Title: The Forger (1927)
Author: Edgar Wallace
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Language:  English
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The Forger

by

Edgar Wallace

TO DENNIS NEILSON TERRY

CHAPTER I

THE BIG consulting-room at 903, Harley Street differed as much from its kind as Mr Cheyne Wells differed from the average consultant.

It was something between a drawing-room and the kind of a library which a lover of good books gathers together piecemeal as opportunity presents. There was comfort in the worn, but not too-worn, furniture, in the deep, leather-covered settee drawn up before the red fire. Two walls were filled with shelves wedged with oddly bound, oddly sized volumes; there were books on the table, a newspaper dropped by a careless hand on the floor, but nothing of the apparatus of medicine--not so much as a microscope or test tube.

In one corner of the room, near the window where yellow sunlight was pouring in, was a polished door; beyond that a white-tiled bathroom without a bath but with many glass shelves and glass-topped table. You could have your fill of queer mechanisms there, and your nostrils offended by pungent antiseptics. There were cupboards, carefully locked, with rows and rows of bottles, and steel and glass cabinets full of little culture dishes. But though Peter Clifton had been a constant visitor for years, he had never seen that door opened.

He was sitting now on an arm of one of the big chairs, his fine head screwed round so that he could see the street, though he had no interest in the big car which stood at the kerb, or the upper floors of the houses on the opposite side of the road which filled his vision. But he was a sensitive man, with a horror of emotional display, and just then he did not wish any man--even Cheyne Wells--to see his face.

Presently he jerked back his head and met the dark eyes of the man who straddled before the fireplace, a cigarette drooping from his lips.

Mr Wells was rather thin, and this gave the illusion of height which his inches did not justify. The dark, saturnine face with its neat black moustache was almost sinister in repose: when he smiled, the whole character of his face changed, and he was smiling now.

Peter heaved a deep sigh and stretched his six feet of bone and muscle.

"It was a good day for me when I mistook you for a dentist!" he said.

There was a nervous tension in his laugh which Mr Donald Cheyne Wells did not fail to note.

"My good chap"--he shook his head--"it was a double-sided benefit, for you have been the most foolishly generous patient I have ever had. And I bless the telephone authorities that they made 903, Harley Street the habitation of a gentleman who left the week before I moved in."

Again the other laughed.

"You even cured the old molar!" he said.

The smile left the surgeon's face.

"I have cured nothing else--except your misgivings. The real assurance on which your faith must rest is Sir William Clewers's. I would not have dared to be so definite as he; even now I tell you that although the big danger is wiped out you are liable to the attacks I spoke about. I did not think it was worth while discussing that possibility with Sir William, but you may have another consultation if you wish?"

Peter shook his head emphatically.

"In future I am making long detours to avoid Harley Street," he said, and added hastily: "That's pretty ungracious-"

But the surgeon waved his agreement.

"You'd be a fool if you didn't," he said, and then, turning the subject abruptly: "What time is this interesting ceremony?"

He saw a frown gather for an instant on the broad forehead of his patient. It was a surprising expression to observe on the face of a very rich and a very good-looking young man who was to marry the most beautiful girl Cheyne Wells had seen in his life, yet the consultant was not wholly surprised.

"Er--twelve-thirty. You'll be there, of course? The reception is at the Ritz and we go on to Longford Manor. I thought Jane would have preferred the Continent--but she seems rather keen on Longford."

There was no sound for a little while except the soft tick of the Swiss clock on the mantelpiece. Then: "Why the frown?" asked Wells, watching his patient's face intently.

Peter threw out his arms in a gesture of uncertainty. "The Lord knows--really. Only...it has been such a queer courtship...with this thing hanging over my head. And sometimes Jane is rather--how shall I put it?--'cold' isn't exactly the word--neither is 'indifferent'. Impregnable--that's the word. One can't get into her mind. She becomes a stranger, and that terrifies me. The whole thing started on the wrong note--we haven't kept step. I'll go on mixing my metaphors till I can get a little lucid." The smile was twitching the corner of Cheyne Wells's lips.

"I introduced you--here beginneth the first wrong note!" he said. "And--"

"Don't be a silly ass--that was the rightest thing you ever did. Donald, I adore Jane! There is nothing in the world I wouldn't do for her. She terrifies me because I feel that way and because I know she doesn't. And there is no reason why she should--that's my bit of comfort. I sort of burst into that quiet home and made myself an infernal nuisance--I almost bullied her into an engagement that wasn't an engagement--"

His teeth came together, and again that strained, worried look.

"Donald, I bought her," he said quietly, and this time the consultant laughed aloud.

"You're too imaginative, my friend--how could you buy her? Stuff!"

But Peter shook his head.

"Of course, I didn't say, 'I want your daughter--I'll give a hundred thousand pounds for her'; I'd have been chucked out if I had. But when, like a blundering left-handed oaf, I cornered Leith in his study and blurted out that I would settle that sum if I married...and I'd only seen Jane twice! I have an idea that broke down opposition...I'm not sure...I feel rather rotten about it. Do you know that I've never kissed Jane?"

"I should start today," said the other dryly. "A girl who is going to be married the day after tomorrow expects some sort of demonstration."

Peter ran his fingers through his untidy brown hair.

"It's wrong, isn't it?" he asked. "It is my fault, of course...once I got panic-stricken--I wondered if she had heard something about me. You know what I mean. Or whether there was some arrangement which I upset--Hale, for example."

"Why should she--"

There was a soft tap on the door of the consulting-room.

"That is my wife," said Wells. "Do you mind her coming in, or do you want to talk?"

"I've talked enough," said Peter ruefully.

He went towards the slim, youthful woman who came in. Marjorie Wells was thirty-five and looked ten years younger, though darker than her husband.

"They told me you were here," she said with a quick flash of teeth. "Hail to the bridegroom! And, by the way, I saw the bride this morning, looking conventionally radiant--with the wrong man!"

If she saw the quick sidelong glance her husband shot in her direction, she gave no evidence. There was a thread of malice--in the most innocent of Marjorie's comments; this was a veritable rope.

He it was who took up the challenge.

"The wrong man--not Basil Hale by any chance?"

He saw Peter's grey, questioning eyes turned in Marjorie's direction. He winced rather easily, did this young man who had once been deputy sheriff of Gwelo and had hanged L'chwe, the rebel chief, out of hand.

"It was Basil, of course--poor old Basil! I'm sure he feels rotten--"

"Why should he?"

When Cheyne Wells used a voice that had the hard tinkle of metal in it, his wife became meek and penitent.

"I am a mischievous gossip, aren't I? I'm so sorry, Peter."

He was taking up his hat and was smiling as at some secret joke.

"Yes--you are," he said grimly. "You give me more heart jumps than any woman I know. Come and dine tomorrow night, Wells."

The surgeon nodded. "It will have to be a bachelor dinner," he said significantly. "I can't have you made miserable the night before your wedding."

He walked with Peter to the door and stood on the top step until the Rolls had disappeared into Wigmore Street. Then he came back to the consulting-room.

"What's the matter with Peter really?--he looks healthy enough."

She asked the question off-handedly, as though the repetition of Peter's visits had only just dawned on her.

"I have told you half a dozen times, Marjorie, that I do not discuss my patients--even in my sleep. And, Marjorie," as, with a petulant twist of one shoulder, she turned towards the door, "don't be--er--difficult about Peter--do you understand...Well, what is it?"

A maid was at the open door. A small sealed envelope lay on the silver plate she carried. It was unaddressed, but he broke the flap and took out a card. This he studied.

"All right, show Mr Rouper in, please. You can clear." This to his wife. "I'll talk to you later about Peter--and other things."

She was out of the room before he had finished.

The man who was ushered in was tall and broad-shouldered; what hair he had was grey, but he carried himself like a soldier. Cheyne Wells shut the door and pointed the visitor to a chair.

"Sit down, Inspector."

Chief Inspector Moses Rouper put his Derby hat carefully on the table, peeled his brown leather gloves and felt anxiously in the inside pocket of his greatcoat. When he had brought to light a fat leather wallet he seated himself.

"Sorry to bother you. Doctor," he began. "I know that you're a busy man, but I had to see you."

Mr Wells waited, expectant but wondering.

"Here we are." The inspector fished out a folded white paper and spread it on the table. "A fifty-pound note. We shouldn't have been able to trace it only your name is stamped on the back." He fixed pince-nez and read: "'D. Cheyne Wells, MRCS, 903, Harley Street'."

He passed the note to the consultant, who turned it over and saw the faded purple stamp mark.

"Yes," he said, "that is my stamp--I use it for a variety of purposes, though I can't remember stamping this note."

"Do you remember passing the note--or where it came from?"

Cheyne Wells was thinking.

"Yes--fifties are an unusual denomination--I had that from a patient, Mr Peter Clifton. I passed it at Kempton Park races--I like to bet occasionally, and I hate bookmakers' accounts,"

The detective smiled genially. "And you lost it?"

Mr Wells shook his head with a laugh. "As a matter of fact, I won--a couple of hundred." Rouper was writing rapidly on the back of an envelope. "Mr Peter Clifton. I think I know the gentleman," he said. "He's got a flat in Carlton House Terrace."

"But what is the mystery?" asked Wells, and added good humouredly: "You're not suggesting that he stole it?"

The inspector finished his writing before he spoke. "No, sir. But that note is a forgery. It's the Clever One's worst job! The paper gave him away."

There was no need to seek information about the Clever One. For five years his unauthorized intrusions into the currency field had agitated a world of bankers. So long had he been active that nobody quite remembered who had named him so. (In point of fact it had been a police constable in the course of his evidence against one of the Clever One's agents.)

"He's never tackled English notes before," said Rouper. "He started on the Bank of Africa, then he switched off to the Swiss Federal, then he had a cut at the US hundred-dollar bills, then he came back to the Bank of France. We thought he was taking up the United States again--we traced one bill in Paris, and it was a bit of a startler to find he'd gone all unpatriotic!" He laughed wheezily and coughed.

"You haven't lost your money," he assured the worried surgeon. "The Bank has met the note, and now I want to meet the man who forged it!"

Wells opened a small wall safe and took out a book. "I'll make absolutely sure," he said, and turned the leaves quickly. After a while he stopped. "Here it is--Mr Peter Clifton, £52 10s.--cash. He never paid me by cheque."

"Number?"

Mr Wells shook his head. "No, I didn't take the number. I never do. It would be rather like hard work. Most of the people who consult me pay in cash."

The detective ran his eye down the page. "That would be about the date," he nodded, and, drawing a small brown book from his pocket, thumbed the leaves. "Yes, Kempton was the same day. Thank you. Doctor." Him also Cheyne Wells saw to the door. When he came back there was a thoughtful frown on his face--and it was not the forgery which concerned him. If there was one thing more certain than another, it was that he had not stamped his name on the back of that note. Who had? And what was the object?

CHAPTER 2

"HAVE YOU seen Peter today?"

John Leith looked up from his evening newspaper as the question followed on chance thought.

"No, Daddy."

Mr Leith resumed his study of the day's news. He was a hearty man, with a long beard that had once been golden and now was completely grey.

The walls of the lofty room in which they sat would have proclaimed his calling even had not the long windows said 'studio'. Every inch of wall space was covered with his landscapes, his studies, his copies of the great masters. It was his wont to confess plaintively that comfortable circumstances had ruined him as an artist. After a while he put down his paper and came to this favourite topic of his.

"Without the spur of poverty a man is just a loafer after his fancies. It is when a man has to paint what the public wants that he growls himself to greatness. All the masters did their best work to order--Murillo, Leonardo, Bellini, Michaelangelo--chapel-hacks every one of 'em! Greuze painting like the devil to keep his extravagant virago of a wife supplied with money; Morland and his public-house signs; Gainsborough with his duchesses--when an artist can afford to choose his own subjects he's finished!"

But she was not interested in artists. Her legs doubled under her, she reclined over the bulbous end of a settee, her face in her hands, her grave eyes fixed on the one being in the world she loved without reservations.

"We are awfully well off, aren't we, Daddy?"

He pursed his bearded lips.

"Tolerably, my dear--"

"Then, why must I marry Peter? I know that he is hideously rich--and I really think I am fond of him, though there is a look on his face sometimes that scares me...and I do think I could be much fonder of him, if--well, if there wasn't such a violent hurry."

He reached over lazily and caught her hand. "My dear--I wish it. I want to see you settled."

She looked at him, startled. "You're not ill. Daddy--?"

