Only when they were at the door did Leslie
arouse to the immediate urgencies.

"Do please be very quiet and not wake Aunt Marcia!" she begged. "I'm
afraid the effect on her would be very bad if she were to realize all
that has happened here."

They entered the bungalow on tiptoe, removed their drenched wraps, and
sank down in the nearest chairs by the dying fire.

"And now," remarked Phyllis, constituting herself spokesman, as she threw
on a fresh log and some smaller sticks, "we'd be awfully obliged to you,
Ted and Eileen, if you'll kindly explain what this mystery is all about!"

"I don't see why under the sun _you_ had to come butting into it!"
muttered Ted, resentfully, nursing some bruises he had sustained in the
recent fray.

"Please remember," retorted Phyllis, "that if I hadn't come butting into
it--and Leslie and Rags,--you'd probably be very much the worse for wear
at this moment!"

"That's so! Forgive me, old girl! You _did_ do a fine piece of work--all
of you. I'm just sore because the thing turned out so--badly. But what I
really meant was that I can't see how you got mixed up in it at all--from
the very beginning, I mean."

"That's precisely what we think about _you_!" laughed Phyllis. "We've
felt all along as if it were _our_ affair and that _you_ were
interfering. So I think we'd better have explanations all around!"

"Well, as a matter of fact, it's Eileen's affair, most of all, so I think
she'd better do her explaining first," Ted offered as a solution of the
tangle.

They all looked toward Eileen, sitting cowered over the fire, and she
answered their look with a startled gaze of her own.

"I--I don't know whether I ought!" she faltered, turning to Ted. "Do you
think I ought?"

"I guess you'd better!" he declared. "It's got to a point where these
folks seem to have some inside information of their own that perhaps
might be valuable to you. How they got it, I can't think. At any rate,
there'll be no harm done by it, I can vouch for that. So--just fire
away!"

Thus adjured, Eileen drew a long breath and said hesitantly:

"I--I really don't know just where to begin. A lot of it is just as much
a mystery to me as it is to you. I think you all have heard that I have a
grandfather who is very ill, in a hospital over in Branchville. He is the
Honorable Arthur Ramsay, of Norwich, England. He has been for many years
a traveler and explorer in China and India and Tibet. Early this year he
had a