The amateur crime

Contents

Prologue I. The Nesbitt Combination II. From Cocktails to Criminology III. Mr. Priestley Is Adventurous IV. Red Blood and Red Ink V. Confusing the Issue VI. Adventures of a Pair of Handcuffs VII. Inspector Cottingham Smells Blood VIII. Two into One Will Go IX. George Says Nothing, Much X. Laura Surpasses Herself XI. Perspicacity of a Chief Constable XII. Mr. Priestley Becomes an Uncle XIII. Cynthia Begins to Smile XIV. Interesting Scene in a Tool-Shed XV. Various People Get Busy XVI. Mr. Priestley Bursts a Bombshell XVII. Awkward Predicament of Some Conspirators XVIII. Mr. Priestley Solves His Last Problem

To My Sister

Prologue

The young man waved his arms violently. “You’re a cabbage!” he shouted. “A turnip! A vegetable marrow! A—” He paused. “A snail!” he concluded, relinquishing this horticultural catalogue.

Mr. Matthew Priestley blinked at him mildly through his glasses. “Am I, Pat?” he asked, not without surprise.

“Yes, you are.” From his stand upon the hearthrug the young man contemplated his host with extreme severity. “How old are you, Priestley?” he demanded at length.

“Thirty-six,” apologised Mr. Priestley.

“Thirty-six!” repeated the young man with remarkable scorn. “And what do you think people would take you for?”

“Thirty-five?” hazarded Mr. Priestley optimistically.

“Certainly not!” said the young man sharply. “Sixty-five, more like.”

“Oh, no, Pat,” protested Mr. Priestley, pained.

“At least sixty-five,” rejoined the young man firmly. “And no wonder. Do you know what you are, Priestley?”

“Well, yes,” said Mr. Priestley, a little doubtfully, “I’m a cabbage, and a vegetable-marrow, and a snail, and——”

“You’re a limpet!”

“A limpet as well?” said Mr. Priestley, with distress. “Now, what makes you say that, Pat?”

“Well, look at you!” observed the young man shortly.

Mr. Priestley obeyed. “I seem much the same as usual,” he ventured.

“That’s the whole point!” the young man said with force. “You’re always much the same as usual. Always!”

“I wear a different suit nearly every day,” Mr. Priestley protested wistfully.

“You know what I mean. Look at you—thirty-six, and as set and unenterprising as a man of sixty! Why don’t you move out of your rotten little rut, man? Move about! See life! Have adventures!” The young man ran a sensitive hand through his rather long black hair.

Mr. Priestley looked round the cosy bachelor room in the cosy bachelor flat; if it was a rut, it was a remarkably pleasant one. “It’s curious how restless love seems to make a man,” he observed mildly.

The young man stamped violently several times up and down the room. “I’m not restless!” he exclaimed loudly. “I’m happy!”

“I see,” replied Mr. Priestley with humility. “Have another drink, won’t you?”

The young man manipulated the decanter and siphon. “I do hate to see a man vegetating,” he growled into his glass.

“I suppose it’s the result of getting engaged,” Mr. Priestley meditated. “That sort of thing must be upsetting, no doubt.”

“It makes a fellow so happy, he wants to make his friends happy, too,” the young man condescended to explain.

“But I am happy, Pat! Remarkably happy.”

“You’re nothing of the sort,” snapped the young man.

“Aren’t I?” queried Mr. Priestley in surprise. “Well, I certainly thought I was.”

“Oh, yes,” said the young man with remarkable bitterness. “You think you are, of course. But you’re nothing of the sort. How can you be? Is a cabbage happy? Why don’t you live, man? Get about! Fall in love! Have adventures!”

“But adventures don’t happen to me.”

“Of course they don’t. Because you never let them. If you saw an adventure coming, you’d shut both eyes and wrap your head up in a rug. You’re turning into a regular hermit, Priestley: that’s what’s the matter with you. And hermits have a habit of becoming most confoundedly dull.”

Soon after that the young man took his leave; and quite time, too.

After his departure Mr. Priestley sat for a few moments turning over in his mind what had been said. Was it true that he was getting into a rut? Was he a turnip? Was he in danger of becoming a hermit, and a confoundedly dull hermit at that? He looked round his comfortable room again and sighed gently. Certainly most of his interests were concentrated in the flat—his books, for instance, and his china, and his collection of snuff-boxes. It was equally certain that, with a comfortable income which precluded his having to work for his living, and a valet who looked after him better than a nurse, he found himself very much more comfortable in his home than out of it. But did that necessarily mean that he was a snail?

“Poof!” observed Mr. Priestley with mild decision. “Ridiculous! Pat has just become engaged, to, as I understand, a charming and beautiful girl, and his whole world is upset. Out of the exuberance of his spirits he wants to upset everybody else’s world as well. Hermit, indeed.”

And he reached happily for his Theocritus.

Thus, regardless of his doom, the little victim played.

Chapter I.

The Nesbitt Combination

On a certain soft evening in early April, Guy Nesbitt of Dell Cottage, Duffley, Oxfordshire, was engaged in wrestling with his dress-tie.

Dress-ties did not take kindly to Guy. When a dress-tie found itself encircling a collar belonging to Guy a devil entered into it. All dress-ties were like this with Guy. They knew he had met his master, and they became as wax in his hands. They melted, they drooped, they languished, they slid, and the means they employed to prevent the ends of their bows from ever coming even were a manifestation of the triumph of matter over mind. A South African negro, seeing a dress-tie pursuing its eel-like antics in Guy’s impotent hands would have had no hesitation in falling down on his knees and worshipping it on the spot, and quite rightly; one of Guy’s dress-ties could have given pounds to any of the ju-ju’s of his native land and disposed of him in half a round.

Giving up the unequal struggle, Guy dashed the victorious excrescence to the floor, where it lay chortling gently, whipped another out of the open drawer in front of him and strode to the door which separated his dressing-room from his wife’s bedroom, muttering naughtily to himself as he went. At the risk of becoming tedious, he must try to give some idea of his appearance during the second-and-a-half occupied by his journey.

Guy Nesbitt was a thin, tall man, almost an attenuated tall man, and he carried himself just about as badly as a man can. His rather narrow shoulders were invariably bowed like those of Atlas, and between them his small, half-bald head shot forward at such an angle that, although he was nearly always taller than his interlocutor, he gave the impression of peering up at anybody he happened to be addressing over his rimless pince-nez. In spite of the ribald observations of one of his wife’s friends, Guy was not old; a mere thirty-one. But he had looked exactly as he did now (which was forty-five) for the last five years, and would probably continue to do so for the next twenty. The other part of the candid friend’s remark was not inapt; he did look exactly like a vulture, but a thoroughly benign and good-tempered old vulture at that. Guy had never lost his temper in his life, a matter which had caused his parents (he was an only son) considerable satisfaction —for parents are notoriously short-sighted folk—and his old nurse an equal perturbation.

For the rest he was delicate, but refused to admit it; possessed of a private income with which he was generous beyond reason or logic; not so much of a recluse as might have been expected, considering the scholarly nature of his chief hobby, which was the minor poets of the seventeenth century; and he wielded a nifty brassie and a surprisingly ferocious tennis-racket. His manner was as much of a contradiction as most of his other attributes; at times he was as prim and precise as the maiden aunt of a Dean, at others he verged on the Rabelaisian. He had a pretty wit, and he could make up his mind quickly.

“Blessed were the Picts and Scots, Cynthia,” he observed wistfully, closing the door meticulously behind him. “They may have had trouble at times with their sporrans, perhaps, but what is a mere sporran?”

Cynthia, seated in a kimono before her dressing-table, smiled at him over her shoulder; she had a particularly sweet smile. She was a tall, graceful girl of twenty-three, who bore every promise of turning later into that most delightful of creatures, a charmingly gracious woman. Gracious women are of two widely opposite kinds, one the most adorable and one the most fell of their sex, and it is the presence or absence of charm which makes or mars them. There was no fear of Cynthia falling into the latter category.

Guy and Cynthia had been married for two years, which period had been passed during the winters at Guy’s old home in Lincolnshire and in the summers at their riverside cottage in Duffley, a quiet little village on the Thames nearly mid-way between Oxford and Abingdon (it was called a “cottage”). To outward appearances they were as incompatible as a couple may well be, and they were extremely happy together. That shows the value of outward appearances.

“A sporran, darling?” Cynthia repeated. “Don’t try to make me answer that; you know how I hate admitting ignorance. All my life I’ve wondered what a sporran is, and never had the courage to ask. It seemed to be a thing that any decently educated person ought to know, like French verbs, or what Edward the Somethingth said to the lady whose garter he picked up, and that sort of thing. What _is_ a sporran, Guy?”

Her husband stroked his chin reflectively. “Isn’t it something you wear in your bonnet?” he hazarded.

“No, dear,” Cynthia told him gently. “That’s a bee. Well, never mind about sporrans. Let’s get this grim piece of work over.” She pushed back her chair and stood up. “I’ve been expecting you for the last ten minutes.”

“I nearly did it myself to-night,” Guy said ruefully, handing her the strip of black devilry, which instantly ceased to be diabolical at all and, assuming an air of almost offensive rectitude, permitted Cynthia to do with it as she would. “I must have got the ends within an inch of each other at least half-a-dozen times.”

“There!” Cynthia stepped back and regarded her handiwork complacently. “Not so bad for a first shot, I fancy. You are a ridiculous old butterfingers, aren’t you?” She kissed the ridiculous old butterfingers lightly on the end of his long nose and resumed her seat.

“Well, well,” said the old butterfingers, and moved towards the door. “Thank you, my dear.”

“Oh, don’t go, Guy. You’re practically ready, and there’s heaps of time. Sit down and smoke a cigarette and watch me make myself beautiful; there are some cigarettes in the box on the mantelpiece.”

“Sure you don’t mind, in here?”

Cynthia smiled at her husband again. If good manners never won fair lady, they must have often come very near it. It warmed Cynthia’s heart to reflect that this husband of hers was just as courteous to her now, after two years of marriage, as on the very first day he ever met her; how many women could say the same?

“As a very great treat, I think you might be allowed to, for once,” she said, in a tender little voice that matched her smile, feeling like a mother, and a wife, and a lover, and a sister, and all sorts of other things as well towards this adorably helpless person, so infinitely inferior to herself and at exactly the same time so infinitely superior, whom she had elected to marry. “Now watch, and I’ll show you what happens to sandy eyebrows when they get into my toils. It’s supposed to be hopelessly bad policy, I know, but I have no secrets from you, darling; not even toilet ones.”

“I won’t have my wife’s eyebrows insulted,” Guy retorted, dropping his long, lean frame into an arm-chair. “They’re not sandy, they never have been sandy, and they never will be sandy.”

“My dear old Guy,” laughed Cynthia, taking effective steps to clear the brows in question of any lingering imputations of sandiness, “you’d never notice if they were, so don’t pretend you would. Why, I don’t believe you could even say off-hand what colour my eyes are.”

“My dear!” exclaimed her husband, with righteous indignation.

“Well—what colour are they then?”

Guy shifted a trifle uneasily in his chair. “A—a sort of greeny-brown,” he said, somewhat defiantly.

“Commonly called hazel. Is that what you mean?”

“Hazel,” Guy nodded with some relief. “Yes.”

“Guy, you’re hopeless!” Cynthia laughed. “What sort of a husband do you think you are? Really! Not to have the faintest idea of the colour of his own wife’s eyes! Well, you might have said blue and been complimentary at any rate.”

“Do you mean to say they’re not hazel?” her husband inquired.

Cynthia nodded with emphasis. “I should hope I do! They’re gray, my poor child. If you don’t believe me, ask George to-night. I shouldn’t call George a particularly observant man, but I think his powers will probably have carried him that far. Guy, I think you’d better begin rather hurriedly to talk about the weather.”

Guy began to laugh instead. He had a curious and rather fascinating laugh. He laughed with a kind of guilty air, as if he knew he were doing something he shouldn’t, but for the life of him could not help it. His laughter was subdued but hearty, and reminded one irresistibly of a small boy stealing jam.

“I meant gray,” said Mr. Guy Nesbitt, stealing jam.

Cynthia became engrossed in the intricacies of her beautifying operations and the conversation languished.

Guy was the first to break the silence. “Looking forward to this evening, darling?” he asked.

“Mps,” Cynthia murmured absently, busy with her comb. “Quite. I want to meet Dora’s fiancé. I’d like to see her married, I must say; though when it’s going to happen, goodness knows. In her last letter, she said quite cheerfully that Pat couldn’t even raise the money for their furniture yet, and apparently she saw little chance of his ever doing so. Are you?”

“Very much. If Laura is anything like Dora (and being her sister I take it she will be) we ought to have an amusing evening. This fellow Pat Doyle sounds quite an entertaining sort of chap, too. I’ve never met a journalist before, least of all an Irish journalist. The combination ought to prove remarkable.”

Cynthia turned round to look at her husband. “You are a funny old thing, you know,” she observed with a smile.

“So you frequently tell me, my dear. Why particularly in this instance?”

“Well, you’re so unexpected. I should have expected you to hate meeting strangers, but you positively revel in it.”

“Of course I do! I collect strangers. What you never seem to realise, my otherwise admirable Cynthia, is that I am profoundly interested in the human animal. I like to observe his little squirmings and watch his reactions to all the ordinary, and still more to the extraordinary things of life. And the more strangers I meet, the more I recognise what a lot there is still to learn.”

“I’m glad I’m not a psychologist,” Cynthia returned. “It must be awfully uphill work.”

“All women are psychologists,” retorted her husband sententiously. “They may not know it, but applied psychology is part of their stock-in-trade.”

“Humph!” Cynthia did not encourage her husband to air his views upon women, about whom she considered he knew less than nothing. She allowed him to call himself a psychologist because she was a kind and tactful girl, but her own word for him so far as her sex was concerned would have been idealist; and she had enough sex-loyalty not to wish to shatter his illusions. “Well,” she went on, changing the subject brightly, “hold the magnifying glass over Mr. Doyle as much as you like, but I’ll just give you one word of advice before it’s too late; beware of Laura, and beware of Dora, but above all, beware of Laura and Dora!”

“And now,” said Guy, throwing the end of his cigarette carefully out of the window, “explain that somewhat cryptic remark.”

“Well, you know Dora, don’t you?”

“Fairly well, I thought. She’s stayed with us—what was it?—three times during the last two years.”

“Well, you know how demure and soulful she always looks, as if butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth, when all the time it would disappear just as fast as you could put it in with a shovel?”

“I know that Dora’s appearance is a little deceptive, yes,” gravely agreed Guy, who knew all about his wife’s ideas regarding his own views on her sex but would not have let her guess so for the world.

“Dora, if she wants to, can be a little demon,” amplified Cynthia frankly. “Well, Laura is a worse edition of Dora, that’s all. Apart, they’re demons, but together they’re positively diabolical. I warn you.”

“Query,” Guy murmured, “when is a demon not diabolical? When it’s apart.”

“And when should a purist cease to be pure?” smiled Cynthia. “In his wife’s bedroom, I should have thought, at least.”

“Mrs. Nesbitt, you shock me,” Guy cackled in high glee. Cynthia’s occasional lapses into pleasant vulgarity he privately considered one of the most delightful things about her. He uncurled his length from the chair. “Well, thank you for warning me. I’ll be on my guard against this diabolical pair. Let us hope that the presence of her fiancé will be a restraining influence upon Dora’s demoniacal tendencies.”

“What a lot of long words my husband does know,” confided Cynthia to her hair-brush. “Where are you off to now? They’re not due for another twenty minutes.”

“I must see about the wine,” Guy replied reverently, and retired. Wine and his wife were about the only two things in this world which Guy really respected.

Chapter II.

From Cocktails to Criminology

It has been said, no doubt with truth, that to make her mark in these overcrowded days a girl must adopt a line and stick to it like grim death. She may be languid, she may be sporting, she may be offensively rude, she may be appealing and doll-like, and she will find success, but she must never be purely and simply herself; that is the fundamental mistake. Such criticism could not be applied to the Misses Howard.

