ng fashion. There is a limit to one's
belief in coincidences, and the extraordinary combination of chances
suggested by McMurtrie's smooth explanations was just a little too
stiff for me to swallow. I felt sure that he was lying in some
important particulars--but precisely which they were I was unable to
guess for certain.

That he wanted the secret of the new explosive, and wanted it badly,
there could be no doubt, but neither he nor Savaroff in the least
suggested to me a successful manufacturer of cordite or anything
else. They seemed to me to belong to a much more interesting if less
conventional type, and I couldn't help wondering what on earth such
a curious trio as they and Sonia could be doing tucked away in an
ill-furnished, deserted-looking country house in a corner of South
Devon.

However it was no good worrying, for as far as I was concerned it was
painfully clear that there was no alternative. If I declined their
offer and refused to let McMurtrie carve my face about, they had only
to turn me out, and in a few hours I should probably be back in my
cell with the cheerful prospect of chains, a flogging, and six months'
semi-starvation in front of me.

Anything was better than that--even the wildest of plunges in the
dark. Indeed I am not at all sure that the mystery that surrounded
McMurtrie's offer did not lend it a certain charm in my eyes. My life
had been so infernally dull for the last three years that the prospect
of a little excitement, even of an unpleasant kind, was by no means
wholly disagreeable.

At least I had my week's "fun" in London to look forward to, and the
thought of that alone would have been quite enough to make me go
through with anything. I had lied to McMurtrie about my object,
but the falsehood, such as it was, did not sit very heavily on my
conscience. The precise meaning of "fun" is purely a matter of
opinion, and I was as much entitled to my definition as he was to his.
After all, if a convicted murderer can't be a little careless about
the exact truth, who the devil can?

CHAPTER VI

THE FACE OF A STRANGER

McMurtrie had left me under the impression that he meant to start work
on my face the next day, but as it turned out the impression was a
mistaken one. Both the paraffin wax and the X-ray outfit had to be
procured from London, and according to Sonia it was to see about these
that her father went off to town early the following morning. She told
me this when