VII

"Talking of books," said Dollar, "the General told me he was writing one, and that you were helping him?"

"He didn't tell you what it was about?"

"No."

"Then I mustn't. I wish I could. It's to be the last word on a certain subject, but he won't have it spoken about. That's one reason why it's getting on his nerves."

"Isit his book?"

"It and everything. Doesn't he remind you of a man sitting on a powder-barrel? If he weren't what he is, there'd be an explosion every day. And there never is one—no matter what happens!"

Dollar watched the pale youth swallowing his smoke.

"Do they often talk about crime?"

"Always! They can't keep off it. And Aunt Essie always changes the subject as though she hadn't been every bit as bad as uncle. Of course they've had a good lot to make them morbid. I suppose you heard about poor Dingle, the last gardener?"

"Only just"

"He was the last man you would ever have suspected of such a thing. It was in those trees just outside." The crickets made extra merry as he paused. "They didn't find him for a day and a night!"

"Look here! I'm not going to let you talk about it," said Dollar. But the good-humored rebuff cost him an effort. He wanted to hear all about the suicide, but not from this worn lad with an old man's smile. He knew and liked the type too well.

"I'm sorry, Captain Dollar." Jim Paley looked sorry. "Yet, it's all very well! I don't suppose the General told you what happened last night?"

"Well, yes, he did, but without going into any particulars."

And now the doctor made no secret of his curiosity; this was a matter on which he could not afford to forego enlightenment. Nor was it like raking up an old horror; it would do the boy more good than harm to speak of this last affair.

"I can't tell you much about it myself," said he. "I was wondering if I could, just now on the lawn. That's where it happened, you know."

"I didn't know."

"Well, it was, and the funny thing is that I was there at the time. I used to go out with the dog for a cigarette when they turned in; last night I was foolish enough to fall asleep in a chair on the lawn. I had been playing tennis all the afternoon, and had a long bike-ride both ways. Well, all I know is that I woke up thinking I'd been shot; and there was my aunt with a revolver she insists on carrying—and poor Muggins as dead as a door-nail."

"Did she say it was an accident?"

"She behaved as if it had been; she was all over the poor dead brute."

"Rather a savage dog, wasn't it?"

"I never thought so. But the General had no use for him—and no wonder! Did he tell you he had bitten him in the shoulder?"

"No."

"Well, he did, only the other day. But that's the old General all over. He never told me till the dog was dead. I shouldn't be surprised if——"

"Yes?"

"——if my aunt hadn't been in it somehow. Poor old Muggins was such a bone between them!"

"You don't suppose he'd ended by turning on her?"

"Hardly. He was like a kitten with her, poor brute!"

Another cigarette was lighted; more inhaling went on unchecked.

"Was Mrs. Dysone by herself out there—but for you?"

"Well—yes."

"Does that mean she wasn't?"

"Upon my word, I don't know!" said young Paley, frankly. "It sounds most awful rot, but just for a moment I thought I saw somebody in a sort ofsurplice affair. But I can only swear to Aunt Essie, and she was in her dressing-gown, and it wasn't white."

Dollar did not go to bed at all. He sat first at one window, watching the black trees turn blue, and eventually a variety of sunny greens; then at the other, staring down at the pretty scene of a deed ugly in itself, but uglier in the peculiar quality of its mystery.

A dog; only a dog, this time; but the woman's own dog! There were two new sods on the place where he supposed it had lain withering....

But who or what was it that these young men had seen—the one the General had told him about, and this obviously truthful lad whom he himself had questioned? "Brown devils in flowing robes" was perhaps only the old soldier's picturesque phrase; they might have turned brown in his Indian mind; but what of Jim Paley's "somebody in a sort of surplice affair"? Was that "body" brown as well?

In the wood of worse omen the gay little birds tuned up to deaf ears at the open window. And a cynical soloist went so far as to start saying,"Pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty!" in a liquid contralto. But a little sharp shot, fired two nights and a day before, was the only sound to get across the spare-room window-sill....

The bathroom was next door; in that physically admirable house there was boiling hot water at six o'clock in the morning; the servants made tea when they heard it running; and the garden before breakfast was almost a delight. It might have been an Eden ... itwas... with the serpent still in the grass!

Blinds went up like eyelids under bushy brows of ivy. The grass remained gray with dew; there was not enough sun anywhere, though the whole sky beamed. Dollar wandered indoors the way the General had taken him the day before. It was the way through his library. Libraries are always interesting; a man's bookcase is sometimes more interesting than the man himself, sometimes the one existing portrait of his mind. Dollar spent the best part of an absorbing hour without taking a single volume from its place. But this was partly because those he would have dipped into were under glass and lock and key. And partly it was due tomore accessible distractions crowning that very piece of ostensible antiquity which contained the books, and of which the top drawer drew out into the General's desk.

The distractions were a peculiarly repulsive gilded idol, squatting with its tongue out, as if at the amateur author, and a heathen sword on the wall behind it. Nothing more; but Dollar also had served in India in his day, and his natural interest was whetted by a certain smattering of lore. He was still standing on a newspaper and a chair when a voice hailed him in no hospitable tone.

