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But she ignored me, very properly, and shifted the scene from hotel to steamer, where Franz von Blenheim, in the guise of Van Blarcom, had given her a fright. As she exhibited her passport at the gang-plank, he had read her name across her shoulder; then he had claimed acquaintance with her, a claim that she knew was false. "And he wasn't impertinent. That was the worst of it," she faltered.
Neither, I patriotically assumed, were the men of my country's secret-service, however humble their part as cogs in that great machinery, or however distasteful Mr. Van Blarcom, personally, might be to me. And finally, I could not deny that women, clever, well-born, and beautiful, had served as spies a thousand times in the world's history, urged to it by some sense of duty, some tie of blood.
The questions came in a reassuringly mechanical fashion; the man was doing his duty, nothing more. "I may go also to France." Her voice was steady, but I saw that she had clenched her hands beneath the table. I glanced at Van Blarcom, to find him listening intently, his neck thrust forward, his eyes almost protruding in his eagerness not to miss a word. But there was to be nothing more.
He belonged to the old traveling circus of Blarcom & Burton, and made several journeys through our country in the days when those establishments found no use for the railways, but patiently plodded from town to town, delighting the hearts and eyes of our grandfathers and grandmothers when they were children just as we are now.
But please don't worry," I urged with false heartiness. "I'll explain when you come down." To cut the discussion short, I turned to go. Once her door had closed, however, I halted at the staircase, retraced my steps, and, without hesitation, circled the gallery to the rooms of Mr. John Van Blarcom and his friends. I had had enough of uncertainties; henceforth I meant to deal with facts.
Who was this fourth figure, who knew my name and spoke such colloquial English? I raised my candle as high as possible and scanned him. Then I stood transfixed. "Van Blarcom!" I gasped. "And in a uniform, by all that's holy!" He grinned. "No. You haven't got that quite right," he told me. "What's the use keeping up the game now that we're here, all friends together? My name isn't Van Blarcom.
"This mountain travel is maddening; one might as well be a snail." "Sure, a slow train's tiresome," agreed Van Blarcom. "Specially if you're not feeling overpleased with life anyway," he added, with a knowing smile. An angry answer rose to my lips, but the Mont Cenis tunnel opportunely enveloped us, and in the dark half-hour transit that followed I regained my self-control.
John Van Blarcom, who, at the sight of Miss Falconer and myself to all appearances cozily established for a tete-a-tete meal, stopped in his tracks and fastened on me the hard, appraising scrutiny that a policeman might turn on a hitherto respectable acquaintance discovered in converse with some notorious crook. For an instant he seemed disposed to buttonhole me and remonstrate.
No wonder that Van Blarcom had felt moved to say a helping word for me, as for a congenital idiot not responsible for his acts! "When you are ready " the lieutenant was remarking. I pulled myself together as hastily as I could. "First," I began, with all the resolution I could muster, "I want to say that I am as much at a loss as you are about this thing.
The unwelcome intruder was Mr. John Van Blarcom, my late fellow-voyager, and he accepted the encounter with a better grace than I. "Why, hello!" he greeted me cheerfully. "Going through to France? Glad to see you but you're about the last man that I was looking for. I got the idea somehow you were planning to stop a while in Rome."
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