His loud laugh was a reassuring answer. "No, I'm not ill," he said good naturedly. "I'm keeping nothing from you. Only I want to see you married. He's a good fellow, and, as you say, enormously rich."

"Where did he make his money?" She had asked this question before. "He never speaks about his relations--he couldn't inherit an enormous fortune unless everybody knew about it. Basil says--"

"Basil says a lot that Basil shouldn't say." Mr Leith's voice was quiet, but she gathered that at the moment Basil was unpopular. "You haven't heard from Peter, eh?"

"Yes--I've heard from him. He telephoned. Some police officer has been to his house about a fifty-pound note that was forged, and it had Donald Wells's name stamped on it, and Peter was quite agitated--you know how his voice goes, all funny and high?"

"A forged fifty-pound note--there's some reference here to the fellow they call the Clever One." Mr Leith had returned to his journal. He both read aloud and pursued his private thoughts. "Rascal! They'll catch him...um, about Peter. Clever chap, Peter. He's cursed with money, too--he might be as great as Zohn. Really, Peter's etchings are marvellous. Do you remember those beauties he did for you--"

"And which you lost," she accused, and he grumbled, in his middle-aged way, about his failing memory..

"Where the deuce I left them I can't think--I was going somewhere and I put them in my pocket--left them in the train, I'll swear."

She let him go on, her interest being completely self-centred.

"And, talking of things one loses," she nodded, "Daddy, don't you realize that I shall be married in forty-eight hours! And I don't want to be a bit--isn't it awful?"

The bearded man put down his newspaper and, leaning over, nicked open a cigar box and took the first cigar that came. He bit off the end and lit it almost simultaneously. "There are nine and seventy cardinal illusions of youth." He pulled strongly at the cigar. "Maybe there are two or three more. But an important one is that all brides-to-be are deliriously happy and impatient for the last forty-eight hours to pass. That all brides are confident of the future, that no brides, or only a miserable few, have any serious misgivings about the future."

He was looking at her over his glasses.

"They do, my dear--the nice ones. The young people who love each other with equal desperation are the exceptions."

"In fact the position is horribly normal?" She nodded agreement to this possibility. "Well, it--it isn't pleasant. I have a feeling that I ought to say something--tabulate my emotions and inhibitions and have them witnessed before a commissioner of oaths. In other words, I want to be fair to Peter, and I'm not being."

She looked round as the door handle turned, and slid down to a more graceful pose. Mr Leith raised his head to stare at the visitor.

"I want to see you, Basil," he said.

"Sounds like a row--what have I done?"

There were times when Jane decided that she loathed Basil: usually, such is the contrariness of women, these were the occasions when Basil Hale made a very special effort to please her. He had a round, fresh face; his hair was reddish and he smiled all the time. There was a period in their acquaintance when his assurance was a source of irritation to Jane Leith, an irritation in which was a spice of uneasiness. Instinctively she knew that there were no boundaries to his audacity, that he was cast in the mould of the brigand who takes what he wants, asks no man's permission and fears no man's resentment. He was as unlike her mental picture of a Lothario as any man could be. Handsome he was not; he was inclined to chubbiness; but his vitality was immeasurable. He drew something from every man and woman who fell under its spell, and left them at the end inert and exhausted.

He stood now by the door, a delighted grin on his glowing face, in no wise abashed by the ominous note in her father's voice or the disapproval in her eye. From his burnished head to the tip of his shiny shoes he was resplendent. There was a glittering diamond point in the onyx buttons of his white waistcoat, two larger scintillations from his shirt; even the gardenia in the buttonhole of his dress coat had an ultra-exotic quality.

"What's the trouble and why the chilliness? I'm going to the Arts' Dance. What about it, Jane?"

"Jane is not going to any dance, artistic or otherwise. I want a few words with you, Basil."

Leith got up from his chair and nodded to his study, which opened from the studio.

"O Lord! You're not going to rag me, are you?" Basil had a gurgling little giggle of a laugh. "Stop him, Jane! I'll stand anything if you'll come and dance. Dash up and climb into something simple an' expensive. Jane, you look divine tonight--you do, by Heaven! It's a desecration marrying that dull monument of virtue--"

"Hale!"

When Mr Leith called him by his surname, Basil seldom argued. As the study door closed on them, Jane heard the purr of the front door bell and crossed quickly to the large window. A big Rolls stood in Avenue Road before the door. Was it dismay she felt, apprehension? For some reason which was not to be analysed she was irritated. She could not allow herself to believe this--nor could she wholly hide from realization the devastating discovery. The man to whom she would be married in forty-eight hours bored her already!

She tried hard to simulate pleasure at seeing him, gave a warmth to her greeting that surprised and pleased him. She hated herself for the deception. He wore his shabbiest suit and was unusually nervous and tongue-tied. She had not sufficient self-conceit to realize that he had a palpable excuse.

When Cheyne Wells had said that she was the most beautiful woman in London, he had been daring rather than extravagant. She had all that regular features and a faultless skin could lend to natural charm of expression and grace of figure. But there was something that had neither form nor shape, an elusive glory which dwelt somewhere behind the grey eyes--a visible fragrance like a tropic dawn, like daffodils growing on a field sloping to the sea.

"I didn't expect you."

It sounded terribly trite.

"No"--he was a little hoarse. "I didn't expect to come. But I've been thinking out--things. You know the sort of thing--"

With Peter, tautology was the forerunner of incoherence.

"What things?"

"You, mostly. I'm afraid I've been rather a--what shall I say--you know--"

She knew, but would not help him. She found an ugly satisfaction in her cruelty.

"Well--you and everything. Whether it is the game to marry you when you aren't frantically keen I mean--well, you're not, are you?"

For one wild moment she was urged to tell him the truth, tempering the blow with protestations of her friendship.

"You haven't come to break it off, have you, Peter?"

What a liar she was! She was aghast at the duplicity of the concern in her voice.

"Er--no. I thought I'd like you to say--you know?"

"You'd like me to break it off?"

Then the danger of this drift came to her. In consternation she realized that the return of her father would precipitate this cloudy mixture of hint and half-dissolved intention into a definite separation.

"Don't be silly. Of course I wouldn't dream of doing anything so--" She paused here for a word, rejected 'absurd' as ill-fitting. Happily he filled the gap. If a large, relieved sigh can fill a gap.

"Sorry--I'm rather worried tonight. A fellow from Scotland Yard has been to see me. I told you that. I have a sneaking admiration for Scotland Yard--I was in the Rhodesian Police when I was a kid."

"Did you find a gold mine in Rhodesia?"

She smiled the question, but there was purpose in it.

His confusion dumbfounded her.

"No. I--er--inherited it from--from my father."

She could have sworn that the hand that went up to his face was shaking; he seemed to realize that his agitation needed explaining.

"How abruptly you asked that question! You made me feel as if I had stolen the money!"

Her steady eyes were fixed on his.

"I didn't even ask you about money--I was joking! I don't even know whether one does find gold mines in Rhodesia."

She was lying at the rate of one every few seconds, she noted, through the awkward silence which followed.

He was the type of man (she decided) that would make most girls envious of her fortune. She would give him full points for his looks--ordinarily that kind of face fascinated her. The straight nose and firm chin and the big, rather deep-set eyes. A good figure too--an athlete of a man. If he would only talk! If he had the aplomb of Basil or the worldliness of Donald Wells!

There he sat, the most obviously ill-at-ease visitor that had ever come to the studios, literally twiddling his fingers and trying, in his disjointed way, to make conversation about the weather and etching.

John Leith led the way out of his study, and a somewhat chastened Basil followed. Not so chastened that he could not wink at Jane as he caught her eye. Nor completely squashed either.

"I say, honestly, Jane--what about this last spinster fling? Here's the Arts' Ball calling, and it won't take you a minute to dress. Old Peter won't mind. I'll bet he wants to talk business."

She looked expectantly at Peter. His brows had met: for the first time since their acquaintance began. That decided her.

"I think I'll go. Daddy," she said.

Mr Leith shrugged his shoulders. When Jane came down, a beautiful, ethereal thing in green, Peter had gone.

Somehow she did not enjoy the evening.

CHAPTER 3

WHEN PETER stepped out of his car before St George's he faced fifty cameras. A dozen urgent voices begged him to stand still--there was a fierce chattering of falling shutters.

"Thank you, Mr Clifton," said a newspaper photographer.

"Thank you," said Peter mechanically. What on earth brought all these people here? Every pew filled; throughout the church the sickly perfume of flowers. Strangers, most of them--idle folk lured by curiosity to see two millions of money marry beauty. Idle, open-mouthed women staring at him and nudging one another--he saw his valet in one pew and his butler and wife in another. Forby smiled respectfully, in his face a look of sad uncertainty. Possibly he would not 'suit' the new madame. It was rather dreadful to have so many lives dependent on one. Blossoms were massed along the chancel rail, and flowers on the altar, and lighted candles. His gloved hands twiddled with the rim of his hat.

"Have you got the ring?"

"Eh?"

He felt in his waistcoat pocket. Yes, it was there. Jane had begun by expressing her indifference to gold or platinum, and had finished by distinctly favouring platinum.

Marjorie Wells smiled at him from a favoured front pew. She looked unusually haggard, and there was no geniality in her smile. Perhaps she was continuing, mutely, her protest against Donald acting as best man. She had become a stickler for custom. It was unlucky to have a married best man; it was absurd. Surely Peter had a friend. His lawyer? Peter's lawyer was also a benedict--lawyers marry young.

Marjorie Cheyne Wells had been crying! He made the discovery when she turned full face to him, and it came as a shock. Marjorie was no sentimentalist.

"For Heaven's sake, how long do we wait?" he asked fretfully.

Donald Wells looked at his watch.

"You've been here just under fifty seconds. Nervous?"

"A bit, yes. I wish I had seen Jane yesterday--I was rather stuffy about her going out to dance with Hale--I wanted to apologize."

Wells's thin lips were pressed tighter. Jane should have been spanked, he thought. She had set the town talking--supping tete a tete with Basil Hale two nights before her marriage.

A stir and a craning of necks. The choir was waddling down to meet the bride. 'Waddle'--that was the word for it, decided Peter. Like a double rank of white ducks...

She was here! The organ trembled, and one clear note led the sweet voices of boys. Now they were coming back with greater dignity. And here was Jane on her father's arm and mysteriously strange girls in white behind her. He hardly knew one of them--certainly did not recognize Jane, though he stared and stared till Wells caught his sleeve and placed him...

Kneeling was an aching business, though in Jane it seemed no effort. Would her hand be cold when he took it--no, it was blood-warm and soft: to touch it was to receive a caress.

She never looked at him once; her voice was clear when she answered the priest's demands--but she never looked at Peter--did not take his arm as they walked to the vestry. He was so dazed that he had to think before he signed the register--a full half minute he kept them waiting, the pen poised...

More snappings of cameras and a swaying mass of women surging up to the car door. A policeman stood on the step till they were clear of the crowd.

"Ghastly, wasn't it?" she said.

"Yes...rather...I don't realize."

They were alone, but no more alone than when he had driven her back from Lord's or a theatre. And there was no splendour in this very loneliness.

"I'll be awfully good to you," he blurted out.

It was just the banality he would utter. Jane drew into the corner of the car, for the first time in her life self-conscious.

Thank Heaven she had managed at the eleventh hour to change the venue of the reception from the hotel to the house in Avenue Road! It had involved the dispatch of hundreds of telegrams, and fewer people would come--which was an advantage.

In her own room she sat down to take stock. Mainly she was concerned about herself, but now and again a thought of Peter crossed her mind and her maid saw her face shadow.

"You ought to go down soon, madame."

Madame! She was Mrs Peter Clifton. There was no time to reflect on the phenomenon.

"Porter, who did the flowers for the house, said Mr Clifton paid him with a bad five-pound note, miss--ma'am. I told Porter it would be all right--"

"Bad five-pound note? A forgery?" Jane's first sensation was one of amusement.

"Yes, miss. He took it to the post office and they said: 'Where did you get it?' and all that--and Porter says he can't afford to lose all that money."

A bad five-pound note! How odd! And yesterday there was trouble about a fifty-pound note. Jane was not amused any longer.

She opened a drawer of her writing table, took out her bag and opened it.

"Here is another five pounds--tell Porter not to be silly--of course he will lose nothing. Mr Clifton must have had these forgeries passed on him."

She went downstairs, so intent upon the forged note that she had to be shepherded to the studio. This was not a moment to discuss the matter with Peter. She found it very difficult to talk to him at all...

