THE three met at breakfast and Faraday gave no hint of his recent tremendous experience. He was taciturn as usual, but the letters that awaited him loosened his tongue and he spoke to Greta and Ernest as they ate their meal.
“In the present confusion of interests represented by politics it will be hard to establish a firm foundation for the Commission on Atomic Energy ordained by the United Nations,” he said. “But one thing is certain: those representing Science should insist on having a paramount position upon it and future international agreements must respect the liberty of the individual demanded by men like myself. The traditions and rights as well as the obligations of science have to be considered and no curb for a moment set upon its freedom. We have always honoured our rights and duties, and no return to collective security, as a way out of the problem confronting all sovereign States, can for a moment be tolerated by us in future. The myth of collective security must never be revived again.”
He went on to say that it was his intention to place his discoveries before the world at a very early date.
“Everything is done and I am now actually composing my announcement,” he told them. “A communication to The Times may be the better course; but the Royal Society is anxious that I shall address the nation through them in person.”
After breakfast was ended Greta disappeared as swiftly as she might and an hour later, being invited to do so, her husband accompanied Faraday to the laboratory. None was working there now but the director himself, for what remained to be done needed no assistants. The great place streaked with morning sunshine stretched empty save for machines and scientific appliances that caught the light in a maze of glass or polished steel. Faraday pointed to the vast domes of metal that rose through the roof.
“These are midgets compared with the machinery in America. My laboratory is like a tiny model of what stands there,” he explained, “but it cost a million, has answered its purpose, and enabled me to reach my goal.”
“More than a million,” answered Trensham. “Two innocent and worthy lives.”
His desire was to convince the other that a decision had yet to be made; but Faraday showed no vexation.
“We can leave that until we meet to-night, Ernest,” he answered. “For the moment I only desired to give you a glimpse of my workshop, which I have never done since it was completed and at work. Very few human eyes have looked upon this strange scene and I shall probably get it photographed as an historical document before I pull it down. Much has been accomplished here — much of more lasting value to humanity than the creation of the atomic bomb. Years of personal and concentrated labour have taught me how to create this terrific power, how to harness it and how to derive it from sources unguessed. That is my master achievement: the discovery of a synthesis of elements utterly unimagined.”
“And controllable?”
“As controllable as steam, or gas, or the electric current, yet atomic in their immensity.”
A little later he did an extraordinary thing: he unlocked the drawer of a stout chest and lifted from it for a moment a square block of heavy metal.
“Lead,” he told his companion. “The receptacle which contains the radium I stole from St. Luke’s hospital. It will be here, to prove a valuable piece of evidence against me in a certain event.”
Faraday then returned the object and locked it up, while his companion remained silent and too astonished to utter any comment.
“I am not showing you my materials,” continued the other, “because obviously no detail concerning them will ever reach you, or anybody else, should you decide that my discoveries shall not be made public. In that case neither shall I speak or write concerning them, nor leave a clue of any sort behind me. It is important, therefore, that I hear to-night where I stand. Our conclusion may be described as ‘a gentleman’s agreement.’ I realize my position and you feel no difficulty in doing the same, no doubt.”
“The Crown would be final arbiter, not I,” said his brother-in-law.
“We may assume I should be allowed to live: a disappointing sequel for you, Ernest, because, in that case my life would represent no return whatever for you and I should not be called to thank you for it.”
Faraday amused himself with remarks of this kind and presently dismissed the other.
“Now I must go to work,” he said, “and I shall do so on the assumption that my news is to be made known and the world soon the wiser. If otherwise, then considerable details have yet to be planned that all may be neat and orderly. My bargaining counters must be sorted out and my bequests considered. I have enough atomic energy bottled up here to separate Devon from Cornwall if liberated improperly, and the disposal of this hurricane would seem to be largely a matter for your decision. You will tell me what I must know to-night at the belvedere.”
The other did not believe this statement, but was none the less glad to be gone. He had kept up his pretence of an open mind with a conclusion yet to reach, but he well knew that Faraday was aware of what he would say that night. For the moment his thoughts ran on the laboratory. There was nothing sinister about it, but he guessed that his invitation to see it might be a prelude to the suggestion that the final meeting should take place there — a course common caution urged him to decline.
They did not meet at lunch, for the scientist telephoned, as he often did about midday, that a meal should be sent to him; and when Greta was alone with her husband, she submitted another cause for care and opened a new line of thought.
