I peculiarly remember my sense of well-being and happiness during that short walk. I was in a glow of satisfaction. Everything had turned out even better than I had expected. What did the scoop for the paper matter after all? Nothing, in comparison with the more or less intimate relations in which I now stood with Gideon Morse. I was to see Juanita constantly. She was almost mine already, and fortune had been marvelously on my side. Of course there would be obstacles, there was no doubt of that. I was no real match for her. But the obstacles in the future were as nothing to those that had been already surmounted. I began to smile with conceit at the diplomatic way in which I had dealt with the great financier; not for a single moment, as I put my key into the latch, did I dream that I had been played with the utmost skill, tied myself irrevocably to silence, and that horrible trouble and grim peril even now walked unseen by my side. When I got into the smoking-room I found things just as usual. I had hardly lit a last cigarette when the door opened and Preston entered. "Good heavens!" I said, "I never told you to wait up for me, Preston. There was not the slightest need. You ought to have been in bed hours ago." "So I was, Sir Thomas," he said looking at me in a surprised sort of way, and I noticed for the first time that he was wearing a gray flannel dressing-gown and slippers. "What do you mean?" "Until the telephone message came, Sir Thomas." "What telephone message?" "Why, yours, Sir Thomas." "I never telephoned. When do you mean?" "Not very long ago, Sir Thomas," he said, "I didn't take particular notice of the time, somewhere between one o'clock and now." I was on the alert at once, though I could not have particularly said why. "Are you quite sure that it was I who 'phoned?" "But, yes," he answered, "it was your voice, Sir Thomas. You said you were speaking from the office." "From the _Evening Special_? I've not been there since late afternoon. And when have I ever been there so late? There's never more than one person there all night long until six in the morning. It's not a morning paper as you know." Preston seemed more than ever bewildered as I flung this at him. "All I can say is, Sir Thomas," he said, "that I heard your voice distinctly and you said you were at the office." "What did I say exactly?" "About the young gentleman, Sir Thomas, the young gentleman who has come to stay for a time. Your instructions were that he should be wakened and told to come to Fleet Street without the least delay. You also said a taxicab would be waiting for him, by the time he was dressed, to drive him down." "And he went?" "Certainly, Sir Thomas, he was in his clothes quicker than I ever see a gentleman dress before, had a glass of milk and a biscuit, and the cab was just coming as I went down with him and opened the front door."