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"I shouldn't care much to be there, sir," remarked Tredennick. "No," laughed the general. "But really there's no danger except that we're just in the line of their fire." So they struck off to the left and approached the position by a circuitous route, being greeted by the colonel and other officers, to whom the visit of Sir Hugh Elcombe had been a considerable surprise.
"I have found some curious things in this place! Secret printing-presses for forged notes." "We already know that," he said. "Sir Hugh Elcombe here has, unknown to us, obtained certain knowledge, and to-day he came to me and gave me a full statement of what has been in progress. What he has told me this afternoon is among the most valuable and reliable information that we ever received."
Hitherto he had held cynical notions concerning love and matrimony, but ever since he had met Enid Orlebar in that winter hotel beside the sea, and had afterwards discovered her to be stepdaughter of Sir Hugh Elcombe, he had found himself reflecting upon his own loneliness. At luncheon he was to come face to face with her again.
His secretary, a tall, thin, deep-eyed man, entered, and to him he gave the note. "Well, let us proceed while they are looking up the information," the chief went on. "Harry Bellairs, as you know, was on the staff of Sir Hugh Elcombe, that dear, harmless old friend of yours who inspects troops and seems to do odd jobs for Whitehall.
Many of those secrets he kept to himself, one being the remarkable truth that General Sir Hugh Elcombe was implicated in a very strange jumble of affairs a matter that was indeed incredible. To the tall, well-groomed, military-looking man with whom he stood at eleven o'clock on the following morning in a private room at New Scotland Yard he had never confided that discovery of his.
"Of course not," said Lady Elcombe decisively. "She must go to-morrow if she goes at all. I will not allow her to travel by herself." The girl and the man exchanged meaning glances, and just then Sir Hugh himself entered, greeting his visitor cheerily. The butler brought in the tea-tray, and as they sat together the two men chatted.
"Ah!" he exclaimed, glancing at the paper, "I see that the fellow Barker, who was a chauffeur before he entered Harry's service, has set up a motor-car business in Southampton." "You believe him to have been an accessory, eh?" "Yes, a dupe in the hands of a clever woman." "Of what woman?" asked Walter, holding his breath. "As you know, Harry was secretary to your friend Elcombe.
Therefore, full of disappointment, he crossed one afternoon to Folkestone, and that night again found himself in his dingy chambers in Holles Street. Next day he called upon Sir Hugh, and found him in much better spirits. Lady Elcombe told him that Enid had written expressing herself delighted with her season in Sicily, and saying that both she and Mrs.
Essentially a sportswoman, she could handle gun or rod, ride to hounds, or drive a motor-car with equal skill, and as stepdaughter of Sir Hugh she had had experience on the Indian frontier and in Egypt. Her father had been British Minister at the Hague, and afterwards at Stockholm, but after his death her mother had married Sir Hugh, and had become Lady Elcombe.
Sir Hugh was congratulating himself at the easy solution of the difficulty, but Walter, seated at that little marble-topped table in the winter sunshine, knowing Weirmarsh's character, remained in daily apprehension. The exciting life he led in assisting to watch those whom Scotland Yard suspected was as nothing compared with the constant fear of the unmasking of Sir Hugh Elcombe.
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