re in London!"

Milsom nodded.

"You won't find him," he said brusquely. "I tell you I've left him after
a talk about certain patriotic misgivings on my part--look!"

He lifted his right hand, which hitherto he had kept concealed by his
side, and Oliva shut her eyes and felt deathly sick.

"Right index digit and part of the phalanges shot away," said Milsom
philosophically. "That was my trigger-finger--but he shot first. Give me
a drink!"

They brought him a bottle of wine, and he drank it from a long tumbler
in two great breathless gulps.

"You've closed the coast to him," he said, "you shut down your wires and
cables, you're watching the roads, but he'll get his message through,
if----"

"Then he hasn't cabled?" said Beale eagerly. "Milsom, this means liberty
for you--liberty and comfort. Tell us the truth, man, help us hold off
this horror that van Heerden is loosing on the world and there's no
reward too great for you."

Milsom's eyes narrowed.

"It wasn't the hope of reward or hope of pardon that made me break with
van Heerden," he said in his slow way. "You'd laugh yourself sick if I
told you. It was--it was the knowledge that this country would be down
and out; that the people who spoke my tongue and thought more or less as
I thought should be under the foot of the Beast--fevered sentimentality!
You don't believe that?"

"I believe it."

It was Oliva who spoke, and it appeared that this was the first time
that Milsom had noticed her presence, for his eyes opened wider.

"You--oh, you believe it, do you?" and he nodded.

"But why is van Heerden waiting?" asked McNorton. "What is he waiting
for?"

The big man rolled his head helplessly from side to side, and the hard
cackle of his laughter was very trying to men whose nerves were raw and
on edge.

"That's the fatal lunacy of it! I think it must be a national
characteristic. You saw it in the war again and again--a wonderful plan
brought to naught by some piece of over-cleverness on the part of the
super-man."

A wild hope leapt to Beale's heart.

"Then it has failed! The rust has not answered----?"

But Milsom shook his head wearily.

"The rust is all that he thinks--and then some," he said. "No, it isn't
that. It is in the work of organization where the hitch has occurred.
You know something of the story. Van Heerden has agents in every country
in the world. He has spent nearly a hundred thousand pounds in
perfecting his working plans, a