"You must--you must appear quite charmed. Also, should you catch me
smirking like an infatuated ninny, remember I am only doing my own
indifferent best to act."
Laughter trembled deliciously in her voice: "I promise faithfully to bear
in mind your heartlessness!"
"I am an ass," he enunciated with the humility of conviction. "But that
can't be helped. Attend to me, if you please--and do not start. This place
turns out to be a nest of Prussian spies. I was brought here by a trick. I
understand the order is I may not leave alive."
Playing her part so well as almost to embarrass Lanyard himself, the girl
smiled daringly into his eyes.
"Because of that packet?" she breathed.
"Because of that, mademoiselle."
"Where is it?"
For an instant Lanyard lost countenance absolutely. Through sheer good
fortune the girl was now dancing with face averted, her head so nearly
touching his shoulder that it seemed to rest upon it.
Nevertheless, it was at cost of an heroic struggle that he fought down all
signs of that shock with which it had been borne in upon him that he dared
not assure the girl her packet was in safe hands.
If he had failed in his efforts to restore the thing to her, that she might
consign it as she saw fit and so discharge her personal trust, till now
Lanyard had solaced himself with a hazy notion that she would in turn be
comforted when she learned the document was in the keeping of her country's
Secret Service.
Impossible to tell her that: his own act had rendered it impossible,
that act the outcome of wilful trifling with his infirmity, his itch for
thieving.
Of a sudden the pilfered necklace secreted in an inner pocket of his
waistcoat, above his heart, seemed to have gained the weight of so much
lead. The hideous consciousness of the thing stung like the bite of live
coals.
This woman was in distress; he yearned to lighten her burden; he could do
that with half a dozen words; his guilt prohibited.
A thief!
Now indeed the Lone Wolf tasted shame and realized its bitterness....
Puzzled by his constraint, the girl's eyes again sought his; and warned
in time by the movement of her head, he mustered impudence to meet their
question with the look of tenderness that went with the rôle she suffered
him to play.
"What is the matter?"
"I am ashamed that I have failed you...."
"Don't think of that. I know you did your best. Only tell me what became of
it."
"It was stolen; when I returned to my stateroom that night I was held up
and robbed. The thief shot at me, killed his confederate, decamped by
way of the port. I pursued. Another aided him to overpower and cast me
overboard."
"Yet you escaped...!"
Strange she should seem more intrigued by that than concerned about her
loss!
"I escaped, no matter how...."
"You don't know who stole the packet?"
"I don't recall the man among the passengers, but he may have been in one
of the boats, a fellow of about my stature, with a flowing beard...."
He sketched broadly Ekstrom as he had seen him in the Stanistreet library.
Her eyes quickened.
"One such escaped in our boat, the second steward; I think his name was
Anderson."
"Doubtless the same."
"Then it is gone!"
For once in his acquaintance with her, that brave spirit seemed to falter:
she became a burden, bereft for a little of all grace and spontaneity.
He was constrained to swing her forcibly into time.
Almost instantly she recollected herself, covered her lapse with a little
laugh innocent of any hint of its forced falsity, and showed him and the
room as well a radiant countenance: all with such address and art that the
incident might well have escaped notice, otherwise have passed for a bit of
natural by-play.