The Box with Broken Seals E-Book

E. Phillips Oppenheim

• Herausgeber: Ktoczyta.pl
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

„The Box with Broken Seals” is a thrilling cat and mouse murder mystery following the narrative of Jocelyn Thew and the English Service. This skillfully written and an exciting espionage story of intrigue, unfolding in the Oppenheim’s best style. The reader will follow with avidity the daring moves of Thew from the time he sails from New York on the „City of Boston,” accompanied by a dying man and a special nurse in the person of Katharine Beverley, a society girl who is under special undisclosed obligations to Thew. The eventful trip across the Atlantic and the attempts of an agent to outwit his enemies in England lead to the climax which will surprise even the inveterate Oppenheim reader.

Leseprobe

Contents

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

CHAPTER VII

CHAPTER VIII

CHAPTER IX

CHAPTER X

CHAPTER XI

CHAPTER XII

CHAPTER XIII

CHAPTER XIV

CHAPTER XV

CHAPTER XVI

CHAPTER XVII

CHAPTER XVIII

CHAPTER XIX

CHAPTER XX

CHAPTER XXI

CHAPTER XXII

CHAPTER XXIII

CHAPTER XXIV

CHAPTER XXV

CHAPTER XXVI

CHAPTER XXVII

CHAPTER XXVIII

CHAPTER I

James Crawshay, Englishman of the type usually described in transatlantic circles as “some Britisher,” lolled apparently at his ease upon the couch of the too-resplendent sitting room in the Hotel Magnificent, Chicago. Hobson, his American fellow traveler, on the other hand, betrayed his anxiety by his nervous pacing up and down the apartment. Both men bore traces in their appearance of the long journey which they had only just completed.

“I think,” Crawshay decided, yawning, “that I shall have a bath. I feel gritty, and my collar–heavens, what a sight! Your trains, Hobson, may be magnificent, but your coal is filthy. I will have a bath while your friend, the policeman, makes up his mind whether to come and see us or not.”

His companion treated the suggestion with scant courtesy.

“You will do nothing of the sort,” was his almost fierce objection. “We’ve got to wait right here until Chief of Police Downs comes along. There’s something crooked about this business, something I don’t understand, and the sooner we get to the bottom of it, the better.”

The Englishman pacified himself with a whisky and soda which a waiter had just brought in. He added several lumps of ice and drained the contents of the tumbler with a little murmur of appreciation.

“It will be confoundedly annoying,” he admitted quietly, “if we’ve had all this journey for nothing.”

Hobson moistened his dry lips with his tongue. The whisky and soda and the great bucket of ice stood temptingly at his elbow, but he appeared to ignore their existence. He was a man of ample build, with a big, clean-shaven face, a square jaw and deep-set eyes, a man devoted to and wholly engrossed by his work.

“See here, Crawshay,” he exclaimed, “if that dispatch was a fake, if we’ve been brought here on a fool’s errand, they haven’t done it for nothing. If they’ve brought it off against us, you mark my words, we’re left–we’re bamboozled–we’re a couple of lost loons! There’s nothing left for us but to sell candy to small boys or find a job on a farm.”

“You’re such a pessimist,” the Englishman yawned.

“Pessimist!” was the angry retort. “I’ll just ask you one question, my son. Where’s Downs?”

“I certainly think,” Crawshay admitted, “that under the circumstances he might have been at the station to meet us.”

“He wouldn’t even talk through the ‘phone,” Hobson pointed out. “I had to explain who we were to one of his inspectors. No one seemed to know a goldarned thing about us.”

“They sent for him right away when you explained who you were,” Crawshay reminded his companion.

Hobson found no comfort whatever in the reflection.

“Of course they did,” he replied brusquely. “There’s scarcely likely to be a chief of police of any city in the United States who wouldn’t get a move on when he knew that Sam Hobson was waiting for a word. I haven’t been in the Secret Service of this country for fifteen years for nothing. He’ll come fast enough as soon as he knows I’m waiting, but all the same, what I want to know is, if that dispatch was on the square, why he wasn’t at the station to meet us, and if it wasn’t on the square, how the hell do we come out of this?”

Their conversation was interrupted by the tinkle of the telephone which stood upon the table between them, the instrument which both men had been watching anxiously. Hobson snatched up the receiver.

