is much enraptured of thy note----"

She stopped suddenly. The next lines were distinctly amorous. He
laughed with ready appreciation of her difficulty, but generously
provided a way out.

"Poor mortal!" he tittered. "And must I wear an ass's head to be in
character?"

A loud report, and then another, brought them back rudely from a
make-believe wood near Athens to a peril-haunted park in an English
county. For the second time that night Sylvia knew what fear meant.
Intuitively, she shrank close to the strong man who seemed destined
to be her protector; and when an arm clasped her again, she cowered
close to its sheltering embrace.

"Oh, what is it?" she wailed in terror.

"It is hard to say," he answered quietly, and the confidence in his
voice was the best assurance of safety he could have given. "Those
shots were fired from some sort of rifle, not of the same caliber as
that which was used this morning, but unquestionably a rifle. Perhaps
it is one of these modern pistols. I don't wish to alarm you
needlessly, Miss Manning, but there is some probability that the
police have discovered the man who killed Mr. Fenley, and there is a
struggle going on. At any rate, let us remain out here in the open. We
shall be as safe here as anywhere."

Sylvia, who had not been afraid to venture alone into the park at
midnight, was now in a quite feminine state of fright. She clung to
Trenholme without any pretense of other feeling than one of unbounded
trust. Her heart was pounding frantically, and she was trembling from
head to foot.

The police whistles were shrilling their insistent summons for help,
and Trenholme knew that the commotion had arisen in the exact part of
the Quarry Wood whence the murderous bullet had sped that morning. He
was unarmed, of course, being devoid of even such a mildly aggressive
weapon as a walking-stick, but there was doubt in his mind that the
best thing to do was to stand fast. He was not blind to the
possibility of imminent danger, for the very spot they had reached lay
in a likely line of retreat for any desperado whom the police might
have discovered and be pursuing. Naturally he took it for granted that
the criminal had fired the two shots, and the fact that the whistles
were still in full blast showed that the chase had not been abandoned.

Still, the only course open was to take such chances as came their
way. He could always shield the girl with his own body, or tell her to
lie fla