but it's something a jolly sight more important--it is the
voice of man--or rather of woman. So I think we'd better scoot in its
direction."

MacIan snatched up his fallen weapon without a word, and the two raced
away towards that part of the distant road from which the cry was now
constantly renewed.

They had to run over a curve of country that looked smooth but was very
rough; a neglected field which they soon found to be full of the tallest
grasses and the deepest rabbit-holes. Moreover, that great curve of the
countryside which looked so slow and gentle when you glanced over it,
proved to be highly precipitous when you scampered over it; and Turnbull
was twice nearly flung on his face. MacIan, though much heavier, avoided
such an overthrow only by having the quick and incalculable feet of the
mountaineer; but both of them may be said to have leapt off a low cliff
when they leapt into the road.

The moonlight lay on the white road with a more naked and electric glare
than on the grey-green upland, and though the scene which it revealed
was complicated, it was not difficult to get its first features at a
glance.

A small but very neat black-and-yellow motor-car was standing stolidly,
slightly to the left of the road. A somewhat larger light-green
motor-car was tipped half-way into a ditch on the same side, and four
flushed and staggering men in evening dress were tipped out of it. Three
of them were standing about the road, giving their opinions to the
moon with vague but echoing violence. The fourth, however, had
already advanced on the chauffeur of the black-and-yellow car, and was
threatening him with a stick. The chauffeur had risen to defend himself.
By his side sat a young lady.

She was sitting bolt upright, a slender and rigid figure gripping the
sides of her seat, and her first few cries had ceased. She was clad in
close-fitting dark costume, a mass of warm brown hair went out in two
wings or waves on each side of her forehead; and even at that distance
it could be seen that her profile was of the aquiline and eager sort,
like a young falcon hardly free of the nest.

Turnbull had concealed in him somewhere a fund of common sense and
knowledge of the world of which he himself and his best friends were
hardly aware. He was one of those who take in much of the shows of
things absent-mindedly, and in an irrelevant reverie. As he stood at
the door of his editorial shop on Ludgate Hill and meditated on the