“Thank God I need not see him again now,” she said, “for I shall not be home for tea and can say I have a headache and avoid dinner; but, though you feel no danger and would admit none, remember this when you meet him up there. You know where you stand and are bringing him what, of course, will ease his mind and clear the future for him. But, against that, you have to remember he may have made his own plans too. He faces what he knows to be a doubtful situation and you have to ask yourself how he may decide to act in that situation. We know the truth of the situation, but he does not. You lied and he believed you, assuming the facts must be as you stated. It was natural that he should believe you. But, believing you, we have to see how he may be thinking now.”
“He and I think alike, Greta. I know him well enough to see that.”
“Know him? What ordinary human being, moved and actuated by ordinary human impulses, knows him? God forbid you should know him, so listen to me and don’t assume for a moment you and he think alike, or view the position alike.”
“I only told one falsehood, but it was largely spoken to save you the fate of having to face him again after he was aware you knew what he had done.”
“I felt thankful to avoid that; but, when I could see straight this morning and use my brains, something which looked equally horrible appeared and no lie will save me from it. I have his blood in me and some of his power to look through a thing; so I looked through this. It offered no flaw from your point of view; you listened and it was reasonable that he should argue for the greater issues. It looks all right now; but how can things ever be right? What is truth to him, though he swears only by truth to your face? How shall you trust a man that could do what he has done?”
“Failure on his part to keep faith would mean his instant exposure.”
“Not instant exposure but long delayed exposure, Ernest, and how would you explain your delay?” she answered. “But now do see how he must view his position from a different standpoint than you can. It wanted no diplomacy or cunning to make him believe you when you said that nobody on earth but yourself knew the facts. Had you confided in others, he would have found a different welcome on reaching England. But how does he stand now? He is convinced that one person only knows what he has done, and if he would rather kill you than present you with a fabulous sum of money — if he decides that it would be simpler to murder you than pay for your silence — what more likely than that he will try to do so? That is how I feel now, beloved, and I cannot see why this final meeting should be made at all, or why you should see him again. I would feel a thousand times happier if you got into your car at once and never stopped driving until you were safe in London.”
He shook his head.
“This is a bad dream,” he told her. “Just your love for me building up imaginary perils for me. But no need to fear any more violence, or imagine he is thinking like that. He wants peace and a free hand to proceed on his way. If you had been able to hear us talking, you would have seen everything that occupied his mind. He could find means to kill me, no doubt; any resolute and intelligent man can kill a fellow-creature if determined to do so; but my death would only complicate his life for the moment and he knows I should not be easy to liquidate. We cannot be sure that he does believe me so completely as you imagine. He may suspect I have a secret security and that any sudden end to me would let loose the truth in some quarter vital for him. It would be elementary to assume a man with my vast experience of crime is not going to take this line unprotected. He probably argues that even, while none at the moment knows the truth, it is contained in documentary evidence, to be opened in the event of any mystery overtaking me. No, he is trustable, just as he knows I am trustable. We have in fact to admit the element of trust.”
His wife, however, renewed her entreaties, but found him convinced that, once safe himself, Faraday was not going to plan danger for others.
“If he ever did take any subject on a higher plane than his personal welfare, it is the subject of his discovery,” Ernest told her. “In all concerning that he is to be relied upon with absolute confidence, and now, at the summit of his hopes, he will have no thought for any lesser thing until his proclamation is made. Then he will turn to me, keep his promises and regard the whole dreadful matter as an incident of no significance in his story. He will not waste any hatred on me. Indeed I don’t think, as I have heard you say, he can hate any more than he can love. He is the robot sort of man that he would like us all to be. I have never denied his genius, or the splendour of his goal. This he knows and will not misjudge my motives. To let him go on with his life is justified by my belief in what he is going to do with it, and therefore the ethical conclusion for me to come to. Your favourite author, George Sand, says, ‘Ask from no man what he was, or what he wanted yesterday.’ What we are and what we want to-day will not be what we are and what we want a year hence.”
“If you have already forgotten how to hate,” answered Greta, “then perhaps to-morrow you will have forgotten how to love.”
“All the love I ever had, or shall have, is yours and I would never do anything to lose one heart-beat of your love,” he answered. “If I love you, it follows that I hate him; but because I love you and your security and happiness I take this course. Hate him I must for the abomination he is. The devil hasn’t made me forget he is one.”
