Chapter III: Part 3

"Where's the fire?" inquired Alfie, idiomatically; but his professional friend, like other artists in narration, and all givers of real news, was not going to surrender the bone of the situation until his audience sat up and begged for it.

Mr. Croucher literally did sit up, while the exasperating Shoddy interrupted himself to make a stealthy tour of the room, in the course of which his electric torch illumined the comfortably bolted door, and the delectable box of Upmanns. To one of these he helped himself without permission, but a brace were in blast before he resumed his position on the bed.

"The fire?" said he, as though seconds and not minutes had elapsed since the cryptic question. "There's no fire anywhere as I know of--not to-night--but there soon may be, that's why I want you out o' this. If you didn't commit yourself, Alfie, don't you see as somebody else must 'ave done?"

"Oh, bring it up!" cried Croucher under his breath.

"Well, if you didn't stiffen that copper on the night o' the sufferygite disturbance--an' we know you didn't--then somebody else did!"

"You don't mean to tell me you know who did?"

There had been a tense though tiny pause; there was another while Shoddy changed the torch to his right hand, and blew a cloud over the head of his now recumbent companion.

"I know what everybody says, Alfie."

"More than their prayers, I'll bet, like they did before. Wot do they say?"

"One o' the sufferygites----"

"Corpsed the copper?"

"That's it, old man."

"And I never thought of it!"

"It bears some thinkin' about, don't it?" said Shoddy. "Why, you're trem'lin' like a blessed leaf!"

"I should think I was trem'lin'! So would you if you'd been through wot I been ... Shod!"

"Yuss, Alfie?"

"I see the 'ole blessed thing!"

"I thought you would."

"It was 'er wot broke the jooler's winder for me!"

"That's wot they say."

"They? Who?"

"Lots o' people. I 'eard it down some mews: some o' the pipers 'ave 'inted at it. Topham's in fair 'ot water all round; they say 'e's 'ushed it up because she's in serciety."

"Wot's 'er nime, Shod?"

"Lidy Moyle--Lidy Vera Moyle, I think it is. And 'ere's another thing, a thing that I was forgettin'."

"Out with it."

"I see 'er come 'ere this afternoon, whilst I was watchin' the 'ouse in case you come out."

"My Gawd, Shoddy! Let me sit up. I can't breathe lyin' down."

"She 'ad some flowers wiv 'er," said Shoddy, pursuing his reminiscences. "Looks as though she's got a friend in the 'ome."

"I'm the friend," said Mr. Croucher grimly. "Take and run yer light over that wash-stand; the guv'nor brought 'em up 'isself wiv these 'ere smokes."

"Roses, in the month o' March!" murmured Shoddy, as a bowl of beauties filled the disk of light; "'ot'ouse flowers for little Alfie! Why, the girl's fair struck on you, cully!"

"I'll strike 'er!" said Alfie, through teeth that chattered with emotion. "I very near 'anged for the little biter, and don't you forget it!"

"Not me," said Shoddy, steering for the bed with his headlights of white-hot filament and red-hot cigar. "That's wot brought me 'ere through thick and thin."

"So she's the great unknown!" said Croucher more than once, but not twice in the same tone. "So it was 'er, was it?" he inquired as often, until Shoddy insisted on a hearing.

"Don't I keep tellin' yer?" said Shoddy. "That's wot brings me, at the gaudiest risks you ever see--only to 'ear you gas! Can't you listen for a change? There's a big thing on if you've guts enough for the job."

It was a simple thing, however, like most big things; the projector had it at his finger-ends; and in a very few minutes Mr. Croucher was considering a complete, crude, and yet eminently practical proposition.

"There's money in it," he was forced to admit, "if there ain't the big money you flatter yerself. But I believe she thinks o' givin' me a start in life any'ow."

"This'd be a start an' a finish, Alfie! Besides, it'd be your revenge; don't you forget wot you've been through," urged the other.

"Catch me!" said Croucher, eagerly. "But--don'cher see? I been through so much that I was lookin' forward to dossin' down 'ere a bit. I ain't the man I was. It's wot I need. Where's the fire, as I said afore? The gal won't run away."

"That's just wot she will, Alfie; goin' abroad any day--an' might get married any day, a piece like 'er. Then you might find it more of a job. There's another 'old we've got, an' might lose any old day."

The other hold appealed with peculiar power to the character and temperament of Alfred Croucher, and not less strongly to a certain sagacity which added more to his equipment. But he had never been quite so comfortable in his life; comfort had never been so decidedly his due; and the substance of present luxury (with a fresh start in the near future) was not lightly to be exchanged for a gold-mine, with all a gold-mine's gambling chances, including the proverbial optimism of prospectors.

The discussion ended in a compromise and the withdrawal of Shoddy by the catlike ways and means of his arrival. But he did not depart without pointing, through the open window and a forest of chimney-stacks, to a lighted but uncurtained square on a lower level. And thither, at certain appointed hours, the patient might have been caught peeping, or even in the act of rude and furtive signals, for several days to come.

Handled as it deserves, the tale of those days would make a psychological chapter of dual interest, and for reasons that may yet appear. But for the moment Alfred Croucher holds the stage, and soliloquies are out of vogue. Yet even his objective life had points of interest. He slept less than he had planned to sleep, but read more than he had ever read in all his life; and his reading, if not a sign of grace, was at least a straw that showed the way the wind might have blown but for the intrusive Shoddy.

