The Lone Wolf: A Melodrama

Produced by Suzanne Shell, Jayam Subramanian and PG Distributed Proofreaders

THE LONE WOLF

By
LOUIS JOSEPH VANCE

1914

CONTENTS

I. TROYON'S

II. RETURN

III. A POINT OF INTERROGATION

IV. A STRATAGEM

V. ANTICLIMAX

VI. THE PACK GIVES TONGUE

VII. L'ABBAYE

VIII. THE HIGH HAND

IX. DISASTER

X. TURN ABOUT

XI. FLIGHT

XII. AWAKENING

XIII. CONFESSIONAL

XIV. RIVE DROIT

XV. SHEER IMPUDENCE

XVI. RESTITUTION

XVII. THE FORLORN HOPE

XVIII. ENIGMA

XIX. UNMASKED

XX. WAR

XXI. APOSTATE

XXII. TRAPPED

XXIII. MADAME OMBER

XXIV. RENDEZVOUS

XXV. WINGS OF THE MORNING

XXVI. THE FLYING DEATH

XXVII. DAYBREAK

THE LONE WOLF

I

TROYON'S

It must have been Bourke who first said that even if you knew your way about Paris you had to lose it in order to find it to Troyon's. But then Bourke was proud to be Irish.

Troyon's occupied a corner in a jungle of side-streets, well withdrawn from the bustle of the adjacent boulevards of St. Germain and St. Michel, and in its day was a restaurant famous with a fame jealously guarded by a select circle of patrons. Its cooking was the best in Paris, its cellar second to none, its rates ridiculously reasonable; yet Baedeker knew it not. And in the wisdom of the cognoscenti this was well: it had been a pity to loose upon so excellent an establishment the swarms of tourists that profaned every temple of gastronomy on the Rive Droit.

The building was of three storeys, painted a dingy drab and trimmed with dull green shutters. The restaurant occupied almost all of the street front of the ground floor, a blank, non-committal double doorway at one extreme of its plate-glass windows was seldom open and even more seldom noticed.

This doorway was squat and broad and closed the mouth of a wide, stone-walled passageway. In one of its two substantial wings of oak a smaller door had been cut for the convenience of Troyon's guests, who by this route gained the courtyard, a semi-roofed and shadowy place, cool on the hottest day. From the court a staircase, with an air of leading nowhere in particular, climbed lazily to the second storey and thereby justified its modest pretensions; for the two upper floors of Troyon's might have been plotted by a nightmare-ridden architect after witnessing one of the first of the Palais Royal farces.

Above stairs, a mediaeval maze of corridors long and short, complicated by many unexpected steps and staircases and turns and enigmatic doors, ran every-which-way and as a rule landed one in the wrong room, linking together, in all, some two-score bed-chambers. There were no salons or reception-rooms, there was never a bath-room, there wasn't even running water aside from two hallway taps, one to each storey. The honoured guest and the exacting went to bed by lamplight: others put up with candlesticks: gas burned only in the corridors and the restaurant--asthmatic jets that, spluttering blue within globes obese, semi-opaque, and yellowish, went well with furnishings and decorations of the Second Empire to which years had lent a mellow and somehow rakish dinginess; since nothing was ever refurbished.

With such accommodations the guests of Troyon's were well content. They were not many, to begin with, and they were almost all middle-aged bourgeois, a caste that resents innovations. They took Troyon's as they found it: the rooms suited them admirably, and the tariff was modest. Why do anything to disturb the perennial peace of so discreet and confidential an establishment? One did much as one pleased there, providing one's bill was paid with tolerable regularity and the hand kept supple that operated the cordon in the small hours of the night. Papa Troyon came from a tribe of inn-keepers and was liberal-minded; while as for Madame his wife, she cared for nothing but pieces of gold....

To Troyon's on a wet winter night in the year 1893 came the child who as a man was to call himself Michael Lanyard.

He must have been four or five years old at that time: an age at which consciousness is just beginning to recognize its individuality and memory registers with capricious irregularity. He arrived at the hotel in a state of excitement involving an almost abnormal sensitiveness to impressions; but that was soon drowned deep in dreamless slumbers of healthy exhaustion; and when he came to look back through a haze of days, of which each had made its separate and imperative demand upon his budding emotions, he found his store of memories strangely dulled and disarticulate.

The earliest definite picture was that of himself, a small but vastly important figure, nursing a heavy heart in a dark corner of a fiacre. Beside him sat a man who swore fretfully into his moustache whenever the whimpering of the boy threatened to develop into honest bawls: a strange creature, with pockets full of candy and a way with little boys in public surly and domineering, in private timid and propitiatory. It was raining monotonously, with that melancholy persistence which is the genius of Parisian winters; and the paving of the interminable strange streets was as black glass shot with coloured lights. Some of the streets roared like famished beasts, others again were silent, if with a silence no less sinister. The rain made incessant crepitation on the roof of the fiacre, and the windows wept without respite. Within the cab a smell of mustiness contended feebly with the sickening reek of a cigar which the man was forever relighting and which as often turned cold between his teeth. Outside, unwearying hoofs were beating their deadly rhythm, _cloppetty-clop_....

Back of all this lurked something formlessly alluring, something sad and sweet and momentous, which belonged very personally to the child but which he could never realize. Memory crept blindly toward it over a sword-wide bridge that had no end. There had been (or the boy had dreamed it) a long, weariful journey by railroad, the sequel to one by boat more brief but wholly loathsome. Beyond this point memory failed though sick with yearning. And the child gave over his instinctive but rather inconsecutive efforts to retrace his history: his daily life at Troyon's furnished compelling and obliterating interests.

Madame saw to that.

It was Madame who took charge of him when the strange man dragged him crying from the cab, through a cold, damp place gloomy with shadows, and up stairs to a warm bright bedroom: a formidable body, this Madame, with cold eyes and many hairy moles, who made odd noises in her throat while she undressed the little boy with the man standing by, noises meant to sound compassionate and maternal but, to the child at least, hopelessly otherwise.

Then drowsiness stealing upon one over a pillow wet with tears ... oblivion....

And Madame it was who ruled with iron hand the strange new world to which the boy awakened.

The man was gone by morning, and the child never saw him again; but inasmuch as those about him understood no English and he no French, it was some time before he could grasp the false assurances of Madame that his father had gone on a journey but would presently return. The child knew positively that the man was not his father, but when he was able to make this correction the matter had faded into insignificance: life had become too painful to leave time or inclination for the adjustment of such minor and incidental questions as one's parentage.

The little boy soon learned to know himself as Marcel, which wasn't his name, and before long was unaware he had ever had another. As he grew older he passed as Marcel Troyon; but by then he had forgotten how to speak English.

A few days after his arrival the warm, bright bed-chamber was exchanged for a cold dark closet opening off Madame's boudoir, a cupboard furnished with a rickety cot and a broken chair, lacking any provision for heat or light, and ventilated solely by a transom over the door; and inasmuch as Madame shared the French horror of draughts and so kept her boudoir hermetically sealed nine months of the year, the transom didn't mend matters much. But that closet formed the boy's sole refuge, if a precarious one, through several years; there alone was he ever safe from kicks and cuffs and scoldings for faults beyond his comprehension; but he was never permitted a candle, and the darkness and loneliness made the place one of haunted terror to the sensitive and imaginative nature of a growing child.

He was, however, never insufficiently fed; and the luxury of forgetting misery in sleep could not well be denied him.

By day, until of age to go to school, he played apprehensively in the hallways with makeshift toys, a miserable, dejected little body with his heart in his mouth at every sudden footfall, very much in the way of femmes-de-chambre who had nothing in common with the warm-hearted, impulsive, pitiful serving women of fiction. They complained of him to Madame, and Madame came promptly to cuff him. He soon learned an almost uncanny cunning in the art of effacing himself, when she was imminent, to be as still as death and to move with the silence of a wraith. Not infrequently his huddled immobility in a shadowy corner escaped her notice as she passed. But it always exasperated her beyond measure to look up, when she fancied herself alone, and become aware of the wide-eyed, terrified stare of the transfixed boy....

That he was privileged to attend school at all was wholly due to a great fear that obsessed Madame of doing anything to invite the interest of the authorities. She was an honest woman, according to her lights, an honest wife, and kept an honest house; but she feared the gendarmerie more than the Wrath of God. And by ukase of Government a certain amount of education was compulsory. So Marcel learned among other things to read, and thereby took his first blind step toward salvation.

Reading being the one pastime which could be practiced without making a noise of any sort to attract undesirable attentions, the boy took to it in self-defence. But before long it had become his passion. He read, by stealth, everything that fell into his hands, a weird mélange of newspapers, illustrated Parisian weeklies, magazines, novels: cullings from the débris of guest-chambers.

Before Marcel was eleven he had read "Les Misérables" with intense appreciation.

His reading, however, was not long confined to works in the French language. Now and again some departing guest would leave an English novel in his room, and these Marcel treasured beyond all other books; they seemed to him, in a way, part of his birthright. Secretly he called himself English in those days, because he knew he wasn't French: that much, at least, he remembered. And he spent long hours poring over the strange words until; at length, they came to seem less strange in his eyes. And then some accident threw his way a small English-French dictionary.

He was able to read English before he could speak it.

Out of school hours a drudge and scullion, the associate of scullions and their immediate betters, drawn from that caste of loose tongues and looser morals which breeds servants for small hotels, Marcel at eleven (as nearly as his age can be computed) possessed a comprehension of life at once exact, exhaustive and appalling.

Perhaps it was fortunate that he lived without friendship. His concept of womanhood was incarnate in Madame Troyon; so he gave all the hotel women a wide berth.

The men-servants he suffered in silence when they would permit it; but his nature was so thoroughly disassociated from anything within their experience that they resented him: a circumstance which exposed him to a certain amount of baiting not unlike that which the village idiot receives at the hands of rustic boors--until Marcel learned to defend himself with a tongue which could distil vitriol from the vernacular, and with fists and feet as well. Thereafter he was left severely to himself and glad of it, since it furnished him with just so much more time for reading and dreaming over what he read.

By fifteen he had developed into a long, lank, loutish youth, with a face of extraordinary pallor, a sullen mouth, hot black eyes, and dark hair like a mane, so seldom was it trimmed. He looked considerably older than he was and the slightness of his body was deceptive, disguising a power of sinewy strength. More than this, he could care very handily for himself in a scrimmage: la savate had no secrets from him, and he had picked up tricks from the Apaches quite as effectual as any in the manual of jiu-jitsu. Paris he knew as you and I know the palms of our hands, and he could converse with the precision of the native-born in any one of the city's several odd argots.

To these accomplishments he added that of a thoroughly practised petty thief.

His duties were by day those of valet-de-chambre on the third floor; by night he acted as omnibus in the restaurant. For these services he received no pay and less consideration from his employers (who would have been horrified by the suggestion that they countenanced slavery) only his board and a bed in a room scarcely larger, if somewhat better ventilated, than the boudoir-closet from which he had long since been ousted. This room was on the ground floor, at the back of the house, and boasted a small window overlooking a narrow alley.

He was routed out before daylight, and his working day ended as a rule at ten in the evening--though when there were performances on at the Odéon, the restaurant remained open until an indeterminate hour for the accommodation of the supper trade.

Once back in his kennel, its door closed and bolted, Marcel was free to squirm out of the window and roam and range Paris at will. And it was thus that he came by most of his knowledge of the city.

But for the most part Marcel preferred to lie abed and read himself half-blind by the light of purloined candle-ends. Books he borrowed as of old from the rooms of guests or else pilfered from quai-side stalls and later sold to dealers in more distant quarters of the city. Now and again, when he needed some work not to be acquired save through outright purchase, the guests would pay further if unconscious tribute through the sly abstraction of small coins. Your true Parisian, however, keeps track of his money to the ultimate sou, an idiosyncrasy which obliged the boy to practise most of his peculations on the fugitive guest of foreign extraction.

In the number of these, perhaps the one best known to Troyon's was Bourke.

He was a quick, compact, dangerous little Irishman who had fallen into the habit of "resting" at Troyon's whenever a vacation from London seemed a prescription apt to prove wholesome for a gentleman of his kidney; which was rather frequently, arguing that Bourke's professional activities were fairly onerous.

Having received most of his education in Dublin University, Bourke spoke the purest English known, or could when so minded, while his facile Irish tongue had caught the trick of an accent which passed unchallenged on the Boulevardes. He had an alert eye for pretty women, a heart as big as all out-doors, no scruples worth mentioning, a secret sorrow, and a pet superstition.

The colour of his hair, a clamorous red, was the spring of his secret sorrow. By that token he was a marked man. At irregular intervals he made frantic attempts to disguise it; but the only dye that would serve at all was a jet-black and looked like the devil in contrast with his high colouring. Moreover, before a week passed, the red would crop up again wherever the hair grew thin, lending him the appearance of a badly-singed pup.

His pet superstition was that, as long as he refrained from practising his profession in Paris, Paris would remain his impregnable Tower of Refuge. The world owed Bourke a living, or he so considered; and it must be allowed that he made collections on account with tolerable regularity and success; but Paris was tax-exempt as long as Paris offered him immunity from molestation.

Not only did Paris suit his tastes excellently, but there was no place, in Bourke's esteem, comparable with Troyon's for peace and quiet. Hence, the continuity of his patronage was never broken by trials of rival hostelries; and Troyon's was always expecting Bourke for the simple reason that he invariably arrived unexpectedly, with neither warning nor ostentation, to stop as long as he liked, whether a day or a week or a month, and depart in the same manner.

His daily routine, as Troyon's came to know it, varied but slightly: he breakfasted abed, about half after ten, lounged in his room or the café all day if the weather were bad, or strolled peacefully in the gardens of the Luxembourg if it were good, dined early and well but always alone, and shortly afterward departed by cab for some well-known bar on the Rive Droit; whence, it is to be presumed, he moved on to other resorts, for he never was home when the house was officially closed for the night, the hours of his return remaining a secret between himself and the concierge.

On retiring, Bourke would empty his pockets upon the dressing-table, where the boy Marcel, bringing up Bourke's petit déjeuner the next morning, would see displayed a tempting confusion of gold and silver and copper, with a wad of bank-notes, and the customary assortment of personal hardware.

Now inasmuch as Bourke was never wide-awake at that hour, and always after acknowledging Marcel's "bon jour" rolled over and snored for Glory and the Saints, it was against human nature to resist the allure of that dressing-table. Marcel seldom departed without a coin or two.

He had yet to learn that Bourke's habits were those of an Englishman, who never goes to bed without leaving all his pocket-money in plain sight and--carefully catalogued in his memory....

One morning in the spring of 1904 Marcel served Bourke his last breakfast at Troyon's.

The Irishman had been on the prowl the previous night, and his rasping snore was audible even through the closed door when Marcel knocked and, receiving no answer, used the pass-key and entered.

At this the snore was briefly interrupted; Bourke, visible at first only as a flaming shock of hair protruding from the bedclothes, squirmed an eye above his artificial horizon, opened it, mumbled inarticulate acknowledgment of Marcel's salutation, and passed blatantly into further slumbers.

Marcel deposited his tray on a table beside the bed, moved quietly to the windows, closed them, and drew the lace curtains together. The dressing-table between the windows displayed, amid the silver and copper, more gold coins than it commonly did--some eighteen or twenty louis altogether. Adroitly abstracting en passant a piece of ten francs, Marcel went on his way rejoicing, touched a match to the fire all ready-laid in the grate, and was nearing the door when, casting one casual parting glance at the bed, he became aware of a notable phenomenon: the snoring was going on lustily, but Bourke was watching him with both eyes wide and filled with interest.

Startled and, to tell the truth, a bit indignant, the boy stopped as though at word of command. But after the first flash of astonishment his young face hardened to immobility. Only his eyes remained constant to Bourke's.

The Irishman, sitting up in bed, demanded and received the piece of ten francs, and went on to indict the boy for the embezzlement of several sums running into a number of louis.

Marcel, reflecting that Bourke's reckoning was still some louis shy, made no bones about pleading guilty. Interrogated, the culprit deposed that he had taken the money because he needed it to buy books. No, he wasn't sorry. Yes, it was probable that, granted further opportunity, he would do it again. Advised that he was apparently a case-hardened young criminal, he replied that youth was not his fault; with years and experience he would certainly improve.

Puzzled by the boy's attitude, Bourke agitated his hair and wondered aloud how Marcel would like it if his employers were informed of his peculations.

Marcel looked pained and pointed out that such a course on the part of Bourke would be obviously unfair; the only real difference between them, he explained, was that where he filched a louis Bourke filched thousands; and if Bourke insisted on turning him over to the mercy of Madame and Papa Troyon, who would certainly summon a sergent de ville, he, Marcel, would be quite justified in retaliating by telling the Préfecture de Police all he knew about Bourke.

This was no chance shot, and took the Irishman between wind and water; and when, dismayed, he blustered, demanding to know what the boy meant by his damned impudence, Marcel quietly advised him that one knew what one knew: if one read the English newspaper in the café, as Marcel did, one could hardly fail to remark that monsieur always came to Paris after some notable burglary had been committed in London; and if one troubled to follow monsieur by night, as Marcel had, it became evident that monsieur's first calls in Paris were invariably made at the establishment of a famous fence in the rue des Trois Frères; and, finally, one drew one's own conclusions when strangers dining in the restaurant--as on the night before, by way of illustration--strangers who wore all the hall-marks of police detectives from England--catechised one about a person whose description was the portrait of Bourke, and promised a hundred-franc note for information concerning the habits and whereabouts of that person, if seen.

Marcel added, while Bourke gasped for breath, that the gentleman in question had spoken to him alone, in the absence of other waiters, and had been fobbed off with a lie.

But why--Bourke wanted to know--had Marcel lied to save him, when the truth would have earned him a hundred francs?

"Because," Marcel explained coolly, "I, too, am a thief. Monsieur will perceive it was a matter of professional honour."

Now the Irish have their faults, but ingratitude is not of their number.

Bourke, packing hastily to leave Paris, France and Europe by the fastest feasible route, still found time to question Marcel briefly; and what he learned from the boy about his antecedents so worked with gratitude upon the sentimental nature of the Celt, that when on the third day following the Cunarder Carpathia left Naples for New York, she carried not only a gentleman whose brilliant black hair and glowing pink complexion rendered him a bit too conspicuous among her first-cabin passengers for his own comfort, but also in the second cabin his valet--a boy of sixteen who looked eighteen.

The gentleman's name on the passenger-list didn't, of course, in the least resemble Bourke. His valet's was given as Michael Lanyard.

The origin of this name is obscure; Michael being easily corrupted into good Irish Mickey may safely be attributed to Bourke; Lanyard has a tang of the sea which suggests a reminiscence of some sea-tale prized by the pseudo Marcel Troyon.

In New York began the second stage in the education of a professional criminal. The boy must have searched far for a preceptor of more sound attainments than Bourke. It is, however, only fair to say that Bourke must have looked as far for an apter pupil. Under his tutelage, Michael Lanyard learned many things; he became a mathematician of considerable promise, an expert mechanician, a connoisseur of armour-plate and explosives in their more pacific applications, and he learned to grade precious stones with a glance. Also, because Bourke was born of gentlefolk, he learned to speak English, what clothes to wear and when to wear them, and the civilized practice with knife and fork at table. And because Bourke was a diplomatist of sorts, Marcel acquired the knack of being at ease in every grade of society: he came to know that a self-made millionaire, taken the right way, is as approachable as one whose millions date back even unto the third generation; he could order a dinner at Sherry's as readily as drinks at Sharkey's. Most valuable accomplishment of all, he learned to laugh. In the way of by-products he picked up a working acquaintance with American, English and German slang--French slang he already knew as a mother-tongue--considerable geographical knowledge of the capitals of Europe, America and Illinois, a taste that discriminated between tobacco and the stuff sold as such in France, and a genuine passion for good paintings.

Finally Bourke drilled into his apprentice the three cardinal principles of successful cracksmanship: to know his ground thoroughly before venturing upon it; to strike and retreat with the swift precision of a hawk; to be friendless.

And the last of these was the greatest.

"You're a promising lad," he said--so often that Lanyard would almost wince from that formula of introduction--"a promising lad, though it's sad I should be to say it, instead of proud as I am. For I've made you: but for me you'd long since have matriculated at La Tour Pointue and graduated with the canaille of the Santé. And in time you may become a first-chop operator, which I'm not and never will be; but if you do, 'twill be through fighting shy of two things. The first of them's Woman, and the second is Man. To make a friend of a man you must lower your guard. Ordinarily 'tis fatal. As for Woman, remember this, m'lad: to let love into your life you must open a door no mortal hand can close. And God only knows what'll follow in. If ever you find you've fallen in love and can't fall out, cut the game on the instant, or you'll end wearing stripes or broad arrows--the same as myself would, if this cursed cough wasn't going to be the death of me.... No, m'lad: take a fool's advice (you'll never get better) and when you're shut of me, which will be soon, I'm thinking, take the Lonesome Road and stick to the middle of it. 'He travels the fastest that travels alone' is a true saying, but 'tis only half the truth: he travels the farthest into the bargain.... Yet the Lonesome Road has its drawbacks, lad--it's _damned_ lonely!"

Bourke died in Switzerland, of consumption, in the winter of 1910--Lanyard at his side till the end.

Then the boy set his face against the world: alone, lonely, and remembering.

II

RETURN

His return to Troyon's, whereas an enterprise which Lanyard had been contemplating for several years--in fact, ever since the death of Bourke--came to pass at length almost purely as an affair of impulse.

He had come through from London by the afternoon service--via Boulogne--travelling light, with nothing but a brace of handbags and his life in his hands. Two coups to his credit since the previous midnight had made the shift advisable, though only one of them, the later, rendered it urgent.

Scotland Yard would, he reckoned, require at least twenty-four hours to unlimber for action on the Omber affair; but the other, the theft of the Huysman plans, though not consummated before noon, must have set the Chancelleries of at least three Powers by the ears before Lanyard was fairly entrained at Charing Cross.

Now his opinion of Scotland Yard was low; its emissaries must operate gingerly to keep within the laws they serve. But the agents of the various Continental secret services have a way of making their own laws as they go along: and for these Lanyard entertained a respect little short of profound.

He would not have been surprised had he ran foul of trouble on the pier at Folkestone. Boulogne, as well, figured in his imagination as a crucial point: its harbour lights, heaving up over the grim grey waste, peered through the deepening violet dusk to find him on the packet's deck, responding to their curious stare with one no less insistently inquiring.... But it wasn't until in the gauntlet of the Gare du Nord itself that he found anything to shy at.

Dropping from train to platform, he surrendered his luggage to a ready facteur, and followed the man through the crush, elbowed and shouldered, offended by the pervasive reek of chilled steam and coal-gas, and dazzled by the brilliant glare of the overhanging electric arcs.

Almost the first face he saw turned his way was that of Roddy.

The man from Scotland Yard was stationed at one side of the platform gates. Opposite him stood another known by sight to Lanyard--a highly decorative official from the Préfecture de Police. Both were scanning narrowly every face in the tide that churned between them.

Wondering if through some fatal freak of fortuity these were acting under late telegraphic advice from London, Lanyard held himself well in hand: the first sign of intent to hinder him would prove the signal for a spectacular demonstration of the ungentle art of not getting caught with the goods on. And for twenty seconds, while the crowd milled slowly through the narrow exit, he was as near to betraying himself as he had ever been--nearer, for he had marked down the point on Roddy's jaw where his first blow would fall, and just where to plant a coup-de-savate most surely to incapacitate the minion of the Préfecture; and all the while was looking the two over with a manner of the most calm and impersonal curiosity.

But beyond an almost imperceptible narrowing of Roddy's eyes when they met his own, as if the Englishman were struggling with a faulty memory, neither police agent betrayed the least recognition.

And then Lanyard was outside the station, his facteur introducing him to a ramshackle taxicab.

No need to speculate whether or not Roddy were gazing after him; in the ragged animal who held the door while Lanyard fumbled for his facteur's tip, he recognized a runner for the Préfecture; and beyond question there were many such about. If any lingering doubt should trouble Roddy's mind he need only ask, "Such-and-such an one took what cab and for what destination?" to be instantly and accurately informed.

In such case to go directly to his apartment, that handy little rez-de-chaussée near the Trocadéro, was obviously inadvisable. Without apparent hesitation Lanyard directed the driver to the Hotel Lutetia, tossed the ragged spy a sou, and was off to the tune of a slammed door and a motor that sorely needed overhauling....

The rain, which had welcomed the train a few miles from Paris, was in the city torrential. Few wayfarers braved the swimming sidewalks, and the little clusters of chairs and tables beneath permanent café awnings were one and all neglected. But in the roadways an amazing concourse of vehicles, mostly motor-driven, skimmed, skidded, and shot over burnished asphalting all, of course, at top-speed--else this were not Paris. Lanyard thought of insects on the surface of some dark forest pool....

