“Oh,” she said quickly, “then he _is_ coming?” “I don’t know why he shouldn’t,” he said slowly. There was a pause. “Shall you go?” “To London? I’ll think about it.” “There! You see? You refuse my first request.” “I would like to know your purpose.” “I think you know it already,” she put in quickly. “You want something that I cannot give you--something that is not mine to give.” She had come out into the open defiantly and he met her challenge with a laugh. “Because it is Hammersley’s?” he said. “You think so and Hammersley thinks so, and possession is nine points of the law. But I will contest.” “Your visit is vain. Go back to London, my friend.” “I find it pleasanter here.” “Then you refuse?” “I must.” “Then it is war between us.” “If you will have it so,” he said, with an inclination of the head. Doris put her foot on the fender and leaned with her hands upon her knee for a moment as though in deep thought. Then she turned toward the door. “Come,” she said coolly. “Let us join the others.” There was a relief in the thought that at least they had come to an understanding and that the matter of the possession of the papers had at last become a private contest between them. She had brought the interview to an end not because she was afraid to continue it but because she wanted to think of a plan to disarm him. She felt that she was moving in the dark but she trusted to her delicate woman’s sense of touch to stumble upon some chance, some slip of his tongue, which might lead her into the light. In the drawing-room by common consent all talk of war had been abolished. She sat in at a hand of auction, but playing badly, she was gladly relinquished by her partner at the end of the rubber. John Rizzio, who disliked the game, had gone off for a quiet smoke, but when she got up from the card table he was there waiting for her. “Cyril shall know of this,” laughed Betty, as they went toward the door. “They say that absence makes the heart grow fonder--of the other fellow.” Doris led the way to the gun-room, a place used by Algie Heathcote for his sporting implements and trophies of the chase. It was comfortably furnished in leather and oak and a cheerful fire was burning in the grate. Doris sank into the davenport and motioned to her companion to the place at her side. She was thoroughly alive to her danger, but the sportswoman in her made her keen to put it to the test. “We are quite alone here,” she said coolly. “The others are not even within call. Now what do you want of me?” Her audacity rather startled him, but he folded his arms and leaned back smiling. “The papers of Riz-la-Croix, of course,” he said amiably. “And how do you know they’re in my possession?” He shrugged. “Because they couldn’t possibly be anywhere else.” “How do you know?” “Because I have exhausted every other resource.” “You’re frank at least--including the burglary at Ashwater Park and the messing in my box upstairs?”