After the first moment of stupefaction, Lady McIntyre's, "Oh—a—is that all?" resolutely proclaimed there was nothing out of the way in a governess having a box half full of ... books chiefly, weren't they?

The first thing Grindley took out was a roll of tracing-paper. He undid it. He smoothed it flat. He turned it over. He held it up to the light.

"Nothing! Not a thing!" breathed the lady.

Three pairs of eyes had fallen simultaneously on a letter which had been underneath the roll of paper—a letter unaddressed, in a sealed envelope. Grindley opened it. Singleton leaned over to read it, too. All that Napier could see was that the communication appeared to be in German script, not written compactly, as the national instinct for economy seems to inculcate. The lines were wide apart. Grindley's thick finger, traversing the blank space, seemed to emphasize this fact.

"Nothing there," said Singleton, dipping his hand in the box again.

"Nothing that jumps to the eye." Grindley laid letter and envelope on the floor by the tracing-paper. Out of a shallow cardboard box, full of numbered films, Singleton had briskly helped himself to one after another. He held each in turn up to the light—held the first two so that Grindley could see them.

"To keep such things! It's the kind of extraordinarily rash things they do." A look of understanding passed between the two secret-service men.

"They?" inquired Lady McIntyre, and as no one answered, "Rash?" She turned her helpless eyes on Napier. "What a world to live in, when to take a little picnic snap-shots is 'rash'!"

"You have a dark room? She develops her own photographs?"

Lady McIntyre swung her ear-rings.

While Singleton was running rapidly through the picture series, Grindley took out a book—a leather-covered book, with a lock.

"A diary, that is, just like mine," said Lady McIntyre. "Her diary had a lock, too," she said. But the fact did not save this one from desecration. Off came the lock at the edge of the chisel, and Grindley was bending his head over pages of exquisite writing. That it was German, seemed in no wise to disconcert Grindley. "Plain sailing," was his comment as he handed the book over to Singleton, who, with a kind of affectionate regret, put down the two films he had been studying side by side. "Very instructive, seen seriatim," he remarked, as he swept them toward the case, and took the diary.

Whether it was a fellow feeling for this private chronicle with the lock like hers, yet so ineffectual, certainly the sight of Greta's diary being passed from one strange hand to another made a sudden breach in Lady McIntyre's hard-won self-control.

"How you can!" She leaned forward to cast the three words into the dull face again over Greta's box. Grindley's hand was about to close upon a little gray silk bag which had fallen out of an envelope. Lady McIntyre was before him.

"I'll see what that is!" she said.

Napier winced in anticipation of the undignified struggle to which Lady McIntyre's action had laid her open.

But not at all. Grindley's good manners suffered him to make only the most civil protest.

"I wouldn't, really. Please, take care!"

Too late. Lady McIntyre had untied the drawstring and opened the innocent-looking, feminine thing, only to draw back, choking. Then she sneezed loudly. She sneezed without intermission, as she held the bag out at arm's length.

"Wha-atchew! What-atchew—is it? Chew!"

Grindley, handling the bag with caution, returned it to the thick waxed envelope and added that to his collection. Singleton had looked up an instant from his reading, sympathy in his attitude, a gleam of entertainment in his eye at recognition of this new object lesson in the unadvisability of a lady's poking her nose where a secret-service man warns her not to.

Napier stood anxiously over Lady McIntyre during the final paroxysm.

"What was that stuff?" he demanded of the oblivious Grindley.

"Usually snuff and cayenne," Singleton answered for him. "Harmless, unless it's flung into the eyes."

"Flung in!" gasped Lady McIntyre, receiving, as it were, full in the face her first staggering suspicion.

"If you get only a whiff, the thing to do is to gargle and bathe the eyes," Singleton advised politely, and fell upon his book again, like some intrigued reader of romance.

Lady McIntyre declined to go away to bathe and gargle. She sat wiping her streaming eyes and letting loose an occasional sneeze.

There still remained in the boot box, as Napier had seen, two modest-sized receptacles to be examined. One was of nickel or silver; the other, a trifle larger, appeared, as Grindley lifted it out, to be an ordinary japanned cash-box, with the key sticking in the lock.

"Achew! chew! chew!" said Lady McIntyre, trying to clear her watery vision, the better to verify the fact that the box was full of English gold—most of it done up in amateur rouleaux of twenty pounds each, sealed at each end.

Surprising, but not criminal, Lady McIntyre's inflamed face seemed to say. "Maybe," she wedged the words in between a couple of less violent sneezes; already she was steadying herself after the shock of knowing that gray bag of devilment in Greta's possession—"maybe she is custodian—others'—savings—some refugee."