The roof of the cab rang like a drumhead; the driver blinked through the back-splatter from his rubber apron; now and again the tyres lost grip on the treacherous going and provided instants of lively suspense. Lanyard lowered a window to release the musty odour peculiar to French taxis, got well peppered with moisture, and promptly put it up again. Then insensibly he relaxed, in the toils of memories roused by the reflection that this night fairly duplicated that which had welcomed him to Paris, twenty years ago.

It was then that, for the first time in several months, he thought definitely of Troyon's.

And it was then that Chance ordained that his taxicab should skid. On the point of leaving the Ile de la Cité by way of the Pont St. Michel, it suddenly (one might pardonably have believed) went mad, darting crabwise from the middle of the road to the right-hand footway with evident design to climb the rail and make an end to everything in the Seine. The driver regained control barely in time to avert a tragedy, and had no more than accomplished this much when a bit of broken glass gutted one of the rear tyres, which promptly gave up the ghost with a roar like that of a lusty young cannon.

At this the driver (apparently a person of religious bias) said something heartfelt about the sacred name of his pipe and, crawling from under the apron, turned aft to assess damages.

On his own part Lanyard swore in sound Saxon, opened the door, and delivered himself to the pelting shower.

"Well?" he enquired after watching the driver muzzle the eviscerated tyre for some eloquent moments.

Turning up a distorted face, the other gesticulated with profane abandon, by way of good measure interpolating a few disconnected words and phrases. Lanyard gathered that this was the second accident of the same nature since noon that the cab consequently lacked a spare tyre, and that short of a trip to the garage the accident was irremediable. So he said (intelligently) it couldn't be helped, paid the man and over tipped precisely as though their journey had been successfully consummated, and standing over his luggage watched the maimed vehicle limp miserably off through the teeming mists.

Now in normal course his plight should have been relieved within two minutes. But it wasn't. For some time all such taxis as did pass displayed scornfully inverted flags. Also, their drivers jeered in their pleasing Parisian way at the lonely outlander occupying a position of such uncommon distinction in the heart of the storm and the precise middle of the Pont St. Michel.

Over to the left, on the Quai de Marché Neuf, the façade of the Préfecture frowned portentously--"La Tour Pointue," as the Parisian loves to term it. Lanyard forgot his annoyance long enough to salute that grim pile with a mocking bow, thinking of the men therein who would give half their possessions to lay hands on him who was only a few hundred yards distant, marooned in the rain!...

In its own good time a night-prowling fiacre ambled up and veered over to his hail. He viewed this stroke of good-fortune with intense disgust: the shambling, weather-beaten animal between the shafts promised a long, damp crawl to the Lutetia.

And on this reflection he yielded to impulse.

Heaving in his luggage--"Troyon's!" he told the cocher....

The fiacre lumbered off into that dark maze of streets, narrow and tortuous, which backs up from the Seine to the Luxembourg, while its fare reflected that Fate had not served him so hardly after all: if Roddy had really been watching for him at the Gare du Nord, with a mind to follow and wait for his prey to make some incriminating move, this chance-contrived change of vehicles and destination would throw the detective off the scent and gain the adventurer, at worst, several hours' leeway.

When at length his conveyance drew up at the historic corner, Lanyard alighting could have rubbed his eyes to see the windows of Troyon's all bright with electric light.

Somehow, and most unreasonably, he had always believed the place would go to the hands of the house-wrecker unchanged.

A smart portier ducked out, seized his luggage, and offered an umbrella. Lanyard composed his features to immobility as he entered the hotel, of no mind to let the least flicker of recognition be detected in his eyes when they should re-encounter familiar faces.

And this was quite as well: for--again--the first he saw was Roddy.

III

A POINT OF INTERROGATION

The man from Scotland Yard had just surrendered hat, coat, and umbrella to the vestiaire and was turning through swinging doors to the dining-room. Again, embracing Lanyard, his glance seemed devoid of any sort of intelligible expression; and if its object needed all his self-possession in that moment, it was to dissemble relief rather than dismay. An accent of the fortuitous distinguished this second encounter too persuasively to excuse further misgivings. What the adventurer himself hadn't known till within the last ten minutes, that he was coming to Troyon's, Roddy couldn't possibly have anticipated; ergo, whatever the detective's business, it had nothing to do with Lanyard.

Furthermore, before quitting the lobby, Roddy paused long enough to instruct the vestiaire to have a fire laid in his room.

So he was stopping at Troyon's--and didn't care who knew it!

His doubts altogether dissipated by this incident, Lanyard followed his natural enemy into the dining-room with an air as devil-may-care as one could wish and so impressive that the maitre-d'hotel abandoned the detective to the mercies of one of his captains and himself hastened to seat Lanyard and take his order.

This last disposed of; Lanyard surrendered himself to new impressions--of which the first proved a bit disheartening.

However impulsively, he hadn't resought Troyon's without definite intent, to wit, to gain some clue, however slender, to the mystery of that wretched child, Marcel. But now it appeared he had procrastinated fatally: Time and Change had left little other than the shell of the Troyon's he remembered. Papa Troyon was gone; Madame no longer occupied the desk of the caisse; enquiries, so discreetly worded as to be uncompromising, elicited from the maitre-d'hôtel the information that the house had been under new management these eighteen months; the old proprietor was dead, and his widow had sold out lock, stock and barrel, and retired to the country--it was not known exactly where. And with the new administration had come fresh decorations and furnishings as well as a complete change of personnel: not even one of the old waiters remained.

"'All, all are gone, the old familiar faces,'" Lanyard quoted in vindictive melancholy--"damn 'em!"

Happily, it was soon demonstrated that the cuisine was being maintained on its erstwhile plane of excellence: one still had that comfort....

Other impressions, less ultimate, proved puzzling, disconcerting, and paradoxically reassuring.

Lanyard commanded a fair view of Roddy across the waist of the room. The detective had ordered a meal that matched his aspect well--both of true British simplicity. He was a square-set man with a square jaw, cold blue eyes, a fat nose, a thin-lipped trap of a mouth, a face as red as rare beefsteak. His dinner comprised a cut from the joint, boiled potatoes, brussels sprouts, a bit of cheese, a bottle of Bass. He ate slowly, chewing with the doggedness of a strong character hampered by a weak digestion, and all the while kept eyes fixed to an issue of the Paris edition of the London Daily Mail, with an effect of concentration quite too convincing.

Now one doesn't read the Paris edition of the London Daily Mail with tense excitement. Humanly speaking, it can't be done.

Where, then, was the object of this so sedulously dissembled interest?

Lanyard wasn't slow to read this riddle to his satisfaction--in as far, that is, as it was satisfactory to feel still more certain that Roddy's quarry was another than himself.

Despite the lateness of the hour, which had by now turned ten o'clock, the restaurant had a dozen tables or so in the service of guests pleasantly engaged in lengthening out an agreeable evening with dessert, coffee, liqueurs and cigarettes. The majority of these were in couples, but at a table one removed from Roddy's sat a party of three; and Lanyard noticed, or fancied, that the man from Scotland Yard turned his newspaper only during lulls in the conversation in this quarter.

Of the three, one might pass for an American of position and wealth: a man of something more than sixty years, with an execrable accent, a racking cough, and a thin, patrician cast of features clouded darkly by the expression of a soul in torment, furrowed, seamed, twisted--a mask of mortal anguish. And once, when this one looked up and casually encountered Lanyard's gaze, the adventurer was shocked to find himself staring into eyes like those of a dead man: eyes of a grey so light that at a little distance the colour of the irises blended indistinguishably with their whites, leaving visible only the round black points of pupils abnormally distended and staring, blank, fixed, passionless, beneath lashless lids.

For the instant they seemed to explore Lanyard's very soul with a look of remote and impersonal curiosity; then they fell away; and when next the adventurer looked, the man had turned to attend to some observation of one of his companions.

On his right sat a girl who might be his daughter; for not only was she, too, hall-marked American, but she was far too young to be the other's wife. A demure, old-fashioned type; well-poised but unassuming; fetchingly gowned and with sufficient individuality of taste but not conspicuously; a girl with soft brown hair and soft brown eyes; pretty, not extravagantly so when her face was in repose, but with a slow smile that rendered her little less than beautiful: in all (Lanyard thought) the kind of woman that is predestined to comfort mankind, whose strongest instinct is the maternal.

She took little part in the conversation, seldom interrupting what was practically a duologue between her putative father and the third of their party.

This last was one, whom Lanyard was sure he knew, though he could see no more than the back of Monsieur le Comte Remy de Morbihan.

And he wondered with a thrill of amusement if it were possible that Roddy was on the trail of that tremendous buck. If so, it would be a chase worth following--a diversion rendered the more exquisite to Lanyard by the spice of novelty, since for once he would figure as a dispassionate bystander.

The name of Comte Remy de Morbihan, although unrecorded in the Almanach de Gotha, was one to conjure with in the Paris of his day and generation. He claimed the distinction of being at once the homeliest, one of the wealthiest, and the most-liked man in France.

As to his looks, good or bad, they were said to prove infallibly fatal with women, while not a few men, perhaps for that reason, did their possessor the honour to imitate them. The revues burlesqued him; Sem caricatured him; Forain counterfeited him extensively in that inimitable series of Monday morning cartoons for Le Figaro: one said "De Morbihan" instinctively at sight of that stocky figure, short and broad, topped by a chubby, moon-like mask with waxed moustaches, womanish eyes, and never-failing grin.

A creature of proverbial good-nature and exhaustless vitality, his extraordinary popularity was due to the equally extraordinary extravagance with which he supported that latest Gallic fad, "le Sport." The Parisian Rugby team was his pampered protégé, he was an active member of the Tennis Club, maintained not only a flock of automobiles but a famous racing stable, rode to hounds, was a good field gun, patronized aviation and motor-boat racing, risked as many maximums during the Monte Carlo season as the Grand Duke Michael himself, and was always ready to whet rapiers or burn a little harmless powder of an early morning in the Parc aux Princes.

But there were ugly whispers current with respect to the sources of his fabulous wealth. Lanyard, for one, wouldn't have thought him the properest company or the best Parisian cicerone for an ailing American gentleman blessed with independent means and an attractive daughter.

Paris, on the other hand--Paris who forgives everything to him who contributes to her amusement--adored Comte Remy de Morbihan ...

But perhaps Lanyard was prejudiced by his partiality for Americans, a sentiment the outgrowth of the years spent in New York with Bourke. He even fancied that between his spirit and theirs existed some subtle bond of sympathy. For all he knew he might himself be American...

For some time Lanyard strained to catch something of the conversation that seemed to hold so much of interest for Roddy, but without success because of the hum of voices that filled the room. In time, however, the gathering began to thin out, until at length there remained only this party of three, Lanyard enjoying a most delectable salad, and Roddy puffing a cigar (with such a show of enjoyment that Lanyard suspected him of the sin of smuggling) and slowly gulping down a second bottle of Bass.

Under these conditions the talk between De Morbihan and the Americans became public property.

The first remark overheard by Lanyard came from the elderly American, following a pause and a consultation of his watch.

"Quarter to eleven," he announced.

"Plenty of time," said De Morbihan cheerfully. "That is," he amended, "if mademoiselle isn't bored ..."

The girl's reply, accompanied by a pretty inclination of her head toward the Frenchman, was lost in the accents of the first speaker--a strong and sonorous voice, in strange contrast with his ravaged appearance and distressing cough.

"Don't let that worry you," he advised cheerfully. "Lucia's accustomed to keeping late hours with me; and who ever heard of a young and pretty woman being bored on the third day of her first visit to Paris?"

He pronounced the name with the hard C of the Italian tongue, as though it were spelled Luchia.

"To be sure," laughed the Frenchman; "one suspects it will be long before mademoiselle loses interest in the rue de la Paix."

"You may well, when such beautiful things come from it," said the girl. "See what we found there to-day."

She slipped a ring from her hand and passed it to De Morbihan.

There followed silence for an instant, then an exclamation from the Frenchman:

"But it is superb! Accept, mademoiselle, my compliments. It is worthy even of you."

She flushed prettily as she nodded smiling acknowledgement.

"Ah, you Americans!" De Morbihan sighed. "You fill us with envy: you have the souls of poets and the wealth of princes!"

"But we must come to Paris to find beautiful things for our women-folk!"

"Take care, though, lest you go too far, Monsieur Bannon."

"How so--too far?"

"You might attract the attention of the Lone Wolf. They say he's on the prowl once more."

The American laughed a trace contemptuously. Lanyard's fingers tightened on his knife and fork; otherwise he made no sign. A sidelong glance into a mirror at his elbow showed Roddy still absorbed in the Daily Mail.

The girl bent forward with a look of eager interest.

"The Lone Wolf? Who is that?"

"You don't know him in America, mademoiselle?"

"No...."

"The Lone Wolf, my dear Lucia," the valetudinarian explained in a dryly humourous tone, "is the sobriquet fastened by some imaginative French reporter upon a celebrated criminal who seems to have made himself something of a pest over here, these last few years. Nobody knows anything definite about him, apparently, but he operates in a most individual way and keeps the police busy trying to guess where he'll strike next."

The girl breathed an incredulous exclamation.

"But I assure you!" De Morbihan protested. "The rogue has had a wonderfully successful career, thanks to his dispensing with confederates and confining his depredations to jewels and similar valuables, portable and easy to convert into cash. Yet," he added, nodding sagely, "one isn't afraid to predict his race is almost run." "You don't tell me!" the older man exclaimed. "Have they picked up the scent--at last?"

"The man is known," De Morbihan affirmed.

By now the conversation had caught the interest of several loitering waiters, who were listening open-mouthed. Even Roddy seemed a bit startled, and for once forgot to make business with his newspaper; but his wondering stare was exclusively for De Morbihan.

Lanyard put down knife and fork, swallowed a final mouthful of Haut Brion, and lighted a cigarette with the hand of a man who knew not the meaning of nerves.

"Garçon!" he called quietly; and ordered coffee and cigars, with a liqueur to follow....

"Known!" the American exclaimed. "They've caught him, eh?"

"I didn't say that," De Morbihan laughed; "but the mystery is no more--in certain quarters."

"Who is he, then?"

"That--monsieur will pardon me--I'm not yet free to state. Indeed, I may be indiscreet in saying as much as I do. Yet, among friends..."

His shrug implied that, as far as _he_ was concerned, waiters were unhuman and the other guests of the establishment non-existent.

"But," the American persisted, "perhaps you can tell us how they got on his track?"

"It wasn't difficult," said De Morbihan: "indeed, quite simple. This tone of depreciation is becoming, for it was my part to suggest the solution to my friend, the Chief of the Sûreté. He had been annoyed and distressed, had even spoken of handing in his resignation because of his inability to cope with this gentleman, the Lone Wolf. And since he is my friend, I too was distressed on his behalf, and badgered my poor wits until they chanced upon an idea which led us to the light."

"You won't tell us?" the girl protested, with a little moue of disappointment, as the Frenchman paused provokingly.

"Perhaps I shouldn't. And yet--why not? As I say, it was elementary reasoning--a mere matter of logical deduction and elimination. One made up one's mind the Lone Wolf must be a certain sort of man; the rest was simply sifting France for the man to fit the theory, and then watching him until he gave himself away."

"You don't imagine we're going to let you stop there?" The American demanded in an aggrieved tone.

"No? I must continue? Very well: I confess to some little pride. It was a feat. He is cunning, that one!"

De Morbihan paused and shifted sideways in his chair, grinning like a mischievous child.

By this manoeuvre, thanks to the arrangement of mirrors lining the walls, he commanded an indirect view of Lanyard; a fact of which the latter was not unaware, though his expression remained unchanged as he sat--with a corner of his eye reserved for Roddy--speculating whether De Morbihan were telling the truth or only boasting for his own glorification.

"Do go on--please!" the girl begged prettily.

"I can deny you nothing, mademoiselle.... Well, then! From what little was known of this mysterious creature, one readily inferred he must be a bachelor, with no close friends. That is clear, I trust?"

"Too deep for me, my friend," the elderly man confessed.

"Impenetrable reticence," the Count expounded, sententious--and enjoying himself hugely--"isn't possible in the human relations. Sooner or later one is doomed to share one's secrets, however reluctantly, even unconsciously, with a wife, a mistress, a child, or with some trusted friend. And a secret between two is--a prolific breeder of platitudes! Granted this line of reasoning, the Lone Wolf is of necessity not only unmarried but practically friendless. Other attributes of his will obviously comprise youth, courage, imagination, a rather high order of intelligence, and a social position--let us say, rather, an ostensible business--enabling him to travel at will hither and yon without exciting comment. So far, good! My friend the Chief of the Sûreté forthwith commissioned his agents to seek such an one, and by this means several fine fish were enmeshed in the net of suspicion, carefully scrutinized, and one by one let go--all except one, the veritable man. Him they sedulously watched, shadowing him across Europe and back again. He was in Berlin at the time of the famous Rheinart robbery, though he compassed that coup without detection; he was in Vienna when the British embassy there was looted, but escaped by a clever ruse and managed to dispose of his plunder before the agents of the Sûreté could lay hands on him; recently he has been in London, and there he made love to, and ran away with, the diamonds of a certain lady of some eminence. You have heard of Madame Omber, eh?" Now by Roddy's expression it was plain that, if Madame Omber's name wasn't strange in his hearing, at least he found this news about her most surprising. He was frankly staring, with a slackened jaw and with stupefaction in his blank blue eyes.

Lanyard gently pinched the small end of a cigar, dipped it into his coffee, and lighted it with not so much as a suspicion of tremor. His brain, however, was working rapidly in effort to determine whether De Morbihan meant this for warning, or was simply narrating an amusing yarn founded on advance information and amplified by an ingenious imagination. For by now the news of the Omber affair must have thrilled many a Continental telegraph-wire....

"Madame Omber--of course!" the American agreed thoughtfully. "Everyone has heard of her wonderful jewels. The real marvel is that the Lone Wolf neglected so shining a mark as long as he did."

"But truly so, monsieur!"

"And they caught him at it, eh?"

"Not precisely: but he left a clue--and London, to boot--with such haste as would seem to indicate he knew his cunning hand had, for once, slipped."

"Then they'll nab him soon?"

"Ah, monsieur, one must say no more!" De Morbihan protested. "Rest assured the Chief of the Sûreté has laid his plans: his web is spun, and so artfully that I think our unsociable outlaw will soon be making friends in the Prison of the Santé.... But now we must adjourn. One is sorry. It has been so very pleasant...."

A waiter conjured the bill from some recess of his waistcoat and served it on a clean plate to the American. Another ran bawling for the vestiaire. Roddy glued his gaze afresh to the Daily Mail. The party rose.

Lanyard noticed that the American signed instead of settling the bill with cash, indicating that he resided at Troyon's as well as dined there. And the adventurer found time to reflect that it was odd for such as he to seek that particular establishment in preference to the palatial modern hostelries of the Rive Droit--before De Morbihan, ostensibly for the first time espying Lanyard, plunged across the room with both hands outstretched and a cry of joyous surprise not really justified by their rather slight acquaintanceship.

"Ah! Ah!" he clamoured vivaciously. "It is Monsieur Lanyard, who knows all about paintings! But this is delightful, my friend--one grand pleasure! You must know my friends.... But come!"

And seizing Lanyard's hands, when that one somewhat reluctantly rose in response to this surprisingly over-exuberant greeting, he dragged him willy-nilly from behind his table.

"And you are American, too. Certainly you must know one another. Mademoiselle Bannon--with your permission--my friend, Monsieur Lanyard. And Monsieur Bannon--an old, dear friend, with whom you will share a passion for the beauties of art."

The hand of the American, when Lanyard clasped it, was cold, as cold as ice; and as their eyes met that abominable cough laid hold of the man, as it were by the nape of his neck, and shook him viciously. Before it had finished with him, his sensitively coloured face was purple, and he was gasping, breathless--and infuriated.

"Monsieur Bannon," De Morbihan explained disconnectedly--"it is most distressing--I tell him he should not stop in Paris at this season--"

"It is nothing!" the American interposed brusquely between paroxysms.

"But our winter climate, monsieur--it is not fit for those in the prime of health--"

"It is I who am unfit!" Bannon snapped, pressing a handkerchief to his lips--"unfit to live!" he amended venomously.

Lanyard murmured some conventional expression of sympathy. Through it all he was conscious of the regard of the girl. Her soft brown eyes met his candidly, with a look cool in its composure, straightforward in its enquiry, neither bold nor mock-demure. And if they were the first to fall, it was with an effect of curiosity sated, without hint of discomfiture.... And somehow the adventurer felt himself measured, classified, filed away.

Between amusement and pique he continued to stare while the elderly American recovered his breath and De Morbihan jabbered on with unfailing vivacity; and he thought that this closer scrutiny discovered in her face contours suggesting maturity of thought beyond her apparent years--which were somewhat less than the sum of Lanyard's--and with this the suggestion of an elusive, provoking quality of wistful languor, a hint of patient melancholy....

"We are off for a glimpse of Montmartre," De Morbihan was explaining--"Monsieur Bannon and I. He has not seen Paris in twenty years, he tells me. Well, it will be amusing to show him what changes have taken place in all that time. One regrets mademoiselle is too fatigued to accompany us. But you, my friend--now if you would consent to make our third, it would be most amiable of you."

"I'm sorry," Lanyard excused himself; "but as you see, I am only just in from the railroad, a long and tiresome journey. You are very good, but I--"

"Good!" De Morbihan exclaimed with violence. "I? On the contrary, I am a very selfish man; I seek but to afford myself the pleasure of your company. You lead such a busy life, my friend, romping about Europe, here one day, God-knows-where the next, that one must make one's best of your spare moments. You will join us, surely?"

"Really I cannot to-night. Another time perhaps, if you'll excuse me."

"But it is always this way!" De Morbihan explained to his friends with a vast show of mock indignation. "'Another time, perhaps'--his invariable excuse! I tell you, not two men in all Paris have any real acquaintance with this gentleman whom all Paris knows! His reserve is proverbial--'as distant as Lanyard,' we say on the boulevards!" And turning again to the adventurer, meeting his cold stare with the De Morbihan grin of quenchless effrontery--"As you will, my friend!" he granted. "But should you change your mind--well, you'll have no trouble finding us. Ask any place along the regular route. We see far too little of one another, monsieur--and I am most anxious to have a little chat with you."

"It will be an honour," Lanyard returned formally....

In his heart he was pondering several most excruciating methods of murdering the man. What did he mean? How much did he know? If he knew anything, he must mean ill, for assuredly he could not be ignorant of Roddy's business, or that every other word he uttered was rivetting suspicion on Lanyard of identity with the Lone Wolf, or that Roddy was listening with all his ears and staring into the bargain!

Decidedly something must be done to silence this animal, should it turn out he really did know anything!

It was only after profound reflection over his liqueur (while Roddy devoured his Daily Mail and washed it down with a third bottle of Bass) that Lanyard summoned the maitre-d'hôtel and asked for a room.

It would never do to fix the doubts of the detective by going elsewhere that night. But, fortunately, Lanyard knew that warren which was Troyon's as no one else knew it; Roddy would find it hard to detain him, should events seem to advise an early departure.

IV

A STRATAGEM

When the maitre-d'hôtel had shown him all over the establishment (innocently enough, en route, furnishing him with a complete list of his other guests and their rooms: memoranda readily registered by a retentive memory) Lanyard chose the bed-chamber next that occupied by Roddy, in the second storey.

The consideration influencing this selection was--of course--that, so situated, he would be in position not only to keep an eye on the man from Scotland Yard but also to determine whether or no Roddy were disposed to keep an eye on him.

In those days Lanyard's faith in himself was a beautiful thing. He could not have enjoyed the immunity ascribed to the Lone Wolf as long as he had without gaining a power of sturdy self-confidence in addition to a certain amount of temperate contempt for spies of the law and all their ways.

Against the peril inherent in this last, however, he was self-warned, esteeming it the most fatal chink in the armour of the lawbreaker, this disposition to underestimate the acumen of the police: far too many promising young adventurers like himself were annually laid by the heels in that snare of their own infatuate weaving. The mouse has every right, if he likes, to despise the cat for a heavy-handed and bloodthirsty beast, lacking wit and imagination, a creature of simple force-majeure; but that mouse will not advisedly swagger in cat-haunted territory; a blow of the paw is, when all's said and done, a blow of the paw--something to numb the wits of the wiliest mouse.

Considering Roddy, he believed it to be impossible to gauge the limitations of that essentially British intelligence--something as self-contained as a London flat. One thing only was certain: Roddy didn't always think in terms of beef and Bass; he was nobody's facile fool; he could make a shrewd inference as well as strike a shrewd blow.

