The Yellow Dove Part 1

THE YELLOW DOVE

PRELUDE

RIFTS of sullen gray in the dirty veil of vapor beyond the reaches of dunes, where the sea in long lines of white, like the ghostly hosts of lost regiments, clamored along the sand.…

A soughing wind, a shrieking of sea-birds, audible in pauses between the faraway crackle of rifle-fire and the deep reverberations of artillery—familiar music to ears trained by long listening. A shrill scream of flying shrapnel, a distant crash and then a tense hush.…

Silence—nearly, but not quite. A sound so small as to be almost lost in the echoes of the clamor, an impact upon the air like the tapping of the wings of an insect against one’s ear-drum, a persistent staccato note which no other noise could still, borne with curious distinctness upon some aërial current of the fog bank.

And yet this tiny sound had a strange effect upon the desolate scene, for in a moment, as if they had been sown with dragon’s teeth, the sand dunes suddenly vomited forth armed men who ran hither and thither, their hands to their ears, peering aloft as though trying to pierce the mystery of the skies.

“The blighter! It’s ’im agayn.”

​“’Im! ’Oo’s ’im, I’d like to arsk?”

“Stow yer jaw, cawn’t yer ’ear? Ole Yaller-belly, agayn.”

The sounds were now clearly audible and to the south a series of rapid detonations shivered the air.

“There goes ‘Johnny look in the air.’ Cawn’t get ’im, though. ’Strewth! ’E’s a cool one—’e is!”

A hoarse order rang out from the trenches behind them—and the men ran for cover. The fog lifted a little and a shaft of light touched the leaden gray of the sea like the sheen on a dirty gun-barrel. The nearer high-angle guns were speaking now—fruitlessly, for the sounds seemed to come from directly overhead. The fog lifted again and a shaft of pale sunlight shot across the line of entrenchments.

“There ’e is, not wastin’ no time—’e ayn’t.”

“Yus. But they’re arfter ’im. There comes hyviashun. O ’ell!”

The expletive in a final tone of disgust for the fog had fallen again, completely obliterating the air-craft and its pursuers.

“’Oo’s Yaller-belly?” asked a smooth-faced youth who still wore the sallow of London under his coat of windburn.

“You’re one of the new lot, ayn’t yer? You’ll know b——y soon ’oo Yaller-belly is, won’t ’e, Bill? Pow! That’s ’im—them sharp ones.”

“Garn!” said the one called Bill. “’E never ’its anythink but the dirt an’ ’e cawn’t ’elp that.”

“’Tayn’t ’cos ’e don’t try. ’Ear ’em? Nice droppin’s fer a dove, ayn’t they?”

“Dove?” said the newcomer.

“Yus. Tubs the swine calls ’em——”

“Tawb, yer blighter.”

​“Tub, I says. Whenever troops is moving’, ’e’s always abaht—jus’ drops dahn hinformal-like, out o’ nowhere——”

“And cawn’t they catch ’im?”

“Catch ’im—? Bly me—not they! A thousand ’orse-power, they say ’e ’as—flies circles round hour hair squad like they was a lot o’ bloomink captivatin’ balloons.”

“But the ’igh-hangles——?”

“Moves too fast—’ere an’ gone agayn, afore you can fill yer cutty. They do say ’as ’ow when Yaller-belly comes, there’s sure to be big doin’s along the front.”

“Aye,” said Bill. “When we was dahn at Copenhagen——”

“Compayn, gran’pop——”

“Aw! Wot’s the hodds? Dahn at Copenhagen, ’e flew abaht same as ’e’s doin’ now.”

Bill paused.

“And what happened?”

“You’ll ’ave to arsk Sir John abaht that, me son,” finished the other dryly.

“We was drillin’ rear-guard actions, wasn’t we, Bill?”

“Aye. We was drilled, right, left, an’ a bit in the middle.” Bill rose and spat down the wind. “Tyke it from me,” he finished, with a glance aloft through the mist, “there’ll be somethin’ happen between ’ere an’ Wipers afore the week is hout——”

“Aye—the ’earse, Bill.”

“Wot ’earse?” asked the newcomer again.

“The larst time ’e kyme—down Wipers-way. There was a lull in the firin’ an’ ’tween the lines o’ trenches where the dead Dutchies was, comes a ’earse—a real ​’earse with black ’orses, plumes an’ all. We thought ’twas some general they’d come to fetch and hup we stands hout o’ the trenches, comp’ny after comp’ny, caps off, all respec’ful-like. This ’ere ’earse comes along slow an’ mournful, black curt’ins an’ all flappin’ in the wind an’ six of the blighters a-marchin’ heads down behind it. They wheels up abreast of our comp’ny near a mound o’ earth and stops, an’ while we was lookin’—the front side of that there b——y vee-Hicle drops out an’ a machine-gun begins slippin’ it into us pretty as you please. ’Earse—that’s wot it was—a ’earse! an’ it jolly well made a funeral out o’ B Company.”

“Gawd!” said the newcomer. “And Yaller-belly——?”

“I ayn’t sayin’ nothin’ abaht ’im. You wait, that’s all.”

The sounds of firing rose and fell again. The fog thickened and the last crashes of the high-angle guns echoed out to sea, but the rush of the flying planes continued. Three machines there were by the sound of them, but one grew ever more distinct until the sounds of the three were merged into one. Closer it came, until like the blast of a storm down a mountainside, a huge shadow fell across the dunes and was gone amid a scattering of futile shots into the fog which might as well have been aimed at the moon.

Bill, the prescient, straightened and peered through the fog toward the flying plane.

“A ’earse,” he muttered. “That’s wot it was—a ’earse.”

 

CHAPTER I
SHELTERED PEOPLE

LADY Betty Heathcote had a reputation in which she took pride for giving successful dinners in a neighborhood where successful dinners were a rule rather than an exception. Her prescription was simple and consisted solely in compounding her social elements by strenuous mixing. She had a faculty for discovering cubs with incipient manes and saw them safely grown without mishap. At her house in Park Lane, politics, art, literature, and science rubbed elbows. Here pictures had been born, plays had had their real premières, novels had been devised, and poems without number, not a few of which were indited to My Lady Betty’s eyebrow, here first saw the light of day.

For all her dynamic energy in a variety of causes, most of them wise, all of them altruistic, Lady Betty had the rare faculty of knowing when to be restful. Tired Cabinet ministers, overworked lords of the Admiralty, leaders in all parties, knew that in Park Lane there would be no questions asked which it would not be possible to answer, that there was always an excellent dinner to be had without frills, a lounge in a quiet room, or, indeed, a pair of pyjamas and a bed if necessary.

But since the desperate character of the war with Germany had been driven home into the hearts of the ​people of London, a change had taken place in the complexion of many private entertainments and the same serious air which was to be noted in the mien of well-informed people of all classes upon the street was reflected in the faces of her guests. Her scientists were engrossed with utilitarian problems. Her literary men were sending vivid word-pictures of ruined Rheims and Louvain to their brothers across the Atlantic, and her Cabinet ministers conversed less than usual, addressing themselves with a greater particularity to her roasts or her spare bedrooms. Torn between many duties, as patroness to bazaars, as head of a variety of sewing guilds, as president of the new association for the training and equipment of nurses, Lady Heathcote herself showed signs of the wear and tear of an extraordinary situation, but she managed to meet it squarely by using every ounce of her abundant energy and every faculty of her resourceful mind.

Many secrets were hers, both political and departmental, but she kept them nobly, aware that she lived in parlous times, when an unconsidered word might do a damage irreparable. Agents of the enemy, she knew, had been discovered in every walk of life, and while she lived in London’s innermost circle, she knew that even her own house might not have been immune from visitors whose secret motives were open to question. It was, therefore, with the desire to reassure herself as to the unadulterated loyalty of her intimates that she had carefully scrutinized her dinner lists, eliminating all uncertain quantities through whom or by whom the unreserved character of the conversation across her board might in any way be jeopardized. So it was that tonight’s dinner-table had something of the complexion of a family party, in which John Riz​zio, the bright particular star in London’s firmament of Art, was to lend his effulgence. John Rizzio, dean of collectors, whose wonderful house in Berkeley Square rivaled the British Museum and the Wallace Collection combined, an Italian by birth, an Englishman by adoption, who because of his public benefactions had been offered a knighthood and had refused it; John Rizzio, who had been an intimate of King Edward, a friend of Cabinet ministers, who knew as much about the inner workings of the Government as majesty itself. Long a member of Lady Heathcote’s circle, it had been her custom to give him a dinner on the anniversary of the day of the acquisition of the most famous picture in his collection, “The Conningsby Venus,” which had, before the death of the old Earl, been the aim of collectors throughout the world.

As usual the selection of her guests had been left to Rizzio, whose variety of taste in friendships could have been no better shown than in the company which now graced Lady Heathcote’s table. The Earl and Countess of Kipshaven, the one artistic, the other literary; their daughter the Honorable Jacqueline Morley; Captain Byfield, a retired cavalry officer now on special duty at the War Office; Lady Joyliffe, who had lost her Earl at Mons, an interesting widow, the bud of whose new affections was already emerging from her weeds; John Sandys, under-secretary for foreign affairs, the object of those affections; Miss Doris Mather, daughter of the American cotton king, who was known for doing unusual things, not the least of which was her recent refusal of the hand of John Rizzio, one of London’s catches, and the acceptance of that of the Honorable Cyril Hammersley, the last to be mentioned member of this distinguished company, gentleman ​sportsman and man about town, who as everybody knew would never set the world afire.

No one knew how this miracle had happened, for Doris Mather’s brains were above the ordinary; she had a discriminating taste in books and a knowledge of pictures, and just before dinner, upstairs in a burst of confidence she had given her surprised hostess an idea of what a man should be.

“He should be clever, Betty,” she sighed, “a worker, a dreamer of great dreams, a firebrand in every good cause, a patriot willing to fight to the last drop of his blood——”

Lady Betty’s laughter disconcerted her and she paused.

“And that is why you chose the Honorable Cyril?”

Miss Mather compressed her lips and frowned at her image in the mirror.

“Don’t be nasty, Betty. I couldn’t marry a man as old as John Rizzio.”

Lady Betty only laughed again.

“Forgive me, dear, but it really is most curious. I wouldn’t laugh if you hadn’t been so careful to describe to me all the virtues that Cyril—hasn’t.”

Doris powdered the end of her nose thoughtfully.

“I suppose they’re all a myth—men like that. They simply don’t exist—that’s all.”

Lady Betty pinned a final jewel on her bodice.

“I’m sure John Rizzio is flattered at your choice. Cyril is an old dear. But to marry! I’d as soon take the automatic chess player. Why are you going to marry Cyril, Doris?” she asked.

A long pause and more powder.

“I’m not sure that I am. I don’t even know why I ​thought him possible. I think it’s the feeling of the potter for his clay. Something might be made of him. He seems so helpless somehow. Men of his sort always are. I’d like to mother him. Besides”—and she flashed around on her hostess brightly—“he does sit a horse like a centaur.”

“He’s also an excellent shot, a good chauffeur, a tolerable dancer and the best bat in England, all agreeable talents in a gentleman of fashion but—er—hardly——” Lady Betty burst into laughter. “Good Lord, Doris! Cyril a firebrand!”

Doris Mather eyed her hostess reproachfully and moved toward the door into the hallway.

“Come, Betty,” she said with some dignity, “are you ready to go down?”

All of which goes to show that matches are not made in Heaven and that the motives of young women in making important decisions are actuated by the most unimportant details. Hammersley’s good fortune was still a secret except to Miss Mather’s most intimate friends, but the conviction was slowly growing in the mind of the girl that unless Cyril stopped sitting around in tweeds when everybody else was getting into khaki, the engagement would never be announced. As the foreign situation had grown more serious she had seen other men who weighed less than Cyril throw off the boredom of their London habits and go soldiering into France. But the desperate need of his country for able-bodied men had apparently made no impression upon the placid mind of the Honorable Cyril. It was as unruffled as a highland lake in mid-August. He had contributed liberally from his large means to Lady Heathcote’s Ambulance Fund, but his manner had become, if anything, more bored than ever.

​Miss Mather entered the drawing-room thoughtfully with the helpless feeling of one who, having made a mistake, pauses between the alternatives of tenacity and recantation. And yet as soon as she saw him a little tremor of pleasure passed over her. In spite of his drooping pose, his vacant stare, his obvious inadequacy she was sure there was something about Cyril Hammersley that made him beyond doubt the most distinguished-looking person in the room—not even excepting Rizzio.

He came over to her at once, the monocle dropping from his eye.

“Aw’fly glad. Jolly good to see you, m’dear. Handsome no end.”

He took her hand and bent over her fingers. Such a broad back he had, such a finely shaped head, such shoulders, such strong hands that were capable of so much but had achieved so little. And were these all that she could have seen in him? Reason told her that it was her mind that demanded a mate. Could it be that she was in love with a beautiful body?

There was something pathetic in the way he looked at her. She felt very sorry for him, but Betty Heathcote’s laughter was still ringing in her ears.

“Thanks, Cyril,” she said coolly. “I’ve wanted to see you—tonight—to tell you that at last I’ve volunteered with the Red Cross.”

Hammersley peered at her blankly and then with a contortion set his eyeglass.

“Red Cross—you! Oh, I say now, Doris, that’s goin’ it rather thick on a chap——”

“It’s true. Father’s fitting out an ambulance corps and has promised to let me go.”

John Rizzio, tall, urbane, dark and cynical, who had ​joined them, heard her last words and broke into a shrug.

“It’s the khaki, Hammersley. The women will follow it to the ends of the earth. Broadcloth and tweeds are not the fashion.” He ran his arm through Hammersley’s. “There’s nothing for you and me but to volunteer.”

The Honorable Cyril only stared at him blankly.

“Haw!” he said, which, as Lady Betty once expressed it, was half the note of a jackass.

Here the Kipshavens arrived and their hostess signaled the advance upon the dinner-table.

One of the secrets of the success of Lady Heathcote’s dinners was the size and shape of her table, which seated no more than ten and was round. Her centerpieces were flat and her candelabra low so that any person at the table could see and converse with anyone else. It was thus possible delicately to remind those who insisted on completely appropriating their dinner partners that private matters could be much more safely discussed in the many corners of the house designed for the purpose. Doris sat between Rizzio and Byfield, Hammersley with Lady Joyliffe just opposite, and when Rizzio announced the American girl’s decision to go to France as soon as her training was completed she became the immediate center of interest.

“That’s neutrality of the right sort,” said Kipshaven heartily. “I wish all of your countrymen felt as you do.”

“I think most of them do,” replied Doris, smiling slowly, “but you know, you haven’t always been nice to us. There have been many times when we felt that as an older brother you treated us ​rather shabbily. I’m heaping coals of fire, you see.”

“Touché!” said Rizzio, with a laugh.

“I bare my head,” said the Earl.

“Ashes to ashes,” from Lady Joyliffe.

Kipshaven smiled. “Once in England gray hairs were venerated, even among the frivolous. Now,” he sighed, “they are only a reproach. Peccavi. Forgive me. I wish I could set the clock back.”

“You’d go?” asked Doris.

“Tomorrow,” said the old Earl with enthusiasm.

Miss Mather glanced at Hammersley who was enjoying his soup, a purée he liked particularly.

“But isn’t there something you could do?”

“Yes. Write, for America—for Italy—for Sweden and Holland—for Spain. It’s something, but it isn’t enough. My fingers are itching for a sword.”

The Honorable Cyril looked up.

“Pen mightier than sword,” he quoted vacuously, and went on with his soup.

“You don’t really mean that, Hammersley,” said Kipshaven amid smiles.

“Well rather,” drawled the other. “All silly rot—fightin’. What’s the use. Spoiled my boar-shootin’ in Hesse-Nassau—no season at Carlsbad—no season anywhere—everything the same—winter—summer——”

“You wouldn’t think so if you were in the trenches, my boy,” laughed Byfield.

“Beastly happy I’m not,” said Hammersley. “Don’t mind shootin’ pheasant or boar. Bad form—shootin’ men—not the sportin’ thing, you know—pottin’ a bird on the ground—’specially Germans.”

“Boches!” said Lady Betty contemptuously. She was inclined to be intolerant. For her Algy had al​ready been mentioned in dispatches. “I don’t understand you, Cyril.”

Hammersley regarded her gravely while Constance Joyliffe took up his cudgels.

“You forget Cyril’s four years at Heidelberg.”

“No I don’t,” said their hostess warmly, “and I could almost believe Cyril had German sympathies.”

“I have, you know,” said Hammersley calmly, sniffing at the rim of his wineglass.

“This is hardly the time to confess it,” said Kipshaven dryly.

Doris sat silent, aware of a deep humiliation which seemed to envelop them both.

Rizzio laughed and produced a clipping from Punch. “Hammersley is merely stoically peaceful. Listen.” And he read:

“I was playing golf one day when the Germans landed
All our troops had run away and all our ships were stranded
And the thought of England’s shame nearly put me off my game.”

Amid the laughter the Honorable Cyril straightened.

“Silly stuff, that,” he said quite seriously, “to put a fellow off his game.” And turning to Lady Joyliffe: “Punch a bit brackish lately. What?”

“Cyril, you’re insular,” from Lady Heathcote.

“No, insulated,” said Doris with a flash of the eyes.

Rizzio laughed. “Highly potential but—er—not dangerous. Why should he be? He’s your typical Briton—sport-loving, calm and nerveless in the most exacting situations—I was at Lords, you know, when ​Hammersley made that winning run for Marylebone—two minutes to play. Every bowler they put up——”

“It’s hardly a time for bats,” put in Kipshaven dryly. “What we need is fast bowlers—with rifles.”

The object of these remarks sat serenely, smiling blandly around the table, but made no reply. In the pause that followed Sandys was heard in a half whisper to Byfield.

“What’s this I hear of a leak at the War Office?”

Captain Byfield glanced down the table. “Have you heard that?”

“Yes. At the club.”

Captain Byfield touched the rim of his glass to his lips.

“I’ve heard nothing of it.”

“What?” from a chorus.

“Information is getting out somewhere. I violate no confidences in telling you. The War Office is perturbed.”

“How terrible!” said Lady Joyliffe. “And don’t they suspect?”

“That’s the worst of it. The Germans got wind of some of Lord Kitchener’s plans and some of the Admiralty’s—which nobody knew but those very near the men at the top.”

“A spy in that circle—unbelievable,” said Kipshaven.

“My authority is a man of importance. Fortunately no damage has been done. The story goes that we’re issuing false statements in certain channels to mislead the enemy and find the culprit.”

“But how does the news reach the Germans?” asked Rizzio.

“No one knows. By courier to the coast and then ​by fast motor-boat perhaps; or by aëroplane. It’s very mysterious. A huge Taube, yellow in color, flying over the North Sea between England and the continent has been sighted and reported by English vessels again and again and each flight has coincided with some unexpected move on the part of the enemy. Once it was seen just before the raid at Falmouth, again before the Zeppelin visit to Sandringham.”

“A yellow dove!” said Lady Kipshaven. “A bird of ill omen, surely.”

“But how could such an aëroplane leave the shores of England without being remarked?” asked Kipshaven.

“Oh,” laughed Sandys, “answer me that and we have the solution of the problem. A strict watch is being kept on the coasts, and the government employees—the postmen, police, secret-service men of every town and village from here to the Shetlands are on the lookout—but not a glimpse have they had of him, not a sign of his arrival or departure, but only last week he was reported by a destroyer flying toward the English coast.”

“Most extraordinary!” from Lady Kipshaven.

“It’s a large machine?” asked Rizzio.

“Larger than any aëroplane ever built in Europe. They say Curtis, the American, was building a thousand horsepower machine at Hammondsport—in the States. This one must be at least as large as that.”

“But surely such a machine could not be hidden in England for any length of time without discovery.”

“It would seem so—but there you are. The main point is that he hasn’t been discovered and that its pilot is here in England—ready to fly across the sea with our military secrets when he gets them.”

​“D—n him!” growled Kipshaven quite audibly, a sentiment which echoed so truly in the hearts of those present that it passed without comment.

“The captain of a merchant steamer who saw it quite plainly reported that the power of the machine was simply amazing—that it flew at about six thousand feet and was lost to sight in an incredibly brief time. In short, my friends, the Yellow Dove is one of the miracles of the day—and its pilot one of its mysteries.”

“But our aviation men—can they do nothing?”

“What? Chase rainbows? Where shall their voyage begin and where end? He’s over the North Sea one minute and in Belgium the next. Our troops in the trenches think he’s a phantom. They say even the bombs he drops are phantoms. They are heard to explode but nobody has ever been hit by them.”

“What will the War Office do?”

Sandys shrugged expressively. “What would you do?”

“Shoot the beggar,” said the Honorable Cyril impassively.

“Shoot the moon, sir,” roared the Earl angrily. “It’s no time for idiotic remarks. If this story is true, a danger hangs over England. No wholesome Briton,” here he glanced again at Hammersley, “ought to go to sleep until this menace is discovered and destroyed.”

“The Yellow Dove is occult,” said Sandys, “like a witch on a broomstick.”

“A Flying Dutchman,” returned Lady Joyliffe.

“There seems to be no joke about that,” said the Earl.

CHAPTER II
THE UNDERCURRENT

THEY were still discussing the strange story of Sandys when Lady Heathcote signaled her feminine guests and they retired to the drawing-room. Over the coffee the interest persisted and Lord Kipshaven was not to be denied. If, as it seemed probable, this German spy was making frequent flights between England and the continent, he must have some landing field, a hangar, a machine shop with supplies of oil and fuel. Where in this tight little island could a German airman descend with a thousand horsepower machine and not be discovered unless with the connivance of Englishmen? The thing looked bad. If there were Englishmen in high places in London who could be bought, there were others, many others, who helped to form the vicious chain which led to Germany.

“I tell you I believe we’re honeycombed with spies,” he growled. “For one that we’ve caught and imprisoned or shot, there are dozens in the very midst of us. If this thing keeps up we’ll all of us be suspecting one another. How do I know that you, Sandys, you, Rizzio, Byfield or even Hammersley here isn’t a secret agent of the Germans? What dinner-table in England is safe when spies are found in the official family at the War Office?”

Rizzio smiled.

“We, who are about to die, salute you,” he said, ​raising his liqueur glass. “And you, Lord Kipshaven, how can we be sure of you?”

“By this token,” said the old man, rising and putting his back to the fire, “that if I even suspected, I’d shoot any one of you down here—now, with as little compunction as I’d kill a dog.”

“I’ll have my coffee first,” laughed Byfield, “if you don’t mind.”

“Coffee—then coffin,” said Rizzio.

“Jolly unpleasant conversation this,” remarked Hammersley. “Makes a chap a bit fidgety.”

“Fidgety!” roared the Earl. “We ought to be fidgety with the Germans winning east and west and the finest flower of our service already killed in battle. We need men and still more men. Any able-bodied fellow under forty who stays at home”—and he glanced meaningly at the Honorable Cyril—“ought to be put to work mending roads.”

The object of these remarks turned the blank stare of his monocle but made no reply.

“Yes, I mean you, Cyril,” went on the Earl steadily. “Your mother was born a Prussian. I knew her well and I think she learned to thank God that fortune had given her an Englishman for a husband. But the taint is in you. Your brother has been wounded at the front. His blood is cleansed. But what of yours? You went to a German university with your Prussian kinsmen and now openly flaunt your sympathies at a dinner of British patriots. Speak up. How do you stand? Your friends demand it.”

Hammersley turned his cigarette carefully in its long amber holder.

“Oh, I say, Lord Kipshaven,” he said with a slow smile, “you’re not spoofing a chap, are you?”

​“I was never more in earnest in my life. How do you stand?”

“Haw!” said Hammersley with obvious effort. “I’m British, you know, and all that sort of thing. How can an Englishman be anything else? Silly rot—fightin’—that’s what I say. That’s all I say,” he finished looking calmly for approval from one to the other.

Smiles from Sandys and Rizzio met this inadequacy, but the Earl, after glaring at him moodily for a moment, uttered a smothered, “Paugh,” and shrugging a shoulder, turned to Rizzio and Sandys who were discussing a recent submarine raid.

