eimer" until stone walls and heavy
doors shut her from earshot....

I only hope that her rage has kept up all night, that it's prevented her
from relapsing into the misery and terror in which she started away from
the shelter of Vi Vassity's wing at the "Refuge"! For then, I know, she
was perfectly convinced that what we were setting out for was, at the
very least, ten years' penal servitude! Evidently Miss Million hasn't
the slightest touch of faith in the ultimate triumph of all Innocence.

To her, because that Rattenheimer ruby is stolen, and she and her maid
are suspected of being the thieves, it means that it's impossible for us
to be cleared!

I don't feel that; but I do feel the humiliation and the discomfort of
having been put in prison!

How many nights like the last, I wonder dismally, am I to spend in this
horrible little cell?

Well! I suppose this morning will show us.

This morning, in about an hour's time, I suppose we are to go before the
magistrate of this court, and to answer the "serious charge" that has
been brought against us by Mr. Julius Rattenheimer.

CHAPTER XXX

OUT ON BAIL

THERE!

The much-dreaded ordeal is over.

That is, it is over for the present. For we have been committed for
trial, and that trial is still to come.

We shall have to go on living somehow under a cloud of the blackest
suspicion. But there's one ray of comfort that I find among the inky
gloom of my (mental) surroundings.

At least, there isn't going to be any more prison cell for us to-night!
At least, I shall have a long and perfect and much-needed sleep in my
delightfully luxurious white bed at the Hotel Cecil.

For that's where we've returned for the day, to pack up a few more
things before we accept Miss Vi Vassity's kindly invitation and return
to the "Refuge"--a refuge indeed!

It's too good of her to welcome two suspect characters such as my young
mistress and me among her professional friends.

The Breathing Statue, the Boy-Impersonator, the Serio, the
emerald-green-tighted Acrobat Lady--these all dwell on the heights of
respectability as far as their private characters are concerned.

Of course, Marmora, the Twentieth-Century Hebe, is an arrant flirt, but
a girl may be that and a model of propriety at the same time. This touch
of nature never fails to exasperate, for some reason, any of the men
who know her. The Ventriloquis