"They were very polite but we are prisoners—for how long I don't know. I've failed, Herr Renwick——" she finished miserably.
"Perhaps it isn't too late——"
"There are men outside. They intend to keep us here for the present."
"There ought to be a way——" said Renwick, putting his feet to the ground. "I could——" He stopped abruptly, for at that moment he discovered that the captured weapon had been removed from his pocket.
"I'm afraid it's hopeless," said Marishka bitterly.
Renwick glanced at his watch. "Only eight o'clock. Even now we could——"
He rose and walked to the window, peering through a crack in the shutter, but an attack of vertigo caused him to sink into a chair. She regarded him dubiously, pride and compassion struggling, but she said nothing.
"Beastly stupid of me," he groaned. "I might have known they'd spare no detail——"
There was a knock upon the door, and at Marishka's response, a turning of the key, and a man entered. In spite of a discolored eye and a wrinkled neckband, he was not difficult to identify as their friend of the railroad train. His manner, however, was far from forbidding, for he clicked his heels, swept off his cap and smiled slowly, his gold tooth gleaming pleasantly.
"Herr Renwick is, I trust, feeling better," he said politely.