Reviewing the scene in the restaurant, Lanyard felt measurably warranted in assuming not only that Roddy was interested in De Morbihan, but that the Frenchman was well aware of that interest. And he resented sincerely his inability to feel as confident that the Count, with his gossip about the Lone Wolf, had been merely seeking to divert Roddy's interest to putatively larger game. It was just possible that De Morbihan's identification of Lanyard with that mysterious personage, at least by innuendo, had been unintentional. But somehow Lanyard didn't believe it had.

The two questions troubled him sorely: Did De Morbihan _know_, did he merely suspect, or had he only loosed an aimless shot which chance had sped to the right goal? Had the mind of Roddy proved fallow to that suggestion, or had it, with its simple national tenacity, been impatient of such side issues, or incredulous, and persisted in focusing its processes upon the personality and activities of Monsieur le Comte Remy de Morbihan? However, one would surely learn something illuminating before very long. The business of a sleuth is to sleuth, and sooner or later Roddy must surely make some move to indicate the quarter wherein his real interest lay.

Just at present, reasoning from noises audible through the bolted door that communicated with the adjoining bed-chamber, the business of a sleuth seemed to comprise going to bed. Lanyard, shaving and dressing, could distinctly hear a tuneless voice contentedly humming "Sally in our Alley," a rendition punctuated by one heavy thump and then another and then by a heartfelt sigh of relief--as Roddy kicked off his boots--and followed by the tapping of a pipe against grate-bars, the squeal of a window lowered for ventilation, the click of an electric-light, and the creaking of bed-springs.

Finally, and before Lanyard had finished dressing, the man from Scotland Yard began placidly to snore.

Of course, he might well be bluffing; for Lanyard had taken pains to let Roddy know that they were neighbours, by announcing his selection in loud tones close to the communicating door.

But this was a question which the adventurer meant to have answered before he went out....

It was hard upon twelve o'clock when the mirror on the dressing-table assured him that he was at length point-device in the habit and apparel of a gentleman of elegant nocturnal leisure. But if he approved the figure he cut, it was mainly because clothes interested him and he reckoned his own impeccable. Of their tenant he was feeling just then a bit less sure than he had half-an-hour since; his regard was louring and mistrustful. He was, in short, suffering reaction from the high spirits engendered by his cross-Channel exploits, his successful get-away, and the unusual circumstances attendant upon his return to this memory-haunted mausoleum of an unhappy childhood. He even shivered a trifle, as if under premonition of misfortune, and asked himself heavily: Why not?

For, logically considered, a break in the run of his luck was due. Thus far he had played, with a success almost too uniform, his dual rôle, by day the amiable amateur of art, by night the nameless mystery that prowled unseen and preyed unhindered. Could such success be reasonably expected to attend him always? Should he count De Morbihan's yarn a warning? Black must turn up every so often in a run of red: every gambler knows as much. And what was Michael Lanyard but a common gambler, who persistently staked life and liberty against the blindly impartial casts of Chance?

With one last look round to make certain there was nothing in the calculated disorder of his room to incriminate him were it to be searched in his absence, Lanyard enveloped himself in a long full-skirted coat, clapped on an opera hat, and went out, noisily locking the door. He might as well have left it wide, but it would do no harm to pretend he didn't know the bed-chamber keys at Troyon's were interchangeable--identically the same keys, in fact, that had been in service in the days of Marcel the wretched.

A single half-power electric bulb now modified the gloom of the corridor; its fellow made a light blot on the darkness of the courtyard. Even the windows of the conciergerie were black.

None the less, Lanyard tapped them smartly.

"_Cordon_!" he demanded in a strident voice. "_Cordon, s'il vous plait! _"

"_Eh? _" A startled grunt from within the lodge was barely audible. Then the latch clicked loudly at the end of the passageway.

Groping his way in the direction of this last sound, Lanyard found the small side door ajar. He opened it, and hesitated a moment, looking out as though questioning the weather; simultaneously his deft fingers wedged the latch back with a thin slip of steel.

No rain, in fact, had fallen within the hour; but still the sky was dense with a sullen rack, and still the sidewalks were inky wet.

The street was lonely and indifferently lighted, but a swift searching reconnaissance discovered nothing that suggested a spy skulking in the shelter of any of the nearer shadows.

Stepping out, he slammed the door and strode briskly round the corner, as if making for the cab-rank that lines up along the Luxembourg Gardens side of the rue de Medicis; his boot-heels made a cheerful racket in that quiet hour; he was quite audibly going away from Troyon's.

But instead of holding on to the cab-rank, he turned the next corner, and then the next, rounding the block; and presently, reapproaching the entrance to Troyon's, paused in the recess of a dark doorway and, lifting one foot after another, slipped rubber caps over his heels. Thereafter his progress was practically noiseless.

The smaller door yielded to his touch without a murmur. Inside, he closed it gently, and stood a moment listening with all his senses--not with his ears alone but with every nerve and fibre of his being--with his imagination, to boot. But there was never a sound or movement in all the house that he could detect.

And no shadow could have made less noise than he, slipping cat-footed across the courtyard and up the stairs, avoiding with super-developed sensitiveness every lift that might complain beneath his tread. In a trice he was again in the corridor leading to his bed-chamber.

It was quite as gloomy and empty as it had been five minutes ago, yet with a difference, a something in its atmosphere that made him nod briefly in confirmation of that suspicion which had brought him back so stealthily.

For one thing, Roddy had stopped snoring. And Lanyard smiled over the thought that the man from Scotland Yard might profitably have copied that trick of poor Bourke's, of snoring like the Seven Sleepers when most completely awake....

It was naturally no surprise to find his bed-chamber door unlocked and slightly ajar. Lanyard made sure of the readiness of his automatic, strode into the room, and shut the door quietly but by no means soundlessly.

He had left the shades down and the hangings drawn at both windows; and since these had not been disturbed, something nearly approaching complete darkness reigned in the room. But though promptly on entering his fingers closed upon the wall-switch near the door, he refrained from turning up the lights immediately, with a fancy of impish inspiration that it would be amusing to learn what move Roddy would make when the tension became too much even for his trained nerves.

Several seconds passed without the least sound disturbing the stillness.

Lanyard himself grew a little impatient, finding that his sight failed to grow accustomed to the darkness because that last was too absolute, pressing against his staring eyeballs like a black fluid impenetrably opaque, as unbroken as the hush.

Still, he waited: surely Roddy wouldn't be able much longer to endure such suspense....

And, surely enough, the silence was abruptly broken by a strange and moving sound, a hushed cry of alarm that was half a moan and half a sob.

Lanyard himself was startled: for that was never Roddy's voice!

There was a noise of muffled and confused footsteps, as though someone had started in panic for the door, then stopped in terror.

Words followed, the strangest he could have imagined, words spoken in a gentle and tremulous voice:

"In pity's name! who are you and what do you want?"

Thunderstruck, Lanyard switched on the lights.

At a distance of some six paces he saw, not Roddy, but a woman, and not a woman merely, but the girl he had met in the restaurant.

V

ANTICLIMAX

The surprise was complete; none, indeed, was ever more so; but it's a question which party thereto was the more affected.

Lanyard stared with the eyes of stupefaction. To his fancy, this thing passed the compass of simple incredulity: it wasn't merely improbable, it was preposterous; it was anticlimax exaggerated to the proportions of the grotesque.

He had come prepared to surprise and bully rag the most astute police detective of whom he had any knowledge; he found himself surprised and discountenanced by _this_...!

Confusion no less intense informed the girl's expression; her eyes were fixed to his with a look of blank enquiry; her face, whose colouring had won his admiration two hours since, was colourless; her lips were just ajar; the fingers of one hand touched her cheek, indenting it.

The other hand caught up before her the long skirts of a pretty robe-de-chambre, beneath whose edge a hand's-breadth of white silk shimmered and the toe of a silken mule was visible. Thus she stood, poised for flight, attired only in a dressing-gown over what, one couldn't help suspecting, was her night-dress: for her hair was down, and she was unquestionably all ready for her bed....But Bourke's patient training had been wasted if this man proved one to remain long at loss. Rallying his wits quickly from their momentary rout, he reasserted command over them, and if he didn't in the least understand, made a brave show of accepting this amazing accident as a commonplace.

"I beg your pardon, Miss Bannon--" he began with a formal bow.

She interrupted with a gasp of wondering recognition: "Mr. Lanyard!"

He inclined his head a second time: "Sorry to disturb you--"

"But I don't understand--"

"Unfortunately," he proceeded smoothly, "I forgot something when I went out, and had to come back for it."

"But--but--"

"Yes?"

Suddenly her eyes, for the first time detached from his, swept the room with a glance of wild dismay.

"This room," she breathed--"I don't know it--"

"It is mine."

"Yours! But--"

"That is how I happened to--interrupt you."

The girl shrank back a pace--two paces--uttering a low-toned monosyllable of understanding, an "_O!_" abruptly gasped. Simultaneously her face and throat flamed scarlet.

"_Your_ room, Mr. Lanyard!"

Her tone so convincingly voiced shame and horror that his heart misgave him. Not that alone, but the girl was very good to look upon. "I'm sure," he began soothingly; "it doesn't matter. You mistook a door--"

"But you don't understand!" She shuddered.... "This dreadful habit! And I was hoping I had outgrown it! How can I ever explain--?"

"Believe me, Miss Bannon, you need explain nothing."

"But I must...I wish to...I can't bear to let you think...But surely you can make allowances for sleepwalking!"

To this appeal he could at first return nothing more intelligent than a dazed repetition of the phrase.

So that was how...Why hadn't he thought of it before? Ever since he had turned on the lights, he had been subjectively busy trying to invest her presence there with some plausible excuse. But somnambulism had never once entered his mind. And in his stupidity, at pains though he had been to render his words inoffensive, he had been guilty of constructive incivility.

In his turn, Lanyard coloured warmly.

"I beg your pardon," he muttered.

The girl paid no attention; she seemed self-absorbed, thinking only of herself and the anomalous position into which her infirmity had tricked her. When she did speak, her words came swiftly:

"You see...I was so frightened! I found myself suddenly standing up in darkness, just as if I had jumped out of bed at some alarm; and then I heard somebody enter the room and shut the door stealthily...Oh, please understand me!"

"But I do, Miss Bannon--quite."

"I am so ashamed--"

"Please don't consider it that way."

"But now that you know--you don't think--"

"My dear Miss Bannon!"

"But it must be so hard to credit! Even I... Why, it's more than a year since this last happened. Of course, as a child, it was almost a habit; they had to watch me all the time. Once... But that doesn't matter. I _am_ so sorry."

"You really mustn't worry," Lanyard insisted. "It's all quite natural--such things do happen--are happening all the time--"

"But I don't want you--"

"I am nobody, Miss Bannon. Besides I shan't mention the matter to a soul. And if ever I am fortunate enough to meet you again, I shall have forgotten it completely--believe me."

There was convincing sincerity in his tone. The girl looked down, as though abashed.

"You are very good," she murmured, moving toward the door.

"I am very fortunate."

Her glance of surprise was question enough.

"To be able to treasure this much of your confidence," he explained with a tentative smile.

She was near the door; he opened it for her, but cautioned her with a gesture and a whispered word: "Wait. I'll make sure nobody's about."

He stepped noiselessly into the hall and paused an instant, looking right and left, listening.

The girl advanced to the threshold and there checked, hesitant, eyeing him anxiously.

He nodded reassurance: "All right--coast's clear!"

But she delayed one moment more.

"It's you who are mistaken," she whispered, colouring again beneath his regard, in which admiration could not well be lacking, "It is I who am fortunate--to have met a--gentleman."

Her diffident smile, together with the candour of her eyes, embarrassed him to such extent that for the moment he was unable to frame a reply.

"Good night," she whispered--"and thank you, thank you!"

Her room was at the far end of the corridor. She gained its threshold in one swift dash, noiseless save for the silken whisper of her garments, turned, flashed him a final look that left him with the thought that novelists did not always exaggerate, that eyes could shine like stars....

Her door closed softly.

Lanyard shook his head as if to dissipate a swarm of annoying thoughts, and went back into his own bed-chamber.

He was quite content with the explanation the girl had given, but being the slave of a methodical and pertinacious habit of mind, spent five busy minutes examining his room and all that it contained with a perseverance that would have done credit to a Frenchman searching for a mislaid sou.

If pressed, he would have been put to it to name what he sought or thought to find. What he did find was that nothing had been tampered with and nothing more--not even so much as a dainty, lace-trimmed wisp of sheer linen bearing the lady's monogram and exhaling a faint but individual perfume.

Which, when he came to consider it, seemed hardly playing the game by the book.

As for Roddy, Lanyard wasted several minutes, off and on, listening attentively at the communicating door; but if the detective had stopped snoring, his respiration was loud enough in that quiet hour, a sound of harsh monotony.

True, that proved nothing; but Lanyard, after the fiasco of his first attempt to catch his enemy awake, was no more disposed to be hypercritical; he had his fill of being ingenious and profound. And when presently he again left Troyon's (this time without troubling the repose of the concierge) it was with the reflection that, if Roddy were really playing 'possum, he was welcome to whatever he could find of interest in the quarters of Michael Lanyard.

VI

THE PACK GIVES TONGUE

Lanyard's first destination was that convenient little rez-de-chaussée apartment near the Trocadéro, at the junction of the rue Roget and the avenue de l'Alma; but his way thither was so roundabout that the best part of an hour was required for what might have been less than a twenty-minute taxicab course direct from Troyon's. It was past one when he arrived, afoot, at the corner.

Not that he grudged the time; for in Lanyard's esteem Bourke's epigram had come to have the weight and force of an axiom: "The more trouble you make for yourself, the less the good public will make for you."

Paradoxically, he hadn't the least intention of attempting to deceive anybody as to his permanent address in Paris, where Michael Lanyard, connoisseur of fine paintings, was a figure too conspicuous to permit his making a secret of his residence. De Morbihan, moreover, through recognizing him at Troyon's, had rendered it impossible for Lanyard to adopt a nom-de-guerre there, even had he thought that ruse advisable.

But he had certain businesses to attend to before dawn, affairs demanding privacy; and while by no means sure he was followed, one can seldom be sure of anything, especially in Paris, where nothing is impossible; and it were as well to lose a spy first as last. And his mind could not be at ease with respect to Roddy, thanks to De Morbihan's gasconade in the presence of the detective and also to that hint which the Count had dropped concerning some fatal blunder in the course of Lanyard's British campaign.

The adventurer could recall leaving no step uncovered. Indeed, he had prided himself on conducting his operations with a degree of circumspection unusually thorough-going, even for him. Yet he was unable to rid himself of those misgivings roused by De Morbihan's declaration that the theft of the Omber jewels had been accomplished only at cost of a clue to the thief's identity.

Now the Count's positive information concerning the robbery proved that the news thereof had anticipated the arrival of its perpetrator in Paris; yet Roddy unquestionably had known nothing of it prior to its mention in his presence, after dinner. Or else the detective was a finer actor than Lanyard credited.

But how could De Morbihan have come by his news?

Lanyard was really and deeply perturbed....

Pestered to distraction by such thoughts, he fitted key to latch and quietly let himself into his flat by a private street-entrance which, in addition to the usual door opening on the court and under the eye of the concierge, distinguished this from the ordinary Parisian apartment and rendered it doubly suited to the adventurer's uses.

Then he turned on the lights and moved quickly from room to room of the three comprising his quarters, with comprehensive glances reviewing their condition.

But, indeed, he hadn't left the reception-hall for the salon without recognizing that things were in no respect as they ought to be: a hat he had left on the hall rack had been moved to another peg; a chair had been shifted six inches from its ordained position; and the door of a clothes-press, which he had locked on leaving, now stood ajar.

Furthermore, the state of the salon, which he had furnished as a lounge and study, and of the tiny dining-room and the bed-chamber adjoining, bore out these testimonies to the fact that alien hands had thoroughly ransacked the apartment, leaving no square inch unscrutinized.

Yet the proprietor missed nothing. His rooms were a private gallery of valuable paintings and antique furniture to poison with envy the mind of any collector, and housed into the bargain a small museum of rare books, manuscripts, and articles of exquisite workmanship whose individuality, aside from intrinsic worth, rendered them priceless. A burglar of discrimination might have carried off in one coat-pocket loot enough to foot the bill for a twelve-month of profligate existence. But nothing had been removed, nothing at least that was apparent in the first tour of inspection; which, if sweeping, was by no means superficial.

Before checking off more elaborately his mental inventory, Lanyard turned attention to the protective device, a simple but exhaustive system of burglar-alarm wiring so contrived that any attempt to enter the apartment save by means of a key which fitted both doors and of which no duplicate existed would alarm both the concierge and the burglar protective society. Though it seemed to have been in no way tampered with, to test the apparatus he opened a window on the court.

The lodge of the concierge was within earshot. If the alarm had been in good order, Lanyard could have heard the bell from his window. He heard nothing.

With a shrug, he shut the window. He knew well--none better--how such protection could be rendered valueless by a thoughtful and fore-handed housebreaker.

Returning to the salon, where the main body of his collection was assembled, he moved slowly from object to object, ticking off items and noting their condition; with the sole result of justifying his first conclusion, that whereas nothing had escaped handling, nothing had been removed.

By way of a final test, he opened his desk (of which the lock had been deftly picked) and went through its pigeon-holes.

His scanty correspondence, composed chiefly of letters exchanged with art dealers, had been scrutinized and replaced carelessly, in disorder: and here again he missed nothing; but in the end, removing a small drawer and inserting a hand in its socket, he dislodged a rack of pigeon-holes and exposed the secret cabinet that is almost inevitably an attribute of such pieces of period furniture.

A shallow box, this secret space contained one thing only, but that one of considerable value, being the leather bill-fold in which the adventurer kept a store of ready money against emergencies.

It was mostly for this, indeed, that he had come to his apartment; his London campaign having demanded an expenditure far beyond his calculations, so that he had landed in Paris with less than one hundred francs in pocket. And Lanyard, for all his pride of spirit, acknowledged one haunting fear that of finding himself strapped in the face of emergency.

The fold yielded up its hoard to a sou: Lanyard counted out five notes of one thousand francs and ten of twenty pounds: their sum, upwards of two thousand dollars.

But if nothing had been abstracted, something had been added: the back of one of the Bank of England notes had been used as a blank for memorandum.

Lanyard spread it out and studied it attentively.

The handwriting had been traced with no discernible attempt at disguise, but was quite strange to him. The pen employed had been one of those needle-pointed nibs so popular in France; the hand was that of an educated Frenchman. The import of the memorandum translated substantially as follows:

_"To the Lone Wolf--
"The Pack sends Greetings
"and extends its invitation
"to participate in the benefits
"of its Fraternity.
"One awaits him always at
"L'Abbaye Thêléme."_

A date was added, the date of that very day...

Deliberately, having conned this communication, Lanyard produced his cigarette-case, selected a cigarette, found his briquet, struck a light, twisted the note of twenty pounds into a rude spill, set it afire, lighted his cigarette there from and, rising, conveyed the burning paper to a cold and empty fire-place wherein he permitted it to burn to a crisp black ash.

When this was done, his smile broke through his clouding scowl.

"Well, my friend!" he apostrophized the author of that document which now could never prove incriminating--"at all events, I have you to thank for a new sensation. It has long been my ambition to feel warranted in lighting a cigarette with a twenty-pound note, if the whim should ever seize me!"

His smile faded slowly; the frown replaced it: something far more valuable to him than a hundred dollars had just gone up in smoke ...

VII

L'ABBAYE

His secret uncovered, that essential incognito of his punctured, his vanity touched to the quick--all that laboriously constructed edifice of art and chicane which yesterday had seemed so substantial, so impregnable a wall between the Lone Wolf and the World, to-day rent, torn asunder, and cast down in ruins about his feet--Lanyard wasted time neither in profitless lamentation or any other sort of repining.

He had much to do before morning: to determine, as definitely as might in discretion be possible, who had fathomed his secret and how; to calculate what chance he still had of pursuing his career without exposure and disaster; and to arrange, if investigation verified his expectations, which were of the gloomiest, to withdraw in good order, with all honours of war, from that dangerous field.

Delaying only long enough to revise plans disarranged by the discoveries of this last bad quarter of an hour, he put out the lights and went out by the courtyard door; for it was just possible that those whose sardonic whim it had been to name themselves "the Pack" might have stationed agents in the street to follow their dissocial brother in crime. And now more than ever Lanyard was firmly bent on going his own way unwatched. His own way first led him stealthily past the door of the conciergerie and through the court to the public hall in the main body of the building. Happily, there were no lights to betray him had anyone been awake to notice. For thanks to Parisian notions of economy even the best apartment houses dispense with elevator-boys and with lights that burn up real money every hour of the night. By pressing a button beside the door on entering, however, Lanyard could have obtained light in the hallways for five minutes, or long enough to enable any tenant to find his front-door and the key-hole therein; at the end of which period the lamps would automatically have extinguished themselves. Or by entering a narrow-chested box of about the dimensions of a generous coffin, and pressing a button bearing the number of the floor at which he wished to alight, he could have been comfortably wafted aloft without sign of more human agency. But he prudently availed himself of neither of these conveniences. Afoot and in complete darkness he made the ascent of five flights of winding stairs to the door of an apartment on the sixth floor. Here a flash from a pocket lamp located the key-hole; the key turned without sound; the door swung on silent hinges.

Once inside, the adventurer moved more freely, with less precaution against noise. He was on known ground, and alone; the apartment, though furnished, was untenanted, and would so remain as long as Lanyard continued to pay the rent from London under an assumed name.

It was the convenience of this refuge and avenue of retreat, indeed which had dictated his choice of the rez-de-chaussée; for the sixth-floor flat possessed one invaluable advantage--a window on a level with the roof of the adjoining building.

Two minutes' examination sufficed to prove that here at least the Pack had not trespassed....

Five minutes later Lanyard picked the common lock of a door opening from the roof of an apartment house on the farthest corner of the block, found his way downstairs, tapped the door of the conciergerie, chanted that venerable Open Sesame of Paris, "_Cordon, s'il vous plait!_" and was made free of the street by a worthy guardian too sleepy to challenge the identity of this late-departing guest.

He walked three blocks, picked up a taxicab, and in ten minutes more was set down at the Gare des Invalides.

Passing through the station without pause, he took to the streets afoot, following the boulevard St. Germain to the rue du Bac; a brief walk up this time-worn thoroughfare brought him to the ample, open and unguarded porte-cochére of a court walled with beetling ancient tenements.

When he had made sure that the courtyard was deserted, Lanyard addressed himself to a door on the right; which to his knock swung promptly ajar with a clicking latch. At the same time the adventurer whipped from beneath his cloak a small black velvet visor and adjusted it to mask the upper half of his face. Then entering a narrow and odorous corridor, whose obscurity was emphasized by a lonely guttering candle, he turned the knob of the first door and walked into a small, ill-furnished room.

A spare-bodied young man, who had been reading at a desk by the light of an oil-lamp with a heavy green shade, rose and bowed courteously.

"Good morning, monsieur," he said with the cordiality of one who greets an acquaintance of old standing. "Be seated," he added, indicating an arm-chair beside the desk. "It seems long since one has had the honour of a call from monsieur."

"That is so," Lanyard admitted, sitting down.

The young man followed suit. The lamplight, striking across his face beneath the greenish penumbra of the shade, discovered a countenance of Hebraic cast.

"Monsieur has something to show me, eh?"

"But naturally."

Lanyard's reply just escaped a suspicion of curtness: as who should say, what did you expect? He was puzzled by something strange and new in the attitude of this young man, a trace of reserve and constraint....

They had been meeting from time to time for several years, conducting their secret and lawless business according to a formula invented by Bourke and religiously observed by Lanyard. A note or telegram of innocent superficial intent, addressed to a certain member of a leading firm of jewellers in Amsterdam, was the invariable signal for conferences such as this; which were invariably held in the same place, at an hour indeterminate between midnight and dawn, between on the one hand this intelligent, cultivated and well-mannered young Jew, and on the other hand the thief in his mask.

In such wise did the Lone Wolf dispose of his loot, at all events of the bulk thereof; other channels were, of course, open to him, but none so safe; and with no other receiver of stolen goods could he hope to make such fair and profitable deals.

Now inevitably in the course of this long association, though each remained in ignorance of his confederate's identity, these two had come to feel that they knew each other fairly well. Not infrequently, when their business had been transacted, Lanyard would linger an hour with the agent, chatting over cigarettes: both, perhaps, a little thrilled by the piquancy of the situation; for the young Jew was the only man who had ever wittingly met the Lone Wolf face to face....

Why then this sudden awkwardness and embarrassment on the part of the agent?

Lanyard's eyes narrowed with suspicion.

In silence he produced a jewel-case of morocco leather and handed it over to the Jew, then settled back in his chair, his attitude one of lounging, but his mind as quick with distrust as the fingers that, under cover of his cloak, rested close to a pocket containing his automatic.

