“No,” she said quietly. “I do not hate him. I am keeping that for later. I fear him desperately. Some day when we have broken him utterly I will hate him, and drive all likeness of him out of my memory like an unclean thing. But till then I won’t waste energy on hate. We want to hoard every atom of our strength for the work of beating him.”
She had won back her composure, and I turned on my light to look at her. She was in nurses’ outdoor uniform, and I thought her eyes seemed tired. The priceless gift that had suddenly come to me had driven out all recollection of my own errand. I thought of Ivery only as a would-be lover of Mary, and forgot the manufacturer from Lille who had rented his house for the partridge-shooting. “And you, Dick,” she asked; “is it part of a general’s duties to pay visits at night to empty houses?”
“I came to look for traces of M. Bommaerts. I, too, got on his track from another angle, but that story must wait.”
“You observe that he has been here today?”
She pointed to some cigarette ash spilled on the table edge, and a space on its surface cleared from dust. “In a place like this the dust would settle again in a few hours, and that is quite clean. I should say he has been here just after luncheon.”
“Great Scott!” I cried, “what a close shave! I’m in the mood at this moment to shoot him at sight. You say you saw him in Paris and knew his lair. Surely you had a good enough case to have him collared.”
She shook her head. “Mr Blenkiron—he’s in Paris too—wouldn’t hear of it. He hasn’t just figured the thing out yet, he says. We’ve identified one of your names, but we’re still in doubt about Chelius.”
“Ah, Chelius! Yes, I see. We must get the whole business complete before we strike. Has old Blenkiron had any luck?”
“Your guess about the ‘Deep-breathing’ advertisement was very clever, Dick. It was true, and it may give us Chelius. I must leave Mr Blenkiron to tell you how. But the trouble is this. We know something of the doings of someone who may be Chelius, but we can’t link them with Ivery. We know that Ivery is Bommaerts, and our hope is to link Bommaerts with Chelius. That’s why I came here. I was trying to burgle this escritoire in an amateur way. It’s a bad piece of fake Empire and deserves smashing.”
I could see that Mary was eager to get my mind back to business, and with some difficulty I clambered down from the exultant heights. The intoxication of the thing was on me—the winter night, the circle of light in that dreary room, the sudden coming together of two souls from the ends of the earth, the realisation of my wildest hopes, the gilding and glorifying of all the future. But she had always twice as much wisdom as me, and we were in the midst of a campaign which had no use for day-dreaming. I turned my attention to the desk.