Free of everything at last, thank God--of white charmeuse and veil and the faint smelling bouquet, free of the slavery of greeting unimportant people with a smile that must approximate to happiness.

Basil Hale was almost the last to approach, and she saw an imp in his dancing eyes.

"I've got orders not to annoy or depress you," he said, and whilst he spoke he was shaking hands with Peter, at whom he did not look. "Happy life to you, Jane, and all that sort of thing, and come back soon and make matches for all your friends--ow!"

His hand was still resting in Peter's--Peter had given it a sudden and excruciating grip.

"Congratulate me!" he said coolly.

It was the first glimpse she had of another Peter.

"By Gad--you've got a grip on you!" complained Basil.

That was the one distinct memory she carried away from the babel and the white rosettes and silver confetti.

As the car went swiftly and noiselessly across Hampstead Heath she brushed the last silver anchor from her skirt and looked round at her husband. His arm was in the rest loop, his eyes fixed thoughtfully on the road ahead. She tried to ask him if he was happy, but she could not bring her tongue to this supreme hypocrisy. And then she remembered the five-pound note. She thought he hadn't heard her, and told him again.

"Porter? Yes, I gave him a fiver. Bad, was it? How careless!"

Careless was not exactly the word she expected. She discovered that she badly wanted him to talk--she was living for the present: the future was not to be contemplated sanely.

"Longford Manor was your idea, Jane," he said in surprise.

"Was it?" Jane could be very provocative.

"I thought Paris or--"

"Don't say 'Como'," she breathed. She felt that if he said 'Como' she would scream.

He went red.

"I don't know Como," he said, a little stiffly. "But whatever I should have said it would not have been Longford Manor. I thought you didn't like the place when you saw it."

"Is it your own house?" She evaded the challenge.

"No--I've hired it three months at a time when I got sick of town. The owner lives permanently abroad and one can always get it. The grounds are nice and its loneliness rather appealed to me."

"It shall appeal to me too," she said stoutly, and went on: "Don't mind if I'm rather nervy today--getting married is a nervy business. Did you see Marjorie? That woman is in love with you, Peter." He was too astonished to protest. "I know. She looked at me with a basilisk eye. Isn't that funny?"

"I'll swear you're mistaken," he said, almost violently.

"Perhaps I am--about you. But she loathes me."

"But why?"

Jane shook her head. They had traversed the mean streets of Tottenham and were on the Epping road. He returned to the question of honeymoon--she would rather have talked about Marjorie Cheyne Wells.

"We could go abroad after," he suggested. "New York--Long Island or somewhere. It is glorious on the Sound. I know quite a lot of people in the States. I went over there last year with Bourke--he's the big fellow at Scotland Yard."

He had been many times in America--pleasure trips to kill ennui really. She found herself wondering why Peter sought out detectives and made them his friends.

There was little more said on that wearisome journey. With a fluttering at her heart she saw from the crest of the hill above Newport the chimneys of Longford Manor in the distance. Before she could quite collect her thoughts and order them, the car had passed the lodge gates and was slowing before the door of the house.

The two menservants were waiting in the open doorway, deaf old men who had been in the owner's service for years. An ancient maid brought a cup of tea to Jane in her panelled sitting-room-boudoir would have been too pretty a name for this severe apartment.

Peter's room as well as her own opened from this chamber. He appeared at the door as she was sipping the hot liquid.

"You've not seen the garden and the rockery?" he asked her. She was childishly glad to get into the open air and the slanting sunlight, but when he took her arm she was so unresponsive that after a while he let it fall awkwardly.

Time did not pass. Every minute had to be lived through--she was wearing with the strain of it when she went up to dress for dinner with the help of the old maid. For one thought of Peter's she was grateful: Anna was under the impression that the honeymoon was in its decline.

"Mr Clifton said he'd bring you here before you went to London, ma'am. This is a rare place for honeymoons. We often let for a month, but you're the first lady that's ever finished her honeymoon at Longford."

For which she thanked Peter rather prettily when they were at dinner.

"Anna doesn't read the newspapers or she'd know I was a liar," he said, and seemed in a hurry to change the subject.

They spent that interminable evening in the big library that formed one wing of the manor house. Once or twice he tried to say something, but the stream of thought ran into a sandy delta of incoherent words. More than once she had an inclination to fly from the house and find some sort of conveyance that would take her home. When he tried to talk of housekeeping or the future, she sat tense, holding herself in.

"...You'll sign what cheques you wish--a sort of joint account, Jane. Money is rather a horrid subject for a honeymoon, isn't it?"

"You've been awfully generous."

He was momentarily deceived into a deeper blundering.

"The settlement was nothing--the hundred thousand, I mean. Money is a ruthless sort of weapon--I wonder sometimes whether I haven't used it a little cruelly."

"It gives you what you want."

A little devil was in her: how could he guess that she was seeking a respite from her panic by the most obvious method?

"It gave me to you--I mean, it made possible--"

It needed that gaucherie of his and the arm that slipped a little awkwardly about her shoulders.

She was on her feet, looking down at him with smouldering eyes.

"It bought me--that is what you mean!"

"I meant nothing of the kind--"

"Yes, you did--money was the short cut--we comfortably placed people are inclined to be dazzled with sums that seemed fabulous. It was easier than--courting--that's a stupid old word, but it's expressive. You don't think I love you, do you?"

A white face above her shook from side to side. "No. I hoped. But I don't think so."

"Or that you have anything more in me than money can buy? A bargain's a bargain--I'll keep to mine. I'll be your wife. I am your wife. I'm not going to be a fool at this hour. But I don't love you. I hate being heroic, but you can't buy that. You can kiss me if you like, but I shall hate it--I'm sorry. I ought to have told you last night--when was it I saw you? If you are satisfied with that--here I am!"

He was looking down at her blankly, and his face had lost all expression.

"I see," he said at last. "Well--I don't want what I paid for. I want what you can give."

She shook her head. "That is nothing," she said.

He nodded at this. "Well, we've got--er--a month to fill in somehow," he said.

At that second came on the outer door a knock that reverberated thunderously through the bare stone hall. A shuffle of feet on the flags and the rattle of chains. Peter waited, his eyes on the door. Presently it opened.

It was Chief Inspector Rouper. "Sorry to interrupt you, Mr Clifton."

He was terse to a point of brusqueness as he laid a small attache-case on the library table and snapped it open. Jane was watching in amazement--almost forgotten was the unnerving five minutes through which she had just passed, though she was shaking from head to foot.

Rouper pulled out a bundle of banknotes and laid them on the table.

"They were found in a suitcase that you left at Victoria parcels office yesterday morning," he said quietly. "I should like some explanation, Mr Clifton."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean," said the detective, "that every one of those notes is a forgery."

CHAPTER 4

PETER CLIFTON looked from the detective to the neatly packed bundle of notes.

"I have never left a suitcase at Victoria," he said steadily.

"I am telling you--" began the inspector, raising his voice.

"Don't be aggressive, please." The authority in his voice made Jane open her eyes. "I have told you that I have never left a suitcase at Victoria."

"It had your label on," insisted Rouper, but in a milder tone.

Peter's lips parted in a ghost of a smile.

"One does not label bags containing forged notes and leave them in a public place--I would like to have your chief constable's views on that. And Superintendent Harvey's and a few other gentlemen's. The inference I am to draw is that I knew those notes were forged and that I was distributing them. The Bank of England will give you one million eight hundred thousand reasons why I should not do anything so stupid. Have you the suitcase?"

Rouper turned to one of the two men who stood outside the door and gave an order, and presently he brought in a brand-new cowhide case. To the handle dangled a printed label:

'Mr Peter Clifton, 175, Carlton House Terrace'

"I have never seen it before," said Peter after one glance. "Would it be suggesting that you betray official secrets if I asked you how you knew the bag was at Victoria?"

"That is neither here nor there." Rouper, never an even-tempered man, was ruffled. "I've come down to inquire into the circumstances. And another thing--"

"I gave a man a forged fiver this morning, and a forged fifty was traced to me yesterday and--"

Peter put his hand in his pocket and took out a leather notecase. He opened this on the table and slowly extracted one by one its contents.

"That is a good twenty and so is that--this one"--he lifted the note to the light--"is forged. The watermark is bad--you'd better take charge of it. This note"--he fingered the fourth carefully--"is genuine, and this--but this is a forgery; I can feel without looking."

One by one he sorted the notes.

"Did you get these from your bank?"

"Some of them--I'm rather careless about money and keep my notes in a steel-lined drawer of my desk. When I want money I take the first that comes to hand. When I receive money in return for a cheque I replenish the store."

"From the bank?" asked the detective quickly.

Peter shook his head. "I seldom go to the bank. No, from tradespeople--my tailor, for example, cashed a cheque last week for a hundred. Whoever's nearest."

Jane listened, puzzled, fascinated. Suppose--if he were guilty here was a complete and baffling explanation.

Baffled, Rouper certainly was. He fell back on the bundle of notes. "You couldn't have got these from a shop," he said triumphantly.

There was contempt in Peter's voice.

"I have told you--they are not mine. The case isn't mine. The only thing that looks like mine is the label. An enemy hath done this."

"Have you any enemies?"

Peter smiled.

"Only you, Rouper."

The detective's face went dark with anger.

"I'm no enemy--I am surprised that a gentleman like you should say so. I'm doing my duty."

Then, to the amazement of the listening girl, Peter shook his head. "You have been watching me for a month--keeping me under observation, I think, is the expression."

Anger overcame the inspector's discretion. "Have I? Then perhaps you'll put a little more information at my disposal. Who is the lady who has been visiting you in your flat night after night--going in by the side door and leaving I don't know when?"

"What a horrible invention!"

Jane could hardly believe that it was she who was talking so furiously. "Even if it were true, you have no right--"

"It is true." Peter was coolness itself. "Perfectly true. I have been visited in my flat by a lady who has generally stayed no longer than an hour and has left by the way she came. Her age is, I believe, sixty-five. Her name and address I am not prepared to give--"

"A friend of yours?"

Again Peter smiled.

"Not even a friend. She is in truth one who hates me--her occupation is, or was, a cook, and I will add she is, or was, a very bad cook. And that, I think, is all I can tell you."

Rouper rubbed his chin irritably.

"This will have to be reported to our people," he said.

"It will be reported by me." Peter nodded to the telephone on the table.

The inspector hesitated. "Can I use that?" He half reached for the instrument.

"No," curtly, "you cannot. There is no law which gives you the right to use my telephone."

Rouper's surprise was almost comic.

"All right, sir. I am sorry I annoyed you. As a matter of fact, I haven't reported this matter to the Yard--"

"Nor to the Essex police," smiled Peter. "In fact, Rouper, of all the people in this room you are in the worst mess! You've come without a warrant--you're on territory where you have no right except at the request of the Chief Constable of Essex, you've brought two men with you--unauthorized, I imagine--and you've got to ask me very kindly not to mention this matter to headquarters."

Rouper looked at him suspiciously. "You're not a police officer of any kind, are you?"

Peter shook his head. "Merely an intelligent observer," he said.

Then for the first time he appeared to be aware of his wife's presence. "Jane, if you will excuse us for a moment, I would like to talk to the inspector."

She went into the dark drawing-room and turned on the light. A big barn of a place that smelt mustily and of earth, so that, even though the night was warm, she shivered and switched on the electric stove that stood in the open bricklined fireplace. The sound of voices came to her in a low hum.

Almost, in the new interest, the supreme drama had receded into the background. In that quarter of an hour when she had stood by the side of her husband and heard the stupefying accusation, she had experienced almost every human emotion. Fear amounting to terror, relief, near-happiness as the half charge was turned away from him; contempt--when had she felt contempt? It was with something of dismay to recall that it was Peter's quiet contempt that she had shared. He had changed--the nervous and tongue-tied Peter she knew had vanished and left no trace. It was another man who faced these merciless servants of the law, fenced with them, by inference threatened them.

Was he bluffing? Her heart sank at the thought. Suppose these two millions of his were mythical...Yet the hundred thousand he had settled on her was real enough. John Leith had, as it were, bitten every single pound.

She heard the front door close, and Peter came in. She expected that he would be smiling, but he was very serious. "The bloodhounds have gone," he said.

"Who is this Rouper?"

"A genuine detective. They are rather a fine lot of fellows at the Yard--poorly paid but beyond suspicion. I suppose they make a little by side-lines--so do we all. Now and again they get a fellow who is gambolling with the hares when he should be snug at home in his kennel. That's Rouper--he's all side-line."

