Not long after, still another party turned up and was assigned a nearby table. Lanyard accorded its four members the same shrewd but covert study which he had already wasted on their predecessors, perceiving in these newcomers, as well, nothing to re-excite a disposition to distrust mankind in toto which was yielding rapidly to the blandishments of that delightful and devoted presence at his elbow, a dinner most admirable of its kind, and a wine finer than any a discriminating palate had relished in many a moon; influences so powerful as to compensate even his forebodings of the reckoning to come. Some acquaintance with the ways of road-houses like this, broad-minded enough to produce a bottle of sound Burgundy without so much as a gesture of deference to the law of the land, lent strength to the apprehension that, when Lanyard had settled his score, he would bear away from the Inn of the Green Woods a purse as thin as his expectation of a dull old age. And never a hope of being able to replenish it before the next quarterly remittance day, two months away!
A thought to drive a man in love distracted who had no other worries tearing at his heart. With all his might Lanyard tried to put it out of mind lest it shadow his mood too evidently to be misread. Eve must never be permitted to suspect that pride of penury had anything to do with his decision to make an end tonight of relations which, however heartrending the wrench that must sever them, love worthy of its inspiration might no longer sanction.
Either the wine or his anxiety to seem at ease loosened his tongue and enlivened his wit, Lanyard found himself talking with a humour and a verve that enabled him to ride cavalierly over awareness of the look in the eyes so constant to his, a look in which perplexity and patience too constantly found place. But all the while he was half-consciously preparing for the challenge which came when, with the room to themselves but for one other party of diners, they lingered over coffee and cigarettes before the fire.
"When are you going to tell me, Michael, what is on your mind?"
Words quietly spoken, like drops of cool water added one by one to the seething contents of a test tube, precipitating the elements of the situation between them. And he who had no small conceit in the readiness with which he was wont to deal with others, experienced now a moment of mental flurry, lost the thread of his argument, and stared helplessly into those smiling but intent eyes. She was finished, he had to recognize, with forbearance; nevertheless he could not but make one last attempt to stave off the inevitable.
"What should there be, Eve, more than you know?"
"Do you really want me to believe you have forgotten our talk, the other night at the Ritz, the discussion you yourself started and that, at my request, we didn't finish?"
"Must we recall that now?"
"It isn't like you, Michael, to palter . . . We aren't children any more, my dear; you know my mind and I know yours—at least in part. I love you and want you for my husband; but you won't ask me to marry you, of your own volition you have raised up the ghost of your dead yesterday to stand between us and"—she had a smile for the verbal extravagance—"forbid the banns! But I have refused to be frightened by bogeys. With that we left the question open, night before last; since when something has happened." She nodded gravely: "Tell me, Michael . . ."
"What makes you think—?"
"You love me too well to distress me needlessly by leaving a matter so vital in suspense. If nothing had occurred to make you hesitate, for fear of giving me pain, you wouldn't be trying so hard to talk about everything imaginable but the one thing that counts."
He gave his head a tormented shake. "Is it not enough that, the more I weigh the circumstances, the more sure I feel I am right?—the only way to be fair to you is to take myself out of your life."
"But it seems to me I am the one to say what is fair or unfair to me. After all, my happiness is at stake."
"Not more than mine."
"Much more than yours. You are selfish, Michael—not meaning to be, but because you would hurt me to my very heart to spare yourself self-reproach, if ever after our marriage anything should come out of the past to trouble us. As if anything matters to a woman who loves, so long as she is well loved in return!"
"You show me to myself in an unkind light . . ."
"I am using every weapon I can find in my fight with life for the right to be happy."
"I would break my own heart rather than cause you an instant's unhappiness . . ."
"You think so, dear. But you at least would have the memory of an act of renunciation to console you—you could say to yourself: 'I suffer, but for her sake.' For me there would be only the knowledge that I had been cheated out of my due. I have the right to claim more of life than it has given me . . ."
The voice of melancholy music faltered, then resumed: "The War took my husband from me before I was old enough to know what love could mean. Now, long after, I have found a greater love—and I am required to give it up solely because you are afraid somebody may some day tell me what I already knew, that once upon a time you were a little lower than the angels!"
To avoid the accusation of her look, Lanyard stared blindly into the fire.
"I am not good enough for such a love as yours, Eve."
"Perhaps no one of us is good enough for Love. Yet we can try to be, by serving . . ."
Lanyard hung his head; and in accents of quiet conviction Eve de Montalais pursued: "Somethinghashappened. I thought so, from your manner this afternoon, now I am sure. It isn't that you have ceased to care for me—"
"You know it is not that."
"What, then? It must be something quite as serious, you couldn't hold out against me as you do if it were anything less. Michael: you can't refuse to tell me now."
He made a sign of submission combined with a plea for time in which to assort his thoughts. Indisputably nothing less than the truth would satisfy her; but it might be that something less than the whole truth, so sure to terrify the woman, would serve.
And while he sat turning the matter over in his mind, their waiter approached.
"Monsieur Paul Martin?" the man enquired, with an execrable attempt to give the words a French inflexion.
In his abstraction, Lanyard signified an impatient negative, but Eve de Montalais was less thick-witted.
"What name?" she quickly enquired.
"Paul Martin, ma'm. He's wanted on the telephone—a long distance call."
"From New York?"
"I don't know, ma'm, the party didn't say, just asked for Monsieur Paul Martin—party with a sort of a foreign accent, French, I guess."
Eve looked sharply to Lanyard: "It is for you—you must answer it." He responded with a puzzled nod, though his memory needed no more jogging. But was it possible? he wondered, letting the waiter lead to the telephone booth in the office of the inn; aside from Eve and himself, that alias of a day long past was known to but three people in the world; and of these one was in London and one at last accounts in Paris, the third alone was in New York . . .
But if Liane knew where he was dining, so far away from Town, she must have been informed by somebody who had followed him without his knowledge!
Not the voice of Liane, but a man's saluted him above the humming of the long distance wire, a man's voice with, as the waiter had indicated, a strong tinge of nasal French.
"Monsieur Paul Martin?"
"Yes. Who wants him?"
"I am spikin' for 'is sister. Ees this Monsieur Martin spikin'?"
It was Liane who for her own ends had nominated herself the sister of Monsieur Paul Martin, one day in Paris long ago.
Lanyard answered "Yes."
"Pardon, monsieur: your sister ees too beesy now to telephone you 'erself. She have ask' me to geev you a message."
"Monsieur is most amiable," Lanyard replied in French. "What is the message, please?"
"Prenez garde."
"What do you say?"
"Bon soir, monsieur."
"Hello! hello!"
