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CAPTAIN GARDINER OF THE INTERNATIONAL POLICE

A Secret Service Novel of the Future

By Robert Allen (Allen Robert Dodd)

1916

Chapter I

Mrs. Thornton Gives A Dance

It was on one of the hottest nights of that unusually hot September that Mrs. Thornton gave a dance. The moist, lifeless air enveloped the earth like a heavy cloak and even the carefully shaded lights failed to conceal the lines of heat-weariness in the jaded faces of the guests. To Evelyn Thornton, in whose honour the affair was ostensibly held, the feverish rooms presently became unbearable, and abandoning the arduous duties of hostess to her mother and her younger and more energetic sister Mabel, she took refuge in the darkness of the small easterly veranda overlooking the beach. Light mist wreaths dimmed the splendid moonlight and gave a ghostly quality to the scene which transformed the indistinct line of the breakwater and its lighthouse into a monster of gigantic dimensions, gazing seaward with a baleful blood-red eye, and made of the commonplace tramp steamer labouring southward down the coast a veritable Flying Dutchman.

"Oh, bother!" exclaimed Evelyn crossly; "I do believe that it's hotter out here than it is inside."

"That's merely the illogicalness of overwrought sensibilities, my dear girl," replied a voice, seemingly at her very elbow; "I think you'll find if you stay out here --"

"Of course that isn't what I meant exactly," the girl corrected herself hastily. "What I meant was-- now I know you're laughing at me!" For the Captain's broad sm

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