upon Doris
that she cried out in amazement, and then with a revulsion of feeling so
great that it deprived her of all speech she threw herself forward and
clung to the masked chauffeur in an agony of tears.

Brandon was staring at him with dropped jaw.

"Who the blazes are you?" he said.

"You know me, I think," the chauffeur responded quietly. He was pressing
Doris back into her seat with absolute steadiness. "We have met before.
I was present at your first wedding ten years ago, and--as a junior
counsel--I helped to divorce you a few months after. My name is Vivian
Caryl."

He freed a hand to push up his mask. His pale face with its heavy-lidded
eyes stared, supremely contemptuous, into Brandon's suffused
countenance. His composure was somehow disconcerting.

"Suppose you get out," he suggested. "I can talk to you then in a
language you will understand."

"Curse you!" bawled Brandon. "Where's Fricker?"

Caryl shrugged his shoulders.

"You have seen him since I have. Are you going to get out? Ah, I thought
you would."

He stood aside to allow him to do so, and then stepped back to shut the
door. He did not utter a word to the girl cowering within, but that
action of his was a mute command. She crouched in the dark and listened,
but she did not dare to follow or to flee.

CHAPTER VII

THE MAN AT THE WHEEL

When Caryl came back to the motor his handkerchief was bound about the
knuckles of his right hand, and his face wore a faint smile that had in
it more of grimness than humour.

He paused at the open window and looked in on Doris without opening the
door. The sound of the rain pattering heavily upon his shoulders filled
in a silence that she found terrible. He spoke at length:

"You had better shut the window, the rain is coming in."

That was all, spoken in his customary drawl without a hint of anger or
reproach. They cut her hard, those few words of his. It was as if he
deemed her unworthy even of his contempt.

She raised her white face.

"What--are you going to do?" she managed to ask through her quivering
lips.

"I am going to take you to the nearest town--to Bramfield to spend the
rest of the night. It is getting late, you know--past midnight already."

"Bramfield!" she echoed with a start. "Then--then we have been going
north all this time?"

"We have been going north," he said.

She glanced around. Her eyes were hunted.

"No," said Caryl. "I haven't killed him. He is sitti