“Police headquarters speaking? Right! Yes, this is Sam Hobson. I’m here with Crawshay, of the English Secret Service. We got your dispatch.–What’s that?–Well?–Chief Downs is on the way, eh?–Just started? Good! We’re waiting for him.”

Hobson replaced the receiver upon the instrument.

“Downs is coming right along,” he announced. “I tell you what it is, Mr. Crawshay,” he went on, recommencing his walk up and down the apartment, “I don’t feel happy to be so far away from the coast. That’s what scares me. Chicago’s just about the place they’d land us, if this is a hanky-panky trick. We’re twenty hours from New York, and the City of Boston sails to-morrow at five o’clock.”

The Englishman shook himself and rose from his recumbent position upon the sofa. He was a man of youthful middle-age, colourless, with pleasant face, a somewhat discontented mouth, but keen grey eyes. He had been sent out from Scotland Yard at the beginning of the war to assist in certain work at the English Embassy. So far his opportunities had not been many, or marked with any brilliant success, and it seemed to him that the gloom of failure was already settling down upon their present expedition.

“You don’t believe, then, any more than I do, that when a certain box we know of is opened at the Foreign Office in London, it will contain the papers we are after?”

“No, sir, I do not,” was the vigorous reply. “I think they have been playing a huge game of bluff on us. That’s why I am so worried about this trip. I wouldn’t mind betting you the best dinner you ever ate at Delmonico’s or at your English Savoy that that box with the broken seals they all got so excited about doesn’t contain a single one of the papers that we’re after. Why, those blasted Teutons wanted us to believe it! That’s why some of the seals were broken, and why the old man himself hung about like a hen that’s lost one of its chickens. They want us to believe that we’ve got the goods right in that box, and to hold up the search for a time while they get the genuine stuff out of the country. I admit right here, Mr. Crawshay, that it was you who put this into my head at Halifax. I couldn’t swallow it then, but when Downs didn’t meet us at the depot here, it came over me like a flash that you were right that we were being flimflammed.”

“We ought, perhaps, to have separated,” the Englishman ruminated. “I ought to have gone to New York and you come here. On the other hand, you must remember that all the evidence which we have managed to collect points to Chicago as having been the headquarters of the whole organisation.”

“Sure!” the American admitted. “And there’s another point about it, too. If this outsider who has taken on the job for them should really turn out to be Jocelyn Thew, I’d have banked on his working the scheme from Chicago. He knows the back ways of the city, or rather he used to, like a rat. Gee, it would be a queer thing if after all these years one were to get the bracelets on him!”

“I don’t quite see,” Crawshay remarked, “how such a person as this Jocelyn Thew, of whom you have spoken several times, could have become associated with an affair of this sort. Both the Germans and the Austrians at Washington had the name of being exceedingly particular with regard to the status of their agents, and he must be entirely a newcomer in international matters. From the dossier you handed me, Jocelyn Thew reads more like a kind of modern swashbuckler spoiling for a fight than a person likely to make a success of a secret service job.”

“Don’t you worry,” Hobson replied. “Jocelyn Thew could hold his own at any court in Europe with any of you embassy swaggerers. There’s nothing known about his family, but they say that his father was an English aristocrat, and he looks like it, too.”

“It was you yourself who called him a criminal, the first time you spoke of him,” Crawshay reminded his companion.

“And a criminal he is at heart, without a doubt,” the American declared impressively.

“Has he ever been in prison?”

“He has had the luck of Old Harry,” Hobson grumbled. “In New York they all believed that it was he who shot Graves, the Pittsburg millionaire. The Treasury Department will have it that he was the head of that Fourteenth Street gang of coiners, and I’ve a pal down at Baltimore who is ready to take his oath that he planned the theft of the Vanderloon jewels–and brought it off, too! But I tell you this, sir. When the trouble comes, whoever gets nabbed it’s never Jocelyn Thew. He’s the slickest thing that ever came down the pike.”

“He is well off, then?”

“They say that he brought half a million from Mexico,” Hobson declared. “How he brought money out of that country, neither I nor anybody else on the Force can imagine. But he did it. I know the stockbroker down-town who handles his investments.–Here’s our man at last!”

