the rest will be easy. Furneaux's prisoner, Len Shi, may be got to talk when a Chinese interpreter tackles him. Again, there is every prospect of an important capture being made in the Croydon house. Most important of all is the prolonged absence from the yard of Furneaux. He is busy, or he would have put in an appearance there hours ago, if only to get to know my whereabouts. That means something. Furneaux never wastes time. Usually we hunt in couples. Today, by the fortune of war, we are separated, and perhaps fortunately so. It is all your fault, Mr. Theydon."
"Mine?" was the astonished cry.
"Yes. We had to try all sorts of tricks on you before you would speak. Just imagine Scotland Yard being compelled to tap the telephone of a respectable and well-known author before he would own up to such knowledge as he possessed of the murder in No. 17!"
So that was how Furneaux had played the necromancer, and was able to mystify Theydon that morning.
The chief inspector, by raising the question, was touching on dangerous ground, as he was well aware, but he was determined now that all barriers should be thrown down. Evelyn Forbes was no bread-and-butter miss from whose cognizance the evil things of life must be sedulously averted. A, woman of spirit and intelligence, who had already run the dreadful risk of sharing Mrs. Lester's fate, should be made to understand every phase of the difficulty with which the Criminal Investigation Department had yet to deal.
British law and Chinese anarchy would soon grapple in a life and death conflict, and it was idle folly to suppose that, no matter how reticent her friends might be, this sharp-witted girl would not find out for herself the exact nature of the link which bound the fortunes of her own family with those of the dead woman.
Theydon tried to pass off the detective's retort with a careless laugh, but Evelyn reverted to the topic when they were seated in the London-bound train after Winter had dropped them at Tunbridge Wells Station.
"What did the chief inspector mean when he said you refused to help him at first?" she inquired. "There are gaps in my history of this affair. How did you come to know that my father was acquainted with Mrs. Lester? Why did you seem, at one time, to be taking sides with my father against a public inquiry by the police?"
Then, seeing there was no help for it, Theydon began at the beginning and told the girl the full, true and unexpurgated story of events on the Monday night. Once or twice, when he hinted at the cause of his otherwise inexplicable actions—which, quite obviously, lay in his interest in the girl herself, she blushed a little and averted her eyes. But she listened in silence, and did not speak during many seconds after he had ceased.
Then she simply murmured:
"Poor, dear Dad! How worried he must have been! And how well he concealed it from me!"
After another pause, she added:
"We are deeply in your debt, Mr. Theydon. When this ordeal is ended, and those horrid men have been put in prison or driven out of the country, our next difficulty will be to—to thank you adequately for what you have done."
Surgit amari aliquid! Even in life's pleasantest hours something bitter arises. Theydon was in the company of the woman he loved, yet no word of love could rise to his lips. In the first place he dared not woo the daughter of a millionaire; in the second were his suit even possible, he was far too honorable minded to take immediate advantage of her disturbed state and the services he had undoubtedly rendered, and give the slightest hint of his passion.
So he sighed and looked out of the window at a fast-flying vista of a Kentish hillside, and contented himself by saying:
"For what little I have done, or attempted to do, I am already rewarded far beyond my wildest dreams."
Even that was more than he meant to say. Glancing timidly at Evelyn to see whether or not she resented his words, he was astounded to find that she had blushed scarlet, and, in her turn, was absorbed in the landscape.
Then he remembered that in the frenzy of the moment following the report of her mother's capture by Wong Li Fu, he had kissed her. Had he, or had he not? If not, why not now? But that way lay madness. And, wretched doubt, was she already the promised bride of another man? It was a relief when the train stopped at Sevenoaks.
When it moved on again, they were normal young people once more, and discussed various features of the Young Manchus' raid on society as though the extermination of political adversaries were a commonplace occurrence in modern England.
At last, after a journey which lived long in their minds, since even a prosaic train may follow the path to Wonderland, they arrived at London Bridge, and hummed in a taxi through streets of gaunt warehouses until the light of Westminster flashed on a Thames veiled in the blue mystery of a Summer gloaming.
The cab had hardly halted outside the Fortescue Square mansion when the door was thrown wide, and Tomlinson appeared, flanked by two stalwart footmen. The butler's face was aglow with pleasure.
"It's all right now you've come, Miss Evelyn," he said joyfully. "Mrs. Forbes arrived more than an hour ago."
But Tomlinson was in error. He did not know what tribulations loomed already through the haze of the future, or he would have laid to heart the time-honored advice to venturesome travelers:
"Never hallo till you're out of the wood!"
CHAPTER XII
NO SURRENDER
Mrs. Forbes, a slim, elegant woman, looked as if she were her daughter's elder sister. Although driven by hay fever to the seaside regularly at the beginning of the London season, she was far from being a malade imaginaire. She did not go willingly. Each year she hoped against hope that the annoying ailment would not make itself felt, yet no sooner was the month of May well established than for six or seven weeks she had either to drag her husband and daughter away from the metropolis or live by herself in some South Coast hotel.
She had tried Brighton, whence Mr. Forbes could travel to the city, but soon discovered that the daily train journey was not good for his health. After that, she insisted on adopting the self-denying ordinance of leaving Evelyn with her father in the town house from the middle of May till the end of June, when all three went to the Highlands.
She, of course, had not the remotest knowledge of the terrors threatening her household; a thunderbolt out of a Summer sky would have astonished her less than the indignities she endured when haled away from Eastbourne in the luxurious car which Wong Li Fu had at his command.
Theydon had been in the house nearly half an hour and was exchanging experiences with Forbes and Handyside—the latter, by virtue of his extraordinary share in the day's adventures, being admitted to the full confidence of the others—when Evelyn brought her mother into the library.
"Here is some one who positively refuses to retire for the night until she has met you, Mr. Theydon," said the girl, radiant with joy and relief, now that the shadow of death had passed, apparently forever, leaving her dear ones unscathed.
Mrs. Forbes, an aristocrat to the finger tips, greeted her guest with marked cordiality.
"I have been living during the past few hours like one of the characters one sees in the fearsome little plays produced on the stage of the Grand Guignol in Paris," she said, gazing at him with frank brown eyes singularly like her daughter's, "but I have contrived to gather one definite impression among the whirl of things, and that is that were it not for Mr. Frank Theydon, my daughter and I would now be in as bad a predicament as two women could possibly face anywhere."
"I was lucky enough to be of some little use, but Mr. Handyside is the lion of today's contest," said Theydon.
"I am grateful to both of you, how grateful I can never find words to tell, but Mr. Handyside rivals you in modesty, Mr. Theydon. He assured me that you were the deus ex machina, though he obtained the machine itself, and rode sixty miles to rescue me from my dragon. By the way, where