“Suppose I come down into Spain and burgle your house--” her eyes lit up--“and I would do it! Or, suppose, when you have--settled down--and when you have all deposited your symbols of success in your banks, I planned a little coup and smashed your banks? I could do it easily and I would do it,” she said. “What would you do?” Their faces were a study. The Colonel was stroking his white moustache. Francis Stockmar was scowling horribly. Mr. Cunningham was staring blankly at the opposite wall. “Naturally you would not play such a low-down trick upon your old friends,” said the Colonel soothingly; “nobody believes you would, Kate. I mean, it would be tragic for some of us, after spending years of our lives accumulating a little nest egg to find we had become beggars in a night. Of course, speaking personally, I should consider myself exonerated from any responsibility I had in regard to our relationship and I should have to tell the police--” “You would call the police, too, would you? Would you, Stockmar?” “Yas,” said the stolid Austrian, “of goorse. The mooney to recover, ain’t it?” “And you?” “I don’t think you would do anything so treacherous,” said Mr. Cunningham; “naturally, we would not take that sort of thing lying down.” “Naturally,” said Colling Jacques, “the whole matter is this, when we go back to the respectable world and obey the laws, we, as citizens, are entitled to the protection which the laws give us.” “I see. You are, so to speak, touching wood. The wood is the law.” “That is it,” he said. Kate got up and walked to the one window of the room and looked out upon the dreary yard with its tangle of twisted machinery, its rusted boilers, its chaos of rotting cement bags. “Well, you can all do as you like,” she turned on them, “but I tell you this, that if you think you are going to--settle down--at my expense, and if you think I have been planning and scheming and play-acting and lying in order that you might all become respected parish councillors, you have made a mistake. You talk about my friends, if you are my friends, God help me! There is one man in the world who is worth the whole crowd of you.” She was interrupted by a crash as though a heavy body had been thrown against a door. Somebody fumbled with the lock and Gregori jumped up and threw it open. They half carried, half pushed a gagged and bound man through the doorway. Behind him peered the saturnine, malignant face of his captor, Doctor Garon. “Got him,” he said triumphantly. “Who is it?” asked Gregori, staring at the half conscious man. The girl did not ask. She went suddenly cold, for she knew it was Michael Pretherston. CHAPTER XVII. THE INDEPENDENT STRATEGY OF SEÑOR GREGORI