I held her hands tightly in mine.

“When it really begins,” I answered, “I shall try and make it a little more interesting!”

I declined a taxicab and turned to walk back to my brother’s hotel.  Certainly in the problem of these two people who had come so curiously into my life there was very much to give me matter for thought.  I believed in the girl, and trusted her.  More than that I did not dare to ask myself!  I should have believed in her, even if her uncle were proved to be a criminal of the most dangerous type.  But none the less I could not help realizing that her present position was a singularly unfortunate one.  To be alone in a big hotel, without maid or chaperon, herself caught up in this web of mystery which Louis and those others seemed to have woven around her, was in itself undesirable and unnatural.  Whatever was transpiring, I was quite certain that her share in it was a passive one.  She had been told to be silent, and she was silent.  Nothing would ever make me believe that she was a party to any wrong-doing.  And yet the more I thought of Delora the less I trusted him.  At Charing Cross Station, for instance, his had not been the anxiety of a man intrusted with a difficult mission.  His agitation had been due to fear,—­fear abject and absolute.  I had seen the symptoms more than once in my life, and there was no mistaking them.  I told myself that no man could be so shaken who was engaged in honest dealings.  Even now he was in hiding,—­it could not be called anything else,—­and the one person with whom I had come in touch who was searching for him was, without a doubt, on the side of law and justice, with at least some settled position behind him.  Delora’s deportment was more the deportment of a fugitive from justice than of a man in the confidence of his government.

Walking a little carelessly, I took a turn too far northward, and found myself in one of the streets leading out of Shaftesbury Avenue.  I was on the point of taking a passage which would lead me more in my proper direction, when my attention was attracted by a large motor-car standing outside one of the small foreign restaurants which abound in this district.  I was always interested in cars, but I noticed this one more particularly from the fact of its utter incompatibility with its surroundings.  It was one of the handsomest cars I had ever seen,—­a sixty to eighty horse-power Daimler,—­fitted up inside with the utmost luxury.  The panels were plain, and the chauffeur, who sat motionless in his place, wore dark livery and was apparently a foreigner.  I slackened my pace to glance for a moment at the non-skidding device on the back tire, and as I passed on I saw the door of the little restaurant open, and a tall commissionnaire hurried out.  He held open the door of the car and stood at attention.  Two men issued from the restaurant and crossed the pavement.  I turned deliberately round to watch them—­vulgar curiosity, perhaps, but a curiosity which I never