But Lanyard worried the hook in vain: the other had hung up, the wire was closed. . . .
Prenez garde—take care!
Lanyard took back to Eve by the fire the most dégagé manner he could manage, a manner of leisured good humour that wasn't all put on at the prompting of amour propre, that was assumed less in hope of hoodwinking her ingenious intuitions than for the benefit of their fellow guests, if so be it these entertained any latent interest in the reactions of Michael Lanyard to a long distance call for "Monsieur Paul Martin," and that dissembled better than he believed a sense of discouragement the most devastating he had ever known—not on his account alone so much as that he was not alone.
The quandary in which he found himself trapped, now that his eyes had been opened by that singular admonition from out of the night, at once cryptic and only too intelligible, was one that defied and, what was worse, promised persistent defiance to the utmost of his resources, from which extrication with credit to himself—or, if it came to that, with his life—seemed out of the question. Not that he put life first: his solicitude was nine parts unselfish, his disheartenment the fruit of inability to hit on any pretext that conceivably would induce Eve to part then and there with one whose company had all at once become equivalent to a pistol trained on her heart point-blank—and with a finger both pitiless and anonymous trembling on the trigger.
A strong statement, but one that by no means painted their predicament an exaggerated black. His "sister" had never played her confrères false or resorted to subterfuge so subtle to put "Monsieur Paul Martin" on his guard against a nebulous or trifling menace. Liane owed Lanyard much on an old score, she would have been faithless to the code of her kind had she, having definite foreknowledge of it, permitted so good a friend to go blindly to meet the fate prepared for him, whatever that might be; such women are nevertheless jealous wardens of their own welfare, it had required perception of a peril to Lanyard immediate and desperate to work Liane up to the point of chancing the resentment of Morphew should her treachery ever transpire. Witness the extravagant pains she had taken to disguise her hand.
No: it would never do to underprize this proof of good will or to read in Liane's warning any spirit but one of the most earnest anxiety. Taken as she had unquestionably intended it, her "prenez-garde" decoded somewhat to this effect: "You are sadly self-deluded, my friend, if you think Morphew resigned to stomach defeat at your hands, or that you have succeeded in keeping your movements hidden from him. He has never for an instant lost sight either of you or of his revenge, he is playing you as heartlessly as an angler plays a trout, gaff in hand—you must go warily to cheat its barbs."
The dilemma thus exposed was appalling: a clean breast of all he had been trying to hide from her was unavoidable if he hoped to make Eve comprehend why he held it imperative for them to seek each a separate way back to New York; whereas, once she did grasp the fact that danger threatened him, she would surely refuse to let him risk it alone. Women of her rare stamp are never readily dismayed or disposed to think first of themselves if physical peril frown also upon one by whom their affections have been engaged. . . . Regard the spirit that poised Eve then in that juncture, awaiting his return with a countenance as composed as it was fair, with eyes unclouded by any confession of impatience or misgivings.
"Sorry I was so long," Lanyard said with intention to be heard across the dining-room. "I stopped to pay the bill and order the car brought round. If you don't mind . . ."
"It's quite time," Eve amiably agreed—"if we're to get home at any respectable hour."
He resumed his chair before the fire and utilized his cigarette case and a match to cover sidelong study of the four who had come in so soon after his arrival with Eve, and who remained still at table, dawdling with dessert. But he couldn't see that his announcement had meant anything to these . . .
The one woman of their number was a creature of strapping comeliness whose hail-fellow swagger was brazen that had been piquant in the flapper she heavily aped; while the men were such as would hardly have won a second glance on any ordinary occasion, types of the American bourgeois case-hardened by "good business," clothed in a weirdly uniform mode of smartness, something stale with over-feeding and drinking and fondling, wanting stimulation yet inclined to grow causelessly arrogant in their cups. But Lanyard was too well learned in the ways of urban America not to know that its Apaches seldom if ever conform to the cliché of the cinema when it turns its cyclopædic if gullible eye on what it knows as denizens of the underworld. The gunman of New York is blown with pride of caste; for all that he isn't keen on bidding for the attention of the police by sporting the conventionalized make-up of a suspicious character, he far prefers to pass in a crowd as a simple man in the street normally addicted to the machine-made "clothing of distinction" of the magazine advertisements. The fact, then, that these three were apparently nobodies in particular minding their own business, didn't necessarily mean that Lanyard could afford to dismiss them from his calculations.
Neither did he, careful though he was to give them no excuse for suspecting he had one thought to spare from the woman at his side.
"There is no one like you," he was saying in gallant repayment of her steadfast and demanding attention: "the loveliest woman that ever breathed, the most adorably patient . . ."
"How little you know me!" she calmly commented—"at least, if you expect me to believe you think me patient. Then your message was important?"
"Very," the man admitted: the time was by when fencing were anything but waste of time. "I am worried about getting you back to Town . . ."
"So it was Mademoiselle Delorme!"
"That only goes to show," Lanyard obliquely remarked, "one should never tell you anything one expects you to forget."
"I have forgotten nothing you have ever told me about yourself—nothing, least of all, that had to do with another woman's affection for you."
"Yet you are incapable of jealousy."
"Still, I am very greedy, I don't like sharing even the least of your thoughts with any other woman."
"Oh!" he laughed—"but Liane isn't a woman, except professionally."
"You are tantalizing me all the same when you don't tell me what she had to say—and how in Heaven's name she guessed you were dining here—and why she resurrected that old nom de guerre instead of calling for you by your right name."
"I'm afraid Liane didn't guess, I suspect somebody told her we had stopped here to dine—"
The teasing half-smile with which Eve had been regarding her lover was erased. "You think we were followed—!"
"How else could they have known?"
"'They'?"
"Who informed Liane."
"But why should she have harked back to 'Paul Martin'?"
"I fancy her reason for that is implicit in Liane's message, a brief one—delivered, if it matters, by a stranger's tongue—'prenez garde'."
Eve nodded thoughtful confirmation of a private conjecture. "You are in some danger?" Not at all deceived by the shrug that sought to depreciate the weight of that term, she glanced quickly to and from the little party that was, just then, noisily making merry at its table across the room. In response, another movement of Lanyard's shoulders disclaimed intelligence: "Perhaps . . . Who knows?"
"You must tell me everything . . ."
"I know; but it's a fairish yarn, and the car ought to be here any minute—I'll hardly have time before we leave. So let me first of all throw myself upon your mercy, Eve, beg you to trust me."
"But you know I do, in every way."
"I mean: trust me to know what is best . . ."
Analysis of this ambiguity knitted a speculative frown. "You're going to ask something of me I won't want to do."
"It is dangerous for us to attempt the journey back to New York together."
