ess she must have been
real mad with herself and you for letting her loose in that get-up," he
said, "prancing about all day in the bright sunlight in that outfit.
Enough to jar any girl of taste in dress, I guess!"

Then his alert face grew grave again. He said, glancing over his
shoulder at the groups that were coming and going in the vestibule:
"Well, we'll discuss this. Come into the lounge, where we can talk
quietly."

We went into the lounge, where only yesterday I had perceived for the
first time the sumptuous apparition of Miss Vi Vassity pouring out tea
for my now vanished mistress.

It seemed to me that everybody there looked up at me as we passed in. I
bit my lip and frowned a little.

"You are right. This is no place for a quiet chat," said the American
softly. "It will have to be my cousin's sitting-room again, I reckon."

Upstairs, in Miss Million's sitting-room, that I seemed to know as well
now as a penal-servitude prisoner knows his cell, the American said to
me gravely and quietly: "There is one thing, I daresay, which you have
not thought of in connection with that----"

He nodded his smooth, mouse-coloured head at the tantalising wire that I
still held crushed in my hand.

"Now, I don't know much about your police system," said young Mr.
Jessop, "but I reckon it won't be so very different from our own in a
matter of this nature." He nodded again, and went on gravely:

"That telegram will have been read all right! The people here, the
manager and the Scotland Yard man, they will know what's in that."

"Know what's in it?" I gasped, staring at him. "Why, how can they? Do
you mean," indignantly, "that they opened it?"

"Why, no! You saw for yourself the envelope was not opened when you got
the thing. But that is not to say that they could not get it repeated,
as easy as winking, at the post-office," said Mr. Hiram P. Jessop, of
Chicago. "So I'd be ready to bet that everybody here knows what you're
up to when you leave this hotel to-morrow. My old acquaintance, Rats,
and all of 'em. They'll know you're taking something to your young
mistress--your confederate, they'll think her!--in Sussex. You may be
quite sure they're not going to allow you to take any trips into
Sussex--alone. Nope. Somebody will go with you, Miss Smith."

"Go with me? D'you mean," I said, "that I shall be shadowed all the way
by that odious detective man?"

"Well, now, isn't it more than probable, Miss Smith?" said the