It was a long road to Rome for Lady Vera Moyle, but toward the end there came another stage in which the _wagon-lit_ forgot to swing and sing like humbler coaches, and the pale Campagna swam past unseen. It began with a knock behind the drawn blind of her compartment--now but a mirrored divan of Utrecht velvet and stamped leather--as unsuggestive of a good night's rest as the white face and the bright eyes behind the tiny table in the corner. "_Entrez!_" she cried with nervous irritation. The door opened and shut upon the somber face and long athletic limbs of John Dollar. "Doctor Dollar! I had no idea you were in the train!" Her voice had broken with very joy; her hand trembled pitifully during its momentary repose in his. "You have never shown up, you see," said he. "I have been in the next compartment all the way from Paris." "The next compartment on which side?" He jerked his head at his own reflection in the looking-glass door. "But there was a priest in there!" cried the girl. "There was the high priest of a new religion in which you'll never believe any more," said Dollar with a wry smile. "May he sit down for a minute, Lady Vera?" She looked at him with cooling eyes. "Certainly, Doctor Dollar, if it makes an explanation any easier." "I didn't intend to explain at all," he had the nerve to tell her. "I meant my ecclesiastical body to do that for me--but its wig was blown out of the window on the other side of Genoa. I've been hanging about all day in the hope of catching you. I couldn't leave it any longer. I had to give you these." And he placed upon the table between them the diamond necklace and pendant, the string of pearls, and the handful of rings she had been wearing in the night. "You made him give them up!" she cried, in thankful tears that never fell, but only softened and sweetened her indescribably. "Naturally," he laughed. "It wasn't very difficult." "And I thought you were a confederate when I saw you crossing the line together!" "I was putting the fear of a foreign jail upon him to the last. But he had a confederate in the train; he was in reserve outside your berth until I lured him into mine and laid him out. Otherwise I should have been with you sooner; but in one way it was better to take our man with your jewels on him--there was no getting out of it. The two of them were only too glad to be kicked out at the first station. And the other fellow was a man who broke into my house to see Croucher the first night we had him there." "Did they tell you so?" "No. I knew it at the time. I heard the whole thing, even to fragments of a conversation from which it was possible to reconstruct the plan they actually brought off last night. I make it a rule not to listen at patients' doors, any more than one would at other people's, but I'm not going to blush for this particular exception." Her soft wet eyes were looking him through and through. "Yet you kept him on--for my sake!"