on, in the middle of the
peaceful evening and the drowsy landscape of rose-wreathed cottages and
distant downs, there dropped, as if from one of Mr. Jessop's machines, a
positive bomb!

The unexpected happened once more. The unexpected took the form, this
time, of an unobtrusive-looking man on a bicycle.

When we met him, slipping along on the road coming from the direction
of Miss Vi Vassity's "Refuge," I really hardly noticed that we had
passed a cyclist.

Miss Million, apparently, had noticed; she straightened her back with a
funny little jerky gesture that she has when she means to be very
dignified. She turned to me and said: "Well! He'll know us next time he
sees us, that's one thing! He didn't half give us a look!"

"Did he?" I said absently.

Then we turned up the road to the "Refuge." Neither of us realised that
the man on the bicycle had turned his machine, and had noiselessly
followed us down the road again.

We reached the white gate of the "Refuge," under its dark green cliffs
of elm. I had my hand on the latch when I heard the quiet voice of the
cyclist almost in my ear.

"Miss Smith----"

I turned with a little jump. I gave a quick look up at the man's face.
It was the sort of quiet, neutral-tinted, clean-shaven, self-contained
ordinary face that one would not easily remember, as a rule.

Yet I remembered it. I'd seen quite enough of it already. It was burnt
in on my memory with too unpleasant an association for me to have
forgotten it.

I heard myself give a little gasp of dismay as, through the gathering
dusk, I recognised the face of the man who had wanted to search my
trunks at the Hotel Cecil; the man who had afterwards shadowed me down
the Strand and into the Embankment Garden; the man from Scotland Yard.

Mercy! What could he want?

"Miss Million----" he said.

And Miss Million, too, stared at him, and said: "Whatever on earth is
the meaning of this?"

There was a horrified little quaver in her voice as she said it, for
she'd guessed what was afoot.

I had already told her of the manager's visit to her rooms the day
before I came down from London, and she had been really appalled at the
event until Miss Vi Vassity had come in to cheer her with the
announcement that she was sure this was the last that would ever be
heard by us of anything to do with having our belongings looked at.

And now, after three or four days only, this!...

Here we stood on the dusty road under the elm