behind the grey stone wall was doomed to no long period of waiting. Within five minutes the door of the bar was suddenly opened. The two men lingered there and for a space of five seconds or so they stood full in the blaze from the lamps over the bar counter. Every nerve of Roger’s body was tense and throbbing from the strain of keeping that cry from his lips. He was stupefied with the amazement of the moment. It was the incredible which confronted him! Even the long elegant fingers which held the briquet to the cigarette were visible. It was Prince Antonio Marcus Constantine Savonarilda, Seigneur of Savonarilda and Count of the Holy Roman Empire, who stepped into the car, and Sam the barman who in muttered words was wishing him Godspeed!
The Trente-et-Quarante and Roulette salons were closed when Roger, after a brief visit to the dressing room, entered the Sporting Club bar. To his surprise, it was still comparatively full. With a start he recognised Savonarilda sitting at a table alone with Terence Brown. Dalmorres, Thornton and Maggie Saunders were seated at the counter. Pierre Viotti had apparently taken his leave. There were a dozen other of his intimates scattered about the place, but no Jeannine. He made his way at once to Dalmorres.
“My little commission?” he asked.
“Faithfully and honourably executed,” Dalmorres assured him.
Roger drew a sigh of relief. He turned to his favourite barman.
“A double whisky and soda, Henry,” he ordered.
“Why this burst of anxiety concerning Mademoiselle Jeannine?” Dalmorres asked curiously.
“I don’t know,” Roger replied. “Such queer things are happening in this place all the time.”
“Well, there’s one thing very certain,” his friend said, with a regretful sigh. “Concerning Mademoiselle Jeannine, you need have no anxiety. From what particular planet of heaven she fell I do not know, but the Lord has greatly blessed you. She has the deafest of ears to all love-making, forensic or sentimental. I, who have brought tears in my younger days to the eyes of stolid British juries, succeed in evoking nothing but ribald mirth from the lips of that young woman. What are you going to do with that enormous drink, Roger?”
“Drink it,” Roger assured him and kept his word.
“You were thirsty?” Dalmorres enquired politely.
“I was thirsty,” Roger confessed. “I have also been nearly wet through and I have had pretty well the shock of my life.”
“Perhaps another might go to the spot,” his companion suggested. “I’m taking the smaller edition myself.”
“Try me,” Roger begged.
The order was given. Roger leaned sideways confidentially towards him.
“You took Jeannine absolutely to her home?” he asked.
“My dear fellow, I did more than that,” Dalmorres assured him. “I waited on the pavement until Madame opened the door, I introduced myself, and I saw the door closed before I took my sorrowing departure. Mademoiselle Jeannine is safe, at any rate.”
“Any more news about our American friend?”
“He’s gone back on the ship,” Thornton announced. “It seems it doesn’t sail until the day after to-morrow. The people are making excursions all over the place, so he’ll be able to make up his mind for himself whether he stays and tries to get back his eighty thousand dollars or leaves it to the police. From the last I heard of him, he was going to cable the President of the United States, and several Senators, the American Ambassador in Paris and a few other notabilities.”
Dalmorres looked up and down the bar.
“Our little friend who was so expansive last night has left us,” he observed.
Savonarilda lounged across to them.
“So for once,” he remarked, “the fair ladies have not dragged you all away to dancing parties.”
“There was to have been a dance at the Palace,” Terence Brown, who had just joined the little group, reminded them. “The invitations were only countermanded at the last moment. Very wisely too, I think. No one wants to dance around the rooms where those two poor fellows were killed.”
“Hello, Thornton! What about your early night?” Roger asked.
“I’m off directly,” Thornton confided. “I should have gone hours ago, but Lord Dalmorres has been telling me stories about the law courts of his younger days, and I fell from grace.”
“And Major Thornton,” Dalmorres remarked, “has been telling me very interesting things too about the liaison work between the police and the foreign service. Some day you will have to write your reminiscences, Major Thornton.”
The latter shrugged his angular shoulders.
“There has been too much of that sort of thing,” he pronounced, with some severity. “Many things have been discussed which never should have been spoken of or written about. I have never talked of my work and I shall certainly never write about it.”
“A very excellent attitude,” Dalmorres approved. “I have known the sensation of sentencing criminals to the death which they richly deserved, but I should not wish to write about it. I have also known,” he went on, a rare seriousness in his tone, “the experience of sentencing men to death, according to the law, but whom I did not consider morally criminals at all. Some of those cases I do not even care to think about.”
“Seems to me,” Terence Brown observed, lighting one of his favourite long cigars, “that crime was pretty well dying out in the world until this liquor business came along over in my country. Young fellows went into bootlegging just as their great-grandfathers went into buccaneering—for the sport of the thing—just as in England years ago all the gentry in the southwest corner of the country, when they got tired of fox-hunting and cock-fighting, used to take to smuggling.”
“What’s ugly to-day is this,” Savonarilda suddenly affirmed, without a trace of his usual flippancy: “people are committing crimes to-day in cold deliberation where, in my country, at any rate, it was always in hot blood. They kill a man—first to get what he’s got and secondly to make themselves perfectly safe. That is the ugly side of it. They do not dare to take a risk. They kill out of policy.”
Thornton drew Roger a little on one side.
“I don’t feel up to these abstruse discussions to-night,” he admitted. “I wondered if you wanted to talk to me?”
Roger that night was a man unlike himself. Any one who was not a close observer would have thought that he was on the road to becoming drunk. His eyes were unnaturally bright, his manner detached, he was holding a half-filled tumbler in his hand, the contents of which he drained at one gulp. He passed the glass to a valet.
“Thornton,” he confided, “I don’t want to talk to any one to-night. I’m going to have one more drink and then I’m going home to bed.”
“Did you follow out your crazy fancy?” Thornton asked him, with a shadow of that faintly disagreeable smile at the corner of his lips.
Roger also smiled, but it was a gesture of a different order. It was the smile of a man who, after stumbling about in a morass, has found solid ground beneath his feet.
“Don’t think I’m bad-tempered or obstinate, Thornton, or crazy,” he begged. “I’m not one of the three, I can assure you, but to-night I have nothing to say. To-morrow my head will be clear. I will meet you, and there will be things to be said and a plan to work out. I’m just going to let things lie to-night.”
“Just as you please,” the other replied. “I simply thought if you had discovered anything, you’d like to get it off your chest.”
“What I have discovered I have not yet digested. To-night I am going to have another drink and go to bed. Savonarilda,” he invited, turning back to the group at the bar, “you have many virtues but one fault—you never drink. Have a last