"Think so?" and did not even trouble to defend his opinion.
At the club he found a box that had come for him by parcels post. A wooden one with the address printed on a card and nailed to the lid, which was screwed down. It did not look particularly interesting; he told one of the club servants to unscrew it for him. When he came to examine the contents he found, first a lot of damp packing, and then a wide-necked stoppered bottle, two-thirds full of white powder. It bore a label printed neatly like the address—
"Herr Van de Greutz's Explosive.
"Formula as he said it...."
For a moment Rawson-Clew held the bottle, staring at it in blank astonishment; so tense was his attitude that it caught the other man's attention.
"Hullo!" he said, "some one sent you an infernal machine?"
Rawson-Clew roused himself. "No," he answered shortly.
He put the bottle back in the box after he had felt in the packing and found nothing, then he fastened it up with more care than was perhaps necessary. He looked at the address on the lid, but it told him nothing more than it had at first; neither that nor the name of the post-office from which it was sent gave any clue to the sender. And yet he felt as if Julia were at his elbow with that mute sympathy in her eyes which had been there when they talked of failure in the wood on the Dunes.
He rose, and taking the box, went towards the door; the other man watched him curiously. "One would think you had found a ghost in your box," he said.
"I'm not sure that I have not," Rawson-Clew looked back to answer; "the ghost of a good comrade."