state, just as you were brought here, and set down in the night not far
from your hotel. If you refuse, you will be taken out during the night,
and dropped into the Thames."

The man had then gone on to question him. The questions he had asked had
been numerous, and one and all had had to do with persons of high
station with whom Jack was on terms of intimacy--all of them rich
people. What most astonished him, he said, was that his unseen
interlocutor should know so much about him--his questions and remarks
showed how much he knew--and that he should apparently know who all his
friends were.

Jack could not remember all the questions he had been asked, but he
repeated some of them. Whereabouts did the Duchesse de Montparnasse keep
her jewels in her chateau on the Meuse? The questioner said he knew that
Osborne could tell him, because he knew that Osborne, just before going
to Nigeria, had, while staying at that chateau, been shown by the
Duchesse herself her priceless jewellery--one of the finest collections
in the world, chiefly valuable owing to its interesting historic
associations.

Then, in which apartment in Eldon Hall, in Northumberland, the seat of
the Earl of Cranmere, was the large safe that Lord Cranmere had bought
ten months before from an American firm, the name of which was given? He
said that he, Osborne, must know, because he was a guest at Lord
Cranmere's when the safe arrived--which was the truth. He also wanted to
know if there were a priests' hiding-hole in Eldon Hall, as was the case
in so many of the large country mansions built about the same period,
and, if so, its exact whereabouts in the house.