“That’s how I know, dash you!  Superintendent sent me out after him, hot foot; and after a bit I picked him up in the Strand, toddling along with that French hussy as cool as you please.  But, blow him! he must have eyes all round his head, for he saw me just as soon as I saw him, and he and Frenchy separated like a shot.  She hopped into a taxi and flew off in one direction; he dived into a crowd and bolted in another, and before you could say Jack Robinson he was doubling and twisting, jumping into cabs and jumping out again—­all to gain time, of course, for the woman to do what he’d put her up to doing—­and leading me the devil’s own chase through the devil’s own tangle till he was ready to bunk for the Embankment.  And you let him go, you blooming footler!  Had him and let him go, and chucked away a third of L200 for the price of half a quid!”

And long after Smathers and Petrie had left him, and the wondering crowd had dispersed, and point duty at “Dead Man’s Corner” was just point duty again and nothing more, P.C.  Collins stood there, chewing the cud of bitter reflection over those words, and trying to reckon up just how many pounds and how much glory had been lost to him.

II

“But, damme, sir, the thing’s an outrage!  I don’t mince my words, Mr. Narkom—­I say plump and plain the thing’s an outrage, a disgrace to the police, an indignity upon the community at large; and for Scotland Yard to permit itself to be defied, bamboozled, mocked at in this appalling fashion by a paltry burglar—­”

“Uncle, dear, pray don’t excite yourself in this manner.  I am quite sure that if Mr. Narkom could prevent the things—­”

“Hold your tongue, Ailsa—­I will not be interfered with!  It’s time that somebody spoke out plainly and let this establishment know what the public has a right to expect of it.  What do I pay my rates and taxes for—­and devilish high ones they are, too, b’gad—­if it’s not to maintain law and order and the proper protection of property?  And to have the whole blessed country terrorised, the police defied, and people’s houses invaded with impunity by a gutter-bred brute of a cracksman is nothing short of a scandal and a shame!  Call this sort of tomfoolery being protected by the police?  God bless my soul! one might as well be in charge of a parcel of doddering old women and be done with it!”

It was an hour and a half after that exciting affair at “Dead Man’s Corner.”  The scene was Superintendent Narkom’s private room at headquarters, the dramatis personae, Mr. Maverick Narkom himself, Sir Horace Wyvern, and Miss Ailsa Lome, his niece, a slight, fair-haired, extremely attractive girl of twenty, the only and orphaned daughter of a much-loved sister, who, up till a year ago, had known nothing more exciting in the way of “life” than that which is to be found in a small village in Suffolk, and falls to the lot of an underpaid vicar’s