“I ought to have puzzled that out myself,” Crawshay said humbly.
“I am not so sure,” she retorted drily, “that you didn’t, long ago.”
“Surmises are of very little interest by the side of facts,” he reminded her. “I like to have something solid to build upon.”
She smiled at him appreciatively.
“If I were a sentimental sort of girl,” she declared, “I could take a fancy to you, Mr. Crawshay.”
“Now you’re laughing at me,” he protested. “However, I’m going right on with it and then we will dismiss all serious subjects. Miss Beverley has certainly quit herself of any obligation to Jocelyn Thew. Richard Beverley is no longer free. Besides, he has only a couple of days in England, so there’s very little chance of his being of use. Yet,” he continued impressively, “I happen to know that every hour just now is of the greatest importance to Jocelyn Thew. Why does he spend another entire evening with these two?”
“Say, which of us is the detective — you or me?” she demanded.
“Professionally, I suppose I am,” he admitted. “Just now, however, I consider myself as indulging in the relaxation of private life.”
She leaned across the table towards him, her chin supported by her clenched hands.
“Then relax all you want to,” she begged, with a smile of invitation. “We’ll drop the other stunt, if you don’t mind. And please remember, though I’ve never enjoyed a dinner more in my life, that we don’t want to be too late for the Empire.”
Crawshay returned to his rooms about one o’clock the next morning, with his hat a little on the back of his head, and wearing, very much against his prejudice, a white rose in his buttonhole. Brightman, who was awaiting him there, looked up eagerly at his entrance.
“Any luck, Mr. Crawshay?”
Crawshay laid his hat and coat upon the table and mixed himself a whisky and soda.
“I am not sure,” he replied thoughtfully. “Are you any good at English history, Brightman?”
“I won an exhibition in my younger days,” the detective replied. “I used to consider myself rather great on history.”
“Who won the Wars of the Roses?”
“The Lancastrians, of course.”
Crawshay nodded.
“They were the chaps with the red roses, weren’t they?” he observed. “Brightman, I fancy we are going to reverse that. I am laying five to one that I’ve found out how Jocelyn Thew counts on getting his spoils into Germany.”
.
CHAPTER XXII
The dinner of the red roses, as though in emulation of its rival entertainment, seemed on its way to complete success. Jocelyn Thew, from whose manner there seemed to have departed much of the austerity of the previous evening, had never been a more brilliant companion. He, who spoke so seldom of his own doings, told story after story of his wanderings in distant countries, until even Katharine lost her fears of the situation and abandoned herself to the enjoyment of the moment. His tone was kindlier and his manner more natural. He spoke with regret of Richard Beverley’s departure in a couple of days, and only once did he hint at anything in the least disturbing.
“Wonderful feat, that of you flying men,” he remarked, “dropping ten thousand copies of Wilson’s speech over the German lines. I am not sure that it isn’t rather a dangerous precedent, though.”
“Why dangerous?” Katharine enquired.
“Because,” he answered coolly, “it might suggest a possible means of communication with Germany to a person, say, like myself.”
“But you are not a flying man,” Katharine reminded him.
He smiled.
“It would not be necessary,” he observed, “for me to be my own messenger.”
There was a brief and rather a blank silence. The shadow of a new fear had arisen in Katharine’s heart. The brother and sister exchanged quick glances.
“I believe I am right,” their host went on, a few minutes later, “in presuming that you have told Richard here the details of our little adventure upon the City of Boston?”
“I have told him everything,” Katharine acknowledged. “You don’t mind that, do you? I felt that I had to.”
“You were quite right,” Jocelyn Thew assented. “There is no reason for you to keep anything secret from Richard.”
The young man was conscious of a sudden recrudescence of anger, the flaming up again of his first resentment.
“The whole thing was a rotten business, Thew,” he declared. “I should never have resented your making use of me in any way you wished, but to make a tool of Katharine—”
“My dear fellow,” Jocelyn Thew interrupted, smoothly but with a dangerous glitter in his eyes, “please don’t go on. I have an idea that you were going to say something offensive. Better not. Your sister came to no real harm. She never ran any real risk.”
“It depends upon the way you look at these things,” the young man replied gloomily. “Katharine tells me that she is watched at her hotel day and night, and that she has come under the suspicion of the Government for being concerned in this affair.”
“That really isn’t of much account,” the other assured him. “You yourself,” he went on, “came very nearly under suspicion once for something infinitely more serious.”
It was a chill note in the warmth of their festivities. Katharine glanced reproachfully at her host, and he seemed to realise at once his lapse.
“Forgive me, both of you,” he begged. “I fear that I am a little irritable to-night. This constant espionage gets on one’s nerves. Look at them all around us, — Crawshay in the corner, trying his best to get something incriminating out of Nora Sharey; Brightman smoking a cigar out there, with his eyes wandering all the time through the glass screen towards this table; and the young man who seemed to haunt your hotel, Miss Beverley — Henshaw I believe his name is — you see him dining there with his back turned ostentatiously towards us and a little pocket mirror by his side. There are three pairs of eyes that scarcely ever leave us. I don’t know whether they expect me to produce my spoils from my pocket and lay them upon the table, or whether one of them is a student of the lip language and hopes to learn the secrets of our conversation. Bah! They are very stupid, this professional potpourri of secret-service agents and detectives. Can’t you hear them, how they will whisper in the lobby after we have left? ‘Jocelyn Thew is entertaining a young Flying Corps man on leave from the front, the brother of Miss Beverley, who has already helped him. What does that mean?’ Then they will put their fingers to their noses and you, too, will probably be watched, Dick. They will congratulate themselves upon possessing the subtlety of the Devil. They will see through my scheme. They will say— ‘This young man is to drop the documents behind the German lines!’ Don’t be alarmed, Richard, if you find a secret service man in your bedroom when you get home to-night.”
Katharine laughed almost joyously.
“Then you’re not going to ask Dick to do anything of that sort?” she demanded, her tone indicating an immense relief.
He smiled.
“I am not going to ask your brother to do anything which is so palpably obvious,” he replied. “His help I am certainly going to engage, but in a manner which is very unlikely to bring trouble upon him. I promise you that.”
She suddenly leaned across the table. The cloud had passed from her features, the dull weight from her heart. Her eyes were more eloquent even than her tremulous lips.
“Mr. Thew,” she said, “do you know that I have always had one conviction about you, and that is that all these strange adventures in which you have taken part — some of them, as you yourself have acknowledged, more creditable than others — you have entered into chiefly from that spirit of adventure, just the spirit in which Dick here,” she added with a little shiver, “made his mistake. Why can’t you satisfy that part of your nature as Dick is doing? This war, upon which we Americans looked so coldly at first, has become almost a holy war, a twentieth-century crusade. Why don’t you join one of these irregular forces and fight?”