Grindley had tumbled the rouleaux and the loose gold into his handkerchief. He knotted it and threw it into his case.

"I shall tell her!" Lady McIntyre's still streaming eyes arraigned him. "She shall know you've got it."

"Of course," said Grindley.

"And now for the jewel case." Reluctantly Singleton closed the diary.

But it wasn't a jewel case. No close observer needed Singleton's, "This is what you were looking for," to recognize Grindley's satisfaction at discovering a spirit lamp and alcohol flask fitted neatly into the box.

"It's to heat curling-tongs," said Lady McIntyre in her rasped and clouded voice. "That's all it is. Nothing in this world but the arrangement to heat her tongs. Every woman—"

"Miss von Schwarzenberg doesn't curl her hair with tongs," said the astonishing Grindley, a man you wouldn't have expected to know if a woman's hair were green and dressed in pot-hooks.

"How do you know she doesn't use tongs?" Napier could not forbear asking. Grindley, working with the lamp, made no reply.

"Do we understand you to say she does curl her hair with tongs?" Singleton inquired politely of Lady McIntyre. It was clear to the pair that part of Singleton's affair was to transact his business with as little friction as possible, to establish coÖperation in the most unlikely quarters. "You can't say she uses tongs," he said persuasively.

"I certainly cannot say she doesn't. Neither can you." Lady McIntyre stuck to her point as if she knew what hung upon it.

Grindley had unscrewed the wick cap. If she didn't use tongs, certainly she had used the lamp; the wick was charred. He lifted out the receiver and shook it. "Nearly full," he said.

Singleton was rapidly going through the few things left in the bottom of the safe. Several leather jewel cases. They revealed a truly astonishing store—chiefly diamonds.

"She can have these back at once," Singleton said, setting the cases down by Lady McIntyre's feet.

Grindley still hung over the alcohol lamp. He had found narrow metal bands folded down at the sides of the box. They were supports, as he proved by setting them upright, and in relation to yet others, with which they formed an overhead platform above that wired bed, which was so much more extensive than was necessary to supply the flame for the heating of tongs. But Grindley seemed to find no flaw in the arrangement. He made libation of alcohol, and felt for a match. As the wavering blue flame played along the wire mattress under the tester-like frame, Grindley put out a hand for the tracing-paper.

The conviction flashed across Napier's mind, bringing with it a twinge of acute distaste: Grindley's enjoying himself. Not that the vacant eyes achieved vision, nor the blunt features keenness. But Grindley was given up to a pleasureable absorption; an intentness that should not—considering his task—and yet somehow did insist on seeming less of the intellect than of the sensory nerves. It was the same look you will see on the face of the heavy feeder. A slight congestion; a gloss, as of a faint perspiration. Napier was sure that, apart from Grindley's professional stake in the issue of the hour, he was living through highly compensatory moments, as he watched the heat bringing out marks in the tracing paper. Very slowly the faint lines blackened.... Grindley showed no impatience; nothing but that gloating, with its suggestion of sensual abandonment. During those moments of waiting, Napier struggled against the injustice of his impression. What, after all, were they looking on at? Wasn't Grindley's satisfaction the same in its lesser degree as that Champollion felt when he forced the Rosetta Stone to yield the key to Egyptian hieroglyphics? Champollion used his wits to serve the ends of learning. Grindley was using his to serve his country. Why, then, did one feel a horrible kind of guilty excitement rather than honorable pride, as the heat of Grindley's lamp brought out clean and clear an outline drawing to scale of a new system of fortification on the northern coast?

Napier could hardly repress an explosion of consternation at the sight. But the only audible sound, except a crackling of the tracing-paper, as Grindley held it up, was Lady McIntyre's bewildered, "What do you call that?"

Grindley had thrown it down for Singleton to deal with, and now the unaddressed letter was being laid on the grille. Here for some reason the invisible ink answered less reluctantly to the warmth of the blue flames' invitation. Between the wide-apart lines appeared like magic the second letter. Again that stillness, a kind of drunkenness of pleasure on Grindley's part; again Singleton's quick reaction to success; again, the instant the lamp had done the work, its abandonment by Grindley. He looked at his watch. "I suppose we mustn't go without—" He moved toward the screen.

