“You’re a wonderful help, Sir Michael,” she said. “You’ve more or less expressed what I feel myself. . . . It’s a comfort to know that I’m not alone in my lunacy.”
“I think, though,” he warned her, “you ought to ask the young man to give his own explanation. If he trusts you, and if he’s the type I gather he is, he’ll make a clean breast of it all. Hasn’t he told you anything about himself?”
She was instantly on her guard.
“What sort of things?” she countered, and he showed surprise that she should ask such a question.
“Well, things! He can’t have expected you not to be at all curious about the reason for these extraordinary goings-on.”
“He just told me I must be patient and believe in him. He said it would be dangerous for me to know too much, but that once it was all cleared up and the enemy was out of the way he’d be able to explain it all.”
“And who is this mysterious enemy?”
“Mr. Templar calls him the Tiger—I don’t know why.”
Lapping knitted his brows for a time in thought.
“I seem to recognise the nickname,” he said. “Wait a minute. . . . Wasn’t there a sensation in the papers some time ago? A Chicago gang called the Tiger Cubs had broken a bank and escaped with an enormous sum of money in gold—something of the sort.”