. The girl had not stirred from hers since the first alarm;
+    she sat as if transfixed with terror, leaning forward with her
+    elbows on the table, her hands tightly clasped, her face, a
+    little blanched, turned to the door. But her scarlet lips were
+    set and firm with inflexible purpose, and her brown eyes met
+    Calendar's with a look level and unflinching. Beyond this she
+    gave no sign of recognition.</p>
+
+    <p>Nearest of the four to the adventurers was Charles, the
+    mechanician, paused in affrighted astonishment at sight of the
+    revolver. Calendar, choosing to advance suddenly, poked the
+    muzzle of the weapon jocularly in the man's ribs. "Beat it,
+    Four-eyes!" he snapped. "This is your cue to duck! Get out of
+    my way."</p>
+
+    <p>The mechanician jumped as if shot, then hastily, retreated
+    to the table, his sallow features working beneath the
+    goggle-mask which had excited the fat adventurer's scorn.</p>
+
+    <p>"Come right in, Cap'n," Calendar threw over one shoulder;
+    "come in, shut the door and lock it. Let's all be sociable, and
+    have a nice quiet time." vStryker obeyed, with a derisive
+    grimace for Kirkwood.</p>
+
+    <p>Calendar, advancing jauntily to a point within a yard of the
+    table, stopped, smiling affably down upon his prospective
+    victims, and airily twirling his revolver.</p>
+
+    <p>"<i>Good</i> evening, all!" he saluted them blandly.
+    "Dorothy, my child," with assumed concern, "you're looking a
+    trifle upset; I'm afraid you've been keeping late hours. Little
+    girls must be careful, you know, or they lose the bloom of
+    roses in their cheeks.... Mr. Kirkwood, it's a pleasure to meet
+    you again! Permit me to paraphrase your most sound advice, and
+    remind you that pistol-shots are apt to attract undesirable
+    attention. It wouldn't be wise for <i>you</i> to bring the
+    police about our ears. I believe that in substance such was
+    your sapient counsel to me in the cabin of the <i>Alethea</i>;
+    was it not?... And you, sir!"&#8212fixing Brentwick with a cold
+    unfriendly eye. "You animated fossil, what d'you mean by
+    telling me to go to the devil?... But let that pass; I hold no
+    grudge. What might your name be?"</p>
+
+    <p align="center"><img src="illp421s.jpg"
+         width="600"
+         height="808"
+         border="1"
+         alt="'<i>Good</i> evening, all!' he saluted them blandly"></p>
+
+    <p>"It might be Brentwick," said that gentleman placidly.</p>
+
+    <p>"Brentwick, eh? Well, I like a man of spirit. But permit me
+    to advise you&#8212"</p>
+
+    <p>"Gladly," nodded Brentwick.</p>
+
+    <p>"Eh?... Don't come a second time between father and
+    daughter; another man might not be as patient as I, Mister
+    Brentwick. There's a law in the land, if you don't happen to
+    know it."</p>
+
+    <p>"I congratulate you on your success in evading it," observed
+    Brentwick, undisturbed. "And it was considerate of you not to
+    employ it in this instance." Then, with a sharp change of tone,
+    "Come, sir!" he demanded. "You have unwarrantably intruded in
+    this room, which I have engaged for my private use. Get through
+    with your business and be off with you."</p>
+
+    <p>"All in my good time, my antediluvian friend. When I've
+    wound up my business here I'll go&#8212not before. But, just to
+    oblige you, we'll get down to it.... Kirkwood, you have a
+    revolver of mine. Be good enough to return it."</p>
+
+    <p>"I have it here,&#8212under the table," interrupted Brentwick
+    suavely. "Shall I hand it to you?"</p>
+
+    <p>"By the muzzle, if you please. Be very careful; this one's
+    loaded, too&#8212apt to explode any minute."</p>
+
+    <p>To Kirkwood's intense disgust Brentwick quietly slipped one
+    hand beneath the table and, placing the revolver on its top,
+    delicately with his finger-tips shoved it toward the farther
+    edge. With a grunt of approval, Calendar swept the weapon up
+    and into his pocket.</p>
+
+    <p>"Any more ordnance?" he inquired briskly, eyes moving
+    alertly from face to face. "No matter; you wouldn't dare use
+    'em anyway. And I'm about done. Dorothy, my dear, it's high
+    time you returned to your father's protection. Where's that
+    gladstone bag?"</p>
+
+    <p>"In my traveling bag," the girl told him in a toneless
+    voice.</p>
+
+    <p>"Then you may bring it along. You may also say good night to
+    the kind gentlemen."</p>
+
+    <p>Dorothy did not move; her pallor grew more intense and
+    Kirkwood saw her knuckles tighten beneath the gloves. Otherwise
+    her mouth seemed to grow more straight and hard.</p>
+
+    <p>"Dorothy!" cried the adventurer with a touch of displeasure.