Our semi-civilised conventions have their disadvantages. In a more enlightened age the Misses Howard might have been compelled to go through life wearing horns and a barbed tail and a passable imitation of cloven hooves, as a timely warning to unsuspecting strangers not to take these two innocent-looking maidens at their face-value, charming as that was. Dissimulation, as practised by the Misses Howard, was more than a fine art; it was a hobby. The unsuspecting stranger (of the male sex, of course; female strangers are never unsuspecting, and the more strange they are the more they suspect), catching sight of one of the Miss Howards would swell his manly chest and pat his manly back, and say to himself in his manly tones: “Here is a poor, frightened little thing who looks at me as if I were a god. Who knows? Perhaps I am a god. I am very much inclined, when this helpless and pretty little thing looks at me like that, to think that I am. Out with the lance and armour! Are there any dragons about? Or, failing dragons, mice? At any rate, it is palpably up to me to protect this delectably timid small person from something, and that pretty quickly.”

And twenty minutes later, if he had interested the timid little thing enough, he would be wondering ruefully if certain words of hers really meant what they had implied, or whether they were intended to convey something quite different and impossibly puncturing to the gallant balloon of manly self-esteem. If he did not interest her enough, he would be wondering still more ruefully how he could ever have imagined such a frigid block of sarcastic ice to be incapable in any conceivable way of looking after, not merely herself, but the entire universe as well. The Misses Howard may perhaps most politely be described as “stimulating.”

Nevertheless, the family of Howard had done one good thing—it had brought Guy and Cynthia together. George Howard, the brother of the two demons, a large, solid person, as unlike his sisters as the elephant is unlike the mosquito, had been Guy’s worshipping disciple at school and at Oxford; Dora and Cynthia had been “best friends.” George had now taken for the summer the cottage at Duffley whose garden adjoined Guy’s. He had moved in only three days before this story opens, and the fate of Duffley still hung in the balance.

Laura, younger than her sister by a couple of years, had shouldered the responsibilities of her lot and the family’s orphanhood by accompanying her brother George about wherever he went and insisting upon keeping his house for him, much to that simple soul’s sorrow; on the whole, George would rather have had his house kept for him by a combination of Catherine of Medici and Lucretia Borgia than by either of his sisters. George was the sort of person who likes to know where he is at any given moment, and has a rooted distaste for dwelling upon a volcano. Laura, therefore, was now wasting her gifts upon the rustic life of Duffley. Dora, investing her talents to better purpose, had gone on the stage, where she had confidently expected to multiply them sevenfold.

The British stage is a mass of curious contradictions. It lives upon humbug, it exploits humbug, and it is itself more taken in by humbug than any other institution. If a penniless actress lays out her last ten shillings in a pair of new gloves and a taxi-fare to the stage-door, the stage will say to itself as often as not: “Ha! Trixie Two-shoes is going about everywhere in taxis now, is she? She must be getting on, that girl. There is evidently more in her than I thought. I must have her for my next show, at double the salary she’s getting now. Good!” The stage then buys four cigars at five times the price it usually pays, in order to impress the financial magnate after lunch with the strength of its own position.

But when humbug was offered to it of such rare and golden quality that its exploitation should have been repaid a hundred times over, the stage would have none of it. Dora had been unable to penetrate further into the legitimate drama which she felt herself called upon to enrich, than the stage-door-keeper’s box. Refusing to be beaten (she had no need of the money, but she was determined by hook or by crook to get on that elusive stage), Dora had abandoned the idea of legitimate drama for the time being and expressed her willingness to adorn the chorus of a revue, comforting herself with the reflection that not a few great stars have risen from the musical ranks to legitimate heights. She had at once obtained the position to which her face and figure entitled her and, after a year in the provinces, had for the last six months been adorning the front row of the Mammoth Chorus at the Palladeum. She was now rehearsing a production which was to open the following week, and so was at liberty to present herself, with her fiancé, at a Saturday to Monday housewarming for George.

Only once had either of the Miss Howards met their match, and that was when a certain Mr. Doyle irritably besought Dora five months ago, within twenty minutes of the opening of their acquaintance, “for Heaven’s sake not to try and pull that moon-eyed, baby-voiced stuff on him. He wasn’t born yesterday, and he didn’t like it. In short, her artless behaviour left Mr. Doyle not only cold but weary.” Dora was so taken aback that for the first time in her life she became perfectly natural with a complete stranger.

The sequel was inevitable. When four days later the volatile Mr. Doyle, touched apparently by this complimentary change of front, besought her hand in marriage, she kept her whirling head long enough to accept him on the spot; she felt she had at last met her master, and the sensation though novel was by no means disagreeable. Since then they had remained engaged, in spite of all expectations to the contrary, their own included; indeed, Mr. Doyle had gone so far as to inform his fiancée with engaging candour that this was the longest period he had ever been engaged to any one girl. They were now even beginning to think quite seriously of the possibility of really getting married some day if Mr. Doyle could scrape together the capital on which to do so.

In spite of Cynthia’s assurances, Guy Nesbitt was not on hand when the quartet arrived. With a face like a high priest’s he was performing solemn rites in the dining-room over a bottle of port and a decanter, and Cynthia had to welcome her guests in the drawing-room alone.

She cast a somewhat anxious eye at the sisters as they marched decorously into the room on the heels of the maid’s announcement, their faces both ornamented with the same shy smile. Although she had known them most of her life and Dora was her closest friend, Cynthia never felt she knew quite where she was with them. In their rear walked Mr. Doyle, and behind him George Howard. Where Cynthia cast one anxious eye, George cast two. In spite of his elder years George knew even less where he was with his sisters than Cynthia did.

“Hallo, Lawks!” smiled their hostess. “Hallo, Dawks!” To be admitted to the circle of those permitted to address them by these pseudonyms, which George had invented with simple pride at the age of eight, was the highest privilege the two had to bestow. The number so allowed was, for each sister, twelve, and no one fresh could be received within the magic circle until a suitable vacancy occurred. Cynthia did not know Laura nearly so well as her sister (the two had, very wisely, been despatched to different schools), but was permitted the honour in view of her position as Dora’s Best Friend.

Laura smiled her greeting, and Dora motioned Mr. Doyle forward. “This is my appendage, Cynthia,” she remarked frankly.

“He isn’t much to look at perhaps,” Laura amplified, “but his heart’s in the right place; at least Dora says it is, we haven’t had him vetted yet. His name’s Henry Aloysius Frederick Doyle, but never mind about that; he answers much better to the name of Pat. He’s Irish.”

Mr. Doyle, a slightly-built, clean-shaven young man with black hair, turned in the act of bowing to Cynthia. “I’m not!” he said indignantly.

“Yes, you are,” his future sister-in-law contradicted him. “How could you help being, with a name like Pat Doyle?”

“But my name isn’t Pat Doyle. It’s Henry Doyle. Pat’s a nickname, goodness knows why. I’ve told you a hundred——”

“Stop arguing and shake hands with the lady,” the younger Miss Howard interrupted. “Goodness knows your manners are bad enough at the best of times without making them worse. And we did want you to shine a little to-night. That’s why I told you not to speak with your mouth full, like you usually do, and not to wave your fork in the air when you argue. Of course you’re Irish!”

With a somewhat heightened colour, which told Cynthia that these candid remarks were not without their substratum of truth, Mr. Doyle completed his greeting of his hostess. George, trying hard to look as if he had heard nothing, took Cynthia’s slim hand in his huge paw and told her, with remarkable earnestness, that it had been a topping day; he also expressed his hopes that it would be as topping a day to-morrow. One gathered that George was being what he considered tactful.

Cynthia embarked upon her share of the unnatural conversation that takes place between intimate friends before a rather formal dinner.

Glancing surreptitiously at Dora from time to time, Cynthia decided that the engagement had done her friend good. Dora seemed quieter. Not subdued, or anything like that, but tasting her enjoyment of life with a rather more detached, almost a lazy air. In contrast with the more bounding spirits of Laura, Dora seemed far older than the two years between them would have suggested. Cynthia was conscious of a certain relief.

Five minutes later Guy came hurrying in and paused for a moment in the doorway, blinking benignly round through his glasses. “Sorry I’m so late,” he apologised. “Hallo, Dawks. Good-evening, Laura. The bottles were disgustingly dirty, and I had to go and wash again.”

“Never mind washing, in a good cause,” murmured Mr. Doyle, and came forward to be introduced.

The cocktails which Guy then proceeded to dispense played their usual helpful part (what would civilisation be without its cocktails?) and the little gathering moved into the dining-room. Dora seemed, for such a self-possessed young woman, acutely conscious of the presence of her fiancé, on trial, as it were, before the Best Friend, and was in consequence refreshingly innocuous; Laura, who was only meeting Guy for the third time and was not yet quite sure what to make of him, was equally tentative. Cynthia was able to take her seat at the bottom of the table with the happy confidence that her party was going to be a success. Cynthia was more right than she imagined.

The dinner proceeded much in the way of all dinners, and the ice, to which the cocktails had already dealt a sound blow, was gradually smashed into diminishing smithereens.

As the port was placed before him and the maid withdrew, Guy glanced with satisfaction round his dinner-table, on whose polished mahogany the candles in their heavy silver stands gleamed softly. The meal had gone off well, the guests had been exceedingly cheerful, and Cynthia, in a black velvet gown which admirably enhanced the white beauty of her arms and shoulders, was looking her very best. The host in Guy was full of content, the husband no less so. He poured himself out a glass of port as the decanter reached him from Dora, and beamed round once more.

The young man Doyle had pleased Guy particularly. He had shown signs of a tendency towards argument which was most gratifying; rather voluble, perhaps, and occasionally a little excitable, but good, sound argument; and if there was one form of mental exercise which Guy’s soul loved beyond all others it was argument. In the dreamy contentment that follows a perfectly good dinner he listened to Cynthia rolling the conversational ball at her end of the table and meditated on a new subject to attract Doyle’s attention from his fiancée.

“By the way,” Cynthia was remarking to George, “Monica and Alan are coming to stay with us the week after next for a few days, George. We must get up a river picnic for them.”

“Thank goodness,” Laura took it on herself to reply. “We’ve only been in Duffley three days, but I’m bored stiff with the place already. I feel wasted here. There are possibilities in a river picnic.”

“Oh, rather,” George murmured dutifully, concealing his blenches in his port-glass.

As Cynthia’s brother and sister, and consequently Guy’s brother and sister-in-law, Alan and Monica undoubtedly had every claim upon him; but he was not unduly elated at Cynthia’s news. Duffley was a nice, peaceful place, where one could get a tolerably good game of golf and smoke a quiet pipe or two in the country round. It seemed a pity to have it turned upside down, even for a few days.

George had met Alan and Monica before; the meeting had taken place two years ago, but George would never forget it. “Oh, rather,” he repeated sadly, wondering whether there were many frogs in the neighbourhood of Duffley. The last time they had met, Alan had done his best to endear himself by putting a frog in George’s bed. Neither George nor the frog had altogether appreciated the jest. George had had something of a fellow-feeling for frogs ever since.

Cynthia turned to her other neighbour. “Will you still be here, Pat?” “Mr. Doyle,” had been dropped, on command of the sisters, before the champagne had been round twice.

“I doubt it,” observed Laura darkly, from the other side of the table. It appeared that Laura had taken it upon herself to entertain the gravest doubts as to the engagement lasting for more than a few hours in the immediate future, and to give voice to those doubts upon every possible occasion. When she was not doing this, she was trying to correct, with an air of patient despondency, certain faults which she professed to see in her future brother-in-law’s manners. “For,” as she told her indignant sister, “you may be going to marry him, but I’ve got to be a sister to him; and I never could be a sister to a man who eats and drinks at the same time.”

“No, Cynthia,” said Mr. Doyle with emphasis. “I shall certainly not be here then. Why?”

“What a pity! I couldn’t help thinking you’d be so useful,” Cynthia smiled. “I mean, anybody who can manage to engage himself to Dawks—well, Monica ought to be child’s-play to him.”

“Are you meaning,” inquired Mr. Doyle carefully, “that you want me to get engaged to your sister as well as Dawks? I’m a very obliging man, and I do my best to be kind to my friends, but the trouble is that I’ve never been properly trained as a bigamist. Besides, don’t you think Dawks might have something to say about it?”

“She will,” interposed that young lady’s sister promptly. “She’ll say, ‘Get to it, my lad, and step briskly!’ That’ll be all right, Cynthia. He’ll be free for Monica days before she comes.”

Cynthia laughed tactfully and proceeded with her exposition. “No, I wasn’t meaning that you need go so far as to get engaged to her; what I did think, though, was that you might be able to—well, what is known as _handle_ her, perhaps.”

“Man-handle her, more like,” put in the faithful Greek chorus.

George stifled another groan in his wine-glass. The last time he had encountered her, Monica had handled him, with a hose-pipe, causing him to dance at her commands as madly as any dervish on the front lawn of her house half an hour before the ceremony, on pain of having his wedding garments drenched, what time the wedding-guests stood about in the background feebly beating their breasts; and all because he had bestowed a brotherly tug at the thick plait which hung down her back—a thing to George’s ideas that was almost inevitable etiquette in the presence of a flapper. George had singularly few pleasant recollections of Monica.

Mr. Doyle seemed to have caught something of the spirit of George’s apprehensions. He groaned faintly and ran a hand through his long black hair. “You don’t mean—you don’t mean that your sister is anything like——?” He paused. “Oh, no!” he said with decision. “You must put her off. Remember, Dawks might come down for another week-end, and then there’d be three in the place at a time. Duffley couldn’t stand it. The whole village would vanish in a cloud of blue smoke, and we with it. You must put her off, Cynthia.”

“Are we,” Laura inquired carefully of her sister, “are we, do you think, being insulted, Dawks? Are we being insulted by this wretched Sein Feiner you’re trying to smuggle into the family?”

An apprehensive look appeared on Cynthia’s face. She loved the sisters, and she loved to see them ragging; but she did not love the idea of their ragging across her dining-room table.

Help came from an unexpected quarter. Dora, who had been unwontedly silent during the last half-hour, smiled lazily at her sister. “When are you going to grow up, Lawks?” she asked gently.

Nobody but herself could have posed such a question and retired unscathed. As it was, Laura was half out of her chair before she sank back feebly, turning incredulous eyes up to the ceiling.

“The woman’s nerve’s all gone,” she murmured in a faint voice. “She’s got soft. It’s young love, I suppose. She’ll be asking people to call her Miss Howard soon. Well, Heaven preserve me from ever getting engaged, that’s all!”

“On behalf of the sex,” remarked Mr. Doyle piously, “which I so unworthily represent, Amen!”

Laura’s pose altered abruptly, and her eyes sparkled with battle, but before she could translate her feelings into action, Guy, catching a frantic signal from his wife’s eyes, interposed with a change of subject. “Cheer up, George,” he said hastily. “What’s the matter? You look as if you’d committed a murder, and couldn’t decide what to do with the body.”

“I think he’s just seen a ghost, and is being tactful about it,” said Laura, her attention successfully diverted.

George, roused abruptly from his meditations concerning frogs and hose-pipes, smiled wanly. “Me? I’m all right,” he muttered.

“I think you’ve guessed it, Nesbitt,” remarked Doyle, regarding his future brother-in-law closely. “He has committed a murder. How awkward for him! Now I come to look at him, he has got a criminal face, hasn’t he? I wonder what type he belongs to. The Palmer, would you say? He has that look of chubby innocence. But no, he’s too big and massive. Now, who. . . ? Smith, perhaps? Smith was always the gent, wasn’t he?” He prattled on happily. Thus great events from causes small do spring.

In Guy’s eyes an eager light had appeared, the light that must have gleamed in Stanley’s eyes when he pretended to greet Livingstone so nonchalantly. “I say, Doyle,” he said in hushed tones, “you’re not—you’re not interested in criminology, are you?”

The light leaped into Doyle’s eyes. He looked at his host with reverence and awe. “Are you?” he asked, in the same cathedral-like voice.

“Yes. I’ve never met any one else who was before.”

“Neither have I!”

