"Yes," he said, "there is a difference, but it is so subtle that even I should not have noticed it unless you had called my attention to it. But I know who you are now. You are Miss Harcourt, daughter of Colonel Harcourt, late of the —th. I have often told Vera of the wonderful likeness between you. If you should ever meet her in private life——"
"I have met her, I am personating her at the present moment," Jessie whispered.
"Amazing!" Maxwell exclaimed. "But I understood that you were—that you had been—in short——"
"Engaged in a Bond Street shop," Jessie finished the sentence. "So I was till to-day, when I was discharged through no fault of my own. Miss Galloway sent for me to take her place. Secretly I have played her part all this evening. And she went away dressed in my simple black clothes——"
"But why?" Maxwell demanded jealously. "Why all this absurd mystery?"
"Surely you can guess? Why do you look so suspicious? I am not altogether in Miss Galloway's confidence, but I understand that she wanted to save somebody whom she loved—somebody that was in trouble. It requires no great intelligence to guess that you were the person in question. It was all connected with those papers missing from the Foreign Office."
"I know no more about it than the dead," Maxwell said vehemently. "The papers in question—and others—were as much in Lancing's custody as mine. It was he who was to blame, though I admit that I locked the papers away to-night after Lord Merehaven had done with them. When I saw the Mercury I was horror-stricken. I guessed exactly what had happened."
"How could you guess what had happened?" Jessie asked.
"Because I have had my suspicions for some time," Maxwell said. "I dismissed those suspicions as unworthy of me and insulting to Captain Lancing. I know that he was greatly infatuated with Countess Saens, whom a Mr. Lechmere, a late Queen's Messenger, had warned me against as no better than a Russian spy. Lancing was mad over her. There is not the slightest doubt that she induced Lancing to let her have those papers to copy. Then she refused to return them, and Lancing committed suicide. That is what I make of it."
"The sensational report in the Mercury went farther than that," Jessie said. "It is assumed that you are a party to the conspiracy, and that you fled to Paris. Is that true, or going to be true?"