"I shall be delighted," was the only answer he could make without showing open hostility.
"Wait in the hall, then," said Mrs. Talmage Eglinton. "I am only going up to see if some jewelry I left locked up when I went down to Prior's Tarrant is safe."
She hurried up the remaining stairs, and Forsyth continued his way down to the hall, a prey to conflicting emotions. Disgust at having to lunch with a woman he abhorred was the least of them. What worried him most at that moment was the doubt, restored by this meeting, whether Mrs. Talmage Eglinton was not, after all, the victim of a chain of coincidences.
And then, suddenly, a flicker of light broke on the situation through--of all places in the world--a tiny flaw in the lady's defensive armor. She had spoken of her suite as locked up, but he remembered now that the outer door of it had been slightly ajar when he went in to his interview with Ziegler. He went up to the big uniformed porter on duty at the swing doors, and asked him if he knew Mrs. Talmage Eglinton by sight.
"Oh yes, sir," the man replied. "You'll catch her if you run up to her rooms sharp. She's just going out."
"Going out?" exclaimed Forsyth, with well simulated surprise. "I thought I caught a glimpse of her going upstairs a moment ago. She seemed to have only just arrived."
"Oh no, sir; she came in an hour ago, and was on her way out just now when she found she'd forgotten something."
Forsyth left the proximity of the porter quickly, and went and waited at the foot of the staircase. The horizon had cleared again, and he smiled at the very thin trick which had so nearly deceived him--would have deceived him, in fact, if one of the gang, eagerly expecting her, had not chanced to be at her door when he went up. After concluding her business with her accomplices she had contrived the meeting on the stairs to throw dust in his eyes, going, in her desire for realism, to the length of explaining to the hall-porter why she had gone upstairs again after coming down into the hall. Well, he would hold her to the lunch invitation; let her think that she had hoodwinked him; and endeavor to ascertain whether she was courting his society as a mere bluff to lend color to her deception, or with some other object as yet undefined.