The suggestion seemed a sensible one; and although I fully shared Northcote's lack of confidence in his cousin, I had no wish to quarrel with the latter for the present. That was a luxury which I must postpone until I was a little more certain of my ground. "Very good," I said. "I'll be ready in a minute. I must just go upstairs and get some papers." "Right you are," he drawled. "Don't be too long." I mounted the stairs feeling in anything but an amiable temper. Open danger one can face with calmness, but this back-door assassination business was beginning to get on my nerves. I understood why Northcote had been driven to such a desperate step, and I cursed my folly in not having insisted on a fuller explanation from him before tackling the business. The fact probably was that he wanted me to be killed; thus ridding himself for ever of the danger that threatened him. For all I knew, he might even have lied to me in what he did say. However, there was no getting out of it now. Apart from going back on my word (a useful habit that has never particularly appealed to me), I was determined to see the thing through for my own satisfaction. I object to being murdered, even in mistake for someone else, and it was my ardent wish to bring that objection home very forcibly to my unknown friends. Besides, there was Mercia. What precisely she was doing in that galley I couldn't say, but, like the hero in a play, I felt certain that it was "no place for her." I pictured her in an altogether different environment, a pleasant phase of thought which restored me to a more harmonious frame of mind. What I had really come upstairs for was Northcote's pocket-book. I had promised him to keep any engagements he had made for the first few days, and I wanted to see if I had a programme mapped out for that afternoon. When I turned up the page, I found two entries: one an appointment with his tailor in Sackville Street at 12.30, and the other a directors' meeting of the London General Traffic Company at the Cannon Street Hotel after lunch. Neither sounded particularly important, but for lack of anything better to do I decided to attend them both. I was becoming quite interested in Northcote's private affairs. When I came downstairs I found Maurice waiting for me in the hall. It struck me again that there was a kind of suppressed satisfaction in his manner, but I put it down as being very probably due to my imagination. In my present state of mind, it was easy to discover suspicious symptoms in everyone. "By the way," he said carelessly, as the door closed behind us, "do you want to get another man permanently, or just to fill Milford's place while he's seedy?" "Oh, only for the time, of course," I said. "I couldn't part with Milford." He nodded. "That will be quite easy. Seagrave's can always turn you in a temporary man. You'd better leave it to them."