There was a note of rising anger in his tone. Katharine laid her fingers upon his hand.
“Don’t imagine things, please, Dick,” she begged. “It is my own foolishness if I am disturbed. I really had nothing to do. Mr. Thew has been most considerate.”
“In any case,” Jocelyn Thew went on, “I think that the matter had better be discussed another time, when we are alone. We might have to make reference to things which are best not mentioned in a public place.”
For a moment the young man’s eyes challenged his. Then they fell. He shivered a little.
“Why ever speak of them?” he demanded.
“Ah, well, we’ll see,” Jocelyn Thew observed. “Now what about an hour or two at a music-hall? I have a box at the Alhambra.”
Katharine rose at once to her feet. They all made their way into the lounge. Whilst they waited for her to fetch her cloak, Beverley swung round to his companion.
“Look here,” he said, “for myself it doesn’t matter — you know that — but what game are you playing? I don’t know much about your life, of course, before those few days, but on your own showing you were out for big things. Are you known here? Is it anything — anything against the law, this business you’re on? I don’t care for myself — you know that. It’s Katharine I’m thinking of.”
Jocelyn Thew knocked the ash from his cigar. He smiled deprecatingly at his companion. Certainly there was no man in that very fashionable restaurant who looked less like a criminal.
“My dear Beverley,” he expostulated, “you must remember that I am an exceedingly clever person. I am suspected of any number of misdemeanours. I will not say that there are not one or two of which I have not been guilty, but I have never left behind me any proof. I dare say the English police over here look on me sometimes just as hungrily as the New York ones. They feel in their hearts that I am an adventurer. They feel that I have been connected with some curious enterprises, both in the States and various other countries of the globe. They know very well that where there has been fighting and loot and danger, I have generally followed under my own flag. They know all this, but they can prove nothing against me. They can only watch me, and that they do wherever I am. They are watching me now, every hour of the day.”
“It isn’t,” the young man commenced, with a sudden break in his tone —
Jocelyn shook his head.
“No, my young friend,” he said, “the curtain fell upon that little episode. I doubt whether there is even a police record of it. It isn’t the lives of individuals I am juggling with to-day. It’s the life of a nation.”
“Are you a spy?” Beverley asked him hoarsely.
“Your sister,” Jocelyn Thew pointed out, “is waiting for us.”
.
CHAPTER XX
Crawshay, having the good fortune to find, as he issued from his rooms, a taxicab whose driver’s ideas of speed were in accordance with his own impatience, managed to reach the Savoy at a few minutes before eight. He entered the hotel by the Court entrance. An insignificant-looking young man with a fair moustache and watery eyes touched him on the shoulder as he passed through the Court lobby. Crawshay glanced lazily around and assured himself that they were unobserved.
“Anything fresh?” he asked laconically.
“Nothing. We have searched Miss Sharey’s rooms thoroughly, and two of our men have been over Thew’s apartments again.”
“Miss Sharey up-stairs?”
The young man shook his head.
“Hasn’t been up for some hours,” he reported.
Crawshay nodded and strolled on. He left his coat and hat in charge of the attendant, and entered the grill room. Here, however, he met with disappointment. The place was crowded but his search was methodical. There was no sign there of Nora Sharey. He climbed the few stairs and entered the smoking room. Seated in an armchair, reading a novel, he discovered the young lady of whom he was in search.
He crossed the room at a slow saunter, as though on his way to the bar, and paused before the girl’s chair. She laid down her book and looked up at him. Her smile at once assured him of a welcome.
“I am glad that I am not altogether forgotten, Miss Sharey,” he said, holding out his hand which she promptly accepted. “I suppose it still is Miss Sharey, is it? I hope so.”
“I guess the name’s all right,” she replied. “Glad to see you don’t bear any ill-will against me, Mr. Crawshay. You Englishmen sometimes get so peevish when things don’t go quite your way, and you weren’t saying nice things to me last time we met.”
Crawshay smiled and glanced at the seat by her side. She made room for him, and he subsided into the vacant space with a little sigh of content.
“A man’s profession,” he confided, “sometimes makes large and repugnant demands upon him.”
“If that means you are sorry you were rude to me last time we met down in Fourteenth Street,” she said, “I guess I may as well accept your apology. You were a trifle disappointed then, weren’t you?”
“We acted,” Crawshay explained, with studied laboriousness,— “my friends and I acted, that is to say — upon inconclusive information. America at that time, you see, was a neutral Power, and the facilities granted us by the New York police were limited in their character. My department was thoroughly convinced that the — er — restaurant of which your father was the proprietor was something more than the ordinary meeting place of that section of your country-people who carried their enmity towards my country to an unreasonable extent.”
She looked at him admiringly.
“Say, you know how to talk!” she observed. “What about getting an innocent girl turned out of a job at Washington, though?”
Crawshay stroked his long chin reflectively.
“You don’t suppose,” he began —
“Oh, don’t yarn!” she interrupted. “I’m not squealing. You knew very well that I’d no need to take a post as telephone operator, and you did your duty when you got me turned off. It was very clever of you,” she went on, “to tumble to me.”
Crawshay accepted the compliment with a smile.
“If you will permit me to say so, Miss Sharey,” he declared, “you are what we call in this country a good sportsman.”
“Oh, I can keep on the tracks all right,” she assented. “I guess I am a little easier to deal with, for instance, than your friend Mr. Jocelyn Thew.”
Crawshay frowned. His expression became gloomier.
“I am bound to confess, Miss Sharey,” he sighed, “that your friend Mr. Jocelyn Thew has been the disappointment of my life.”
“Some brains, eh?”
“He has brains, courage and luck,” Crawshay pronounced. “Against these three things it is very hard work to bring off — shall I say a coup?”
“The man who gets the better of Jocelyn Thew,” she declared, with a little laugh, “deserves all the nuts. He is a sure winner every time. You’re up against him now, aren’t you?”
“More or less,” Crawshay confessed. “I crossed on the steamer with him.”
“I bet that didn’t do you much good!”
“I lost the first game,” Crawshay confessed candidly. “I see that you know all about it.”
“No need to put me wiser than I am,” the girl observed carelessly. “Jocelyn Thew’s no talker.”
“Not unless it serves his purpose. It is astonishing,” Crawshay went on reflectively, “how the science of detection has changed during the last ten years. When I was an apprentice at it — and though you may not think it. Miss Sharey, I am a professional, not an amateur, although I am generally employed on Government business — secrecy was our watchword. We hid in corners, we were stealthy, we always posed as being something we weren’t. We should have denied emphatically having the slightest interest in the person under surveillance. In these days, however, everything is changed. We play the game with the cards upon the table — all except the last two or three, perhaps — and curiously enough, I am not at all sure that it doesn’t add finesse to the game.”