rt. Perhaps if ever we meet
again--which is scarcely probable--you will recognize my voice. And
always recollect that should you or Mr. Henfrey ever receive a message
from 'Silverado' it will be from myself." And he spelt the name.

"Silverado. Yes, I shall not forget you, my mysterious friend."

"_Au revoir_!" he said as, bowing gracefully, he turned and left her.

The sun was rising from the sea when Dorise entered her bedroom at the
hotel. Her maid had retired, so she undressed herself, and putting on a
dressing-gown, she pulled up the blinds and sat down to write a letter
to Hugh.

She could not sleep before she had sent him a reassuring message.

In the frenzy of her despair she wrote one letter and addressed it, but
having done so she changed her mind. It was not sufficiently reassuring,
she decided. It contained an element of doubt. Therefore she tore it up
and wrote a second one which she locked safely in her jewel case, and
then pulled the blinds and retired.

It was nearly noon next day before she left her room, yet almost as soon
as she had descended in the lift the head _femme de chambre_, a stout
Frenchwoman in a frilled cap, entered the room, and walking straight to
the waste-paper basket gathered up the contents into her apron and went
back along the corridor with an expression of satisfaction upon her full
round face.

NINTH CHAPTER

CONCERNS THE SPARROW

With the rosy dawn rising behind them the big dusty car tore along
over the white road which led through Pegli and Cornigliano, with their
wealth of olives and palms, into the industrial suburbs of old-world
Genoa. Then, passing around by the port, the driver turned the car up
past Palazzo Doria and along that street of fifteenth-century palaces,
the Via Garibaldi, into the little piazza in front of the Annunziata
Church.

There he pulled up after a run of two hours from the last of the many
railway crossings, most of which they had found closed.

When Hugh got out, the mysterious man, whose face was more forbidding in
the light of day, exclaimed:

"Here I must leave you very shortly, signore. But first I have certain
instructions to give you, namely, that you remain for the present in a
house in the Via della Maddalena to which I shall take you. The man and
the woman there you can trust. It will be as well not to walk about in
the daytime. Remain here for a fortnight, and then by the best means,
without, of course, re-entering Fran