small white gate that led out from the garden into the road. It was as though the gate held him from the outer world and he would never pass through it until this was decided for him. Her face came before him as she had sat there on the other side of the table, as it had been when their glances met. No, he did not doubt her for an instant. 

 Whatever her experiences of the last month she was pure in heart and soul as some child at her mother's knee. She had her pride, her pluck, her resolve, but also, above all else, her innocent simplicity, her ignorance of all the evil in the world. And as though the most urgent problem of all his life had been solved, he gave the little white gate a push and stepped through it into the open road. 

II

 He was now in the country to the left of, and above, the town. He could see its lights clustered, like gold coins thrown into some capacious lap, there below him in the valley. 

 He struck off along a path that led between deeply scented fields and that led straight down the hill. He began now more soberly to consider the facts of the case, and a certain depression stole about him. He didn't after all see very well what he would be able to do. They were going, on the following morning, the three of them, abroad, and once there how was he to effect any sort of rescue? 

 The girl was apparently quite legally married and, although the horrible young Crispin had been silent and sinister, there were no signs that he was positively cruel. The deeper Harkness looked into it the more he was certain that the secret of the whole mystery lay in the older Crispin—it was of him that the girl was terrified rather than the son. Harkness did not know how he was sure of this, he could trace no actual words or looks, but there—yes, there, the centre of the plot lay. 

 The man was strange and queer enough to look at, but a more charming companion you could not find. He had been nothing but amiable, friendly and courteous. His attitude to his daughter-in-law had been everything that any one could wish. He had seemed to consider her in every possible way. 

 Harkness, with his American naïveté of conduct, was fond of the word "wholesome," or rather, had he not spent so much of his life in Europe, would have found it his highest term of praise to call his fellow-man "a regular feller!" Crispin Senior was not "a regular feller" whatever else he might be. There had, too, been one moment towards the end of dinner 

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