"I want never to recall those days," said John. "If I ever acted as you say, I must have been mad." He suddenly turned towards her. And all his passionate desire to protect her, the deep love he had grown to feel for her seemed in that moment to animate his face. "Elaine," he said, "promise me you'll forget it, and never think of it again?"
"Never again," answered she. She slid her arms about his neck and drew him towards her. For a minute he forgot his compact with himself. But presently his self-possession returned to him. He fell back a pace, and, lifting her hand, kissed her fingers, and once again assumed the light conversational tone.
"We are comrades now, Elaine," said he, "both working against Voules and his myrmidons." He turned and looked at the little clock on Elaine's mantelshelf. "Hallo!" he exclaimed, "I must be off; I am on duty to-night."
He felt that it was safer to go, and five minutes later he was at the door of the house.
"Remember, Elaine," he said, looking down at her in the dim little passage, "any time you want me, if Cherriton offends you in any way, ring me up at the Golden Pavilion Hotel."
CHAPTER XXIII
One evening, a week later, when darkness had fallen, John found himself in Grosvenor Place, pacing unobtrusively in the shadow of the russet-brown brick wall which surrounds the royal garden of Buckingham Palace. He was watching a taxi which was waiting before the broad door of Mr. Beecher Monmouth's residence. Some minutes passed before John, from his discreet vantage ground, observed Mrs. Beecher Monmouth herself, a vague, befurred, silk-clad figure in the distance, descend from her house and enter the vehicle.
The lady's taxi sped away, and John lifted his attention from the door of the house to the first floor. Here a chink of light from two windows showed him that Mrs. Beecher Monmouth's maid, having attired her mistress for the evening, was still busy, either in the bedroom or Mrs. Beecher Monmouth's boudoir.
"When Mademoiselle Cecily puts out the light and goes downstairs, I'll make a dash for it," thought John.
For a quarter of an hour after that he waited patiently in the shadow of the royal wall. Then first one light, and then another, vanished behind the first floor curtains of the house across the road. John gave Cecily sufficient time to descend to the housekeeper's room, where she usually spent the evening. At last, however, with something of alacrity and a quickened pulse-beat, he crossed the road. He was the veriest amateur as a burglar, but his cause was the best in the world, and in less than a minute he had slipped a small Yale key into the hall door. He had possessed himself of that key from Mrs. Beecher Monmouth's handbag earlier in the evening, and he knew she would not miss it until her return from her dinner-party at the Savoy.