the vulnerable point. Lavatory window, please!"

"But, Delavoye, look here!"

"I'm looking," said he, and we faced each other in the broad moonlight that flooded the already ragged lawn.

"If you think I'm going to let you break into this house, you're very much mistaken."

I had my back to the windows I meant to hold inviolate. No doubt the moon revealed some resolution in my face and bearing, for I meant what I said until Delavoye spoke again.

"Oh, very well! If it's coming to brute force I have no more to say. The police will have to do it, that's all. It's their job, when you come to think of it; but it'll be jolly difficult to get them to take it on, whereas you and I----"

And he turned away with a shrug to point his admirable aposiopesis.

"Man Uvo," I said, catching him by the arm, "what's this job you're jawing about?" 

"You know well enough. You're in the whole mystery of these people far deeper than I am. I only want to find the solution."

"And you think you'll find it in their house?"

"I know I should," said Uvo with quiet confidence. "But I don't say it'll be a pleasant find. I shouldn't ask you to come in with me, but merely to accept some responsibility afterwards--to-night, if we're spotted. It will probably involve more kudos in the end. But I don't want to let you in for more than you can stand meanwhile, Gillon."

That was enough for me. I myself led the way back to the windows, angrily enough until he took my arm, and then suddenly more at one with him than I had ever been before. I had seen his set lips in the moonlight, and felt the uncontrollable tremor of the hand upon my sleeve.

It so happened that it was not necessary to break in after all. I had generally some keys about me and the variety of locks on our back doors was not inexhaustible. It was the scullery door in this case that a happy chance thus enabled me to open. But I was now more determined than Delavoye himself, and would have stuck at no burglarious excess to test his prescience, to say nothing of a secret foreboding which had been forming in my own mind.

To one who went from house to house on the Estate as I did, and knew by heart the five or six 

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