They gazed at each other in ecstasy.

“What’s your real opinion of the Thompson case?” Guy managed to whisper.

“I heard an awfully interesting theory about the Mahon case,” whispered Doyle at the same moment.

Cynthia coughed gently, “Have I caught your eye, Dawks? This, I think, is where we three gracefully retire.”

They did so.

“Do _you_ think Seddon ought to have been convicted?” murmured Doyle, closing the door as absently as he had opened it.

“Have you read the MacLachlan trial?” murmured Guy absently, producing cigars. “The character of old Fleming is most absorbing. Of course he did it.”

They opened the flood-gates of their hobby and the long pent tide poured forth.

For a time George listened with interest, for murders, dash it, are interesting, say what you like. Then he listened with less interest, for murders, hang it, are a bit what-you-might-call boring, taken in the mass; a good juicy mystery with his morning-paper George enjoyed as much as any one, but one, in George’s opinion, was enough at a time. Besides, after a fellow had done some one in and been well and truly hanged for it, what on earth was there to go on yapping about? George listened with growing boredom.

“What about a foursome to-morrow morning, Guy?” said George. “We can get Dawks to make up the four. She doesn’t play at all too badly.”

“When are your sister and brother-in-law coming, Guy?” said George.

“I say, hadn’t we better be getting into the drawing-room?” said George. “They’ll be wondering what’s happened to us.”

He might have saved himself the trouble; for when two or three criminologists are gathered together, then is for them neither time nor space, sweetheart nor wife, necessity nor law.

They talked on.

“I say,” said George, nerving himself for a supreme effort, “I’m getting a bit fed up with all this chat about murder.”

Never once before in all his life had George so much as hinted that anything his elder and superior did, came to him the least little bit amiss; never before had the disciple ventured to criticise the master. At school where there were three years between them (and three years at school is an eternity) the small but beefy George, a stolid boy in those days, had worshipped, humbly adoring, at the shrine of Guy, the Head of his House. When Guy, who had only just scraped his second fifteen cap, came down as an old boy to find George captain of the school fifteen and runner-up for the captaincy of the cricket eleven, George had all but wept for joy to hear himself addressed almost on equal terms.

At Oxford, where Guy was a fourth-year man, the time of George’s fresherhood had been brightened and sanctified by the presence in the same town of his divinity. Had not George been permitted to be the humble instrument for bringing about Guy’s marriage with the only woman in this world remotely approaching worthiness, and had he not been rewarded beyond rubies by being allowed to be the great one’s best man—an honour he valued far more than the note from his captain announcing that he had been awarded a blue for rugger? Yet, after all that, here he was, red in the face and not unconscious of his epoch-making action, saying gruffly that he was getting fed up with all that chat about murder! Murder has turned people into revolutionaries before George.

The two ghouls paused in their banquet and turned glazed eyes upon George. Had they heard aright?

“_Fed up?_” demanded Doyle incredulously.

“Yes,” replied the mutinous George. “Too much of a good thing.”

“_Too much?_” repeated Mr. Doyle. He exchanged pitying glances with Guy.

“My dear chap,” that gentleman took up the tale, rather in the tones of one addressing a small and particularly foolish infant (thus do all criminologists address on this particular subject those who are not of their own persuasion, which accounts largely for their unpopularity.) “My dear chap, you’ve got hold of the wrong end of the stick. It isn’t the mere _act_ of murder which interests us, it’s the state of mind of the murderer. The particular psychology, in fact, which finds its culmination in murder. The motives, the amount of premeditation, the lack of premeditation even more, the psychology of the victim, the network of circumstance, and a hundred other things—_those_ are what makes murder the most absorbing of all psychological studies.”

“Oh!” said George. But he was impressed. George had never realised that murder had a psychology at all. George was learning things.

Guy saw that the faithful hound was beginning to think of coming once more to heel, and carried on with the good work.

He leaned back in his chair, joined his finger-tips and regarded his now uneasy disciple over his glasses with some severity.

“Let me put it in this way,” he said, striving conscientiously to speak in words of not more than one syllable. “Suppose _you_ committed a murder, George. Suppose you were playing with the vicar, and he foozled his tee-shot to the last green and the whole match, and half-a-crown, depended on it; and suppose, unable to live in the same world with such bungling incompetence, you smote him on the head with one of your clubs, so that he died. Are you supposing all that?”

“Ye-es,” said George, supposing manfully.

“Well, what would interest us is not whether you smote him with your mashie or your niblick, or how much he bled, or whether his death-agonies removed any divots from the fairway. Nothing like that at all, George. Simply the state of your mind which showed you in one moment of blinding revelation that nothing short of murder was demanded by the situation.”

“But I’m not a murderer,” said George, putting his finger on the weak spot.

“No, George, at present you’re not; at least, so we hope. But if you ever happened to murder anybody, then you, yes, even you, George Howard, would be a murderer; and we should be studying the intricate psychology which caused you to snatch at your niblick and lay the vicar low just as eagerly as we now discuss the singular mentality of Mr. George Joseph Smith, who drowned a woman in her bath one minute and strummed on the organ in his sitting-room the next.”

“What he means,” Mr. Doyle chimed in, “is that the really interesting thing is the reactions of the ordinary person to the idea of murder. What he feels like,” he amplified kindly, “after he’s done it, in fact.”

“And before,” Guy amended.

“And before,” Mr. Doyle agreed. “Look, in short, upon this picture and on that. Mr. Howard before murder, same gent after murder. The cross marks the spot where the body was found.”

“So now do you understand, George?” Guy inquired.

“I think so,” George responded, trying to look as if he did. “You mean, you like probing into the mind of a chap who’s committed a murder?”

“In a nutshell!” approved Mr. Doyle.

“But unfortunately we have to do our probing at second-hand,” Guy lamented. “Or rather, we have to let others do the probing for us and then try to draw our own deductions. What wouldn’t you give, Doyle, for the chance to probe yourself? To psycho-analyse a murderer before the law got hold of him and messed his mind up?”

“Oh, don’t!”

“To have him under observation right from the time of the crime,” Guy gloated wistfully. “To know exactly what he thought and felt and did.”

“Don’t tempt me, Nesbitt! I’ll be getting George to murder you in a minute, if you go on like this. I promise I wouldn’t give you away, George, if you’d only let me psycho-analyse you afterwards.”

“That’s right,” Guy said. “George is just the person, of course. The ordinary man is far more interesting than your sordid murderer for gain or your mentally kinked. The reactions of the ordinary man to murder! That’s the crux of the whole thing. And so few murderers are ordinary men, unfortunately. What do you imagine he’d do, Doyle? I believe the ordinary decent man would go straight to the nearest police-station and give himself up.”

The light of argument kindled in Doyle’s eye. George’s heart sank.

“That depends on the circumstances. You must postulate those first. Do you mean, if the murder was a more or less unpremeditated one, and without witnesses?”

“Yes, certainly. Any circumstances you like. Your ordinary decent man’s impulse would be to give himself up at once.”

“Not he!” retorted Mr. Doyle with much scorn. “If there are no witnesses and no evidence against him, he’s going to make one arrow-flight for home and safety.”

“I don’t agree with you,” Guy hunched his head between his shoulders till he looked more like an ill-omened bird of prey than ever. His glasses and the top of his head shone with enjoyment. “I don’t agree with you. He wouldn’t stop to consider whether there was evidence or not. He’d assume that there must be; he’d take it for granted that he’d be found out. He’d give himself up, without hesitation. In a way, you see, it’s a shelving of responsibility, and the ordinary decent man avoids responsibility like the plague. Besides, he’d have too great a respect for the law.”

“Your ordinary decent man sounds to me uncommonly like a spineless worm,” retorted Mr. Doyle. “Now this is what he probably _would_ do. . . .”

The argument raged delectably.

It continued to rage.

It developed heat.

George’s heart sank till it could sink no further. He poured himself out another glass of port and recklessly consumed it side by side with his cigar, an action that would have caused Guy in his saner moments the utmost pain and distress; as it was he never even noticed it. George squirmed, he wriggled, he writhed. Seven times he said, “I say!” and seven times said no more.

“I say!” said George loudly for the eighth time. “I say, if you’re so jolly keen on knowing what the wretched chap would do, why on earth don’t you stage a murder and find out?”

George had a large voice. In spite of their preoccupation his words penetrated into the minds of the other two. They actually stopped arguing to look at him.

“Do what?” said Mr. Doyle.

“What do you mean?” asked Guy.

So far as he knew, George had not meant anything, except a desperate endeavour somehow to break the thick cord of this interminable argument, but desperation sharpens the wits and George saw in a flash what he must have been meaning. “Why,” he explained modestly, “carry out an experiment, of course. A psychological experiment,” he added with pride. “Not a real murder, of course. Just fix things so that a chap thinks he’s committed a murder, you see. Oughtn’t to be so difficult. You could hammer out half a dozen different ways of working it, Guy, with your gumption.”

They stared at him in respectful silence. George, who was by way of sharing their respect, stared back.

“By jove!” exclaimed Mr. Doyle softly. One gathered that the idea appealed to him. He looked at George with new eyes.

That gentleman obliged with another brain-wave. “Do you remember that time when you wondered what a Dean would do if he found a girl in his rooms after the coll. gates were locked, under the impression that she’d been invited to stay till morning, so to speak, Guy? Well, something like that.”

Guy, remembering his innocent curiosity on that point and the means he had taken to gratify it, began to laugh silently, stealing jam with every appearance of joyful guilt. Across his delighted vision strayed the germs of three separate and distinct plans for making an innocent citizen imagine that he had murdered a fellow. “The ordinary man’s reactions to murder, eh?” he chuckled. “It _could_ be done. Upon my soul, it could! What do you say, Doyle?”

What Mr. Doyle should have said is: “Nesbitt, your cocktails were good, your champagne better, your port superlative. Of all have we drunk, and in consequence we are not a little elated. Let us realise the fact, and not toy with fascinating impossibilities.” He said nothing of the sort. What he did say, tersely, was: “Every time! Let’s!”

Guy jumped to his feet, grinning madly. “I think—yes, I think I see it! I shall want a female accomplice. Let’s go and hear what the others have got to say about it.”

They joined the ladies.

There, five minutes later, Guy was being accorded the highest honours, as an enlivener of the tedium of Duffley’s daily round, amid hearty shrieks which effectively drowned the one half-hearted dissentient voice in the room.

“Guy, I hand it to you,” Laura was shrieking. “And to mark the occasion I’m going to create a precedent. I’ve got no vacancy in my inner circle, but I must do something. I’m going to create an entirely extra place for you and make a baker’s dozen of it. Henceforth I am Lawks to you, and Lawks only!”

“Lawks it is!” beamed the gratified Guy, and winked broadly at his wife. “Thank you.”

That lady, watching his narrow back as he drew up chairs for the conference, had no difficulty in correctly interpreting the wink. It said quite plainly: “What price my ideas about feminine psychology now?”

With much ceremony and clinking of glasses (a bottle of Benedictine was specially opened for the occasion and ruthlessly carried into the drawing-room in defiance of all decent convention) Guy was sealed of the tribe of Howard.

“Oh!”

An exclamation from Mr. Doyle caused all heads to turn in his direction. He was smiting the back of a chair with clenched fist.

“_I_ know the man for us!” cried Mr. Doyle. “The very fellow! As ordinary and decent as you like, and the sort of man whose reactions it’s almost impossible to predict. And it’d do him all the good in the world, too. He wants shaking up badly. It might be the saving of him to imagine for twenty-four hours that he’d killed a man. A fellow called Priestley. . . .”

Chapter III.

Mr. Priestley Is Adventurous

To say that Mr. Priestley had been seriously perturbed by the vegetable accusations that had been hurled against him, would be to overstate the case; to say that he dismissed them immediately with complacent assurance from his mind, would be to trifle with the truth. During the few days that followed the young man’s visit Mr. Priestley was at some pains to prove to himself over and over again that he could not, by any stretch of imagination, be truthfully termed a turnip. The outburst he explained with complete satisfaction as the spasmodic attempt of a nervous mentality, disordered by love, to convert the whole world to its own way of thinking and being; and he put the whole thing out of his mind as unworthy of serious consideration, exactly forty-eight separate times.

Yet these baseless insinuations of our friends, dismiss, explain or shelve them as we will, have a habit of rankling. We _know_ that they are baseless, because of course they are; but they rankle—perhaps out of their own sheer baselessness. It is extraordinarily annoying of them.

Without his quite realising the fact, a spirit of restlessness began to pervade the ordered round of Mr. Priestley’s daily life. He did things he had never done before. He snapped at his perfectly good man; he sniffed the spring air, while vague and foolish aspirations filled his bosom; several times he looked almost with distaste at the unoccupied chair on the other side of his hearth, instead of congratulating himself as usual on its emptiness; he conceived something approaching dislike for the pleasantly impossible idealism of Theocritus, and substituted the cynical Theophrastes as his bedside book.

On Saturday evening things reached a climax. Shattering into small fragments the record of years, Mr. Priestley shook the dust of his flat off his feet (or performed the motions of shaking dust off feet, in the total absence of the commodity itself) and went out to dine at a restaurant! No snail, Mr. Priestley felt sure, ever forsakes its house to dine at a restaurant. His vindication was surely complete.

The restaurant Mr. Priestley chose as the scene of this epoch-making meal was in Jermyn Street, a quiet, pretentious place, where the high-priestlike demeanour of the head-waiter amply justified the length of the bill. High-priestlike head-waiters are worth their weight in extras. Mr. Priestley, with a wisdom beyond his experience, allowed the high-priest to choose his dinner for him and his half-bottle of burgundy.

Now, Mr. Priestley did know something about burgundy, and his knowledge told him that this was very excellent burgundy indeed. So impressed was Mr. Priestley with the excellence of this admirable burgundy that he readily agreed to the high-priest’s suggestion that one paltry half-bottle was not enough for a man of palate. He had another half-bottle.

The high-priest was delighted with Mr. Priestley’s palate. He mentioned at the end of dinner, in the tones of one chanting a solemn anthem, that there was some Very Special Brandy in the cellars which even such a palate as Mr. Priestley’s would receive with awe and wonder. It was a Chance, the high-priest intimated, which would Not Occur Again. Mr. Priestley, now as mellow and glowing as an October sunset, fell in with the idea at once. He gave his palate its chance. The high-priest then chose Mr. Priestley a cigar, superintended the seven underlings who helped him into his overcoat, pocketed his remuneration with the air of one accepting alms for the deserving rich, and turned Mr. Priestley out into the night.

His very expensive cigar between his teeth, Mr. Priestley ambled down Jermyn Street, at peace with the world. His case was proved for the forty-ninth time, and now without a shadow of doubt; he was _not_ a vegetable-marrow. Do vegetable-marrows dine alone in expensive restaurants, knowingly discuss palates with high-priests, and smoke the best cigars procurable? They do not.

“And neither, confound it!” observed Mr. Priestley aloud with sudden vehemence, “do snails!” And he winked surprisingly at a passing respectable matron. He was shocked at his action the next moment, but he was also guiltily pleased with it. Even Pat would admit that a hermit practically never winks at respectable ladies, even of safely mature years.

Mr. Priestley ambled on, feeling something like a cross between the devil and the deep blue sea.

The entrance to the tube station attracted his attention and he turned into it. It would be pleasant, he thought, to stroll through and have a look at the lights of Piccadilly Circus. For some reason obscure to him Mr. Priestley felt that he wanted lights, and plenty of them. He might even linger for a few minutes in Piccadilly Circus. It was a mildly devilish thing to do, he knew.

He took up his stand at the Circus entrance of the station and gazed benevolently out upon the scene, crowded with hurrying late-comers to the neighbouring theatres.

A lady with a very white nose and very red lips looked at him and diagnosed the two half-bottles under his waistcoat.

“Hullo, dear!” said the lady, with a winning smile.

Mr. Priestley started violently and plunged back into the station behind him like a rabbit into its burrow. The lady, diagnosing this time that she had failed to please, passed on. Mr. Priestley emerged again, properly ashamed of himself.

