e
came down wearing a plain, dark-brown motor coat with a small,
close-fitting cap to match. She was, indeed, unusually dowdy in
appearance.

"Well, George," she exclaimed, as she sat behind me in the car and I
drove down Pall Mall, "we're going out on a little adventure, I
understand. Do you know where we're going?"

"Down to Ripley, on the Portsmouth Road," I replied. "I have to meet a
man named Houston at the Talbot Hotel. That's all I know," I answered.

"Yes," she said. "I know Houston. We must be careful to-night--very
careful."

We went through the crooked roads of Kingston and out through Surbiton
towards Ditton, when, after a long silence, she exclaimed as she bent
towards me:

"Tell me, George, have you ever heard the name of Gori, and if so, in
what connection? I ask this in confidence between ourselves, as the
outcome may mean much to both of us."

"I don't quite understand you, Madame," was my polite reply. "I only
wish your husband had asked that question."

"Look here," she said in a low, tense voice, "you love Lola! I know
you do. Then will you, for her sake, reply to me openly and frankly?
Have you in these past few days met a bald-headed Italian named Luigi
Gori? And in what circumstances?"

I remained silent for some minutes. Then I said:

"I have met a man named Gori. He called upon Rudolph."

"When?" she gasped.

"He called on Monday night."

Madame Duperre held her breath for a few moments. She seemed to be
calculating.

"I recognize certain grave probabilities in Gori's visit," she said,
and then lapsed again into silence.

Presently I pulled up before the big old seventeenth-century
posting-house in the long, quiet village of Ripley, once noted in the
late Victorian craze of the "push-bike" as being the Mecca of the
daring cyclist who ran out of London and back.

The great gateway through which the mail coaches for Portsmouth used
to rumble was dark and cavernous, but on the right I saw a small door,
and opening it found myself in a very low-ceiled but cosy bar, in
which burned a great log fire with shining pewters above it. The
Talbot is nothing if not a link with the days of the highwaymen of
Weybridge Heath. Few inns in England are so unspoiled by modern
improvements as the Talbot, at Ripley.

In the rather dim light of that low-pitched, well-warmed inn parlor,
with its wide, inviting chimney-corner, I saw four men. One of them,
facing the firelight, I recognized from th