nd open fields in the very depths of the country.
"Good gracious! Johnston must have lost his senses!" she exclaimed
agitatedly. "Look where we are, Captain Hawksley!--out in the country
with only a farmhouse or two in sight. Johnston! Johnston!" She bent
forward and rapped wildly on the glass panel. "Johnston, stop!--turn
round!--are you out of your head? Captain Hawksley, stop him--stop him,
for pity's sake!"

"Sit down, Miss Lorne." He made reply in a low, level voice, a voice in
which there was something that made her pluck the child to her and hold
him tight to her breast. "You are not going home to-night. You are going
for a ride with me; and if---- Oh, that's your little game, is it?"
lurching forward as she made a frantic clutch at the handle of the door.
"Sit down, do you hear me?--or it will be worse for you! There!"--the
cold bore of a revolver barrel touched her temple and wrung a quaking
gasp of terror from her--"Do you feel that? Now you sit down and be
quiet! If you make a single move, utter a single cry, I'll blow your
brains out before you've half finished it! Look here, do you know who
you're dealing with now? See!"

His hand reached up and twitched away the fair beard and moustache; he
bent forward so that the moonlight through the glass could fall on his
face. It had changed as his voice had now changed, and she saw that she
was looking at the man who in those other days of stress and trial had
posed as "Gaston Merode," brother to the fictitious "Countess de la
Tour."

"You!" she said in a bleak voice of desolation and fright. "Dear heaven,
that horrible Margot's confederate, the King of the Apaches!"

"Yes!" he rapped out. "You and that fellow Cleek came between us in one
promising game, but I'm hanged if you shall do it in this one! I want
this boy, and--I've got him. Now, you call off Cleek and tell him to
drop this case, to make no effort to follow us or to come between us and
the kid, or I'll slit your throat after I've done with his little
lordship here. Lanisterre!"--to the chauffeur--"Lanisterre, do you
hear?"

"_Oui, monsieur._"

"Give her her head and get to the mill as fast as you can. Margot will
be with us in another two hours' time."

III

Through the ever-deepening dusk Cleek and Arjeeb Noosrut moved onward
together; and onward behind them moved, too, the same dilatory messenger
boy who had loitered about in the neighbourhood of the Park, squandering
his halfpence now as t