let Maynard, the daughter of the rich Birmingham man who has taken
the Manor House for the summer."

"Then I expect that is where he was coming from," suggested Reggie. "I
met him in the club yesterday. Your father introduced him. He seemed a
decent sort of chap, but down on his luck I thought."

"You have made two blunders in one statement," was Miss Enid's pert
retort. "He can't have been coming from the Manor House because he
wasn't in evening dress. And he can't be down on his luck because he's
got heaps of money. Why, he's going to start on a cruise round the world
soon in a steam yacht that is fitting out at Portland."

"Sorry I spoke," said Reggie. "Come, he's far enough ahead not to be a
nuisance now; let me give you a hand up on to the path. I suppose that
Mr. Mallory is prejudiced against Chermside, since he's a friend of
Travers Nugent, eh?"

Disdaining the offer of assistance, Enid ran lightly up the slope on to
the path before replying.

[Illustration: "Their glimpse was only momentary, because, as though
dazzled, he raised his hand to his eyes."]

"On the contrary," she said as Reggie joined her, "I can't quite make
father out on the subject of Mr. Leslie Chermside. For once in a way the
dear old man is inconsistent, or so he seems to me. He won't commit
himself to a definite opinion, but I can see that he is deeply
interested in Mr. Nugent's friend, and in the relations existing between
the pair. I think, from signs and portents known only to myself, that
father rather likes Mr. Chermside."

"Lucky for Chermside," Reggie absently mused aloud. "There!" he added
with a quick return to nautical briskness. "Thank goodness that infernal
searchlight has moved off us and found the town at last. I prefer being
at the other end of the beastly thing to having it in one's eyes. There
goes the first gun from the cruiser."

And under cover of the restored darkness arms were clasped again, and
the young heads fell very close together for the rest of the way back to
the town that was now being vigorously bombarded in mimic warfare.

Two miles out at sea the big guns flashed and boomed, and ahead of them
on the marshland path the footsteps of the man they had seen in the rays
of the searchlight were dying away, so quickly had he outpaced the
lingerers. But Lieutenant Beauchamp and Miss Enid Mallory took no heed
of either, little dreaming of the terrible significance that attached to
what they had seen and heard