The two men were coming nearer. They both paused as the dogs gave tongue.
Through the thick belt of trees lights gleamed from one or two windows of
the house. Steel pulled up and shuddered slightly in spite of himself.

"Crimson blinds," he said. "Crimson blinds all through this business.
They are beginning to get on my nerves. What about those dogs, Bell?"

"Dogs or no dogs, I am not going back now," Bell muttered. "It's
perfectly useless to come here in the daytime; therefore we must fall
back upon a little amateur burglary. There's a girl yonder who might have
assisted me at one time, but--"

Enid slipped into the road. The night was passably light and her
beautiful features were fairly clear to the startled men in the road.

"The girl is here," she said. "What do you want?"

Bell and his companion cried out simultaneously: Bell because he was so
suddenly face to face with one who was very dear to him, David because it
seemed to him that he recognised the voice from the darkness, the voice
of his great adventure. And there was another surprise as he saw Ruth
Gates side by side with the owner of that wonderful voice.

"Enid!" Bell cried, hoarsely. "I did not expect--"

"To confront me like this," the girl said, coldly. "That I quite
understand. What I don't understand is why you intrude your hated
presence here."

Bell shook his handsome head mournfully. He looked strangely downcast and
dejected, and none the less, perhaps, because a fall in crossing the down
had severely wrenched his ankle. But for a belated cab on the Rottingdean
road he would not have been here now.

"As hard and cruel as ever," he said. "Not one word to me, not one word
in my defence. And all the time I am the victim of a vile conspiracy--"

"Conspiracy! Do you call vulgar theft a conspiracy?"

"It was nothing else," David put in, eagerly. "A most extraordinary
conspiracy. The kind of thing that you would not have deemed possible out
of a book."

"And who might this gentleman be?" Enid asked, haughtily.

"A thousand pardons for my want of ceremony," David said. "If I had not
been under the impression that we had met before I should never have
presumed--"

"Oh, a truce to this," Bell cried. "We are wasting time. The hour is not
far distant, Enid, when you will ask my pardon. Meanwhile I am going up
to the house, and you are going to take me there. Come what way, I don't
sleep to-night until I have speech with your aunt."

David ha