She kissed him.

There came a groan and a heavy sigh from Melchard.

"No, he's not awake, nor near it," said Dick, when he had examined his patient. "But I'd better give him another dose. There's going to be fun at Todsmoor, and I don't want any Millsborough back-talk mixed up with it. Look out of that window while I physic him. It's not nice to watch."

It was nasty enough to hear, thought Amaryllis.

By the time it was over the train was slowing down. Before it stopped Dick was out on the platform, and in two strides had caught the guard.

"There's been an accident. Man fell out of this carriage—next to mine," he said, in a low voice, speaking now in the assured tones of a gentleman accustomed to obedience. "Don't make a fuss. Fetch the station-master."

The bearded autocrat hesitated, eyeing this strange figure with the "officer's swank," as he called it afterwards.

"I advise you to hurry," said Dick, his eyes opening a little wider.

The autocrat took the advice, and returned with another.

Dick was standing with his hand on the door of the compartment with one traveller—the remaining motor-cyclist.

"Look here, station-master," he said, beginning before the man could open his mouth; "I don't want to leave you with a nasty job like this on your hands, without telling you what I know. I am Major Richard Bellamy of the R.A.F. Never mind my clothes. Take it I've been celebrating. At Harthborough I got into the next compartment with a lady, and a man I have befriended. I am looking after him. He'll be all right to-morrow. Just as we left—the train had actually started—two fellows in overalls jumped into this compartment. Half-way between this and Harthborough we heard a row going on—the lady and I. It got worse and worse, and I looked out of the window just in time to see one of the pair fall out backwards."

Here Dick looked at his watch.

"Twelve minutes ago, it was. I took the time then. He hit the grass bank and rolled. Shouldn't wonder if he's all right. Probably alive, anyhow."

"Why didn't you pull the communication cord?" asked the station-master, pompously stern.

Now Dick had forgotten the communication cord. But it would have been impossible for him to forget a few things he had once learned about railways.

He glanced at the guard, and found uneasiness in his eye.

"It's a slip carriage," he said, smiling, tolerantly superior. "Was the connection made?" he asked, looking hard in the guard's face.

The man flushed an awkward red. "No," he said. "'Tain't worth the trouble for the little bit of a journey before we slip her."

"H'm!" said the station-master.

"Just so," said Dick, simultaneously. "So perhaps it'd be just as well for me not to have thought of the communication cord, eh?"

The station-master said nothing. But the guard looked as if there were gratitude in him somewhere.

"If the poor beggar's alive, he'll have gained by our not stopping, because he'll get a doctor and a stretcher all the quicker," Dick went on. "Now, I advise you to hold the fellow in this compartment here for your local police. Look at him. He's sat there like that ever since we ran in here. You can see he was in no hurry to give information concerning what had happened to his friend."

The station-master turned to the guard.

"Did you see anything?" he asked.

"No. But I heard a door bang. I looked out, but I heard nothing. The gentleman's quite right, though, about the two chaps scrambling in as we pulled out of Harthborough."

The station-master turned to Dick with a face diffidently serious.

"I'm afraid you ought to wait here, sir," he said.

"I know I ought not. Duty's duty, and you can't keep me, my good fellow," replied Dick, dredging the breast pocket of his coat and producing and opening his cigarette-case. "Here's my card. The address will always find me."

The station-master looked at the card, hesitating still, and turning it about in his fingers.

"I can uncouple the through carriage," he said.

"And I can move my party to another," Dick blandly retorted. "And you'll only inconvenience everybody up the line that meant to use it. See here, man; I'm witness of what was possibly an accident. I give you the information, and add my private opinion that it was something worse than an accident. That's all. It's up to you to put your police on the job, not to disturb a traveller that wasn't even in the man's compartment. Ask this fellow here, who was in it. Most likely he's got no ticket, running it fine as they did at Harthborough. That'll give you reason enough to make him miss the train while one of your men's fetching a constable. And the constable won't let him out of sight till you've found the other man, alive or dead. But he won't object to waiting, unless he wants to rouse suspicion. Now I do object." And here Dick laughed. "Why," he went on, "with your way of doing things, they'd have to arrest a hundred witnesses every time a lorry ran into a lamp-post."

And he stood by, lighting his pipe, while the station-master attempted to extract information from the man in overalls.

He proved docile enough; mumbled a halting tale of dozing in his corner when his friend, leaning from the window, had been launched from the train by the sudden opening of the door. Supposed it hadn't been properly latched; his friend had been fooling with the lock a few minutes before. No, there'd been no words—not to say quarrel; they'd talked a bit—nothing more. Oh, yes, of course he'd get out and wait over, and do his bit to help 'em find his chum—poor, silly blighter!

The man cast one sly side-glance at Dick, and thought he was not being watched.

But Dick saw, and gathered from that one flash of the eye that this was Pepe's "Heberto, the London man," and that 'Erb was not even yet sure whether this was or was not the wild man who had leapt upon him from the stairs in the hall at "The Myrtles," eight or nine hours ago.

As the train ran out of Todsmoor, "I shouldn't wonder," said Dick comfortably to Amaryllis, "if that's the last fence, and a straight run home for us."

But there was fear as well as disgust in the glance which Amaryllis threw at the gross slumber of their prisoner.

She had felt his power stretched over half a county, and who should fix its limit for her?

But she merely said:

"What time do we get to King's Cross, Dick?"

"Ten-thirty—on paper; but we're twenty minutes late already."

"Then—what'm I going to do then? Eleven o'clock, and me so tired!"

"You'll be all right. I'll see that you are," said Dick.

Apparently satisfied by this pledge, Amaryllis had almost fallen asleep in her corner, now the furthest from Melchard, when Dick said:

"What you want to-night, my prize-packet, is a fairy godmother."

"She would save lots of trouble," admitted Amaryllis.

"And all you've got is that mildewed chaperon, snoring there."

Amaryllis shuddered.

"I don't know even yet," she said, "why you brought it—a thing you might have left tied in a bundle by the roadside. He's only been dangerous and disgusting. And you said——"

"Said it wasn't to take it out of him that I did it. Did I? If I did, it's right."

There was a silence.

"I suppose you could guess," said Dick, breaking it.

"Was it because you thought of the harm that he does, making drugs and selling them to sad people and bad people, Dick?"

"That might have been a good reason. It's not my line, though—if I'm on oath."

"Oh, but you're not, Dick. You needn't say anything unless you want to tell me."

"I do. That reason wasn't mine. I don't feel like that about people in the lump. And now they say the people is free and democratic—doing things, you know, off its own bat, when it hasn't a cat's notion of cricket—now I think, as far as I think about the lump at all, that it'd better have a fair run at its own game. Result may be anything; might be a new and a good one. But I simply hate seeing the old professional groundsman pretending that the new mob of boys likes cricket, and sweating himself all for nothing.

"As for the drug business, it cures in the end by killing, and grandmotherly legislation belongs to dear old tyranny; and I'm not at all sure, if five-eighths of the people said that the rest mustn't kill pigs to eat 'm, that you and I would be wrong to have an illicit rasher when we could get it. Anyhow, the immoral remnant of the nation doesn't trouble my dreams. It rubs itself out in the end. So, you see, it wasn't the dope evil that made me bind him in the chains of tangle-foot and force his putrid company on an angel. Guess again."

