BOOK II: THE ISLE OF PREY

--I--

THE SPELL OF THE MOONBEAMS

It was a night of white moonlight; a languorous night. It was a night of impenetrable shadows, deep and black; and, where light and shadow met and merged, the treetops were fringed against the sky in tracery as delicate as a cameo. And there was fragrance in the air, exotic, exquisite, the fragrance of growing things, of semi-tropical flowers and trees and shrubs. And very faint and soft there fell upon the ear the gentle lapping of the water on the shore, as though in her mother tenderness nature were breathing a lullaby over her sea-cradled isle.

On a verandah of great length and spacious width, moon-streaked where the light stole in through the row of ornamental columns that supported the roof and through the interstices of vine-covered lattice work, checkering the flooring in fanciful designs, a girl raised herself suddenly on her elbow from a reclining chair, and, reaching out her hand, laid it impulsively on that of another girl who sat in a chair beside her.

"Oh, Dora," she breathed, "it's just like fairyland!"

Dora Marlin smiled quietly.

"What a queer little creature you are, Polly!" she said. "You like it here, don't you?"

"I _love_ it!" said Polly Wickes.

"Fairyland!" Dora Marlin repeated the word. "Wouldn't it be wonderful if there were a real fairyland just like the stories they used to read to us as children?"

Polly Wickes nodded her head slowly.

"I suppose so," she said; "but I never had any fairy stories read to me when I was a child, and so my fairyland has always been one of my own--one of dreams. And this is fairyland because it's so beautiful, and because being here doesn't seem as though one were living in the same world one was born in at all."

"You poor child!" said Dora Marlin softly. "A land of dreams, then! Yes; I know. These nights _are_ like that sometimes, aren't they? They make you dream any dream you want to have come true, and, while you dream wide awake, you almost actually experience its fulfilment then and there. And so it is nearly as good as a real fairyland, isn't it? And anyway, Polly, you look like a really, truly fairy yourself to-night."

"No," said Polly Wickes. "You are the fairy. Fairies aren't supposed to be dark; they have golden hair, and blue eyes, and--"

"A wand," interrupted Dora Marlin, with a mischievous little laugh. "And if it weren't all just make-believe, and I _was_ the fairy, I'd wave my wand and have _him_ appear instantly on the scene; but, as it is, I'm afraid he won't come to-night after all, and it's getting late, and I think we'd better go to bed."

"And I'm sure he will come, and anyway I couldn't go to bed," said Polly Wickes earnestly. "And anyway I couldn't go to sleep. Just think, Dora, I haven't seen him for nearly four years, and I'll have all the news, and hear everything I want to know about mother. He said they'd leave the mainland to-day, and it's only five hours across. I'm sure he'll still come. And, besides, I'm certain I heard a motor boat a few minutes ago."

"Very likely," agreed Dora Marlin; "but that was probably one of our own men out somewhere around the island. It's very late now, and in half an hour it will be low tide, and they would hardly start at all if they knew they wouldn't make Manwa by daylight. There are the reefs, and--"

"The reefs are charted," said Polly Wickes decisively. "I know he'll come."

A little ripple of laughter came from Dora Marlin's chair.

"How old is Captain Newcombe, dear?" she inquired naïvely.

"Don't be a beast, Dora," said Polly Wickes severely. "He's very, very old--at least he was when I saw him last."

"When you weren't much more than fourteen," observed Dora Marlin judicially. "And when you're fourteen anybody over thirty is a regular Methuselah. I know I used to think when I was a child that father was terribly, terribly old, much older than he seems to-day when he really is an old man; and I used to wonder then how he lived so long."

Polly Wickes' dark eyes grew serious.

"It doesn't apply to me," she said in a low tone. "I wasn't ever a child. I was old when I was ten. I've told you all about myself, because I couldn't have come here with you if I hadn't; and you know why I am so eager and excited and so happy that guardy is coming. I owe him everything in the world I've got; and he's been so good to mother. I--I don't know why. He said when I was older I would understand. And he's such a wonderful man himself, with such a splendid war record."

Dora Marlin rose from her chair, and placed her arm affectionately around her companion's shoulders.

"Yes, dear," she said gently. "I know. I was only teasing. And you wouldn't be Polly Wickes if you wanted to do anything else than just sit here and wait until you were quite, quite sure that he wouldn't come to-night. But as I'm already sure he won't because it's so late, I'm going to bed. You don't mind, do you, dear? I want to see if father's all right, too. Poor old dad!"

"Dora!" Polly Wickes was on her feet. "Oh, Dora, I'm so selfish! I--I wish I could help. But I'm sure it's going to be all right. I don't think that specialist was right at all. How could he be? Mr. Marlin is such a dear!"

Dora Marlin turned her head away, and for a moment she did not speak. When she looked around again there was a bright, quick smile on her lips.

"I am counting a lot on Captain Newcombe's and Mr. Locke's visit," she said. "I'm sure it will do father good. Good-night, dear--and if they do come, telephone up to my room and I'll be down in a jiffy. Their rooms are all ready for them, but they're sure to be famished, and--"

"I'll do nothing of the sort!" announced Polly Wickes. "The idea of upsetting a household in the middle of the night! I'll send them back to their yacht."

"You won't do anything of the kind!" said Dora Marlin.

"Yes, I will," said Polly Wickes.

"Well, he won't come anyway," said Dora Marlin.

"Yes, he will!"

"No, he won't!"

They both began to laugh.

"But I'll tell you what I'll do," said Polly Wickes. "After he's gone I'll creep into bed with you and tell you all about it. Good-night, dear."

"Good-night, Polly fairy," said Dora Marlin.

Polly Wickes watched the white form weave itself in and out of the checkered spots of moonlight along the verandah, and finally disappear inside the house; then she threw herself down upon the reclining chair again, her hands clasped behind her head, and lay there, strangely alert, wide-eyed, staring out on the lawn.

She was quite sure he would come--even yet--because when they had sent over to the mainland for the mail yesterday there had been a letter from him saying he would arrive some time to-day.

How soft the night was!

Would he be changed; would he seem very different? Had what Dora had said about the viewpoint from which age measures age been really true? And if it were? _She_ was the one who would seem changed--from a little girl in pigtails to a woman, not a very old woman, but a woman. Would he know her, recognise her again?

What a wonderful, glorious, dreamy night it was!

Dreams! Was she dreaming even now, dreaming wide awake, that she was here; a dream that supplanted the squalour of narrow, ill-lighted streets, of dark, creaking staircases, of lurking, hungry shapes, of stalking vice, of homes that were single, airless rooms gaunt with poverty--a dream that supplanted all that for this, where there was only a world of beautiful things, and where even the airs that whispered through the trees were balmy with some rare perfume that intoxicated the senses with untold joy?

She startled herself with a sharp little cry. Pictures, memories, vivid, swift in succession, were flashing, unbidden, through her mind--a girl in ragged clothes who sold flowers on the street corners, in the parks, a gutter-snipe the London "bobbies" had called her so often that the term had lost any personal meaning save that it classified the particular species of outcasts to which she had belonged; a room that was reached through the climbing of a smutty, dirty staircase in a tenement that moaned in its bitter fight against dissolution in common with its human occupants, a room that was scanty in its furnishings, where a single cot bed did service for two, and a stagnant odour of salt fish was never absent; a woman that was grey-haired, sharp-faced, of language and actions at times that challenged even the license of Whitechapel, but one who loved, too; the smells from the doors of pastry shops on the better streets that had made her cry because they had made her more hungry than ever; the leer of men when she had grown a few years older who thought a gutter-snipe both defenceless and fair game.

She had never been a child.

Polly Wickes had turned in the reclining chair, and her face now was buried in the cushion.

And then into her life had come--had come--this "guardy." He did not leer at her; he was kind and courtly--like--like what she had thought a good father might have been. But she had not understood the cataclysmic, bewildering and stupendous change that had then taken place in her life, and so she had asked her mother. She had always remembered the answer; she always would.

"Never you mind, dearie," Mrs. Wickes had said. "Wot's wot is wot. 'E's a gentleman is Captain Newcombe, a kind, rich gentleman, top 'ole 'e is. An' if 'e's a-goin' to adopt yer, I ain't goin' to 'ave to worry any more abaht wot's goin' into my mouth; an' though I ain't got religion, I says, as I says to 'im when 'e asks me, thank Gawd, I says. An' if we're a-goin' to be separated for a few years, dearie, wye it's a sacrifice as both of us 'as got to myke for each other."

They had been separated for nearly four years. As fourteen understood it, she had understood that she was to be taught to live in a different world, to acquire the viewpoints of a different station in life, in order that she might fit herself to take her place in that world and that station where her guardian lived and moved. To-day she understood this in a much more mature way. And she had tried to do her best--but she could never forget the old life no matter how completely severed she might be from it, or how far from it she might be removed even in a physical sense; though gradually, she was conscious, the past had become less real, less poignant, and more like some dream that came at times, and lingered hauntingly in her memory.

The hardest part of it all had been the separation from her mother, but she would see her mother soon now, for Captain Newcombe had promised that she should go back to England when her education was finished in America. And her education was finished now--the last term was behind her. Four years--her mother! Even if that separation had seemed necessary and essential to her guardian, how wonderful and dear he had been even in that respect. How happy he had made them both! Indeed, her greatest happiness came from the knowledge that her mother, since those four years began, had removed from the squalour and distress that she had previously known all her life, and had lived since then in comfort and ease. Her mother could not read or write, of course, but--

Polly Wickes caught her breath in a little, quick, half sob. Could not read or write! It seemed to mean so much, to visualise so sharply that other world, to--to bring the odour of salt fish, the nauseous smell of guttering tallow candles. No, no; that was all long gone now, gone forever, for both her mother and herself. What did it matter if her mother could not read or write? It _had_ not mattered. Even here guardy had filled the breach--written the letters that her mother had dictated, and read to her mother the letters that she, Polly, sent in her guardian's care. And her mother had told her how happy she was, and how comfortable in a cosy little home on a pretty little street in the suburbs.

Was it any wonder that she was beside herself with glad excitement to-night, when at any moment now the one person in all the world who had been so good to her, to whom she owed a debt of gratitude that she could never even be able to express, much less repay, would--would actually, _really_ be here? For he would come! She was sure of it. After all, it wasn't so _very_ late, and--

She rose suddenly from the reclining chair, her heart pounding in quickened, excited throbs, and ran lightly to the edge of the verandah. He was here now. She had heard a footstep. She could not have been mistaken. It was as though some one had stepped on loose gravel. She peered over the balustrade, and her forehead puckered in a perplexed frown. There wasn't any one in sight; and there wasn't any gravel on which a footstep could have crunched. All around the house in this direction there was only the soft velvet sward of the beautifully kept lawn. The driveway was at the other side of the house. She had forgotten that. And yet it did not seem possible she could have been mistaken. Imagination, fancy, could hardly have reproduced so perfect an imitation of such a sound.

It was very strange! It was very strange that she should have--No; she hadn't been mistaken! She _had_ heard a footstep--but it had come from under the verandah, and some one was there now. She leaned farther out over the balustrade, and stared with widened eyes at a movement in the hedge of tall, flowering bush that grew below her along the verandah's length. A low rustle came now to her ears. Sheltered by the hedge, some one was creeping cautiously, stealthily along there under the verandah.

Her hands tightened on the balustrade. What did it mean? No good, that was certain. She was afraid. And suddenly the peace and quietness and serenity of the night was gone. She was afraid. And it had always seemed so safe here on this wonderful little island, so free from intrusion. There was something snakelike in the way those bushes moved.

She watched them now, fascinated. Something bade her run into the house and cry out an alarm; something held her there clinging to the balustrade, her eyes fixed on that spot below her just a few yards along from where she stood. She could make out a figure now, the figure of a man crawling warily out through the hedge toward the lawn. And then instinctively she caught her hand to her lips to smother an involuntary cry, and drew quickly back from the edge of the balustrade. The figure was in plain sight now on the lawn in the moonlight--a figure in a long dressing gown; a figure without hat, whose silver hair caught the sheen of the soft light and seemed somehow to give the suggestion of ghostlike whiteness to the thin, strained face beneath.

It was Mr. Marlin.

For a moment Polly watched the other as he made his way across the lawn in a diagonal direction toward the grove of trees that surrounded the house. Fear was gone now, supplanted by a wave of pity. Poor Mr. Marlin! The specialist had been right. Of course, he had been right! She had never doubted it--nor had Dora. What she had said to Dora had been said out of sympathy and love. They both understood that. It--it helped a little to keep up Dora's courage; it kept hope alive. Mr. Marlin was so kindly, so lovable and good. But he was an incurable monomaniac. And now he was out here on the lawn in the middle of the night in his dressing gown. What was it that he was after? Why had he stolen out from the house in such an extraordinarily surreptitious way?

She turned and ran softly along the verandah, and down the steps to the lawn, and stood still again, watching. There was no need of getting Dora out of bed because in any case Mr. Marlin could certainly come to no harm; and, besides, she, Polly, could tell Dora all about it in the morning. But, that apart, she was not quite certain what she ought to do. The strange, draped figure of the old man had disappeared amongst the trees now, apparently having taken the path that led to the shore. Mechanically she started forward, half running--then slowed her pace almost immediately to a hesitating walk. Had she at all any right to spy on Mr. Marlin? It was not as though any harm could come to him, or that he--

And then with a low, quick cry, her eyes wide, Polly Wickes stood motionless in the centre of the lawn.

--II--

THE VOICE IN THE NIGHT

Captain Francis Newcombe, from the dock where he had been making fast a line, surveyed for a moment the deck of the _Talofa_ below. His eyes rested speculatively on Howard Locke, who, with sleeves rolled up and grimy to the elbows, was busy over the yacht's engine; then his glance passed to Runnells on the forward deck of the little vessel, who was assiduously engaged in making shipshape coils of a number of truant ropes. Captain Francis Newcombe permitted a flicker to cross his lips. It was a new experience for Runnells, this playing at sailorman--and Runnells had earned ungrudging praise from Locke all the way down from New York. Runnells had taken to the job even as a child takes to a new toy. Well, so much the better! Runnells and Locke had hit it off together from the start. Again, so much the better!

He lit a cigarette and stared shoreward along the dock. Manwa Island! Well, in the moonlight at least it was a place of astounding beauty, and if its appearance was any criterion of its material worth, it was a-- He laughed softly, and languidly exhaled a cloud of cigarette smoke. There was a lure about the place--or was it the moonlight that, stealing with dreamy treachery upon the senses, carried one away to a land of make-believe? That stretch of sand there like a girdle between sea and shore, as fleecy as driven snow; the restless shimmer of the moonbeams on the water like the play of clustered diamonds in a platinum setting; the trees and open spaces etched against myriad stars; the smell of semi-tropical growing things, just pure fragrance that made the nostrils greedy with insatiable desire.

He drew his hand suddenly across his eyes.

"What a night!" he exclaimed aloud. "It's like the eyes and the lips of a dream woman; like a goblet of wine of the vintage of the gods! No song of the sirens could compare with this! I'm going ashore, Locke. What do you say?"

Locke looked up with a grunt, as he swabbed his arms with a piece of waste.

"I'm done in with this damned engine!" he said irritably. "It's too late to go ashore. They'll all be asleep."

"I'm not going to ring the doorbell," said Captain Francis Newcombe pleasantly. "I'm simply going to stroll in paradise. You don't mind, do you?"

"Go to it!" said Locke. "I'm going to bed."

"Right!" said Captain Francis Newcombe.

He turned and walked shoreward along the dock. Over his shoulder he saw Runnells pause in the act of coiling rope to stare after him--and again an ironical little flicker crossed his lips. Runnells was no doubt prompted to call out and ask what this midnight excursion was all about, but Runnells in the eyes of Howard Locke was a valet, and Runnells must therefore be dumb. Runnells on occasions knew his place!

He nodded in a sort of self-commendatory fashion to himself, as, reaching the shore, he started forward along a roadway that opened through the trees. He was well satisfied with his decision to bring Runnells along on the trip. "Captain Francis Newcombe and man" looked well, sounded well, and was well--since Runnells, for once in his life, even though it was due to no moral regeneration on the part of Runnells, but due entirely to Runnells' belief that he was on an innocent holiday, could be made exceedingly useful in bolstering up his master's social standing without bagging any of the game!

"Blessed is he who expects little," murmured Captain Francis Newcombe softly to himself, "for he shall receive--still less!"

He paused abruptly, and stared ahead of him. Curious road, this! Like a great archway of trees! And all moon-flecked underfoot! Where did it lead? To the house probably! This was Manwa Island--the home of the mad millionaire! Queer freak of nature, these Florida Keys--if what he had been able to read up about them was true. Almost a continuous bow of islands, some fruitful, some barren, some big, some small--such a heterogeneous mess!--stretching along off the coast, some near, some far, for two hundred miles. Nothing but rocks on one; tropical fruits and verdure in profusion on another! Well, the mad millionaire, if the night revealed anything, had picked the gem of them all!

He walked on again. The road wound tortuously through what appeared to be a glade of great extent. It seemed to beckon, to lure, to intrigue him the farther he went, to promise something around each moon-flecked turning. He laughed aloud softly. Promised what? Where was he going? Why was he here ashore at all? Was it possible that he had no ulterior motive in this stroll, that for once the sheer beauty of anything held him in thrall? Well, even so, it at least afforded him a laugh at himself then. This road, for instance, was like an enchanted pathway, and there was magic in the night.

Or was it Polly?

Captain Francis Newcombe shook his head. Hardly! Not at this hour! Thanks to the engine trouble that had delayed them, she would long since have given up expecting him to-night, even though he had written her that he would be here.

The house, then? A surreptitious inspection; an entry even?--there were half a million dollars there! Again he shook his head. He was not so great a fool as to _invite_ disaster. To-morrow, and for days thereafter, he would be an inmate of the house when he would have opportunities of that nature without number, and without entailing any risk or suspicion--and time was no object.

He smiled complacently to himself. Things were shaping up very well--very well indeed. The seed so carefully planted years ago was to bear fruit at last. The greatest coup of his life was just within his grasp; and, if he were not utterly astray, that very coup in itself should prove but the stepping stone to still greater ones. Polly! Yes, quite true! The future depended very materially upon Polly. How amenable would she be to influence?--granting always that the said influence be delicately and tactfully enough applied!

