g the favour of a
word or two.

"Signor Muscari," said the cleric, "in this queer crisis personalities
may be pardoned. I may tell you without offence of a way in which you
will do more good than by helping the gendarmes, who are bound to break
through in any case. You will permit me the impertinent intimacy, but do
you care about that girl? Care enough to marry her and make her a good
husband, I mean?"

"Yes," said the poet quite simply.

"Does she care about you?"

"I think so," was the equally grave reply.

"Then go over there and offer yourself," said the priest: "offer her
everything you can; offer her heaven and earth if you've got them. The
time is short."

"Why?" asked the astonished man of letters.

"Because," said Father Brown, "her Doom is coming up the road."

"Nothing is coming up the road," argued Muscari, "except the rescue."

"Well, you go over there," said his adviser, "and be ready to rescue her
from the rescue."

Almost as he spoke the hedges were broken all along the ridge by a rush
of the escaping brigands. They dived into bushes and thick grass
like defeated men pursued; and the great cocked hats of the mounted
gendarmerie were seen passing along above the broken hedge. Another
order was given; there was a noise of dismounting, and a tall officer
with cocked hat, a grey imperial, and a paper in his hand appeared
in the gap that was the gate of the Paradise of Thieves. There was a
momentary silence, broken in an extraordinary way by the banker, who
cried out in a hoarse and strangled voice: "Robbed! I've been robbed!"

"Why, that was hours ago," cried his son in astonishment: "when you were
robbed of two thousand pounds."

"Not of two thousand pounds," said the financier, with an abrupt and
terrible composure, "only of a small bottle."

The policeman with the grey imperial was striding across the green
hollow. Encountering the King of the Thieves in his path, he clapped him
on the shoulder with something between a caress and a buffet and gave
him a push that sent him staggering away. "You'll get into trouble,
too," he said, "if you play these tricks."

Again to Muscari's artistic eye it seemed scarcely like the capture of
a great outlaw at bay. Passing on, the policeman halted before the
Harrogate group and said: "Samuel Harrogate, I arrest you in the name
of the law for embezzlement of the funds of the Hull and Huddersfield
Bank."

The great banker nodded with an odd air of busi