“Oh, Mr. Cleek, you think you can get the stolen paper back?  You believe you can outwit those dreadful people and save the Baron de Carjorac’s honour and his life?”

“Miss Lorne”—­he took her hand in his and lifted it to his lips—­“Miss Lorne, I thank you for giving me the chance!  If you will do what I ask you, be where I ask you in two hours’ time, so surely as we two stand here this minute, I will put back the German calendar by ten years at least.  They drink ‘To the day,’ those German Johnnies, but by to-morrow morning the English hand you are holding will have given them reason to groan over the night!”

CHAPTER VIII

It was half-past eleven o’clock.  Madame la Comtesse, answering a reputed call to the bedside of a dying friend, had departed early, and was not to be expected back, she said, until to-morrow noon.  The servants—­given permission by the gentleman known in the house as Monsieur Gaston Merode, and who had graciously provided a huge char-a-banc for the purpose—­had gone in a body to a fair over in the neighbourhood of Sevres, and darkness and stillness filled the long, broad corridor of the Chateau Larouge.  Of a sudden, however, a mere thread of sound wavered through the silence, and from the direction of Miss Lorne’s room a figure in black, with feet muffled in thick, woollen stockings, padded to an angle of the passage, lifted a trap carefully hidden beneath a huge tiger-skin rug, and almost immediately Cleek’s head rose up out of the gap.

“Thank God you managed to do it.  I was horribly afraid you would not,” said Ailsa in a palpitating whisper.

“You need not have been,” he answered.  “I know a dozen places beside ‘The Inn of the Twisted Arm’ from which one can get into the sewers.  I’ve screwed a bolt and socket on the inner side of this trap in case of an emergency, and I’ve carried a few things into the passage for ‘afterwards.’  I suppose that fellow Merode, as he calls himself, is in his room, waiting?”

“Yes; and, although he pretends to be alone to-night, he—­he has other men with him, hideous, ruffianly looking creatures, whom I saw him admit after the servants had gone.  The countess has left the house and gone I don’t know where.”

“I do, then.  Make certain she’s at ‘The Twisted Arm,’ waiting, first, for the coming of Clodoche, and, second, for the arrival of this precious ‘Merode’ with the remaining half of the document.  I’ve sent Dollops there to carry out his part of the programme, and when once I get the password Margot requires before she will hand over the paper, the game will be in my hands entirely.  They are desperate to-night, Miss Lorne, and will stop at nothing—­not even murder.  There! the rug’s replaced.  Quick! lead me to the baron’s room—­there’s not a minute to waste.”

She took his hand and led him tiptoe through the darkness, and in another moment he was in the Baron de Carjorac’s presence.