His wife interrupted.
“Leave all that now and think of your security as well as my own. Anybody can see that he might think it vital to destroy you. If his own flesh and blood, why not you?”
“Don’t go over the old ground,” he begged. “We view him alike, but I look farther ahead than you and read him a little deeper. He would never waste time and thought, or court personal dangers, or commit a needless crime. Our understanding is founded on a rational basis that satisfies us both.”
She shook her head.
“I leave you to your wishful thinking, darling, but I shall not be content until we are both in another air than this.”
“That will be very soon now,” he promised.
Faraday reappeared at dinner declaring himself weary.
“To leave everything safe and orderly is a great task,” he said. “Above all to leave it safe. I am surprised myself at the immense amount of priceless but highly dangerous material accumulated here. Ignorance might play the deuce with it.”
“You’ll come back to dismantle it yourself, no doubt,” suggested Ernest, but the other thought that improbable.
“Wiser to dispose of the peril before I leave,” he answered. “I shall convey certain material to London for exhibition purposes, but all that really matters is in my head and only safe there. My synthesis remains unknown until the world is more trustworthy than at present, and I may yet change my mind and deny this knowledge even to our own Government.”
Greta was not with them at dinner and Faraday continued to keep up the farce of conversation during the meal. When it was ended he prepared to return to the laboratory.
“I shall work there until a quarter to eleven,” he said. “I shall then shut up and ascend to the gazebo. You can count on me there at twelve and we will come down together. There is going to be nothing in writing, but a formal declaration, first from you and then from me. Deeds are better than words and, in the event of an understanding, within a few months I make the transfer. Meantime, if you and Greta want to buy a big place and launch out, an estate can be acquired. If I may advise you will do no such thing, because, should the Coalition go out of office at the next general election and the nation find socialism at the helm, then big estates may be cheap; but they will probably prove costly to run and your boot-black demand more money than your butler gets at present. No red rebellion, no guillotines and tumbrils for our sort; but extermination by the gentle means of confiscation, starvation and nationalization. The middle-classes will become museum specimens and, in their turn, the socialists find communism win the masses and hear our philosophers explain that evolution is inevitable and eternal.”
“And where will atomic energy come in?” asked Ernest.
“On the side of the truth — truth meaning everlasting change,” declared the other. “We shall always advance, but never arrive.”
The time was now near nine o’clock and the night very dark and rough, with promise of rain from the sea. Trensham spent an hour with his wife and strove to abate her anxiety, but she made no attempt to conceal it, inquired as to why they could not come to a conclusion at Cliff and what was the point of climbing to the belvedere, or leaving the house again.
“It is all so unreal and theatrical and utterly unlike Faraday,” she said. “Another man might plan this mystery and secrecy, but not him. Then why these silly solemnities and rubbish about nothing in writing? Heaven knows what he may have in writing, or in his head either. He may have police hidden up there to arrest you for blackmail. He may be going to fight you and declare your charges false in every particular.”
He deplored her attitude.
“I’ll protect myself and go armed to please you,” he promised. “It has been my business to watch my step on many an occasion and I never did so in vain. We cannot see him with the same eyes, my treasure, but I have seldom failed to read character and, if ever there was a man who desires nothing but peace at present and no complications in his life, it is he. One must allow even such a self-contained creature to be thrown out of his stride by an awful upset like this, but his purpose is as clear as crystal to me. He is a realist and, after the first shock, quickly grasped that only one hope remained for him. I had never thought of such a way out myself, needless to tell you; but when he submitted it and I put it to the needful tests, being also a realist and having to admit the weight and even justice of what he suggested I decided finally as I have done. To destroy himself he would consider a crime against science and recognizes no other judge.”
“Leaving me to destroy him single-handed.”
Her husband made no answer to that.
“Expect me back again soon after midnight,” he told her. “We shall return together, for the interview will not occupy five minutes. Silly, I grant you, but he wished it so.”
“Why?” she asked. Then Greta’s heart turned solely to him. “Can’t you even now feel that he had a reason? Does he ever plan silly things? I have always believed your word like the gospel, but for the first time in our lives, I feel nothing, nothing is right with it. Oh, my dearest, cannot you believe me and admit how much there is on my side? Have you ever found my intuitions mistaken? They are rare enough; but they were never wrong.”
