The queer little one-sided smile cocked up the corner of Cleek’s mouth. “Sure of that, Sir Charles?” he inquired placidly. “Sure that she was not? I am told, it is true, that she left the note saying she was going to drown herself, and disappeared four nights ago; I am also told that since the date of Mr. Beachman’s suspension this place has been under constant guard night and day, but I have not been told, however, that any of the guards saw her leave the place. No, no, no! Don’t jump to conclusions so readily, gentlemen. She will be out of it now,—out and never likely to return; the news of that miscarried message would warn her that something was wrong, and she would be ‘up and out of it’ like a darting swallow. The question is, how and when did she get out? Let’s have in the guard and see.”

The sentries were brought in one after the other and questioned. At no time since they were first put on guard, they declared—at no time, either by day or by night—had any living creature entered or left the house up to now, except the Admiral Superintendent, his secretary, the auditor, and the nurse who had been summoned to look after the stricken girl. To that they one and all were willing to take solemn oath.

There is an old French proverb which says: “He that protests too much leads to the truth in spite of himself.” It was the last man to be called who did this.

“No, sir, nobody passed, either in or out, I’ll take my dying oath to that,” asserted he, his feelings riled up by the thought that this constant questioning of his statement was a slur upon his devotion to his duty. “There aren’t nobody going to hint as I’m a slacker as don’t know what he’s a-doing of, or a blessed mug that don’t obey orders; no, sir—no fear! Sir Charles’s orders was, ‘Nobody in or out’ and nobody in or out it was; my hat! yuss! Why, sir”—turning to the dock master—“you must ’a’ known; he must ’a’ told you. I wouldn’t allow even young Master Reggie in last night when he came a-pleading to be let in to get the school books he’d left behind.”

“When he what?” almost roared the dock master, fairly jumping. “Good lord, Marshall, have you gone off your head? Do you mean to claim that you saw my boy here—last night?”

“Certainly, sir. Just after that awful clap of thunder it was—say about eight or ten minutes after; and what with that and the darkness and the way the wind was howling, I never see nor heard nothing of him coming till I got to the door, and there he was—in them light-coloured knickers and the pulled-down wideawake hat I’d seen him wear dozens of times—with his coat collar turned up and a drippin’ umbrella over his head, making like he was going up the steps to try and get in. ‘Who’s there?’ as I sings to him, though I needn’t, for the little light was streaking out through the windows showed me what he was wearing and who it was well enough. ‘It’s me—Master Reggie, Marshall,’ he says. ‘I’ve come to get my school books. I left ’em behind in the hurry, and father says he’s sure you’ll let me go in and get ’em.’ ‘Oh, does he?’ says I. ‘Well, I’m surprised at him and at you, too, Master Reggie, a-thinking I’d go against orders. Word is that nobody gets in; and nobody does, even the king hisself, till them orders is changed. So you just come away from that door, and trot right away back to your pa,’ I says to him, ‘and ask him from me what kind of a sentry he thinks Bill Marshall is.’ Which sets him a-snivelling and a-pleading till I has to take him by the shoulder, and fair drag him away before I could get him to go as he’d been told.”

“Well done, Sophie!” exclaimed Cleek. “Gad! what a creature of resource the woman is, and what an actress she would make, the vixen! No need to ask you if your son really did come over here last night, Mr. Beachman; your surprise and indignation have answered for you.”

“I should think it would, by George!” rapped out the dock master. “What sort of an insane man must you have thought me, Marshall, to credit such a thing as that? As if I’d have been likely to let a delicate fifteen-year-old boy go out on an errand of any kind in a beast of a storm like last night’s, much less tell him that he was to ask a sentry, in my name, to disobey his orders. Good God! gentlemen, it’s simply monstrous! Why, look here, Sir Charles; look here, Mr. Cleek! Even if I’d been guilty of such a thing, and the boy was willing to go out, he couldn’t have done it to save his life. The poor little chap met with an accident last night and he’s been in bed ever since. He was going down the stairs on his way to dinner when that terrific clap of thunder came, and the blessed thing startled him so much that, in the pitch darkness, he missed his footing, fell clear to the bottom of the staircase, and broke his collar bone.”

“Poor little lad! Too bad, too bad!” sympathized Sir Charles, feelingly, and, possibly, would have said more but that Cleek’s voice broke in softly, but with a curiously sharp note underlying its sleekness.

“In the pitch darkness, Mr. Beachman?” it inquired. “The pitch darkness of a public hotel at dinner time? Isn’t that rather extraordinary?”

“It would be, under any other circumstances, sir, but that infernal clap of thunder interfered in some way with the electric current, and every blessed light in the hotel went smack out—whisk! like that!—and left the place as black as a pocket. Everybody thought for the moment that the wires must have fused, but it turned out that there was nothing the matter with them—only that the current had been interrupted for a bit—for the lights winked on again as suddenly as they had winked out.”