"Really, Captain Dollar! I should have asked the servants for a ladder while I was about it!"

Of course it was Mrs. Dysone, and she was not even pretending to look pleased. He jumped down with an apology which softened not a line of her sallow face and bony figure.

"It was an outrage," he owned. "But I did stand on a paper to save the chair. I say, though, I never noticed it was this week'sField."

Really horrified at his own behavior, he did his best to smooth and wipe away his footmarks on the wrapper of the paper. But those subtle eyes, likeblots of ink on old parchment, were no longer trained on the offender, who missed yet another look that might have helped him.

"My husband's study is rather holy ground," was the lady's last word. "I only came in myself because I thought he was here."

Mercifully, days do not always go on as badly as they begin; more strangely, this one developed into the dullest and most conventional of country-house Sundays.

General Dysone was himself not only dull, but even a little stiff, as became a good Briton who had said too much to too great a stranger overnight. His natural courtesy had become conspicuous; he played punctilious host all day; and Dollar was allowed to feel that, if he had come down as a doctor, he was staying on as an ordinary guest, and in a house where guests were expected to observe the Sabbath. So they all marched off together to the village church, where the General trumpeted the tune in his own octave, read the lessons, and kept waking up during the sermon. There were the regulation amenities with other devout gentry of the neighborhood; there was the national Sundaysirloin at the midday meal, and no more untoward topics to make the host's forehead glisten or the hostess gleam and lower. In the afternoon the whole party inspected every animal and vegetable on the premises; and after tea the visitor's car came round.

Originally there had been much talk of his staying till the Monday; the General went through the form of pressing him once more, but was not backed up by his wife, who had shadowed them suspiciously all day. Nor did he comment on this by so much as a sidelong glance at Dollar, or contrive to get another word with him alone. And the crime doctor, instead of making any excuse to remain and penetrate these new mysteries, showed a sensitive alacrity to leave.

Of the nephew, who looked terribly depressed at his departure, he had seen something more, and had even asked two private favors. One, that he would keep out of that haunted garden for the next few nights, and try going to bed earlier; the other an odd request for an almost middle-aged man about town, but rather flattering to the young fellow. It was for the loan of his Panama, so that Dollar'shatter might see if he could not get him as good a one. Paley's was the kind that might be carried up a sleeve, like the modern handkerchief; he explained that the old General had given it him.

Dollar tried it on almost as soon as the car was out of sight of Valsugana—while his young chauffeur was still wondering what he had done to make the governor sit behind. It was funny of him, just when a chap might have been telling him a thing or two that he had heard down there at the coachman's place. But it was all the more interesting when they got back to town at seven in the evening, and he was ordered to fill up with petrol and be back at nine, to make the same trip over again.

"I needn't ask you," the doctor added, "to hold your tongue about anything you may have heard at General Dysone's. I know you will, Albert."

And almost by lighting-up time they were shoulder to shoulder on the road once more.

But at Valsugana it was another dark night, and none too easy to find one's way about the place on the strength of a midsummer day's acquaintance. And for the first time Dollar was glad the dog of the house was dead, as he finished a circuitousapproach by stealing through the farther wood, toward the jagged lumps of light in the ivy-strangled bedroom windows; already everything was dark down-stairs.

Here were the pale new sods; they could just be seen, though his feet first felt their inequalities. His cigarette was the one pin-prick of light in all the garden, though each draw brought the buff brim of Jim Paley's Panama within an inch of his eyes, its fine texture like coarse matting at the range. And the chair in which Jim Paley had sat smoking this time last night, and dozing the night before when the shot disturbed him, was just where he expected his shins to find it; the wickers squeaked as John Dollar took his place.

Less need now not to make a sound; but he made no more than he could help, for the night was still and sultry, without any of the garden noises of a night ago. It was as though nature had stopped her orchestra in disgust at the plot and counterplot brewing on her darkened stage. The cigarette-end was thrown away; it might have been a stone that fell upon the grass, and Dollar could almost hear it sizzling in the dew. His aural nerves were tunedto the last pitch of sensitive acknowledgment; a fly on the drooping Panama-brim would not have failed to "scratch the brain's coat of curd." ... How much less the swift and furtive footfall that came kissing the wet lawn at last!

It was more than a footfall; there was a following swish of some long garment trailing through the wet. It all came near; it all stopped dead. Dollar had nodded heavily as if in sleep; had jerked his head up higher; seemed to be dropping off again in greater comfort.

The footfalls and the swish came on like thunder now. But now his eyelids were only drooping like the brim above them; in the broad light of their abnormal perceptivity, it was as if his own eyes threw a dreadful halo round the figure they beheld. It was a swaddled figure, creeping into monstrosity, crouching early for its spring. It had draped arms extended, with some cloth or band that looped and tightened at each stride: on the rounded shoulders bobbed the craning head and darkened face of General Dysone.

