"I can't, there's no time. You must go--go at once--save yourself before they can come back and catch you here."
"Oh, you will drive me mad!" Amazingly, on top of that, the slender body shook with guarded laughter. "Very well, then! I'll tell you--but on two conditions: You must promise me to go immediately after, and not to let Morphew suspect. I want to be the first to tell him, and see his face when he learns . . . I've had dictographs wired in all through the house."
[Illustration: CRANE LEARNS THAT HIS CONFIDENCE IN THE LONE WOLF'S CAPACITY FOR REGENERATION HAS NOT BEEN MISPLACED.]
"You're _so_ stupid!" The rug deadened the stamp of a frivolous slipper. "Why do you think I care whether you go or stay? Why do you suppose I ever let them think they'd got round me again? Only because I wanted to help . . ."
"You're not really stupid, you know," Folly commented, and whipped her hand back into her own keeping. "You've known all along . . . Now keep your promise and go. Get as far away as you can and . . . Give me a ring in the morning, I'll tell you what has happened."
"'What has happened'!" On the point of taking her at her word, Lanyard checked in suspicion. "What can happen, if I let Morphew down?"
"You don't think that would stop him? You don't know that monster. I heard him tell Pagan, if you should fail him tonight, refuse to go through or succeed in escaping, there would be a robbery just the same, and of course you'd get all the credit."
"You were right," Lanyard affirmed. "There's no time to waste."
Too late the young woman saw her error and sought to detain him by putting herself in his path.
Lanyard's hands clipped her elbows to her sides and lifted her bodily till her face was level with his own. Soundly if hastily kissed, she was set to one side, and when she recovered was alone.
A wilder spirit now ruled the night: the freshening wind blew with zest more constant, with briefer and less frequent lulls, the trees it worried fought back in bootless fury, with thrashing limbs and lows of torment, a heavier wrack coursed the skies, the blinded stars found fewer rifts through which to wash the world with their troubled and misleading light. Lanyard, traversing an unknown terrain, with nothing but impatient memories of Morphew's rough sketch-map to guide him, threw caution to the very wind whose wanton spirit shouted down his noisy flounderings, and shouldered headlong through hedges, coppices and thickets, reckless whether or not he were heard or seen and followed. His prayer, indeed, was not so much that he might give Morphew and his crew the slip, as that chance might throw him into direct personal collision with his enemy.