‘Wait there!’ The sound of her voice, tense and authoritative, came through the slit of the window and thrilled him.  ’All is well now, but I will send you a message.’

And the window was swiftly closed and a curtain drawn behind the blind.  He could hear nothing.

He had small intention of obeying her.  ’She must have gone in by the servants’ entrance,’ he argued.  ’I should have seen her if she had tried the other.’  And he ran to the small door, but it was shut fast.  In vain he knocked and shook the handle for several minutes.  Then he hastened to the main door on the broad balcony, but that also was impregnable.

Should he break a pane?

A noise far along the balcony attracted him.  He flew towards it, found nothing but a cat purring, and returned.  The luscious music of the Tsigane band, one of the nine orchestras which he owned, reached him faintly over the edge of the quadrangle.

Then he decidedly did hear human footsteps on the balcony.  They were the footsteps of Shawn.

’She’s gone, sir.  Took the lift, and whizzed off in Mr. Tudor’s electric brougham that was waiting.’

‘And the men?’ he gasped.

’Seen neither of them, sir.  She put this note in my hand as she passed me, sir.’

CHAPTER VI

A LAPSE FROM AN IDEAL

‘If you please, sir,’ said Simon Shawn, when he brought Hugo’s tea the next morning, ’I am informed that a man has secreted himself on the summit of the dome.’

Hugo, lying moveless on his back, and ignoring even the tea, made no reply to this speech.  He was still repeating to himself the following words, which, by constant iteration, had assumed in his mind the force and emphasis of italics:  ’So grateful for your sympathetic help.  When next I see you, if there is opportunity, I will try to thank you.  Meantime, all is well with me.  Please trouble no more.  And forget.’ Such were the exact terms of the note from Camilla Payne delivered to him by Albert Shawn.  Of course, he knew it by heart.  It was scribbled very hastily in pencil on half a sheet of paper, and it bore no signature, not even a solitary initial.  If it had not been handed to Albert by Camilla in person, Hugo might have doubted its genuineness, and might have spent the night in transgressing the law of trespass and other laws, in order to be assured of a woman’s safety.  But under the circumstances he could not doubt its genuineness.  What he doubted was its exact import.  And what he objected to in it was its lack of information.  He wished ardently to know whether Ravengar and Tudor, or either of them, had been wounded, and if so, by whose revolver; for he could not be certain that it was Camilla who had fired.  An examination of the revolver which he and she had passed from hand to hand had shown two chambers undischarged.  He wished ardently to know how she had contrived to settle her account with Tudor,