The door was opened by the floor waiter, who held it while a thin, dark man, dressed in civilian clothes of most correct cut, passed in. Hobson gripped him at once by the hand.

“Chief Downs,” he said, “this is my friend Mr. Crawshay, who is connected with the English Embassy over here. You can shake hands with him later. We’re on a job of business, and the first thing before us is to get an answer from you to a certain question. Did you send this dispatch or did you not?”

Hobson handed over to the newcomer the crumpled telegraph form which he had just produced from his pocket. The latter glanced through it and shook his head.

“It’s a plant,” he announced. “I’m sorry if the use of my name has misled you in any way, but it was quite unauthorised. I know nothing whatever about the matter.”

Hobson remained for a moment silent, silent with sick and angry astonishment. Crawshay had glanced towards the clock and was standing now with his finger upon the bell.

“Is it a big thing?” the Chicago man enquired.

“It’s the biggest thing ever known in this country,” Hobson groaned. “It’s what is known as the Number Three Berlin plant.”

“You didn’t get the stuff at Halifax, then?” Downs asked.

“We didn’t,” Hobson replied bitterly. “We’ve sent a representative over to sit on the box with the broken seals till they can open it at the Foreign Office in London, but I never believed they’d find anything there. I’m damned certain they won’t now!”

A waiter had answered the bell.

“Don’t have our luggage brought up,” Crawshay directed. “We are leaving for New York to-night. That’s so, isn’t it, Hobson?” he added, turning to his companion.

“You bet!” was the grim reply. “I’d give a thousand dollars to be there now.”

“The Limited’s sold out,” the man told them. “There are two or three persons who’ve been disappointed, staying on here till to-morrow.”

“I’ll get you on the train,” Downs promised. “I can do as much as that for you, anyway. I’ll stop and go on to the station with you from here. I’m very sorry about this, Hobson,” he continued, fingering the dispatch. “We shall have to get right along to the station, but if there’s anything I can do after you’ve left, command me.”

“You might wire New York,” Hobson suggested, as he struggled into his overcoat. “Tell ‘em to look out for the City of Boston, and to hold her up for me if they can. I’ve got it in my bones that Jocelyn Thew is running this show and that he is on that steamer.”

“Those fellows at Washington must have collected some useful stuff,” Chief Downs observed, as the three men left the room and stepped into the elevator. “They’ve been working on their job since before the war, and there isn’t a harbour on the east or west coast that they haven’t got sized up. They’ve spent a million dollars in graft since January, and there’s a rumour that the new Navy Department scheme for dealing with submarines, which was only adopted last month, is there among the rest.”

“Anything else?” Crawshay asked indolently.

The Chief of Police glanced first at his questioner and then at Hobson.

“What else should there be?” he enquired.

“No idea,” the Englishman replied. “Secret Service papers of the usual description, I suppose. By-the-by, I hear that this man Jocelyn Thew has stated openly that he is going to take all the papers he wants with him into Germany, and that there isn’t a living soul can stop him.”

Hobson’s square jaw was set a little tighter, and his narrow eyes flashed.

“That’s some boast to make,” he muttered. “Kind of a challenge, isn’t it? What do you say, Mr. Crawshay?”

Crawshay, who had been gazing out of the window of the taxicab, looked back again. His tone was almost indifferent.

“If Chief Downs can get us on the Limited,” he said, “and if we catch the City of Boston, I think perhaps we might have a chance of making Mr. Jocelyn Thew eat his words.”

The Chief smiled. The taxicab had turned in through the entrance gates of the great station.

“I have heard men as well-known in their profession as you, Hobson, and you too, Mr. Crawshay, speak like that about Jocelyn Thew, but when the game was played out they seem to have lost the odd trick. Either the fellow isn’t a criminal at all but loves to haunt shady places and pose as one, or he is just the cleverest of all the crooks who ever worked the States. Some of my best men have thought that they had a case against him and have come to grief.”

“They’ve never caught him with the goods, because they’ve never been the right way about it,” Hobson declared confidently.

“And you think you are going to break his record?” Downs asked, with a doubtful smile. “If you find him on the City of Boston, you know, the stuff you’re after won’t be in his pocketbook or in the lining of his steamer trunk.”

