s
begin again from another point. Why had Winifred invited his amorous
interest? She--but Beatrice had warned him--unnecessarily, had been his
foolish thought--against the wiles of Winifred. Her seductive friendship
had been simply a trap ... but, no! the remembrance of his recent
delectable danger, the sincerity of her--love? the faith of her
eyes--all denied a trap. Winifred could not be a conspirator; at worst
she must be a half-hearted conspirator who had begun to sympathize with
her enemies. But if that were so, she must soon be on the side of
Beatrice, of whom she would speedily be jealous! His brain reeled.

The sum of his perplexed musings was that he must keep his eyes open,--a
poor result for so much mental effort. That, however, was all he
achieved by dinner-time, and he sucked small comfort therefrom. "I am
not made for detective work," he reflected gloomily as he played with
dinner. "I went into this adventure too light-heartedly. I thought it a
game.... So it is, and deucedly exciting now, but I don't seem to have
mastered the rules. A blind man in a total eclipse looking for
something that isn't there,--that's Lionel Mortimer, Esquire. Old man,
you'd better have a drink."

Sensations were crowding thick upon him. His uneventful fortnight was to
bear a heavy interest within a few brief hours. In the library, after
further futile pondering, he tried to distract his thoughts with books.
It was a failure; he could not concentrate his attention on printed
words for more than five minutes together. Always he came back to
Beatrice and the ramifications reaching from Constantinople to London
and thence to Shereling. With a grunt of dissatisfaction, he got up at
last at eleven o'clock and knocked out his pipe upon the hearth. As he
did this he heard a slight crunch as of a foot upon the gravel. He
turned quickly toward the French window and saw that he had forgotten to
draw down the blind. He saw something else as well. For a brief second
Lionel had a glimpse--the barest glimpse--of a white face pressed
against the pane, _watching_. The face vanished almost before the retina
had time to record the impression, but he knew two things at once--it
was a man's face, and a man he had never seen before.

Lionel did exactly what you and I would have done. He stood stock-still
for a moment, his heart clop-clopping against his ribs as if intent on
bursting its way through to the light, hammering a Morse message--"You
are