eting just outside the study
door--all this had been more than satisfactory to him. He sat at his
window thinking it over. The weather had been clear and there was a
moon; as he watched the light upon the water and gazed now and again at
the south wing where Santoine had his study, suddenly several windows
on the first floor blazed out simultaneously; some one had entered
Santoine's work-room and turned on the light. Almost at once the light
went out; then, a minute or so later, the same windows glowed dully.
The lights in the room had been turned on again, but heavy, opaque
curtains had been drawn over the windows before the room was relighted.
These curtains were so close over the windows that, unless Eaton had
been attracted by the first flash of light, he scarcely would have
noticed that the lights were burning within the room.

He had observed, during the day, that Avery or Harriet had been at work
in that room--one of them or both--almost all day; and besides the girl
he had met in the hall, there had been at least one other stenographer.
Must work in this house go on so continuously that it was necessary for
some one to work at night, even when Santoine lay ill and unable to
make other than the briefest and most important dispositions? And who
was working in that room now, Avery or Harriet? He let himself think,
idly, about the girl--how strange her life had been--that part of it at
least which was spent, as he had gathered most of her waking hours of
recent years had been spent, with her father. Strange, almost, as his
own life! And what a wonderful girl it had made of her--clever, sweet,
lovable, with more than a woman's ordinary capacity for devotion and
self-sacrifice.

But, if she were the one working there, was she the sort of girl she
had seemed to be? If her service to her father was not only on his
personal side but if also she was intimate in his business affairs,
must she not therefore have shared the cruel code which had terrorized
Eaton for the last four years and kept him an exile in Asia and which,
at any hour yet, threatened to take his life? A grim set came to
Eaton's lips; his mind went again to his own affairs.

CHAPTER XIII

THE MAN FROM THE TRAIN

In the supposition that he was to have less liberty, Eaton proved
correct. Harriet Santoine, to whose impulses had been due his first
privileges, showed toward him a more constrained attitude the following
morning. She did not