ooms, here
in your damp country."

Enid's active brain worked rapidly. The onion-seller had evidently got a
bee in his bonnet which it was useless to try to disentangle. The
salient fact stood out that Nugent had a project afoot for that night,
in which all the principal actors in the Levison mystery, as enumerated
by her father, were concerned, and of which her father would wish to be
informed without delay. And here was she, his only possible informant,
a prisoner without any prospect of release except at the hands of a
cunning schemer who would have reason for preventing her from imparting
the knowledge she had acquired. The action of "the Bootlace Man" in
locking her in took a more sinister meaning by the light of what she had
heard, and at the same time made her more than ever anxious to escape.

The suggestion that Violet Maynard's maid was the object of Nugent's
machinations she dismissed with scorn, but that Leslie Chermside was to
be "deported" in a steamer, either voluntarily or otherwise, was an item
which ought to be under her father's consideration before it became an
accomplished fact.

"I think that if I was out of this horrid place I could help you," she
said. "Miss Maynard, the mistress of Louise, is a friend of mine. I
would go to her and persuade her not to allow Louise any liberty
to-night. Sailors are so clever, especially French sailors. I am sure
that you will be able to hit upon some way of getting out."

The sun was low in the heavens, and inside the shrub-girt grotto it was
scarcely possible to see the walls. Legros peered up at the little
window, the top of which was just on a level with the eaves, where the
slope of the roof began. Enid followed the direction of his glance, and
pointed out that the aperture was not big enough for either of them to
pass through. For answer Legros went and collected some of the patent
fertilizer kegs, set them one upon the other under the window, and
clambered up on to the topmost. By so doing he could easily reach with
his hand the upper pane. It was already cracked, and, cautiously
removing the broken glass, he thrust his arm through.

"From here I can make a hole in the roof big enough," he called down in
a hoarse whisper. "It will take very long time to pick off the slates,
they so firm fixed. But it the only way."

"Then, my dear good man, please begin at once," Enid urged him. "And
don't make more noise than you can help in dislodging the slates, or