ally.

"What for?" he asked.

"Oh, well: please yourself," answered Deede Dawson; "I don't know that
it matters, and perhaps you have reasons of your own for preferring a
beard. Come on up to the house now and I'll tell Mrs. Dawson to give you
some breakfast. And you might as well have a wash, too, perhaps--unless
you object to that as well as to shaving."

Dunn rose without answering, made his toilet by shaking off some of
the dust that clung to him, and followed his new employer out of the
tool-house into the open air.

It was a fresh and lovely morning, and coming towards them down one of
the garden paths was Ella, looking as fresh and lovely as the morning in
a dainty cotton frock with lace at her throat and wrists.

That she could possibly have spent the night tearing across country in a
powerful car conveying a dead man to an unknown destination, appeared to
Dunn a clean impossibility, and for a moment he almost supposed he had
been mistaken in thinking he recognized her voice.

But he knew he had not, that he had made no mistake, that it had indeed
been Ella he had seen dash away into the darkness on her strange and
terrible errand.

"Oh, my daughter," said Deede Dawson carelessly, noticing Dunn's
surprise. "Oh, yes, she's back--you didn't expect to see her this
morning. Well, Ella, Dunn's surprised to see you back so soon, aren't
you, Dunn?"

Dunn did not answer, for a kind of vertigo of horror had come upon him,
and for a moment all things revolved about him in a whirling circle
wherein the one fixed point was Ella's gentle lovely face that
sometimes, he thought, had a small round hole with blue edges in the
very centre of the forehead, above the nose.

It was her voice, clear and a little loud, that called him back to
himself.

"He's not well," she was saying. "He's going to faint."

"I'm all right," he muttered. "It was nothing, nothing, it's only that
I've had nothing to eat for so long."

"Oh, poor man!" exclaimed Ella.

"Come up to the house," Deede Dawson said.

"Breakfast's ready," Ella said. "Mother told me to find you."

"Has the woman come yet?" Deede Dawson asked. "If she has, you might
tell her to give Dunn some breakfast. I've just been telling him I'm
willing to give him another chance and to take him on as gardener and
chauffeur, so you can keep an eye on him and see if he works well."

Ella was silent for a moment, but her expression was grave and a little
puzzled as though