The three men were hurrying out to the platform now, where the great train, a blaze of light and luxury, was standing upon the track. Captain Downs made his way to where the Pullman conductor was standing and engaged him in a brief but earnest conversation. A car porter was summoned, and in a few moments Crawshay and Hobson found themselves standing on the steps of one of the cars. They leaned over to make their adieux to Chief Downs. Crawshay added a few words to his farewell.

“I quite appreciate all your remarks about Jocelyn Thew,” he said. “One is liable to be disappointed, of course, but I still feel that if we can catch that steamer it might be an exceedingly interesting voyage.”

“If you’re on time you may do it,” was the brief reply. “All the same–”

The gong had sounded and the train was gliding slowly out of the station. Crawshay leaned over the iron gate of the car.

“Go on, please,” he begged. “Don’t mind my feelings.”

Chief Downs waved his hand.

“I’m afraid,” he confessed, “that my money would be on Jocelyn Thew.”

CHAPTER II

At just about the hour when Crawshay and Hobson were receiving the visit of Chief Downs in the Chicago hotel an English butler accepted with due respect the card of a very distinguished-looking and exceedingly well-turned-out caller at the big, brownstone Beverley house in Riverside Drive, New York.

“Miss Beverley is just back from the hospital, sir,” the former announced. “If you will come this way, I will see that your card is sent to her at once.”

The caller–Mr. Jocelyn Thew was the name upon the card–followed the servant across the white stone circular hall, with its banked-up profusion of hothouse flowers and its air of elegant emptiness, into a somewhat austere but very dignified apartment, the walls of which were lined to the ceiling with books.

“I will let Miss Beverley have your card at once, sir,” the man promised him again, “if you will be so kind as to take a seat for a few moments.”

The visitor, left to himself, stood upon the hearthrug with his hands behind his back, waiting for news of the young lady whom he had come to visit. At first sight he certainly was a most prepossessing-looking person. His face, if a little hard, was distinguished by a strength which for the size of his features was somewhat surprising. His chin was like a piece of iron, and although his mouth had more sensitive and softer lines, his dark-blue eyes and jet-black eyebrows completed a general impression of vigour and forcefulness. His figure was a little thin but lithe, and his movements showed all the suppleness of a man who has continued the pursuit of athletics into early middle-life. His hair, only slightly streaked with grey, was thick and plentiful. His clothes were carefully chosen and well tailored. He had the air of a man used to mixing with the best people, to eating and drinking the best, to living in the best fashion, recognising nothing less as his due in life. Yet as he stood there waiting for his visitor, listening intently for the sound of her footsteps outside, he permitted himself a moment of retrospection, and there was a gleam of very different things in his face, a touch almost of the savage in the clenched teeth and sudden tightening of the lips. One might have gathered that this man was living through a period of strain.

The entrance of the young lady of the house, after a delay of about ten minutes, was noiseless and unannounced. Her visitor, however, was prepared for it. She came towards him with an air of pleasant enquiry in her very charming face–a young woman in the early twenties, of little more than medium height, with complexion inclined to be pale, deep grey eyes, and a profusion of dark brown, almost copper-coloured hair. She carried herself delightfully and her little smile of welcome was wonderfully attractive, although her deportment and manner were a little serious for her years.

“You wish to see me?” she asked. “I am Miss Beverley–Miss Katharine Beverley.” “Sometimes known as Sister Katharine,” her visitor remarked, with a smile.

“More often than by my own name,” she assented. “Do you come from the hospital?”

He shook his head and glanced behind her to be sure that the door was closed.

“Please do not think that my coming means any trouble, Miss Beverley,” he said, “but if you look at me more closely you will perhaps recognise me. You will perhaps remember–a promise.”

He stepped a little forward from his position of obscurity to where the strong afternoon sunlight found its subdued way through the Holland blinds. The politely interrogative smile faded from her lips. She seemed to pass through a moment of terror, a moment during which her thoughts were numbed. She sank into the chair which her visitor gravely held out for her, and by degrees she recovered her powers of speech.

“Forgive me,” she begged. “The name upon the card should have warned me–but I had no idea–I was not expecting a visit from you.”

“Naturally,” he acquiesced smoothly, “and I beg you not to discompose yourself. My visit bodes you no harm–neither you nor any one belonging to you.”

