“Me!  She scorns me!” he said, and laughed again, and flung them all back and shut the drawer upon them.  And presently he knew that he held her all the higher because she did scorn him; because her life was such that she could scorn him; and the bitterness dropped out of him, his eyes softened, and though he still laughed, it was for an utterly different reason, and in a wholly different way.

Some pots of tulips and mignonette stood on the ledge of his window.  He walked over to see that they were watered before he went to bed.  And between the time when he got down on his knees to fish out his bath-slippers from beneath the bed-stead and the creak of the springs when he lay down for the night, he was so long and so still that one might have believed he was doing something else.

He slept long, and rose in the morning soothed and subdued in spirit—­better and brighter in every way; for now no affair, for The Yard hampered his movements and claimed his time.  He was free; he was back in the Town—­beautiful because it contained her—­and he might hark back to the old trick of watching and following and being close to her without her knowledge.

It was a vain hope that, however.  For, although he dressed and went out and haunted the neighbourhood of Sir Horace Wyvern’s house for hours on end, he saw nothing of her that day.  Nor did he see her the next, nor the next, nor yet the next again.  At first, he began to think that she must come out and return during the times when he was obliged to go off guard and get his meal—­for he could not bring himself to play the part of the spy or the common policeman, and filch news from the servants—­but when a week had gone by in this manner, he set all question upon that point at rest by remaining at his post from sunrise to ten o’clock at night.  She did not appear.  He wondered what that meant—­whether it indicated that she had already accepted one of the two positions, or had gone to stop with her friend on the other side of Hampstead Heath.

The result of that wondering was that, for the next five days, the gentleman who was known in Clarges Street as “Captain Horatio Burbage,” became a regular visitor to the neighbourhood of the house in Bardon Road.  The issue was exactly the same.  Miss Lorne did not appear.

He could no longer doubt that she had accepted one or other of the two positions; but steadfastly refrained from making any personal inquiry.  She would hear of it if anybody called to inquire her whereabouts; and she would guess who had done it.  He would not have her feel that he was thrusting himself upon her, inquiring about her as one might inquire about a common servant.  If it was her will that he should know, then that knowledge should come from her, not be picked up as one picks up clues to missing people of the criminal class.

So then, it was good-bye to Bardon Road, just as it had been good-bye to Mayfair.  He turned his back upon it in the very moment he came to that conclusion, and had just set his face in the direction of the heath when he was brought to a standstill by the sound of someone calling out sharply:  “Burbage—­I say, Captain Burbage:  stop a moment, please.”  And, screwing round instantly, he saw a red limousine pelting toward him, and an excited chauffeur waving a gloved hand.