ion.

"What shall you do?" she said.

"I?"

The man glanced about the room. There was a certain display within
the sweep of his vision. Some rugs of great value, vases and bronzes;
genuine and of extreme age. He made a careless gesture with his hands.

"I shall explore some ruins in Syria, and perhaps the aqueduct which the
French think carried a water supply to the Carthage of Hanno. It will
be convenient to be beyond British inquiry for some years to come; and
after all, I am an antiquarian, like Prosper Merimee."

Lady Muriel continued to finger her gloves. They had been cleaned and
the cryptic marks of the shopkeeper were visible along the inner side of
the wrist hem. This was, to the woman, the first subterfuge of decaying
smartness. When a woman began to send her gloves to the laundry she
was on her way down. Other evidences were not entirely lacking in the
woman's dress, but they were not patent to the casual eye. Lady Muriel
was still, to the observer, of the gay top current in the London world.

The woman followed the man's glance about the room.

"You must be rich, Hecklemeir," she said. "Lend me a hundred pounds."

The man laughed again in his queer chuckle.

"Ah, no, my Lady," he replied, "I do not lend." Then he added.

"If you have anything of value, bring it to me.... not information
from the ministry, and not war plans; the trade in such commodities is
ended."

It was the woman's turn to laugh.

"The shopkeepers in Oxford Street have been before you, Baron.. .. I've
nothing to sell."

Hecklemeir smiled, kneading his pudgy hands.

"It will be hard to borrow," he said. "Money is very dear to the
Britisher just now--right against his heart.... Still.... perhaps one's
family could be thumb screwed......An elderly relative with no children
would be the most favorable, I think. Have you got such a relative
concealed somewhere in a nook of London? Think about it. If you could
recall one, he would be like a buried nut."

The man paused; then he added, with the offensive chuckling laugh:

"Go to such an one, Lady Muriel. Who shall turn aside from virtue
in distress? Perhaps, in the whole of London, I alone have the
brutality--shall we call it--to resist that spectacle."

The woman rose. Her face was now flushed and angry.

"I do not know of any form of brutality in which you do not excel,
Hecklemeir," she said. "I have a notion to, go to Scotland Yard with the
whole story of your secret traf