The two emotions struggled with his soul. Five years of silence and solitude had left their mark. The constant eyes of the guards in the prison still were there. He felt them in the center of his brain. They haunted, despite his attempt to dismiss their presence. His early buoyancy died.
He was passing through the experience that every released prisoner knows. He was fagged from lack of sleep. The excitement of the game to come had worn off. There remained only weariness and dejection.
A park, hedged about with plane trees and towered over by neat boxed-houses, brought him to the realization of his locality. North, lay Brooke Street and Oxford. A mews was at his right, between two mansions. He took this narrow passage, passed hostlers grooming horses, and emerged upon a street which would lead him to Soho Square and Burlington Arcade.
He came, with the same swift glide, to a coffee house under the sign of a brown cup. There he wheeled and flashed a defiant glance back and over the street. He searched each face that passed him. He swept the throng. No one of all of them was familiar. He was
not being followed. The thought had been the distillate of a tired brain.
Braced on two cups of black coffee, and quieted by the dragging fumes of a cigarette, he went on into the city and was swallowed up by the three who toiled and cheated and gamed out the day.
The alchemy of sleep—in a Soho hotel noted for its cleanliness—removed the last vestige of weariness from his mind. He glanced at his watch as he called for cold water and plenty of it. He bathed and dressed hurriedly, then took stock of his possessions.
There were the cuff-links and the pin and the cigarette-case which MacKeenon had brought to Dartmoor. There were the tweed coat, the little silver greyhound, and the bank notes and gold. More than these was Saidee’s diagram of the embassy. He studied this before opening his door.
The plan flashed over his brain. He memorized the details like a draughtsman reading a white-print. He closed his eyes and repeated each item. Then, and naturally, he struck a match on his heel, held out the blazing paper and dropped its ashes along the narrow hallway where they would never be noticed.
Keen-brained from the sleep, and with eight hours ahead of him, he plunged into the opening meshes of the game. There was much to do in that short time. A plan had already mapped itself out. It would not do to go to Holland without every necessary tool for the operation of opening the strong-box. These, he knew, were to be found at a certain shop on Ludgate Street.