“That,” observed Mr. Priestley to himself, with considerable severity, “was the action of a snail. I ought to have returned that woman’s greeting and taken her off to some place of refreshment. A glass of port would probably have purchased her story, and I should have undergone an interesting and unprecedented experience. I should, in fact, as Pat counselled me, have had an Adventure. Never mind, the opportunity will probably occur again.” Which, as Mr. Priestley was communing with himself in the Piccadilly entrance of the Underground Railway, was no less than the truth.

As even Mr. Priestley had surmised, he had not long to wait. Almost the next moment a voice spoke at his elbow—a pleasantly modulated feminine voice this time, though not altogether free from irritation.

“Well, here you are at _last_!” said the voice. “I was beginning to think you never were coming. I’ve been waiting round about here for nearly twenty minutes.”

This time Mr. Priestley had better command of himself. He did not start violently, he did not bolt for the lift like a mole for its hill, he did not even pause to reflect upon what he was doing. He just turned round and gazed with interest at the pretty, flower-like face that was upturned to his and the innocent blue eyes, just clouded with what must have been pardonable exasperation. Then he smiled benignly.

Some sage has already put it upon record that circumstances alter cases. He did not add that some circumstances can take a case, jump on it, turn it inside out, roll it out flat and then build it up backwards; yet this is what his own circumstances were doing for Mr. Priestley’s case. A week ago Mr. Priestley would have raised his hat, turned a bright brick-red and stammered out to the owner of the trusting, flower-like face the error of her ways. As it was he descended blithely to such depths of duplicity as at that remote time he would have deemed incredible. This was his chance! This was to the life-stories of improper ladies over glasses of port as that burgundy had been to red ink! This was an ADVENTURE not merely with a capital “A” but in block letters a mile high! This was Heaven-sent Opportunity!

Wherein Mr. Priestley erred. It was not Heaven who had sent him the opportunity, but a much more unscrupulous agency.

“I’m exceedingly sorry I’m so late,” replied the adventurous Mr. Priestley, and continued to beam. Limpet indeed!

If this answer brought a tinge of astonishment into the girl’s eyes, if she lifted one cheek out of the fur in which it nestled as if incredulous that she had heard aright and wanted the remark repeated, if she then involuntarily stepped back half a pace and scrutinised Mr. Priestley’s face with something not unlike acute misgiving, if her delicately slender form finally quivered slightly and she bit her lip as one making violent and drastic efforts to control the muscles of her face—if these things happened, I say, then Mr. Priestley was far too occupied in admiring his own devilishness to notice them. He was the sort of person to shut both eyes and wrap his head up in a rug if he saw an adventure approaching him, was he? Huh!

By an impartial observer the girl might have been thought to pull herself together with an effort. “Well, now you are here,” she said, and her voice expressed nothing but asperity, “where can we talk?”

Mr. Priestley looked at the face of his unexpected companion and found that it was good. He looked round at the lights of Piccadilly and found that they were good. He bestowed a casual glance on the world in general, and found that it was good, too. “Talk?” he said. “I should think we might talk anywhere.” He looked round Piccadilly Circus again and his surmise was confirmed; it was simply full of places where this charming person and he might talk.

“We don’t want to be overheard, you know,” the charming person reminded him, with a touch of austerity.

Mr. Priestley was in entire agreement. “Oh, no. Of course not. Good gracious, no!” While he was still speaking he knew vaguely there was something he wanted to ask; the next moment he realised what it was. Why, after all, did they not want to be overheard?

“What about the lounge of the Piccadilly Palace?” suggested the girl, before he could frame the question.

“Admirable!” said Mr. Priestley with enthusiasm, his question completely forgotten before his interest in the particularly delightful way in which his companion’s brows just did not meet as she frowned her perplexity over this serious matter. The thought occurred to him that for all he knew the world might have been full of feminine brows that delightfully just did not meet when their owners were charmingly perplexed, and he had never noticed this remarkable phenomenon. The next moment he knew for a certainty that there was only one possible pair of brows that could behave like that and his life hitherto had not been really wasted after all.

The next coherent thing that Mr. Priestley knew was that he was sitting before a small table in the Piccadilly Palace lounge and ordering coffee. To the waiter’s bland assumption that liqueurs would be required as well the girl shook her head in a decided negative; and Mr. Priestley, who detested platitudes almost as much as false quantities, reminded himself that enough was as good as a feast, and shook his head in a decided negative too.

The breathing space before the coffee arrived gave Mr. Priestley time to collect his hitherto somewhat scattered wits and conquer the dream-like state of his mind. This was not an illusion, he pointed out to himself half-incredulously during his companion’s fortuitous silence; he really was sitting in the lounge of the Piccadilly Palace with a particularly charming young woman who was labouring under the impression that he was some one else. Whom she had mistaken him for, or what she wanted to talk to him about, he could neither imagine nor very much cared; for once in his life he was living only in the present. The explanations which must inevitably come later, would be awkward no doubt, but they could take care of themselves; in the meantime he was going to take unscrupulous advantage of the situation for just as long as he possibly could. Did somebody once mention the word “limpet”?

The coffee, which arrived with singular promptitude, helped Mr. Priestley to dispel the slight mistiness from his brain. Glancing covertly at his companion, he now consciously perceived what had before been an unconscious impression, that her prettiness had a quality of wistful charm which was particularly appealing. One saw at once that her dainty fragility was not fitted to cope with the harsh realities of this world. She needed looking after. Somebody, Mr. Priestley decided with mild indignation, _ought_ to be looking after her; it was extremely remiss of somebody not to be looking after her. A feeling that was not exactly paternal, not at all brotherly, and perhaps not so entirely disinterested as its owner imagined, took possession of him: he would look after this eminently protectable small person. The feeling was, in fact, that of the prowling knight-errant who comes across the prepossessing maiden who has been stripped and tied to the tree by robbers; he rescues her with eager zest, but he does not look upon her like a father.

At present the distressed maiden’s childlike features wore an expression of stern resolve which sat upon them, Mr. Priestley thought, with pathetic incongruity. She was quietly, but even to his uninitiated eyes, expensively dressed, in pleasant contrast with his late encounter, whose clothes had cleverly combined the maximum of loudness with the minimum of cost. Hitherto, except for a few murmured commonplaces regarding sugar and milk and such trifles, she had not spoken since they entered the place. Mr. Priestley awaited her next words with ill-suppressed eagerness.

She sipped at her coffee, set down the cup and turned to look at him fairly and squarely. “You know,” she said with a certain charming diffidence, “you’re not quite the sort of person I expected.”

“No?” beamed Mr. Priestley warily, drawing rapid deductions.

“In fact, if it hadn’t been for the carnation, I should certainly never have recognised you.”

Mr. Priestley threw a surprised glance towards his buttonhole. Certainly there was a carnation in it, of a rather uncommon mauve hue; equally certainly there had been none when he left his own carnationless abode. Evidently the high-priest must have set it there, as a floral tribute of respect to such an uncommon palate. Mr. Priestley’s heart warmed still more towards that dignitary.

“What sort of person did you expect, then?” he ventured, greatly daring.

The girl laughed a little awkwardly. “Oh, well, you understand, surely. I mean, we needn’t really have met there after all. I wouldn’t mind being seen with you anywhere.”

“Thank you,” murmured the mystified Mr. Priestley. The tone was that of a compliment, but it seemed to him that the words might have been better chosen.

“You see you’re not—well, not very like the description you gave me in your letter, are you?”

Mr. Priestley affected to consider the point. “Well, not _very_ much, no,” he admitted.

“_I_ shouldn’t call you sturdy and powerful-looking, six-foot high and forty round the chest,” pursued the girl with innocent candour.

“Did I say that?” murmured Mr. Priestley, aghast.

“You know you did,” said his companion with gentle severity. “Why?”

Mr. Priestley hesitated. This was becoming very difficult; very difficult indeed. “Well,” he floundered, “because I thought—because it seemed more likely that—because I hoped——” He drew his handkerchief from his sleeve and mopped his brow.

“You mean, because you thought I should be more likely to give you a favourable reply in those circumstances?”

“Exactly!” Mr. Priestley said with relief. “Yes, that was it. Exactly.”

“It wasn’t very straight of you,” the girl commented in severe tones, but there was just a suspicion of a smile at the corners of her mouth.

Mr. Priestley caught sight of the smile and took heart. “No,” he agreed contritely, drawing more deductions, “I—I’m afraid it wasn’t. I see that now.” Had the unhappy girl been answering an advertisement in a matrimonial paper, or what? Most decidedly she wanted all the looking after she could get. What were her brothers doing? Perhaps she hadn’t got any. Then what had her parents been doing not to give her some? Most certainly somebody was very much to blame.

“But after all, I suppose one could hardly expect straightness from _you_, could one?” surprisingly remarked the object of his solicitude.

Mr. Priestley started slightly. “No, no,” he assented, playing for safety. “No, of course not. Naturally. I quite understand that.”

There was a short pause while the girl sipped her coffee with a thoughtful air and Mr. Priestley tried hard to imagine who he was supposed to be, what the favourable reply had been about, and why one could hardly expect straightness from him. He did not succeed.

“Well, I suppose you’ll do,” remarked the girl at last. She spoke without any degree of enthusiasm. It appeared that she had been debating the point.

“Er—good,” said Mr. Priestley, also with a marked lessening of enthusiasm. It may have been that the effects of that second half-bottle were beginning to wear off, it may have been due to the unexpected complication in what had promised to be a straightforward little episode, but the truth was that the Adventure was rapidly losing its light-hearted aspect. For some reason Mr. Priestley felt sure that quite serious developments were in the wind, and he was wondering uneasily just how he was going to cope with them.

The girl turned to him with a quick movement. “Did you bring your tools with you?”

“My—my _tools_?” echoed Mr. Priestley in bewilderment. Surely he had not been mistaken for a plumber?

“Yes, I should love to see them. But I suppose you don’t carry them with you usually, do you?”

“Oh, very seldom,” said Mr. Priestley firmly. “Very seldom, indeed.” A dim recollection came to him. “My—er—mate, you know,” he murmured.

“What a pity! Still, it doesn’t really matter, because you won’t be wanting them to-night, as I told you. I can show you a very easy way into the house.”

Mr. Priestley’s blood, already somewhat chilled, dropped several further degrees. For a moment he stared dumbly at his pretty companion. Then he took his bull by its horns.

“Perhaps you had better tell me the—the whole story,” he said a little huskily.

The girl’s eyes widened in innocent surprise. “But I told you everything, in my letter!”

“Yes. Oh, yes,” mumbled Mr. Priestley. “Quite. But I—I think you had better tell me _again_, you see. Letters are never very satisfactory, are they? I mean, perhaps I should understand it all rather more clearly if you—if you told me again, you know!”

“I thought I’d made it clear enough,” said the girl in puzzled tones. “We were to meet here to discuss anything necessary, and then go down in my car to break into the house while they’re away for the week-end. What else is there you want me to tell you?”

Mr. Priestley’s blood retired a little farther into cold storage. His mild blue eyes remained fixed on his companion’s face in a horrified stare. “To—to break into the house?” he repeated faintly.

“Of course! I explained it all in my letter. Why, you’re looking quite startled.”

Mr. Priestley strove to pull himself together. “Well, it—it is a little bit startling, isn’t it?” he said with a ghastly attempt at a smile. “Just a little bit. To—to break into the house, so to speak.”

The girl’s lips twitched and she turned her head hastily away, apparently to contemplate with every sign of interest an under-developed palm-tree in an opposite corner of the lounge. When she turned back to Mr. Priestley again a moment later her face once more wore an expression of guileless bewilderment.

“But what else should I want to hire a burglar for?” she asked, reasonably enough.

Mr. Priestley swallowed. “Of course, there—there is something in that,” he conceded, endeavouring to assume the air of one debating an interesting point. “Oh, yes, I quite see that.”

He cast a hunted glance round. The Adventure was beginning to assume the aspect less of an adventure than a nightmare. Protection! There was certainly one person at their table who required all the protection that could be got, but it was not the one at his side; appearances, Mr. Priestley reflected wildly, _are_ deceptive. The sooner, in fact, that he got away from this promising young criminal, the better. Should he make a plain bolt for it at once, or——

“Well, is there anything else you want to ask me?” the girl’s voice broke into his agonised thoughts. “Because, if not, hadn’t we better be making a move? We don’t want to be _too_ late getting back to London, do we? I’ll pay the waiter, of course, if you will call him.” And she began to refasten the fur at her throat and collect her various impedimenta by way of a hint that was anything but mistakable.

“After all, I can tell you the details just as well in the car going down, can’t I?” she added.

Mr. Priestley moistened his dry lips. The second half-bottle was very little in evidence by this time. “Er—Miss—er—Miss—er——”

“Spettigue, I think you mean,” the girl rescued him gently. “Didn’t you get that letter I wrote you at all, Mr. Mullins?”

“Oh, yes,” Mr. Priestley-Mullins replied hastily. “Yes, of course, Miss—er—Spettigue. But I don’t—that is——”

The girl came as near to showing impatience as a creature so demurely angelic could. “It’s half-past nine already,” she said plaintively. “We really must not waste any more time, Mr. Mullins. Isn’t that our waiter over there? Do please call him.” And she fixed Mr. Priestley with a look that should have caused even milder men than he to write fiercely to _The Times_ about the dragon-shortage in these degenerate days, and can’t something be done about it? She also rose to her feet with a decision that left no room for further delay.

Reluctantly, very reluctantly, Mr. Priestley followed suit. Somebody (he never knew who) paid the waiter, and they made their way out into the open air again.

“The car’s in a garage up in Maida Vale,” remarked the girl. “We’d better take the Underground.”

“I think, perhaps a taxi——?” suggested Mr. Priestley, in whose harassed brain a plan was now beginning to form.

The girl looked at him with appealing helplessness. “I do so _much_ prefer the Underground,” she said wistfully. “It’s so much safer.”

They took the Underground.

Now Mr. Priestley was a chivalrous man. Even as his Adventure had turned out, he could not bring himself to slip out of it, as he easily could have done already, without a word of explanation. He had been responsible for this tangled skein; it was equally his responsibility to leave it in a properly tidied condition. Without going so far as to make a clean breast of his own baseness, he yet felt it necessary to explain that this evening at any rate was a close season for burglars. For the rest, any faint feelings of curiosity which he might have entertained regarding the ultimate intentions of this charming but nefarious maiden had now been quite swamped in the urgency of his anxiety not to be mixed up in them. Even to himself Mr. Priestley could not but admit that he would make a remarkably poor burglar.

A taxi would have suited his purpose much better, but he had to do the best he could with the Underground. Fortunately, there were only one or two people in the carriage, and Mr. Priestley was able to deliver himself with no fear of being overheard. “Miss Spettigue,” he began, in the low, firm voice of the Man who will Stand No Nonsense. “Miss Spettigue, I fear I have some unpleasant news for you.”

The lady curved a small hand round an invisible ear. “Did you say anything?” she inquired at the top of her voice.

Mr. Priestley abandoned the low, firm voice and substituted a louder edition. “I fear I have some unpleasant news for you,” he roared above the din of the train. Chatty conversation on the Underground is best carried on between a retired fog-horn and a bull from Bashan.

“If it’s your tools,” the girl howled cheerfully, “I——”

“It isn’t my tools,” bellowed Mr. Priestley with a testiness which quite surprised him. “It’s this. I regret that I shall be unable to—er—to break into this house for you.”

“Unable to——?” The girl looked at him with astonishment. “What do you mean?” she shrieked.

At that moment the train considerately slowed down to approach a station, and the interchange of ideas became easier.

“What do you mean?” repeated the girl, in more normal tones.

Mr. Priestley wriggled uneasily. “I—I’ve reformed, you see,” he mumbled.

“You’ve _what_?”

“Reformed. I—I’m not going to burgle any more.”

“Why ever not?”

Mr. Priestley fixed a hot gaze on an advertisement containing some pithy advice to mothers. “I—well, I don’t think it’s right,” he said uncomfortably.

There was a short but tense silence. The train shrieked to a standstill.