"I'm too tired," said Amaryllis "to have a guess left in me. Tell me."

"My dear," he answered, "the cherry's always been bigger than the bunch to me. You are just the greatest, and the roundest and the reddest, and the sweetest cherry on the big tree. And the cherry nearest to you——"

"My dad?" she asked, interrupting with a catch of the breath.

He nodded.

"Yes," he said. "It was for him I took the dope from that scented ape—because he'd have been hurt if it'd got loose to ravage the world. And when I got the chance I just pouched the ape too for the same reason—so that the man that cursed you shall not only feel that his patent curse hasn't done any damage, but has even helped to chain up a lot of rival plagues. These men of science are like benevolent Jupiters: Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday colloguing with Vulcan to forge heavier and sharper thunderbolts; Thursday, Friday and Saturday conferring anxiously with all Olympus as to how they shall be blunted and lightened, lest they hurt poor mortal fools too much.

"This chap Melchard, properly handled, will give the show away, and the League of Nations or some other comic crowd'll corral the lot."

"What lot?" asked Amaryllis.

"The crew your father told us about. My dear, I wanted to please you by pleasing him. To do it I had to let you run a shade more risk and endure a lot more discomfort. Was that—was it——"

For once Dick Bellamy could not find his words. Yet his eyes, it seemed to Amaryllis, were hardened—stabbing hers with steel points barbed with curiosity.

She knew what he meant, and said so.

"Of course it was nothing against me—against love," she answered. "It was just the hook, dear, that's going to hold this fish for ever."

When they had expressed the inexpressible and explained the obvious, he returned to that fish-hook phrase of hers.

"What made you put it like that, young woman?" he asked.

"Your eyes, Dick. For a moment you were afraid, wondering whether I should toe the line exactly. Your eyes got hard. They stabbed right into me, and they had a sort of backward wings, like fish-hooks—father's got a horrid arrow like that—won't come out again without tearing. Yours won't ever, Dick."



CHAPTER XXIV.

"KUK-KUK-KUK-KATIE."

Soft, even light filled the wide entrance hall of No. — Park Lane.

The single, expressionless footman appeared almost hopeful, knowing his release was near; for the time was only twenty minutes short of midnight.

The road between the front door and the park railings was almost as peaceful as the houses on its one side, and the grass and trees on the other. Hardly a hoof on the wood, and but a rare motor rushing, at intervals, with soft, apologetic speed over the thoroughfare from north to south.

But there came at last a taxi—Charles, in spite of thick door and perfect roadway, recognised its venal characteristics—a taxi which hesitated, stopped, started again, and came to rest at the very door of No. —.

Though his ears could scarce believe it on that Saturday night, when there was not within earshot any function or reception going on, there came feet up those splendid, shallow steps—feet which seemed to halt, and even vacillate beneath a swaying body.

The mere suspicion was shocking; but even worse, to that cultivated ear, was the clamour of the bell which followed.

But when, having opened the door, Charles examined the ringer, he was astounded, not to say appalled.

The man, though his eyes were heavy and his voice that of one driving himself to the limit of his strength, was certainly not intoxicated; for in that matter, Charles the footman knew and trusted the nicety of his own judgment. But the condition of the dress, the cut cheek-bone, the puffy eye above it, the dirty hands with raw knuckles, and the pockets grotesquely bulging, made a picture so painfully in contrast with the house and its quarter, that the footman's face lost its habitual expression of restrained good-humour under a mask of severity altogether tragic.

For a moment he hesitated: to ask this scarecrow his business would concede him the right to exist; and the ruffian's undamaged eye and his assured carriage were plain warning against any concession whatsoever.

The visitor, therefore, spoke first, even as if he had been respectable.

"I want to see Mr. Bruffin," he said.

"Not at home," replied Charles, trying to boom like a butler.

"Then I'll wait till he comes," said Dick Bellamy, taking a step forward in spite of the door and the footman's hand upon it.

"Impossible to see Mr. Bruffin to-night—sir," said Charles. "I'm afraid I must ask you to step outside."

His vision of what might be in those bloated pockets was only a little less alarming than the reality.

But Dick felt he had only a drop or so of physical energy left; and so, lest they should trickle from him, he used them now.

And Charles, lifted most disconcertingly by the slack of his breeches and the stiffness of his resisting neck, was shifted quickly and painfully to the doorstep, to hear the door close upon him before he could turn to face it.

The house was new, even to its owners. Its rebuilding and exquisite refitting had been a marvel for the magpie chorus of the occasional column. The public already knew more of his new house than George Bruffin could ever forget.

But Dick, who never read more of a newspaper than he must, knew only its address and the day when George and his wife should go into residence. This, he had remembered, was the first day of their second week, and, even if George had already learned his way to his own study, Dick must find means to reach him more expeditious than geographical exploration.

He looked about him, and his eye fell upon a thing of which George had told him with pride almost boyish; a framework of shell-cases, graduated from the slender treble of a shortened soizante-quinze to the deepest base of a full-length monster from some growling siege-gun.

For George had done his portion of fighting and had collected this material for a dinner gong, on which one might play with padded stick anything from the "Devil's Tattoo" to "Caller Herrin'" or the "Wedding March."

From the doorstep, the frantic Charles, with eyes rolling, saw the taxi. What was in it he could not see, for the chauffeur stood blocking the open window, watching, it appeared, whatever the cab might contain—wild Bolshevists with bombs, perhaps, or soft litters of pedigree pups.

From Apsley House to Marble Arch, he felt, was never a policeman. He could have embraced the hoariest of specials.

The service entrance was too far round. Before he could reach it all might be over.

So, forgetting the bell, he turned and beat, with fists none too hard, upon the door that was anything but soft. And cursed, as he had never cursed man before, the architect whose enlightened scheme had found no place for a knocker.

And with his first blow there burst out in the hall the wild, indecorous strains of "Kuk-kuk kuk-Katie," pealing out louder and ever louder as the musician found confidence.

With his left hand supporting half his tired weight on the frame of these bells, translated by some twentieth-century Tubal Cain to a music so strangely different from the first they had uttered, Dick was absorbed in his rendering of such bars of the vulgar melody as he could remember, when he heard, far behind him, a slow, unimpassioned voice.

"What's all this hell's delight?" it asked.

A confused chorus of protesting explanation, interwoven with the yapping cries and hysterical laughter of women, was all his answer.

In a fresh surge of enthusiasm "Katie" drowned it.

Then George Bruffin shouted—almost, the servants felt, as if he might some day lose his temper.

"How did this freak minstrel get in?" he roared.

"Don't know, sir."

"Who was on duty here?"

"Charles, sir," chimed the chorus.

"Where is he?"

The music died in a last tinkling "Kuk-kuk." And then, as the minstrel swung round to face his audience, the whole company heard the beating on the great door.

"That," said Dick with a wave of his baton towards it, "is Charles."

While George stared heavily at the intruder's battle-worn visage, the second footman flung open the door.

With a face livid and distorted by passion, Charles made a rush at his enemy—to be brought up short by the sight of his master, wringing the rascal's hand and patting his disgraceful shoulder.

