"'To rid you of her?' he says, his eyes bulging. 'She's a deal more likely to rid you of me.'
"The chief looked as if he could bear that, but he said all he insisted on was that she should be got out of America. No power under heaven, Pforzheim told him, would tempt Schwarzenberg to leave America.
"'You set me an impossible task!' he wept.
"'It's the condition,' says the chief.
"'It's my death-sentence,' says Pforzheim. That was how he went off."
For the next three weeks, whenever Tommy appeared, Napier would ask, as though Ernst Pforzheim, too, were in hospital, how that person was "getting on."
Though Tommy was forever full of other news, all that he was able to produce relating to the luckless Ernst was that he'd disappeared.
Napier hadn't succeeded in getting his letters forwarded from France in those terrible days. After four weeks in hospital he cabled Julian what had happened and that he was getting on all right. A fortnight later, the day of Napier's discharge, came a telegram from New York.
Returning with Nan to-morrow. S. S. Leyden.
Julian.