+    "You heard me?"</p>
+
+    <p>"I heard you," she replied a little wearily, more than a
+    little contemptuously. "Don't mind him, please, Mr.
+    Kirkwood!"&#8212with an appealing gesture, as Kirkwood, unable to
+    contain himself, moved restlessly in his chair, threatening to
+    rise. "Don't say anything. I have no intention whatever of
+    going with this man."</p>
+
+    <p>Calendar's features twitched nervously; he chewed a corner
+    of his mustache, fixing the girl with a black stare. "I
+    presume," he remarked after a moment, with slow deliberation,
+    "you're aware that, as your father, I am in a position to
+    compel you to accompany me."</p>
+
+    <p>"I shall not go with you," iterated Dorothy in a level tone.
+    "You may threaten me, but&#8212I shall not go. Mr. Brentwick and
+    Mr. Kirkwood are taking me to&#8212friends, who will give me a home
+    until I can find a way to take care of myself. That is all I
+    have to say to you."</p>
+
+    <p>"Bravo, my dear!" cried Brentwick encouragingly.</p>
+
+    <p>"Mind your business, sir!" thundered Calendar, his face
+    darkening. Then, to Dorothy, "You understand, I trust, what
+    this means?" he demanded. "I offer you a home&#8212and a good one.
+    Refuse, and you work for your living, my girl! You've forfeited
+    your legacy&#8212"</p>
+
+    <p>"I know, I know," she told him in cold disdain. "I am
+    content. Won't you be kind enough to leave me alone?"</p>
+
+    <p>For a breath, Calendar glowered over her; then, "I presume,"
+    he observed, "that all these heroics are inspired by that
+    whipper-snapper, Kirkwood. Do you know that he hasn't a brass
+    farthing to bless himself with?"</p>
+
+    <p>"What has that&#8212?" cried the girl indignantly.</p>
+
+    <p>"Why, it has everything to do with me, my child. As your
+    doting parent, I can't consent to your marrying
+    nothing-a-year.... For I surmise you intend to marry this Mr.
+    Kirkwood, don't you?"</p>
+
+    <p>There followed a little interval of silence, while the warm
+    blood flamed in the girl's face and the red lips trembled as
+    she faced her tormentor. Then, with a quaver that escaped her
+    control, "If Mr. Kirkwood asks me, I shall," she stated very
+    simply.</p>
+
+    <p>"That," interposed Kirkwood, "is completely understood." His
+    gaze sought her eyes, but she looked away.</p>
+
+    <p>"You forget that I am your father," sneered Calendar; "and
+    that you are a minor. I can refuse my consent."</p>
+
+    <p>"But you won't," Kirkwood told him with assurance.</p>
+
+    <p>The adventurer stared. "No," he agreed, after slight
+    hesitation; "no, I shan't interfere. Take her, my boy, if you
+    want her&#8212and a father's blessing into the bargain. The Lord
+    knows I've troubles enough; a parent's lot is not what it's
+    cracked up to be." He paused, leering, ironic.
