The hand guided him across a room of moderate size, avoiding its furniture with almost uncanny ease, then again brought him to a halt.  Brass rings clashed softly on a pole, a gap opened in heavy draperies curtaining a window, a shaft of street light threw the girl’s profile into soft relief.  She drew him to her till their shoulders touched.

“You see...”

He bent his head close to hers, conscious of a caressing tendril of hair that touched his cheek, and the sweet warmth and fragrance of her; and peering through the draperies saw their pursuing motor car at pause, not at the curb, but in the middle of the street before the house.  The man’s arm still rested on the sill of the window; the pale oval of the face above it was still vague.  Abruptly both disappeared, a door slammed on the far side of the car, and the car itself, after a moment’s wait, gathered way with whining gears and vanished, leaving nothing human visible in the quiet street.

“What did that mean?  Did they pick somebody up?”

“But quite otherwise, mademoiselle.”

“Then what has become of him?”

“In the shadow of the door across the way:  don’t you see the deeper shadow of his figure in the corner, to this side.  And there ...  Ah, dolt!”

The man in the doorway had moved, cautiously thrusting one hand out of the shadow far enough for the street lights to shine upon the dial of his wrist-watch.  Instantly it was withdrawn; but his betrayal was accomplished.

“That’s enough,” said Lanyard, drawing the draperies close again.  “No trouble to make a fool of that one, God has so nobly prepared the soil.”  The girl said nothing.  They no longer touched, and she was for the time so still that he might almost have fancied himself alone.  But in that quiet room he could hear her breathing close beside him, not heavily but with a rapid accent hinting at an agitation which her voice bore out when she answered his wondering:  “Mademoiselle?” “J’y suis, petit Monsieur Paul.”

“Is anything the matter?”

“No ... no:  there is nothing the matter.”

“I’m afraid I have tired you out to-night.”

“I do not deny I am a little weary.”

“Forgive me.”

“There is nothing to forgive, not yet, petit Monsieur Paul.”  A trace of hard humour crept into her tone:  “It is all in the night’s work, as the saying should be in Paris.”

“Three favours more; then I will do you one in return.”

“Ask...”

“Be so kind as to make a light and find me a pocket flash-lamp if you have one.”

“I can do the latter without the former.  It is better that we show no light; one stray gleam through the curtains would tell too much.  Wait.”

A noise of light footsteps muffled by a rug, high heels tapping on uncovered floor, the scrape of a drawer pulled out:  and she returned to give him a little nickelled electric torch.