Napier was not yet out of the hospital when the cable came, telling the date of Julian's sailing from New York and that Nan was returning by the same ship.

Nine days after, Napier sat in his sister's London house, raging feverishly at his slow convalescence, which wasn't in reality slow at all. To him, there, caught, as he said, "by the foot, like a rabbit in a trap," came the awful news—they still cried these things in streets—of the torpedoing of the Leyden.

He sent his man Day to Liverpool that evening to give help or, at the worst, to send back instant news. The knowledge that Sir James and Lady Grant had taken the first train on the same errand was a thought to lean on.

Yet those next days of waiting! They were followed by the news, wirelessed from the SS. Clonmel, which told of falling in with a handful of Leyden survivors among a boatful of dead. "Identities not established," it announced. That meant people too injured or too delirious to tell their names; people rescued too late, people dying.

Who could sit and wait in London? Not Napier. Within two hours of a stormy interview with his surgeon Napier was on his way.

Leaning on his crutches, he stood in the crowd on the Liverpool wharf. Among the faces all about him, fear-darkened, hope-lit, tear-stained, or merely curious, one of them caught Napier's eye for its look of detachment. Or was it for something familiar? The blue eyes crossed his with no flicker of recognition. But when Napier looked round again, the man was withdrawing from the line of vision, and to do that was no easy matter in the crush. Was it Ernst Pforzheim, with his mustache shaved off? Napier had decided against so far-fetched an assumption before the incident was forgotten in the wild cheering that broke from the crowd, and which rose again and again, as the Clonmel steamed up the Mersey with its tragic remnant.

There was no glimpse of Julian among those ravaged faces, and no use, Napier told himself, no earthly use, to look for that other. Yet all the forces of body and of soul met in the concentration of his scrutiny from end to end of the slowing ship.

No, she wasn't there. Napier's right hand tightened on the bar of his crutch. He leaned an instant against the shoulder of his servant, feeling the dreaded onset of that dizzy sickness which comes back upon men who have had a touch of gas. Still, he was master enough of himself to notice that the captain moved a little as he put up his hand in recognition of some one on the wharf. Then Napier saw her—or was it Nan?

The face, with the scarf wound round it, was like a mask. Lines, features, the pale brune coloring, were there; but where was Nan?

A second cheer had gone up from the docks as the Clonmel made fast. The crowd surged forward, shouting questions about the fate of certain Liverpool stokers and seamen. The police intervened, and opened a lane as the first passengers came down the gangway, hatless, unshaven, in borrowed clothes. Women in the crowd below, crying out names, questions, had to be held back by main force. "Let the passengers land first!" And still the cries went up, one sharper than all the rest: "Is Jimmy O'Brian saved?"

The pressure was relieved about the gangway when Nan, one of the last to land, had reached the wharf. She stood with those vacant eyes of hers on Gavan's crutch instead of on his face.

"You—wounded!"

He had not shaped the words, "Where's Julian?" and yet she answered him. "Julian is dead. The rescue people buried him—at sea."

Napier tried ineffectually enough to shield her from a man with a note-book, volleying questions.

While Napier and his man, with the girl between them, slowly made their way through the throng, Napier told her she must take over the rooms he had engaged.

"You won't be able to travel for a day or two," he said.

She stopped short at that, and began to look about with those unseeing eyes. She was "quite able to travel." She "must travel." She was going to Scotland.

A chill gripped Gavan's heart. Was she delirious?

"Anywhere you like when you've had a few days—"

"A few days? I can't wait a few days. She can't wait—Julian's mother. I'm going first to her."

An immense relief swept over him. The mind was there, the faithful, loyal mind.

"You needn't go to Scotland. The Grants are behind you, in that crowd, talking to the captain."

Vision rose again in the dimmed eyes. A great tenderness lit the still features as Nan caught sight of the tall, bent old man beside Julian's mother, and the changed face of the woman.

When once she had reached them, the last threads that had seemed precariously to hold her to Napier snapped. Her meeting with the Grants was very quiet, but evidently it changed the old people's plans in so far as they had plans. Sir James took Nan on his arm. The policeman, piloting Lady Grant, led the way out of the crowd within a yard of Napier. The girl turned to him.

"Gavan!"

"Where shall you be?" Napier made a motion to join her.

"She'll be with us, naturally," said Julian's father, his eyes resting an instant on Napier. "And you—soon you'll come—" he didn't try to finish. That "soon" had said enough. The old man could not at the moment bear even Gavan near his grief. The look in his eyes brought tears to Napier's as, forlornly, he watched the little group disappear in the crowd.

What a world! Would people ever be happy again?

The reporters, who had got hold of the captain and one of the survivors, surrounded the pair three and four deep. Their ranks were broken by a distracted woman with a shawl over her head, strained tight round her piteous face.

