Several times during the night Nella inquired for her father, but could gain no knowledge of his whereabouts. Now, at half-past six in the morning, a rumour had mysteriously spread among the servants of the hotel about the happenings of the night before. How it had originated no one could have determined, but it had originated. ‘Where is my father?’ Nella asked of Hans. He shrugged his shoulders, and pointed upwards. ‘Somewhere at the top, they say.’ Nella almost ran out of the room. Her interruption of the interview between Jules and Theodore Racksole has already been described. As she came downstairs with her father she said again, ‘Prince Eugen is dying-- but I think you can save him.’ ‘I?’ exclaimed Theodore. ‘Yes,’ she repeated positively. ‘I will tell you what I want you to do, and you must do it.’ Chapter Twenty-Nine THEODORE IS CALLED TO THE RESCUE AS Nella passed downstairs from the top storey with her father--the lifts had not yet begun to work--she drew him into her own room, and closed the door. ‘What’s this all about?’ he asked, somewhat mystified, and even alarmed by the extreme seriousness of her face. ‘Dad,’ the girl began, ‘you are very rich, aren’t you? very, very rich?’ She smiled anxiously, timidly. He did not remember to have seen that expression on her face before. He wanted to make a facetious reply, but checked himself. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I am. You ought to know that by this time.’ ‘How soon could you realize a million pounds?’ ‘A million--what?’ he cried. Even he was staggered by her calm reference to this gigantic sum. ‘What on earth are you driving at?’ ‘A million pounds, I said. That is to say, five million dollars. How soon could you realize as much as that?’ ‘Oh!’ he answered, ‘in about a month, if I went about it neatly enough. I could unload as much as that in a month without scaring Wall Street and other places. But it would want some arrangement.’ ‘Useless!’ she exclaimed. ‘Couldn’t you do it quicker, if you really had to?’ ‘If I really had to, I could fix it in a week, but it would make things lively, and I should lose on the job.’ ‘Couldn’t you,’ she persisted, ‘couldn’t you go down this morning and raise a million, somehow, if it was a matter of life and death?’ He hesitated. ‘Look here, Nella,’ he said, ‘what is it you’ve got up your sleeve?’ ‘Just answer my question, Dad, and try not to think that I’m a stark, staring lunatic.’ ‘I rather expect I could get a million this morning, even in London. But it would cost pretty dear. It might cost me fifty thousand pounds, and there would be the dickens of an upset in New York--a sort of grand universal slump in my holdings.’ ‘Why should New York know anything about it?’