she had never seen one, and that the Messrs. Picton--for so she
called her lodgers--kept no female company, and very rarely had asked
even a gentleman to their rooms.

The inspector listened to all she had to say and then made a formal
search of the house. It would be waste of time to insist that he found
nothing--not so much as a scrap of paper or an empty collar-box to
enlighten him; but he gave strict orders that no one was to enter the
men's room upon any pretext whatsoever; and when he had locked it and
pocketed the key, he made me drive him back to the Boundary Road and
then up to the hospital at Hampstead, to which the little girl had been
carried and where she was then lying. Naturally I had the _entree_ as
well as he--for there were three or four swagger men from Scotland Yard
on the carpet by this time, and all of them mighty anxious to make my
acquaintance. From these I learned that the child was still incoherent
in her talk, and utterly unable to remember who she was or whence she
had come. Fright had paralysed her faculties. She might have been
born yesterday for all she knew about it.

For my part, I had a strong desire to talk to the girl myself and put a
few questions which had come into my head while we were waiting; but
the police would have none of this, and the most they would permit me
to do was to look at her from the far end of the ward, which I did for
a long time, watching her face very closely, and wondering how
beautiful it was.

When they sent me away at last I returned to the garage down West, and
so to my bed, but not to sleep. It must have been three o'clock of the
morning by this time, and I lay until I heard some noisy church-clock
striking seven, when I determined to stop there tossing about no
longer, but to get up and read the morning papers. Few of them,
however, had more than a brief paragraph announcing the fact, and we
had to wait for the "evenings" to discover the real sensation. My
word, how thick they laid it on--and what a hero they made of me. I
must have been interviewed a dozen times that day, and when the
following morning's papers came, I read for the first time that a
reward of five hundred pounds had been offered for the capture of the
perpetrators of this outrage, and that it would be paid by the Editor
of the _Daily Herald_ on the day that the mystery was solved.

Of course, there were many theories. Some believed it to be a case of
abduction pure and s