In his last stride he swerved, as if to get as much behind the chair as its position under the treepermitted. The cloth clapped as it came taut over Dollar's head, but was not actually round his neck when he ducked and turned, and hit out and up with all his might. He felt the rasp of a fifteen-hours' beard, heard the click of teeth; the lawn quaked, and white robes settled upon a senseless heap, as the plumage on a murdered pigeon.

Dollar knelt over him and felt his pulse, held an electric lamp to eyes that opened, and quickly something else to the dilated nostrils.

"O Jim!" shuddered a voice close at hand. It was shrill yet broken, a cry of horror, but like no voice he knew.

He jumped up to face the General's wife.

"It's not Jim, Mrs. Dysone. It's I—Dollar. He'll soon be all right!"

"Captain—Dollar?"

"No—doctor, nowadays—he called me down as one himself. And now I've come back on my own responsibility, and—put him under chloroform; but I haven't given him much; for God's sake let us speak plainly while we can!"

She was on her knees, proving his words without uttering one. Still kneeling speechless, she leanedback while he continued: "You know what he is as well as I do, Mrs. Dysone; you may thank God a doctor has found him out before the police! Monomania is not their business—but neither are you the one to cope with it. You have shielded your husband as only a woman will shield a man; now you must let him come to me."

His confidence was taking some effect; but she ignored the hands that would have helped her to her feet; and her own were locked in front of her, but not in supplication.

"And what can any of you do for him," she cried fiercely—"except take him away from me?"

"I will only answer for myself. I would control him as you can not, and I would teach him to control himself if man under God can do it. I am a criminal alienist, Mrs. Dysone, as your husband knew before he came to consult me on elaborate pretenses into which we needn't go. He trusted me enough to ask me down here; in my opinion, he was feeling his way to greater trust, in the teeth of his terrible obsession, but last night he said more than he meant to say, so to-day he wouldn't say a word. I only guessed his secret this morning—whenyou guessed I had! It would be safe with me against the world. But how can I take the responsibility of keeping it if he remains at large as he is now?"

"You can not," said Mrs. Dysone. "I am the only one."

Her tone was dreamy and yet hard and fatalistic; the arms in the wide dressing-gown sleeves were still tightly locked. Something brought Dollar down again beside the senseless man, bending over him in keen alarm.

"He'll be himself again directly—quite himself, I shouldn't wonder! He may have forgot what has happened; he mustn't find me here to remind him. Something he will have to know, and you are the one to break it to him, and then to persuade him to come to me. But you won't find that so easy, Mrs. Dysone, if he sees how I tricked him. He had much better think itwasyour nephew. My motor's in the lane behind these trees; let him think I never went away at all, that we connived and I am holding myself there at your disposal. It would be true—wouldn't it—after this? I'll wait night and day until I know!"

"Doctor Dollar," said Mrs. Dysone, when she had risen without aid and set him to the trees, "you may or may not know the worst about my poor husband, but you shall know it now about me. I wish you to take this—and keep it! You have had two escapes to-night."

She bared the wrist from which the smallest of revolvers dangled; he felt it in the darkness—and left it dangling.

"I heard you had one. He told me. And I thought you carried it for your own protection!" cried Dollar, seeing into the woman at last.

"No. It was not for that"—and he knew that she was smiling through her tears. "I did save his life—when my poor dog saved Jim's—but I carried this to save the secret I am going to trust to you!"

Dollar would only take her hand. "You wouldn't have shot me, or any man," he assured her. "But," he added to himself among the trees, "what a fool I was to forget thattheynever killed women!"

It turned almost cold beside the motor in the lane; the doctor gave his boy a little brandy, and together they tramped up and down, talking sport and fiction by the small hour together. The starsslipped out of the sky, the birds began, and the same cynic shouted "Pretty, pretty, pretty!" at the top of its strong contralto. At long last there came that other sound for which Dollar had never ceased listening. And he turned back into the haunted wood with Jim Paley.

The poor nephew—still stunned calm—was as painfully articulate as a young bereaved husband. He spoke of General Dysone as of a man already dead, in the gentlest of past tenses. He was dead enough to the boy. There had been an appalling confession—made as coolly, it appeared, as Paley repeated it.

"He thoughtIknocked him down, and I had to let him think so! Aunt Essie insisted; sheisa wonder, after all! It made him tell me things I simply can't believe.... Yet he showed me a rope just like it—meant for me!"

"Do you mean just like the one that—hanged the gardener?"

"Yes.Hedid it, so he swears ...afterward. He'll tell you himself—he wants to tell you. He says he first ... I can't put my tongue to it!" The lapse into the present tense had made him human.

"Like the Thugs?"

"Yes—like that sect of fiendish fanatics who went about strangling everybody they met!Theywere what his book was about. How did you know?"

"That's Bhowanee, their goddess, on top of his bureau, and he has Sleeman and all the other awful literature locked up underneath. As a study for a life of sudden idleness, in the depths of the country, it was enough to bring on temporary insanity. And the strong man gone wrong goes and does what the rest of us only get on our nerves!"

Dollar felt his biceps clutched and clawed, and the two stood still under more irony in a gay contralto.

"Temporary, did you say? Onlytemporary?" the boy was faltering.

