Hade got slowly to his feet. The smile was gone from his lips. His strange black eyes looked indescribably tired and old. There was a sag to his alert figure.
"It's hard to plan a coup like mine," he sighed, "and then to be bilked by a man with not one-tenth my brain. Luck was with you. Blind luck. Don't imagine you've done this by your wits."
As he spoke he shuffled heavily to the adjoining music-room, and let his dreary gaze stray toward its two windows. On the veranda, framed in the newly unshuttered window-space, stood four Secret Service men, grimly on guard.
Hade strode to one window after the other, with the cranky mien and action of a thwarted child, and slammed the shutters together, barring out the sinister sight of his guards. Gavin did not try to prevent him from this act of boyish spite. The master-mind's reaction, in its hour of brokenness, roused his pity.
From the windows, Hade's gloomy eyes strayed to the piano. On it lay a violin case. He picked it up and took out an age-mellowed violin.
"I think clearer when I play," he said, glumly, to Brice. "And I've nearly a million dollars' worth of thinking to do in this half hour. Is it forbidden to fiddle? Milo's father paid $4,000 for this violin. It's a genuine Strad. And it gives me peace and clear vision. May I play, or—?"
"Go ahead, if you want to," vouchsafed Gavin, fancying he read the attempt of a charlatan to remain picturesque to the end. "Only get your thinking done, and come to a decision before the half hour is up. And, by the way, let me warn you again that those men out there have orders to shoot, if you make a move to escape."
"No use in asking you to play my accompaniments, Claire?" asked Hade, in pathetic attempt at gayety as he walked to the hallway door. "No? I'm sorry. Nobody else ever played them as you do."
He tried to smile. The effort was a failure. He yanked the curtains shut that hung between music room and hall. Then, at a gesture from Gavin, he pulled them halfway open again, and, standing in the doorway, drew his bow across the strings.
Gavin sat down on the long hall couch, a yard outside the music-room door, beside Claire and the still stupefied Milo. The Jap took up his position back of them, alert and tense as a fox terrier. The three Secret Service men in the front doorway stood at attention, yet evidently wondering at the prisoner's queer freak.