"He is an elderly man--"

"Due to retire this year. I know Scotland Yard rather well. I have had to consult them once or twice--no, I'm not a disguised detective masquerading as a millionaire! I'm just--well, it pays me to keep in touch with the Yard."

"But this man is watching you."

He chuckled at this. "I made him spiteful and then it came out. Yes, he has been watching me."

He looked at his watch.

"You had better toddle off to bed. You had better lock your door in case somebody leaves a few forged fivers under your pillow."

She smiled for the first time that day--genuinely.

"Longford Manor has no other surprises to offer." Jane was almost flippant. "A family ghost, now?"

"I do not allow my family ghost to travel with me," was all he said. And then he nodded towards the door.

In this way was Jane Clifton peremptorily dismissed on her wedding night.

She was amused as she went up the broad stairs--a little piqued, too. She had pictured many possibilities--it was not within the scope of her unpleasant daydreams that she should be dismissed, or that she should so meekly obey the imperious gesture.

As she reached the landing she had a fright. It was lit by one dim globe, and that was enclosed in an antique iron lantern that swung from the ceiling. One foot was on the top stair when she saw a figure moving in the shadow. Jane suppressed a scream only by sheer force of will.

"Oh, it is you, Anna!"

The aged servant came into the light.

"Yes, ma'am--I bin waiting for you."

She followed the girl into the bedroom with its big four-poster and tapestry-covered walls. But it was bright enough when the light was switched on.

The old lady was ready to accept credit for the efficiency of the electric service.

"We're the only house in the neighbourhood to be lit that way," she said proudly. "Everything's done by it--cookin', cleanin', everything."

"Does Mr Clifton come here very often?" asked Jane as she stepped out of her dress.

She was surprised at the rebuff which followed.

"We ain't supposed to talk about anybody's business," said Anna primly. "That's why we keep our jobs."

"But are you Mr Clifton's servants?"

"We belong to the 'ouse," was the cryptic reply, "an' we're let with the 'ouse."

"But the house isn't Mr Clifton's, I know that," said the undaunted Jane.

Anna had her reply. She belonged to the house and was hired with the house. To which she added. Jinks & Jinks done everything. Jane gathered they were the house agents.

The bed was unexpectedly comfortable--the appointments were made for comfort--you could extinguish all or half the lights from the bedhead. She turned them out and snuggled down luxuriously. She was half asleep when she remembered she had not locked the door.

She had no intention of doing anything so theatrical. She was asleep almost before the thought ran out of her mind...

Anna looked very old in the searching light of morning.

"Good morning, ma'am."

Ma'am--of course. How funny!

Waiting till the old woman had gone out of the room, Jane slipped into her dressing-jacket and slippers and went over to the open window. She looked down upon a shaven lawn separated from the park by a decrepit iron fence. Beyond was the rolling green of parkland that stretched to a belt of sunlit elms.

She did not see Peter, but, as she was turning away, he came into view, and to her surprise a strange man walked by his side.

Peter apparently was in good spirits: the sound of his laughter came to her. "...poor old Rouper...caught him out..."

She was not sure whether she was glad or sorry to find him so cheerful. Perhaps he did not care very much--or was he waiting to wear down her mental resistance, or hoping that blessed propinquity would bring about a change in her attitude?

She drank the tea that Anna had brought, turned on the water in her bath and began to unpack her one big trunk. When she joined the two men on the lawn, Peter's flippant mood had passed: he was grave, almost glum, and for the first time since that scene in the library was his old embarrassed self.

"Jane, this is Mr Bourke--you've heard me speak of him."

So this was the redoubtable Superintendent Bourke. He was a stoutish man with a large, jovial face and many chins.

"Sorry to intrude myself into the Garden of Eden, Mrs Clifton."

Mr Bourke was less like a great detective than any man she had ever imagined. It was only when she looked into his eyes, steadfast, searching, sceptical, that she found the attributes of a thief-catcher.

"I hope old man Rouper didn't worry you last night, Mrs Clifton? Good chap, Rouper, but he rather jumps at conclusions, huh?"

He ended almost every question with a deep-throated growl of inquiry.

He turned abruptly to Peter.

"Perhaps it was the gardener, Mr Clifton?"

Clifton shook his head.

"The gardener would hardly walk on flower-beds, and to my knowledge he has no car."

She was listening, puzzled.

"What is it?" she asked, and again Peter showed signs of embarrassment. He went red and shifted uneasily.

"The fact is...some fellow was in the grounds last night...we don't know who it was, but one of the servants saw him." He pointed to a garden bed under the window. "He left footmarks on the mould. It is nothing to worry about. Bourke didn't come down because of that: we were merely discussing it."

Seeing that he did not wish to pursue the subject, Jane left the men alone. She expected Bourke to stay to lunch, but, to her surprise, he disappeared, and she found herself alone at the long table with Peter.

He was no more inclined now to discuss the midnight visitor than he had been.

"A tramp possibly," he said. "These fellows know that the house is empty half the year. I suppose he was looking for an unfastened window."

He spoke enthusiastically of Bourke, his genius and his qualities as an investigator. She listened without interrupting to a eulogy that lasted through the greater part of the meal.

"How did you come to know these people at Scotland Yard, Peter?" she asked, as they strolled out on to the sunlit lawn.

The question produced a curious effect upon him: from the self-possessed, cool man of the world, he became an incoherent, stammering schoolboy.

"Well...they have been rather decent to me...taken an interest in me and all that sort of thing and helped me tremendously, especially Bourke. You have no idea what good fellows they are. And of course it is always as well to be on the right side--"

"On the right side of Scotland Yard? Why?" she asked quickly.

He did not answer at once, evidently revolving in his mind many alternative answers.

"Well, it is," he said at last, very unconvincingly, and changed the subject.

They spent the afternoon on a miniature golf course. As the day wore on, they both experienced something of the tension and the peculiar antagonism of the night before. Was it antagonism? Was it not in her heart a fear and in his a sense of resentment, she wondered.

He grew shorter and more sparing of speech. Eventually she relapsed into silence, and in silence they dined, under the myopic eye of the old and asthmatic manservant who acted as butler, footman and man-of-all-work.

After dinner she wandered into the drawing-room. The night was a little chilly: a small wood fire smouldered on the open hearth. He followed, and waited (she imagined) with suppressed impatience until the coffee had come. It was almost like a ritual, this coffee-drinking together. The girl in the grey evening frock, and this man sitting stiffly on the edge of a big armchair, were indulging in a ceremony from which neither obtained the least pleasure.

Presently he made an excuse.

"I shall be in the library if you want me," he said, in such a tone as suggested to her that he had not the slightest expectation of being wanted at all.

At ten o'clock she looked in. He was sitting at the table with a blank sheet of notepaper before him, nibbling the end of a. pen. Peter jumped up in some confusion, which suggested she had surprised him in a reprehensible act.

"I am going to bed now," she said, and was gone before his mumbled reply reached her.

Sleep did not come easily, and hardly had her head touched the pillow before she remembered the visitor of the night before. She got out of bed and, going to the window, looked out. The moon had not yet risen. The calm of the day was at an end: a fitful wind was blowing; from somewhere in the south came a low growl of thunder.

She pulled the curtains over the open window, went back to bed and tried to sleep. It was an hour before she fell into a restless slumber.

It was unusual in her to dream, but now dreams followed in bewildering succession. Of Peter, of her father, of that stout detective. They were without beginning or end--just fitful, uneasy glimpses of horrors--Peter drowning in the sea and the detective grinning fiendishly at him from the high bridge of a liner...

She turned in her sleep, shivering. Peter had told her to lock the door, but she had no fear.

Suddenly she was awake. Somebody's arm was about her thinly clad shoulders.

There were lips to her cheek, hot, hungry lips that roved blindly. With a scream she struggled up, fighting back the man who held her.

CHAPTER 5

HER HAND thrust wildly at a bristling chin--she remembered an old jiu-jitsu trick and pressed it upward, and as she did so she felt the arm encircling her shoulder relax under the shock. In an instant she wriggled from his grasp and was out of bed, too breathless to scream, too terrified to think.

Blindly she ran to the door by the window. It swung open and she was in the dour sitting-room. She could see nothing. The drawn curtains excluded even the faint lights of the night.

Behind her she could hear the scraping of feet on the polished floor of her bedroom, and in a frenzy of fear she ran forward and, stumbling over a chair, fell. Falling, her hands touched the handle of a door, and this in her desperation she turned.

"Who is there?"

A sudden blinding glow of light. Peter was half out of bed. As she picked herself up from where she sprawled on the floor she stared at him, amazed, dumbfounded. The visitor of the night had not been this newly wakened sleeper. She had felt the roughness of a tweed coat and a soft collar.

"Jane! What is wrong?"

She could only point backward through the dark opening of the door and gasp an incoherent story. Before she was half way through her narrative, Peter had run past her. Jane staggered to the bed and sat down. She was trembling from head to foot. For the first time in her life she had known, fear. And she was cold--terribly cold.

She looked round helplessly for something to cover her, did not see his black dressing-gown hanging behind the door.

Peter came back to find her sitting on his bed, an eiderdown about her trembling shoulders.

"Your window is wide open and there is a ladder against the wall outside. Now just tell me what happened."

He sat down on the edge of the bed and listened as she told her disjointed story. He was not furious, as she expected him to be. There was a certain gravity in his tone which first surprised and then piqued her. All his interest seemed to be centred, not in the identity, but in the clothing of the visitor.

"You're sure he was dressed?"

"Of course he was dressed," she said, a little impatiently. "I tell you, I felt the coat, and there was a safety pin in his collar which came loose and scratched my finger--look!"

He was silent for a while, but she knew that he was not thinking of her scratched finger, at which he had hardly glanced.

"He didn't speak--you're sure of that? And he wore boots? I must have been sleeping heavily: I did not hear you scream."

"I didn't scream. I had no breath to scream. I thought it was--you!"

He had raised his head, listening. She heard the whine and purr of a distant motor car.

"That is he," he said.

It may have been imagination on her part, but she could have sworn she detected relief in his tone.

"Why didn't you follow him?"

She tried to simulate reproach, but did not succeed. She was only too glad that he had not left her alone.

"I wasn't sure." And then, in some confusion: "You see, I didn't exactly know what had happened--it might have been nightmare. And even if I had followed, it is very unlikely that I could have come up with him."

He was walking about the room now, gathering up his clothes.

"I suppose you want me to go?"

He shook his head again.

"No, I'll dress. It's nearly four o'clock and I've slept quite long enough. You had better stay here and keep the light on till I come back."

Apparently he dressed in the sitting-room, for in an incredibly short space of time he returned to take the electric torch that lay on the bedside table.

"I'm going down the ladder to do a little investigation," he said. "In the meantime you can either go to sleep--I don't think you will, somehow--or dress yourself--or, alternatively, stay where you are!"

He said this with one of those quick, rare smiles of his, and she had the impression that he was feeling very cheerful about something. She heard his feet on the rungs of the ladder, and, slipping out of the bed, she made her way to the sitting-room.

The electric fire offered a coal-like comfort, but it did not induce her to stay. Passing into her bedroom, she shut the door and looked out of the open window. Peter was standing on the gravel path below. She saw the circle of his lamp roving the garden beds, and she must have made some sound, for he addressed her.

"There are new footmarks here," he said conversationally.

It was extraordinary, she thought, as she closed the window and drew the curtains before turning on the light, how calmly he accepted her terrifying experience. It was almost as though he had expected something of the sort to happen.

She had not finished dressing when she heard him come back up the ladder, cross the sitting-room and pass into the corridor. Going into the sitting-room, she found he had turned on the lights. She had hardly settled herself in a chair before the all too warm radiator when he came in with two cups of tea and a plate of biscuits, which he set on the table. He might have been a thought-reader, to have gauged her wonder and resentment.

"I suppose you think I take this rather calmly," he said. "As a matter of fact, I'm only just beginning to realize what has happened. If I'd been quite awake I'd have gone after that fellow and broken his neck!"

The venom in his voice was certainly genuine, she decided. She too was feeling the reaction, and though the hand that reached out to take the tea did not tremble, she had not wholly recovered from the shock. Dawn was paling in the eastern skies; the elms in the drive were a hard, black line against the steel of morning.

"We had better change rooms," he suggested. "I can keep my window closed. There are three panes which open and admit all the air that I want. But I don't imagine this bird will repeat his attempt--you found no jewellery missing?"

She shook her head. That had been one of the discoveries she had made when she went to dress; though the thought that she might have been robbed had been the last thing to occur to her.