"You silly goat," were all the words George could find for his laughter.

"I had to see you," said Dick. "And I do."

"Why couldn't you have me fetched decently?"

The chorus had vanished; they two were alone, with Charles, abashed.

"Your man wanted to put me out. I'm all in, George, so I just put him out, and rang the bells for you." He sighed wearily, and added: "Anyhow, it worked."

George turned a heavy face on the footman, but Dick spoke first.

"Charles is a damned good servant," he said. "I know what I look like. He was in the right, so I had to evict."

"What's your trouble, Dick?" asked George, speaking, thought the servant, as if this Dick were the first of all Dicks and all men.

"I've got a girl in a cab out there. She's worse beat than I am, George. I want you and Liz to look after her till to-morrow."

Bruffin turned to his servant.

"Lady Elizabeth is in my study," he said. "Ask her to come to me here." Then, to Dick, "Sit down," he went on, and disappeared, to return quickly with a tumbler in his hand.

With half-closed eyes, Dick continued as if the other man had never left him.

"She's mounting guard," he said, "with the shuvver to help, over our catch—the worst blackguard unhung."

A handsome woman of some thirty years, with masses of darkest hair cunningly disposed, neck and shoulders beautiful beyond criticism, and dressed in a peignoir of delicate simplicity, came to her husband with a rush smooth as the full-sailed speed of a three-masted schooner.

Charles, with recovered dignity, followed in her wake.

"George! What is it, George?" she exclaimed, before she had even time to get her eyes focused upon his companion.

"That," answered George, with a derisive gesture.

"Why, it's—oh, Dick!" she cried.

With her long, slender hands on his shoulders, she peered close and eagerly into the battered countenance.

"Oh, Dickie dear, whatever have they been doing to its good old face?" she demanded, with tenderness for the one, and anger for the many mingling in her voice.

"Nothing to what they got from him, Betsy—unless I'm an ass. But he'll tell us when that whisky's worked in his veins a bit. He's got a lady out there, waiting. Shall I fetch her in—or you?"

Dick half rose from his chair. But Lady Elizabeth Bruffin pushed him back into it.

"I will, of course," she said, and made for the front door so quickly that Charles only just had it open in time.

As he told the butler before he slept that night, "It'd've done your kind heart good, Mr. Baldwin, to see how they were eating 'im with their eyes. His word law, you know, and do what he wanted, almost before he could say what it was, and it might be an hour before he could tell 'em why. And the terrible object he was—but with something strong and compelling, one might say, underneath."

He was thinking, perhaps of the hand which had lifted him over the threshold.

Charles had followed his mistress to the taxi.

The driver, turning on her approach, stood back, touching his cap; amazed by this condescension of jewels and silk to beauty ill-clothed, draggled, dirty and exhausted.

Suddenly Lady Elizabeth remembered that she did not know even the girl's name.

"Open the door, please," she said to the driver. And then, to Amaryllis, "My dear, you're to come in," and stretched her hands out with a motion so inviting that the girl laid her own in them, taking all their support to rise and get out on the pavement.

"Take my arm. Poor little thing, you're tired to death," said Lady Elizabeth, with what the girl called a coo in her voice.

"You don't even know my name——" began Amaryllis.

"I know something better—you're Dick Bellamy's friend. That is a passport and an introduction, my dear."

Charles followed them up the steps. On the third his mistress stopped and turned. Charles halted on the second step.

"There's a man in the taxi?" said Lady Elizabeth interrogatively.

"Yes," replied the girl. "We're keeping him. He's drunk."

"Charles," said Lady Elizabeth, "assist the driver in keeping the person inside from getting out."

"Yes, my lady," said Charles; and, feeling that haply he was mixing in great matters, he went back to the cab and stood sentry very loftily over its further exit.

When they were inside, Lady Elizabeth shut the big door.

"George!" she said; and Bruffin took his eyes from Dick, to see his wife leading towards them a pale-faced, tear-smudged girl, with a battered sun-bonnet flung back on her shoulders and a great halo of untidy red hair topping a graceful, weary figure habited in clothes which, in their present state, would have disgraced the woman they had come from.

George took a step forward, and Dick half rose in courtesy.

"This is Miss ——" said Lady Elizabeth, and stuck.

"Oh, Liz!" cried Dick. "Beginning an introduction, when you haven't been introduced yourself! Lady Elizabeth Bruffin, you have on your arm Miss Caldegard, daughter of the eminent Professor Caldegard. George, you behold the same. Miss Caldegard, Lady Elizabeth Bruffin, and her husband, Mr. George Bruffin. He is famous for immeasurable wealth which he can't use and a few brains which he uses in all sorts of queer ways, and hasn't yet spent."

He limped towards the two women.

"Liz, dear," he went on, "please put her to bed. She's had the deuce and all of a day. She'll tell you, only don't let her talk too much."

Lady Elizabeth nodded.

"Would you like to go to bed now, dear?" she asked.

A smile, radiant on the tired face, illuminated Amaryllis.

"Oh, please, yes. I can see it—all white!" she answered.

And without a word from any of the four, the women left the men standing in the hall.

It was empty when Lady Elizabeth returned. She found George in his study.

Her eyes shone with a kind of maternal satisfaction, but she looked at her husband without speaking.

"How's the young woman?" he asked. "She looked about done in."

"She's had a bath. Suzanne's done her hair. She's in bed, so sleepy that I left Suzanne with her to keep her from spilling her bouillon and toast before she's finished it. Oh, George, she's a ripper—perfectly lovely, without all those horrid clothes."

George took his cigar from his mouth.

"I shouldn't wonder," he said.

Lady Elizabeth ignored the interruption.

"And I believe she's Dick's," she went on. "Who is this Professor Caldegard?"

"Scientific—coal-tar—big bug of the first magnitude," answered Bruffin. "Some day he'll synthesize albumen, and then all the farmers'll go into the workhouse."

"But are they—what sort of people are they? It's Dick, George."

"You've seen the girl, Betsy."

"Yes," admitted Lady Elizabeth.

"And when you catch Dick Bellamy making a break over a man, a horse, a dog or a woman, Bet, p'r'aps you'll let me know."

Lady Elizabeth sighed contentedly, as if he had removed the last doubt from a happy mind.

"That's quite true," she said. Then she looked round the room. "Is he in your bath-room, or in bed, or where? You oughtn't to leave him alone."

"He's left me," replied George. "Wouldn't stay a moment after he knew Miss Caldegard was in your clutches. He's gone off with his intoxicated captive. He's made a conquest of Charles by pitching him out of the house, and the taxi-man would help him do murders."

"Is he coming back to bed here?"

"Didn't ask."

"Oh, George, why not?"

"He'll come if he wants to."

"Didn't he tell you where he was taking his prisoner?"

"Only said, 'Must get a move on. Got a man to be hanged,' and went."

"Then it's Scotland Yard," said Lady Elizabeth.

"I don't think that's where they turn 'em off, Betsy, but perhaps you know best."

"I do, this time. Have a car out at once and drive there. Somebody's got to look after him. And, if you get on the track of the father, tell him about Amaryllis——"

"Amaryllis!" echoed George, reflectively weighing the word.

"And bring him along too, if he wants to have just a peep at her."