He fell to whistling very softly under his breath. He had plans for Polly. And if they matured the future looked very bright--for himself. He wondered what she was like--particularly as to character and disposition. Was she affectionate, romantic--what? A great deal, a very great deal, depended on that. Not in the present instance--Polly had fully served her purpose in so far as a certain half million dollars in cash was concerned, and being innocent of any connivance must remain so--but thereafter. England was an exploited field; it had become dangerous; the net there was drawing in. Oh, yes, he had had all that in mind on the day he had first sent Polly to America, but only in a general way then, while to-day it had become concrete. Locke would make a most admirable "open sesame" to the New Land--if Locke married Polly. Polly, as Mrs. Locke, would step at once into a social sphere than which there was no higher--_or wealthier_--and, _ipso facto_, Captain Francis Newcombe would do likewise. And given a half million as stake money, Captain Francis Newcombe, if he knew Captain Francis Newcombe at all, would not fail in his opportunities! He had expected Polly in due course to make a place for herself in social America; that was what he had paid money for--but Howard Locke was a piece of luck. Locke conserved time; Locke opened the safety vault of possibilities immediately.

He frowned suddenly. Suppose Polly did not prove amenable? Nonsense! Why shouldn't she--if the man weren't flung at her head! Locke was the kind of chap a girl ought to like, and all girls _were_ more or less romantic, and the element of romance had just the right spice to it here--the guardian she has not seen in years who is accompanied by a young man, who, from any standpoint, whether of looks, physique, manner or position, would measure up to the most exacting of young ladies' ideals! And to say nothing of the magic spells that seemed to have their very home in this garden isle--a veritable wooer's bower! There would be other moonlight nights. Bah! There was nothing to it--save to put a few minor obstacles in the way of the turtle doves!

Where the devil did this road lead to? Well, no matter! It was like a tunnel, dreamy black with its walls of leaves, dreamy with its sweet-smelling odours. In itself it was well worth while. It continued to invite him. And he accepted the invitation. His thoughts roved farther afield now. Locke ... the trip down on the fifty-foot _Talofa_ ... not an incident to mar the days--nothing since the night that shot had been fired on shipboard through his cabin window.

His face for a moment grew dark--then cleared again. If, as through the hours thereafter when he had sat there in the cabin, it had seemed as though the shot had come from some ghostly visitor out of the past, there was no reason now why it should bother him further; for, granting such a diagnosis as true, Locke and the _Talofa_ had thrown even so acute a stalker as a supernatural spirit off the trail. As a matter of fact, it had probably been some maniacal or drug-crazed idiot running for the moment amuck. To-night, with these soft, whispering airs around him, and serenity and loveliness everywhere in contrast with that night of storm, the incident did not seem so virulent a thing anyway; it seemed to be _smoothed_ over, to be relegated definitely to where it belonged--to the realm of things ended and done with. Certainly, since that night nothing had happened.

And yet, now, his lips tightened.

It was unfortunate he had not caught the man. He would have liked to have seen the other's _face_; to have exchanged memory with memory--and to have slammed forever shut that particular door of the bygone days if by any chance he found he had been careless enough to have left one, in passing, ajar.

He swore sharply under his breath; but the next moment shrugged his shoulders. The incident was too immeasurably far removed from Manwa Island to allow it to intrude itself upon him now. Why think of things such as that when the very night itself here with its languor, its beauty, and--yes, again--its magic, sought to bring to the senses the gift of delightful repose and contentment? When the--

He stood suddenly still, and in sheer amazement rubbed his eyes. He had come to the end of the tree-arched road, and it seemed as though he gazed now on the imaginative painting of a master genius, daring, bold in its conception, exquisite in its execution. Either that, or there _was_ magic in the night, and he had been transported bodily through enchantment into the very land of the Arabian Nights!

A few yards away, he faced what looked in the moonlight like a great marble balustrade, and rising above this, painted into a hue of softest white against the night, towered what might well have been a caliph's palace. It stretched away in lines unusual in their beauty and design; columns above the balustrade; little domes like minarets against the sky line; quaint latticed windows. And the effect of the whole was that of a mirage on a sea of emerald green; for, sweeping away from the balustrade, wondrous in its colour under the moonlight, was a wide expanse of lawn, level, unbroken until the eye met again the horizon rim beyond in the wall of encircling trees, a wall of inky blackness.

He moved forward out on to the lawn--and as suddenly halted again, as there seemed to float into his line of vision from around the corner of the balustrade, like some nymph of the moonlight, the slim, graceful figure of a girl in white, clinging draperies, whose clustering masses of dark hair crowned a face that in the soft light was amazingly beautiful. And he caught his breath as he gazed. And the girl, with a low cry, stood still--and then came running toward him.

"Oh, guardy! Guardy! Guardy!" she cried. "I knew you'd come! I knew it!"

It was Polly's voice. It hadn't changed. Was the nymph Polly? She was running with both hands outstretched. He caught them in his own as she came up to him, and stared into her face almost unbelievingly. Polly! This wasn't Polly! Polly's photographs were of a very pretty girl--this girl was glorious! She stirred the pulses. Damn it, she made the blood leap!

She hung back now a little shyly, the colour coming and going in her face.

He laughed. He meant it to be a laugh of one entirely in command both of himself and the situation; but it sounded in his ears as a laugh forced, unnatural, a poor effort to cover a suddenly routed composure.

"And is this all the welcome I get?" he demanded. He drew her closer to him. Gad, why not take his rights? She was worth it!

She held up her cheek demurely.

"I--I wasn't quite sure," she said coyly. "One's deportment with one's guardian wasn't in the school curriculum, you know--guardy!"

"Then I should have been more particular in my selection of the school," he said. It was strange, unaccountable! His voice seemed to rasp. He kissed her--then held her off at arm's-length. Polly! This bewitching creature was Polly! How the colour came and fled; and something glistened in the great, dark eyes--like the dew glistening in the morning sunlight.

"Oh, guardy!" she murmured. "It's so good to see you!"

"You waited up for me, Polly?" he asked.

"Yes," she answered. "Dora was sure you wouldn't come to-night because it was so late, and on account of it being low tide; but I was equally sure you would."

"Of course, I would!" said Captain Francis Newcombe glibly. "And I'm here. We're just in. I was afraid it was hopelessly late; but I didn't want to disappoint you in case you might still be clinging to what must have seemed a forlorn hope, and so I came ashore on the chance."

"Guardy," she said delightedly, "you're the only guardy in the world! But what happened? You were to have left the mainland to-day, and it's only five hours across."

"You'll have to ask Locke," he smiled. "That is, as to details--when he's in a better humour. In a general way, however, the engine broke down. We've been since one o'clock this afternoon getting over."

"Oh!" she exclaimed. "What perfectly wretched luck! And where's Mr. Locke now? And--no--first, you must tell me about mother. Is she changed any? Is she well, and quite, quite happy? And does she like her home? Is it pretty? And how--"

"Good heavens, Polly!" expostulated Captain Francis Newcombe with assumed helplessness. "What a volley!" But his mind was at work swiftly, coldly, judicially. To preface his visit with the announcement of Mrs. Wickes' untimely--or was it timely?--end, would create an atmosphere that would not at all harmonise with his plans. Polly in mourning and retirement! Locke! Impossible! Nor did it suit him to explain that Mrs. Wickes was not her mother. He was not yet sure when that particular piece of information might best be used to advantage. And so Captain Francis Newcombe laughed disengagingly. "I can't possibly answer all those questions to-night--we'd be here until daylight. The mother's quite all right, Polly--quite all right. You can pump me dry to-morrow."

"Oh, I'm so glad--and so happy!" she cried. She clapped her hands together. "All right, to-morrow! We'll talk all day long. Well, then, about Mr. Locke--where is he? And how did you come to make such a trip? You know, you just wrote that you were coming down from New York on his yacht. Who is he? Tell me about him."

Locke! Damn it, the girl was incredibly beautiful--the figure of a young goddess! What hair! Those lips! Fool! What was the matter with him? Polly was only a tool to be used; not to turn his head just because she had proved to be a bit of a feminine wonder. Fool! The downfall of every outstanding figure in his profession had been traceable to a woman. It was a police axiom. It did not apply to Shadow Varne! A girl--bah--the world was full of them! And yet-- His hand at his side clenched, while his lips smiled.

"That's something else for to-morrow," he said. "You'll meet him then, and"--what was it he had said to himself a little while ago about slight obstacles in the way of the turtle doves?--"I hope you'll like him, though I've an idea that perhaps you won't."

"Why won't I?" demanded Polly instantly.

"Well, I don't know--upon my word, I don't," said Captain Francis Newcombe with a quizzical grin. "He certainly isn't strikingly handsome; and I've an idea he's anything but a ladies' man--though not altogether a bad sort in spite of that, you know."

"Oh!" said Polly Wickes, with a little pout that might have meant anything. "Well, who is he, then--and where did you meet him?"

"I met him at the club in London, and we chummed up on the way over. It's quite simple. He was off for a holiday with no choice as to where he went, whereas I wanted to come here--so we came down in his motor cruiser. As to who he is, he's just young Howard Locke, the son of Howard Locke, senior, the American financier."

"Oh!" said Polly Wickes again.

What a ravishing little pout! Where had the girl learned the trick? Was it a trick? Those eyes were wonderfully frank, steady, ingenuous--wonderfully deep and self-reliant. He wondered if he looked old in those eyes? _Young_ Locke! Fool again! Go on, tempt the gods! Ask her if thirty-three fell within her own category of youth, or--

"Don't make a sound!" she cautioned suddenly. "Quick! Here!"

He found himself, obedient to the pressure on his arm, standing back again within the shadows of the tree-arched road.

"What is it, Polly?" he asked in surprise.

"Look!" she whispered, and pointed out across the lawn.

A figure was emerging from the trees some hundred yards away, and, in the open now, began to approach the house. Captain Francis Newcombe stared. It was a bare-headed, white-haired old man in a dressing gown that reached almost to his heels. The man walked quickly, but with a queer, bird-like movement of his head which he cocked from side to side at almost every step, darting furtive glances in all directions around him.

Captain Francis Newcombe felt the girl's hand tighten in a tense grip on his arm. Rather curious, this! The figure was making for that hedge of bushes that seemed to enclose the verandah from below. And now, reaching the hedge, and pausing for an instant to look around him again in every direction, the man parted the bushes and disappeared under the verandah.

"My word!" observed Captain Francis Newcombe tersely. "What's it about? A thief in the night--or what? I'll see what the beggar's up to anyway!"

He took a step forward, but Polly held him back.

"Keep quiet!" she breathed. "It's--it's only Mr. Marlin."

Captain Francis Newcombe whistled low under his breath.

"As bad as that, is he?"

Polly nodded her head.

"Yes," she said a little miserably. "I'm afraid so; though it's the first time I ever saw anything like this."

"But what is he doing under the verandah there at this hour?" demanded Captain Francis Newcombe.

Polly shook her head this time.

"I don't know," she said; "but I think there must be some way in and out of the house under there, for I am certain he was in bed less than an hour ago, because when Dora left me she was going to see that her father was all right for the night, and if she hadn't found him in his room, I am sure she would have been alarmed and would have come back to me. I--I saw him come out of there a little while ago. I was sitting on the verandah waiting for you. I started to follow him across the lawn, and then I thought I had no right to do so, and then I saw you, and--and I forgot all about him."

Captain Francis Newcombe was a master of facial expression. He became instantly grave and concerned.

"Well, I should say then," he stated thoughtfully, "that, from what I've just seen, and from what you wrote in your letter about the fabulous sum of money he keeps about him, he ought to have a good deal of medical attention, and the money taken from him and put in some safe place. Don't you know Miss Marlin well enough to suggest something like that?"

Polly Wickes shook her head quickly.

"Oh, you don't understand, guardy!" she said anxiously. "He has had medical attention. The very best specialist from New York has been here since I wrote you. And he says there is really absolutely nothing that can be done. Mr. Marlin is just the dearest old man you ever knew. It's just on that one subject, not so much money as finance, though I don't quite understand the difference, that he is insane. If he were taken away from here and shut up anywhere it would kill him. And, as Doctor Daemer said, what better place could there be than this? And anyway Dora wouldn't hear of it. And as for taking the money away from him, nobody knows where it is."

Captain Francis Newcombe was staring at the bushes that fringed the verandah.

"Oh!" he said quietly. "That puts quite a different complexion on the matter. I didn't understand. I gathered from your letter that the money was more or less always in evidence. In fact, I think you said he showed it to you--a half million dollars in cash."

"So he did," Polly answered; "but that's the only time I ever saw it; and I don't think even Dora has ever seen it more than once or twice. He has got it hidden somewhere, of course; but as it would be the very worst thing in the world for him to get the idea into his head that any one was watching him in an effort to discover his secret, Dora has been very careful to show no signs of interest in it. Doctor Daemer warned her particularly that any suspicions aroused in her father's mind would only accentuate the disease. Oh, guardy, it's a terribly sad case; and insanity is such a horribly strange thing! He never seems to--"

Polly was still talking. Captain Francis Newcombe inclined his head from time to time in assumed interest. He was no longer listening. Polly, the beauty of the night, his immediate surroundings, were, for the moment, extraneous things. His mind was at work. Incredible luck! The problem that had troubled him, that he had never really solved, that he had, indeed, finally decided must be left to circumstances as he should find them here and be then governed thereby, was now solved in a manner that far exceeded anything he could possibly have hoped for. To obtain the actual possession of the money from a fuddle-brained old idiot had never bothered him--that was a very simple matter. But to get away with the money after the robbery had been committed had not appeared so simple. Some one on the island must be guilty. The circle would be none too wide. He must emerge without a breath of suspicion having touched him. Not so simple! There would have been a way, of course; wits and ingenuity would have supplied it--but that had been the really intricate part of the undertaking. And now--incredible luck! He had naturally assumed that the household knew where the old madman kept his money; naturally assumed that there would be a beastly fuss and uproar over its disappearance--but now there would be nothing of the kind. It might take a few days to solve the old fool's secret, but in the main that would be child's play; after that, if by any unfortunate chance an accident happened to Mr. Jonathan P. Marlin, the whereabouts of the money would forever remain a mystery--save to one Captain Francis Newcombe. No one could, or would, be accused of having _taken_ it!

"... Guardy, you quite understand, don't you?" ended Polly Wickes.

Captain Francis Newcombe smiled at the upturned, serious face.

"Quite, Polly! Quite!" he answered earnestly. "Very fully, I might say. It must be very hard indeed on Miss Marlin. I am so sorry for her. I wish there were something we might do. Your being here must have been a blessing to her."

The colour stole into Polly Wickes' cheeks.

"Guardy, you're a dear!" she whispered.

"Am I?" he said--and took possession of her hand.

What a soft, cool little palm it was! What an entrancing little figure! Who would have dreamed that Polly would develop into so lovely--no, not lovely--damn it, she was divine! Polly and a half million! Why Locke? Curse Locke! The eyes and lips of a dream woman, he had said; a half million--both his for the taking! Did he ask still more? He was not so sure about Locke having her. No, it wasn't the night drugging his senses and steeping his soul in fanciful possession of desires. It was real. If it pleased him, he had only to take, to drink his fill to satiation of this goblet of the gods. There was nothing to stay him. He had builded for it, and he was entitled to it; it wasn't chance. Chance! There was strange laughter in his heart. Chance was the playground of fools! Why shouldn't he laugh, aye, and boastingly! Who was to deny him what he would; this woman if he wanted her, the--

He stood suddenly like a man dazed and stunned. He let fall the girl's hand. Was he mad, insane, his mind unbalanced; was reason gone? It had come out of the night, a mocking thing, a voice that jeered and rocked with wild mirth.

His eyes met Polly's. She was frightened, startled; her face had gone a little white.

Imagination? As he had imagined that night in his cabin on board ship? A voice of his own creation? No; it came again now, jarring, crashing, jangling through the stillness of the night:

"Shadow Varne! Shadow Varne! Ha, ha! Ha, ha!" It rose and fell; now almost a scream; now hoarse with wild, untrammelled laughter. "Shadow Varne! Shadow Varne! Ha, ha! Ha, ha!" And then like a long, drawn-out eerie call: "_Shad-ow Va-arne!_"

And then the soft whispering of the leaves through the trees, and no other sound.

"What is it? What is it?" Polly cried out. "What a horrible voice!"

Captain Francis Newcombe's hand, hidden in his pocket, held a revolver. To get rid of the girl now! The voice had come from the woods in the direction of the shore. A voice! Shadow Varne! Who called Shadow Varne here on this island where Shadow Varne had never been heard of? He was cold as ice now; cold with a merciless fury battering at his heart. He did not know--but he _would_ know! And then--

"You run along into the house, Polly." He forced a cool sang-froid into his voice. "It's probably nothing more than some of the negroes you spoke of in your letter cat-calling out there on the water; or else some one with a perverted sense of humour in the woods here trying to spoof us--and in that case a lesson is needed. Quick now, Polly! It's time you were in bed anyway. And say nothing about it--there's no use raising an alarm over what probably amounts to nothing. I'll tell you all about it in the morning."

She was still staring at him in a frightened, startled way.

"But, guardy," she faltered, "you--"

Damn the girl! She was wasting precious moments! But he could not explain that he had a _personal_ interest in that cursed voice, could he?

He smiled reassuringly.

"I'll tell you all about it in the morning--if there's anything to tell," he repeated. "Now, run along. Good-night, dear!"

"Good-night, guardy," she said hesitatingly.

He watched her start toward the house; then he swung quickly from the road into the woods. He swore savagely to himself. She had kept him too long. There was very little chance now of finding the owner of that voice. Had there ever been? What did it matter, the moment or so it had taken to get rid of Polly? The odds were all with the voice, and had been from the start. He was not only metaphorically, but literally, stabbing in the dark. What did it mean? Again he swore, and swore now through clenched teeth. He knew well enough what it meant. It meant what he knew now that shot through his cabin window had meant. It meant that he was known to some one as he should be known to no one. It meant that of two men on this island, there was room for only _one_; otherwise it promised disaster, exposure--the end. A strangling, horrible end--on the end of a rope.

A door of the past ajar!

