CHAPTER X.

THE GIRL OF THE SNOWS

Ten minutes later Darville’s telephone bell rang again, whereupon he held a brief conversation with somebody who told him something which caused him both surprise and alarm. Two other urgent calls came through in quick succession, whereupon he sat down and wrote a hasty note:

“Dear Edris,--I am so very sorry, but it will be impossible for me to keep our appointment this afternoon, as I have to be out of London again. I shall be at my flat at Hove over the week-end. Can you induce your mother to allow you to come and see me there, instead of going back home? I want so very much to see you--so do come. Drew, my man, will take any message if I am not here. Do forgive me for canceling the appointment, but I’m horribly busy.

“Yours as ever, “Seton Darville.”

He addressed it to her at the Berkeley Hotel, and then sent Drew round with it into Piccadilly immediately.

At eleven he presided over a secret conference held in his private room at the office. All four men who sat with him were smartly dressed, alert, shrewd cosmopolitans, who spent their adventurous lives traveling in the interests of the defense of Britain against the machinations of her enemies.

In a few terse, well-chosen words Darville explained why they were in conference, and then he unfolded an enemy intrigue which held all of them amazed at his astuteness and foresight. He had established facts of which the world had never dreamed. His intuition was as astounding as it was uncanny, and his bold entry into that house in Edinburgh was yet another illustration of that utter fearlessness which all his staff so admired. When anything unusually dangerous was to be undertaken, Seton Darville, in order to set an example, never failed to do it himself in his easy-going, debonair way, just as though he had no care in all the world.

The Englishmen who “do things” never talk about them. Darville never