She nodded. "Yes. If you—"
"Look out!"
Some one now was coming downstairs. The girl had time only to whisper swiftly, "If we don't get a chance to speak again, watch that vase." She pointed to a bronze antique which stood on a table near them. "When I'm sure the agreement is in the house, I'll drop a glove-button in that—a black one, if I think it'll be in the safe on the right, white on the left. Now go."
Eaton moved quietly on and into the drawing-room. Avery's voice immediately afterwards was heard; he was speaking to Miss Davis, whom he had found in the hallway. Eaton was certain there was no suspicion that he had talked with her there; indeed, Avery seemed to suppose that Eaton was still in the study with Harriet Santoine. It was her lapse, then, which had let him out and had given him that chance; but it was a lapse, he discovered, which was not likely to favor him again. From that time, while never held strictly in restraint, he found himself always in the sight of some one. Blatchford, in default of any one else, now appeared to assume the oversight of him as his duty. Eaton lunched with Blatchford, dined with Blatchford and Avery—Blatchford's presence as a buffer against Avery's studied offense to him alone making the meal endurable. Eaton went to his room early, where at last he was left alone.
The day, beginning with his discovery of the fact that he was in Santoine's house and continuing through the walk outside, which first had shown him the lay of the grounds, and then the chance at the sight of Santoine's study followed by the meeting just outside the study door—all this had been more than satisfactory to him. He sat at his window thinking it over. The weather had been clear and there was a moon; as he watched the light upon the water and gazed now and again at the south wing where Santoine had his study, suddenly several windows on the first floor blazed out simultaneously; some one had entered Santoine's work-room and turned on the light. Almost at once the light went out; then, a minute or so later, the same windows glowed dully. The lights in the room had been turned on again, but heavy, opaque curtains had been drawn over the windows before the room was relighted. These curtains were so close over the windows that, unless Eaton had been attracted by the first flash of light, he scarcely would have noticed that the lights were burning within the room.
He had observed, during the day, that Avery or Harriet had been at work in that room—one of them or both—almost all day; and besides the girl he had met in the hall, there had been at least one other stenographer. Must work in this house go on so continuously that it was necessary for some one to work at night, even when Santoine lay ill and unable to make other than the briefest and most important dispositions? And who was working in that room now, Avery or Harriet? He let himself think, idly, about the girl—how strange her life had been—that part of it at least which was spent, as he had gathered most of her waking hours of recent years had been spent, with her father. Strange, almost, as his own life! And what a wonderful girl it had made of her—clever, sweet, lovable, with more than a woman's ordinary capacity for devotion and self-sacrifice.
But, if she were the one working there, was she the sort of girl she had seemed to be? If her service to her father was not only on his personal side but if also she was intimate in his business affairs, must she not therefore have shared the cruel code which had terrorized Eaton for the last four years and kept him an exile in Asia and which, at any hour yet, threatened to take his life? A grim set came to Eaton's lips; his mind went again to his own affairs.