Cynthia Vanrenen might even then be gazing at the shining ocean. He looked at his watch. Half-past nine.
"I am behaving like a blithering idiot," he told himself. "Miss Vanrenen and her friends are either on the pier listening to the band, or sitting over their coffee in the glass cage behind there. I'll wire Simmonds in the morning to hurry up." A man descended the steps of the hotel and walked straight across King's Road. A light gray overcoat, thrown wide on his shoulders, gave a lavish display of frilled shirt, and a gray Homburg hat was set rakishly on one side of his head. In the half light Medenham at once discerned the regular, waxen-skinned features of Count Marigny, and during the next few seconds it really seemed as if the Frenchman were making directly for him. But another man, short, rotund, very erect of figure, and strutting in gait, came from the interior of a "shelter" that stood a little to the right of Medenham's position on the rails.
"Hello, Marigny," said he jauntily. The Count looked back towards the hotel. His tubby acquaintance chuckled. The effort squeezed an eyeglass out of his right eye. "Aie pas peur, mon vieux!" cried he in very colloquial French. "My mother sent a note to say that the fair Cynthia has retired to her room to write letters. I have been waiting here ten minutes." Now, it chanced that Medenham's widespread touring in France had rubbed up his knowledge of the language. It is ever the ear that needs training more than the tongue, and in all likelihood he would not have caught the exact meaning of the words were it not for the hap of recent familiarity with the accents of all sorts and conditions of French-speaking folk.
"Jimmy Devar!" he breathed, and his amazement lost him Marigny's muttered answer. But he heard Devar's confident outburst as the two walked off together in the direction of the West Pier.
"You are growing positively nervous, my dear Edouard. And why? The affair arranges itself admirably. I shall be always on hand, ready to turn up exactly at the right moment. What the deuce, this is the luck of a lifetime...." The squeaky, high-pitched voice--a masculine variant of Mrs. Devar's ultra-fashionable intonation--died away amidst the chatter and laughter of other promenaders. Medenham's first impulse was to follow and listen, since Devar had yielded to the common delusion of imagining that none except his companion on the sea-front that night understood a foreign language. But he swept the notion aside ere it had well presented itself as a means of solving an astounding puzzle.
"No, dash it all, I'm not a private detective," he muttered angrily. "Why should I interfere? Confound Simmonds, and d----n that railway van! I have a good mind to hand the car over to Dale in the morning and return 

 Prev. P 23/231 next