George nodded and rang the bell.



CHAPTER XXV.

WAITERS.

Dick Bellamy's two letters, the one posted in York, the other in the country letter-box by the landlord of "The Coach and Horses," had been read at New Scotland Yard at about eight o'clock in the evening.

The first note had contained merely the information that Alban Melchard was the man of whom Dick was going in pursuit, and Melchard's address, found that evening in the letter received by Amaryllis; the second, the few particulars concerning Melchard which he had gathered from the landlord.

Superintendent Finucane, of the Criminal Investigation Department, had immediately put himself in telephonic communication with the chief constables of Millsborough and the County.

To the Government, this fresh proof of the Opiate Ring's influence and power, and of its ramification even wider than had hitherto been ascertained, was matter of the first importance.

Sir Charles Colombe had lost sight of the abducted girl in the theft of the drug and its formula; while the Secretary of State, Sir Charles's political chief, had suspicion so strong of liaison between certain European leaders of Bolshevism and the Opiate Ring, that the Drug, the Lost Lady, and even the Deleterious Drugs' Control Bill itself, had become secondary factors in the greatest struggle of the day.

To net a Millsborough gallimaufry of decadents, criminals, and potential rebels had become in a few hours his absorbing desire. And in this short time he had almost frayed the smooth edges of the Permanent Under Secretary's official decorum.

Randal Bellamy, with his affection for the girl, and his absorbing love of his younger brother, had as much interest in the affair as any other concerned. But he alone of them all had been really welcome at New Scotland Yard; for, whatever he may have felt, he had shown there on his first visit that Saturday—at about three o'clock in the afternoon—a face as smiling and unwrinkled as his excellent white waistcoat. And there was a refreshing serenity in the offer that he made to the commissioner himself, of laying him ten pounds to one on his brother Richard's success in any shikar that he undertook.

This wager, made in the superintendent's room, had so much pleased that official, to-day more oppressed by his superiors than by his work, that he had actually invited Sir Randal to give him a call after dinner. The others were merely expected.

"After dinner" is an elastic appointment, and Randal stretched it as late as Caldegard's impatience would endure.

At a quarter past eleven the father could bear suspense no longer, and forced his friend to go with him to the Castle where, between the Embankment and Parliament Street, Argus and Briareus dwell together in awful co-operation.

As they walked down Whitehall, the father remembered that this was a lover at his side.

"I don't see how you manage to bear it with all that sang froid, Bellamy," he said. "Another day of it'll drive me mad."

"I'm banking on Dick," said Randal.

"He's all you say, no doubt. But if you feel all you've told me for my girl, it's almost as terrible for you as for me. And your brother can't do the impossible, tracking without trace. Vestigia nulla!" And the father groaned, looking twenty years older than he had seemed twenty-four hours ago. "I watch every young woman in the street, half hoping she'll turn her face and show me Amaryllis. And all the time I know it's impossible."

Then, again, "God, man!" he broke out, "these things don't happen in civilised communities. I suffer like the damned, without the satisfaction of believing in my hell."

A few minutes later, as they turned out of Parliament Street, "You do take it easy for a lover, Randal," he repeated. "I don't understand you."

At the moment Randal made no reply, but, as they waited for the lift, "Perhaps I ought to tell you," he said, "that I'm no longer in the running. I'm afraid it pained her kind heart, saying no to me."

"When was that?" asked the father, speaking more like his ordinary self.

"The last time we spoke of it was about an hour before we missed her. After that I think she went into my study to be alone, and possibly, as a woman will, shed a few tears over the matter; and then, perhaps, fell asleep, and was caught unawares—but it's no use guessing."

The lift came down, and the escorting constable sidled up and entered it after them.

As they left it, the discreet guide keeping well ahead in the gloomy corridor, Caldegard whispered:

"Then it's even worse for you than I thought, Randal. You're a good man, and I'm an ill-tempered old one."

"We shall have news, and her, soon—and something else," said Randal.

"What?" asked Caldegard.

"I thought you'd forgotten it! Ambrotox, of course. I'll tell her, Caldegard. I once heard a man tell his wife, after she'd been chattering to him for twenty minutes, that he'd forgotten to light his pipe all the time she'd been talking. She said it was the best compliment she'd ever had. I shall tell Amaryllis how you forgot Ambrotox."

Superintendent Finucane felt his spirits rise at the sight of the urbane barrister, and received even the dishevelled person of the lost lady's father with a measure of cordiality. He showed his visitors Dick's two scrawled messages, and explained how he had acted upon their information.

Caldegard complained: Dick should have telegraphed, should have gone himself to the police in the neighbourhood.

"From what I have heard of him, Mr. Richard Bellamy is the kind that seizes on a big chance, and doesn't lose it by running after smaller ones," said Finucane. "If he has played against time and wins, they call him a genius."

"Will he succeed?" asked Caldegard.

"I am inclined to think he will bring your daughter back," replied Finucane. "But I don't advise you to be too hopeful about the drug."

"Oh, damn the drug!" interjected Caldegard.

"He has appreciated his job," explained the superintendent. "He's not after side issues. He isn't even out to catch a man who's committed a crime—only to prevent a crime being committed."

"Has he prevented it—tell me that?" cried Caldegard.

And, as if in answer, the bell of Finucane's telephone jarred the nerves of all three men.

While he listened to the one-sided interview between the superintendent and the instrument on his table, Caldegard's control was in danger of breaking down altogether.

"Hold the line," said Finucane at last. "Dr. Caldegard, can you describe the dress Miss Caldegard was wearing when she disappeared?"

"I dined in town," began the father, his face like white paper.

"My brother and I," said Randal, "dined with Miss Caldegard. She wore a dinner-gown—silk—darkish green, which showed, when she moved, the crimson threads it was interwoven with."

"And her shoes?" asked Finucane.

Bellamy shook his head; it was Caldegard, now steady as a rock, who answered:

"With that frock, my daughter always wore green-bronze shoes and green stockings."

Finucane turned again to the telephone. After saying that Miss Caldegard had worn green silk shot with red, and green evening slippers, he listened for a time which kept his guests in torture of suspense. Then, "I'm here all night. But scrape the county with a tooth-comb," he said, and hung up the receiver. Swinging his chair round, he faced the two men, and spoke with gravity.

"Millsborough got my information about eight-thirty p.m. By nine every available man was out on the hunt, to round up all Melchard's places, and to go through all the riverside dens and harbour slums. The county police, horse and foot, under the chief constable, were all over the place. Martingale—that's the man I've just been talking to—rushed a strong party of the Millsborough force out to 'The Myrtles' in cars. House deserted, except a fellow lying in bed, groaning. In the back kitchen a woman's frock had been burned. Unconsumed fragments were found—green silk shot with red. Upstairs, in a bedroom, pair of lady's shoes—shiny green leather."

Caldegard rose from his seat, opened his mouth to speak, and sat down again.

In relation to merely normal death the abandoned garment carries an intimate cruelty which will unexpectedly break down control proof against direct attack.

But to hear, in these surroundings, of his daughter's little green shoes, and to remember how, the first time she had worn them, she had flourished at him from her low chair that pretty foot and reckless green stocking, and to catch himself now foolishly wondering where the green stockings themselves would be found, brought poor Caldegard to an embittered weakness which he fought only in vague desire neither to break into cursing nor decline upon weak tears.

