“You know well enough whom I mean! Where is he?”
“Then he is not to be found in his usual haunts?”
“He has disappeared.”
“And you come out seeking Professor Barter because Bentley his disappeared! It is almost as though you had previously arranged with him to come seeking me if, at a certain time he failed to return from some mysterious rendezvous....”
Barter’s face was now a mask of uncanny shrewdness. In a few words he had pierced through Ellen’s secret of why she had deliberately placed herself in the way of Barter’s minions in order to be taken, and now he had used the words of her own questions to form a weapon against her. Ellen gasped in terror.
Had she made a hideous mistake? Had she, by failing to wait for word from Bentley, ruined all his well laid plans?
Barter now stood before her, his eyes almost shooting fire.
“Tell me quickly,” he began, and for a second she thought he would put his hands on her, “what sort of plan is he making to betray me into the hands of my enemies, who are the enemies of super-civilization because they are my enemies?”
“I know of nothing,” said Ellen stoutly, hoping that she had not, after all, betrayed the fact that she knew Bentley had started to work out an unusual scheme. The details she didn’t know, for Lee hadn’t told her. “But I do know, what all the world knows, that he was helping the police against you. Naturally, then, when he vanished I thought of you. Besides you had already warned him that you would remove him in your own good time. He caused you the loss of two of your puppets and I thought, naturally enough, that you would try to remove him to some place where he could not operate so successfully against you.”