l you?" he begged. "As for Fenn and
that other brute, what I have to say about them will keep."

CHAPTER XIV

It was a little more than half an hour later when Julian ascended the
steps of his club in Pall Mall and asked the hall porter for letters.
Except that he was a little paler than usual and was leaning more
heavily upon his stick, there was nothing about his appearance to denote
several days of intense strain. There was a shade of curiosity, mingled
with surprise, in the commissionaire's respectful greeting.

"There have been a good many enquiries for you the last few days, sir,"
he observed.

"I dare say," Julian replied. "I was obliged to go out of town
unexpectedly."

He ran through the little pile of letters and selected a bulky envelope
addressed to himself in his own handwriting. With this he returned to
the taxicab in which the Bishop and Catherine were seated. They gazed
with fascinated eyes at the packet which he was carrying and which he at
once displayed.

"You see," he remarked, as he leaned back, "there is nothing so
impenetrable in the world as a club of good standing. It beats
combination safes hollow. It would have taken all Scotland Yard to have
dragged this letter from the rack."

"That is really--it?" Catherine demanded breathlessly.

"It is the packet," he assured her, "which you handed to me for safe
keeping at Maltenby."

They drove almost in silence to the Bishop's house, where it had been
arranged that Julian should spend the night. The Bishop left the
two together before the fire in his library, while he personally
superintended the arrangement of a guest room. Catherine came over and
knelt by the side of Julian's chair.

"Shall I beg forgiveness for the past," she whispered, "or may I not
talk of the future, the glorious future?"

"Is it to be glorious?" he asked a little doubtfully.

"It can be made so," she answered with fervour, "by you more than by
anybody else living. I defy you--you, Paul Fiske--to impugn our scheme,
our aims, the goal towards which we strive. All that we needed was a
leader who could lift us up above the localness, the narrow visions of
these men. They are in deadly earnest, but they can't see far enough,
and each sees along his own groove. It is true that at the end the same
sun shines, but no assembly of people can move together along a dozen
different ways and keep the same goal in view."

He touched the packet.

"We do not yet know t