The Man Who Bought London by Edgar Wallace

nun.’
    ‘I know somebody who will!’ she said.
    ‘Who?’ he asked quickly.
    ‘Me,’ said the girl coolly.
    He sank back again in his chair with a growl.
    ‘It is hard lines on you – my not getting married,’ she went on. ‘You get the whole of the inheritance if I do – during the period of probation.’
    ‘I don’t want you to marry,’ he snarled.
    She smiled behind the hand that held the cigarette to her lips. ‘Poor soul!’ she mocked; then, more seriously: ‘Hermann, people are saying rather horrid things about you just now.’
    He stared up at her coldly. ‘What things, and what people?’ he asked.
    ‘Oh, paper people and the sort of bounder person one meets. They say you were in some way associated with –’
    She stopped and looked at him, and he met her gaze unflinchingly.
    ‘Well?’
    ‘With a rather ghastly murder in Southwark,’ she said slowly.
    ‘Rubbish!’ he laughed. ‘They would suspect the Archbishop of Canterbury – it is too preposterous.’
    ‘I don’t know about that,’ said the girl. ‘I’m positively afraid of you sometimes; you’d just do anything for money and power.’
    ‘Like what?’
    She shrugged her shoulders. ‘Oh, murder and things like that,’ she said vaguely. ‘There is a lot of good Czech in our blood, Hermann; why, sometimes you exasperate me so that I could cheerfully kill you.’
    He grinned a little uncomfortably. ‘Keep your door locked,’ he said, and his lips tightened as at an unpleasant thought.
    ‘I do,’ she replied promptly, ‘and I always sleep with a little revolver under my pillow.’
    He muttered something about childishness, and continued his study of the evening paper.
    ‘You see,’ she went on thoughtfully, ‘it would make an awful big difference to you, Hermann, if I died suddenly from ptomaine poisoning – or whatever weird diseases people die from – or if I walked in my sleep and fell out of a window.’
    ‘Don’t say such beastly things!’ he snapped.
    ‘It would make you richer by seven million dollars – recoup all your losses, and place you in a position where you could go on fighting that nice grey man – King Kerry.’
    He got up from his chair; there was a ghost of a smile on his face.
    ‘If you’re going to talk nonsense, I’m going,’ he said. ‘You ought to get married; you’re getting vixenish.’
    She laughed, throwing her head back in an ecstasy of enjoyment.
    ‘Why don’t you pick up one of your tame students?’ he sneered. ‘Marry him – you’ll be able to do it in a month – and make him happy. You could teach him to sound his h’s with a little trouble.’
    She had stopped laughing, and was eyeing him as he stood with the edge of the open door in his hand.
    ‘You’ve a merry wit,’ she said. ‘Poor Daddy never realized it as well as I. There’s a coarse fibre in the maternal ancestry of your line, Hermann.’
    ‘You leave my mother’s relations alone!’ he said in a burst of anger.
    ‘God knows I do,’ she said piously. ‘If various United States marshals and diverse grand juries had also left them alone, many of them would have died natural deaths.’
    He slammed the door behind him before she had concluded her sentence. The mocking smile passed from her face as the door closed, and in its place came a troubled frown. She threwaway the end of her cigarette and crossed the room to a small writing-table between the two big windows.
    She sat for some time, a pen in her hand and a sheet of paper before her, undecided. If she wrote she would be acting disloyally to her half-brother – yet she owed him no loyalty. Behind her drawling contempt was an ever-present fear, a fear which sometimes amounted to a terror. Not once, but many times in the last year, she had intercepted a glance of his, a look so cold and speculative, and having in it a design so baleful that it had frozen her soul with horror. She thought of the insidious attempts he had made to get her married. The men