I was determined not to tell him. Anne might be dead, or in a Russian prison, which was worse than death; at any rate nearly two thousand miles of sea and land separated us, and I was powerless to aid her,—as powerless as I had been while I lay in the prison of Peter and Paul. But there was one thing I could still do; I could guard her name, her fame. It would have been a desecration to mention her to this man Southbourne. True, he had proved himself my good and generous friend; but I knew him for a man of sordid mind, a man devoid of ideals, a man who judged everything by one standard,—the amount of effective “copy” it would produce. He would regard her career, even the little of it that was known to me, as “excellent material” for a sensational serial, which he would commission one of his hacks to write. No, neither he nor any one else should ever learn aught of her from me; her name should never, if I could help it, be touched and smirched by “the world’s coarse thumb and finger.”
So I answered his question with a repetition of my first statement.
“I got wind of the meeting, and thought I’d see what it was like.”
“Although I had expressly warned you not to do anything of the kind?”
“Well, yes; but still you usually give one a free hand.”
“I didn’t this time. Was the woman at the meeting?”
“What woman?” I asked.
“The woman whose portrait I showed you,—the portrait Von Eckhardt found in Carson’s pocket. Why didn’t you tell me at the time that you knew her?”
“Simply because I don’t know her,” I answered, bracing up boldly for the lie.
“And yet she sat next to Cassavetti at the Savage Club dinner, an hour or two before he was murdered; and you talked to her rather confidentially,—under the portico.”