I have applauded him. Oh, I have had a difficult autumn.'

'Mary,' I cried, 'tell me you hate him.'

'No,' she said quietly. 'I do not hate him. I am keeping that for
later. I fear him desperately. Some day when we have broken him utterly
I will hate him, and drive all likeness of him out of my memory like an
unclean thing. But till then I won't waste energy on hate. We want to
hoard every atom of our strength for the work of beating him.'

She had won back her composure, and I turned on my light to look at
her. She was in nurses' outdoor uniform, and I thought her eyes seemed
tired. The priceless gift that had suddenly come to me had driven out
all recollection of my own errand. I thought of Ivery only as a
would-be lover of Mary, and forgot the manufacturer from Lille who had
rented his house for the partridge-shooting. 'And you, Dick,' she
asked; 'is it part of a general's duties to pay visits at night to
empty houses?'

'I came to look for traces of M. Bommaerts. I, too, got on his track
from another angle, but that story must wait.'

'You observe that he has been here today?'

She pointed to some cigarette ash spilled on the table edge, and a
space on its surface cleared from dust. 'In a place like this the dust
would settle again in a few hours, and that is quite clean. I should
say he has been here just after luncheon.'

'Great Scott!' I cried, 'what a close shave! I'm in the mood at this
moment to shoot him at sight. You say you saw him in Paris and knew his
lair. Surely you had a good enough case to have him collared.'

She shook her head. 'Mr Blenkiron--he's in Paris too--wouldn't hear of
it. He hasn't just figured the thing out yet, he says. We've identified
one of your names, but we're still in doubt about Chelius.'

'Ah, Chelius! Yes, I see. We must get the whole business complete
before we strike. Has old Blenkiron had any luck?'

'Your guess about the "Deep-breathing" advertisement was very clever,
Dick. It was true, and it may give us Chelius. I must leave Mr
Blenkiron to tell you how. But the trouble is this. We know something
of the doings of someone who may be Chelius, but we can't link them
with Ivery. We know that Ivery is Bommaerts, and our hope is to link
Bommaerts with Chelius. That's why I came here. I was trying to burgle
this escritoire in an amateur way. It's a bad piece of fake Empire and
deserves smashing.'

I could see that Mary was eager to get my mind back to business, and