Hammersley and Byfield sat near each other at the side of the table away from the others. There was a moment of silence—which Hammersley improved by blowing smoke rings toward the ceiling. Captain Byfield watched him a moment and then after a glance in the direction of the Earl leaned carelessly on an elbow toward Hammersley.

“Any shootin’ at the North?” he asked.

Hammersley’s monocle dropped and the eyes of the two men met.

“Yes. I’m shootin’ the day after tomorrow,” said Hammersley quietly. Byfield looked away and another long moment of silence followed. Then the Honorable Cyril after a puff or two took the long amber holder from his mouth, removed the cigarette and smudged the ash upon the receiver.

“Bally heady cigarettes, these of Algy’s. Don’t happen to have any ’baccy and papers about you, do you, Byfield?”

“Well, rather,” replied the captain. And he pushed a pouch and a package of cigarette papers along the tablecloth. “It’s a mix of my own. I hope you’ll like it.”

​Hammersley opened the bag and sniffed at its contents.

“Good stuff, that. Virginia, Perique and a bit of Turkish. What?”

Byfield nodded and watched Hammersley as he poured out the tobacco, rolled the paper and lighted it at the candelabra, inhaling luxuriously.

“Thanks,” he sighed. “Jolly good of you,” and he pushed the pouch back to Byfield along the table.

“You must come to Scotland some day, old chap,” said the Honorable Cyril carelessly.

“Delighted. When the war is over,” returned Byfield quietly. “Not until the war is over.”

“Awf’ly glad to have you any time, you know—awf’ly glad.”

“In case of furlough—I’ll look you up.”

“Do,” said the Honorable Cyril.

Hammersley’s rather bovine gaze passed slowly around the room, and just over Lord Kipshaven’s head in the mirror over the mantel it met the dark gaze of John Rizzio. The fraction of a second it paused there and then he stretched his long legs and rose, stifling a yawn.

“Let’s go in—what?” he said to Byfield.

Byfield got up and at the same time there was a movement at the mantel.

“Don’t be too hard on the chap,” Rizzio was saying in an undertone to Kipshaven. “You’re singing the ‘Hassgesang.’ He’s harmless—I tell you—positively harmless.” And then as the others moved toward the door: “Come, Lady Heathcote won’t mind our tobacco.”

Hammersley led the way, with Byfield and Rizzio at his heels. Jacqueline Morley had been trying to ​play the piano, but there was no heart in the music until she struck up “Tipperary,” when there was a generous chorus in which the men joined.

Hammersley found Doris with Constance Joyliffe in an alcove. At his approach Lady Joyliffe retired.

“Handsome, no end,” he murmured to her as he sank beside her.

“Handsome is as handsome does, Cyril,” she said slowly. “If you knew what I was thinking of, you wouldn’t be so generous.”

“What?”

“Just what everybody is thinking about you—that you’ve got to do something—enlist to fight—go to France, if only as a chauffeur. They’d let you do that tomorrow if you’d go.”

“Chauffeur! Me! Not really!”

“Yes, that or something else,” determinedly.

“Why?”

She hesitated a moment and then went on distinctly.

“Because I could never marry a man people talked about as people are talking about you.”

“Not marry—?” The Honorable Cyril’s face for the first time that evening showed an expression of concern. “Not marry—me? You can’t mean that, Doris.”

“I do mean it, Cyril,” she said firmly. “I can’t marry you.”

“Why——?”

“Because to me love is a sacrament. Love of woman—love of country, but the last is the greater of the two. No man who isn’t a patriot is fit to be a husband.”

“A patriot——”

She broke in before he could protest. “Yes—a ​patriot. You’re not a patriot—that is, if you’re an Englishman. I don’t know you, Cyril. You puzzle me. You’re lukewarm. Day after day you’ve seen your friends and mine go off in uniform, but it doesn’t mean anything to you. It doesn’t mean anything to you that England is in danger and that she needs every man who can be spared at home to go to the front. You see them go and the only thing it means to you is that you’re losing club-mates and sport-mates. Instead of taking the infection of fervor—you go to Scotland—to shoot—not Germans but—deer! Deer!” she repeated scathingly.

“But there aren’t any Germans in Scotland—at least none that a chap could shoot,” he said with a smile.

“Then go where there are Germans to shoot,” she said impetuously. She put her face to her hands a moment. “Oh, don’t you understand? You’ve got to prove yourself. You’ve got to make people stop speaking of you as I’ve heard them speak of you tonight. Here you are in the midst of friends, people who know you and like you, but what must other people who don’t know you so well or care so much as we? What must they think and say of your indifference, of your openly expressed sympathy with England’s enemies? Even Lady Betty, a kinswoman and one of your truest friends, has lost patience with you—I had almost said lost confidence in you.”

Her voice trailed into silence. Hammersley was moving the toe of his varnished boot along the border of the Aubusson rug.

“I’m sorry,” he said slowly. “Awf’ly sorry.”

“Sorry! Are you? But what are you going to do about it?”

“Do?” he said vaguely. “I don’t know, I’m sure. ​I’m no bally use, you know. Wouldn’t be any bally use over there. Make some silly ass mistake probably. No end of trouble—all around.”

“And you’re willing to sacrifice the goodwill, the affection of your friends, the respect of the girl you say you love——”

“Oh, I say, Doris. Not that——”

“Yes. I’ve got to tell you. I can’t be unfair to myself. I can’t respect a man who sees others cheerfully carrying his burdens, doing his work, accepting his hardships in order that he may sleep soundly at home far away from the nightmare of shot and shell. You, Cyril, you! Is it that—the love of ease? Or is it something else—something to do with your German kinship—the memory of your mother. What is it? If you still want me, Cyril, it is my right to know——”

“Want you, Doris—” his voice went a little lower. “Yes, I want you. You might know that.”

“Then you must tell me.”

He hesitated and peered at the eyeglass in his fingers.

“I think—it’s because I—” He paused and then crossed his hands and bowed his head with an air of relinquishment. “Because I think I must be a”—he almost whispered the word—“a coward.”

Doris Mather gazed at him a long moment of mingled dismay and incredulity.

“You,” she whispered, “the first sportsman of England—a—a coward.”

He gave a short mirthless laugh.

“Queer, isn’t it, the way a chap feels about such things? I always hated the idea of being mangled. Awf’ly unpleasant idea that—’specially in the tummy. In India once I saw a chap——”

​“You—a coward!” Doris repeated, wide-eyed. “I don’t believe you.”

He bent his head again.

“I—I’m afraid you’d better,” he said uncertainly. She rose, still looking at him incredulously, another doubt, a more dreadful one, winging its flight to and fro across her inner vision.

“Come,” she said in a tone she hardly recognized as her own, “come let us join the others.”

He stood uncertainly and as she started to go,

“You’ll let me take you home, Doris?” he asked.

She bent her head, and without replying made her way to the group beyond the alcove.

Hammersley stood a moment watching her diminishing back and then a curious expression, half of trouble, half of resolution, came into his eyes.

Then after a quick glance around the curtain he suddenly reached into his trousers pocket, took something out and scrutinized it carefully by the light of the lamp. He put it back quickly and setting his monocle sauntered forth into the room. As he moved to join the group at the piano John Rizzio met him in the middle of the room.

“Could I have a word with you, Hammersley?” he asked.

“Happy,” said the Honorable Cyril. “Here?”

“In the smoking-room—if you don’t mind?”

Hammersley hesitated a moment and then swung on his heels and led the way. At the smoking-room door from the hallway Rizzio paused, then quietly drew the heavy curtains behind them.

Hammersley, standing by the table, followed this action with a kind of bored curiosity, aware that Rizzio’s dark gaze had never once left him since they had ​entered the room. Slowly Hammersley took his hands from his pockets, reached into his waistcoat for his cigarette case, and as Rizzio approached, opened and offered it to him.

“Smoke?” he asked carelessly.

“I don’t mind if I do. But I’ve taken a curious liking for rolled cigarettes. Ah! I thought so.” He opened the tobacco jar and sniffed at it, searched around the articles on the table, then, “How disappointing! Nothing but Algy’s dreadful pipes. You don’t happen to have any rice-papers do you?”

Hammersley was lighting his own cigarette at the brazier.

“No. Sorry,” he replied laconically.

Rizzio leaned beside him against the edge of the table.

“Strange. I thought I saw you making a cigarette in the dining-room.”

Hammersley’s face brightened. “Oh, yes, Byfield. Byfield has rice-papers.”

“I’d rather have yours,” he said quietly.

The Honorable Cyril looked up.

“Mine, old chap? I thought I told you I hadn’t any.”

Rizzio smiled amiably.

“Then I must have misunderstood you,” he said politely.

“Yes,” said Hammersley and sank into an armchair.

Rizzio did not move and the Honorable Cyril, his head back, was already blowing smoke rings.

Rizzio suddenly relaxed with a laugh and put his legs over a small chair near Hammersley’s and folded his arms along its back.

​“Do you know, Hammersley,” he said with a laugh, “I sometimes think that as I grow older my hearing is not as good as it used to be. Perhaps you’ll say that I cling to my vanishing youth with a fatuous desperation. I do. Rather silly, isn’t it, because I’m quite forty-five. But I’ve a curiosity, even in so small a matter, to learn whether things are as bad with me as I think they are. Now unless you’re going to add a few more gray hairs to my head by telling me that I’m losing my sight as well as my hearing, you’ll gratify my curiosity—an idle curiosity, if you like, but still strangely important to my peace of mind.”

He paused a moment and looked at Cyril, who was examining him with frank bewilderment.

“I don’t think I understand,” said Hammersley politely.

“I’ll try to make it clearer. Something has happened tonight that makes me think that I’m getting either blind or deaf or both. To begin with I thought you said you had no cigarette papers. If I heard you wrong, then the burden of proof rests upon my ears—if my eyes are at fault it’s high time I consulted a specialist, because you know, at the table in the dining-room when you were sitting with Byfield, quite distinctly I saw you put a package of Riz-la-Croix into your right-hand trousers pocket. The color as you know is yellow—a color to which my optic nerve is peculiarly sensitive.” He laughed again. “I know you’d hardly go out of your way to make a misstatement on so small a matter, and if you don’t mind satisfying a foible of my vanity, I wish you’d tell me whether or not I’m mistaken.”

He stopped and looked at Hammersley who was regarding him with polite, if puzzled tolerance. Then, ​as if realizing that something was required of him Hammersley leaned forward.

“I say, Rizzio. What the deuce is it all about? I’m sorry you’re gettin’ old an’ all that sort of thing, but I can’t help it. Now can I, old chap?”

Rizzio’s smile slowly faded and his gaze passed Hammersley and rested on the brass fender of the fireplace.

“You don’t care to tell me?” he asked.

“What?”

“About that package of rice-papers.”

“Byfield has them.”

“Not that package,” put in Rizzio with a wave of the hand. And then, leaning forward, in a low tone, “The other.”

Hammersley sat upright a moment, his hands on the chair-arms and then sank back in his chair with a laugh.

“I say. I can take a joke as well as the next, but—er—what’s the answer?”

Rizzio rose, his graceful figure dominant.

“I don’t think that sort of thing will do, Hammersley.”

His demeanor was perfectly correct, his hand-wave easy and a well-bred smile flickered at his lips, but his tone masked a mystery. Hammersley rose, removing his cigarette with great deliberateness from its holder and throwing it into the fire.

“If there isn’t anything else you want to see me about—” He took a step in the direction of the door.

“One moment, please.”

Hammersley paused.

“I think we’d better drop subterfuge. I know ​why you were here tonight, why Byfield was here and perhaps you know now why I am here.”

“Can’t imagine, I’m sure,” said Cyril.

“Perhaps you can guess, when I tell you that this party was of my own choosing—that my plans were made with a view to arranging your meeting with Captain Byfield in a place known to be above suspicion. I have been empowered to relieve you of any further responsibility in the matter in question—in short of the papers themselves.”

“Oh, I say. Vanished youth, cigarette papers and all that. You’re goin’ it a bit thick, Rizzio, old boy.”

Rizzio put a hand into the inside pocket of his evening coat and drew out a card-case, which he opened under Hammersley’s eyes.

“Look, Hammersley,” he whispered. “Maxwell gave me this! Perhaps you understand now.”

The Honorable Cyril fixed his eyeglass carefully and stared at the card-case.

“By Jove,” he muttered, with sudden interest.

“Now you understand?” said Rizzio.

“You!” whispered Hammersley, looking at him. The languor of a moment before had fallen from him with his dropping monocle.

“Yes, I. Now quick, the papers,” muttered Rizzio, putting the card-case in his pocket. “Someone may come at any moment.”

For a long space of time Hammersley stood uncertainly peering down at the pattern in the rug, then he straightened and, crossing the room, put his back to the fireplace.

“There may be a mistake,” he said firmly. “I can’t risk it.”

Rizzio stood for a moment staring at him as though ​he had not heard correctly. Then he crossed over and faced the other man.

“You mean that?”

Hammersley put his hands in his trousers pockets.

“I fancy so.”

“What are you going to do?”

“What I’ve been told to do.”

“My orders supersede yours.”

“H-m. I’m not sure.”

“You can’t doubt my credentials.”

“Hardly that. Er—I think I know best, that’s all.”

Rizzio took a pace or two before the fireplace in front of him, his brows tangled, his fingers twitching behind his back. Then he stopped with the air of a man who has reached a decision.

“You understand what this refusal means?”

Hammersley shrugged.

“You realize that it makes you an object of suspicion?” asked the other.

“How? In doing what was expected of me?” said Hammersley easily.

“You are expected to give those papers to me.”

“I can’t.”

Rizzio’s fine face had gone a shade paler under the glossy black of his hair and his eyes gleamed dangerously under his shaggy brows. He measured the Honorable Cyril’s six feet two against his own and then turned away.

“I think I understand,” he said slowly. “Your action leaves me no other alternative.”

Hammersley, his hands still deep in his pockets, seemed to be thinking deeply.

“Oh, I wouldn’t say that. Each man according to his lights. You have your orders. I have mine. They ​seem to conflict. I’m going to carry mine out. If that interferes with carrying out yours, I’m not to blame. It’s what happens in the end that matters,” he finished significantly.

Rizzio thought deeply for a moment.

“You’ll at least let me see them?”

“No, I can’t.”

“Why?”

“I have my own reasons.”

Another pause in which Rizzio gave every appearance of a baffled man.

“You realize that if I gave the alarm and those papers were found on you——”

“You wouldn’t do that.”

“Why not?”

“Because of your card-case.”

“That signifies nothing to anyone but you and me.”

Hammersley smiled.

“I’ll take the risk, Rizzio,” he said finally.

The two men had been so absorbed in their conversation that they had not heard the drawing of the curtains of the door, but a sound made them turn and there stood Doris Mather.

CHAPTER III
RICE-PAPERS

DORIS looked from the man whose hand she had accepted to the one she had refused. Their attitudes were eloquent of concealment and the few phrases which had reached her ears as she paused outside the curtain did nothing to relieve the sudden tension of her fears. She hesitated for a moment as Rizzio recovered himself with an effort.

“Do come in, Doris,” he said with a smile. “Hammersley and I were—er——”

“Discussing the scrap of paper. I’m sure of it,” she said coolly. “Nothing is so fruitful of argument. I shouldn’t have intruded, but Cyril was to take me home and I’m ready to go.”

A look passed between the men.

“By Jove—of course,” said Cyril with a glance at his watch. “If you’ll excuse me, Rizzio——”

“Betty is going to Scotland tomorrow early and I think she wants to go to bed.”

Rizzio laughed. “The war has made us virtuous. Eleven o’clock! We’re losing our beauty sleep.”

He followed them to the door, but pleading a desire for a night-cap, remained in the smoking-room.

“I promised that you should take me home,” said the girl to Hammersley as they passed along the hall. “But I’m sorry if I interrupted——”

“Awf’ly glad,” he murmured. “Nothing important, you know. Club matter. Personal.”

​Doris stopped just outside the drawing-room door and searched his face keenly, while she whispered:

“And the threats—of exposure. Oh, I heard that. I couldn’t help it—Cyril—”

He glanced down at her quickly.

“Hush, Doris.”

Something she saw in his expression changed her resolution to question him. The mystery which she had felt to hang about him since he had said he was a coward had deepened. Something told her that she had been treading on forbidden ground and that in obeying him she served his interests best, so she led the way into the drawing-room, where they made their adieux.

Byfield had already gone and Sandys and Lady Joyliffe were just getting into their wraps.

“You’ll meet me here at ten?” their hostess was asking of Constance Joyliffe.

“If I’m not demolished by a Zeppelin in the meanwhile,” laughed the widow.

“Or the Yellow Dove,” said Jacqueline Morley. “I’m sure he alights on the roofs of the Parliament Houses.”

“You’ll be safe in Scotland at any rate, Constance. We’re quite too unimportant up there to be visited by engines of destruction—” she laughed meaningly. “That is—always excepting Jack Sandys.”

Sandys looked self-conscious, but Lady Joyliffe merely beamed benignly.

“It will really be quite restful, I’m sure,” she said easily. “Is Cyril going to be at Ben-a-Chielt?”

Hammersley awoke from a fit of abstraction.

“Quite possible,” he murmured, “gettin’ to be a bit of a hermit lately. Like it though—rather.”

​“Cyril hasn’t anyone to play with,” said Betty Heathcote, “so he has taken to building chicken-houses.”

“Fearfully absorbin’—chicken-houses. Workin’ ’em out on a plan of my own. You’ll see. Goin’ in for hens to lay two eggs a day.” And then to Kipshaven, “So the submarines can’t starve us out, you know,” he explained.

“I don’t think you need worry about that,” said the Earl dryly, moving toward the door.

Doris Mather went upstairs for her wraps and when she came down she found Hammersley in his topcoat awaiting her. As they went down the steps into the waiting limousine her companion offered her his arm. Was it only fancy that gave her the impression that his glance was searching the darkness of the Park beyond the lights of the waiting cars with a keenness which seemed uncalled for on so prosaic an occasion? He helped her in and gave the direction to the chauffeur.

“Ashwater Park, Stryker, by way of Hampstead—and hurry,” she heard him say, which was surprising since the nearer way lay through Harlenden and Harrow-on-Hill. The orders to hurry, too, save in the stress of need, were under the circumstances hardly flattering to her self-esteem. But she remembered the urgent look in his eyes in the hall when he had silenced her questions and sank back in the seat, her gaze fixed on the gloom of Hyde Park to their left, waiting for him to speak. He sat rigidly beside her, his hands clasped about his stick, his eyes peering straight before him at the back of Stryker’s head. She felt his restraint and a little bitterly remembered the cause of it, buoyed by a hope that since he had thought it ​fit to enact a lie, the whole tissue of doubts which assailed her might be based on misconception also. That he was no coward she knew. More than one instance of his physical courage came back to her, incidents of his life before fortune had thrown them together and she only too well remembered the time when he had jumped from her car and thrown himself in front of a runaway horse, saving the necks of the occupants of the vehicle. He had lied to her. But why—why?

She closed her eyes trying to shut out the darkness and seek the sanctuary of some inner light, but she failed to find it. It seemed as though the gloom which spread over London had fallen over her spirit.

“The City of Dreadful Night,” she murmured at last. “I can’t ever seem to get used to it.”

She heard his light laugh and the sound of it comforted her.

“Jolly murky, isn’t it? I miss that fireworks Johnny pourin’ whiskey over by Waterloo Bridge—and Big Ben. Doesn’t seem like London. All rot anyway.”

“You don’t think there’s danger,” she asked cautiously.

He hesitated a moment before replying. And then, “No,” he said, “not now.”

Silence fell over them again. It was as though a shape sat between, a phantom of her dead hopes and his, something so cold and tangible that she drew away in her own corner and looked out at the meaningless blur of the sleeping city. Her lips were tightly closed. She had given him his chance to speak, but he had not spoken and every foot of road that they traversed seemed to carry them further apart. The end of their journey—! Was it to be the end . . . of everything between them?

​After a while that seemed interminable she heard his voice again.

“I suppose you think I’m an awful rotter.”

She turned her head and tried to read his face, but he kept it away from her, toward the opposite window. The feeling that she had voiced to Betty Heathcote of wanting to “mother” him came over her in a warm effusion.

“Nothing that you can say to me will make me think you one, Cyril,” she said gently.

“Thanks awf’ly,” he murmured. And after a pause, “I am though, you know.”

She leaned forward impulsively and laid a hand on his knee.

“No. You’re acting strangely, but I know that there’s a reason for it. As for your being a coward”—she laughed softly—“it’s impossible—quite impossible to make me believe that.”

He laid his fingers over hers for a moment.

“Nice of you to have confidence in a chap and all that, but appearances are against me—that’s the difficulty.”

“Why are they against you? Why should they be against you? Because you—” She stopped, for here she felt that she was approaching dangerous ground. Instead of parleying longer, she used her woman’s weapons frankly and leaning toward him put an arm around his neck and compelled him to turn his face to hers. “Oh, Cyril, won’t you tell me what this mystery is that is coming between us? Won’t you let me help you? I want to be in the sunlight with you again. It can’t go on this way, one of us in the dark and the other in the light. I have felt it for weeks. When I spoke to you tonight about going to France it ​was in the hope that you might give me some explanation that would satisfy me. My heart is wrapped up in the cause of England, but if the German blood in you is calling you away from your duties as an Englishman, tell me frankly and I will try to forgive you, but don’t let the shadow stay over us any longer, Cyril. I must know the truth. What is the mystery that hangs over you and makes——”

“Mystery?” he put in quickly. “You’re a bit seedy, Doris. Thinkin’ too much about the war. Nothin’ mysterious about me.” He turned his head away from her again. “People don’t like my sittin’ tight—here in England,” he said more slowly, “when all the chaps I know are off to the front. I—I can’t help it. That’s all.”

“But it’s so unlike you,” she pleaded. “It’s the sporting thing, Cyril.”

“I want you to believe,” he put in slowly, “it isn’t the kind of sport I care for.”

“I won’t believe it. I can’t. I know you better than that.”

“That’s the trouble,” he insisted. “I’m afraid you don’t know me at all.”

“I don’t know you tonight,” she said sadly. “It almost seems as though you were trying to get rid of me.”

He clasped her tightly in his arms and kissed her gently.

“God forbid,” he muttered.

“Then tell me what it is that is worrying you,” she whispered. “Not a living soul shall ever know. What were the threats of exposure that passed between you and Rizzio. He can’t bear you any illwill because I chose you instead of him. I didn’t mean to listen but ​I couldn’t help it. What was the menace in his tone to you? What is the danger that hangs over you that puts you in his power? It’s my right to know. Tell me, Cyril. Tell me.”

She felt the pressure of the arm around her relax and the sudden rigidity of his whole body as he drew away.

“I think you must have been mistaken in what you say you heard,” he said evenly. “I told you that it was a personal matter—a club matter in which you couldn’t possibly be interested.”

They were speaking formally now, almost as strangers. She felt the indifference in his tone and couldn’t restrain the bitterness that rose in hers.

“One gentleman doesn’t threaten a club-mate with exposure in a club matter unless—unless he has done something discreditable—something dishonorable——”

The Honorable Cyril bent his head.

“You have guessed,” he said. “He—he is jealous. He wants to humiliate me.”

She laughed miserably. “Then why did you threaten him?”

“I had to defend myself.”

“You! Dishonorable! I’ll have to have proofs of that. What are the papers you have that he wants? And what is there incriminating in Rizzio’s card-case? You see, I heard everything.”

“What else did you hear?” he asked quickly.

She drew away from him and sank back heavily in her corner.

“Nothing,” she muttered. “Isn’t that enough?”

It seemed to the girl as though her companion’s figure relaxed a little. And he turned toward her gently.

​“Don’t bother about me. I’m not worth bothering about. The worst of it is that I can’t make any explanation—at least any that will satisfy you. All I ask is that you have patience with me if you can, trust me if you can, and try to forget—try to forget what you have heard. If you should mention my conversation with Rizzio it might lead to grave consequences for him—for me.”