Who? _Who?_

He was making too much noise! Rather than stalking his game, he was more likely to be stalked. He had been stalked--when that voice had cried out. He halted--listened. Nothing! But it was somewhere in here that the voice had come from. He could swear to that.

He worked forward again. Damn the trees and foliage! How could one go quietly when one had to fight one's way through? And it was soggy and wet underfoot--one's feet made squeaky, oozy noises.

He came out on the beach--a long, curving stretch of sand, glistening white in the moonlight. He was amazed that he had travelled so far. How far had he travelled? His mind, like his soul, was in a state of fury, of fear; there was upon him a frenzy, the urge of self-preservation, to kill.

A structure of some kind, extending out into the sea, loomed up a distance away over to the right. He stared at it. It was a boathouse; and its ornate, exaggerated size stamped it at once as an adjunct to the mad millionaire's mansion. But the voice had not come from the boathouse--it had come from the woods back in here behind him.

Captain Francis Newcombe retraced his steps into the woods again, but now with far greater caution than before; and presently, his revolver in his hand, he sat down upon the stump of a tree. He held his hand up close before his eyes. It was steady, without sign of tremor. That was better! He was cooler now--no, cool; not cooler--quite himself. If he could not move here in the woods without making a noise, neither could any one else. And from the moment that voice had flung its threat and jeer through the night there had been no sound in the underbrush. He had listened, straining his ears for that very thing, even while he had manoeuvred to get Polly out of the road without arousing suspicion anent himself in her mind. He was listening now. It was the only chance. True, whoever it was might have been close to the beach, or close to the road, and had already escaped, and in that case he was done in; but on the other hand, the man, if it were a man and not a devil, might very well have done what he, Captain Francis Newcombe, was doing now, remained silent and motionless, secure in the darkness. If that were so then, sooner or later, the other must make a move.

Silly? Impossible? A preposterous theory? Perhaps! But there was no alternative hope of catching the other to-night. Why hadn't he adopted this plan from the start? How sure was he after all that, covered by the noise he himself had made, the other had not got away?

The minutes passed--five, ten of them. There was no sound. The silence itself became heavy. It began to palpitate. It grew even clamorous, thundering ghastly auguries, threats and gibes in his ears. And then it began to take up a horrible sing-song refrain: "Who was it? Who was it? Who was it?"

What would to-morrow bring? Shadow Varne! It was literally a death sentence, wasn't it?--unless he could close forever those bawling lips! He felt the grey come creeping into his face. He, who laughed at fear, who had laughed at it all his life, save through that one night on board the ship, was beginning to fight over again his battle for composure. Shadow Varne! Shadow Varne! Hell itself seemed striving to shake his nerve.

Well, neither hell nor anything else could do it! There were those who had learned that to their cost! And, it seemed, there was another now who was yet to learn it! His teeth clamped suddenly together in a vicious snap, and suddenly he was on his feet. Faintly there came the rustle of foliage--it came again. He could not place its direction at first. It might be an animal. No! The rustling ceased. Some one was _running_ now on the road in the direction of the dock--but a long way off.

He lunged and tore his way through trees and undergrowth, and broke into the clear of the road. He raced madly along it. He could see nothing ahead because of those infernal moon-flecked turnings that he had been fool enough to rave over on his way to the house. Nothing! He drew up for a second and listened. Nothing! He spurted on again. A game of blindman's-buff--and he was blindfolded!

He came out into the clearing with the dock in sight. Again he stopped and listened. Still nothing!

His lips tightened. It was futile. He would only be playing the fool to grope further around in the darkness in what now could be but the most aimless fashion, robbed even of a single possible objective. He could not search the island! There was nothing left to do but go on board.

He started out along the dock--and then suddenly, as his eyes narrowed, his stride became nonchalant, debonair. He fell to whistling softly a catchy air from a recent musical comedy. Runnells had not gone to bed. Runnells was stretched out on his back on the deck of the yacht smoking a pipe, his head propped up on a coil of rope.

Captain Francis Newcombe dropped lightly from the wharf to the deck.

"Hello, Runnells," he observed, as he halted in front of the other, "the artistry of the night got you, too? Well, I must say, it's too fine to waste all of it at any rate in sleep."

"You're bloody well right, it is!" said Runnells. "Strike me pink, if it ain't! I've heard of these here places from the time I was born, but I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't laid here smoking my pipe and saying to myself, this here's you, Runnells, and that there's it. London! I can do without London for a bit!"

"Quite so!" said Captain Francis Newcombe. He leaned over and ran his fingers along the sole of Runnells' upturned boot.

Runnells sat up with a jerk.

"What the 'ell are you doing?" he ejaculated.

"Striking a match," said Captain Francis Newcombe, as he lighted a cigarette. "You don't mind, do you? It saves the deck."

Runnells, with a grunt, returned his head to the comfort of the coiled rope.

"Locke turned in?" inquired Captain Francis Newcombe casually.

"About ten minutes after you left," said Runnells. "That engine did him down, if you ask me. I mixed him a peg, and he was off like a shot."

"Well, I don't know of anything better to do myself," said Captain Francis Newcombe.

He turned and walked slowly toward the cabin companionway; but aft by the rail he paused for a moment, and, flinging his cigarette overboard, watched it as it struck the water, and listened as it made a tiny hiss--like a serpent's hiss.

His face for an instant became distorted, then set in hard, deep lines.

Who was it?

The sole of Runnells' boot was dry--quite dry.

--III--

THE MAD MILLIONAIRE

"It's an amazing place!" said Howard Locke.

"Yes; isn't it?" said Polly Wickes. "But, come along; you haven't seen it all yet."

"Is there more?" Howard Locke asked with pretended incredulity. "I've seen a private power plant; an aquarium that contains more varieties of fish than I ever imagined swam in the sea; a house as magnificent and spacious as a palace; stables; gardens; flowers; bowers of Eden. More! Really?"

"I think guardy was right," observed Polly Wickes naïvely.

"Yes?" inquired Howard Locke.

Polly Wickes arched her eyebrows.

"He said you weren't a ladies' man."

"Oh!" said Howard Locke with a grin. "So he's been talking behind my back, has he?"

"I'm afraid so," she admitted.

"And may I ask why you agree with him--why I am condemned?"

"Because," said Polly Wickes, "it would have been ever so much nicer, instead of saying what you did, to have expressed delight that the tour of inspection wasn't over--something about charming company, you know, even if everything you saw bored you to death."

"Unfair!" Locke frowned with mock severity. "Most unfair! I _was_ going to say something like that, and now I can't because you'll swear you put the words into my mouth and I simply parroted them."

"Sir," she said airily, "will you see the bungalows and the pickaninnies next, or the boathouse?"

"I am contrite and humble," he said meekly.

Polly Wickes' laughter rippled out on the air.

"Come on, then!" she cried, and, turning, began to run along the path through the grove of trees where they had been walking.

Locke followed. She ran like a young fawn! He stumbled once awkwardly--and she turned and laughed at him. He felt the colour mount into his cheeks--felt a tinge of chagrin. Was she vamping him; did she know that if his eyes had been occupied with where he was going, and not with her, he would not have stumbled? Or was she just a little sprite of nature, full to overflowing with life, buoyant, and the more glorious for an unconscious expression of the joy of living? Amazing, he had called what he had seen on this island since he had been installed here as a guest that morning, but most amazing of all was Newcombe's ward. Newcombe's ward! It was rather strange! Who was she? How had a girl like this come to be Captain Newcombe's ward? Newcombe had not been communicative save only on the point that since she had gone to America to school Newcombe had not see her. Rather strange, that, too! He was conscious that she piqued him one moment, while the next found him possessed of a mad desire to touch, for instance, those truant wisps of hair that now, as she stood waiting for him on the edge of the shore, a little out of breath, the colour glowing in her cheeks, she retrieved with deft little movements of her fingers.

Her colour deepened suddenly.

"_That's_ the boathouse over there," she said.

"I--I beg your pardon," said Locke in confusion. And then deliberately: "No; I don't!"

Polly Wickes stared. Again the colour in her cheeks came and went swiftly.

"Oh!" she gasped; then hurriedly: "Well, perhaps, that is better! Don't you think those two little bridges from the rocks up to the boathouse are awfully pretty?"

"Awfully!" laughed Locke.

"You're not looking at them at all," said Polly Wickes severely.

"Yes, I am," asserted Locke. "And just to prove it, I was going to ask why that amazing structure--you see, I said amazing again--that looks more like the home of a yacht club than a private boathouse, is built out into the water like that, and requires those bridges at all? Is it on account of the tide? I see there's no beach here."

"I'm sure I don't know," said Polly Wickes. "But they are pretty, aren't they?--and the place _does_ look like a clubhouse. And it looks more like one inside--there's a lovely little lounging room with an open fireplace, and I can't begin to tell you what else. Shall we go in?"

"Yes, rather!" said Locke.

He was studying the place now with a yachtsman's eye. It was built out from the rocky shore a considerable distance, and rested on an outer series of small concrete piers, placed a few feet apart; while, by stooping down, he could see, beneath the overhang of the verandah, a massive centre pier, wide and long, obviously the main foundation of the building. At the two corners facing the shore were the little bridges, built in shape like a curving ramp and ornamented with rustic railings, that she had referred to. These led from a point well above high water mark on the shore to the verandah of the boathouse itself.

"Mr. Marlin must be an enthusiast," he said, as he followed his guide across one of the bridges.

Polly Wickes did not answer at once, and they began to make the circuit of the verandah.

Howard Locke glanced at her. Her face had become suddenly sobered, the dark eyes somehow deeper, a sensitive quiver now around the corners of her lips. His glance lengthened into an unconscious stare. She could be serious then--and, yes, equally attractive in that mood. It became her. He wondered if she knew it became her? That was cynical on his part. Was he trying to arm himself with cynicism? Well, it was easily pierced then, that armour! It was a very wonderful face; not merely beautiful, but fine in the sense of steadfastness, self-reliance and sincerity. He was a poor cynic! Why not admit that she attracted him as no woman had ever attracted him before?

They had reached the seaward side of the verandah. Here a short dock was built out to meet a sort of sea-wall that gave protection to any craft that might be berthed there--but the slip was empty of boats.

She looked up at him now, as she answered his observation.

"He was," she said slowly; "but all the boats are stowed away inside now. Poor Mr. Marlin!" She turned away abruptly, her eyes suddenly moist. "Let's go inside."

They found a cosy corner in the little lounging room of which she had spoken, and seated themselves.

Locke picked up the thread of their conversation.

"You're very fond of him, aren't you, Miss Wickes?" he said gently.

"Yes," she said simply.

"It's a very strange case," said Howard Locke.

"And a very, very sad one," said Polly Wickes. "I don't know how much Dora--Miss Marlin--has said to you, or perhaps even Mr. Marlin himself, for he is sometimes just like--like anybody else, so I don't--"

"I hardly think it could be a case of trespassing on confidences in any event," Locke interrupted quietly. "It's rather well known outside; that is, in what might be called the financial world, you know. What I can't understand, though, is that, having lost all his money, a place like this could still be kept up."

Polly Wickes shook her head thoughtfully.

"Guardy was speaking about the same thing," she said; "but I don't think it costs so very much now. You see, it is almost in a way self-supporting--the vegetables, and fruit, and fuel and all that. And the servants all have their little homes, and have lived on the island for years, and the wages are not very high, and anyway Dora has a fortune in her own name--from her mother, you know; and, besides, thank goodness, dear old Mr. Marlin hasn't lost all his money anyway."

"Not lost it?" ejaculated Locke. "Why, that was the cause of his mind breaking!"

Polly Wickes looked up in confusion.

"Oh, perhaps, I shouldn't have said that," she said nervously. "But--but, after all, I don't see why I shouldn't, for you could not help but know about it before very long. Indeed, I shouldn't be a bit surprised if Mr. Marlin showed it to you himself, just as he did to me, for he seems to have taken a great fancy to you. He hardly let you out of his sight this morning."

"He knows of my father in a business way," said Locke. "I suppose that's it. Do you mean that he showed you a sum of money here on this island?"

"Yes," said Polly Wickes slowly, "after I had been here a little while; a very large sum--half a million, he said."

"Good heavens!" exclaimed Locke. "That's hardly safe, is it? I know the peculiar form his disease has taken is an antipathy to all investments, but can't Miss Marlin persuade him to deposit it somewhere?"

"That's exactly what guardy said," nodded Polly Wickes. "But it's quite useless. Dora has tried, but her father won't even tell her where he keeps it."

Howard Locke rose from his chair, walked over to the empty fireplace, and, standing with his back to Polly Wickes, opened his cigarette case.

"Captain Newcombe, of course, is quite _au fait_ with the conditions?" he observed casually.

"Of course," said Polly Wickes ingenuously. "I naturally wrote him all about it."

"Naturally!" agreed Howard Locke.

He stooped over, and, striking a match on the edge of the fireplace, lighted his cigarette. So Captain Francis Newcombe had known all about it, had he, even before he had left England? And yet Captain Francis Newcombe in the smoking room of the liner on the way across had been densely in ignorance, and even alarmed for his ward's safety at the first intimation that her host was a monomaniac! It was rather peculiar! More than peculiar!

Locke turned, and, leaning against the mantel over the fireplace, faced Polly Wickes. His mind was working swiftly, piecing together strange and apparently irrelevant fragments, that, irrelevant as they appeared, seemed to make a most suggestive whole. Captain Newcombe had lied that night on board the liner. Why? Who was it that had invaded his, Locke's stateroom and had searched through his belongings? And why? Why was it that now for the first time in four years Captain Newcombe should have come to visit his ward in America? He had more than Newcombe's word for that--Polly here had said so herself; and Miss Marlin had referred to it in the most natural way when welcoming Newcombe that morning. What had an insane old man, who hid away a half-million dollars on a little island in the Florida Keys, got to do with the letter received in London and containing those facts that Polly Wickes had just admitted she had written? What did it mean? Was a certain, insistent deduction to be carried to a logical conclusion, or was he hunting a mare's nest in his mind? Was it a mere coincidence in life, where far stranger coincidences were daily happenings--or was it a half-million dollars? And Polly Wickes, here? Captain Francis Newcombe--and his ward! Was it a bird of paradise in cahoots with a vulture? No, he wouldn't believe that! It was preposterous! There weren't any grounds for it anyway. He was an irresponsible fool. He became angry with himself. He was worse than a fool--he was a cad! The girl's very ingenuousness in what she had said put to rout any possibility of connivance. But, damn it--Captain Newcombe's ward! How? What was the explanation of that? And if--

Polly Wickes' small foot beat the floor in a sharp little tattoo.

Locke straightened up with a start. In his fit of abstraction he had been gazing at the girl with abominable rudeness.

"I forgot to say," said Polly Wickes severely, "that besides saying you were not a ladies' man, guardy said something else about you."

"No! Surely not!" Locke forced a mock dismay into his voice. "What was it?"

Polly Wickes took a critical survey of the toe of her spotless white shoe.

"He said he didn't know whether I would like you or not."

Locke took a step forward from the fireplace.

"And do you?" he demanded.

"I do not," she said promptly; "at least not when I am utterly ignored for a whole five minutes, except to be stared at as though I were a specimen under a microscope."

"I'm awfully sorry," said Locke contritely; "really I am. I was thinking of what we had been saying about Mr. Marlin, and--"

She suddenly lifted a warning finger.

"There he is now," she said in a low voice.

Locke turned around. His back had been to the door, leading to the seaward side of the verandah, which they had left open behind them. Mr. Marlin was peering cautiously around the jamb of the door--and now, as the blue eyes under the silvered hair, which was rumpled and astray, caught his, Locke's, the old man thrust a beckoning finger into view.

Locke glanced at Polly Wickes.

"I think," she said in a whisper, "that he has been acting more strangely just of late than ever before. He wants you for something. Of course, you must go and see what it is."

"All right," said Locke.

He walked quietly across the room, and out on to the verandah.

"You wanted to speak to me, Mr. Marlin?" he said pleasantly.

It was a queer, strangely contradictory figure, that of the little, stoop-shouldered, old man, who now seized his arm in feverish haste and led him hurriedly away from the door. And quite a different figure from the Mr. Marlin of the morning! The white clothes were spruce and immaculate, but he wore no hat, and, as Locke had already noted, his hair was dishevelled. The thin, almost gaunt face, a rather fine old face, had lost the calm and composure that had marked it, for instance, a few hours ago at lunch, and there was now a furtive, hunted look in the eyes, a spasmodic twitching of the facial muscles, a sort of pathetic tearing aside of the veil that had so jealously striven to hide the man's affliction; and yet too, and perhaps even more pathetic in this particular, there seemed to cling intangibly about the old financier a certain dignity of manner and bearing--the one heritage possibly of the days when he had been a power, his name a talisman in the money markets of the world.

"I don't want her to hear," said Mr. Marlin mysteriously. "I can't trust her, Locke."

"Can't trust her!" repeated Locke. "You can't trust Miss Wickes? Why, surely, Mr. Marlin, you are making a mistake. Why can't you trust her?"

"Because," said the old man sharply, "she is the ward of Captain Newcombe."

Locke stared into the other's face. A half angry, half--yes, that was it--cunning gleam had come into the blue eyes.

"What is the matter with Captain Newcombe?" he asked bluntly.

"He's a philanthropist," snapped Mr. Marlin. "A philanthropist! And all philanthropists are fools--with money."

"Oh!" said Locke a little helplessly. "So that's it, is it? Yes, of course! But I did not know Captain Newcombe was a philanthropist."

"What else is he?" demanded Mr. Marlin fiercely. "Polly Wickes herself proves it. Do you know who Polly Wickes is? No; you don't! I'll tell you! I heard her tell Dora. She was a poor girl--sold flowers on the street corners in London. Newcombe spends his money like water on her--education--clothes--thousands. He is a philanthropist, that is enough!"

"Good Lord!" muttered Locke to himself. The man hadn't been anything like this during the several hours that, off and on, he had been in the other's company that morning. The man had seemed almost, if not wholly, rational then. It was one of the idiosyncratic phases of the disease, of course. There was nothing to do but humour him. Captain Francis Newcombe a philanthropist! Five minutes ago he had come to quite another conclusion!

"Yes; I see," he said seriously. They had walked around the corner of the verandah, and now halfway down the side he halted. "But there was something you wanted to speak to me about, Mr. Marlin, wasn't there?"

