"Certainly, Holford," was his quick reply. "I confess that I had watched you for a year, and I felt that I could rely upon you. I wished to enlist your services as one of my assistants, and to initiate you into work for which the Government would pay well. It would assuredly have been worth your while to leave your business to the care of your manager, Mr. Pelham, and take service in the department of which I hold control. But, remember, when I asked you to come here, even I was deceived. I believed that my friend Greer, with whom I had had a slight quarrel a few weeks before, was dead. When I found what had really occurred, I saw that the only danger lay in your discovering the truth. Hence all that tangled chain of subterfuges." "But surely the Professor might, even now, be charged with murder--or at least with manslaughter!" I remarked. "My father may, Mr. Holford, if you do not preserve his terrible secret!" cried Ethelwynn. "Upon you alone depends all the future!" Once again I demanded the truth concerning Mabel and news of her whereabouts, but all Kirk would tell me was what Greer had already said--only a promise that we should meet, and that when we did she would make full and ample explanation. I returned to Bath Road utterly bewildered, and, seated with Gwen, related to her the whole facts from the first, just as I have here recounted them. She sat staring at me open-mouthed. "But where is Mabel?" she cried in alarm. "The Professor and the others have returned from abroad, yet she is still absent. Will they accord you no satisfaction?" "None!" I replied with a weary sigh. "I don't know, after all, whether to accept what has been related to me, or whether to disbelieve it." "The fact that the police refused to inquire into your story, Harry, seems sufficient proof that this man Kirk is a powerful and influential person. Indeed, does it not tend to confirm the story that the Professor did not die, and that he really killed the German in self-defence?" I admitted that it did. And then I made up my mind that, as Kirk would give me no satisfaction concerning Mabel, I, on my part, would decline to enter into any bond of secrecy. My wife was worth far more to me than any international complication. What was Germany's wrath at being foiled in her dastardly attempt to obtain the secret of the new steel, to Mabel's honour and her love? Two lagging days had gone by. Kershaw Kirk had called in the evening about seven o'clock, but I refused to see him. I sent word by Annie that I was out driving a car. "Tell Mr. Holford to come in and see me the instant he returns. I must speak to him at the earliest possible moment," he had said. And this was the message which the maid had brought to me when the astute official of the British Government had left.