"No; I very foolishly left my rings and bracelets on the dressing-table, but they have not been touched. If it were a burglar--"

She knew that it was no burglar, and in this certitude could not even discuss such a possibility.

Making conversation was something of a trial. She discovered with a sense of dismay that they had so few friends and interests in common. She found herself talking about her wedding as though it were a ceremony in which she had little more than a detached interest. She had not seen Marjorie Cheyne Wells, either in the church or at the reception.

"Do you like her?" she asked, almost knowing what he would reply, for he was one of those maddening people who had no strong likes or dislikes. It was almost in the nature of a pleasant surprise to hear that Marjorie was not a favourite of his.

"I don't quite know what to make of her," he said. "She can be so extraordinarily sour--spiteful is a better word."

"Has she been spiteful to you?" she asked quickly, and he laughed.

"No. I'm too insignificant to arouse her animosity."

Here was an opportunity to ask a question which had been on the tip of her tongue since the visit of the detective. This queer intimacy which the adventure of the night had brought about created an atmosphere in which the most embarrassing problems might be discussed. Nevertheless she thought he was a little distant, and her uneasiness was intensified when, for a moment after she had questioned him, he remained silent.

"Yes, it is perfectly true that this lady frequently visits me; but she is, as I told Rouper, a cook--at least, she was many years ago."

He chuckled nervously. "She has a grievance," was all that he would tell her, except that her name was Untersohn, of Swedish origin.

The sun came up into a blue, cloudless sky, and garden and lawn called urgently. By seven o'clock, despite the stimulation of tea, Jane found her head nodding. She went to her room, intending to lie down for an hour--it was the sound of the luncheon gong which woke her.

Many things had happened while she had slept. Looking out of the window, she saw Peter walking down the drive with a man whose figure suggested Superintendent Bourke.

Peter was waiting lunch for her. "I told them not to sound that infernal gong," he said. "You were sleeping so heavily that I didn't want you wakened."

"Was that Mr Bourke I saw?"

He explained that Bourke had come down at his request, and that he had no doubt whatever about the man who had come to her room in the night being the same individual who had been wandering about the grounds the night before. He did not explain how he knew this, but went on:

"By the way, I hope you won't mind: I've asked Donald Wells if he can come down--I would have gone up to him, but I don't like leaving you here alone."

She looked up from her plate quickly.

"Why? Aren't you well?" she asked.

"Eh--well? Oh, yes, I'm well! Of course, Donald loathed the idea of intruding on our honeymoon."

There was the ghost of a laugh in his eyes when he said this.

"Is he bringing Marjorie?"

Peter shook his head. "No," he said shortly.

"But why is he coming, if you're not ill?" she insisted.

It was an opportunity for heroics and oblique reproach. Yet somehow she did not expect this, nor was she disappointed.

The afternoon came and brought the second shock of the day.

Peter was reading in the library, and she, having made a futile attempt to interest herself in the rose garden and make conversation with an ancient and taciturn gardener, had returned to the house with a blank feeling of despair as she contemplated the hours that had to be filled before bedtime.

Peter looked up as she came in and hastily concealed the book he was reading--an odd circumstance which excited her curiosity.

"How long do we have to stay at Longford?" she asked desperately. "Peter, this is an awful place, and will you be very angry if I tell you that I am terribly bored?"

His smile was sympathetic. "I've been thinking the same thing," he confessed, "and without consulting you I have engaged a suite at the Ritz-Carlton. At least we shall have the theatres."

She was almost happy at the prospect of release from her dismal environment.

"Father mustn't know--he wouldn't understand," she said. "When do we leave?"

He told her that he had not been able to secure the suite he wanted until the day after the morrow.

"What were you reading when I came in?"

Very guiltily he produced the book. It was a French work on etching. She had forgotten that he had a hobby, and told him so.

"I owe it a lot," he said. "I shouldn't have met you if my vanity hadn't run in the direction of a private show."

She had even forgotten that it was in a dingy gallery off Bond Street that her father had introduced them.

"Poor Daddy! He was terribly upset about losing your plates. I am sorry."

Here Peter was sufficiently human to echo her sorrow. For in a moment of expansiveness he had loaned what to him was an invaluable set of his etchings to his prospective father-in-law. Peter's work was extraordinarily fine. The lost plates, each no larger than a postcard, represented his supreme efforts.

"It's a terrible pity--I'll never do such good work again," he said, for the moment a picture of gloom. Then he laughed almost gaily. "And they say we English have no artistic leaning! I offered a thousand pounds for the return of the plates, but the finder preferred the masterpieces!"

She sat in a low chair on the other side of the fire, her chin in her palm, looking at him, her mind strangely busy.

"I suppose this man--what do they call him?--the Clever One--must be an etcher too? Daddy says that only a brilliant artist could do the work--he has seen some specimens."

"I suppose so."

His tone was completely indifferent. Evidently he was not greatly interested in the artistic abilities of the unknown forger. The very mention of the Clever One seemed to dry up his good humour and inhibit further conversation.

After a while she rose and went out into the hall.

She was standing at the door, looking across the park, when she became aware of the car. It was not an ordinary limousine. Her first impression was that by some error part of a circus procession had strayed into the grounds. The body was large and old-fashioned. It was painted a bright crimson lake, and this was 'picked out' with gold. The handles and the other metal appointments were of dull gold--the chauffeur and the footman were in uniform which completely matched the car and its upholstery, for their caps were gold-laced.

Watching this tremendous machine open-mouthed, Jane observed that the servants' caps were further ornamented with imposing cockades.

The footman got down and opened the door. He seemed rather self-conscious. From the interior stepped a large woman. She was of commanding height; stout of build, coarse-skinned. But Jane could see, beyond the inflamed face and swollen flesh, the beauty that once had lived in that repellent visage. The thick coating of white powder accentuated the furrows and wrinkles beneath. Her lips were a bright scarlet, the eyelashes heavily darkened--a smear of the colouring matter had somehow reached her cheek and had given a touch of the grotesque to a face which in itself was a little terrifying.

Her swollen hands were gloveless, and every finger was tightly ringed from knuckle to knuckle. There were diamonds in her ears, and suspended from her neck a huge and glittering plaque that rested on her bosom.

She was expensively and youthfully dressed, but the colours must have been of her own choosing. No tyrannical designer would have sanctioned that champagne hue or those girlish lines.

She stood under the portico, staring sombrely at the girl.

"You're his wife? I'm Madame Untersohn."

Madame Untersohn--the cook! This, then, was the mysterious woman who had visited Peter almost daily. Her voice was hard and common; she made no attempt to carry any further than in her appearance and state the illusion of gentility.

"I am Mrs Clifton, yes."

The large woman was breathing heavily; obviously under the effect of some pent emotion--Jane suspected a rumbling fury and was more interested than alarmed.

"You're gettin' what ain't his to give." The visitor almost barked the accusation. "What he's robbin' the rightful heir out of--"

For a moment Jane was staggered. She could overlook the theatrical gesture, the hackneyed cliche of cheap melodrama. "Rightful heir? Who is 'the rightful heir'?" Madame Untersohn struck yet another attitude. "Peter Clifton's brother--my son!" she said.

CHAPTER 6

PETER'S BROTHER? Peter was an only child: it was the one piece of information that he had given to her about himself.

"I think you are mistaken--"

"Allow me!"

It was Peter's voice. He had come out of the library noiselessly behind her.

"Allow you, eh?" The painted lips curled in an ugly sneer. "You'll do all the talkin'! But you can't talk your poor brother out of his rights!"

There was a subtle difference in the harsh voice that addressed Peter Clifton. The coarse assurance had been replaced by a note of pleading, there was an uneasiness in it which was reflected in the woman's gesture, for now the jewelled hands were rubbing nervously one over the other and the blackened lashes were blinking nervously.

"I come down to see you an' have it out!" The voice had grown shrill. "I'm not afraid of you. If you come any of your father's tricks I'll shoot you like a dog, by God I will!" She had snapped open the big bag she carried, groped into its depths and now one trembling hand held a nickel-plated revolver. "...shoot you as soon as look at you. I want justice, and you ain't goin' to frighten me!"

Peter was surveying her, his face expressionless, his grave eyes fixed on the woman's.

"Come in, Mrs Untersohn," he said, and, turning, walked to the library and threw open the door.

Jane could only gape, dumbfounded at the scene. It was like the segment of a fantastic dream that had neither beginning nor end. She watched the woman waddle past, her suspicious eyes on Peter, the shining pistol still wagging tremulously in her hand.

Madame Untersohn backed into the room and Peter followed her. The door closed upon them. Jane walked out on to the lawn, her head in a whirl.

What did all this mean--what explanation could there possibly be for the intrusion of this overdressed old woman with her threats and her revolver and her cryptic references to Peter's brother?

As she walked slowly and aimlessly towards the drive she heard the hum of wheels and, looking up, saw a car appear from the direction of the lodge gates. Her heart leapt as she recognized the blue body of it, and she ran across the lawn, waving her hand.

"I'm terribly sorry--barging into Arcady and all that sort of thing." Donald Cheyne Wells's white teeth showed in a smile as he took her hand.

"And I'm terribly glad you came," she said fervently. "Welcome to Wonderland!"

He smiled again. "A pleasant wonderland, I hope?" he suggested. It was a curious fact (she remembered even as she revealed the happenings of the night) that she had never before been on terms of confidence either with Donald or his wife, and yet, almost before she realized what she was saying, she had told him of the midnight visitor.

The effect upon him was remarkable. He stood stock still, staring at her.

"For God's sake!" he breathed; and then quickly: "You didn't know him?"

There was something almost comic in his agitation. And then she saw his eyes open even wider. The 'coach' of Madame Untersohn had drawn up beyond the house, and as they walked it had come into view.

"Untersohn--is she here?"

His face had gone peaked and grey. She could only gaze at him in consternation.

"Do you know her? Who is she?"

But before her question was finished he was walking quickly towards the house.

Before he could reach the portico, Madame Untersohn had appeared. Under the powder her face was a choleric red. Imperiously she beckoned to the watchful footman and her ponderous car moved towards her.

Cheyne Wells stopped at the sight of her and did not speak or move until the machine moved on with its resplendent burden.

"How long has she been here?" He was brusque almost to a point of rudeness.

"Only a few minutes," said Jane wonderingly. "Who is she?"

She heard his long sigh, the sigh of a man from whom a weight of trouble had been shifted; his tone became more amiable.

"She's a woman who's been worrying Peter rather a lot, I fancy," he said. And then quickly: "Did you see her? Did she say anything to you?"

Jane laughed.

"You're becoming mysteriouser and mysteriouser, Donald," she said. "Yes, I did have a brief interview with the lady, in the course of which she told me that her son was the rightful heir, that he was Peter's brother--"

Again his face had gone tense; his dark eyes had narrowed till they were the merest slits.

"She told you that, did she? She's mad! Obviously she's mad. Nobody would travel about in a band wagon as she does unless they were crazy. You didn't take the slightest notice of anything she said, did you?"

Jane shook her head.

"I haven't had time to think about it," she said, and was going on, but he interrupted her.

"Peter never had a brother. This woman is a lunatic, obsessed with the idea that her son is the heir to Peter's fortune."

"She doesn't seem particularly poor herself," said Jane, remembering the flashing diamonds.

Wells nodded.

"She ought to be a rich woman. That makes her behaviour all the more extraordinary." He seemed most anxious to convince her on the point--too anxious, she thought, in her shrewd way.

"Peter should have had her arrested years ago; he's too kind-hearted--hallo, Peter, old boy!"

Peter Clifton had strolled out from the house, his hands thrust deep into his flannel pockets, a half smile on his lips. Without a word to the girl, Donald Wells darted to him, caught him by the arm and led him, reluctantly, Jane thought, back into the house.

"Mysteriouser and mysteriouser," said Jane, and went up to her ugly little sitting-room. No bride ever felt more unbride-like than she, or less necessary to the happiness, the comfort or the entertainment of anybody.

She could not believe her ears a quarter of an hour later when she heard Donald's car moving off. He had gone without saying goodbye, without exchanging another word. At first she was amused, then a little angry, and it required something more than Peter's message of farewell at third hand to restore her equanimity.

"He had to rush back to town."

"Why did he rush down?" she asked, almost tartly.

"I asked him to see me--what do you think of the lady?"

He followed her into the library and pushed an easy chair for her, but she stood by the side of the library table, her fingers drumming ominously.

