A knot of spies, O'Reilly and Velasco among them, whirled into the room, pulled up at sight of that strange, grim figure, disguised beyond all recognition by its half-mask of black, facing and menacing them with a pistol.

O'Reilly fired in the next breath, his shot echoed by half a dozen so closely bunched as to resemble the rattle of a mitrailleuse.

At the first report the pistol dropped from Ekstrom's grasp. He carried a hand vaguely to his throat, staggered a single step, uttered a strangled moan, and fell forward, his body fairly riddled, his death little short of instantaneous.

While the fusillade was still resounding Lanyard, seizing the girl's wrist, unceremoniously dragged her from behind the chair and thrust her through the door, retreating after her with his face to the roomfull, his pistol ready.

None of that lot paid him any heed, the attention of all wholly absorbed by the tragedy their violent hands had wrought. Velasco, the first to stir, ran forward and dropped to his knees beside the dead man. Others followed.

Gently Lanyard drew the door to, locked it on the outside, and at the sound of a choking cry from Cecelia Brooke, whirled smartly round, prepared if need be to make good his promise to clear with gun-play a way to the street though opposed by every inmate of the establishment.

But the first face he saw was Crane's.

The Secret Service man stood within a yard. To him as to a rock of refuge Cecelia Brooke had flown, to his hand she was clinging like a frightened child, trying to speak, failing because she choked on sobs and gasps of horror.

Behind him, on the landing at the head of the staircase, running up from below, ascending to the upper storeys, were a score' or more of men of st.u.r.dy and business-like bearing and indubitably American stamp. Of these two were herding into a corner a little group of frightened German servants.

Lanyard's stare of astonishment was met by Crane's twisted smile.

"My friend," he said, as quietly as anyone could with his accent of a quizzical buzz-saw, "I sure got to hand it to you. Every time I try to pull anything off on the dead quiet you beat me to it clean. Everywhere I think you ain't and can't be, that's just where you are. But I ain't complaining; I got to admit, if you hadn't staged your act to occupy the minds of those gents in there, we might've had a lot more difficulty raiding this joint."

Quickly he wound an arm round the waist of Cecelia Brooke when, without warning, she swayed blindly and would have fallen.

"Here, now!" he protested. "That's no way to do.... Why, she's flickered out! Well, Monsieur d.u.c.h.emin-Lanyard-Ember, to a man up a tree this looks like your job. You take this little lady off my hands and see her home, and I'll just naturally try and finish what I started--or what you did. For, son, I got to give you credit: you sure are one grand li'l trouble-hound!"

XXI

QUESTION

Through the breathing hush of that dark hour which foreruns the dawn, that hour in which the head that knows a wakeful pillow is p.r.o.ne to sudden and disquieting apprehension of its insignificance and it's soul's dread isolation, the cab sped swiftly south upon the Avenue, shadowed reaches of the park upon its right, upon its left the dull, tired faces of those homes whose tenants lay wrapped in the cotton-wool of riches.

The rain had ceased. A little wind was blowing up. There was a fresh smell in the air. Sidewalks began to be maculated with spreading areas of dryness, but the roadway was still wet and shining, the wide black mirror of a myriad lights.

Through the windows of the speeding cab an orderly procession of street lamps, marching past, threw each its fugitive and pallid glimmer. Periods of modified darkness intervened, when the face of the girl in her corner seemed a vision subtle and wraithlike. But ever the recurrent lights revealed her sweetly incarnate if deep in enervation of crushing weariness.

Once she stirred and sighed profoundly; and Lanyard, bending toward her, asked if he could be in any way of service.

She replied in an undertone scarcely better than a whisper: "Thank you, I am quite comfortable.... Please--what time is it?"

The cab was pa.s.sing Sixtieth Street. Lanyard caught a fleeting glimpse of a street clock with a dial like a little golden moon.

"It's just four."

"Thank you...."

"Very tired?"

"Very...."

