o upon the document.
You must not ask me how or in what manner, but that document has come
into my possession."

Vine's companion looked at him in astonishment.

"Are you sure of your facts, Vine?" he asked. "Are you sure that the
thing is not a forgery?"

"Absolutely certain!" Vine answered.

"Then you know, of course," his host continued, "that you hold all these
men in the hollow of your hand."

"Yes, I know it," Vine answered, "and so do they! They have offered me a
million dollars already for the document, but I have declined to sell.
While I considered what to do, I thought it better, for more reasons
than one, that I did not remain in New York."

"I should say so," the other remarked softly. "This is a big thing,
Vine. I could have scarcely realized it."

He rose to his feet, and took a few quick steps backwards and forwards.
The two men were sitting in wicker chairs on a small flat space on the
roof of the American Embassy in Ormonde Square. Vine's host, tall, with
shrewd, kindly face, the stoop of a student, and the short uneven
footsteps of a near-sighted man, was the ambassador himself. He had been
more famous, perhaps, in his younger days, as Philip Deane, the man of
letters, than as a diplomatist. His appointment to London had so far
been a complete success. He had shown himself possessed of shrewd and
far-reaching common sense, for which few save those who had known him
well, like Norris Vine, had given him credit. He stood now with his back
to Vine, looking down across the Square below, glittering with lights
aflame with the busy night life of the great city. The jingle of hansom
bells, and the distant roar of traffic down one of the great
thoroughfares, was never out of their ears; but in this place, cut off
from the house by the trap-door through which they had climbed, it was
cooler by far than the smoking-room, which they had deserted half an
hour before.

For some reason Deane seemed to wish to let the subject rest for a
moment. He stood close to the little parapet, looking towards the
horizon, watching the dull glare of lights, whose concentrated
reflection was thrown upon a bank of heavy clouds.

"You have not told me, Norris," he remarked, "what you think of my
attempted roof-garden."

"It is cool, at any rate," Norris Vine answered. "I wonder why one
always feels the heat more in London than anywhere else in the world."

"It is because they have been so unaccustomed to it over here