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"Maurice Wynn, I have a warrant for your arrest on the charge of murdering Vladimir Selinski, alias Cassavetti." The next I knew I was in bed, in a cool, darkened room, with a man seated in an easy-chair near at hand, smoking a cigarette, and reading what looked remarkably like an English newspaper. I lay and looked at him lazily, for a few minutes.
"You must ask me nothing of him; perhaps you will learn all there is to know one day. How strangely your fate has been linked with mine! Think of Yossof meeting you that night. He had heard of my danger from the League. Ah, that traitor, Selinski! How much his miserable soul had to answer for!
I remembered the man's terror of Cassavetti or Selinski as he had called him, and his evident conviction that he was in some way connected with the danger that threatened "the gracious lady," who, alas, seemed determined to be anything but gracious to me on this unlucky evening. Cassavetti listened impassively.
He meant to warn her. They guessed that, and they condemned, murdered him!" He began pacing up and down the room, muttering to himself; and I sat trying to piece out the matter in my own mind. "Have you heard anything of a man called Cassavetti; though I believe his name was Selinski?" I asked at length. Von Eckhardt turned to me open-mouthed. "Selinski?
But she would not; she loved him, yes, but she loved the Cause more; it was her very life, her soul! "The yacht lay off Greenwich for the night; she meant to land next day, and come up to see Selinski. She had never happened to meet him, though he was one of the Five." "Selinski! Cassavetti! Mishka, it was not she who murdered him!"
And he did not know whom to trust, so he set out himself, though he speaks no word of any language but his own, and bribed and begged his way to London. He found out some of the League there, at a place in Soho, learned there where Selinski lived, stole the key to his rooms, and met you. He is a marvel, the poor good Yossof!" "Did you know it was he, when I described him that night?"
He sat silent, in frowning thought, for a minute or more, and then said slowly: "Selinski had arranged everything beforehand, and his assistants carried out his instructions, though he, himself, was dead. But all that belongs to the past; we have to deal with the present and the future! You know already that one section of the League at least is, as it were, reconstructed.
"Remains now only that we do justice on the murderess of Selinski, the traitress who has betrayed our secrets, has frustrated many of our plans, has warned more than one of those whom we have justly doomed to death her lover among them with the result that they have escaped, for the present.
I'd have known the man anywhere by that alone; though in some ways he looked different now, less frail and emaciated than he had been, with a wiry vigor about him that made him seem younger than I had thought him. "The excellency mistakes!" he said. "How should such an one as I get to London?" "That is for you to say. I know only that you are the man who wanted to see Vladimir Selinski.
I was taken to a house where several horrid men quite superior sort of men in a way, but they seemed as if they hated me, and I couldn't think why asked me a lot of questions. At first they spoke in a language I didn't understand at all, but afterwards in French; and then I found they wanted to know about that Mr. Cassavetti; they called him by another name, too " "Selinski," I said.
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