The Pawns Count by E. Phillips Oppenheim (page 4)

fiercely, fighting for his consciousness, fighting against a wave of giddiness, a deadly sinking of the heart, a strange slackening of all his nerve power. The young stockbroker rose hastily to his feet.

“Anything wrong, old fellow?” he asked anxiously.

“A glass of water,” Fischer begged.

He was conscious of drinking it, vaguely conscious that he was winning. Soon the office had regained its ordinary appearance, his pulse was beating more regularly. He had once more the feeling of living–of living, though in a minor key.

“A touch of liver,” he murmured. “What did you say about the markets?”

“You look pretty rotten,” Van Teyl remarked sympathetically. “Shall I send out for some brandy?”

“Not for me,” Fischer scoffed. “I don’t need it. What price are Anglo-French?”

“Ninety-four. You’ve only done them in a point, after all, and that’s nominal. I daresay I could get ten thousand back at that.”

“Let them alone,” was the calm reply. “I’ll sell another fifty thousand at ninety-four.”

“Look here,” Van Teyl said, swinging round in his chair, “I like the business and I know you can finance it, but are you sure that you realise what you are doing? Every one believes Anglo-French have touched their bottom. They’ve only to go back to where they were–say five points–and you’d lose half a million.”

Fischer smiled a little wearily.

“That small sum in arithmetic,” he remonstrated, “had already passed through my brain. Send in your selling order, Jim, and come out to lunch with me. I’ve come straight through from Washington–only got in this morning.”

Van Teyl called in his clerk and gave a few orders. Then he took up his hat and left the office with his client.

“From Washington, eh?” he remarked curiously, as they passed into the crowded streets. “So that accounts–“

He broke off abruptly. His companion’s warning fingers had tightened upon his arm.

“Quite right!” Van Teyl confessed. “There’s gossip enough about now, and they seem to have tumbled to it that you’re our client. The office has been besieged this morning. Sorry, Ned, I’m busy,” he went on, to a man who tried to catch his arm. “See you later, Fred. I’ll be in after lunch, Mr. Borrodaile. No, nothing fresh that I know of.”

Fischer smiled grimly.

“Got you into a kind of hornets’ nest, eh?” he observed.

“It’s been like this all the morning,” Van Teyl told him. “They believe I know something. Even the newspaper men are tumbling to it. We’ll lunch up at the club. Maybe we’ll get a little peace there.”

They stepped into the hall of a great building, and took one of the interminable row of lifts. A few minutes later they were seated at a side table in a dining room on the top floor of one of the huge modern skyscrapers. Below them stretched a silent panorama of the city; beyond, a picturesque view of the river. A fresh breeze blew in through the opened window. They were above the noise, even, of the street cars.

“Order me a small bottle of champagne, James,” Fischer begged, “and some steak.”

Van Teyl stared at his companion and laughed as he took up the wine list.

“Well, that’s the first time, Fischer, I’ve known you to touch a drop of anything before the evening! I’ll have a whisky and soda with you. Thank God we’re away from that inquisitive crowd for a few minutes! Are you going to give me an idea of what’s moving?”

Fischer watched the wine being poured into his glass.

“Not until this evening,” he said. “I want you to bring your sister and come and dine at the new roof-garden.”

“I don’t know whether Pamela has any engagement,” Van Teyl began, a little dubiously.

“Please go and see,” Fischer begged earnestly. “The telephones are just outside. Tell your sister that I particularly wish her to accept my invitation. Tell her that there will be news.”

Van Teyl went out to the telephone. Fischer sipped his champagne and crumbled up his bread, his eyes fixed a little dreamily on the grey river. He was already conscious of the glow of the wine in his veins. The sensation was half pleasurable, in a sense distasteful to him. He resented this artificial humanity. He had the feeling of a man who has stooped to be doped by a quack doctor. And he was a little afraid.

His young companion returned triumphant.

“Had a little trouble with Pamela,” he observed, as he resumed his place at the table. “She was thinking of the opera with a girl friend she picked up this morning. However, the idea of news, I think, clinched it. We’ll be at the Oriental at eight o’clock, eh?”

Fischer looked up from the fascinating patchwork below. Already there was anticipation in his face.

“I am very glad,” he said. “There will certainly be news.”

CHAPTER XXIV

“Now indeed I feel that I am in New York,” Pamela declared, as she broke off one of the blossoms of the great cluster of deep red roses by her side, and gazed downward over her shoulder at the far-flung carpet of lights. “One sees little bits of America in every country of the world, but never this.”

Fischer, unusually grave and funereal-looking in his dinner clothes and black tie, followed her gesture with thoughtful eyes. Everything that was ugly in the stretching arms of the city seemed softened, shrouded and bejewelled. Even the sounds, the rattle and roar of the overhead railways, the clanging of the electric car bells, the shrieking of the sirens upon the river, seemed somehow to have lost their harsh note, to have become the human cry of the great live city, awaking and stretching itself for the night.

“I agree with you,” he said. “You dine at the Ritz-Carlton and you might be in Paris. You dine here, and one knows that you are in America.”

“Yet even here we have become increasingly luxurious,” Pamela remarked, looking around. “The glass and linen upon the tables are quite French; those shaded lights are exquisite. That little band, too, was playing at the Ritz three years ago. I am sure that the maitre d’hotel who brought us to our table was once at the Cafe de Paris.”

“Money would draw all those things from Europe even to the Sahara,” Fischer observed, “so long as there were plenty of it. But millions could not buy our dining table in the clouds.”

“A little effort of the imagination, fortunately,” Pamela laughed, looking upwards. “There are stars, but no clouds.”

“I guess one of them is going to slip down to the next table before long,” Van Teyl observed, with a little movement of his head.

They all three turned around and looked at the wonderful bank of pink roses within a few feet of them.

“One of the opera women, I daresay,” the young man continued. “They are rather fond of this place.”

Pamela leaned forward. Fischer was watching the streets below; Only a short distance away was a huge newspaper building, flaring with lights. The pavements fringing it were thronged with a little stationary crowd. A row of motor-bicycles was in waiting. A night edition of the paper was almost due.

“Mr. Fischer,” she asked, “what about that news?”

He withdrew his eyes from the street. Almost unconsciously he straightened himself a little in his place. There was pride in his tone. Behind his spectacles his eyes flashed.

“I would have told it you before,” he said, “but you would not have believed it. Soon–in a very few moments–the news will be known. You will see it break away in waves from that building down there, so I will bear with your incredulity. The German and British fleets have met, and the victory has remained with us.”

“With us?” Pamela repeated.

“With Germany,” Fischer corrected himself hastily.

“Is this true?” James Van Teyl almost shouted. “Fischer, are you sure of what you’re saying? Why, it’s incredible!”

“It is true,” was the proud reply. “The German Navy has been a long time proving itself. It has done so now. To-day every German citizen is the proudest creature breathing. He knew before that his armies were invincible. He knows now that his fleet is destined to make his country the mistress of the seas. England’s day is over. Her ships were badly handled and foolishly flung into battle. She has lost many of her finest units. Her Navy is to-day a crippled and maimed force. The German fleet is out in the North Sea, waiting for an enemy who has disappeared.”

“It is inconceivable,” Pamela gasped.

“I do not ask you to believe my word,” Fischer exclaimed. “Look!”

As though the flood gates had been suddenly opened, the stream of patient waiters broke away from the newspaper building below. Like little fireflies, the motor-bicycles were tearing down the different thoroughfares. Boys like ants, with their burden of news sheets, were running in every direction. Motor-trucks had started on their furious race. Even the distant echoes of their cries came faintly up. Fischer called a messenger and sent him for a paper.

“I do not know what report you will see,” he said, “but from whatever source it comes it will confirm my story. The news is too great and sweeping to be contradicted or ignored.”

“If it’s true,” Van Teyl muttered, “you’ve made a fortune in my office to-day. It looks like it, too. There was something wrong with Anglo-French beside your selling for the last hour this afternoon. I couldn’t get buyers to listen for a moment.”

“Yes, I shall have made a great deal of money,” Fischer admitted, “money which I shall value because it comes magnificently, but I hope that this victory may help me to win other things.”

He looked fixedly at Pamela, and she moved uneasily in her chair. Almost unconsciously the man himself seemed somehow associated with his cause, to be assuming a larger and more tolerant place in her thoughts. Perhaps there was some measure of greatness about him after all. The strain of waiting for the papers became almost intolerable. At last the boy reappeared. The great black headlines were stretched out before her. She felt the envelopment of Fischer’s triumph. The words were there in solid type, and the paper itself was one of the most reliable.

GREAT NAVAL BATTLE IN THE NORTH SEA.

BRITISH ADMIRALTY ADMITS SERIOUS LOSSES.

“QUEEN MARY,” “INDEFATIGABLE,” AND MANY FINE SHIPS LOST.

Pamela looked up from the sheet.