Out of the doctor's little typewritten list, the patient in the top-floor-back began by choosing _For the Term of His Natural Life_. It held him--with a tortured brow that sometimes glistened. When the book was finished, he was advised that _It Is Never Too Late to Mend_ was a better thing of the same kind; "In spite of its name," added Dollar, in studied disparagement. Croucher took the hint, and was soon breathing as hard as he had done before he knew that Shoddy was Shoddy; was heard blaspheming over Hawes in his solitude, and left wondering what Tom Robinson's creator would have made of Alfred Croucher. Something of that speculation found its way into words, with the return of the book, and was the cause of lengthier visitations from the doctor, whose eye began to brighten when it fell on Croucher, as that of a man put on his mettle after all.

And then one morning he came in with a blue review and a new long poem, which might have hurt but might have helped; only it had no chance of doing either, because the top back room was empty of Alfred Croucher, who had walked out of the house in the loudest of his brand-new clothes.

III

The Rome Express had left Paris sprinkled with the green flakes of a precocious spring; and it hummed through a mellow evening into a night of velvet clasped with a silver moon. The famous train was not uncomfortably crowded; it is not everybody who will pay two pounds, eight shilling, seven pence for a berth in a sleeper which in Switzerland, say, would cost some twenty francs. Most of those who had committed the extravagance seemed by way of getting their money's worth; even the lady traveling alone in the foremost _wagon-lit_, though she refrained from dining in the restaurant-car, would have struck an acquaintance as in better spirits than for some months past. And so she was. But she was still far from being the Lady Vera Moyle of last year's fogs.

She was going to her mother, who had been seriously ill since Christmas, but was now completing her recovery in Rome. And yet her illness had meant less to Lady Armagh than to the wayward child who had been told (by the rest of the family) to consider herself its cause; it might indeed have been a direct dispensation to tie Lady Vera's hands and tongue; and in the _train de luxe_, perhaps for the first time, she herself recognized the merciful wisdom of Providence in the matter.

Alfred Croucher was a free man: that was the great thing. There were moments when it was an even greater thing than Lady Armagh's convalescence. But there was later and greater news yet for Lady Vera to gloat over in the train. Not only was poor Croucher a free man, but that dear Doctor Dollar had hopes of him at last! He had said so the day she left for Paris; he had never said anything of the kind before. Nothing could have been more pessimistic than the crime doctor's first report on his latest patient; nothing franker than the way he had made room for him in the home, merely and entirely to gratify her whim. Alfred Croucher was "not his style," and there had been an end of him but for the fact that Lady Vera was.

She belonged to the class that he was pleased to consider as potentially the most criminal of all. She was well aware of it, and the knowledge provided her with a considerable range of feelings as the train flew on and on. She felt herself the object of a purely pathological interest; she felt almost as small as a specimen under a microscope; she felt lonelier than ever in her life before....

Lonely she was in the way that mattered least. She was traveling for once without a maid. The faithful creature (a would-be militant of the blood-thirstiest, in her day) had been with her dear ladyship over the Sunday in Paris (hobnobbing with certain exiles for the Cause); but just as they were leaving their hotel a telegram had come to summon her to a bucolic death-bed. Esther would have let her old father die without her, but her beloved ladyship, still quick with her own filial awakenings, had sent her about her dismal business with a kiss.

The compartment was overheated; they always are unless you complain in time. Lady Vera had made her efficient little fuss too late, and the result was not apparent before the small hours and Modane. During the long wait there she lay awake, though she had duly entrusted her keys to the conductor, and the voices of those who had omitted that precaution caused a welcome change in her "long, long thoughts." She put her mind to her fellow-passengers, and kept it on them with native resolution.

She was in decent company: a moderately well-known man and wife in one adjoining compartment, a white-haired ecclesiastic in the other. She wove a romance about the venerable gentleman, and speculated on the well-being of the other pair. In such innocent ways could she amuse herself when out of muddle-headed mischief in the name of God knows what. In all else she was sweet and sane enough--unless it was just one tiny matter that annoyed her memory before she fell asleep to the renewed lullaby of the express. It was the utterly unimportant matter of a youngish man in a loud suit, one of a brace of incredibly common Englishmen, who had nevertheless been staying at the hotel in Paris, had "passed a remark" to Esther in the lift, and certainly stared with insolence at Esther's mistress, not only in Paris but in passing along the corridor of this very train, before and after the hour for dinner.

To Vera Moyle there seemed no time at all between her passing thought of this creature and the vile glare that woke her up. At first it blinded her, for she was in the upper berth, within inches of the excruciating blaze. It came almost as a relief when a head bobbed between the glare and her eyes.

Lady Vera blinked her indignation. She was too sleepy to do more at first, and too old a traveler to make much fuss about a mere piece of stupidity. She could not see the man's face, but his head was of the type which occasions the inevitable libel on the bullet, and its hideousness hardly mitigated by the Rembrandtesque effect of the electric light behind it. She conceived it to belong to some blundering official, and ordered him out in pretty sharp French. But the man did not move. And in another short moment Vera Moyle had become aware of three very horrible things: it was the creature in the loud suit, and he had shut the door behind him, and was holding an automatic pistol to her breast.