+    "But,"&#8212deliberately, "there's still this other matter of the
+    gladstone bag. I don't mind abandoning my parental authority,
+    when my child's happiness is concerned, but as for my
+    property&#8212"</p>
+
+    <p>"It is not your property," interrupted the girl.</p>
+
+    <p>"It was your mother's, dear child. It's now mine."</p>
+
+    <p>"I dispute that assertion," Kirkwood put in.</p>
+
+    <p>"You may dispute it till the cows come home, my boy: the
+    fact will remain that I intend to take my property with me when
+    I leave this room, whether you like it or not. Now are you
+    disposed to continue the argument, or may I count on your being
+    sensible?"</p>
+
+    <p>"You may put away your revolver, if that's what you mean,"
+    said Kirkwood. "We certainly shan't oppose you with violence,
+    but I warn you that Scotland Yard&#8212"</p>
+
+    <p>"Oh, that be blowed!" the adventurer snorted in disgust. "I
+    can sail circles round any tec. that ever blew out of Scotland
+    Yard! Give me an hour's start, and you're free to do all the
+    funny business you've a mind to, with&#8212Scotland Yard!"</p>
+
+    <p>"Then you admit," queried Brentwick civilly, "that you've no
+    legal title to the jewels in dispute?"</p>
+
+    <p>"Look here, my friend," chuckled Calendar, "when you catch
+    me admitting anything, you write it down in your little book
+    and tell the bobby on the corner. Just at present I've got
+    other business than to stand round admitting anything about
+    anything.... Cap'n, let's have that bag of my dutiful
+    daughter's."</p>
+
+    <p>"'Ere you are." Stryker spoke for the first time since
+    entering the room, taking the valise from beneath the chair and
+    depositing it on the table.</p>
+
+    <p>"Well, we shan't take anything that doesn't belong to us,"
+    laughed Calendar, fumbling with the catch; "not even so small a
+    matter as my own child's traveling bag. A
+    small&#8212heavy&#8212gladstone bag," he grunted, opening the valise
+    and plunging in one greedy hand, "will&#8212just&#8212about&#8212do for
+    mine!" With which he produced the article mentioned. "This for
+    the discard, Cap'n," he laughed contentedly, pushing the girl's
+    valise aside; and, rumbling with stentorian mirth, stood
+    beaming benignantly over the assembled company.</p>
+
+    <p>"Why," he exclaimed, "this moment is worth all it cost me!
+    My children, I forgive you freely. Mr. Kirkwood, I felicitate
+    you cordially on having secured a most expensive wife.
+    Really&#8212d'you know?&#8212I feel as if I ought to do a little
+    something for you both." Gurgling with delight he smote his fat
+    palms together. "I just tell you what," he resumed, "no one yet
+    ever called Georgie Calendar a tight-wad. I just believe I'm
+    going to make you kids a handsome wedding present.... The good
+    Lord knows there's enough of this for a fellow to be a little
+    generous and never miss it!"</p>
+
+    <p>The thick mottled fingers tore nervously at the catch;
+    eventually he got the bag open. Those about the table bent
+    forward, all quickened by the prospect of for the first time
+    beholding the treasure over which they had fought, for which
+    they had suffered, so long....</p>
+
+    <p>A heady and luscious fragrance pervaded the atmosphere,
+    exhaling from the open mouth of the bag. A silence,
+    indefinitely sustained, impressed itself upon the little
+    audience,&#8212a breathless pause ended eventually by a sharp snap
+    of Calendar's teeth. "<i>Mmm</i>!" grunted the adventurer in
+    bewilderment. He began to pant.</p>
+
+    <p>Abruptly his heavy hands delved into the contents of the
+    bag, like the paws of a terrier digging in earth. To Kirkwood
+    the air seemed temporarily thick with flying objects. Beneath
+    his astonished eyes a towel fell upon the table&#8212a crumpled,
+    soiled towel, bearing on its dingy hem the inscription in
+    indelible ink: "<i>H&#244;tel du Commerce, Anvers</i>." A
+    tooth-mug of substantial earthenware dropped to the floor with
+    a crash. A slimy soap-dish of the same manufacture slid across
+    the table and into Brentwick's lap. A battered alarm clock with
+    never a tick left in its abused carcass rang vacuously as it
+    fell by the open bag.... The remainder was&#8212oranges: a dozen or
+    more small, round, golden globes of ripe fruit, perhaps a shade
+    overripe, therefore the more aromatic.</p>
+
+    <p>The adventurer ripped out an oath. "Mulready, by the living
+    God!" he raged in fury. "Done up, I swear! Done by that
+    infernal sneak&#8212me, blind as a bat!"</p>
+
+    <p>He fell suddenly silent, the blood congesting in his face;
+    as suddenly broke forth again, haranguing the company.</p>
+
+    <p>"That's why he went out and bought those damned oranges, is
+    it? Think of it&#8212me sitting in the hotel in Antwerp and him
+    lugging in oranges by the bagful because he was fond of fruit!