"Is it here he is, the gentleman who was saved? For the love of God, sir, did ye see Jimmy O'Brian? I'm his mother."

Napier leaned more heavily on his servant.

"We must get out of this," he said. But they couldn't. People who hadn't found their friends were not to be convinced they weren't on board. Again and again denied access to the ship, they pressed through the crowd with cries and questions. They couldn't see the crutch. Napier was knocked and jostled. The old gas-sickness was heavy on him. He took refuge on a sea-chest behind a pile of luggage, and sent Day to keep places in the train. When he lifted his swimming head, struggling still against that tide of nausea rising to choke him, Napier saw that the crowd had thinned now to a few groups of last, despairing lingerers. Even the cries for Jimmy O'Brian had sunk into the same stillness that wrapped the sailor at the bottom of the sea. A little old man in a threadbare coat closely buttoned round a meager body went up to the guard at the foot of the gangway.

"You are quite sure? The passengers are all off?"

"Haven't I told you no end o' times? They're gone, every man Jack of 'em, and we're hoistin' the gangway."

The old man walked forlornly away, his threadbare ulster flapping against his shins.

"Any idea when the other lady will be coming off?" a foreign-sounding voice asked on the other side of the luggage.

"'Other lady'! What other lady?"

Napier, leaning over, saw something shoved into a grimy fist. The Clonmel deck-hand had no need to look at the aid to memory. The faculty of touch had applied the stimulus. "There was another lady," he said; "but she ain't comin' ashore here. Goin' back with us to Ireland."

Napier watched the sailor take the inquirer over to the guard. The guard proved amenable. In a moment the stranger with the square back had passed up the gangway. No detectives were with him; he had gone on board alone. If it wasn't Ernst Pforzheim, it was some mustacheless individual extremely like him in feature, and as unlike as a seedy bowler, shabby clothes, and a slouching air could render the smart young gentleman of Glenfallon Castle. What did it mean?

The same question seemed to have occurred to a reporter who observed from a distance this case of flagrant favoritism. He was further rewarded for his patience by seeing presently the sailor who had been tipped beckoned by a steward from the top of the gangway. The reporter came strolling along the now nearly deserted wharf. He coasted gloomily round the piled-up luggage, looking at the labels. When he had passed out of Napier's range—suddenly voices!

Napier shifted his position again. Two men who had given no sign of life before were being asked some question by the reporter. One of the pair caught Napier's eye. Singleton! Napier's chilled blood ran swiftly. It was Ernst, then, who had gone on board! And if he didn't come back, if he was for escaping to Ireland, Singleton and his companion would search the ship. Plainly Singleton was trying to get rid of the reporter. Whatever was afoot here, it was not desirable to have it in the papers. The secret-service man and his companion, who looked as if he might be a plain-clothes policeman, turned a cold shoulder on the reporter, and suddenly fell back in the direction of Napier. Suddenly the reporter darted out from the shadow of the luggage and stood hovering near the gangway. The sailor and a steward were bringing down a shrouded figure in an invalid chair—a lady, you might think, if you didn't strongly suspect it to be Ernst doubling on his track after getting wind of Singleton waiting down there behind the luggage. When quiet had descended on the wharf and the ship was searched, Mr. Ernst would be far away.

"Put the lady down." Singleton's companion had planted himself in the way of the little procession, his coat turned back to show the police badge.

"Go on, I tell you!" The voice that came shrilly out of the veils was bewilderingly unlike the one Napier had been waiting for. The rest was mere pantomime from where he sat. The veiled head turned and seemed to catch sight of Singleton. Whereon the invalid darted out of the chair and ran with extraordinary fleetness down toward the warehouses.

When Gavan had pulled himself up on his crutch, he saw in the middle distance Singleton's companion and the reporter running along the wharf, while some yards further on, a squat, petticoated figure struggled fiercely in the arms of a fat policeman. Hat and veil were torn off, and Napier had an instant's glimpse of the face of Greta von Schwarzenberg, horrible with fear. The next instant she had succeeded in drawing back far enough to lift her foot, and to launch at the policeman a totally unexpected blow in the belly. Stark astonishment, as much as anything, sent the man stumbling back a couple of paces. The woman darted past into a region of piled barrels, casks, and cases, policeman and reporter in pursuit. Napier had fleeting glimpses of a game of hide-and-seek, grotesque in spite of the fact that it was played with passion, Greta appearing, disappearing, the others hot on her track, Greta tearing off scarf, ulster, and jacket as she ran, and casting them forth for her pursuers to catch their feet in. The policeman again fulfilled her hopes, but in vain was the net spread in sight of Singleton. He it was who at the most critical moment headed her off from the street. Back she doubled toward the water and was once more lost to view.