“I was foolish,” she confessed. “I have been working overtime at the hospital lately–we have sent so many of our nurses to France. My nerves are not quite what they should be.”

He bowed sympathetically. His tone and demeanour were alike reassuring.

“I quite understand,” he said. “Still, some day or other I suppose you expected a visit from me?”

“In a way I certainly did,” she admitted. “You must let me know presently, please, exactly what I can do. Don’t think because I was startled to see you that I wish to repudiate my debt. I have never ceased to be grateful to you for your wonderful behaviour on that ghastly night.”

“Please do not refer to it,” he begged. “Your brother, I hope, is well?”

“He is well and doing famously,” she replied. “I suppose you know that he is in France?”

“In France?” he repeated. “No, I had not heard.”

“He joined the Canadian Flying Corps,” she went on, “and he got his wings almost at once. He finds the life out there wonderful. I never receive a letter from him,” she concluded, her eyes growing very soft, “that I do not feel a little thrill of gratitude to you.”

He bowed.

“That is very pleasant,” he murmured. “And now we come to the object of my visit. Your surmise was correct. I have come to ask you to redeem your word.”

“And you find me not only ready but anxious to do so,” she told him earnestly. “If it is a matter–pardon me–of money, you have only to say how much. If there is any other service you require, you have only to name it.”

“You make things easy for me,” he acknowledged, “but may I add that it is only what I expected. The service which I have come to claim from you is one which is not capable of full explanation but which will cause you little inconvenience and less hardship. You will find it, without doubt, surprising, but I need not add that it will be entirely innocent in its character.”

“Then there seems to be very little left,” she declared, smiling up at him from the depths of her chair, “but to name it. I do wish you would sit down, and are you quite sure that you won’t have some tea or something?”

He shook his head gravely and made no movement towards the chair which she had indicated. For some reason or other, notwithstanding her manifest encouragement, he seemed to wish to keep their interview on a purely formal basis.

“Let me repeat,” he continued, “that I shall offer you no comprehensive explanations, because they would not be truthful, nor are they altogether necessary. In Ward Number Fourteen of your hospital–you have been so splendid a patroness that every one calls St. Agnes’s your hospital–a serious operation was performed to-day upon an Englishman named Phillips.”

“I remember hearing about it,” she assented. “The man is, I understand, very ill.”

“He is so ill that he has but one wish left in life,” Jocelyn Thew told her gravely. “That wish is to die in England. Just as you are at the present moment in my debt for a certain service rendered, so am I in his. He has called upon me to pay. He has begged me to make all the arrangements for his immediate transportation to his native country.” She nodded sympathetically.

“It is a very natural wish,” she observed, “so long as it does not endanger his life.”

“It does not endanger his life,” her visitor replied, “because that is already forfeit. I come now to the condition which involves you, which explains my presence here this afternoon. It is also his earnest desire that you should attend him so far as London as his nurse.”

The look of vague apprehension which had brought a questioning frown into Katharine Beverley’s face faded away. It was succeeded by an expression of blank and complete surprise.

“That I should nurse him–should cross with him to London?” she repeated. “Why, I do not know this man Phillips. I never saw him in my life! I have not even been in Ward Fourteen since he was brought there.”

“But he,” Jocelyn Thew explained, “has seen you. He has been a visitor at your hospital before he was received there as a patient. He has received from various doctors wonderful accounts of your skill. Besides this, he is a superstitious man, and he has been very much impressed by the fact that you have never lost a patient. If you had been one of your own probationers, the question of a fee would have presented no difficulties, although he personally is, I believe, a poor man. As it is, however, his strange craving for your services has become a charge upon me.”

“It is the most extraordinary request I ever heard in my life,” Katharine murmured. “If I had ever seen or spoken to the man, I could have understood it better, but as it is, I find it impossible to understand.”

“You must look upon it,” Jocelyn Thew told her, “as one of those strange fancies which comes sometimes to men who are living in the shadowland of approaching death. There is one material circumstance, however, which may make the suggestion even more disconcerting for you. The steamer upon which we hope to sail leaves at four o’clock to-morrow afternoon.”

The idea in this new aspect was so ludicrous that she simply laughed at him.

