“Of course. But is it wise to turn one’s back upon Fortune in this way?” asked Adam, in that insidious manner by which he had entrapped many a man. “Review the position calmly. Here is a project which, by good luck, has fallen into my hands. I want somebody to go shares with me in it. You are my friend, I like you. I know you are an upright man, and I ask you to become my partner in the venture. Yet you refuse to do so because—well, merely because a woman’s pretty face has attracted you, and you think that you please her by remaining here in London!
“Is it not rather foolish in your own interests? Constantinople is not the Pole. A fortnight will suffice for you to get there and back and clinch the bargain. Muhil is awaiting us. I had a wire only yesterday. Do reconsider the whole question—there’s a good fellow.”
Max had said nothing about the meeting with Marion. Therefore he believed that she had not told her lover. Adam was reflecting whether she might not, after all, be a woman to be trusted. This refusal of Max’s to go out to Turkey interfered seriously with the plans he had formed. Yet what those plans actually were he had not even told the hunchback. He was a man who took counsel of nobody. His ingenious schemes he evolved in his own brain, and carried them into effect by his own unaided efforts.
The past history of Jean Adam, alias John Adams, had been one of amazing ups-and-downs and clever chicanery. He knew that Samuel Statham held him in awe, and was now playing upon his fears, and gloating over the success which must inevitably be his whenever he thought fit to deal the blow. It would be irresistible and crushing. He held the millionaire in his power. But before he moved forward to strike, he intended that Max should be induced to go abroad. And if he went—well, when he thought of his victim’s departure his small, near-set eyes gleamed, and about the corners of his mouth there played an expression of evil.
“My decision does not require any reconsideration,” said the young fellow, after a pause. “I shall remain in London.”
“And lose the chance of a lifetime—eh?” exclaimed Adam, as though perfectly unconcerned.
“I have some very important private matters to attend to.”
“I, too, used to have when I was your age.”
“They do not concern the lady,” Max said quickly. “It is purely a personal matter.”
“Of business? Why, you’d make as much in an hour over this Railway business as you’d make in twenty years here in London,” Adam declared. “Besides, you want a change. Come out to the Bosphorus. It’s charming beside the Sweet Waters.”