“The door is locked, Excellency: she will not let me in.”
“Spy through the keyhole, then; or hide in one of the empty rooms across the corridor, and watch—”
A muted mutter from the direction of the desk dried speech on Victor’s lips. He started hastily toward the source of the sound, midway wheeled, and dismissed the maid with a brusque hand and monosyllable—“Go!”—then fairly pounced upon the telephone.
But all he heard, in the course of the ensuing five minutes, was the voice of the trunk-line operator advising him, to begin with, that she was ready to put him through to Westminster, then maddeningly punctuating the buzz and whine of the empty wire with her call of a talking doll—“Are you theah?... Are you theah?... Are you theah?”
At length, however, the connection was established; and Victor, hearing the falsetto of Chou Nu’s second-uncle cheerily respond to the operator’s query, unceremoniously broke in:
“Shaik Tsin? It is I, Number One. And the devil’s own time I’ve had getting through. Why didn’t you answer more promptly? What’s the matter? Has anything gone wrong?”
“All is well, Excellency, as well as you could wish, knowing what you know.”
Profound relief found voice in a sigh from Victor’s heart.
“You got my messages, then? Nogam delivered them?”
“So I understand. I myself did not see him, Excellency. The man Sturm—”