“It is too wonderful,” she whispered, with a note of awe in her tone. “I don’t think that any one ever expected this. We all believed in the British Navy.”

“There is nothing,” Fischer declared, “that England can do which Germany cannot do better.”

“And America best of all,” Pamela said.

Fischer bowed.

“That is one comparison which will never now be made,” he declared, “for from to-night Germany and America will draw nearer together. The bubble of British naval omnipotence is pricked.”

“Meanwhile,” Van Teyl observed, putting his paper away, “we are neglecting our dinner. Nothing like a good dose of sensationalism for giving us an appetite.”

Fischer was watching his glass being filled with champagne. He seized it by the stem. His eyes for a moment travelled upwards.

“I am an American citizen,” he said, with a strange fervour in his tone, “but for the moment I am called back. And so I lift my glass and I drink–I alone, without invitation to you others–to those brave souls who have made of the North Sea a holy battle-ground.”

He drained his glass and set it down empty. Pamela watched him as though fascinated. For a single moment she was conscious of a queer sensation of personal pity for some shadowy and absent friend, of something almost like a lump in her throat, a strange instinct of antagonism towards the man by her side so enveloped in beatific satisfaction–then she frowned when she realised that she had been thinking of Lutchester, that her first impulse had been one of sympathy for him. The moment passed. The service of dinner was pressed more insistently upon them. James Van Teyl, who had been leaning back in his chair, talking to one of the maitres d’hotel, dismissed him with a little nod and entrusted them with a confidence.

“Say, do you know who’s coming to the next table?” he exclaimed. “Sonia!”

They were all interested.

“You won’t mind?” Fischer asked diffidently.

“In a restaurant, how absurd!” Pamela laughed. “Why, I’m dying to see her. I wonder how it is that some of these greatest singers in the world lead such extraordinary lives that people can never know anything of them.”

“Society is tolerant enough nowadays,” her brother observed, “but Sonia won’t give them even a decent chance to wink at her eccentricities. She crossed, you know, on the Prince Doronda’s yacht, for fear they wouldn’t let her land.”

“Here she comes,” Pamela whispered.

There was a moment’s spellbound silence. Two maitres d’hotel were hurrying in front. A pathway from the lift had been cleared as though for a royal personage. Sonia, in white from head to foot, a dream of white lace and chinchilla, with a Russian crown of pearls in her glossy black hair, and a rope of pearls around her neck, came like a waxen figure, with scarlet lips and flashing eyes, towards her table. And behind her–Lutchester! Pamela felt her fingers gripping the tablecloth. Her first impulse, curiously enough, was one of wild fury with herself for that single instant’s pity. Her face grew cold and hard. She felt herself sitting a little more upright. Her eyes remained fixed upon the newcomers.

Lutchester’s behaviour was admirable. His glance swept their little table without even a shadow of interest. He ignored with passive unconcern the mistake of Van Teyl’s attempted greeting. He looked through Fischer as though he had been a ghost. He stood by Sonia’s side while she seated herself, and listened with courteous pleasure to her excited admiration of the flowers and the wonderful vista. Then he took his own place. In his right hand he was carrying an evening paper with its flaming headlines.

“That,” Fischer pronounced, struggling to keep the joy from his tone, “is very British and very magnificent!”

* * * * *

Pamela had imperfect recollections of the rest of the evening. She remembered that she was more than usually gay throughout dinner-time, but that she was the first to jump at the idea of a hurried departure and a visit to a cabaret. Every now and then she caught a glimpse of Sonia’s face, saw the challenging light in her brilliant eyes, heard little scraps of her conversation. The Frenchwoman spoke always in her own language, with a rather shrill voice, which made Lutchester’s replies sound graver and quieter than usual. More than once Pamela’s eyes rested upon the broad lines of his back. He sat all the time like a rock, courteous, at times obviously amusing, but underneath it all she fancied that she saw some signs of the disturbance from which she herself was suffering. She rose to her feet at last with a little sigh of relief. It was an ordeal through which she had passed.

Once in the lift, her brother and Fischer discussed Lutchester’s indiscretion volubly.

“I suppose,” Van Teyl declared, “that there isn’t a man in New York who wouldn’t have jumped at the chance of dining alone with Sonia, but for an Englishman, on a night like this,” he went on, glancing at the paper, “say, he must have some nerve!”

“Or else,” Fischer remarked, “a wonderful indifference. So far as I have studied the Anglo-Saxon temperament, I should be inclined to vote for the indifference. That is why I think Germany will win the war. Every man in that country prays for his country’s success, not only in words, but with his soul. I have not found the same spirit in England.”

“The English people,” Pamela interposed, “have a genius for concealment which amounts to stupidity.”

“I have a theory,” Fischer said, “that to be phlegmatic after a certain pitch is a sign of low vitality. However, we shall see. Certainly, if England is to be saved from her present trouble, it will not be the Lutchesters of the world who will do it, nor, it seems, her Navy.”

They found their way to a large cabaret, where Pamela listened to an indifferent performance a little wearily. The news of what was termed a naval disaster to Great Britain was flashed upon the screen, and, generally speaking, the audience was stunned. Fischer behaved throughout the evening with tact and discretion. He made few references to the matter, and was careful not to indulge in any undue exhilaration. Once, when Van Teyl had left the box, however, to speak to some friends, he turned earnestly to Pamela.

“Will it please you soon,” he begged, “to resume our conversation of the other day? However you may look at it, things have changed, have they not? An invincible British Navy has been one of the fundamental principles of beliefs in American politics. Now that it is destroyed, the outlook is different. I could go myself to the proper quarter in Washington, or Von Schwerin is here to be my spokesman. I have a fancy, though, to work with you. You know why.”

She moved uneasily in her place.

“I have no idea,” she objected, “what it is that you have to propose. Besides, I am only just a woman who has been entrusted with a few diplomatic errands.”

“You are the niece of Senator Hastings,” Fischer reminded her, “and Hastings is the man through whom I should like my proposal to go to the President. It is an honest offer which I have to make, and although it cannot pass through official channels, it is official in the highest sense of the word, because it comes to me from the one man who is in a position to make himself responsible for it.”

Her brother came back to the box before Pamela could reply, but, as they parted that night, she gave Fischer her hand.

“Come and see our new quarters,” she invited. “I shall be at home any time to-morrow afternoon.”

It was one of the moments of Fischer’s life. He bowed low over her fingers.

“I accept, with great pleasure,” he murmured.

CHAPTER XXV

Sonia had the air of one steeped in an almost ecstatic content. On her return from the roof garden she had exchanged her wonderful gown for a white silk negligee, and her headdress of pearls for a quaint little cap. She was stretched upon a sofa drawn before the wide-flung French windows of her little sitting-room at the Ritz-Carlton, a salon decorated in pink and white, and filled almost to overflowing with the roses which she loved. By her side, in an easy chair which she had pressed him to draw up to her couch, sat Lutchester.

“This,” she murmured, “is one of the evenings which I adore. I have no work, no engagements–just one friend with whom to talk. My fine clothes have done. I am myself,” she added, stretching out her arms. “I have my cigarettes, my iced sherbet, and the lights and murmur of the city there below to soothe me. And you to talk with me, my friend. What are you thinking of me–that I am a little animal who loves comfort too much, eh?”

Lutchester smiled.

“We all love comfort,” he replied. “Some of us are franker than others about it.”

She made a little grimace.

“Comfort! It is my own word, but what a word! It is luxury I worship–luxury–and a friend. Is that, perhaps, another word too slight, eh?”

He met the provocative gleam of her eyes with a smile of amusement.

“You are just the same child, Sonia,” he remarked. “Neither climate nor country, nor the few passing years, can change you.”

“It is you who have grown older and sterner,” she pouted. “It is you who have lost the gift of living to-day as though to-morrow were not. There was a time, was there not, John, when you did not care to sit always so far away?”

She laid her hand–ringless, over-manicured, but delicately white—- upon his. He smoothed it gently.

“You see, Sonia,” he sighed, “troubles have come that harden the hearts even of the gayest of us.”

She frowned.

“You are not going to remind me–” she began.

“If I reminded you of anything, Sonia,” he interrupted, “I would remind you that you are a Frenchwoman.”

She stretched out her hand restlessly and took one of the Russian cigarettes from a bowl by her side.

“You are not, by any chance, going to talk seriously, dear John?”

“I am,” he assured her, “very seriously.”

“Oh, la, la!” she laughed. “You, my dear, gay companion, you who have shaken the bells all your life, you are going to talk seriously! And to-night, when we meet again after so long. Ah, well, why should I be surprised?” she went on, with a pout.

“You have changed. When one looks into your face, one sees the difference. But to me, of all people in the world! Why talk seriously to me! I am just Sonia, the gipsy nightingale. I know nothing of serious things.”