The girl listened as though in a nightmare, the suspicions that had been slowly gathering in her brain throughout the evening now focusing upon him from every incident with a persistence that was not to be denied. The shape sat between them again, more tangible, more cold and cruel than before. All his excuses, all his explanations gave it substance and reality. The phantom of their dead hopes it had been before—now it was something more sinister—something that put all thoughts of the Cyril she knew from her mind—the shade of Judas fawning for his pieces of silver—a pale Judas in a monocle. . . . She closed her eyes again and tried to think. Cyril! It was unbelievable. . . . And a moment ago he had kissed her. She felt again the touch of his lips on her forehead. . . . It seemed as though she too were being betrayed.

“You ask something very difficult of me,” she stammered chokingly.

“I can only ask,” he said, “and only hope that you’ll take my word for its importance.”

She shivered in her corner. The sound of his voice was so impersonal, so different from the easy bantering tone to which she was accustomed, that it seemed that what he had said was true—that she did not know him.

​Another surprise awaited her, for he leaned forward, peering into the mirror beside the wind shield in front of Stryker and turned and looked quickly out of the rear window of the car. Then she heard his voice in quick peremptory notes through the speaking-tube.

“There’s a car behind us. Lose it.”

The driver touched his cap and she felt the machine leap forward. The thin stream of light far in front of them played on the gray road and danced on the dim façades of unlighted houses which emerged from the obscurity, slid by and were lost again as the car twisted and turned, rocking from side to side, moving ever more rapidly toward the open country to the north. The dark corners of cross streets menaced for a moment and were gone. A reflector gleamed from one, but they went by it without slowing, the signal shrieking. A flash full upon them, a sound of voices cursing in the darkness and the danger was passed! At the end of a long piece of straight road Cyril turned again and reached for the speaking-tube. But his voice was quite cool.

“They’re coming on. Faster, Stryker.”

And faster they went. They had reached the region of semi-detached villas and the going was good. The road was a narrow ribbon of light reeling in upon its spool with frightful rapidity. The machine was a fine one and its usual well-ordered purr had grown into a roar which seemed to threaten immediate disruption.

Doris sat rigidly, clutching at the door sill and seat trying to adjust her braced muscles to the task of keeping upright. But a jolt of the car tore her grasp loose and threw her into Cyril’s arms and there he held her steadily. She was too disturbed to resist, and ​lay quietly, conscious of the strength of the long arms that enfolded her and aware in spite of herself of a sense of exhilaration and triumph. Triumph with Cyril! What triumph—over whom? It didn’t seem to matter just then whom he was trying to escape. She seemed very safe in his arms and very contented though the car rocked ominously, while its headlight whirled drunkenly in a wild orbit of tossed shadows. The sportswoman in her responded to the call of speed, the chance of accident, the danger of capture—for she felt sure now that there was a danger to Cyril. Over her shoulder she saw the lights of the pursuing machine, glowing unblinkingly as though endowed with a persistence which couldn’t know failure. Under the light of an incandescent she saw that its lines were those of a touring-car and realized the handicap of the heavy car with its limousine body. But Stryker was doing his best, running with a wide throttle picking his road with a skill which would have done credit to Cyril himself. The heath was already behind them. At Hendon, having gained a little, Stryker put out his lights and turned into a by-road hoping to slip away in the darkness, but as luck would have it the moon was bright and in a moment they saw the long spoke of light swing in behind them.

“Good driver, that Johnny,” she heard her companion say in a note of admiration to Stryker. “Have to run for it again.”

The road was not so good here and they lost time without the searchlights, so Stryker turned them on again. This evasion of the straight issue of speed had been a confession of weakness and the other car seemed to realize it, for it came on at increased speed which shortened the distance so that the figures of the occu​pants of the other were plainly discernible, five men in all, huddled low.

A good piece of road widened the distance. The limousine, now thoroughly warmed, was doing the best that she was capable of and the tires Cyril told her were all new. Her question seemed to give him an idea, for he reached for the flower vase and, thrusting out a hand, jerked it back into the road.

“A torn tire might help a little,” he said.

But the fellow behind swerved and came faster.

It was now a test of metal. Their pursuer lagged a little on the levels but caught them on the grades and, barring an accident, it was doubtful whether they would reach the gates of Ashwater Park safely. She heard a reflection of this in Cyril’s voice as he shouted through the open front window.

“How far by the road, Stryker?”

“Five miles, I’d say, sir.”

“Give her all she can take.”

Stryker nodded and from a hill crest they seemed to soar into space. The car shivered and groaned like a stricken thing, but kept on down the hill without the touch of a brake. They crossed a bridge, rattled from side to side. Cyril steadied the girl in his arms and held her tight.

“Are you frightened?” he asked her.

“No. But what is it all about?”

Her companion glanced back to where the long beams of light were searching their dust. When he turned toward her his face was grave. He held her closely for a moment, peering into her eyes.

“Will you help me, Doris?” she heard him say.

“But how? What can I do, Cyril?”

He hesitated again, glancing over his shoulder.

​“Bally nuisance to have to drive you like this. Wouldn’t do it if it wasn’t most important——”

“Yes——”

“They want something I’ve got——”

“Papers?”

“You’ll laugh when I tell you. Most amusin’—cigarette papers!”

“Cigarette——”

“That’s all. I give you my word. Here they are.” And reaching down into his trousers pocket he produced a little yellow packet. “Cigarette papers, that’s all. These chaps must be perishin’ for a smoke. What?” he laughed.

“But I don’t understand.”

“It isn’t necessary that you should. Take my word for it, won’t you? It’s what they want. And I’m jolly determined they’re not goin’ to get it.”

“You want me to help you? How?”

He looked back again and the lights behind them found a reflection in his eyes. If, earlier in the evening she had hoped to see him fully awake, she had her wish now. He was quite cool and ready to take an amused view of things, but in his coolness she felt a new power, an inventiveness, a readiness to resort to extremes to baffle his pursuers. Her apprehension had grown with the moments. Who were these men in the touring-car? Special agents of Scotland Yard? She had never been so doubtful nor so proud of him. Weighed in the balance of emotion the woman in her decided it. She caught at his hand impulsively.

“Yes, I’ll help—if I can—whatever comes.”

He raised her fingers to his lips and kissed them gently.

“Thank God,” he muttered. “I knew you would.” ​He looked over his shoulder and then peered out in search of familiar land-marks. They had passed Canons Hill and swung into the main road to Watford. If they reached there safely they would get to Ashwater Park which was but a short distance beyond.

She heard him speaking again and felt something thrust into the palm of her hand.

“Take this,” he said. “It’s what they want. They mustn’t get it.”

“But who are they?”

“I don’t know. Except that they’ve been sent by Rizzio.”

“Rizzio!”

“Yes. He’s not with them. This sort of game requires chaps of a different type.”

“You mean that they——”

“Oh, don’t be alarmed. They won’t hurt me and of course they won’t hurt you. I’m going to get you out of the way—with this. My success depends on you. We’ll drive past the Park entrance close to wicket gate in the hedge near the house. Just as we stop, jump out, run through and hide among the shrubbery. Your cloak is dark. They won’t see you. When they’re gone, make your way to the house. It’s a chance, but I’ve got to take it.”

“And you?” she faltered.

“I’ll get away. Don’t worry. But the packet. Whatever happens don’t let them get the packet.”

“No,” she said in a daze, “I won’t.”

“Keep it for me, until I come. But don’t examine it. It’s quite unimportant to anybody but me——” he laughed, “that is, anybody but Rizzio.”

She stared straight in front of her trying to think, but thought seemed impossible. The speed had got ​into her blood and she was mastered by a spirit stronger than her own. He held her in his arms again and she gloried in the thought that she could help him. Whatever his cause, her heart and soul were in it.

They roared into Watford and, turning sharp to the left, took the road to Croxley Green. The machine hadn’t missed a spark but the touring-car was creeping up—was so close that its lights were blinding them. Hammersley leaned forward and gave a hurried order to Stryker. They passed the Park gates at full speed—the wicket gate was a quarter of a mile beyond. Would they make it? The touring-car was roaring up alongside but Stryker jockeyed it into the gutter. Voices were shouting and Doris got the gleam of something in the hand of a tall figure standing up in the other car. There followed shots—four of them—and an ominous sound came from somewhere underneath as the limousine limped forward.

“It’s our right rear tire,” said Stryker.

“Have we a spare wheel,” she heard Cyril say.

“Yes, sir.”

“When we stop put it on as quick as you can. A hundred yards. Easy—so and we’re there, Stryker. Now. Over to the left and give ’em the road. Quick! Now stop!”

The other machine came alongside at their right and the men jumped down just as Cyril threw open the left-hand door and Doris leaped out and went through the gate in the hedge.

CHAPTER IV
DANGEROUS SECRETS

ONCE within the borders of her father’s estate and hidden in a clump of bushes near the hedge, all idea of flight left Doris’s head. She was home and the familiar scene gave her confidence. From the middle of her clump of bushes grew a spruce tree, and into it she quickly climbed until she reached a point where she could see the figures in the road beside the quivering machines. She had not been followed. The five men were gathered around Cyril, who was protesting violently at the outrage. They had not missed her yet. Stryker was on his knees beside the stricken wheel.

“Come, now,” she heard the leader saying, “you’re not to be hurt if you’ll give ’em up.”

“Why, old chap, you’re mad,” Cyril was saying coolly. “I was thinkin’ you wanted my watch. You chase me twenty miles in the dead of night and then ask me for cigarette papers. You’re chaffin’—what?”

“You’ll find out soon enough,” said the tall man gruffly. “Off with his coat, Jim. . . . Now search him.”

Cyril made no resistance. Doris could see his face quite plainly. He was smiling.

“Rum go, this,” he said with a puzzled air. “I only smoke made cigarettes, you know.”

But they searched him thoroughly, even taking off his shoes.

​“I say, stop it,” she heard him laugh. “You’re ticklin’.”

“Shut up, d—n you,” said the tall man, with a scowl.

“Right-o!” said Cyril, cheerfully. “But you’re wastin’ time.”

They found that out in a while and the leader of the men straightened. Suddenly he gave a sound of triumph.

“The girl!” he cried and, rushing to the limousine, threw open the door.

“Gone!” he shouted excitedly. “She can’t be far. Find her.”

He rushed around the rear wheels of the limousine and for the first time spied the gate in the hedge.

“Tricked, by God! In after her, some of you.”

“It won’t do a bit of good,” remarked Cyril. He was sitting in the dirt of the middle of the road near the front wheels of the machines. “She doesn’t smoke, o’ chap. Bad taste, I call it, gettin’ a lady mixed up in a hunt for cigarettes. Besides she’s almost home by this. The house isn’t far. She lives there, you know.”

In her tree Doris trembled. She was well screened by the branches and she heard the crackle of footsteps in the dry leaves as the searchers beat the bushes below her, but they passed on, following the path toward the house. As the sounds diminished in the distance she saw Cyril still seated on the ground leaning against the front wheels of the touring-car while he argued and cajoled the men nearest him. Helping himself by a wheel as he arose he faced the tall man who had come up waving his revolver and uttering wild threats.

“It won’t help matters calling me a lot of names,” said Cyril, brushing the dust from his clothes. “You ​want something I haven’t got—that’s flat. I hope you’re satisfied.”

“Not yet. They’ll bring the girl in a minute. She can’t have gone far.”

Cyril glanced around him carelessly and brushed his clothes again.

He had discovered that Stryker had put on the spare wheel and was parleying with one of their captors.

“Oh, very well. Have your way. What more can I do for you? If you don’t mind I’d like to be going on.”

“You’ll wait for the girl—here.”

Doris watched Stryker skulking along in the shadow of the limousine. She saw him reach his seat, heard a grinding of the clutches and a confused scuffle out of which, his blond hair disheveled, his shoulders coatless, Cyril emerged and leaped for the running-board of the moving machine.

“You forgot to search the limousine,” she heard him shout.

The tall man scrambled to his knees and fired at the retreating machine while the others jumped for the touring-car.

It had no sooner begun to move than there was a sound of escaping air and an oath from the chauffeur.

“A puncture,” someone said. And Doris heard a volley of curses which spoke eloquently of the sharpness of Cyril’s pocket-knife.

Doris in her hiding-place breathed a sigh of relief. Cyril had gotten safely off, and his last words had created a diversion in the camp of the enemy. They were working furiously at the tire, but she knew that the chance of coming up with Cyril again that night was ​gone. Now that the affair had resulted so favorably to Cyril she began to regret her imprudence in remaining to see the adventure to its end. Cyril had played for time, and if she had followed his instructions she could have gotten far enough away to have eluded her pursuers. By this time, in all probability, she would have been safe beneath the parental roof. The worst of it was that Cyril thought her safe. The packet in her glove burned in her hand. Beneath her, somewhere between her refuge and the house were two men, and how to pass them with her precious possession became now the sole object of her thoughts. Cyril had told her that the packet must under no circumstances fall into the hands of their pursuers and the desperateness of his efforts to elude them gave her a renewed sense of her importance as an instrument for good or ill in Cyril’s cause—whatever it might be. Now that Cyril had gone she felt singularly helpless and small in the face of such odds. For a moment she thought of hiding the packet in the crotch of one of the branches where she might come and reclaim it at her leisure and go down and run the chance of being taken without it. But the unpleasantness which might result from such an encounter deterred her, and so she sat, her chilly ankles depending, awaiting she knew not what. She had almost reconciled herself to the thought of spending several hours in this uncomfortable position when the tall man in the road blew a blast on a sporting whistle and soon the passing of footsteps through the gate advised her that the men inside the grounds had returned.

This was her opportunity, and without waiting to listen she dropped quietly down on the side of the tree away from the gate and, stealing furtively along in ​the shadow of the hedge, made her way as quickly as possible in the direction of the house. Out of breath with exercise and excitement, when she reached a patch of trees at the edge of the lawn, she stopped and looked behind her. Then she blessed her luck in coming down when she did, for she saw the thin ray of a pocket light gleaming like a will-o’-the-wisp in her place of concealment and knew that the search for her was still on.

Fear lent her caution. She skirted the edge of the wide lawn in the shadow of the trees, running like a deer across the moonlit spaces, always keeping the masses of evergreens between her and the wicket gate until she reached the flower garden, where she paused a moment to get her breath. A patch of moonlight lay between her and the entrance and the hedge was impenetrable. There was no other way. She bent low and hurried forward, trusting to the good fortune that had so far aided her. Halfway across the open she heard a shout and knew that she had been seen.

There was nothing for it but to run straight for the house. So catching her skirts up above her knees and scorning the garden path which would have taken her a longer way, she made straight for the terrace, the main door of which she knew had been left open for her return. Across the wide lawn in the bright moonlight she ran, her heart throbbing madly, the precious yellow packet clutched tightly against her palm. Out of the tail of her eye she saw dark forms emerge from the bushes and run diagonally for the terrace steps in the hope of intercepting her. But she was fast, and she blessed her tennis for the wind and muscle to stand the strain. She was much nearer her goal than her pursuers, but they came rapidly, their bulk looming ​larger every moment. She saw the lights and knew that servants were at hand. Her father, too, was in the library, for she saw the glow of his reading-lamp. She had only to shout for help now and someone would hear her. She tried to, but not a sound came from her parching throat. With a last effort she raced up the terrace steps, pushed open the heavy door and shut and bolted it quickly behind her. Then sank into the nearest piece of furniture in a state of physical collapse.

Doris Mather did not faint, an act which might readily have been forgiven her under the circumstances. Her nerves were shaken by the violence of her exercise and the narrowness of her escape, and it was some moments before she could reply to the anxious questions that were put to her. Then she answered evasively, peering through the windows at the moonlit lawn and seeing no sign of her pursuers. In a few moments she drank a glass of water and took the arm of Wilson, her maid, up the stairway to her rooms, after giving orders to the servants that her father was not to be told anything except that she had come in very tired and had gone directly to bed.

For the present at least Cyril’s packet was safe. In her dressing-room Wilson took off her cloak and helped her into bedroom slippers, not, however, without a comment on the bedraggled state of her dinner dress and the shocking condition of her slippers. But Doris explained with some care that Mr. Hammersley’s machine had had a blow-out near the wicket gate, that she had become frightened and had run all the way across the lawn. All of which was true. It didn’t explain Mr. Hammersley’s deficiencies as an escort, but Wilson was too well trained to presume further. ​A little sherry and a biscuit and Doris revived rapidly. While the maid drew her bath she locked Cyril’s cigarette papers in the drawer of the desk in her bedroom, and when she was bathed and ready for the night she dismissed Wilson to her dressing-room to wait within call until she had gone to bed.

Alone with her thoughts, her first act was to turn out her lights and kneel in the window where she could peer out through the hangings. It was inconceivable that her pursuers would dare to make any attempt upon the house, but even now she wondered whether it would not have been wiser if she had taken her father into her confidence and had the gardeners out to keep an eye open for suspicious characters. But the motives that had kept her silent downstairs in the hall were even stronger with her now. She could not have borne to discuss with her father, who had an extraordinary talent for getting at the root of difficulties, the subject of Cyril’s questionable packet of cigarette papers. She was quite sure, from the adventure which had befallen them tonight, and the mystery with which Cyril had chosen to invest the article committed to her care, that Cyril himself would not have approved of any course which would have brought the packet or his own actions into the light of publicity.

The packet of cigarette papers! With a last scrutiny of the landscape she pulled the shades and hangings so that no ray of light could reach the outside of the house, then groped her way across the room. A thin line of light beneath the door of her dressing-room showed that Wilson was still there. So she took the precaution of locking that door as well as the others leading to the upstairs hall, then went to her desk and turned on her lamp. She unlocked the drawer ​of the desk and taking the small object gingerly in her fingers, scrutinized it carefully. It was yellow in color, quite new, bound with a small rubber band, a very prosaic, a very harmless looking object to have caused so much excitement and trouble to all who had been concerned about it. She turned it over and stretched its rubber band, snapping it thoughtfully two or three times. Now for the first time since Cyril had given it to her did she permit herself to think of the hidden meanings the thing might possess. In the machine, during the chase Cyril had won her unreservedly to his side. As against the mysterious men of John Rizzio Cyril’s cause had been the only one to be considered. She had been carried off her feet and there hadn’t been time to think of anything but the real necessity of acceding to Cyril’s wishes in getting the small object to a place of safety. Then it had only been a packet of cigarette papers—a mere package of Riz-la-Croix which everybody, for some reason or other, seemed to want. Now, weighed lightly in her hand, the seclusion of her room gave it a different character. She recalled Cyril’s bantering tone at having been chased twenty miles for a cigarette. But his attitude deceived Doris no more than it had his pursuers. There was material here for something more deadly than cigarettes. She took the yellow packet in both hands and pressed it to her temples as though by this act she could pass its secrets into her own brain. In spite of herself she was frightfully curious and frightfully afraid.

She got up and paced the floor rapidly. No—it couldn’t go on. She must know the truth. As the key of the one unopened room fascinated Blue Beard’s wife, as the box fascinated Pandora, so this unopened ​yellow packet plagued and fascinated Doris Mather. She hesitated another long moment and then slipped off the rubber band and opened it, trembling so that the first leaf of paper came out in her fingers and fell to the floor. She picked the paper up and examined it minutely, holding it up to the light. There was nothing unusual about it, no mark, no sign of any kind that might indicate a secret mission. Leaf by leaf, slowly at first and then more rapidly she went through the leaves, examining each page back and front, without success. It was not until she was almost half through it that she came upon the writing—four pages written lengthways in ink with a line too fine almost for legibility.

She put the packet down for a moment, her heart throbbing with excitement and incredulity, too apprehensive to read, in mortal dread of a revelation which was to change the whole course of her life and Cyril’s. There was still time to close the book and go to bed. Why did she sit there holding the thing open, stupidly gazing at nothing? If Cyril——

Yes, if Cyril was the unspeakable thing of her doubts, it was time that she knew it and no compunctions of honor should hold her with such a man. Besides she had promised him nothing. Hesitating no longer, she held the leaves under the light of her lamp and slowly deciphered the thin script.

At first she could make little of it, as it seemed to consist of numerals which she couldn’t understand, but here and there she made out the names of towns, the names of regiments familiar to her and a series of dates, beginning in March and ending in May. As the meaning of the writing grew clearer to her, she read on, her eyes distended with horror. Even a child could ​have seen that this was a list of the British forces under arms, the proposed dates for the completion of their equipment, training and departure for France. When she had finished reading the written pages, her inert fingers slowly turned the blank papers over to the end. There was nothing more. God knows it was enough! Cyril—the Honorable Cyril—a spy of the Germans!

She sank low in her armchair, her senses numb from the horror of the revelation. Her thoughts became confused like those of a sick person awaking from a nightmare to a half consciousness, peopled with strange beautiful images doing the dark things of dreams. Cyril—her Cyril—a spy!

What would happen now. And which way did duty lie? Toward England or toward Cyril? She sat crouched on the floor in an agony of misery at the thought of Cyril’s baseness, the package of paper clenched in her hand, trying to think clearly for England, for Cyril, for herself, but the longer she battled the deeper became her desperation and despair.

The world seemed to be slipping away from her, the orderly arrangement of her thoughts was twisted and distorted so that wrong had become right and right wrong. She had lost her standard of judgment. She did not know which way to turn, so she bent her head forward into her hands and silently prayed. There seemed to be nothing else to do. For a long while she remained prostrate by the window, her brain tortured, her body stiff with weariness, until she could think no more. Then slowly and painfully she rose and, still clutching the yellow packet, groped her way to bed, into which she fell exhausted in mind and body.

CHAPTER V
THE PURSUIT CONTINUES

AT eight o’clock Doris was awakened by a loud knocking on the door leading to her dressing-room. She had slept the sleep of utter exhaustion and aroused herself with difficulty, a little bewildered at the unusual sounds. Then she dimly remembered locking the door and got quickly out of bed, put the yellow packet in the drawer of her desk and pushed back the bolt of the door.

To her surprise her father confronted her and behind him were other members of the family in various stages of their morning toilets.

“Thank the Lord,” said David Mather with a sigh of relief.

“What on earth is the matter?” asked the girl, glancing from one to the other in alarm.

Her father laughed. “Oh, nothing, now that you’re all right. Burglars, that’s all.”

Doris’s heart stopped beating as in a flash of reviving memory the incidents of the night before came quickly back to her.

“Burglars!” she stammered.

“Yes, they got in here—came up the water spout,” pointing to the dressing-room window, “and a fine mess they made of things. You’ll have to take account of stock, child, and see how you stand.”

She glanced around the disordered room, very much alarmed. The drawers of her cupboards were all ​pulled out and their contents scattered about on the floor.

“When did—did it happen?” she asked timorously, more because she had to say something than because that was what she wanted to know.

“Some time before dawn,” said her father. “Wilson was here until three thinking that you might want her and then went out to her own room in the wing.”

“Yes, I remember,” said the girl, passing her hand across her eyes. “I wasn’t feeling very well—so I asked her to stay here for a while. But I can’t understand why I didn’t wake.”

“That’s what frightened us,” Cousin Tom broke in. “We were afraid the snoozers might have got in to you——”

“It’s lucky you had your door locked.”

“They were at my library desk, too,” she heard her father saying. “Must have gone down the hall from here. But so far as I can see, they didn’t get anything.”

Her Aunt Sophia gasped a sigh.

“Thank the Lord,” she put in reverently. “At least we’re all safe and sound.”

Stunned at the daring of Rizzio’s men and bewildered by the persistence with which they had followed their quest while she was sleeping, Doris managed to formulate a quick plan to hide the meaning of this intrusion from the members of her family.

She had been examining the disordered contents of the upper drawers of a bureau.

“My jewel case, fortunately, I keep in my bedroom,” she said, “but there was an emerald brooch to be repaired which I put in this drawer yesterday. It’s gone.”

​She saw a puzzled look come into the eyes of Wilson, who stood near the window, and a glance passed between them.

“Oh, well,” her father said as he turned toward the door, “we’re lucky it wasn’t worse. I’m ’phoning to Watford for a constable.”