"I hope so, honestly. You see, it was just on that one point ... and even there ... I believe hedidwant his wife out of the way, and for her own sake, too!" said Dollar, with a sympathetic tremor of his own.

"But do you know what he's saying? He means to tell the whole world now, and let them hang him, and serve him right—he says! And he's as saneas we are now—only he might have been through a Turkish bath!"

"More signs!" cried Dollar, looking up at the brightening sky. "But we won't allow that. It would undo nothing and he has made all the reparation.

" ... Come, Paley! I want to take him back with me in the car. It's broad daylight."

The doctor was coping with his Sunday meal when the telephone went off in the next room. On his ears the imperious summons never fell without a thrill; in his sight, the tulip-shaped receiver became a live thing trumpeting for help; and he would answer the call himself, at any hour of the day or night. It was necessary at night, with the Bartons asleep in the basement like a family in a vault, but it was just the same when they were all on duty, as at the present moment. Back went the Cromwellian chair, at the head of the bare and solitary trestle table. An excited personage, who might have been just outside the window, was expeditiously appeased in monosyllables. And Dollar returned with an appetite to what had been set before him.

"Send Bobby round to the garage, Barton, toorder the car at once. He can tell Albert I shall be ready as soon as he is, but to take his headlights and fill up with petrol." This was repeated with paternal severity in the wings. "Now, Barton, my little red road-book, and see if you can find Pax Monktons in the wilds of Surrey. It can't be more than a hamlet. Try the Cobham country if it's not in the index."

This took longer—took a survey map and two pairs of eyes before Pax Monktons Chase was discovered in microscopic print, and the light green peppered with dots signifying timber three hundred feet above sea-level.

"Never heard of it in my life before," said Dollar, as he laced brown shoes before his coffee. "Or of the man either, or his double-barreled name for that matter. You might see if there's a Dale-Bulmer inWho's Who."

But again Barton was unsuccessful; and here his services ended, though through no fault of his own, or failure of unselfish zeal for one of those more than probable adventures which made him hate the chauffeur who was always in them, and curse the duties that kept other people out.

"Will you take your flask, sir?"

"Lord, no! I'm not going to the North Pole."

"Or your—or one of those revolvers, sir?"

"What on earth for? Besides, they're not mine; they ought to be in the Black Museum at Scotland Yard." The nucleus of a branch exhibition was forming itself in Welbeck Street. "Don't you give way to nerves, Barton! I'm only going down to see a man who seems anxious to see me, but I shouldn't be going to him if we had anybody up-stairs. You three make an afternoon of it somewhere; never mind if I'm back first; go out and enjoy yourselves."

And he was off as if on a deliberate jaunt; but an involuntary chuckle in the voice over the telephone, the hint of a surprise, the possibility of a trick, made lively thinking after the doldrums of the dog-days; and the fine September afternoon seemed expressly ordered for motorists with time upon their hands. Dollar had only been thinking so when the call came through, to supply just the object which gives a run its zest, and nothing else mattered in the least. However frivolous the end and errand, the means and the meantime were so much to the good on such a day.

It was warm, yet delightfully keen at thirty milesan hour; clear as crystal within rifle-shot, and deliciously hazy in the distance; the bronze upon the trees seldom warming to a premature red, often lapsing into the liquid greens of midsummer; but all the way an autumnal smear of silver in the sunlight. Dollar divided his mind between a sensuous savoring of the heavenly country, and more or less romantic speculations on the case in store. Some people's notions of a crime doctor's functions were so much wider even than his own; ten months out of the twelve, he could not have afforded to come so far afield without a distastefully definite foreword about fees.

This afternoon he was prepared to do almost anything for next to nothing: and after twenty sedentary miles he was on his legs as often as not in the next two or three, asking his way at likely lodges, or from strolling bands of shaven yokels, all Sunday collars and cigarettes.

"Pax Monktons Chase?" at last said one who seemed to have heard the name before. "Straight as ever you can go, and the first lodge on the left. But there's no one there."

"No one there!" echoed Dollar. "Do you mean the place is empty?"

"I believe there's workmen there on week-days, but you won't find anybody now, unless the chap that's bought it's motored over."

"Isn't he living there, then?"

"Not yet; there's alterations being made; and I don't know where he does live, or anything at all about him, except that he motors over sometimes on a Sunday."

Dollar felt dashed until he remembered to appreciate one of the few possibilities for which he had not come quite prepared. There was some promise in a surprise thus early and so complete. But it made Pax Monktons Chase fall a little flat when found. It robbed the dreary lodge of all its value as an eye-opener; it made the chase itself look vast and desolate for nothing, and a noble pile of seasoned stone fling but drab turrets and ineffective battlements against a silver sky, which the sun had ceased to polish in the last tortuous mile.

It was all the pleasanter to find a ruddy, genial, bearded face, mounted on a spotted tie that wenttwice round a nineteen-inch neck, smiling a welcome under the entrance arch. The man introduced himself as Dale-Bulmer, bolting a mouthful made for rolling on the tongue. Dollar was much taken with the humor and simplicity of his address and bearing. A smart chauffeur waited with a plutocratic car in the sweep of the drive. And there was no third sign of life about the place.