“You carry one very serious secret in your heart,” he told her gravely, “one little pain which must sometimes stab you. You are a Frenchwoman, and yet–“

Lutchester paused for a moment. Sonia, too, seemed suddenly to have awakened into a state of tense and vivid emotion. The cigarette burned away between her fingers. Her great eyes were fixed upon Lutchester. There was something almost like fear in their questioning depths.

“Finish! Finish!” she insisted. “Continue!”

“And yet,” he went on, “your very dear friend, the friend for whose sake you are here in America, is your country’s enemy.”

She raised herself a little upon the couch.

“That is not true,” she declared furiously. “Maurice loves France. His heart aches for the misery that has come upon her. It is your country only which he hates. If France had but possessed the courage to stand by herself, to resist when England forced her friendship upon her, none of this tragedy would ever have happened. Maurice has told me so himself. France could have peace today, peace at her own price.”

“There is no peace which would leave France with a soul, save the peace which follows victory,” Lutchester replied sternly.

She crushed her cigarette nervously in her fingers, threw it away, and lit another.

“I will not talk of these things with you,” she cried. “It was not for this that you sought me out, eh? Tell me at once? Were these the thoughts you had in your mind when you sent your little note?–when you chose to show yourself once more in my life?”

For the first time of his own accord, he drew his chair a little nearer to hers. He took her hand. She gave him both unresistingly.

“Listen, dear Sonia,” he said, “it is true that I am a changed man. I am older than when we met last, and there are the other things. You remember the Chateau d’Albert?”

“Of course!” she murmured. “And the young Due d’Albert’s wonderful house party. We all motored there from Paris. You and I were together! You have forgotten that, eh?”

“I lay in that orchard for two days,” he went on grimly, “with a hole in my side and one leg pretty nearly done for. I saw things I can never forget, in those days, Sonia. D’Albert himself was killed. It was in that first mad rush. Of the Chateau there remains but four blackened walls.”

“_Pauvre enfant_!” she murmured. “But you are well and strong again now, is it not so? You will not fight again, eh? You were never a soldier, dear friend.”

“Just now,” he confided, “I have other work to do. It is that other work which has brought me to America.”

She drew him a little closer to her. Her eyes questioned him.

“There is, perhaps, now,” she asked, “a woman in your life?”

“There is,” he admitted.

She made a grimace.

“But how clumsy to tell me, even though I asked,” she exclaimed. “What is she like? … But no, I do not wish to hear of her! If she is all the world to you, why did you send me that little note? Why are you here?”

“Because we were once dear friends, Sonia,” he said, “because I wish to save you from great trouble.”

She shrank from him a little fearfully.

“What do you mean?”

“Sonia,” he continued, with a note of sternness in his tone, “during the last two years you have gone back and forth between New York and Paris, six times. I do not think that you can make that journey again.”

She was standing now, with one hand gripping the edge of the table.

“John! … John! … What do you mean?” she demanded, and this time her own voice was hard.

“I mean,” he said, “that when you leave here for Paris you will be watched day and night. The moment you set foot upon French soil you will be arrested and searched. If anything is found upon you, such as a message from your friend in Washington–well, you know what it would mean. Can’t you see, you foolish child, the risk you have been running? Would you care to be branded as a spy?–you, a daughter of France?”

She struck at him. Her lace sleeves had fallen back, and her white arm, with its little clenched fist, flashed through the twilight, aimlessly yet passionately.

“You dare to call me a spy! You, John?” she shrieked. “But it is horrible.”

“It is the work of a spy,” he told her gravely, “to bring a letter from any person in a friendly capital and deliver it to an enemy. That is what you have done, Sonia, many times since the beginning of the war, so far without detection. It is because you are Sonia that I have come to save you from doing it again.”

She groped her way back to the couch. She threw herself upon it with her back towards him, her head buried in her hands.

“The letters are only between friends,” she faltered. “They have nothing to do with the war.”

“You may have believed that,” Lutchester replied gently, “but it is not true. You have been made the bearer of confidential communications from the Austrian Embassy here to certain people in Paris whom we will not name. I have pledged my word, Sonia, that this shall cease.”

She sprang to her feet. All the feline joy of her languorous ease seemed to have departed. She was quivering and nervous. She stood over her writing-table.

“A telegraph blank!” she exclaimed. “Quick! I will not see Maurice again. Oh, how I have suffered! This shall end it. See, I have written ‘Good-by!’ He will understand. If he comes, I will not see him. Ring the bell quickly. There–it is finished!”

A page-boy appeared, and she handed him the telegram. Then she turned a little pathetically to Lutchester.

“Maurice was foolish–very often foolish,” she went on unsteadily, “but he has loved me, and a woman loves love so much. Now I shall be lonely. And yet, there is a great weight gone from my mind. Always I wondered about those letters. You will be my friend, John? You will not leave me all alone?”

He patted her hand.

“Dear Sonia,” he whispered, “solitude is not the worst thing one has to bear, these days. Try and remember, won’t you, that all the men who might have loved you are fighting for your country, one way or another.”

“It is all so sad,” she faltered, “and you–you are so stern and changed.”

“It is with me only as it is with the whole world,” he told her. “To-night, though, you have relieved me of one anxiety.”

Her eyes once more were for a moment frightened.

“There was danger for poor little me?”

He nodded.

“It is past,” he assured her.

“And it is you who have saved me,” she murmured. “Ah, Mr. John,” she added, as she walked with him to the door, “if ever there comes to me a lover, not for the days only but _pour la vie,_ I hope that he may be an Englishman like you, whom all the world trusts.”

He laughed and raised her fingers to his lips.

“Over-faithful, you called us once,” he reminded her.

“But that was when I was a child,” she said, “and in days like these we are children no longer.”

CHAPTER XXVI

Lutchester left Sonia and the Ritz-Carlton a few minutes before midnight, to find a great yellow moon overhead, which seemed to have risen somewhere at the back of Central Park. The broad thoroughfare up which he turned seemed to have developed a new and unfamiliar beauty. The electric lamps shone with a pale and almost unnatural glow. The flashing lights of the automobiles passing up and down were almost whimsically unnecessary. Lutchester walked slowly up Fifth Avenue in the direction of his hotel.

Something–the beauty of the night, perhaps, or some faint aftermath of sentimentality born of Sonia’s emotion–tempted him during those few moments to relax. He threw aside his mask and breathed the freer for it. Once more he was a human being, treading the streets of a real city, his feet very much upon the earth, his heart full of the simplest things. All the scheming of the last few days was forgotten, the great issues, the fine yet devious way to be steered amidst the rocks which beset him; even the depression of the calamitous news from the North Sea passed away. He was a very simple human being, and he was in love. It was all so unpractical, so illusionary, and yet so real. Events, actual happenings–he thrust all thoughts of these away from his mind. What she might be thinking of him at the moment he ignored. He was content to let his thoughts rest upon her, to walk through the moonlit street, his brain and heart revelling in that subtle facility of the imagination which brought her so easily to his presence. It was such a vividly real Pamela, too, who spoke and walked and moved by his side. His memory failed him nowhere, followed faithfully the kaleidoscopic changes in her face and tone, showed him even that long, grateful, searching glance when their eyes had met in Von Teyl’s sitting-room. There had been times when she had shown clearly enough that she was anxious to understand, anxious to believe in him. He clung to the memory of these; pushed into the background that faint impression he had had of her at the roof-garden, serene and proud, yet with a faint look of something like pain in her startled eyes.

A large limousine passed him slowly, crawling up Fifth Avenue. Lutchester, with all his gifts of observation dormant, took no notice of its occupant, who leaned forward, raised the speaking-tube to his lips, and talked for a moment to his chauffeur. The car glided round a side street and came to a standstill against the curb. Its solitary passenger stepped quietly out and entered a restaurant. The chauffeur backed the car a little, slipped from his place, and followed Lutchester.

By chance the little throng of people here became thicker for a few moments and then ceased. Lutchester drew a little sigh of relief as he saw before him almost an empty pavement. Then, just as he was relapsing once more into thought, some part of his subconscious instinct suddenly leaped into warning life. Without any actual perception of what it might mean, he felt the thrill of imminent danger, connected it with that soft footfall behind him, and swung round in time to seize a deadly uplifted hand which seemed to end in a shimmer of dull steel. His assailant flung himself upon Lutchester with the lithe ferocity of a cat, clinging to his body, twisting and turning his arm to wrest it free. It was a matter of seconds only before his intended victim, with a fierce backward twist, broke the man’s wrist and, wrenching himself free from the knees which clung around him, flung him forcibly against the railings which bordered the pavement. Lutchester paused for a moment to recover his breath and looked around. A man from the other side of the street was running towards them, but no one else seemed to have noticed the struggle which had begun and finished in less than thirty seconds. The man, who was half-way across the thoroughfare, suddenly stopped short. He shouted a warning to Lutchester, who swung around. His late assailant, who had been lying motionless, had raised himself slightly, with a revolver clenched in his left hand. Lutchester’s spring on one side saved his life, for the bullet passed so close to his cheek that he felt the rush and heat of the air. The man in the center of the road was busy shouting an alarm vociferously, and other people on both sides of the thoroughfare were running up. Lutchester’s eyes now never left the dark, doubled-up figure upon the pavement. His whole body was tense. He was prepared at the slightest movement to spring in upon his would-be murderer. The man’s eyes seemed to be burning in his white face. He called out to Lutchester hoarsely.

