Part 37 (2/2)

”Yes!” cried his companion. ”He has evidently gone that way. We must follow.”

”Hark!” I said. ”Listen to what they are saying! Delanne is following your father!”

”He is his worst enemy,” she said simply. ”Do you not remember that he was watching him in Manchester?”

The fact that he was an a.s.sociate of Reckitt puzzled me. I felt highly resentful that the fellow should have thus intruded upon my privacy and broken up my very pleasant evening. He had intruded himself upon me once before, causing me both annoyance and chagrin. I looked forth into the corridor, and there saw the figures of two men in the act of getting through the window at the end, while a waiter and a _femme-de-chambre_ stood looking on in surprise.

”Who is that man?” I asked of Sylvia, as I turned back into our salon.

”His real name is Guertin,” she replied.

”He told me that he knew you.”

”Perhaps,” she laughed, just a trifle uneasily, I thought. ”I only know that he is my father's enemy. He is evidently here to hunt him down, and to denounce him.”

”As what?”

But she only shrugged her shoulders. Next instant I saw that I had acted wrongly in asking Sylvia to expose her own father, whatever his faults might have been.

Again somebody rushed past the door and then back again to the head of the staircase. The whole of the quiet aristocratic hotel seemed to have suddenly awakened from its lethargy. Indeed, a hue and cry seemed to have been started after the man who had until a few moments before been my guest.

What could this mean? Had it not been for the fact that Guertin--or Delanne, as he called himself--was a friend of the a.s.sa.s.sin Reckitt, I would have believed him to have been an agent of the _surete_.

We heard shouting outside the window at the end of the corridor. It seemed as though a fierce chase had begun after the fugitive Englishman, for yet another man, a thin, respectably-dressed mechanic, had run along and slipped out of the window with ease as though acquired by long practice.

I, too, ran to the window and looked out. But all I could see in the night was a bewildering waste of roofs and chimneys extending along the Rue de Rivoli towards the Louvre. I could only distinguish one of the pursuers outlined against the sky. Then I returned to where Sylvia was standing pale and breathless.

Her face was haggard and drawn, and I knew of the great tension her nerves must be undergoing. Her father was certainly no coward. Fearing that he could not escape by either the front or back door of the hotel his mind had been quickly made up, and he had made his exit by that window, taking his chance to hide and avoid detection on those many roofs in the vicinity.

The position was, to me, extremely puzzling. I could not well press Sylvia to tell me the truth concerning her father, for I had noticed that she always had s.h.i.+elded him, as was natural for a daughter, after all.

Was he an a.s.sociate of Reckitt and Forbes, as I had once suspected?

Yet if he were, why should Delanne be his enemy, for he certainly was Reckitt's intimate friend.

Sylvia was filled with suppressed excitement. She also ran along the corridor and peered out of the window at the end. Then, apparently satisfied that her father had avoided meeting Delanne, she returned and stood again silent, her eyes staring straight before her as though dreading each second to hear shouts of triumph at the fugitive's detection.

I saw the manager and remonstrated with him. I was angry that my privacy should thus be disturbed by outsiders.

”Monsieur told the clerk that he was a friend,” he replied politely.

”Therefore he gave permission for him to be shown upstairs. I had no idea of such a contretemps, or such a regrettable scene as this!”

I saw he was full of regret, for the whole hotel seemed startled, and guests were asking each other what had occurred to create all that hubbub.

For an hour we waited, but Delanne did not return. He and the others had gone away over the roofs, on what seemed to be an entirely fruitless errand.

”Were they the police?” I heard a lady ask anxiously of a waiter.

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