This was what Doris had feared and yet she could not protest. So she shut her lips firmly and let them go out of the room, leaving her alone with Wilson.

She knew that the woman was devoted to her and that she was not in the habit of talking belowstairs, but her mistress had seen the look of incredulity in the woman’s eyes last night and the puzzled expression a moment ago which indicated a suspicion connecting Doris’s arrival in the Hall with the mysterious entrance of the dressing-room. Doris knew that she must tell her something that would satisfy her curiosity.

“My bath please, Wilson,” she said coolly in order to gain time. “And say nothing, you understand.”

“Of course, Miss Mather,” said Wilson, with her broad Kentish smile. “I wouldn’t ha’ dreamed of it.”

The cool water refreshed and invigorated the girl, and she planned skillfully. By the time Wilson brought her breakfast tray she had already wrapped the yellow packet of cigarette papers and her Cousin Tom’s tobacco pouch in a pair of silk stockings surrounded by many thicknesses of paper and in a disguised handwriting had addressed it to Lady Heathcote at her place in Scotland. She had also written a note to Betty advising her of a change in plans and of her intention to come to her upon the following day, asking in a postscript twice underlined to keep a certain package addressed to her and carefully described ​safely under lock and key for her without opening until her arrival. She would explain later.

A gleam of hope had penetrated to her through the gloom that encompassed her thoughts—only a gleam at the best, but it was enough to give her courage to go on with her efforts to save Cyril from immediate danger. And this was the belief born of the forcible and secret entry of the house that the men who were in pursuit of the fateful packet were not in any way connected with Scotland Yard or the War Office. Otherwise if they believed the papers to be in her possession they would have come boldly in the light of day and demanded of her father the right to search the house. These were not times when the War Office hesitated in matters which concerned the public interest. John Rizzio, for some reason which she could not fathom, was acting upon his own initiative with a desire as urgent as Cyril’s to keep his object secret.

She pondered those things for a long while and then with a sigh of uncertainty dismissed them from her thoughts, which were too full of the immediate necessity to carry out her carefully formulated plans. First she called Wilson and after assuring herself that she was making no mistake, took her partially into confidence, telling her of the important paper intrusted by Mr. Hammersley to her care which it was to the interest of other persons to possess and the necessity for getting them safely out of the house. Her mistress’s confidences flattered the maid and she entered very willingly into the affair, concealing the emerald brooch which Doris produced from her jewel box, in a trunk containing old clothes which had long stood neglected in a dusty corner of the attic.

After the visit of the man from Watford, who went ​over the situation with a puzzled brow and departed still puzzled, she confided to her father the letter and package which were to be mailed from London, the letter in the morning, the package not until night.

“Don’t fail me, daddy. It’s very important——” she said as she kissed him. “It’s a surprise for Betty, but it mustn’t get to Scotland until tomorrow night at the earliest. And good-by——” And she kissed him again. “I’m going with it.”

“Tonight?”

“Tomorrow.”

Mr. Mather smiled and pinched her cheeks. He was quite accustomed to sudden changes of plan on the part of his daughter and would as soon have thought of questioning them as he would the changes in the weather. He hadn’t liked the idea of her hunting or playing polo, but she had done them both and cajoled him into approving of her. He had objected fearfully when she went in for aviation, but had learned to watch the flights of her little Nieuport with growing confidence and had even erected a shed for her machines in the meadow behind the stables.

“Take care of yourself,” he said lightly. “You’re looking a little peaky lately. If you don’t get rosier I’ll withdraw my ambulance corps.”

She laughed. “Don’t forget!” she flung after him as he got into the car.

With the departure of the yellow packet a weight had been lifted from Doris’s mind. John Rizzio’s men might come now if they liked—and she would invite them to search the place. She was not in the least afraid of herself, and she knew that the danger to Cyril had passed—at least for the present.

​She hoped that Cyril wouldn’t come today—or telephone her. She wanted time to think of what she should say to him. At moments it even seemed as though she didn’t care if she ever saw him again. But as the day passed and she had no word from him, she grew anxious. What if Rizzio had told the War Office!

That night men from Watford kept a watch upon the house, but there was no disturbance. Her watchers had evidently taken the alarm. But it was in no very certain or very happy state that Doris drove her machine out of the gate of the Park in the later afternoon of the next day with her cousin Tom beside her and Wilson and the luggage in the rear seat. The main road to London was empty of vehicles except for a man on a motor-cycle just ahead of her bound in the same direction. At least, she was no longer to be watched. There was plenty of time, so she drove leisurely, reaching Euston Station with twenty minutes to spare. She sent a wire to Lady Heathcote and then Tom saw her safely into her carriage.

The movement of the train soothed her and she closed her eyes and slept, Wilson like a watchful Gorgon, guarding against intrusion.

There was but one incident which destroyed the peace of the journey. Toward morning, Wilson, who slept with one eye open, wakened her suddenly and asked her quietly to look out of the window. Her train had stopped at a large station, the platform of which was well lighted. From the darkness of their compartment she followed the direction of Wilson’s figure. Outside, pacing the platform and smoking cigarettes, were two men.

“What is it?” asked Doris, half asleep.

​“The big one,” whispered Wilson excitedly. “It was him that was ridin’ the motor-cycle.”

Doris remembered passing and repassing the vehicle on the road to London, and the face of its driver came back to her. She peered out at him eagerly and as the man turned she saw the face and figure of the larger man clearly. It was the motor-cycle man, and in a rush the thought came to her that his figure and bearing were strangely familiar.

“It’s true,” she whispered, her fingers on Wilson’s arm. “We’re followed. It’s the same man. Last night, too.”

“Last night?”

“Yes. It’s the man called Jim, who searched Mr. Hammersley in the road.”

“No,” said Wilson, her eyes brightening. “You don’t say so, Miss Mather. Of all the brazen——”

“Sh—” said Doris.

But there was no more sleep for either of them that night. Bolt upright, side by side, they watched the dawn grow into sunrise and the sunrise into broad day. They saw no more of the motor-cycle man and Doris reassured herself that there was nothing to be feared now that the packet was— She started in affright. The packet at Betty Heathcote’s! Perhaps at this very moment lying innocently in Betty’s post-box or in the careless hands of some stupid Scotch gardener, or worse yet inviting curiosity on Betty’s desk or library table. Her heart sank within her as she realized that her brave plans might yet miscarry.

It was with a sense of joyous relief that the train pulled at last into Innerwick Station. When she got down she saw Betty Heathcote’s yellow brake, the four chestnuts restive in the keen moorland air, and look​ing very youthful and handsome in a brown coat which made the symphony complete, the lady herself, the wind in her cheeks and in her cheery greeting.

“Of course, Doris, you’re to be trusted to do something surprising. Oh, here’s Jack Sandys—you didn’t know, of course.”

The sight of these familiar faces gave Doris renewed confidence, and when from the box seat she glanced around in search of her pursuer he had disappeared.

Sandys clambered up behind them. Wilson got into the back seat with the grooms, the boxes went in between, and they were off.

“Constance was tired, Jack. At least she said she was. I really think that all she wanted was to disappoint you. Nothing like disappointment. It breeds aspiration. But,” she added mischievously, “I’m sure she’s dying to see you. Awf’ly sad—especially since it’s not quite forty-eight hours since you were waving a tearful good-by in Euston Station.”

“Did you get my package?” whispered Doris in her ear, at the first opportunity.

“What package? Oh, yes, the stockings. It was torn and awf’ly muddy. Higgins dropped it from the dog-cart on the way over and had to go back for it. Lucky he found it—in the middle of the road. What a silly thing to make such a mystery of. And the cigarette papers—you might be sure I’d have something to smoke at Kilmorack House. I can’t understand. You really could smoke here if you want to without so much secrecy about it.”

“I—I didn’t know,” stammered the girl. “I—I’ve just taken it up and I thought you mightn’t approve.”

Betty glanced at her narrowly.

​“Whatever ails you, child? I disapprove! You know I smoke when I feel like it—which isn’t often.”

The subject fortunately was turned when they passed the road to Ben-a-Chielt.

“I always envied Cyril his cliffs. I love the sea and Cyril hates it. ‘So jolly restless,’” she mimicked him. “Makes one ‘quiggledy.’ And there I am—away inland—five miles to the firth at the very nearest. But I suppose,” she sighed, “one has to overlook the deficiencies of one’s grandfather. If he had known I’d have liked the sea, Cyril, of course, would have come into my place.”

With this kind of light chatter, of which Lady Heathcote possessed a fund, their whip drove them upon their way, her own fine spirits oblivious of the silence of her companions. But at last she glanced at them suspiciously. “If I didn’t know that you were both hopelessly in love with other persons, I’d think you were épris of each other.”

Doris laughed.

“We are. That’s why we chose opposite ends of the train.”

But Sandys only smiled.

“Nothing that’s happening makes a chap happy nowadays. I bring bad news.”

Lady Heathcote relaxed the reins so that one of her leaders plunged madly, while her face went white.

“Not Algy——”

“No, no—forgive me. He’s safe. I’ve kept watch of the bulletins.”

“Thank God!” said Lady Heathcote, and sent her whiplash swirling over the ears of the erring leader.

“Not Algy—Byfield——”

“Byfield—not dead——?”

​“No. Worse.”

“What——?”

“In prison. He was taken into custody yesterday afternoon as he was leaving the War Office. Orders from ‘K.’”

“You can’t mean that Richard Byfield is——”

Sandys nodded quickly.

“Yes. He was one of the leaks—a spy.”

“A spy!” Betty Heathcote whispered in awestricken tones. “A spy—Dick! Horrible! I can’t—I won’t——”

“Unfortunately there’s not the least doubt about it. They found incriminating evidence at his rooms.”

“My God!” said Lady Heathcote. “What are we coming to? Dick Byfield—why, two nights ago he was a guest at my table—with you, and you——”

Doris nodded faintly, the landscape swimming in a dark mist before her eyes. Byfield—Cyril—Rizzio—all three had been at Lady Heathcote’s dinner. Something had happened that night—only a part of which she knew. Byfield was arrested—and Cyril—— She clutched desperately at the edge of the seat and set her jaw to keep herself from speaking Cyril’s name.

“Were there—any others?” she asked, with an effort.

“None so far. But there must have been others. God help them! They won’t get any mercy.”

“But what made him do such a thing?” asked Betty. “I could have sworn——”

“Money—lots of it. He wasn’t very well off, you know.”

They were swinging over the ridge towards Kilmo​rack House in a tragic silence mocked by the high jubilant notes of the coach horn which the groom was winding to announce their approach.

Doris got down swiftly, summoning her courage to be silent and wait. In the drawing-room when the news was told, Constance Joyliffe added another note of gloom.

“We’re going to be a lively party,” said Lady Heathcote bitterly. “Thank the Lord, John Rizzio is coming.”

“Rizzio!”

Doris flashed around, her terror written so plainly that anyone might read.

“Yes. I had his wire at Innerwick when I was waiting for you.” And then catching the girl by the arm, “Why, dear, what is the matter?”

“I—I think I’ll go up to my room if you don’t mind, Betty. I won’t have any luncheon. A cup of tea is all.” She moved toward the door, her hand in Lady Heathcote’s. “And Betty—the package, please—I—I think it may soothe me to smoke.”

Betty examined her quizzically but made no comment, though she couldn’t understand such a strange proceeding in a girl who was accustomed to do exactly as she pleased. She got the package from her desk in the library and handed Doris the silk stockings, tobacco, and the yellow packet. The wrapping paper which had been soiled had been relegated to the scrap-basket.

“And Betty——” pleaded Doris as she quickly took them, “promise me that you won’t tell John Rizzio.”

Lady Heathcote glanced at her quickly and then laughed.

“I suppose I’m the least curious woman in Scot​land,” she laughed, “but I would really like to know——”

“Don’t ask me, Betty,” Doris pleaded. “I’ve a reason—a silly one, perhaps, but I ask you—not to speak of this—to anyone.”

“Oh, very well,” said Lady Heathcote, “I won’t. But don’t be mysterious. All mysteries nowadays are looked on with suspicion. Even such an innocent little mystery”—and she laughed—“as a package of cigarette papers.”

Doris made some light reply and went to her room, where, with the doors locked, she quickly examined the packet to be sure that it had not been tampered with. Nothing seemed to have been changed and she gave a sigh of relief to think that thus far her secret had escaped detection. It was very clear to her now that John Rizzio had decided that the secret information was in her possession and that his visit was planned with the object of getting it away from her. This should never be. By the light of the window she read and re-read the thin script until the lines were etched upon her memory. She would burn the papers if they were in danger. If Cyril was to meet Captain Byfield’s fate, it would be upon other evidence than this. Her hands, at least with regard to Cyril, must be clean.

A knock upon the door and she hurriedly thrust the packet under a table cover and answered. It was the maid with her tea, and upon the tray lay a note in an unfamiliar handwriting. When the maid had gone she tore the flap and read:

Mr. Hammersley begs that Miss Mather will not be unduly alarmed upon his account. Business of ​an urgent nature has detained him but he assures her that he will join her at the earliest possible moment. He begs that she will be careful.

There was no signature and the handwriting was curious—like none to which she was accustomed, but the message seemed somehow to sound like Cyril. She rang for the maid, questioned her, and found that the note had just come over by messenger from Ben-a-Chielt.

When the maid went down, Doris re-read the message thankfully. Cyril was safe—at least for the present. And her relief in the knowledge was the true measure of her relation to him. Whatever else he was, he was the man she had promised to marry—the man who a little later would have been hers for better or for worse. And between Cyril and John Rizzio it had not been difficult to choose. It did not seem difficult now.

She took up the packet of papers and paused before the open fire, a smile playing for the first time at the corners of her lips. John Rizzio! He was clever, as she knew, but there was more than one way of playing the game. Perhaps with her John Rizzio might be at a disadvantage. She hesitated a moment and then—pulled up her skirts and slipped the yellow packet into her stocking.

CHAPTER VI
RIZZIO TAKES CHARGE

RIZZIO was to arrive that night. Meanwhile, with the papers hidden about her and bright fires burning in all the living-rooms of the house in which they could in a moment be destroyed, Doris thought herself well placed upon the defensive. Cyril’s note had cheered her, and after removing the dust of her journey she went down into the library, where she joined the other members of the house party assembled. Black seemed to be the prevailing color, for, in addition to the weeds of Lady Constance, there was Wilfred Hammersley, Cyril’s uncle, who had lost an only son at La Bassée, and the Heatherington girls, who had lost a brother.

“Ugh!” Lady Betty was saying. “I came to Scotland to try and forget, but the war follows me. Dick Byfield a traitor! Who next? Let’s not even speak of it. Come, I’ve ordered the brake, Doris. We’re going out for a spin. You and I and Angeline. Constance of course has a headache, and Jack will be having another for sympathy.”

The air outside was life-giving, and when she returned later Doris felt that her brain had been swept clear of its cobwebs of perplexity. She found Wilson standing in her room gazing with a puzzled expression at the tray of her unpacked box, the contents of which were in a state of confusion.

“It’s strange, Miss Mather. Someone has been at ​your things while I was down in the servants’ hall at luncheon.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yes, Miss Mather, sure. Quite positive, in fact. Those waists were lying flat when I left.”

“The window wasn’t open?” asked Doris with a glance around.

“Oh, no, Miss.” She looked about and lowered her voice. “It’s somebody inside.”

“Curious,” said Doris thoughtfully. “Nothing has been taken? Is the jewel box there?”

Together they examined the things and found that nothing was missing.

“Say nothing about this, Wilson,” said Doris thoughtfully. “Unless something is taken, I shouldn’t care to disturb Lady Heathcote.”

“It can’t be——” Wilson paused, her voice hushed.

“The papers are safe, Wilson—as long as I am safe,” replied the girl, and told the maid of her place of concealment.

Wilson looked dubious. “I wish you’d give them to me, Miss Mather.”

But the girl shook her head—she was thoroughly alive now to the perils which hung about her, here within the very doors of Lady Heathcote’s house, but she had determined that if she could not find it possible to keep the papers until Cyril appeared she would destroy them. She was not frightened, for however clumsy John Rizzio’s agents might be she was in no danger from himself. Whatever the interests which made the possession of the yellow packet so vital, she knew the man well enough to be sure that if there came an issue between them, he would act with her as he had always acted—the part of a gentleman.

​Instead of apprehension at his approaching visit she now felt only interest and a kind of suppressed exhilaration as at the prospect of a flight in a new plane or the trying out of a green hunter—excitement like that which preceded all her sportive ventures.

So that when she met John Rizzio in the drawing-room after dinner—he had not been able to manage a more opportune train—she gave him a warm hand-clasp of greeting and a smile which caused him some surprise and not a little regret—surprise that she was carrying off a difficult situation with consummate ease; regret that such self-possession and artistry were not to be added to the ornaments of his house in Berkeley Square. Perhaps still——

“How agreeable,” she was saying charmingly. “The great man actually condescends to come to the land of Calvin, oatcake and sulphur, when there are truffles and old Madeira still to be had in London.”

He laughed, his dark eyes appraising her slender blond beauty eagerly.

“I have no quarrel with Calvin. Oatcake—by all means. Sulphur—er—I suppose the sulphur will come in time.”

“Not if you’re polite,” said the girl coolly, “and tell me what brought you so unexpectedly to Scotland.”

They were standing near the fire apart from the others, Doris with one slipper on the fender, which she was regarding approvingly, her head upon one side. He admired her careless tone. She was quite wonderful.

“Perhaps you will not believe me,” he said suavely, “if I were to tell you that I came to see you.”

“Me? I am flattered. I thought that great col​lectors were always deterred by fear of the spurious.”

She was carrying the war into his camp. He met the issue squarely. “They are only deterred by the spurious. Therefore I am here. The inference is obvious.”

He had always showed the slightest trace of his foreign accent. It went admirably with his shrug and mobile fingers.

“I am genuine in this,” she laughed, “that however much you know about pictures, about objets de vertu—women must remain for you and for all other men an unknown quantity.”

“Not when they are both,” he said gallantly.

“There are good and bad pictures—objects of virtue, excessively ugly——”

“Objects of virtue are usually excessively ugly, especially if they are women.”

“Thanks,” said Doris. “You’re most flattering. There’s something in the air of Scotland that makes one tell the truth.”

He laughed. “If Scotland is as merciless as that, I shall be off in the morning. I could imagine no worse purgatory than a place in which one always tells the truth. Lying is one of the highest arts of a mature civilization. I haven’t the slightest notion, nor have you, that either of us means a thing he says. We were all born to deceive—some of us do it in one way, some in another, but we all do it to the very best of our bent. For instance, you said a while ago that it was agreeable for you to see me. But I’m quite sure, you know, that it wasn’t.”

“It isn’t agreeable if you’re going to be horrid and cynical. Why shouldn’t I be glad to see you? You ​always stimulate my intelligence even if you don’t flatter it.”

The others had moved on to the library and they had the room to themselves.

“I don’t see how I could flatter it more than I have already done,” he said in a low tone of voice.

She raised her chin a trifle and peered at him slantwise.

“Do you think that you flatter it now when you recall the mistakes of my past?”

He searched her face keenly but her blue eyes met his gaze steadily. She was smiling up at him guilelessly.

“A mistake—of course,” he said slowly. “You are young enough to afford to make mistakes. But I am old enough to wish that it hadn’t been made at my expense.”

“You still care?” she asked.

“I do.”

“If I hadn’t thought that you wanted me for your collection——”

“You are cruel——”

“No. I know. You wanted me for your portrait harem, and I should have been frightfully jealous of the Coningsby Venus. I couldn’t compete with that sort of thing, you know.”

He smiled at her admiringly and went on in a low tone.

“You know why I wanted you then, and why I want you now—because you’re the cleverest woman in England, and the most courageous.”

“It took courage to refuse the hand of John Rizzio.”

“It takes more courage in John Rizzio to hear those words from the lips that refused him.”

​She laid her hand gently on his arm.

“I am sorry,” she said.

He bent his head and kissed her fingers.

“It is not the Coningsby Venus who is essential to my happiness,” he whispered. “It’s the Doris Diana.”

She laughed.

“That’s the disillusionment of possession.”

“No. The only disillusionments of life are its failures—I got the Venus by infinite patience. The Diana——” He paused and drew in his breath.

“You think that you may get the Diana by patience also?” she asked quietly.

He looked at her with a gaze that seemed to pierce all her subterfuges.

“I waited for the Coningsby Venus,” he said in measured tones, “until the man who possessed her—was dead.”

She started, and the color left her cheeks.

“You mean—Cyril?” she stammered.

“I mean,” he replied urbanely, “precisely nothing—except that I will never give you up.”

She recovered her poise with an effort, and when she replied she was smiling gayly.

“I’m not at all sure that I want to be given up,” she said, with a laugh that was meant to relax the tension. “You are, after all, one of the best friends I have.”

“I hope that nothing may ever happen to make you think otherwise.”

Was this a threat? She glanced at him keenly as she quoted:

“‘Friendship is constant in all other things save in the office and affairs of love.’ May I trust you?”

“Try me.”

​“No, I might put you to a test that would be difficult.”

“Try me.”

“Very well, I will. Go back to London in the morning.”

He looked at her and laughed.

“Why?”

“It will be easier for you to be patient there than here——”

“When Hammersley comes?”

“Oh,” she said quickly, “then he is coming?”

“I don’t know why he shouldn’t,” he said slowly.

There was a pause.

“Shall you go?”

“To London? I’ll think about it.”

“There! You see? You refuse my first request.”

“I would like to know your purpose.”

“I think you know it already,” she put in quickly. “You want something that I cannot give you—something that is not mine to give.”

She had come out into the open defiantly and he met her challenge with a laugh.

“Because it is Hammersley’s?” he said. “You think so and Hammersley thinks so, and possession is nine points of the law. But I will contest.”

“Your visit is vain. Go back to London, my friend.”

“I find it pleasanter here.”

“Then you refuse?”

“I must.”

“Then it is war between us.”

“If you will have it so,” he said, with an inclination of the head. Doris put her foot on the fender and leaned with her hands upon her knee for a moment as ​though in deep thought. Then she turned toward the door.

“Come,” she said coolly. “Let us join the others.”

There was a relief in the thought that at least they had come to an understanding and that the matter of the possession of the papers had at last become a private contest between them. She had brought the interview to an end not because she was afraid to continue it but because she wanted to think of a plan to disarm him. She felt that she was moving in the dark but she trusted to her delicate woman’s sense of touch to stumble upon some chance, some slip of his tongue, which might lead her into the light.

In the drawing-room by common consent all talk of war had been abolished. She sat in at a hand of auction, but playing badly, she was gladly relinquished by her partner at the end of the rubber. John Rizzio, who disliked the game, had gone off for a quiet smoke, but when she got up from the card table he was there waiting for her.

“Cyril shall know of this,” laughed Betty, as they went toward the door. “They say that absence makes the heart grow fonder—of the other fellow.”

Doris led the way to the gun-room, a place used by Algie Heathcote for his sporting implements and trophies of the chase. It was comfortably furnished in leather and oak and a cheerful fire was burning in the grate. Doris sank into the davenport and motioned to her companion to the place at her side. She was thoroughly alive to her danger, but the sportswoman in her made her keen to put it to the test.

“We are quite alone here,” she said coolly. “The others are not even within call. Now what do you want of me?”

​Her audacity rather startled him, but he folded his arms and leaned back smiling.

“The papers of Riz-la-Croix, of course,” he said amiably.

“And how do you know they’re in my possession?”

He shrugged.

“Because they couldn’t possibly be anywhere else.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I have exhausted every other resource.”

“You’re frank at least—including the burglary at Ashwater Park and the messing in my box upstairs?”

“And since you must know the full truth,” he continued politely, “the careful search of your room in your absence this evening—including the removal of the rugs and bedding. Oh, don’t be disturbed, I beg of you,” as she made a movement of alarm, “they have all been replaced with a nice care for detail.”

“And if I told Lady Heathcote of this——”

“I am quite sure that the best interests of all,” he said politely, “are conserved—by silence.”