“I think I’d better get out here,” murmured Mr. Priestley unhappily, still learning what to do if he ever became a mother.

“Here’s your ticket,” muttered Mr. Priestley, now blushing miserably all over.

The silence full of unutterable things into which his companion had retired, her face turned away from him, was broken by a curious sound. It was not exactly a sniff, nor was it a gulp, and it certainly was not a choke; but in some curious way it combined the essential elements of all three. Mr. Priestley, taken by surprise, turned and looked at her. As he did so he gave a violent start and quite forgot that the train was on the point of moving on from the station where he had planned a graceful exit. Her shoulders were heaving, and she was fumbling blindly in her ridiculous little bag. The next moment she drew out a still more ridiculous handkerchief and applied it to her eyes.

“God bless my soul!” Mr. Priestley petitioned.

“Good gracious me!” observed Mr. Priestley.

“Well, I never!” Mr. Priestley remarked.

“Here, I say, you mustn’t do that!” ordered Mr. Priestley, aghast.

“Please don’t cry!” Mr. Priestley implored, and incontinently abandoned all lingering thoughts about exits.

The girl turned a woebegone face towards him, her lower lip trembling pathetically. Anything more utterly helpless and appealing could hardly be imagined. “Then you’re—you’re going to leave me in the lurch, Mr. Mullins?” she asked, in a funny, shaky little voice.

Mr. Priestley squirmed. It appeared to him with sudden and unexpected force how remiss it was of him not to be a burglar. It was not playing the game. Here was this charming girl expecting to meet her burglar, never dreaming that she was doing anything else but meet her burglar; and there was Mr. Priestley going about the place not being a burglar at all. His conduct had been despicable, that was the only word for it—despicable!

Still, the fact remained that however contemptible it might be of him, he certainly was not a burglar. “I’m afraid I must,” he replied uneasily.

The girl had recourse to her handkerchief. “I think it’s most c-cruel of you,” she quavered. “After all, you can’t c-count my letters as b-burgling! I think you’re horrid. And after you p-promised, and I sent half your f-fee in advance.”

“My f-fee?” repeated the bewildered Mr. Priestley. “Your l-letters?”

“Yes. Oh, how can you be so unk-kind?”

That is just what Mr. Priestley was wondering. But he was wondering a large number of other things as well. In any case, he really had to find out more about this mysterious business first. “Look here,” he said desperately, while the train gathered speed, “will you tell me the whole thing from beginning to end as if I didn’t know anything about it at all? I—I’m afraid I must have been mixing you up with—with somebody else. I have—er—so many clients, you see.”

Bright hope was dawning in the face which the girl turned eagerly towards him. “And you’ll get my letters for me, after all?”

“I can’t make any promises,” returned Mr. Priestley cautiously, “but let me have the—er—the facts of the case first.”

With renewed animation the girl proceeded to give them to him, telling her story as much as possible between stations but not sparing her larynx even in the tunnels.

Mr. Priestley listened to her with mingled feelings of relief and uneasiness. The relief was due to the fact that she was not, after all, the promising young criminal for which he had taken her, the uneasiness to the realisation that the matter was very much more complicated than he had ever imagined; she was planning to commit burglary, true, but it was, so to speak, a white burglary.

Briefly, the story which Mr. Priestley learnt with gradually increasing indignation was to the effect that Miss Spettigue had, when a younger and exceedingly foolish virgin, written certain letters to a man who had turned out subsequently to be, if not a wolf, at any rate a fox in sheep’s clothing.

“Nothing actually wrong in them, Mr. Mullins,” she explained with touching earnestness. “Just—well, just _silly_.”

“Oh, quite,” murmured the temporary Mr. Mullins uncomfortably. “Precisely.”

The disguised fox had since married; but, on being approached with a view to surrendering his trophies of Miss Spettigue’s girlish affections, had refused point-blank to do anything of the sort. Matters had begun to look serious, for the Fox, this time approaching Miss Spettigue himself, had hinted very plainly that, if she wished to regain possession of her compromising effusions, she must be prepared to pay for the privilege, and very handsomely too.

Miss Spettigue here paused to dab her eyes again and gulp.

“The scoundrel!” exclaimed the horrified Mr. Priestley.

The lady flashed him a look of gratitude and continued her tale.

A sum had actually been named, far in excess of her possibilities, and there the matter had rested—with the unpleasant threat in the background that if the money were not paid by a certain date “steps would be taken.” As the money could not be paid, it was obviously a matter of some urgency to obtain possession of the letters by other means.

“You’re engaged to be married, no doubt?” observed Mr. Priestley half-abstractedly, when the recital was finished. His thoughtful gaze was fixed on the opposite side of the carriage and he seemed to be debating his immediate future. “Of course, you could hardly tell your fiancé. I quite see that.”

His companion bestowed on him a sidelong and somewhat anxious look. Mr. Priestley was far too preoccupied to notice it, but a shrewd observer might have summed it up as the calculating look of one hastily reckoning up comparative values.

If this were so, she made her decision with commendable promptitude. “I am not engaged to be married, Mr. Mullins,” she said, “I _am_ married.”

“God bless my soul!” exclaimed Mr. Priestley, looking at her with new eyes. Somehow he could not associate this flower-like innocence (as it was after all now plainly proved to be) with the coarsities of married life. She might be of marriageable years, no doubt she was; but in essence she was still a child—and children are forbidden to marry. So should grown-up children be too, thought Mr. Priestley, reluctantly abandoning in favour of its legal owner the rôle of protector which he had been beginning again to contemplate. The next instant he hastily picked it up again. Of course she needed protection, now more than ever —from this coarse, obtuse, gross-bodied husband of hers! Mr. Priestley had no doubt at all that this must be a correct description of the absent Mr. Spettigue. “God bless my soul!” he repeated.

With intuitive genius the girl must have been following the line of his thoughts. A frightened look appeared in her lustrous eyes as she gazed at him in mute entreaty.

“That’s the awful part, you see,” she faltered. “If I were single it—it wouldn’t matter so much, but my husband——!” She choked. “He’d never forgive me!” she concluded mournfully—but not so mournfully that she was precluded from watching Mr. Priestley’s reactions to this interesting piece of news very closely indeed. It was the crux of the situation, and if Mr. Priestley did not recognise the fact, his companion certainly did.

A genuine tear glistened in her eye. “My life would be ruined!” she quavered. “Absolutely ruined!”

Mr. Priestley drew a deep breath. “Don’t distress yourself, my dear young lady, please,” he implored. “We—we must see what can be done. Tell me the rest of the story.”

The girl drew a deep breath also. In an artistically shaky voice she proceeded to tell the rest of her story.

It had been impossible to confide in her husband. “He —he wouldn’t quite _understand_,” she explained with pathetic dignity, and Mr. Priestley nodded violent agreement. So, she had decided that the best thing to do was to get some one to burgle the Fox’s lair for her, and had therefore inserted the newspaper advertisement which Mr. Mullins had answered. Their subsequent correspondence was, of course, fresh in his memory. In the meantime she herself had not been idle. She had found out where the letters were kept and, by an intelligent system connected with a certain inmate of the household itself, was able to keep herself informed of its master’s doings. Through this medium news had reached her of the projected week-end visit and the consequent closing of the house, and she had arranged the raid accordingly.

“I see,” observed Mr. Priestley very thoughtfully. “Yes, all this certainly must make things very much clearer.”

The recently married Mrs. Spettigue leaned towards him and impulsively laid a small, gloved hand upon his. “Now _do_ say you’ll get my letters for me, Mr. Mullins!” she beseeched, her pretty eyes fixed on his in a look of infinite entreaty. “You can’t possibly pretend it’s real burgling, can you? _Please!_”

The good red blood leapt in Mr. Priestley’s veins as it had not done for fifteen years. After all, what did it matter? The cause was just enough in all conscience, and even if things did go wrong, his own name would not be brought into it. But, bother all that—what did anything matter beside the good name of this poor, charming creature, whose little hand still lay so trustfully upon his?

“I—I’ll do my best,” he promised huskily. “My dear young lady, I’ll certainly do my best.”

His companion’s relief was undisguised. “Oh, you _dear_!” Her little hand gently squeezed Mr. Priestley’s in touching gratitude. She smiled at him through her tears. “I _knew_ you wouldn’t let me down when it really came to the point.”

Many heroes have had less reward.

For the rest of the journey, and during the long ride through the darkness in the powerful two-seater, Mr. Priestley remained strangely silent. As a matter of fact he was trying hard to remember anything he had ever read which might prove helpful to one about to commit a felony. Wasn’t there somebody once called Charlie Peace? Or was it Charlie Raffles?

Chapter IV.

Red Blood and Red Ink

The girl backed the car skilfully up an almost invisible lane, and switched off the engine.

“We’d better get out here,” she said, in matter-of-fact tones. “The house is only a few yards away.”

They got out and walked down the road. Behind trim hedges, broken by white gates, loomed up dimly the shadowy masses of substantial houses. Before one of the white gates Mrs. Spettigue paused.

“Here we are!” she observed, in a low, thrilling voice.

“Oh!” said Mr. Priestley, unable altogether to prevent himself from wishing they were not. “I—er—I see.”

“What do we do now, Mr. Mullins?”

Mr. Priestley pulled himself together and did his best to vanquish the curious sinking feeling at the pit of his waistcoat. He must not forget that he was a professional burglar. The reputation of the absent Mr. Mullins rested on his shoulders.

“We go in,” he replied, with a decision which he was far from feeling.

They went in.

As they walked up the short drive Mr. Priestley pondered very earnestly. Now it came to the point, how on earth _did_ one break into a house? The nearer he got to the building, the more solid and impenetrable it looked. Weren’t there cunning things to be done with knife-blades and window-latches? And treacle and that he had never come at all and being remarkably glad that he had. Anyhow, turnip indeed!

With infinite care they crept into what seemed to be a passage and listened. Not a sound was audible. If ever a house was deserted, Mr. Priestley reflected, surely this one was. A small hand clutched one of his, and he clutched back. They began to move soundlessly down the dark passage.

A penetrating squeak brought Mr. Priestley’s heart for a moment into his mouth. Then he saw that the girl had opened a door on the right of the passage. Through the aperture a pair of French windows on the farther side of a fair-sized room was faintly illuminated by the moonlight.

“This is the library,” said the girl in a low voice and drew him inside, closing the door behind them.

Mr. Priestley’s first action was the result of his ponderings. One item of criminal lore at least he had remembered—always provide for your way of escape! He walked swiftly across the room and opened the French windows.

“Oh, Mr. Mullins!” exclaimed the girl with soft admiration, when, not without pride, Mr. Priestley had explained the reason for his action. “What a thing it is to have an experienced burglar to help me. I should never have done that by myself.”

Mr. Priestley began to think that perhaps he would not have made such a bad burglar after all.

“Now, then, where does he keep those letters?” he asked, in brisk, businesslike tones.

“In one of the drawers of the writing-table,” said the girl softly. “Would it be safe to turn on the light, do you think?”

“No!” replied Mr. Priestley with firmness. “It wouldn’t.”

“Did you bring an electric torch?”

“Er—no, I’m afraid I didn’t.”

“Well, just strike a match, and I’ll show you the drawer.”

It was against Mr. Priestley’s instincts of preservation, but he complied. The flaring match gave him a brief glimpse of a big, comfortable room, and Mrs. Spettigue standing in front of a large writing-desk against one wall. Then it died down and Mr. Priestley prudently extinguished it.

“Did you see?” came the girl’s voice. “This one—second from the top on the right-hand side. It’s locked, unfortunately.”

“Bother!” said Mr. Priestley with feeling. How on earth did one tackle a locked drawer? Ah, of course! “Do you think you could get me the poker, if there is one?” he asked, feeling his way over to the table.

He heard the girl move across the room and a minute later a stout bar of iron was in his hands. He touched the drawer with it tentatively. Nothing much happened.

“Bother!” said Mr. Priestley again.

“What a pity you didn’t bring your tools, after all,” observed Mrs. Spettigue in a thoughtful voice.

Mr. Priestley gave the drawer a smart rap. The noise which resulted seemed as if it must have awakened the Seven Sleepers. Mr. Priestley hurriedly abandoned this method of approach.

“I think perhaps, if we——!”

He broke off abruptly, for at that moment the electric light flooded the room and a gruff voice remarked, in somewhat jerky tones, “Ah, Chicago Kate—er—um—I suppose? I was—er—um—expecting you.”

There was a terrified squeak from the girl at his side, and Mr. Priestley, spinning hastily round, found himself confronting, as it seemed to his horrified gaze, the biggest man he had ever seen.

This formidable-looking personage now standing in the open doorway was in full evening kit, with a broad blue ribbon across his shirt-front and an imposing decoration hung about his neck, evidently the insignia of some important order. And these were not the only striking things about him; the big black beard that covered his cheeks and chin and was trimmed to a neat point some three inches below his collar-stud, added considerably to the strikingness of his appearance. The fact that he fingered this beard with a gesture that was very like nervousness, and that his halting, almost reluctant tones were in strange contrast with the general fierceness of his aspect, Mr. Priestley was far too agitated to remark.

Mr. Priestley was, in fact, glued to the piece of floor on which he was standing in sheer horror, bereft of the powers both of movement and speech. Not so his companion. With an incoherent expression of emotion she flung herself on her knees before the big man in a gesture that was undoubtedly dramatic.

“Spare us, sir!” she exclaimed in heart-rending tones. “Do not send for the police! We were hungry, and came in to see if we could find a crust of bread. We have not tasted food for three days, either of us. Scold us, if you must, but don’t send us to prison!”

The big man, whose face during this speech had been a study in conflicting emotions, ranging from embarrassed bewilderment to painful efforts to control his features, looked the relief of one who has recognised an unexpected clue. “I know you, Chicago Kate,” he growled mildly. “I had word of your arrival in this country. You have been after my miniatures before, but this time—er—this time——” He hesitated and looked strangely uncomfortable. “Gimme that poker!” he remarked suddenly, and advanced to twitch the weapon out of Mr. Priestley’s nervous hand. “Have you broken open the drawer in which I keep them?” he demanded over his shoulder of the still kneeling Mrs. Spettigue.

That agile young lady followed him across the room on her knees, wringing her hands. “No sir! Before God and this gentleman here, I haven’t! I wouldn’t do such a thing, not if it were ever so!”

“What is the name of your dastardly companion, whose face is strange to me?” asked the large man with a despairing expression, as of one this time who has lost all cues and never hopes to find another.

“Oh, sir,” said Mrs. Spettigue earnestly, “I don’t think he’s got one.”

“Then I shall telephone for the police,” said the other, with an air of relieved finality. “If—er—if either of you attempts to escape from this room, you will be shot. I mean—er—biffed on the head with this poker.”

It was then at last that Mr. Priestley, to whose dazed mind this scene had fortunately conveyed little or no meaning, came to his senses. At the same moment he found his voice. His brain had turned in an instant from boiling hot into icy cold. Perfect indignation casteth out fear, and Mr. Priestley suddenly discovered that he was very indignant indeed.

“Yes, send for the police, you—you scoundrel,” he squeaked fiercely. “Send for the police, and I’ll give you in charge myself. You villain!” He turned round to the girl. “This is the man you were telling me about, I suppose?”

The girl jumped up from her knees. “Yes, it is!” she wailed, continuing to wring her hands. “Oh, what shall I do—what shall I do?”

Her anguish added fuel to the flames of Mr. Priestley’s wrath. He sprang forward and flourished an inexperienced fist a couple of inches below the black beard. “Blackmail!” he spluttered. “Open that drawer and hand over those letters at once, or it will be the worse for you, my friend. You—you hound!”

There was no mistaking the large man’s bewilderment. “Letters,” he repeated doubtfully. “There are—er—um—it’s my miniatures in that drawer, you know. Besides,” he added with an appearance of acute discomfort, “I’ve got to ring up the police. Must. Er—duty, you know, and all that.” The thought appeared to strike him that he was perhaps not being quite effective enough. He assumed a terrific scowl, brandished the poker and laid his hand on the telephone.

