Jocelyn Thew was for a moment grave.
“I am very glad that you told me this,” he said, “but I think that I can nevertheless promise you the stage box for Monday night. I have a call on it. We must all meet once more. It is just possible that I may have a pleasant surprise for both of you.”
“Do give us an idea what it is,” she begged.
He shook his head. Somehow, since the coming of Michael Dilwyn, a tired look had crept into his eyes. He seemed to have lost all his old vivacity. He had paid the bill some time before and they strolled together now into the lounge. Katharine was carrying half a dozen of the roses, which the waiter had pressed into her hand.
“To-night,” she said, looking up into his face and dropping her voice a little, “I am feeling so much happier — happier than I have felt for a long time. Why do you keep us both, Mr. Thew, in such a state of uneasiness? You give us so little of your real confidence, so little of your real self. Sometimes it seems as though you deliberately try to make yourself out a harder, crueller person than you really are. Why do you do that?”
For a moment she fancied that the impossible had happened, that she had penetrated the armour of that steadfast and studied indifference.
“We are all just a little the fools of circumstance,” he sighed. “A will to succeed sometimes, if it is strong enough, crushes out things we would like to keep alive.”
She thrust one of the blossoms which she was carrying through his buttonhole.
“I know you will hate that,” she whispered, “but you can take it out the moment you have gotten rid of us. Dick and I are going on now, you know, to the Esholt House dance. Shall I thank you for your dinner?”
“Or I you for your company?” he murmured, bowing over her fingers.
They took their leave, and Jocelyn Thew, almost as though against his will, walked back into the foyer, after a few minutes of hesitation, and sat there twirling the rose between his fingers, with his eyes fixed upon the interior of the restaurant. He had the air of one waiting.
.
CHAPTER XXIII
Crawshay was awakened the next morning a little before the customary hour by his servant, who held out a card.
“Gentleman would like a word with you at once, sir,” the latter announced.
Crawshay glanced at the card, slipped out of bed, and, attired in his dressing gown and slippers, made an apologetic entrance into the sitting room. The young man who was waiting there received him kindly, but obviously disapproved of the pattern of his dressing gown.
“Chief wants a word with you, sir,” he announced. “He is keeping from ten to ten-thirty.”
“I will be there,” Crawshay promised, “on the stroke of ten.”
“Then I need not detain you further,” his visitor remarked, making a graceful exit.
Crawshay bathed, shaved and breakfasted, and at five minutes before ten entered an imposing-looking building and sent up his card to a very great man, who had a fancy for being spoken of in his department as Mr. Brown. After a very brief delay, he was admitted to the august presence. Mr. Brown waved his secretaries from the room, shook hands kindly with Crawshay and motioned him to a chair close to his own.
“Mr. Crawshay,” he said, “this is the first time I have had the pleasure of meeting you, but we have received at various times excellent reports as to your work at Washington.”
“I am very pleased to hear it, sir.”
“From what I gather as to the present situation, however,” the great man continued, “I imagine that you were more successful in the conventional secret service work than you have been in the very grave business I have sent for you to discuss.”
“I should like to point out, sir,” Crawshay begged, “that that foolish journey to Halifax was undertaken entirely against my convictions. I protested at the time! Neither had I any confidence in the summons to Chicago.”
Mr. Brown took the circumstance into gracious consideration.
“I am glad to hear that,” he said, “and I must admit that your recovery was almost brilliant. A sense of humour,” he went on, “sometimes obtrudes itself into the most serious incidents, and the idea of your boarding that steamer from a seaplane and then getting to work upon your investigations will always remain to me one of the priceless unrecorded incidents of the war. But to put the matter into plain words, our enemies got the better of you.”
“Absolutely,” was the honest confession.
“There is no doubt,” the right honourable gentleman continued, “that the person who took charge of this affair is exceedingly clever. He appears to have resource and daring. Personally, I, like you, never believed for a moment that the whole of the records of German espionage in America for the last three years, would be found upon the same steamer as that by which the departing ambassadorial staff travelled. However, I can quite see that under the circumstances you had to yield to the convictions of those who were already in charge of the affair.”
“You have had full reports, sir, I suppose?” Crawshay asked. “You know the manner in which the documents were brought into this country?”
“A ghastly business,” Mr. Brown acknowledged, “ingenious but ghastly. Yes, Mr. Crawshay,” he went on, “I think I have been kept pretty well posted up till now. I have sent for you because I am not sure whether one point has been sufficiently impressed upon you. As you are of course aware, there are many documents and details connected with this propaganda which are of immense value to the police of New York, but there is just one — a letter written in a moment of impulse by one great personage to another, and stolen — which might do the cause of the Allies incalculable harm if it were to fall into the wrong hands.”
“I had a hint of this, sir. Mason knew of it, too. His idea was that they would be quite willing to destroy all the rest of the treasonable stuff they have, if they could be sure of getting this one letter through.”
“The documents have been in England now,” Mr. Brown observed, “for some days. Have you formed any theory at all as to where they may be concealed?”
“To be perfectly frank,” Crawshay confessed, “I have not. Doctor Gant, Jocelyn Thew, a young woman called Nora Sharey, and Miss Beverley are the four people possibly implicated in their disappearance, although of these two I consider Miss Sharey and Miss Beverley out of the question. Nevertheless, their rooms and every scrap of property they possess have been searched thoroughly, and their movements since they arrived in London are absolutely tabulated. Not one of them has written a letter or dispatched a parcel which has not been investigated, nor have they made a call or even entered a shop without being watched. It seems absolutely impossible that they can have taken any steps towards the disposal of the documents since Jocelyn Thew arrived in London.”
“Have they given any indication of their future plans?”
“Doctor Gant,” Crawshay replied, “has booked a passage back in the American boat which sails for Liverpool early to-morrow morning. We shall escort him there, and his effects will be searched once more in Liverpool. Otherwise, we have no intention of detaining him. He and Miss Beverley were simply the tools of the other man.”
“And the other man?”
“He has shown no signs of making any move whatsoever. He lives, to all appearance, the perfectly normal life of a man of leisure. I understand that he is entirely a newcomer to this sort of business, but he is, without a doubt, the most modern thing in secret service. He lives quite openly at a small suite in the Savoy Court. He never makes the slightest concealment about any of his movements. We know how he has spent every second of his time since we first took up the search, and I can assure you that there is not a single suspicious incident recorded against him.”