"Awfully good of you to come," said Dale-Bulmer, with apologetic warmth. "I thought you might, from what I'd heard of you, and you seemed to jump at it when I rang you up. I haven't known anybody take so kindly to a trip since I left the bush."

"An Australian?" asked the doctor, with all a doctor's readiness to make talk; but he was more curious than ever to learn the secret of his summons.

"Yes! I come from that enlightened land, where Labor runs the show and Women have the Vote. In fact," the big man added, with the fat chuckle heard over the telephone, "that's precisely why Ihavecome from Australia—as I was fool enough to say the other night at a meeting in these parts. But I seem to have jumped out of the frying-pan into the fire."

"I'm sorry to hear that," observed Dollar, with polite forbearance.

"Well, not quite into the fire, as it happens," said Dale-Bulmer, chuckling again in his noble neck. "Come inside, and you'll see." He led the way into a broad central corridor, choked with ladders and builders' tools, pipes and tubing, curtain-rods, and a stack of boards; but a model of order compared with the chaos visible through an open door at which he paused. Here were more bare joists than navigable floor, and a forest of scaffolding therefrom to the crisscrossed plaster ceiling. "Look you here!" said the man from Australia, and pointed to a heap of shavings on a remnant of the floor.

"The British workman's such a careless dog," sighed Dollar, shaking a sententious head, for a box of vestas had been spilt about the place.

"British workman be hanged!" cried the other bluntly. "The British workman's got a job here that will keep him in beer and betting-money till Christmas, and as much longer as he can spin itout. This is the little game of another sporting type—the British lady burning for the vote!"

"So that's it! But are you sure?" asked Dollar, though he wanted to ask if that was all.

"Certain. I met a flaming brace of 'em on bicycles, just outside my boundary. This is what I was to get for speaking out about them the other night."

"I don't see their literature, and I can't smell their paraffin."

"It's in that bottle on the mantelpiece. Something must have scared them at the last moment—all but one sportswoman."

"What about her?"

"I've got her," said Dale-Bulmer, with sepulchral excitement.

"Got her prisoner?"

"I should hope so! Why, I caught her on the very point of setting fire to that very heap of shavings—and me without a hose-pipe in the house! Those are her matches on the floor;shewasn't going to turn tail till she'd done her job—and didn't till I nearly trod on it! You could hardly expect me to bow her out of the front door after that!"

Dollar could only stare into the jovial face wreathed in rubicund grins, but no longer free from a certain serio-comic compunction and concern.

"But, my dear sir——"

"Don't pitch into me!" pleaded Dale-Bulmer, pathetically. "I had to do something; if I hadn't thought of you, and one or two things I've heard about you, doctor, I should only have telephoned to the police; and what's the good of putting these young women in the jug, to be poured out again within a week? I heard you ran a nursing-home for criminals, worth all the prisons in the world."

"But I don't run people into it," said the doctor; "they've got to come in of their own free will. What have you done with this young woman?"

"I? Nothing; it's her own doing entirely. She chose her cover—I only turned the key."

"You've locked her up in some room?"

"Yes—more or less—rather more."

And Dale-Bulmer laughed a rather nervous, guilty laugh.

"Up-stairs somewhere?"

"Yes—look you here! She was picking up those matches when I spotted her from this door,and out she streaked through that one over there. Come and have a look at her line of country, doctor."

It led into an anteroom or inner hall, or the well of some staircase still to come, with a lashed ladder towering in its midst, but not quite reaching a skeleton landing of yawning joists. Dale-Bulmer gazed aloft, wagging a horizontal beard.

"Surely she didn't go up there?" said Dollar.

"Like a lamplighter, doctor! I went the way we'll both go now, if it's all the same to you."

A fine forked staircase bore them from the lower corridor to its counterpart above. And here the leader trod gently, a finger laid across his lips.

"That's the room," he whispered, pointing to a shut door in a side passage. "I—I almost think I'll leave her to you, doctor. It's not locked—not the door."

"I thought she was your prisoner?"

"Yes—but you'll see where she's hidden herself. I did turnthatkey, doctor, but that's all I did. Still, I think I'd rather you let her out."

There was nothing facetious in his droll air ofguilt; he seemed really rather ashamed of his impetuous measures, as if long in doubt as to their gallantry, and abashed by the unspoken criticisms of the man whom he had brought so far afield on the spur of a flustering moment. But the truth was that Dollar did not blame him in the least, as he turned the handle softly, and heard a pusillanimous step retreating down the corridor.

It was a light and lofty room, with a broad bay-window overlooking the park; and in the bay a window-seat forming a coffer, which had been broken open from within; and just clear of the splinters, her hands raised to her disheveled hair, hat awry and country clothes begrimed, a young woman risen like Aphrodite from the foam. She had been gazing out as she put herself to rights; but at the opening of the door she turned with a light disdain, and the pair of them stood rooted to the floor.