"Have you any more surprises for me?" She asked, and something in her tone amused him, for he laughed.

"I'm terribly sorry." Peter was apologetic, but he was in no sense abashed--not even apprehensive. "She was surprising, wasn't she?"

He was waiting for a further question, and she did not disappoint him.

"What did she mean when she talked about your brother?"

He smiled faintly.

"That is one of my many family skeletons," he said; "to me, the smallest. I suppose I've got an unmoral mind, but that particular indiscretion of my father does not trouble me as it should."

She was silent at this.

"Oh--is it that?" she asked awkwardly.

"It is that. I'm sorry. Mrs Untersohn, who, so far as I know, is Miss Untersohn, has very hazy ideas of primogeniture and imagines that her son is entitled to a--er--share in the estate."

His questioning eyes were upon her. Was she convinced? they seemed to ask.

"It is very--ugly, isn't it?"

It was a lame, almost hypocritical response on her part; she really was not shocked; did not even realize the unpleasantness of the revelation. Her chief emotion was one of relief.

"Yes--very. Do you mind? I have asked Bourke to come to dinner."

She was a little staggered at this.

"The police officer? Peter, why are you so keen on having detectives around you?"

This genuinely amused him.

"I thought I had explained," he laughed. "In fact, I can't improve on the explanation I have given. Bourke is a very good friend of mine. He has done a great deal for me. Do you really mind if he comes? I can put him off."

She had no objections at all. A third at dinner would relieve the tension.

"Is he staying the night?"

Peter shook his head.

"He goes back to London soon after dinner."

There was no link between their talk and the realization of their extraordinary relationship. It came upon her suddenly--the grotesque unreality of their positions. Peter had accepted her with amazing readiness; his compliance was almost inhuman. She sat at the window of her bedroom, looking out over a world that had grown bleak and a little ugly, wondering whether presently she would wake up and find her marriage was a dream; in some respects--here was the curious perversity of it--rather a pleasant dream.

When she saw Peter crossing the lawn slowly she had to tell herself: "That is your husband--you bear his name; you are his wife rill death do you part."

Even the horrible inevitability did not shock her; even as she did not believe the unbelievable phenomenon of her marriage, so she accepted her own fate as something in which she was not personally interested.

"Which is silly," she told herself; yet there was no conviction in her scorn.

The afternoon post brought a letter from Basil Hale, and the sight of his handwriting gave her a little pang. Peter brought the letter to her in her room, together with a wrappered newspaper.

"I didn't see the postman come," she said in surprise.

"He was here an hour ago--I forgot to give you the letter," he answered.

She slit the envelope--what had Basil to say? He had, he said, returned from Bournemouth that morning; the London postmark indicated the earliest postal collection.

'I am wondering when it will be reasonably decent to call upon you young love birds...Your father was so dismal the night you left that I took a late train to Bournemouth. I don't exactly know why...'

The rest was so much chronicling of unimportant personal experiences.

For some reason the letter irritated her. It may have been the suggestion that there was a privacy into which he or anybody else could not intrude.

Basil was being normally impertinent. She was forced to consider her mental attitude towards Basil Hale. They had been friends years before she had met Peter. A typical happy-go-lucky young man of the town, coarse in the grain, inclined to be loose of tongue, but thoroughly amusing. Brilliant sometimes; an excellent companion who could shock, but never bored.

Idly she turned over the little sheet and saw that at the bottom he had written a postscript--an odd trick of his:

'I am terribly worried about you--honestly. Have I done right? Have any of us? This passion for money for which we are prepared to sacrifice everything--'

There the postscript ended--without so much as a full stop. Jane searched the envelope for some continuation of the message--there was none. But as she opened it out she made a discovery. The flap of the envelope curled back under the strain of her search, and the gum was still wet.

Somebody had opened the letter and read it, and that somebody could be no other person than her husband.

CHAPTER 7

SHE FOUND Peter in the library, dozing over a book, and without preamble made her accusation.

"I am probably being very unjust in suspecting you of a meanness which only one of the servants--"

"You need not blame the servants," he said quietly. "Yes, I opened the letter."

A wave of anger swept over her and for a moment left her dumb.

"You opened my letter? Why? Is that one of the privileges that marriage gives you?"

"I haven't noticed any particular privilege attaching to matrimony," he said, with a half smile which maddened her. (She told herself she loathed Peter in his more confident mood.)

"Will you please explain"--she tried to keep her voice calm--"why you took this extraordinary step? It was not an accident--you would have told me."

"It was not an accident," he said coolly. "Only I object to Basil Hale corresponding with you. I intended telling you this later--I never dreamt he would have the nerve to write to you; when you were on your--honeymoon."

She was angry, but she was bewildered too. She had always thought that he and Basil were good friends. And, as if he read her mind, he went on quickly: "I am not jealous in the vulgar sense of the word. Hale and I are as the poles apart. I mistrust him, and he doesn't like me."

"Why do you mistrust him?"

He shrugged.

"One takes unreasonable dislikes, and he is one of them. I know I have committed an unpardonable fault, but, Jane, I had only your happiness in mind."

The last part of his speech was uttered a little haltingly. She was not convinced. Unless she was prepared to quarrel, the sane course was to let the matter rest where it stood; saner, perhaps, to find an excuse for him in order that the possibilities of a growing friendship might not be disturbed. This last course she took.

"It isn't really important," she said, almost carelessly. "I was a little annoyed. One gives letters a very special value."

"Naturally. I'm terribly sorry."

This incident drove them a little farther apart; by the time Bourke arrived their relations were almost frigid, and she could bless the happy thought that had brought a third party to that unpromising meal.

Mr Bourke, that stout man, was in his heartiest mood, so that she thawed under his genial influence and found herself taking an interest in criminals. Apparently there was only one in the world, and that one exceptionally clever.

"I'm a poor man, but I'd give a thousand pounds to put my hand on him," boomed Mr Bourke.

He had a trick of emphasizing his words with imaginary thumps on the table. Every time he raised his huge fist Jane winced, but never once did the expected thud come.

"Here's a man outside of all the criminal categories. He has confederates, yet none have betrayed him. Why? Because they don't know him!"

"In what respect does he differ from other forgers?" she asked.

There was no need for her to simulate an interest is the Clever One; the unknown forger had taken hold of her imagination.

Bourke put his hand in his pocket, took out a thick leather notecase and opened it. From one of its many compartments he extracted an American bill for one hundred dollars.

"Look at that," he said. "You're not an expert, but if you were you'd say the same. It is impossible to distinguish this from a genuine bill. There are plenty of cheap forgeries in circulation. There is a place in Hamburg where you can buy five-pound notes at eighteenpence a time. But a fellow who buys the Clever One's work has got to pay--and he's paying for safety."

Peter, who seemed scarcely interested, broke in with a question.

"What would that hundred-dollar bill cost straight from the hands of the maker?" He leaned forward as he asked the question, his eyes on the detective's face.

"Twenty dollars," replied Bourke promptly; "or rather, that would be the cost from the agent, who would probably make five dollars on the transaction. That is where the Clever One differs from all the others--he charges for peace of mind. You could go through the United States of America with a pocket full of these, and the chance of your being caught is one in ten thousand. Unless you happen to be in Washington or in some town where there was a chance of the Federal authorities taking a casual peek at the money in circulation. There was a banker in Ohio who, in the course of a year, passed three thousand of these hundred-dollar bills into circulation--innocently, of course."

The modus operandi of the Clever One he found difficult to explain. Agents had been arrested in Paris, Berlin and Chicago, and they could give no other information except that at an agreed hour and rendezvous, usually at night, and in some open place where there was no chance of espionage, the forged bills or banknotes were handed to them and they gave in exchange the price to the last penny. With the forgeries was a typewritten slip telling them where they could write for the next batch. The address was never the same: it was, the police discovered in one case, an 'accommodation' provided by a small newsagent. Invariably a chance-found boy was sent to collect the letters, which probably passed through two or three hands before they eventually reached the forger.

"He never makes the mistake of flooding the market. Sometimes he will supply nothing for nine months at a time. But what he turns out is the best. The only thing we're certain about is that his agents are very few in number. There never has been a case where deliveries have been made simultaneously in Paris and Berlin."

"Yet his profits must be enormous," said the girl wonderingly.

Bourke nodded.

"Sixty thousand a year. That's a lot of money. The only time he ever put out forged bills wholesale was during the slump of the franc--he was probably one of the contributing causes. He put thirty million francs in mille notes on the French market."

Peter had been playing with his knife through this conversation, his eyes fixed upon the table. Jane had the impression that he was a little bored, and wondered why a man who was so interested in police work should find so little that was thrilling in this narrative.

She gathered from his restlessness that he was anxious to see Bourke alone. He left the conversation to Bourke and herself and sat throughout the meal staring at the one picture the room held--a big oil painting in a dull gold frame affixed to the panelling. It was a picture of a man of the Regency period, high-stocked, heavy-faced, with a harsh, big mouth and eyes into which the painter had conveyed more than a hint of cold malignity. The picture seemed to fascinate him, for again and again his eyes wandered back to the painted canvas.

At the earliest possible moment she rose and left them, and Peter visibly brightened at the first sign of her coming departure. She was not by nature curious, and was irritated to find herself speculating upon what was the subject of the talk that held these two men in such earnest conference. Really it was no business of hers.

She wandered from the drawing-room to her sitting-room upstairs; poked the smouldering wood fire to a feeble liveliness, and, in sheer boredom, searched the little bookshelf for something to read. There was a number of three-decker novels, a volume on archaeology (published in 1863), a dogeared school manual, and, to her surprise, a very modern volume in German. She could not read German, but the illustrations left her in no doubt as to the subject of the book. It was a manual on the art of etching.

Peter's? She remembered the plates that her father had lost; remembered, too, some of the better examples of Peter's work. A fenland scene, full of light and soft shadows. John Leith had told her that this little work of Peter's compared favourably with Zohn at his best.

The book had been read carefully, for there were certain unintelligible phrases underlined. So Peter spoke or read German--she was discovering some new accomplishment every day. Here she was shocked to find that there was a sneer in her thought--there was no reason to sneer at Peter. There was, in truth, much that she could admire and respect.

It was ten o'clock when Peter called her down to say goodnight to Mr Bourke. She stood by her husband's side and watched the red tail light of the car disappear down the drive before they walked back to the library, a little awkward in their companionship. "Well, did you have a very satisfactory talk?" she asked.

She wasn't really interested, but she was trying desperately hard to return her friendship to the notch whence it had slipped that afternoon.

He was gauche; stammered a little, and there was an uncomfortable silence before she said "Goodnight" somewhat hastily, and went up to her room.

Tonight she locked the door, drew the curtains over the window and fastened the latch of the casement so that it could not be opened; then she undressed. She was not a bit tired--only bored, bored beyond words. For an hour she lay, turning from side to side, in a vain attempt to sleep, until at last she fell into a state that was neither one thing nor the other, a sort of dazed and stupid wakefulness...

What brought her to full consciousness, her heart thumping, she did not know. It was a sound--the crunch of feet on gravel. Perhaps in her sleep subconsciously she had been listening. Danger had come before, and might come again, from without.

She was out of bed in a second and, pulling on her dressing-gown, she walked stealthily to the window and looked out. For a time she saw nothing, and then...

It was not imagination: against the darkness of the grass she saw something darker moving--the figure of a man.

She had to put her hand before her mouth to suppress the exclamation of terror. There it was again! With trembling hands she opened the door leading to the sitting-room, crossed it swiftly and opened Peter's door. The bed was empty, had not been slept in, she saw by the light of the little lamp burning on the bedside table.

The hands of the clock beneath the lamp pointed to two. She went through the room and down the stairs. The library door was open and the interior dark, but she saw a crack of light under the dining-room door and went in. This room, too, was empty, but even as she turned the handle she was conscious of a faint rhythmic-like whirr like the sound of machinery.

Where was the picture of the malignant man?

It had disappeared from the wall, and in its place was an oblong aperture. The picture and the lower portion of the panelling formed a door, now standing wide open.

Jane crept forward and, looking round the edge, saw a sight which she would never forget.

A long, narrow room, dusty, unfurnished save for a stout bench in the centre and a smaller bench against the wall littered with the paraphernalia of the etcher's craft. But it was not these on which her eye rested. On the central bench was a small machine that whirred and clicked softly as its cylinders turned, A printing machine...

Then her heart nearly stopped beating, as she saw the oblong slips which were being fed along a small canvas band. They were banknotes, and the man who was standing, watching the automatic delivery, was her husband!

