very much to give me matter for thought. I
believed in the girl, and trusted her. More than that I did not dare
to ask myself! I should have believed in her, even if her uncle were
proved to be a criminal of the most dangerous type. But none the less
I could not help realizing that her present position was a singularly
unfortunate one. To be alone in a big hotel, without maid or chaperon,
herself caught up in this web of mystery which Louis and those others
seemed to have woven around her, was in itself undesirable and
unnatural. Whatever was transpiring, I was quite certain that her
share in it was a passive one. She had been told to be silent, and
she was silent. Nothing would ever make me believe that she was a
party to any wrong-doing. And yet the more I thought of Delora the
less I trusted him. At Charing Cross Station, for instance, his had
not been the anxiety of a man intrusted with a difficult mission. His
agitation had been due to fear,--fear abject and absolute. I had seen
the symptoms more than once in my life, and there was no mistaking
them. I told myself that no man could be so shaken who was engaged in
honest dealings. Even now he was in hiding,--it could not be called
anything else,--and the one person with whom I had come in touch who
was searching for him was, without a doubt, on the side of law and
justice, with at least some settled position behind him. Delora's
deportment was more the deportment of a fugitive from justice than of
a man in the confidence of his government.

Walking a little carelessly, I took a turn too far northward, and
found myself in one of the streets leading out of Shaftesbury
Avenue. I was on the point of taking a passage which would lead me
more in my proper direction, when my attention was attracted by a
large motor-car standing outside one of the small foreign restaurants
which abound in this district. I was always interested in cars, but I
noticed this one more particularly from the fact of its utter
incompatibility with its surroundings. It was one of the handsomest
cars I had ever seen,--a sixty to eighty horse-power Daimler,--fitted
up inside with the utmost luxury. The panels were plain, and the
chauffeur, who sat motionless in his place, wore dark livery and was
apparently a foreigner. I slackened my pace to glance for a moment at
the non-skidding device on the back tire, and as I passed on I saw the
door of the little restaurant open, and a tall _commissionnaire_