+    When did he do it? How do I know? If I knew, would I be here
+    and him the devil knows where, this minute? When my back was
+    turned, of course, the damned snake! That's why he was so hot
+    about picking a fight on the boat, hey? Wanted to get thrown
+    off and take to the woods&#8212leaving me with <i>this</i>! And
+    that's why he felt so awful done up he wouldn't take a hand at
+    hunting you two down, hey? Well&#8212by&#8212the&#8212Eternal! I'll camp on
+    his trail for the rest of his natural-born days! I'll have his
+    eye-teeth for this, I'll&#8212"</p>
+
+    <p>He swayed, gibbering with rage, his countenance frightfully
+    contorted, his fat hands shaking as he struggled for
+    expression.</p>
+
+    <p>And then, while yet their own astonishment held Dorothy,
+    Kirkwood, Brentwick and Stryker speechless, Charles, the
+    mechanician, moved suddenly upon the adventurer.</p>
+
+    <p>There followed two metallic clicks. Calendar's ravings were
+    abrupted as if his tongue had been paralyzed. He fell back a
+    pace, flabby jowls pale and shaking, ponderous jaw dropping on
+    his breast, mouth wide and eyes crazed as he shook violently
+    before him his thick fleshy wrists&#8212securely handcuffed.</p>
+
+    <p>Simultaneously the mechanician whirled about, bounded
+    eagerly across the floor, and caught Stryker at the door, his
+    dexterous fingers twisting in the captain's collar as he jerked
+    him back and tripped him.</p>
+
+    <p>"Mr. Kirkwood!" he cried. "Here, please&#8212one moment. Take
+    this man's gun, from him, will you?"</p>
+
+    <p>Kirkwood sprang to his assistance, and without encountering
+    much trouble, succeeded in wresting a Webley from Stryker's
+    limp, flaccid fingers.</p>
+
+    <p>Roughly the mechanician shook the man, dragging him to his
+    feet. "Now," he ordered sternly, "you march to that corner,
+    stick your nose in it, and be good! You can't get away if you
+    try. I've got other men outside, waiting for you to come out.
+    Understand?"</p>
+
+    <p>Trembling like a whipped cur, Stryker meekly obeyed his
+    instructions to the letter.</p>
+
+    <p>The mechanician, with a contemptuous laugh leaving him,
+    strode back to Calendar, meanwhile whipping off his goggles;
+    and clapped a hearty hand upon the adventurer's quaking
+    shoulders.</p>
+
+    <p>"Well!" he cried. "And are you still sailing circles round
+    the men from Scotland Yard, Simmons, or Bellows, or Sanderson,
+    or Calendar, or Crumbstone, or whatever name you prefer to sail
+    under?"</p>
+
+    <p>Calendar glared at him aghast; then heaved a profound sigh,
+    shrugged his fat shoulders, and bent his head in thought. An
+    instant later he looked up. "You can't do it," he informed the
+    detective vehemently; "you haven't got a shred of evidence
+    against me! What's there? A pile of oranges and a peck of
+    trash! What of it?... Besides," he threatened, "if you pinch
+    me, you'll have to take the girl in, too. I swear that whatever
+    stealing was done, she did it. I'll not be trapped this way by
+    her and let her off without a squeal. Take me&#8212take her; d'you
+    hear?"</p>
+
+    <p>"I think," put in the clear, bland accents of Brentwick, "we
+    can consider that matter settled. I have here, my
+    man,"&#8212nodding to the adventurer as he took up the black
+    leather wallet,&#8212"I have here a little matter which may clear
+    up any lingering doubts as to your standing, which you may be
+    disposed at present to entertain."</p>
+
+    <p>He extracted a slip of cardboard and, at arm's length, laid
+    it on the table-edge beneath the adventurer's eyes. The latter,
+    bewildered, bent over it for a moment, breathing heavily; then
+    straightened back, shook himself, laughed shortly with a
+    mirthless note, and faced the detective.</p>
+
+    <p>"It's come with you now, I guess?" he suggested very
+    quietly.</p>
+
+    <p>"The Bannister warrant is still out for you," returned the
+    man. "That'll be enough to hold you on till extradition papers
+    arrive from the States."</p>
+
+    <p>"Oh, I'll waive those; and I won't give you any trouble,
+    either.... I reckon," mused the adventurer, jingling his
+    manacles thoughtfully, "I'm a back-number, anyway. When a
+    half-grown girl, a half-baked boy, a flub like Mulready&#8212damn
+    his eyes!&#8212and a club-footed snipe from Scotland Yard can put
+    it all over me this way,... why, I guess it's up to me to go
+    home and retire to my country-place up the Hudson." He sighed
+    wearily.</p>
+
+    <p>"Yep; time to cut it out. But I would like to be free long
+    enough to get in one good lick at that mutt, Mulready. My
+    friend, you get your hands on him, and I'll squeal on him till
+    I'm blue in the face. That's a promise."</p>
+
+    <p>"You'll have the chance before long," replied the detective.
