"I cannot understand about last night. Your presence was an accident——"
He laughed softly.
"I knew that Lady Vignoles' party numbered fourteen. I caused your father to be detained. One of my friends—I will not name him—suggested a novel mode of seeking a guest: I caused Megger's man to be absent whilst another of my friends, imitating his speech, sent the telephone message! Is that accident?"
"It is——"
"Unworthy, you would say? The work of a common cracksman? But, by those lowly means I secured proof that Bernard Megger, director of the Uitland Rands Consolidated Mines Syndicate, and Isaac Jacobsen, the Kimberley mail robber, were one and the same! He has escaped the laws of England, but he cannot escape me!"
She shrank involuntarily, her now frightened eyes fixed upon the face of this man, whose patriotism, whose zeal, whose incredibly lofty purpose she did not, could not, doubt, but whose methods she could, not condone—by whose will her own father had suffered. Then, in a quickly imperious yet kindly manner, he placed both his hands upon her shoulders, looking, with earnest, searching eyes, deep into her own.
"What would you desire me to do that half a million pounds can compass?" he asked.
"Return it to those it belongs to, if you can, and, with any that you cannot return, endow homes by the shore for sick slum children!"
He moved his left hand, and she saw dully gleaming upon his finger, a great green stone, bearing a strange device. In some weird fashion it seemed to convey a message to her—intimate, convincing. Within those green depths there dwelt a mystery. She felt that the ring was incalculably old, and that its wearer must wield almost limitless power. It was an uncanny idea, but she lived to know that her instincts had not wholly misled her.
"It shall be done!" said Séverac Bablon. "And you will be my friend?"