“Don’t move or I shall shoot!”

He looked up and down the street. One of the nearest of the hastening figures was a policeman. He turned the revolver against his own temple and pulled the trigger….

Lutchester and a policeman walked slowly back along Fifth Avenue. Behind them, a little crowd was still gathered around the spot from which the body of the dead man had already been removed in an ambulance.

“I really remember nothing,” Lutchester told his companion, “until I heard the footsteps behind me, and, turning round, saw the knife. This is simply an impression of mine–that he might have descended from the car which passed me and stopped just round the corner of that street.”

“He’s a chauffeur, right enough,” the inspector remarked. “It don’t seem to have been a chance job, either. Looks as though he meant doing you in. Got any enemies?”

“None that I know of,” Lutchester answered cautiously. “Why, the car’s there still,” he added, as they reached the corner.

“And no chauffeur,” the other muttered.

The officer searched the car and drew out a license from the flap pocket. The commissionaire from the restaurant approached them.

“Say, what are you doing with that car?” he demanded.

“Better fetch the gentleman to whom it belongs,” the inspector directed.

“What’s up, anyway?” the man persisted.

“You do as you’re told,” was the sharp reply.

The commissionaire disappeared. The officer studied the license which he had just opened.

“What’s the name?” Lutchester inquired.

The man hesitated for a moment, then passed it over.

“Oscar H. Fischer,” he said. “Happen to know the name?”

Lutchester’s face was immovable. He passed the license back again. They both turned round. Mr. Fischer had issued from the restaurant.

“What’s wrong?” he asked hastily. “The commissionaire says you want me, Mr. Officer?”

The inspector produced his pocketbook.

“Just want to ask you a few questions about your chauffeur, sir.”

Fischer glanced at the driver’s seat of the car, as though aware of the man’s disappearance for the first time.

“What’s become of the fellow?” he inquired.

“Shot himself,” the inspector replied, “after a deliberate attempt to murder this gentleman.”

Mr. Fischer’s composure was admirable. There was a touch of gravity mingled with his bewilderment. Nevertheless, he avoided meeting Lutchester’s eyes.

“You horrify me!” he exclaimed. “Why, the fellow’s only been driving for me for a few hours.”

“That so?” the officer remarked, with a grunt. “Get any references with him?”

“As a matter of fact, I did not,” Fischer admitted frankly. “I discharged my chauffeur yesterday, at a moment’s notice, and this man happened to call just as I was wanting the car out this afternoon. He promised to bring me references to-morrow from Mr. Gould and others. I engaged him on that understanding. He told me that his name was Kay– Robert Kay. That is all that I know about him, except that he was an excellent driver. I am exceedingly sorry Mr. Lutchester,” he went on, turning towards him, “that this should have happened.”

“So you two know one another, eh?” the officer observed.

“Oh, yes, we know one another!” Lutchester admitted drily.

“I shall have to ask you both for your names and addresses,” the official continued. “I think I won’t ask you any more questions at present. Seems to me headquarters had better take this on.”

“I shall be quite at your service,” Lutchester promised.

The man made a few more notes, saluted, and took his leave. Fischer and Lutchester remained for a moment upon the pavement.

“It is a dangerous custom,” Lutchester remarked, “to take a servant without a reference.”

“It will be a warning to me for the remainder of my life,” Fischer declared.

“I, too, have learnt something,” Lutchester concluded, as he turned away.

CHAPTER XXVII

Fischer, as he waited for Pamela the following afternoon in the sitting-room of her flat on Fifty-eighth Street, felt that although the practical future of his life might be decided in other places, it was here that its real climax would be reached. Pamela herself was to pronounce sentence upon him. He was feeling scarcely at his best. An examination in the courthouse, which he had imagined would last only a few minutes, had been protracted throughout the afternoon. The district attorney had asked him a great many questions, some rather awkward ones, and the inquiry itself had been almost grudgingly adjourned for a few hours. And here, in Pamela’s sitting-room, the first things which caught his eye were the headlines of one of the afternoon papers:

WESTERN MILLIONAIRE ENGAGES
THE GIRL HESTE’S MURDERER
AS CHAUFFEUR!

ATTEMPTED MURDER AND SUICIDE
IN FIFTH AVENUE
LAST NIGHT.

Fischer pushed the newspaper impatiently away, and, in the act of doing so, the door was opened and Pamela entered. She came towards him with outstretched hand.

“I see you are looking at the account of your misdeeds,” she said, as she seated herself behind a tea tray. “Will you tell me why a cautious man like you engages, without reference, a chauffeur who turns out to be a murderer?”

Fischer frowned irritably.

“For four hours,” he complained, “several lawyers and a most inquisitive police captain have been asking me the same question in a hundred different ways. I engaged the man because I needed a chauffeur badly. He was to have brought his references this morning. I was only trusting him for a matter of a few hours.”

“And during those few hours,” she observed, “he seems to have developed a violent antipathy to Mr. Lutchester.”

“I do not understand the affair at all,” Mr. Fischer declared, “and, if I may say so, I am a little weary of it. I came here to discuss another matter altogether.”

She leaned back in her place.

“What have you come to discuss, Mr. Fischer?”

“That depends so much upon you,” he replied. “If you give me any encouragement, I can put before you a great proposition. If your prejudices, however, remain as I think they always have been, on the side of England, why then I can do nothing.”

“If I counted for anything,” Pamela said, “I mean to say if it mattered to any one what my attitude was, I would start by admitting that my sympathies are somewhat on the side of the Allies. On the other hand, my sympathies amount to nothing at all compared with my interest in the welfare of the United States. I am perfectly selfish in that respect.”

“Then you have an open mind to hear what I have to say,” Fischer remarked. “I am glad of it. You encourage me to proceed.”

“That is all very well,” Pamela said, stirring her tea, “but I cannot help asking once more why you come to me at all? What have I to do with any proposition you may have to make?”

“Just this,” he explained. “I have a serious and authentic proposition to make to the American Government. I cannot make it officially– although it comes from the highest of all sources–for the most obvious reasons. It may seem better worth listening to to-day, perhaps, than a week ago, so far as you are concerned. That is because you believed in British invincibility upon the sea. I never did.”

“Go on, please,” Pamela begged. “I am still waiting to realise my position in all this.”

“I should like,” Fischer declared, “my proposition to reach the President through Senator Hastings, and Senator Hastings is your uncle.”

“I see,” Pamela murmured.

“My offer itself is a very simple one,” Fischer continued. “Your secret service is so bad that you probably know nothing of what is happening. Ours, on the other hand, is still marvellously good, and what I am going to tell you is surely the truth. Japan is accumulating great wealth. She is saving her ships and men for one purpose, and one purpose only. Europe could not bribe her highly enough to take a more active part in this war. Her price was one which could not be paid. She demanded a free hand with the United States.”

“This,” Pamela admitted, “is quite interesting, but it is entirely in the realms of conjecture, is it not?”

“Not wholly,” Fischer insisted. “At the proper time I should be prepared to bring you evidence that tentative proposals were made by Japan to both England and France, asking what would be their attitude, should she provide them with half a million men and undertake transport, if at the conclusion of the war she desired a settlement with the United States. The answer from France and England was the same–that they could not countenance an inimical attitude towards the States.”

“You are bound to admit, then,” Pamela remarked, “that England played the game here.”

“The bribe was not big enough,” Fischer replied drily. “England would sell her soul, but not for a mess of pottage. To proceed, however, Japan has practically kept out of the war. She is enjoying a prosperity never known before, and for every million pounds’ worth of munitions she exports to Russia, she puts calmly on one side twenty-five per cent, to accumulate for her own use. At the conclusion of the war she will be in a position she has never occupied before, and while the rest of the world is still gasping, she will proceed to carry out what has been the dream of her life–the invasion of your Western States.”

“I admit that this is plausible,” Pamela confessed, “but you are only pointing out a very obvious danger, for which I imagine that we are already fairly well prepared.”

“Believe me,” Fischer said earnestly, “you are not. It is this fact which makes the whole situation so vital to you. Later on in our negotiations, I will show you proof of your danger. Meanwhile, let me proceed to the offer which I am empowered to make, which comes direct from the one person in Germany whose word is unshakable.”