She meditated a moment, her gaze on the coals.

“Yes,” she said slowly, “you’re clever—more than ordinarily clever. I can’t understand how I could ever have refused you. But don’t you think your methods have been a little—er—unchivalrous?”

“The importance of my objects admitted of no delay. I hope you have not been inconvenienced——”

“Not in the least,” calmly. “My recollection of your many civilities merely made me think that your agents were overzealous.”

“I am sorry,” he said genuinely. “It could not be helped. You and I are merely pawns in a game greater than anything the world has ever known.”

​“I didn’t want you to apologize. I merely thought in order to avoid comment that you might have come to me yourself.”

“I thought I might save you the unpleasantness of a controversy which can only have one end.”

“You mean—that you will win.”

“I do.”

“How?”

“You will give me the papers—here, tonight.”

“And if I told you that I had destroyed them?”

“That would be manifestly untrue, since at the present moment in the position of your body their outline is quite clearly defined on the inside of your right knee.”

Doris put both slippers upon the ground, her feet together, her face flushing warmly.

“I hope you will forgive my frankness,” she heard him say gently, “but the method of your challenge—is—unusual.”

She clasped her hands around her knees and frowned into the fire.

“You mistake, I think, my friend. It is not a challenge. It is merely a method of defense—the safest, I am sure, against John Rizzio.”

He bowed low with deep ceremony.

“Of course, I am helpless.” And then, “I can only rely on your good sense and”—here his voice sunk a note lower—“and on your loyalty to the cause of England.”

This was the opening that she had been waiting for. She thrust quickly.

“And if the cause is England’s why didn’t Scotland Yard come to Ashwater Park?”

“Dunsinane to Burnam Wood!” he shrugged. “They ​would have made asinine mistakes as they always do—the chief of which would have been that of denouncing Miss Doris Mather as an agent of England’s enemies.”

The girl tapped her toe reflectively upon the rug.

“I won’t attempt subterfuge. Of course, I know the contents of that packet.”

“You wouldn’t be a woman if you didn’t.”

“And how it was passed from Captain Byfield to Cyril Hammersley.” This was a random shot but it hit the mark. Rizzio’s eyes dilated slightly, but she saw them.

“Byfield! Impossible.”

“Not at all. Cyril told me,” she lied.

“He told you——?” he paused aghast, for now she was laughing at him.

“No—but you have.”

His brow tangled and he folded his arms again.

“Of course, you know the importance to Cyril and Captain Byfield of keeping such a matter secret.”

He had not heard! He did not know! She remembered that the subject of the dreadful news from London had not been reopened and Jack Sandys’ sources of information were probably semiofficial.

She controlled her voice with an effort.

“I would hardly be the one to mention names under the circumstances—since my own fortunes seem to be involved in the matter, but as for Captain Byfield, I’m afraid that further secrecy will hardly help him.”

“What do you mean?”

“Merely that he was arrested late yesterday afternoon as he was leaving the War Office.”

She had not counted on the effect she created. She ​knew that her last thrust had put him more carefully on guard, but he could not hide the sudden intake of breath and the quick searching glance his dark eyes shot at her.

“What is your source of information?”

“Jack Sandys. He came here directly from Downing Street.”

She saw Rizzio’s lips meet under his mustache in a thin line.

“So. It has come sooner—than I expected.”

He got up and paced the floor, his fingers twitching behind his back. She said nothing, waiting for him to rejoin her. When he did, it was with a serious expression.

“I suppose you know what this means to—to Hammersley,” he said in a low voice.

Doris sat without moving, but her brain was busy weighing Rizzio.

“No,” she replied calmly, “I don’t. Won’t you tell me?”

He leaned forward toward her along the back of their seat, his look and voice concentrated upon her.

“Is it possible,” he continued, “that you haven’t realized by this time exactly what Cyril Hammersley is?”

“No,” she said staunchly. “I will believe nothing of him unless he tells it to me himself.”

He waited a moment, watching her, and fancied that he saw her lips tremble slightly. Her loyalty to Hammersley inflamed him. He followed up his advantage quickly.

“There are reasons why I should dislike to give you pain, greater reasons why I should be generous with a successful rival, and I have done what I can ​to take this matter out of your hands. There is still time. Will you give me that packet?”

She shook her head.

“Then I must speak,” he went on. “My duty demands it, whatever happens to him—whatever happens to you. Don’t make me go to extremes with you. I cannot bear to do it. Hammersley is a German spy. Those papers were to be forwarded to Germany. You are saving them for him, that he may betray England.”

“That is not true,” she said chokingly. “I do not believe it.”

“You must. Isn’t there proof enough in what you have read?”

“There is some mistake.”

“No. There can’t be. Your sentiments are blinding you.”

“One moment, please.” Doris had risen and faced him across the hearth, a new fire of resolution in her eyes. To Rizzio, the lover of beauty, she was a mockery of lost happiness. She was Diana, not the huntress but the hunted.

“You have told me what Cyril Hammersley is. Now if you please I would like to know what you are!”

He paused a moment and then with a step toward her said gently:

“I think my interests should be fairly obvious. I am acting for the English Government.”

“I have only your word for it. Have you any papers that would prove it—in your card-case, for instance?”

He started back, his fingers instinctively reaching upward. Then he shrugged and laughed.

“You are surely the most amazing person. Un​

"‘Not that,' he whispered hoarsely, 'for God's sake not that.’"

​fortunately I have no documents. I am only doing my duty as a private citizen—a loyal resident of the Empire.”

“But not a Briton. Neither am I. We meet on equal terms.”

“Then you refuse me—definitely, finally.”

“Yes, I must.”

“I beg that you will consider carefully the alternatives. If you give me the papers—silence on my part—safety for Hammersley. If you refuse to give them up——” he paused.

“Then what will you do?” she defied him.

“It would be the most terrible moment of my life—but I will denounce him—here tonight—tomorrow in London. Those papers must not reach Germany—even if I have to denounce you, too.”

“And if I promise that the papers will not reach Germany?”

He hesitated a moment.

“There is too much at stake. I can’t take the risk. No woman can be trusted——”

“Not even the woman John Rizzio would have made his wife?”

He moved his shoulders expressively. Her youth and cleverness were bewildering him.

“No, that will not do,” he said in desperation. “You must give me the papers.”

“I will not. You shall have to take them from me.”

He leaned toward her along the mantel aware of her dominant loveliness.

“You would not drive me to that!”

“Yes. It is a challenge. I offer it. I will fight you, and I am strong. I have a voice and I will raise ​an outcry. They will come and I will tell them. Then you can denounce me? Will you dare?”

He came toward her while she fled around the davenport, eluding him with ease. She was swifter of foot than he. He stopped a moment near the gun-rack to plead. She kept the huge oak lounge between them and listened by the fire. Something she saw in his eyes decided her, for as he came forward to leap over the davenport she threw something yellow toward him.

He gave a gasp of relief, picked the object up and made a cry of dismay.

“The cover! I must have the papers,” he cried, coming forward again.

By this time the girl was standing upright, a poker in one hand, the thin cigarette papers cramped in the fingers of the other, over the open fire.

Rizzio paused in the very act of leaping.

“Not that,” he whispered hoarsely, “for God’s sake—not that.”

“Stay where you are, then,” said the girl in a low resolute tone.

Rizzio straightened. Doris still bent over the fire.

“Give it to me,” he said again.

“No. England’s secrets shall be safe.”

“Don’t you understand?” he whispered wildly. “I’ve got to prove that they are.”

“I can prove that as well as you——”

“But you won’t. Hammersley is——”

He paused and both of them straightened, listening. Outside in the hall there was a commotion and a familiar voice as the Honorable Cyril, his face and fur coat spattered with mud, came into the room.

CHAPTER VII
AN INTRUDER

HE looked from one to the other with a quickly appraising eye. The girl was fingering the lace of her bodice. Rizzio had turned toward the newcomer recovering his poise.

“Hope I’m not intrudin’,” said Hammersley, with a laugh.

“Well, hardly. You’ve come in a hurry.”

“Yes,” drawled Hammersley. “I missed your train, I think. Too bad. Jolly slow work travelin’ alone. Stryker picked me up at Edinburgh and we came on by motor.”

He took off his fur coat in leisurely fashion and crossing to the fireplace took Doris’s proffered hand. “You had my note?” he asked carelessly.

The girl nodded. “I was glad,” she said.

“Well, I’m here. Jolly happy, too. Had a narrow squeak of it, though. Some bally idiot stretched rope across the road over by Saltham Rocks, but we saw it in time, and went around. Fired a few shots at us, too. Must have taken me for Rizzio. What?” he laughed.

Thus directly appealed to, Rizzio smiled grudgingly.

“You don’t ask me to believe that story, Hammersley,” he said dryly.

“You don’t have to, Rizzio.”

The girl’s look was fixed on Hammersley’s face. Suddenly she broke in with a voice of alarm.

​“Cyril—you’re hurt—and there’s blood on your coat——”

“Is there? By Jove, so there is—it doesn’t matter. I wouldn’t mind a peg though—and a cigarette.”

Doris had started for the door in alarm.

“Wait!” Hammersley’s voice came sharply. And as she paused, “Ring, Doris.”

She understood and touched the button beside the door.

“We might as well have an understanding before they come, Rizzio,” put in Hammersley quickly. “Do you prefer to believe my story—or would you like to invent one of your own?”

Rizzio shrugged. “As you please,” he said. “It seems that I am de trop here.” At the door he paused and finished distinctly. “I hope that your explanations will prove satisfactory.”

Doris had helped Cyril off with his coat and by the time the maid brought Betty Heathcote, had cut away the sleeve of his shirt with Cyril’s pocket knife. It was merely a gash across the upper arm, which a bandage and some old-fashioned remedies would set right.

Lady Heathcote heard the story (from which Hammersley eliminated the rope) with amazement, and was for sending at once for the local constabulary.

“Oh, it’s hardly worth while,” said the Honorable Cyril, sipping his whiskey and water, comfortably. “Poor devils—out of work, I fancy. Wanted my money. If they’d come to Ben-a-Chielt tomorrow I’d give it to ’em. But I wouldn’t mind, Betty, if you could put me up for the night. I’m not keen to be dodgin’ bullets in the dark.”

“Of course,” said Lady Heathcote. “How extraor​dinary! I can’t understand—Saltham Rocks—that’s on my place. Something must be done, Cyril.”

Hammersley yawned. “Oh, tomorrow will do. Couldn’t catch the beggars in the dark. Besides, it’s late. Do me a favor, Betty. Don’t let those people come in here again. I want a word with Doris.”

He had stretched himself out comfortably on the Davenport, his eyes on the girl, who still stood uncertainly beside him.

Lady Betty shrugged, and taking up her basin and lotion moved toward the door.

“It’s most mysterious. Are you sure we’re quite safe?”

“Quite. But I think it might be better if I had the room between yours and Doris’s.”

“I was putting John Rizzio there.”

“Well, change—there’s a dear. And say nothing about it. I—I might need a new dressing on this thing in the night.”

She examined him curiously, but he was looking lazily into the fire, having already taken her acquiescence for granted.

When she went out, Hammersley sat up and threw his cigarette into the fire.

“You have it still?” he whispered anxiously, taking Doris by both hands.

She nodded.

“Thank God for that. I seemed to have arrived at the proper moment.”

“I was about to burn them.”

He drew a long breath of relief.

“You know what they are?”

“Yes. I read them.”

​“I was afraid you would. You have spoken to no one.”

“No,” proudly. “Hardly. After what I went through.” And, with an air of restraint, she told him everything.

He listened, a serious look in his eyes.

“It was my fault. I should have left them in the machine. I got away scot free.”

“Yes, I know. I saw you.”

“You poor child,” he said softly. “I was desperate. I thought it necessary. How can I ever thank you?”

“You can’t.” The tones of her voice were strange.

“I’d jolly well give my life for you, Doris. You know that,” he said earnestly.

“It’s something less than that that I want, and something more—your word of honor.”

“My word——?”

“Yes,” she went on quietly. “To forswear your German kinship and give me an oath of loyalty to England. Difficult as it is, I’ll believe you.”

“Sh—!” He glanced toward the door. All the windows of the room were closed. “He told you that I was a German spy?” he whispered anxiously.

“You forget that I had proof of that already.”

He sat up and looked into the fire. “I hoped you wouldn’t read ’em. It has done no good.”

“I have no regrets. I will not betray England, Cyril, even for you.”

He rose and paced the rug in front of her for a moment. Then he spoke incredulously in a whisper.

“You mean that you won’t give ’em to me?”

“I mean that—precisely.”

“But that is impossible,” he went on, with greater ​signs of excitement than she had ever seen in him. “Don’t you realize now that every moment the things are in your possession you’re in danger—great danger? Isn’t what you’ve gone through—isn’t this”—and he indicated his arm—“the proof of it?”

“Yes,” she said firmly. “But I would rather suffer injury myself than see you share the fate of Captain Byfield.”

He started. “Oh, you heard that?”

“Yes. Jack Sandys is here.” She put her face in her hands in the throes of her doubts of him and then suddenly thrust out her hands and laced her fingers around his arm.

“Oh, give it up, Cyril, for my sake give it all up. Can’t you see the terrible position you’ve placed me in? If I give these papers to Jack Sandys they’ll come and take you as they took Captain Byfield. I’ve kept them for you, because I promised. But I cannot let this information get to Germany. I would die first. What shall I do?” she wailed. “What on earth can I do?”

His reply made her gasp.

“There’s a fire,” he said quietly. “Burn ’em.”

Her fingers went to her corsage and her eyes gleamed with a new hope. She took the crumpled rice-papers out and looked at them. Then in a flash the thought came to her.

“You know the information contained in these papers?” she asked in an accent of deprecation.

“No,” he replied shortly. “I merely glanced at them.”

“You hadn’t the chance to study them?”

“No.”

Still she hesitated. “But what—what is Rizzio?”

He walked to the door of the room, opening it sud​denly. Then he shut it quietly and coming back to the fire took the poker and made a hole between the glowing coals.

“Burn ’em!” he commanded.

She obeyed him wonderingly and together they watched the package of rice-papers flame into a live coal and then turn to ashes. When the last vestige of them had disappeared, they sat together on the davenport, Cyril thoughtful, the girl bewildered.

“What is Rizzio?” she repeated. “He told me that he was an agent of the English Government.”

“I can’t tell you,” he whispered hoarsely. “I can’t tell you anything—even you. Don’t you understand?”

“No, I don’t. It’s your word against his. I would rather believe you than him. I want to, Cyril. God knows I want to.”

“Didn’t I ask you to burn the papers? Didn’t he try to prevent it?”

“Yes.”

“Can’t you see? If he were acting for England, it wouldn’t matter what became of ’em if they didn’t reach Germany.”

“Oh, I thought of that—but what you have told me bewilders me. Why should you run away with secrets of England—given you by a traitor who is about to pay the penalty with—with death? What does it mean? Why didn’t you take those papers at once to the War Office? Why did Captain Byfield give them to you? He—a traitor—to you—Cyril! It is all so horrible. I am frightened. Your danger—Rizzio’s men, here—tonight—all about us.”

“If they were English secret service men,” Cyril put in quietly, “wouldn’t they come here to this house and arrest me in the name of the law?”

​“Yes. There must be other reasons why they can’t. What is the contest between you and Rizzio? Tell me. Tell me everything! I will believe you. Haven’t I kept your trust? If I could do that—for your sake—do you not think that I could keep silent for England’s sake?”

Her arms were about his neck, and her lips very close to his, but he turned his head away so that the temptation might not be too strong for him.

“I can’t,” he muttered, “I cannot speak—even to you. I am sworn to secrecy.”

She drooped upon his arms and then moved away despairingly. It was the failure of the appeal of her femininity that condemned him.

“Oh, you won’t let me believe in you. You won’t let me. It’s too great a test you’re asking of me. Everything is against you—but the worst witness is your silence!”

He stood by the mantel, his head lowered.

“It is hard for you—hard for us both,” he said softly, “but I can’t tell you anythin’—anythin’.” He raised his head and looked at her with pity. She had sunk upon the divan, her head upon her arms in a despair too deep for tears.

He crossed and laid his hand gently upon her shoulder.

“You must trust in me if you can. I will try to be worthy of it. That’s all I can say.” He paused. “And now you must go to bed. You’re a bit fagged. Perhaps in the mornin’ you’ll pull up a bit and see things differently.”

She straightened slowly and their eyes met for a moment. His never wavered, and she saw that they were very kind, but she rose silently and without offer​ing him her lips or even her hand, moved slowly toward the door.

He reached it in a stride before her and put his hand upon the knob.

“There’s one thing more I’ve got to ask.”

Her look questioned.

“You must sleep in my room tonight, next to Betty’s. I shall sleep in yours.”

Her weary eyes sought his with an effort.

“You mean you think Rizzio—would still——?”

She paused.

“Yes, he thinks you would not give them to me.” And then, with a laugh, “You wouldn’t, you know.”

“And if I tell him I have burned them——”

“He will not believe you.”

“He would not believe me,” she repeated in a daze.

“You must do what I ask,” Cyril went on quietly. “I know what is best. I’ll arrange it with Betty.” He glanced at his watch. “One o’clock. By Jove! It’s time even for auction players.”

She promised him at last after a protest on his own account.

“Nothin’ to worry about,” he laughed. “They may not try anythin’, and when they find I’m there they’ll bundle out in a hurry.”

Thus reassured she went out to the drawing-room where the card players were just rising. Rizzio was nowhere to be seen. Cyril at once took their hostess aside and told her that Doris was a little upset by the shooting, asking if Betty would mind letting her take the room next to her own, so that she could open the door between.

“Don’t say anything about it, Betty,” he urged. “Just ask her in, won’t you, when you get upstairs.”

​“And you?”

“I could do a turn on steel spikes,” he laughed.

“Your arm?”

“Right as rain. It’s nothing at all.”

Doris accepted the situation without a word. Indeed she was numbed with the fatigue of strained nerves. The swift rush of incident since Betty’s London dinner, with its rapid alternations of hope and fear, had left her bewildered and helpless. But it was the interview with Cyril tonight that had plunged her into the dark abyss of despair. She had tried so hard to believe in him, but he would do nothing to take away the weight that had been dragging her down further and further from the light. A new kind of love had come to her, born of the new Cyril who had won her over by the sheer force of a personality, the existence of which she had not dreamed. A short time ago she had wanted to see him awake—a firebrand—and she had had her wish, for she had kindled to his touch like tinder. But tonight, in her utter weariness, it seemed as though her spirit was charred, burnt to a cinder, like the package of papers in the grate in the gun-room, destroyed, as the secret message had been, in the great game that Cyril was playing.

She undressed slowly, listening for any sounds that might come from the room next door, but the only sign she had of him was the familiar smell of his pipe tobacco which came through the cracks and key-hole. A little later Betty Heathcote came in prepared for what she called a “back hair talk,” but found her guest so unresponsive that at last she went into her own room and bed. Doris lay for a while watching the line of light under Cyril’s door, wondering what he was doing and what the night was to bring forth. One memory ​persisted in the chaos of the night’s events. Cyril didn’t know the contents of the papers and yet he had commanded her to burn them. The thought quieted her, and at last she saw the light in his room go out, then, after a time, in spite of her weariness, she slept.

•⁠•⁠•⁠•⁠•

She awakened, trembling with terror, listening for she knew not what. And then as her wits slowly came to her, she was aware of the sounds which had awakened her. They were suppressed, secret, and strange, but none the less terrible, the shuffling of feet, hoarse whispers, and the creaking of straining furniture. She sat upright, slipped to the floor quickly, and, getting into the dressing-gown at the foot of the bed, stood for a moment in the middle of the room, her heart beating wildly. Then with quick resolution she moved swiftly to Betty Heathcote’s room and, after assuring herself that her hostess still slept, closed the door softly and passed the bolt.

Again she hesitated. The sounds from Cyril’s room continued, the hard breathing of men who seemed with one accord to be trying to keep their struggles silent. Aware of her danger, but considering it less than the physical need for immediate action, with trembling fingers she turned the key and quickly opened the door.

At first, silence, utter and profound, but full of a terror which a breath might reveal.

“Cyril! What is it?” she managed to whisper.

“Sh—” she heard. And dimly, in the pale moonlight, she made out the dark blur of figures upon the floor in the corner of the room.

“Cyril!” she repeated.

​“It’s all right,” she heard in a breathless whisper. “Go back to your room. It’s nothin’.”

But having ventured thus far she did not hesitate, and closing the door behind her came forward. Upon the floor, half against the wall, was the figure of a man. Cyril was sitting on his legs and holding him with one hand by the neck cloth.

“You’re safe?” she whispered.

“Yes. Go back to bed. Don’t you understand—if anyone came——?”

“I don’t care.” Her curiosity had triumphed. She leaned forward and saw that it was John Rizzio.

“Rizzio!” she whispered. “My room!”

“I ought to kill him, Doris,” said Cyril savagely, “but I’ve only choked him a little. He’ll come around in a minute.” And then more quietly: “Get me a glass of water, but don’t make a fuss, and don’t make a light. There are men outside.”

She obeyed, and in a moment Rizzio revived and sat up, Cyril standing over him, his fist clenched.

“Oh, let him go, Cyril, please,” Doris pleaded.

At the sound of the girl’s voice Rizzio started and with Cyril’s help struggled to his feet.

“Yes, he’s going the way he came—by the window,” growled Hammersley. “Head first, if I have my way.”

Rizzio succeeded in a smile, though he was still struggling for breath.

“I suppose—I—I must thank you for your generosity, Hammersley,” he said with as fine a return of his composure as his throat permitted. “I have been guilty of—of an error in judgment——”

“I’m sorry you think it’s only that,” said Cyril dryly. “Now go,” he whispered threateningly, pointing to the window.

​“In a moment—with your permission,” he said, recovering his suavity with his breath. “In extenuation of this visit, terrible as it seems to Miss Mather, I—I can only say that if I had succeeded I would have saved her from remembering some day that she had given England’s secrets into the hands of the enemy.”

“You’re mistaken,” said Doris quietly. “I have burned them.”

“You—you burned them?”

“Yes—tonight.”

Rizzio peered at her in silence for a long moment and then shrugged. “Oh,” he said, “in that case, I have made two errors in judgment——”

“You’ll make a third, if you’re not out of that window in half a second,” said Cyril.

But Rizzio laughed at him.

“I don’t think it would be wise to make a disturbance——” he said coolly. “I think Miss Mather will admit my generosity to herself and to you when I say that I’ve only to raise my voice and have half a dozen men up here in a moment.”

Doris clutched him fearfully by the arm, thinking of Cyril.

“You’d not do that——?”

Hammersley laughed dryly.

“There’s no danger,” he said.

“No,” returned Rizzio with a touch of his old magnificence. “There is no danger of that—the reasons are obvious.”

As he moved toward the window Hammersley touched him lightly on the arm.

“I warn you, Rizzio,” he said in a low concentrated tone, “that you’re playing a dangerous hand. I should punish you—but other agencies——”

​Rizzio halted. “Yes, other agencies——” he replied significantly. He bowed in the girl’s direction and sitting on the window-sill he threw his feet outside. “I bid you good night.” And carefully feeling for his footing he slowly descended.

Cyril Hammersley followed him to the window, and Doris took a step in his direction, when her thinly slippered foot touched something in the wooden floor—something which slid upon the polished surface from the shadow into the moonlight. Instinctively she glanced down and then started—scarcely restraining a gasp. There, unmistakable in the shape and color for so many hours graven on her mind, was a yellow packet of Riz-la-Croix cigarette papers. She glanced at Cyril, who was closing the casement window, then stooped and, picking up the packet, fled noiselessly into her room and quickly locked the door.

CHAPTER VIII
EVIDENCE

INSIDE her own room she stood for a moment tremulously in the dark, fingering the guilty thing in her hands as she had fingered the other one—the one she had destroyed. Or hadn’t she destroyed it? For a moment the thought came to her that Cyril had practiced some trick upon her when they had knelt before the fire, substituting other papers for the ones that were to be burned. But that was impossible. The papers had not touched his fingers. He it was who had made a hole for them in the fire, but her fingers had thrust the original papers into the glowing coals. She turned the packet over and over in her fingers, glancing at the closed door that separated her from Cyril. Another message! It must be.