"One syl'ble that anybody else can 'ear," he muttered as her mouth opened, "an' it's yer larst in life! 'Old yer noise an' I won't be 'ard on you--not 'alf as 'ard as you been on me!"

"It isn't--oh, surely it isn't Croucher?" cried the girl, with an emotion made up of every element but fear.

"It is Croucher," said he in brutal mimicry. "That bein' just so, I puts away the barker--see?--no decepshun!" The pistol dropped into a loud tweed pocket. "I reckon I can do me own bit o' barkin'--yuss! an' bitin', too!" concluded Croucher, with an appropriate snarl.

"Will you please go out?" said Lady Vera, still with sorrow in her steady eyes.

"No, I will not please. I'll see you damned first!" said Croucher, with sudden ferocity--"like you very near seen me! If we're over'eard, you'll be thought no better'n you ought to be; but by Gawd they won't think you as bad as wot you are!"

Lady Vera took no advantage of a studious pause. The ruffian was making his points with more than merely ruffianly effect; the whole thing might have been carefully rehearsed. But to the girl in the upper berth it was now no more than she deserved. It was a light enough punishment for the dreadful deed by her committed--no matter how unconscious, in how fine a frenzy or how just a cause--and on him visited with all but the last dread vengeance of the criminal law. He had a right to say what he liked to her after that, even to say it then and there, with all his natural and acquired brutality. Was it not she who had done most of all to brutalize him?

"That is, until I tell 'em," added Croucher, with crafty significance. His hearer had to recall the words before the pause; when she had done so, he was again requested to leave the compartment, and there was a harder light in her eyes.

"I'll see you in the morning," she promised. "I'm going on to Rome."

He laughed scornfully. "You needn't tell _me_ where you're goin'! I know all about you, and 'ave done for some time. I been on yer tracks, my dear! You seen me. It's your own fault we didn't 'ave it out before. This ain't quite the pitch--but it's a better place than the one you got me into!"

"I got you--out again," was what Lady Vera had begun to say, but something about him made her stop short of that. "I was doing my best for you," she continued humbly. "I thought you were going to let me give you a fresh start in life."

"A fresh start! I want a bit more than that, lidy!"

"Well, what do you want?"

He rolled his eyeballs over the racks laden with her hand-luggage.

"Your jewel-case," said he promptly. "Which is it?"

"That one, in this corner, over my feet."

Her equal alacrity might have been the mere measure of her eagerness to get rid of him; but Alfred Croucher was far too old in deception to be himself very easily deceived.

"Then you can keep it, with my love!" said he. "I'll trouble you for them rings instead--_and_ the rest wot you're 'idin' be'ind 'em!"

The girl turned paler in the electric light She was sitting up in her suspicious readiness to point out the jewel-case; the other hand, with most of her rings on it, had flown instinctively to her throat; for she was traveling, as ladies will, with her greatest treasures--her diamond necklace and pendant, and a string of pearls--on her neck for safety.

"Suppose I refuse and----"

She glanced toward the bell.

"Then I'll say what _I_ know."

"And what do you know?" Her back was to the wall.

"What I see that night! What I see an' was mug enough not to twig till I come out an' 'eard all the talk! Is that good enough? If not, the rest'll keep; but it'll put you in the jug all right, I don't care 'oo's on your side. It's one law for the rich and one for the pore. 'Ang me as never done it, an' 'ush you up, as did! But I've heard tell that murder will out, an' you'll find that murderers will in--to prison--even when they're titled lidies with the King on 'is throne be'ind 'em! It'll ruin you, if it does no more--ruin you an' yours--an' break all your 'earts!"

It was enough. She stripped her neck, she stripped her fingers; rings and necklace, pearls and pendant, all lay in a shimmering heap in his capacious palm, held for a moment's triumph under the electric light, reflected for that moment in a mirror which his bulky frame had hidden until now.

It was the mirror on the door of the miniature dressing-room between every two compartments in the _train de luxe_; but in the very moment of his exultation it ceased to reflect either Alfred Croucher or his ill-gotten spoil. The door had opened; it framed a sable figure crowned with silvery locks; lean hands flew out from the black shoulders, and met round the neck of Croucher with the fell dexterity of a professional garroter.

The pair backed together without a word. The one had murder in his set teeth, the other death in the bulging eyes and darkening face, with its collar of interlaced fingers white to the nails with their own pressure. Lady Vera watched the two men as the fawn might watch the python struck to timely death, until the communicating door shut upon them both, and only her own unearthly form remained in the mirror. And the train ran on and on, and the whole coach creaked and trembled, as coaches will even in a _train de luxe_, only in that particular compartment it had not been noticeable for some time.

Presently, as her nerve came back, one or two further observations of a negative order were gradually made by Vera Moyle. She may be said to have noticed that she did not notice one or two things she might have expected to notice by now. The chief thing was that there was no sound whatever from the compartment beyond the looking-glass door, no fuss or undue traffic in the corridor. What had happened? Only too soon she knew.

They had stopped at some nameless station between the tags of the Italian boot. It was a chance of peeping out, and out peeped the shaken girl from her window overlooking the line. And there, skipping on to the next low platform, bag in hand, went the loud trousers under Alfred Croucher's equally new and noisy ulster; and there at his elbow went the venerable ecclesiastic, even holding him by the sleeve!