He had the maddest notion that her head inclined to droop toward his shoulder. Perhaps the motion of the cab.... If so, she recovered easily.

"Can I do anything?"

"No, thank you, only ..." An ungloved hand stirred from her lap and for the merest instant rested lightly above his own, or hovered rather, barely touching it with a touch tenuous and elusive, no sooner realised than gone.

"I mean," she murmured, "I am a bit too overwrought, too tired, to talk."

"I quite understand," he said. "Please forget I'm here; just rest."

Perhaps she smiled drowsily. Or was that, too, a freak of his imagination?

Lanyard a.s.sured himself it was, in excess of consideration even tried to persuade himself he had dreamed that ghost of a caress upon his hand. It seemed so little like her.

Not that anything had happened more than a gesture of transient inadvertence due to fatigue. It could not have been intentional, that act of intimacy, when the girl was altogether engrossed in young Thackeray.

There was something one must not forget, something that gave the lie flatly to that innuendo of the Weringrode's. Ignorant of the circ.u.mstances the intrigante had leaped blindly at conclusions, after the habit of her kind.

True, Sophie had not implied that this girl cared for him, but vice versa: either supposition, however, was as absurd as the other. As if Lanyard could love a woman who loved another! As if the name of love meant aught to him but the memory of a sweetness like a vagrant air of Spring that had breathed fitfully for a season upon the Winter of his heart!

A corner of Lanyard's mouth lifted in a sneer. That precious heart of his! the heart of a thief upon which even now the fruits of his thieving weighed....

Irritated, he wrenched his thoughts into another channel, and began to piece together inconsecutive s.n.a.t.c.hes of information gained from Crane in the confusion of the quarter hour just past, while the Secret Service operatives were busy rounding up the inmates of that spy-fold and searching for evidences of their impudent activities.

It appeared that Washington had at length, however tardily, roused out of its inertia and at midnight had telegraphed instructions to arrest out of hand every enemy alien in the land against whom there was evidence of conspiracy or even a ponderable suspicion.

So unexpected was this order that Crane had volunteered to show Cecelia Brooke that midnight rendezvous of the Prussian spy system without the least notion that he might be required before morning to lead a raiding force against the establishment; and even when a messenger stopped him as he turned to enter Au Printemps, he was not advised concerning the cause of this demand for his immediate presence at headquarters.

The first cast of what Crane aptly termed the dragnet had brought in the management and service staff to a man, with a number of the restaurant's habitues, including Sophie Weringrode and her errand-boy, the exquisite Mr.

Revel.

Velasco, however, had somehow mysteriously managed to slip through the meshes and had straightway hastened to spread the alarm.

As for O'Reilly and Dressier, they had left with Ekstrom in pursuit of Lanyard less than five minutes before, and so had escaped not only arrest but all knowledge of the raid prior to their return to Seventy-ninth Street.

The second cast of the net had been made at the latter place as soon as the watchers were able to a.s.sure Crane that Ekstrom and O'Reilly had returned--Dressier having antic.i.p.ated them there by something like half an hour.

By daybreak, then, these gentry would be interned on Ellis Island....

And break of day impended visibly in grayish shades that stole westward through the cross-town streets like clouds of secret agents spying out the city against invasion by the serried lances of the sun.

A garish twilight washed Forty-second Street from wall to wall by the time the car swung round in front of the Knickerbocker. As yet, however, there was little evidence that the town was growing restive in its sleep with premonition of the ardour of another day.

Lanyard stepped down and offered the girl a hand in whose palm her slender fingers rested lightly for an instant ere she pa.s.sed on, while he turned to bid the driver wait. Following, he overtook her in the entrance, where by tacit consent both paused and lingered in an odd constraint. There was so much to be said that was impossible to say just then.

Visibly the woman drooped, betraying physical exhaustion in every line of her pose, seeming scarcely strong enough to lift the silken lashes that trembled upon cheeks a little drawn and pale, with the faintest of bluish rings beneath the eyes.