The Cluny Problem. Dorothy Fielding

The man turned sharply. At the sight of his fiancée he smiled pleasantly, though a sharp observer would have said that there was something in his eyes that suggested a man about to make the best of a position not entirely to his liking.

"My dear girl!" he ejaculated warmly, "what brings you to Macon? Did you get into the wrong train, or out of the right one, or what?"

"I'm on my way to Cluny. Buried, neglected Cluny. The town where the lace is made, and, less interesting to me, I guess, the town where there are some ruins that must be seen in order to be forgotten. I mean the ruins of that wonderful abbey about which the Frenchman raved at dinner last night. You started him off by asking him if he knew the place. But you didn't speak of coming on here yourself."

"Nor you!" Sir Anthony Cross spoke easily, yet the very swiftness of his reply suggested a hidden irritation.

"Ah, but I'm only marking time at Enghien with a sister! You're supposed to be rushing back to London to summon board meetings, and dismiss the president, I mean the prime minister, and generally make very important things hum. Is this the way you usually go back to England?"

"You can reach it via Macon," he said as lightly as she.

Vivian was smiling up into his face. She was a very pretty young woman, in spite of the fact that she looked clever.

"Sure. Just as you could round by Constantinople," she agreed sweetly.

Again Anthony Cross smiled at her. Yet again there was that faint hint in his face of a man not entirely pleased with things.

"As with you," he began easily, "one might think that French professor has fired me up to look at his town. I'm keen on architecture, you know, and I ought to feel quite ashamed of myself that I've never been to the place. But the idea of your going there! Somehow one doesn't connect you with ruins."

"Why not? We all come to them some day," she spoke with the gaiety of under twenty-five. "Besides, as an American, I dote on anything we don't have over at home. If you're off for the same place, why, we shall have the whole long day to ourselves. You look charmed at the notion, Anthony, yet somehow I don't believe you really like it."

She never called him Tony. One could not easily imagine any one calling the man to whom she was speaking, to whom she was engaged, by a nickname. For, though young looking, there was so little of youth's softness in his face, that one suspected him of being much older than he showed. He had, in fact, crossed the forty line. Hard was the mouth, stubborn the jaw, obstinate the nose, and his fine eyes could at times cleave like a flash of lightning. He looked what he was, a man of high position, social and mental. But for an indefinable air of being a man of affairs, one would have guessed him a barrister.

"If so," he said rather slowly, "it's because I shan't be able to see much of you, or of the remains of the great abbey either." He looked at her meditatively before he went on:

"I suppose you're going back to Enghien tomorrow?"

It was at that little resort so near Paris that he and Vivian had just got engaged. There in the hotel where her brother-in-law and his wife had been staying, Anthony Cross and Vivian had renewed an acquaintanceship made earlier on shipboard. She nodded. "You too, I suppose?"

"No. I may be delayed some days. There's history to be read in the stones of Cluny, I fancy—since it was made there once upon a time." He spoke as one turning some other thought over in his mind. Now he looked quickly down at her, as though he had decided on his course of action.

"You know the real reason why I'm back in Europe just now," he said in a low voice.

She nodded. She knew from him that there was a constant leakage from the parcels of diamonds sent to Amsterdam by the Diamond Combine in South Africa, of which Anthony Cross was one of the directors. That great firm's detectives had been trying to locate the leakage for months. They had decided that the master mind was not in Amsterdam, nor in Holland, but probably in France. Possibly in Paris. She knew, too, that Cross had left Capetown to make further, and personal, inquiries in the matter.

"Then, in confidence, I believe that in Cluny I may possibly pick up a certain piece of information which I very much want to get. Or rather, that something that I may learn from a man whom I expect to meet there may settle definitely a point that ought to be settled."

His jaw shut very tightly as he said this last. "And that's the reason, dear, why I may not have been as delighted at the thought of your coming to Cluny just now as I should otherwise be. In reality, but again in strict confidence, mine is entirely and simply a business visit. At which hotel have you engaged rooms?"

She told him.

"I think, on the whole, it would be better if we do not meet. I should in any case, of course, go to another hotel, but I'll let you take this coming train out there alone, and go on later. Sorry, Vivian, it's a rotten way to spend what might have been a most delightful time together, but there's no help for it."

She did not in the least see the reason, or the need, for so much mystery. But men have their own funny ways of doing business, she decided.

"If I run across you in the street, I'll ask you the way to the abbey in French,"

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