"Yes," said the old man eagerly. He looked cautiously around him in all directions. "I put great faith in you as your father's son. I have never met your father; but I know of him. I know a great deal about him. He is a power. You must influence him. The world is facing a crisis, but we may yet save it from ruin. I must have a conference with you where no one can hear or see. No one must _see_--do you understand? That is most important. Some people think I am a little touched in the head; but they are the fools. I shall show you, my boy, for I shall have with me the proof that I am in earnest, and the evidence that I practise what I preach. You shall see for yourself who is the fool. To-morrow night"--he fumbled in the pocket of his coat, and drew out a little book--"what day is to-day, and what is the date? Yes, yes, of course; this is Tuesday, isn't it?"

"Yes," said Locke gravely; "to-day is Tuesday."

"Tuesday, the twenty-fifth," mumbled the old man, as he consulted the book. "Yes, yes!" He returned the book to his pocket. "Very well, then, to-morrow night. Meet me in the aquarium to-morrow night at a quarter past two."

Locke, for the sake of nonchalance, carefully selected another cigarette from his case and lighted it. A quarter past two to-morrow night! If it were not pitiable, it would be absurd that the old man should have come down here in this manner to the boathouse to make an appointment for to-morrow night, when in the natural course of events he would have been afforded an endless number of infinitely more convenient opportunities to make the same request! And why to-morrow night, other than to-night, or this afternoon, or even now? And why at such an hour? It was useless to ask the question for it found its answer simply in the workings of a poor, unhinged mind--and yet Locke found himself asking the question mechanically.

"That's a rather unusual hour, isn't it, Mr. Marlin? And why to-morrow night? Why not to-night, for instance?"

The old man came close, and gripped Locke's arm again with feverish intensity. He looked all around him, then placed his lips to Locke's ear.

"I'll tell you why," he whispered. "Since last night I have been watched and followed--watched and followed all the time, all the time, all the time. They think I am mad, that my reason is gone. Ha, ha, can you imagine that, young man? Well, they will see! And so it cannot be to-night, for I must be very careful, and I must have time to prepare. And the hour? You do not understand that? Well, I will tell you something else. The hour is fixed; it cannot be altered; it cannot be changed. It is fixed." He gripped suddenly with a fiercer pressure on Locke's arm. "Ha! Did I not tell you I was always being watched and followed?" he breathed excitedly. "Listen! Listen! There is some one coming now!"

The old man was trembling violently. Locke laid his hand reassuringly upon the other's shoulder. It was quite true that there was distinctly the sound of some one's footsteps coming across one of the little bridges from the shore, the one on the far side of the boathouse from where they stood obviously, for the one on this side was in plain view.

"Why, Mr. Marlin," Locke smiled, "it's only some one coming to the boathouse. That's quite natural. There's nothing to cause you alarm in that. But just to set your mind at rest we'll go and see who it is."

"No, no!" whispered Mr. Marlin fiercely. "No one must know that I suspect anything. I can elude them--they're around on the other side now. You stay here. Don't move! I'm going now. But remember! To-morrow night! You will remember?"

"Yes; of course, Mr. Marlin," Locke replied soothingly.

The old man laid his finger to his lips.

"And not a word about it! No one must know! Keep silent! You will see! You will see! But I must be quick now! I will elude them. Keep silent--not a word!"

The old man was running at top speed along the verandah.

Locke leaned against the railing, his face strangely set, as he watched the flying figure cross the bridge, and, with head constantly jerking around to peer first over one shoulder and then the other, disappear finally along the shore.

"Good Lord!" muttered Locke to himself again. "And this morning he appeared to be as sane as I am!" He frowned suddenly. "Queer obsession, that--of being constantly watched! Since last night! I wonder!"

He straightened up abruptly, and drew a letter from his pocket. He read it slowly, carefully, several times, as though almost he were memorising it; and then he began to tear it into little pieces.

"I guess it's safer," he confided to himself; and then with a grim smile: "Perhaps it's just as well I didn't have anything like this with me that night on board ship!"

He threw the pieces over into the water, but one fluttered back through the railing. And, staring at this, he laughed a little shortly as his eyes deciphered the typewritten fragment on the verandah floor:

ll reports approved. Use w Scotland Yard fully pre

He picked it up, tore it into minute shreds, searched carefully to make sure there were no other wayward scraps, and then started slowly back along the verandah to rejoin Polly Wickes.

His mind seemed in confusion, coherence smothered in a multitude of thoughts that impinged one upon the other, each vociferating its right to sole consideration. There was Newcombe and that smoking room scene on the liner, and a letter advising about a half-million dollars, and a madman, and--no--there was something else, something that was gradually gaining priority over the rest. Yes--Polly Wickes! Well, Polly Wickes, then ... a flower girl in London ... a lady four years later in America ... how old had she been when this had happened ... how old had she been ... confound it, what did he mean by that ... what did he mean ... she couldn't have been more than a child ... a mere child....

He halted, abruptly at the sound of his own name. Unconsciously he had almost reached the door leading into the lounging room of the boathouse. Polly Wickes was talking to some one--to whoever it was, of course, whose arrival at the boathouse had frightened old Mr. Marlin away a few minutes ago. Ah, yes! Newcombe! That was Newcombe laughing now.

"But just the same," said Polly Wickes, "it _does_ seem a little strange to me that Mr. Locke would make such a trip with you on so short acquaintance."

"Nonsense!" replied Captain Francis Newcombe. "There's nothing strange about it. You don't know that type of young American, that's all. The 'short acquaintance' end of it is purely the insular English viewpoint. He had a holiday on his hands, as I told you, and he meant to spend it on his boat somewhere. We hit it off splendidly together coming over, and--well, we've hit it off splendidly ever since. That's all."

"Let's change the subject, then," said Polly Wickes.

Captain Francis Newcombe laughed complacently.

"I was going to," he said. "I want to speak to you about last night."

"I don't care for your choice," said Polly Wickes in what seemed to Locke like sudden agitation. "I haven't been able to get that horrible cry out of my mind all day, and I hardly slept at all when I went to bed."

"But, my dear, that is utterly absurd!" Captain Francis Newcombe returned, with another laugh. "I can only repeat what I said to you this morning--that it must have been some boatmen out on the water cat-calling to each other. I was startled myself at first, and a bit angry, I'll admit, at the thought that some one was taking liberties with us; but I am quite sure now it was nothing of the kind. You mustn't give it another thought--really. It isn't worth it! But I wasn't going to refer to that again. What I wanted to know was whether or not you told Miss Marlin about seeing her father out there at that hour of night?"

"Yes," said Polly Wickes. "I told her; and she said she knew he sometimes went out night after night for a number of nights, and that, strangely enough, he'd go out later each night until finally it would be just before daybreak when he left the house--and then, after that, for a long while he wouldn't go out at all. She said she had never given her father an inkling that she knew, and had never put any restraint upon him. As I have told you, what the doctors have warned her about, and what she is more afraid of than anything else, is arousing any suspicion in her father's mind that he requires watching or is being watched. There is the danger that he might become violent. In fact, it is almost certain that he would under such conditions, Doctor Daemer said."

"H'm!" commented Captain Francis Newcombe.

A chair creaked within; a footstep sounded on the floor approaching the door.

And Howard Locke retreated quietly around the corner of the boathouse.

--IV--

THE UNKNOWN

It was dark in the room, save where the moonlight stole in through the window and stretched a filmy path across the floor until, in a strange, nebulous way, it threw into relief a cheval-glass that stood against the opposite wall. And in the glass a shadowy picture showed: The reflection of a man's figure seated in a chair, but curiously crouched as though about to spring, the shoulders bent a little forward, the head outthrust, the elbows outward, strained with weight, the hands clenched upon the arms of the chair. And then suddenly, with a low, snarling oath, the more vicious for its repression, the figure sprang from the chair, and stood with face thrust close against the mirror.

It was Captain Francis Newcombe.

He stared into the glass, his fists knotted at his sides. It was as though the two faces flung a challenge one at the other, each mocking the other in a sort of hideous imitation of every muscular movement. They were distorted--the lips drawn back, displaying teeth as beasts might do; and in the shadows the eyes were lost, only the sockets showing like small, black, ugly, cavernous things.

The minutes passed--long minutes. A metamorphosis was taking place. The faces became more composed; they became debonair, suave--and finally they smiled at one another as though a truce had been proclaimed.

Captain Francis Newcombe swung back to the chair, and flung himself down in it again. It was over for the moment. For the moment! Yes, that was it--for the moment! But it would come again. Last night in his bunk on the _Talofa_ he had lain awake, and lived through hell. To-day, behind his mask of complaisance, fear had gnawed. Fear! And it had been his boast that fear and he were strangers.

His lips grew tight.

Well, his boast still held good! What man had ever stood before him, and taunted him with fear! This was fear in a different sense. It was a fear of the intangible, of what he could not reach, or see, of what he could not materialise into actual form. It was the fear of the _unknown_.

He was on his feet again.

"Damn you!" he snarled. "Come out into the open and fight! You hell-hound, you spawn of the devil, come out, show your face--"

No! Quiet! That would not do! He was in control of himself again, wasn't he? It was a game of wits against wits, of cunning matched against cunning. But against whom--and what was the stake this unknown, who had come to plague and torment him, played for? Revenge? The law? A Nemesis rising up out of forgotten things?

His mind prodded and sifted and strove, and in its striving seemed to jar and jangle and crunch like the parts of some machinery in motion, which, out of gear, threatened at any moment to demolish itself.

If he went mad--like Mr. Marlin! Ha, ha!

"By God!" he muttered grimly. "This is bad--a bad bit of nerves. If it was the same blighter who fired at me on shipboard, and it must have been, why didn't he fire at me again last night when he had an even better chance, instead of yowling through the darkness?"

That was better! It was the one trump card in his hand; the card that, as he had watched the daylight creep in through the tiny portholes of the _Talofa_ that morning, had determined him, not only to carry on, but to make it serve as a trap to put an end to this skulking familiar who had fastened itself upon his trail. That wasn't fear, was it?

Shadow Varne! Who was the fool who dared to challenge Shadow Varne!

He was smiling now--but his lips were thin and merciless.

It could no longer be held attributable to some crazed, irresponsible act, that shot on shipboard, which chance had elected should be fired through his stateroom window rather than through any other. Logic now denied that. The man who had fired that shot, and the man who had screamed out in taunting mockery at him last night, were one and the same. Well, who was it, then, who had been on the liner, and was now on Manwa Island?

There were only two. Runnells and Locke!

Had Runnells had time to change his shoes, or, granting the time, had cunning enough to have thought of doing so? No; the chances were a thousand to one against it. Locke, then? But Runnells had said that Locke hadn't left the _Talofa_. Were Runnells and Locke in cahoots together? They had been extremely friendly on the way down. But Locke--it was preposterous! He knew who Locke was--a young American business man of good family. It was curious, though, that Polly should have made that remark to-day--about a trip like this on such short acquaintance. No; there was nothing in that. It had happened too naturally. Locke had a good many pairs of shoes. Like Runnells', none of them had been wet; but he was not sure he had found all of them in the darkness in the cabin with Locke--supposedly at least--asleep there on the opposite bunk. Locke could easily have hidden a tell-tale pair; and Locke was decidedly the kind of man who would have had the intelligence to do so.

But how could Locke know him as Shadow Varne?

Well, there was Runnells!

His jaws set with a snap. Was it Runnells? There was one way to find out--within the next ten minutes--with his hands at Runnells' throat! No; that would not do--not yet--save as a last resort. If it were not Runnells, then any act like that on his part would disclose his hand, arouse Runnells' suspicions that this trip to Manwa Island was perhaps, after all, not entirely a holiday jaunt!

He began to pace up and down the room--but noiselessly, without sound. His subconscious mind imposed the necessity for silence.

His hands clenched until the nails bit into the palms. Who was it? What did it mean? What was at the bottom of it? There was no answer that solved the question even to the satisfaction of a tormented brain that would have grasped with eager relief at even a plausible conclusion. The law? If the law had proof that he was Shadow Varne, he would not be an instant at liberty--though he would never be taken alive again--not even under the helpless condition that had done him down in Paris for the first and only time, as that old busybody, Sir Harris Greaves, the fool who loved to play with lighted matches over a powder cask, had so unctuously set forth. But perhaps the law did not have proof, had only suspicion--was only playing a game to trip him into disclosing his identity. Revenge? Then why not another shot last night, as on the liner; why--

The cycle! The infernal and accursed cycle again!

Well, whoever it was, they would play with Shadow Varne, would they? Fools! Did they think he was one, too--that he could not see the weak spot in their attack? Something was holding them back here on the island from a shot as on the liner; here, for some reason, an attempt to inspire fear was evidently being resorted to instead. Something kept them from coming out into the open; something necessitated this cat-and-mouse game. Something, if exposure were actually within their power, prevented them from exposing him.

That was it! That was it exactly--the one point on which he would stake everything and play out the game. Curse them and their childish tricks to frighten him! Exposure was the only thing he feared, because that would ruin every chance of success here; but if he was safe from exposure, or if exposure were only delayed long enough--and it need not be very long delayed, at that--he would have got, as he meant to get, in spite of God, or man, or the devil, what he had come for!

There was another angle. What had transpired might not have anything to do with what had brought him here.

Of course not! Why should it--essentially? But it was a menace, a hideous thing. It made him think of a picture he had seen somewhere--a gibbet at a bleak, wind-swept, dark-skyed cross-road with a figure dangling from it. One of those damned steel-plate engravings of the highwaymen days in England!

The unknown!

For a moment he stood still--and then suddenly both fists were raised above his head. That was a reason above all others why he should go on. The stakes were on the table. It was not merely a question of old Marlin's money. Win or lose here, the menace of that voice that shrieked the name of Shadow Varne for all to hear now hung over his whole future. It must either be removed, or he, Shadow Varne, promised with ghastly certainty to take the place of that dangling, swaying thing upon the gibbet chain. The menace was _here_. What better chance was there to fight it than here and now? Who was the more cunning? Who would misplay a card?

Not Shadow Varne!

A grim and cold composure came. He had two birds to kill with one stone now--that was all! Frighten Shadow Varne away? Bah! They did not know Shadow Varne--save only as a name to be screeched out from some safe retreat in the darkness! What might transpire in the secret recesses of his heart, the purely human fact that dismay and fear might prey at ugly moments upon him, was one thing; to halt him, to make him even hesitate, was another! He had never hesitated; he had but moved the more quickly, speeded up his plans, for time was a greater object now. He was at work at this very moment--waiting until the house was quiet for the night.

Well, it was time now, wasn't it?

A small flashlight played on the dial of his wrist watch.

Just midnight!

He nodded his head sharply, slipped across the room, and, with the door ajar, stood listening. A minute passed--another. There was no sound. He stepped out into the great, wide hall, and closed his door softly behind him.

It was like a shadow moving now.

That was Locke's room there; Polly's here--Dora Marlin's opposite. He passed them by, silently descended the great staircase, made his way back along another wide hallway, and finally halted before a door. This was Mr. Marlin's room. He listened intently. The sound of regular breathing, as of one asleep, was distinctly audible from within.

He smiled grimly as he turned away, and cautiously let himself out through a French window in the living-room which opened on the verandah. From here, he dropped lightly to the lawn.

The money was not hidden in the house. He was spared from the start any loss of time in an abortive search of that kind. There was too much significance attached to the old maniac's act of creeping stealthily in and out under his own verandah in the dead of night; especially when added to this had been the information gleaned from Polly that Mr. Marlin was in the habit of stealing out of the house at intervals for a succession of nights on end, though at a later hour each night. It was the obvious! But why a later hour each night? Rather queer! But the man's brain was queer! Why try to square insanity with the rational?

It was the secret under the verandah that interested him.

But his mind, as he made his way noiselessly along the edge of the bushes that fringed the verandah, reverted with a certain disturbing insistence to Polly. The girl hadn't stopped talking about going back to England! She said he had promised her she should when her education was finished. Well, perhaps he had--as one makes a promise to quiet a child! She wanted to be with her mother. Quite natural! But she hadn't any mother; and, if things went right here, _he_ was rather inclined to believe that hereafter he preferred America to England as a permanent place of residence. He had reiterated his promise, of course. He couldn't afford to do anything else--yet. Sooner or later, he would have to "explain" to Polly; but when that time came, unless he had lost a certain facility in explanations that had never failed him yet, he should be able to turn even the fact that he had kept Mrs. Wickes' death from her to his own account. And tell the truth, even if somewhat inverted, at that! Solicitude would be the keynote--that, since Mrs. Wickes was not really her mother, her visit here need not be spoiled by ill news that would keep. Solicitude--and all that sort of idea. It was a good thing Mrs. Wickes was dead. Polly wouldn't want to live in England now. Mrs. Wickes' death settled that problem, which, otherwise, he would have had to find some other way of settling.

A minor matter! Very minor! Why should it even have crossed his mind? There was first the money; then, as a corollary, when that was found, the distressingly fatal _accident_ that would overtake poor old Mr. Marlin--and, woven into the warp and woof of this, the twisting of a certain windpipe that would screech its indiscretions for the last time to a far different tune!

Ah, that was more like Shadow Varne!

He parted the bushes and slipped in under the verandah. This was the spot where the old madman had disappeared from view last night. His flashlight was switched on now. It showed a well-defined path, if it could be called a path, where through much usage the earth and gravel had been pressed down close up against the side of the house. It led toward the rear. He followed it. It took him around the corner of the house, and here, under a flight of steps that led to the verandah above, he found himself confronted with a basement door. Captain Francis Newcombe smiled. He had never ranked the task of probing the old fool's actions as one that demanded much ingenuity, or as presenting any particular difficulty. It was simply a question of watching the other without being seen himself; and with the man's mode of exit and entry from and into the house already known, the rest would almost automatically take care of itself.

He opened the door and stepped inside. The flashlight disclosed an ordinary basement storeroom, and, at one side, a flight of stairs. Captain Francis Newcombe moved quickly, but without sound now. He crossed the basement and crept up the stairs. Here, at the top, another door confronted him. With the flashlight out, he opened this door cautiously--and again a smile touched his lips. He had rather expected it! The door opened on the lower hall, and almost directly opposite Mr. Marlin's room.

