"Yes, but I don't believe one word of it," Vera replied. A kiss sufficed to wash the bitterness of the candor away. "I don't believe you were picked up by a yacht. I don't believe that you were in any danger. I don't understand it."
"Then we are both in the same state of benighted ignorance," Geoffrey smiled. "You are right not to believe me, dearest, but I had to tell the story and I had to play a part. It is all in the desperate game we are playing against our secret foe. For the present I am a puppet in the hands of abler men than myself. What I am doing will go far to set us free later."
Vera sighed gently. She sidled closer to her lover. Mrs. Gordon was coming out of the drawing room, a sign that Vera would have to go.
"I feel that I don't want to part with you again," she whispered, her eyes looking into his and her arm about him. "I feel as if I had nearly lost you. And if I did lose you, darling, what would become of me?"
Geoffrey kissed the quivering lips tenderly.
"Have no fear, sweetheart," he said; "all is coming right. See how those people have been frustrated over and over again. They have come with schemes worthy of Satan himself and yet they have failed. And it has been so arranged that those failures seem to be the result of vexatious accident. But they are not. And they will fail again and again until the net is around them and we shall be free. Darling, you are to sleep in peace to-night."
With a last fond embrace Vera slipped from her lover's side. She smiled at him brightly from the doorway and was gone. Geoffrey lighted a cigarette that presently dropped from his fingers and his head fell forward.
He started suddenly; the cigarette smelt pungently as it singed the carpet. Somebody was whispering his name; somebody was calling him from the stairs. Then he recognized Ralph's croaking voice.
"Tchigorsky," he muttered sleepily. "I had forgotten that Tchigorsky wanted me."