"Watch!" whispered Seton. "He's signalling to the Greenwich bank!"
Kerry's teeth snapped savagely together, and he chewed but made no
reply, until:
"There it is!" he said rapidly. "On the marshes!"
A speck of light in the darkness it showed, a distant moving lantern
on the curtain of the night. Although few would have credited Kerry
with the virtue, he was a man of cultured imagination, and it seemed
to him, as it seemed to Seton Pasha, that the dim light symbolized the
life of the missing woman, of the woman who hovered between the gay
world from which tragically she had vanished and some Chinese hell
upon whose brink she hovered. Neither of the watchers was thinking of
the crime and the criminal, of Sir Lucien Pyne or Kazmah, but of Mrs.
Monte Irvin, mysterious victim of a mysterious tragedy. "Oh, Dan! ye
must find her! ye must find her! Puir weak hairt--dinna ye ken how she
is suffering!" Clairvoyantly, to Kerry's ears was borne an echo of his
wife's words.
"The traffic!" he whispered. "If we lose George Martin tonight we
deserve to lose the case!"
"I agree, Chief Inspector," said Seton quietly.
The grating sound made by a boat thrust out from a shingle beach came
to their ears above the whispering of the tide.
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