He stepped across the hall and listened again at the old man's door. There still came from within the sounds of occupancy; but instead now of the regular breathing as of one asleep, it was the sound as of one moving softly around within.

Captain Francis Newcombe retreated to the stairs, closed the door behind him, descended the stairs, left the basement, and selected a spot amongst the trees at the edge of the lawn where he could command a view of the shrubbery bordering the verandah. It was still a little earlier than the hour last night when, according to Polly, Mr. Marlin had gone out, and if, in the bizarre workings of a warped brain, a later hour each night added to secretness and security, Mr. Marlin was not yet to be expected for a little while. Quite so! He, Captain Francis Newcombe, had formulated his own timetable on that basis. There was nothing to do now but wait.

He frowned suddenly. Suppose, though, Mr. Marlin did not come out at all? This might well be one of the nights when-- No! He shook his head decisively. To begin with, he had just heard the man moving around in his room after having previously been, or pretended that he had been, asleep; and if Polly's report was based on fact, as it undoubtedly was, the old maniac, once started on his period of peregrinations, kept it up until, on the basis of a later hour each night, his final sortie was made just before daybreak--and taking into account the hour at which the old man had been out last night, Mr. Marlin ought at present to be in the thick of one of those periods of nocturnal activity that would endure for a number of consecutive nights to come.

In a sort of grim mirth, he laughed softly now to himself. _One_ night, not a number of nights, would be all that was required! It did not entail any distressingly laboured mental effort to understand _why_ the old man went out--it was simply a question of _where_ he went.

The minutes dragged along. A quarter of an hour went by; it became half an hour--and then Captain Francis Newcombe drew back silently a little deeper in amongst the trees. Yes, there was the old maniac now, dressing gown and all, and cocking his head to and fro in all directions as he parted the bushes in emerging from under the verandah. A moment later, the old man scurried across the lawn to a spot not far from where he, Captain Francis Newcombe, was standing. The woods here surrounding the house were full of little paths and walks, and the grotesque figure with the flapping gown now disappeared along one of these paths a few yards away.

Captain Francis Newcombe's lips twisted a little ironically as he took up the chase. The head that kept cocking itself around so idiotically would avail its owner little in the shape of protection! Apart from it being too dark to see more than a few feet in any direction now in the wooded path, he, Captain Francis Newcombe, had not the slightest intention of trying to keep the other in sight, much less run any risk of being seen himself. The sense of sound was quite sufficient--entirely adequate! Twigs and dried pine needles snapped eloquently under Mr. Marlin's feet. Captain Francis Newcombe's ironical smile deepened. His own rubber-soled yachting shoes, combined with a little precaution, might be relied upon to cause the old maniac no alarm!

The chase led on, following the turnings and twistings of the path for perhaps three hundred yards, and then turned into a narrow intersecting by-path at the right. Here again Captain Francis Newcombe followed the sound of the other's footsteps for perhaps another hundred yards--and then suddenly he halted. The footsteps had ceased abruptly.

For a moment Captain Francis Newcombe remained motionless, listening; then with extreme caution he went forward again. He came presently to where the path ended at the edge of a small clearing; and here, though shadowy and indistinct, he could make out just in front of him the outline of what looked like a little _cabane_, or hut. He nodded his head complacently. From inside the hut he caught the sound of movement again. So this was where Mr. Marlin went at nights, was it!

He crept forward on hands and knees now, careful to make not the slightest noise, made the circuit of the little hut, and halted again--this time on the side opposite from the door and beneath the single window that the place possessed. From what he had been able to make out in the darkness, the hut appeared to be in a more or less tumble-down and neglected condition. It was probably an old tool house or something of the sort. Well, that mattered very little!

With his head well at one side of the window frame to guard against any possibility of being seen from within, he brought his eyes to a level with the sill, and peered in. At first he could distinguish nothing; then gradually a shadowy figure took form in one corner and kept moving up and down with a motion, which, more than anything else that suggested itself to him, resembled the motion of a woman assiduously at work over a washboard. This was accompanied by a scraping sound.

_Mr. Marlin was digging!_

Captain Francis Newcombe quietly sat down on the ground beneath the window. It was quite hopeless to expect to see anything more than he had seen--for the present! One would have asked a good deal to have asked more! The spot where the old maniac was at work was close up against the wall at the right of the door and almost directly opposite the window!

The digging ceased. Another sound took its place--a sort of crooning, a sing-song droning sound. Words, snatches of sentences, became audible:

"... All! All here! ... In the darkness where no one can see.... And I do not need to see--I feel.... Night after night I feel, and my fingers count.... Money! Money! ... Ha, ha--and they do not understand.... Fools! All fools! ... You will multiply yourself a hundred, a thousandfold.... Fools! Blind fools! ... They would not listen.... They called me mad...."

The crooning went on.

Captain Francis Newcombe with cool nonchalance made himself more comfortable now by propping his back against the side of the hut. When the old fool was through with his puling, and the fondling of that half million in banknotes that he imagined was so safely hidden, the next move would be in order. Until then there was nothing to do except to exercise what degree of patience he could.

Patience! He stirred suddenly. Why exercise patience? Was it, after all, absolutely necessary that he should? A moment's work would do away with that senile old idiot now. Mr. Marlin would be found, but the money would not be found. That was the plan in its actual essence, wasn't it?

He snarled, then, angrily at himself under his breath. That was the method of the "cusher," which, on a certain occasion, he had branded with so much contempt! The record of Shadow Varne was marred by no such crudeness as that. A cusher without art! It brought him a sense of intense irritation that the thought should even have entered his mind.

Why had it?

He shook his head. Was it impatience, or perhaps, rather, a prescience prompting him to be through and done with this with the least possible delay? Were the events that had happened since he had left England insidiously taking effect upon him to the detriment of his customary cold and measured judgment? Well, he would see to it that nothing of that sort should happen! Crime was a science; its procedure was calculated, methodical, orderly, denying scruples. He had always approached it as a science; he proposed never to approach it in any other way. The case in point, for instance: Once he knew exactly where this hidden half-million was, where he could lay his hands on it whenever he desired at an instant's notice--and he would locate its precise position inside the hut there as soon as the old maniac returned home to his bed--Mr. Marlin would be removed. But that must be accomplished apparently through an accident--and the accident must be such as to serve as _proof_, so to speak, that Captain Francis Newcombe could not possibly have had any part in it. This became the more essential now in view of that infernal voice last night. The nature of the accident itself was a mere detail. The choice was legion. There had been others who, becoming encumbrances in the path of Shadow Varne, had met with accidents. What folly to go in there now--and have the whole island aroused by the crime of murder and invaded by the police; with the crime itself proclaiming the fact that the murder had been done for the money the old madman was known to have had somewhere, but which was now obviously in the possession of _some one_, to wit, the murderer!

Bah! What was the matter with him? Did he need to rehearse the obvious? Mr. Marlin's secret would die with him; and, being unable to find the money, they would give the old maniac more credit for cunning and originality than was due to the moss-eaten method of selecting a hiding place under the floor of an old hut! The pitiful fool! Under the floor! That was where the treasure was always hidden--in every book he had ever read!

The crooning continued. It began to get a little on his nerves. It was interminable. Would the man stay here until daylight? No; that was hardly likely--not if he ran true to form. Old Marlin hadn't stayed out until daybreak last night when Polly and he, Captain Francis Newcombe, had watched the other go in under the verandah.

It might have been an hour, though it seemed two, when at last Captain Francis Newcombe rose silently to his feet. The crooning had finally ceased, and in its place there came now a series of low, thudding sounds, as though soft earth were being tamped into place; and then he heard the door creak a little as it was opened and closed. An instant later the footsteps of the old man died away along the path by which he had come.

Captain Francis Newcombe stepped quickly around to the other side of the hut, and tried the door. It was unlocked. He smiled in a sort of grim humour as he pushed it open, and, entering, closed it again behind him. That was the first sign of intelligence--no, applied to a maniac, it could hardly be termed intelligence!--well then, craftiness that measured up in at least a little way to the intensive order of cunning with which the insane in general were popularly credited. An unlocked door was no mean safe-guard. The last place one would expect to find, or look for, a half-million dollars would be behind an unlocked door!

His flashlight threw an inquisitive circle of light around the interior. Whatever the place had been used for at one time, it was decidedly neglected and in disuse now. The flooring was in an advanced state of decay. His eyes followed the ray of the flashlight as it held on a spot on the flooring near the door. Yes, knowing beforehand that some pieces of the flooring there had been lifted, he could see that such was the case in spite of the fact that the pieces had been very neatly replaced.

The flashlight continued its tour of inspection. There was a pile of rubbish and some old barrels over in the far corner. He stepped quickly across to these and nodded his head sharply in satisfaction, as, tucked in behind the barrels, he found what he had been looking for. Mr. Marlin had been digging. Exactly! Here was the spade. He lifted it up and examined it. Particles of fresh earth still clung to it.

Captain Francis Newcombe stood still now for an instant to listen. And as he listened his brows gathered in a savage frown of annoyance. Why this exaggerated precaution? What did he expect to hear? What sound could there be? The old fool was finished for the night. There wasn't the slightest chance that he would return. Why should he, Captain Francis Newcombe, waste time now, when with a moment's work he could satisfy himself that the half-million dollars that had brought him to Manwa Island was definitely within his reach? Was that it? Was it psychological? Was it that _voice_ he was listening for again?

He swore fiercely under his breath in a sudden flood of blind rage at himself; and, crossing the hut, stood the spade up against the wall within reach, and knelt down on the floor with the flashlight playing on the two or three sections of board that the old man had removed. Yes, they were quite loose. His fingers worked their way into a crack between two of them. The old maniac's half-million! Hidden under the flooring! It was child's--

_What was that?_

He was on his feet, the flashlight out, every muscle tense, his revolver outflung before him.

In God's name, what was that?

It seemed to crash and thunder through the stillness.

Only a knock upon the door?

Again!

Once more--sharp, imperative!

He stood motionless--his jaws clamped like iron. What was he to do? If he answered the summons--what then? How explain the presence here of Captain Francis Newcombe, the guest, who at this hour should be peacefully asleep in his bed? Who was it out there who had knocked upon the door? Not the old fool himself who might have come back. Old Marlin wouldn't have knocked. Who, then?

Strange! A full minute must have passed. Why were the knocks not repeated? There was no sound from without. He had heard no one approach--he had heard no one go away. Only the knocks upon the door.

He was listening now, every faculty alert. Was some one standing outside there, as tense, as silent, waiting--as he stood tense and silent, waiting, here within? If so, then, that was another angle to the situation. It must be so! There was not a sound out there--there had not been a sound. He had heard no one go away. Well, two could play at a game like that! And it would be the other who would show his hand!

He moved softly toward the door. In the darkness he felt out with his hand. It touched the panel of the door, crept down until it clasped the knob--and then suddenly, even as he moved swiftly to one side out of the direct line, he flung the door wide back upon its hinges.

And where the door had stood, there showed now but an oblong of filmy, hazy murk, scarcely more penetrable to the eye than the black interior of the hut. Nothing more! No, that was not true. There was something else--something white, a small white fluttering thing that seemed to drift and flutter downward to the ground. No sound from without--save the night sounds of the woods: The leaves talking to one another; the stir in the grasses; the low, faint, never-ending chatter of insects.

The watch ticking on Captain Francis Newcombe's wrist became a loud, discordant thing. It ticked away the minutes before he moved again.

His eyes became accustomed to the murk outside the open door. There was no one there.

That white thing lying by the threshold was an envelope. It had been stuck in the door. He reached out now, and picked it up. And now he closed the door again, and, with the flashlight on, he tore the envelope open.

He stared at the sheet of paper it contained. The single line of crude, printed letters seemed to leap out at him from the white sheet, scorching, burning, searing its message into his consciousness. He raised his hand and drew it across his forehead. It came away wet with sweat. He looked around him, snarling like a beast at bay. A thousand minions of hell here in the hut were screeching in his ears the words he had just read:

"_Who murdered Sir Harris Greaves?_"

--V--

THE GUTTER-SNIPE

A clock somewhere in the house chimed the hour.

Midnight!

Polly Wickes rose hastily from the corner of the big leather-upholstered Chesterfield in which her small figure had been tucked away.

"Oh!" she exclaimed. "I had no idea it was so late. Every one else has been in bed ages ago."

"I think," said Locke gravely, "that it is our duty to stand by that last log. It's been a rather jolly fire, you know. I--"

"That is the second one you have put on after having made the same remark twice before," she accused him severely.

"I know," said Locke. "I'm guilty--but think of the extenuating circumstances."

Polly Wickes laughed.

"No," she said.

"This is positively the last," pleaded Locke. "There may not be any excuse for a grate fire to-morrow night. Have you thought of that? The wind is still howling, but the rain has stopped and the moon is coming out, and--" His tongue was running away with him inanely. He stopped short.

"Yes?" inquired Polly Wickes demurely.

The great dark eyes were laughing at him--teasing a little.

"Well, confound it," he blurted out, "I don't want you to go! This has been a day and an evening that I shall never forget--very wonderful ones for me. I don't want them to be only memories--yet."

He met the dark eyes steadily now. The laughter had gone from them. He found them studying him for an instant in an almost startled way--and then the eyelids drooped and covered them, and she turned her head a little, facing the portièred window beside the fireplace of the living room in which they stood, and the colour crept softly upward from the full, bare throat, and stole into her cheeks.

He caught his breath. He felt his pulse stir into a quicker beat. She was very lovely as she stood there with the soft, mellow glow of the rose-shaded lamp and with the flicker of the flames from the firelight playing upon her.

"Just this last one," he pleaded again.

She hesitated for an instant, then sat down slowly on the Chesterfield once more. And as he watched her, there seemed to have come a curious quiet upon her. She did not look at him now--she was staring at her hands, which were tightly clasped together in her lap.

"Very well," she said in a low voice. "I think that I, too, would like to have--that last log. There is something that I want to say--that I meant to say this afternoon on the yacht. I--Mr. Locke, do you know who I am?"

She would not look up. He could not see her face. He knew what she meant--Mr. Marlin's words of the day before flashed upon him. There was something of dreariness in her voice, something that strove to be very bravely defiant but was only wistful, and an almost uncontrollable impulse fell upon him to touch her face and lift it gently, and make her eyes meet his again. There would be an answer there--an answer that he had not yet dared put in words. What right had he to do so? A day of dreams on the yacht to-day--that, and yesterday. Two days! He had known her longer than that....

He found himself answering her question automatically.

"What a strange question!" He was laughing--speaking lightly. "Of course, I know who you are."

"Yes," she said gravely, "you know that my name is Polly Wickes--but do you know anything about me?"

He came and stood a little closer to her.

"I think I know _you_." His voice had lost its lighter tone.

A little flood of colour came as she shook her head.

"Did guardy tell you anything about me on your trip down here?"

"No," he said.

"I didn't think he had," she said. "He has always been opposed to either of us saying anything about it to any one. Dear guardy! I know it is for my sake and that he believes it makes it easier for me, and generally it does; but--but sometimes it doesn't." She stopped and looked up suddenly. "But I do think it is more than likely that Mr. Marlin, in his queer way, has said something. Has he?"

"Look here," said Locke impulsively, "does it really matter--does it even matter at all? Mr. Marlin did say something, as a matter of fact--yesterday, down there at the boathouse, you know."

"What did he say?" she demanded.

"Why," Locke smiled, "something about London, and selling flowers."

"Well, it is quite true," she said slowly. "That is exactly what I was--a flower girl in London--on the street corners."

"I sell bonds--when I can--and wherever I can." Locke was laughing again--he was not quite sure whether he was striving the more to put her or himself at ease. "I can't see any difference on the basis of pure commerce between the two--except perhaps that the flowers are the more honest offering of the two. Bonds sometimes are not always what they seem."

She shook her head.

"That's very nice of you, Mr. Locke," she said. She was studying her clasped hands again. "But--but of course, as you quite well know, that has nothing whatever to do with what I am saying. You know London, don't you?"

"Why, yes; a bit," he answered.

"Yes," she said. "I think you do. Indeed, from what you have said to-day, I am sure you know it better than any American I have ever met before; and, indeed, far better than most people who live there all their lives. And so--and so"--her voice broke a little, then steadied instantly--"it is not necessary to go into any details, for you will understand quite well when I say that I lived in Whitechapel, and even there where only the cheapest room was to be found, and that when I sold flowers I did not have any shoes--and to the police I was known as a gutter-snipe."

He was beside her, bending over her.

"My God, Miss Wickes--Polly," he burst out, "why do you hurt yourself like this!"

He had called her "Polly." The name had come unbidden to his tongue. It had brought no rebuke--or was it that she had not noticed it?

"I would hurt myself more," she said steadily, "if I felt that those around me could have any justification in believing that I was purposely masquerading in order to deceive. That would be hypocrisy--and I hate that!" She flung out her hands suddenly with a queer, little helpless gesture. "Oh, I wonder if you understand what I mean; I wonder if I am explaining myself--and if you won't at once think that I am utterly inconsistent when I say that at school no one knew anything about my former life? But, you see, I have never felt that I was called upon to make the intimate things in my life a matter of public knowledge. And in that respect I can quite understand guardy's attitude in wishing me to say nothing about it, for, in so many cases, and especially at school, it would have just supplied a fund for gossip, and--and that would have been abominable."

"Of course, it would!" There was savage assent in Locke's voice. "It's nobody's business but your own."

"Oh, yes, it is," she answered instantly. "It's Miss Marlin's business--if I come here as a guest."

"Yes," said Locke quickly; "but you _have_ told her, and--"

"Wait!" she interrupted. "Yes, I have told her; and now I have told you. But your two cases are entirely different, and I am not altogether sure that my reason for telling you is entirely to my credit, because it--it is perhaps like the child who confesses when he knows he is sure to be found out. You couldn't be here with poor Mr. Marlin very long before you knew. Do you understand? I couldn't bear the thought of you, or any one, thinking I was deliberately trying to hide the truth, or that, when there was reason to do so, I was afraid or ashamed to speak out myself."

"I wish you hadn't added that 'any one,'" he said in a low voice.

She did not answer. She was staring now into the fire. And he too stared into it now. It was full of pictures--strange, drab pictures. He knew Whitechapel--its stark, hopeless realism; he knew its children--without shoes. Was that what she saw there now? The fire was dying--beneath the one remaining log, almost burned through now, there were only embers. They glowed here and there and went out--black. Like some memories!

