I am the
man with whom Miss Polkington had the misfortune to be lost on the
Dunes."

Vrouw Van Heigen gasped; the gentle, drawling voice, the manner, the
whole air of the speaker overwhelmed her, and shattered all her
previous thoughts of the affair. With Mijnheer it was different; right
was right, and wrong wrong to him, no matter who the persons concerned
might be.

"Then, sir," he said, growing somewhat red, "I am glad indeed that I
cannot tell you where she is."

Rawson-Clew looked up with faint admiration, righteous indignation, or
at all events the open expression of it, was a discourtesy practically
extinct with the people among whom he usually lived. He felt respect
for the old bulb grower who would be guilty of it.

"I am sorry you should think so badly of me," he said; "I can only
assure you that it is without reason. You do not believe me? I suppose
it is quite useless for me to say that my sole motive in seeking Miss
Polkington is a desire to prevent her from coming to any harm?"

"She will, I should think, come to less harm without you than with
you," Mijnheer retorted; and Rawson-Clew, seeing as plainly as Julia
had yesterday, the impossibility of making the position clear, did not
attempt it.

"I hope you may be right," he said, "but I am afraid she will be in
difficulties. She had little money, and no friends in Holland, and
was, I have reason to believe, on such terms with her family that it
would not suit her to return to England."

"Ah, but she must have gone to England!" Vrouw Van Heigen cried. "She
went away in a carriage as one does when one goes to the station to
start on a journey."

"She received letters from her family," Mijnheer said sturdily, "not
frequently, but occasionally; there was not, I think, any quarrel or
disagreement. She must certainly have set out to return home last
night. If not, and if she had nowhere to go, why should she leave as
she did yesterday? We did not say 'go!' we were content that she
should remain several days, until her arrangements could be made."

"She might not have cared for that," Rawson-Clew suggested; "if you
insinuated to her the sort of things you did to me; women do not like
that, as a rule, you know."

All the same, as he said this, he could not help thinking Mijnheer
right; Julia must have had somewhere to go. Her dignity and feelings
were not of the order to lose sight of essentials in details, or to
demand unreasonable sacrifice of comm