hundred thousand pounds I expect you to place yourself at my disposal. For a hundred thousand pounds I expect not only your services, but the services of all those whom you employ. And the greatest of these services will be silence.

“I am going back to England as Sir Paul Westerham, Baronet, the richest man in the world. Thanks to the prying of the New York reporters I have had to sail on this ship in my own name. I did not wish it, and I have no intention of ever being discovered in London in the same character as I left New York.”

Westerham laughed a little to himself.

“No reporters at the dock-side for me,” he said. “No triumphal entry into London. No account of what I eat and do, and how many hours a night I sleep. I am going back to London to do precisely as I choose.”

Melun was very quiet. He knew he had met a stronger spirit than his own. For all the bleak chilliness of the eyes of the man who talked to him, he knew that he had to deal with the fierceness of a wild animal which feels the cage opening before him, that Westerham was seeking to evade the bars of a social prison.

“In three days' time,” Westerham went on,[Pg 21] “we shall be in Liverpool. I shall leave the ship in such a dress that no man will recognise me. I shall go straight to London and put up at Walter's Hotel in the Strand. It is a little place, where not even journalists will look for a millionaire.”

[Pg 21]

“You forget,” said Melun, “that if you disappear in that manner there will be an awful outcry over your disappearance.”

“That matters nothing,” said Westerham. “Disappear I shall, to pursue my own ends as I choose to follow them. For once I am going to prove that money has the power to hide a man. Do you agree to my bargain?”

Melun nodded his head.

“I agree,” he said, “because I must. The day after you land in Liverpool I will meet you at Walter's.”

“You tell me,” said Westerham, “that you agree. Yet I doubt your word. There is something which I have not yet fathomed. You are still thinking of Lady Kathleen?

“Lie to me if you dare!” he added with brutal emphasis.

“I am not such a fool as to lie to you,” answered Captain Melun. “I am still thinking of the Lady Kathleen.”

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