"Lady—Vera!" he could only gasp.

She made him an abrupt little bow; then her head went back to the truculent angle necessitated by a jelly-bag hat worn almost as a mask; and hereyes hung under the brim like great blue rain-drops, grim and gleaming, but with little of his blank amazement, and nothing of the shame that shook his soul.

"No wonder you would never see me!" he muttered more to himself than to her. "Not a word even when I wrote—and I wondered what I'd done! I thought of heaps of things—but I never thought of this!"

She shook her head as abruptly as she had bowed; the blue rain-drops looked frozen where they hung, but the firm lips parted impulsively. Instinct prepared him for something inconceivable. But her self-restraint was a lesson and a reproof; and, in laying it to heart and listening to what she did say he for the moment ceased from wondering what it was that she had just kept back—what charge she had deferred against him.

"Tell me one thing, Doctor Dollar." Her voice was all that it had been in other emergencies, only colder by some degrees. "Have you been following me, or is this pure chance?"

"Not chance—pure Fate!"

"Did you dog me down here, or did you not?"

"Not consciously. Do I look as if I had?"

"You look as if you'd seen a ghost," she told him, with a sudden twinkle of the big blue drops.

"So I have!" he cried in passionate earnest. "I've seen the ghost of everything I held most——"

"Thank you," she said quietly, when he had checked himself on her model. "I know what you must think—what you really have a special right to think—after two years ago. Do be generous and don't say it! This isn't altogether fun for me, you know, much less after being buried alive for hours!" She just turned her head toward the broken window-seat, and his eyes devoured the light upon her profile. "What's going to happen to me? Is my natural enemy a friend of yours? Has he sent for the police?"

"No—for me instead."

"Did he know who it was at sight?"

"He didn't, and he doesn't, and he never shall unless you tell him!" exclaimed Dollar vehemently. "O Vera, when I was longing to see you, to warn you against your enemies, that you should go theway to put yourself more than ever in their power!"

A glitter under the tilted hat had unconsciously rebuked an unconscious liberty; yet once this man had begged this woman to marry him, and once she had practically said she would but for the burden on her soul. Ceremony, at least, they had foregone of old. Was it merely her new lease of error that had come between them of late months? He was beginning to ask himself the question when she broke in with one of her own:

"What enemies do you mean, Doctor Dollar?"

"We are not to speak of two years ago."

"Croucher!" She shuddered almost like a law-abiding lady. "I haven't heard of him since that night in the train."

"I said you wouldn't But I also said, if you remember, that Croucher was only deadly as a tool. Well, he has fallen into the deadliest hands I know—that's all."

It was not, and Lady Vera knew that it was not. The angle of her hat was all amicable attention now, and her eyes shone clear of the brim, with a softer light that made her all at once incredible in herlatest incarnation. Dollar's feelings flew back into his face; she read them with a smile that made him wince, by its cynical resemblance to one or two that still enriched his dreams.

"You think I'm as bad as any of them," she divined aloud.

"I think the crime of arson is worse than most crimes," he made sturdy answer, standing up to the little body with the strangest difficulty, as though he were the culprit and she the man. "It's a thing absolutely nothing on earth can possibly excuse. I think you'd have died rather than descend to it—two years ago!"

He had heard a step behind him, and lowered his voice; but Lady Vera raised hers as a burly form halted shyly on the threshold; and her tone was like none that she had taken hitherto.

"Two years ago," she declaimed, "women had not been treated quite so shabbily as they have been since. Then this miserable Government—"

"Look you here!" blustered Dale-Bulmer, striding out of his shyness into the center of the stage.

"Two years ago," she reiterated for his benefit,"it wasn't war to the handle of the knife! Now it would be fire and sword, if we were any good with the sword; as we are not, it's simply fire!"

"You really think you can burn your way to political power?" cried the man of extremes, with ungovernable indignation.

"Political existence is all we ask."

"As a first instalment! I know you! I come from a country where you started just like that!"

"As you told your audience the other night, if you are Mr. Dale-Bulmer," said Lady Vera, with an explosive little sigh.

"I am; and for that I'm to have a house like this burned to the ground; and you ladies think that's the way to advance your cause, to prove your value to the State! Well, I suppose you know your own business best. It's no use reasoning with you; but it really is enough to set one off, after what I caught you doing down-stairs."

"I wish to goodness you hadn't caught me," cried Lady Vera, with quite extraordinary simplicity.

But neither of them took her up; the doctor could only shake his head in professional despair, while the injured householder recovered his composure, and the little criminal looked as if she weretrying not to look the mistress of the situation.

"I only came," resumed Dale-Bulmer, rather as one who had no right in the room, "to say that a run-about car has been found in the yard behind one of the empty lodges. As I fancy your friends were on bicycles, it struck me that the two-seater might perhaps be yours?"

Was it just the nature of the man to change his whole manner in a moment, or had the quality of the woman something to do with it? He seemed unconscious of the change himself—unaware that he had dropped into a tone of courteous consideration bordering almost on the apologetic. But the corners of her little mutinous mouth showed that nothing was lost upon Lady Vera.

