"
"Money?" I inquired.
"Confound you!" he said, and, though he was laughing, I thought
it was a point at which the subject might be changed.
"Well," I said, "it wasn't for Miss Werner you wanted us to play
strangers, was it? You have some deeper game than that, eh?"
"I suppose I have."
"Then hadn't you better tell me what it is?"
Raffles treated me to the old cautious scrutiny that I knew so
well; the very familiarity of it, after all these months, set me
smiling in a way that might have reassured him; for dimly already
I divined his enterprise.
"It won't send you off in the pilot's boat, Bunny?"
"Not quite."
"Then--you remember the pearl you wrote the--"
I did not wait for him to finish his sentence.
"You've got it!" I cried, my face on fire, for I caught sight of
it that moment in the stateroom mirror.
Raffles seemed taken aback.
"Not yet," said he; "but I mean to have it before we get to
Naples."
"Is it on board?"
"Yes."
"But how--where--who's got it?"
"A little German officer, a whipper-snapper with perpendicular
mustaches."
"I saw him in the smoke-room."
"That's the chap; he's always there. Herr Captain Wilhelm von
Heumann, if you look in the list. Well, he's the special envoy
of the emperor, and he's taking the pearl out with him."
"You found this out in Bremen?"
"No, in Berlin, from a newspaper man I know there.
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