Accepting the box with a little bow, the Jew pressed the catch and discovered its contents. But the richness of the treasure thus disclosed did not seem to surprise him; and, indeed, he had more than once been introduced with no more formality to plunder of far greater value. Fitting a jeweller's glass to his eye, he took up one after another of the pieces and examined them under the lamplight. Presently he replaced the last, shut down the cover of the box, turned a thoughtful countenance to Lanyard, and made as if to speak, but hesitated.

"Well?" the adventurer demanded impatiently.

"This, I take it," said the Jew absently, tapping the box, "is the jewellery of Madame Omber."

"_I_ took it," Lanyard retorted good-naturedly--"not to put too fine a point upon it!"

"I am sorry," the other said slowly.

"Yes?"

"It is most unfortunate..."

"May one enquire what is most unfortunate?"

The Jew shrugged and with the tips of his fingers gently pushed the box toward his customer. "This makes me very unhappy," he admitted: "but I have no choice in the matter, monsieur. As the agent of my principals I am instructed to refuse you an offer for these valuables."

"Why?"

Again the shrug, accompanied by a deprecatory grimace: "That is difficult to say. No explanation was made me. My instructions were simply to keep this appointment as usual, but to advise you it will be impossible for my principals to continue their relations with you as long as your affairs remain in their present status."

"Their present status?" Lanyard repeated. "What does that mean, if you please?"

"I cannot say monsieur. I can only repeat that which was said to me."

After a moment Lanyard rose, took the box, and replaced it in his pocket. "Very well," he said quietly. "Your principals, of course, understand that this action on their part definitely ends our relations, rather than merely interrupts them at their whim?"

"I am desolated, monsieur, but ... one must assume that they have considered everything. You understand, it is a matter in which I am wholly without discretion, I trust?"

"O quite!" Lanyard assented carelessly. He held out his hand. "Good-bye, my friend."

The Jew shook hands warmly.

"Good night, monsieur--and the best of luck!"

There was significance in his last words that Lanyard did not trouble to analyze. Beyond doubt, the man knew more than he dared admit. And the adventurer told himself he could shrewdly surmise most of that which the other had felt constrained to leave unspoken.

Pressure from some quarter had been brought to bear upon that eminently respectable firm of jewel dealers in Amsterdam to induce them to discontinue their clandestine relations with the Lone Wolf, profitable though these must have been.

Lanyard believed he could name the quarter whence this pressure was being exerted, but before going further or coming to any momentous decision, he was determined to know to a certainty who were arrayed against him and how much importance he need attach to their antagonism. If he failed in this, it would be the fault of the other side, not his for want of readiness to accept its invitation.

In brief, he didn't for an instant contemplate abandoning either his rigid rule of solitude or his chosen career without a fight; but he preferred not to fight in the dark.

Anger burned in him no less hotly than chagrin. It could hardly be otherwise with one who, so long suffered to go his way without let or hindrance, now suddenly, in the course of a few brief hours, found himself brought up with a round turn--hemmed in and menaced on every side by secret opposition and hostility.

He no longer feared to be watched; and the very fact that, as far as he could see, he wasn't watched, only added fuel to his resentment, demonstrating as it did so patently the cynical assurance of the Pack that they had him cornered, without alternative other than to supple himself to their will.

To the driver of the first taxicab he met, Lanyard said "L'Abbaye," then shutting himself within the conveyance, surrendered to the most morose reflections.

Nothing of this mood was, however, apparent in his manner on alighting. He bore a countenance of amiable insouciance through the portals of this festal institution whose proudest boast and--incidentally--sole claim to uniquity is that it never opens its doors before midnight nor closes them before dawn.

He had moved about with such celerity since entering his flat on the rue Roget that it was even now only two o'clock; an hour at which revelry might be expected to have reached its apogee in this, the soi-disant "smartest" place in Paris.

A less sophisticated adventurer might have been flattered by the cordiality of his reception at the hands of that arbiter elegantiarum the maitre-d'hôtel.

"Ah-h, Monsieur Lanya_rrr_! But it is long since we have been so favoured. However, I have kept your table for you."

"Have you, though?"

"Could it be otherwise, after receipt of your honoured order?"

"No," said Lanyard coolly, "I presume not, if you value your peace of mind."

"Monsieur is alone?" This with an accent of disappointment.

"Temporarily, it would seem so."

"But this way, if you please...."

In the wake of the functionary, Lanyard traversed that frowsy anteroom where doubtful wasters are herded on suspicion in company with the corps of automatic Bacchanalians and figurantes, to the main restaurant, the inner sanctum toward which the naïve soul of the travel-bitten Anglo-Saxon aspires so ardently.

It was not a large room; irregularly octagonal in shape, lined with wall-seats behind a close-set rank of tables; better lighted than most Parisian restaurants, that is to say, less glaringly; abominably ventilated; the open space in the middle of the floor reserved for a handful of haggard young professional dancers, their stunted bodies more or less costumed in brilliant colours, footing it with all the vivacity to be expected of five-francs per night per head; the tables occupied by parties Anglo-Saxon and French in the proportion of five to one, attended by a company of bored and apathetic waiters; a string orchestra ragging incessantly; a vicious buck-nigger on a dais shining with self-complacence while he vamped and shouted "_Waitin' foh th' Robuht E. Lee_"...

Lanyard permitted himself to be penned in a corner behind a table, ordered champagne not because he wanted it but because it was etiquette, suppressed a yawn, lighted a cigarette, and reviewed the assemblage with a languid but shrewd glance.

He saw only the company of every night; for even in the off-season there are always enough English-speaking people in Paris to make it possible for L'Abbaye Thêléme to keep open with profit: the inevitable assortment of respectable married couples with friends, the men chafing and wondering if possibly all this might seem less unattractive were they foot-loose and fancy-free, the women contriving to appear at ease with varying degrees of success, but one and all flushed with dubiety; the sprinkling of demi-mondaines not in the least concerned about _their_ social status; the handful of people who, having brought their fun with them, were having the good time they would have had anywhere; the scattering of plain drunks in evening dress.... Nowhere a face that Lanyard recognized definitely: no Mr. Bannon, no Comte Remy de Morbihan....

He regarded this circumstance, however, with more vexation than surprise: De Morbihan would surely show up in time; meanwhile, it was annoying to be obliged to wait, to endure this martyrdom of ennui.

He sipped his wine sparingly, without relish, considering the single subsidiary fact which did impress him with some wonder--that he was being left severely to himself; something which doesn't often fall to the lot of the unattached male at L'Abbaye. Evidently an order had been issued with respect to him. Ordinarily he would have been grateful: to-night he was merely irritated: such neglect rendered him conspicuous....

The fixed round of delirious divertissement unfolded as per schedule. The lights were lowered to provide a melodramatic atmosphere for that startling novelty, the Apache Dance. The coon shouted stridently. The dancers danced bravely on their poor, tired feet. An odious dwarf creature in a miniature outfit of evening clothes toddled from table to table, offensively soliciting stray francs--but shied from the gleam in Lanyard's eyes. Lackeys made the rounds, presenting each guest with a handful of coloured, feather-weight celluloid balls, with which to bombard strangers across the room. The inevitable shamefaced Englishman departed in tow of an overdressed Frenchwoman with pride of conquest in her smirk. The equally inevitable alcoholic was dug out from under his table and thrown into a cab. An American girl insisted on climbing upon a table to dance, but swayed and had to be helped down, giggling foolishly. A Spanish dancing girl was afforded a clear floor for her specialty, which consisted in singing several verses understood by nobody, the choruses emphasized by frantic assaults on the hair of several variously surprised, indignant, and flattered male guests--among them Lanyard, who submitted with resignation....

And then, just when he was on the point of consigning the Pack to the devil for inflicting upon him such cruel and inhuman punishment, the Spanish girl picked her way through the mob of dancers who invaded the floor promptly on her withdrawal, and paused beside his table.

"You're not angry, mon coco?" she pleaded with a provocative smile.

Lanyard returned a smiling negative.

"Then I may sit down with you and drink a glass of your wine?"

"Can't you see I've been saving the bottle for you?"

The woman plumped herself promptly into the chair opposite the adventurer. He filled her glass.

"But you are not happy to-night?" she demanded, staring over the brim as she sipped.

"I am thoughtful," he said.

"And what does that mean?"

"I am saddened to contemplate the infirmities of my countrymen, these Americans who can't rest in Paris until they find some place as deadly as any Broadway boasts, these English who adore beautiful Paris solely because here they may continue to get drunk publicly after half-past twelve!"

"Ah, then it's la barbe, is it not?" said the girl, gingerly stroking her faded, painted cheek.

"It is true: I am bored."

"Then why not go where you're wanted?" She drained her glass at a gulp and jumped up, swirling her skirts. "Your cab is waiting, monsieur--and perhaps you will find it more amusing with that Pack!"

Flinging herself into the arms of another girl, she swung away, grinning impishly at Lanyard over her partner's shoulder.

VIII

THE HIGH HAND

Evidently his first move toward departure was signalled; for as he passed out through L'Abbaye's doors the carriage-porter darted forward and saluted.

"Monsieur Lanyarr'?"

"Yes?"

"Monsieur's car is waiting."

"Indeed?" Lanyard surveyed briefly a handsome black limousine that, at pause beside the curb, was champing its bits in the most spirited fashion. Then he smiled appreciatively. "All the same, I thank you for the compliment," he said, and forthwith tipped the porter.

But before entrusting himself to this gratuitous conveyance, he put himself to the trouble of inspecting the chauffeur--a capable-looking mechanic togged out in a rich black livery which, though relieved by a vast amount of silk braiding, was like the car guiltless of any sort of insignia.

"I presume you know where I wish to go, my man?"

The chauffeur touched his cap: "But naturally, monsieur."

"Then take me there, the quickest way you know."

Nodding acknowledgement of the porter's salute, Lanyard sank gratefully back upon uncommonly luxurious upholstery. The fatigue of the last thirty-six hours was beginning to tell on him a bit, though his youth was still so vital, so instinct with strength and vigour, that he could go as long again without sleep if need be.

None the less he was glad of this opportunity to snatch a few minutes' rest by way of preparation against the occult culmination of this adventure. No telling what might ensue of this violation of all those principles which had hitherto conserved his welfare! And he entertained a gloomy suspicion that he would be inclined to name another ass, who proposed as he did to beard this Pack in its den with nothing more than his wits and an automatic pistol to protect ten thousand-francs, the jewels of Madame Omber, the Huysman plans, and (possibly) his life.

However, he stood committed to his folly, if folly it were: he would play the game as it lay.

As for curiosity concerning his immediate destination, there was little enough of that in his temper; a single glance round on leaving the car would fix his whereabouts beyond dispute, so thorough was his knowledge of Paris.

He contemplated briefly, with admiration, the simplicity with which that affair at L'Abbaye had been managed, finding no just cause to suspect anyone there of criminal complicity in the plans of the Pack: a forged order for a table to the maitre-d'hotel, ten francs to the carriage-porter and twenty more to the dancing woman to play parts in a putative practical joke--and the thing had been arranged without implicating a soul!...

Of a sudden, ending a ride much shorter than Lanyard would have liked, the limousine swung in toward a curb.

Bending forward, he unlatched the door and, glancing through the window, uttered a grunt of profound disgust.

If this were the best that Pack could do...!

He had hoped for something a trifle more original from men with wit and imagination enough to plot the earlier phases of this intrigue.

The car had pulled up in front of an institution which he knew well--far too well, indeed, for his own good.

None the less, he consented to get out.

"Sure you've come to the right place?" he asked the chauffeur.

Two fingers touching the visor of his cap: "But certainly, monsieur!"

"Oh, all right!" Lanyard grumbled resignedly; and tossing the man a five-franc piece, applied his knuckles to the door of an outwardly commonplace hôtel particulier in the rue Chaptal between the impasse of the Grand Guignol and the rue Pigalle.

Now the neophyte needs the introduction of a trusted sponsor before he can win admission to the club-house of the exclusive Circle of Friends of Humanity; but Lanyard's knock secured him prompt and unquestioned right of way. The unfortunate fact is, he was a member in the best of standing; for this society of pseudo-altruistic aims was nothing more nor less than one of those several private gambling clubs of Paris which the French Government tolerates more or less openly, despite adequate restrictive legislation; and gambling was Lanyard's ruling passion--a legacy from Bourke no less than the rest of his professional equipment.

To every man his vice (the argument is Bourke's, in defence of his failing). And perhaps the least mischievous vice a professional cracksman can indulge is that of gambling, since it can hardly drive him to lengths more desperate than those whereby he gains a livelihood.

In the esteem of Paris, Count Remy de Morbihan himself was scarcely a more light-hearted plunger than Monsieur Lanyard.

Naturally, with this reputation, he was always free of the handsome salons wherein the Friends of Humanity devoted themselves to roulette, auction bridge, baccarat and chemin-de-fer: and of this freedom he now proceeded to avail himself, with his hat just a shade aslant on his head, his hands in his pockets, a suspicion of a smile on his lips and a glint of the devil in his eyes--in all an expression accurately reflecting the latest phase of his humour, which was become largely one of contemptuous toleration, thanks to what he chose to consider an exhibition of insipid stupidity on the part of the Pack.

Nor was this humour in any way modified when, in due course, he confirmed anticipation by discovering Monsieur le Comte Remy de Morbihan lounging beside one of the roulette tables, watching the play, and now and again risking a maximum on his own account.

A flash of animation crossed the unlovely mask of the Count when he saw Lanyard approaching, and he greeted the adventurer with a gay little flirt of his pudgy dark hand.

"Ah, my friend!" he cried. "It is you, then, who have changed your mind! But this is delightful!"

"And what has become of your American friend?" Asked the adventurer.

"He tired quickly, that one, and packed himself off to Troyon's. Be sure I didn't press him to continue the grand tour!"

"Then you really did wish to see me to-night?" Lanyard enquired innocently.

"Always--always, my dear Lanyard!" the Count declared, jumping up. "But come," he insisted: "I've a word for your private ear, if these gentlemen will excuse us."

"Do!" Lanyard addressed in a confidential manner those he knew at the table, before turning away to the tug of the Count's hand on his arm--"I think he means to pay up twenty pounds he owes me!"

Some derisive laughter greeted this sally.

"I mean that, however," Lanyard informed the other cheerfully as they moved away to a corner where conversation without an audience was possible--"you ruined that Bank of England note, you know."

"Cheap at the price!" the Count protested, producing his bill-fold. "Five hundred francs for an introduction to Monsieur the Lone Wolf!"

"Are you joking?" Lanyard asked blankly--and with a magnificent gesture abolished the proffered banknote.

"Joking? I! But surely you don't mean to deny--"

"My friend," Lanyard interrupted, "before we assert or deny anything, let us gather the rest of the players round the table and deal from a sealed deck. Meantime, let us rest on the understanding that I have found, at one end, a message scrawled on a bank-note hidden in a secret place, at the other end, yourself, Monsieur le Comte. Between and beyond these points exists a mystery, of which one anticipates elucidation."

"You shall have it," De Morbihan promised. "But first, we must go to those others who await us."

"Not so fast!" Lanyard interposed. "What am I to understand? That you wish me to accompany you to the--ah--den of the Pack?"

"Where else?" De Morbihan grinned.

"But where is that?"

"I am not permitted to say--"

"Still, one has one's eyes. Why not satisfy me here?"

"Your eyes, by your leave, monsieur, will be blindfolded."

"Impossible."

"Pardon--it is an essential--"

"Come, come, my friend: we are not in the Middle Ages!"

"I have no discretion, monsieur. My confrères--"

"I insist: there will be trust on both sides or no negotiations."

"But I assure you, my dear friend--"

"My dear Count, it is useless: I am determined. Blindfold? I should say not! This is not--need I remind you again?--the Paris of Balzac and that wonderful Dumas of yours!"

"What do you propose, then?" De Morbihan enquired, worrying his moustache.

"What better place for the proposed conference than here?"

"But not here!"

"Why not? Everybody comes here: it will cause no gossip. I am here--I have come half-way; your friends must do as much on their part."

"It is not possible...."

"Then, I beg you, tender them my regrets."

"Would you give us away?"

"Never that: one makes gifts to one's friends only. But my interest in yours is depreciating so rapidly that, should you delay much longer, it will be on sale for the sum of two sous."

"O--damn!" the Count complained peevishly.

"With all the pleasure in life.... But now," Lanyard went on, rising to end the interview, "you must forgive me for reminding you that the morning wanes apace. I shall be going home in another hour."

De Morbihan shrugged. "Out of my great affection for you," he purred venomously, "I will do my possible. But I promise nothing."

"I have every confidence in your powers of moral suasion, monsieur," Lanyard assured him cheerfully. "Au revoir!"

And with this, not at all ill-pleased with himself, he strutted off to a table at which a high-strung session of chemin-de-fer was in process, possessed himself of a vacant chair, and in two minutes was so engrossed in the game that the Pack was quite forgotten.

In fifteen minutes he had won thrice as many thousands of francs. Twenty minutes or half an hour later, a hand on his shoulder broke the grip of his besetting passion.

"Our table is made up, my friend," De Morbihan announced with his inextinguishable grin. "We're waiting for you."

"Quite at your service."

Settling his score and finding himself considerably better off than he had imagined, he resigned his place gracefully, and suffered the Count to link arms and drag him away up the main staircase to the second storey, where smaller rooms were reserved for parties who preferred to gamble privately.

"So it appears you succeeded!" he chaffed his conductor good-humouredly.

"I have brought you the mountain," De Morbihan assented.

"One is grateful for small miracles...."

But De Morbihan wouldn't laugh at his own expense; for a moment, indeed, he seemed inclined to take umbrage at Lanyard's levity. But the sudden squaring of his broad shoulders and the hardening of his features was quickly modified by an uneasy sidelong glance at his companion. And then they were at the door of the cabinet particulier.

De Morbihan rapped, turned the knob, and stood aside, bowing politely.

With a nod acknowledging the courtesy, Lanyard consented to precede him, and entered a room of intimate proportions, furnished chiefly with a green-covered card-table and five easy-chairs, of which three were occupied--two by men in evening dress, the third by one in a well-tailored lounge suit of dark grey.

Now all three men wore visors of black velvet.

Lanyard looked from one to the other and chuckled quietly.

With an aggrieved air De Morbihan launched into introductions:

"Messieurs, I have the honour to present to you our confrère, Monsieur Lanyard, best known as 'The Lone Wolf.' Monsieur Lanyard--the Council of our Association, known to you as 'The Pack.'"

The three rose and bowed ceremoniously, Lanyard returned a cool, good-natured nod. Then he laughed again and more openly:

"A pack of knaves!"

"Monsieur doubtless feels at ease?" one retorted acidly.

"In your company, Popinot? But hardly!" Lanyard returned in light contempt.

The fellow thus indicated, a burly rogue of a Frenchman in rusty and baggy evening clothes, started and flushed scarlet beneath his mask; but the man next him dropped a restraining hand upon his arm, and Popinot, with a shrug, sank back into his chair.

"Upon my word!" Lanyard declared gracelessly, "it's as good as a play! Are you sure, Monsieur le Comte, there's no mistake--that these gay masqueraders haven't lost their way to the stage of the Grand Guignol?"

"Damn!" muttered the Count. "Take care, my friend! You go too far!"

"You really think so? But you amaze me! You can't in reason expect me to take you seriously, gentlemen!"

"If you don't, it will prove serious business for you!" growled the one he had called Popinot.

"You mean that? But you are magnificent, all of you! We lack only the solitary illumination of a candle-end--a grinning skull--a cup of blood upon the table--to make the farce complete! But as it is.... Messieurs, you must be rarely uncomfortable, and feeling as foolish as you look, into the bargain! Moreover, I'm no child. ... Popinot, why not disembarrass your amiable features? And you, Mr. Wertheimer, I'm sure, will feel more at ease with an open countenance--as the saying runs," he said, nodding to the man beside Popinot. "As for this gentleman," he concluded, eyeing the third, "I haven't the pleasure of his acquaintance."

With a short laugh, Wertheimer unmasked and exposed a face of decidedly English type, fair and well-modelled, betraying only the faintest traces of Semitic cast to account for his surname. And with this example, Popinot snatched off his own black visor--and glared at Lanyard: in his shabby dress, the incarnate essence of bourgeoisie outraged. But the third, he of the grey lounge suit, remained motionless; only his eyes clashed coldly with the adventurer's.

He seemed a man little if at all Lanyard's senior, and built upon much the same lines. A close-clipped black moustache ornamented his upper lip. His chin was square and strong with character. The cut of his clothing was conspicuously neither English nor Continental.

"I don't know you, sir," Lanyard continued slowly, puzzled to account for a feeling of familiarity with this person, whom he could have sworn he had never met before.

"But you won't let your friends here outdo you in civility, I trust?"

"If you mean you want me to unmask, I won't," the other returned brusquely, in fair French but with a decided transatlantic intonation.

"American, eh?"

"Native-born, if it interests you."

"Have I ever met you before?"

"You have not."

"My dear Count," Lanyard said, turning to De Morbihan, "do me the favour to introduce this gentleman."

"Your dear Count will do nothing like that, Mr. Lanyard. If you need a name to call me by, Smith's good enough."

The incisive force of his enunciation assorted consistently with the general habit of the man. Lanyard recognized a nature no more pliable than his own. Idle to waste time bickering with this one....

"It doesn't matter," he said shortly; and drawing back a chair, sat down. "If it did, I should insist--or else decline the honour of receiving the addresses of this cosmopolitan committee. Truly, messieurs, you flatter me. Here we have Mr. Wertheimer, representing the swell-mobsmen across Channel; Monsieur le Comte standing for the gratin of Paris; Popinot, spokesman for our friends the Apaches; and the well-known Mr. Goodenough Smith, ambassador of the gun-men of New York--no doubt. I presume one is to understand you wait upon me as representing the fine flower of the European underworld?"

"You're to understand that I, for one, don't relish your impudence," the stout Popinot snapped.

"Sorry.... But I have already indicated my inability to take you seriously."

"Why not?" the American demanded ominously. "You'd be sore enough if we took you as a joke, wouldn't you?"

"You misapprehend, Mr.--ah--Smith: it is my first aim and wish that you do not take me in any manner, shape or form. It is you, remember, who requested this interview and--er--dressed your parts so strikingly!"

"What are we to understand by that?" De Morbihan interposed.

"This, messieurs--if you must know." Lanyard dropped for the moment his tone of raillery and bent forward, emphasizing his points by tapping the table with a forefinger. "Through some oversight of mine or cleverness of yours--I can't say which--perhaps both--you have succeeded in penetrating my secret. What then? You become envious of my success. In short, I stand in your light: I'm always getting away with something you might have lifted if you'd only had wit enough to think of it first. As your American accomplice, Mr. Mysterious Smith, would say, I 'cramp your style.'"

"You learned that on Broadway," the American commented shrewdly.

"Possibly.... To continue: so you get together, and bite your nails until you concoct a plan to frighten me into my profits. I've no doubt you're prepared to allow me to retain one-half the proceeds of my operations, should I elect to ally myself with you?"

"That's the suggestion we are empowered to make," De Morbihan admitted.

"In other words, you need me. You say to yourselves: 'We'll pretend to be the head of a criminal syndicate, such as the silly novelists are forever writing about, and we'll threaten to put him out of business unless he comes to our terms.' But you overlook one important fact: that you are not mentally equipped to get away with this amusing impersonation! What! Do you expect me to accept you as leading spirits of a gigantic criminal system--you, Popinot, who live by standing between the police and your murderous rats of Belleville, or you, Wertheimer, sneak-thief and black-mailer of timid women, or you, De Morbihan, because you eke out your income by showing a handful of second-storey men where to seek plunder in the homes of your friends!"

He made a gesture of impatience, and lounged back to wait the answer to this indictment. His gaze, ranging the four faces, encountered but one that was not darkly flushed with resentment; and this was the American's.

"Aren't you overlooking me?" this last suggested gently.

"On the contrary: I refuse to recognize you as long as you lack courage to show your face."

"As you will, my friend," the American chuckled. "Make your profit out of that any way you like."

Lanyard sat up again: "Well, I've stated your case, messieurs. It amounts to simple, clumsy blackmail. I'm to split my earnings with you, or you'll denounce me to the police. That's about it, isn't it?"

"Not of necessity," De Morbihan softly purred, twisting his moustache.

"For my part," Popinot declared hotly, "I engage that Monsieur of the High Hand, here, will either work with us or conduct no more operations in Paris."

"Or in New York," the American amended.

"England is yet to be heard from," Lanyard suggested mockingly.

To this Wertheimer replied, almost with diffidence: "If you ask me, I don't think you'd find it so jolly pleasant over there, if you mean to cut up nasty at this end."

