dy Cranston. Good night once
more."

This time their departure was uninterrupted. Helen removed her
handkerchief from her eyes, and Philippa made a little grimace at the
closed door.

"Do you believe," Helen asked seriously, "that Captain Griffiths has any
suspicions?"

Philippa shrugged her shoulders.

"If he has, who cares?" she replied, a little defiantly. "The very idea
of a duel of wits between those two men is laughable."

"Perhaps so," Helen agreed, with a shade of doubt in her tone.

CHAPTER X

Philippa and Helen started, a few mornings later, for one of their
customary walks. The crystalline October sunshine, in which every
distant tree and, seaward, each slowly travelling steamer, seemed to
gain a new clearness of outline, lay upon the deep-ploughed fields, the
yellowing bracken, and the red-gold of the bending trees, while the west
wind, which had strewn the sea with white-flecked waves, brought down
the leaves to form a carpet for their feet, and played strange music
along the wood-crested slope. In the broken land through which they
made their way, a land of trees and moorland, with here and there a
cultivated patch, the yellow gorse still glowed in unexpected corners;
queer, scentless flowers made splashes of colour in the hedgerows; a
rabbit scurried sometimes across their path; a cock pheasant, after
a moment's amazed stare, lowered his head and rushed for unnecessary
shelter. The longer they looked upwards, the bluer seemed the sky. The
grass beneath their feet was as green and soft as in springtime. Driven
by the wind, here and there a white-winged gull sailed over their
heads,--a cloud of them rested upon a freshly turned little square of
ploughed land between two woods. A flight of pigeons, like torn leaves
tossed about by the wind, circled and drifted above them. Philippa
seated herself upon the trunk of a fallen tree and gazed contentedly
about her.

"If I had a looking-glass and a few more hairpins, I should be perfectly
happy," she sighed. "I am sure my hair must look awful."

Helen glanced at it admiringly.

"I decline to say the correct thing," she declared. "I will only remind
you that there will be no one here to look at it."

"I am not so sure," Philippa replied. "These are the woods which the
special constables haunt by day and by night. They gaze up every tree
trunk for a wireless installation, and they lie behind hedges and watch
for mysterious flashes."

"Are you s