"It sounds like mine," she confessed without indecent amusement. "But I hope you don't think, because there's room for two, that there's another of us still concealed about the premises? I came down quite by myself, in the car you have discovered. And who's to drive it back to town again, I'm sureIdon't know!"

Dale-Bulmer glanced defiantly at Dollar, a flash-light in his eyes.

"I do," he cried. "Yourself!"

"Myself, Mr. Dale-Bulmer? In—handcuffs?"

And it was not her worst smile that was subdued in deference to the full glow of his shamefaced magnanimity.

"Don't talk nonsense!" said he gruffly. "Your car is ready waiting for you at the door."

"Not really?"

"Of course. I buried you alive, didn't I?" His eyes came from the wrecked window-seat. "Won't that meet the immediate case for martyrdom?" And he managed another twinkle after all.

It was a last amenity. He had been thanked, but without the smile which had been ready enough when it was out of place; now that she had cause to smile, the perversity of these women came out, as of course it would! Not that this one took everything quite for granted; on the contrary, she caused an explosion by offering to pay for the damage to the window-seat. The militant party would have wished him to secure ample compensation from his insurance people, she asserted, if the placehadbeen burned down. "Then I might have built the kind of house I really want, instead of trying to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear!" he hadretorted in his better manner, as though he had been a fool to interfere.

But it was not his best manner; it was almost as unrepresentative as the calm self-centered way in which the released prisoner spent the last minutes looking for her gloves, and, when she failed to find them, held out her bare hand with a brazen air of innocence, and no more thanks than would have become a parting guest.

Even John Dollar felt a new pang of disappointment as the two-seater shrank panting out of sight and ear-shot, beneath the bronzed timber of the disappearing drive, and Dale-Bulmer turned on his heel under the arch.

"Doesn't that take the cake?" he cried, when he had swallowed his pique with a chastened chuckle. "A real well-bred 'un—if ever there was one—playing the very devil, and carrying it off like a little angel of light! That's what did me—the way she carried it off! I wanted to give her a fatherly word, to tell her not to go on making such a wicked little fool of herself. But she simply wouldn't look the part, would she? I hadn't even the cheek to ask her name—had you?"

"No. I don't know why you let her off," said Dollar, irritably; but at the moment he hated Dale-Bulmer for extorting his common gratitude at the expense of his sacred flame.

"Why?" cried that cavalier. "Didn't you guess how I found out about her car?"

"How?"

"Reported to me by the police!"

"The police? Were there any about?"

Dollar felt as cold down the back as though his sacred flame had never flickered behind iron bars.

"Two blighters," said Dale-Bulmer. "I caught sight of 'em just after I had left you to have it out with her. That's what they had to say for themselves when I went out to let off steam; swore they were from Scotland Yard, and trumped up the two-seater when I pretended not to believe them. Nor did I till I'd run them down to the lodge and seen it for myself."

"And then?"

"I swore it belonged to a friend, of course, and sent them both to the devil."

"And—and you were man enough not to say a word about it to—to her?" It was as much asDollar could do to keep his enthusiastic respect within bounds of discretion.

"Man enough? I wasn't going to have that sort of carrion coming in and spoilingyourjob!"

Then he perceived how he had spoilt it himself; hung his great head like an elderly elephantine schoolboy; turned his broad back with an inimitable shrug, and stood shaken to the pit with sobs of mirth. Dollar joined him with a shout that relieved them both. And they roared together until a gaunt caretaker appeared on the scene, with a face expressive of such crass bewilderment that their poor clay quaked with a second shock.

"He lives in the bowels of the house," moaned Dale-Bulmer. "He doesn't know a thing that's happened. If he did I might have to double his screw. And—and I'd much rather treble your fee!"

He was solemn once more in his remorse, but not so solemn as the doctor had become within a minute.

"I wouldpaya fee to take his place till to-morrow morning! I mean it, my dear sir. If you think you owe me any little amends, let me do this, for my own satisfaction!"

This from a Dollar at whom the other stared as though they had only just met. It was the crime doctor come at last.

"Stay here for the night, Doctor Dollar?"

"Yes—alone."

"But why, my good fellow?"

"I can hardly tell you; only let me stay, if you can trust me!"

"You know it isn't that."

"Then do let me! It isn't so much for your sake—I won't pretend it is—yet what if there should be a second attempt on the house? Then I might even earn the fee you talk about; otherwise, not a brass farthing! I wouldn't have missed the case for anything, even as it stands. And you only took my treatment out of my mouth; you did the very thing I was going to beg you to do, but not more earnestly than I beg of you now to leave me in charge here to-night."

"But not without this man of mine to look after you?"

"Especially without that man of yours! He gave me the idea—he's my own height and build—we can change places beautifully. I want him toput on my cap and coat and goggles, and to drive away in my car, so that anybody looking would think they had seen the last of me."

"But who should be looking? Surely not that little——"

"God forbid! But perhaps somebody on her side—or perhaps only somebody on her tracks. Curious about those two detectives; but the whole business bristles with curiosities, which I long to investigate in peace, unknown to the whole outside world. This is the only way it can be done; and this, my dear Mr. Dale-Bulmer, is the one and only thing that you can do for me!"