She pulled the curtains at the window and then moving quietly to the bed, lit the candle on the night-stand. Another packet of Riz-la-Croix, new like the other, with its tiny thin rubber band. She opened it quickly and scanned its pages, finding what she sought without difficulty. The writing was not in the same hand. It was rounder and less minute, covering in all seven pages, and it was written carelessly as if the writer had been in a hurry. Cyril’s own handwriting it seemed. The purport of its message was the same.

No. She remembered the dates. These were some​what different. The names of the regiments were the same, but the dates instead of days in April and May gave days in the months of June and July. And the numerals which at first had puzzled her were smaller. For instance, among “Highland Regiments Foot” the numerals of which she remembered particularly, instead of 120,000 she saw the numerals 42,000. It was the same under other headings in the remainder of the items. Under “shrapnel” there were changes, and under “artillery”——

She closed the packet in icy fingers, for the figures swam before her eyes. They were all true—all the horrible things that she had thought of Cyril! This was later and more accurate information—the exact reason for which she did not pretend to understand—and was intended to follow the previous message—perhaps to be used as a code in connection with it. Cyril was—— Oh, the dishonor of it! And she had gone to sleep almost ready to believe in him again—because he had let her burn the other papers. What did it matter to him whether she burned the papers when he had other messages to send and had committed to memory the facts he had let her destroy? He had lied to her. He was false as Judas and more dangerous, for now she knew that he was desperate as well as cunning, stooping to any means, no matter how ignoble, to gain his ends. She had been a mere bauble in his hands, a child upon whose credulity he had played without scruple. He had used her, the woman he had said he loved, for his own unworthy ends as he used Betty Heathcote and her house. She was filled with shame for him and for herself, who could love something shameful.

And John Rizzio! Rizzio, Cyril’s enemy, stood for ​England and right, and she had permitted herself to see through Cyril’s eyes just as Cyril had wanted her to see.

It seemed as she compared them that Rizzio’s nobility attained a firmer contour. He had come to her room to save her from her own ignorance and wilfulness, from committing a crime, the greatest of all crimes against England. Rizzio knew what Cyril was and on her account had refrained from giving Cyril up to the officers of the law, although they were within call—even when he felt himself yielding to the fury of Cyril’s superior physical strength. Not even the spirit of revenge for the punishment Cyril had given him, not even the humiliation he had suffered before her eyes had been enough to make him forget his intention to save, if he could, for the woman who loved him, a successful rival. And she, Doris, had stood by Cyril’s side warm in Cyril’s cause, against the one man who held Cyril’s fate as the bearer of treacherous messages, in his hand.

There was still danger in the air. The last words of the two men to each other had been hidden threats of “other agencies,” whatever they were, and she found herself praying in a whisper that the agency of England, even if it meant Cyril’s danger, might conquer. O God! It would have been better, it seemed, if the bullet at Saltham Rocks that had grazed Cyril’s arm had killed him. That death would at least have been free from the shame of that which awaited Captain Byfield.

She gazed with wide eyes at her guttering candle. She was wishing for Cyril’s death! She shivered with pity for herself and for him and huddled down in the bed, a very small, very miserable object, seeking in ​vain some hope, some rest for her mind amid the torture of her thoughts.

Suddenly she started up and sat clutching the yellow packet to her breast, her gaze fixed on the door into Cyril’s room. Had she heard a knock? Or was it only imagination? Yes. There it was again. She leaned over hurriedly and blew out the candle and lay very still, her teeth chattering with the cold, her body trembling. He was knocking again, a little louder this time, and she heard his voice through the keyhole whispering her name. She made no response and feigned sleep. He knocked again still louder and she heard her name spoken quite distinctly. He would awaken the house if this went on. When he knocked again she got up and went over to the door.

“Doris!” he was saying.

She answered him.

“Will you open the door—just a crack?”

“No,” she whispered.

“I want to speak to you.”

“You cannot.”

“Please.”

“I’m listening. What do you want to say?”

“I’ve lost something—something that must have fallen from my pocket.”

She was silent.

And then in quick anxious tones:

“You didn’t see—anythin’—on the floor by the door?”

“No,” she lied, trembling. “I didn’t.”

She heard him mutter.

“You’re sure?” came his voice again.

“Yes.”

And then in dubious tones:

​“Oh, very well then. Sorry to have troubled you. Good night.”

She didn’t reply and stole back through the darkness to her bed, into which she crept, like some thin wraith of vengeance, biding her time.

Into bed, but not to sleep. She watched the moonlight grow pale into the west and saw the first gray streaks of dawn paint the wooded slopes of Ben Darrah across the valley of the Dorth. In pity for herself and Cyril she watched the new day born, a new day, bleak and cheerless, which seemed by its very aspect to pronounce a sentence upon them; the new day which was to mark the passing of all the things growing womanhood holds most dear, her first faith, her first tenderness, her first passion.

Doris kept to her room until Betty came in, awakening her from a heavy sleep into which she had fallen just before sunrise. Lady Heathcote rang for Wilson and then retired to the ministrations of her own maid, leaving Doris to dress for the morning at her leisure. And when the girl got downstairs to breakfast she found that the other guests had preceded her. But Betty Heathcote was still in the breakfast room picking with dainty fingers at the various dishes upon the sideboard and making sparkling comment as was her custom on men and things. She found the disappearance of John Rizzio, bag, baggage and man, from Kilmorack House without even a line to his hostess both unusual and surprising, since her guest was a man who made much of the amenities and forms of proper behavior. Doris commented in a desultory way, trying to put on an air of cheerfulness, aware of Cyril Hammersley somewhere in the background awaiting the chance to speak to her alone. She did not hurry, and ​when Betty arose sauntered into the library where the other guests were waiting for the horses to come around. Twice Cyril tried to speak to her, but she avoided him skillfully, contriving to be a part of a group where personal topics were not to be discussed. That kind of maneuvering she knew was a game at which any woman is more than a match for any man. But she saw by the cloud that was growing in Cyril’s eyes that he was not in the mood to be put off with excuses, and realized that the sooner the pain of their interview was over, the better it would be for both of them. She was dressed in the long coat and breeches which she wore in the hunting field, and in her waistcoat pocket was the yellow packet.

“I’ve got to see you for half an hour alone,” he said at last, taking the bull by the horns.

“I shall miss my ride.”

“They’re taking the long road to Ben-a-Chielt. I’ll take you there in the motor and send your mount on by a groom.”

She acquiesced with a cool shrug which put him at once upon his guard, but Doris had reached a pass when all she wanted was to bring their relations to an end as speedily and with as little pain as possible. So that when the others had gone she sank into a chair before the fire, coldly asking him what he wanted. He stood with his back to the hearth, his hands clasped behind him, in a long moment of silence as though trying to find the words to begin.

“Well?” she asked insolently.

“What has happened since last night to change you so, Doris?”

“I’ve had a chance to think.”

“Of what?”

​“That it was time you and I had an understanding.”

“I don’t see——”

“Wait!” she commanded, with a wave of the hand. “There isn’t anything that you can say that will make me change my mind. Therefore the sooner this talk is over the better for both of us. I’ve told you and you know already that my whole soul is wrapped in the cause of England in this war. I can have nothing but pity and contempt for any Englishman——”

She paused, for at this moment, the parlor maid appeared and, gathering up some brasses on Lady Heathcote’s desk, went out of the room.

“I beg that you will be more careful, Doris,” Cyril whispered.

She was silent a moment, and then after a glance at the dining-room door, went on with more restraint.

“Pity and contempt are hardly the kind of ingredients that love can live on. They’ve poisoned mine. It’s dead. I don’t want to see you again,” she finished coldly—“ever. I hope you understand.”

He bowed his head and for a moment made no reply.

“I asked——” he said slowly, “I hoped—that you would be willin’ to trust me—that you’d wait until I was able to speak to you—to explain the—the things you do not understand.”

“Unfortunately,” she put in distinctly, “there is nothing that I do not understand. I know—God help you!—what you are. I have done what I can to save you from the fate you’re courting—and I shall still do so, for the sake of—of what once was—was between us. But I do not want to see you again. I have put you out of my life—completely—as though you never had been in it. And now,” she rose, “will you let me go?”

​“One moment, please,” he said calmly. “You found those papers last night?”

“Yes,” she said coolly. “And if I did?”

He seemed to breathe more freely.

“I have nothing to say,” he muttered.

“Oh,” she said quickly, “I’m glad of that. You don’t deny——?”

“I deny nothing,” he said with a shrug. “I see that it would be useless.”

“I’m glad you give me credit for that much intelligence,” she said scathingly. “You haven’t done so before.”

“It was not your intelligence,” he said gently, “so much as your heart that I had relied upon.”

“Oh, you thought I was a fool that you could use—indefinitely——”

“No. I thought you were a woman that I could count on indefinitely.”

Something in the tone of his own voice made her turn and look at him.

“A woman—yes, but not an enemy of England.”

He was silent again, and when he spoke it was not to argue. His voice was subdued—shamed even it seemed.

“And now—I suppose you will give the—the papers to Sandys,” he said.

She examined him closely and pity for him seemed even stronger than shame.

“It is a part of our misunderstanding,” she said coolly, “that you should think so little of me. I have told you that I shall protect you. My hands shall be clean, if my heart isn’t.”

“What will you do with the papers?” he asked.

“This,” and she turned toward him—“burn them.” ​She put her hand into her pocket, drew out the papers and went toward the hearth. Her hand was even extended toward the fire when, with a quick movement, he snatched the yellow packet from her fingers.

She fell away from him in dismay, as if she had been touched by something poisonous, touching her wrist and the fingers into which her rings had been driven. Then she hid her face in her hands and closed her eyes.

“Oh!” she gasped. “You’d pay my generosity—with this!”

He had examined the papers coolly and had put them into his pocket.

“I? I don’t count in a game like this—nor do you. I’m sorry. They were mine. You took them. I had to have them.”

“Then this——” she stammered, “this was what you kept me here for?”

“I had to have them,” he repeated dully. That was all. Her wrist and fingers burned where he had hurt them. A brute—a coward—as well as a traitor. She straightened proudly and with a look at his bowed head, she went by him and out of the room.

Hammersley stood as she had left him for a moment and only raised his head when the parlor maid came in again and replaced the brasses on Lady Heathcote’s desk. In his eyes there came a keen look and he took a step forward.

“Do you always clean Lady Heathcote’s brasses on Friday?” he asked the maid.

She turned around with a startled air.

“Oh, yes, sir,” she replied demurely. “Friday, sir.”

“Oh!” said Hammersley. “Thanks.”

She stood a moment as if awaiting further questions and then went out.

​Hammersley followed her with his gaze and then with a last look around the room went into the hall, put on his fur coat and cap and quickly made his way toward the garage.

Upstairs Doris paced her room in an agony of rage and humiliation. She had meant to give him his dismissal kindly, but it was his abjectness that had made her scornful—abjectness worn as she now knew with an object that was indifferent to scorn. It was only with the purpose of getting the papers from her that he had kept her there, and the contempt that she had shown for him seemed but a piteous thing beside the enormity of his brutality. He had not cared what she thought of him. He had not cared. He had said so himself. Their love was a trifle beside the greater matter that concerned him.

He had led her on under the guise of a shame he did not feel, from one revelation to another, playing upon her emotions, upon things, which should have been sacred even to him in such an hour until with infinite cunning he had made her bring out the papers—and then——

Rage possessed her. She felt that she had been tricked—with weapons that he should have scorned to use. She hated him at that moment, not as she hated the secrecy and dishonor of his cause, but as a man who could take advantage of a woman, as a hypocrite, a coward, a bully.

She knew the fury of Dido, but she felt the pain of Ariadne too. She heard the sound of his roadster and ran to the window, peering dark-eyed through the muslin curtains, and saw him go by under her windows, low down in his seat, his gaze fixed on the road ahead, driving fast, Stryker beside him. He passed without ​even a glance upward or back—out of her life. It seemed to her that if he had turned his head just then and given one look at the house even, she could have forgiven him much, but she watched him until he turned the angle of the road and was gone.

Their interview had seemed so brief—in all it seemed scarcely more than a moment—to have made such a horrible change in her way of looking at things. If he had protested innocence, fought, if even so weakly, against her evidence, fought with a man’s strength against odds the danger of losing the woman he wanted, she could have seen him go with a calmness born of woman’s inherent right to dismiss. But this——! Death surely was no worse than for a woman to be spurned by such a man.

After a while tears came, and they helped her, tears of anger, if you will, but tears, soft and humid, in which to a woman there is always a kind of bitter sweetness, too. She threw herself on her bed in her riding togs, her mannish coat and mannish boots, eloquent of their own pretensions. In spite of them and the things they typified she was merely a very tired little girl, weeping her heart out as other little girls had done before and will again, because her lover had gone away from her.

Toward luncheon time when the others were expected to return she got up, bathed her eyes and, summoning Wilson, changed into a dress for the afternoon. Pride came to her rescue now, and with the help of her maid and the mysterious process with which maids are familiar she managed to make herself presentable enough to avoid notice from so keen an observer as her hostess. Doris found herself smiling, and doing her share of conversation in a mechanical way which left a ques​in her mind as to the depth of her own emotions. But the weight about her heart, the dull echo of reiterated thoughts pervaded all and she knew that it was merely that her spirit was dulled, her heart numb, like a nerve from the shock of a blow. She stole away when she could with a book to the gun-room, where she could sit alone and try to put her thoughts in order.

HE VIKING'S TOWER

THERE in the middle of the afternoon the butler brought her a note. For a moment before she read the superscription, a wild rush of something which might have been joy yet could not be, sent a pale flush of color into her cheek. But she glanced at the envelope carelessly, and when the man had gone, quickly opened it.

It was from John Rizzio, signed with the familiar initials and begun without either name or qualification:

You will think it strange, perhaps, that I should write to you after the events of last night, because the modesty of a woman is the last thing that forgives. My action is beyond apology and I offer none for fear that it may be construed into a hope—a selfish hope of an unimaginable forgiveness. Hope has passed—that with the others, but something else remains, something less selfish than hope and more vital than self-interest and that is a whole-hearted wish that your honor may be kept free from the taint of the dark and furtive things with which it has come into contact.

I am not a man, as you know, to boast of disinterestedness. I have lived a life in which my own affairs were always paramount, my own aims always most important. I am telling you this to warn you that my generosity to Hammersley is not actuated by any love of a man who has spoiled my dearest ​ambition, but by the continued esteem with which I still regard yourself. I do not love him; and my own wish, my duty, my own honor, my loyalty to England all acclaim that he should be delivered at once to those in authority. And yet I have refrained—for you, Doris. But I have learned that H—— is in communication with G—— and that Crenshaw of Scotland Yard is on the alert. I may not be able to save him.

This is an appeal to the one person who has the most influence with him and I ask that you use whatever power over him you possess to bring him to a sense of the impossibility of his mad plans. If you still have doubt as to the character of the work he has undertaken, I ask that you go to Ben-a-Chielt tonight and listen secretly to convincing proof of what he is. For tonight at one o’clock on the cliffs near the old Viking’s Tower, he will meet a personal messenger from G——.

I appeal to you for England—but more than for England, for—yourself.

Yours,⁠
J. R.

Doris read the note through again and again, her thoughts blurring unpleasantly, like a photograph out of focus. It seemed impossible that she could do what he asked of her. Every instinct, wounded and sore from her last encounter, revolted at the thought of meeting Cyril again under the conditions presented. It was impossible that she should go. Cyril would only laugh at her or, what would be worse, show her the callousness and brutality that he had done this morning. Rizzio asked her to do what she could. Why should she save him? What had he done to merit such a sacrifice of pride on her part. The past? ​That was dead and Cyril buried with it. England? She put her head forward into her hands and pressed her fingers to her temples. England!

As the afternoon faded into night the conviction grew in Doris’s mind that the situation made personal considerations unimportant. After dinner she excused herself and, dressing warmly, toward twelve o’clock went downstairs past the library door and out to the stables. She found a sleepy groom and, giving him a liberal fee as the price of his silence, had a side-saddle put on a good horse and made her way in the direction of Ben-a-Chielt. She knew the road well, for she had traveled it many times with Cyril and Betty during the previous summer when all the world was gay and she and Cyril were lovers. She was a little nervous at being alone on the moor in the darkness, but not frightened. She gave herself greater hardihood by trying to remember that Cyril and Rizzio were gentlemen, one of whom she had thought she could have trusted with her life, the other a friend who wanted to be trusted with it—and now protested he held her honor dearer than his own. Not her enemies surely; and the thought of physical harm from either of them, the only thing that could have deterred her from this midnight venture, did not occur to her. But as she came to Saltham Rocks, the scene of Cyril’s last night’s encounter, she pressed forward more rapidly with a keen eye upon the gray blur of the road. She reached the cross-roads, her breath coming a little more rapidly, pulled her horse down to a walk and turned in upon Cyril’s property, going forward more slowly. Until the present moment she had formulated no plan of action, nor had counted upon the possibilities of discovery, so she rode cautiously, making a long de​tour across the moor to avoid the lights of one of the keepers’ houses which stood upon the road. She found that she had to choose her way among the rocks and whins, but her horse was sure-footed, and at a walk there was little danger of a cropper. She kept the road in sight and by the fitful light of the stars, between the rack of mist and clouds that were coming in from the sea, she made her way in the general direction of the Lodge. On her right she had glimpses of the sea beyond the cliffs and heard the pounding of the surf upon the rocks and shingle. The Viking’s Tower was up among the rocks near Beaufort Head, half a mile beyond the house. She had been there with Cyril many times, and from the ruined wall had sat with him and looked out over the North Sea, while he had told her in his sportive vernacular the story of the tower and of the “Johnnies” who had built it. It was difficult to identify that Cyril now with the man of mystery lurking out here somewhere in the dark, his mind set on the odious business of betraying his country.

The Lodge was set inland from the sea in a valley between two ridges which narrowed down to a fissure in the rocks that fell away to Beaufort Cove, a small harbor almost land-locked where Cyril kept his motor-boats and sloop. As the girl approached the Lodge, she turned far to the left and made a wide circle among the hills, so that there could be no chance of inquisitive eyes discovering the bold silhouette of her horse against the sky. Slowly she climbed the lower ridges of Ben-a-Chielt until she reached a level spot, high above the house, garage, stables and hangar, where she stopped for a moment to rest her winded horse.

​Below her a wild panorama of land and wind-blown sky, the ragged profile of black rocks etched deep into the sullen gray of the sea. Seen from this height the contours were unfamiliar to her and the purpose of her grim visit gave the grim vista a dramatic significance that was almost theatrical. Long lines emerged from the dark blur of sea and sky and roared in upon the rocks that guarded the harbor upon which they were shivered into foam. Inside the rim of rocks the placid cove calmly reflected the sky. She saw the motor-boats near the landing, made out the specter lines of Cyril’s sloop, the Windbird, and in the shadow of the cliffs saw another vessel, the lines of which were unfamiliar. This craft was long and slender with a wireless mast and two large smoke-stacks. No lights showed aboard of her, but there were signs of activity, for while the girl looked a small boat was lowered and was pulled for the landing; and suddenly the real meaning of this dark vessel was borne to her. There was no mistaking the grim profile of the thing that projected from the forward superstructure and the curving decks which met the water in such slender lines. It was a war-vessel, a destroyer, and the man who was putting out for the shore was the German messenger who was to meet Cyril Hammersley at Ben-a-Chielt. She trembled and clung to the pommel of her saddle. The brief joyous moments that had come to her at intervals during the evening as she thought of the inflections of Cyril’s voice, of the weary look she had seen in his eyes, and hoped that even tonight he might be able to justify himself in her own thoughts at least were engulfed in the damning conviction of what she saw before her. John Rizzio had told her the truth. How he had learned what was to happen, she did not ​know or care, but the accuracy of his information was no longer a matter to doubt.

She looked around her in the darkness toward the way by which she had come, really frightened for the first time that evening as at the palpable presence of sin. For a moment she hesitated in her intention to go forward. She had seen enough to convince her. There was no need of more. But the real object of her mission nerved her to her task. She must go on at once if she wished to reach the Tower in time to conceal herself. So she pressed her horse along the hill, and when she had crossed the ridge rode down in a path parallel to the edge of the cliffs, which brought her after a while into a line with Beaufort Head, where she could see the dim mass of the ruin rising above the chaos of rock that surrounded it.

When she reached a spot not too far distant, she dismounted in a clump of bushes and fastening the bridle of her horse to the gnarled limb of a stunted tree, crept forward on foot. The excitement of the venture and its possible consequences now gave her renewed strength and caution. Moving to the left, toward the northern side of the Tower, she clambered over the rocks toward the sea. There should be plenty of time to reach a place of concealment before the occupant of the boat had time to climb the steep and tortuous path from the landing, and peering from side to side, pausing from time to time to listen, she reached the shadow of Table Rock, a huge slab of granite which had been tossed by some convulsion of Nature upon the very summit of the Head. The physical contours of the place made her approach an easy one, for the cliffs were strewn with bowlders and it was easy to slip from one to another without detection.

​Assured that the spot that she had reached was as near the Tower as she dared approach for the present, she wedged herself into a crevice between two rocks, into which she might pass and go out by the other side, and sank down upon her knees and waited. The moments passed slowly. Where was John Rizzio? Would Cyril never come? She had a moment of horror in the thought that the German messenger might come and discover her before Cyril arrived. What would he do to her? Kill her, of course. And in a panic of sinking nerves she thought of getting to her feet and fleeing into the friendly darkness from which she had come. She had even risen and her head was just below the level of the top of her refuge when she heard footsteps close by and got the odor of a cigarette. So she sank back, her hand at her heart to quiet its throbbings.

The footsteps passed her, returned and then went toward the Tower and she bared her head and peered cautiously out. A tall figure in a long coat and deer-stalker cap was standing watching the path to the landing. She could not see his features, but she knew that it was Cyril. For one moment she thought of running to him and throwing herself at his feet and pleading with him while there was still time to go away into the darkness—with her—anywhere before this stranger should reach him. But her courage failed her and she sank back into her corner. And when she straightened again her moment had passed, for she heard other footsteps to her right of a man as he clambered up the rocks. He passed quite near her, a burly man in a naval cap and coat, out of breath from his exertions.

Cyril came forward to meet him, and she heard the short words of their greeting.

​“Herr Hammersley?”

“Ja.”

She peered out and saw the burly man straighten, his heels together, and touch his fingers to the rim of his cap. Cyril bowed and asked a question and the other replied in a sentence that contained the word “Hochheit,” which was the only word she understood. She crept a little closer so that she could hear more distinctly, hoping that her slight knowledge of German might aid her. She watched Cyril to see if he passed anything to the German officer. Instead of this the German took a letter from an inside pocket and handed it to Cyril, and she heard the words “Hochheit” again and “Excellenz”—a message it seemed from some prince, or from some general or high official of the German Government. Cyril appeared to offer apologies and broke the seal of the envelope, bringing from the pocket of his overcoat an electric torch, by the aid of which he read the letter. Doris could see his face quite plainly in the reflected light from the page, and marked the deep lines at his brows and the stern look at his mouth and chin. He went over the document twice very carefully, and then as he turned to his companion she heard his voice saying quite distinctly in German:

“You know the purport of this paper?”

“No, Herr Hammersley,” said the officer. “My orders are merely to deliver this letter which was to receive your acceptance.”

Cyril paused for a long moment, tapping the document lightly with his finger and then taking a pencil from his pocket bent over and upon the nearest rock wrote something. Then he slipped the letter into its envelope and handed it to the other, who put it into ​his pocket, saluted again and with a hurried farewell turned down the path and was gone.

