"You'll be taken bad, my lady. You'll faint—"
"I never faint," said Bundle. "But you might as well get me a cocktail. I shall certainly need it. Then lock the door of the room again—don't forget—and take all the door keys back to their proper doors. And, Alfred—don't be too much of a rabbit. Remember, if anything goes wrong, I'll see you through."
"And that's that," said Bundle to herself when, having served the cocktail, Alfred had finally departed.
She was not nervous lest Alfred's nerve should fail and he should give her away. She knew that his sense of self-preservation was far too strong for that. His training alone helped him to conceal private emotions beneath the mask of the well-trained servant.
Only one thing worried Bundle. The interpretation she had chosen to put upon the cleaning of the room that morning might be all wrong. And if so—Bundle sighed in the narrow confines of the cupboard. The prospect of spending long hours in it for nothing was not attractive.
Chapter XIV
The Meeting Of The Seven Dials
It would be as well to pass over the sufferings of the next four hours as quickly as possible. Bundle found her position extremely cramped. She had judged that the meeting, if meeting there was to be, would take place at a time when the club was in full swing—somewhere probably between the hours of midnight and 2 A.M.
She was just deciding that it must be at least six o'clock in the morning when a welcome sound came to her ears, the sound of the unlocking of a door.
In another minute the electric light was switched on. The hum of voices, which had come to her for a minute or two rather like the far-off roar of sea waves, ceased as suddenly as it had begun, and Bundle heard the sound of a bolt being shot. Clearly someone had come in from the gaming room next door, and she paid tribute to the thoroughness with which the communicating door had been rendered sound proof.