nged the witness into momentary inarticulateness,
from which she was rescued by Trimmle, who, by means of ingenious
circumlocutions, elicited the statement that before she could cross the
hall to the back passage she had heard the gentlemen behind her, and had
seen them go out of the front door together.

"Then, if you saw the gentleman twice, you must be able to tell me what
he looked like."

But with this final challenge to her powers of expression it became
clear that the limit of the kitchen-maid's endurance had been reached.
The obligation of going to the front door to "show in" a visitor was
in itself so subversive of the fundamental order of things that it had
thrown her faculties into hopeless disarray, and she could only stammer
out, after various panting efforts at evocation, "His hat, mum, was
different-like, as you might say--"

"Different? How different?" Mary flashed out at her, her own mind, in
the same instant, leaping back to an image left on it that morning, but
temporarily lost under layers of subsequent impressions.

"His hat had a wide brim, you mean? and his face was pale--a youngish
face?" Mary pressed her, with a white-lipped intensity of interrogation.
But if the kitchen-maid found any adequate answer to this challenge,
it was swept away for her listener down the rushing current of her own
convictions. The stranger--the stranger in the garden! Why had Mary not
thought of him before? She needed no one now to tell her that it was he
who had called for her husband and gone away with him. But who was he,
and why had Boyne obeyed his call?

IV

It leaped out at her suddenly, like a grin out of the dark, that they
had often called England so little--"such a confoundedly hard place to
get lost in."

A CONFOUNDEDLY HARD PLACE TO GET LOST IN! That had been her husband's
phrase. And now, with the whole machinery of official investigation
sweeping its flash-lights from shore to shore, and across the dividing
straits; now, with Boyne's name blazing from the walls of every town
and village, his portrait (how that wrung her!) hawked up and down the
country like the image of a hunted criminal; now the little compact,
populous island, so policed, surveyed, and administered, revealed itself
as a Sphinx-like guardian of abysmal mysteries, staring back into his
wife's anguished eyes as if with the malicious joy of knowing something
they would never know!

In the fortnight since Boyne's disappeara