"A number of people knew of our long search for grandfather's covered map, among them an enemy through whom we have been deprived, but whose name we do not know. How he could have been informed just when I found or where I placed it, I cannot conceive. Possibly the safe has been under periodic search, although we never suspected. Possibly some one within the house is in the employ of this unknown enemy and saw me give it to my aunt for deposit or heard that I had turned over some valuable. I was unforgivably careless."
"An inside job?" Pape queried. "I thought so."
"But not through Jasper--I'd stake anything on that!" the girl exclaimed. "He was our own butler in better days and is loyal, I know. Since that disastrous night, I've been trying to work out the verses of the crypt from memory before its present possessor would get the key to a translation. 'To whispers of poplars four' was the second line of one of the verses. That is why----"
The rising of Curtis Lauderdale interrupted her. He crossed, with a nervous clutch on this chair and that, to where Pape stood in the room's center.
"There's very great need of haste," he said. "Now that they are watching Jane's movements--Since they've trailed her here--Mr. Pape, I cannot afford to mistrust you, even were I inclined to do so. My dear girl here blames me for trusting people, but since I must trust her to some one, I'd rather it should be you. I accept and hold you to your offer to see her safely through to-night. Much more than you could imagine hangs in the balance. This may be our last chance."
"I never acknowledge any chance as the last until success, sir." Pape again grasped the forward fluttering right of the blind man. His left hand he extended to the girl. "I'll try to deserve your father's confidence--and yours, Jane."
"Near the four poplars, then, at dusk," she consented.
Also she gave him a smile, all the lovelier for its faintness and rarity.
That moment of au revoir, in which they formed a complete circle, palms to palms, Pape felt to be his initiation into what was to him a divine triumvirate. "At dusk!" There was nothing--quite nothing which he could not accomplish for the common, if still unknown cause that night, then, at dusk.