“Nor can you say that mine are. Why doubt where my mind is so clear, Greta? First and above all else you are safe. Even if anything happened to me, he could have no quarrel with you.”
“If anything happened to you, I shall kill him,” she answered. “Remember that. As surely as evil overtook you, Ernest, so surely will the truth of him be known; and if the State were to decide for him to live, then I myself shall end his life.”
He kissed her and left her then, his mind occupied with the last thing she had said to him. Her ferocity impressed him, for she had uttered these words without passion or rise of voice. ‘If she were right, which happily she is not, she would spend the balance of her widowed life hunting down that man,’ he reflected.
Convinced that he stood on firm ground and unable to see the force of his wife’s argument, he left the house presently and went on his way through Cliff gardens to the hill-top above them. Familiar enough was the pathway that wound by hair-pin bends aloft. He turned up his coat collar and proceeded slowly, for he desired to be somewhat late and satisfy himself that his brother-in-law was at the belvedere before he arrived. He felt no shadow of alarm and dismissed Greta’s fears as sprung from ignorance of Faraday’s real attitude to the future. He was satisfied with his reading of human nature and, seeing that the scientist had behaved under his ordeal as he would have done himself in reversed circumstances, proceeded with a mind unclouded by any doubt and his thoughts merely concerned to use the right words and strike the right note when they met. Formalities were absurd and written exchange likewise futile for, if Heron failed to keep his promise, he would know the consequence. Before this massive certainty many other possibilities were overlooked by the triumphant man and he climbed, through darkness without and contentment within, to the rendezvous.
The path turned off the cliff presently into a rough thicket, then over open ground where, amid boulders, grew the sea-pink and white rock rose. Here he delayed a moment, for the gazebo crowned this elevation perched on a red sandstone precipice with its face to the sea. No light shone from the window, however, and, five minutes after his time, Trensham believed he must be the first to arrive. He hesitated a moment, then stepped forward and, as he did so, his doubt was relieved, for the electric light within the little building flashed on and a sound came from it. The beam made it darker without and in a dozen strides, after shouting his approach, he entered the open door. Broad windows of plate glass which could be slid away in fine weather, opened to seaward, but now they were closed. A marine telescope stood on a tripod beside one of them and a table and easy-chairs occupied the chamber. As Ernest crossed the threshold, an object dropped from the ceiling on to the stone floor. He had just begun to express regret for his late arrival as this happened and, with the words on his lips, was turned to dust. In the fraction of a second there roared a blaze of flame and broke a bellow of thunder. Overpowering might thrust upward and downward. The little building rose like a feather into the air, to crash in marble rubble upon the waves beneath, and the conglomerate rock on which it stood was carved as by a giant knife, sliced from the solid earth and the whole cliff-side thrown into the sea. A glare to blind normal eyes accompanied the explosion and the volume of sound had surely deafened any ear at hand; but nothing with life might have survived. The region was blasted in a moment; from grass to tree all vanished and only a raw and gaping chasm remained streaked with red-hot stone and crumbling earth. The dazzle and din died slowly together; the fires went out; the earth-born thunder reverberated along the coast and was still; but for long the broken precipices continued to fall and their vibrations shook peak and pinnacle up and down the coast line. Masses of stone fell from aloft to sea and strand, and dawn was destined to show familiar land-marks had vanished for ever, the contours of the cliff-faces changed. Morning revealed a little corner of Devon’s shore remodelled, but the night hid all under curtains of falling rain, intensified by this convulsion.
It was near midnight when the sleeping countryside awakened before a summons so tremendous and some minutes later a telephone at Cliff House throbbed shrilly. The great mansion had trembled with the earth that bore it and people already in bed there arisen to join and win support from each other. Old Roger Horn answered the telephone and cried ‘Thank God!’ when he heard it, for he believed from the first that this was no thunderstorm but signified the death of his master and the destruction of the laboratory. But the familiar tinkle came with hope for him and other domestics, who crowded to learn what news there might be.
Faraday himself had rung to hear if all was well and let it be known that no harm had overtaken him or the laboratory. He spoke with Horn and then sent a message.
“Let the Trenshams hear that I am all right,” he said. “What I believe to be a meteorite has fallen on the top of the hill and I am now going up with my home guard to see where. It sounded like a bomb, but can hardly have been that. A vast ærolite probably. Tell them I’ll be back in an hour or so and prepare some food for me. Then everybody go to bed.”