Lady McIntyre had made no effort to read a syllable of the new writing. She sat intensely quiet, while Singleton folded the letter and blew out the lamp. All her exclamatory speech, all her fluttering motions, were as stilled as death would one day leave them. It was like the rest one takes after a prodigious journey. The distance traversed since the hat-box had been wrenched open was made as clear as though the last object in the box had been yet another lamp shedding an intenser ray. Singleton had brought out something rolled in a scarf of Roman silk. The two objects inside were a small box of cartridges and a revolver. It was then that Lady McIntyre, rising and steadying herself by the chair, showed how far she had come in these last moments. "At all events, you can't say you've found any bombs!"

"No! oh, no!" If anything could minimize the implications of tragedy evoked by the sight of a revolver among the personal possessions of a lady in England, it would be the even pleasantness of Mr. Singleton's voice. "Nothing of that sort."

Singleton was busy putting away a medley of things into the attachÉ case, while Grindley was churning up the contents of the drawers in the American wardrobe trunk with the energy that seemed so nearly passive and was so uncannily effectual. The great trunk held no papers and only the lesser trinkets. But the store of purple and fine linen! Lace and lawn, and cobweb silk, dribbled from half-open drawers. Brocade and cloth, chiffon and velvet, swung out to view on adjustable supports. And all that brave show the unappreciative Grindley dismissed with a single word, "Nothing," and back he went to La Motte's Dictionary.

Singleton picked up the jewels that had come out of the hat-box and held the cases out to Lady McIntyre.

She seemed, as she stood there steadying herself by the chair back, to have gone momentarily blind. Singleton suggested she should take care of the jewels.

"No; oh, no!" she shrank back, and then the poor soul broke into weeping. "Under William's roof!"

Singleton slipped the jewels into the brown suit-case and led the way to the door. Grindley stood with La Motte open in the hollow of his arm. Now and then he made a note on a piece of paper, laid on the open page.

They waited for Lady McIntyre to master her tears.

"What are you meaning to do?" she demanded.

Singleton didn't hesitate an instant. The lady would be shown every consideration. Out of respect to Sir William.

"I suppose," said Lady McIntyre, with unexpected shrewdness, "it's his duty to tell me that." She turned from Napier to the man who stood there with that awful "body of conviction" in the brown suit-case.

"It will be terrible to have her here—terrible. But all the same you shall not take her to London to-night."

"I am afraid those are our instructions," Singleton answered deferentially.

"Instructions!" she echoed. "Sir William issues the instructions here. You cannot take her away till he comes home. Mr. Napier,"—she clutched at his arm—"will you ring up Sir William?"

On the other side of the threshold Grindley paused an instant and looked into the room again. Reluctantly he shut La Motte, and went back for his hat and stick.

"Oh, come away and shut the door!" wailed Lady McIntyre, casting a look of horror about the raided room. A few paces down the hall she loosed her hold on Napier and walked in front of the three men. Even before she got to her own room, she put out her hand like a blind person feeling for the door. She seemed to fall against it. It opened and hid the little figure from their sight.

Napier followed guiltily behind the brown case, glancing in at open doors, listening over the banister.

Nan! His heart suddenly stood still. There was the cap of Mercury on the chest in an angle of the lower hall.

"What is it?" asked the observant Singleton.

"She has—they have come back!" said Napier.

"Oh, no." He went on with the same light, swinging gait.

If Singleton was not, certainly the noiseless brown presence at Napier's side could not fail to be aware of the afternoon letters on a table in the hall below. The uppermost in one pile bore the American stamp. That would be addressed Miss Anne Ellis.

An undefined dread which had lurked in the dark of Napier's mind, masking itself as dislike of the man Singleton, betrayed more than a hint of its presence in an anxious speculation as to whether these men, licensed to break all laws of human dealing, ought to be left alone a moment in company with letters and telegrams, and God knew what, down there on the hall table.

"We'll go into Sir William's room and telephone him," Napier suggested.

Singleton looked at his watch.

"He's due here in about a quarter of an hour. Meanwhile, we'd better take these in out of the wet."

Napier could have sworn Singleton was studying the top letter on Miss Ellis's pile. The only ones he touched were Greta's. All the same, Napier had to put pressure on himself to avoid picking up Nan's letters and secreting them in his own pocket. He seriously considered the possibility of going out and heading off her return. He fixed an inimical eye on Grindley—Grindley, wandering about taking his bearings, La Motte still open on his arm. Now he was at the door, looking out—not for Sir William at all, as it seemed to Napier's mounting uneasiness. He was standing there looking out for Miss von Schwarzenberg's "ever loving" friend. Her "confederate," he might be capable of thinking.

