ring that, it was a sheer delight to be free from all Yard
calls for a time that he might give his whole attention to the work
of getting the place ready for her; and day after day he was busy in
the high-walled old-world garden--digging, planting, pruning--that
when she came it might be brimming over with flowers.

But although he devoted himself mind and body to this task and
lived each day within the limits of that confining wall, he had
not wholly lost touch with the world at large, for each morning
the telephone--installed against the time of Ailsa's tenancy--put
him into communication with Mr. Narkom at the Yard, and each night
a newspaper carried in to him by Dollops kept him abreast of the
topics of the times.

It was over that telephone he received the first assurance that his
haste in getting out of Yorkshire had not been an unnecessary
precaution, his suspicions regarding the probable action of the
Nosworths not ill grounded, for Mr. Narkom was able to inform
him that carefully made inquiries had elicited the intelligence
that, within two days after the Round House affair, men who were
undoubtedly foreigners were making diligent inquiries throughout
the West Riding regarding the whereabouts of two men and a boy
who had been travelling about in a two-horsed caravan.

"That sudden bolt of ours was a jolly good move, old chap," said
the superintendent, when he made this announcement. "It did the
beggars absolutely. Shouldn't be a bit surprised if they'd chucked
the business as a bad job and gone back to the Continent disgusted.
At any rate, none of my plain-clothes men has seen hide nor hair of
one of the lot since, either in town or out. Waldemar, too, seems
to have hooked it and can't be traced; so I reckon we've seen the
last of him."

But Cleek was not so sure of that. He had his own ideas as to what
this disappearance of the Apaches meant, and did not allow himself
to be lulled into any sense of security by it. There were more ways
than one in which to catch a weasel, he recollected, and determined
not to relax his precautions in the smallest iota when next the
Yard's call for his services should come.

That it would come soon he felt convinced as the days advanced that
rounded out the end of his second week of freedom from it; and what
form it would take when it did come was a matter upon which he could
almost have staked his life, so sure he felt of it.

For a time of great national excitement, gr