Aware that Ernest was out-of-doors, Horn hastened with his message to her rooms and met Greta descending from them. The explosion had broken upon her reverie and the glare of the distant flame illuminated her where she sat in darkness counting the minutes before her husband should return. She leapt to the window and saw that a great light enveloped the precipice westward and crowned their summit. And that told her much, but not all. Her thoughts had travelled far since Ernest left her and, until this moment, their tendency, while diminishing personal alarm for him, increased great mental misery as to the future of them both. Now terror reawakened. What she had seen and heard meant death — of that she felt small doubt. But something inclined her to believe that both men might have perished. Then, through the murmur of voices below, there presently broke the sound of the telephone and she guessed the truth, which Horn confirmed a few minutes later.
“ ’Twas Sir Faraday, Madam,” he said. “He’s rung up from the works to say he’s all right and to know if you are. I told him to my certain knowledge you was, but that Mr. Trensham had gone out three parts of an hour ago. ‘Gone out!’ he said. ‘Why the devil did he want to go out on a dirty night like this?’ But it’s not uncommon for Mr. Trensham to take the air after dinner. Then Sir Faraday said the rumpus looked to have burst out on top of the hill and he was going up to see if he could make anything of it. He thinks it was a thunder-stone fell from the sky. He bade me to say he ordained to be home in an hour or thereabout.”
The old man went his way and Greta saw the immediate past unfold before her eyes and marked the fabric of the future with uncanny intuition. No difficulty any longer presented itself. The hope that her brother might have lost his life had vanished, but she knew now that her husband was dead.
He had kept his appointment and fallen victim to his own false reading of Faraday. She faced her own position and realized her brother would swiftly return. He would dwell on the magnitude of the disaster and suggest all manner of possibilities but the true one; he would face the subsequent inquiry, declare his utter ignorance of the vanished man’s purpose, should he be found dead and hazard no suggestion concerning Ernest’s movements if no trace of him appeared. Greta was practical and grasped the situation. She knew that she could never meet Faraday again without revealing her knowledge, and also knew that, if that happened, her own thread would soon be cut. Her heart told her that life was worthless already since Ernest could share it no more, but she nerved herself for the task before her: her brother’s destruction. For a moment she contemplated killing him when he presently returned to tell his tale. But instead she concentrated on instant flight. She dressed for the road, descended to the garage, crept away in her own car and passed from her home into the darkness. She had bidden her maid retire and none marked her retreat, nor did the great, ceremonial gates of Cliff open for her, but a lesser entrance a mile distant, through which she usually chose to go and come. Before one o’clock Greta was on the road to East Devon, designing to ring up London friends at dawn and reach them as soon as she might. She carried little with her, but the vital documents in town she would hand with the rest of her story to those concerned to-morrow. Then it seemed that her brother faded from the foreground of the woman’s thoughts, becoming but an amorphous, malignant shadow no longer to be feared yet for ever hated as the supreme evil that life had brought upon her. Greta’s mind occupied itself with her husband and, while speeding through the night, she traced their united years of devotion. Since he brought his story to her, she perceived how their steadfast cadence had first begun to fall out of harmony and reveal a dissonance unheard and unguessed till then. Gradually, unknown to Ernest but recognized by her, the rift widened. It seemed disloyal and she had striven to explain it away, told herself it was inevitable that he should view the dreadful facts differently. He had long passed through the storm of rage and horror that still shook her and had brought patience and his wide experience of crime to the outrage. Murder had been his business for many years and he was too strong and restrained to suffer even deeds so atrocious to waken passion, or endanger his steadfast answer to their challenge. She strove thus to explain his pacific outlook upon Faraday’s value to humanity; but this attitude did not quench her own fiery hatred and could never again do so. She had done her best to turn him from his purpose and impress his danger upon him; but much was already mingled with the old love, ere their last parting: sorrow for his revealed weakness and a throb of something like indignation to find that he could hold her entreaties so lightly. Now all Greta’s fears were justified, for she knew that he had paid the penalty and was dead. No ray of hope lessened this conviction as she drove forward through the darkness.
Meantime her brother returned to Cliff somewhat more than an hour after she had departed, and Horn awaited him.
“A mighty catastrophe up aloft, Roger,” he said. “One can determine little to-night, but with torches we saw more than enough to show tremendous things. The gazebo is clean gone — hundreds of tons of white marble thrown down into the sea and thousands of tons of cliff swept off the shore. This is no natural landslide and I begin to fear enemy action. But what enemy? Where’s my sister?”
