his eye was attracted by a yellow
speck in the background of green. It was a tiny fragment of khaki,
caught on one of the bramble bushes.

CHAPTER XIX

Superintendent Merrington sat in his office at Scotland Yard, irascible
with the exertions of a trying day which had made heavy inroads upon his
temper and patience. He had several big cases on his hands, his time had
been broken into by a series of visitors with grievances, and he had
been called upon to adjust a vexatious claim of a woman attacked in the
street by a police dog, while the animal was supposed to be on duty
tracking a sacrilegious thief who had felled a priest in an oratory and
bolted with the silver candlesticks from the altar.

The woman had gone mad from the shock and had been placed in a public
asylum, where she had imagined herself to be a horse, and in that guise
had neighed harmlessly, for some years, until cured by auto-suggestion
by a rising young brain doctor who had devoted much time and study to
her peculiar case. Her first act of returned reason was to bring a heavy
claim for damages against Scotland Yard, and Merrington had fought it
out that day with an avaricious lawyer who had taken up the case on the
promise of an equal division of the spoils.

Merrington had preferred to pay rather than contest the suit in law, and
he was exceedingly wroth in consequence. He was angry with the old woman
for presuming to get cured, and angry with the brain doctor for curing
her. He considered that the brain doctor had been guilty of a piece of
meddlesome interference in restoring the old lady to so-called sanity in
a world of fools, without achieving any object except robbery from the
public funds by a rascally lawyer. To use Merrington's own words,
expressed with intense exasperation to an astonished subordinate, the
old woman was quite all right as a horse, comfortable and well-fed, and
had probably got more out of life in that guise than she ever had as a
human being, compelled to all sorts of shifts and contrivances and mean
scrapings before her betters for a scanty living, with nothing but the
work-house ahead of her. He concluded in a sort of grumbling epilogue
that some people never knew when to leave well alone.

It was in no very amiable frame of mind, therefore, that he received
Colwyn's card with a pencilled request for an immediate interview.
Merrington disapproved of all private detectives as an unwarrantable
usurpation of the