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 A little apart, and contrasting with them in bearing and mood, was a grey and brooding man of fifty.

"Mr. Lacey," Bane called him, with a queer mixture of respect and suspicion. Mr. Lacey was slight of build, like his daughter, and endowed with the dignity which, even in his brooding mood of depression, declared him a man of good birth and breeding. Obviously, he was out of place among these other companions of Bane; he shared nothing with them—least of all their expectant excitement. He knew the purpose of these airplanes and pilots with their tons of TNT and the knowledge overwhelmed him. He examined Pete and me with dull, absent-minded eyes.

He seemed, for a moment, familiar to me. Somewhere, under very different conditions, I had seen him; or perhaps it was his picture in a newspaper. His name, Lacey, as Bane repeated it, struck me more familiarly, too; it ought to carry some connotation. What? I wondered and tried to recall, as I shook hands with him.

His daughter hovered at his elbow, and he