And, as he lay there, a cigarette between his lips, wakeful, his restless gaze wandering, he suddenly caught a glimpse of something moving—a human face pressed to the dark glass of the corridor window between the partly lowered shade and the cherry-wood sill.

So amazed was he that the face had disappeared before he realised that it resembled the face of Ilse Dumont. The next instant he was on his feet and opening the door of the drawing-room; but the corridor between the curtained berths was empty and dark and still; not a curtain fluttered.

He did not care to leave his doorway, either, with the box lying there on his bed; he stood with one hand on the knob, listening, peering into the dusk, still excited by the surprise of seeing her on the same train that he had taken.

However, on reflection, he quite understood that she could have had no difficulty in boarding the midnight train for New York without being noticed by him; because he was not expecting her to do such a thing and he had paid no attention to the group of passengers emerging from the waiting room when the express rolled in.

“This is rather funny,” he thought. “I wish I could find her. I wish she’d be friendly enough to pay me a visit. Scheherazade is certainly an entertaining girl. And it’s several hours to New York.”

He lingered a while longer, but seeing and hearing 186 nothing except darkness and assorted snores, he stepped into his stateroom and locked the door again.

Sleep was now impossible; the idea of Scheherazade prowling in the dark corridor outside amused him intensely, and aroused every atom of his curiosity. Did the girl really expect an opportunity to steal the box? Or was she keeping a sinister eye on him with a view to summoning accomplices from vasty metropolitan deeps as soon as the train arrived? Or, having failed at Brookhollow, was she merely going back to town to report “progress backward”?

He finished his mineral water, and, still feeling thirsty, rang, on the chance that the porter might still be awake and obliging.

Something about the entire affair was beginning to strike him as intensely funny, and the idea of foreign spies slinking about Brookhollow; the seriousness with which this young girl took herself and her mission; her amateur attempts at murder; her solemn mention of the Turkish Embassy—all these excited his sense of the humorous. And again incredulity crept in; and presently he found himself humming Irwin’s immortal Kaiser refrain:

“Hi-lee! Hi-lo!
Der vinds dey blow
Joost like die wacht am Rhine!
Und vot iss mine belongs to me,
Und vot iss yours iss mine!”