e roadway
were the tracks of a vehicle that I instinctively knew to be a cab. It
had veered right in towards the kerb, and a moment's study convinced me
that it had stopped at Bryce's house. Now that meant that somebody had
arrived during my absence, and, as Bryce had said nothing to me about
expecting a visitor, I decided that the sooner I entered the house and
investigated the better for the safety of all concerned. I drove the car
into the garage in record time and darted into the house as if the devil
were at my heels. There wasn't a sound to be heard; even the eternal
clatter of the typewriter had ceased. With a caution born of experience
I tip-toed up the passage, all my senses instinctively on the alert. The
door of Bryce's room was still locked and everything, to all outward
seeming, was just as I had left it. I don't know what I had expected to
find in the passage, but the very apparent quietness of the place
sobered me considerably, and I realised abruptly on what a slender
foundation I had based my fears. If anything had happened during my
absence it was almost certain that I would have found some trace of it
in the hall, a rug disarranged, or a mat kicked away from the door. All
the odds were on Bryce working quietly behind the locked door. Yet of
all the foolish things in the world for me to think of the idea that
entered my mind just then was that something that concerned me very
intimately was being worked out in the room across the passage.

I made one step forward and then I stopped abruptly. Some one else than
Bryce was in the room. Out of the silence came a voice, a woman's voice.
It was smooth and well-modulated, and there was the faintest touch of
music in it. In some curious way it touched a stray chord in my memory.
I knew at once that I had heard it before, but how or where I could no
more say than I could fly. Perhaps that was because its full notes were
muffled by the door that intervened.

"I'd do anything," the woman said in the quietest tones imaginable,
"anything but that. You don't understand. If you knew all the
circumstances, if you knew just how and why we parted you wouldn't ask
me. I'm sorry for it all now, more sorry than you could believe, but you
can't expect me to take up things just where they left off--as if
nothing had happened."

"Bryce's got a little romance tucked away up his sleeve," I thought.
"This sort of complicates matters. Wonder who the lady is?"

"My dear girl,"