Page:Arthur Stringer--The House of Intrigue.djvu/51

Rh box. And I took a deep breath as I turned around to where he was waiting for me.

"It may seem rather an absurd hour to dine, but the sooner we dig ourselves in, so to speak, the safer we may be for any possible attack," my Hero-Man suggested. And I hadn't eaten my second oyster before I realized the wisdom of that strategy.

It was not the house-detective, however, but the hotel manager himself who came to confer with Wendy Washburn. That conference took place just beyond my hearing. It showed that my Hero-Man, whatever he may have been, was at least a good actor. He neither lost his dignity nor over-did the part. He neither expostulated nor argued. He merely announced. And he did it so quietly that that hotel manager tucked his last suspicion into its four-poster of official politeness and apologized for what must have been a mistake of his employees.

"That's over, I imagine," my Hero-Man announced, as he rejoined me, quite unruffled. And as he sat across the table from me and went on with his dinner, as calmly as though we had dined together a thousand times, I did my best to study his face. I wanted to understand him.

But that face didn't seem an easy one to understand. At first it struck me as being cold. Then it