CHAPTER 8

JANE COULD only stare at her husband--numbed--speechless. Here, then, was the secret of the Clever One, and the Clever One was--

She wanted to scream as the horror of her discovery came upon her. She was married to a forger, the most notorious forger in the world, the man for whom the police of Europe and America were searching. It wasn't true, it couldn't be true. Yet here he was, examining with a critical eye one of the notes he had taken from the belt.

His back was towards her as she cringed away from the door. She gained the hall, and had one foot on the stairs when she remembered the man on the lawn. Under the stress of this new shock he seemed unimportant, and it was not until she reached the upper landing that the old fear returned, and, leaning over the banisters, she called Peter by name. At the third time his voice answered her.

"What is it, Jane?" he asked.

"There is a man...on the lawn."

She tried to keep her voice steady. He heard its quaver and misunderstood the cause. She waited, listening, heard him go back to the dining-room and the soft thud of a door closing, and then a sharp click. Almost immediately she heard him race into the hall and the jangle of chains being removed.

From the window of her room she caught a glimpse of him in the light thrown from the hall. There was no sign of the intruder, and after a while she saw Peter reappear from the gloom.

She was sitting now, terribly calm, not as she had been the night before. The discovery had stunned her, yet her mind was unnaturally active. She could remember certain little incidents, examine them with a strange, passionless detachment. This was the source of Peter's wealth, the explanation for the 'legacy'. He was the Clever One, and this house, which he pretended to rent, was his headquarters.

As she drew the curtain and turned on the lights she heard his foot on the stairs, and when he appeared in the doorway she was not more than a few feet away from him.

"I could see nobody," he said breathlessly, and then, as he saw her face, she detected the look of dismay in his eyes.

She knew she was pale, never dreamt how colourless and drawn her face had become.

"My dear! You look terrible! If I find that man I'll murder him!"

"The man?" She had almost forgotten the shape on the lawn. "Oh, yes. You didn't find him?"

He made no answer, his chief concern for the moment was this shaken wife of his.

"We'll go to town tomorrow," he said, and when she shook her head: "Why?" he demanded in surprise.

"I don't know. I'll tell you tomorrow. I'm very tired."

She was more than tired. Mentally and physically she was exhausted. She lay for half an hour staring into the dark, trying to reorganize her outlook upon life and Peter. Once she heard him go out from the house, evidently conducting a new search for the unknown trespasser.

Jane went cold as a possible solution for that intrusion came to her. A detective! Was Peter under observation? In his anxiety to keep friendly with the police was he blind to the possibility that Bourke had guessed his secret and was watching him?

She fell into a deep sleep amidst these speculations and woke to find the sun pouring into her room and hear the vinegary-faced Anna asking if she had had a good night.

Jane sat up in bed and looked round, bewildered. Had it all been an ugly dream? It was almost impossible to believe that it could have been anything else, in the freshness and gaiety of the morning...

"Did you go downstairs in the night, ma'am?" Anna was asking. "I found one of your slippers in the hall."

No dream--hideous reality. She remembered leaving the slipper behind her as she had fled up the stairs.

"Reminded me of Cinderella," Anna went on--the morning seemed to have brought a little of its loveliness into her own withered heart. "Funny me dunking that--I ain't seen the play for years."

As Jane sipped her tea an idea occurred to her. "Anna--to whom does this house belong?"

Anna shook her head. "I don't know now, ma'am. It used to be owned by an old gentleman who lived abroad. Maybe he's dead by now. The agent is a gentleman named Blonberg--he's got an office in the West End--Knowlby Street. I never seen him. Sometimes he comes down here and stays a month at a time."

Jane stared at the woman.

"And yet you've never seen him?"

"No, ma'am. When Mr Blonberg comes down he brings his own servants, and a poor lot they are! The place is like a pigsty after they've gone. Nothing swept, nothing dusted, the garden in rack and ruins."

"But where do you go when he's here?"

Anna smiled toothlessly. "Home to my brother in London. All the servants get a holiday on board wages--none of us live in the neighbourhood, except the gardener. He works in the garden three days a week, but he's not allowed to come to the house."

Jane turned the extraordinary circumstances over and over in her mind. Who was Mr Blonberg? Somebody who was anxious to avoid recognition...

She began to see clearly now. This was Peter's own house...Blonberg was the name behind which he worked and schemed--the man who, according to Bourke the detective, had many confederates, but was not betrayed because they were ignorant of his identity.

She was very cool now, until a little aching of heart revealed a most peculiar and devastating knowledge. She was fond of Peter! Why this discovery of his guilt should emphasize his attractive qualities she could not analyse. Of a sudden she was conscious of his great loneliness, his danger, was tenderly aware of his gentleness with her.

What could she do? Write to her father and tell him everything? She shook her head at the thought. No, it must remain her secret--hers and Peter's--and she must find some way to avert the inevitable disaster which awaited him.

The police were already suspicious and the net was being drawn. Rouper knew him for what he was, Bourke must know, too, and be utilizing his friendship to blind Peter to the peril in which he stood.

Jane was the type that thrived on the threat of misfortune. All her dormant qualities were stirred to life. She was almost cheerful as she stood under the cold shower and felt the icy fingers of the water tattoo upon her slim body.

Peter was in the grounds, striding up and down the lawn, and at the sight of his face she hardly restrained an exclamation of alarm. He was pale, hollow-eyed, listless.

"No--I didn't sleep very well," he said. "The truth is--the country doesn't agree with me. But I am afraid you will have to put up with Longford Manor for another night--those confounded people can't put us up until tomorrow."

There was a querulous note in his tone--she had never seen him so nervous and irritable.

"I should like to spend a full week here--can't we?" she asked.

To leave this place with its ghastly secret for other prying eyes would be an unpardonable folly.

He seemed relieved at her suggestion, and then his face clouded.

"I suppose it isn't possible for you to go to town and leave me here for a day or two?" And then, quickly: "That's an extraordinary suggestion, I know, and of course it is impossible. Only--I've one or two things I want to clear up. And I thought of asking Cheyne Wells to come down for a night, I wish to see him about--things."

She puzzled over the suggestion that Donald Wells should be asked down. Did Peter wish to see him as friend or doctor? The strain he was undergoing must be a frightful one, calling for every stimulation that science could devise.

"Certainly, ask him. But, Peter, I couldn't possibly go to town by myself--people would think all sorts of queer things."

He ought to know, she thought, that what 'people' might think or say would not influence her in the slightest degree. Apparently he accepted her conventional objection without question. She was almost annoyed.

Slipping her arm through his, she paced by his side.

"Peter--I'm being a selfish pig and you're being a perfect angel. If you don't hate me you ought to--if I were you I'd loathe the sight of me! But I really do want to help you--where and how I can. I mean--in various ways."

He laughed softly.

"You don't know how you're helping me at this very minute!" he said, and added, before he could check his speech: "I hope you never will know."

Here was a challenge which yesterday she would have taken up instantly. To his relief she did not ask the question which he thought was inevitable.--He gave her little chance, for he went on:

"If you think you're being unreasonable, it will comfort you to know that I'm not worrying--really. My natural vanity was rather hurt for a bit. Men are rather godlike--they think the world and all that is in it was created for their satisfaction. I don't think you hate me or that we're going to drift apart, or that we've discovered that we've both made a terrible mistake and that the future is a tragic blank. The only unreality about our marriage was an entire absence of courtship--an old-fashioned word but the only one."

She nodded. That really was the case. Peter and she had enjoyed the most formal of engagements. Except for the kiss he had given her in the vestry on the day of their marriage, there had been nothing.

"Anyway we avoided that illusion," he went on surprisingly. "And it is the greatest of all the illusions. A man meets a girl, is on his best behaviour--meets her again, calls on her people and takes her to dances and things. She learns to like him--allows him certain little privileges--they drift into an engagement. He seldom shows her the ugly side of him--always on his best behaviour, always acting perfection. Naturally she is an idealist and, seeing her ideal, loves the man he shows her. And then they marry and he slackens off. She sees him at breakfast, when he doesn't have to act, and after dinner, when he's as nature made him, and she knows she's been cheated. I'd rather you were never cheated."

Jane listened, fascinated. For the moment she forgot that she was talking to the Clever One, the forger for whom the police of Europe were searching; forgot the cloud that shadowed both their lives, in the exposition of a philosophy which held for her a hope--a certainty of happiness.

"We'll just hang on and trust in truth," he smiled down on her oddly. "I think we shall have great need of one another. Please God you will have no great shocks in the near future, but if you do--I want to feel that there is firm ground beyond any mud through which we may have to wade."

Thus, in the glory of morning sunlight and amidst the fragrance of flowers, he offered his first warning of the catastrophe that was to shake her to the very foundations of life.

CHAPTER 9

"WHAT DO you mean--mud?"

She had to force herself to ask the question, and her voice was husky. Perhaps he would tell her the truth and ask her help. She knew he loved her; was more sure of him at that moment than ever she had been. The realization brought her to the edge of tears. Eagerly, yet dreading, she waited, holding her breath.

"Mud--well, ugliness. I can't explain."

He was vague, unwilling, she guessed, to go any farther along the path of self-revelation. The breakfast gong put a prosaic period to his mood.

At breakfast he relapsed into silence. Once she saw him staring fixedly at the picture on the panelled wall, and, in spite of her self-control, shuddered. Fortunately he did not notice this.

She tried to make conversation. Very daringly she referred to the eccentric Mrs Untersohn--a subject that had by tacit agreement been taboo--and only then did she arouse him to interest.

"A queer woman--she lives at Hampstead--no, that isn't why she is queer. Lots of nice, normal people live at Hampstead. She ought to be well off, but I suspect her son is a drain. I've helped her many times--I suppose I've given her ten thousand pounds in the past four years."

He was very diffident and apologetic about his plan to have Cheyne Wells down for the night.

"As a matter of fact, it was his suggestion; he thought I was looking run down--are you sure you don't mind?"

If he had asked her on the previous night she would have been wholehearted in her endorsement of the plan. But now--? She did not want outsiders. With Peter alone she might get nearer to his confidence.

"When is he coming?"

"Tonight--if you'd rather he didn't I could put him off?"

But she shook her head.

That morning, after Peter had gone to the village to send some telegrams (he said), she made a discovery. It came about in a most commonplace way. Anna had unpacked her trunk and deposited its contents in various drawers of the ancient wardrobe. Jane could not find her handkerchiefs and rang for the ancient maid.

"Now where did I put 'em, ma'am?"

Anna added a new homeliness to her face by a deep frown.

"I remember--I put all the handkerchiefs together in Mr Clifton's dressing-table drawer. I'll get 'em."

"Don't trouble--I can find them myself."

Jane was in no great hurry. It was half an hour later that she went into Peter's room. The one drawer in his dressing-table was locked, but the key was on the table top. She turned the lock, opened the drawer, and the first thing she saw was a neat pile of small copper plates. She lifted the top plate out and instantly recognized it as one of the collection which Peter said her father had lost. There was no doubt about it. So they hadn't been lost after all! Peter, in his absent-minded way, had them here all the time and had forgotten. When had they been mislaid? She concentrated in an effort of memory. On April 1st! She remembered that her father had made a jest about the date, denying that he had ever had the plates and claiming that Peter was making an April fool of him.

The servant came up soon after and Jane asked carelessly: "When was Mr Blonberg here last?"

Anna thought.

"At the beginning of April, ma'am."

So that was it! Jane recalled the fact that at the beginning of April Peter had a mysterious call to Paris.

"He didn't always sleep here--Mr Blonberg. He comes down for the day in his car and goes back the same night as often as not. He always drives himself in a little closed car."

Jane sighed.

"How interesting!" she said.

With an effort she drove her mind to a more mundane subject.

"Dr Wells is staying the night--I suppose there is a spare bedroom?"

"Three, ma'am. Is he coming by himself?"

It was a startling possibility that Donald Wells should bring his wife, the one woman in the world whom Jane actively disliked.

"I suppose so--yes, I'm sure."

The possibility of being called upon to entertain Marjorie Cheyne Wells was more than she dared contemplate.

Donald came after lunch--and came alone.

"There is nothing to be alarmed about," he told her when, at the first opportunity, she sought him out and asked point-blank if there was any special reason for his visit. "Peter is run down--I don't exactly know why. He was as fit as a fiddle when he left London--I hope that woman Untersohn hasn't rattled him. Marjorie? Oh, she's fine," he answered shortly.