"Dangerous," Eve objected, "isn't definite enough."
"It would appear that one whom I have recently been obliged to humiliate plans to pay me out tonight. He will fail—trust me for that—but I shall be more free to make him see the error of his ways if I can feel sure the harm meant for me can't by mischance be visited upon you instead."
"Ah, no, my friend! you don't seriously think I will consent . . ."
"You would not hesitate if I could only make it clear how much better my chances would be."
"I'm afraid it's a hopeless task, but"—she made her smile provoking—"suppose you try."
"Conceive, then"—Lanyard spoke deliberately in an endeavour to put the business in a nutshell—"that after leaving you night before last I was thrown in with one who chose to declare war on me for his own ends—"
"The Sultan of Loot!"
"Why try to keep anything from you?"
"You forget, I too had a premonition concerning that creature. Who is he?"
"I can more easily tell you what he is. He styles himself Morphew and the Tenderloin calls him King of the Bootleggers—justly, one is told. In addition, he nurses a penchant for having a finger in every lawless pie. To discipline me, that night, he caused the loot of a burglary to be hidden in my pockets while I lay in a stupor, drugged by his direction, then saw to it that I was suspected of having committed the theft."
"Oh, no!" the woman interrupted involuntarily, revolted by the bare suggestion of such enormity.
"Or else—I must believe I stole the jewels myself, in instinctive reversion to old ways, drink having abolished the inhibitions of the new."
"Never!"
"I do not know," Lanyard confessed with a wry face. "There are circumstances which make me uneasy . . . I do not know!"
"How can you even suggest such a thing?"
"Let me tell you . . . Last night I visited—or revisited!—the house from which the jewels had been stolen, meaning secretly to restore them. This I managed. I was even more fortunate in being able to bring about the arrest of one of Morphew's lot as the burglar of fact—which the fellow may well have been. Finally, to confuse pursuit, I quitted the house by the way the burglar had taken the night before—let myself out of a window to the roof of an extension, dropped down to a backyard, scaled a board fence, and stole through an excavation for a new building to the street beyond. Eve . . ."
Lanyard faltered and worked his hands together, his features wrung, haunted eyes reflecting the enigma of the embers which held their stare. And with a gesture of quick sympathy, the woman sat forward to screen him. But these others seemed to be completely preoccupied with their own hilarious concerns; and the racket of congenial voices they raised must have prevented their overhearing anything of Lanyard's confession when at length he resumed.
"Up to that time," he said slowly, "I had hardly questioned the assumption that Morphew deliberately had schemed to victimize me . . . But then, while I was creeping away from that house, quite literally like a thief in the night—once upon the roof, again when I stood in the kitchen-yard, looking back at the blank rear windows, and yet again while stumbling through that foundation pit beyond the fence—at every stage of that journey I knew a feeling as of doing something I had done before, repeating the identical moves I had made at another time, upon an occasion strangely forgotten . . ."
"Well?" the woman in cool amusement asked.
"Well!"—his smile sketched a wistful expression of bewilderment—"I do not know, perhaps it was true, perhaps . . ."
Careless whether they were observed, the woman leaned forward and lightly covered one of his hands with her own. "Poor dear!" she cried, with a thrill of fond laughter—"to let himself be so tormented by a sensation such as everybody has at times."
"Everybody?" he iterated in a stare.
"It happens to us all—has it never happened to you before?—a phenomenon so common the psychologists have a special name for it. Whatdothey call it? reflex memory? Something of the sort, I forget . . . One only needs a new scene and a mood especially susceptible to impressions of strangeness or beauty—and all at once one feels quite sure one has visited that very spot in some previous existence. Precisely that happened to you, last night, my Michael, in your super-excited state of mind, worried by ignorance of the truth about the stolen property in your possession. . . . Take my word for it."
"You believe that?" he insisted—"truly?"
"Truly, my dear."
"You don't think I could possibly—?"
"Never—I know you better than you do yourself." Eve gave his hand a comforting pressure, and sat back. "If you let anything so absurd fret you another instant I shall be cross with you."
"You make me happy," Lanyard said. "It costs me something to tell you . . ."
"I know!"
"I don't deserve such faith."
"But I don't consider you a good judge of your own worth, dear. And now that I understand the situation—you've made a fool and an enemy of this man Morphew, and he's conspiring to be revenged—tell me, what is it you have to propose about returning to Town?"
"I want you to let me find my way back alone. I have consulted road-maps and time-tables posted in the office here. There's a train for New York from the nearest station"—Lanyard glanced at the watch on his wrist—"in about half an hour. . . . Which reminds me, your driver is taking his time."
"Patience. He's always tinkering with the motor—he'll be ready any minute. You were saying—?"
"I want you to let me drop you at the railroad and take the train back to Town, with your chauffeur for protection, while I go on in the car."
Undisguised derision honoured this proposal. "But why should I, when it is you, not I, the Sultan of Loot is after? If the train can be considered safe, surely you're the one—"
"You forget, Morphew's people will aim at your motor-car, believing me to be in it whether I am or not. If I should succeed in leaving it unobserved, they would still pursue the car. You can't ask me to expose you to a danger from which I turn tail."
"Then why shouldn't we both take the train?"
"It is what you American call an accomodation—stops at every station. If we should abandon your car to be found near the railroad, it would be too simple to have the train anticipated by telephone, boarded somewhere between here and New York, and the two of us kept so closely watched we would have no chance . . ."
The woman's head described a sign of flat rejection——Lanyard's rueful recognition of an outcome foreseen.
"Impossible, my friend. I couldn't dream of leaving you to shift for yourself."
"But how else—?"
"I have a saner scheme. Why not stop here for the night? The inn must have accomodations. . . . You see!" Eve cried in laughing triumph—"you are trying to get rid of me when the truth is, you need me. Two heads are better than one . . . But why shake yours so dourly?"
"I am afraid of your plan for more reasons than one. Daylight for our return will hardly be the same thing as accident insurance. If you give me my choice, I like darkness better."
"And your other reasons—?"
"If I stop here overnight, where I am beyond much doubt under surveillance even now, I remain placed and give Morphew just so much more time to close his net round me. And nothing I know of makes this inn a sanctuary or guarantees the bona fides of the management."
"You don't mean to say you think the people who run this place—!"
"I have been taught to trust nobody at times like this. More than that, everybody knows most of these resorts in and about New York that openly flout the Prohibition Amendment are actively in league with if not actually owned by bootlegging interests. I will breathe more comfortably, I promise you, when—and if—we are permitted to go our way unhindered."
"Oh, but surely you exaggerate!"
"Possibly; it's not always a bad fault, by no means so bad as under-exaggeration when one's neck is concerned. However, it can't be long now before we know."