The great man of science had not attracted the superintendent of the Criminal Investigation Department; but the father grunting savagely: "Oh, damn the drug!" was another man. And Finucane, by no means himself convinced that the worst must be argued from these fragments of evidence, yet found himself at a loss for encouraging words. Pity, however, forced him to the effort, and he would have spoken, had not Randal Bellamy touched him on the arm.

"Not now," he said. "You can't wash that picture from his mind. There'll be more news coming."

With a tap on the door, it came.

To the superintendent's consent there entered a police sergeant.

"There's a gentleman wishes to see you, sir. Says he can't keep awake another ten minutes. Has important evidence, and a person he wishes to introduce to you. Name o' Bellamy."

"Oh, hell!" said Randal, in a voice like his brother's, "fetch him up."

The sergeant took no notice, but kept his gaze on the superintendent. Finucane's eyes twinkled. "Fetch him up," he said.

"To save time, sir, he's standing outside."

"Fetch him in," said Finucane.

The sergeant moved himself three inches.

"Superintendent Finucane will see you, sir," he said; and made room for the entrance of Dick Bellamy, holding by the arm, and both supporting and guiding the wavering steps of Alban Melchard.



CHAPTER XXVI.

PRISONER AND ESCORT.

Dick presented to the expectant three the same disreputable and truculent aspect which had so deeply offended Charles of Mayfair—an aspect so extraordinary as to strike speechless for a moment even the three so deeply interested in his advent.

"That chair with arms," said Dick to the sergeant, "or he'll fall off."

The sergeant brought it, and Dick pushed the still tipsy wretch, a bundle of false elegance deflowered, into its embrace.

Then Randal, with beaming face, caught his brother by the shoulders.

"You grisly scallywag!" he cried.

Finucane had risen, turning his own chair for the new-comer.

"Sit down, sir," he said.

And Dick, seeing only those who addressed him, dropped into the seat.

"Don't hurry yourself, Mr. Bellamy. What'll you have?" asked Finucane. "Brandy—whisky?"

"Tea," interrupted Dick. "A potful—and awfully strong."

"See to that, will you, sergeant?" said Finucane.

The man left the room, and Dick spoke again.

"There are things I must tell you before I slack off." Then, a little more alert, he looked round him, and for the first time saw Caldegard glowering at him across the table with fierce curiosity.

"I didn't see you, sir," he said, his heart warming to the old man's piteous face, "or I'd have told you before I spoke to anyone else that Miss Caldegard is perfectly well, though she's a bit done up."

"Where is she?" asked the father, new lines of joy making havoc of a mask scored by inelastic sorrow.

"In bed, I think. Asleep, I hope. If you'll let me get a few bits of information off my chest for the police, I'll tell you all about it—how I found her, how brave and clever she's been—lots of things."

Then the bright spark came into the tired eyes again, as they searched the face of the father of Amaryllis—the spark which Amaryllis says, comes always just before he says something nice.

But Caldegard spoke first.

"You've had a devilish bad time of it, my boy," he said.

"Nothing to what you've been through, sir. It's hell, I know, when one can't do anything."

Caldegard stretched his hand across the table. Dick turned from his grasp to see Randal pouring terrific black tea into a thick white cup.

When he had swallowed three burning gulps of it, he began:

"That's Melchard," he said, pointing. "This bundle of letters I took off him. Amongst them you'll find useful information. Read 'em now, superintendent. You'll find there's a flat in Bayswater, where two or three of his crowd in the illicit drug traffic are expecting him to-morrow morning. That's the important one—the thick mauve paper."

And he drank more tea, while Finucane ran eager eyes over the letter.

"Good God!" he said, rising. "Go on with your tea, Mr. Bellamy—not your story. Back in three minutes."

He pushed an electric button, and almost ran from the room.

"You see, sir," said Dick to Caldegard, "as we were coming home in the train from our little day out, poor Miss Caldegard was so tired that she said I must find her a fairy godmother directly we reached town. So I took her straight to the only lady of that rank whom I know. I dare say you know her too—it's Lady Elizabeth Bruffin. George Bruffin's an old friend of mine—Mexico—and his wife's a connoisseur in pumpkins and rat-traps."

Since all London that season was talking of the two Bruffins, and every newspaper, in direct ratio to the badness of its paper and print, was scavenging for paragraphs, true or false, concerning the "palatial home" in Park Lane, neither Caldegard nor Randal Bellamy could conceal round-eyed astonishment.

"But Amaryllis? Did she look—well, anything like——"

"Like me?" asked Dick, grinning all over the better side of his twisted face. "Well, sir, she hasn't been knocked about, you know. But her rig did her certainly less justice than mine does me. Nothing on earth could make her look like a tough, and the sun-bonnet certainly had an——"

But Finucane was with them again.

"Excuse me behaving like Harlequin in the pantomime, gentlemen," he said. "Now, Mr. Bellamy."

"Can you take advice?" asked Dick.

"From you, Mr. Bellamy," said Finucane, "who wouldn't?"

"I'm so sleepy that if I don't give it now, I may forget it. Properly handled, that dirty thing in the chair there will give his show away. Keep him to-night as a drunk and disorderly. Better have a doctor to him. I tasted the stuff. Tomorrow I'll swear a dozen charges against him—burglary, abduction, instigation to murder, attempts to kill; and when he hears 'em read over, he'll be putty in your fingers."

"Thanks," said Finucane.

"Next: ring up the police and the station-master at Todsmoor. Tell 'em to keep tight hold of the man who fell out of the train between Harthborough and Todsmoor at five-forty p.m. and of the bloke that was with him, suspected of throwing him out."

Finucane paid his guest the compliment of obeying without question.

As he hung up the receiver,

"The man's in hospital, all right," he said, "broken collar-bone. I was just in time to prevent them from letting the other go. They're to hold him on a charge of throwing his pal out."

"I did that," said Dick. "At least, I scared the bird off his perch."

Again Finucane rang.

"And I'll send this one," he said, "to his nest."

When Melchard had been removed, Dick gave his three listeners a rapid and, as their faces and exclamatory comment testified, a vivid sketch of his adventure from his detection of the perfume which pervaded the alcove in Randal's study and the corroboration of his suspicions given by Melchard's attempted alibi in the letter to Amaryllis, to the time when his train pulled out of Todsmoor station; and, in the course of his narrative, he laid on the table, each at its historic point, his pieces de conviction.

Having told how Amaryllis had fainted at the sight of Ockley with the knife-point protruding from the back of his neck, he extracted the Webley from his overcrowded pocket.

"That," he said, "is the man's gun, which Miss Caldegard found for me."

Later, he produced Mut-mut's baag-nouk, laying it, talons upward, beside the Webley.

"That was strapped to his hand. I gave him the first of my two shots before he jumped, the second I put through his head as he lay scrabbling in the car."

At this point there entered the room a stout, bearded man with careworn face and irritable expression. Finucane rose respectfully, but the new-comer made a motion waiving ceremony, sat in the nearest chair, and became one of the audience.

Dick, never observing the addition, continued his tale in a voice monotonous with fatigue.