+    "We received a telegram from the Amsterdam police late this
+    afternoon, saying they'd picked up Mr. Mulready with a woman
+    named Hallam, and were holding them on suspicion. It
+    seems,"&#8212turning to Brentwick,&#8212"they were opening negotiations
+    for the sale of a lot of stones, and seemed in such a precious
+    hurry that the diamond merchant's suspicions were roused. We're
+    sending over for them, Miss Calendar, so you can make your mind
+    easy about your jewels; you'll have them back in a few
+    days."</p>
+
+    <p>"Thank you," said the girl with an effort.</p>
+
+    <p>"Well," the adventurer delivered his peroration, "I
+    certainly am blame' glad to hear it. 'Twouldn't 've been a
+    square deal, any other way."</p>
+
+    <p>He paused, looking his erstwhile dupes over with a
+    melancholy eye; then, with an uncertain nod comprehending the
+    girl, Kirkwood and Brentwick, "So long!" he said thickly; and
+    turned, with the detective's hand under his arm and,
+    accompanied by the thoroughly cowed Stryker, waddled out of the
+    room.</p>
+
+    <center>
+        <h4><a name="III&#8212&#8212THE%20JOURNEY'S%20END">III&#8212&#8212THE JOURNEY'S
+        END</a></h4>
+    </center>
+
+    <p>Kirkwood, following the exodus, closed the door with
+    elaborate care and slowly, deep in thought, returned to the
+    table.</p>
+
+    <p>Dorothy seemed not to have moved, save to place her elbows
+    on the marble slab, and rest her cheeks between hands that
+    remained clenched, as they had been in the greatest stress of
+    her emotion. The color had returned to her face, with a
+    slightly enhanced depth of hue to the credit of her excitement.
+    Her cheeks were hot, her eyes starlike beneath the woven, massy
+    sunlight of her hair. Temporarily unconscious of her
+    surroundings she stared steadfastly before her, thoughts astray
+    in the irridescent glamour of the dreams that were to
+    come....</p>
+
+    <p>Brentwick had slipped down in his chair, resting his
+    silvered head upon its back, and was smiling serenely up at the
+    low yellow ceiling. Before him on the table his long white
+    fingers were drumming an inaudible tune. Presently rousing, he
+    caught Kirkwood's eye and smiled sheepishly, like a child
+    caught in innocent mischief.</p>
+
+    <p>The younger man grinned broadly. "And you were responsible
+    for all that!" he commented, infinitely amused.</p>
+
+    <p>Brentwick nodded, twinkling self-satisfaction. "I contrived
+    it all," he said; "neat, I call it, too." His old eyes
+    brightened with reminiscent enjoyment. "Inspiration!" he crowed
+    softly. "Inspiration, pure and simple. I'd been worrying my
+    wits for fully five minutes before Wotton settled the matter by
+    telling me about the captain's hiring of the motor-car. Then,
+    in a flash, I had it.... I talked with Charles by
+    telephone,&#8212his name is really Charles, by, the bye,&#8212overcame
+    his conscientious scruples about playing his fish when they
+    were already all but landed, and settled the artistic
+    details."</p>
+
+    <p>He chuckled delightedly. "It's the instinct," he declared
+    emphatically, "the instinct for adventure. I knew it was in me,
+    latent somewhere, but never till this day did it get the
+    opportunity to assert itself. A born adventurer&#8212that's what I
+    am!... You see, it was essential that they should believe we
+    were frightened and running from them; that way, they would be
+    sure to run after us. Why, we might have baited a dozen traps
+    and failed to lure them into my house, after that stout
+    scoundrel knew you'd had the chance to tell me the whole
