He nodded.
“After all,” he said, “that was bound to come to an end when America declared war. You people did the only wise thing — brother to San Francisco, eh, your father to Chicago, and you over here?”
“You do know things,” she laughed.
“I am a perfect dictionary as to your movements,” he assured her.
“Have you anything to do with the fact that my rooms have been searched by the police?” she asked abruptly.
“Indirectly I fear so,” he confessed. “You see, up to the present we haven’t the least idea as to what has become of all those documents and plans which Mr. Jocelyn Thew so very cleverly brought over to this country.”
“Don’t know where he’s tucked them away, eh?” she enquired.
“That’s a fact,” Crawshay confessed. “We discovered, a trifle too late, how they were brought over, but what has become of them since Jocelyn Thew’s arrival in London we do not know. Every one concerned has been searched, no deposit has been made at any hotel or in any of the ordinary places where one might conceal securities. They have momentarily vanished.”
The girl’s eyes twinkled.
“Well,” she exclaimed, “he does put it over you, doesn’t he? I wonder whether you think that I am going to be any use to you — that you’ll trap Jocelyn Thew through me?”
“Not now,” he answered. “I used to think so once.”
“Why have you changed your mind?”
“Because,” he told her bluntly, “I used once to think that you and he cared for one another.”
“And now?”
“I have changed my mind,” he admitted. “You know him so well that I need not remind you that where women are concerned he seems to have shown few signs of weakness. Personally, I have a theory that the time has come when he is likely to go the way of all other men.”
She leaned across the table. Those wonderful brown eyes of hers were lit with an indescribable interest. Crawshay for a moment lost the thread of his thoughts. They were certainly the most beautiful eyes he had ever looked into.
“You think there is anything between those two — Katharine Beverley and him?”
“The consideration of that point,” Crawshay continued, resuming his usual manner, “although it lies off the track of my present investigation, presents some points of interest. She can be of no further use to him in his present scheme. She certainly would not aid him in the concealment of any of his spoils, nor could she become an intermediary in forwarding them to their destination. Yet he has sent her roses every day she has been in England, and dined with her two nights following. You, who know him better than I do, will agree that such a course is unusual with him.”
“But Dick Beverley is with them to-night, you told me,” she reminded him.
“That scarcely alters the situation,” Crawshay pointed out, “because his coming was quite unexpected. If anything, it rather strengthens my point of view. Beverley is very much a young man of the world, and he probably knows Jocelyn Thew’s reputation. He certainly would not consent to meet him in this friendly fashion, in company with his sister, unless the latter insisted.”
“She doesn’t need to insist,” Nora said, watching the champagne poured into her glass. “Unless you’re kidding me, you don’t seem to be able to see much further than your nose. Katharine Beverley didn’t come across the Atlantic for her health, and Dick Beverley didn’t join that little dinner party for nothing to-night. They both of them did as they were told, and they had to do it.”
“This, I must confess,” Crawshay murmured, smoothly and mendaciously, “puzzles me. Your idea is, then, that Jocelyn Thew has some hold over them?”
She laughed at him a little contemptuously.
“You are not going to make me believe,” she said, “that you are not wise about that. It isn’t clever, you know, to treat me as a simpleton.”
“I am afraid,” he confessed humbly, “that it is I who am the simpleton. You think, then, that the red roses are more emblematic of warfare than of love?”
Nora shrugged her shoulders and was silent for several moments. Her companion changed the subject abruptly, pointed out to her several theatrical celebrities, told her an entertaining story, and talked nonsense until the smile came back to her lips. It was Nora herself who returned to the subject of the Beverleys, reopening it with a certain abruptness which showed that it had never been far from her thoughts.
“See here, Mr. Crawshay,” she said, “you seem to me to be wasting a lot of time worrying round a subject, when I don’t know whether a straightforward question wouldn’t clear it up for you. If you want to know what there is between those three, Jocelyn Thew and the two Beverleys, I don’t know that I mind telling you. It’s probably what you asked me to dine with you for, anyway.”
“My dear Miss Sharey!” Crawshay protested, with genuine earnestness. “I can assure you that I had only one object in asking you to spend the evening with me.”
She smiled at him over the glass which she had just raised to her lips.
“And that?”
“The pleasure of talking to you — of being with you.”
“You’re easily satisfied.”
“Perhaps not so easily as I seem,” he whispered, leaning a little forward in his place. “If only I were sure that you were not in love with Jocelyn Thew!”
“If you think that I am,” she observed, “why are you always slinging that Beverley girl at me?”
“Perhaps,” he said coolly, “to make you jealous. All’s fair in love and war, you know.”
“I see. Then what you really want is to make love to me yourself? I’m sitting here and taking notice. Go right ahead.”
Crawshay let himself go for a few moments, and his companion listened to him approvingly.
“It sounds quite like the real thing,” she sighed, “but I never trust you Englishmen. You seem to acquire the habit of talking love to us girls just as easily as you drink a cocktail. You know that if I were to put my little hand in yours this moment across the table, you wouldn’t know what to do with it.”
“Try me,” Crawshay begged.
She held it out — a long, rather thin, capable woman’s hand, manicured a few hours ago in the latest fashion, but ringless. Crawshay promptly raised it to his lips. She snatched it away, half amused, half vexed, and glanced furtively around.
“If you did that in an American restaurant,” she told him, “you’d stand some chance of getting yourself laughed at.”
“It’s quite the custom over here and on the Continent,” he assured her equably. “It means — well, just as much as you want it to mean.”
She sighed and looked at her fingers reflectively.
“What you’d like me to tell you, then,” she suggested, raising her eyes and looking at him thoughtfully, “is that I’ve never wasted a thought on Jocelyn Thew, but that Mr. Reginald Crawshay is it with a capital ‘I’?”
“It would make me very happy,” he assured her with much conviction.
She laughed at him very softly. Little sparks seemed to flash from her eyes, and her teeth were wonderful.
“You’re very nice, anyway,” she declared, “although I am not sure that I believe in you as much as I’d like to. I’ll just tell you as much as I know. It really doesn’t amount to anything. It was just after Jocelyn Thew had come back from Nicaragua and Dick Beverley was having a flare-up of his own in New York. They came together, those two, when Dick was in a tight corner. I don’t know the story, but I know that Jocelyn Thew played the white man. Dick Beverley owes him perhaps his life, perhaps only his liberty, and his sister knows it. That’s how those three stand to one another.”