r, and went back into the house.

Trembling with excitement and keeping back genuine tears for Amaryllis,
a guest to serve whom had been pleasure, the parlour-maid fetched him
cold meat, bread and beer. When he had changed his clothes, he ate
hastily in the hall, swallowing doggedly what he could not taste.

"Twenty-five minutes--they'll be in town. Another fifteen and the
wires'll be humming," he calculated. "Twenty more--the local police will
be here, and rub out every trace. Is there a trace, a mark--a print--a
smell, even? I've got an hour."

He sent all the servants to bed, except Randal's chauffeur, whom he
summoned to the hall.

"My car's fit to travel, Martin," he said. "Shove in as many tins of
petrol as she'll hold. I may want her to-night. Run her out into the
drive, put on an overcoat and sit inside till I come."

Then he went to the study, lit all the candles and another lamp, opened
the safe with the duplicate key, and found, as he had expected, the
money in its drawer.

"Mostly one-pound notes," he muttered, as he locked the safe.

Turning to leave it, he stood suddenly stock-still, head up and sniffing
the air, puzzled by an intangible association of sense and memory.

Failing to fix it, he left the alcove, and went to the writing-table,
choosing the chair she had sat in, when she could not, or would not,
give reason for her tears. And now he gave a flash of thought where
before he had refrained even from speculation. Could it have been the
forgotten letter that had made her weep? Yet there had been no trouble
in her face while she read it, and it seemed certain that the
handwriting was unfamiliar.

While he mused his eyes were fixed on the alcove at the end of the room.
The light of the candle he had left there outlined sharply the edges of
the two curtains which hung from the rod crossing the recess. At the
ceiling their edges met, but, at a height of some two and a half feet
from the floor, their folds were looped back to the wall in a style
formally old-fashioned. And now, even before his mind became concerned,
his eye was irritated by a lack of symmetry in the draping; for the
drooping fold of the right-hand curtain was out of shape. Again, his
thought ran, if thieves playing for so great a stake as Ambrotox had
found a woman in their way, their best card was prompt murder. If they
could abduct in silence, they could have killed silently. And this made
clear to him the soundness of what ha