“So you’re not dead, Miss Tuppence, any more than that Tommy boy of yours was!”
“The Young Adventurers take a lot of killing,” boasted Tuppence.
“So it seems,” said Sir James dryly. “Am I right in thinking that the joint venture has ended in success, and that this”—he turned to the girl on the couch—“is Miss Jane Finn?”
Jane sat up.
“Yes,” she said quietly, “I am Jane Finn. I have a lot to tell you.”
“When you are stronger—”
“No—now!” Her voice rose a little. “I shall feel safer when I have told everything.”
“As you please,” said the lawyer.
He sat down in one of the big armchairs facing the couch. In a low voice Jane began her story.
“I came over on the Lusitania to take up a post in Paris. I was fearfully keen about the war, and just dying to help somehow or other. I had been studying French, and my teacher said they were wanting help in a hospital in Paris, so I wrote and offered my services, and they were accepted. I hadn’t got any folk of my own, so it made it easy to arrange things.
“When the Lusitania was torpedoed, a man came up to me. I’d noticed him more than once—and I’d figured it out in my own mind that he was afraid of somebody or something. He asked me if I was a patriotic American, and told me he was carrying papers which were just life or death to the Allies. He asked me to take charge of them. I was to watch