It was a long road to Rome for Lady Vera Moyle, but toward the end there came another stage in which the _wagon-lit_ forgot to swing and sing like humbler coaches, and the pale Campagna swam past unseen. It began with a knock behind the drawn blind of her compartment--now but a mirrored divan of Utrecht velvet and stamped leather--as unsuggestive of a good night's rest as the white face and the bright eyes behind the tiny table in the corner.

"_Entrez!_" she cried with nervous irritation.

The door opened and shut upon the somber face and long athletic limbs of John Dollar.

"Doctor Dollar! I had no idea you were in the train!"

Her voice had broken with very joy; her hand trembled pitifully during its momentary repose in his.

"You have never shown up, you see," said he. "I have been in the next compartment all the way from Paris."

"The next compartment on which side?"

He jerked his head at his own reflection in the looking-glass door.

"But there was a priest in there!" cried the girl.

"There was the high priest of a new religion in which you'll never believe any more," said Dollar with a wry smile. "May he sit down for a minute, Lady Vera?"

She looked at him with cooling eyes. "Certainly, Doctor Dollar, if it makes an explanation any easier."

"I didn't intend to explain at all," he had the nerve to tell her. "I meant my ecclesiastical body to do that for me--but its wig was blown out of the window on the other side of Genoa. I've been hanging about all day in the hope of catching you. I couldn't leave it any longer. I had to give you these."

And he placed upon the table between them the diamond necklace and pendant, the string of pearls, and the handful of rings she had been wearing in the night.

"You made him give them up!" she cried, in thankful tears that never fell, but only softened and sweetened her indescribably.

"Naturally," he laughed. "It wasn't very difficult."

"And I thought you were a confederate when I saw you crossing the line together!"

"I was putting the fear of a foreign jail upon him to the last. But he had a confederate in the train; he was in reserve outside your berth until I lured him into mine and laid him out. Otherwise I should have been with you sooner; but in one way it was better to take our man with your jewels on him--there was no getting out of it. The two of them were only too glad to be kicked out at the first station. And the other fellow was a man who broke into my house to see Croucher the first night we had him there."

"Did they tell you so?"

"No. I knew it at the time. I heard the whole thing, even to fragments of a conversation from which it was possible to reconstruct the plan they actually brought off last night. I make it a rule not to listen at patients' doors, any more than one would at other people's, but I'm not going to blush for this particular exception."

Her soft wet eyes were looking him through and through.

"Yet you kept him on--for my sake!"

"Not altogether, Lady Vera." They were an honest couple. "It put me on my mettle; it gave me something to prevent. At first--as I'm afraid you knew--I really didn't want to touch the fellow with a pole. He was an obvious incurable; he would have been better hanged--justly or unjustly."

"Don't speak of that--or do!" exclaimed the girl. "It makes me forgive him everything!"

"Well, my first idea was about right. He was beyond reclaim. But I never thought he would give me a definite move to block; that, as you know; is one's chief job after all, and it put a new complexion on the case. It was as though--as though one took a man on for cancer and found him plotting to shoot the Chancellor of the Exchequer before he died! I apologize for the analogy, Lady Vera," said Dollar, making the most of their laugh, "but the man became a new proposition on the spot. And the funny thing is that I believe I almost might have cured him after all--done him some good, anyhow--but for the very thing that bucked me up!"

Lady Vera looked out at a flying brake of naked trees, the color of cigar-ash. He had lost her attention for the moment.

"I was a little fool," she said at length. "I should have listened to you, and been content to help in some other way. I am sorry."

"I'm not!" replied Doctor Dollar. "It was a very sporting folly--but everything you ever did was that!"

She shook her head sadly, as a brown river, girt with olives, flashed under the train like a child's skipping-rope.

"I haven't changed my opinions," she said, just a trifle aggressively. "But I would give my life to undo many of my actions--not only that one--many, many!" and she looked him bravely and humbly in the eyes. "So the whole thing has served me right, and will if it happens all over again."

"If what does?"

"This blackmailing of me by that poor man!"

"It won't. I've frightened him."

"He will think of some subtler way."

"There's no subtlety in him, no power, no initiative, no anything but mere brute force," said Dollar, with a touch of that same strength and weakness in his unusually emphatic assertion. "The fellow is a deadly tool and nothing more. He knuckled under to me in a moment."

Lady Vera shook her head again, but this time she was looking firmly in his face.

"I feel," she said, with a stoical conviction, "that I shall be fair game to him as long as we are both in the world. And it's what I deserve."

Dollar abandoned his attempt at disingenuous disabuse; the extreme to which he flew instead was a little startling, but these two knew each other.

"You must marry, Lady Vera," he was moved to say. But his manner was eminently uninspired. He might have been telling her she must hand her keys to the hotel porter at Rome. That was in fact the note he meant to take, only he sang it louder than he knew.

"I can never marry," she answered calmly. "I have blood upon my hands."

"You can marry a man who knows!"

And the unaltered note took on a tremolo of which he was both aware and ashamed; but still their eyes were frankly locked.

"I can marry nobody, Doctor Dollar."

"The man I mean isn't fit to black your boots! But he'd protect you, he'd help you, and you would be the making not only of him but of his dream--and not only _his_ little dream----"

It was her hand that stopped him. It had taken his across the little table.