Mr. Priestley sprang forward as if to forestall him, but his companion in crime was quicker. With a piercing shriek she flung her arms about Mr. Priestley’s neck and clung to him desperately.

“Save me, Mr. Mullins! Save me!” she cried hysterically. “My husband would never forgive me if I got three years—never! He’s so dreadfully conventional. Oh, save me—save me!”

His fair burden embarrassed Mr. Priestley not a little in his efforts to reach the telephone. For a moment he struggled frantically. Then he became aware that she was trying to whisper something into his ear. He ceased his efforts and listened.

“Draw your revolver!” she was whispering frantically. “We must get away! That story about the letters was all nonsense, because you’d reformed. It was the miniatures I was after. If he sends for the police we’ll get five years’ imprisonment! For Heaven’s sake draw the revolver and fire it at him! It’s only blank, but he’ll be frightened and we can get away before he realises.”

For an instant Mr. Priestley’s long-suffering brain seemed to go suddenly numb. He had been taken in—tricked—bamboozled. . . . There were no letters—it was a criminal enterprise he was engaged on! Five years in prison!

Then his mind ceased to think and became one single emotion—the overpowering desire to get _away_. He whipped the revolver out of his pocket, fired it blindly in the direction of the big man and dragged the girl with him towards the open French window, all in one movement.

A horrified exclamation from his companion did not check him. A second, and more urgent one, did. On the threshold of the window he turned and looked back. To his horror he saw the big man leaning on the writing-desk in a curiously sagging attitude, one hand to his chest; and below the hand an unmistakably red stream trickled slowly down across his white shirt-front. Before Mr. Priestley’s horrified eyes he crumpled slowly up without a word and collapsed on to the floor, where he lay hideously still.

The girl was staring at him too, one hand pressed to her mouth. Slowly she turned a horrified face to Mr. Priestley and gazed at him with wide eyes. “It—it must have been loaded after all!” she whispered in strangled tones.

Suddenly she darted forward, fell on her knees by the big man’s side and ripped open his shirt-front, inserting a small hand. For a moment both she and Mr. Priestley were as still as statues, hardly daring to breathe. Then:—

“I—don’t—think—his—heart—is—beating!” she muttered jerkily. “You come and feel!”

Mr. Priestley shook his head speechlessly, hardly conscious of what he was doing.

“Come and feel!” ordered the girl, more peremptorily.

Mr. Priestley went.

The girl took his hand and held it where hers had been. That this happened to be on the right of the corpse’s chest instead of the left he was far too agitated to notice.

“Can you feel anything?” asked the girl anxiously.

“No,” Mr. Priestley had to admit.

The girl sat back on her heels. “He’s dead,” she said, with horrid finality.

They stared at each other.

“Good God!” muttered Mr. Priestley distractedly. “What on earth had we better do?”

The girl gave him no help. “It’s murder,” she said shortly.

“But—but—good God, I never _meant_ to kill him! It isn’t _murder_. I thought the revolver was loaded with blank ammunition, as you said.”

“So did I!” said the girl helplessly. “I’m sure I told my maid to load it with blank. But you wouldn’t believe how careless that girl is. I knew she’d be getting me into trouble one of these days.”

The corpse’s face twitched spasmodically, but Mr. Priestley was fortunately still engaged in staring at the cause of all his trouble.

“And it won’t help you in the least to say you thought it wasn’t loaded,” that lady told him frankly. “They’ll know we came here after those miniatures. You’re known to the police, I suppose; and of course I am. It’s not much good saying we shot him by mistake; it’s murder they’ll try us for. If we’re caught, it’s a hanging job for both of us.”

“There’s no need,” said Mr. Priestley slowly, “for you to appear in it at all. After all, it was I who shot him; nobody’s going to know there were two of us. We’d better separate, and you can——”

“’Ullo!” said a gruff voice from the open window—a really gruff voice this time. “What’s all this about, eh?”

Both of them started to their feet. Just inside the room was a burly policeman, flashing a quite unnecessary lantern. They stared at him aghast as he advanced upon them.

“’Eard a scream comin’ from ’ere, not above two minutes back,” went on the policeman sternly, “an’ then a shot. Or sounded like a shot, it did. So I thought as ’ow——” He caught sight of the corpse on the floor, which had hitherto been partially hidden by an arm-chair, and broke off abruptly. His bulging eyes contemplated it with incredulity.

The girl was the first to recover herself. Clapping her hand to her mouth, she turned hastily about and her shoulders heaved as if under great emotion; the next moment she faced the guardian of the law, her face still working painfully.

“We didn’t do it, constable!” she cried wildly. “We found it here. We heard the shot too, and came in like you. We didn’t do it!”

The constable took no notice of this dramatic cry. His eyes were still fastened on the sprawling corpse, upon whose white shirt-front the large red stain showed up with ominous distinctness. He continued to contemplate it.

Mr. Priestley, fastened once more to the ground, contemplated it also. In his paralysed brain one thought only found place—“murder will out!” In his more intelligent moments Mr. Priestley might have noted with interest that the more dramatic the situation became, the more he had recourse to platitudes to express his feelings; as it was, he could not even have told you what a platitude was.

“Is ’e—is ’e _dead_?” asked the constable in awed tones.

“I’m afraid he is,” replied the girl more soberly.

With an effort the constable’s eyes disengaged themselves from the body and roved slowly over the room. They fell on the revolver which Mr. Priestley in his agitation had dropped. With an exclamation of pleasure the constable picked it up.

“This ’ere’s the weapon,” he remarked acutely.

The corpse took advantage of his and Mr. Priestley’s preoccupation with the revolver to direct an expressive glance towards the girl, uneasy and interrogative. The glance said, as plainly as glances may, “What the blazes are we to do now?”

The girl contorted her pretty features into a prodigious wink. The wink said, as clearly as a wink can: “You just lie doggo and leave it all to me. This is an unexpected development, I admit, but advantage may yet be derived from it. Take your cue from me and go on emulating a door-nail.” The corpse did so.

“Well, I’ll be blowed!” observed the policeman, continuing to stare at the revolver. A gleam illuminated his stolid face. “Murder!” he exclaimed. “Murder —that’s what it is! And this ’ere’s the weapon that did it.” He looked with sudden suspicion on the guilty couple. “Now then,” he said in an official voice. “What’ve you two got to say, I’d like to know? And I warn you that anything you say will be taken down and used in evidence against you.” He scowled upon them darkly.

“Then we won’t say anything, constable,” replied the girl brightly. “But we really didn’t do it, you know. Can we go now, please? We’ve got an appointment with——”

“Are you sure he’s dead, constable?” Mr. Priestley interrupted, in not too steady tones. His mind had begun to work again and the glimmerings of a plan had appeared to him. “You haven’t—er—examined him, you know. He may not be dead at all.”

“But the young lady said he was,” objected the constable, with the air of one scoring a distinct point.

Mr. Priestley almost danced with impatience. “Well, examine him, man, and find out for yourself!” he cried. The habit of obedience was strong in the constable. This was how he was accustomed to being addressed, and then he just went and did as he had been told. He did so now, and turned his back on the other two in order to advance towards the corpse.

Now it had been Mr. Priestley’s plan, as soon as this large back was turned, to grab the girl by the wrist and make a bolt for it, trusting to the darkness and the waiting two-seater to make a clean get-away. What was to come after that, or what his own future course was to be, he had not had time to consider; for the present the future could take care of itself. He dived forward to grab.

The girl must have been a singularly obtuse young woman. Apparently she had not gathered the faintest inkling of Mr. Priestley’s deep scheme. Instead of waiting to be grabbed she had actually darted forward herself and forestalled the constable at the corpse’s side. “His heart isn’t beating at all!” she exclaimed, dropping on her knees again and guiding the constable’s large hand inside the corpse’s shirt.

It is remarkable how emotion derives us of a large proportion of our horse-sense. The constable’s emotion had a different basis from that of Mr. Priestley, but neither did he notice that he was anxiously feeling the corpse’s right wing instead of his left.

“And his pulse isn’t beating either,” amplified the girl, submitting the corpse’s inert wrist to official inspection.

“It isn’t that,” agreed the constable solemnly. He was perfectly right. Pulses very seldom do beat on the wrong side of the wrist.

“Let’s try a feather on his nose,” suggested the girl. “Have you got a feather? No? Well, I suppose a hair will do.” She plucked one from her own head and laid it delicately across the corpse’s nostrils; it did not quiver. She waited a few moments till signs of incipient apoplexy became apparent in the corpse’s features, then lifted the hair and examined it closely. “It never moved,” she announced. “Here, constable, you’d better keep this. It’s a valuable piece of evidence, you know. Have you got a pocket-book?”

The constable took the hair and placed it carefully between the blank pages of his notebook. He was not quite certain as to its precise importance, but he was very amenable to suggestion. “’E’s dead all right,” he announced portentously.

In the background Mr. Priestley was hovering uneasily. The aching to escape was getting almost unbearable. Whatever this extraordinary girl might or might not be, her continued proximity to the representative of the Law was intolerable. Escape first, and explanations, perhaps, afterwards; but anyhow, escape first! He cast agonising glances from her to the invitingly open window, and from the open window to her. The ridiculous child did not seem even to understand the awful gravity of her position.

Casting discretion to the winds, he caught her eye with his own rolling optic, jerked his head backward and then nodded it towards the window; he could not make his meaning plainer without words.

He had made it only too plain. The constable might not have possessed the brightest intellect in Duffley, but Mr. Priestley’s agitated eye and jerky leaping would have conveyed suspicion to the most charitable. The constable rose portentously to his feet. Mr. Priestley edged towards the window. The constable followed him.

Unfortunately for Mr. Priestley’s plans it was his opponent this time who had the revolver. Nor did he scruple to employ it. “You stand still!” ordered the constable in a dignified bellow, the inner meaning of the situation growing plainer to him every minute. Here was a perfectly good murder, and here were two people in a state of considerable agitation, and here also was a revolver. This wanted looking into. “You stand still!” he repeated, advancing to look into it.

Mr. Priestley stood still; but he did not stand silent. “Run!” he shouted suddenly to the girl, unawed even by the menacing revolver. “Run for it—window—I’ll look after this chap! Get away!”

“Ho!” said the policeman, and promptly placed his burly body between the girl and the window. “Would, would you? You’ll ’ave to comealongerme, both of you. Now then, ’ands up!”

It is difficult not to accede to the request of a formidable man when his demand is emphasised by a judiciously wielded revolver, and there was no doubt that the constable was now a very formidable man indeed. The state of affairs had become even clearer to him. Here were not only two murderers, caught quite literally red-handed, but here also was himself, and at the business end of a revolver. Even the constable could put this two and two together and make the answer “sergeant.”

After a momentary hesitation, Mr. Priestley’s hands wobbled up. After a still longer hesitation, those of the girl did also. The happy, carefree expression had departed from her face; she looked like a lady who had made advances to a cow and found that she was toying with a bull. The corpse took a hasty glance round and uttered a faint, strangled sound, but spoke no word; his not to reason why, his but to do and die. He went on dying.

By means of a series of brisk commands, punctuated by prods of the revolver, the constable manœuvred his captives into line facing the door. They jumped nimbly to execute his pleasure. Then their wrists adjacent to one another were gripped, there was a sharp click, and the sound ensued as of a heavy body stepping back with satisfaction.

“Now you can take ’em down,” observed the constable almost benevolently, regarding his handiwork with modest pride. “And stand still while I make out me report, _if_ you please. An’ don’t you try any more monkey-tricks with _me_.” He drew out a stub of pencil from his pocket, seated himself at the desk, laid the revolver in front of him and contemplated the two with a truculent eye.

They returned his gaze gloomily, even Mr. Priestley. Mr. Priestley had never before been tethered by the wrist to that of a particularly charming young woman, and he might have been pardoned for feeling a little exhilaration in the idea; yet his countenance was completely lacking in exhilaration. A large number of emotions, it is true, were represented there, but exhilaration was not among them. Nor did the young woman evince any greater delight in being tethered to Mr. Priestley. Handcuffs evidently brought her soul no joy. By her expression, anybody less addicted to the use of handcuffs would have been hard to find. She now wore the air of one who has stepped gaily into a train labelled Birmingham, and finds herself in Crewe; a blend of dismay, annoyance, bewilderment as to the precise whereabouts, and anxiety regarding the return to the starting-point. The corpse was now prudently keeping its eyes tightly closed.

And then events happened with a rapidity that would have done credit to an American Cinema producer. With one dive Mr. Priestley was at the desk, and the revolver in his hand. With another he was at the nearest door, and lo! it was open. The young woman, having no option, followed his movements about the room with the jerky leaps of a fish manœuvring in mid-air, at the end of a line; this was not the moment to consider feminine deportment, and Mr. Priestley quite rightly did not stop to do so.

The door he had flung open was not that by which they had entered the room; it gave access to a shallow cupboard, having shelves across its upper half and tolerably empty below. Mr. Priestley viewed it for one-fifth of a second with exultation, then he turned back to the thoroughly bewildered constable. Rural constables get very little time for attending the cinema.

“Get in there,” said Mr. Priestley very grimly to the constable, “as you value your life.” And he in turn pointed his words by a recourse to the _argumentum ad hominem_.

The constable did value his life. He did not know very much of what was happening, but he did know that. He got in.

Mr. Priestley closed the door on him and turned the key. Then he bent down, jerked the young woman’s right wrist somewhere into the neighbourhood of the small of her back, and curved his free arm round her knees. The next moment she was swung off her feet and hoisted up in the air, while this new cave-man edition of Mr. Priestley trotted with hasty, if slightly wobbly steps out into the night. Thus did the knight not only rescue his lady, but even carried her off with him in the orthodox way.

The corpse was so far galvanised as to sit up and stare after their swaying figures. Then he, too, rose and fled into the night, uttering strange noises.

Chapter V.

Confusing the Issue

In the shadow of a shrubbery two hitherto respectable English citizens clutched one another with ecstatic fingers, moaning feebly. Through uncurtained French windows just in front of them a large policeman could be seen, flourishing a revolver. The words, “You stand still!” floated out into the peaceful night.

“Oh, my sacred _hat_!” moaned the shorter of the two citizens in the shrubbery. “This is better than the films—far, far, better. Why go to the cinema, when you can stage this sort of thing in your own home?”

The other citizen, a tall, lanky figure with bowed shoulders, removed his pince-nez, misty with emotion, and polished them hastily. His long body quivered with guilty joy. “Yes, but look here, Doyle,” he said reluctantly, “what’s going to happen? We can’t have Laura taken off to the police-station.”

“Why not?” asked that young woman’s future brother-in-law unfeelingly. “It’d do her all the good in the world. And I wouldn’t bail her out either. Oh, sportsman!” he added, as more words floated out on the still air. “He’s trying to get her to bolt for it, see? Strikes me that old Priestley’s coming through this with colours flying.”

“He is,” agreed Guy. “But I really think we ought to intervene now, you know. Matters have been taken rather out of our hands, with this ass of a policeman interfering. We don’t want to get involved in a conspiracy to make a bigger hass of the law than it usually is. We’d better go along and explain before things get worse.”

“Good God, _no_!” croaked Mr. Doyle with emotion. “For Heaven’s sake don’t spoil things now, Nesbitt. They’re just beginning to get interesting. We couldn’t have got a policeman into it more neatly if we’d plotted for a month. Just think how his presence is going to intensify our friend’s reactions, my dear chap!”

“That’s true enough,” said Guy quivering again.

“And you needn’t worry about things,” pursued Mr. Doyle earnestly. “Not so long as Laura’s on the spot. You leave it to her. I’d back that girl to— Hullo! What the blazes is happening now?”

In the lighted room two uneasy backs now confronted their audience. The constable could be seen approaching them with awful determination in every line of his massive form.

“Great Scott!” observed Mr. Doyle a moment later, in tones of respect. “He’s _handcuffed_ ’em. Handcuffed ’em together. Handcuffed Laura to—well, well, I’ll be blowed!” One gathered that the person who ventured to handcuff Laura had earned Mr. Doyle’s deepest veneration.