Seeing their waiter approach, Lanyard got up and took Eve's wrap from the back of her chair. But the natural expectation of word that the brougham was at the door suffered a blight even before the man spoke, by reason of the odd look with which he saluted Lanyard.
"Excuse me, Mr. Martin," he said with—or instinct was at fault—a tinge of mockery in his supple habit—"the manager's compliments, and he'd be much obliged if you'd step into the office a minute, he'd like to have a word with you."
"Indeed? What does the good man want?"
"If it's all the same to you, sir, it'd be better if you'd kindly talk with the boss."
"About what?"
"Well, sir," the waiter stammered—"I don't want to alarm the lady—something's happened."
Lanyard looked to Eve with lifting brows. "If you will excuse me—"
"I don't think I will," Eve cheerfully replied, rising. "And I don't in the least mind being alarmed. I'm coming along."
With a formal bow of consent, Lanyard folded the wrap round her shoulders, then threw his coat over his arm and prepared to follow the waiter. But the latter was just then peremptorily hailed by the host of the remaining party with a demand for "the check"; so Lanyard and Eve proceeded to the little office unescorted, to find awaiting them a person of decent manners with an intelligent if at the moment somewhat harassed eye. There had been, he began, an unfortunate accident, he was more sorry than he could say that it had occurred in his establishment . . .
"What sort of an accident?" Lanyard with a touch of asperity cut his apologies short.
"If you and your lady don't mind stepping this way, I'll show you . . ."
Ushered out to the night, they were conducted round the corner of the building to the space where, in the chilly glimmer of a belated moon, the brougham stood parked with one other motor-car, and, near the former, two men were stooping over something that rested motionless upon the packed earth, one of them focussing upon it the beam of an electric torch.
Lanyard touched Eve's arm, recommending her to wait aside, and with the manager joined the group round the supine body of Eve's chauffeur.
The man lay in a limp sprawl, his face in that uncompromising glare a congested crimson, mouth slack and drooling, half-closed lids showing only the whites of eyes rolled back, stertorous respiration fouling the sweet smell of the night—evidently no worse than dead drunk.
"I just don't know how he worked it to get like this," the manager was protesting. "It's dead against our rules to sell hootch to chauffeurs, and I'll sack the bird responsible for this if I have to bounce the whole staff to get rid of him. But that isn't any comfort to you, I guess."
"None," Lanyard curtly agreed.
"He was all right as long's he was sittin' in the chowfers' dinin'-room," the man with the lamp volunteered—"you wouldn't have thought he'd had more'n a couple. But as soon as the cold air hit him he flopped like somebody'd crowned him. Funny . . ."
"No doubt you find it so."
"The only thing I can suggest, Mr. Martin," the manager put in, Lanyard thought too eagerly, "is to lend you somebody to drive you back to New York. Arthur here's a darn' good driver, knows all the roads like a book."
"That's very good of you," Lanyard returned, with a warning eye for Eve. "We'll be glad to make it worth Arthur's while, for neither of us can drive or has even a general idea of the roads. But first"—the toe of his boot stirred the body—"we would like to be sure this poor fool will get proper attention. I daresay you can give him a room."
"Of course, sir—and I'll 'phone for a doctor, if you say so, though I don't think that ought to be necessary. This isn't any case of wood-alcohol poisoning, there isn't a drop of bad liquor in the house—"
"I'm sure there isn't. All the same, what he had must have been wicked stuff. If you don't mind having him carried indoors, I'll make an examination myself—I have a limited amount of medical knowledge."
"You bet I will . . ."
Directed by the speaker, the two underlings, with no noteworthy enthusiasm, surrendered the torch and their leisure, lifted the body of the drunkard by the legs and shoulders and, staggering with the weight of that inert lump, made crabwise progress toward the rear entrance to the inn, the manager following with the light while Lanyard turned back to Eve with a suggestion clearly articulated for the benefit of whatever ears might care to hear.
"If you'll make yourself comfortable in the car, I promise I won't keep you waiting long."
"Thank you," Eve equably returned. "I don't mind waiting, and I do want to be sure that poor boy is in no real danger."
Lanyard offered Eve a hand, but the door he unlatched was one that admitted not to the car but to the front seat of the driver's right.
"Quick!" he urged in an undertone, and when Eve was in place doubled round to the other side of the brougham.
But the manager was not napping. "Here now!" he remonstrated, jolted out of his vocational urbanity, and came running back—"thought you said you couldn't—"
The moonlight silvered something In his hand which might or might not have been the darkened torch, and which Lanyard could not afford to give the benefit of the doubt. Standing on the running-board, without the smallest compunction he planted a foot in the midriff of the man so forcibly that the latter dropped whatever it was he had been holding and, with a yelp, doubled up.
Immediately settling into place behind the wheel, Lanyard released the emergency brake, with the result that the brougham, standing on a slight down-grade, began to move of its own weight even before he could locate the starting pedal. Muttering a prayer of thankfulness, he meshed the gears in third and swung the car into the down-hill road. At the same time the two who had been carrying the chauffeur let their senseless burden drop and started in pursuit. One tripped over some inequality in the ground and plunged to his knees. The other gained the running-board in a bound and aimed a blow at Lanyard's head. It went wide, and Lanyard's fist glanced upon the fellow's jaw with sufficient weight to dislodge him. Beating the air with frantic arms, he disappeared.
Fumbling for the switch with one hand, with the other Lanyard steered for the maw of the road through the woods. For one more instant the inn, painted with pale lunar phosphorescence, stood out in bold relief against its background of blurred forest, while with the tail of his eye Lanyard saw its front door of a sudden release a stream of saffron light. Somebody shouted in profane astonishment, somebody stumbled out upon the veranda and pelted toward the parking space. Then, between two heartbeats, Lanyard solved the secret of headlights and ignition, and the brougham, momentum sharply hastened, swept on into the pillared tunnel through the pines.
At first, hands that hadn't grasped a wheel in years had all they could do to hold the lurching fabric to a sharply declivitous and twisting path. Then the grade grew more moderate, the way less tortuous, and the car, obedient to its brakes, slipped gently past the fiery sign and turned its nose southwards on the highway.
"Well done!" Eve applauded—"Oh, well done!"
"Wait!" Lanyard prayed, with the man in mind who had sprinted from the lighted doorway toward the other car—"physical fact to the contrary notwithstanding, we're not out of the woods yet."
His toe found the accelerator pedal, the motor responded with a mettlesome snort and a drumming drone that waxed apace, the car clove the night like a frightened cat . . .
