r to the ground.

This time he did not swear. He picked himself up quickly, lit the
lamp on the table by the window, and brought it over to the
bookcase. Where Shakespeare's Comedies had stood was now a gaping
void with a small key stuck in a lock, above a brass handle.
Desmond mounted on the steps again and eagerly turned the key.
Then he grasped the handle and puled, the section of bookshelves
swung back like a door, and he found himself face to face with a
great stack of petrol cans. They lay in orderly piles stretching
from the floor to the top of the bookshelves near the railing,
several tiers deep. At a rough computation there must have been
several hundred cans in the recess. And they were all full.

In a flash Desmond realized what his discovery signified. The
motor-cycle in the shed without was the connecting link between
Bellward and the man with whom he was co-operating in the
organization. Under pretext of reading late in his library
Bellward would send old Martha to bed, and once the house was
quiet, sally forth by his secret exit and meet his confederate.
Even when he was supposed to be sleeping in London he could still
use the Mill House for a rendezvous, entering and leaving by the
secret door, and no one a bit the wiser. In that desolate part of
Essex, the roads are practically deserted after dark. Bellward
could come and go much as he pleased on his motor-cycle. Were he
stopped, he always had the excuse ready that he was going to--or
returning from the station. The few petrol cans that Desmond had
seen openly displayed in the shed without seemed to show that
Bellward received a small quantity of spirit from the Petrol
Board to take him to and from the railway.

The cache, so elaborately concealed, however, pointed to long
journeys. Did Bellward undertake these trips to fetch news or to
transmit it? And who was his confederate? Whom did he go to meet?
Not Mortimer; for he had only, corresponded with Bellward. Nor
was it Nur-el-Din; for she had never met Bellward, either.

Who was it, then?

CHAPTER XIV. BARBARA TAKES A HAND

"No luck, Mr. Marigold," said the Assistant Provost Marshal, "I'm
sorry, but there it is! We've made every possible inquiry about
this Private... er..." he glanced at the buff-colored leave pass
in his hand, "... this Gunner Barling, but we can't trace him so
far. He should have gone back to France the afternoon before the
day on which you found his pass. But he hasn't