Guy began to chuckle silently. The idea of a handcuffed Laura appeared to appeal to him too.

“Keep still!” Mr. Doyle implored, recovering from the first shock of this novel spectacle. “Oh, Nesbitt, keep still! We mustn’t interrupt this. Oh, sacred pigs, how gorgeous! Look, he’s going to make out a report. My dear chap, _can_ you see Laura’s face? We’ll rescue ’em later somehow, but—oh, _cripes_!” He clung to a laurel-branch and abandoned himself to helpless giggling.

Guy, scarcely less self-controlled, caught at his arm. “Look! That friend of yours is turning the tables. Oh, well done, man, well done! Look—he’s going to put him in the cupboard. He—well, I’ll be hanged!”

With damp eyes they watched Mr. Priestley’s imitation of an American film-drama. An instant later a heavy body in swift if somewhat unsteady motion, lumbered past their hiding-place; peeping cautiously out, they were just able to catch the look of alarm and despondency which was being worn by the most disconcerted damsel in England at that moment. They clapped their hands hurriedly over their mouths and clung to one another again. Then came George.

“Did you fellows see?” demanded George weakly. “_Did_ you see?”

“We did, oh admirable corpse,” moaned Mr. Doyle and promptly clung to this more solid support. “And do you mean to say you lay through it all and never gave yourself away?”

“Don’t think I did, no,” replied George modestly. “But look here, I say, what on earth are we going to do? That bobby’s rather messed things up, hasn’t he?”

“We’ll give them ten minutes to get away,” Guy grinned, “and then we’ll liberate him. It’s all right, I think. Laura will take her cue from that handcuff, and see the game’s up. She’ll bring him back here, and we’ll have to file the thing off. Do you know, I wondered all the time whether it would come off at all (the plot, I mean, not the handcuff), but I never dreamed it would fail as gloriously as that.”

“She got him up to scratch all right,” George observed. “Something to do with letters, he was babbling about. Anyhow, he pooped off like a good ’un. Well, what about wandering along to the drawing-room and telling the other two what’s happened? I say, we’ll have to let that bobby out soon, or he’ll have the house over. Listen to him!”

They listened. Through the French windows now came sounds as of a large person in distress, whoopings, bellowings and thuds, mingled now and then with muffled solos on the policeman’s whistle.

“We’ll give him five minutes,” Guy decided. “Come on, then.”

Doyle caught his arm, his face alight with new excitement. “I say, Nesbitt,” he spluttered, “don’t go in yet. I—I’ve had a tremendous brain-wave. Look here—don’t you see what the gods have sent us?”

“Beyond a bellowing bobby,” said Guy, “and an awkward pair of handcuffs, I don’t, no.”

“Why,” exclaimed Mr. Doyle, now almost incoherent with excitement, “why, don’t you see? A detective story in real life! The stock beginning of half the thrillers ever published! Mysterious stranger murdered, bobby surprises suspicious couple who may or may not be guilty, couple turn tables on bobby and make their escape, and when bobby is released—_the corpse has disappeared_! Man, it’s great! We must make use of it somehow!”

They stared at each other. George stared at both of them. He was not quite sure what was happening, but as long as they did not want him to put on another false beard or spoil another white shirt with red ink, he was perfectly game.

Over Guy’s features spread an unholy smile. “This wants looking into,” he agreed. “Let’s to the drawing-room.”

Disregarding the muffled frenzy from the library, they went.

Two agitated women rose at them as one girl, and danced before them.

“Guy, dear,” demanded that gentleman’s wife, “what _has_ been happening? We heard the shot, and then. What _is_ that curious whistling noise?”

“Pat, tell me the whole story,” Miss Howard danced with impatience, “or I’ll _scream_! I couldn’t have stood it a minute longer. I don’t care how strict your orders were, we were coming out the very next minute. Weren’t we, Cynthia?”

With all possible haste Guy put them out of their misery. He went on to mention Mr. Doyle’s brilliant scheme.

“Oh, dear!” Cynthia collapsed weakly into a chair. “Guy, this is too silly. _Poor_ Laura! Handcuffs! Oh, _dear_!”

But Miss Howard was made of sterner material. Disregarding her sister’s interesting predicament, she concentrated on the matter in hand. “Clues!” she announced, wrinkling her own pretty forehead in the same way as that which, in her sister’s case, had led directly to Mr. Priestley’s undoing. “Wait a minute—let me think! The body’s gone. Yes, but how did it go? It was dragged! Where to? Obviously the river, where there was a boat waiting in readiness to receive it. How’s that?”

The others looked at her with respect.

“But look here,” George interposed, “what’s it all about? I mean, what are you getting at? What’s the idea?”

The others looked at him, without respect.

“They want to set the scene for an ordinary conventional shilling-dreadful, George, in order to find out what would really happen in actual life instead of fiction,” Cynthia told him gently. “I’m not at all sure that I approve. Anyhow, never mind those children; come and sit here and tell me how you liked being shot. But do, for goodness’ sake, take off that dreadful beard!” she concluded with a little squeak, collapsing again.

George did as he was bid, and tugged manfully at his spirit-gummed beard. Having tugged the tears into his eyes, he gave up the effort in despair and continued to wear his face-embroidery.

The others were busily conferring.

“A sack of potatoes is what we want,” Doyle remarked. “We don’t want to have to drag George on the seat of his trousers, but unless you can suggest anything else——!” He looked inquiringly at Guy.

“I don’t think we have a sack of potatoes,” Guy replied, “and there’s always the possibility that George might object. What about a rug, with George sitting on it? That ought to give the right track.”

“That’s fine,” Dora agreed breathlessly. “Come on, George; you’re wanted.”

“At once, do you think?” Doyle demurred.

“Of course, idiot!” retorted his fiancée frankly. “We must let him _hear_ the corpse being dragged out.”

“Dora,” said Mr. Doyle, “you’re a wonder. Come on, George!”

Not altogether willingly, George came.

In the hall Doyle held up his hand. “We’re murderers, don’t forget,” he whispered. “Now, where the murderer in real life usually goes wrong (the one who gets caught, I mean) is, as my fellow criminologist will tell you, through insufficient attention to detail. Take care of the details, and the body takes care of itself. Let us therefore concentrate upon details. We are a couple of genteel desperadoes, aren’t we? Therefore, we’re in boiled shirts and dinner-jackets. Good! But we are on a river-trip, and we don’t want to be recognised by stray passers-by; therefore we wear overcoats and hats, and mufflers across our mouths. Overcoats, hats and mufflers forward, please?” He grabbed his own coat and began to struggle into it.

“Is that really necessary?” asked George plaintively.

“Not for you. You’re only a corpse. For us, yes. Ready, Nesbitt? Then you creep very softly in by the door here, George, and take up your former position. We will enter by the French windows, talking in gruff voices in a foreign tongue, to match your beard and decorations. We are, as a matter of fact, inhabitants of Jugo-Chzechovina, and converse almost entirely in ‘z’s’ and ‘x’s.’ Let her rip!”

George crept dutifully off, and Guy, pulling his soft hat well down over his eyes, led the way down the passage. Mr. Doyle hovered near his fiancée, who was keeping a superintendent’s eye upon all of them. “Do you realise this means our furniture, old girl?” he grinned at her.

“Furniture? Pat—what do you mean?”

“Why, isn’t this the chance of a life-time? I’ve got a scoop here, backed by that bobby’s evidence, that’s going to be worth a whole houseful of furniture, and a watering-can for the garden as well. What else do you think I’ve been engineering it all for? Thzmx zp! as they say in Jugo-Chzechovina.” He sped after his host, winding his muffler across the lower part of his face as he went. Dora gazed after him with a very different expression on her face from that usually seen by the public.

When the two approached the French windows a moment later, the noise was still in full swing, though now spasmodic and conveying a somewhat dispirited effect; but they had hardly stamped over the threshold and exchanged a few gruff “z’s” and “x’s” before it ceased abruptly.

“Eel ehcoot, ler jongdarm, sxs zz,” grunted the shorter of the two Jugo-Chzechovinians. “Oo eh ler zbodyx? Ahxha! Venneh soor, Zorx! Soor ler mattoh-x, zzz.”

With stealthy movements and sibilant noises they spread a mat beside George and rolled him on to it. Refusing to wait in the wings this time, Cynthia and Dora appeared in the doorway to watch the performance, the latter going so far as to lend a helping hand, tapping about on the parquet flooring with her high heels; for, as she very reasonably pointed out to her fellow-conspirators as they bent over the corpse together: “Il faut absolument xsx avoir une vamp, zzz?”

The inert George was then conveyed on his rug across the floor, over the threshold into the garden (involving a four-inch drop on the small of his back) and across the lawn to the river at the bottom. There Mr. Doyle caused all four of them to jump energetically about, so as to leave the choicest collection of footprints that any sleuth could desire, after which they returned to the house.

From the cupboard in the library all this time had come a silence even more eloquent than the former protestations.

“Anything else to be done?” asked Mr. Doyle, thoughtfully, when they had returned again to the hall. He seemed to have taken charge of affairs for the moment and Dora, observing the gleam in his eye, had no difficulty in understanding why. She gave her fiancé the credit of being an artist; he was, she knew, quite capable of arranging the whole thing purely for art’s sake. But the vision of that elusive furniture was a very powerful aid to art.

She was very ready to encourage him. “Clues!” she said, wrinkling her forehead again. “We must have some more clues. But what?”

“It’s a pity we’ve got to do things in such a hurry,” remarked Guy. “This sort of affair wants properly thinking out. I don’t see how we’re going to arrange a real set of interdependent clues, on the spur of the moment.”

“Well, I can think of one at any rate,” said Mr. Doyle thirstily. “Blood! When all’s said and done, there’s nothing like blood. The river was all right, but blood is well known to be thicker. Some blood, please, somebody!”

“No, I’m hanged if I will,” said George with decision, catching the predatory gleam in his eye. “I’ve done my share.”

“But only in red ink, George,” Mr. Doyle pointed out wistfully. But George, muttering about “this infernal beard,” was already on his way upstairs and to the bathroom.

“I suppose you haven’t got a spot of blood to spare, have you?” Mr. Doyle inquired politely of his host.

“Pat, I won’t have you after my husband’s blood,” Cynthia interposed.

“Besides,” added her husband, “I gave away most of mine yesterday. I’m afraid I’m almost bloodless at the moment.”

“And it’s practically useless trying to get any out of a stone, I understand,” said Mr. Doyle thoughtfully. “How exceedingly awkward. I shall have to furnish some myself. I take it that you have at any rate a lethal weapon of some sort on the premises; a safety razor, for instance. Lead me to the slaughter, then, please.”

“Don’t bleed to death, darling one, will you?” remarked Dora with anxiety.

“Dora, you touch me,” said her fiancé with emotion. “This solicitude is admirable. No, for your sake, my dearest, I will try very hard not to bleed to death.”

“I was thinking of the furniture we’re going to get out of this,” retorted his fiancée frankly. “We don’t want it wasted.”

Mr. Doyle moved with dignity upstairs.

Guy, following him, looked back over his shoulder. “I think you’d better turn the library light out,” he said. “We don’t want any more unwelcome visitors. And turn all the other lights out as well, will you, Cynthia? I’ve been thinking that we may want an _alibi_ later.”

Cynthia turned into the drawing-room to carry out this request; Dora made her way out into the garden to enter the library once more. She was an astute young woman, and she had recognised that a light turned out by somebody entering the library from the house instead of the garden might give the policeman material for thought upon the wrong lines.

Guy’s chance reference to further visitors proved to be not wide of the mark. As Dora was tap-tapping out into the garden again after extinguishing the light, a form loomed up out of the darkness in front of her.

“Hullo, Mrs. Nesbitt,” observed the form cheerfully. “Bit late to call, I know, but I saw a light as I was passing (seems to be out now) and it’s rather urgent, so I thought you wouldn’t mind. Oh, I—I beg your pardon. I thought it was Mrs. Nesbitt.”

If Dora had been nonplussed it was only for a moment. In rather less than a second and a half she had determined on her line of action. Drawing the chiffon scarf she was wearing across the lower part of her face, she clutched violently at the form’s arm. “Murder!” she exclaimed tensely. “There’s been murder done in there. No—don’t go in, you’ll only make matters worse. Go for the police—quick!”

The form (a thick, short form it was) staggered back. “_M-Murder?_” it echoed. “Good gracious, you don’t mean Mr. or Mrs. Nesbitt?”

“No!” Dora replied impatiently. “They’re out of the way. They’ve been got out of the way, if you must know. It’s nothing to do with them. It’s the Crown Prince of—no, I daren’t tell you. My own life hangs by a hair. Quick, I must go; I can’t keep _them_ waiting any longer. The police—run for the police!”

“Th-th-_them_?” repeated the now thoroughly agitated form. “Good Heavens, do you mean the—the murderers?”

Dora laughed bitterly. “You can call them that, of course. They call themselves executioners. It’s a matter of opinion, I suppose. But I mustn’t stay a moment longer. If _he_ caught us we shouldn’t be alive another second!”

“Who is _he_?” gasped the form.

“The Man with the Broken Nose,” Dora replied in sardonic tones. “You’ve never heard of him, I suppose? Oh, God, would that I hadn’t either!” Her voice broke with considerable artistry. Dora was certainly wasted in revue.

“But look here!” squeaked the form. “Who is—the Crown _Prince_? Good gracious, but——”

Dora shook his arm with awful agitation. “Hush!” she whispered tensely. “He’s coming. Run, man—run for your life! And for the police, of course. Run!” With a final shake she broke away from him and darted in the direction of the river.

The form stood for a hectic moment gazing after her. Then it too lumbered away at a brisk jog-trot. It did not lumber in the direction of the library.

Considerably pleased with herself, Dora returned to the house. Only Cynthia and George (now beardless) were available, sitting, a little uneasily, on the couch in the now darkened drawing-room. Guy and Mr. Doyle were still about their bloody business.

“George, I’m surprised at you,” remarked Miss Howard facetiously, when this state of affairs had been made known to her. “Sitting there and holding hands with Cynthia in the dark. Why haven’t you been up and busy, like me? Listen to what sister’s been doing for the cause.” With no little zest Dora embarked upon an account of her encounter with the form.

She was just finishing it when the other two conspirators returned, Mr. Doyle complaining bitterly of weakness and requiring his fiancée to support him on his feet. Shaking him off, that unfeeling young woman promptly began to recite her adventure over again.

“But who on earth was it?” Cynthia wondered.

“Search me!” responded Miss Howard tersely. “I didn’t stop to ask him his name and address. Anyhow, you see what I’ve done. Provided a new and independent witness, and filled him up with just the sort of tale we wanted—Crown Prince and executioners and gangs and distressed damsel and all the rest of it. The Man with the Broken Nose! Do you know, I’m rather proud of that title; I feel there’s a good thriller behind that title, simply waiting to be written. Oh, by the way, here’s a souvenir,” She tossed a handkerchief into Cynthia’s lap. “I extracted it from his coat-sleeve in the intervals of shaking same. I could have relieved him of his watch and chain if I’d wanted too, and probably his collar and tie as well; he was far too dithery to notice little details like that. Most useful knowledge I’ve gained, if I ever take to crime in real earnest.”

Cynthia was examining the handkerchief by the light of a candle which Guy had lit. “R.F. in one corner,” she announced. “Who on earth is R. F., Guy?”

“Reginald Foster!” replied her husband promptly. “The biggest bore in creation.” He began to shake again with unholy glee. “Have you any blood left, Doyle?”

“Precious little, and I don’t mind telling you that I’m not parting with it. There may be a few scrapings in the cup, though. Why?”

“Just an idea. Here, George; something you can do. On the hall-table you’ll see a cup, bearing traces of blood. Wipe that handkerchief round inside it, and then go and drop it on the river’s brim—where we’ll hope that not even the Inspector from Scotland Yard will mistake it for a primrose. Hurry, won’t you?”

George hurried.

“I think you’re being perfectly horrible, Guy,” said his wife. “Why couldn’t you go on using red-ink, like civilised human beings?”

