CHAPTER XXIVA week had gone by. The seven of us sat over our dessert in London’s finest dining room: Arold Smiff well-scrubbed and ill at ease, Geoff cheerful as ever. Alec busy savoring the coffee. John cynical again. Colonel Bedford complacent and stolid, my Marion all radiant and lovely, and myself, the erstwhile most savage one-man crime wave since Genghis Khan was a pup, fiddling with the silverware and feeling rather mournful, now that all was over.
At first we spoke of the past, as though each of us hated to think of a future apart from his companions. We asked one another questions of which we had heard the answers a dozen times before. Geoff told again how he had wandered down the secret stair that night, feeling his way along the walls, lonely and worried, and how he had remembe
