e this! Of course, as I always say,
well! it's my own hair! Not like some girls that have to have a haystack
on their heads before they're fit to look at, as well as a switch all
round...."

It really seemed as if she was going on with this "mildly mental"
chatter for as long as we chose to listen.

So I gave one glance at Miss Million's cousin, meaning, "Shall we go?"
He nodded gravely back at me. Then, leaving the red-haired lunatic on
the path, shaking her tresses in the sun, we went on between the lilac
bushes with their undergrowth of lilies and stocks and pinks until we
came to the house.

The house was a regular Sussex farm sort of looking place that had
evidently been turned into a more modern dwelling-house place. There
were bright red curtains at all the white-sashed windows, which were
wide open. There were window-boxes with lobelia and canary-creeper and
geraniums. As I say, all the windows were flung wide open, and from out
of them I heard issuing such a babble of mixed noises as I don't think I
had ever heard since I was last in the parrot-house at the Zoo. There
were shrill voices talking; there was clattering of knives and forks
against crockery. These sounds alternated with such bursts of
unrestrained laughter that now I was perfectly certain that my suspicion
outside in the garden had been a correct one. Yes! This place could be
nothing but some institution for the mentally afflicted.

And this--and this was where Million had been spirited off to!

Setting my teeth, and without another glance at the increasingly grave
face of my companion, I ran up the two shallow stone steps to the big
open front door, and rang the bell. The tinkling of it was quite drowned
by the bursts of hysterical merriment that was issuing from the door on
the left of us.

"They can't hear us through that Bedlam," was Mr. Jessop's very
appropriate comment. "See here, Miss Smith, as it appears to be mostly
ladies I shan't be wanted, I guess. Supposing you go easy into the
porch and knock on that door while I wait out here on the steps?"

This I did.

I knocked hard in my desperation. No answer but fresh bursts of
laughter, fresh volumes of high-pitched talk. Suddenly I seemed to catch
through it a deep-voiced masculine murmur with an intonation that I
knew--the caressing Irish inflection of Mr. James Burke.

"What divilment is he up to now, I wonder?" I thought exasperatedly, and
my annoyance at the very thought of th