“To bed, Sir Faraday.”
“And Trensham? Did he get back all right? In that case I needn’t summon them till morning.”
“No. He’s not back, Sir, and I lay the lady’s awake in trouble.”
Faraday turned to the food and wine awaiting him.
“Better let her know I’m home and tell her to come down and see me. I don’t like this, Roger. Why did he go out at all?”
“For a breath of air — so he said, Master. He often will of a night.”
“Nonsense! Perhaps she knows the reason. Tell her I want to see her.”
Left alone he flung off his raincoat and turned to the meal. He had climbed with some of his laboratory guard as near the scene of the explosion as they might venture, to find the cliffs rent before them and a vast, smoking gap where the gazebo stood. Danger yawned on every side in the darkness and all soon returned to safety while he, for the benefit of his companions, uttered an imaginary theory of the facts.
“Too soon to judge,” he said, “but I have a rather dreadful fear this is man’s work, though the war’s over. What I am doing and have already done is known throughout Europe and there may be plenty of Nazi scientists operating in secret. They know my work and have attempted more than once to get us during the last five years. I don’t say it is so, but I feel it possible that this was another attempt. And not a bad shot — only a mile and a half from the laboratory. We shall hear to-morrow if any planes were over us.”
He elaborated the theme and spoke with pretended conviction.
“If this had touched the works,” said one of the little group, “then there wouldn’t have been a whisker among the lot of us to tell the tale, Sir Faraday.”
“Not a waistcoat button, or the link of a watch-chain, my friend. The blast from above would have been answered by a far greater from the laboratory itself. Not only my works and me, but Cliff House might have gone, and half the parish with us.”
Now he was at home again, drinking his hot soup and considering what to say when Greta joined him. As Trensham had climbed the hill to his funeral pyre full of words about to be spoken, so now Faraday prepared to receive his sister and declare his concern and alarm, or display neither. She had never seen him in grave trouble for anybody and knew very well that he cared little for Ernest, so he decided not to associate his brother-in-law with the night’s work, but suggest that he had been cut off on his way home by the explosion and might be counted upon to return with daylight. Then came Horn, after some delay, to report that his sister was not to be found.
“I called up her maiden when she didn’t reply to my knocking,” he said, “and Florence couldn’t get any response either and went in and discovered the mistress wasn’t there, Sir Faraday. She’s looked high and low and not a trace, and the sum total mounts up to be that Mrs. Trensham has gone forth, because her out-door clothes are missing.”
The younger started from his chair.
“Gone out! Where should she go to?” he asked and, to the old man’s surprise, showed excitement.
“Only her Maker can say, Sir Faraday,” he answered. “Maybe to seek Mr. Ernest.”
But a single question concerned Faraday now.
“Ring up the garage and find if she has been there,” he ordered; then, as Horn hastened to obey, the other’s mind moved swiftly and truth rolled in a torrent where falsehood till now had misguided it. Here was one ever ready to welcome truth and acknowledge error; but now the stark thing faced him in awful and unexpected shape and the lie he had believed and acted upon shattered all security. In his hour of fancied triumph, truth had opened the door to an apocalypse of ruin, disgrace and possible death. He had committed Trensham’s own error and, while seducing the lesser man with a falsehood, had himself fallen victim to one. That Greta knew nothing had been accepted as an elementary truth and deceived him utterly. He was reconstructing the future when Horn returned; but the old man brought no surprise except his own and Faraday accepted Greta’s departure as inevitable, for he dealt now with reality. In the conviction that his secret would never reach her he had charted her reaction to Ernest’s death and was prepared with suggestions to explain it and words to declare his regret. He had taken Trensham into the laboratory that morning, where he was shown experimental atomic bombs of varied sizes, presently to be displayed to science, and Faraday proposed to pretend fear that the vanished man might have picked one up and subsequently come to grief with the thing; but now a far different sequel promised. Greta knew the truth and had doubtless known it before he returned to England. She was in her husband’s secrets and had played her part; she knew whither he had gone that night and why. She had heard everything concerning their bargaining and probably felt as much surprise as Faraday himself to find Trensham so easily fall to the bait. And now, with the knowledge that Ernest was dead, Greta had the start of him to some doubtful destination by little more than an hour.