+    yarn... Odd!"</p>
+
+    <p>"Weren't you taking chances, you and Charles?" asked
+    Kirkwood curiously.</p>
+
+    <p>"Precious few. There was another motor from Scotland Yard
+    trailing Captain Stryker's. If they had run past, or turned
+    aside, they would have been overhauled in short order."</p>
+
+    <p>He relapsed into his whimsical reverie; the wistful look
+    returned to his eyes, replacing the glow of triumph and
+    pleasure. And he sighed a little regretfully.</p>
+
+    <p>"What I don't understand," contended Kirkwood, "is how you
+    convinced Calendar that he couldn't get revenge by pressing his
+    charge against Miss Calendar&#8212Dorothy."</p>
+
+    <p>"Oh-h?" Mr. Brentwick elevated his fine white eyebrows and
+    sat up briskly. "My dear boy, that was the most delectable dish
+    on the entire menu. I have been reserving it, I don't mind
+    owning, that I might better enjoy the full relish of it.... I
+    may answer you best, perhaps, by asking you to scan what I
+    offered to the fat scoundrel's respectful consideration, my
+    dear sir."</p>
+
+    <p>He leveled a forefinger at the card.</p>
+
+    <p>At first glance it conveyed nothing to the younger man's
+    benighted intelligence. He puzzled over it, twisting his brows
+    out of alignment. An ordinary oblong slip of thin white
+    cardboard, it was engraved in fine script as follows:</p>
+
+    <table border="1"
+           width="39%">
+        <tr>
+            <td width="100%">
+                <p align="left">MR. GEORGE BURGOYNE CALENDAR<br>
+                <br>
+                81, ASPEN VILLAS, S. W.</p>
+            </td>
+        </tr>
+    </table>
+
+    <p>"Oh!" exclaimed Kirkwood at length, standing up, his face
+    bright with understanding. "<i>You</i>&#8212!"</p>
+
+    <p>"I," laconically assented the elder man.</p>
+
+    <p>Impulsively Kirkwood leaned across the table. "Dorothy," he
+    said tenderly; and when the girl's happy eyes met his, quietly
+    drew her attention to the card.</p>
+
+    <p>Then he rose hastily, and went over to stand by the window,
+    staring mistily into the blank face of night beyond its unseen
+    panes.</p>
+
+    <p>Behind him there was a confusion of little noises; the sound
+    of a chair pushed hurriedly aside, a rustle of skirts, a happy
+    sob or two, low voices intermingling; sighs.... Out of it
+    finally came the father's accents.</p>
+
+    <p>"There, there, my dear! My dearest dear!" protested the old
+    gentleman. "Positively I don't deserve a tithe of this. I&#8212"
+    The young old voice quavered and broke, in a happy laugh....
+    "You must understand," he continued more soberly, "that no
+    consideration of any sort is due me. When we married, I was too
+    old for your mother, child; we both knew it, both believed it
+    would never matter. But it did. By her wish, I went back to
+    America; we were to see what separation would do to heal the
+    wounds dissension had caused. It was a very foolish experiment.
+    Your mother died before I could return...."</p>
+
+    <p>There fell a silence, again broken by the father. "After
+    that I was in no haste to return. But some years ago, I came to
+    London to live. I communicated with the old colonel, asking
+    permission to see you. It was refused in a manner which
+    precluded the subject being reopened by me: I was informed that
+    if I persisted in attempting to see you, you would be
+    disinherited.... He was very angry with me&#8212justly, I admit....
+    One must grow old before one can see how unforgivably one was
+    wrong in youth.... So I settled down to a quiet old age,
+    determined not to disturb you in your happiness....
