ly, I think you are wrong! Not in your aims, but in
making so many new enemies! You have placed yourself outside all laws!
You may be arrested at any hour!"

"That phase of my campaign will pass. I shall meet the Ministers of all
the Powers upon equality--as the plenipotentiary of eight million
people! All that I have done will be forgotten in the light of what I
_shall_ do!"

"I cannot understand about last night. Your presence was an
accident----"

He laughed softly.

"I knew that Lady Vignoles' party numbered fourteen. I caused your
father to be detained. One of my friends--I will not name him--suggested
a novel mode of seeking a guest: I caused Megger's man to be absent
whilst another of my friends, imitating his speech, sent the telephone
message! Is that accident?"

"It is----"

"Unworthy, you would say? The work of a common cracksman? But, by those
lowly means I secured proof that Bernard Megger, director of the Uitland
Rands Consolidated Mines Syndicate, and Isaac Jacobsen, the Kimberley
mail robber, were one and the same! He has escaped the laws of England,
but he cannot escape me!"

She shrank involuntarily, her now frightened eyes fixed upon the face of
this man, whose patriotism, whose zeal, whose incredibly lofty purpose
she did not, could not, doubt, but whose methods she could, not
condone--by whose will her own father had suffered. Then, in a quickly
imperious yet kindly manner, he placed both his hands upon her
shoulders, looking, with earnest, searching eyes, deep into her own.

"What would you desire me to do that half a million pounds can compass?"
he asked.

"Return it to those it belongs to, if you can, and, with any that you
cannot return, endow homes by the shore for sick slum children!"

He moved his left hand, and she saw dully gleaming upon his finger, a
great green stone, bearing a strange device. In some weird fashion it
seemed to convey a message to her--intimate, convincing. Within those
green depths there dwelt a mystery. She felt that the ring was
incalculably old, and that its wearer must wield almost limitless power.
It was an uncanny idea, but she lived to know that her instincts had not
wholly misled her.

"It shall be done!" said Severac Bablon. "And you will be my friend?"

"I will try!" whispered Zoe, "if you wish. But, oh, believe me! You are
wrong! You are wrong! There is, there _must_ be some better way!"

As he removed his hands from her shoulders she turned a