Philip waited nearly a quarter of an hour for Elizabeth.  When at last she returned, she was unusually silent.  They drove off together in her automobile.  She held his fingers under the rug.

“Philip dear,” she said, “I think it is time that you and I were married.”

He turned and looked at her in amazement.  There was a smile upon her lips, but rather a plaintive one.  He had a fancy, somehow, that there had been tears in her eyes lately.

“Elizabeth!”

“If we are ever going to be,” she went on softly, “why shouldn’t we be married quietly, as people are sometimes, and then tell every one afterwards?”

He held the joy away from him, struggling hard for composure.

“But a little time ago,” he reminded her, “you wanted to wait.”

“Yes,” she confessed, “I, too, had my—­my what shall I call it—­fear?—­my ghost in the background?”

“Ah! but not like mine,” he faltered, his voice unsteady with a surging flood of passion.  “Elizabeth, if you really mean it, if you are going to take the risk of finding yourself the wife of the villain in a cause celebre, why—­why—­you know very well that even the thought of it can draw me up into heaven.  But, dear—­my sweetheart—­remember!  We’ve played a bold game, or rather I have with your encouragement, but we’re not safe yet.”

“Do you know anything that I don’t?” she asked feverishly.

“Well, I suppose I do,” he admitted.  “It isn’t necessarily serious,” he went on quickly, as he saw the colour fade from her cheeks, “but on the very night that our play was produced, whilst I was waiting about for you all at the restaurant, a man came to see me.  He is one of the keenest detectives in New York—­Edward Dane his name is.  He knew perfectly well that I was the man who had disappeared from the Waldorf.  He told me so to my face.”

“Then why didn’t he—­why didn’t he do something?”

“Because he was clever enough to suspect that there was something else behind it all,” Philip said grimly.  “You see, he’d discovered that I hadn’t used any of the money.  He couldn’t fit in any of my doings with the reports they’d had about Douglas.  Somehow or other—­I can’t tell how—­another suspicion seems to have crept into the man’s brain.  All the time he talked to me I could see him trying to read in my face whether there wasn’t something else!  He’d stumbled across a puzzle of which the pieces didn’t fit.  He has gone to England—­gone to Detton Magna—­gone to see whether there are any missing pieces to be found.  He may be back any day now.”

“But what could he discover?” she faltered.