After a mile or so of fast going on a road whose wendings required for safe navigation a sure hand and eye, Lanyard felt confidence confirmed in his ability to handle the brougham with fair skill and extract from its motor the best it had to give. And when, before long, a rarely long stretch of straight road made a fair trial feasible, he coaxed the speedometer by degrees up to, then past the mark 50, without feeling that he was tempting fate.
Toward the end of that dash, Eve, who had been keeping an eye on the road astern, reported it bare of pursuing headlights.
"Do you mean to try for that railroad?"
"No—not now, not since things have turned out as they have."
"I am glad," she told him coolly. "This night is too lovely to be spoiled by travelling in a stuffy train."
"Is it?" he queried in grim humour.
"Do you not find it so, my Michael?"
"I find it damnably dangerous."
"And I find it, danger and all, divine."
But Lanyard drove in an obsession of fatality . . . The road, a river of oxidized silver threading an upland world of purples and blacks in blended masses and ever and again opening up vistas of long valleys filled with mist like streams of milk, was a gauntlet of deadly perils. In the blue bowl of the sky it bleached the misshapen moon like a grinning devil-mask swung from side to side of the devious way. The vast stillness that dwelt upon the world beneath had a brooding effect as of beauty holding its breath in dread. Through that somehow abnormal hush the swaying bulk of the brougham bored like something wild of eye and mad with fear. The wind its flight created had an insane whine, and the incessant drum of its exhaust, echoing from hard smooth surfaces, was re-echoed by hills and woods and fields with a rumour as of tom-toms thrumming a bacchanal of death . . .
But to the woman who loved Lanyard it was all divine . . .
Summing up another survey of the road behind, she declared: "There is nothing. You have outwitted and distanced them."
"Have I?"
"Is there more to fear?"
"But everything."
"Even an open road?"
"Who can say what may lie in wait for us round the next bend?"
"What does it matter, so we go to meet it together?"
Neither daring to take his eyes from the streaming road nor knowing how to answer her, Lanyard gave only a groan.
"I fear nothing but to be parted from you. Promise we shall never part."
He could not promise . . .
"Michael!" the heartbreaking voice at his shoulder insisted—"why don't you answer me? Surely you can't still be thinking I will ever let you go?"
He contrived to say, almost explosively: "But I must."
"Ah, no, no! Michael, you couldn't hurt me so."
"Is not tonight enough to prove to you no man who loved you truly could consent to expose you to such a life? It is my fate to love you too well . . ."
What the woman said to that was lost in the blast of a tyre blown out on one of the front wheels. An instantaneous swerve toward a ditch by the roadside all but wrenched the wheel out of control and resulted in a wreck. As it was, frantic work averted that disaster by the slenderest of scrapes. With locked brakes the brougham skidded drunkenly and rolled to a halt broadside to a bluff over across from the ditch.
With amazing self-command, Lanyard suffered never a syllable of a seething vocabulary to escape his lips as he unlatched the door and leaped down. An instant later Eve on her side alighted and came round to join him. Together, they contemplated in silence the ruptured tyre and the two good spares locked in their rack—and the key in the pocket of a chauffeur sleeping off his drink in the Inn of the Green Woods, fifteen miles or more away!
From contemplation of this bad business, Lanyard turned to consider their position, and found it equally bad. The car stood, as far off the road as it could be, but nevertheless somewhat blocking its narrow width, on the waist of an S bend, with a hillside blinding the approach on one hand, a wilderness of young forest on the other. And even as the thought formed that it would be well to move on at once, headlights illuminated the curve ahead, then swung into view, and a car coming from the direction of New York bore down at nothing less than forty miles an hour.
Lanyard had barely time to catch Eve by the arm and drag her out of its path, a maneuvre which took them both to the side of the road bordered by the ditch. Simultaneously the bellow of an unmuffled exhaust told of the approach of another car from the opposite direction. When Lanyard first saw it, it was less than a hundred feet distant, moving at a terrific rate—and running without lights!
So that was why Eve had been able to detect no sign of pursuit . . .
The first car, forced by the stationary brougham to sheer to the wrong side of the road, loosed upon the night a blare of frenzy. Through this penetrated Eve's wail of terror. Lanyard swung to her like a maniac, seized the woman and, exerting every ounce of his strength, caught her up bodily and flung her off the road, into the ditch.
Too late to save himself . . .
The moon, reeling in its blanched blue field, was a scimitar of white flame. It swooped down through the firmament as might the wrath of God. The world like a bomb exploded beneath his feet; a quivering mass of agony, he was hurled far and far into an everlasting abyss of night impenetrable . . .
Pain that threatened to rend his head asunder played before his eyes in blinding flashes, like ragged lightning, crimson and soundless—or the man was deaf to its thunders whose every other faculty was numb in subjugation to sense of pain intolerable, who was faint with pain, sick with it . . .
Hands clipped his body under the arm-pits, a thin, far rumour of articulate noise pronounced some stupidity which he made no attempt either to comprehend or to acknowledge. Arms wrapped round him from behind tightened, heaved, he was set upon unsteady feet, then half-carried, half-guided to an angle of some sort and propped up in it, with arms resting on two broad, plane surfaces, elbow-high. A rudely genial voice volunteered: "There you are, sir, and no 'arm done. Now you'll do nicely."
Lanyard wanted to tell the speaker he was a fool, it was impossible for one to have come through that motor wreck, impossible for any mortal to have been caught between two heavy cars meeting head-on in headlong flight, without incurring desperate if not deadly injuries. How reasonable and true that was this pain proved that racked him from head to foot, but more particularly his head, and made him want to retch, pain so acute it paralyzed the very instinct to complain . . .
His tongue temporarily refusing its office, Lanyard contented himself with a grunt through locked teeth; and because his knees were as water, hung on with both hands to the rounded surfaces that met behind his back to form the angle, till presently the pain grew less, the feeling of nausea passed off, his senses renewed contact with their environment and flashed strange tidings to his brain in respect of conditions they could neither grasp nor accomodate themselves to.
Some moron (he inferred) had taken to amusing himself with the headlights of one of the motor-cars, switching them on and off while they stared Lanyard full in the face at such close range that he was conscious of the heat they generated between the spaces of darkness. Furthermore, a storm of sorts had evidently sprung up out of that clear midnight sky: he remembered well how cloudless it had been just before the collision, how bright with mockery the gibbous moon; the boding calm which had bound everything in Nature he recalled distinctly, too. But now a great wind was shrieking like a warlock, gusts of warm rain spattered the flesh of his face, the very earth beneath him was convulsed, bucking and rocking like a wild mustang, and the keen, sweet smell of the inland night had given place to the salt breath of the sea . . .
