“Perhaps to spend a week by the sea!” laughed Sylvia.
“Hardly that!” Falconer said. “He was down here for some distinct purpose. And that purpose I mean to discover. I intend to establish why he came down here so near the Poldhu station and stayed the night as Mr. Martin. Remember, only the other day he was at Chelmsford, and now he had been to Poldhu, and left hurriedly after seeing me.”
“Perhaps he never expected you were here.”
“That’s exactly my opinion. Probably my presence has frightened him off. I only hope it has. Nevertheless I don’t like the situation. Something is amiss somewhere—and I intend to fathom it.”
“The man is not English, you told me. Why should he go under the name of Martin?”
“Martin is a name not unknown in France,” Falconer remarked. “He may be French. Indeed, I recollect when I first saw him in the train I put him down as a Parisian.”
Both Sylvia and her lover were much puzzled. It certainly was annoying to be watched as Falconer had evidently been.
That evening they drove back over the Cornish hills with the sun setting away across the Atlantic. But already the breeze was increasing. The storm prophecy of early morning was being fulfilled.
Together they dined pleasantly in that long room at the Poldhu Hotel which overlooks the pretty cove, Mr. and Mrs. Hamilton dining with them. Afterwards they all went across the wide grounds of the wireless station to the Hamiltons’ pretty bungalow, where they spent the remainder of the evening.
Hamilton was a typical Marconi man, burly, easy-going, and refined. An expert wireless engineer, he had worked stations in India, South America, and other places, and ran a secret station during the war—a station which had to its credit the destroying of many German submarines. With his charming, dark-haired, cosmopolitan wife who that night was hostess to the wealthy South American widow, he had lived in all sorts of outlandish places in the shadow of wireless aerials, ever on duty day and night with the alarm-bell at his bedside in case of a breakdown.