-plick!" of the
dropping moisture.

The five minutes became eight, ten, a dozen, without the slightest
change in anything. Then, all of a sudden, Lennard's tense nerves gave a
sort of jump and a swift prickle flashed up his spine and through his
hair. A sound had come--a rustle--a step--a movement. Not from the
direction in which he was looking, however, but from the lane beyond the
arch and _behind_ the limousine.

He jumped to his feet and rising on tiptoe on his driver's seat flashed
the light of his electric torch back over the top of the vehicle; what
he saw took all the breath out of him and set his heart and pulses
hammering furiously.

Against that thick blanket of mist the penetrating power of the torch's
gleam was so effectually blunted that it could do nothing more than
throw a pale, weak circle of light a few feet into the depths of a
crowding vapour, leaving all beyond and upon either side doubly dark in
contrast.

Yet as the light streamed out and flung that circle into the impinging
mist, there moved across it the figure of a woman, young and fair, with
a scarf of lace thrown over her head, from beneath which fell a glory
of unbound hair, thick and lustrous, over shoulders that were wrapped in
ermine--ermine in mid-April!

A woman! Here! At this hour! In this time of violence and evil doing!
The thing was so uncanny, so unnatural, so startlingly unexpected, that
Lennard's head swam.

She was gone so soon--just glimmering across the circle of light and
then vanishing into the mist as suddenly as she had appeared--that for a
moment or two he lost his nerve and his wits, and ducked down under the
screen of the motor's top, remembering all the tales he had ever heard
of ghosts and apparitions, and, in a moment of folly, half believing he
had looked upon one. But of a sudden his better sense asserted itself,
and realizing that for a woman--_any_ woman, no matter how dressed, no
matter how young and fair and good to look upon--to be moving stealthily
about this place, at this hour, when there was talk of murder, was at
least suspicious, he laid hands upon the wheel, and being unable to turn
the vehicle in the arch and go after _her_, put on full power and went
after Narkom and his men. A swift whizz carried him through the arch and
up the lane, and, once in the open, he laid hand upon the bulb of the
motor horn and sent blast after blast hooting through the stillness,
shouting at the top of his voice as