Napier struggled with a vivid prevision of Nan coming back to find that ambiguous figure—Grindley—at the door. And when she knew what he stood there for, wouldn't she by every look and motion proclaim her share in the Schwarzenberg's fate?

Napier returned hastily to the man at the table.

"You have," Napier suggested, "some idea, perhaps, when Miss von Schwarzenberg is likely to be here?"

In the instant of Singleton's pause to enter a note in that little book of his, footsteps sounded on the gravel. Steps so quick and light, whose could they be but—Napier stood braced to meet the misery of this "coming back." To see her for the first time after that fleeting rapture among the rocks—to see her like this! He turned his head. Grindley put out a slow hand. "I'll take it," he said to a telegraph boy who stood there.

God!—the relief!

"You were saying, oh, yes, When." Singleton pocketed his note-book. "If nothing is altered, she'll be back with the others in an hour or so. Say, a little after six."

"From Sir William McIntyre's point of view mightn't it be better to—a—detach Miss von Schwarzenberg from the rest of the party? To get some of what can't fail to be—a very disagreeable business over without—a—"

Singleton eyed him.

"Not a bad suggestion." He pulled out a time-table. "What do you say, Grindley, to doing without another night in that beast of an inn?"

Grindley was at his elbow, holding the orange-brown envelope, superscription uppermost. "Schwarzenberg," all three read. Singleton dropped his time-table and laid hold of the envelope.

"No, you'd tear it." Grindley's thick soft thumb was already gently inserted under the flap. He persuaded it. He put the envelope in his side pocket and opened the paper slip. As the two secret-service men closed together to read the message, Napier made a movement for which he derided himself, an instinctive drawing out of range, as though the telegram were the private property of these men.

Singleton dropped his end of the paper with an impatient, "Just exactly as interesting as usual." He gathered Miss Greta's letters in a pile and opened the brown case to receive them. The case was now so full that, in order to include the dictionary abandoned for the moment by Grindley, Singleton opened the fat volume in the middle, and spatchcocked it face down on the journal and the jewel boxes. Even so, the case refused to shut. Singleton turned La Motte out.

"What's the good of it!"

"M'm." The sound Grindley made reminded one of a child mouthing a sweet. But his vacant eyes never left the telegram.

"You haven't told me,"—with difficulty Napier controlled his impatience—"I gather"—he went on—"that you know where to lay your hand on Miss von Schwarzenberg?"

"Tea telephoned for by Mr. Grant, Golden Lion, Newton Hackett," Singleton answered, still readjusting the contents of the case.

"Shall I see if I can get her on the telephone?"

Singleton hesitated. Over his shoulder he looked round at Napier with the faintest possible trace of a smile.

"Just as you like."

"Yes, it's I, Gavan Napier. Speaking from Lamborough."

She was surprised, greatly, you'd say pleasantly, surprised. Had Napier not stopped her, she would have been welcoming, in spite of the fact conveyed by that subtle inflection which tells the experienced ear that the speaker at the other end of the wire is not alone.

"Don't use names," Napier warned. "Could you get away from your party and return here at once?"

"What's happened?" the voice came sharply back.

"You might say Lady McIntyre wants you. She isn't ill. And she would specially like the party not to be broken up. The motor can go back for the others. One moment! Could you—use your influence to prevent anybody coming with you? Any one at all?"

After a second's pause the voice came pleasantly:

"The others have begun tea already. Famished. But I don't mind waiting to have mine with ... perhaps with you! Good-by, dear—"

Napier nearly dropped the receiver.

"—dear Lady McIntyre."

Before he rang off, he stepped back as far as the cord on the receiver allowed him to go. To the very threshold of the telephone room. He had suddenly remembered Nan's letters. Had they dared—?

He could see the two quite plainly, Grindley with a glass at his eye, studying the telegram, with Greta's dictionary between them. The message was in French, then. A sharp pricking of curiosity brought Napier back into the hall.

Grindley folded Miss Greta's telegram, returned it to its envelope, and stuck down the flap. Then he laid it, address uppermost, in the empty space between Lady McIntyre's letters and those of Miss Ellis, picked up the brown case, and passed Singleton, with a murmured, "Back in time."

"Perishing for a pipe," was his companion's comment to Napier, as the stout figure turned off among the shrubberies. "Great person, Grindley!"

Singleton took a letter off Miss Ellis's pile.

"How much is she—the American—in this, should you say?"

"You're too good at your job," retorted Napier, "to imagine she's within a thousand miles of being 'in it.'"

"Oh, you think that?"

His look drew a sudden stricture round Napier's heart.