Bernadine stood for a moment, his face dark with passion. He bit his lip till the blood came, and the veins at the back of his clenched hands were swollen and thick. Nevertheless, when he spoke he had recovered in great measure his self-control.
“Your keys are here, Baron de Grost,” he said, placing them upon the table. “If a bungling amateur may make such a request of a professor, may I inquire how you escaped from your bonds, passed through the door of a locked warehouse and reached here before me?”
The Baron de Grost smiled as he pushed the cigarettes across to his visitor.
“Really,” he said, “you have only to think for yourself for a moment, my dear Bernadine, and you will understand. In the first place, the letter you sent me signed ‘Greening’ was clearly a forgery. There was no one else anxious to get me into their power, hence I associated it at once with you. Naturally, I telephoned to the chief of my staff—I, too, am obliged to employ some of these un-uniformed policemen, my dear Bernadine, as you may be aware. It may interest you to know, further, that there are seven entrances to the warehouse in Tooley Street. Through one of these something like twenty of my men passed and were already concealed in the place when I entered. At another of the doors a motor-car waited for me. If I had chosen to lift my finger at any time, your men would have been overpowered and I might have had the pleasure of dictating terms to you in my own office. Such a course did not appeal to me. You and I, as you know, dear Count von Hern, conduct our peculiar business under very delicate conditions, and the least thing we either of us desire is notoriety. I managed things, as I thought, for the best. The moment you left the place my men swarmed in. We kindly, but gently, ejected your guard, released Greening and my clerk, and I passed you myself in Fleet Street, a little more comfortable, I think, in my forty-horsepower motor-car than you in that very disreputable hansom. As to my presence here, I have an entrance from the street there which makes me independent of my servants. The other details are too absurdly simple; one need not enlarge upon them.”
Bernadine turned slowly to Violet.
“You knew?” he muttered. “You knew when you brought me here?”
“Naturally,” she answered. “We have telephones in every room in the house.”
“I am at your service,” Bernadine declared, calmly.
De Grost laughed.
“My dear fellow,” he said, “need I say that you are free to come or go, to take a whiskey and soda with me, or to depart at once, exactly as you feel inclined? The door was locked only until you restored to me my keys.”