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172 rapher. Must work in this house go on so continuously that it was necessary for some one to work at night, even when Santoine lay ill and unable to make other than the briefest and most important dispositions? And who was working in that room now, Avery or Harriet? He let himself think, idly, about the girl—how strange her life had been—that part of it at least which was spent, as he had gathered most of her waking hours of recent years had been spent, with her father. Strange, almost, as his own life! And what a wonderful girl it had made of her—clever, sweet, lovable, with more than a woman's ordinary capacity for devotion and self-sacrifice.

But, if she were the one working there, was she the sort of girl she had seemed to be? If her service to her father was not only on his personal side but if also she was intimate in his business affairs, must she not therefore have shared the cruel code which had terrorized Eaton for the last four years and kept him an exile in Asia and which, at any hour yet, threatened to take his life? A grim set came to Eaton's lips; his mind went again to his own affairs.