He looked at her again. Her face, that he could see now, seemed strangely pinched and drawn. Her hand toyed nervously with a frill of her dress. And something seemed suddenly to choke in his throat, and a great yearning came--and it would not be denied.

"Polly!" he whispered, and, leaning over, caught her hand in his.

With a quick, sharp indrawing of her breath as of one in sudden pain, she rose to her feet and drew her hand away.

"Oh, why did you do that?" she cried out.

"Because," he said, "I love--"

"No, no!" she cried out again. "Don't answer me! I didn't mean that you should answer. It is only that _now_ there is something else that I must say. I--I--" Her voice broke suddenly.

"Don't!" he said huskily. "Polly, there is nothing to take to heart. What could it ever matter, those days? They are gone now forever. You exaggerate any possible bearing they could have on to-day. Suppose you were a flower girl, that you have known poverty in its bitterest sense--would that matter, could it possibly matter to any one who was not a contemptible snob, or to--"

"There is something else now that I must say." She was repeating her own words, almost as though she were unconscious of any interruption. "You--you make me say it. I--I never knew who my father was."

She was gone.

He had had a glimpse of a face pitifully white, of dark eyes that fought bravely against a mist that sought to blind them; and then before he could move or speak she had run from the room--and he stood alone before the fireplace.

And in the fireplace the last log fell spluttering, throwing out its dying rain of little sparks, and lay a broken thing between the dogs.

--VI--

THE MAN IN THE MASK

Again a clock somewhere in the house chimed the hour. And again.

One o'clock.

Two o'clock.

The embers in the fireplace had long since turned to black charred things. Locke raised his head. Two o'clock! He had not been conscious of it when the last little glow had died away. He had turned out the light when Polly had gone--and had sat there staring at the dying fire. He had not put on another log. The fire was dead now--quite dead. He had been staring into a black fireplace--that was as black as the room itself.

Two o'clock!

He stood up, and, going to the windows, flung back the portières. It was still blowing hard; but the moon was beginning to show through the scudding clouds. He brushed his hand heavily across his eyes. It was very still in the house; but the stillness itself seemed a disquiet, untranquil, chaotic thing. Polly! Yes, Polly had filled his thoughts during those two hours--Polly, and Captain Francis Newcombe. But he had not forgotten withal the bizarre appointment he was to keep with Mr. Marlin in the aquarium--at a quarter past two. One would not be likely to forget so extraordinary a thing in any case, no matter what might meanwhile have intervened--even if Mr. Marlin had not been so grotesquely persistent in his reminders. A dozen times that day the old man had plucked significantly at his, Locke's, coat sleeve, or had signalled mysteriously with his finger to his lips; and twice, with a childish titter, the old man had come upon him unexpectedly and had said exactly the same thing on each occasion.

"Tee-hee, tee-hee!" the old man had tittered. "It is all right for to-night, my boy--you will see--you will see. And they thought I was a fool. Do not say a word. Keep quiet--keep quiet--you will see."

What would he see? What would he learn? Much--or little? Would it be only the babble of a sick brain? Queer, strange, almost impossible conditions in this house! Where would they climax--and how? Whose hand held the trumps?

His eyes fixed suddenly on a spot across the lawn. Something seemed to have moved there. Fancy, perhaps; or a shadow cast by the swaying branches. The moon was just coming out from under the edge of a cloud--another moment and he would be able to tell if anything were there. Yes! A woman emerging from the path that led to the shore. The figure began to cross the lawn, approaching the house.

And then Locke's eyes narrowed suddenly in astonishment. It wasn't a woman at all; it was a man wearing a long gown, a dressing gown. It was Mr. Marlin. And the man kept cocking his head from side to side; and he appeared to be carrying something under the dressing gown--at least his arm was crooked up as though he held a bundle there.

Locke smiled now a little grimly, as the old man finally disappeared around the corner of the house. It was almost a quarter past two. He would find Mr. Marlin in the aquarium.

He drew the portières together again, and, leaving the room, went out into the reception hall beyond. There was no light showing anywhere and he was obliged to feel his way along. The aquarium was in, or, rather, composed in itself, a little wing built at the rear of the house, but connected therewith by a short, covered passageway. He knew the way quite well--he had been there with Polly on that first day.

That _first_ day! That was only yesterday ... it was incredible, impossible.... His mind was running riot as he groped his way to the rear of the main staircase and into the wide passage that ran parallel with the length of the house. But then the whole place was incredible! The house itself was like a great hotel with its corridors and its endless number of rooms! This was Mr. Marlin's room here at his right, and--

He stood still. A door on his left had opened. It shut again instantly--and then he could hear it being cautiously reopened a little way.

"Don't you move!" said a voice in a fierce whisper. "Don't you move! I can see you! If you move I will shoot you!"

Locke found his muscles, that had suddenly grown tense and strained, as suddenly relaxed. He could see nothing--the door wasn't wide enough open--but it was the old madman's voice. Strange, though! How had the man got there? That wasn't Mr. Marlin's room--Mr. Marlin's room was on the opposite side of the hall. Yes, of course, there must be an entrance into the house there of some sort.

"It's Locke," he announced quietly. "That's you, Mr. Marlin, isn't it?"

"Hah!" ejaculated the other. "You, my boy, eh? Well, that's quite different. Of course, it's you. You know the value of being prompt. Excellent! Excellent! Be very quiet--but hurry! Follow me. We have only a little time."

Locke could just make out the old man's form now as the other came through the door--and then in the darkness it was lost again. But the patter of footsteps ahead of him, hurrying along, served as a guide. He followed the other to the end of the hall, turned into the covered passageway, and was halted again by the old man, this time at the door of the aquarium.

"Tee-hee!" tittered the maniac. "They think they are dealing with a fool. Wait! Wait, young man, I will see that the window shades are all down before we turn on the light--though there will be no one here to-night except ourselves--tee-hee!--they will be somewhere else!"

The old man opened the door and disappeared. And now Locke, as he waited, and though he listened, could not hear the other moving around inside--what sound the old man made was drowned by the noise of running water through the pipes that fed the tanks, and, added to this, the low, constant drip and trickle that pervaded the place.

Presently the lights went on.

"Here!" cried the old man. "Come over here!"

Locke blinked a little in the light as he stepped forward. It reflected bewilderingly from the glass faces of the tanks that were everywhere about. He joined the old man in the centre of the aquarium. Here there was an open space from which the tanks radiated off much after the manner of the spokes of a wheel, and this space was utilised as a sort of luxurious observation point, so to speak, for a heavy oriental rug was on the tiled floor, and ranged around a table were a number of big easy chairs.

From under his dressing gown now the old man took a package that was wrapped in oiled silk, and laid it on the table.

"Money!" he cried out abruptly. "Hah! We know its power, young man, you and I!" He began to fumble with the cord that was tied around the package; and then suddenly commenced to titter again. "Did I not tell you I was being followed, always being followed? Well, last night they followed a wrong scent. Tee-hee! Tee-hee! I told you you would see who was the fool! They are there to-night--digging--digging--digging. Tee-hee! Tee-hee! They will dig the place all up before they are sure it is not there."

Money! That package! Locke's lips tightened a little. Was this, as he had more than half expected, what he was to "see"--the half-million dollars at last that Polly had seen? And what did the man mean by "wrong scent"? And "digging"?

"Yes, of course, Mr. Marlin," said Locke quietly. "Of course, they will! But who is it that is following you?"

The old man dropped the package from his hands and leaned across the table, his eyes suddenly ablaze.

"If I knew, I would kill them!" he whispered. "It is everybody--everybody!"

"Perhaps you are mistaken." Locke spoke in a soothing tone. "Did you see anybody following you last night?"

"It is not necessary to see"--the old madman's whisper had become suddenly confidential--"I know. They were there--they are always there--watching--eyes are always watching." He broke into his insane titter once more. "Tee-hee, yes, yes; and we are being watched by thousands of eyes to-night--look at them--look at them--the pretty things--see them swimming all around you--but they look and they say nothing--and they do not follow me." His voice was rising shrilly; he began to gesticulate with his hands, pointing with darting little motions at one tank after another. "Do you hear? You need not be afraid because they watch. They will not follow us."

Locke sat down leisurely in a chair facing the other across the table. He was rather curious about this mysterious digging of last night, a little more than curious--but, also, it was necessary to calm the old maniac's growing excitement.

"I am quite sure of that, Mr. Marlin," he agreed heartily. "We should be perfectly safe here, especially as you say that you have succeeded in making whoever was following you watch somewhere else. That was very clever of you, Mr. Marlin."

The old man put his finger to his lips.

"I'll tell you where it was, young man," he said. "The old hut in the woods behind the house. They think it's there. They think that's where I hide the money. And they'll keep on looking there. It will take them a long while. They will be looking there to-night--and perhaps to-morrow night, too. And then they will begin to follow me again. But it will be too late--too late for many, many days, because the time-lock will be set--ha, ha--God supplies the time-lock, young man--you do not understand that--but can you imagine any one opening a time-lock that God has made?"

Locke took refuge in a cigarette. Apart from some mare's nest in an old hut, it was quite hopeless! The old maniac's condition was growing steadily worse. There was a marked change in even the last twenty-four hours. It did not require any professional eye to discern that.

"I think," suggested Locke conversationally, "that you were going to show me something in that package, Mr. Marlin."

"Yes," said the old madman instantly, and as though quite oblivious of any digression. "That is why you are here. Listen! You will tell your father about it. I do not ask others to do what I do not do myself. Your father must do the same. He must get all the great capitalists of America to do likewise--it is the only thing that will save the country from ruin and disaster. Look!" The old man ripped off the cord and wrapper, and there tumbled out upon the table, each held together with two or three elastic bands, a half dozen or more small bundles of bank notes. "See! See! Do you see, young man?"

Locke with difficulty maintained an impassive countenance. He had expected something of the sort, but it seemed somehow incredible that a sum so great as Polly had named should be represented by those few little bundles scattered there on the table in front of him. He picked one of them up and riffled the notes through his fingers. It contained perhaps a hundred bills, each one of the denomination of a thousand dollars--one hundred thousand dollars. He laid the bundle back on the table. Others were of like denomination; others again of five hundred. The full amount was undoubtedly there.

"Do you know how much is there?" demanded the old madman sharply.

Locke regarded the money thoughtfully. To name the exact amount offhand might aggravate the old maniac's already suspicious frame of mind.

"I can see that there is a very large sum," he answered cautiously.

"A large sum!" echoed the madman aggressively. "And what do you call a large sum, young man?"

"Well, at a guess," said Locke quietly, "and basing it on that package I have just examined, I should say in the neighbourhood of half a million dollars."

The old maniac thrust his head forward across the table, stared for an instant, and then suddenly burst into a peal of wild, ironical laughter.

"Half a million!" He rocked upon his feet, his peals of laughter punctuating his words. "Bah! There are five millions, ten millions, fifty millions there!" He shook his finger under Locke's nose. "Do you hear what I say, young man?"

The blue eyes had become alight with a mad blaze; hectic spots began to burn in the old madman's cheeks. Locke nodded his head in a slow, deliberate manner--as the most effective thing he could think of to do by way of calming the other. The whole place, the surroundings, the grotesque shapes swimming around in the tanks everywhere he looked, the eyes of the queer sea creatures that all seemed to be fascinated by that fortune which lay upon the table, the constant drip and trickle of water, the crazed old man who rocked upon his feet and laughed, were eerily unreal. That sea-horse in the tank that faced him from just beyond the other side of the table, for instance, seemed to be a most bizarre and unnatural creature both in shape and actions even for one of his own species! Half-past two in the morning, in an aquarium with a madman and a half-million dollars! Again, by way of appeasing the other, he nodded his head.

"Listen!" cried the old maniac fiercely. "You must help me. Men are blind, blind, blind! Europe is crumbling, nations are bankrupt--chaos--chaos--chaos is everywhere. Everything else is decreasing in value; only the American dollar climbs up and up and up. Sell, sell, sell while there is time! Commercial houses are tottering, dividends are not being paid, the employment of labour becomes less and less--the end is near. And fools cling to their business enterprises; and their capital shrinks and is swallowed up and lost. Lost!" The man was working himself into a frenzy. His voice rose in a shriek. "_Lost_! Do you not see? Do you not understand? Money alone has any value. And the less money there is left in the world, and the more that is lost, the greater will be the value of what remains. It will multiply itself by the thousandfold. Look! Look what is on the table here! It will become a wealth beyond counting in any case, and if no one will believe me then the more it will be worth because there will be the less money to compete against it. Millions! Millions! Hundreds of millions! But I am not selfish. I do not wish to see the ruin of the world. And you--_you_! You will now be responsible. They will not listen to me because they say I am mad--I, who alone have the vision to see, and the courage to act. But your father will listen to you and he will believe you, and the great financiers of America will follow your father, and--"

Subconsciously Locke was aware that the old maniac was still talking, the crazed words rising in shrieks of passionate intensity--but he was no longer paying any attention to the other. He was staring again at the glass tank, behind and a little to one side of the old madman, that contained the sea-horse. The creature was most strange! It was only a small and diminutive thing, but, unless he were the victim of an hallucination, it had taken on an extraordinary appearance. It seemed to possess _human_ eyes; to assume almost the shape of a face--only there was a shadow across it. The water rippled a little. The sea-horse moved to the opposite corner of the tank--but the eyes remained in exactly the same original spot.

Locke leaned nonchalantly back in his chair, though his lips were compressed now into a thin, grim line. They were human eyes, and the shadow across the face was a mask. Where did it come from? He began trying to figure out the angle of reflection. The face of each glass tank, of course, with the deeper-hued water behind it, was nothing more or less than a reflecting mirror. What was that dark straight line above the eyes? To begin with, the reflection must come from somewhere behind him, and well to one side of him. Taking into consideration the position in which Mr. Marlin stood, it must be the left-hand side. The tanks, then, that would seem to answer that requirement became instantly limited in number--it must be either the first or second tank of those that formed the left-hand side of the alleyway nearest to where he sat, and that, like the spoke of the wheel, led obliquely to the wall. He could not see the wall, but-- Yes, he had it now. There was a window there. That dark line above the eyes was the window shade--raised six inches or so from the sill. It could easily have been accomplished--even if the old madman had carefully drawn every shade and shut every window in the place, as presumably he had. The drip and trickle, the running water, would have deadened any little sound made in forcing the window, and after that to reach in and manipulate the shade would have been but child's play.

Locke's eyes shifted now to the old madman. What was to be done? The other, still rocking and swaying upon his feet, still flinging his arms about in mad gestures, his facial muscles twitching violently as he shrieked out his words, was already verging on a state of acute hysteria. Even to hint at the possibility that they were being watched would not only have a probably very dangerous effect upon the maniac, but would in itself defeat any chance of turning the tables on that watcher outside the window! Whose eyes were those, whose face was that behind the mask? Intuitively he felt he knew--the trail went back, broad and well defined, to London. Newcombe! Captain Francis Newcombe! Who else could it be? His jaws clamped hard together now. How turn intuition into a practical, visible certainty--by stripping that mask from the other's face?

The eyes were still there in the tank.

His mind was working keenly, swiftly now. Suppose he made some excuse to leave the aquarium and stole around outside to that window? No; that would not do. In the first place, he probably could not get away from the old madman; and, if he could, he dared not, for the length of time it would take him to accomplish any such purpose, leave the other alone with that money on the table and subject to attack from an open window only a few feet away. There was only one thing to do. The man outside the window there, unaware that his presence was known, would naturally not consider that he, Locke, was a factor to be reckoned with when, say, the old madman left the aquarium here to return the money to its hiding place, wherever that might be; and therefore, if he, Locke, could manage to keep ward over Mr. Marlin without being seen himself, the man out there would almost certainly rise to the bait and bring about his own downfall. The money was in evidence for the first time; its whereabouts known--and the man in the mask would be illogical indeed if he allowed it to be restored to the security of a secret hiding place without making an attempt to get it when an opportunity such as this apparently presented itself. But against this was a certain risk to which the old man would be subjected; if not a physical risk, then a mental one--which latter, to one in Mr. Marlin's condition, would probably be the more dangerous of the two. And then there was the chance, too, that if luck turned an ugly trick the money itself might be in jeopardy. The old maniac's unconscious co-operation must be secured. The hiding place was somewhere outside the house. That was obvious, both from Mr. Marlin's nocturnal habits, and from the even more significant fact that the old madman, in coming to this appointment here to-night, had brought the money with him from somewhere outdoors. Also it seemed to be no secret that Mr. Marlin roamed abroad at night. Polly had spoken of it without reserve. It was therefore but fair to presume that one as interested as was the man outside the window, and particularly if it were Newcombe, was in possession of this knowledge, and being in possession of it was equally capable of putting two and two together, and would expect the old maniac to go out again to-night--with the money. If then, without unduly alarming him, Mr. Marlin could be persuaded to remain in the house with his money to-night, it would not only be the safest thing the old madman could do, but would afford him, Locke, if he were right in his supposition, an excellent chance to trap the man in the mask while the latter waited for his prey to come out.

Locke, leaning forward now, crossed his arms on the table, and nodded his head earnestly at the old maniac. One corner of the table at least was distinctly visible from where the window would be along that little alleyway between the rows of tanks, but he was careful not to glance in that direction. The reflection of the masked face still showed in the same place. What was the old madman saying? Well, it didn't matter, did it? He interrupted the other now.

"You are right, Mr. Marlin," he said gravely. "I agree with everything you have said. It is a most serious situation. I had no idea that there existed any such vital and immediate necessity of realising cash for every description of asset that we can lay our hands upon. And I had no idea of the immense potential value that this money here on the table, for instance, possesses. As you say, when the crash comes it will be worth untold millions--a fabulous amount."

"Yes, yes!" agreed the old man excitedly. He began to pat and fondle the bundles of bank notes. "Millions! Millions! Hundreds of millions!"

"The amount is so vast," said Locke, still earnestly, "that I cannot help thinking about what you said in reference to being followed out there in the woods last night. I don't think you should risk any chance of being followed to-night when you have all this great wealth with you, even though you are quite sure you have put whoever it may be off the scent, and that he, or they, will be busy somewhere else. I don't think, if I were you, I would go out of the house again to-night."