Pamela changed her position a little, as though to escape from the sunlight which was finding its way underneath the broad blinds. Her eyes were fixed upon her visitor. She listened intently to every word he had to say. Despite some vague feeling of mistrust, which she acknowledged to herself might well have been prejudiced, she found the situation interesting, even stimulating. Her few excursions into the world of high politics had never brought her into such a position as this. She felt both flattered and interested–attracted, too, in some nameless way, by the man’s personality, his persistence, his daring, his whole-heartedness. The situation was instinct with interest to her.

“But why make it to me?” she murmured.

“You are to be my delegate,” he answered. “Take the substance of what I say to you, to your uncle. Try, for your country’s sake, to interest him in it. The offer which I make shall save you a vast amount of sacrifice. It shall save your dislocating the industries of the country and sowing the seeds of a disturbing and yet inadequate militarism. I offer you, in short, a German alliance against Japan.”

“The value of that offer,” Pamela remarked thoughtfully, “would depend rather upon the issue of the present war, wouldn’t it?”

Fischer’s face darkened. His tone was almost irritable.

“That is already preordained,” he said firmly. “You see, I will be quite frank with you. Germany has lost her chance of sweeping and complete victory. The result of the war will be a return to the status-quo-ante. Yet, believe me, Germany will be strong enough to settle some of the debts she owes, and the debt to Japan is one of these.”

“Still, there is the practical question of getting men and ships over from Germany to America,” Pamela persisted.

“It is already solved,” was the swift reply. “At the proper time I will show you and prove how it can be done. At present, not one word can pass my lips. It is one of the secrets on which the future of Germany depends.”

“And the price?” Pamela asked.

“That America adopts our view as to the high seas traffic,” Fischer replied. “This would mean the stopping of all supplies, munitions and ammunition from America to England. We offer you an alliance. We ask only for your real and actual neutrality for the remainder of the war. We offer a great and substantial advantage, a safeguard for your country’s future, in return for what? Simply that America will pursue the course of honour and integrity to all nations.”

“America,” Pamela declared, “has never failed in this.”

Fischer shrugged his shoulders.

“There is more than one point of view,” he reminded her. “Will you take my message with you to Washington to-morrow?”

“Yes,” Pamela promised, “I will do that. The rest, of course, remains with others. I do not myself go so far, even,” she added, “as to declare myself in sympathy with you.”

“And yet,” he insisted, with swift violence, “it is your sympathy which I desire more than anything in the world–your sympathy, your help, your companionship; a little–a very little at first–of your love.”

“I am afraid that I am not a very satisfactory person from that point of view,” Pamela confessed. “I have a great sympathy with every man who is really out for the great things, but so far as you are concerned, Mr. Fischer, or any one else,” she went on, after a moment’s hesitation, “I have no personal feeling.”

“That shall come,” he declared.

“Then please wait a little time before you talk to me again like this,” she said, rising and holding out her hand. “At present there is no sign of it.”

“There is so much that I could offer you,” he pleaded, gripping the hand which she had given him in farewell, “so much that I could do for your country. Believe me, I am not talking idly.”

“I do believe that,” she admitted. “You are a very clever man, Mr. Fischer, and I think that you represent all that you claim. Perhaps, if we really do negotiate–“

“But you must!” he interrupted impatiently. “You must listen to me for every reason–politically for your country’s sake, personally because I shall offer you and give you happiness and a position you could never find elsewhere.”

For a moment her eyes seemed to be looking through him, as though some vision of things outside the room were troubling her. Her finger had already touched the bell and a servant was standing upon the threshold.

“We shall meet in Washington,” Mr. Fischer concluded, with an air of a prophet, as he took his leave.

CHAPTER XXVIII

It was within half an hour of closing time that same afternoon when Lutchester walked into James Van Teyl’s office. The young man greeted him with some surprise.

“Will you do some business for me?” Lutchester asked, without any preliminaries.

“Sure!”

“How many Anglo-French will you buy for me? I can obtain credit by cable to-morrow through any bank for twenty or thirty thousand pounds.”

“You want to buy Anglo-French?” Van Teyl repeated softly.

His visitor nodded.

“Any news?”

Lutchester hesitated, and Van Teyl continued with an apologetic gesture.

“I beg your pardon. That’s not my job, anyway, to ask questions. I’ll buy you twenty-five thousand, if you like. Guess they can’t drop much lower.”

Lutchester sat down.

“Thank you,” he said, “I will wait.”

A little ripple of excitement went through the office as Van Teyl started his negotiations. It seemed to Lutchester that several telephones and half a dozen perspiring young men were called into his service. In the end Van Teyl made out a note and handed it to him.

“I could have done better for you yesterday,” he observed. “The market is strengthening all the time. There are probably some rumours.”

A boy went by along the pavement outside waving a handful of papers. His cry floated in through the open window:

REPORTED LOSS OF MANY MORE GERMAN
BATTLESHIPS.
BRITISH CLAIM VICTORY.

Van Teyl grinned.

“You got here just in time,” he murmured, “but I suppose you knew all about this.”

“I have known since three o’clock,” Lutchester replied, “that all the reports of a German victory were false. You will find, when the truth is known, that the German losses were greater than the British.”

“Then if that’s so,” Van Teyl remarked, “I’ve got one client who’ll lose a hatful which you ought to make. Coming up town?”

“I should like, if I may?” Lutchester said, “to be permitted to pay my respects to your sister.”

“Why, that’s fine!” Van Teyl exclaimed unconvincingly. “We’ll take the subway up.”

They left the office and plunged into the indescribable horrors of their journey. When they stepped out into the sunlit street in another atmosphere, Van Teyl laid his hand upon his companion’s arm in friendly fashion.

“Say, Lutchester,” he began, “I don’t know that you are going to find Pamela exactly all that she might be in the way of amiability and so on. I know these things are done on the other side, but here it’s considered trying your friends pretty high to take a lady of Sonia’s reputation where you are likely to meet your friends. No offence, eh?”

“Certainly not,” Lutchester replied. “I was sorry, of course, to see you last night. On the other hand, Sonia is an old friend, and my dinner with her had an object. I think I could explain it to your sister.”

“I don’t know that I should try,” Van Teyl advised. “For all her cosmopolitanism, Pamela has some quaint ideas. However, I thought I’d warn you, in case she’s a bit awkward.”

Pamela, however, had no idea of being awkward. She welcomed Lutchester with a very sweet smile, and gave him the tips of her fingers.

“I was wondering whether we should see you again before we went,” she said. “We are leaving for Washington to-morrow.”

“By the three o’clock train, I hope?” he ventured.

She raised her eyebrows.

“Why, are you going, too?”

“I hope so.”

“I should have thought most of the munition works,” she observed, “were further north.”

“They are,” he acknowledged, “but I have business in Washington. By the bye, will you both come out and dine with me to-night?”

Van Teyl glanced at his sister. She shook her head.

“I am so sorry,” she said, “but we are engaged. Perhaps we shall see something of you in Washington.”

“I have no doubt you will,” Lutchester replied “All the same,” he added, “it would give me very great pleasure to entertain you at dinner this evening.”

“Why particularly this evening?” she asked.

He looked at her with a queer directness, and Pamela felt certain very excellent resolutions crumbling. She suffered her brother to leave the room without a word.

“Because,” he explained, “I think you will find a different atmosphere everywhere. There will be news in the evening papers.”

“News?” she repeated eagerly. “You know I am always interested in that.”

“The reports of a German naval victory were not only exaggerated,” Lutchester said calmly; “they were untrue. Our own official announcement was clumsy and tactless, but you will find it amplified and explained to-night.”

Pamela listened with an interest which bordered upon excitement.

“You are sure?” she exclaimed.

“Absolutely,” he replied. “My notification is official.”

“So you think if we dined with you, the atmosphere to-night would be different?” she observed, with a sudden attempt at the recondite.

Lutchester looked into her eyes without flinching. Pamela, to her annoyance, was worsted in the momentary duel.

“We cannot always choose our atmosphere,” he reminded her.

“Mademoiselle Sonia is perhaps connected with the regulation of the munition supplies from America?”

“Mademoiselle Sonia,” Lutchester asserted, “is an old friend of mine. Apart from that, it was my business to talk to her.”

“Your business?”

Lutchester assented with perfect gravity.

“Within a day or two,” he said, “now, if you made a point of it, I could explain a great deal.”

Pamela threw herself into a chair almost irritably.

“You have the cult of being mysterious, Mr. Lutchester,” she declared. “To be quite frank with you, you seem to be the queerest mixture of any man I ever knew.”

“It is the fault of circumstances,” he regretted, “if I am sometimes compelled to present myself to you in an unfavourable light. Those circumstances are passing. You will soon begin to value me at my true worth.”

“We had half promised,” Pamela murmured, “to go out with Mr. Fischer this evening.”

“The more reason for my intervention,” Lutchester observed. “Fischer is not a fit person for you to associate with.”

She laughed curiously.

“People who saw you at the roof-garden last night might say that you were scarcely a judge,” Pamela retorted.

