he thrust the door open and slipped into dense
darkness. Lanyard lingered another instant. The car was slowing down,
and the street lamp on the corner revealed plainly a masculine arm
resting on its window-sill; but the spying face above the arm was only
a blur.

"Come, monsieur!"

Lanyard stepped in and shut the door. A hand with which he was
beginning to feel fairly well acquainted found his and led him through
the dead obscurity to another pause. A key grated in a lock, the hand
drew him on again, a second door closed behind him.

"We are chez moi," said a voice in the dark.

"One could do with a light."

"Wait. This way."

The hand guided him across a room of moderate size, avoiding its
furniture with almost uncanny ease, then again brought him to a halt.
Brass rings clashed softly on a pole, a gap opened in heavy draperies
curtaining a window, a shaft of street light threw the girl's profile
into soft relief. She drew him to her till their shoulders touched.

"You see..."

He bent his head close to hers, conscious of a caressing tendril of
hair that touched his cheek, and the sweet warmth and fragrance of her;
and peering through the draperies saw their pursuing motor car at
pause, not at the curb, but in the middle of the street before the
house. The man's arm still rested on the sill of the window; the pale
oval of the face above it was still vague. Abruptly both disappeared, a
door slammed on the far side of the car, and the car itself, after a
moment's wait, gathered way with whining gears and vanished, leaving
nothing human visible in the quiet street.

"What did that mean? Did they pick somebody up?"

"But quite otherwise, mademoiselle."

"Then what has become of him?"

"In the shadow of the door across the way: don't you see the deeper
shadow of his figure in the corner, to this side. And there ... Ah,
dolt!"

The man in the doorway had moved, cautiously thrusting one hand out of
the shadow far enough for the street lights to shine upon the dial of
his wrist-watch. Instantly it was withdrawn; but his betrayal was
accomplished.

"That's enough," said Lanyard, drawing the draperies close again. "No
trouble to make a fool of that one, God has so nobly prepared the
soil." The girl said nothing. They no longer touched, and she was for
the time so still that he might almost have fancied himself alone. But
in that quiet room he could hear her breathing close beside him, not
heavily but with a ra