"If it was anybody else," Napier said, struggling to a balance on the well foot, "I'd say she hadn't a dog's chance."

"No, sir," the returned Day remarked obligingly as he steadied the crutch.

Owing, Napier afterward learned, to police orders in connection with the apprehension of a passenger off the Clonmel, the Euston train was still in the station. As Napier hobbled along the platform, Singleton and one of the ship's officers went by, making hurried inspection of each carriage. One door they opened revealed a man lying out at full length on the seat. As he raised his head, Napier recognized in the changed face Hallett Newcomb. The Clonmel officer asked if his late passenger had seen anything of "the lady, the older one."

Newcomb shook his head. He'd heard she was going on to Ireland.

"So did we," said Singleton. "We sent a man on board to induce her quietly to change her mind; but that woman's the devil. Simply vanished into air, or, rather, I believe she dived." All the same, they went on with their examination. Napier meanwhile had his bag brought into Hallett Newcomb's carriage. The fruitless search for Greta ended; the train was allowed to proceed.

On that journey back to London Napier heard through what the survivors of the Leyden had lived, to what Julian had succumbed.

In those next days Nan lay in that house in Berkeley Street where she had helped to nurse Julian back to health. Napier sent or telephoned daily to inquire for her. "Great care, complete quiet," Lady Grant wrote at the end of a week. "Not easily or soon will she shake off the horror of that voyage and of Julian's death."

Napier was the less prepared for Singleton's visit, a few days later, hot-foot from Berkeley Street. Singleton had, as he said, hunted up Miss Ellis "as a last hope." Oh, yes, he'd seen her.

"She'd been on the point of sending to you to get my address. What I hoped she'd tell me, I've come to doubt if she knows. I want your opinion on that. I see now I shall have to go warily." Singleton drew his chair closer to the fire and held out a hand to the blaze. There was not wariness only in the fine eyes, but the passion of the quest, and behind all a suppressed excitement, new in Napier's knowledge of the man. "For months," he went on, "there's been a leakage at the War Office."

Yes, Napier knew that. What he didn't know was that Schwarzenberg had been the one to make first-hand use of the leakage. Singleton had come to believe she'd engineered it. However that might be, "there's leakage still."

Napier caught the infection of Singleton's excitement.

"Can't Ernst get to the bottom of it—with the lady's kind help?"

"Her help? After he'd let her into the Liverpool trap?" inquired Singleton with scorn for such innocence. "Ernst, poor devil, won his release from Miss Greta, when he'd got her into our hands." The secret-service man studied the fire, frowning. "I didn't get what I went for, but I've had a rather curious interview with your American friend. She'd been looking at back copies of the newspapers. The library, where she was lying, was half snowed under with newspapers. Been poring over accounts of the torpedoing and the rescue. But she hadn't been able to find anything about Greta, not a breath. 'Well,' I said, 'doesn't that mean there's nothing to say?'

"'Only something to keep dark?' she suggested. Oh, she's no fool! She sat up and looked through me. I explained that all I meant was that Schwarzenberg mightn't be of such general interest as she imagined. She thought that over a moment, and then she said something that astonished me a good deal, given the terms Newcomb tells me they'd been on.' If it isn't known where Greta is,' she said, 'that's bad all round.' I asked, 'Why, all round?'

"She wouldn't answer directly. 'To be able to vanish like that,' she said. 'It's true, then; you do some things badly over here.'

"'Undoubtedly we do.'" Singleton smiled again as though recalling a compliment paid the British service.

And then he owned that she had very nearly bowled him over the next moment by saying: "'You don't happen to know where Mr. Ernst Pforzheim is?'

"'Pforzheim?'" Singleton had echoed feebly with his vacant, uninterested look. "'What makes you think of Pforzheim?'

"'Because wherever Ernst Pforzheim is, we'll find Greta.'"

Singleton smiled at her: "You're clear off the track. Pforzheim was arrested ages ago and locked up."

"But he escaped; Greta told me so."

"Well, he hasn't escaped, so make your mind easy about that."

She lay silent a moment, turning it over in her mind: "But if she didn't find Ernst, what did she do?"

Singleton seemed not to know the answer to that.

The girl sat up with startling suddenness: "'I thought I'd ask you first,' she said.

"'And second?'

"'I shall have to pull myself together and find out if somebody doesn't know where she is.'"

Singleton asked, "Why?" As she didn't answer that: "Is there any great hurry?"

"Well, there is," she admitted, with a nervous clasping and unclasping of her hands. "I can't say any more, but the authorities have got to know."

"To know—" He waited.

"That Greta ought to be found."

"And when she is found?" Singleton inquired innocently.

Her answer evidently cost her something. "She ought to be sent out of the country."