In their turn he added to the display the Malay's revolver, with which he had captured Melchard, and Melchard's automatic.

And, after telling them how he had forced his prisoner to drink,

"I couldn't bring the bottle—no room," he said, patting his shrinking pocket. "The tangle-foot all went down the pussyfoot's neck, so I left 'Robbie Burns' in the car. By the way, don't forget to ring up about that car. Old Mut-mut cut the cushions to ribbons; that bit of evidence might save my neck."

Finucane smiled pleasantly.

"You seem to have left a trail of coroner's inquests behind you," he said.

"All in the day's work," said Dick. "But not, thank God! in to-night's."

And when he had carried his audience past Todsmoor station,

"That's all," he said. "Can't I go home to bed now, superintendent?"

But the bearded stranger intervened.

"One of your clever young officers, I presume," he said to Finucane.

"I wish to God he were, Sir Gregory," replied the superintendent.

"A clever, and, I gather, somewhat high-handed amateur. The young lady, I hope, is safe."

"She is, Sir Gregory—thanks entirely to the extraordinary rapidity of Mr. Richard Bellamy's intuition and action," said Finucane, speaking with unruffled respect, which yet did not hide, nor was intended to hide, a note of reproof. "Without him the Department would have been too late for the show. As it is, we are acting effectively—on information supplied by Mr. Bellamy."

Now Dick stood in no awe of potentates, and he liked his superintendent.

"It was my luck to be on the spot," he said. "There's nothing more in it."

"Pardon me if I differ from you, Mr. Bellamy," said Sir Gregory. "There is this more in it: if the police had been given your opportunities they would not have limited their action to the rescue of this unfortunate young lady, but would have devoted themselves also to the recovery of what is, for the country—I might almost say for the world—of vastly greater importance. You are possibly aware that a sample of a new drug of great potentiality for good and ill was the object of the outrage which led to the abduction."

The great man's beard and the great man's manner annoyed Dick Bellamy, stimulating him even through his shroud of somnolence.

He rubbed his eyes and yawned; then looked up at Sir Gregory.

"I don't know who you are, my good man," he said, "nor why you come barging into this. What more d'you want? Your Napoleon of crime is in the oubliette, two of his dastard accomplices are in clink at Todsmoor, three more are being tracked to their doom in Bayswater, two are dead——"

Here Dick produced from inner pockets a small white packet and an envelope.

"And these," he concluded, "are the dope and the book-o'-the-words."

Both Finucane and Sir Gregory started forward as if to take possession, but Dick drew back.

"No," he said, "I didn't go looting for my country's sake, nor the world's. I just happened to pick up two little things belonging to a friend of mine." And, turning, he put the Ambrotox and the formula into Caldegard's hand, smiling his crooked smile.

"That's the lot," he murmured, and laid his head on his arms, folded upon the table.

An uncomfortable pause was broken by the entrance of a constable with a card.

"Gentleman wishes to know if Mr. Richard Bellamy is here," he said to the superintendent.

But Dick did not move.

His brother bent over him.

"The boy's fast asleep," he said.

Finucane passed the card to Randal.

"'George Bruffin,'" he read out. "Better ask him up, superintendent, if you don't mind."

Sir Gregory had been feeling himself pushed aside. He had taken the sow, it seemed, by the wrong ear. And now, the great Bruffin and his millions!

George came in, ponderous and unsmiling; picked out the superintendent at once, and thanked him gruffly for admission to the "sanctum"; a word which George chose to please him—and succeeded.

Sir Gregory pressing himself forward, Finucane was obliged to mumble an introduction.

George replied vaguely, saying, "Oh, ah—yes, of course!"

And then, his eye falling on Randal, he came alive.

"You're Dick's big brother," he said.

"I can't help that," responded Randal, holding out his hand.

"Some people do have all the luck," said George. Then, looking down at the sleeper, he continued: "My car's outside. My wife's waiting till I bring him. You'd better come with us, Sir Randal, and help us tuck him up in bed."

Sir Gregory tried again.

"Game to the last!" he said, joining the group; "but not, I suppose, very robust. Evidently a case of complete nervous exhaustion."

Caldegard had spoken little since Dick's entrance. He now rose as if shot from his chair by a spring, and spoke with a vigour that reminded Randal of their youth.

"Five hundred miles—driving your own car in the dark! Climb the side of a house. Break in—save one woman from being knifed by another. Fight five armed men with your fists and boots. Knock out four of them. Run a mile, dragging a girl—from a man chasing you, and shooting at you with a revolver. Kill a murderer with a murderess's dagger. Nurse a girl with an attack of hysteria. Drive a coach, humbug a woman, a parson, a railway porter, a guard and a station-master. Kill a man armed with that steel-clawed thing there, steal a car, knock a man off a train, and bring home the exhausted woman alive and your chief enemy drunk and a prisoner—do all that without sleep for thirty-six hours, Sir Gregory; then, if you can drop off to sleep like that, instead of having your head packed in ice and babbling pink spiders and blue monkeys, you may call your constitution cast-iron. All exhaustion is nervous, Sir Gregory, and the man who can stand the biggest dose of it is the strongest man."

"Oh, from that point of view—yes—of course," bleated the bearded politician.

But George covered his final discomfiture.

"I wish you'd tell me your name, sir," he said to Caldegard.

Caldegard told him.

"Thought so," exclaimed George, almost with enthusiasm. "We have the immense pleasure of looking after Miss Caldegard. My wife won't be happy unless you come round with me and feast your eyes on what she says is the prettiest sight in London—Miss Caldegard asleep."

This time the father's countenance did him justice.

Finucane told his wife that night that he had at last seen an old man perfectly happy.

The potentate saw that flash of glory, and put himself "on-side."

He went round to Caldegard, and saying, "Let me congratulate you," took the hand offered him, and went out.

"Nothing in this meeting became him like——" began Randal.

But Caldegard cut him short.

"He meant it, Randal," he said.

"Exactly. Requiescat. Let's see if we can get this neurasthenic down to the car without waking him."



CHAPTER XXVII.

AN INTERIM REPORT.

Though maid to a lady accounted very fine, Suzanne, in presence of beauty unadorned, was a simple and kind-hearted enthusiast in her art. Before lunch-time next day she had done so well for Amaryllis out of Lady Elizabeth Bruffin's wardrobe, that she declared, with conviction to fill up the gap in evidence, "que mademoiselle n'a jamais pu paraitre plus seduisante, plus pimpante qu'aujourd'hui."

"How can she know that?" asked Amaryllis laughing.

"Because nothing possible could be, you pretty creature," said Lady Elizabeth, glowing with pleasure in the success of her nursing and in the quality of Dick Bellamy's conquest.

She had, indeed, good reason: eleven hours' sleep, with redundant happiness and bodily health as elastic as a child's, had made Amaryllis scarcely more delightful to her new friends' eyes than to her own. For on this Sunday morning she looked into her glass for the first time through a man's eyes.

In spite of her beauty, however, and of her joy in the man who was to see and praise it, there was yet in her heart a pricking as of conscience.

In the night there had come to her, for the first time since Dick had saved her from the Dutchwoman and her knife, the memory of Randal Bellamy; of his kindness, of his favour with her father and of his love for herself.