"The man you mean is worth ten million of me! But I can never marry him or anybody. And you, and you alone, know why!"

She bent her brave eyes back on the Campagna; a pale tufted heath was swimming by; gum-trees hardly heightened the prevailing neutral tint; a modern corrugated roof, pinned in place by a few primeval boulders, held her attention on its swift course across the window-panes; and when she looked round, Lady Vera was all alone.

IV

THE GOLDEN KEY

"Shelley was quite right!" exclaimed the young man at the book-shelf, with the prematurely bent back turned upon Doctor Dollar at his old oak desk.

"He was never wrong when he stuck to poetry," said the doctor, looking up from an unfinished prescription on which the ink was nevertheless dry.

The other gave a guilty start. He was an immaculate young wreck, with the fashionable glut of hair plastered back from a good enough face, as if to make the most of its haggard pallor. And he was in full evening dress, for the crime doctor's patients came at all hours.

"Did I say anything?" he asked with exaggerated embarrassment.

"You thought something aloud," said Dollar, smiling. "Don't let it worry you; that's not one of the straws that shows an ill wind. What is it of Shelley's, Mr. Edenborough?"

"Only a bit of one of his letters," said the young man. "I just happened to open them at something that rather appealed to me." And the book shot back into its place.

"Not the bit about the prussic acid, I hope?" suggested the doctor, for all the world as if in fun.

"What was that?" said Edenborough, with a face that would not have imposed upon an infant.

"A little commission from Shelley to Trelawny, for a small quantity of the 'essential oil of bitter almonds,' as he called it, so that he might 'hold in his possession that golden key to the chamber of perpetual peace.'"

"That was it," said the youth at length. "I may as well be honest about it. But I don't know how on earth you knew!"

The doctor gave a kindly little laugh.

"Only by knowing the book," he assured the patient. "It's rather a notorious passage--and you had just been clamoring for at least a silver key to some chamber of temporary peace!"

"You said you would give me one, Doctor Dollar."

"And now I think I won't," said the doctor, rising from his aged chair. "No; you shall not go without hearing my reasons, and what I am going to propose to you instead. These keys, Mr. Edenborough"--and he tore the unfinished prescription into little bits--"gold or silver, they are not keys at all, but burglars' jemmies that injure and vitiate the chambers they break into. It certainly is so with the night's rest you want at any price; it may be the same with the perpetual peace that Shelley took for granted. Yet I happen to have a Chamber of Peace of sorts here in this house. It's my latest fad. You've found it a name, and in return I should like to offer it to you for the night."

"Do you mean a room that sends you off instead of drugs?"

Young Edenborough was looking puzzled, but for the moment taken out of himself. He had heard of Doctor Dollar as a rather eccentric consultant, but as the very man for him, from no less an authority than the Home Secretary of England, and no further back than that very evening at dinner. He had come straight round from Portman Square, foreseeing miracles and magic potions; but he had not foreseen John Dollar, or his unprofessional conversation, or the slight cast that actually added to his magnetic eyes, his cheery yet gentle confidence, or (least of all) a serious if casual invitation for the night.

"That's exactly what I do mean," said the author of these surprises. "It's the most silent room in London, and there are other little points about it. I got our friend Topham to give it a trial during the bread strike. His verdict was that the Chancellor of the Exchequer would sleep the sleep of the just there!"

Edenborough had a laugh that turned him back into a schoolboy; but he checked it sharply, as though the sound put him to shame and pain.

"I would give anything for one decent night," he said. "But you are far too good, sir, especially to a man you know nothing at all about."

"I ought to know more in the morning, Mr. Edenborough, but it will keep very well till then. Enough for the night that you're a friend of the Home Secretary, and at your worst at just the time when a man wants to be at his best."

Edenborough smote his brow like a young man on the stage, but with a piteous spontaneity beyond all histrionic art.

"It's on Thursday!" he cried, as one in exquisite dread. "My God, I'm to be married on Thursday, and this is Sunday night! How can I toe the mark unless I get some sleep? And how can I sleep----"

"Leave that to me," said Dollar, cutting a pregnant pause as short as possible; "leave everything to me, and come straight up-stairs. I keep the room in constant readiness; you shall be fitted with pajamas, and I'll send a special messenger anywhere you like for whatever you may want in the morning. Come, my dear man! I am burning to give my Chamber of Peace a crucial test, because I know we shall all come out with flying colors!"

There was less confidence in the Doctor Dollar who ran down-stairs a little later and sat at his telephone with an urgent face. In another minute he had left the house, and in another two Mr. Topham Vinson was opening the door to him in Portman Square.

"I call this too bad of you," began the doctor, short of breath and shorter still of patience with his powerful friend.

"My dear fellow, I couldn't help it," vowed the Minister, with disarming meekness. "He would go straight to you, and just then I couldn't have rung you up without giving him away at this end."

"I can stay five minutes," said Dollar, looking at his watch, "to hear as much as you can tell me in the time of what I ought to have known before I saw your neurotic friend."

"Hasn't he told you all about himself?"

"Hardly a word worth anything in a case like this, where the cause matters more than the effect. Of course I could have insisted, but that might have finished him off for the night. I gather, however, that he's one of the First Lord's secretaries, but a friend of yours, on the brink of being married, and in more than the normal state about it, or something to do with it."