He gave her the impression that he was not anxious to discuss his wife. Jane had guessed that the relationships between Donald and his wife were not of the best, and Basil Hale had suggested that Mrs Cheyne Wells was a difficult woman to live with. But then, Basil's gossip was frankly malicious.

For some reason Jane began to resent the presence of the doctor before he had been in the house an hour. He represented a barrier to the smooth progression of her new understanding with Peter--an understanding which must remain one-sided until the opportunity came for her to tell him all that she knew and feared. Towards the close of the day, however, she had an experience which shattered much of her confidence that the understanding could be anything more than one-sided.

She was alone with him for a few minutes before tea, and remembered the incident of the morning. Perhaps he himself was unaware that the lost plates had been found.

"Oh, I forgot to tell you, Peter--do you know that your plates are in the drawer--the plates you thought Daddy had lost--"

So far she got, and stopped. His face had gone the colour of chalk.

"How do you know--why did you go to my drawer?"

His voice was sharp, almost angry, and momentarily she was staggered by his tone.

"I went for some handkerchiefs--but, Peter, why are you cross? I thought you valued those etchings..."

He was making a supreme effort to recover his equilibrium.

"Yes--sorry I'm so jumpy. In the drawer, are they? What a careless fool I am! And I suppose I left the key on the table? I really need a nurse!"

The colour was back in his face, but he was obviously distressed by her discovery. She knew, when he suggested that he did not know the plates were there, he was lying, and lying clumsily.

"Very awkward--I mean, after accusing your father of losing them. Jane, I'd be greatly obliged if you would keep this matter to yourself. I mean, I shouldn't like your father to know that I'd made such an ass of myself."

"But he'd understand--"

"I'd rather you didn't tell him--honestly. I'm rather keen on his not knowing."

It seemed such a stupid little thing to make such a fuss about, but she promised smilingly: the smile was wholly forced.

His anger she might understand; his undisguised fear was inexplicable. Jane was baffled. Just when she thought she was beginning to know him, something happened that threw her back to the place whence she had started. She found a sort of an explanation in the presence of Donald Wells. Peter was a bundle of jangled nerves--for the moment abnormal. How far she had contributed to that state was a matter for uneasy consideration.

She wrote to John Leith that afternoon--a colourless letter about trivialities. She made no mention of the lost plates. Her letter to Basil Hale was equally uninformative. She wondered as she wrote what would be Basil's caustic verdict if he knew that his letter to her had been opened. That was another strange happening at variance with all her preconceptions of Peter.

Dinner was for eight o'clock, and at seven Peter and Donald Wells were still together in the library. She dressed and came down. They were still engaged, and she wandered out into the garden. The world was very quiet and, except for the chattering of the birds, there was no sound. The peacefulness of the evening had a curiously sedative effect upon her--she was getting nervous, too. How nervous, she was to discover as she passed through the opening in the yew hedge that led to the garden. Somebody called her name in a whisper and she jumped.

"Oh! Who is that?"

She looked round with a wildly beating heart, saw nobody, and was preparing to flee when the voice spoke again, this time more loudly.

"Jane!"

It was Basil Hale, sitting on a low garden seat, scarcely visible under the drooping branches of a willow tree.

"Basil! What on earth are you doing here?"

He came cautiously from cover, a broad grin on his red face.

"Scared you!" he chuckled. "Where is hubby--with Donald?"

There was something in his tone that she did not like--perhaps she had forgotten the old domineering air of proprietorship he had habitually assumed. It jarred on her now a little.

"Yes--they are in the library. Are you staying to dinner?"

He shook his head.

"No--I've got my flivver down the road--I was on my way back to town and thought I'd slip in for a glimpse of the bonny bride."

Her eyes were smiling--it had always been difficult to be annoyed with Basil, though she found it less of an effort than usual.

"Been down to hear the preliminary court proceedings against Worth, a crazy labourer who murdered his wife with a hatchet," he said pleasantly.

Basil had been called to the Bar. He never practised, but he took an academic interest in horrors. Jane took none whatever, but it had so happened that in her ennui of the afternoon she had read the newspaper very thoroughly, and amongst other items had noticed that the police court proceedings against the mad Worth had been postponed. She was on the point of offering ironical condolences that he had had his journey for nothing, when he continued:

"I've been in court all day--"

"But the case was postponed."

He seemed to regard this as a great joke.

"Fancy your knowing that! Jane, you're becoming quite a murder expert. Yes, it was postponed and my introduction is spoilt! Dam' nuisance--and I rehearsed it so carefully! Do you remember the case of Alexander Welerson?"

She was looking at him, her mouth an 'O' of amazement.

"What are you talking about, Basil? Have you been--"

"Drinking? No. Welerson was a very rich man who killed two perfectly innocent servants in cold blood. He's the text of my argument. He was crazy mad, of course. There was a bad history of insanity in the family. His father died in an asylum and Welerson eventually died in Dartmoor. There hasn't been a member of the family that wasn't queer in some way or other."

"What is all this to do with me?" she demanded, and he smiled up at her slyly.

"Wells is here, isn't he? He's been looking after Peter for years. Why is Wells here now? Because Peter feels another attack is coming on, after Donald had given him a clean bill of health for his marriage."

She stood petrified with horror at the innuendo.

"Peter--what do you mean?"

He saw that she understood, and nodded.

"Peter's crazy. I like you too much to allow you to stay in ignorance of your danger. He's the son of Alexander Welerson--a mad homicide--and it's about time you knew what your fool father has allowed you to marry!"

Jane Clifton looked at the red-faced man, dazed, uncomprehending. The horror of his revelation momentarily paralysed her.

"It's not true." She found her voice. "It was a terrible thing to say--terrible!"

He was grave enough now.

"I'm not blaming your father--Wells said he was cured and they're all gambling on that. But they're gambling with your life, Jane--"

He heard a quick step on the gravel and turned with a grimace of fear that she did not fail to notice.

"What are you doing here?"

It was Peter's voice, hard and authoritative, Basil blinked at him.

"Eh? I happened to be passing and I thought I'd call in to see Jane. I hope you don't mind?"

Peter glanced from one to the other. Jane's face was drawn and haggard; her trembling body told him less than he wished to know, more than he could see without pain.

"What have you been telling her?" he demanded in a low voice.

Basil made a pitiable attempt to appear indifferent.

"All the gossip of town, old boy--" he began, but Peter turned abruptly away to the girl.

"What is wrong, Jane--what has he told you?"

She shook her head.

"Nothing," she muttered, and tried to brush past him.

"What has he told you?" His strong hands held her by the shoulder. He was looking down into her face. She did not answer, and again he turned to Basil.

"I've two scores against you. Hale," he said slowly, "and I'm going to allow one of them to wait."

"I'm afraid I can't follow you." Basil was smiling, but the uneasiness in his voice was clear even to Jane.

"You broke into my house the second night I was here, and into my wife's room. For that I intended killing you. And if the thing you have told Jane is what I believe it to be, keep out of my way, Hale!"

"Don't threaten me," grated the other, fury overcoming fear.

"I have warned you," said Peter.

What followed was so unexpected, so quick to happen, that Jane thereafter had only a confused memory. She saw Basil Hale crouch, heard the thud of the blow as Peter's fist caught him squarely on the jaw, and in another second he was a sobbing, howling, bestial thing, writhing in a clump of dwarf roses. Lifting her bodily, Peter swung her through the yew opening.

"I think you'd better go to the house," he said, and turned to meet the fury that came leaping towards him with whirlwind arms.

CHAPTER 10

MADAME UNTERSOHN lived in a dark little Georgian house in Hampstead: a squat, two-floored building that was hardly visible behind high walls or through a confusion of trees which must have been planted in some remote period almost trunk to trunk. It had been built in the days when America was still a British colony and the neighbourhood a veritable woodland, and was a house of uneven floors and low ceilings; the lower rooms had the everlasting musty earth smell which seems inevitable in such old houses. They are living yet decaying things, rooted in stale soil.

A dark house that at nights was full of creaks and rustlings; one almost heard the shuffling of ghostly feet along its crooked corridors.

If Mrs Untersohn could have lived happily anywhere it was at Heathlands with its half acre of unkempt garden. The place was to her taste. A long drawing-room cluttered up with quaint modern furniture, showy Japanese cabinets and tawdry little souvenirs of her limited travels, was her ideal of what such a room should be. Two domestic servants and a chauffeur (she hired a footman for state occasions from a local garage) comprised her staff.

Mrs Untersohn was in her drawing-room sitting at an inadequate writing-table and endeavouring, with the aid of pencil stub and a memorandum book, to make both ends meet. There were inevitable miscalculations, both in addition and subtraction, but the broad effect of her accountancy was depressing. She rubbed her nose with her knuckles, shook her head and betrayed by other signs the extent of her dismay.

She enjoyed a fixed income on which she could have lived comfortably, but Madame Untersohn had many demands upon her purse--heavy and insistent demands which could not be denied.

She looked at the jewelled watch on her wrist, rose with a groan of discomfort and went upstairs to her bedroom. When she came down she was dressed in an unpretentious ulster and a very plain hat--a change which considerably improved her appearance, though she would have been annoyed if anybody had told her this.

She went out, not announcing her departure, and, walking to the Edgware Road, boarded a bus. It was nine o'clock when she came to Marylebone Lane and Knowlby Street. Higgson House was a narrow-faced office block that had been built on the frontage of a dwelling house by a speculative builder. It stood, an eyesore to the neighbourhood, in a street of good class houses and ran back to the untidy mews behind. Higgson House had ruined its builder and brought to bankruptcy two of its eventual purchasers. Its present owner had apparently found tenants for the tiny suites and narrow rooms, for on the door posts were divers brass plates and painted names. In faded yellow letters she read 'Blonberg, Financier'.

The front door was closed and she pressed a bell. Almost instantly there was a 'click!' and the door yielded to her pressure. Closing it behind her, she passed along the meagre passage and began to climb the stairs. Three flights she negotiated and then came to a small landing from which two doors opened. She turned the handle of that facing her and entered a small back room lighted by one dusty lamp.

"Come in," called a voice.

It came from an inner room. There was no illumination here, but sufficient light came from the outer office to show a small table apparently set against the wall. Mrs Untersohn knew, as she sat down breathlessly, that the 'wall' was a screen of fine wire gauze and that sitting behind that gauze was the man she sought.

"I had your note." The voice from the darkness had a hollow sound--a little metallic and unnatural. "You ask for a lot of money."

"I'm worth a lot of money," she answered in her deep voice. "Millions! If I had my rights..."

"I am not interested in your rights," said the voice, "but I am very much interested in something else. You come at a very good time. Mrs Untersohn, if your son values his life he must not repeat his visit to Longford Manor!"

"Eh!"

The unseen could imagine her jaw dropping with astonishment. Then she was not in it, he decided.

"I don't know what you're talking about, Mr Blonberg," she gasped. "My son? He didn't go to Longford at all. I went there myself--and it was like talking to a bit of stone tryin' to make Clifton do the right thing by me. Him rollin' in money an' me tryin' to make a penny do the work of a pound--"

"Your son was at Longford Manor last night," said the voice sternly. "He broke into the room of Mrs Clifton. Warn him. He should be down on his knees in gratitude that he has the chance I give him. How much do you want?"

The last question was put abruptly.

"A thousand, Mr Blonberg--and as to my son."

"You can't have a thousand. Five hundred will be posted to you. Have you the promissory note?"

She fumbled in her bag, produced a slip of paper and pushed it through a slit, in shape and size like the slit of a letterbox, cut in the gauze. Instantly she heard the crinkle of notes and saw a thin pad of money lying on the table before her.

"Unfasten the spring catch of the front door as you go out and close it after you," said the voice of Mr Blonberg, "and as usual wait in the outer office until you hear my bell ring."

Mrs Untersohn got up from the table.

"I only want to tell you that my boy wouldn't do anything wrong," she said. "He's naturally high spirited being a gentleman born, but--"

"Better be a gentleman born than a gentleman dead," said the ominous voice. "Wait in the office."

She went outside. Presently she heard the snap of a lock and a faint moaning sound that died away into silence. A few seconds later, a noisy bell tinkled. Mrs Untersohn went out, shutting the door, which fastened behind her. Obediently she released the catch of the front door and slammed it.

This time she did not go back by bus: it was raining, and, chartering a providential taxicab which she found in Marylebone Lane, she was driven home.

And throughout the journey her troubled mind was so occupied by the thought of the danger attending the one person she loved, that she did not realize she was still grasping the bundle of notes Blonberg had pushed into her hands.

Her son. There had been a threa