282 FOR THE FLAG

I pushed open the door and entered.

“© M. Roch,” I said.

He neither saw nor heard me.

““M. Roch,” I repeated.

He raised his head first, then turned round and looked
at me.

“Ah! it is you, Hart!’ he spoke calmly, almost
indifferently.

He knows my name. Serk6é had informed him that it
was not Gaydon the keeper, but Simon Hart who had
attended him at Healthful House.

“ Do you know ?” I began.

“‘T know for what purpose you attended me! Yes!
you hoped to find out a secret that no one wanted to pay
for!”

Roch knew everything, and perhaps it was better so,
considering what I had to tell him.

“Well, you have not succeeded, Mr. Hart, and so far as
this is concerned,’’ he continued, as he shook the glass
tube, “no one has succeeded yet—and no one will
succeed.”

It is as I hoped; he has not made known the com-
position of his deflagrator,

I looked him straight in the face and said,—

“You know whol am, but do you know where you
are?”

“Tam dt home,” he replied.

That is what Ker Karraje has induced him to believe. -
At Backcup the inventor thinks himself in his own