"I'll take your points in order," said Topham Vinson, who could be brisker than anybody when he chose. "George Edenborough is not only one of Stockton's secretaries, but the most private and most confidential of the crowd. I don't know about his being a friend of mine; I've been a friend to him for family reasons, and found him a nice enough fellow. But the girl he's going to marry--if they do marry--is one of us."

"If!" cried the doctor. "Do you mean to say she'd draw back in the last week?"

"She may not be able to help herself," was the grave reply. "George Edenborough is under a cloud that may burst at any moment."

"A sudden cloud?"

"Out of the blue for me. I only heard of it from Stockton on Friday night. But it's no new thing to him. He might have told me sooner, I think, seeing it was through me that Edenborough ever went to him."

"In some special capacity, I rather gather?"

"Yes; he can draw a bit--in fact, he's not a secretary at all except in name, but the First Lord's private draftsman. Stockton's a whale for details but a dunce at technicalities. What he likes is the thing on paper, as he sees it with his own eyes; so he makes his inspections with Edenborough and a sketch-block, illustrated notes are taken at every turn, and all sorts of impossible improvements worked out in subsequent collaboration. I had that this evening from the boy himself. It will show you what chances he has had of giving things away--or--selling them!"

"Is it as bad as that?"

"Stockton swears it is. To me it's inconceivable. But he gives chapter and verse of at least one drawing that found its way across the North Sea early in the year. Edenborough admits that he either lost it or had it stolen from him. He seems to have been more careful--whichever way you look at it--during the summer. But this autumn the trouble has begun again. A dockyard sketch-map has flown the German Ocean, come home to roost by some means into which we'd better not inquire, and is pronounced by Stockton a bad imitation of one made for him by Edenborough six weeks ago."

"Why a bad imitation, I wonder?"

"The original has been in the First Lord's archives ever since; he says the copy must have been made from memory; but he has good reasons why nobody but Edenborough could have made it."

"Reasons that are not so good in law, apparently?"

"Exactly; as yet there's no case and there has been no accusation. But I very much fear that traps are being set, and I've taken it on myself to put the madman on his guard."

"To-night?"

"Yes; it was the first chance of getting hold of him, and that only by having the poor little bride to dinner as well. Heavy work, Dollar, drinking their healths and knowing what was in the air! The only comfort was that Edenborough knew as well as I did; it was written on his face, if you had the key, and I hadn't to do much beating about the bush when I got him to myself. He was wonderfully frank, from his point of view. He told me that the air of suspicion was driving him out of his mind; he said he hadn't slept for nights and nights."

"Although no accusation has been made?"

"Although not an open word has been said to connect him with the bad copy of his own map!"

"That's the worst thing you've told me," said Dollar quietly. "He protested his innocence, of course?"

"In absolute tears!"

"And what was your own impression, Mr. Vinson?"

"Extremely mixed. I felt that he was speaking the truth, and yet not the whole truth. He had an air of guilty knowledge, if not of actual guilt."

"His physical condition bears you out," observed the doctor with reluctance. "And the poor devil's to be married in four days' time!"

"There my pity's on the other side."

"But the girl's another friend of yours? May I ask her name?"

"Lucy Trevellyn."

"Any relation of Admiral Trevellyn?"

"Own daughter to the old sea-dog, and if anything the breezier of the two! I couldn't imagine a young girl more like an old salt at heart. She'd go to sea if she could; as she can't, she's a little pillar of the Navy League--and engaged to the First Lord's best young man! Could you conceive a more ingenious irony, or a greater tragedy when the truth comes out? Dollar, it must come out before Thursday, if it's ever coming out at all!"

"Is it otherwise a likely match?"

"The very likeliest, but for this world's goods, and there'll be more of them one day. She has go enough for two, and they have tastes in common. I told you he could draw a bit, but she's a little artist, though you wouldn't think it if you saw her teaching him to skate at Prince's or taking me on at golf! Lucy Trevellyn's the best type of sportswoman--just as Vera Moyle is one gone wrong."

John Dollar was on his feet.

"Well, I've stayed longer than I intended," said he abruptly. "I promised to go up within half an hour to see if he was asleep. And he will be. But what's a night's rest against such a tragedy as the whole thing's bound to be!"

"Or such a mystery?" suggested Topham Vinson. "If you could only get to the bottom of that, Dollar, we might know how to act."

"I'm not a detective," returned the doctor--but the stiff words were hardly out before the stiff lips relaxed in a smile. "I've said that before, Vinson, and I shouldn't wonder if you made me say it again. I am out to stop things happening, not to bother about things that have been done and can't be mended. But in this case discovery may be the mother of prevention, and I must have a shot with both barrels while there's time."

He had come in glum and grumbling; he went off gay and incisive, subtly enlivened by the very gravity of the matter, as he always was. But it was grave enough, as was Dollar himself behind the sparkling mask that he wore unawares in all times of stress. And on one point his confidence was justified without delay; the young man in the Chamber of Peace was found drenched already in slumbers worthy of the name he had unwittingly bestowed upon that magic fastness.

