* * * * *

The phonograph went off into an inarticulate whirr of its own machinery.  The recital was over.  Tudor must have died immediately after securing the record in the safe in his bedroom, where Hugo had just listened to it.

‘She lives!’ was Hugo’s sole thought.

The profound and pathetic tragedy of Tudor’s career did not touch him until long afterwards.

’She lives!  Ravengar lives!  Ravengar probably knows where she is, and I do not know!  And Ravengar is at large!  I have set him at large.’

His mind a battlefield on which the most glorious hope struggled against a frenzied fear, Hugo rose from the chair in front of the phonograph-stand, and, after a slight hesitation, left the flat as he had entered it.  Before dawn the pane had been replaced in the drawing-room window, and the side-door secured.

PART III

THE TOMB

CHAPTER XX

‘ARE YOU THERE?’

The next morning Hugo’s dreams seemed to be concerned chiefly with a telephone, and the telephone-bell of his dreams made the dreams so noisy that even while asleep he knew that his rest was being outrageously disturbed.  He tried to change the subject of his fantastic visions, but he could not, and the telephone-bell rang nearly all the time.  This was the more annoying in that he had taken elaborate precautions to secure perfect repose.  Perfect repose was what he needed after quitting Tudor’s flat.  He felt that he had stood as much as a man can expect himself to stand.  In the vault, and again in the flat, his life had been in danger; he had suffered the ignominy of the ruined sale; he had come to grips with Ravengar, and let Ravengar go free; he had listened to the amazing recital of the phonograph.  Moreover, between the interview with Ravengar and the burglary of the flat he had summoned his Council of Ten, or, rather, his Council of Nine (Bentley being absent, dead), had addressed all his employes, had separated three traitorous shopwalkers, ten traitorous cashiers, and forty-two traitorous servers from the main body, and sent them packing, had arranged for the rehabilitation of Lady Brice (nee Kentucky-Webster), had appointed a new guardian to the Safe Deposit, had got on the track of the stolen stoles, and had approved special advertisements for every daily paper in London.

And, finally and supremely, he had experienced the greatest stroke of joy, ecstatic and bewildering joy, of his whole existence—­the news that Camilla lived.  It was this tremendous feeling of joy, and not by any means his complex and variegated worries, that might have prevented him from obtaining the sleep which Nature demanded.