The boy with the beard gave way by inches. As long as there was a dog's chance of any further excitement, he did not see why he should be out of it, much less in his own house, and after the humdrum life he had led since Labor and the Ladies had driven him home from Australia. But the man with the stronger will seemed perfectly sincere in his further asservations that there were features in the case which he wanted to study for his own private and professional ends; that he honestly believed, they had no more to fear from their friendsthe enemy, but that somebody ought to remain on guard, that he was the obvious man. All this rang true enough; and but for Dollar's strange anxiety in the matter, and Dale-Bulmer's sudden discovery that he squinted, the plan might have gained earlier acceptance than it did. It was settled, however, by a timely telephone call from the Australian's furnished house at Esher, to ask if anything had happened to him, and was he never going to tear himself away from Pax Monktons Chase?

Thus it was nearly five o'clock before the crime doctor was alone at last, with certain plain quarters and plainer fare at his disposal, but with every nook and cranny of a country mansion to himself until next morning. The situation had the intrinsic charm of all lonely vigils; even if nothing was likely to come of this one, it would at least afford that continuous possibility of a thrill which becomes more thrilling than the thrill itself. And the whole business was supremely after John Dollar's heart; nothing could have been more congenial to him; and yet, though he did look forward to the night, and whatever the night might still bring forth, it was not for the night's sake that he had maneuvered toremain in the empty house. It was for the residue of daylight, and the systematic investigations it would enable him to make.

On these he started, with the precaution of a seaman marooned on a desolate island, not indubitably uninhabited, as soon as the front door shut upon Dale-Bulmer and the two chauffeurs, with the gaunt caretaker his muffled image in his own car. And these motorists were not followed out of sight or hearing, from the fading pile that looked so empty in the drooping eye of heaven. But it very soon seemed to the man within as if the whole house were a-hum with its own abysmal silence, and his lightest breath a stertorous disturbance of its ponderous peace.

He began by searching the unfurnished room in which the fire would have originated. There could be no doubt about the fell attempt so nearly made. It would have been diabolically certain of success. The scaffolding, like sticks in a gigantic grate; the draft through the joists, where the floor had been taken up; the natural flue formed by the adjoining well, so lofty that an ordinary ladder was too short to reach the landing—all these were asbellows and chimney, and the best of fuel ready laid for lighting. And here were the shavings, all nicely swept together, and the matches spilled at the last moment; as Dollar put them back into the box, his finger-tips ached for all they might have learned from that which they held—for the whole truth about the guilty hand which had let the match-box fall.

It was the whole truth, too, that he was seeking next upon his knees, in the rubble down between the joists; some fresh fact, still inconceivable as a concrete discovery, that he hoped against hope to find and to set against the facts beyond dispute. Facts could not lie, but they might exaggerate; somewhere, surely, there must be something to extenuate, something to redeem even this atrocious attempt, if only the silent walls could speak up for one who never made excuses for herself!

It was a childish instinct, a quite babyish yearning to undo what has once been done, and yet this had been the spring of that dense desire to be left behind in the house at all costs. Then he had only felt it, like a dull ache; now it became a dear and poignant conviction that there was some discoverystill to make, and that he was the man to make it; that one of these walls had a word to say to him, and to him alone.

But it was none of the new bricks and mortar, wanting even their first coat of plaster; it was nothing under the lofty rafters of a quiet baronial hall where the builder had not been turned loose, nor any intruder left a trace; it was not in the round room, filled with a first instalment of the Dale-Bulmer furniture, nor yet anywhere else down-stairs, in spite of the shrill tale told by the scullery window. There the Amazons had entered, after breaking a pane like journeymen burglars. They had fled incontinently by the door. But what else had they done, and where else had they been, within those sardonically silent walls?

Had they been up-stairs before Vera Moyle ran up the ladder? Dollar returned to that speaking spot, and climbed up gingerly, in an agony of enthusiasm for her misused pluck. The gap between the top rung and the new landing was unpleasant even for him, and he was at least a foot taller than the little fool. The little fool! A pretty way to think of her, even now; but there was aworse way; and still there was a better, vaguely haunting him all the time, but almost ceasing to be vague in the room where he had found her in the flesh. He could see her there again. She had not faced him like a little fool, but a little heroine, God forgive her! Not so much as a pout about her horrible imprisonment under the window-seat! Not a moment's loss of dignity, even after that; not a moment's loss of temper. Head up, and eyes shining in the shadow of her wicked little hat!

Here, to an inch, he had caught her gazing out of that window, out and down into the chase—rolling right up to the house on this side—beating against a breakwater of a sunk fence just underneath, and dotted with leafy sail. Deer in the distance, and swallows darting across and across the window, like shuttles weaving the scene in silk, brought the picture back to good dry land. But the wide sky was still rather like a sea-sky; and it had lightened again with the approach of evening; there were silver rims to the clouds, as John Dollar tore himself from the enchanted scene.


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