“People who did not know the circumstances might have considered me guilty of an indiscretion,” Lutchester admitted, “but they would have been entirely wrong. On the other hand, your friend Fischer is a would-be murderer, a liar, and is at the present moment engaged in intrigues which are a most immoral compound of duplicity and cunning.”

“I shall begin to think,” Pamela murmured, “that you don’t like Mr. Fischer!”

“I detest him heartily,” Lutchester confessed.

“I find him singularly interesting,” Pamela announced, sitting up in her chair.

“I dare say you do,” Lutchester replied. “Women are always bad judges of our sex. All the same, you are not going to marry him.”

“How do you know he wants to marry me?” Pamela demanded.

“Instinct!”

“And what do you mean by saying that I am not going to marry him?”

“Because,” Lutchester announced, “you are going to marry some one else.”

Pamela rose to her feet. There was a little spot of colour in her cheeks.

“Am I indeed!” she exclaimed. “And whom, pray?”

“That I will tell you at Washington,” Lutchester promised.

“You know his name, then?”

“I know him intimately,” was the cool reply. “What about our dinner to-night?”

“We are going to dine with Mr. Fischer,” Pamela decided.

“I really don’t think so,” Lutchester objected. “For one thing, Mr. Fischer will probably have to attend the police court again later on.”

“What about?”

“For having hired a famous murderer to try and get rid of me.” Lutchester explained suavely.

“Do you really believe that?” Pamela scoffed. “Why should he want to get rid of you? What harm can you do him?”

“I am trying to find out,” Lutchester replied grimly. “Still, since you ask the question, the pocketbook which is on its way to Germany, and which I picked up when Nikasti was taken ill–“

“Oh, yes, I know about that!” Pamela interrupted. “That is the one thing that always sets me thinking about you. What did you do it for? How did you know what it meant to me?”

“Divination, I imagine,” Lutchester answered, “or perhaps I was thinking what it might mean to Mr. Fischer.”

She looked at him and her face was a study in mixed expressions. Her forehead was a little knitted, her eyes almost strained in their desire to read him; her lips were petulant.

“Dear me, what a puzzle you are!” she exclaimed. “All the same, I am going to wait for Mr. Fischer. It doesn’t matter whether one dines or sups. I suppose he will get away from the police court sometime or other.”

“But anyway,” he protested, “you’ve heard all that Mr. Fischer has to say. Now I, on the other hand, haven’t shown you my hand yet.”

“Heard all that Mr. Fischer has to say?” she repeated.

“Certainly! Wasn’t he here for several hours with you this afternoon? Didn’t he promise you an alliance with Germany against Japan, if you could persuade certain people at Washington to change their tone and attitude towards the export of munitions?”

“This,” she declared, trying to keep a certain agitation from her tone, “is mere bluff.”

Lutchester was suddenly very serious indeed.

“Listen,” he said, “I can prove to you, if you will, that it is not bluff. I can prove to you that I really know something of what I am talking about.”

“There is nothing I should like better,” she declared.

“To begin with then,” Lutchester said, “the pocketbook which Nikasti is supposed to have stolen from your room, the pocketbook of young Sandy Graham, which Mr. Fischer has sent to Germany, does not contain the formula of the new explosive, or any other formula that amounts to anything.”

“Just how do you know that?” she demanded.

“To continue,” Lutchester said, playing with a little ornament upon the mantelpiece, “you have an appointment–within half an hour, I believe–with Mr. Paul Haskall, who is a specialist in explosives, having an official position with the American Government.”

She had ceased to struggle any longer with her surprise. She looked at him fixedly but remained silent.

“It is your belief,” he proceeded, “that you are going to hand over to him the formula of which we were speaking.”

“It is no belief,” she replied. “It is certainty. I took it myself from Graham’s pocket.”

Lutchester nodded.

“Good! Have you opened it?”

“I have,” she declared. “It is without doubt, the formula.”

“On the other hand, I am here to assure you that it is not,” Lutchester replied.

Her hand was tearing at the cushion by her side. She moistened her lips. There was something about Lutchester hatefully convincing.

“What do you mean?” she demanded. “Is this a trick. You won’t get it! No one but Mr. Haskall will get that formula from me!”

Lutchester smiled.

“It will only puzzle him when he gets it! To tell you the truth, the formula is rubbish.”

“I don’t believe you,” she said firmly. “If you think you are going to interfere with my handing it over to him, you are mistaken.”

“I have no wish to do anything of the sort,” Lutchester assured her. “Make a bargain with me. Mr. Haskall will be here soon. Unfasten the little package you are carrying somewhere about your person, hand him the envelope and watch his face. If he tells you that what you have offered him is a coherent and possible formula for an explosive, then you can look upon me for ever afterwards as the poor, foolish person you sometimes seem to consider me. If, on the other hand, he tells you that it is rubbish, I shall expect you at the Ritz-Carlton at half-past eight.”

There was a ring at the bell. She rose to her feet.

“I accept,” she declared. “That is Mr. Haskall. And, by the bye, Mr. Lutchester, don’t order too elaborate a dinner, for I am very much afraid you will have to eat it all yourself. Now, an revoir,” she added, as the door was opened in obedience to her summons and a servant stood prepared to show him out. “If we don’t turn up to-night, you will know the reason.”

“I am very hopeful,” Lutchester replied, as he turned away.

CHAPTER XXIX

At five-and-twenty minutes past eight that evening Lutchester, who was waiting in the entrance hall of the Ritz-Carlton, became just a little restless. At half-past, his absorption in an evening paper, over the top of which he looked at every newcomer, was almost farcical. At five-and-twenty to nine Pamela arrived. He advanced down the lounge to meet her. Her face was inscrutable, her smile conventional. Yet she had come! He looked over his shoulder towards the men’s coat room.

“Your brother?”

“I sent Jim to his club,” she said. “I want to have a confidential talk with you, Mr. Lutchester.”

“I am very flattered,” he told her, with real earnestness.

She vanished for a few moments in the cloakroom, and reappeared, a radiant vision in deep blue silk. Her hair was gathered in a coil at the top of her head, and surmounted with an ornament of pearls.

“You are looking at my headdress,” she remarked, as they walked into the room. “It is the style you admire, is it not?”

He murmured something vague, but he knew that he was forgiven. They were ushered to their places by a portly maitre d’hotel, and she approved of his table. It was set almost in an alcove, and was partially hidden from the other diners.

“Is this seclusion vanity or flattery?”

“As a matter of fact, it is rather a popular table,” he told her. “We have an excellent view of the room, and yet one can talk here without being disturbed.”

“To talk to you is exactly what I wish to do,” she said, as they took their places. “We commence, if you please, with a question. Mr. Fischer thought that he had that formula and he hasn’t. I could have sworn that it was in my possession–and it isn’t. Where is it?”

“I took it to the War Office before I left England,” he told her simply. “They will have the first few tons of the stuff ready next month.”

“You!” she cried, “But where did you get it?”

“I happened to be first, that’s all,” he explained. “You see, I had the advantage of a little inside information. I could have exposed the whole affair if I had thought it wise. I preferred, however, to let matters take their course. Young Graham deserved all he got there, and I made sure of being the first to go through his papers. I’m afraid I must confess that I left a bogus formula for you.”

“I had begun to suspect this,” Pamela confessed. “You don’t mind being put into the witness box, do you?” she added, as she pushed aside the menu with a little sigh of satisfaction. “How wonderfully you order an American dinner!”

“I am so glad I have chosen what you like,” he said, “and as to being in the witness box–well, I am going to place myself in the confessional, and that is very much the same thing, isn’t it?”

“To begin at the beginning, then–about that destroyer?”

“My mission over here was really important,” he admitted. “I couldn’t catch the _Lapland_, so the Admiralty sent me over.”

“And your golf with Senator Hamblin? It wasn’t altogether by accident you met him down at Baltusrol, was it?”

“It was not,” he confessed, “I had reason to suspect that certain proposals from Berlin were to be put forward to the President either through his or Senator Hastings’ mediation. There were certain facts in connection with them, which I desired to be the first to lay before the authorities.”

She looked around the room and recognised some of her friends. For some reason or other she felt remarkably light-hearted.

“For a poor vanquished woman,” she observed, turning back to Lutchester, “I feel extraordinarily gay to-night. Tell me some more.”

He bowed.

“Mademoiselle Sonia,” he proceeded, “has been a friend of mine since she sang in the cafes of Buda Pesth. I dined with her, however, because it had come to my knowledge that she was behaving in a very foolish manner.”

Pamela nodded understandingly.

“She was the friend of Count Maurice Ziduski, wasn’t she?”

“She is no longer,” Lutchester replied. “She sailed for France this morning without seeing him. She has remembered that she is a Frenchwoman.”

“It was you who reminded her!”

“Love so easily makes people forgetful,” he said, “and I think that Sonia was very fond of Maurice Ziduski. She is a thoughtless, passionate woman, easily swayed through her affections, and she had no idea of the evil she was doing.”

