"I've got a lady coming here, as I told you--Mrs Kirby, to whom you telegraph sometimes. She won't get here till night, and I must wait for her. She'll have some urgent information to send across to the other side. Penney will meet her in Lincoln, where she'll arrive by train, and he'll bring her on by car." "You'd better keep to the bedroom," urged the old man. "They might come back later on." "Yes: I won't be seen," and returning to the stuffy little room, he reopened the cable instruments and soon got into communication with Stendel, in order to pass away the time which he knew must hang heavily upon his hands, for even then it was not yet nine o'clock in the morning. He sat smoking and gossiping with the old fisherman nearly all the day, impatient for the coming of darkness, for his imprisonment there was already becoming irksome. It grew dusk early when, about four o'clock, a footstep outside caused them both to start and listen. In answer to the summons at the door Tom went, and was handed a telegram by the boy messenger from Huttoft. Opening it, he found it had been despatched from London, and read: "Impossible to leave till to-morrow.--M." He gave it to Rodwell, who at once saw that the woman he expected had been delayed. Probably she had not yet been able to gather that important information which was wanted so urgently in Berlin. The telegram puzzled him. Was it possible that the arrangements which he had made with such cunning and forethought, and had left to Molly to carry out, had broken down after all? Lewin Rodwell bit his lip, and wondered. He seemed that day beset by misfortune, for when at five o'clock, Ted having returned, he tested the cable as usual, a call came through from Berlin. Rodwell answered it, whereupon "Number 70" flashed the following message beneath the sea. "Your information of this morning regarding troop-ships leaving Plymouth for Dardanelles is incorrect. _Desborough_ was torpedoed off Canary Islands on January 18th, and _Ellenborough_ is in dry dock in Belfast. Source of your report evidently unreliable." Rodwell read the words upon the long green tape as it slowly unwound, and sat staring at them like a man in a dream. CHAPTER NINETEEN. DAYS OF DARKNESS. On the same afternoon that Lewin Rodwell was stretching himself, impatient and somewhat nervous, in the lonely little house on the beach, Elise Shearman, pale and apprehensive, was seated in Sir Houston Bird's consulting-room in Cavendish Square. The spruce, young-looking pathologist, clean-shaven and grave, with hair streaked with grey, was listening intently to the girl's words. It was her second visit to him that day. In his waiting-room were half a dozen persons who had come to consult him, but the blue-eyed young lady had been ushered straight into the sanctum of the great Home Office expert.