That was all. The interview had not lasted more than five minutes, but Doris knew by the look she had seen on Cyril’s face that danger threatened. The letter had contained a command, a command from a German officer of high rank to Cyril Hammersley—a spy receiving his orders from the government he served. If he had gone back to the Lodge at this moment she would have let him go past her without a word, for the bitterness came back into her heart and engulfed all purpose. She sat in her place of concealment, peering out at him, fascinated. He moved nearer and then stood, his feet braced on the rocks, gazing down the path by which his midnight visitor had disappeared. How long he stood there motionless she could not know, but as the moments passed and he did not move, she rose from her cranny, her trembling nerves seeking an outlet in motion or speech. Why didn’t he move?

At last her overtaxed nerves could no longer endure and she came out of the shadow and spoke his name. Still he made no motion, and she realized that her lips had made no sound. But her foot touched a small stone, which fell among the rocks, and she saw him wheel around and face her quickly, something glittering in his hand, while his voice rang sharply.

“Stand where you are!”

He took a few threatening steps toward her, his look studying her small bulk.

“It’s I, Cyril,” she said faintly, “Doris.”

“You!” He glanced to right and left, putting the thing in his pocket and faced her, incredulous. “What are you doing here, Doris?”

​“I came to—to see you again——”

His eyes were still searching the darkness around them.

“Who told you to come here?”

“No one,” she lied. “I followed you.”

“Who saw you come? You heard?”

“Yes——” slowly. “O Cyril—I can’t let you go from me like this——”

She put her face to her hands and felt his arms enfold her. She trembled, but in this weakness a new kind of strength came to her. “I want you to come with me away—away from all this—for me—for England. It’s my last appeal—you must not refuse it. I—I want you so, Cyril, as it used to be.”

She felt his lips gently touch her brow and heard his whisper,

“God bless you!”

She clung to him desperately, to his caress, the one sure symbol of his purity——

“I love you, Cyril,” she murmured, “I can’t help it. I’ve tried not to. But you couldn’t kiss me like this, reverently, if you did not love me well enough to forget everything else. Say you do, dear.”

“I love you,” he whispered again. “But you must not stay here. You must——”

“Doesn’t it mean something to you that I came,” she went on breathlessly, “that I could forget—what happened—that the love that was in my heart for you was greater than my hatred of what you are? I came so that you could know it by the difficulty, the danger that I ran. I don’t care what others may think of me. The only thing that matters is to have you again. You don’t know what it cost me to come. I am not the kind to be held so lightly, Cyril. I have forgotten my ​pride, even my sense of what is fitting for a girl to do, in the hope that you will listen to me.”

“Yes,” he murmured, “but not now, Doris. You must go back.”

“Not yet——” she protested.

“I—I have much to do——” he said.

“That messenger—O Cyril—you mustn’t. Come back with me—tonight—now——”

“I can’t,” he muttered. “It—it is important for me to stay here——”

She loosened his arms and stood away from him, peering down into the cove where clouds of black smoke were belching from the funnels of the black vessel. The water of the cove was churning in its wake and its prow was turning toward the harbor mouth.

Suddenly she saw Cyril start and peer around him in the darkness.

“Who sent you here?” she heard his voice in a strangled whisper at her ear.

“No one,” she denied again, “I followed you.”

“That isn’t possible, Doris,” he said quickly. “I have reasons for knowing. You were here before I came. Rizzio told you—— He knew what was to happen—he was the only one who could have known.”

“Why?” Her curiosity sent all subterfuge flying. She could see his pale face in the moonlight.

“Because it was Rizzio who sent this messenger to meet me.”

“Rizzio!” The mystery was deepening. “I can’t understand.”

He hesitated a long moment before replying, as though weighing something in his mind.

“I’ll tell you this much,” he said at last. “You’ve a right to know. Rizzio told you that he was an agent ​of the English Government. It’s my word against his. You can believe me or not if you like. Rizzio is a spy of Germany!”

“Impossible! John Rizzio——” she whispered aghast.

He laughed.

“The pot callin’ the kettle black—what? It’s the truth.”

“But Rizzio! What object would he have in betraying England? A man of his position!”

“That’s the kind of men England’s enemies want,” put in Cyril dryly.

“But he has no need of money. Not money. Impossible!”

“No, not money. There are other things that John Rizzio values more than money.”

“What?”

He caught her by the arm impressively to make his meaning clear. “You don’t know the passion of collectors. They would sell their souls for the things they want. The things that seem impossible are the things they want the most.”

“But I don’t understand.”

“After the war Rizzio is to be permitted to ‘buy’ Rubens’s ‘Descent from the Cross’ from the German Government.”

“Oh!” she gasped in horror. A new idea of the terrible possibilities of duplicity was borne to her. But she couldn’t believe.

“How do you know this?” she asked.

He laughed.

“It’s one of the things I stopped in London to find out.”

“Then you——”

​“I am a German spy.”

“I don’t believe you,” she cried proudly. There was a note of joy in her voice, a momentary note which seemed to trail off into one of terror. “Cyril!” she whispered. “Rizzio! He wrote me to come here.”

“I knew it.”

“But he said he——” she hesitated. “Why did he want me to come? There must have been some other reasons besides wanting me to see—he’s here, Cyril—somewhere——”

Hammersley started and turned, his hand in his pocket, and Doris followed his look. Three men had risen from among the rocks toward the Tower.

“Don’t move, Hammersley,” said Rizzio’s voice. “You’re in danger, Doris.”

But the girl was clinging to Cyril’s arm. “No, no,” she was crying. Several shots rang out as Cyril threw her aside, dashing forward. One of the men seemed to stumble among the rocks and fall heavily. The other came in toward Cyril, his arm raised, but another shot from behind the rocks made him pause, twist half around, his hand to his shoulder as Cyril caught him a blow which sent him reeling to the edge of the cliff, over which he hung for a moment, peering downwards in horror, and then disappeared from view.

“Well done, Stryker,” she heard Cyril cry. “The other—this way. Don’t let him get off.”

And Stryker disappeared after Rizzio.

CHAPTER X
THE YELLOW DOVE

IN a daze Doris saw Cyril bend over the prostrate figure and then come toward her.

“Dead?” she whispered in horror.

But he didn’t seem to hear her. He caught her by the arm and forcibly led her inland.

“Dead!” she whispered again. “It might have been you.”

“Or you,” she heard him say sharply.

“Me?”

“Yes. But it’s my fault. I should have guessed.”

“John Rizzio would kill me. Oh, it’s unbelievable!”

“You know too much.” He gave a short laugh. “Far too much for your own good—or mine.” He caught her suddenly by both arms and made her look straight into his eyes. “Doris, you’ve seen nothing, you’ve heard nothing tonight. Do you understand?”

His grasp on her arms hurt her but she bore it without a murmur.

“Yes,” she said.

“You swear it?”

“Yes,” faintly, “I do.”

“I’ve got to go away from Ben-a-Chielt tonight. I can’t tell you why. You’ve got to go straight to Kilmorack House now. You rode over. Take the short cut by Horsham Hill. It’s not so well known. I would go with you but I haven’t a moment to spare. Don’t trust anyone—not even the maids at the house. ​Go back to London tomorrow with Jack Sandys and don’t let him leave you until you’re safe at Ashwater Park. Where’s your horse?”

She told him and followed blindly.

“Where are you going, Cyril?” she pleaded.

“It doesn’t matter.”

He found the horse and untied the bridle.

“Tell me, Cyril. I’ve earned the right to know.”

“Something has happened,” he said quietly, “which has put all my plans in danger——”

“And you?”

“Yes. The thing I’ve been trying to do may fail. It hangs or falls by this issue.”

“But what—what?”

“You can’t know that,” he said quickly. “Don’t ask me anything more. I can’t answer. But trust in me if you can. Trust in me, Doris, and if you love me—silence!”

He gave her a lift into the saddle and kissed her hand. Then he looked around him and gave a parting injunction.

“Now cut sharp off to the right in the darkness until you strike the old sheep trail. You can see it quite plainly in the heather. Follow it to the head of the ridge, then take the road to Horsham Hill. Good-by and God bless you.”

A sob rose in her throat and she could only wave a hand in reply. And so she left him standing there alone gazing after her with bared head in the darkness. The strain on her nerves had told on her and she sat her side-saddle listlessly holding on by the pommel, and peering into the darkness before her, with eyes that saw nothing but pictures of death. She could not forget the wounded man grasping at space as he ​tottered on the rim of the rocks. Cyril had killed a man. War! She had thought war a more glorious thing. This seemed very like murder. She blessed God for Stryker who had come so opportunely. Rizzio had tried to kill Cyril. In horror she had seen him raise his pistol and aim, but at her cry he had missed his shot and with the disabling of his confederates he had fled.

Rizzio was a German spy. Then since they were enemies of course Cyril was loyal—playing a part to deceive the enemy—learning its secrets that England might profit by them. The message! What was the message that the German naval officer had brought which had so disturbed Cyril? What was this mysterious duty of Cyril’s which meant so much to his cause, the success or failure of which hung by a thread? She tried to think what Cyril could do in England and after a time the thing began to come to her. Cyril was acting for England. He had succeeded, in the guise of a German secret agent, in finding the traitor in the War Office, and it was Cyril who had caused the arrest of Captain Byfield. Rizzio, too, was a German spy who for some reason or other had been sent—O God—that was it. The Germans suspected Cyril and had used John Rizzio to put him to the test—had set a thief to catch a thief. Cyril had found that the message was a dangerous one—and had refused to give it up to Rizzio. That seemed to explain everything—Cyril’s willingness to have her burn the papers, Rizzio’s anxiety to save them, that he might send them to his employers. The second packet of papers? A false message, prepared for a purpose which Cyril was to fulfill. The German naval officer! His message—what was it? Imagination refused to aid her. ​She could not understand. He brought a command—a test of Cyril’s loyalty to Germany perhaps? Was that it? And if so, what? A test which meant victory or defeat—that was what Cyril’s last words had meant. Victory or defeat—life or death. It was a desperate game that he was playing. And what was he going to do tonight that made it necessary for him to leave her to ride to Kilmorack House alone?

Bewildered and weary with excitement and much thinking, she gave it up, and as in a daze set her mind to the task of finding the way to Horsham Hill. She rode on inland searching for the old sheep trail as Cyril had described it to her, but as the minutes went by and she did not find it she began to think that she must have passed it in the darkness. She had ridden at a walk for hours it seemed, keeping as she thought in a direction which would surely lead her to a road toward the Hill, but she realized now that she was lost on the moor and that it might be morning before she would find her way to Betty Heathcote’s. She stopped her horse and peered in every direction. Nothing but the undulations of the moor, hill and dale, a dead tree outlined against the sky, masses of rock uncouth in form, bushes which whispered in the wind, the babble of a tarn somewhere behind her, though she had not remembered passing it. There were no lights in any direction, none even from the heavens, for the stars had gone out. After a long while she wondered vaguely what time it was. She had no watch, but it seemed that a paleness like that which precedes the dawn had spread along the sky—though it hardly seemed possible it could be so late as that. Three—four o’clock she thought it might be—perhaps later. The one thing that now seemed to persist in her mind ​was the hope that Wilson had obeyed orders and kept Lady Heathcote in ignorance of her absence.

She was startled by her horse which, without moving, had stretched his neck and whinnied loudly. He, too, had realized the aimlessness of their wanderings and wanted the warm stalls at the Kilmorack stables. Doris tried to think what was best to do. All sense of direction was gone and she was beyond even the sound of the sea. At last she decided to try a slight eminence and see if she could make out the bulk of Ben-a-Chielt, but a mist had fallen, and when she reached the height she was no wiser than before. Fortunately, it was not cold, and if she did not fall from the saddle in utter weariness, daylight would show her a way. She got down from her horse and, fastening him to a bush, walked to and fro to keep awake, waiting for the day, for at sunrise she could make her way toward the east until she reached the coast, after which by following the cliffs to the right she would reach the Lodge, and from there the way to Kilmorack House.

She had grown accustomed to the silences and now and then paused in her pacing to stop and listen. She thought she heard a sound different from the others—behind her it seemed, a subdued murmur, which, as she listened, grew in intensity until she clearly made it out to be the quick reverberations of a motor, running with its cut-out open. It was coming fast, and in a moment a long fan of light shot across the sky from below the brow of a distant hill and then fell suddenly to earth, where it picked out the shapes of trees and bushes along what appeared to be its road. The motor was not traveling toward her, but at an angle which would make it pass near her, but ​quickly as she mounted and rode toward it she was unable even to come within earshot before the machine had passed and was lost to sight in the distance. It had not gone by so rapidly that Doris had not been able to make out on a rise of ground against the sky the profile of a roadster and the shapes of two men. Cyril and Stryker! There could be no doubt of it, for the body of Cyril’s car was familiar to her and the chances of any other machine being abroad in this locality at this hour were remote indeed. Where were they going? In which direction? Toward Saltham Rocks or northward? She did not know, but decided to take the chance and follow. She reached the road without difficulty—a trail it appeared to be with well-defined wheel tracks and the marks of hoofs. She pressed her horse onward in the wake of the speeding machine, not to overtake it, but to reach a destination of some sort which would be better than the utter loneliness of the desolate moor, the silence and inaction of which made her a prey to unhappy thoughts. Her horse was willing, and as the going was good broke into a brisk trot which for a while kept the glow of the swinging searchlight of the machine in sight. But presently that, too, disappeared and all was as before. And glancing above she understood. To her right a pale streak of light was showing along the horizon, and above her between patches of dark clouds she caught a faint reflection of violet light. It was the beginning of the dawn.

Dawn on her right—that meant the east. She was riding north, then. North—and to what destination? She had ridden this road with Cyril, but never to its end, which as she knew was among the unhospitable crags of Rudha Mor, a wild spot unfrequented by any ​except Cyril’s gamekeepers. What was Cyril’s errand in the night to such a place when everything that had happened would seem to indicate the necessity for his immediate return to London? The same kind of curiosity that had made her open the package of cigarette papers against Cyril’s wishes, stimulated her to follow this quest to its end. She forgot that she had had no sleep all night, and little the night before. Of physical weariness now she seemed to have none, and in the growing light she urged her tired horse forward into a hard gallop which covered the miles swiftly. She came to the cliffs and saw the sea, passed inland again. The going was rougher here, less turf and more rocks and whins, while to her left the hills were split by crags which protruded in fantastic shapes, like heads of prisoned monsters of the underworld which had forced their way up through the crust of the earth to the light of day. It was curious. The trail was well worn here as it had been before, and there were signs of much hauling. What was going on at Rudha Mor? The place could not be far distant, for she saw that the road wound up the rocks and fell away rapidly into a deep gorge, the further side of which she could see, dimly colored with the opalescent tint of the East. This she thought must be nearly the end of her ride. She did not know what was in store for her and was doubtful as to her wisdom, but she was eaten with curiosity, and dismounted, led her horse slowly to the lip of the gorge and peered over. What she saw made her gasp. She drew quickly back, tethered her horse to a bush and came forward again. Near by, under a shed built on the brink of the cliff, was Cyril’s roadster, but of Cyril and Stryker she saw no sign. Beneath her feet the cliffs fell away rap​idly by easy steps, down which she marked a well-worn footpath. The bottom of the gorge was of rock and sand shelving gradually toward the sea and fairly in its middle, built strongly of rough lumber, she saw a shed with wide doors which even now were open—a large hangar from which as she looked several figures wheeled forth a huge aëroplane—to a platform of planks which extended for a long way toward the sea. From a distance it was difficult to judge its measurements, but by comparison with the heights of the men Doris knew that she had never seen a machine so large. As the east grew lighter she could see Cyril plainly. He came out of the hangar dressed in leather, gave some orders which made the other figures hurry and a series of deafening explosions from the engine as they “tuned it up,” gave Doris a sense of immediate departure. For a while she watched, fascinated, her interest in the size of this huge toy and its possibilities making a separate mind-picture which superseded all those that had gone before. But as the light grew stronger and she made out the color of the wide yellow planes, she started up with a cry which would have been heard by the men below her had it not been for the racket that the engine was making. “A huge machine with yellow wings,” she remembered Jack Sandys’ description, “a thousand horsepower at least.” The Yellow Dove—this was the Yellow Dove and the man of mystery, its driver, was—Cyril.

Spellbound and trembling with excitement, she watched Cyril climb up into one of the seats. Cyril was going to fly to the Germans, she knew it now, to obey the commands which had been brought last night by the German officer, commands to come to Germany and explain his failure to deliver his secret message to ​

'Her lips . . . were whispering words that she hoped could follow him into the distance."

​Rizzio. They suspected him and yet he was going to face them. It was desperate, foolhardy, insane. He would never come back. Not victory, but death—that was what it meant. She ran out to the very edge of the rocks, shrieking his name, but the sounds were lost in the fearful din of the motor below. The explosions echoed and reëchoed in the gorge which seemed to quiver with the volume of sound. Not a head from below was turned up to look at her and she had a sense of her own unimportance in the immensity of Cyril’s viewpoint. She saw the yellow machine start slowly down the incline, gathering momentum as it ran until it left the runway and rose magnificently, its engine roaring steadily, clearing the surf and rocks and heading straight into the growing day.

O God! That she should have suspected him of anything base and dishonorable—a man who could face death as he was doing, as he had been doing for months. Cyril—the Yellow Dove. There could be no doubt of it, for she had seen with her own eyes. She understood now many things that had been a mystery before; why he could not speak to her; the reasons for his occasional absences, for his air of indifference, for his coolness in the face of adverse criticism. She understood about John Rizzio and the reasons why Cyril had wanted her to take such precautions in getting safely back to Ashwater Park, precautions which she had disregarded. But what mattered about her when Cyril every day, every hour for months had taken chances against death, the most ignominious death of all!

Her heart was big with pride in him and she followed the Yellow Dove with her gaze, now rising high and diminishing rapidly in the mist, her soul in her ​moist eyes and on her lips which were whispering words that she hoped could follow him into the distance. Her Cyril, still hers, and England’s—the Honorable Cyril whom the world had come to know as the Yellow Dove.

She stood in the shelter of the rocks, for she knew now in which way her duty to Cyril lay, and waited until the aëroplane was but a speck against the sky, when she turned with a sigh which was almost a gasp of weariness and walked slowly toward her horse. The ride before her was long, but by good riding she might still reach Kilmorack House before Lady Betty’s guests were up. Otherwise her reputation was gone. She knew that, for she could make no explanation of any kind. On that she was——

Quick footsteps behind her—her arms caught from behind—a glimpse of a strange face and then something white over her head—a pungent odor and—unconsciousness.

CHAPTER XI
VON STROMBERG

IN the Taunus range north of the Schwartzwald, lies the village of Windenberg, on the slopes of the well-wooded hills that lead by slow stages to higher elevations of the Grosser Feldberg. In the valleys are vineyards, orchards, chestnut and almond-groves and in times of peace, the people are contented, well-to-do and industrious. The schloss of the Counts von Winden stands upon an eminence and looks down upon a rolling country of velvety woods extending for miles along the slope of the range. In this region of firs and beech trees one might walk for miles off the roads without coming upon a sign of human habitation, or indeed without passing the boundaries of the von Winden estate.

But three miles from Winden Schloss well hidden among the hills was a spot of cleared land containing perhaps two hundred acres which had been once used by the von Winden family as a farm, but had been taken since the beginning of the war by the State for purposes of its own. A good road led to Windenberg five miles away through the forest, but much secrecy attached to Blaufelden, as the place was called. Men of the Imperial Forest Service kept guard upon all the roads, and no one but those having official permission were allowed to come within two miles of the place.

A visit would have soon explained the reasons for this extraordinary care on the part of the men in uni​form, for not far from the house and stables, unobtrusive buildings of brick and stone, were aviation sheds, a well-supplied garage and storage houses, which indicated at almost any hour of the day or night a military activity.

Within the farmhouse of Blaufelden, rather late in a night in March a tall iron-gray figure, slender, buttoned to the neck in a close-fitting uniform coat, paced slowly up and down. A plain wooden table stood in the center of the room. It was lighted by a lamp with a green shade and covered with papers arranged in orderly piles. There were chairs, strongly but simply made, and a sad-colored rug, and the walls were decorated with pictures of hunting scenes, while over the stone fireplace in which the pine logs intermittently blazed, there was a colored lithograph of the Emperor of Germany. It was the kind of room, and the kind of furniture one would expect to find in any of the rural districts of the great empire, with the one difference that nowhere was there visible the touch of a woman’s hand. Whatever its original purpose the room at the present moment contained only the essentials of the barest comfort. And the figure of the man in uniform, erect, silent and austere, completed the impression which the barrack-like simplicity of his surroundings created—order, cleanliness, efficiency expressed in the simplest terms.

The German officer stopped pacing the room and touched a bell upon the table. His brows were furrowed and his broad capable hands tapped impatiently among the documents. His summons was answered almost immediately by a man in the uniform of the Jägers, the Imperial Forest Service, who stood silently his heels together awaiting orders.

​“There has been no word?” asked the officer in German.

“None, Excellenz.”

“You stationed your men as I directed?”

“Yes, Excellenz——”

The officer paused. And then, “Send Herr Hauptmann von Winden the moment he arrives.”

The man saluted, wheeled and went out, closing the door noiselessly behind him. The tall figure regarded the door fixedly for a moment in deep thought, and then tapped the back of his left hand with the fingers of his right, a habit he had when things were not going to his liking. General Graf von Stromberg, Privy Councilor to the German Emperor and head of the military sections of the Secret Service, was not a person accustomed to have things go wrong, and delay of any kind annoyed him exceedingly.

But the door of the room opened and a young officer in uniform appeared and stood awaiting the will of his superior. He was blond, ruddy and well set up and bore all the marks of the army training—a member beyond doubt of the military caste with something in the clearly cut, if somewhat arrogant, features of his face which suggested good blood and lineage.

“Ah, Herr Hauptmann!” said the General, frowning. “You have heard?”

“Yes, Excellenz. He should be here by midnight.”

“What was the cause of the delay?”

“He was forced to come down at Ostend, yesterday. It has taken him all day to make repairs. He is on the way now.”

Von Stromberg grunted and sank into his chair at the table, motioning the younger officer into one beside him.

​“Come, sit down. Let’s forget that we are parts of the intricate machinery of State. Here is a cigar. Smoke. It will do you good.”

Von Winden, flattered by this mark of condescension, obeyed.

“You are glad?” von Stromberg asked.

“Yes, Excellenz. I am glad. It is not the kind of thing one wants to be worried about—one’s own flesh and blood. But I knew there must have been a mistake.”

General von Stromberg puffed his smoke toward the ceiling and stretched his long legs upon the floor.

“It is very curious. I am not sure that I understand. Herr Rizzio is a careful man and he has much at stake. Why should your cousin Hammersley have refused to take cognizance of his credentials?”

“He had doubtless good reasons of his own. But since he will soon be here he will answer your questions himself. The fact that he comes at all, Excellenz, should be proof of his loyalty.”

“Yes,” said the General thoughtfully. “That should be true. One doesn’t thrust one’s head into the lion’s mouth for the mere pleasure of examining his teeth. Who sent this message?”

“General von Betzdorf.”

“There were no other wireless communications?”

“None, Excellenz. But Stammer should reach Wilhelmshaven tonight.”

The General smoked silently for a moment, and then:

“Herr Hammersley’s mother was a Prussian?”

“Yes, Excellenz, a sister of my mother——”

“Yes, I remember now. Von Eppingen——” the ​General muttered, his brows wrinkled. And then, “You saw much of your cousin?”

“For a while he went with me to the gymnasium, then to the University of Heidelberg. He has come over each year and shot with me here at Windenberg.”

“You are fond of him?”

Von Winden shrugged.

“He is my relative. We have always got along. I should not have cared to find that he was a traitor.”

The General smoked silently, his gaze on the fire.

“But his father was an Englishman, Graf von Winden. We can’t forget that. Tell me. You have known him always. What was his attitude at the University? Did he show a real affection for German life and customs? In short was he ever able to forget that half of him was English?”

Udo von Winden pulled at his small blond mustache thoughtfully.

“I can only say that he was quieter than most of us. But he was popular. He was a member of the Saxe-Borussia and represented the Corps on the Mensurboden against Suevia and Guestphalia. A Prussian for all that any of us knew— Prussian of Prussians.”

