“It would be my only hope,” he said, “against the superior intelligence of Scotland Yard.” And he went on. He was annoyed by the incident. Would he never escape from this ridiculous pretension! As he entered the crowd overflowing on the bottom of the stairway, he caught a glimpse of Sir Henry Dercum and the girl in an eddy beyond where the great newel post turned. Dercum’s big shoulders would be anywhere conspicuous. He was a massive Englishman, with a wide, Oriental face, purpled by good feeding, and little reptilian eyes under heavy lids that very nearly obscured them. The man had a habit of lifting his head when he was very much concerned, as though to get a better view of his subject without the effort or the danger of raising his eyelids. The girl before him was in the splendid lure of youth; her dark hair was lifted, by some subtlety of the coiffeur’s art, into a beautiful, soft background for her face; her dark eyes and her delicate skin were exquisitely brought out by it. She was in the first bud of life, and she was very lovely. But there was more than mere physical beauty; there was the charm of inexperience, the charm of adventurous youth that does not question, and, like charity, believeth all things—that inexperience which is gayly ready for any adventure into what it beautifully imagines to be a fairy world. The Secret Service agent saw the expression bedded into Dercum’s heavy face, and he knew what it meant. He heard also the sentence he was speaking. “You will need a bit of change from all this artificiality.” “Do I look stale so soon, Sir Henry?” The girl laughed. His eyes traveled over her, his head thrown back in a slow, heavy-lidded expression as though it were a physical caress. “Ah, no,” he said; “but you will have inherited some of your father’s interest in the waste places of the earth. How would you like to go with me and find a lost river?” “I should love it,” she said. “Where is your lost river, Sir Henry?” He looked about him. “Let us find a seat somewhere,” he said, “and I will show you a map.” They got out of the crowd, traversed the long hall that runs parallel to St. James’s Park, and entered the conservatory. Walker followed. Dercum’s words had almost the sting of a blow. It was the verification of Lord Donald Muir’s anxiety. If love were blind, Walker reflected, it had surely the intuition of the saints. Dercum’s plan, the plan which Walker had considered academic and unlikely, was practical and on the way. The Chief of the American Secret Service went on into the conservatory, through fringes of the gay crowd floating everywhere like gorgeous butterflies disentangled from the mass. He stopped beside an immense vase filled with Japanese chrysanthemums of a peculiar color, huge like a shock of hair on an immense stem. They entirely obscured him, and he did not move.