“My dear Mr. Jocelyn Thew!” she exclaimed. “You can’t possibly be in earnest! You mean that you expect me to leave New York with less than twenty-four hours’ notice, and go all the way to London in attendance upon a stranger, especially in these awful times? Why, the thing isn’t reasonable–or possible! I have just consented to take the chairmanship of a committee to form field hospitals throughout the country, and–”

“May I interrupt for one moment?” her visitor begged.

The stream of words seemed to fall away from her lips. There was a touch of Jocelyn Thew’s other manner–perhaps more than a touch. She looked at him and she shivered. She had seen him look like that once before.

“Your attitude is perfectly reasonable,” he continued, “but on the other hand I must ask you to carry your thoughts back some little time. I shall beg you to remember that I have a certain right to ask this or any other service from you.” “I admit it,” she confessed hastily, “but–there is something so outlandish in the whole suggestion. There are a score of nurses in the hospital to any one of whom you are welcome, who are all much cleverer than I. What possible advantage to the man can it be, especially if he is seriously ill, to have a partially-trained nurse with him when he might have the best in the world?”

“I think,” he said, “I mentioned that this is not a matter for reasoning or argument. It is you who are required, and no one else. I may remind you,” he went on, “that this service is a very much smaller one than I might have asked you, and, so far as you and I are concerned, it clears our debt.”

“Clears our debt,” she repeated.

“For ever!”

She closed her eyes for several moments. For some reason or other, this last reflection seemed to bring her no particular relief. When she opened them again, her decision was written in her face.

“I consent, of course,” she acquiesced quietly. “Is there anything more to tell me?”

“Very little,” he replied, “only this. You should send your baggage on board the City of Boston as early as possible to-morrow morning. Every arrangement has been made for transporting Phillips in his bed, as he lies, from the hospital to the boat. The doctor who has been in attendance will accompany him to England, but it is important that you should be at the hospital and should drive in the ambulance from there to the dock. I shall ask very little of you in the way of duplicity. What is necessary you will not, I think, refuse. You will be considered to have had some former interest in Phillips, to account for your voyage, and you will reconcile yourself to the fact that I shall not at any time approach the sick man, or be known as an acquaintance of his on board the ship.”

His words disturbed her. She felt herself being drawn under the shadow of some mystery.

“There is something in all this,” she said, “which reminds me of the time when Richard was your protégé, the time when we met before.”

He leaned towards her, understanding very well what was in her mind.

“There is nothing criminal in this enterprise–even in my share of it,” he assured her. “What there is in it which necessitates secrecy is political, and that need not concern you. You see,” he went on, a little bitterly, “I have changed my role. I am no longer the despair of the New York police. I am the quarry of a race of men who, if they could catch me, would not wait to arrest. That may happen even before we reach Liverpool. If it does, it will not affect you. Your duty is to stay with a dying man until he reaches the shelter of his home. You will leave him there, and you will be free of him and of me.”

“So far as regards our two selves,” she enquired, “do we meet as strangers upon the steamer?”

He considered the matter for a few moments before answering. She felt another poignant thrill of recollection. He had looked at her like this just before he had bent his back to the task of saving her brother’s life and liberty, looked at her like this the moment before the unsuspected revolver had flashed from the pocket of his dress-coat and had covered the man who had suddenly declared himself their foe. She felt her cheeks burn for a moment. There was something magnetic, curiously troublous about his eyes and his faint smile.

“I cannot deny myself so much,” he said. “Even if our opportunities for meeting upon the steamer are few, I shall still have the pleasure of a New York acquaintance with Miss Beverley. You need not be afraid,” he went on. “In this wonderful country of yours, the improbable frequently happens. I have before now visited at the houses of some whom you call your friends.”

“Why not?” she asked him. “I should look upon it as the most natural thing in the world that we were acquainted. But why do you say ‘your country’? Are you not an American?”

He looked at her with a very faint smile, a smile which had nothing in it of pleasantness or mirth.

“I have so few secrets,” he said. “The only one which I elect to keep is the secret of my nationality.”

She raised her eyebrows.

“Then you can no longer,” she observed, “be considered what my brother and I once thought you–a man of mysteries–for with your voice and accent it is very certain that you are either English or American.”

