"As heaven is my witness, no," Maxwell said in a hoarse whisper. "When I had made up my mind what had happened, I determined to get possession of those papers. I vanished, saying that I was called suddenly to Paris. For the last four hours I have been dogging Countess Saens. I followed her here, and I am not going to lose sight of her until she is safely at home. And when she is once safely at home, I am going to do a desperate and daring thing. What is she doing here?"
Jessie made no reply for the moment. She had pulled her wrap over her face again so that she should not be recognized. She was watching the movements of Countess Saens breathlessly. The woman had passed up the steps into the big hall beyond the swinging glass doors. She seemed to be arguing with a porter, who shook his head in an emphatic way. Evidently the countess was angry; so much could be seen from her gestures and the shake of her shoulders.
"She is trying to see a patient at irregular hours," Jessie said, "and the porter is adamant. I pray from the bottom of my heart that she may fail."
"Is this another piece in the puzzle?" Maxwell asked hopelessly.
"It is the key-piece of the problem," said Jessie. "Ah, the porter is not to be moved. He has sent off an under porter, possibly to call one of the house surgeons. See, the countess sits down."
Surely enough the countess had flung herself angrily into a seat. Nobody seemed to care much about her, for she waited ten minutes without any sign of anybody in authority. Meanwhile Jessie was making Maxwell au fait with the situation.
"You threatened some dangerous and desperate enterprise a little later on," she said. "I suppose that is a supreme effort to try and get those papers?"
"You have guessed it," Maxwell said grimly. "If I could do that, the whole situation would be saved. We could do anything; we could point to Lancing's suicide as the result of reckless gambling. Mind you, that would be more or less true. If Lancing had not been desperately situated, he would never have yielded to the countess's fascinations and sold those precious documents."
"Yes, yes," Jessie interrupted. "But unless I am greatly mistaken, you have been forestalled. Somebody else has already removed the documents from Countess Saens's custody."
"You don't really mean that! What was it—a case of diamond cut diamond?"