On second thoughts he was rather glad there had been no evidence. Gang or no gang, it was rather pleasant to think that Heloise Reys really would be with him on the Empress until they all reached Quebec.... And perhaps he’d be with her longer.
“All the same,” he reflected, “this isn’t going to be so simple as it looks. I only know indirectly that there is a gang at work to ensnare Heloise Reys. Nothing to go on except suspicion. Also, I must remember that Heloise herself is, to all intents and purposes, on the side of the gang. She wants to get to Henry Gunning and marry him. She does regard the one member of the gang she knows, this Gorgon companion, Méduse, not as an enemy, but as a tried, and trusted friend. If I do unpleasant and senseless things to the gang I make Heloise my enemy, through the Gorgon.... Oh, it’s infernally complicated. This isn’t a matter for clumsy rough-and-tumble methods. This is a matter for wits, for brain work, for guileful intelligence.... However, I fancy I have a good share of guileful intelligence.”
As a matter of fact Clement was doing himself rather less than justice. He had rather more than his fair share of keen wits, only, as one of his friends said, “one never noticed it because he was so well-tailored.”
Clement Seadon was one of those young Anglo-Saxons—and their number is not so inconsiderable as our enemies imagined—who were responsible for so many German failures during the war. They were so entirely unlike the things they were capable of doing.
Clement, for example, looked indolent. He looked easy-going. He looked as if he cared for nothing very much, and hadn’t any particular intelligence. He was obviously very careful about the set of his clothes, and could be guaranteed to shine adequately in most sports and at any social gathering. He had blunt, but neat features, that conspired to give him a suggestion of geniality not easily moved from an habitual calm. People felt they could not take him quite seriously—until they suddenly bumped up against an extremely disconcerting and swift coolness of wit. Only then, when they had been “stung” did they note the squareness of the jaw and the lips, and the broad and quite definite power of his brow.
Clement Seadon, in fact, was rather a drastic sort of young man to those who thought he didn’t matter very much. In the Diplomacy, where he had served before the war, several quite brilliant brains had chuckled at him for an amiable and well-dressed ninny, whom it was ridiculously easy to twist round the finger. They had thought this until a sharp reprimand from their Governments, and, on some occasions, instant dismissal, taught them that some people are not so simple as they look, and that the cheerful young man who had seemed to them so easy a victim had actually been twisting them round his well-manicured fingers all the time—not they him.
Clement was not in Diplomacy now; he had thrown up his job to go to the front. His father, his only relative, had died during the war, so that after the armistice he had found himself in complete control of a very useful income, and with it a freedom to indulge his love of travel and sport, which, up to the war, he had only been able to assuage intermittently.
He was, then, a young man entirely free to do as he liked. A young man who preferred action, who did not ask for adventure, but wasn’t so very sorry when adventure came along; and also a young man who knew quite well how to enjoy the considerable mental faculties he happened to possess.... He was, as the little lawyer had felt, quite the luckiest ally Heloise could find in a battle against the powers of crime.
Clement, thinking near his door, turned the matter over.