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Page 30
A gleam of light was disappearing into the open sea.
He put his hand into his pocket and took out the scraps of torn
paper.
"These notes," he said, "like the ones which you hold in your
bank-vault, were never issued by the Bank of England."
I stammered some incoherent sentence; and the great chief of the
Criminal Investigation Department of Scotland Yard turned toward
me.
"Do you know who that woman is?"
"Surely," I cried, "she went to school with my sister at Miss
Page's; she came to visit Mrs. Jordan. . . ."
He looked at me steadily.
"She got the data about your sister out of the Back Bay
biographies and she used the accident of Mrs. Jordan's death to
get in with it . . . the rest was all fiction."
"Madame Barras?" I stuttered. "You mean Madame Barras?"
"Madame the Devil," he said. "That's Sunny Suzanne. Used to be
in the Hungarian Follies until the Soviet government of Austria
picked her up to place the imitation English money that its
presses were striking off in Vienna."
IV. The Cambered Foot
I shall not pretend that I knew the man in America or that he was
a friend of my family or that some one had written to me about
him. The plain truth is that I never laid eyes on him until Sir
Henry Marquis pointed him out to me the day after I went down
from here to London. It was in Piccadilly Circus.
"There's your American," said Sir Henry.
The girl paused for a few moments. There was profound silence.
"And that isn't all of it. Nobody presented him to me. I
deliberately picked him up!"
Three persons were in the drawing-room. An old woman with high
cheekbones, a bowed nose and a firm, thin-lipped mouth was the
central figure. She sat very straight in her chair, her head up
and her hands in her lap. An aged man, in the khaki uniform of a
major of yeomanry, stood at a window looking out, his hands
behind his back, his chin lifted as though he were endeavoring to
see something far away over the English country - something
beyond the little groups of Highland cattle and the great oak
trees.
Beside the old woman, on a dark wood frame, there was a fire
screen made of the pennant of a Highland regiment. Beyond her
was a table with a glass top. Under this cover, in a sort of
drawer lined with purple velvet, there were medals, trophies and
decorations visible below the sheet of glass. And on the table,
in a heavy metal frame, was the portrait of a young man in the
uniform of a captain of Highland infantry.
The girl who had been speaking sat in a big armchair by this
table. One knew instantly that she was an American. The liberty
of manner, the independence of expression, could not be mistaken
in a country of established forms. She had abundant brown hair
skillfully arranged under a smart French hat. Her eyes were
blue; not the blue of any painted color; it was the blue of
remote spaces in the tropic sky.
The old woman spoke without looking at the girl.
"Then," she said, "it's all quite as" - she hesitated for a word
- "extraordinary as we have been led to believe."
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