of disconnected episodes, linked together by a strangely
sweet emotional thread of sentiment. And the girl was watching his
face with every sense strained to catch his words and the meaning of
them. Vaguely he felt his danger, even from the first.

"Well, I got there in plenty of time," he began. "It was a beautiful
house, beautifully furnished and arranged. The people were queer,
not at all the sort I expected. Most of them seemed half foreign.
They were all very hard to place for such a respectable household as
Mr. Weatherley's should be."

"They were not really, then, Mr. Weatherley's friends?" she asked
quietly.

"As a matter of fact, they were not," he admitted. "That may have
had something to do with it. Mrs. Weatherley was a foreigner. She
came from a little island somewhere in the Mediterranean, and is
half Portuguese. Most of the people were there apparently by her
invitation. After dinner--such a dinner, Ruth--we played bridge.
More people came then. I think there were eight tables altogether.
After I left, most of them stayed on to play baccarat."

Her eyes still held his. Her expression was unchanged.

"Tell me about Mrs. Weatherley," she murmured.

"She is the most beautiful woman I have ever seen. She is pale and
she has strange brown eyes, not really brown but lighter. I couldn't
tell you the color for I've never seen anything else like it. And
she has real red-brown hair, and she is slim, and she walks like one
of these women one reads about. They say that she is a Comtesse in
her own right but that she never uses the title."

"And was she kind?" asked Ruth.

"Very kind indeed. She talked to me quite a good deal and I played
bridge at her table. It seems the most amazing thing in the world
that she should ever have married a man like Samuel Weatherley."

"Now tell me the rest," she persisted. "Something else has
happened--I am sure of it."

He dropped his voice a little. The terror was coming into the room.

"There was a man there named Rosario--a Portuguese Jew and a very
wealthy financier. One reads about him always in the papers. I have
heard of him many times. He negotiates loans for foreign governments
and has a bank of his own. I left him there last night, playing
baccarat. This morning Mr. Weatherley called me into his office and
sent me up to the Milan Restaurant with a strange message. I was to
find Mr. Rosario and to see that he did not lunch there--to send him
away somewhere else