he front
door. "Thresk's chambers are in King's Bench Walk." He added the number.

"I simply couldn't think of it," Hazlewood repeated as he crossed the
pavement to his car.

"Perhaps not," said Pettifer. "You have the envelope? Yes. Choose an
evening towards the end of the week, a Friday will be your best chance of
getting him."

"I will do nothing of the kind, Pettifer."

"And let me know when he is coming. Goodbye."

The car carried Mr. Hazlewood away still protesting that he really
couldn't think of it for an instant. But he thought a good deal of it
during the next week and his temper did not improve. "Pettifer has rubbed
off the finer edges of his nature," he said to himself. "It is a pity--a
great pity. But thirty years of life in a lawyer's office must no doubt
have that effect. I regret very much that Pettifer should have imagined
that I would condescend to such a scheme."

CHAPTER XX

ON THE DOWNS

They went up by the steep chalk road which skirts the park wall to the
top of the conical hill above the race-course. An escarpment of grass
banks guards a hollow like a shallow crater on the very summit. They rode
round it upon the rim, now facing the black slope of Charlton Forest
across the valley to the north, now looking out over the plain and
Chichester. Thirty miles away above the sea the chalk cliffs of the Isle
of Wight gleamed under their thatch of dark turf. It was not yet nine in
the morning. Later the day would climb dustily to noon; now it had the
wonder and the stillness of great beginnings. A faint haze like a veil at
the edges of the sky and a freshness of the air made the world magical to
these two who rode high above weald and sea. Stella looked downwards to
the silver flash of the broad water west of Chichester spire.

"That way they came, perhaps on a day like this," she said slowly, "those
old centurions."

"Your thoughts go back," said Dick Hazlewood with a laugh.

"Not so far as you think," cried Stella, and suddenly her cheeks
took fire and a smile dimpled them. "Oh, I dare to think of many
things to-day."

She rode down the steep grass slope towards the race-course with Dick at
her side. It was the first morning they had ridden together since the
night of the dinner-party at Little Beeding. Mr. Hazlewood was at this
moment ordering his car so that he might drive in to the town and learn
what Pettifer had discovered in the cuttings from the newspapers. But
they were q