Singleton suggested the futility of that had been proved.

"That's why, that's why!" She clutched the silk coverlid. "The people who know how to deal with these things have got to know. Though for me to have to tell them,"—her eyes filled—"it's an awful thing!"

He saw a way to ingratiate himself.

"I think I can save you that," he said.

"Can you? Can you? Oh, I'd be endlessly thankful!"

"I didn't say that nobody knew where to find the lady. Lord, it made her sit up straighter than ever."

"I was right, then," she said. "I felt you'd be the one to know. But you are keeping back something. Mr. Singleton, what has happened to Greta?"

He told her nothing very serious had happened as yet.

She lay back on the cushions an instant, with her chin up and her eyes on the window cornice.

"Then—I'm—not too late," she said.

"Too late for what?"

"Where is she?"

"I didn't tell you I could put my hand on her," he said. "I told you, very privately, of course, and as a great—the greatest—mark of confidence, that there were those who could."

"Well, I've got to be one of them," she said in her shortcut American way. When she saw he wasn't going to notice that observation, she went on: "Ever since I got better, I've lain in the room up there waiting for a letter from her." She had said it precisely as though her last encounter with the Schwarzenberg had been one of ordinary friendship. "I telegraphed Lady McIntyre to forward any letters, and she has. Not a thing from Greta."

"No, I dare say not," Singleton had answered.

"But why do you 'dare say not'?" Anxiety settled on her face again. "You make me all the surer of what I've been feeling so strongly that I can't sleep. Greta is in terrible need of help. All the more because of what she's done."

"And do you imagine, if she were in need of help, she'd turn to you?"

"Oh, quite certainly."

Singleton hadn't been able to repress the rejoinder: "It's a good thing, then, she can't." He wasn't the least prepared for the sensation by that innocent utterance.

"She can't!" The girl had risen, and the silk coverings fell about her feet as she stood there with frightened eyes, saying under her breath, "Why can't she?"

He did his best to soothe her. "You've just admitted you wouldn't have her free to carry out her designs."

"No! no!" She dropped weakly on the edge of the sofa and sat leaning forward: "Not free to do harm, but surely she is free to write to a friend?"

"I wouldn't, if I were you, be heard calling yourself a friend."

"I was a friend," she said. "How far can you go back, once you've been an intimate friend?"

"You have never been a friend, intimate or otherwise, because you never really knew the woman." And then he told her—not the details of the struggle on the wharf, the escape at risk of drowning, and the two days' pursuit of one of the most notorious spies in Europe. He told her merely that Miss von Schwarzenberg was under detention during his Majesty's pleasure.

When he had done so, he devoutly wished he hadn't.

"Instead of helping us to find out who the woman's accomplices are," he complained to Napier, "your Miss Ellis will be worrying us about the woman herself."

Then Singleton developed the idea that had come to him after leaving Berkeley Street. Mightn't it be possible to get the all-important clue out of Schwarzenberg herself by means of the Ellis girl if the authorities could be persuaded to give her access to Miss Ellis?

Napier was quite sure when his visitor left that Singleton was convinced of the hopelessness as well as the inadvisability of that device. Napier thought the less about what he characterized to himself as "the fellow's crazy project," because his mind was occupied with endless speculations about Nan.

A sentence in a letter which came the next day in answer to one of Napier's, shed a certain light. "Don't you, too, feel that I must tell Lady Grant how things are before I see you here? I haven't the strength for that just yet." She went on to say she'd seen Singleton and she had since tried to get more definite news through the authorities. "But you won't want to hear about Greta, though I must just tell you that Mr. Singleton has been very kind. He's found out she's a Prisoner of the First Class. That's so like Greta, if she was to be a prisoner at all!"

In his uneasiness Napier managed, two days later, to get Singleton on the telephone. He was told in a voice with impatience of "the stupidity at H. Q. which persisted in blocking the unceasing efforts of that girl to get permission to see the Elusive One. I've advised your friend"—Singleton's laugh came metallic along the wire—"to ask you to get her the permit."

"She knows better," retorted Napier. Something seemed to go wrong with the line after that. He didn't get Singleton again. Singleton was greatly occupied about that time.

As a special, indeed an unprecedented, concession, a permit was ultimately obtained for an unnamed lady to pay a visit to a person designated only by the Number 96 in a metropolitan prison.

Singleton didn't show Miss Ellis the permit until he had talked to her for some minutes about the superhuman difficulties that had to be surmounted before he had been able to get their request so much as listened to. He had sworn not to yield up the all-powerful piece of paper without exacting a pledge from Miss Ellis. She was to promise on her word of honor that she wouldn't let the Schwarzenberg know who had moved in the matter. This was of an importance he could not explain to her, but it was "the condition."