Lanyard opened his eyes, only to close them tight the next instant and shut out what indisputably was the delusion of a mind deranged; yet a vision so vividly coloured and in every particular so circumstantial, stamping the retinas with an impression of so much brilliance and animation, that he could not refrain from looking again, if only to convince himself of the sheer wonder of it—but half expecting his sight, on this occasion, to be greeted by another illusion and a different, if one quite as impossibly unreal.
He saw, however, precisely what he had seen, and rejected, before . . .
A length of steamer deck, looking forward from the angle in which he stood at the after end of the superstructure, with deck-chairs all folded and lashed to the inner rail and window-ports all fast; its scoured planking now blue with shadow cast by the deck overhead, now flooded with sun glare from end to end, as the vessel rolled in a rough seaway. Beyond the rail a bright blue sky without a cloud, a horizon unbroken by any loom of land, a sea of incredible ultramarine creaming under the lash of a full gale, the sleek hollow bellies of its charging waves a-dazzle with the sun's spilled gold, its flying spindrift sprays of diamond-dust . . .
Forward, opposite the entrance to the saloon companionway, a girl clinging to the rail, bobbed blonde hair fluffed out by the wind, filmy yellow sweater and brief sports-skirt of white silk moulded to her slender young contours, intent eyes turned aft to Lanyard. In the dark mouth of the door a cluster of men and women, likewise staring. Nearer and a little to the left a lithe young man of British stamp, wearing a look of cheerful concern and the white-duck jacket of a steward, with long legs well apart balancing to the motion of the vessel while he watched Lanyard.
Finding himself the target of the latter's bemused regard, the man grinned broadly. "Nahsty tumble, sir," he cried in the penetrating pitch of a seafarer schooled to talk against the wind, and with an inflexion that suited precisely his racial type—"and a wicked crack it did give your 'ead and no mistike. Like a pistol shot it sounded. Thought for a minute it 'ad done you in for fair, but it didn't take long to mike sure you 'adn't broke' no bones. 'Ow do you feel now, sir?"
"What . . ." Lanyard's voice in his hearing was attenuated and strange. His tongue felt unwieldy. "What? . . ."
The figure in the white jacket waved a hand toward the foot of a ladder nearby. "You was comin' down from the bridge-deck, sir—don't you remember?—when a sea 'it us and knocked you clean off your pins. 'Ad to 'ang on to the rail to keep from bein' knocked abaht myself."
Lanyard replied with a sign of exorcism, releasing the rail with one hand to describe it. At the same time he shut his eyes fast and made a determined effort to shake off the bondage of this fantastic dream. But when he looked again nothing had changed, the hallucination remained as definite and bright as ever, perfect to its last least detail.
"Feel a bit shiken up, don't you, sir?" The steward moved to Lanyard's side. "I don't wonder. But if you'll just tike it easy a while, I think you'll find you aren't much 'urt."
Dumbfoundered, Lanyard wagged his head, bringing about recurrence of its splitting ache, which none the less led to the discovery that, barring a bruised shoulder and elbow, a well-battered head was all his damage. But this too he laid to delirium, as being a manifest physical inconsistency in one who had just taken part in a motor smash of the first magnitude. And wondering if exertion of will would bring this lunatic scramble of a world round to its right guise of reality, he fixed the steward with an exacting eye, the eye of a man who had made up his mind to stand for no more nonsense.
"Madame de Montalais?" he enunciated distinctly—"is she all right?"
But demonstrably this wasn't the requisite magic formula, enunciation of it failed to do away with those unbelievably factual circumstances of a summer gale at sea and set up in their stead an autumnal nocturne of moonlit hills and vales. Its only effect, indeed, was to light a flicker of real solicitude in the steward's eyes.
"Beg pardon, sir: what was that you said?"
"The lady with me—was she injured?"
"But there wasn't any lidy with you, sir—you was quite alone, arf w'y down the ladder, when the sea 'it us. I 'appened to be watchin' you, sir, though not 'andy enough to save you the fall, I'm sorry to s'y. But per'aps you feel strong enough now to let me 'elp you to your berth and fetch the doctor to give you a look over."
Lanyard in despair resigned himself: the world had gone stark staring mad and he was the maddest madman in it. Weakly he suffered the steward to take his arm in a respectful yet persuasive hold.
"Let me see, now, sir: what was the number of your stiteroom?"
In unbounded amazement Lanyard heard himself reply without any hesitation: "Thirty-nine."
"Quite so, sir. This w'y, if you please, and lean on me as 'eavy as you like: I won't let you tike another tumble, never fear."
A door in the after wall of the superstructure admitted to a passage by way of which it was only a step to Stateroom 39. Here the steward considerately removed the passenger's coat and shoes and made him comfortable in a berth wedged with pillows, then hurried away to call the ship's surgeon, leaving Lanyard to nurse a temper of dull indignation, satisfied that he was being somehow sold by his ingrate senses, but quite incapable of understanding how. His head still hurt like hell—there was a cruel swelling above one ear—and seemed to be utterly of no service other than as a container for pain-impregnated cotton wool that stiffled every essay of his wits to seize the meaning of his present plight. After a while he gave up trying to think and lay looking round the room with resentful eyes; to move these in their orbits made them ache intolerably, but there was nothing else to do . . .
The stateroom had been designed and fitted to accomodate three people without crowding. Nevertheless it had every appearance of dedication to the uses of a single tenant. A solitary dressing-gown and one suit of pyjamas hung on hooks behind the door. One collection of shaving implements and other masculine toilet articles cluttered the shelves above the washstand. A lonely kit-bag, obviously on its first voyage out of the shop, displayed the monogram A. D. None of these was Lanyard able to identify as property of his. If you asked him, he could swear he had never laid eyes on them before. But neither was he on terms of visual acquaintance with the coat which the steward had stripped from his shoulders and which was now oscillating like some uncouth and eccentric pendulum from a hook at the foot of the berth. A garment fashioned of the smokiest of Scotch tweed but with an incurably American accent, it gave circumstantial contradiction to the feeling that one had no business to pose as the rightful tenant of that stateroom; for quite as apparently one had had no business posing as the rightful tenant of that coat.
But the affair as a whole was past puzzling out by a head whose buzzing mocked every attempt at ordered thought; and with a sigh Lanyard gave it up for the time being, and shut his eyes to screen out refracted sun-glare wavering like a prismatic cobweb on the white paint overhead . . .
Consciousness was on the point of lapsing when the door-latch rattled and the inimitable cadences of a British public school voice hailed him with an affectation of friendliness whose falsity was more elusive, and yet somehow less successful, than it commonly is in the bedside geniality of the general practitioner.
