infernal beads, and the rogue Cunningham had gone to him with a substantial bribe. So let the pigtail wail for his jade.

On the dresser he saw a sheet of paper partly opened. Beside it lay a torn envelope. Dennison’s heart lost a beat. The handwriting was his father’s!

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CHAPTER VII

Jane had gone to meet his father. How to secrete this note without being observed by either the manager or the Chinaman? An accident came to his aid. Someone in the corridor banged a door violently, and as the manager’s head and Ling Foo’s jerked about, Dennison stuffed the note into a pocket.

A trap! Dennison wasn’t alarmed—he was only furious. Jane had walked into a trap. She had worn those accursed beads when his father had approached her by the bookstall that afternoon. The note had attacked her curiosity from a perfectly normal angle. Dennison had absorbed enough of the note’s contents to understand how readily Jane had walked into the trap.

Very well. He would wait in the lobby until one; then if Jane had not returned he would lay the plans of a counter-attack, and it would be a rough one. Of course no bodily harm would befall Jane, but she would probably be harried and bullied out of those beads. But would she? It was not unlikely that she would become a pretty handful, once she learned she had been tricked. 80 If she balked him, how would the father act? The old boy was ruthless when he particularly wanted something.

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If anything should happen to her—an event unlooked for, accidental, over which his father would have no control—this note would bring the old boy into a peck of trouble; and Dennison was loyal enough not to wish this to happen. And yet it would be only just to make the father pay once for his high-handedness. That would be droll—to see his father in the dock, himself as a witness against him! Here was the germ of a tiptop drama.

But all this worry was doubtless being wasted upon mere supposition. Jane might turn over the beads without bargaining, provided the father had any legal right to them, which Dennison strongly doubted.

He approached Ling Foo and seized him roughly by the arm.

“What do you know about these glass beads?”

Ling Foo elevated a shoulder and let it fall.

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