The old madman straightened up, and for a moment stared at Locke; and as he stared the red spots began to overspread his cheeks, and the pupils of the blue eyes seemed to enlarge and darken. And then with a sudden sweep of his arms he gathered the bundles of bank notes together, wrapped them up frantically in the oiled-silk covering, and thrust the package under his dressing gown.

"Hah!" His voice rose in a wild and savage scream. "You think I should stay in the house, do you? Hah! I see! I see! That is what you want me to do, is it? You want to trick me! You are one of them--one of them--one of them! You could never find the money where I hide it! You could never open God's time-lock! So you want me to keep it in the house to-night where you can get it! And you think that I am a madman and cannot see what you are after! You are one of them--one of them that follows--follows everywhere--and watches--and watches!"

He burst into a wild peal of laughter--another and another. He clutched fiercely at the package under his dressing gown. His face was distorted. His free hand pounded the table; saliva showed at the corners of his lips.

"For God's sake, Mr. Marlin," cried Locke, "listen--"

"One of them! One of them!" screamed the old man--and, turning suddenly, dashed for the door.

Locke's chair overturned with a crash as he sprang to his feet, and, darting around the table, started to follow--but the old maniac by now was already at the door. He saw the other's hand snatch at the electric-light switch. The aquarium was in sudden darkness. He heard the door slam. He groped his way to it, and wrenched at it.

The old madman had locked it on the outside.

--VII--

THE FIGHT

For a moment, grim-lipped, Locke stood there at the door. He had accomplished exactly the opposite to what he had intended--the old man, the money, were both in infinitely greater peril now than under almost any other circumstances of which he could conceive. He did not blame himself--the vagaries, the impulses, the irrational promptings of an insane mind were beyond his control or guidance. It was the last thing he had expected the old maniac to do. But it was done now; it was too late to consider that phase of it. There was work for his own brain to do--he hoped more logically.

He turned sharply now, and began to make his way as best he could in the darkness toward the window at the end of that aisle of tanks outside of which he knew the masked man had stood. He dared not show any light here, though by so doing he would have been able to move more swiftly. The man who had been at the window was almost certainly gone now--to watch for the old maniac's appearance outside the house. And Mr. Marlin would assuredly, and as quickly as he could, scurry outside to hide his money away again. And even if the man in the mask had had no previous knowledge of the old madman's strange nightly movements, which would be a very unsafe assumption on which to depend, he would have _heard_ enough at the window, if not to know, then, at least, to expect that the old maniac's one thought now would be to secrete his money, and that the hiding place, this time-lock that God had made, as the old man had called it, was somewhere outside the house. But the watcher's new lurking place might still embrace a view of the window, and if he, Locke, climbed out with the light behind him--

He was at the window now. He smiled grimly. He was pitted against no fool--but then he never had been fool enough himself ever to place Captain Francis Newcombe in that category! The man in the mask had left no tell-tale evidence of his presence behind him. The shade was drawn down; the window closed.

Locke lifted the shade now, raised the window quietly, and stood for an instant listening, staring out. He could see little or nothing, other than the swaying branches of trees against the sky line; and there was no sound save the sweep of the wind which was still blowing half a gale. And now he swung himself over the window sill, dropped the few feet to the ground--and crouched against the wall, listening, staring again into the blackness.

Nothing! The moon, burrowing deeper under the clouds, made it even blacker than it had been a moment ago. He straightened up and began to run toward the front of the house. It was perhaps a case of blindman's-buff, but there was not an instant to lose, and, deprived of any aid from the sense of either sight or hearing, he was left with only one thing to do. From the living room window a little while ago, he had seen Mr. Marlin _coming_ toward the house from across the lawn, after having presumably just unearthed his money from its hiding place; the chances were that it was by the same route the old maniac would _return_ now.

Locke ran on, stumbling, half groping his way through what seemed a veritable maze of out-buildings here at the rear of the house. The minutes seemed to be flying--wasted. The old maniac, if he had left the house the moment he had run from the aquarium, must by now have had a good three minutes' start; and if the man in the mask had at once picked up the trail, then--

No; he was not too late! He had reached the front corner of the house now, and across the lawn, where in the open space it was a little lighter, something, a blacker thing than the darkness, moving swiftly, caught his eye. It was the figure of a man running toward the trees in the direction of the path that led to the shore, and from which old Mr. Marlin had emerged earlier in the evening. And now the figure was gone--lost in the trees.

But he, Locke, too, was running now, sprinting for all he knew across the lawn. It was perhaps sixty yards. There was no time to use caution and circuit warily around the edge of the woods. He might be seen--but he had to take that chance. He would not be heard--the soft grass and the whine of the wind guaranteed him against that. It was a little better than an even break. The figure he had seen was not, he was sure, that of the old maniac. The long, flapping dressing gown would, even in a shadowy way, have been distinguishable. If he were right, then, in his supposition, the figure he had seen was the man in the mask, and old Mr. Marlin was already in there on the path leading through the woods to the shore. A cry, sudden, like a scream that was strangled, came with the gusting wind. It came again. From the edge of the lawn now, Locke leaped forward along the path. Black, twisting shapes loomed up just ahead of him. He flung himself upon them.

A low, startled, vicious snarl answered his attack. After that there was no sound while perhaps a minute passed, save the rustle of leaves and foliage, the _snip_ of broken twigs under swiftly moving, straining feet. Locke was fighting now with merciless, exultant ferocity. It was the man in the mask he was at grips with--it was not the dressing gown alone, the _feel_ of it, that distinguished one from the other; he had even in that first plunging rush in the darkness felt his hand brush against the mask on the man's cheek.

It was all shadow, all blackness. To this side and that, close locked together, he and his antagonist now swayed madly. The man's one evident desire was to break away from his, Locke's, encircling arms; his, Locke's, purpose not only to prevent escape, but to unmask the other--the moon might come out again at any instant--filter through the branches--just enough light to see the other's face if the mask were off.

A peal of laughter rang out. It was the old madman. Locke, as he fought, more sensed than saw the old man's form close to the ground, as though the other were groping around on his hands and knees. The peal of laughter came again; and then the old maniac's voice in a triumphant scream:

"I've got it! I've got it! Money! Money! Money! Millions! Millions! Millions! It's all here! I've got it! It's all--"

The voice was dying away in the distance. Locke laughed a little with grim, panting breath. Whether it had been dropped or had been snatched from him in the first attack, old Marlin had now obviously recovered his package of bank notes. He was gone now--running to hide it again, of course. In any event, the old maniac and his money were safe, and--

His antagonist had wrenched free an arm. Locke's head jolted back suddenly from a wicked short-arm blow that caught the point of his chin. A sensation of numbness seemed to be trying insidiously to creep upward to his brain--but it did not reach that far--not quite that far--only it loosened his grip for an instant and the shadowy form that he had held appeared to be floating away from him. And then, as his brain cleared, he shot his body forward in a low, lunging tackle. The other almost eluded him, but his hands caught and clung to the man's arm--both around one of the other's arms. The man wrenched and squirmed in a savage frenzy to tear himself free. There was a sound of the ripping and rending of cloth--something showed white in the darkness--the other's sleeve had torn away at the armpit.

A white shirt sleeve! It was a beacon in the blackness. The man would not get away now. There was something more tangible than a shadow--something to see. In a flash Locke shifted his hold, and his arms swept around the other, pinioning the man's hands to his sides--tighter--tighter. Neither spoke. The only sounds were hoarse, rasping gasps for breath. Tighter! He was bending the man backward now--slowly--surely--a little more. No--the man was too strong--the pinioned arms were free again, and Locke felt them grip together like a vise around the small of his own back.

They lurched now, swaying from side to side like drunken men. The mask! To get at the mask! They were locked together, the chin of one on the other's shoulder--straining until the muscles cracked. Locke began to raise his head a little. The hot breath of the other was on his cheek now--and now his cheek rubbed against the other's mask.

An oath broke suddenly from the man--quick, muttered, the voice unrecognisable in its laboured breathing; and the other, seeming to sense his, Locke's, intention, suddenly relinquished his grip, snatched for a throat-hold instead, and, missing, began then to tear at Locke's arms in an effort to break away.

And then Locke laughed again grimly. It would avail nothing to snatch at the mask and get it off in the darkness here, if by so doing, with his own hold on the other gone, the man should get away. There was another way to get the mask off--and still maintain his grip upon the other!

They were holding now, seemingly as motionless as statues, the strength of one matched against the other in a supreme effort. The sweat broke out in great beads on Locke's forehead; his arms seemed to be tearing away from their sockets. He could feel the muscles in the other's neck, as it hugged against his own, swell and stand out like great steel ridges. And then slowly, inch by inch, he forced his own head around until his face was against the other's cheek. He could just feel the mask now with his lips--another inch--yes, now he had it--his teeth closed on the lower edge of the mask, chewed at it until he had a still firmer grip--and then he suddenly wrenched his head backward.

The mask came away in Locke's teeth. He spat it out. The other was a man gone mad with fury now; and with a new strength that fury brought he strove only to strike and strike again--but Locke only closed his hold the tighter. To strike back was to take the chance of the other breaking loose. It was too dark to see the man's face, though the mask was off now--but it could only be a few yards along the path to the open space of the lawn out there--and the moon would not always be fickle--it would break through the clouds, and--

They were rocking, lurching, twisting, swaying in their mad struggle--and now they circled more widely--and branches snatched and tore at them, and broke and fell from the trees at the sides of the path. And here Locke gave a step, and there another, working nearer and nearer to the edge of the lawn.

And then suddenly there came a half-choked cry from the other. The man had tripped in the undergrowth. Locke swung his weight to complete the fall--tripped himself--and both, with their balance gone, but grappling the fiercer at each other, pitched headlong with terrific force into the trees at the side of the path.

And Locke was for an instant conscious of a great blow, of streaks of fiery light that smote at his eyeballs with excruciating pain--and then utter blackness came.

When he opened his eyes again a moonbeam lay along the path, and a figure in a long dressing gown was passing by. He was dreaming, wasn't he? There was a sick sensation in his head, a giddiness--and besides that it gave him great pain. He raised himself up cautiously on his elbow, fighting to clear his mind--and suddenly his lips tightened grimly. There was something ironical in that moonbeam--something that mocked him in disclosing a figure in a dressing gown instead of a face that had been unmasked yet still could not be seen. He looked around him now. He was lying a few feet in from the edge of the path, and against the trunk of a large tree. Yes, he remembered now. His head had struck against the tree and he had been knocked unconscious. And the man who had been masked was gone.

He rose to his feet. He was very groggy--and for a moment he leaned against the tree trunk for support. The giddiness began to pass away. That was old Mr. Marlin who had just gone by. Well, neither the old madman nor his money had come to any harm, anyway! He stepped out on the path, and from there to the edge of the lawn. The old madman was just disappearing around the corner of the verandah.

Locke put his hands to his eyes. How his head throbbed! How long had he lain there unconscious? He took out his watch. His eyes seemed blurred--or was it the meagreness of the moonlight? He was not quite sure, but it seemed to be ten minutes after three. It wasn't very easy to figure backward. He did not know how long he and the old maniac had been together in the aquarium, but, say, half an hour. Starting then at the hour of the rendezvous, which had been at a quarter past two, that would bring it to a quarter of three; then, say, ten minutes for what had happened afterward, including the fight, and that would make it five minutes of three. He must therefore have been lying in there unconscious for at least fifteen minutes.

The man who had worn the mask was gone now--naturally. But perhaps it would not be so difficult to pick up the trail. Captain Francis Newcombe's room offered very promising possibilities--and there was a torn coat sleeve that would not readily be replaced in fifteen minutes!

He made his way now across the lawn, and up the steps to the verandah. He tried the front door. It was locked. Of course! He had forgotten that he had left the house by crawling out of the aquarium window. There was no use going back that way because the old madman had locked the aquarium door. Mr. Marlin, though, had some means of entrance--and if that door through which the man had so suddenly appeared in the back hall meant anything, the entrance the old man used was likely to be somewhere in the rear. But Mr. Marlin would probably have locked that, too, behind him.

He looked up and down the now moon-flecked verandah--and began to try the French windows that opened upon it from the front rooms of the house. The first two were locked as he had expected. It was only a chance, but he might as well begin here as anywhere else. He tried the third one almost perfunctorily. It opened at a touch.

"I'm in luck!" Locke muttered, and stepped inside.

He turned the knob to lock the French window behind him, and found the bolt already thrown. Queer! He stood frowning for an instant, then stooped and felt along the inside edge of the threshold. The socket that ordinarily housed the bolt-bar was gone. The same condition therefore obviously existed at the top, as the long bar had a double throw.

He straightened up, a curious smile twitching at his lips now, and, making his way silently to the stairs, he reached the upper hall, stole along it to the door of his own room, and entered. Here, from one of his bags, he procured a revolver; and a moment later, his ear to the panel, listening, he stood outside Captain Francis Newcombe's door.

There was no sound from within. Softly he began to turn the door handle--the door would hardly be locked; that would be a misplay; one didn't lock one's bedroom door when a guest in a private house. No; it was not locked. He had the door ajar now. Again he listened. There was still no sound from within. Was the man back yet, or not? The absence of any sound meant nothing, save that Newcombe was probably not in the sitting room of his suite--he might easily, however, be in either the bathroom or the bedroom beyond.

Locke swung the door a little wider open, stepped through, and closed it noiselessly behind him. Again he stood still, his revolver now outthrust a little before him. The moonlight played across the floor. It disclosed an open door beyond. Still no sound.

Locked moved forward. He could see into the bedroom now. The bed was not only empty, but had not been slept in. He turned quickly and opened the bathroom door. The bathroom, too, was empty.

Captain Francis Newcombe had not, then, as yet returned. With a grim smile Locke thrust his revolver into his pocket. It was perhaps just as well--the time while he waited might possibly be used to very good advantage! Captain Francis Newcombe's baggage was invitingly at one's disposal--the _Talofa_, with its confined quarters, and where, on the little vessel, it was always _crowded_, as it were, had offered no such opportunity!

Locke opened one of the bags. His smile now had changed to one of irony. Barring any other justification, turn about was no more than fair play, was it? He possessed a moral certainty, if he lacked the actual proof, that Captain Francis Newcombe had not hesitated to invade his, Locke's, cabin on the liner and go through his, Locke's, effects.

He laughed a little now in low, grim mirth. He wondered which of the two, Newcombe or himself, would be the better rewarded for his efforts?

There was little light, but Locke worked swiftly by the sense of touch, with fingers that ignored the general contents, and that sought dexterously for _hidden_ things. His fingers traversed every inch of the lining of the bag, top, bottom and sides. He disturbed nothing.

Presently he laid the bag aside, and started on another--and suddenly he nodded his head sharply in satisfaction. This one was what was generally known as a Gladstone bag, and under the lining at one side his fingers felt what seemed like a folded paper that moved under his touch. The lining was intact, of course, but there must be some way of getting in underneath it--yes, here it was! Rather clever! And ordinarily quite safe--unless one were actually looking for something of the sort! There was a flap, or pocket, at the side of the bag, the ordinary sort of thing, and at the bottom of the flap Locke's fingers, working deftly, found that the edges of the lining, while apparently fastened together, were made, in reality, into a double fold--the lining being stiff enough, even when the edges were displaced, to fall back of its own accord into place again.

He separated the edges now, worked his fingers into the opening, and drew out an envelope. It had been torn open at one end, and there was a superscription of some sort on it in faded writing which, in the semi-darkness, he could not make out. He stood up, and went quickly to the window to obtain the full benefit of the moonlight. He could just decipher the writing now:

"Polly's papers which is God's truth, Mrs. Wickes X her mark."

For a moment he stood there motionless--but his eyes had lifted from the envelope now and were fixed on the lawn below. The window here gave on the side of the lawn with the trees at the rear of the house in view. A man had just stepped out from the shadow of the trees and was coming toward the house.

Locke stared, even the envelope in his hand temporarily forgotten, as a frown of perplexity that deepened into amazed chagrin gathered on his forehead. The figure was quite recognisable, even minutely so. It was Captain Francis Newcombe. It accounted for the missing sockets on that French window perhaps--but the man was as perfectly and immaculately dressed as he had been that night at dinner. There was no torn coat--on missing coat sleeve. The man he had fought with, the man in the mask, had not been Captain Francis Newcombe.

He laughed now--not pleasantly. He had obviously been waiting here for the wrong man. There was no need of waiting any longer--unless he desired to be caught himself! Queer! Strange! But there was the envelope. Polly's papers! What was it that was "God's truth"? At least, he would find that out!

He thrust the envelope into his pocket, closed the bag, and returned to his own room. He switched on the light, hurriedly took the envelope from his pocket again, and from it drew out two documents. He studied them while minute after minute passed, then dropping them on the table before him, he stood with drawn face and clenched fists staring across the room. Polly's birth certificate! The marriage certificate of her parents! He saw again the agony in the dark eyes, he heard again the agony in the voice that had proclaimed a parentage outside the pale. And a great oath came now from Locke's white lips.

He flung himself into a chair beside the table. He fought for cool, contained reasoning. These papers--Newcombe! Did it change anything, place Newcombe in any better light, because it was some other man who had worn that mask to-night? He shook his head in quick, emphatic dissent. It did not! He was sure, certain of that. The trail led too far back, was too well defined, too conclusive. And even to-night! What was Newcombe doing out of the house at three o'clock in the morning? Ah, yes--he had it! The old maniac's words came back with sudden and sure significance: "Digging--digging--digging.... The wrong scent.... The hut in the woods at the rear of the house."

Locke gnawed savagely at his lips. That was where Newcombe had come from--the woods at the rear of the house. It meant that Newcombe was the one who had been tricked by the old madman's cunning, which could never have happened if Newcombe had not been stealthily trying to find the hidden money; it simply meant that Newcombe was the one who had been on the wrong scent--and that some one else had been on the right one!

His face was set in lines like chiselled marble now. Who was this "some one else"? Was the question very hard to answer? The field was very limited--_significantly_ limited now! He wasn't wrong, was he? He couldn't be wrong! And there was always the torn sleeve!