"Then what am I to infer? If you're afraid to lay an information against me--and it wouldn't be wise, I admit--you'll merely cause me to be assassinated, eh?"

"Not of necessity," the Count murmured in the same thoughtful tone and manner--as one holding a hidden trump.

"There are so many ways of arranging these matters," Wertheimer ventured.

"None the less, if I refuse, you declare war?"

"Something like that," the American admitted.

"In that case--I am now able to state my position definitely." Lanyard got up and grinned provokingly down at the group. "You can--all four of you--go plumb to hell!"

"My dear friend!" the Count cried, shocked--"you forget--"

"I forget nothing!" Lanyard cut in coldly--"and my decision is final. Consider yourselves at liberty to go ahead and do your damnedest! But don't forget that it is you who are the aggressors. Already you've had the insolence to interfere with my arrangements: you began offensive operations before you declared war. So now if you're hit beneath the belt, you mustn't complain: you've asked for it!"

"Now just what _do_ you mean by that?" the American drawled ironically.

"I leave you to figure it out for yourselves. But I will say this: I confidently expect you to decide to live and let live, and shall be sorry, as you'll certainly be sorry, if you force my hand."

He opened the door, turned, and saluted them with sarcastic punctilio.

"I have the honour to bid adieu to Messieurs the Council of--'The Pack'!"

IX

DISASTER

Having fulfilled his purpose of making himself acquainted with the personnel of the opposition, Lanyard slammed the door in its face, thrust his hands in his pockets, and sauntered down stairs, chuckling, his nose in the air, on the best of terms with himself.

True, the fat was in the fire and well a-blaze: he had to look to himself now, and go warily in the shadow of their enmity. But it was something to have faced down those four, and he wasn't seriously impressed by any one of them.

Popinot, perhaps, was the most dangerous in Lanyard's esteem; a vindictive animal, that Popinot; and the creatures he controlled, a murderous lot, drug-ridden, drink bedevilled, vicious little rats of Belleville, who'd knife a man for the price of an absinthe. But Popinot wouldn't move without leave from De Morbihan, and unless Lanyard's calculations were seriously miscast, De Morbihan would restrain both himself and his associates until thoroughly convinced Lanyard was impregnable against every form of persuasion. Murder was something a bit out of De Morbihan's line--something, at least, which he might be counted on to hold in reserve. And by the time he was ready to employ it, Lanyard would be well beyond his reach. Wertheimer, too, would deprecate violence until all else failed; his half-caste type was as cowardly as it was blackguard; and cowards kill only impulsively, before they've had time to weigh consequences. There remained "Smith," enigma; a man apparently gifted with both intelligence and character.... But if so, what the deuce was _he_ doing in such company?

Still, there he was: and the association damned him beyond consideration. His sorts were all of a piece, beneath the consideration of men of spirit....

At this point, the self-complacence bred of his contempt for Messrs. de Morbihan et Cie. bred in its turn a thought that brought the adventurer up standing.

The devil! Who was he, Michael Lanyard, that held himself above such vermin, yet lived in such a way as practically to invite their advances? What right was his to resent their opening the door to confraternity, as long as he trod paths so closely parallel to theirs that only a sophist might discriminate them? What comforting distinction was to be drawn between on the one hand a blackmailer like Wertheimer, a chevalier-d'industrie like De Morbihan, or a patron of Apaches like Popinot, and on the other himself whose bread was eaten in the sweat of thievery?

He drew a long face; whistled softly; shook his head; and smiled a wry smile.

"Glad I didn't think of that two minutes ago, or I'd never have had the cheek..."

Without warning, incongruously and, in his understanding, inexplicably, he found himself beset by recurrent memory of the girl, Lucia Bannon.

For an instant he saw her again, quite vividly, as last he had seen her: turning at the door of her bed-chamber to look back at him, a vision of perturbing charm in her rose-silk dressing-gown, with rich hair loosened, cheeks softly glowing, eyes brilliant with an emotion illegible to her one beholder....

What had been the message of those eyes, flashed down the dimly lighted length of that corridor at Troyon's, ere she vanished?

Adieu? Or au revoir? ...

She had termed him, naïvely enough, and a gentleman.

But if she knew--suspected--even dreamed--that he was what he was?...

He shook his head again, but now impatiently, with a scowl and a grumble:

"What's the matter with me anyway? Mooning over a girl I never saw before to-night! As if it matters a whoop in Hepsidam what she thinks!... Or is it possible I'm beginning to develop a rudimentary conscience, at this late day? Me!..."

If there were anything in this hypothesis, the growing-pains of that late-blooming conscience were soon enough numbed by the hypnotic spell of clattering chips, an ivory ball singing in an ebony race, and croaking croupiers.

For Lanyard's chair at the table of chemin-de-fer had been filled by another and, too impatient to wait a vacancy, he wandered on to the salon dedicated to roulette, tested his luck by staking a note of five hundred francs on the black, won, and incontinently subsided into a chair and an oblivion that endured for the space of three-quarters of an hour.

At the end of that period he found himself minus his heavy winnings at chemin-de-fer and ten thousand francs of his reserve fund to boot.

By way of lining for his pockets there remained precisely the sum which he had brought into Paris that same evening, less subsequent general disbursements.

The experience was nothing novel in his history. He rose less resentful than regretful that his ill-luck obliged him to quit just when play was most interesting, and resignedly sought the cloak-room for his coat and hat.

And there he found De Morbihan--again!--standing all garmented for the street, mouthing a huge cigar and wearing a look of impatient discontent.

"At last!" he cried in an aggrieved tone as Lanyard appeared in the offing. "You do take your time, my friend!"

Lanyard smothered with a smile whatever emotion was his of the moment.

"I didn't imagine you really meant to wait for me," he parried with double meaning, both to humour De Morbihan and hoodwink the attendant.

"What do you think?" retorted the Count with asperity--"that I'm willing to stand by and let you moon round Paris at this hour of the morning, hunting for a taxicab that isn't to be found and running God-knows-what risk of being stuck up by some misbegotten Apache? But I should say not! I mean to take you home in my car, though it cost me a half-hour of beauty sleep not lightly to be forfeited at my age!"

The significance that underlay the semi-humourous petulance of the little man was not wasted.

"You're most amiable, Monsieur le Comte!" Lanyard observed thoughtfully, while the attendant produced his hat and coat. "So now, if you're ready, I won't delay you longer."

In another moment they were outside the club-house, its doors shut behind them, while before them, at the curb, waited that same handsome black limousine which had brought the adventurer from L'Abbaye.

Two swift glances, right and left, showed him an empty street, bare of hint of danger.

"One moment, monsieur!" he said, detaining the Count with a touch on his sleeve. "It's only right that I should advise you ... I'm armed."

"Then you're less foolhardy than one feared. If such things interest you, I don't mind admitting I carry a life-preserver of my own. But what of that? Is one eager to go shooting at this time of night, for the sheer fun of explaining to sergents de ville that one has been attacked by Apaches? ... Providing always one lives to explain!"

"It's as bad as that, eh?"

"Enough to make me loath to linger at your side in a lighted doorway!"

Lanyard laughed in his own discomfiture. "Monsieur le Comte," said he, "there's a dash in you of what your American pal, Mysterious Smith, would call sporting blood, that commands my unstinted admiration. I thank you for your offered courtesy, and beg leave to accept."

De Morbihan replied with a grunt of none too civil intonation, instructed the chauffeur "To Troyon's," and followed Lanyard into the car.

"Courtesy!" he repeated, settling himself with a shake. "That makes nothing. If I regarded my own inclinations, I'd let you go to the devil as quick as Popinot's assassins could send you there!"

"This is delightful!" Lanyard protested. "First you must see me home to save my life, and then you tell me your inclinations consign me to a premature grave. Is there an explanation, possibly?"

"On your person," said the Count, sententious.

"Eh?"

"You carry your reason with you, my friend--in the shape of the Omber loot."

"Assuming you are right--"

"You never went to the rue du Bac, monsieur, without those jewels: and I have had you under observation ever since."

"What conceivable interest," Lanyard pursued evenly, "do you fancy you've got in the said loot?"

"Enough, at least, to render me unwilling to kiss it adieu by leaving you to the mercies of Popinot. You don't imagine I'd ever hear of it again, when his Apaches had finished with you?"

"Ah!... So, after all, your so-called organization isn't founded on that reciprocal trust so essential to the prosperity of such--enterprises!"

"Amuse yourself as you will with your inferences, my friend," the Count returned, unruffled; "but don't forget my advice: pull wide of Popinot!"

"A vindictive soul, eh?"

"One may say that."

"You can't hold him?"

"That one? No fear! You were anything but wise to bait him as you did."

"Perhaps. It's purely a matter of taste in associates."

"If I were the fool you think me," mused the Count "I'd resent that innuendo. As it happens, I'm not. At least, I can wait before calling you to account."

"And meantime profit by your patience?"

"But naturally. Haven't I said as much?"

"Still, I'm perplexed. I can't imagine how you reckon to declare yourself in on the Omber loot."

"All in good time: if you were wise, you'd hand the stuff over to me here and now, and accept what I chose to give you in return. But inasmuch as you're the least wise of men, you must have your lesson."

"Meaning--?"

"The night brings counsel: you'll have time to think things over. By to-morrow you'll be coming to offer me those jewels in exchange for what influence I have in certain quarters."

"With your famous friend, the Chief of the Sûreté, eh?"

"Possibly. I am known also at La Tour Pointue."

"I confess I don't follow you, unless you mean to turn informer."

"Never that."

"It's a riddle, then?"

"For the moment only.... But I will say this: it will be futile, your attempting to escape Paris; Popinot has already picketted every outlet. Your one hope resides in me; and I shall be at home to you until midnight to-morrow--to-day, rather."

Impressed in spite of himself, Lanyard stared. But the Count maintained an imperturbable manner, looking straight ahead. Such calm assurance would hardly be sheer bluff.

"I must think this over," Lanyard mused aloud.

"Pray don't let me hinder you," the Count begged with mild sarcasm. "I have my own futile thoughts...."

Lanyard laughed quietly and subsided into a reverie which, undisturbed by De Morbihan, endured throughout the brief remainder of their drive; for, thanks to the smallness of the hour, the streets were practically deserted and offered no obstacle to speed; while the chauffeur was doubtless eager for his bed.

As they drew near Troyon's, however, Lanyard sat up and jealously reconnoitered both sides of the way.

"Surely you don't expect to be kept out?" the Count asked dryly. "But that just shows how little you appreciate our good Popinot. He'll never object to your locking yourself up where he knows he can find you--but only to your leaving without permission!"

"Something in that, perhaps. Still, I make it a rule to give myself the benefit of every doubt."

There was, indeed, no sign of ambush that he could detect in any quarter, nor any indication that Popinot's Apaches were posted thereabouts. Nevertheless, Lanyard produced his automatic and freed the safety-catch before opening the door.

"A thousand thanks, my dear Count!"

"For what? Doing myself a service? But you make me feel ashamed!"

"I know," agreed Lanyard, depreciatory; "but that's the way I am--a little devil--you really can't trust me! Adieu, Monsieur le Comte."

"Au revoir, monsieur!"

Lanyard saw the car round the corner before turning to the entrance of Troyon's, keeping his weather-eye alert the while. But when the car was gone, the street seemed quite deserted and as soundless as though it had been the thoroughfare of some remote village rather than an artery of the pulsing old heart of Paris.

Yet he wasn't satisfied. He was as little susceptible to psychic admonition as any sane and normal human organism, but he was just then strongly oppressed by intuitive perception that there was something radically amiss in his neighbourhood. Whether or not the result of the Count's open intimations and veiled hints working upon a nature sensitized by excitement and fatigue, he felt as though he had stepped from the cab into an atmosphere impregnated to saturation with nameless menace. And he even shivered a bit, perhaps because of the chill in that air of early morning, perhaps because a shadow of premonition had fallen athwart his soul....

Whatever its cause, he could find no reason for this; and shaking himself impatiently, pressed a button that rang a bell by the ear of the concierge, heard the latch click, thrust the door wide, and re-entered Troyon's.

Here reigned a silence even more marked than that of the street, a silence as heavy and profound as the grave's, so that sheer instinct prompted Lanyard to tread lightly as he made his way down the passage and across the courtyard toward the stairway; and in that hush the creak of a greaseless hinge, when the concierge opened the door of his quarters to identify this belated guest, seemed little less than a profanity.

Lanyard paused and delved into his pockets, nodding genially to the blowsy, sleepy old face beneath the guardian's nightcap.

"Sorry to disturb monsieur," he said politely, further impoverishing himself in the sum of five francs in witness to the sincerity of his regret.

"I thank monsieur; but what need to consider me? It's my duty. And what is one interruption more or less? All night they come and go...."

"Good night, monsieur," Lanyard cut short the old man's garrulity; and went on up the stairs, now a little wearily, of a sudden newly conscious of his vast and enervating fatigue.

He thought longingly of bed, yawned involuntarily and, reaching his door, fumbled the key in a most unprofessional way; there were weights upon his eyelids, a heaviness in his brain....

But the key met with no resistance from the wards; and in a trice, appreciating this fact, Lanyard was wide-awake again.

No question but that he had locked the door securely, on leaving after his adventure with the charming somnambulist....

Had she, then, taken a whim to his room?

Or was this but proof of what he had anticipated in the beginning--a bit of sleuthing on the part of Roddy?

He entertained little doubt as to the correctness of this latter surmise, as he threw the door open and stepped into the room, his first action being to grasp the electric switch and twist it smartly.

But no light answered.

"Hello!" he exclaimed softly, remembering that the lights could readily have been turned off at the bulbs. "What's the good of that?"

In the same breath he started violently, and swung about.

The door had closed behind him, swiftly but gently, eclipsing the faint light from the hall, leaving what amounted to stark darkness.

His first impression was that the intruder--Roddy or whoever--had darted past him and out, pulling the door to in that act.

Before he could consciously revise this misconception he was fighting for his life.

So unexpected, so swift and sudden fell the assault, that he was caught completely off guard: between the shutting of the door and an onslaught whose violence sent him reeling to the wall, the elapsed time could have been measured by the fluttering of an eyelash.

And then two powerful arms were round him, pinioning his hands to his sides, his feet were tripped up, and he was thrown with a force that fairly jarred his teeth, half-stunning him.

For a breath he lay dazed, struggling feebly; not long, but long enough to enable his antagonist to shift his hold and climb on top of his body, where he squatted, bearing down heavily with a knee on either of Lanyard's forearms, hands encircling his neck, murderous thumbs digging into his windpipe.

He revived momentarily, pulled himself together, and heaved mightily in futile effort to unseat the other.

The sole outcome of this was a tightening pressure on his throat.

The pain grew agonizing; Lanyard's breath was almost completely shut off; he gasped vainly, with a rattling noise in his gullet; his eyeballs started; a myriad coruscant lights danced and interlaced blindingly before them; in his ears there rang a roaring like the voice of heavy surf breaking upon a rock-bound coast.

And of a sudden he ceased to struggle and lay slack, passive in the other's hands.

Only an instant longer was the clutch on his throat maintained. Both hands left it quickly, one shifting to his head to turn and press it roughly cheek to floor. Simultaneously he was aware of the other hand fumbling about his neck, and then of a touch of metal and the sting of a needle driven into the flesh beneath his ear.

That galvanized him; he came to life again in a twinkling, animate with threefold strength and cunning. The man on his chest was thrown off as by a young earthquake; and Lanyard's right arm was no sooner free than it shot out with blind but deadly accuracy to the point of his assailant's jaw. A click of teeth was followed by a sickish grunt as the man lurched over....

Lanyard found himself scrambling to his feet, a bit giddy perhaps, but still sufficiently master of his wits to get his pistol out before making another move.

X

TURN ABOUT

The thought of Lanyard's pocket flash-lamp offering itself, immediately its wide circle of light enveloped his late antagonist.

That one was resting on a shoulder, legs uncouthly a-sprawl, quite without movement of any perceptible sort; his face more than half-turned to the floor, and masked into the bargain.

Incredulously Lanyard stirred the body with a foot, holding his weapon poised as though half-expecting it to quicken with instant and violent action; but it responded in no way.

With a nod of satisfaction, he shifted the light until it marked down the nearest electric bulb, which proved, in line with his inference, to have been extinguished by the socket key, while the heat of its bulb indicated that the current had been shut off only an instant before his entrance.

The light full up, he went back to the thug, knelt and, lifting the body, turned it upon its back.

Recognition immediately rewarded this manoeuvre: the masked face upturned to the glare was that of the American who had made a fourth in the concert of the Pack--"Mr. Smith," Quickly unlatching the mask, Lanyard removed it; but the countenance thus exposed told little more than he knew; he could have sworn he had never seen it before. None the less, something in its evil cast persistently troubled his memory, with the same provoking and baffling effect that had attended their first encounter.

Already the American was struggling toward consciousness. His lips and eyelids twitched spasmodically, he shuddered, and his flexed muscles began to relax. In this process something fell from between the fingers of his right hand--something small and silver-bright that caught Lanyard's eye.

Picking it up, he examined with interest a small hypodermic syringe loaded to the full capacity of its glass cylinder, plunger drawn back--all ready for instant service.

It was the needle of this instrument that had pricked the skin of Lanyard's neck; beyond reasonable doubt it contained a soporific, if not exactly a killing dose of some narcotic drug--cocaine, at a venture.

So it appeared that this agent of the Pack had been commissioned to put the Lone Wolf to sleep for an hour or two or more--_perhaps_ not permanently!--that he might be out of the way long enough for their occult purposes.

He smiled grimly, fingering the hypodermic and eyeing the prostrate man.

"Turn about," he reflected, "is said to be fair play.... Well, why not?"

He bent forward, dug the needle into the wrist of the American and shot the plunger home, all in a single movement so swift and deft that the drug was delivered before the pain could startle the victim from his coma.

As for that, the man came to quickly enough; but only to have his clearing senses met and dashed by the muzzle of a pistol stamping a cold ring upon his temple.

"Lie perfectly quiet, my dear Mr. Smith," Lanyard advised; "don't speak above a whisper! Give the good dope a chance: it'll only need a moment, or I'm no judge and you're a careless highbinder! I'd like to know, however--if it's all the same to you--"

But already the injection was taking effect; the look of panic, which had drawn the features of the American and flickered from his eyes with dawning appreciation of his plight, was clouding, fading, blending into one of daze and stupour. The eyelids flickered and lay still; the lips moved as if with urgent desire to speak, but were dumb; a long convulsive sigh shook the American's body; and he rested with the immobility of the dead, save for the slow but steady rise and fall of his bosom.

Lanyard thoughtfully reviewed these phenomena.

"Must kick like a mule, that dope!" he reflected. "Lucky it didn't get me before I guessed what was up! If I'd even suspected its strength, however, I'd have been less hasty: I could do with a little information from Mr. Mysterious Stranger here!"

Suddenly conscious of a dry and burning throat, he rose and going to the washstand drank deep and thirstily from a water-bottle; then set himself resolutely to repair the disarray of his wits and consider what was best to be done.

In his abstraction he wandered to a chair over whose back hung a light dressing-gown of wine-coloured silk, which, because it would pack in small compass, was in the habit of carrying with him on his travels. Lanyard had left this thrown across his bed; and he was wondering subconsciously what use the man had thought to make of it, that he should have taken the trouble to shift it to the chair.

But even as he laid hold of it, Lanyard dropped the garment in sheer surprise to find it damp and heavy in his grasp, sodden with viscid moisture. And when, in a swift flash of intuition, he examined his fingers, he discovered them discoloured with a faint reddish stain.

Had the dye run? And how had the American come to dabble the garment in water--to what end?

Then the shape of an object on the floor near his feet arrested Lanyard's questing vision. He stared, incredulous, moved forward, bent over and picked it up, clipping it gingerly between finger-tips.

It was one of his razors--a heavy hollow-ground blade--and it was foul with blood.

With a low cry, smitten with awful understanding, Lanyard wheeled and stared fearfully at the door communicating with Roddy's room.

It stood ajar an inch or two, its splintered lock accounted for by a small but extremely efficient jointed steel jimmy which lay near the threshold.

Beyond the door ... darkness ... silence...

Mustering up all his courage, the adventurer strode determinedly into the adjoining room.

The first flash of his hand-lamp discovered to him sickening verification of his most dreadful apprehensions.

Now he saw why his dressing-gown had been requisitioned--to protect a butcher's clothing.

After a moment he returned, shut the door, and set his back against it, as if to bar out that reeking shambles.

He was very pale, his face drawn with horror; and he was powerfully shaken with nausea.

The plot was damnably patent: Roddy proving a menace to the Pack and requiring elimination, his murder had been decreed as well as that the blame for it should be laid at Lanyard's door. Hence the attempt to drug him, that he might not escape before police could be sent to find him there.

He could no longer doubt that De Morbihan had been left behind at the Circle of Friends of Harmony solely to detain him, if need be, and afford Smith time to finish his hideous job and set the trap for the second victim.

And the plot had succeeded despite its partial failure, despite the swift reverse chance and Lanyard's cunning had meted out to the Pack's agent. It was _his_ dressing-gown that was saturate with Roddy's blood, just as they were his gloves, pilfered from his luggage, which had measurably protected the killer's hands, and which Lanyard had found in the next room, stripped hastily off and thrown to the floor--twin crumpled wads of blood-stained chamois-skin.

He had now little choice; he must either flee Paris and trust to his wits to save him, or else seek De Morbihan and solicit his protection, his boasted influence in high quarters.

But to give himself into the hands, to become an associate, of one who could be party to so cowardly a Crime as this ... Lanyard told himself he would sooner pay the guillotine the penalty....

Consulting his watch, he found the hour to be no later than half-past four: so swiftly (truly treading upon one another's heels) events had moved since the incident of the somnambulist.

This left at his disposal a fair two hours more of darkness: November nights are long and black in Paris; it would hardly be even moderately light before seven o'clock. But that were a respite none too long for Lanyard's necessity; he must think swiftly in contemplation of instant action were he to extricate himself without the Pack's knowledge and consent.

Granted, then, he must fly this stricken field of Paris. But how? De Morbihan had promised that Popinot's creatures would guard every outlet; and Lanyard didn't doubt him. An attempt to escape the city by any ordinary channel would be to invite either denunciation to the police on the charge of murder, or one of those fatally expeditious forms of assassination of which the Apaches are past-masters.

He must and would find another way; but his decision was frightfully hampered by lack of ready money; the few odd francs in his pocket were no store for the war-chest demanded by this emergency.

True, he had the Omber jewels; but they were not negotiable--not at least in Paris.

And the Huysman plans?

He pondered briefly the possibilities of the Huysman plans.

In his fretting, pacing softly to and fro, at each turn he passed his dressing-table, and chancing once to observe himself in its mirror, he stopped short, thunderstruck by something he thought to detect in the counterfeit presentment of his countenance, heavy with fatigue as it was, and haggard with contemplation of this appalling contretemps.

And instantly he was back beside the American, studying narrowly the contours of that livid mask. Here, then, was that resemblance which had baffled him; and now that he saw it, he could not deny that it was unflatteringly close: feature for feature the face of the murderer reproduced his face, coarsened perhaps but recognizably a replica of that Michael Lanyard who confronted him every morning in his shaving-glass, almost the only difference residing in the scrubby black moustache that shadowed the American's upper lip.

After all, there was nothing wonderful in this; Lanyard's type was not uncommon; he would never have thought himself a distinguished figure.

Before rising he turned out the pockets of his counterfeit. But this profited him little: the assassin had dressed for action with forethought to evade recognition in event of accident. Lanyard collected only a cheap American watch in a rolled-gold case of a sort manufactured by wholesale, a briquet, a common key that might fit any hotel door, a broken paper of Régie cigarettes, an automatic pistol, a few francs in silver--nothing whatever that would serve as a mark of identification; for though the grey clothing was tailor-made, the maker's labels had been ripped out of its pockets, while the man's linen and underwear alike lacked even a laundry's hieroglyphic.

With this harvest of nothing for his pains, Lanyard turned again to the wash-stand and his shaving kit, mixed a stiff lather, stropped another razor to the finest edge he could manage, fetched a pair of keen scissors from his dressing-case, and went back to the murderer.

He worked rapidly, at a high pitch of excitement--as much through sheer desperation as through any appeal inherent in the scheme either to his common-sense or to his romantic bent.

In two minutes he had stripped the moustache clean away from that stupid, flaccid mask.

Unquestionably the resemblance was now most striking; the American would readily pass for Michael Lanyard.

This much accomplished, he pursued his preparations in feverish haste. In spite of this, he overlooked no detail. In less than twenty minutes he had exchanged clothing with the American in detail, even down to shirts, collars and neckties; had packed in his own pockets the several articles taken from the other, together with the jointed jimmy and a few of his personal effects, and was ready to bid adieu to himself, to that Michael Lanyard whom Paris knew.

