The Traitor's Gate by Edgar Wallace — Read

THERE WERE MOMENTS that afternoon when Hope Joyner had doubts of her wisdom. So doubtful was she, that she called up Dick Hallowell at three in the afternoon, only to learn that he was on guard. Colley Warrington she knew as everybody knew. The story of his early exploits was public property. He had lived down his past to some extent, but there were doors still closed to him, doors that would never open. Had she consulted Dick Hallowell, Colley would never have passed the threshold of her apartment.

He had come into her life largely through the instrumentality of the rajah, though she could not have guessed this, believing rather that she owed her acquaintance with Colley to the fortuitous circumstance that he was a friend of a member of her Indian committee. It supported his suggestion that he could put her in the Way of discovering something about her origin, that Colley had notoriously an encyclopaedic knowledge of the social world and the larger world which fringes that restricted area. She might have rejected, or listened with amused contempt to, almost any other semi-stranger who dared even introduce the subject of her obscure beginning. But Colley was licensed; could and did say things which in another man would have been outrageous; and when, without preamble or warning, he had coolly asserted his right as a "friend" to share her confidences, she had been too staggered to repulse him. And before she knew what had happened, he was telling her with the greatest gravity that information had come to him about her father. At nine o'clock that evening she found herself; largely to her own consternation, walking down Villiers Street, ready on the slightest excuse to turn back.