I think I have never seen so sublime a look of faith on any one’s face before.  If I had not seen and heard what I had, it might have shaken my own convictions.

“He told me to trust him and to have no fear,” she said simply, gripping herself mentally and physically by main force, then with an air of defiance she looked at me.  “I do not believe that he is dead!”

I tried to comfort her.  I wanted to do so.  But I could do nothing but shake my head sadly.  My own heart was full to overflowing.  An intimacy such as had been ours could not be broken except with a shock that tore my soul.  I knew that the poor girl had not seen what I had seen.  Yet I could not find it in my heart to contradict her.

She saw my look, read my mind.

“No,” she cried, still defiant, “no—­a thousand times, no!  I tell you—­he is not dead!”

CHAPTER VI

THE LOST TORPEDO

From the rocks of a promontory that jutted out not far from the wharf where Wu Fang’s body was found and Kennedy had disappeared, opened up a beautiful panorama of a bay on one side and the Sound on the other.

It was a deserted bit of coast.  But any one who had been standing near the promontory the next day might have seen a thin line as if the water, sparkling in the sunlight, had been cut by a huge knife.  Gradually a thin steel rod seemed to rise from the water itself, still moving ahead, though slowly now as it pushed its way above the surface.  After it came a round cylinder of steel, studded with bolts.  It was the hatch of a submarine and the rod was the periscope.

As the submarine lay there at rest, the waves almost breaking over it, the hatch slowly opened and a hand appeared groping for a hold.  Then appeared a face with a tangle of curly black hair and keen forceful eyes.  After it the body of a man rose out of the hatch, a tall, slender, striking person.  He reached down into the hold of the boat and drew forth a life preserver.

“All right,” he called down in an accent slightly foreign, as he buckled on the belt.  “I shall communicate with you as soon as I have something to report.”

Then he deliberately plunged overboard and struck out for the shore.  Hand over hand, he churned his way through the water toward the beach until at last his feet touched bottom and he waded out, shaking the water from himself like a huge animal.

The coming of the stranger had not been entirely unheralded.  Along the shore road by which Kennedy and I had followed the crooks whom we thought had the torpedo, on that last chase, was waiting now a powerful limousine with its motor purring.  A chauffeur was sitting at the wheel and inside, at the door, sat a man peering out along the road to the beach.  Suddenly the man in the machine signalled to the driver.

“He comes,” he cried eagerly.  “Drive down the road, closer, and meet him.”