"Ah, Mr. Duchemin! been tryin' to butt a hole through the promenade deck, have you?"
Disguising instinctive resentment, Lanyard smiled amiably up at a new face that proved a good match for the voice, the sanguine face of a young man, cleanly razored, set with hard blue eyes and an arrogant, thin nose. "Monsieur . . ." he managed to say, rousing on an elbow; but the movement caused agony to stab through his temples again and he dropped back to his pillow, groaning.
"Bad as all that, eh?" the other commented in a tone that somehow implied he wasn't being taken in. "Well! needn't punish yourself to prove it to me: I'm not fussy about fine points of etiquette, I don't insist on everybody risin' when I come into the room. Lie still now, and let me have a look."
"You are the ship's surgeon, monsieur?" Lanyard enquired with difficulty, because his teeth were set to stifle grunts as fingers deft enough but none too gentle searched out the sore spot.
"Well: I leave it to you," their owner replied in ironic patience . . . "Hmm! worse than I expected. Miracle you got off without a fracture. . . . Do you think I've been pullin' your leg about my ratin' these last few nights? Or d'you mean my luck at Bridge qualifies me in your estimation as a card-sharp first and a sea-goin' sawbones last? . . . Hold still, now, and don't try to answer: I'm goin' to sponge this noble contusion and decorate it with a becoming patch."
An interlude of intense discomfort came to an end with the announcement: "You'll do now, I fancy; but if I were you, my friend, I'd take it easy and watch my step till this hatful of wind blows itself out—which it ought to before long, goin' by the glass."
"Many thanks, monsieur . . ."
A rising inflection made that last word an open bid for the name of the person addressed; who, however, chose coolly to ignore it.
"And now, if you don't mind ownin' up," he said with a clearer note of sarcasm: "What the devil are you drivin' at?AmI the ship's surgeon! Tryin' to make out a triflin' crack on the head has knocked you silly? Because it's no go, if you are: I may be the demon Bridge player of this vessel, but I'm a good enough medico besides to know that, barrin' a beautiful bump, you're as right as rain."
It was anything but easy to school oneself to stomach such superciliousness; but it had to be done if one hoped to learn the reason for it, or the inwardness of those several other matters which urgently required elucidation.
"If you would be so good as to sit down one moment, monsieur," Lanyard civilly suggested—"assuming, of course, your valuable time permits—I would be most grateful for your professional advice."
"Right-O!" The surgeon drew up a chair and settled himself in it with the manner of a man who didn't mind humouring a persistent child this once. "What's on your mind, Mr. Duchemin—more than your casualty?"
"To begin with, I should be glad to know the time of day."
"Why not consult that pretty trinket strapped on your wrist? Or was that, too, cracked by your fall?"
Indignation failed while Lanyard studied the time-piece to which his attention had thus delicately been drawn, with the more interest because, to the best of his knowledge, the watch, unmistakably a fine one, was none of his.
Through the concert of the gale three double strokes of resonant bell-metal sang and were followed by a single. "Seven bells of the forenoon watch," the surgeon interpreted of his own accord. "Does yours agree?"
"Precisely . . . Monsieur," Lanyard said earnestly: "I should like very much to consult you concerning myself in strict confidence . . ."
"Let the oath of Hippocrates comfort your misgivin's—and fire away."
"Then let me tell you something." After a brief pause Lanyard announced with a deal of true diffidence: "It is now some twelve hours, or little more, by my best reckoning, since I figured unfortunately in a motor-car accident on the Armonk Road, in Westchester County, thirty miles or so north of the city of New York."
"That's interestin'," the Englishman commented with a skeptical twitch of lips—"especially in view of the fact that we are now three days' run south of New York."
"Monsieur is not making fun of me?"
"No, thanks: that sort of thing doesn't amuse me as it does you."
"But I am entirely serious, I assure you."
"Haven't the slightest doubt of it. All the same I'd give somethin' to know what it is you're so serious about."
"Be patient with me another minute, monsieur," Lanyard devoted at least that much time to anxious thought. "Yesterday," he at length submitted, "was the third of November, Nineteen Twenty-two."
"You're going to have trouble, my friend, makin' that statement jibe with the log, which calls today the fifth of June, Twenty-three."
Lanyard lifted a hand to beg for grace, and did the sum in his head while the Englishman sat watching him with what all but insufferably seemed to be contemptuous amusement. But one couldn't afford to resent that yet.
A double line deepened between Lanyard's brows. His first guess had evidently been a poor one: the elapsed time proved that Morphew hadn't picked him up unconscious after the crash, hurried him in that condition back to New York, and caused him forthwith to be shanghaied.
"Seven months to be accounted for," he mused aloud—"seven months lost out of life!"
"Oh?"
None but a Briton could have infused so much cynic incredulity into one lonely syllable. In spite of himself Lanyard flushed.
"Oblige me, monsieur, by believing that, between losing consciousness in that motor crash of November fifth, and regaining it after being thrown from a ladder half an hour ago, I remember nothing."
"Astonishin'."
"Even so, not—I believe—a case without precedent."
"Quite so."
"One is misled, then"—Lanyard's tone was as cold as his eye—"by an impression you give—no doubt without intention—of disbelief in my sincerity?"
The eyes of the Englishman winced, he coloured in his turn, but with anger more than with mortification to find his unmannerly attitude so directly challenged.
"My dear Mr. Duchemin!" he uncomfortably protested: "When you consider that one has seen a good deal of you in the last few days, talked with you, dined with you, played cards with you for hours at a time, and found you always a man of entirely collected mind, no different from the man one is conversin' with at this moment, perhaps you'll agree there's some excuse for one's bogglin' at a pretty tall tale on the face of it."
"It makes me very happy to accept your apology, monsieur." Gravely Lanyard watched the face of the surgeon burn a deeper red. "And on my part I am truly sorry to think I have put too great a strain upon your charity. Yet—you must let me assure you again—what I am telling you is the simple truth about conditions which I find profoundly disconcerting. I am afraid I shall need time to get my bearings, and I would be vastly grateful for assistance."
"By all means," the other said in a stifled voice—"'m sure."
"It would help measurably to know what vessel this is . . ."
"The Port Royal—Monon Line."
"Ah! a fruit steamer, I take it?"
"Right: you took it for Nassau, Havana, Kingston, the Canal Zone, and Costa Rica."
"I think you said we were three days out? Then we ought to be not far from Nassau now."
"This gale has held us back a bit, but we ought to make port by daybreak tomorrow."
"One can send a cable there, of course . . ."
Either a mistrustful mind deceived Lanyard or the Englishman wasn't happy in his efforts to disguise a thrill of keen inquisitiveness.