“So that disposes of Sonia,” Pamela reflected.

“Sonia was only an interlude,” Lutchester declared. “She really doesn’t come into this affair at all. The one person who does come into it, whom you and I must speak of, is Fischer.”

“A most interesting man,” Pamela sighed. “I really think his wife would have a most exciting life.”

“She would!” Lutchester agreed. “She’d probably be allowed to visit him once every fourteen days in care of a warder.”

“Spite!” Pamela exclaimed, with a suspicious little quiver at the corner of her lips.

Lutchester shook his head.

“Fischer is too near the end of his rope for me to feel spiteful,” he said, “though I am quite prepared to grant that he may be capable of considerable mischief yet. A man who has the sublime effrontery to attempt to come to an agreement with two countries, each behind the other’s back, is a little more than Machiavellian, isn’t he?”

“Is that true of Mr. Fischer?”

“Absolutely,” Lutchester assured her. “He is over here for the purpose of somehow or other making it known informally in Washington that Germany would be willing to pledge herself to an alliance with America against Japan, after the war, if America will alter her views as to the export of munitions to the Allies.”

“Well, that’s a reasonable proposition, isn’t it, from his point of view?” Pamela remarked. “It may not be a very agreeable one from yours, but it is certainly one which he has a right to make.”

“Entirely,” Lutchester agreed, “but where he goes wrong is that his primary object in coming here was to meet Hie chief of the Japanese Secret Service, to whom he has made a proposition of precisely similar character.”

Pamela set down her glass.

“You are not in earnest!”

“Absolutely.”

“Nikasti?”

“Precisely! He came all the way from Japan to confer with Fischer. Probably, if we knew the whole truth, those rooms at the Plaza Hotel, and the social partnership of your brother and Fischer, were arranged for no other reason than to provide a safe personality for Nikasti in this country, and a safe place for him to talk things over with Fischer.”

“Mr. Fischer was paying nearly the whole of the expenses of the Plaza suite,” Pamela observed thoughtfully.

“Naturally,” Lutchester replied. “Your brother’s name was a good, safe name to get behind. But to conclude with our friend Nikasti. He is supposed to leave New York next Saturday, and to carry to the Emperor of Japan an autograph letter from a nameless person, promising him, if Japan will cease the export of munitions to Russia, the aid of Germany in her impending campaign against America.”

“An autograph letter, did you say?” Pamela almost gasped.

“An autograph letter,” Lutchester repeated firmly. “Now don’t you agree with me that Fischer’s game is just a little too daring?”

“It is preposterous!” she cried.

“I have a theory,” Lutchester continued, “that Fischer was never intended to use more than one of these letters. It was intended that he should study the situation here, approach one side, and, if unsuccessful, try the other. Fischer, however, conceived a more magnificent idea. He seems to be trying both at the same time. It is the sublime egotism of the Teutonic mind.”

“It is monstrous!” Pamela exclaimed indignantly.

“It is almost as monstrous,” Lutchester agreed, “as his daring to raise his eyes to you, although, so far as you are concerned, I believe that he is as honest as the man knows how to be.”

“And why,” she asked, “do you credit him with so much good faith?”

“Because,” Lutchester replied, “if he had not been actuated by personal motives, he would never have sought you out as an intermediary. There are other sources open to him, by means of which he could make equally sure of reaching the President’s ear. His idea was to impress you. It was foolish but natural.”

Pamela was deep in thought. There was an angry spot of colour burning in her cheek.

“Do you mean to tell me, Mr. Lutchester,” she persisted, “that this afternoon, say, when with every appearance of earnestness he was begging me to put these propositions before my uncle, he had really made precisely similar overtures to Japan?”

“I give you my word that this is the truth,” Lutchester assured her solemnly.

She looked at him with something almost like wonder in her eyes.

“But you?” she exclaimed. “How do you know this? How can you be sure of it?”

“I have seen the autograph letter which Nikasti has in his possession,” he announced.

“You mean that Mr. Fischer showed it to you?” she exclaimed incredulously.

Lutchester hesitated.

“There are methods,” he said, “which those who fight in the dark places for their country are forced sometimes to make use of. I have seen the letter. I have half convinced those who represent Japan in this matter of Fischer’s duplicity. With your help I am hoping wholly to do so.”

Pamela leaned for a moment back in her chair.

“Really,” she declared, “I am beginning to have the feeling that I am living almost too rapidly. Let us have a breathing spell. I wonder what all these other people are talking about.”

“Probably,” he suggested, with a little glance around, “about themselves. We will follow their example. Will you marry me, please, Miss Van Teyl?”

“We haven’t even come to the ice yet,” she sighed, “and you pass from high politics to flagrant personalities. Are you a sensationalist, Mr. Lutchester?”

“Not in the least,” he protested. “I simply asked you an extremely important question quite calmly.”

“It isn’t a question that should be asked calmly,” she objected.

“I have immense self-control,” he told her, “but if you’d like me to abandon it–“

“For heaven’s sake, no!” she interrupted. “Tell me more about Mr. Fischer.”

“You won’t forget to answer my little question later on, will you?” he begged. “To proceed, then. I spent some little time this afternoon with your chief of the police here, and I fancy that the person you speak of is becoming a little too blatant even for a broad-minded country like this. He belongs to an informal company of wealthy sympathisers with Germany, who propose to start a campaign of destruction at all the factories manufacturing munitions for the Allies. They have put aside–I believe it is several million dollars, for purposes of bribery. They don’t seem to realise, as my friend pointed out to me this afternoon, that the days for this sort of thing in New York have passed. Some of them will be in prison before they know where they are.”

“Exactly why did you come to America?” she asked, a little abruptly.

“To meet Nikasti and to look after Fischer.”

“Well, you seem to have done that pretty effectually!”

“Also,” he went on calmly, “to keep an eye upon you.”

“Professionally?”

“You ask me to give away too many secrets,” he whispered, leaning towards her.

She made a little grimace.

“Tell me some more about your little adventure in Fifth Avenue?” she begged.

He smiled grimly.

“You wouldn’t believe me,” he reminded her, “but it really was one of Fischer’s little jokes. It very nearly came off, too. As a matter of fact,” he went on, “Fischer isn’t really clever. He is too obstinate, too convinced in his own mind that things must go the way he wants them to, that Fate is the servant of his will. It’s a sort of national trait, you know, very much like the way we English bury our heads in the sand when we hear unpleasant truths. The last thing Fischer wants is advertisement, and yet he goes to some of his Fourteenth Street friends and unearths a popular desperado to get rid of me. The fellow happens most unexpectedly to fail, and now Fischer has to face a good many awkward questions and a good deal of notoriety. No, I don’t think Fischer is really clever.”

Pamela sighed.

“In that case, I suppose I shall have to say ‘No’ to him,” she decided. “After waiting all this time, I couldn’t bear to be married to a fool.”

“You won’t be,” he assured her cheerfully.

“More British arrogance,” she murmured. “Now see what’s going to happen to us!”

A tall, elderly man, with smooth white hair plastered over his forehead, very precisely dressed, and with a gait so careful as to be almost mincing, was approaching their table. Pamela held out her hands.

“My dear uncle!” she exclaimed. “And I thought that you and aunt never dined at restaurants!”

Mr. Hastings stood with his fingers resting lightly upon the table. He glanced at Lutchester without apparent recognition.

“You remember Mr. Lutchester?” Pamela murmured.

Mr. Hastings’ manner lacked the true American cordiality, but he hastened to extend his hand.

“Of course!” he declared. “I was not fortunate enough, however, to see much of you the other evening, Mr. Lutchester. We have several mutual friends whom I should be glad to hear about.”

“I shall pay my respects to Mrs. Hastings, if I may, very shortly,” Lutchester promised.

“Are you with friends here, uncle?” Pamela inquired.

“We are the guests of Mr. Oscar Fischer,” the Senator announced.

Pamela raised her eyebrows.

“So you know Mr. Fischer, uncle?”

“Naturally,” Mr. Hastings replied, with some dignity. “Oscar Fischer is one of the most important men in the State which I represent. He is a man of great wealth and industry and immense influence.”

Pamela made a little grimace. Her uncle noticed it and frowned.

“He has just been telling us of his voyage with you, Pamela. Perhaps, if Mr. Lutchester can spare you,” he went on, with a little bow across the table, “you will come and take your coffee with us. Your aunt is leaving for Washington, probably to-morrow, and wishes to arrange for you to travel with her. Mr. Lutchester may also, perhaps, give us the pleasure of his company for a few minutes,” he added, after a slight but obvious pause.

“Thank you,” Pamela answered quickly, “I am Mr. Lutchester’s guest this evening. If you are still here, I shall love to come and speak to aunt for a moment later on. If not, I will ring up to-morrow morning.”

The bland, almost episcopal serenity of Senator Hastings’ face was somewhat disturbed. It was obvious that the situation displeased him.