But this was not a case in which the crime doctor could leave well alone. Every hour of the night he was up-stairs and down again; and, in the intervals, either deep in such grim reading as the Illustrative Cases of Transitory Mania, in the terrible fourth volume of _Casper's Forensic Medicine_, or deeper yet in his own cognate speculations.

In the morning it was he who carried up the patient's suit-case, woke him up, and watched the rising tide of memory drown the thanks in his throat. Now was the doctor's chance of checking Mr. Vinson's version of the young man's troubles; but he waited for George Edenborough to open his own heart, and waited in vain till the last five minutes, when the boy began to thank him and ended with the whole story.

It differed very little from the second-hand synopsis, but it confirmed more than one impression which Dollar would have given much to relinquish. The talk of intolerable suspicions was indeed more consistent with a guilty conscience than anything else, since it was duly followed by the admission that nobody had expressed such suspicions in anything like so many words. The crime doctor was sorry he had put the question; it was the only one he asked. But by exhorting Edenborough to get all the exercise he could, and by saying he had heard great things of Miss Trevellyn's skating, the reluctant dissembler had little difficulty in obtaining an immediate invitation to tea at Prince's Skating Club.

Edenborough had departed with a face almost radiant at the prospect; yet he had scarcely spoken of his beloved until the subject of skating cropped up. It was as though that was the only relation in which he could still think of her without pain and shame; and in due course he was discovered on the ice with the same look of lingering pride and joy.

It was the height of the skating afternoon, and the glassy strip an opaque pane on which a little giant might have been scribbling with a big diamond. The eye swam with pairs rotating as in a circus--with single practitioners at work under dashing instructors down the middle of the rink--while the ear sang with a resounding swish of skates. One of the workers was George Edenborough, who came off one leg, with a glistening forehead, to find his guest a good place behind the barrier.

"So glad you're not late for the waltzing," he said nervily. "I've had a long day out of town, and didn't get here myself till much later than I expected. Lucy's writing a letter in the lounge, but she'll be here in a minute for the enclosure, and after that we'll have tea."

Dollar ascertained that the waltzing enclosure was a close quarter-of-an-hour for all but those more or less proficient in that delicate and astounding art. Edenborough said that he himself was not quite up to the standard of these displays, and suited the action to the word by taking the floor unsteadily on his skates. As he seated himself a gong sounded, the band struck up, beginners dispersed, confident hands clasped lissome waists, long edges ended in lightning threes, and the rink was a maze of sweeping grace and symmetry.

Dollar had never seen anything like it in his life, for artificial ice was in its infancy in London before the war, and ever since he had been a busy man. He followed first one couple and then another, and each seemed to him more competent and graceful than the last. Yet the first short waltz was not over before an involuntary selection had eliminated all but a dark strong girl in red and a swarthy man with bright eyes and a black mustache.

"Those two are the best," said he--"that girl in red and the heavy alien."

"Do you think so?" cried the delighted Edenborough. "Then you're a judge, because that's Lucy!"

"I didn't mean to insult her partner," said Dollar in some dismay. "He's the best waltzer on the ice except Miss Trevellyn."

"He's an Italian marquis," returned Edenborough, in another voice. "Rocchi's his beastly name. I've no use for the fellow. But he can skate."

The first waltz finished there were two more in quick succession, and Edenborough had a better word for Miss Trevellyn's next partner. He was only a glowing schoolboy, home from Eton for his leave, but the past mistress lent herself to his dash and fling with a gusto equal to his own.

"I'm glad that's over," said Edenborough, as she escaped with her life from the desperado's clutches. "I say, confound that fellow Rocchi!"

She was waltzing with the handsome brute again; for he looked no less, with his deep blue chin and insolent eyes, and his air of conscious mastery. Edenborough plainly loathed him, chafing visibly as the pair swept past with certainly the appearance of some extra verve for his benefit. Dollar himself was very disagreebly impressed, and that down to the end, when Rocchi skated up with the lady, whom he surrendered with a gleam of palpable bravado.

Yet that impression altered with the very opening of Miss Trevellyn's not less resolute mouth. She had good teeth and a hearty voice, and eyes of a breezy and humane audacity. Dollar thought of Topham Vinson's tribute, and agreed with all except the odious comparison. There was, indeed, no comparing types as different as Lucy Trevellyn and Vera Moyle; but the one had never puzzled him in the past more completely than did the other before he took his leave.

And they had talked about the wedding, and their presents, and the wedding trip, as though neither God nor man could interfere!

"Only three days to go!" said Dollar to himself. And two of the three were soon gone without alarums or excursions, except on the part of the crime doctor himself. He was neglecting his practise for the case in hand; he was nowhere to be found when badly wanted on the Tuesday night, nor yet on the Wednesday morning; and this was the more extraordinary in that it was George Edenborough who wanted him, now with an ashier face than ever, and now on the telephone in a frantic voice.

At dusk on the Wednesday his key turned in the latch, and next day's bridegroom burst from the waiting-room at the same moment.

"At last!" cried Edenborough; and looked so ghastly in the electric light that Dollar did not switch it on in the consulting-room, or ask a question as he shut the door.

It was one of those mild unseasonable days on which the best of servants keep up the biggest fires; the doctor opened the French window that led from his den, down rusty steps, into a foul and futile enclosure of grimy gravel and moribund shrubs. In the meantime Edenborough had not taken a seat as mechanically bidden, but had planted himself in defiant pose before the fire; and the glow showed restless hands twitching into fists, but not the face of which one look had been enough.