“Because red-ink when analysed does not respond to the tests for human blood, wife.”

“But good gracious, you’re not expecting matters to get as far as that, are you?”

“I was once a Boy Scout, Cynthia,” Mr. Doyle intervened, “and my motto was ‘Be Prepared.’ It still is. Another of my mottoes,” he added thoughtfully, “if I remember aright, was ‘Zing-a-zing, Bom Bom!’ But don’t ask me what that means, because I never could discover. It’s probably Jugo-Chzechovinian.”

“But what did you _do_ with the blood?” Cynthia pursued.

“Oh, just sprinkled it about in convenient dollops, like the gentle dew from Heaven, you know.”

“Well, goodness knows what’s going to come of all this,” Cynthia sighed.

“I say,” remarked George, with the appearance of careful thought, “wouldn’t it be a good idea to put your brother and sister off now? Er—supposed to be coming on Tuesday, aren’t they? Yes,” said George weightily, “if I were you I should put them off.”

“We’re certainly going to get into the most dreadful mess,” said Cynthia, not, however, relieving George’s mind.

“Your library carpet’s got into that already,” said Mr. Doyle consolingly.

“Enough of this chatty badinage!” Dora broke in. “Do you know that Mr. Reginald Foster has gone galloping off for the police? He won’t find him, because he won’t think of looking in your library cupboard, but he’ll ring up the nearest station; and then things are going to get busy. We’ve got to work out a plan of campaign. Remember I’ve had it put on record that our host and hostess were lured away from the house.”

“Well, there’s nothing to contradict that,” Guy agreed. “It’s lucky we gave the maids the week-end off, just in case of emergencies. Emergencies seem to be arising every minute. I’ve thought out a plan. I’ll get George and you, Doyle, to help me push the car out of the garage and a little way down the road, and then I’ll come driving back, making as much noise as I can, and generally enact the householder arriving home after a long ride. I surmise that those strange sounds, which seem to have died away altogether, will then break out with renewed force from the library, and I shall liberate our prisoner. I will then deal with any other emergencies as they crop up. It doesn’t matter about our stories coinciding, because your household won’t have heard or know anything at all. So, after you’ve helped me with the car, you three sneak home and go straight to bed.”

“All except me,” murmured Mr. Doyle, “who will be summoned to the telephone a few minutes after the prisoner has been liberated. ‘Knowing that such a distinguished journalist was in the vicinity, Mr. Nesbitt, etc.’”

Guy grinned at him guiltily. “You’re not going to make a newspaper story of it too, Doyle, surely?”

“You bet I am,” rejoined Mr. Doyle grimly. “And a houseful of furniture too. My motives, let it be understood, are entirely mercenary.”

“Well, good luck to them! Now then, here comes George; are we all ready?”

“I say,” said Cynthia suddenly. “I wonder what’s happening to poor Laura all this time? It’s nearly half-past eleven. Oughtn’t we to do something about her? But I suppose we can’t!”

It was the first time anybody had given a thought to poor Laura for almost an hour.

“By Jove, yes, Laura,” agreed her husband. “We must keep an eye open for her. I hope she doesn’t bring that fellow gaol-bird of hers back at an awkward moment. And what the deuce are we going to do about _him_?”

Had Guy but known it, that question was already in process of being answered for him at a spot some considerable distance away.

Chapter VI.

Adventures of a Pair of Handcuffs

When Mr. Priestley performed his masterly retreat from the scene of his crime it was without any definite plan in his head beyond reaching the waiting two-seater and reaching it very quickly. Blundering through shrubberies and over flower-beds, his speechless burden still in his arms, he made his way by a sort of blind instinct to the hedge that bordered the road. Through it he plunged manfully, heedless of the prickly twigs which scratched his face and hands and the dangling legs of his companion (a fact of which the companion herself was anything but heedless), and then at last set his burden on her feet.

But even then there was no time to waste in useless explanations or converse. Grabbing her handcuffed hand with a brief grunt, Mr. Priestley, that suddenly transformed man of leisure, set off at a round pace down the road. His companion, having no say in the matter, and no breath to say it with had she had one, followed. They reached the car and fell inside in a congested bundle.

The fact that it was Mr. Priestley’s left wrist which was tethered, made things a little awkward. For them to sit decorously side by side in the orthodox manner was out of the question, for the car’s gear-levers were on the right.

“I’ll stand on the running-board,” Mr. Priestley panted, “till we’re safely out of the way.” He scrambled nimbly over the side and did his best to anchor himself against it.

Laura started the engine, backed the car out of the lane and set off up the road. Getting into top gear, she drove steadily ahead at a rapidly increasing pace, her face as grim and set as she imagined that of an accessory to murder and professional thief should be. At her side Mr. Priestley bounced unhappily up and down, clinging desperately to the side of the car with his free hand and expecting every moment to be jerked backwards into the road. That in such an event his companion would be neatly extricated from the car to share his fate afforded him no consolation. Fortunately he was far too preoccupied for the moment in saving his own life at every twist or jolt in the road to be in a fit state to think coherently about what had happened since he last saw this car.

Laura, on the other hand, was thinking rapidly. Once the confusion had subsided of that wild rush from the house and her ignominious part in it, her brain had found itself free again to return to business. It was now working overtime.

Two thoughts were foremost in Laura’s mind. One was that this affair had turned into the most glorious rag that the mind of man (or girl) could conceive, and that nothing must be done to spoil it by so much as the set of a hair. The other was that Mr. Matthew Priestley had acquitted himself really most surprisingly, almost incredibly well. He had not only risen to the occasion and obligingly fired off the revolver, he had not only turned the tables on that ridiculous policeman and rescued the two of them from a situation which, if it had been as real as he thought it, would have been a remarkably ticklish one, he had not only proved himself in spite of circumstantial evidence to the contrary to be a man of courage, determination, decent feelings and resource, but (and perhaps this appealed to Laura more than all the foregoing catalogue of Mr. Priestley’s surprising virtues) his first thought from beginning to end had been for her alone, and that even after she had led him to think her a professional thief and therefore, according to the social code, of no personal account whatever. Laura felt herself warming quite a lot towards this normally mild little man with the heart of a bulldog.

But that did not go to say that she enjoyed being handcuffed to him. She did not. Indeed, in the presence of those handcuffs, it was difficult to see how this glorious rag was going to continue. Obviously they must be removed, and as soon as possible; or else they would have to go back and⸺

At this point Laura became aware that words were coming towards her, jerkily, over the side of the car.

“N-not so f-fast!” came the words spasmodically. “I can’t—hold on—m-much longer!”

Laura glanced at her speedometer; the needle was hovering between forty and fifty. She hastened to pull up at the side of the road.

“I’m so sorry,” she said contritely, as Mr. Priestley sobbed for breath and relief. Travelling outside the shelter of the windscreen at fifty miles an hour does knock the breath out of one.

“’Sallright,” gasped Mr. Priestley, drooping like a wet blanket over the side of the car. “But I thought—’f I fell out—you’d have to come—too—oof!”

“Good gracious!” observed Laura, much impressed. “Do you know, that simply never occurred to me.”

“No?” panted Mr. Priestley politely. “But it—would have done—oof—’f I—had. Oh, _oof_!”

A minute or two was devoted to Mr. Priestley’s pursuit of his lost breath.

“Well, Mr. Mullins,” Laura then remarked brightly, “now perhaps you’ll tell me what is the next move?”

“To get rid of this infernal handcuff,” said Mr. Priestley without hesitation.

“Yes, I’d thought of that too. But how?”

“File it off!” returned Mr. Priestley promptly. “Have you got a file in your tool-box?”

“No, I don’t think so. In fact, I’m sure I haven’t. Oh, Mr. Mullins, this is a terrible business! What _are_ we to do?” The look of appealing helplessness that Laura turned on her fellow-adventurer was not what might have been expected from a young woman who had just been driving a car at nearly fifty miles an hour along an unlighted road.

Fortunately Mr. Priestley was in no state to notice such discrepancies. “Don’t you worry, my dear young lady,” he said paternally. “You shall come to no harm. Now, let me see, is there any other way we can arrange ourselves? I really think we should push on a little farther before we see about getting hold of a file, and this running-board is really a most uncomfortable way of travelling. How can we manage?”

“Supposing you knelt in front of the seat with your back to the engine?” suggested Laura. “We might be able to manage like that.”

“Humph,” replied Mr. Priestley, to whom the idea did not seem to appeal. “No, Mrs. Spettigue, I think —by the way, I suppose you’re not Mrs. Spettigue now?”

“I’m afraid not,” Laura confessed with much contrition.

“You’re not married at all?”

“No,” said Laura, hanging her head. One saw that she was now overwhelmed with shame at the thought of her base deception.

“Then who are you?”

“I’m—I’m usually known as Chicago Kate,” Laura said in a very small voice. “I’m supposed to be the cleverest woman thief in the world,” she added with simple pride, brightening a little.

“Bless my soul!” said Mr. Priestley, gazing at her with renewed interest. She looked very young for so notorious a person.

As he gazed Mr. Priestley felt a guilty thrill run through him. Abandoned she might be, but indubitably she was charming; and he was committed to a desperate adventure with her. His fate was linked with hers, in fact, not only literally but metaphorically too. They were joined together not only by a handcuff, but by the joint secret of what Mr. Priestley even now could not bring himself to regard as murder. Dash it all, he had never _meant_ to kill the man! He would never have dreamed of firing if he had even distantly suspected the revolver of being loaded. Manslaughter, perhaps, and most reprehensible; but certainly not murder.

It came to Mr. Priestley with a shock of surprise to find how singularly lightly this man’s death sat upon his conscience at that moment. Probably reaction would come later and he would be properly horrified, but just at the moment his mind was far busier with other matters.

“Well,” he resumed briskly, “what I propose is that we push on a little farther, and then set about borrowing a file. Of course we must take obvious precautions. We must not stop at a place which is likely to be on the telephone, and as we shall appear to be—h’m!—holding hands, I think we should have some story prepared to account for any awkward questions.”

“Oh, Mr. Mullins,” exclaimed his companion delightedly, “it’s a positive pleasure to crack a crib with you. You think of everything.”

Mr. Priestley, who was also of the opinion that his strategy was not too short-sighted, blushed modestly. It was on the tip of his tongue to reveal the fact that he was not Mr. Mullins at all, but a private citizen of hitherto unblemished reputation, but foreseeing embarrassing queries as to the exact identity of the hitherto blameless citizen, he chose the path of prudence. Mr. Priestley had always been jealous of his good name, and it looked as if he would need in the near future all the jealousy he could muster.

“And you don’t look like a burglar a bit,” continued the girl warmly. “No wonder they call you Gentleman Joe. I must get you to tell me some time about that time when you stole the Countess of Kentisbeare’s diamonds, disguised as a dumb waiter, and knocked out two policeman and the butler. Ah, yes, you see I know all about you. These things get round the underworld. By the way, do you work on cocaine or morphia? Personally I always use strychnine; a little strychnine in half a tumbler of soda makes me feel capable of anything. That’s how I escaped from Sing-sing, as you’ve probably heard.”

“Erh’rrrrrm!” coughed Mr. Priestley, somewhat uneasy at the technical turn of the conversation; he did not feel yet quite up to a professional chat with this nefarious young woman. “Yes, yes, of course. Now what about moving on? How are we going to dispose ourselves?”

“Well, if you don’t want to kneel on the floor,” said the nefarious young woman regretfully, “I’m very much afraid you’ll have to stay where you are. I’ve been thinking, and I really can’t see any other way.”

“Oh!” said Mr. Priestley, without joy. He brightened as an idea occurred to him—a wicked idea, quite in keeping with all his other devilry. He spoke in an exceedingly airy way. “How would it do,” said Mr. Priestley very airily, “if I sat where you’re sitting, and you sat—er—on my knee?”

“I’d love to sit on your knee, Mr. Mullins,” said the young woman frankly. “It would be great fun. But unfortunately I couldn’t drive the car at the same time, you see; I couldn’t reach either the pedals or the gears. Besides, it is rather a whole-time occupation, isn’t it? Which do you think is the more important?”

From the slightly mocking tone in her voice Mr. Priestley understood that his wickedness had been unmasked. “Yes—er—quite so. Then perhaps we had better go on as we are. But this time,” he added in heartfelt tones, “please don’t drive quite so fast.”

They went on, at a pace round but reasonable.

This time rational converse was more possible.

“Where are we going?” asked Laura, who had been taking a mild pleasure during the last three miles in changing her gears as often as possible, causing Mr. Priestley each time to dive hurriedly over the side of the car as if trying to catch crabs in a pool.

In the intervals of diving, Mr. Priestley had been debating this question with some anxiety. So far as he could see there was only one course open to them. It was a course which he did not choose with any degree of eager gladness, but he could find no other.

What was in Mr. Priestley’s mind was the plain fact that for two people, linked together by an obviously official pair of handcuffs, to call in at the village blacksmith’s and request the use of a file was to invite suspicion—more, to stand up and loudly demand suspicion.

However simple a village blacksmith may be expected to be, there are some things which become obtrusive to the most half-witted mind, and of these, handcuffs take pride of place. Naturally Mr. Priestley had cast about for a plausible story to explain away these awkward ornaments, but it is surprising how thin the most plausible story explanatory of handcuffs can sound.

No; the thing to do was to stop ostensibly for some other reason, and to demand a file by way of an afterthought or make-weight. And where could the complement of a two-seater more reasonably stop than at a wayside hostelry, demanding food? To ask for a file in order to effect a minor adjustment to the car’s interior while the meal was being prepared, was the most natural thing in the world. Almost anybody can stop at a wayside hostelry and order a file with his dinner without incurring the slightest suspicion.

Mr. Priestley communicated the sum of his reflections to his cuff-mate.

To his relief she gave a ready assent.

With some trepidation he went on to elaborate his theme.

“And—er—touching the story we ought to have ready,” he went on with painful nonchalance, “I think it would be best if we pretended to be—that is, if it came to the point when it was advisable to—er—to be anything, so to speak—I think we had better—that is to say, I _feel_,” said Mr. Priestley with a good deal of earnestness, “that we should pretend to be—h’m!”

“I give it up; what’s the answer?” remarked the young woman, hurriedly changing her gear.

Mr. Priestley caught a crab and returned to the surface. “An—an eloping couple!” he gulped. “A—a honeymoon couple,” he amplified, “who have eloped.”

Once again Mr. Priestley was charmed and relieved at the way in which his companion received his suggestions. “Oh, good!” she exclaimed. “What a brilliant idea! You mean, because we shall have to hold hands whenever any one’s looking at us?”

“That’s right,” beamed Mr. Priestley, who had meant that very thing, but had not quite liked to say so. Mr. Priestley was a man of very delicate susceptibilities.

“And look!” cried the girl, checking the car’s speed so abruptly that Mr. Priestley was all but thrown off his perch. “Look, isn’t this an inn just here? Yes, I’m sure it is. We’ll put our fortunes to the test this very moment.”

She came to a halt a few yards past the house in question, and got out of the car, Mr. Priestley following her politely in over the side and out through the door.

They approached the house and tried the front-door. It was locked. Over their heads an inn-sign creaked, but no life was visible. The windows were black masses and no sound could be heard. His heart bumping strangely, Mr. Priestley rang the bell. Nothing happened. He rang it again. Then he knocked, loudly.

A window above his head opened and a large voice asked him what he wanted.

Somewhat apologetically Mr. Priestley intimated that he would like a little nourishment.

Without any signs of apology the large voice told him very plainly that he could not have any, that couldn’t he see the place was closed, and what did he think he was doing, knocking respectable people up at that hour? Before Mr. Priestley could reply, the window was closed with a bang of finality.

“So now,” said Mr. Priestley with unabated optimism, “we’d better try somewhere else.”

They tried a little farther down the road. The village in which they had now discovered themselves to be, possessed, as do all self-respecting villages, one public-house to every three private ones. There were six houses in the village, and an inn at each end. They repeated the procedure at the second one.

They went on repeating it.

“I’m all in favour of early hours for our rural population,” observed Laura with some feeli