She did not now feel as she had felt in his study before she fell asleep; she did not even define the feeling which had then made her tears flow; and she understood, with the memory of Dick's kisses on her face, that Randal was not wounded as Dick would have been in losing her.

She had not wronged Randal, nor had she any sense of wrong-doing; for to love Dick was a natural thing to do—and a wise thing. It was even a praiseworthy deed: for that this wonderful Dick of all men should go without any smallest thing which he desired, would have been wicked indeed.

The sting was this: Randal did not yet know that she was Dick's, nor Dick that Randal would have had her his own. And she believed that it would hurt Randal less in the end to learn the tremendous news from her mouth than from her father's, Dick's or Lady Elizabeth's; and from Lady Elizabeth she knew she could not keep it long, having a suspicion, even, that she knew it already.

She must see Randal before Dick should come to her. She must tell Randal the most wonderful and most inevitable thing of that terrible and glorious yesterday. And Randal must decide whether Dick was to know what Randal had asked and offered. And if Dick was to know, Randal must decide by whom, and when.

If Randal wished it hidden, she could never tell it—not even to Dick.

For Amaryllis, even before she had "put her hair up," had learned to hate the woman who tries to hide her nakedness with a belt of scalps.

As these thoughts ran through her head, Amaryllis frowned between her eyebrows.

"A fly in the ointment, after all?" asked Lady Elizabeth, smiling so that one knew there was none in hers.

"Only something I remembered. I want——"

"Won't ask, shan't have," said Lady Elizabeth.

"Will Sir Randal Bellamy be here to lunch?" asked the girl.

"I hope so, my dear. He's with Dick—or was—sitting on the bed to keep him down till the doctor came. He's like a hen with one chick over that brother of his."

And Lady Elizabeth Bruffin laughed.

"I think it's—it's beautiful," said Amaryllis, with a shade of indignation in her voice.

"Yes—quite. That's why I laughed."

"I know," replied the girl, unwrinkling her forehead. "I often want to laugh for that." And then, after a moment's pause, she added: "Please, I want to speak to Sir Randal for a moment, before lunch."

"You shall. Heroines must have things made smooth for them, mustn't they, at the end of the book?"

And she took the girl, fresh from Suzanne's finishing touches, to George's study.

"George won't be coming in for half an hour, dear," she said. "There are heaps of papers and books, but no looking-glass. So you'll be able to forget your pretty self for a few minutes."

And off went the fairy godmother—to meet Sir Randal Bellamy on the stairs.

"But you're staying to lunch," she expostulated.

"If you say so, of course I am," said Randal.

"I've left Amaryllis in George's study. She wants you to see I have looked after her as well as if she'd been at home with her father and you."

She passed him, but turned two steps above.

"I wish you'd seen Dr. Caldegard looking at her fast asleep in bed last night," she said in a low voice, very tender. "It was a picture—the kind one keeps."

"Yes," said Randal. "I was in the other room, you know, looking at mine."

And he went down the stair, wondering how a woman he had seen last night for the first time had managed to get that sentimental speech out of him.

Amaryllis rose as he entered, and almost ran to meet him.

"Oh, Randal!" she cried.

He had known his gentle doom on the Friday; and her "Randal," tout court, sealed it, for never had she used his name so to him before. It came now, he knew, not in his own right, but through Dick.

In a single emotion, he was sorry and glad—more glad, he told himself, than sorry. For the sadness seemed to have been with him a long time, while the joy was new.

A little while she babbled of the trouble and pain she had given them.

"You and poor dad! If only I could have yelled out in time!"

"To get a knife in you, my dear—no, it's been all just right. Why, we should never have got the Dope of the Gods back, without you."

And when she laughed, he told her how her father had growled: "Oh, damn the Ambrotox!" and how he had lectured the potentate on nervous exhaustion.

But when a little silence fell between them, Amaryllis took a deep breath and plunged, saying in a half-stifled voice, "I want to tell you something."

"Tell away, child," he replied, smiling benignantly on her, though his heart beat heavily, telling him her tale beforehand.

"It's—it's Dick," she said, and broke down.

"Dick?" he responded. "Of course it's Dick—and Dick it is going to be; Dick for breakfast, Dick for lunch, and Dick for dinner."

"Yes," said Amaryllis, tears running at last, but voice steady. "Dick for ever, I think. It feels like that, Randal dear."

"If it depends on him it will be," said Dick's brother.

"If it depends on me, it shall be," answered the girl.

"Then what's the dear silly child crying for?" he asked.

"I—I don't know," she replied weakly.

"That's a dear silly little lie—you know as well as I do. Although you've been perfectly honest with me, you have a dear silly feeling that the things which have happened so suddenly have been unfair to me. When I spoke to you last, my dear, you were surer than ever that you'd never want me. You didn't know why you were surer than ever—because you were afraid to look and see. Young women all, I suppose, have a moment when they won't look into that dear silly cupboard. But I looked at the blind door of it, and I—well, I guessed what was inside."

The tears would not stop. There was no sobbing nor convulsion of throat or breath. They just ran out in tribute to the man's goodness.

But Randal explained them with a difference.

"The tears from your left eye come tumbling out over the edge of the well of your kindness for me," he said. "You would like me to have everything I want. But you know that Dick must have everything that you are. So there it is. But the tears out of your dear silly right eye are silly sham jewels, sparkling with dear injured vanity. You're afraid I shall somehow think you played a crooked little game with me. I don't."

The silly little handkerchief was getting the best of it.

"When you've quite turned that silly tap off," he went on, "I'll tell you something else."

He got up and walked away from her, looked at two prints which he did not see, lit a cigarette which he could not taste, and came back to a pale-faced, dry-eyed Amaryllis—a girl with a smile on her face that was a woman's smile.

"Tell me that other thing," she said.

"I don't suppose that it'll be altogether news to you, any more than yours was to me. But it's this: For a good long time I resisted you—just and only because the more I admired you, the more I couldn't help thinking that Dick ought to have his chance—what I knew was one of the great chances. Then I got weak, and last Wednesday I tried to grab mine, before he'd even had a look in. I felt mean—and I couldn't stop myself. That afternoon he came, and—well, as it turned out, saved me from the agonies of gout. I always get it, when I've done anything off colour."

"You!" said Amaryllis. "D'you know what he told me, the day we drove to Oxford?"

"Some silly yarn."

"A dear story, not a bit silly. He said he daren't admire a gun or a book or a horse of yours, for fear you'd force it on him. Said it was a mercy of Providence that your size and shape permitted him to admire your coats and trousers."

"Well," asked Randal, "doesn't he deserve the best of everything?"

"Oh, yes!" declared the girl eagerly.

"This time," said Bellamy, "he's getting it. And it's God's truth, my dear, that it makes me unspeakably happy."

Amaryllis put her hands on his shoulders and kissed him.

And then George came in with The Sunday Telegram.

"Raid on a West-End Flat!" he grumbled. "Nice, respectable lot you are, getting me mixed up with a thing like this!" And he read out:

"'In consequence of information which has come into the hands of the police——' and all the usual jabber. And the placards are screaming 'Secret Dope Factories' all over this moral city. 'World-wide Organisation to be Broken Up.' 'Five Leaders Arrested.' They'll be getting me and Betsy into the witness-box."

