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If anything could save me from myself, it would be your confidence. That, I presume, is why I felt called upon to undo my thieving, and make good the loss. The money Colonel Stanistreet paid Ekstrom is now in the safe, back there in the library. The necklace is ... here." Blindly he thrust the tissue packet into her hands.
Thrice within an hour he had fallen short of his promises, to Cecelia Brooke, to himself, to his idee fixe. His three chances, to redeem his word to the girl, to measure up to his queer criterion of honour, to rid his world of Ekstrom, all had slipped through fingers seemingly too infirm to profit by them. He felt of a sudden old; old, and tired, and lonely.
At what seemed little better than a snail's pace it began to pass beneath the span of the Elevated. Like a racing thoroughbred the roadster swept up alongside, motor chanting triumphantly, running-board level with the platform step. Ekstrom, poised to leap aboard, hesitated; a pistol in his hand exploded; a shattered window fell crashing.
Already it was one o'clock. Fortunately he was still in evening dress, and needed only to change collar and tie to repair the disarray caused by his encounter with Ekstrom. In two minutes he was once more in the street.
Between great draped windows and an impressive chimney-piece opposite, beside a broad, long desk, in a straight-backed chair sat a woman, gagged, bound as to her wrists, strips of cloth which had but lately bound ankles as well on the floor about her feet. That woman was Cecelia Brooke. Ekstrom stood behind her, in the act of loosening the knots which held the gag secure.
One furtive glance confirmed this inference. He swore bitterly, if privately and with a countenance of child-like blandness, as he sipped the coffee and finished his cigarette. "Who is it, then?" she asked. "Do you know him?" He reckoned swiftly against distressing her, recalling his mention of the fact that Ekstrom was credited with the Huysman murder.
The raw spirits stung like fire, but proved an instant aid to the badly jangled nerves of the adventurer. In another moment he was much more himself. Drinking in turn, Wertheimer put away the flask. "That's better!" he commented. "Now I'll be able to cut along with this blessed machine without fretting over the fate of Ekstrom. But till now I haven't been able to forget "
He had shown foresight in paying when served, and was consequently able to leave abruptly, without giving Ekstrom time to shy. Rising smartly, he pushed the table aside. The girl was no less quick, and little less sensitive to the strain of the moment; but as she passed him her lashes lifted and her eyes were all his for the instant. "Good night," she breathed "good night ... my dear!"
There was neither wit nor guess-work in that business; once I had seen Blensop's panic over the fancied loss of his pen, the rest was knowledge. I saw him and Ekstrom together last night skulking in those windows, I watched them; and though in my denseness I didn't understand, I saw him write upon that pad, tear off and give the sheet to Ekstrom.
Now the Valkyr seemed to have crept up to within the quarter of a mile of the biplane, and was boring on at a tremendous pace, its single spread of wings on an approximate level with that of the lower plane of the Parrott. But this last was rising steadily.... The driver's seat of the Valkyr held a muffled, burly figure that might be anybody De Morbihan, Ekstrom, or any other homicidal maniac.
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