rom Dijon we left the Paris road and struck due north by Chaumont and
Bar-le-duc to Verdun, Sedan, and Givet, where we passed into Belgium. At
the Metropole, in Brussels, we spent a welcome twenty-four hours, and
slept most of the time. Then on again, still due North, first to Boxtel,
in Holland, and then on to Utrecht.

Until that day--a week after leaving Monte Carlo on our rush across
Europe--Bindo practically preserved a complete silence as to his
intentions or as to what had happened.

All I had been able to gather from him was that Mademoiselle was still
at the Bristol, and that Blythe was still dancing attendance upon her
and the ugly old lady who acted as chaperon.

With Utrecht in sight across the flat, uninteresting country, traversed
everywhere by canals, we suddenly had a bad tyre-burst. Fortunately we
had a spare one, therefore it was only the half-hour delay that troubled
us.

Bindo helped me to take off the old cover, adjust a new tube and cover,
and worked the pump with a will. Then, just as I was giving the nuts a
final screw-up, preparatory to packing the tools away in the back, he
said--

"I expect, Ewart, this long run of ours has puzzled you very much,
hasn't it?"

"Of course it has," I replied. "I don't see the object of it all."

"The object was to get here before the police could trace us. That's why
we took such a roundabout route."

"And now we are here," I exclaimed, glancing over the dull, grey
landscape, "what are we going to do?"

"Do?" he echoed. "You ought to ask what we've _done_, my dear fellow!"

"Well, what have we done?" I inquired.

"About the neatest bit of business that we've ever brought off in our
lives," he laughed.

"How?"

"Let's get up and drive on," he said; "we won't stop in Utrecht, it's
such a miserable hole. Listen, and I'll explain as we go along."

So I locked up the back, got up to the wheel again, and we resumed our
journey.

* * * * *

"It was like this, you see," he commenced. "I own I was entirely misled
in the beginning. That little girl played a trick on me. She's evidently
not the ingenuous miss that I took her to be."

"You mean Pierrette?" I laughed. "No, I quite agree with you. She's been
to Monte Carlo before, I believe."

"Well," exclaimed the debonnair Bindo, "I met her in London, as you
know. Our acquaintance was quite a casual one, in the big hall of the
Cecil--where I afterwards discovered she was