Afterward, when he was himself again and was allowed to tell his strange story, Marco found that both his father and Lazarus had at once had suspicions when he had not returned.  They knew no ordinary event could have kept him.  They were sure that he must have been detained against his will, and they were also sure that, if he had been so detained, it could only have been for reasons they could guess at.

“This was the card that she gave me,” Marco said, and he handed it to Loristan.  “She said you would remember the name.”  Loristan looked at the lettering with an ironic half-smile.

“I never heard it before,” he replied.  “She would not send me a name I knew.  Probably I have never seen either of them.  But I know the work they do.  They are spies of the Maranovitch, and suspect that I know something of the Lost Prince.  They believed they could terrify you into saying things which would be a clue.  Men and women of their class will use desperate means to gain their end.”

“Might they—­have left me as they threatened?” Marco asked him.

“They would scarcely have dared, I think.  Too great a hue and cry would have been raised by the discovery of such a crime.  Too many detectives would have been set at work to track them.”

But the look in his father’s eyes as he spoke, and the pressure of the hand he stretched out to touch him, made Marco’s heart thrill.  He had won a new love and trust from his father.  When they sat together and talked that night, they were closer to each other’s souls than they had ever been before.

They sat in the firelight, Marco upon the worn hearth-rug, and they talked about Samavia—­about the war and its heart-rending struggles, and about how they might end.

“Do you think that some time we might be exiles no longer?” the boy said wistfully.  “Do you think we might go there together—­and see it—­you and I, Father?”

There was a silence for a while.  Loristan looked into the sinking bed of red coal.

“For years—­for years I have made for my soul that image,” he said slowly.  “When I think of my friend on the side of the Himalayan Mountains, I say, ’The Thought which Thought the World may give us that also!’”

XVIII

“CITIES AND FACES”

The hours of Marco’s unexplained absence had been terrible to Loristan and to Lazarus.  They had reason for fears which it was not possible for them to express.  As the night drew on, the fears took stronger form.  They forgot the existence of The Rat, who sat biting his nails in the bedroom, afraid to go out lest he might lose the chance of being given some errand to do but also afraid to show himself lest he should seem in the way.

“I’ll stay upstairs,” he had said to Lazarus.  “If you just whistle, I’ll come.”

The anguish he passed through as the day went by and Lazarus went out and came in and he himself received no orders, could not have been expressed in any ordinary words.  He writhed in his chair, he bit his nails to the quick, he wrought himself into a frenzy of misery and terror by recalling one by one all the crimes his knowledge of London police-courts supplied him with.  He was doing nothing, yet he dare not leave his post.  It was his post after all, though they had not given it to him.  He must do something.