the
sheep-bells that the fresh breeze allowed to drift to our ears.

On we whizzed, and by what miracle we escaped police-traps I do not
know.... We took the turns of our directions, and at last I heard a
short, relieved sort of exclamation from Mr. Hiram P. Jessop.

"Here we are. This'll be it, I guess." For here were the dark-green
towers of elms set back from the road. A red roof and old-fashioned
chimney-stacks showed among them. There was a garden in front, with tall
Mary-lilies and pink-and-white phlox and roses and carnations and thrift
that grew down to the palings.

And close up beside those palings there was drawn a pale-blue car that I
knew well--too well!

It was the car with the silver-winged Victory as mascot! The car in
which we'd been followed and shadowed for so much of our journey by the
Honourable Jim Burke.

He was here, then! He was before us!

What had he to do with the "Refuge"?

Sounds of singing greeted us as we left the car, pushed open the
green-palinged gate, and walked up the pebbled path between the
flower-beds of the garden. Some one behind the lilac bushes was singing,
in a very clear, touching voice, a snatch of the ballad: "Oh, ye'll tak'
the high road and I'll tak' the low road, and I'll be in Scotland before
ye...."

A turn in the garden path brought us full upon the singer. A wonderful
apparition indeed she was! As tall as any woman I had seen (excepting
the long-limbed cobra-lady), and the June sun shone on a head of hair
that was as bright as a bed of marigolds--red hair, but not all the same
kind of red. It was long and loose in the breeze, and it fell to the
singer's waist in a shower of red-gold, covering her face and hiding
most of her bodice, which appeared to be a sort of flimsy muslin
dressing-jacket. Her skirt was very makeshift and of brown holland. The
stockings she wore were white thread, and her shoes were just navy-blue
felt bedroom slippers, with jaeger turn-overs to them. In fact, her
whole appearance was negligee in the extreme. Who--what could she be?
She looked a cross between a mermaid and a scarecrow. She was holding
one hank of red-gold out against her arm, as a shop assistant measures
silk, and she crunched along the garden path, still singing in that
delicious voice: "But I and my true love will never meet again, on the
bonny, bonny banks of Loch Lomond!" Blinded by her hair and the stream
of sunlight, she nearly walked straight into us before she d