"Come off it, George," said Dick from the doorway. "You and Liz aren't going to get boomed in this stunt. Put your money into pars about your yacht and your stables, if the 'Palatial Home' gadget's wearing thin."

His smile was almost straight again, Amaryllis thought, and there was little sign upon him of what he had been through, except the patch of black plaster on his left cheek, and the accentuated limp with which he came across the room to her.

"Oh, Dick!" she exclaimed. "What a lovely coat!"

"That's just what I was going to say about you," he answered, taking her hand. "We look a bit different, don't we?"

"Sent me in a cab, as if I were his valet," said Randal, "to fetch his newest and purplest raiment from his beastly little flat."

"Nothing like it," said George, "to take the taste of savagery out of the mouth. If the proletariat would only dress for dinner every night, we shouldn't have any labour troubles. The Nationalisation of the Dinner-jacket would be death to the Agitator. They say Abe Grinnel is drafting a bill to make it illegal."

Lady Elizabeth came in with Caldegard. Amaryllis soon had her father at one end of the room in a subdued conversation of which the hostess had little difficulty in guessing the subject. The two brothers, she observed, had come together at the other end, and were looking out of the window across the park. She took George discreetly away from his own room.

Of yesterday Randal and Dick had already talked much that morning; but of that adventure which he accounted the greatest, Dick had said nothing.

"Amaryllis has told me," said Randal.

"I'm glad," said Dick. "It didn't come easy to start the subject. I'm not used to it yet."

"Neither of you could have done better," said the elder brother. "I congratulate you, dear boy. And I want to give you—to make you a present of a thing that isn't mine—couldn't have been mine, anyhow. But, all the same, I give it you."

"Thanks," replied the younger. "But what the devil d'you mean?"

Randal looked at him.

"You don't mean—you——" began Dick, and stopped short, shocked by conviction.

"Yes, I do. And I don't think I should ever have let you know it, Dick, but that it doesn't seem comfortable for a girl to carry about with her even a little thing like that which she can't speak of to her husband. So now you know. And there is a way of giving even what one could not withhold. She's perfect, Dick."

"Like the giver," said his brother.

And it was to Randal also that he owed the few minutes which he was able to get alone with Amaryllis before lunch.

He went up to Caldegard.

"Have you heard Bruffin describe Dick's solo on the dinner-bells—last night, you know? Well come and see if he's in the hall now," he said, and dragged the old man away.

Left alone together,

"It's like a dream," said Amaryllis; and, "Which!" asked Dick.

"Yesterday," said the girl, peering at his calm face.

"It's this that's like dreaming, to me," he answered. "When you're awake you make things happen. When you're asleep, things have the best of it—make you follow their lead. Yesterday, Amaryllis, I was some bloke, because I was useful to you. If I'd had time to think, I'd have thought very strong beer of myself. But now I'm—oh, a giddy little stranger that's taken the wrong turning and got in among the Birds of Paradise."

And he touched gingerly the sleeve of her frock,

"Lady Elizabeth's," she said. "You score. Dick. You've got your own, and they fit."

"Do I fit?" asked Dick.

"You don't really mean you feel strange and lost in this dream, do you?" she asked a little anxiously.

"I don't mean I feel strange in civilised life. That's only a variation on savagery—a mere matter of degree—and I like it well enough. I can talk the language, dear child, when I'm in the country. But you are my new life, and I'm—well, dazzled, let's call it. Yesterday I had to fetch you home and see that you didn't get hurt. Now, I've got to make you happier every day for the next fifty odd years. It's a tall order, and there's lots to do. I ought to begin."

"You began when you found me crying in Randal's study, Dick."

"Oh, it's easy to make people less wretched," he objected. "That's why yesterday was, on the whole, a success. But—are you happy?"

"Awfully! Oh, just awfully!" murmured Amaryllis.

"There it is!" sighed Dick, with the humour which she knew already for the natural shell of some wise little kernel. "And I've got to give you, as you give me, the keen edge of appetite for all the world and for all the people that play about in it. The stuff's all there, but——"

"Why, Dick, it's the same thing, after all, as yesterday. You saved me from beasts and from fear and from myself. You made me laugh, and you made me love—even made me love Tod, and poor Pepe, and the bees, and the round-faced girl in the cottage they bumbled round; and 'Opeful 'Arry; and you brought me home to a fairy godmother. If you could do all that in a day, Dick, just think what a lot of laughing and loving you'll be able to dig out of fifty years. And I won't let you off. Wake up, Dick. There's no dreaming about it all."

So they woke up together.

At the lunch-table, Amaryllis looked round her, and felt the last of her troubles was over.

Randal showed, she thought, a face more serene and contented than she had ever before seen him wear.

During the earlier part of the meal the talk went to and fro over the track of what George rashly called the Amarylliad.

Randal told him the word was falsely constructed, Iliad, Odyssey and Aeneid being, he said, syncopated adjectival forms derived from their respective substantive stems.

"Ours," said George, "has been a rag-time Dunciad."

And when the coffee and George's elbows were on the table, and four of his irresistible cigars alight:

"And us," he said, "not to get one little puff out of it all!"

"Advertisement," said Randal, "is the false dawn of fame. You, Mr. Bruffin, do not, I believe, need it, and will certainly not get it out of the Dope Drama. Miss Caldegard and my brother, who are likely to get a great deal, will hate it."

Amaryllis flushed a little at the coupling of names, but faced it bravely.

Her father drew a crumpled newspaper from his pocket.

"'Mysterious Murders near Millsborough,'" he read out. "'Injured Man in Empty House. Bearded Man Stabbed in Lonely Wood. Dead Chinaman on Deserted Roman Road. Abandoned Automobile.'"

"Inquests!" said George.

"Horrid!" said Amaryllis.

"Rescued Damsel!" said Lady Elizabeth.

"Scientist's Daughter Abducted!" cackled Caldegard.

"Lightning Pursuit by Gallant Airman!" boomed George.

"Dope Gang Baffled!" chuckled Randal. "And we understand that the interesting heroine will shortly reward——"

Lady Elizabeth shot a keen glance at Amaryllis and Amaryllis answered it boldly.

"Oh, of course!" she said.

George, having caught the look, seized upon the words.

"I wish to propose the health," he said, himself raising his glass, "of Miss Caldegard, coupling it with that of my ancient friend and fellow-filibuster, Limping Dick."

When four on their feet had toasted the two sitting, Randal spoke seriously.

"The inquests are likely to begin about Wednesday next," he said. "If you two children get yourselves neatly married on Monday, you will be pursued by subp[oe]nas to the Isle of Wight, say, and able to show up and get your evidence begun at least at the second sitting, about a week later. There'll be a paragraph or two before that, and by the time the evidence is reported, you'll be a settled married couple, and the romance will have evaporated."

"Oh, Randal!" said the girl reproachfully.

"Evaporated from the print and paper, dear child," he explained paternally. "Take my advice, and you'll just about break the hearts of the reporters."

"Amaryllis and I," said Lady Elizabeth, rising, "will withdraw and hold counsel. An interim report will be issued at tea."

THE END.