"Yes; it's safe, quite safe, for an hour yet."
"Why didn't you send me money, or help me?" she asked, in her dead and unhappy monotone.
"I did, eighty francs, all I had. I hadn't a penny left. I didn't know the damned language. I prowled about like a cat in a strange garret, but I tried everything, from the American consul at Nice to a Herald correspondent at San Remo. Then I got word of a consumptive young writer from New York, at Mentone—but he died the day I was to meet him. Then I heard of the new Marconi station up the coast, and worked at wireless for two weeks, and made twenty dollars, before they sacked me for not being able to send a message out to a Messina fruit-steamer, in Italian. Then I chanced on the job of doctoring up a generator on an American yacht down here in the bay."
"Yes, yes—I know how hard it is!"
"But listen! When I was on board at work I overheard a Supreme Court judge and a special agent from the Central Office in New York and two English detectives talking over the loss of certain securities. And those securities belong to Richard Penfield!"
He knew that she had started, at the sound of that name.
"Penfield!" she gasped. "What of him?"
"When the district-attorney's men raided Penfield's New York gambling club, one of Penfield's new men got away with all his papers. They had been withdrawn from the Fifth Avenue Safe Deposit Company, for they were mostly cheques and negotiable securities, worth about two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. But beyond all their face value, they constituted prima facie evidence against the gambler."
"But what's all this to us, now?"
"They were smuggled to New Jersey. There the Jersey City chief of police took action, and this agent of Penfield's carried the documents across the North River and up to Stamford. From there he got back to New York again, by night, where he met a second agent, who had secured passage on the Slavonia for Naples. The first man is MacNutt."