“I saved you, Ellen, when you asked me to save you. While McNagel ran to fetch you I put back into the bookcase the law book from which Collander was copying out the citation for his brief—the law book that he held up before him to ward off your first shot—the bullet-hole is in the cover of it. “Ellen,” he said, “if you had fired down over that book the second time instead of up under it, as you did, I don’t know how in hell I could have managed to clear you!” CHAPTER X The Inspiration “Will there be a bobby to hear her scream, north of the Zambezi?” There were two persons in the room. It was a small room, looking out over St. James’s Park, and attached to the library of the great London house. It was meant for the comfort of one who wished to withdraw from the library in order to examine some book at his leisure, or to make some annotation. There were a table, two comfortable chairs, and a painting, rather large for the room, representing an affair of honor on a snow-covered highway in the rear of a French column, presumably Napoleon’s army in Russia. The conversation between the two persons in the room, Lord Donald Muir and Walker, of the American Secret Service, had passed its preliminary stage. The youth seated in one of the great chairs was a typical product of the aristocracy of England. He was little more than a boy, but he had already something of the reserve, the almost pretentious restraint, of his race. But he was not entirely within this discipline; an intensity of feeling broke out. It appeared now and then in a word, in an inflection of his voice, in a gesture. He sat very straight in the chair, in his well-cut evening clothes—his gloves crushed together and gripped in a firm hand that could not remain idle under his intensity of feeling. He was a very good-looking boy, with a single startling feature, his eyebrows were straight and dark, while his hair, weathered by the outdoors, was straw-colored. It gave his blue eyes at all times a somewhat tense expression. Walker had come to London for a conference with the American Ambassador on the passport forgeries, and he had remained a guest at the Embassy ball. And when the Ambassador had asked him to hear the boy and help him if he could, he had gone with Lord Donald Muir into the little room beyond the great library. The Ambassador had explained the matter. He had given him each detail; the girl’s mother was American; she had married the Earl of Rexford; she was dead; Rexford was dead, and here was this dilemma. Walker knew each of the persons in this drama, especially Sir Henry Dercum, who had been in the English foreign service, and at one time attached to the Embassy in Washington. Walker was standing, now, before a window, looking out into the night that enveloped London. The boy continued to speak. “Will he not have the right to take her anywhere he likes?”