The professor came into the room a minute later. He stood in the doorway, and bowed in the stiff German way to Dorothy. With Roden he exchanged a curt nod. His hair was glued to his temples by the rain, which gleamed on his face.
“It is an abominable night,” he said, coming forward. “Ach, Fräulein, please do not leave us—and the fire,” he added; for Dorothy had risen. “I merely came to make sure that he had arrived safely home.” He took the chair offered to him by Roden, and sat on it without bringing it forward. He had but little of that self-assurance which is so highly cultivated to-day as to be almost offensive. “There are, of course, matters of business,” he said, “which can wait till to-morrow. To-night you are tired.” He looked at Roden as a doctor may look at a patient. “Is it not so, Fräulein?” he asked, turning to Dorothy.
“Yes.”
“Except one or two—which we may discuss now.”
Dorothy turned and glanced at him. He was looking at her, and their eyes met for a moment. He seemed to see something in her face that made him thoughtful, for he remained silent for some time, while he wiped the rain from his face with his pocket-handkerchief. It was a pale, determined face, which could hardly fail to impress those with whom he came in contact as the face of a strong man.
“Lord Ferriby has been at the works to-day,” he said; and then, with a gesture of the hands and a shrug, he described Lord Ferriby as a nonentity. “He went through the works, and looked over your books. I wrote out a sort of certificate of his satisfaction with both, and—he signed it.”
Roden was leaning forward over the fire with a cigarette between his lips. He nodded shortly. “Good,” he said.
“Yesterday,” continued Von Holzen, “I met an old acquaintance—a Miss Wade—one of the young ladies of a Pensionnat at Dresden, in which I taught at one time. She is a daughter of the banker Wade, and told me, reluctantly, that she is at The Hague with her father—a friend of Cornish's. This morning I took a walk on the sands at Scheveningen; there was a large fat man, among others, bathing at the Northern bathing-station. It was Major White. It is a regular gathering of the clans. I saw a German paper-maker—a big man in the trade—on the Kursaal terrace this morning. It may be a mere chance, and it may not.”
As he spoke he had withdrawn from his pocket a folded paper, which he was fingering thoughtfully. Dorothy, who knew that she had by her looks unwittingly warned him, made no motion to go now. He would say nothing that he did not deliberately intend for her ears as much as for her brother's. Von Holzen opened the paper slowly, and looked at it as if every line of it was familiar. It was a sheet of ordinary foolscap covered with minute figures and writing.
“It is the Vorschrift, the—how do you say?—prescription for the malgamite, and there are several in The Hague at this moment who want it, and some who would not be too scrupulous in their methods of procuring it. It is for this that they are gathering—here in The Hague.”