for a fool, and he has never betrayed me yet.  There I was in the hotel with these twenty-three derelicts, all underfed, and all more or less mentally defective through Glasson’s ill-treatment.  Two or three were actually crying, in a feeble way, to be ‘taken home,’ as they called it.  They were afraid—­afraid of their kind, afraid of strange faces, afraid of everything but to be starved and whipped.  I was forced to send out and buy new clothes for some, there and then; and their backs, when I stripped ’em, were criss-crossed with weals—­not quite fresh, you understand, for Glasson had been kept busy of late, and the woman Huggins hadn’t his arm.  Well, there I was, stranded, with these creatures on my hands, all of ’em, as you may say, looking up at me in a dumb way, and wanting to know why I couldn’t have let ’em alone—­and if ever I smash up another Orphanage you may call me a Turk, and put me in a harem—­when all of a sudden it occurred to me to look up the names of the benevolent parties backing the institution.  The woman had given me a copy of the prospectus, intending to impress me.  I promised myself I’d rattle these philanthropists as they ’d never been rattled before in their lives.  And then—­why had I ever doubted him?—­half-way down the list I lit on Elphinstone’s name. . . .  His place is at Henley-in-Arden, you see, and not far from Bursfield. . . .  So I rattled the others (I spent three-quarters of an hour in the telegraph office, and before eleven last night I had thirty-two answers.  They are all in my bag, and you shall look ’em over by and by, if you want to be tickled), but I sent Elphinstone what the girl Tilda would call a cough-drop.  It ran to five sheets or thereabouts, and cost four-and-eightpence; and I wound up by telling him I meant every word I’d said.  He’s in Bursfield at this moment, you may bet, carting those orphans around into temporary quarters.  And Elphinstone is a kind-hearted man, but orphans are not exactly his line—­not what he’d call congenial to him.”

“But these two?  You seem to me pretty sure about finding them on Holmness:  too sure, I suggest.  Either you’ve forgotten to say why you’re certain, or I may have missed—­”

“You are getting keen, I see.  No, I have no right to be sure, except that I rely on the girl—­and on Hucks. (You ought to know Hucks, by the way; he is a warrior.) But I am sure:  so sure that I have wired for a steam-launch to be ready by Clatworthy pier. . . .  Will you come?”

“I propose to see this affair through,” he said deliberately.

Miss Sally gave him a sharp look, and once again nodded approval.

“And, moreover, so sure,” she went on, “that I have not wired to send Chichester in search.  That’s worrying me, I confess; for although Hucks is positive the girl would not start for Holmness without provisions—­ and on my reading of her, he’s right—­this is Tuesday, and they have been missing ever since Saturday night, or Sunday morning at latest.”