Henry allowed himself a smile. Here, then, arrived after all the years of waiting, was the hour. The hour of reckoning; the hour in which he, brought face to face with Charles Wilbraham, should expose him before men for what he was. The hour when Charles Wilbraham should face him, reduced at last to impotent silence, deflated to limp nothingness like a gas balloon, and find no word of defence. Shamed and dishonoured, he would slink away, at long last in the wrong. In the wrong himself, after all these years of putting others there. Truly, Henry's hour had arrived.

The President, too, had seen the new-comers now. He paused in his speaking; he was for a moment at a loss. Then, “Gentlemen, excuse me, but this is a strictly private session,” he said clearly across the large room, in his faultless Oxford English.

Charles Wilbraham bowed slightly and advanced.

“Forgive me, sir, but I have a card of admittance. Also for my friend here, Signor Angelo Cristofero.”

“Angelo Cristofero”—the name seemed to ripple over a section of the committee like a wind on waters.

“Who is he?” asked Henry, of an Italian Swiss, and the answer came pat.

“The greatest detective at present alive. An Italian, but at home in all countries, all languages, and all disguises. Really a marvellous genius. Nothing balks him.”

“We have, you see,” continued Wilbraham, in his disagreeable, sneering voice, “some rather important information to communicate to the committee, if you will pardon the interruption. Presently I will ask Signor Cristofero to communicate it. But for the moment might I be allowed to ask for a little personal explanation? Since I entered the room I heard a remark or two relating to myself and various friends of mine which struck me as somewhat strange....”

M. Croza courteously bowed to him, with hostile eyes.

“You have a right to an explanation, sir. As you have entered at what I can but call such a very inopportune moment, you heard what I was saying—words uttered, need I say, in no malicious spirit, but in a sincere and public-spirited desire to discover the truth. I was accusing and do accuse, no one; I was merely laying before the committee information communicated to me this morning by Mr. Henry Beechtree.”

“Mr. Henry Beechtree?”

Charles Wilbraham turned on this gentleman the indifferent and contemptuous regard with which one might look at and dismiss some small and irrelevant insect.

“And who, if I may ask, is Mr. Henry Beechtree?”

“The correspondent, sir, of one of the newspapers of your country—the British Bolshevist.”

Charles laughed. “Indeed? Hardly, perhaps, an organ which commands much influence. However, by all means let me hear Mr. Beechtree's information. I am, I infer, from what I overheard, engaged in some kind of conspiracy, together with my friends M. Kratzky, Sir John Levis, and this gentleman here. May I know further details, or are they for the private edification of the committee only?”

Charles heavily sarcastic, ponderously ironic—how well Henry remembered it.

“Are we,” he went on, “supposed to have spirited away, or even murdered, the missing delegates, may I ask?”

“That,” said M. Croza politely, “was Mr. Beechtree's suggestion—only, of course, a suggestion, based on various facts which had come to his knowledge. You can, doubtless, disprove these facts, sir, or account for them in some other way. No one will be more delighted than the committee over which I preside.”

“Might I hear these sinister facts?” Charles was getting smoother, more unctuous, more happy, all the time. It was the little curl of his lip, so hateful, so familiar, with which he said these words, which seemed to snap something in Henry's brain. He pushed back his chair and sprang to his feet, breathless and dizzy and hot. He regarded not the cries of “Order,” from the chair and the table; order or not, he must speak now to Charles.

“You shall hear them, sir,” he said, and his voice rang shrilly up and up to a high and quivering note. “There is one, at least which you will not be able to deny. That is that you have shares, large and numerous, in the armaments firm of Pottle and Kett, of which Sir John Levis, your father-in-law, is chief director.”

Charles fixed on him a surprised stare. He put on his pince-nez, the better to look.

“I do not think,” he said, in his calm, smooth voice, “that I am called upon to discuss with you the sources of my income. In fact, I'm afraid I don't quite see how you come into this affair at all—er—Mr. Beechtree. But, since your statement has been made in public, perhaps I may inform the committee that it is wholly erroneous. I had once such shares as this—er—gentleman mentioned. It ought to be unnecessary to inform this committee that I sold them all on my appointment to the Secretariat of the League, since to hold them would, I thought, be obviously inconsistent with League principles. If it interests the committee to know, such money that I possess is now mostly in beer. Mr.—er—Beechtree's information, Mr. President, is just a little behind the times. Such a stirring organ as the British Bolshevist should, perhaps, have a more up-to-date correspondent. Will you, Mr. President, request Mr. Beechtree to be seated? I fear I find myself unable to discuss my affairs with—er—him personally.”

Charles's eyes, staring at Henry through his pince-nez, became like blue glass. For a moment silence held the room. Henry flushed, paled, wilted, wavered as he stood. Thrusting desperately his monocle into his eye, he strove to return stare for stare. After a moment Charles's high complacent laugh sounded disagreeably. He had made quite sure.

“How do you do, Miss Montana? We haven't, I think, met since January, 1919.” He turned to the puzzled committee. “Miss Montana, a former lady secretary of mine in the Ministry of Information, Mr. President. Dismissed by me for incompetence. What she is doing here in this disguise I do not know; that is between her and the newspaper which, so she says, employs her. May Signor Cristofero now be permitted to lay his rather important information before the committee? We waste time, and time is precious at this juncture.”

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