en his lips, wakeful, his
restless gaze wandering, he suddenly caught a glimpse of something
moving--a human face pressed to the dark glass of the corridor window
between the partly lowered shade and the cherry-wood sill.

So amazed was he that the face had disappeared before he realised that
it resembled the face of Ilse Dumont. The next instant he was on his
feet and opening the door of the drawing-room; but the corridor
between the curtained berths was empty and dark and still; not a
curtain fluttered.

He did not care to leave his doorway, either, with the box lying there
on his bed; he stood with one hand on the knob, listening, peering
into the dusk, still excited by the surprise of seeing her on the same
train that he had taken.

However, on reflection, he quite understood that she could have had no
difficulty in boarding the midnight train for New York without being
noticed by him; because he was not expecting her to do such a thing
and he had paid no attention to the group of passengers emerging from
the waiting room when the express rolled in.

"This is rather funny," he thought. "I wish I could find her. I wish
she'd be friendly enough to pay me a visit. Scheherazade is certainly
an entertaining girl. And it's several hours to New York."

He lingered a while longer, but seeing and hearing nothing except
darkness and assorted snores, he stepped into his stateroom and locked
the door again.

Sleep was now impossible; the idea of Scheherazade prowling in the
dark corridor outside amused him intensely, and aroused every atom of
his curiosity. Did the girl really expect an opportunity to steal the
box? Or was she keeping a sinister eye on him with a view to summoning
accomplices from vasty metropolitan deeps as soon as the train
arrived? Or, having failed at Brookhollow, was she merely going back
to town to report "progress backward"?

He finished his mineral water, and, still feeling thirsty, rang, on
the chance that the porter might still be awake and obliging.

Something about the entire affair was beginning to strike him as
intensely funny, and the idea of foreign spies slinking about
Brookhollow; the seriousness with which this young girl took herself
and her mission; her amateur attempts at murder; her solemn mention of
the Turkish Embassy--all these excited his sense of the humorous. And
again incredulity crept in; and presently he found himself humming
Irwin's immortal Kaiser refrain: