on my account it will be
simply rotten," she murmured. "I wish I could get out of this before
that wretched man brings him. If I only could there would be nothing to
prove that his story is true, or at worst I could stick it out that it
was not me he caught."

But to wish herself out of the grotto was one thing, and to find a means
of exit another. The door was of oak, strongly clamped with iron and
quite impervious to any battery she could administer. She had her golf
clubs with her, and essayed to prise open the lock with her driving
iron, but the heavy bolt resisted all her efforts. The window was high
out of her reach, and if it had not been it was too small for her to
creep through. With tears of vexation in her eyes she had to admit that
escape was impracticable. There was nothing for it but to await an
ignominious release by way of the door when Nugent should have been
apprised of her capture. It was possible, she thought ruefully, that he
might pretend he had not been told, and keep her there all night as a
punishment for her intrusion.

Having resigned herself to the inevitable, Enid characteristically cast
about for means to extract what comfort she could out of her cheerless
surroundings. The materials at hand were not very promising, the
contents of the grotto consisting of a broken lawn-mower, some empty
kegs that had held patent manure, and a few obsolete garden tools. But
she now noted, what she had missed before, a bench at the far end,
running the whole breadth of the grotto. Upon it lay a lot of matting,
such as is used for protecting cucumber frames in frosty weather.

"I'm in luck's way at last," she muttered. "That'll make a ripping sofa
on which to take it easy till I'm let out of durance vile."

Suiting the action to the word, she moved one or two of the upper mats
more to her liking, and then stretched her lithe young frame luxuriously
on the improvised couch. In a moment she was on her feet again, staring
in dismay at her hastily vacated nest, while every nerve in her body
tingled with apprehension.

Something had moved--"squirmed," she called it afterwards--beneath the
mats. Something soft and yielding, horribly suggestive of a human body
discomfited by her weight.

But there was no further movement. Relieved of its incubus, the thing
that had wriggled its dumb protest had reverted to its previous
quiescence, and was as uncannily still as it had been all the time she
had been in the gro