echoing, dismantled room behind her.
She heard them on the brick of the broad passage which separated the
living-rooms of the bungalow from its bed-chambers. She heard him
lift the latch of the outer door. She heard the outer door shut
behind him. Then she waited for his footsteps to sound again on the
sunken pathway which ran downhill beside her patch of garden, hidden
by the cactus fence--or rather, deep below it. "He is standing on
the doorstep," she said to herself, "lighting a cigarette"; and then,
"but he is a long while about it. This is strange." Still as her
ear caught no sound of him, Santa sprang up and slipped, guitar in
hand, to the outer door--the fence being too tall for her to
over-pry, and moreover prickly. She opened the door and peeped out.
There was no one down the pathway. There was no one up the pathway,
which here, for some fifty or sixty yards, climbed straight, full in
view. "And what on earth has become of him?" wondered Santa.
"He did not go down--I should have heard him. But why should he go
up? He has broken with those drinkers at Engelbaum's. . . . Besides,
it is unbelievable that, in this short time, he should have vanished.
. . ."

So much for guesswork. Now I come back to the story as it was
afterwards related to me.

Santa, standing there in the porch, guitar in hand and leaning
forward over the rail which guarded a long flight of stone
steps, heard a footfall on the road below--an ascending footfall.
For a moment she mistook it for Farrell's: she believed she could
distinguish Farrell's from any other man's: and so for a moment she
stood mystified.

Then a man hove in view around the corner . . . not Farrell, but the
newly-landed stranger she had spied through her binoculars--the
presumed Inspector. His eyes were lifted as he calculated the new
gradient ahead of him, and thus on the instant he caught sight of
Santa aloft in the porch-way. Something held Santa's feet.

"Many pardons, _senora_," said the Stranger, halting a little before
he came abreast of the stairway and lifting his hat. "But can you
tell me if this path leads to the Hotel?"

Now Santa was confused and a little abashed--it may have been because
in her haste she had forgotten to drape her head in her mantilla--a
rite proper to be observed by Peruvian ladies before showing
themselves out-of-doors. But she could not help smiling: the
question being so absurd.

"Seeing, _sentor_, that there can b