"Of course; but why wait? Mean to say, there's our wireless at your service if you're keen to get some message off your mind, Mr. Duchemin."
"How stupid of me to forget." Lanyard's smile could be as charming as he chose, and he chose it to be entirely so just then, intent as he was on disarming one whom he had reason enough to think curiously hostile to him, in whose manner it was impossible to ignore an undercurrent of inexplicable animus. "But then you will be indulgent, remembering the circumstances. One question more, Doctor—?"
"Bright!" that person snapped curtly.
"Thank you. I am wondering . . . No doubt you saw me when or soon after I embarked?"
"Happened to be standin' by the head of the gang-plank when you came aboard, in point of fact."
"If you could tell me whether that event was marked by any unusual circumstances, such as might possibly shed light upon the riddle of why I came aboard at all—?"
"Sorry," the surgeon answered; "but you seemed to be quite peaceable."
"Nothing to lead you to suspect I wasn't in full command of my faculties?"
"Rather not."
"I was—alone?"
"Quite."
"Nobody to bid me bon voyage?"
"At least, I saw nobody."
"And my subsequent behaviour has been, I trust, discreet?"
"To the letter of the word. If you mean your smokin'-room habits, they've been above reproach—more than one can say of most Americans since the 'greatest country on God's green footstool' dried up."
"But I am not an American—"
"Never thought you were, Mr. Duchemin." Dr. Bright's sprained self-esteem was now convalescent. The eyes he bent on Lanyard were lambent with secret satisfaction, as if he knew something that Lanyard didn't, and found this proof of his superiority gratifying. "There's your name, for one thing. And then no American ever spoke such French. Saw enough service in France to know the true Parisian accent when I hear it."
"Indeed? So I have found occasion to speak French about this vessel?"
"Rather. You've been at it daily, and a good part of every day, with the attentions you've been payin' the pretty lady."
Lanyard's eyebrows went up alertly, and he didn't count the twinge that form of comment cost him. "'Pretty lady'?"
"Madame la Comtesse de Lorgnes. At all events, that's her style on the passenger-list. Most fascinatin' and highly finished piece of work this tub has ever carried."
"Good to look at, you mean, monsieur?"
"Good to look at is a feeble way to put it. Every unattached male on board is balmy about her; and the attached ones aren't what one might call unconscious when she's in sight. And every man-jack loathes you like fun because the pretty lady has a hospitable eye and you haven't given anybody else a ghost of a look in."
"Beautiful and—shall we say—not ingénue, eh?"
"Look here," the Englishman knowingly laughed: "if you keep on guessin' so closely, I'll have to suspect your memory isn't as poor as you claim."
"It is true," Lanyard admitted with an air of perplexity, "that name, de Lorgnes, seems not unfamiliar. One wonders where, or when, one has heard it before, if possibly this lady is some friend of younger years . . ."
"Not this Comtesse de Lorgnes," Dr. Bright asserted in another turn of impertinence—"that is, unless the two of you have been playin' a game with me."
"Impossible, monsieur."
"Then you'll have to take my word for it—just as I took yours—you never met the lady before the first day out, when I had the honour of presentin' you—at her request."
"It must be an echo," Lanyard speculated—"that name—from some forgotten yesterday. I recall now—it is odd, I think—the number of this stateroom fell spontaneously from my lips when the steward who picked me up asked for it."
"Not really?" The surgeon had the laugh of one hugely entertained. "There's another point you've overlooked, I fancy—your name, Duchemin. Feel quite at home with that, don't you? You answer to it readily enough."
"But naturally," Lanyard returned with the utmost naïveté. "Why should I not, seeing it is my name?"
"Well! there you are. Cases of submerged identity always go by another name while their first personality is under the cloud. But you came aboard as André Duchemin, you admit you're André Duchemin now; and I daresay you were André Duchemin at the time of that motor crash, what?"
"Monsieur is quite right."
"That settles it, as I see it." Conceit restored encouraged anew an attitude of exasperating patronage. "You'll find it will all come back to you, everythin' you've forgotten, bit by bit as the shock of your tumble wears off. It would be a damned interestin' thing from a professional view point if this should turn out to be a true case of mislaid identity; but I'm afraid you needn't hope for that."
"Hope, monsieur!"
"Mean to say, you'll find it's somethin' much more simple and elementary with you. You've had a bad fall and a rap on the head that recalls a similar mishap several months old, and for the time being everythin' that happened in between seems to have been wiped out. But I'll go bail it will all come back to you inside of twenty-four hours."
"Why twenty-four hours?"
"As soon as you've had a sound sleep, that is—same thing. Let me send you in a powder, and by dinner time you'll be ready to apologize for tryin' to take advantage of my innocent and trustin' nature. What do you say?"
Lanyard said that monsieur was too kind . . . "But a favour, my dear doctor," he added with a tolerably crest-fallen air. "We won't find it necessary to tell our fellow passengers what a sorry fraud I am, will we?"
"Oh! I won't be the one to expose you," Bright replied with vast pleasure in his ambiguity. "And you won't have a chance to tell on yourself before the sea goes down a bit. Meanin' to say, madam la comtesse is a poor sailor. But, you see, your anxiety not to be made a laughin' stock to her proves that your memory is improvin' every minute."
"One wastes time trying to deceive you," Lanyard admitted with humility. "But there is one thing, I believe, that might aid my recovery: a look at the passenger-list. Do you think you could by any chance find a copy for me?"
Contentment with his great cunning sustained this shock with poor grace: the surgeon frowned a frown of impatience mixed with mystification. Was it possible this chap still imagined he had found an easy dupe? However, one had to be diplomatic . . .
"Oh! very well," the surgeon said shortly. "I'll have the steward bring you one with your sleeping powder. Though I must admit I don't quite see . . ."
Lanyard forgot to offer any explanation; and when the passenger-list had duly been delivered and scrutinized was obliged to confess that he had exerted himself to no purpose. "Madame la Comtesse de Lorgnes" was much too transparent an incognita for Liane Delorme; and the discovery that she was a fellow passenger had been excuse enough for the surmise that others of their common acquaintance might be keeping them company en voyage. But if such were the case, the printed list gave no clue, no other name that figured in it proved in the least degree stimulating, none suggested a likely alias for Morphew, or Pagan, or Mallison, or . . . Mrs. Folliott McFee . . .
Neither did anything reward his eager search for a name whose music was like an old song singing in one's heart.
The list slipped from his grasp and joined the surgeon's rejected sleeping powder on the floor. Lanyard lay with a face that mirrored pain more real than that which racked his head, blindly studying the play of rainbow gleams upon the painted ceiling.
Seven months lost beyond recall . . .
And Eve?