ced at his watch.

"I am afraid we can hardly catch the last train to Heredith," he said.

"We will drive down in my car," said Colwyn. "Please excuse me for a few
moments."

He left the room, and returned in a few moments fully equipped for the
journey.

"Let us start," he said.

His tone was decided and imperative, his movements quick and full of
energy. That was wholly like him, once he had decided on his course.

CHAPTER XVI

It was so late that Ludgate Circus was deserted except for a ramshackle
cab with a drunken driver pouring forth a hoarse story of a mean fare to
a sleepy policeman leaning against a lamp post. The sight of two
gentlemen on foot when all 'buses had stopped running for the night
raised fleeting hopes in the cabman's pessimistic breast, and changed
the flow of his narrative into a strident appeal for hire, based on the
plea, which he called on the policeman to support, that he hadn't turned
a wheel that night, and amplified with a profanity which only the
friendliest understanding with the policeman could have permitted him to
pour forth without fear of consequences.

He intimated his readiness to drive them anywhere between the _Angel_
on one side of London and the _Elephant_ on the other for three bob, or,
being a bit of a sport, would toss them to make it five bob or nothing.
The boundaries, he explained in a husky parenthesis, were fixed not so
much by his own refusal to travel farther afield as by his horse's
unwillingness to go into the blasted suburbs. As his importunities
passed unregarded he damned them both with the terrible earnestness of
his class, and rumbled back into his dislocated story with the languid
policeman.

Colwyn kept his car in a garage off the Bridge Street archway. Thither
they proceeded, and waited while the car was got ready for the roads by
a shock-headed man who broke the stillness of the night with prodigious
yawns, and then stood blinking like an owl as he leaned against the yard
gates watching the detective backing the car down the declivity of the
passage into Bridge Street. Before they had reached it, he banged the
gates behind him with another tremendous yawn, and went back to his
interrupted slumber in the interior of a limousine.

It was a fine night for motoring. There was a late moon, and the earlier
rain had laid the dust and left the roads in good condition. Colwyn
cautiously threaded the crooked tangle of narrow streets and sharp
co