“Now then for you, Mr.  ‘The Red Crawl,’” he said, as he walked to the baron’s table, and, sinking down into a deep chair beside it, leaned back with his eyes closed as if in sleep, and the faint light of the moon half-revealing his face.  “I want that password, and I’ll get it, if I have to choke it out of your devil’s throat!  And she said that she would be grateful to me all the rest of her life!  Only ‘grateful,’ I wonder?  Is nothing else possible?  What a good, good thing a real woman is!”

* * * * *

How long was it that he had been reclining there waiting before his strained ears caught the sound of something like the rustling of silk shivering through the stillness, and he knew that at last it was coming?  It might have been ten minutes, it might have been twenty—­he had no means of determining—­when he caught that first movement, and, peering through the slit of a partly opened eye, saw the appalling thing drag its huge bulk along the balcony, and, with squirming tentacles writhing, slide over the low sill of the window, and settle down in a glowing red heap upon the floor; and—­fake though he knew it to be—­he could not repress a swift rush and prickle of “goose-flesh” at sight of it.

For a few seconds it lay dormant; then one red feeler shot out, then another, and another, and it began to edge its way across the carpet to the chair.  Cleek lay still and waited, his heavy breathing sounding regularly, his head thrown back, his limp hands lying loosely, palms upward, beside him; and nearer and nearer crept the loathsome, red, glowing thing.

It crawled to his feet, and still he was quiet; it slid first one tentacle, and then another, over his knees and up toward his breast, and still he made no movement; then, as it rose higher—­rose until its hideous beaked countenance was close to his own, his hands flashed upward and clamped together like a vice—­clamped on a palpitating human throat—­and in the twinkling of an eye the tentacles were wrapped about him, and he and “The Red Crawl” were rolling over and over on the floor and battling together.

“Serpice, you low-bred hound, I know you!” he whispered, as they struggled.  “You can’t utter a cry—­you shan’t utter a cry—­to bring help.  I’ll throttle you, you beastly renegade, that’s willing to sell his own country—­throttle you, do you hear?—­before you shall bring any of your mates to the rescue.  Oh, you’ve not got a weak old man to fight with this time!  Do you know me?  It’s the ’cracksman’—­the ‘cracksman’ who went over to the police.  If you doubt it, now that we’re in the moonlight, look up and see my face.  Oho! you recognise me, I see.  Well, you will die looking at me, you dog, if you deny me what I’m after.  I’ll loosen my grip enough for you to whisper, and no more.  Now what’s the password that Clodoche must give to Margot to-night at ’The Twisted Arm’?  Tell me what it is; if you want your life, tell me what it is.”