g a
powerful man--rich and well-born and all the rest of it--she had a
desperate time. I gather he was pretty high in favour with the old
Court. Then when the Bolsheviks started he went over to them, like
plenty of other grandees, and now he's one of their chief brains--none
of your callow revolutionaries, but a man of the world, a kind of
genius, she says, who can hold his own anywhere. She believes him to
be in this country, and only waiting the right moment to turn up. Oh,
it sounds ridiculous, I know, in Britain in the twentieth century, but
I learned in the war that civilization anywhere is a very thin crust.
There are a hundred ways by which that kind of fellow could bamboozle
all our law and police and spirit her away. That's the kind of crowd
we have to face."

"Did she say what he was like in appearance?"

"A face like an angel--a lost angel, she says."

Dickson suddenly had an inspiration.

"D'you mind the man you said was an Australian--at Kirkmichael? I
thought myself he was a foreigner. Well, he was asking for a place he
called Darkwater, and there's no sich place in the countryside. I
believe he meant Dalquharter. I believe he's the man she's feared of."

A gasped "By Jove!" came from the darkness. "Dogson, you've hit it.
That was five days ago, and he must have got on the right trail by this
time. He'll be here to-night. That's why the three have been lying so
quiet to-day. Well, we'll go through with it, even if we haven't a
dog's chance! Only I'm sorry that you should be mixed up in such a
hopeless business."

"Why me more than you?"

"Because it's all pure pride and joy for me to be here. Good God, I
wouldn't be elsewhere for worlds. It's the great hour of my life. I
would gladly die for her."

"Tuts, that's no' the way to talk, man. Time enough to speak about
dying when there's no other way out. I'm looking at this thing in a
business way. We'd better be seeing the ladies."

They groped into the pitchy hall, somewhere in which a Die-Hard was on
picket, and down the passage to the smoking-room. Dickson blinked in
the light of a very feeble lamp and Heritage saw that his hands were
cumbered with packages. He deposited them on a sofa and made a ducking
bow.

"I've come back, Mem, and glad to be back. Your jools are in safe
keeping, and not all the blagyirds in creation could get at them. I've
come to tell you to cheer up--a stout heart to a stey brae, as the old
folk say