“I think, Pamela,” he said, “that you had better come and speak to your aunt before you leave.”

His bow to Lutchester was the bow of a politician to an adversary. He made his way back in leisurely fashion to the table from which he had come, exchanging a few words with many acquaintances. Pamela watched him with a twinkle in her eyes.

“I am becoming so unpopular,” she murmured. “I can read in my uncle’s tone that my aunt and he disapprove of our dining together here. And as for Mr. Fischer. I’m afraid he’ll break off our prospective alliance.”

Lutchester smiled.

“Prospective is the only word to use,” he observed. “By the bye, are you particularly fond of your uncle?”

“Not riotously,” she admitted. “He has been kind to me once or twice, but he’s rather a starchy old person.”

“In that case,” Lutchester decided, “we won’t interfere.”

CHAPTER XXX

Fischer had by no means the appearance of a discomfited man that evening, when some time later Pamela and Lutchester approached the little group of which he seemed, somehow, to have become the central figure. It was a small party, but, in its way, a distinguished one. Pamela’s aunt was a member of an historic American family, and a woman of great social position, not only in New York but in Washington itself. Of the remaining guests, one was a financial magnate of world-wide fame, and the other, Senator Joyce, a politician of such eminence that his name was freely mentioned as a possible future president. Mrs. Hastings greeted Pamela and her escort without enthusiasm.

“My dear child,” she exclaimed, “how extraordinary to find you here!”

“Is it?” Pamela observed indifferently. “You know Mr. Lutchester, don’t you, aunt?”

Mrs. Hastings remembered her late dinner guest, but her recognition was icy and barely polite. She turned away at once and resumed her conversation with Fischer. Lutchester was not introduced to either of the other members of the party. He laid his hand on the back of an empty chair and turned it round for Pamela, but she stopped him with a word of thanks. Something had gone from her own naturally pleasant tone. She held her hand higher, even, than her aunt’s, as she turned a little insistently towards her.

“So sorry, aunt,” she announced, “but we are going now. Good night!”

Mrs. Hastings disapproved.

“We have seen nothing of you yet, Pamela,” she said stiffly. “You had better stay with us and we will drop you on our way home.”

Pamela shook her head.

“I am coming with you to-morrow, you know,” she reminded her aunt. “To-night I am Mr. Lutchester’s guest and he will see me home.”

Mrs. Hastings drew her niece a little closer to her.

“Is this part of your European manners, Pamela?” she whispered, “that you dine alone in a restaurant with an acquaintance? Let me tell you frankly that I dislike the idea most heartily. My chaperonage is always at your service, and any girl of your age in America would be delighted to avail herself of it.”

“It is very kind of you, aunt,” Pamela replied, “but in a general way I finished with chaperons long ago.”

“Where is Jimmy?” Mrs. Hastings inquired.

“He was coming with us to-night,” Pamela explained, “but I asked him particularly to stay away. I have seen so little of Mr. Lutchester since he arrived, and I want to talk to him.”

The financial magnate awoke from a comatose inertia and suddenly gripped Lutchester by the hand.

“Lutchester,” he repeated to himself. “I thought I knew your face. Stayed with your uncle down at Monte Carlo once. You came there for a week.”

Lutchester acknowledged his recollection of the fact and the two men exchanged a few commonplace remarks. Mrs. Hastings took the opportunity to try and induce Pamela to converse with Fischer.

“We have all been so interested to-night,” she said, “in hearing what Mr. Fischer has to say about the situation on the other side.”

Pamela was primed for combat.

“Has Mr. Fischer been telling you fairy tales?” she laughed.

“Fairy tales?” her aunt repeated severely. “I don’t understand.”

Fischer’s steel grey eyes flashed behind his spectacles.

“I’m afraid that Miss Van Teyl’s prejudices,” he observed bitterly, “are very firmly fixed.”

“Then she is no true American,” Mrs. Hastings pronounced didactically.

“Oh, I can assure you that I am not prejudiced,” Pamela declared, “only, you see, I, too, have just arrived from the other side, and I have been able to use my own eyes and judgment. If there is any prejudice in the matter, why should it not come from Mr. Fischer? He has the very good excuse of his German birth.”

“Mr. Fischer is an American citizen,” Mrs. Hastings reminded her niece, “and personally, I think that the American of German birth is one of the most loyal and long-suffering persons I know. I cannot say as much for the English people who are living over here. And as to fairy stories–“

Pamela intervened, turning towards Fischer with a little laugh.

“Oh, he can’t even deny those! What about the great German victory in the North Sea, Mr. Fischer? Do you happen to have seen the latest telegrams?”

“Our first reports were perhaps a little too glowing,” Mr. Fischer acknowledged. “That, under the circumstances, is, I think, only natural. But the facts remain that the invincible English and the untried German fleets have met, to the advantage of the German.”

Pamela shook her head.

“I cannot even allow that,” she objected. “The advantage, if there was any, rested on the other side. But I just want you to remember what we were told in that first wonderful outpouring of fabricated news–that the naval supremacy of England was gone for ever, that the freedom of the seas was assured, that German merchant vessels were steaming home from all directions! No, Mr. Fischer! Between ourselves, I think that your cause needs a few fairy stories, and I look upon you as one of the greatest experts in the world when it comes to concocting them.”

Fischer, who had risen to his feet half way through Pamela’s speech, was obviously a little taken aback by her direct attack. Mrs. Hastings took no pains to conceal her annoyance.

“For a young girl of your age, Pamela,” she said sternly, “I consider that you express your opinions far too freely. Your attitude, too, is unjustifiable.”

“Ah, well, you see, I am a little prejudiced against Mr. Fischer,” Pamela laughed, turning towards him. “He happened to defeat one of my pet schemes.”

“But I am ready to further your dearest one,” he reminded her, dropping his voice, and leading her a little on one side. “What about our alliance?”

“You scarcely need my aid,” she observed, with a shrug of the shoulders.

He remonstrated vigorously. There was a revived hopefulness in his tone. Perhaps, after all, here was the secret of her displeasure with him.

“You wonder, perhaps, to see me with your uncle. I give you my word that it is a dinner of courtesy only. I give you my word that I have not opened my lips on political matters. I have been waiting for your answer.”

“I have lost faith in you,” she told him calmly. “I am not even certain that you possess the authority you spoke of.”

“If that is all,” he replied eagerly, “you shall see it with your own eyes. You are staying with your uncle and aunt in Washington, are you not? I shall call upon you immediately I arrive, and bring it with me.”

She nodded.

“Well, that remains a challenge, then, Mr. Fischer. And now, if you are quite ready,” she added, turning to Lutchester…. “Good-by, everybody!”

“Aren’t your ears burning?” Pamela asked, after Lutchester had handed her into a taxicab and taken his place by her side. “I can absolutely feel them talking about us.”

“I seem to be most regrettably unpopular,” Lutchester remarked.

“Even now I am puzzled about that,” Pamela confessed, “but you see my aunt considers herself the arbitress of what is right or wrong in social matters, and she is exceedingly narrow-minded. In her eyes it is no doubt a greater misdemeanour for me to have dined at the Ritz-Carlton alone with you, than if I had conspired against the Government.”

“And this, I thought, was the land of freedom for your sex!”

“Ah, but my aunt is rather an exception,” Pamela reminded him. “The one thing I cannot understand, however, is that she should have allowed herself to be seen dining with Mr. Oscar Fischer at the Ritz-Carlton. I should have thought that would have been almost as heinous to her as my own little slip from grace.”

“Is your aunt by way of being interested in politics?” Lutchester inquired.

“Not in a general way,” Pamela replied, “but she is intensely ambitious, and she’d give her soul if Uncle Theodore could get a nomination for the Presidency.”

“Perhaps she is taking up the German-American cause, then,” Lutchester suggested. “It is a possible platform, at any rate.”

“I foresee a new party,” Pamela murmured thoughtfully. “Now I come to think of it, Mr. Elsworthy, the fat old gentleman who knew your uncle, is very pro-German.”

He leaned towards her.

“We have had enough politics,” he insisted. “There is the other thing. Couldn’t I have my answer?”

She let him take her fingers. In the cool darkness through which they were rushing her face seemed white, her head was a little averted. He tried to draw her to him, but she was unyielding.

“Please not,” she begged. “I like you–and I’m glad I like you,” she added, “but I don’t feel certain about anything. Couldn’t we be just friends a little longer?”

“It must be as you say, but I am horribly in love with you,” he confessed. “That may sound rather a bald way of saying so, but it’s the truth, Pamela, dear.”

His clasp upon her fingers was tightened. She turned towards him. Her expression was serious but delightful.

“Well, let me tell you this much, at least,” she confided. “I have never before in my life been so glad to hear any one say so…. And here we are at home, and there’s Jimmy on the doorstep. What is it, Jimmy,” she asked, waving her hand.