'I might give it you,' Niko acknowledged, 'but my country's service is a higher thing than my personal honour, therefore it would do you no good. I shall be frank with you. There is no way you can prevent my report being duly made except by killing me. I am here, a self-confessed robber. If I were in your place, I should shoot.'
'The cowardice of the west, you see,' Lavendale remarked, throwing his revolver upon the table. 'You had better get out of the room. I might change my mind.'
For a moment Niko made no movement. Suzanne rose to her feet and lit a cigarette.
'As a matter of curiosity,' she asked, 'tell us why you returned, Baron?'
'The Empire performance is not over until half-past eleven,' he explained, 'and it is barely ten o'clock. I had some faint misgivings as to the resetting of the lock. I came back to examine it. That is my answer. You speak now of curiosity. I, too, have curiosity. Will you tell me how you knew that I had opened the safe?'
She smiled and lifted her handkerchief for a moment to her lips. Niko's head was bent as though in humiliation.
'It is so hard to outgrow one's errors,' he sighed.
He looked towards Lavendale and Lavendale pointed impatiently towards the door. He took a step or two in that direction, then he paused.
'Sir,' he said, looking back, 'because your methods are not mine, believe me that I still can appreciate their mistaken chivalry. The information I have gained I shall use. No promise of mine to the contrary would avail you. But there is, perhaps, some return which I might offer, more valuable, perhaps, to mademoiselle, yet of some import to you also.'
Suzanne leaned a little forward. Her cigarette burnt idly between her fingers.
'In this great conflict,' Niko continued, 'whose reverberations shake the earth, Japan watches from afar off. There are few who know the reason, but there is a reason. Let that pass. My country lays no seal upon my lips. What I know I pass on to you. A hundred million cartridges and five thousand tons of heavier ammunition, which might otherwise have reached Russia, are lying now at the bottom of the ocean. This is the doing of one man, a man in the pay of Germany, a man who is the greatest traitor the world has ever known.'