“If it affords you any further clue, then,” he replied, “let me confide in you that if there is one country in this world which I detest, it is England; one race of people whom I abominate, it is the English.”

She showed her surprise frankly, but his manner encouraged no further confidence. She touched the bell, and he bowed over her fingers.

“My friend Phillips,” he said, in formal accents, as the butler stood upon the threshold, “will never live, I fear, to offer you all the gratitude he feels, but you are doing a very kind and a very wonderful action, Miss Beverley, and one which I think will bring its own reward.”

He passed out of the room, leaving Katharine a prey to a curious tangle of emotions. She watched him almost feverishly until he had disappeared, listened to his footsteps in the hall and the closing of the front door. Then she hurried to the window, watched him descend the row of steps, pass down the little drive and hail a taxicab. It was not until he was out of sight that she became in any way like herself. Then she broke into a little laugh.

“Heavens alive!” she exclaimed to herself. “Now I have to find Aunt Molly and tell her that I am going to Europe to-morrow with a perfect stranger!”

CHAPTER III

Mr. Jocelyn Thew descended presently from his taxicab outside one of the largest and most cosmopolitan hotels in New York–or the world. He made his way with the air of an habitué to the bar, the precincts of which, at that time in the late afternoon, were crowded by a motley gathering. He ordered a Scotch highball, and gently insinuated himself into the proximity of a group of newspaper men with whom he seemed to have some slight acquaintance. It was curious how, since his arrival in this democratic meeting-place, his manners and deportment seemed to have slipped to a lower grade. He seemed as though by an effort of will to have lost something of his natural air of distinction, to be treading the earth upon a lower plane. He saluted the barkeeper by his Christian name, listened with apparent interest to an exceedingly commonplace story from one of his neighbours, and upon its conclusion drew a little nearer to the group.

“Say,” he exclaimed confidentially, “if I felt in the humour for it I could hand you boys out a great scoop.”

They were on him like a pack of hungry though dubious wolves. He pushed his glass out of sight, accepted one of the drinks pressed upon him, and leaned nonchalantly against the counter.

“What should you say,” he began, “to Miss Katharine Beverley, the New York society young lady–”

“Sister Katharine of St. Agnes’s?” one of them interrupted.

“Daughter of old Joe Beverley, the multi-millionaire?” another exclaimed.

“Both right,” Jocelyn Thew acquiesced. “What should you say to that young woman leaving her hospital and her house in Riverside Drive, breaking all her engagements at less than twenty-four hours’ notice, to take a sick Englishman whom no one knows anything about, back to Liverpool on the City of Boston to-morrow?”

“The story’s good enough,” a ferret-faced little man at his elbow acknowledged, “but is it true?”

Jocelyn Thew regarded his questioner with an air of pained surprise.

“It’s Gospel,” he assured them all, “but you don’t need to take my word. You go right along up and enquire at the Beverley house to-night, and you’ll find that she is packing. Made up her mind just an hour ago. I’m about the only one in the know.”

“Who’s the man, anyway?” one of the little group asked.

“Nothing doing,” Jocelyn Thew replied mysteriously. “You’ve got to find that out for yourself, boys. All I can tell you is that he’s an Englishman, and she has known him for a long time–kind of love stunt, I imagine. She wasn’t having any, but now he’s at death’s door she seems to have relented. Anyway, she is breaking every engagement she’s got, giving up her chairmanship of the War Hospitals Committee, and she isn’t going to leave him while he’s alive. There’s no other nurse going, so it’ll be a night and day job for her.”

“What’s the matter with the chap, anyway?” another questioner demanded.

“No one knows for sure,” was the cautious reply. “He’s been operated upon for appendicitis, but I fancy there are complications. Not much chance for him, from what I have heard.”

The little crowd of men melted away. Jocelyn Thew smiled to himself on his way out, as he watched four of them climb into a taxicab.