The insentient masquerader on the floor had called himself "good-enough Smith"; he must serve now as good-enough Lanyard, at least for the Lone Wolf's purposes; the police at all events would accept him as such. And if the memory of Michael Lanyard must needs wear the stigma of brutal murder, he need not repine in his oblivion, since through this perfunctory decease the Lone Wolf would gain a freedom even greater than before.

The Pack had contrived only to eliminate Michael Lanyard, the amateur of fine paintings; remained the Lone Wolf with not one faculty impaired, but rather with a deadlier purpose to shape his occult courses....

Under the influence of his methodical preparations, his emotions had cooled appreciably, taking on a cast of cold malignant vengefulness.

He who never in all his criminal record had so much as pulled trigger in self-defence, was ready now to shoot to kill with the most cold-blooded intent--given one of three targets; while Popinot's creatures, if they worried him, he meant to exterminate with as little compunction as though they were rats in fact as well as in spirit....

Extinguishing the lights, he stepped quickly to a window and from one edge of its shade looked down into the street.

He was in time to see a stunted human silhouette detach itself from the shadow of a doorway on the opposite walk, move to the curb, and wave an arm--evidently signaling another sentinel on a corner out of Lanyard's range of vision.

Herein was additional proof, if any lacked, that De Morbihan had not exaggerated the disposition of Popinot. This animal in the street, momentarily revealed by the corner light as he darted across to take position by the door, this animal with sickly face and pointed chin, with dirty muffler round its chicken-neck, shoddy coat clothing its sloping shoulders, baggy corduroy trousers flapping round its bony shanks--this was Popinot's, and but one of a thousand differing in no essential save degree of viciousness.

It wasn't possible to guess how thoroughly Popinot had picketed the house, in co-operation with Roddy's murderer, by way of provision against mischance; but the adventurer was satisfied that, in his proper guise as himself, he needed only to open that postern door at the street end of the passage, to feel a knife slip in between his ribs--most probably in his back, beneath the shoulder-blade....

He nodded grimly, moved back from the window, and used the flash-lamp to light him to the door.

XI

FLIGHT

Now when Lanyard had locked the door, he told himself that the gruesome peace of those two bed-chambers was ensured, barring mischance, for as long as the drug continued to hold dominion over the American; and he felt justified in reckoning that period apt to be tolerably protracted; while not before noon at earliest would any hôtelier who knew his business permit the rest of an Anglo-Saxon guest to be disturbed--lacking, that is, definite instructions to the contrary.

For a full minute after withdrawing the key the adventurer stood at alert attention; but the heavy silence of that sinister old rookery sang in his ears untroubled by any untoward sound....

That wistful shadow of his memories, that cowering Marcel of the so-dead yesterday in acute terror of the hand of Madame Troyon, had never stolen down that corridor more quietly: yet Lanyard had taken not five paces from his door when that other opened, at the far end, and Lucia Bannon stepped out.

He checked then, and shut his teeth upon an involuntary oath: truly it seemed as though this run of the devil's own luck would never end!

Astonishment measurably modified his exasperation.

What had roused the girl out of bed and dressed her for the street at that unholy hour? And why her terror at sight of him?

For that the surprise was no more welcome to her than to him was as patent as the fact that she was prepared to leave the hotel forthwith, enveloped in a business-like Burberry rainproof from her throat to the hem of a tweed walking-skirt, and wearing boots both stout and brown. And at sight of him she paused and instinctively stepped back, groping blindly for the knob of her bed-chamber door; while her eyes, holding to his with an effect of frightened fascination, seemed momentarily to grow more large and dark in her face of abnormal pallor.

But these were illegible evidences, and Lanyard was intent solely on securing her silence before she could betray him and ruin incontinently that grim alibi which he had prepared at such elaborate pains. He moved toward her swiftly, with long and silent strides, a lifted hand enjoining rather than begging her attention, aware as he drew nearer that a curious change was colouring the complexion of her temper: she passed quickly from dread to something oddly like relief, from repulsion to something strangely like welcome; and dropping the hand that had sought the door-knob, in her turn moved quietly to meet him.

He was grateful for this consideration, this tacit indulgence of the wish he had as yet to voice; drew a little hope and comfort from it in an emergency which had surprised him without resource other than to throw himself upon her generosity. And as soon as he could make himself heard in the clear yet concentrated whisper that was a trick of his trade, a whisper inaudible to ears a yard distant from those to which it was pitched, he addressed her in a manner at once peremptory and apologetic.

"If you please, Miss Bannon--not a word, not a whisper!"

She paused and nodded compliance, questioning eyes steadfast to his.

Doubtfully, wondering that she betrayed so little surprise, he pursued as one committed to a forlorn hope:

"It's vitally essential that I leave this hotel without it becoming known. If I may count on you to say nothing--"

She gave him reassurance with a small gesture. "But how?" she breathed in the least of whispers. "The concierge--!"

"Leave that to me--I know another way. I only need a chance--"

"Then won't you take me with you?"

"Eh?" he stammered, dashed.

Her hands moved toward him in a flutter of entreaty: "I too must leave unseen--I _must_! Take me with you--out of this place--and I promise you no one shall ever know--"

He lacked time to weigh the disadvantages inherent in her proposition; though she offered him a heavy handicap, he had no choice but to accept it without protest.

"Come, then," he told her--"and not a sound--"

She signified assent with another nod; and on this he turned to an adjacent door, opened it gently, whipped out his flash-lamp, and passed through. Without sign of hesitancy, she followed; and like two shadows they dogged the dancing spot-light of the flash-lamp, through a linen-closet and service-room, down a shallow well threaded by a spiral of iron steps and, by way of the long corridor linking the kitchen-offices, to a stout door secured only by huge, old-style bolts of iron.

Thus, in less than two minutes from the instant of their encounter, they stood outside Troyon's back door, facing a cramped, malodorous alley-way--a dark and noisome souvenir of that wild mediaeval Paris whose effacement is an enduring monument to the fame of the good Baron Haussmann.

Now again it was raining, a thick drizzle that settled slowly, lacking little of a fog's opacity; and the faint glimmer from the street lamps of that poorly lighted quarter, reflected by the low-swung clouds, lent Lanyard and the girl little aid as they picked their way cautiously, and always in complete silence, over the rude and slimy cobbles of the foul back way. For the adventurer had pocketed his lamp, lest its beams bring down upon them some prowling creature of Popinot's; though he felt passably sure that the alley had been left unguarded in the confidence that he would never dream of its existence, did he survive to seek escape from Troyon's.

For all its might and its omniscience, Lanyard doubted if the Pack had as yet identified Michael Lanyard with that ill-starred Marcel who once had been as intimate with this forgotten way as any skulking tom of the quarter.

But with the Lone Wolf confidence was never akin to foolhardiness; and if on leaving Troyon's he took the girl's hand without asking permission and quite as a matter-of-course, and drew it through his arm--it was his left arm that he so dedicated to gallantry; his right hand remained unhampered, and never far from the grip of his automatic.

Nor was he altogether confident of his companion. The weight of her hand upon his arm, the fugitive contacts of her shoulder, seemed to him, just then, the most vivid and interesting things in life; the consciousness of her personality at his side was like a shaft of golden light penetrating the darkness of his dilemma. But as minutes passed and their flight was unchallenged, his mood grew dark with doubts and quick with distrust. Reviewing it all, he thought to detect something too damnably adventitious in the way she had nailed him, back there in the corridor of Troyon's. It was a bit too coincidental--"a bit thick!"--like that specious yarn of somnambulism she had told to excuse her presence in his room. Come to examine it, that excuse had been far too clumsy to hoodwink any but a man bewitched by beauty in distress.

Who was she, anyway? And what her interest in him? What had she been after in his room?--this American girl making a first visit to Paris in company with her venerable ruin of a parent? Who, for that matter, was Bannon? If her story of sleep-walking were untrue, then Bannon must have been at the bottom of her essay in espionage--Bannon, the intimate of De Morbihan, and an American even as the murderer of poor Roddy was an American!

Was this singularly casual encounter, then, but a cloak for further surveillance? Had he in his haste and desperation simply played into her hands, when he burdened himself with the care of her?

But it seemed absurd; to think that she... a girl like her, whose every word and gesture was eloquent of gentle birth and training...!

Yet--what _had_ she wanted in his room? Somnambulists are sincere indeed in the indulgence of their failing when they time their expeditions so opportunely--and arm themselves with keys to fit strange doors. Come to think of it, he had been rather willfully blind to that flaw in her excuse.... Again, why should she be up and dressed and so madly bent on leaving Troyon's at half-past four in the morning? Why couldn't she wait for daylight at least? What errand, reasonable duty or design could have roused her out into the night and the storm at that weird hour? He wondered!

And momentarily he grew more jealously heedful of her, critical of every nuance in her bearing. The least trace of added pressure on his arm, the most subtle suggestion that she wasn't entirely indifferent to him or regarded him in any way other than as the chance-found comrade of an hour of trouble, would have served to fix his suspicions. For such, he told himself, would be the first thought of one bent on beguiling--to lead him on by some intimation, the more tenuous and elusive the more provocative, that she found his person not altogether objectionable.

But he failed to detect anything of this nature in her manner.

So, what was one to think? That she was mental enough to appreciate how ruinous to her design would be any such advances? ...

In such perplexity he brought her to the end of the alley and there pulled up for a look round before venturing out into the narrow, dark, and deserted side street that then presented itself.

At this the girl gently disengaged her hand and drew away a pace or two; and when Lanyard had satisfied himself that there were no Apaches in the offing, he turned to see her standing there, just within the mouth of the alley, in a pose of blank indecision.

Conscious of his regard, she turned to his inspection a face touched with a fugitive, uncertain smile.

"Where are we?" she asked.

He named the street; and she shook her head. "That doesn't mean much to me," she confessed; "I'm so strange to Paris, I know only a few of the principal streets. Where is the boulevard St. Germain?"

Lanyard indicated the direction: "Two blocks that way."

"Thank you." She advanced a step or two, but paused again. "Do you know, possibly, just where I could find a taxicab?"

"I'm afraid you won't find any hereabouts at this hour," he replied. "A fiacre, perhaps--with luck: I doubt if there's one disengaged nearer than Montmartre, where business is apt to be more brisk."

"Oh!" she cried in dismay. "I hadn't thought of that.... I thought Paris never went to sleep!"

"Only about three hours earlier than most of the world's capitals.... But perhaps I can advise you--"

"If you would be so kind! Only, I don't like to be a nuisance--"

He smiled deceptively: "Don't worry about that. Where do you wish to go?"

"To the Gare du Nord."

That made him open his eyes. "The Gare du Nord!" he echoed. "But--I beg your pardon--"

"I wish to take the first train for London," the girl informed him calmly.

"You'll have a while to wait," Lanyard suggested. "The first train leaves about half-past eight, and it's now not more than five."

"That can't be helped. I can wait in the station."

He shrugged: that was her own look-out--if she were sincere in asserting that she meant to leave Paris; something which he took the liberty of doubting.

"You can reach it by the Métro," he suggested--"the Underground, you know; there's a station handy--St. Germain des Prés. If you like, I'll show you the way."

Her relief seemed so genuine, he could have almost believed in it. And yet--!

"I shall be very grateful," she murmured.

He took that for whatever worth it might assay, and quietly fell into place beside her; and in a mutual silence--perhaps largely due to her intuitive sense of his bias--they gained the boulevard St. Germain. But here, even as they emerged from the side street, that happened which again upset Lanyard's plans: a belated fiacre hove up out of the mist and ranged alongside, its driver loudly soliciting patronage.

Beneath his breath Lanyard cursed the man liberally, nothing could have been more inopportune; he needed that uncouth conveyance for his own purposes, and if only it had waited until he had piloted the girl to the station of the Métropolitain, he might have had it. Now he must either yield the cab to the girl or--share it with her.... But why not? He could readily drop out at his destination, and bid the driver continue to the Gare du Nord; and the Métro was neither quick nor direct enough for his design--which included getting under cover well before daybreak.

Somewhat sulkily, then, if without betraying his temper, he signalled the cocher, opened the door, and handed the girl in.

"If you don't mind dropping me en route..."

"I shall be very glad," she said ... "anything to repay, even in part, the courtesy you've shown me!"

"Oh, please don't fret about that...."

He gave the driver precise directions, climbed in, and settled himself beside the girl. The whip cracked, the horse sighed, the driver swore; the aged fiacre groaned, stirred with reluctance, crawled wearily off through the thickening drizzle.

Within its body a common restraint held silence like a wall between the two.

The girl sat with face averted, reading through the window what corner signs they passed: rue Bonaparte, rue Jacob, rue des Saints Pères, Quai Malquais, Pont du Carrousel; recognizing at least one landmark in the gloomy arches of the Louvre; vaguely wondering at the inept French taste in nomenclature which had christened that vast, louring, echoing quadrangle the place du Carrousel, unliveliest of public places in her strange Parisian experience.

And in his turn, Lanyard reviewed those well-remembered ways in vast weariness of spirit--disgusted with himself in consciousness that the girl had somehow divined his distrust....

"The Lone Wolf, eh?" he mused bitterly. "Rather, the Cornered Rat--if people only knew! Better still, the Errant--no!--the Arrant Ass!"

They were skirting the Palais Royal when suddenly she turned to him in an impulsive attempt at self-justification.

"What _must_ you be thinking of me, Mr. Lanyard?"

He was startled: "I? Oh, don't consider me, please. It doesn't matter what I think--does it?"

"But you've been so kind; I feel I owe you at least some explanation--"

"Oh, as for that," he countered cheerfully, "I've got a pretty definite notion you're running away from your father."

"Yes. I couldn't stand it any longer--"

She caught herself up in full voice, as though tempted but afraid to say more. He waited briefly before offering encouragement.

"I hope I haven't seemed impertinent...."

"No, no!"

Than this impatient negative his pause of invitation evoked no other recognition. She had subsided into her reserve, but--he fancied--not altogether willingly.

Was it, then, possible that he had misjudged her?

"You've friends in London, no doubt?" he ventured.

"No--none."

"But--"

"I shall manage very well. I shan't be there more than a day or two--till the next steamer sails."

"I see." There had sounded in her tone a finality which signified desire to drop the subject. None the less, he pursued mischievously: "Permit me to wish you bon voyage, Miss Bannon... and to express my regret that circumstances have conspired to change your plans."

She was still eyeing him askance, dubiously, as if weighing the question of his acquaintance with her plans, when the fiacre lumbered from the rue Vivienne into the place de la Bourse, rounded that frowning pile, and drew up on its north side before the blue lights of the all-night telegraph bureau.

"With permission," Lanyard said, unlatching the door, "I'll stop off here. But I'll direct the cocher very carefully to the Gare du Nord. Please don't even tip him--that's my affair. No--not another word of thanks; to have been permitted to be of service--it is a unique pleasure, Miss Bannon. And so, good night!"

With an effect that seemed little less than timid, the girl offered her hand.

"Thank you, Mr. Lanyard," she said in an unsteady voice. "I am sorry--"

But she didn't say what it was she regretted; and Lanyard, standing with bared head in the driving mist, touched her fingers coolly, repeated his farewells, and gave the driver both money and instructions, and watched the cab lurch away before he approached the telegraph bureau....

But the enigma of the girl so deeply intrigued his imagination that it was only with difficulty that he concocted a non-committal telegram to Roddy's friend in the Prefecture--that imposing personage who had watched with the man from Scotland Yard at the platform gates in the Gare du Nord.

It was couched in English, when eventually composed and submitted to the telegraph clerk with a fervent if inaudible prayer that he might be ignorant of the tongue.

_"Come at once to my room at Troyon's. Enter via adjoining room prepared for immediate action on important development. Urgent. Roddy."_

Whether or not this were Greek to the man behind the wicket, it was accepted with complete indifference--or, rather, with an interest that apparently evaporated on receipt of the fees. Lanyard couldn't see that the clerk favoured him with as much as a curious glance before he turned away to lose himself, to bury his identity finally and forever under the incognito of the Lone Wolf.

He couldn't have rested without taking that one step to compass the arrest of the American assassin; now with luck and prompt action on the part of the Préfecture, he felt sure Roddy would be avenged by Monsieur de Paris.... But it was very well that there should exist no clue whereby the author of that mysterious telegram might be traced....

It was, then, not an ill-pleased Lanyard who slipped oft into the night and the rain; but his exasperation was elaborate when the first object that met his gaze was that wretched fiacre, back in place before the door, Lucia Bannon leaning from its lowered window, the cocher on his box brandishing an importunate whip at the adventurer.

He barely escaped choking on suppressed profanity; and for two sous would have swung on his heel and ignored the girl deliberately. But he didn't dare: close at hand stood a sergent de ville, inquisitive eyes bright beneath the dripping visor of his kepi, keenly welcoming this diversion of a cheerless hour.

With at least outward semblance of resignation, Lanyard approached the window.

"I have been guilty of some stupidity, perhaps?" he enquired with lip-civility that had no echo in his heart. "But I am sorry--"

"The stupidity is mine," the girl interrupted in accents tense with agitation. "Mr. Lanyard, I--I--"

Her voice faltered and broke off in a short, dry sob, and she drew back with an effect of instinctive distaste for public emotion. Lanyard smothered an impulse to demand roughly "Well, what now?" and came closer to the window.

"Something more I can do, Miss Bannon?"

"I don't know.... I've just found it out--I came away so hurriedly I never thought to make sure; but I've no money--not a franc!"

After a little pause he commented helpfully: "That does complicate matters, doesn't it?"

"What am I to do? I can't go back--I won't! Anything rather. You may judge how desperate I am, when I prefer to throw myself on your generosity--and already I've strained your patience--"

"Not much," he interrupted in a soothing voice. "But--half a moment--we must talk this over."

Directing the cocher to drive to the place Pigalle, he reentered the cab, suspicion more than ever rife in his mind. But as far as he could see--with that confounded sergo staring!--there was nothing else for it. He couldn't stand there in the rain forever, gossiping with a girl half-hysterical--or pretending to be.

"You see," she explained when the fiacre was again under way, "I thought I had a hundred-franc note in my pocketbook; and so I have--but the pocketbook's back there, in my room at Troyon's."

"A hundred francs wouldn't see you far toward New York," he observed thoughtfully.

"Oh, I hope you don't think--!"

She drew back into her corner with a little shudder of humiliation.

As if he hadn't noticed, Lanyard turned to the window, leaned out, and redirected the driver sharply: "Impasse Stanislas!"

Immediately the vehicle swerved, rounded a corner, and made back toward the Seine with a celerity which suggested that the stables were on the Rive Gauche.

"Where?" the girl demanded as Lanyard sat back. "Where are you taking me?"

"I'm sorry," Lanyard said with every appearance of sudden contrition; "I acted impulsively--on the assumption of your complete confidence. Which, of course, was unpardonable. But, believe me; you have only to say no and it shall be as you wish."

"But," she persisted impatiently--"you haven't answered me: what is this impasse Stanislas?"

"The address of an artist I know--Solon, the painter. We're going to take possession of his studio in his absence. Don't worry; he won't mind. He is under heavy obligation to me--I've sold several canvasses for him; and when he's away, as now, in the States, he leaves me the keys. It's a sober-minded, steady-paced neighbourhood, where we can rest without misgivings and take our time to think things out."

"But--" the girl began in an odd tone.

"But permit me," he interposed hastily, "to urge the facts of the case upon your consideration."

"Well?" she said in the same tone, as he paused.

"To begin with--I don't doubt you've good reason for running away from your father."

"A very real, a very grave reason," she affirmed quietly.

"And you'd rather not go back--"

"That is out of the question!"--with a restrained passion that almost won his credulity.

"But you've no friends in Paris--?"

"Not one!"

"And no money. So it seems, if you're to elude your father, you must find some place to hide pro tem. As for myself, I've not slept in forty-eight hours and must rest before I'll be able to think clearly and plan ahead....And we won't accomplish much riding round forever in this ark. So I offer the only solution I'm capable of advancing, under the circumstances."

"You are quite right," the girl agreed after a moment. "Please don't think me unappreciative. Indeed, it makes me very unhappy to think I know no way to make amends for your trouble."

"There may be a way," Lanyard informed her quietly; "but we'll not discuss that until we've rested up a bit."

"I shall be only too glad--" she began, but fell silent and, in a silence that seemed almost apprehensive, eyed him speculatively throughout the remainder of the journey.

It wasn't a long one; in the course of the next ten minutes they drew up at the end of a shallow pocket of a street, a scant half-block in depth; where alighting, Lanyard helped the girl out, paid and dismissed the cocher, and turned to an iron gate in a high stone wall crowned with spikes.

The grille-work of that gate afforded glimpses of a small, dark garden and a little house of two storeys. Blank walls of old tenements shouldered both house and garden on either side.

Unlocking the gate, Lanyard refastened it very carefully, repeated the business at the front door of the house, and when they were securely locked and bolted within a dark reception-hall, turned on the electric light.

But he granted the girl little more than time for a fugitive survey of this ante-room to an establishment of unique artistic character.

"These are living-rooms, downstairs here," he explained hurriedly. "Solon's unmarried, and lives quite alone--his studio-devil and femme-de-ménage come in by the day only--and so he avoids that pest a concierge. With your permission, I'll assign you to the studio--up here."

And leading the way up a narrow flight of steps, he made a light in the huge room that was the upper storey.

"I believe you'll be comfortable," he said--"that divan yonder is as easy a couch as one could wish--and there's this door you can lock at the head of the staircase; while I, of course, will be on guard below.... And now, Miss Bannon... unless there's something more I can do--?"

The girl answered with a wan smile and a little broken sigh. Almost involuntarily, in the heaviness of her fatigue, she had surrendered to the hospitable arms of a huge lounge-chair.

Her weary glance ranged the luxuriously appointed studio and returned to Lanyard's face; and while he waited he fancied something moving in those wistful eyes, so deeply shadowed with distress, perplexity, and fatigue.

"I'm very tired indeed," she confessed--"more than I guessed. But I'm sure I shall be comfortable.... And I count myself very fortunate, Mr. Lanyard. You've been more kind than I deserved. Without you, I don't like to think what might have become of me...."

"Please don't!" he pleaded and, suddenly discountenanced by consciousness of his duplicity, turned to the stairs. "Good night, Miss Bannon," he mumbled; and was half-way down before he heard his valediction faintly echoed.

As he gained the lower floor, the door was closed at the top of the stairs and its bolt shot home with a soft thud.

But turning to lock the lower door, he stayed his hand in transient indecision.

"Damn it!" he growled uneasily--"there can't be any harm in that girl! Impossible for eyes like hers to lie!... And yet ... And yet!... Oh, what's the matter with me? Am I losing my grip? Why stick at ordinary precaution against treachery on the part of a woman who's nothing to me and of whom I know nothing that isn't conspicuously questionable?... All because of a pretty face and an appealing manner!"

And so he secured that door, if very quietly; and having pocketed the key and made the round of doors and windows, examining their locks, he stumbled heavily into the bedroom of his friend the artist.

Darkness overwhelmed him then: he was stricken down by sleep as an ox falls under the pole.

XII

AWAKENING

It was late afternoon when Lanyard wakened from sleep so deep and dreamless that nothing could have induced it less potent than sheer systemic exhaustion, at once nervous, muscular and mental.

A profound and stifling lethargy benumbed his senses. There was stupor in his brain, and all his limbs ached dully. He opened dazed eyes upon blank darkness. In his ears a vast silence pulsed.

And in that strange moment of awakening he was conscious of no individuality: it was, for the time, as if he had passed in slumber from one existence to another, sloughing en passant all his three-fold personality as Marcel Troyon, Michael Lanyard, and the Lone Wolf. Had any one of these names been uttered in his hearing just then it would have meant nothing to him--or little more than nothing: he was for the time being merely _himself_, a shell of sensations enclosing dull embers of vitality.

For several minutes he lay without moving, curiously intrigued by this riddle of identity: it was but slowly that his mind, like a blind hand groping round a dark chamber, picked up the filaments of memory.

One by one the connections were renewed, the circuits closed....

But, singularly enough in his understanding, his first thought was of the girl upstairs in the studio, unconsciously his prisoner and hostage--rather than of himself, who lay there, heavy with loss of sleep, languidly trying to realize himself.

For he was no more as he had been. Wherein the difference lay he couldn't say, but that a difference existed he was persuaded--that he had changed, that some strange reaction in the chemistry of his nature had taken place during slumber. It was as if sleep had not only repaired the ravages of fatigue upon the tissues of his brain and body, but had mended the tissues of his soul as well. His thoughts were fluent in fresh channels, his interests no longer the interests of the Michael Lanyard he had known, no longer self-centred, the interests of the absolute ego. He was concerned less for himself, even now when he should be most gravely so, than for another, for the girl Lucia Bannon, who was nothing to him, whom he had yet to know for twenty-four hours, but of whom he could not cease to think if he would.