Locke's eyes fixed upon the two documents on the table again. Captain Francis Newcombe! No; it did not make Newcombe any the less a guilty man because it was not he who had worn the mask to-night. Newcombe stood out sharply defined against the light of evidence which, if only circumstantial, was strong enough to damn the man a thousand times over for what he was. And here, adding to that evidence, was the proof that Polly's identity had been, and was being, deliberately concealed from her. It opened a vista to uglier and still more evil things--things that only a soul dead to decency, black as the pit of hell, could have conceived and patiently put into execution. A child--a gutter-snipe, Polly had called herself--_rescued_ from naked poverty and the slums of Whitechapel by a man such as Newcombe, whose only promptings were the promptings of a fiend! Why? Was there room to question further why Captain Francis Newcombe had years ago adopted such a ward--when now before one's eyes those years were bearing their poison fruit? Polly's introduction into this family here was even at this moment being traded upon to effect the theft of half a million dollars. That was too obvious now to permit denial. Newcombe was making of a girl, high-minded, pure-souled, a hideous cat's-paw. Yes, yes! All that was clear enough! But why should Polly have been deprived of her rightful name, her claim to honest parentage? Was it to weld a stronger bond of gratitude--or make her the more helpless, and therefore the more dependent upon her guardian? Where were these parents? Dead or living? There was Mrs. Wickes--Mrs. Wickes, who had posed as the mother! Well, there were certain quarters in London where those who strayed outside the law could be made to talk. Mrs. Wickes should be able to furnish very interesting information. It was not far to Whitechapel and London--by cable.

His mind, his brain, worked on--but now suddenly in turmoil and misery despite all effort of his to hold himself in check.

Polly! Polly _Gray_!

She loved this monster--that she thought a man, and called her guardian. Not the love of a maid for lover; but with the love, the honour, the respect and gratitude that she would give a cherished father.

The truth would break her heart. The love her friends had given her, turned to their own undoing! The shame would be torture; the self-degradation, the abasement that she would know, would be beyond the bearing. Her faith would be a shattered thing!

Locke's clenched hands lay outspread across the table. He drew them suddenly together and dropped his head upon them.

"And you love her," he whispered to himself. "Do you know what that is going to mean? You did not count on that, did you? Do you know where that will lead? Do you know the consequences?"

He answered his own questions.

"No," he said numbly; "I don't know what it is going to mean. I know I love her."

--VIII--

THE MESSAGE

Polly Wickes, from her pillow, stared into the darkness. There had been no thought of sleep; it did not seem as though there ever could be again. She had undressed and gone to bed--but she had done this mechanically, because at night one went to bed, because she had always gone to bed.

Not to sleep!

The tears blinding her eyes, she had groped her way up the stairs from the living room where she had left Howard Locke, and somehow she had reached her room. That was hours and hours ago. Surely the daylight would come soon now; surely it would soon be morning. She wanted the daylight, she wanted the morning, because the darkness and the stillness seemed to accentuate a terrible and merciless sense of isolation that had come so swiftly, so suddenly into her life--to overturn, to dominate, to stupefy, to cast contemptuously aside the dreams and thoughts and hopes of happiness and contentment. And yet, though she yearned for the morning, she even dreaded it more. How could she meet Howard Locke--at breakfast? She couldn't. She wouldn't go down to breakfast.

The small hands came from under the coverings, and clasped themselves tightly about the aching head--and she turned and buried her face in the pillow. She might easily, very easily evade breakfast--and postpone the inevitable for a few minutes, even a few hours. Why did she grasp at pitiful subterfuges such as that?

_She was nameless_.

That phrase had come hours ago. It had scorched itself upon her brain--as a branding iron at white heat sears its imprint upon quivering flesh, never to be effaced, always to endure. She was nameless. It wasn't that she had not always known it--she always had. But it meant now what it had never meant before. Until now it had been as something that, since it must be borne, she had striven to bear with what courage was hers, and, denying its right to embitter life, had sought to imprison it in the dim recesses of her mind--but now in an instant it had broken its bonds to stand forth exposed in all its ugliness; no longer captive, but a vengeful captor, claiming its miserable right from now on to control and dominate her life.

She had thought of love--it would have been unnatural if she had not. But she had never loved, and therefore she had thought of it only in an abstract way. Dream love--fancies. But she loved now--she loved this man who had so suddenly come into her life--she loved Howard Locke. And happinesss, greater than she had realised happiness could ever be, had unfolded itself to her gaze, and, love had become a vibrant, personal thing, so wonderful, so tender and so glad a thing, that beside it all the world was little and insignificant and empty; but even as the glory of it, and the joy of it had burst upon her, she had been obliged to turn away from it--not very bravely, for the tears had scalded her as she had run from the living room--because there was no other thing to do, because it was something that was not hers to have.

She could never be the wife of any man.

She was nameless.

Why had she ever found it out! It might so easily have been that she would have never known. That--that no one need ever have known! She was sure that even her guardian did not know.

She smothered her face deeper in the pillow as she cried out in anguish. She could have had happiness then--and--and it would have been honourable for her to have taken it, wouldn't it?

She lay quiet for a little while. No; that was cowardly, selfish. If she really loved this man, she should be glad for his sake that she knew the truth, glad now of the day when she had found it out. She remembered that day. It seemed to live more vividly before her now than it ever had before. Mrs. Wickes--her mother--had--had been drinking. The words had been a slip of the tongue; a slip that her mother, owing to her condition at the time, had not even been conscious of. Mrs. Wickes had been garrulously recounting some sordid crime that had remained famous even amongst its many fellows in Whitechapel, and, in placing the date, had stated it was two years after Mr. Wickes had died. Later on, in the same garrulous account, she had again referred to the date, but had placed it this time by saying that she, Polly, was a baby not more than a month old when it had happened.

And on that day when she had listened to her mother's tale she had still been but a child--in years. She could not have been more than twelve--but she was very old for twelve. The slums of London had seen to that. And so, the next day, when her mother had been more herself, she had asked Mrs. Wickes, more out of a precocious curiosity perhaps than anything else, for an explanation. Mrs. Wickes had flown into a furious rage.

"Mind yer own business!" Mrs. Wickes had screamed at her. "The likes of you a-slingin' mud at yer mother! Wot you got to complain of? Ain't I takin' care of you? If ever you says another word I'll break yer back!"

She had never said another word. In one sense she had not been different from any other child of twelve then, and it had not naturally caused any change in her feelings toward her mother; nor in the after years, with their fuller light of understanding, had it ever changed or abated her love for the mother with whom she had shared hardship and distress and want. She thanked God for that now. Her mother might have been one to inspire little love and little of respect in others; but to her, Polly, when she had parted from her mother to come here to America, she had parted from the only human being in all the world she had ever loved, or who, in turn, had ever showed affection for her. She had never ceased to love her mother; instead, she had perhaps been the better able to understand, and even to add sympathy to love and to know a great pity, where bitterness and resentment and unforgiveness might otherwise have been, because she, too, had lived in those drab places where the urge of self-preservation alone was the standard that measured ethics, where one fought and snatched at anything, no matter from where or by what means it came, that kept soul and body together--because she could look out on that life, not as one apart, but with the eyes of one who once had been a--a guttersnipe.

And now?

Now that this crisis in her life had come--what now? She did not know. She had been trying to think calmly, but her brain would not obey her--it was crushed, stunned. It ached even in a physical way, frightfully, and--

She raised her head suddenly from the pillow in a sort of incredulous amazement--and immediately afterward sat bolt upright in bed. The telephone here in her room was ringing. At this hour! Her heart suddenly seemed to stop beating. Something--something must be wrong--something must have happened--Dora--Mr. Marlin!

It was still ringing--ringing insistently.

She sprang from the bed, and, running to the 'phone, snatched the receiver from its hook.

"Yes, yes?" she answered breathlessly. "What is it?"

A voice came over the wire; a man's voice, rising and falling creepily in a sing-song, mocking sort of way:

"Is that you, Polly--Polly Wickes--Polly Wickes--Polly Wickes--Wickes--Wickes--P-o-l-l-y W-i-c-k-e-s?"

It frightened her. She felt the blood ebb from her cheeks. There was something horribly familiar in the voice--but she could not place it. Her hand reached out to the wall for support.

"Yes"--she tried to hold her voice in control, to answer steadily--"yes; I am Polly Wickes. Who are you? What do you want?"

She heard the sound as of a gust of wind from a door that was suddenly blown open, the beat of the sea, then the slam of a door--and then the voice again:

"Polly--Polly Wickes." The words seemed to be choked now with malicious laughter. "Why don't you dress in black, Polly Wickes--Polly Wickes--for your mother, Polly Wickes?"

"What do you mean?" she cried frantically. "Who are you? Who are you? What do you mean?"

There was no answer.

She kept calling into the 'phone.

Nothing! No reply! The voice was gone.

She stood there staring wildly through the darkness. Black ... for her mother ... dead! No, no ... it couldn't be true! That voice ... yes, it was like the horrible voice that had called out the other night ... she knew now why it was familiar....

Terror-stricken, the receiver dropped from her hand.

Dead! Her mother dead! It couldn't be true! She began to grope around her. The chair--her dressing gown. Her hands felt the garment. She snatched it up, flung it around her, and stumbled to the door and along the hall to Captain Francis Newcombe's room. And here she knocked mechanically, but, without listening for response, opened the door, and, stumbling still in a blind way, crossed the threshold.

"Guardy! Guardy! Oh, guardy!" she sobbed out.

Captain Francis Newcombe was not asleep. Quite apart from the fact that he had only got to bed but a very short while before, the cards that night had gone too badly against him, and there was a savage sense of fury upon him that would not quiet down. And now, as he heard his door open and heard Polly call, he was out of bed and into a dressing gown in an instant. Polly out there in his sitting room--at half-past four in the morning! And she was sobbing. She sobbed now as he heard her call again:

"Guardy! Guardy! Oh, guardy!"

This was queer--damned queer! His face was suddenly set in the darkness as he crossed the bedroom floor--but his voice was quiet, cool, reassuring, as he answered her: "Right-o, Polly! I'm coming!"

He switched on the light as he entered the sitting room. It brought a quick, startled cry over the sobs.

"Oh, please, guardy!" she faltered out. "I--I--_please_ turn off the light."

"Of course!" he said quietly--and it was dark in the room again.

He had caught a glimpse of a little figure crouching just inside the door--a little figure with white, strained face, with great, wondrous masses of hair tumbling about her shoulders, with hands that clasped some filmy drapery tightly across her bosom, and small, dainty feet that were bare of covering. And as he moved toward her now across the room, another mood took precedence over the savagery he had just been nursing--a mood no holier. It might be queer, this visit of hers; but that glimpse of her, alluring, intimate, of a moment gone, had set his blood afire again--and far more violently than it had on that first occasion when he had seen her here on the island two nights ago. It brought again to the fore the question that, through a cursed nightmare of happenings, had almost since that time lain dormant. Was he going to let Locke have her--or was he going to keep her for himself? How far had she gone with Locke? They had been a lot together. Well, that mattered little--if he wanted her for himself he would _make_ the way to get her, Locke and hell combined to the contrary! The woman--against her potential value as somebody else's wife! Damn it, that was the wonder of her--that she could even hold her own when weighed on such scales. There were lots of women.

He had reached her now, and touched her, found her hand and taken it in his own. "What is it, Polly?" he asked gently. "What's the matter?"

"It's--it's mother," she whispered brokenly. "The telephone in my room rang a few minutes ago, and some one--a man--and, oh, guardy, I'm sure it was the same voice that we heard when we were in the woods the night before last--asked me why I didn't wear black for my mother. It--it couldn't mean anything else but--but that mother is dead. Oh, guardy, guardy! How could he know, guardy? How could he know?"

Captain Francis Newcombe made no movement, save to place his arm around the thinly clad shoulders, and draw the little figure closer to him. It was dark here, she could not have seen his face anyway, but it was composed, calm, tranquil. Perhaps the lips straightened a little at the corners--nothing more. But the brain of the man was working at lightning speed. Here was disaster, ruin, exposure if he made the slightest slip. Again, eh? This was the fourth time this devil from the pit had shown his hand! The reckoning would be adequate! But how was he to answer Polly? Quick! She must not notice any hesitation. Tell her that Mrs. Wickes was dead? He had a ready explanation on his tongue, formulated days ago, to account for having withheld that information. Seize this opportunity to tell her that Mrs. Wickes was not her mother? No! Impossible! He had meant to use all this to his advantage, and in his own good time. It was too late now. He was left holding the bag! If he admitted that Mrs. Wickes was dead, he admitted that there was some one on this island whose mysterious presence, whose mysterious knowledge, must cause a furor, a search, with possible results that at any hazard he dared not risk. Polly would tell Locke--Dora--everybody. It was impossible! But against this, sooner or later, Polly must know of Mrs. Wickes' death, and-- Bah! Was he become a child, the old cunning gone? He would keep her for a while from England--travel--anything--and, months on, the word would come that Mrs. Wickes was dead, and found in the old hag's effects would be Polly's papers. The one safe play, the _only_ play, was not alone to reassure the girl now, but to keep her mouth shut. Above all to keep her mouth shut! But--how? How? Yes! He had it now! His soul began to laugh in unholy glee. His voice was grave, earnest, tender, sympathetic.

"He couldn't have known, Polly," he said. "That is at once evident on the face of it. How could any one on this little out-of-the-way island possibly know a thing like that when I, who am the only one who _could_ know, and who have just come direct from England, know it to be untrue. Don't you see, Polly?"

He had drawn her head against his shoulder, stroking back the hair from her forehead. She raised it now quickly.

"Yes, guardy!" she said eagerly. "I--I see; and I'm so glad I came to you at once. But--but it is so strange, and--and it still frightens me terribly. I don't understand. I--I can't understand. Why should any one ring the telephone in my room at this hour, and--and tell me a thing like that if it were not true?"

"Or even if it were true--at such an hour, or in such a manner," he injected quietly. "Tell me exactly what happened, Polly."

"I think I've told you everything," she said. "I don't think there was anything else. When I answered the 'phone, the voice asked if I were Polly Wickes, and kept on repeating my name over and over again in a horrible, crazy, sing-songy way, and then I heard a sound as though a door had been blown open by the wind, and I could hear the waves pounding, and then the door was evidently slammed shut again, and the voice said what I--I have told you about wearing black for my mother. And then I couldn't hear anything more, and I couldn't get any answer, though I called again and again into the 'phone. Oh, guardy, I can't understand! I--I'm sure it was the same voice as that other night. What does it mean? Guardy, what should we do? Who could it be?"

A door blown open by the wind! The pound of the waves! Where was there a telephone that would measure up to those requirements? Not in the house! Captain Francis Newcombe smiled grimly in the darkness. The private installation was restricted to the house and its immediate surroundings. Therefore the boathouse! The boathouse had a 'phone connection. And there was still an hour or more to daybreak! But first to shut Polly's mouth.

"Polly," he said gravely, measuring his words, "I haven't the slightest doubt but that it was the same voice we heard in the woods; in fact, I'm quite sure of it. And I'm equally sure now that I know who it is."

She drew back from him in a quick, startled way.

"But, guardy, you said it was only some one catcalling to--"

"Yes; I know," he interrupted seriously. "But I did not tell you what I was really suspicious of all along. With what I had to go on then, it did not seem that I had any right to do so. It's quite a different matter now, however, after what has happened to-night."

"Yes?" she prompted anxiously.

"There can be only two possible explanations," he said. "Either some one is playing a cruel hoax; or it is the work of an unhinged mind, an irrational act, a phase of insanity that--"

"Guardy!" she cried out sharply. "You mean--"

"Yes," he said steadily; "I do, Polly. And there can really be no question about it at all. Can you imagine any one doing such a thing merely from a perverted sense of humour?--any one of us here?--for it must have been some one of us who is connected with the household in order to have had access to a telephone. It is unthinkable, absurd, isn't it? On the other hand, the hour, the irresponsible words, their 'crazy' mode of expression, as you yourself said, the motiveless declaration of a palpable untruth, all stamp it as the work of one who is not accountable for his actions--of one who is literally insane. And then the fact that you recognised the voice as the one we heard two nights ago is additional proof, if such were needed, which it very obviously is not. You remember that we had seen Mr. Marlin in his dressing gown disappear under the verandah a few minutes before we heard the calls and cries and wild, insane laughter. My first thought then was that it was Mr. Marlin, and I was afraid that either harm had, or might, come to him. I sent you at once back to the house, and I ran into the woods to look for him. I did not find him; and, therefore, as there was always the possibility then that I had been mistaken, I felt that I should not alarm any of you here, and particularly Miss Marlin, by suggesting that Mr. Marlin's condition was decidedly worse than even it was supposed to be. Is it quite plain, Polly? I do not think we have very far to look for the one who telephoned you to-night."

He could just see her in the darkness, a little white, shadowy form, as she stood slightly away from him now. One of her hands was pressed in an agitated way to her face and eyes; the other still held tightly to the throat of her dressing gown.

"Oh, yes, it's plain, guardy," she whispered miserably. "It's--it's too plain. Poor, poor Mr. Marlin! What are we to do? It would hurt Dora terribly if she knew her father had done this. I--I can't tell her."

"Of course, you can't," said Captain Francis Newcombe gravely. "Your position is even more delicate than mine was the other night. I do not see that you can do anything--except to say nothing about it to any one for the present."

"Yes," she agreed numbly.

She began to move toward the door.

"It's not likely to happen again," said Captain Francis Newcombe reassuringly; "and, anyway, you can make sure it won't by just leaving the receiver off the hook. Do that, Polly." And then, solicitously: "But you're not frightened any more now, are you, Polly? A mystery explained loses its terror, doesn't it? And, besides, the main thing was to know that your mother was all right."

"My mother--"

He thought he heard her catch her breath in a quick, sudden half sob.

"It's all right, Polly," he said hastily. "Don't think of that part of it any more. Everything's all right."

"Yes; I--I know." Her voice was very low. "It's--all right. I--good-night, guardy."

She had opened the door.

"I'll see you to your room," he said.

"No," she answered; "I'm not frightened any more. Good--good-night, guardy."

"Good-night, Polly," he said.

The door closed.

Captain Francis Newcombe stood in the darkness. And for a moment he did not move--but the mask was gone now, and the laughter that came low from his lips was a mirthless sound, and the working face was black with fury. And then he turned, and with a bound was back in the bedroom, and snatching at his clothes began to dress.

There was still an hour to daybreak.