"I am afraid that I shall have to ask you to go on alone," he said. "In the face of this discovery I do not see my way to lose this opportunity. The king cannot stay here long; you will see that it is impossible for Countess Saens to run any further risks. I am going to wait."
Jessie felt that she would like to wait also, but duty was urging her elsewhere. She stood irresolute just a moment as a figure came down the street, and pausing before the house opposite, whistled a bar from some comic opera. Maxwell touched Jessie's arm.
"Just a minute," he said. "Cling to me as if we were saying good-night. Unless I am greatly mistaken, the whistle was no more than a signal. Ah, that is what I thought! Evidently all the servants have gone to bed, for here is the countess herself."
The countess opened the door and stood on the step with the light behind her. The man stopped whistling and walked up the steps. He saluted the countess properly.
"So you are here at last!" she said. The night was so close and still that her voice was easily carried across the road. "I thought that you were never coming. Take this note and see that Prince Mazaroff has it without delay. You will be able to give him the signal. See it goes into his own hand. Oh, yes, Merehaven House. The best way will be by the garden door. You know where that is."
The man nodded, and said something in Russian that the listeners could not follow. Then he lounged off up the road and the countess vanished. Maxwell was all energy.
"Come along," he said. "I have changed my mind. What the king does for the next few hours must be on his own head and on his own account. It is far greater importance for me to know what message it is that the countess has sent to Prince Mazaroff. We will walk quickly and get ahead of that fellow, so that I can hide myself in the garden before he comes. We shall probably find that the signal is a bar or two of the same opera that our man was whistling just now. Unless fortune plays me a very sorry trick, I shall see the inside of that letter within half an hour."
The slouching figure of the unconscious Russian was passed in a perfectly natural way. Maxwell glanced at him sideways, and saw that he had slipped the letter into his breast pocket. The garden gate leading into the grounds of Merehaven House was safely reached, and Jessie drew a sigh of relief as she threw off her wrap and cast it on a seat. If anybody saw her now it would be assumed that she had come out for a breath of fresh air.
She saw the lights streaming from the library window, she saw the little group there, and she drew nearer. She heard enough to tell her that she was in deadly peril of being discovered. If Mazaroff was not stopped, if he persisted in his determination, the fraud must be exposed.