“Ella is not often here,” her father replied. “She is still playing in ‘Half a Moment!’; besides, she is rehearsing a new revue. So she, happily, has no time to come and see me.”
“But, for your own safety, and your servant’s, do be careful,” Meins urged. “To tell you the honest truth, I almost fear to remove my mask—even now.”
“But there’s surely no danger down here?” asked Drost eagerly.
“There is always danger with such a terribly infectious malady. It is fifty times more fatal than double pneumonia. It attacks the lungs so rapidly that no remedy has any chance. Professor Steinwitz, of Stettin, discovered it.”
“And is there no remedy?”
“None whatsoever. Its course is rapid—a poisoning of the whole pulmonary system, and it’s even more contagious than small-pox.”
Then they removed their masks and drank to “The Day” in their German wine.
Six nights later Stella Steele had feigned illness—a strain while on her motor-cycle, and her understudy was taking her part in “Half a Moment!” much to the disappointment of the men in khaki, who had seated themselves in the stalls to applaud her. Among the men on leave many had had her portrait upon a postcard—together with a programme in three-colour print—in their dug-outs in Flanders, for Stella Steele was “the rage” in the Army, and among the subalterns any who had ever met her, or who had “known her people,” were at once objects of interest.
In the darkness on a road with trees on either side—the road which runs from Tonbridge to Shipborne, and passes between Deene Park and Frith Wood—stood Kennedy and Ella. They had ridden down from London earlier in the evening and placed their motorcycles inside a gate which led into the forest on the left side of the road.
They waited in silence, their ears strained, but neither uttered a word. Kennedy had showed his well-beloved the time. It was half-past one in the morning.