+    Ah&#8212Kirkwood!"</p>
+
+    <p>The old gentleman was standing, his arm around his
+    daughter's shoulders, when Kirkwood turned.</p>
+
+    <p>"Come here, Philip; I'm explaining to Dorothy, but you
+    should hear.... The evening I called on you, dear boy, at the
+    Pless, returning home I received a message from my solicitors,
+    whom I had instructed to keep an eye on Dorothy's welfare. They
+    informed me that she had disappeared. Naturally I canceled my
+    plans to go to Munich, and stayed, employing detectives. One of
+    the first things they discovered was that Dorothy had run off
+    with an elderly person calling himself George Burgoyne
+    Calendar&#8212the name I had discarded when I found that to
+    acknowledge me would imperil my daughter's fortune.... The
+    investigations went deeper; Charles&#8212let us continue to call
+    him&#8212had been to see me only this afternoon, to inform me of
+    the plot they had discovered. This Hallam woman and her son&#8212it
+    seems that they were legitimately in the line of inheritance,
+    Dorothy out of the way. But the woman was&#8212ah&#8212a bad lot.
+    Somehow she got into communication with this fat rogue and
+    together they plotted it out. Charles doesn't believe that the
+    Hallam woman expected to enjoy the Burgoyne estates for very
+    many days. Her plan was to step in when Dorothy stepped out,
+    gather up what she could, realize on it, and decamp. That is
+    why there was so much excitement about the jewels: naturally
+    the most valuable item on her list, the most easy to convert
+    into cash.... The man Mulready we do not place; he seems to
+    have been a shady character the fat rogue picked up somewhere.
+    The latter's ordinary line of business was diamond smuggling,
+    though he would condescend to almost anything in order to turn
+    a dishonest penny....</p>
+
+    <p>"That seems to exhaust the subject. But one word more....
+    Dorothy, I am old enough and have suffered enough to know the
+    wisdom of seizing one's happiness when one may. My dear, a
+    little while ago, you did a very brave deed. Under fire you
+    said a most courageous, womanly, creditable thing. And Philip's
+    rejoinder was only second in nobility to yours.... I do hope to
+    goodness that you two blessed youngsters won't let any
+    addlepated scruples stand between yourselves and&#8212the prize of
+    Romance, your inalienable inheritance!"</p>
+
+    <p>Abruptly Brentwick, who was no longer Brentwick, but the
+    actual Calendar, released the girl from his embrace and hopped
+    nimbly toward the door. "Really, I must see about that petrol!"
+    he cried. "While it's perfectly true that Charles lied about
+    it's running out, we must be getting on. I'll call you when
+    we're ready to start."</p>
+
+    <p>And the door crashed to behind him....</p>
+
+    <p>Between them was the table. Beyond it the girl stood with
+    head erect, dim tears glimmering on the lashes of those eyes
+    with which she met Philip's steady gaze so fearlessly.</p>
+
+    <p>Singing about them, the silence deepened. Fascinated, though
+    his heart was faint with longing, Kirkwood faltered on the
+    threshold of his kingdom.</p>
+
+    <p>"Dorothy!... You did mean it, dear?"</p>
+
+    <p>She laughed, a little, low, sobbing laugh that had its
+    source deep in the hidden sanctuary of her heart of a
+    child.</p>
+
+    <p>"I meant it, my dearest.... If you'll have a girl so bold
+    and forward, who can't wait till she's asked but throws herself
+    into the arms of the man she loves&#8212Philip, I meant it, every
+    word!..."</p>
+
+    <p>And as he went to her swiftly, round the table, she turned
+    to meet him, arms uplifted, her scarlet lips a-tremble, the
+    brown and bewitching lashes drooping over her wondrously
+    lighted eyes....</p>
+
+    <p>After a time Philip Kirkwood laughed aloud.</p>
+
+    <p>And there was that quality in the ring of his laughter that
+    caused the Shade of Care, which had for the past ten minutes
+    been uneasily luffing and filling in the offing and, on the
+    whole, steadily diminishing and becoming more pale and wan and
+    emaciated and indistinct&#8212there was that in the laughter of
+    Philip Kirkwood, I say, which caused the Shade of Care to utter
+    a hollow croak of despair as, incontinently, it vanished out of
+    his life.</p>
+
+    <p><a href="#THE%20BLACK%20BAG">Top of Page</a></p>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Black Bag, by Louis Joseph Vance
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+</pre>
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+</body>
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