“By Jupiter!” Cleek cracked out the two words like the snapping of a whip lash, then quickly turned round on his heel and looked straight and intently at the telegraph operator.

“Speak up—quick!” he said in the sharp staccato of excitement. “I am told that when that crash came and the diverted message began there was a force that almost knocked you off your stool. Is that true?”

“Yes, sir,” the man replied, “perfectly true. It was something terrific. The Lord only knows what it would have been if I’d been touching the instrument.”

“You’d have been as dead as Julius CÆsar!” flung back Cleek. “No wonder she cut away to see what was wrong, the vixen! No wonder the lights went out! Mr. Narkom, the limousine—quick! Come along, Sir Charles; come along, Mr. Beachman—come along at once!”

“Where, Mr. Cleek—where?”

“To the top floor of the house next door to the Ocean Billow Hotel, Sir Charles, to see ‘Miss Greta Hilmann’s’ precious pensioners,” he made answer, rather excitedly. “Unless I am wofully mistaken, gentlemen, one part of this little riddle is already solved, and the very elements have conspired to protect England to become her foeman’s executioner.”

He was not mistaken—not in any point with regard to that house and the part it had played in this peculiar case—for, when they visited it and demanded in the name of the law the right to enter and to interview “the bedridden woman and the crippled girl who occupied the top floor,” they were met with the announcement that no such persons dwelt there, nor had ever done so.

“It is let to an invalid, it is true,” the landlady, a motherly, unsuspecting old soul, told them when they made the demand. “But it is a gentleman, not a lady. A professional gentleman, I believe—artist or sculptor, something of that sort—and never until last night has anybody been with him but his niece, who makes occasional calls. Last night, however, a nephew came—just for a moment; indeed, it seemed to me that he had no more than gone upstairs before he came down again and went out. Pardon? No, nobody has called to-day, neither has the gentleman left his room. But he often sleeps until late.”

He was sleeping forever this time. For when they came to mount the stairs and force open the door of the room, there, under a half-opened skylight, a dead man lay, one screwed-up, contracted hand still clutching the end of a flex, which went up and out to the telegraph wires overhead. On a table beside the body a fused and utterly demolished telegraph instrument stood; and it was evident from the scrap of flex still clinging to this that it had once formed part of that which the dead hand held; that it had snapped somehow, and that the man was attempting to re-attach it to the instrument when death overtook him.

“Gentlemen, the wire tapper—Boris Borovonski!” said Cleek, as he bent over and looked at him. “Step here, Mr. Beachman, and tell me if this is not the man who played the part of ‘Miss Greta Hilmann’s’ interesting papa.”

“Yes, yes!” declared the dock master excitedly, after he, too, had bent over and looked into the dead face. “It is the very man, sir, the very one! But who—but why—but how?” He then looked upward in a puzzled way to where the flex went up and out through the skylight and, threading through a maze of wires, hooked itself fast to one.

“Electrocuted,” said Cleek, answering that inquiring glance. “A few thousand volts—a flash of flame through heart and head and limbs, and then this! See his little game, Mr. Narkom? See it, do you, Sir Charles? He was taking the message from the tapped wire with that flex, and the fragment that reached the telegraph office only got through when the flex snapped. The furious gale did that, no doubt, whipping it away from its moorings, so to speak, and letting the message flash on before he could prevent it.

“Can’t you read the rest when you look up and see that other wire—the thick one with the insulated coating torn and frayed by contact with the chimney’s rough edge? It is not hard to reconstruct the tragedy when one sees that. When the flex snapped he jumped up and grabbed it, and was in the very act of again attaching it to the instrument when he became his own executioner. Look for yourself. The wild wind must either have blown the flex against the bared wire of the electric light or the bared wire against the flex—that we shall never know—and in the winking of an eye he was annihilated.

“No wonder the lights in the hotel went out, Mr. Beachman. The whole strength of the current was short-circuited through this man’s body, and it crumpled him up as a glove crumples when it is cast in the fire. But the dead hand, which had recovered the broken flex, still held it, you see, and no more of the ‘tapped’ message went down the dockyard wire. So long as that message continued, so long as the instrument which sent it continued to send it, it was ‘received’ here—a mere silent, unrecorded, impotent thrill locked up in the grip of a dead man’s hand.

“And look there—the pile of burnt paper beside the fused instrument and the cinder of a matchbox against it. The force which obliterated life in him infused it into the ‘dipped’ heads of those little wooden sticks, and flashed them into flame. So long as there was anything for that flame to feed upon it continued its work, you see, and Sophie Borovonski found nothing to take away with her, after all. Gentlemen, the State secrets that were stolen will remain England’s own—the records were burnt, and the dead cannot betray.”