ery is there?" purred Mrs. Devar, blinking first at one,
then at the other. She bent over the telegram again.

"James sent this message from the West Strand at 9.30 a.m. Perhaps he
had just heard of Mr. Vanrenen's departure," she said.

Judging from Cynthia's occasional references to her father's character
and associates, Medenham fancied it was much more likely that the
American railway magnate had merely refused to meet Captain Devar. But
therein he was mistaken.

At the very hour that the three were settling themselves in the
Mercury before taking the road to Leominster, Mr. Vanrenen, driven by
a perturbed but silent Simmonds, stopped the car on the outskirts of
Whitchurch and asked an intelligent-looking boy if he had noticed the
passing of an automobile numbered X L 4000.

"I s'pose you mean a motor-car, sir?" said the boy.

Vanrenen, a tall man, thin, close-lipped, with high cheekbones, and
long nose, a man utterly unlike his daughter save for the wide-open,
all-seeing eyes, smiled at the naive correction; with that smile some
enchanter's wand mirrored Cynthia in her father's face. Even Simmonds,
who had seen no semblance of a smile in the features of the chilly,
skeptical man by whom he was dragged out of bed at an unearthly hour
in the morning at Bristol, witnessed the alchemy, and marveled.

"Yes, sir, rather," continued the boy, brimming over with enthusiasm.
"The gentleman went along the Hereford Road, he did, yesterday
mornin'. He kem back, too, wiv a shuffer, an' he's a-stayin' at the
Symon's Yat Hotel."

Peter Vanrenen frowned, and Cynthia vanished, to be replaced by the
Wall Street speculator who had "made a pyramid in Milwaukees." Whence,
then, had Cynthia telephoned? Of course, his alert mind hit on a
missed mail as the genesis of the run to Hereford early on Sunday, but
he asked himself why he had not been told of a changed address. He
could not guess that Cynthia would have mentioned the fact had she
spoken to him, but in the flurry and surprise of hearing that he was
not in the hotel she forgot to tell the attendant who took her message
that she was at Symon's Yat and not at Hereford.

"Are you sure about the car?" he said, rendered somewhat skeptical by
the boy's overfullness of knowledge.

"Yes, sir. Didn't me an' Dick Davies watch for it all chapel-time?"

"But why?--for that car in particular?"

"The gentleman bust his tire, an' we watched him mendin' it, an' he
set us a sum, an' pro