It was her plight that perturbed him, from which he sought an outlet--never his own.

Yet his own was desperate enough....

Baffled and uneasy, he at length bethought him of his watch. But its testimony seemed incredible: surely the hour could not be five in the afternoon!--surely he could not have slept so close upon a full round of the clock!

And if it were so, what of the girl? Had she, too, so sorely needed sleep that the brief November day had dawned and waned without her knowledge?

That question was one to rouse him: in an instant he was up and groping his way through the gloom that enshrouded bed-chamber and dining-room to the staircase door in the hall. He found this fast enough, its key still safe in his pocket, and unlocking it quietly, shot the beam of his flash-lamp up that dark well to the door at the top; which was tight shut.

For several moments he attended to a taciturn silence broken by never a sound to indicate that he wasn't a lonely tenant of the little dwelling, then irresolutely lifted a foot to the first step--and withdrew it. If she continued to sleep, why disturb her? He had much to do in the way of thinking things out; and that was a process more easily performed in solitude.

Leaving the door ajar, then, he turned to one of the front windows, parted its draperies, and peered out, over the little garden and through the iron ribs of the gate, to the street, where a single gas-lamp, glimmering within a dull golden halo of mist, made visible the scant length of the impasse Stanislas, empty, rain-swept, desolate.

The rain persisted with no hint of failing purpose....

Something in the dreary emptiness of that brief vista deepened the shadow in his mood and knitted a careworn frown into his brows.

Abstractedly he sought the kitchen and, making a light, washed up at the tap, then foraged for breakfast. Persistence turned up a spirit-stove, a half-bottle of methylated, a packet of tea, a tin or two of biscuit, as many more of potted meats: left-overs from the artist's stock, dismally scant and uninviting in array. With these he made the discovery that he was half-famished, and found no reason to believe that the girl would be in any better case. An expedition to the nearest charcuterie was indicated; but after he had searched for and found an old raincoat of Solon's, Lanyard decided against leaving the girl alone. Pending her appearance, he filled the spirit-stove, put the kettle on to boil, and lighting a cigarette, sat himself down to watch the pot and excogitate his several problems.

In a fashion uncommonly clear-headed, even for him, he assembled all the facts bearing upon their predicament, his and Lucia Bannon's, jointly and individually, and dispassionately pondered them....

But insensibly his thoughts reverted to their exotic phase of his awakening, drifting into such introspection as he seldom indulged, and led him far from the immediate riddle, by strange ways to a revelation altogether unpresaged and a resolve still more revolutionary.

A look of wonder flickered in his brooding eyes; and clipped between two fingers, his cigarette grew a long ash, let it fall, and burned down to a stump so short that the coal almost scorched his flesh. He dropped it and crushed out the fire with his heel, all unwittingly.

Slowly but irresistibly his world was turning over beneath his feet....

The sound of a footfall recalled him as from an immeasurable remove; he looked up to see Lucia at pause upon the threshold, and rose slowly, with effort recollecting himself and marshalling his wits against the emergency foreshadowed by her attitude.

Tense with indignation, quick with disdain, she demanded, without any preface whatever: "Why did you lock me in?"

He stammered unhappily: "I beg your pardon--"

"Why did you lock me in?"

"I'm sorry--"

"Why did you--"

But she interrupted herself to stamp her foot emphatically; and he caught her up on the echo of that:

"If you must know, because I wasn't trusting you."

Her eyes darkened ominously: "Yet you insisted I should trust you!"

"The circumstances aren't parallel: you're not a notorious malefactor, wanted by the police of every capital in Europe, hounded by rivals to boot--fighting for life, liberty and"--he laughed shortly--"the pursuit of happiness!"

She caught her breath sharply--whether with dismay or mere surprise at his frankness he couldn't tell.

"Are you?" she demanded quickly.

"Am I what?"

"What you've just said--"

"A crook--and all that? Miss Bannon, you know it!"

"The Lone Wolf?"

"You've known it all along. De Morbihan told you--or else your father. Or, it may be, you were shrewd enough to guess it from De Morbihan's bragging in the restaurant. At all events, it's plain enough, nothing but desire to find proof to identify me with the Lone Wolf took you to my room last night--whether for your personal satisfaction or at the instigation of Bannon--just as nothing less than disgust with what was going on made you run away from such intolerable associations.... Though, at that, I don't believe you even guessed how unspeakably vicious those were!"

He paused and waited, anticipating furious denial or refutation; such would, indeed, have been the logical development of the temper in which she had come down to confront him.

Rather than this, she seemed calmed and sobered by his charge; far from resenting it, disposed to concede its justice; anger deserted her expression, leaving it intent and grave. She came quietly into the room and faced him squarely across the table.

"You thought all that of me--that I was capable of spying on you--yet were generous enough to believe I despised myself for doing it?"

"Not at first.... At first, when we met back there in the corridor, I was sure you were bent on further spying. Only since waking up here, half an hour ago, did I begin to understand how impossible it would be for you to lend yourself to such villainy as last night's."

"But if you thought that of me then, why did you--?"

"It occurred to me that it would be just as well to prevent your reporting back to headquarters."

"But now you've changed your mind about me?"

He nodded: "Quite."

"But why?" she demanded in a voice of amazement. "Why?"

"I can't tell you," he said slowly--"I don't know why. I can only presume it must be because--I can't help believing in you."

Her glance wavered: her colour deepened. "I don't understand..." she murmured.

"Nor I," he confessed in a tone as low....

A sudden grumble from the teakettle provided welcome distraction. Lanyard lifted it off the flames and slowly poured boiling water on a measure of tea in an earthenware pot.

"A cup of this and something to eat'll do us no harm," he ventured, smiling uneasily--"especially if we're to pursue this psychological enquiry into the whereforeness of the human tendency to change one's mind!"

XIII

CONFESSIONAL

And then, when the girl made no response, but remained with troubled gaze focused on some remote abstraction, "You will have tea, won't you?" he urged.

She recalled her thoughts, nodded with the faintest of smiles--"Yes, thank you!"--and dropped into a chair.

He began at once to make talk in effort to dissipate that constraint which stood between them like an unseen alien presence: "You must be very hungry?"

"I am."

"Sorry I've nothing better to offer you. I'd have run out for something more substantial, only--"

"Only--?" she prompted, coolly helping herself to biscuit and potted ham.

"I didn't think it wise to leave you alone."

"Was that before or after you'd made up your mind about me--the latest phase, I mean?" she persisted with a trace of malice.

"Before," he returned calmly--"likewise, afterwards. Either way you care to take it, it wouldn't have been wise to leave you here. Suppose you had waked up to find me gone, yourself alone in this strange house--"

"I've been awake several hours," she interposed--"found myself locked in, and heard no sound to indicate that you were still here."

"I'm sorry: I was overtired and slept like a log.... But assuming the case: you would have gone out, alone, penniless--"

"Through a locked door, Mr. Lanyard?"

"I shouldn't have left it locked," he explained patiently.... "You would have found yourself friendless and without resources in a city to which you are a stranger."

She nodded: "True. But what of that?"

"In desperation you might have been forced to go back--"

"And report the outcome of my investigation!"

"Pressure might have been brought to induce admissions damaging to me," Lanyard submitted pleasantly. "Whether or no, you'd have been obliged to renew associations you're well rid of."

"You feel sure of that?"

"But naturally."

"How can you be?" she challenged. "You've yet to know me twenty-four hours."

"But perhaps I know the associations better. In point of fact, I do. Even though you may have stooped to play the spy last night, Miss Bannon--you couldn't keep it up. You had to fly further contamination from that pack of jackals."

"Not--you feel sure--merely to keep you under observation?"

"I do feel sure of that. I have your word for it."

The girl deliberately finished her tea, and sat back, regarding him steadily beneath level brows. Then she said with an odd laugh: "You have your own way of putting one on honour!"

"I don't need to--with you."

She analyzed this with gathering perplexity. "What do you mean by that?"

"I mean, I don't need to put you on your honour--because I'm sure of you. Even were I not, still I'd refrain from exacting any pledge, or attempting to." He paused and shrugged before continuing: "If I thought you were still to be distrusted, Miss Bannon, I'd say: 'There's a free door; go when you like, back to the Pack, turn in your report, and let them act as they see fit.'... Do you think I care for them? Do you imagine for one instant that I fear any one--or all--of that gang?"

"That rings suspiciously of egoism!"

"Let it," he retorted. "It's pride of caste, if you must know. I hold myself a grade better than such cattle; I've intelligence, at least.... I can take care of myself!"

If he might read her countenance, it expressed more than anything else distress and disappointment.

"Why do you boast like this--to me?"

"Less through self-satisfaction than in contempt for a pack of murderous mongrels--impatience that I have to consider such creatures as Popinot, Wertheimer, De Morbihan and--all their crew."

"And Bannon," she corrected calmly--"you meant to say!"

"Wel-l--" he stammered, discountenanced.

"It doesn't matter," she assured him. "I quite understand, and strange as it may sound, I've very little feeling in the matter." And then she acknowledged his stupefied stare with a weary smile. "I know what I know," she added, with obscure significance....

"I'd give a good deal to know how much you know," he muttered in his confusion.

"But what do _you_ know?" she caught him up--"against Mr. Bannon--against my father, that is--that makes you so ready to suspect both him and me?"

"Nothing," he confessed--"I know nothing; but I suspect everything and everybody.... And the more I think of it, the more closely I examine that brutal business of last night, the more I seem to sense his will behind it all--as one might glimpse a face in darkness through a lighted lattice.... Oh, laugh if you like! It sounds high-flown, I know. But that's the effect I get.... What took you to my room, if not his orders? Why does he train with De Morbihan, if he's not blood-kin to that breed? Why are you running away from him if not because you've found out his part in that conspiracy?"

His pause and questioning look evoked no answer; the girl sat moveless and intent, meeting his gaze inscrutably. And something in her impassive attitude worked a little exasperation into his temper.

"Why," he declared hotly--"if I dare trust to intuition--forgive me if I pain you--"

She interrupted with impatience: "I've already begged you not to consider my feelings, Mr. Lanyard! If you dared trust to your intuition--what then?"

"Why, then, I could believe that Mr. Bannon, your father ... I could believe it was his order that killed poor Roddy!"

There could be no doubting her horrified and half-incredulous surprise.

"Roddy?" she iterated in a whisper almost inaudible, with face fast blanching. "Roddy--!"

"Inspector Roddy of Scotland Yard," he told her mercilessly, "was murdered in his sleep last night at Troyon's. The murderer broke into his room by way of mine--the two adjoin. He used my razor, wore my dressing-gown to shield his clothing, did everything he could think of to cast suspicion on me, and when I came in assaulted me, meaning to drug and leave me insensible to be found by the police. Fortunately--I was beforehand with him. I had just left him drugged, insensible in my place, when I met you in the corridor.... You didn't know?"

"How can you ask?" the girl moaned.

Bending forward, an elbow on the table, she worked her hands together until their knuckles shone white through the skin--but not as white as the face from which her eyes sought his with a look of dumb horror, dazed, pitiful, imploring.

"You're not deceiving me? But no--why should you?" she faltered. "But how terrible, how unspeakably awful! ..."

"I'm sorry," Lanyard mumbled--"I'd have held my tongue if I hadn't thought you knew--"

"You thought I knew--and didn't lift a finger to save the man?" She jumped up with a blazing face. "Oh, how could you?"

"No--not that--I never thought that. But, meeting you then and there, so opportunely--I couldn't ignore the coincidence; and when you admitted you were running away from your father, considering all the circumstances, I was surely justified in thinking it was realization, in part at least, of what had happened that was driving you away." She shook her head slowly, her indignation ebbing as quickly as it had risen. "I understand," she said; "you had some excuse, but you were mistaken. I ran away--yes--but not because of that. I never dreamed ..."

She fell silent, sitting with bowed head and twisting her hands together in a manner he found it painful to watch.

"But please," he implored, "don't take it so much to heart, Miss Bannon. If you knew nothing, you couldn't have prevented it."

"No," she said brokenly--"I could have done nothing ... But I didn't know. It isn't that--it's the horror and pity of it. And that you could think--!"

"But I didn't!" he protested--"truly I did not. And for what I did think, for the injustice I did do you, believe me, I'm truly sorry."

"You were quite justified," she said--"not only by circumstantial evidence but to a degree in fact. You must know ... now I must tell you ..."

"Nothing you don't wish to!" he interrupted. "The fact that I practically kidnapped you under pretence of doing you a service, and suspected you of being in the pay of that Pack, gives me no title to your confidence."

"Can I blame you for thinking what you did?" She went on slowly, without looking up--gaze steadfast to her interlaced fingers: "Now for my own sake I want you to know what otherwise, perhaps, I shouldn't have told you--not yet, at all events. I'm no more Bannon's daughter than you're his son. Our names sound alike--people frequently make the same mistake. My name is Shannon--Lucy Shannon. Mr. Bannon called me Lucia because he knew I didn't like it, to tease me; for the same reason he always kept up the pretence that I was his daughter when people misunderstood."

"But--if that is so--then what--?"

"Why--it's very simple." Still she didn't look up. "I'm a trained nurse. Mr. Bannon is consumptive--so far gone, it's a wonder he didn't die years ago: for months I've been haunted by the thought that it's only the evil in him keeps him alive. It wasn't long after I took the assignment to nurse him that I found out something about him.... He'd had a haemorrhage at his desk; and while he lay in coma, and I was waiting for the doctor, I happened to notice one of the papers he'd been working over when he fell. And then, just as I began to appreciate the sort of man I was employed by, he came to, and saw--and knew. I found him watching me with those dreadful eyes of his, and though he was unable to speak, knew my life wasn't safe if ever I breathed a word of what I had read. I would have left him then, but he was too cunning for me, and when in time I found a chance to escape--I was afraid I'd not live long if ever I left him. He went about it deliberately; to keep me frightened, and though he never mentioned the matter directly, let me know plainly, in a hundred ways, what his power was and what would happen if I whispered a word of what I knew. It's nearly a year now--nearly a year of endless terror and..."

Her voice fell; she was trembling with the recrudescent suffering of that year-long servitude. And for a little Lanyard felt too profoundly moved to trust himself to speak; he stood aghast, staring down at this woman, so intrinsically and gently feminine, so strangely strong and courageous; and vaguely envisaging what anguish must have been hers in enforced association with a creature of Bannon's ruthless stamp, he was rent with compassion and swore to himself he'd stand by her and see her through and free and happy if he died for it--or ended in the Santé!

"Poor child!" he heard himself murmuring--"poor child!"

"Don't pity me!" she insisted, still with face averted. "I don't deserve it. If I had the spirit of a mouse, I'd have defied him; it needed only courage enough to say one word to the police--"

"But who is he, then?" Lanyard demanded. "What is he, I mean?"

"I hardly know how to tell you. And I hardly dare: I feel as if these walls would betray me if I did.... But to me he's the incarnation of all things evil...." She shook herself with a nervous laugh. "But why be silly about it? I don't really know what or who he is: I only suspect and believe that he is a man whose life is devoted to planning evil and ordering its execution through his lieutenants. When the papers at home speak of 'The Man Higher Up' they mean Archer Bannon, though they don't know it--or else I'm merely a hysterical woman exaggerating the impressions of a morbid imagination.... And that's all I know of him that matters."

"But why, if you believe all this--how did you at length find courage--?"

"Because I no longer had courage to endure; because I was more afraid to stay than to go--afraid that my own soul would be forfeit. And then, last night, he ordered me to go to your room and search it for evidence that you were the Lone Wolf. It was the first time he'd ever asked anything like that of me. I was afraid, and though I obeyed, I was glad when you interrupted--glad even though I had to lie the way I did.... And all that worked on me, after I'd gone back to my room, until I felt I could stand it no longer; and after a long time, when the house seemed all still, I got up, dressed quietly and ... That is how I came to meet you--quite by accident."

"But you seemed so frightened at first when you saw me--"

"I was," she confessed simply; "I thought you were Mr. Greggs."

"Greggs?"

"Mr. Bannon's private secretary--his right-hand man. He's about your height and has a suit like the one you wear, and in that poor light--at the distance I didn't notice you were clean-shaven--Greggs wears a moustache--"

"Then it was Greggs murdered Roddy and tried to drug me! ... By George, I'd like to know whether the police got there before Bannon, or somebody else, discovered the substitution. It was a telegram to the police, you know, I sent from the Bourse last night!"

In his excitement Lanyard began to pace the floor rapidly; and now that he was no longer staring at her, the girl lifted her head and watched him closely as he moved to and fro, talking aloud--more to himself than to her.

"I wish I knew! ... And what a lucky thing, you did meet me! For if you'd gone on to the Gare du Nord and waited there....Well, it isn't likely Bannon didn't discover your flight before eight o'clock this morning, is it?"

"I'm afraid not...."

"And they've drawn the dead-line for me round every conceivable exit from Paris: Popinot's Apaches are picketed everywhere. And if Bannon had found out about you in time, it would have needed only a word..."

He paused and shuddered to think what might have ensued had that word been spoken and the girl been found waiting for her train in the Gare du Nord.

"Mercifully, we've escaped that. And now, with any sort of luck, Bannon ought to be busy enough, trying to get his precious Mr. Greggs out of the Santé, to give us a chance. And a fighting chance is all I ask."

"Mr. Lanyard"--the girl bent toward him across the table with a gesture of eager interest--"have you any idea why he--why Mr. Bannon hates you so?"

"But does he? I don't know!"

"If he doesn't, why should he plot to cast suspicion of murder on you, and why be so anxious to know whether you were really the Lone Wolf? I saw his eyes light up when De Morbihan mentioned that name, after dinner; and if ever I saw hatred in a man's face, it was in his as he watched you, when you weren't looking."

"As far as I know, I never heard of him before," Lanyard said carelessly. "I fancy it's nothing more than the excitement of a man-hunt. Now that they've found me out, De Morbihan and his crew won't rest until they've got my scalp."

"But why?"

"Professional jealousy. We're all crooks, all in the same boat, only I won't row to their stroke. I've always played a lone hand successfully; now they insist on coming into the game and sharing my winnings. And I've told them where they could go."

"And because of that, they're willing to----"

"There's nothing they wouldn't do, Miss Shannon, to bring me to my knees or see me put out of the way, where my operations couldn't hurt their pocketbooks. Well ... all I ask is a fighting chance, and they shall have their way!"

Her brows contracted. "I don't understand.... You want a fighting chance--to surrender--to give in to their demands?"

"In a way--yes. I want a fighting chance to do what I'd never in the world get them to credit--give it all up and leave them a free field."

And when still she searched his face with puzzled eyes, he insisted: "I mean it; I want to get away--clear out--chuck the game for good and all!"

A little silence greeted this announcement. Lanyard, at pause near the table, resting a hand on it, bent to the girl's upturned face a grave but candid regard. And the deeps of her eyes that never swerved from his were troubled strangely in his vision. He could by no means account for the light he seemed to see therein, a light that kindled while he watched like a tiny flame, feeble, fearful, vacillant, then as the moments passed steadied and grew stronger but ever leaped and danced; so that he, lost in the wonder of it and forgetful of himself, thought of it as the ardent face of a happy child dancing in the depths of some brown autumnal woodland....

"You," she breathed incredulously--"you mean, you're going to stop--?"

"I _have_ stopped, Miss Shannon. The Lone Wolf has prowled for the last time. I didn't know it until I woke up, an hour or so ago, but I've turned my last job."

He remarked her hands were small, in keeping with the slightness of her person, but somehow didn't seem so--wore a look of strength and capability, befitting hands trained to a nurse's duties; and saw them each tight-fisted but quivering as they rested on the table, as though their mistress struggled to suppress the manifestation of some emotion as powerful as unfathomable to him.

"But why?" she demanded in bewilderment. "But why do you say that? What can have happened to make you--?"

"Not fear of that Pack!" he laughed--"not that, I promise you."

"Oh, I know!" she said impatiently--"I know that very well. But still I don't understand...."

"If it won't bore you, I'll try to explain." He drew up his chair and sat down again, facing her across the littered table. "I don't suppose you've ever stopped to consider what an essentially stupid animal a crook must be. Most of them are stupid because they practise clumsily one of the most difficult professions imaginable, and inevitably fail at it, yet persist. They wouldn't think of undertaking a job of civil engineering with no sort of preparation, but they'll tackle a dangerous proposition in burglary without a thought, and pay for failure with years of imprisonment, and once out try it again. That's one kind of criminal--the ninety-nine per-cent class--incurably stupid! There's another class, men whose imagination forewarns them of dangers and whose mental training, technical equipment and sheer manual dexterity enable them to attack a formidable proposition like a modern safe--by way of illustration--and force its secret. They're the successful criminals, like myself--but they're no less stupid, no less failures, than the other ninety-nine in our every hundred, because they never stop to think. It never occurs to them that the same intelligence, applied to any one of the trades they must be masters of, would not only pay them better, but leave them their self-respect and rid them forever of the dread of arrest that haunts us all like the memory of some shameful act.... All of which is much more of a lecture than I meant to inflict upon you, Miss Shannon, and sums up to just this: _I_'ve stopped to think...."

With this he stopped for breath as well, and momentarily was silent, his faint, twisted smile testifying to self-consciousness; but presently, seeing that she didn't offer to interrupt, but continued to give him her attention so exclusively that it had the effect of fascination, he stumbled on, at first less confidently. "When I woke up it was as if, without my will, I had been thinking all this out in my sleep. I saw myself for the first time clearly, as I have been ever since I can remember--a crook, thoughtless, vain, rapacious, ruthless, skulking in shadows and thinking myself an amazingly fine fellow because, between coups, I would play the gentleman a bit, venture into the light and swagger in the haunts of the gratin! In my poor, perverted brain I thought there was something fine and thrilling and romantic in the career of a great criminal and myself a wonderful figure--an enemy of society!"

"Why do you say this to me?" she demanded abruptly, out of a phase of profound thoughtfulness.

He lifted an apologetic shoulder. "Because, I fancy, I'm no longer self-sufficient. _I_ was all of that, twenty-four hours ago; but now I'm as lonesome as a lost child in a dark forest. I haven't a friend in the world. I'm like a stray pup, grovelling for sympathy. And you are unfortunate enough to be the only person I can declare myself to. It's going to be a fight--I know that too well!--and without something outside myself to struggle toward, I'll be heavily handicapped. But if ..." He faltered, with a look of wistful earnestness. "If I thought that you, perhaps, were a little interested, that I had your faith to respect and cherish ... if I dared hope that you'd be glad to know I had won out against odds, it would mean a great deal to me, it might mean my salvation!"

Watching her narrowly, hanging upon her decision with the anxiety of a man proscribed and hoping against hope for pardon, he saw her eyes cloud and shift from his, her lips parted but hesitant; and before she could speak, hastily interposed:

"Please don't say anything yet. First let me demonstrate my sincerity. So far I've done nothing to persuade you but--talk and talk and talk! Give me a chance to prove I mean what I say."

"How"--she enunciated only with visible effort and no longer met his appeal with an open countenance--"how can you do that?"

"In the long run, by establishing myself in some honest way of life, however modest; but now, and principally, by making reparation for at least one crime I've committed that's not irreparable."

He caught her quick glance of enquiry, and met it with a confident nod as he placed between them the morocco-bound jewel-case.

"In London, yesterday," he said quietly, "I brought off two big coups. One was deliberate, the other the inspiration of a moment. The one I'd planned for months was the theft of the Omber jewels--here."

He tapped the case and resumed in the same manner: "The other job needs a diagram: Not long ago a Frenchman named Huysman, living in Tours, was mysteriously murdered--a poor inventor, who had starved himself to perfect a stabilizator, an attachment to render aeroplanes practically fool-proof. His final trials created a sensation and he was on the eve of selling his invention to the Government when he was killed and his plans stolen. Circumstantial evidence pointed to an international spy named Ekstrom--Adolph Ekstrom, once Chief of the Aviation Corps of the German Army, cashiered for general blackguardism with a suspicion of treason to boot. However, Ekstrom kept out of sight; and presently the plans turned up in the German War Office. That was a big thing for Germany; already supreme with her dirigibles, the acquisition of the Huysman stabilizator promised her ten years' lead over the world in the field of aeroplanes.... Now yesterday Ekstrom came to the surface in London with those self-same plans to sell to England. Chance threw him my way, and he mistook me for the man he'd expected to meet--Downing Street's secret agent. Well--no matter how--I got the plans from him and brought them over with me, meaning to turn them over to France, to whom by rights they belong."

"Without consideration?" the girl enquired shrewdly.

"Not exactly. I had meant to make no profit of the affair--I'm a bit squeamish about tainted money!--but under present conditions, if France insists on rewarding me with safe conduct out of the country, I shan't refuse it.... Do you approve?"

She nodded earnestly: "It would be worse than criminal to return them to Ekstrom...."