"You might have left word where you were!" he began with great bitterness.

"I have just done so," returned Dollar, "at your rooms. I was wanting to see you--presently. It seems like fate, to find you here before me."

"I suppose you've heard the latest, wherever you've been?" pursued Edenborough, aware and jealous of some independent perplexity on the part of Dollar.

"I have heard so much!" said the doctor, dropping into a chair. "Better be explicit--and as expeditious as you can, my dear fellow. I have an appointment almost directly."

"Oh! there's not much to say," rejoined the other sardonically. "You remember when you came to Prince's, doctor?"

"I do, indeed."

They both spoke as if it were weeks ago.

"You know I told you I'd had a hard day out of town?"

"I remember."

"I meant with my chief--Lord Stockton--seeing his new brood of submarines."

"In their unfledged state, I suppose?"

"That was it--and making the usual sketches. That's my job--or was! I was Stockton's walking Kodak until yesterday afternoon; then I got the boot for a wedding present, and a chance of the jug for my honeymoon!"

The harsh voice broke, for all its sudden slang and satire. Dollar was driven to his only policy.

"I'm not going to pretend I don't know of this," he said. "I know of it from the Home Secretary. A duplicate of one of those last drawings of yours----"

"A duplicate!"

"Well, a bad imitation, if you like."

The doctor paused as though he had finished a sentence, as though the amended phrase had interrupted his thought.

"Well?" said Edenborough grimly. "Did you hear how they got hold of it?"

"Intercepted in the post, I gathered, on its way abroad."

"In our post," said Edenborough. "Almost a _casus belli_ in itself, I should have thought!"

"And have you no idea how it came there?" asked the doctor bluntly--but now he meant to be blunt; he was not sorry when his man flew into a feeble passion on the spot.

"What the devil do you mean, Doctor Dollar? I know no more about the matter than--I was going to say, than you do--but I begin to think you know more than you pretend!"

"I didn't think I had pretended," said Dollar, simply.

"Well, what _do_ you know?" demanded Edenborough, in a fury of suspicion. "All, I suppose?" he added, with a schoolboy sneer, when the answer was slow to come.

"Yes; all," said the doctor, very gravely and reluctantly, as though driven into a pronouncement of life or death.

There was no outcry of surprise from Edenborough. He had some pride. But his knees began to tremble in the firelight, and his unclenched hands to twitch.

"I don't believe it," he exclaimed at length. "You tell me what you know!"

"All that you yourself suspected, and made yourself ill with suspecting--and couldn't sleep for suspecting--long ago!"

Pitiful tone and tender hand carried a heavier conviction than the words. And now it was the patient who had sunk into the chair, the doctor bending over his bowed and quivering shoulders.

"You are not the first man, my dear Edenborough," he went on, "who would seem to have been betrayed in cold blood by a woman--by _the_ woman. Mark my words closely. I say it seems so. I would not condemn the greatest malefactor unheard. I meant to hear Miss Trevellyn first--feeling in my bones, against all reason, that there may still be some unimaginable explanation. But, if the worst be true of her, then the best is true of you; for you are the first man I have known bear the brunt as you have borne it, my very dear fellow!"

"What makes you suspect her?" groaned Edenborough to the ground.

"It's not a case of suspicion--don't deceive yourself as to that, Edenborough. I _know_ that Miss Trevellyn produced--and parted with--those last two sketches about which there's been all the trouble. I only _suspect_ that she got you to show her the originals, almost as soon as they were made, on the plea of her tremendous interest in the Navy."

"Quite true; she did," said Edenborough, but as though he did not appreciate what he was saying, as though something else had stuck in his mind. "But it _was_ a tremendous interest!" he exclaimed, jumping up. "It was her father's interest; his life, indeed! Isn't it inconceivable that his daughter--apart from everything else I've found her--that she of all people should do a thing like this?"

"I am afraid the inconceivable happens almost as often as the unexpected," said Dollar, with a sigh. "Criminology, indeed, prepares us for little else. Think of the perfectly good mothers who have flown to infanticide as the first relief of a mind unhinged! The inversion of the ruling passions is one of the sure symptoms of insanity."

"But of course she's mad," cried Edenborough, "if she's guilty at all. But that's what I can't and won't believe. I can believe it one minute but not the next, just as I've suspected and laughed at my suspicions all this nightmare time. One look in her face has always been enough, and would be at this minute."

"Well, we shall soon see," said Dollar, glancing at the clock. "But I can only warn you that my evidence is overwhelming."

"Let's have it, then; what is your evidence?" demanded Edenborough, in a fresh fit of stone-blind defiance.

"My dear fellow, you force my hand!" said Dollar. "God knows you have a right--and it can't make matters worse than they are. My evidence consists of a full and circumstantial confession by a scoundrel to whom I took your own dislike at sight, and whose career I have spent the week investigating. I needn't tell you I mean the infamous Rocchi."

"Rocchi!" whispered Edenborough at the second attempt, as though his very tongue rejected the abhorrent name. Yet now he stood perfectly still, like a man who sees at last. "Well," he added in an ominously rational voice, "I must live long enough to send _him_ to hell, whatever else I do."