I think I must have fallen asleep when I started into consciousness to find myself staring into the great broken mirror over the mantelpiece and to find that Mr. Morse had returned and was smiling down upon me.
"She's all right, thank heavens," he said, "and has been asleep for a long time. And now, as you seem sleepy too, I'll bid you good-night, with a thousand thanks for your consideration."
It was nearly two o'clock I noticed when I stepped out into the cool air of Piccadilly and walked the few yards to my flat. I must have been asleep for quite a long time, and dear old Morse had forborne to waken me.
I peculiarly remember my sense of well-being and happiness during that short walk. I was in a glow of satisfaction. Everything had turned out even better than I had expected. What did the scoop for the paper matter after all? Nothing, in comparison with the more or less intimate relations in which I now stood with Gideon Morse. I was to see Juanita constantly. She was almost mine already, and fortune had been marvelously on my side. Of course there would be obstacles, there was no doubt of that. I was no real match for her. But the obstacles in the future were as nothing to those that had been already surmounted. I began to smile with conceit at the diplomatic way in which I had dealt with the great financier; not for a single moment, as I put my key into the latch, did I dream that I had been played with the utmost skill, tied myself irrevocably to silence, and that horrible trouble and grim peril even now walked unseen by my side.
When I got into the smoking-room I found things just as usual. I had hardly lit a last cigarette when the door opened and Preston entered.
"Good heavens!" I said, "I never told you to wait up for me, Preston. There was not the slightest need. You ought to have been in bed hours ago."
"So I was, Sir Thomas," he said looking at me in a surprised sort of way, and I noticed for the first time that he was wearing a gray flannel dressing-gown and slippers.
"What do you mean?"
"Until the telephone message came, Sir Thomas."
"What telephone message?"