end for unpunctuality that she shook off her absorption and gave
herself up to the game. Conscious of her slackness, she forced herself
to play rather better than usual, but at the close of the afternoon
round she allowed her obsession to resume its sway.

Concocting some frivolous pretext, she avoided walking down the road to
the town with other homeward-bound golfers, and contrived to slip away
unseen along a moorland path which led to the town by another and longer
route at the edge of the cliff. It had in Enid's eyes the merit of
passing quite close to the rear of The Hut, whereas the road was
separated from the house by the whole extent of a fairly long carriage
drive. Somehow the secluded abode of Mr. Travers Nugent had for her that
day the attraction of a magnet. She simply could not keep away from it.

There was no definite plan in her head, only an intense longing that
something might happen which would enable her to fill the gap in her
father's investigations. Before it struck out on to the cliff the path
led her through a maze of gorse bushes very near the back gate out of
which Nugent had shown Pierre Legros on the night of his first interview
with him. When Enid came opposite this gate, which was of oak set in an
impenetrable hedge of blackthorn, she was seized with an irresistible
impulse to see if the gate was fastened. She fought against it for as
long as it took her to walk resolutely ten paces by, and then there
recurred to her her father's words--

"I am past the age for adventures, or I should be sorely tempted to
explore The Hut in some other character than my own."

The temptation was too strong for her. Retracing her steps, she picked
her way across the few intervening yards of heather and tried the gate.
To her surprise it was neither locked nor bolted, but opened inwards to
the extent of the couple of inches for which she only dared apply
pressure at first. Growing bolder, she pushed the gate further open and
peered in. The house was partly visible fifty yards away through a
screen of copper beeches, but an intense silence brooded over it, nor in
the foreground of garden was there any sign of human life.

"Dad was pleased to be sarcastic about my ability to find out things,"
she murmured to herself. "All the same I think I'll do a little scout on
my own account. It would be good fun to take the old dear a tit-bit of
information that he hadn't been able to ferret out himself."

So at first t