(she thought it theatrical but could not know of the jangled
nerves of the drug-soddened man which magnified all sound to an
intensity which was almost painful).

He opened the door and slid out--and did not close the door behind him.

Swiftly she followed, and as she reached the landing saw his head
disappear down the stairs. She was in a blind panic; a thousand formless
terrors gripped her and turned her resolute soul to water. She could
have screamed her relief when she saw that the sliding door was
half-open--the man had not stopped to close it--and she passed through
and down the first flight. He had vanished before she reached the
half-way landing and the hall below was empty. It was a wide hall,
stone-flagged, with a glass door between her and the open portal.

She flew down the stairs, pulled open the door and ran straight into van
Heerden's arms.

CHAPTER XVII

THE JEW OF CRACOW

If there were committed in London the crime of the century--a crime so
tremendous that the names of the chief actors in this grisly drama were
on the lips of every man, woman and talkative child in Europe--you might
walk into a certain department of Scotland Yard with the assurance that
you would not meet within the confining walls of that bureau any police
officer who was interested in the slightest, or who, indeed, had even
heard of the occurrence save by accident. This department is known as
the Parley Voos or P.V. Department, and concerns itself only in
suspicious events beyond the territorial waters of Great Britain and
Ireland. Its body is on the Thames Embankment, but its soul is at the
Central Office, or at the Surete or even at the Yamen of the police
minister of Pekin.

It is sublimely ignorant of the masters of crime who dwell beneath the
shadows of the Yard, but it could tell you, without stopping to look up
reference, not only the names of the known gunmen of New York, but the
composition of almost every secret society in China.

A Pole had a quarrel with a Jew in the streets of Cracow, and they
quarrelled over the only matter which is worthy of quarrel in that part
of Poland. The sum in dispute was the comparatively paltry one of 260
Kronen, but when the Jew was taken in a dying condition to the hospital
he made a statement which was so curious that the Chief of Police in
Cracow sent it on to Vienna and Vienna sent it to Berne and Berne
scratched its chin thoughtfully and sent it forward to Paris, where i