"Do you mean that these others--" He could not complete the sentence; his brain was in a whirl; was this why Natalie had sent him that strange message of hope? Calabressa released himself, and took his cap, and said, "I can tell you nothing, my dear friend--nothing. My lips are sealed for the present. But surely one is permitted to show you a common little trick with bits of paper!" "But you _must_ tell me what you mean," said Brand, breathlessly, and with his face still somewhat pale. "You suggest there has been a trick. That is why you have come from Naples? What do you know? What is about to happen? For God's sake, Calabressa, don't have any mystification about it: what is it that you know--that you suspect--that you have heard?" "My dear friend," said Calabressa, with some anxiety, "perhaps I have been indiscreet. I know nothing: what can I know? But I show you a trick--if only to prepare you for any news--and you think it is very serious. Oh no; do not be too hopeful--do not think it is serious--think it was a foolish trick--" And so, notwithstanding all that Brand could do to force some definite explanation from him, Calabressa succeeded in getting away, promising to carry to Natalie any message Brand might send in the evening; and as for Brand himself, it was now time for him to go up to Lisle Street, so that he had something else to think of than idle mystifications. For this was how he took it in the end: Calabressa was whimsical, fantastic, mysterious; he had been playing with the notion that Brand had been entrapped into this service; he had succeeded in showing himself how it might have been done. The worst of it was--had he been putting vain hopes into the mind of Natalie? Was this the cause of her message? In the midst of all this bewildering uncertainty, Brand set himself to the work left unfinished by Reitzei, and found Ferdinand Lind as pleasant and friendly a colleague as ever. But a few days after he was startled by being summoned back to Lisle Street, after he had gone home in the afternoon. He found Ferdinand Lind as calm and collected as usual, though he spoke in a hard, dry voice. He was then informed that Lind himself and Beratinsky were about to leave London for a time; that the Council wished Brand to conduct the business at Lisle Street as best he could in their absence; and that he was to summon to his aid such of the officers of the Society as he chose. He asked no explanations, and Lind vouchsafed none. There was something unusual in the expression of the man's face.