“What do you mean?” asked Rolfe, quickly.
“I mean,” the old man said, in a very slow distinct voice—“I mean that you must first sacrifice the honour of the woman you love—Maud Petrovitch.”
“Maud Petrovitch!” he gasped, utterly mystified.
“Yes,” he answered. “You have promised to save me—you have sworn to assist me, and the sacrifice is imperative! It is her honour—or my death!”
Chapter Thirteen.
Describes the Man from Nowhere.
Late that same night, in the small and rather well-furnished dining-room of a flat close to Addison Road station, the beetle-browed man known to some as John Adams and to others as Jean Adam was seated in a comfortable armchair smoking a cigarette.
He was no longer the shabby, half-famished looking stranger who had been watching outside Statham’s house in Park Lane, but rather dandified in his neat dinner jacket, glossy shirt-front, and black tie. Adventurer was written all over his face. He was a man whose whole life history had been a romance and who had knocked about in various odd and out-of-the-way corners of the world. A cosmopolitan to the backbone, he, like his friend Leonard Lyle, whom he was at that moment expecting, hated the trammels of civilised society, and their lives had mostly been spent in places where human life was cheap and where justice was unknown.