f its dangerous master's creatures.
But the old man's sudden pallor was due as much to the contemptuous rage
that overmastered him as to fear for his only child.

"You amazing idiot!" he cried. "Why couldn't you have told me the bare
fact of my daughter having been to The Hut at first, without your string
of silly insinuations? The delay may mean--but there, words are wasted
on such as you----"

He turned to hurry from the room, and there in the doorway, where she
had stood for the last half-minute, in defiance of the most stringent
rule of the club, was the pretty subject of his anxiety, her
sun-browned cheeks all seamed with bramble scratches, her corona of
golden hair tumbling over her shoulders, her golf skirt in tatters.

"Don't look so scared, father," she said. "I'm all right. But that
person has hit the correct nail about my being very mixed up in it, and
you must come away at once, please. I have a lot to tell you."

Ignoring the incoherences of the inquisitive Lazarus, whom they left
babbling his willingness to overlook the infraction of the rule against
the admission of ladies if they would only have their say out there,
father and daughter passed out of the club into the quiet and deserted
street. Alive to the value of every second, Enid condensed the narrative
of her experience in the grotto into a few words, but she missed no
vital point, from her imprisonment by "the bootlace man" to her escape
twenty minutes ago by the aid of her fellow-prisoner, the French
onion-seller. Nor did she omit to repeat the fantastic notions held by
Pierre Legros, and the final mystery of Violet Maynard's voice being
heard in the garden so late at night.

In his absorption in the momentous tale, Mr. Mallory came to a halt
under a street lamp, for they had intuitively turned their steps up the
hill homewards. Enid saw the dawn of a great fear in the well-chiselled
features she knew so well. But she would not have abstained from slang
on the Judgment Day.

"What is it, dad," she said, laying a grimy paw on the sleeve of her
father's dinner jacket. "Have I enabled you to spot the winner?" "This
is what I make of it on a rough calculation," Mr. Mallory replied. "The
Frenchman's suspicions as to Nugent taking Louise Aubin away on a
steamer are, of course, all moonshine. It is Violet Maynard who is being
decoyed on to the steamer, with Chermside and the murder of that
miserable Jew as items in a nice little plot of Nugent's. I