et me hear you speak. You can't
think--you can't imagine how often in the middle of the night, I have
waked up and thought of you, and the cold shivers have come because,
after all, I fancied that you must be a dream, that you didn't really
exist, that that voyage had never existed. Go on talking."

"You foolish person!" she laughed, patting his hands affectionately. "But
then, of course, you are a little overwrought. I am very real, I can
assure you. I have been in Chicago, playing, but there hasn't been a
night when I haven't thought of the times when we used to talk together
in the darkness, when you let me into your life, and I made up my mind to
try and help you. Foolish person! Sit down in that great easy-chair and
draw it up to the fire."

He sank into it with a little sigh of content. She threw herself on to
the couch opposite to him. Her hands drooped down a little wearily on
either side, her head was thrown back. Against the background of
rose-silk cushions, her cheeks seemed unexpectedly pale.

"I am tired with travelling," she murmured, "and I hate Chicago, and I
have worried about you. Day by day I have read the papers. Everything has
gone well?"

"So far as I know," he answered. "I did exactly as we planned--or rather
as you planned. The papers have been full of the disappearance of
Douglas Romilly. You read how wonderfully it has all turned out? Fate has
provided him with a real reason for disappearing. It seems that the
business was bankrupt."

"You mustn't forget, though," she reminded him, "that that also supplies
a considerable motive for tracking him down. He is supposed to have at
least twenty thousand pounds with him."

"I have all the papers," he went on. "They prove that he knew the state
the business was in. They prove that he really intended to disappear in
New York. The money stands to the credit of Merton Ware--and another at a
bank with which his firm apparently had had no connections, a small bank
in Wall Street."

"So that," she remarked, "is where you get your pseudonym from?"

"It makes the identification so easy," he pointed out, "and no one knew
of it except he. I could easily get a witness presently to prove that I
am Merton Ware."

"You haven't drawn the money yet, then?"

"I haven't been near the bank," he replied. "I still have over a thousand
dollars--money he had with him. Sometimes I think that if I could I'd
like to leave that twenty thousand pounds where it is. I s