“That establishes Phillips all right as Miss Beverley’s protégé,” he murmured, as he turned into Fifth Avenue. “And now–”

He stopped short in his reflections. His careful scrutiny of the heterogeneous crowd gathered together around the bar had revealed to him no unfamiliar type save the little man who at that moment was ambling along on the other side of the way. Jocelyn Thew slackened his pace somewhat and watched him keenly. He was short, he wore a cheap ready-made suit of some plain material, and a straw hat tilted on the back of his head. He had round cheeks, he shambled rather than walked, and his vacuous countenance seemed both good-natured and unintelligent. To all appearances a more harmless person never breathed, yet Jocelyn Thew, as he studied him earnestly, felt that slight tightening of the nerves which came to him almost instinctively in moments of danger. He changed his purpose and turned down Fifth Avenue instead of up. The little man, it appeared, had business in the same direction. Jocelyn Thew walked the length of several blocks in leisurely fashion and then entered an hotel, studiously avoiding looking behind him. He made his way into a telephone booth and looked through the glass door. His follower in a few moments was visible, making apparently some aimless enquiry across the counter. Jocelyn Thew turned his back upon him and asked the operator for a number.

“Number 238 Park waiting,” the latter announced, a few moments later.

Jocelyn Thew reentered the box and took up the receiver.

“That you, Rentoul?” he asked.

“Speaking,” was the guarded reply. “Who is it?”

“Jocelyn Thew. Say, what’s wrong with you? Don’t go away.”

“What is it? Speak quickly, please.”

“You seem rather nervy up there. I’m off to Europe to-morrow on the City of Boston, and I should like to see you before I go.”

There was a moment’s silence.

“Why don’t you come up here, then?”

“I’d rather not,” Jocelyn Thew observed laconically. “The fact of it is, I have a friend around who doesn’t seem to care about losing sight of me. If you are going to be anywhere around near Jimmy’s, about seven o’clock–”

“That goes,” was the somewhat agitated reply. “Ring off now. There’s some one else waiting to speak.”

Jocelyn Thew paid for his telephone call and walked leisurely out of the hotel with a smile upon his lips. The stimulus of danger was like wine to him. The little man was choosing a cigar at the stall. As he leaned down to light it, Jocelyn Thew’s practiced eye caught the shape of a revolver in his hip pocket.

“English,” he murmured softly to himself. “Probably one of Crawshay’s lot, preparing a report for him when he returns from Chicago.”

With an anticipatory smile, he entered upon the task of shaking off his unwelcome follower. He passed with the confident air of a member into a big club situated in an adjoining block, left it almost at once by a side entrance, found a taxicab, drove to a subway station up-town, and finally caught an express back again to Fourteenth Street. Here he entered without hesitation a small, foreign-looking restaurant which intruded upon the pavement only a few yards from the iron staircase by which he descended from the station. There were two faded evergreen shrubs in cracked pots at the bottom of the steps, soiled muslin curtains drawn across the lower half of the windows, dejected-looking green shutters which, had the appearance of being permanently nailed against the walls, and a general air of foreign and tawdry profligacy. Jocelyn Thew stepped into a room on the right-hand side of the entrance and, making his way to the window, glanced cautiously out. There was no sign anywhere of the little man. Then he turned towards the bar, around which a motley group of Italians and Hungarians were gathered. The linen-clad negro who presided there met his questioning glance with a slight nod, and the visitor passed without hesitation through a curtained opening to the rear of the place, along a passage, up a flight of narrow stairs until he arrived at a door on the first landing. He knocked and was at once bidden to enter. For a moment he listened as though to the sounds below. Then he slipped into the room and closed the door behind him.

The apartment was everything which might have been expected, save for the profusion of flowers. The girl who greeted him, however, was different. She was of medium height and dark, with dark brown hair plaited close back from an almost ivory-coloured forehead. Her grey eyes were soft and framed in dark lines. Her eyebrows were noticeable, her mouth full but shapely. Her discontented expression changed entirely as she held out both her hands to her visitor. Her welcome was eager, almost passionate.

“Mr. Thew!” she exclaimed.

He held up his hand as though to check further speech, and listened for a moment intently.

“How are things here?” he asked.

“Quiet,” she assured him. “You couldn’t have come at a better time. Every one’s away. Is there anything wrong?”

“I am being followed,” he told her, “and I don’t like it–just now, at any rate.”

“Any one else coming?” she enquired.

“Rentoul,” he told her. “He is in a mortal fright at having to come. They found his wireless, and they are watching his house. I must see him, though, before I go away.”

“Going away?” she echoed. “When? When are you going?”

“To-morrow,” he replied, “I sail for London.”