Chapter XXVI

"Simple enough," Crane opined, "like all these funny little games crooks frame up, once you locate the chink that gives you a look in at the machinery."

He stood in the main doorway. Behind him the wind-swept sky was dull grey with the dusk of a new day. On the drive, at the foot of the veranda steps, a motor-car was waiting, Pagan and Mallison on the back seat with the mild-mannered man, the left wrist of the latter hand-cuffed to the right of the dancing yegg. Another car that could be seen in the distance, turning out of the grounds to the highroad, was carrying away Morphew's henchmen under guard, in the wake of an ambulance from the nearest hospital that had arrived just in time to receive the lifeless body of the Sultan of Loot.

"If crooks could think straight, they might make good, once in every so often; but they can't, that's why we call 'em crooks; and that's why everything they cook up and make such a mystery of is so blamed silly and childish when you come to take it to pieces. Here's Morphew, the biggest frog in his pond, going off his nut with jealousy because the little McFee lady liked Lanyard a whole lot better'n him, and getting Mallison to play Lone Wolf and pull off a couple of jobs so's Mrs. McFee would see what a sap she'd been, falling for a so-called reformed crook. And here's Mallison getting chesty because he's doing the Lone Wolf act to the Queen's taste, and giving Morphew the double-cross--which was plain suicidal mania, if you ask me--and trying to go on with the game on his own. And then there's the Delorme woman, kidnapping Lanyard while he wasn't mentally responsible, with the notion, as near's a body can figure it, she could make him believe he belonged to her and had gone wrong again, so the only thing for them to do was to team up and collect a handsome living from the world at large . . ."

He smiled a vaguely pitying smile at nothing in particular. "These things wouldn't ever happen," he concluded, "if all crooks weren't crazy. . . . Well! time I was on my way." He bent with unexpected courtliness over Eve's hand, and shook Lanyard's. "The top of the morning to you, madam. So long, Lanyard--we won't say good bye--and the best of luck!"

The tyres crunched loudly on the cracked stone of the driveway, the high wind raved about the house and soughed through the tossing limbs of trees; but between Eve and Lanyard there was silence, on her part the stillness of tranquil expectancy, on his the dumbness of constraint.

"So it comes true," he said with a bleak smile, mustering up heart to meet her eyes at last--"what I foretold in the beginning. Say good bye to me, Eve, and let me go."

The hand he offered to take did not move to meet his. "Where will you go?" she quietly enquired.

"Back to England," he said in a sigh--"I suppose--as soon as I can get in touch with the Secret Service and request my recall. That is, if they'll have me again, after their faith in me has been sapped by this Mallison business. It's a question of what and how much they choose to believe."

"That will take a few days at least," she gravely considered. "I shall have plenty of time to wind up my small affairs in this country--I shall be ready, Michael, whenever you wish to go."

He hung his head and shook it wearily. "It is impossible," he said. "Surely you must know now mine isn't a life I can ask the woman I love to share."

"But you love me?"

"You know it."

"And you would leave me?"

"I must."

"Then," she made believe to sigh--"if you insist on having it that way--I can only presume you wish me to divorce you on the grounds of desertion."

"Divorce me!"

She went straightway to his bosom, clung to it in tears and laughter. "Will you ever forgive me--I wonder!--for taking advantage of your helplessness? As soon as possible after that accident, as soon as you were able to talk--we were married!"

THE END

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End of Project Gutenberg's The Lone Wolf Returns, by Louis Joseph Vance