“His father died when he was quite young, I believe?”

“Yes, Excellenz. But his father, too, had lived much in Germany. He was a diplomat and scholar and enjoyed the friendship of the Iron Chancellor. That was before the ‘Hassgesang,’ Excellenz.”

“Or before the ‘Tag,’” growled the General. “Your loyalty to your cousin is natural, but loyalty to the Vaterland——”

Udo von Winden rose quickly.

“You would not suggest, Excellenz——?”

​“Quatsch! Sit down, Captain. I suggest nothing. There are merely some phases of the question which puzzle me. Perhaps when he arrives he can explain them.”

“He will explain. I will stake my honor on it.”

“I trust so. This is hardly a time when my department can afford to make mistakes in the character of those in its employ.”

“But, Excellenz, you surely have no cause to doubt the exactness of the information he has furnished you!”

“It depends upon what you mean by exactness. Our information, as you know, comes from a number of sources. Some of it has proven valuable—some useless. Herr Hammersley’s has been neither the one nor the other.”

“But the British fleet at Cuxhaven——”

“Yes, he gave us that, but they came two days earlier than we expected. It cost us the Blücher.”

“But you knew that the orders were changed—and he sent a wireless——”

“The morning the Blücher was sunk,” said von Stromberg dryly.

“But, Excellenz, he gave us a clear sea for the raid on Falmouth!”

General von Stromberg rose and laid his hand on von Winden’s shoulder.

“You are younger than I, Graf von Winden. The Secret Service makes a maxim to believe everyone guilty until he proves his innocence.”

“But Herr Hammersley?”

“We have reason to believe that the British Government permitted the raid on Falmouth, as a means of increasing the enlistments.” He slowly paced the floor ​and then said reassuringly, “Oh, I merely question—I merely question——”

His words trailed off and Udo von Winden stood silently until he spoke again. “Oh, very well. We shall see—we shall see.”

A knock at the door and an orderly entered.

“Well?”

“Dispatches, Excellenz.”

Udo von Winden watched his superior officer as he dismissed the man and broke the seal of a large envelope and read, the lamplight playing on his long bony features, giving his sharp nose a peculiarly vulture-like avidity. The importance of the communication was obvious, for the small eyes under the heavy thatch of brows flamed in sudden interest. The General read the paper through quickly and then slipped it between the buttons of his coat.

“That will be all, Herr Hauptmann——” he said, with a return of his military abruptness. “You will go at once to the hangar and await the arrival of Herr Hammersley.” And as the officer moved toward the door: “Also, you will first tell Herr Hauptmann Wentz that I wish to see him at once.”

Von Winden clapped his heels together, saluted and went out while the General paced the floor of the room again tapping the back of his left hand with his right. “It is curious,” he muttered to himself. “A coincidence perhaps, but strange. And yet—possible.”

While he was reading the document again Captain Wentz entered. He was short, thickly set and dark with a blue chin and heavy eyebrows, the type of a man who rises in the service from sheer ability. He waited at the door, immovable, in the presence of the great man until ordered to approach.

​“An important message has come from the Wilhelmstrasse, which indicates a mission of peculiar importance.” The General paused a moment, his keen eyes searching Captain Wentz with a terrible tensity, but the face of the younger man remained expressionless. He was merely a piece of machinery—excellent machinery.

“You may have thought it curious, Herr Hauptmann Wentz, that I should have come from the Wilhelmstrasse to Blaufelden. Is it not so?”

“It is not my duty to think, Excellenz, unless ordered to do so,” said the other briefly.

The General smiled. The answer pleased him.

“I wished to see Herr Hammersley, as you know. That is important, and the Yellow Dove cannot go to Berlin.” He stopped and then went on quickly: “Herr Hauptmann, you have been attached to the Secret Service Department three years?”

“Yes, Excellenz.”

“You have performed several important duties and have won promotion. I am now about to commit to your care, a——”

At a gesture of von Stromberg’s thumb the officer went on tiptoe to the door and opened it quickly.

“No one, Excellenz.”

“Good. Now sit. First, you speak French without accent.”

“That was a part of my qualification for this service.”

“Yes. It is in my mind to give you an important mission—one which will require great skill and fortitude.”

Wentz listened attentively, but he made no comment.

​“It is unnecessary of course to warn you to hold what I tell you in the strictest confidence.”

“I do not talk, Excellenz.”

“This is a matter of grave importance to the Empire, a matter which concerns one of the enemies of the Vaterland. The safe delivery of certain dispatches which I am to receive may mean a readjustment of the European situation—perhaps the end of the war with Germany victorious and England humiliated.”

The eyes of Captain Wentz grew a little rounder and sparkled ever so slightly, but he said nothing.

“I am telling you this that you may know the importance of the duty I am giving you. It is an honor which I hope you will appreciate, an honor that may lead to greater favors than you have hitherto received.”

“I hope I may deserve them, Excellenz.”

General von Stromberg took the paper from his breast and glanced over it again.

“You will remember,” he continued, “the affair of the Socialist, Gottschalk?”

“I knew nothing of the details, Excellenz. That matter came in the duty of Oberleutnant von Weringrade.”

“This much then, only, I need tell you. Herr Gottschalk, who lived at Schöndorf near here, came into the possession, in a manner which need not be described, of certain important papers. He kept them for some time, not aware of their importance, and then realizing their value and being a good German, though opposed to the war, two weeks ago communicated with the Government. The result of this correspondence was a summons from Berlin and the delivery of these ​papers into the hands of the Emperor. Do you follow me?”

“Yes, Excellenz.”

“This letter which I have just received by special messenger informs me that His Majesty has decided to act at once, and gives me three days in which to make arrangements to have these papers, which will be forwarded tomorrow, delivered to General Dalmier, commanding at Verdun, to be handed before a certain date, to the President of the French Republic. You are to be the bearer of those letters. They must be delivered personally. You will be provided with the proper passes and facilities, including an armed escort to the French lines. From there you must trust to your own resources. The important matter is that no one, not even Captain von Winden, shall suspect your mission. Perhaps now you will realize the confidence I am reposing.”

“I am honored, Excellenz. These papers will arrive tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow night by automobile at eleven, by the Schöndorf road.”

“And until then——?”

“You will have time to make your arrangements.”

“I shall prepare, Excellenz.”

Captain Wentz rose, but the General halted him.

“One thing more. Herr Hammersley is returning tonight from England with dispatches. He is to be carefully watched tonight and tomorrow, though I shall let him believe that he moves in perfect freedom. You will give the necessary orders. Also I would like you to keep watch outside the door when he is brought to this room, which may be at any moment.”

“Zu befehl, Excellenz.”

​“That is all. You may go.”

Left alone, General von Stromberg took a chair facing the fire, and lighted another cigar. For many years he had been engaged in deciphering interesting problems and in preparing problems for other persons to decipher. Therefore it may be truly said that his was the analytical mind, the mind of the chemist, of the mathematician, and the philosopher, with so complete a schooling in the trade of deception that all things and all persons in the cosmic scheme except himself were objects of suspicion. For him the obvious was the negligible and by converse the negligible of prime importance. As he had said to von Winden, every man was guilty until he was proven innocent. He had a rare nose for scenting unsuspected odors, and a fine hand for finding the weak links in the armor of those he used as well as of those who sought to use him. He had a faculty for appearing at places where he was least expected and a prescience almost miraculous in forestalling the moves of his adversaries. He ruled by fear and by admiration and there was not a man in the Empire with a skeleton in his closet, no matter how high his station, who did not live without a terror of von Stromberg in his heart.

But the habit of mind of suspecting everybody, while it had placed him upon the safe side of every equation, had also resulted, through the elimination of the sentimental, in eliminating the more direct contacts with human nature. To judge a man by his possibilities for venality is like judging a rose by the sharpness of its thorn. Something of the weakness of this cynicism had been apparent to the keen intellect of von Stromberg and he had been finding of late a rare pleasure in trifling with his convictions, admitting ​into the stored cavern of his mind for experimental purposes, an occasional ray of optimism. At the present moment he was analyzing the result of his summons to Herr Hammersley to come to Germany at once and the communication from Herr Rizzio which impugned Herr Hammersley’s loyalty to Germany. Von Stromberg had known Herr Rizzio for years and had done him more than one service in finding ways to cater to his passion for collecting objects of art. It was German social influence secretly exerted that had helped to make easy Rizzio’s rise in favor at the court of St. James. There had been a possibility that some day John Rizzio might be of service to von Stromberg and to Germany. And von Stromberg had long been laying the plans which had made his system of espionage the most perfect in Europe. Von Stromberg had found Rizzio’s weakness and had traded on it, saving his most tempting bait for his greatest service, the betrayal of the home of his adoption. He weighed Rizzio contentedly sure of his own power over him and despising him for having been so easily bought. Rubens’s “Descent from the Cross”! There were fortunately other Rubenses in conquered territory—some very good ones that John Rizzio might like. Von Stromberg had made a list of them. He had learned that it was as necessary to be provided with bribes as with threats. Fortunately Rizzio himself had given him material for the latter. Racially, the great Councilor did not like Latins, and he was quite sure he cared less for Italians now than he did before the proclamation of neutrality. They were not to be trusted by good Germans. If Rizzio had played false to the country of his adoption for the sake of a paltry picture, it was within the bounds of possibility that ​he could be false to Germany if the necessity arose for an even smaller consideration. Yesterday morning before leaving Berlin for Windenberg, von Stromberg had received a dispatch from Rizzio which told of his departure on his yacht from Scotland for Bremen. This was curious—also interesting. Rizzio was needed in England and was useless in Germany. Why was he coming? Had something been learned of him at Scotland Yard? Or had his departure to do with the case of Herr Hammersley? Whatever the visit meant, it was necessary, very necessary, to have Rizzio and Hammersley together at once, so he had deemed it wise to send orders to Bremen to have Rizzio caught on the wireless and when he reached port sent through at once to Windenberg.

Von Stromberg smiled in self-gratulation. There would be no loose ends about this affair. Merely as a precaution in so important a matter he had set one agent to watch another. Byfield had been watched by Hammersley, who in turn had been watched by Rizzio, who had been watched by Herr Maxwell, an agent long in von Stromberg’s service. Rizzio had been given the power and credentials to use his discretion with Hammersley. Why had not Hammersley relinquished the cigarette papers to Rizzio? Hammersley should have good reasons for his refusal. Was there reason for Hammersley to suspect Rizzio? Herr Maxwell, who had been set to watch Rizzio, was silent. This was puzzling. What had happened to Herr Maxwell?

General von Stromberg threw his finished cigar into the fire and got up, rubbing his hands together. Oh, it was very interesting—very. The situation was rapidly approaching culmination. In a short while all the threads of this pretty tangle would be within reach of ​his long fingers. And all that he, von Stromberg, had to do was to catch them by the ends and hold. What would Herr Hammersley bring?

General von Stromberg straightened, listening. The sound of voices and men outside. So. He was here already. There had been no sound from the machine. Of course, he had planed down. A knock on the door and von Winden, Wentz and Hammersley entered.

CHAPTER XII
HAMMERSLEY EXPLAINS

AT the sight of the tall figure of von Stromberg, Hammersley halted for the fraction of a second and then came forward into the room. He still wore his leather jacket and cap, but the wind burn on his cheeks gave his eyes, which had been protected by goggles, a singular grayness. He had had no sleep and his face was drawn in haggard lines, but his greeting showed no signs of uneasiness.

“Had I known you were awaiting me, Excellenz, I should perhaps have made quicker repairs.”

“It does not matter that you are late,” said von Stromberg quickly. “The thing of main importance is that you are here.” The General turned and made a motion to the door of the room. “I wish to be alone with Herr Hammersley. Herr Hauptmann von Winden, you are relieved from duty for the night. Herr Hauptmann Wentz, you will remain within call.”

The two officers saluted and retired and the General motioned Hammersley to approach.

“You have it?” he asked briefly.

“Yes, Excellenz. Here.”

He produced from an inner pocket a small package wrapped in oiled paper and handed it to von Stromberg.

“Ah!” He went quickly over to the table and tearing off the wrapper of the bundle opened the packet of Riz-la-Croix and found the hidden message which he ​scanned quickly, with muttered ejaculations of satisfaction and surprise. Hammersley by the fireplace was warming his hands.

“Ganz gut!” said the General, straightening and turning. “You had difficulties?”

“More than usual, Excellenz. Captain Byfield is in prison.”

“Caught!”

Hammersley nodded.

“They found letters at his rooms.”

“Schafskopf! Were there no fires?”

Hammersley shrugged.

“He is to be tried by court-martial. He will be shot.”

Von Stromberg deliberated a moment.

“And were you suspected?”

“Yes. They followed me to Scotland, but fortunately the Yellow Dove is still a mystery—at least it was yesterday morning, and I got safely away.”

Von Stromberg was scrutinizing him keenly.

“H—m. What makes you think that you were followed?”

“I left London by night train but got off at Edinburgh where my motor met me. But the wire was faster, and they had sent word to stop me. They stretched a rope across the road, but I saw it and went around. They fired at me——”

“When was this?”

“Three nights ago.”

“They didn’t hit you——”

“A mere scratch across the arm——”

“Let me see it.”

Hammersley looked into von Stromberg’s face and laughed.

​“Really?” he asked.

“Yes.”

Rather stiffly Hammersley took off his leather jacket and sweater and rolled up the sleeve of his flannel shirt. Von Stromberg examined the wound with interest.

“So——” he said. “Put on your coat. And after that?”

“I kept away from Ben-a-Chielt and put up for the night at my cousin’s.”

“Who is that?”

“Lady Heathcote——”

“Oh, yes. It was at her house in London that the message passed to you.”

“Yes, Excellenz.”

Von Stromberg paused a moment and then spoke abruptly.

“Why did you not give the papers to Rizzio?”

Hammersley’s gaze met the General’s squarely.

“They were too important. I could not take the risk.”

“But his orders superseded yours.”

“I saw—but I could not take the risk.”

“Why?”

“Because I had reason to believe that Rizzio was acting for the English Government.”

Von Stromberg’s burning gaze flickered and went out. He took a few paces across the room, his right hand tapping the back of his left. At last he came and stood before Hammersley, his hands behind his back.

“What were your reasons for believing that?”

“Maxwell learned it from Byfield.”

“Maxwell! You saw Maxwell—when?”

“The night I left London.”

​“Has anything happened to him?” quickly.

“I do not know.”

The General frowned into the fire.

“It is strange,” he muttered. “Very strange. You did not realize then that I suspected you?”

Hammersley laughed.

“Not at once. I did later. That is your privilege, Excellenz. But I refused to be caught under the circumstances. I preferred to take the risk of failure. After all, you see, I succeeded.”

General von Stromberg was not immune from the frankness of Hammersley’s smile. He turned toward the table and scrutinized the papers with great care.

“These are the very papers you got from Herr Captain Byfield?”

Hammersley’s reply was startling.

“Unfortunately, no. The original papers were burned——”

“Burned!” cried the General, turning in his chair.

“But not before I had made this copy, which I put in a safe place.”

“Explain.”

“I was followed, leaving Lady Heathcote’s dinner party in an automobile, by agents of Scotland Yard. I had the slower machine and they caught me. But not before I had passed the original papers to my companion——”

“Your companion—a woman?”

“Yes, Excellenz, there was nothing else to do. She escaped while they were searching me and kept the papers——”

“Who was this woman?”

“My fiancée.”

“Her name?”

​“Doris Mather.”

“English?”

“No, American.”

“And what happened then?”

“Excellenz, she read them. She is devoted to the English cause. I could do nothing. She learned that I was acting for Germany and, rather than let them fall into my hands, she burned them. It makes no difference to you or to the Vaterland, since I have brought the message here, except that my own utility in England is gone.”

“I should be sorry to be obliged to believe you.”

“I am afraid, Excellenz, that there is nothing left for you to do.”

General von Stromberg was again busy examining the cigarette papers. Suddenly he raised his head, his gaze boring into Hammersley’s face.

“You say this is a copy of the original message?”

“Yes, Excellenz.”

“And where did you make it?”

“In the library upstairs at Lady Heathcote’s in Park Lane.”

“When?”

“After my interview with Herr Rizzio. It is written hurriedly, as you will observe.”

“It is written with a pen finer than those usually employed by ladies.”

“I took what offered, Excellenz,” said Hammersley.

“What was your thought when you made the copy?”

“That Rizzio or his agents would attempt to get it away from me. It seems that I was right.”

“Are you sure that he was acting for England and not for me?” asked von Stromberg quickly.

“For you, Excellenz?”

​“Did it not occur to you that your failure to accede to his request might have given Herr Rizzio the idea that you were saving this document from him in order that you might deliver it to the War Office?”

“How could such an idea occur to me when I already knew what his object was?”

“Oh! You are convinced that he is for the English cause?”

“Naturally. I can conceive of no reason why Rizzio should be for Germany.”

Von Stromberg smiled. If this were skill in parry, he rejoiced in having met his match. If it were merely ingenuousness, he was equally at a loss. He had often admitted to himself that there were but two kinds of people in the world that he could not cope with—those who never lost their tempers and those who told the truth. He had taken advantage of Hammersley’s physical condition to provoke him into irritation, but the man was quite unruffled. The piercing eye, the threatening tone and the dominant air of authority which von Stromberg had so frequently found effective with others had been of no avail here. Herr Hammersley stood by the fire, erect and unperturbed, calmly awaiting his dismissal. If he had told the truth, then Rizzio——

“Herr Rizzio has advised me that you are disloyal to Germany,” said the General at last. “You inform me that he is loyal to England.”

Hammersley shrugged and laughed.

“If I were disloyal to Germany, surely I had proof enough of your suspicions in your secret summons, to remain at Ben-a-Chielt. It is unnecessary for me to say that I should have come without that summons, because it was dangerous for me to stay.”

​“You would, then, have me disregard the message from Herr Rizzio?”

“No. I merely ask that you wait until you hear from Herr Maxwell.”

“And if Herr Maxwell be dead?” asked von Stromberg quietly.

Hammersley’s face became grave.

“In that case, Excellenz, I must rely on your keenness to decide the issue between us.”

Von Stromberg slipped the packet of papers into an inner pocket and rose with a laugh. He covered the distance between himself and Hammersley in three paces with extended hands.

“I was only trying you, Herr Hammersley. It is a habit of mine. It amuses me. You will forgive me, nicht wahr?”

“Willingly, Excellenz, if you will provide me with food and a bed. Failing those, you may have me shot at once.”

“Food you shall have, and a bed is prepared in your room upstairs. As for the shooting, perhaps we may as well postpone that until morning.”

He laughed jovially, showing a very fine set of teeth, and, touching a bell which was answered by Captain Wentz, directed that food and coffee be prepared at once.

“One word more,” he went on, when Wentz went out, “where did you put this copy after leaving Lady Heathcote’s in London?”

“I slipped it down the window sash in my automobile. They did not even search for it. I got away by a ruse.”

“No one saw it?”

“No one. The message is the same.”

​“H—m! You have a good memory?”

“Excellent.”

“Are you sure that the War Office knew of your movements?”

“Positive. I know of no one who would try to kill me——”

“Rizzio?”

“Acting for England, yes.”

“And if he were acting for Germany?”

“Then he is a fool.”

Von Stromberg folded his long arms and gazed at the lamp.

“You do not feel that it would be possible to return at once?”

“Not unless I wished to be shot as a spy.”

“What will you do?”

“Take whatever service you will give me. Failing that I will volunteer for aviation.”

The General, without pursuing the subject further, motioned Hammersley to the door.

“You will find food ready. After eating you had better get to bed. I will talk with you further in the morning.”

As the door closed behind his visitor von Stromberg sank into the chair by the fire and lighted a third cigar, upon which he pulled steadily for some moments, rehearsing by question and reply almost every word of Hammersley’s story. By every rule of the game as he knew it Herr Hammersley should be a liar. And yet his story from first to last held water. There was not a flaw in its texture from beginning to end. If Hammersley had not told the truth he was the most skillful liar in Europe, a man who gave the appearance of truthfulness to the last hair of his head. And yet ​it was much more easy to lie if one knew that there was no man to oppose him. Hammersley did not know that Rizzio was on the way. Tomorrow they would meet. It would be interesting to watch that meeting. For, as to this thing, the mind of the General was clear. One of these men was false to Germany, the other true, but which? Both had come willingly, or was it by necessity? And Herr Maxwell! It was strange that Maxwell should have failed in his report at this crucial moment. And if Maxwell were dead—who had betrayed him? General von Stromberg’s thoughts were interrupted by a knock on the door and the entrance of the orderly.

“A telegram, Excellenz, by motorcycle from Windenberg.”

The General opened the paper. It was in code and he translated it rapidly.

Von Stromberg:

Withhold judgment until my arrival. Will be at Bremen tomorrow early with Miss Mather, who possesses valuable information.

Rizzio.

General von Stromberg sank deeper into his chair, the paper in his fingers, a smile broadening upon his features. The woman! It was almost too good to be true. Miss Doris Mather, the American girl, Hammersley’s fiancée, coming to Germany with Rizzio. And Hammersley obviously did not know it. Intrigue, mystery and now romance. Tomorrow——

The man still stood awaiting orders. Von Stromberg rose with a yawn.

“Is my room prepared?”

“Yes, Excellenz.”

​“Which one?”

“The same as before—next to that of Herr Hammersley.”

“Well, move it into the wing. And when I go up you will set a watch upon my door—also one outside my windows.”

“Zu befehl, Excellenz.”

“In the meanwhile send Herr Hauptmann Wentz to me here.”

The man went out and Captain Wentz entered immediately closing the door behind him.

“What time does the northern express leave Bremen in the morning?”

“At seven.”

General von Stromberg sat and wrote out a message.

“Have this message sent at once.” And then, “That train reaches Windenberg at what hour?”

“Twelve.”

“Good. This mountain air is excellent for the nerves. I shall sleep late tomorrow and do not wish to be called. You will go personally to Windenberg at eleven o’clock with a closed carriage. You will meet Herr Rizzio, whom you will recognize by his tall, distinguished appearance and excellent clothing. He will be accompanied by a young lady. It is my wish that they be brought to this house and given separate rooms on the upper story and placed under guard until I summon them. No one must see them enter this house. To accomplish this purpose, Herr Hammersley must go to the hangar. The means I leave to you. Captain von Winden will be of service. Do you understand?”

“Perfectly.”

​“For the present that is all. I shall go to my room. Good night.”

“Good night, Excellenz.”

•⁠•⁠•⁠•⁠•

Meanwhile, upstairs in his room, Hammersley, after having eaten, was preparing for bed. For a tired man he went about it in a very leisurely way, smoking a cigarette, and wandering about the room stretching his long limbs and yawning between whiles. Then, after a time, he took off his clothes and bathed. It was perhaps an hour before he blew out his candle, and even then he did not get immediately into bed. He sat on the edge of the couch for a while, listening and watching the cold moonlight outside his dormer window, or the dim line of light that came from beneath the door into the hall. Then, apparently satisfied that he was to be quite free from interruption, he straightened and stood up, waiting again. Still no sound. He reached for the table, where he had put his watch and the things from his pockets, and picked up a large pocket-knife, carefully opening the large blade. Then, with quick, noiseless footsteps, he crossed the room to the fireplace and felt with the fingers of one hand carefully along the edge of the chimney breast. His fingers reached a spot where there was an unevenness, and feeling carefully, thrust the knife-blade its full length beneath the paper, slowly withdrawing it. Something protruded which was quickly taken into the palm of his left hand. With great care he smoothed the broken wallpaper back into its place and noiselessly closing the knife got softly into bed.

He lay on his back for a while, his eyes wide open, watching the window and the door and then, pulling ​the heavy blankets up, slipped lower and lower under the covers until he disappeared from view. In the room all was dark, but under the blankets he read by the light of an electric pocket torch some writing in German upon a thin slip of paper.

Papers arrive tomorrow night, eleven—from Berlin—automobile—by Schöndorf road.

This article uses material from the Wikipedia article  Metasyntactic variable, which is released under the  Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.