"That's my view of the matter."

"But these?" The girl rested her hand upon the jewel-case.

"Those go back to Madame Omber. She has a home here in Paris that I know very well. In fact, the sole reason why I didn't steal them here was that she left for England unexpectedly, just as I was all set to strike. Now I purpose making use of my knowledge to restore the jewels without risk of falling into the hands of the police. That will be an easy matter.... And that brings me to a great favour I would beg of you."

She gave him a look so unexpectedly kind that it staggered him. But he had himself well in hand.

"You can't now leave Paris before morning--thanks to my having overslept," he explained. "There's no honest way I know to raise money before the pawn-shops open. But I'm hoping that won't be necessary; I'm hoping I can arrange matters without going to that extreme. Meanwhile, you agree that these jewels must be returned?"

"Of course," she affirmed gently.

"Then ... will you accompany me when I replace them? There won't be any danger: I promise you that. Indeed, it would be more hazardous for you to wait for me elsewhere while I attended to the matter alone. And I'd like you to be convinced of my good faith."

"Don't you think you can trust me for that as well?" she asked, with a flash of humour.

"Trust you!"

"To believe ... Mr. Lanyard," she told him gently but earnestly, "I do believe."

"You make me very happy," he said ... "but I'd like you to see for yourself.... And I'd be glad not to have to fret about your safety in my absence. As a bureau of espionage, Popinot's brigade of Apaches is without a peer in Europe. I am positively afraid to leave you alone...."

She was silent.

"Will you come with me, Miss Shannon?" "That is your sole reason for asking this of me?" she insisted, eyeing him steadily.

"That I wish you to believe in me--yes."

"Why?" she pursued, inexorable.

"Because ... I've already told you."

"That you want someone's good opinion to cherish.... But why, of all people, me--whom you hardly know, of whom what little you do know is hardly reassuring?"

He coloured, and boggled his answer.... "I can't tell you," he confessed in the end.

"Why can't you tell me?"

He stared at her miserably.... "I've no right...."

"In spite of all I've said, in spite of the faith you so generously promise me, in your eyes I must still figure as a thief, a liar, an impostor--self-confessed. Men aren't made over by mere protestations, nor even by their own efforts, in an hour, or a day, or a week. But give me a year: if I can live a year in honesty, and earn my bread, and so prove my strength--then, perhaps, I might find the courage, the--the effrontery to tell you why I want your good opinion.... Now I've said far more than I meant or had any right to. I hope," he ventured pleadingly--"you're not offended."

Only an instant longer could she maintain her direct and unflinching look. Then, his meaning would no more be ignored. Her lashes fell; a tide of crimson flooded her face; and with a quick movement, pushing her chair a little from the table, she turned aside. But she said nothing.

He remained as he had been, bending eagerly toward her. And in the long minute that elapsed before either spoke again, both became oddly conscious of the silence brooding in that lonely little house, of their isolation from the world, of their common peril and mutual dependence.

"I'm afraid," Lanyard said, after a time--"I'm afraid I know what you must be thinking. One can't do your intelligence the injustice to imagine that you haven't understood me--read all that was in my mind and"--his voice fell--"in my heart. I own I was wrong to speak so transparently, to suggest my regard for you, at such a time, under such conditions. I am truly sorry, and beg you to consider unsaid all that I should not have said.... After all, what earthly difference can it make to you if one thief more decides suddenly to reform?"

That brought her abruptly to her feet, to show him a face of glowing loveliness and eyes distractingly dimmed and softened.

"No!" she implored him breathlessly--"please--you mustn't spoil it! You've paid me the finest of compliments, and one I'm glad and grateful for ... and would I might think I deserved! ... You say you need a year to prove yourself? Then--I've no right to say this--and you must please not ask me what I mean--then I grant you that year. A year I shall wait to hear from you from the day we part, here in Paris.... And to-night, I will go with you, too, and gladly, since you wish it!"

And then as he, having risen, stood at loss, thrilled, and incredulous, with a brave and generous gesture she offered him her hand.

"Mr. Lanyard, I promise...."

To every woman, even the least lovely, her hour of beauty: it had not entered Lanyard's mind to think this woman beautiful until that moment. Of her exotic charm, of the allure of her pensive, plaintive prettiness, he had been well aware; even as he had been unable to deny to himself that he was all for her, that he loved her with all the strength that was his; but not till now had he understood that she was the one woman whose loveliness to him would darken the fairness of all others.

And for a little, holding her tremulous hand upon his finger-tips as though he feared to bruise it with a ruder contact, he could not take his eyes from her.

Then reverently he bowed his head and touched his lips to that hand ... and felt it snatched swiftly away, and started back, aghast, the idyll roughly dissipated, the castle of his dreams falling in thunders round his ears.

In the studio-skylight overhead a pane of glass had fallen in with a shattering crash as ominous as the Trump of Doom.

XIV

RIVE DROIT

Falling without presage upon the slumberous hush enveloping the little house marooned in that dead back-water of Paris, the shock of that alarm drove the girl back from the table to the nearest wall, and for a moment held her there, transfixed in panic.

To the wide, staring eyes that questioned his so urgently, Lanyard promptly nodded grave reassurance. He hadn't stirred since his first, involuntary and almost imperceptible start, and before the last fragment of splintered glass had tinkled on the floor above, he was calming her in the most matter-of-fact manner.

"Don't be alarmed," he said. "It's nothing--merely Solon's skylight gone smash!"

"You call that nothing!" she cried gustily. "What caused it, then?"

"My negligence," he admitted gloomily. "I might have known that wide spread of glass with the studio electrics on, full-blaze, would give the show away completely. The house is known to be unoccupied; and it wasn't to be expected that both the police and Popinot's crew would overlook so shining a mark.... And it's all my fault, my oversight: I should have thought of it before.... High time I was quitting a game I've no longer the wit to play by the rules!"

"But the police would never...!"

"Certainly not. This is Popinot's gentle method of letting us know he's on the job. But I'll just have a look, to make sure.... No: stop where you are, please. I'd rather go alone."

He swung alertly through to the hall window, pausing there only long enough for an instantaneous glance through the draperies--a fugitive survey that discovered the impasse Stanislas no more abandoned to the wind and rain, but tenanted visibly by one at least who lounged beneath the lonely lamp-post, a shoulder against it: a featureless civilian silhouette with attention fixed to the little house.

But Lanyard didn't doubt this one had a dozen fellows stationed within call....

Springing up the stairs, he paused prudently at the top-most step, one quick glance showing him the huge rent gaping black in the skylight, the second the missile of destruction lying amid a litter of broken glass--a brick wrapped in newspaper, by the look of it.

Swooping forward, he retrieved this, darted back from the exposed space beneath the shattered skylight, and had no more than cleared the threshold than a second something fell through the gap and buried itself in the parquetry. This was a bullet fired from the roof of one of the adjoining buildings: confirming his prior reasoning that the first missile must have fallen from a height, rather than have been thrown up from the street, to have wrought such destruction with those tough, thick panes of clouded glass....

Swearing softly to himself, he descended to the kitchen.

"As I thought," he said coolly, exhibiting his find.

"They're on the roof of the next house--though they've posted a sentry in the street, of course."

"But that second thump--?" the girl demanded.

"A bullet," he said, placing the bundle on the table and cutting the string that bound it: "they were on the quivive and fired when I showed myself beneath the skylight."

"But I heard no report," she objected.

"A Maxim silencer on the gun, I fancy," he explained, unwrapping the brick and smoothing out the newspaper.... "Glad you thought to put on your hat before you came down," he added, with an approving glance for the girl; "it won't be safe to go up to the studio again--of course."

His nonchalance was far less real than it seemed, but helped to steady one who was holding herself together with a struggle, on the verge of nervous collapse.

"But what are we to do now?" she stammered. "If they've surrounded the house--!"

"Don't worry: there's more than one way out," he responded, frowning at the newspaper; "I wouldn't have picked this place out, otherwise. Nor would Solon have rented it in the first instance had it lacked an emergency exit, in event of creditors.... Ah--thought so!"

"What--?"

"Troyon's is gone," he said, without looking up. "This is to-night's Presse.... '_Totally destroyed by a fire which started at six-thirty this morning and in less than half an hour had reduced the ancient structure to a heap of smoking ashes_'! ..." He ran his eye quickly down the column, selecting salient phrases: "'_Believed to have been of incendiary origin though the premises were uninsured_'--that's an intelligent guess!... '_Narrow escape of guests in their '_whatyemaycallems...._'Three lives believed to have been lost ... one body recovered charred almost beyond recognition_'--but later identified as Roddy--poor devil! ... '_Two guests missing, Monsieur Lanyard, the well-known connoisseur of art, who occupied the room adjoining that of the unfortunate detective, and Mademoiselle Bannon, daughter of the American millionaire, who himself escaped only by a miracle with his secretary Monsieur Greggs, the latter being overcome by fumes_'--what a shame!... '_Police and firemen searching the ruins_'--hm-hm--' _extraordinary interest manifested by the Préfecture indicates a suspicion that the building may have been fired to conceal some crime of a political nature_.'"

Crushing the newspaper between his hands, he tossed it into a corner. "That's all of importance. Thoughtful of Popinot to let me know, this way! The Préfecture, of course, is humming like a wasp's-nest with the mystery of that telegram, signed with Roddy's name and handed in at the Bourse an hour or so before he was 'burned to death.' Too bad I didn't know then what I do now; if I'd even remotely suspected Greggs' association with the Pack was via Bannon.... But what's the use? I did my possible, knowing the odds were heavy against success."

"What was written on the paper?" the girl demanded obliquely.

He made his eyes blank: "Written on the paper--?"

"I saw something in red ink at the head of the column. You tried to hide it from me, but I saw.... What was it?"

"Oh--that!" he laughed contemptuously: "just Popinot's impudence--an invitation to come out and be a good target."

She shook her head impatiently: "You're not telling me the truth. It was something else, or you wouldn't have been so anxious to hide it."

"Oh, but I assure you--!"

"You can't. Be honest with me, Mr. Lanyard. It was an offer to let you off if you'd give me up to Bannon--wasn't it?"

"Something like that," he assented sheepishly--"too absurd for consideration.... But now we're due to clear out of this before they find a way in. Not that they're likely to risk a raid until they've tried starving us out; but it would be as well to put a good distance between us before they find out we've decamped."

He shrugged into his borrowed raincoat, buttoned it to his chin, and turned down the brim of his felt hat; but when he looked up at the girl again, he found she hadn't moved; rather, she remained as one spellbound, staring less at than through him, her expression inscrutable.

"Well," he ventured--"if you're quite ready, Miss Shannon--?"

"Mr. Lanyard," she demanded almost sharply--"what was the full wording of that message?"

"If you must know--"

"I must!"

He lifted a depreciative shoulder. "If you like, I'll read it to you--or, rather, translate it from the thieves' argot Popinot complimented me by using."

"Not necessary," she said tersely. "I'll take your word for it.... But you must tell me the truth."

"As you will.... Popinot delicately suggested that if I leave you here, to be reunited to your alleged parent--if I'll trust to his word of honour, that is, and walk out of the house alone, he'll give me twenty-four hours in which to leave Paris."

"Then only I stand between you and--"

"My dear young woman!" he protested hastily. "Please don't run away with any absurd notion like that. Do you imagine I'd consent to treat with such canaille under any circumstances?"

"All the same," she continued stubbornly, "I'm the stumbling-block. You're risking your life for me--"

"I'm not," he insisted almost angrily.

"You are," she returned with quiet conviction.

"Well!" he laughed--"have it your own way!..."

"But it's _my_ life, isn't it? I really don't see how you're going to prevent my risking it for anything that may seem to me worth the risk!"

But she wouldn't laugh; only her countenance, suddenly bereft of its mutinous expression, softened winningly--and her eyes grew very kind to him.

"As long as it's understood I understand--very well," she said quietly; "I'll do as you wish, Mr. Lanyard."

"Good!" he cried cheerfully. "I wish, by your leave, to take you out to dinner.... This way, please!"

Leading through the scullery, he unbarred a low, arched door in one of the walls, discovering the black mouth of a narrow and tunnel-like passageway.

With a word of caution, flash-lamp in his left hand, pistol in right, Lanyard stepped out into the darkness.

In two minutes he was back, with a look of relief.

"All clear," he reported; "I felt pretty sure Popinot knew nothing of this way out--else we'd have entertained uninvited guests long since. Now, half a minute...."

The electric meter occupied a place on the wall of the scullery not far from the door. Prying open its cover, he unscrewed and removed the fuse plug, plunging the entire house in complete darkness.

"That'll keep 'em guessing a while!" he explained with a chuckle. "They'll hesitate a long time before rushing a dark house infested by a desperate armed man--if I know anything about that mongrel lot!... Besides, when they do get their courage up, the lack of light will stave off discovery of this way of escape.... And now, one word more."

A flash of the lamp located her hand. Calmly he possessed himself of it, if without opposition.

"I've brought you into trouble enough, as it is, through my stupidity," he said; "but for that, this place should have been a refuge to us until we were quite ready to leave Paris. So now we mustn't forget, before we go out to run God-only-knows-what gauntlet, to fix a rendezvous in event of separation.... Popinot, for instance, may have drawn a cordon around the block; we can't tell until we're in the street; if he has, you must leave me to entertain them until you're safe beyond their reach.... Oh, don't worry: I'm perfectly well able to take care of myself....But afterwards, we must know where to find each other. Hotels, cafés and restaurants are out of the question: in the first place, we've barely money enough for our dinner; besides, they'll be watched closely; as for our embassies and consulates, they aren't open at all hours, and will likewise be watched. There remain--unless you can suggest something--only the churches; and I can think of none better suited to our purposes than the Sacré-Cour."

Her fingers tightened gently upon his.

"I understand," she said quietly; "if we're obliged to separate, I'm to go direct to the Sacré-Cour and await you there."

"Right! ...But let's hope there'll be no such necessity."

Hand-in-hand like frightened children, these two stole down the tunnel-like passageway, through a forlorn little court cramped between two tall old tenements, and so came out into the gloomy, sinuous and silent rue d'Assas.

Here they encountered few wayfarers; and to these, preoccupied with anxiety to gain shelter from the inclement night, they seemed, no doubt, some student of the Quarter with his sweetheart--Lanyard in his shabby raincoat, striding rapidly, head and shoulders bowed against the driving mist, the girl in her trim Burberry clinging to his arm....

Avoiding the nearer stations as dangerous, Lanyard steered a roundabout course through by-ways to the rue de Sèvres station of the Nord-Sud subway; from which in due course they came to the surface again at the place de la Concorde, walked several blocks, took a taxicab, and in less than half an hour after leaving the impasse Stanislas were comfortably ensconced in a cabinet particulier of a little restaurant of modest pretensions just north of Les Halles.

They feasted famously: the cuisine, if bourgeois, was admirable and, better still, well within the resources of Lanyard's emaciated purse. Nor did he fret with consciousness that, when the bill had been paid and the essential tips bestowed, there would remain in his pocket hardly more than cab fare. Supremely self-confident, he harboured no doubts of a smiling future--now that the dark pages in his record had been turned and sealed by a resolution he held irrevocable.

His spirits had mounted to a high pitch, thanks to their successful evasion. He was young, he was in love, he was hungry, he was--in short--very much alive. And the consciousness of common peril knitted an enchanting intimacy into their communications. For the first time in his history Lanyard found himself in the company of a woman with whom he dared--and cared--to speak without reserve: a circumstance intrinsically intoxicating. And stimulated by her unquestionable interest and sympathy, he did talk without reserve of old Troyon's and its drudge, Marcel; of Bourke and his wanderings; of the education of the Lone Wolf and his career, less in pride than in relief that it was ended; of the future he must achieve for himself.

And sitting with chin cradled on the backs of her interlaced fingers, the girl listened with such indulgence as women find always for their lovers. Of herself she had little to say: Lanyard filled in to his taste the outlines of the simple history of a young woman of good family obliged to become self-supporting.

And if at times her grave eyes clouded and her attention wandered, it was less in ennui than because of occult trains of thought set astir by some chance word or phrase of Lanyard's.

"I'm boring you," he surmised once with quick contrition, waking up to the fact that he had monopolized the conversation for many minutes on end.

She shook a pensive head. "No, again.... But I wonder, do you appreciate the magnitude of the task you've undertaken?"

"Possibly not," he conceded arrogantly; "but it doesn't matter. The heavier the odds, the greater the incentive to win."

"But," she objected, "you've told me a curious story of one who never had a chance or incentive to 'go straight'--as you put it. And yet you seem to think that an overnight resolution to reform is all that's needed to change all the habits of a life-time. You persuade me of your sincerity of today; but how will it be with you tomorrow--and not so much tomorrow as six months from tomorrow, when you've found the going rough and know you've only to take one step aside to gain a smooth and easy way?"

"If I fail, then, it will be because I'm unfit--and I'll go under, and never be heard of again.... But I shan't fail. It seems to me the very fact that I want to go straight is proof enough that I've something inherently decent in me to build on."

"I do believe that, and yet..." She lowered her head and began to trace a meaningless pattern on the cloth before she resumed. "You've given me to understand I'm responsible for your sudden awakening, that it's because of a regard conceived for me you're so anxious to become an honest man. Suppose ... suppose you were to find out ... you'd been mistaken in me?"

"That isn't possible," he objected promptly.

She smiled upon him wistfully--and leniently from her remote coign of superior intuitive knowledge of human nature.

"But if it were--?"

"Then--I think," he said soberly--"I think I'd feel as though there were nothing but emptiness beneath my feet!"

"And you'd backslide--?"

"How can I tell?" he expostulated. "It's not a fair question. I don't know what I'd do, but I do know it would need something damnable to shake my faith in you!"

"You think so now," she said tolerantly. "But if appearances were against me--"

"They'd have to be black!"

"If you found I had deceived you--?"

"Miss Shannon!" He threw an arm across the table and suddenly imprisoned her hand. "There's no use beating about the bush. You've got to know--"

She drew back suddenly with a frightened look and a monosyllable of sharp protest: "No!"

"But you must listen to me. I want you to understand.... Bourke used to
say to me: 'The man who lets love into his life opens a door no mortal hand can close--and God only knows what will follow in!' And Bourke was right.... Now that door is open in my heart, and I think that whatever follows in won't be evil or degrading.... Oh, I've said it a dozen different ways of indirection, but I may as well say it squarely now: I love you; it's love of you makes me want to go straight--the hope that when I've proved myself you'll maybe let me ask you to marry me.... Perhaps you're in love with a better man today; I'm willing to chance that; a year brings many changes. Perhaps there's something I don't fathom in your doubting my strength and constancy. Only the outcome can declare that. But please understand this: if I fail to make good, it will be no fault of yours; it will be because I'm unfit and have proved it.... All I ask is what you've generously promised me: opportunity to come to you at the end of the year and make my report.... And then, if you will, you can say no to the question I'll ask you and I shan't resent it, and it won't ruin me; for if a man can stick to a purpose for a year, he can stick to it forever, with or without the love of the woman he loves."

She heard him out without attempt at interruption, but her answer was prefaced by a sad little shake of her head.

"That's what makes it so hard, so terribly hard," she said.... "Of course I've understood you. All that you've said by indirection, and much besides, has had its meaning to me. And I'm glad and proud of the honour you offer me. But I can't accept it; I can never accept it--not now nor a year from now. It wouldn't be fair to let you go on hoping I might some time consent to marry you.... For that's impossible."

"You--forgive me--you're not already married?"

"No...."

"Or promised?"

"No...."

"Or in love with someone else?"

Again she told him, gently, "No."

His face cleared. He squared his shoulders. He even mustered up a smile.

"Then it isn't impossible. No human obstacle exists that time can't overthrow. In spite of all you say, I shall go on hoping with all my heart and soul and strength."

"But you don't understand--"

"Can you tell me--make me understand?"

After a long pause, she told him once more, and very sadly: "No."

XV

SHEER IMPUDENCE

Though it had been nearly eight when they entered the restaurant, it was something after eleven before Lanyard called for his bill.

"We've plenty of time," he had explained; "it'll be midnight before we can move. The gentle art of house-breaking has its technique, you know, its professional ethics: we can't well violate the privacy of Madame Omber's strong-box before the caretakers on the premises are sound asleep. It isn't _done_, you know, it isn't class, to go burglarizing when decent, law-abiding folk are wide-awake.... Meantime we're better off here than trapezing the streets...."

It's a silent web of side ways and a gloomy one by night that backs up north of Les Halles: old Paris, taciturn and sombre, steeped in its memories of grim romance. But for infrequent, flickering, corner lamps, the street that welcomed them from the doors of the warm and cosy restaurant was as dismal as an alley in some city of the dead. Its houses with their mansard roofs and boarded windows bent their heads together like mutes at a wake, black-cloaked and hooded; seldom one showed a light; never one betrayed by any sound the life that lurked behind its jealous blinds. Now again the rain had ceased and, though the sky remained overcast, the atmosphere was clear and brisk with a touch of frost, in grateful contrast to the dull and muggy airs that had obtained for the last twenty-four hours.

"We'll walk," Lanyard suggested--"if you don't mind--part of the way at least; it'll eat up time, and a bit of exercise will do us both good."

The girl assented quietly....

The drum of their heels on fast-drying sidewalks struck sharp echoes from the silence of that drowsy quarter, a lonely clamour that rendered it impossible to ignore their apparent solitude--as impossible as it was for Lanyard to ignore the fact that they were followed.

The shadow dogging them on the far side of the street, some fifty yards behind, was as noiseless as any cat; but for this circumstance--had it moved boldly with unmuffled footsteps--Lanyard would have been slow to believe it concerned with him, so confident had be felt, till that moment, of having given the Pack the slip.

And from this he diagnosed still another symptom of the Pack's incurable stupidity!

Supremely on the alert, he had discovered the pursuit before they left the block of the restaurant. Dissembling, partly to avoid alarming the girl, partly to trick the spy, he turned this way and that round several corners, until quite convinced that the shadow was dedicated to himself exclusively, then promptly revised his first purpose and, instead of sticking to darker back ways, struck out directly for the broad, well-lighted and lively boulevard de Sébastopol.

Crossing this without a backward glance, he turned north, seeking some café whose arrangements suited his designs; and, presently, though not before their tramp had brought them almost to the Grand Boulevards, found one to his taste, a cheerful and well-lighted establishment occupying a corner, with entrances from both streets. A hedge of forlorn fir-trees knee-deep in wooden tubs guarded its terrasse of round metal tables and spindle-shanked chairs; of which few were occupied. Inside, visible through the wide plate-glass windows, perhaps a dozen patrons sat round half as many tables--no more--idling over dominoes and gossip: steady-paced burghers with their wives, men in small ways of business of the neighbourhood.

Entering to this company, Lanyard selected a square marble-topped table against the back wall, entrenched himself with the girl upon the seat behind it, ordered coffee and writing materials, and proceeded to light a cigarette with the nonchalance of one to whom time is of no consequence.

"What is it?" the girl asked guardedly as the waiter scurried off to execute his commands. "You've not stopped in here for nothing!"

"True--but lower, please!" he begged. "If we speak English loud enough to be heard it will attract attention.... The trouble is, we're followed. But as yet our faithful shadow doesn't know we know it--unless he's more intelligent than he seems. Consequently, if I don't misjudge him, he'll take a table outside, the better to keep an eye on us, as soon as he sees we're apparently settled for some time. More than that, I've got a note to write--and not merely as a subterfuge. This fellow must be shaken off, and as long as we stick together, that can't well be done."

He interrupted himself while the waiter served them, then added sugar to his coffee, arranged the ink bottle and paper to his satisfaction, and bent over his pen.

"Come closer," he requested--"as if you were interested in what I'm writing--and amused; if you can laugh a bit at nothing, so much the better. But keep a sharp eye on the windows. You can do that more readily than I, more naturally from under the brim of your hat.... And tell me what you see...."

He had no more than settled into the swing of composition, than the girl--apparently following his pen with closest attention--giggled coquettishly and nudged his elbow.

"The window to the right of the door we came in," she said, smiling delightedly; "he's standing behind the fir-trees, staring in."

"Can you make out who he is?" Lanyard asked without moving his lips.

"Nothing more than that he's tall," she said with every indication of enjoying a tremendous joke. "His face is all in shadow...."

"Patience!" counselled the adventurer. "He'll take heart of courage when convinced of our innocence."

He poised his pen, examined the ceiling for inspiration, and permitted a slow smile to lighten his countenance.

"You'll take this note, if you please," he said cheerfully, "to the address on the envelope, by taxi: it's some distance, near the Etoile.... A long chance, but one we must risk; give me half an hour alone and I'll guarantee to discourage this animal one way or another. You understand?"

"Perfectly," she laughed archly.

He bent and for a few moments wrote busily.

"Now he's walking slowly