“We’d ‘a’ found it.  There ain’t a closet or a pair o’ curtains or a shower bath or bookcase or a screen or bureau or table or bed that’s had a chance to keep a secret from us—–­”

“Did you ever hear the song of ‘The Mistletoe Bough?’” inquired the doubter.

“You bet we did.  You don’t have to show us!  We snooped all around the trunk room and rummaged in every box big enough to hold a dwarf.  None of ’em was locked, but if they had been—­why, we go around prepared.”

“You don’t look as if you’d done much prowling in the coal cellar, anyhow!” laughed Peter.

“That’s because there ain’t enough coal in it to dirty a dove,” explained the policeman.  “Why, we even had a squint into the wine bins and the kitchen pantries and under the sink and into a laundry basket.  There ain’t a fly on the wall in this house but we wouldn’t know its face if we met it again!”

They all laughed once more, and none more loudly than Logan, though he had given Peter Rolls a puzzled glance for each new and apparently aimless question.

“If I wrote those detective stories, I’d use this for a plot,” Petro went on; “but it wouldn’t be much good to the magazines the way it’s turned out.  I think I’d have a girl hidden behind a sliding panel, or a picture that came out of its frame, or something, and the hero find her.”

“Then you mustn’t lay your plot in this house,” retorted the officer.  “There ain’t any pictures a full-sized cat could crawl through, and as for Mr. Logan’s panels, they look real nice, but I guess they’re the kind you buy by the yard.  And there ain’t a room with a wall that could open to hide anything thicker than a paper doll.”

He earned a laugh again on that climax.  Peter said that he would have to go to some old country on the other side to write the kind of story he meant.  The men finished their champagne and had more.  Then they finished that with a gay health (proposed by their host) to Freddy Fortescue.  And at last there was no doubt that the time had come to go.

Logan shook hands with both and pressed gifts of cigars and cigarettes upon them.  If Peter intended to give Logan away, now was the latest, the very latest moment.  But he said not a word.  Satisfied that the girl could not possibly be concealed in the house, her name must not be risked.  While Logan accompanied the guardians of the law to the front door, opened by Sims for their benefit, Peter annexed the blue smoke wreath.  A splinter of wood (the furniture was only imitation Jacobean) had impaled the rag of chiffon, and almost tenderly releasing it, Rolls folded the trophy away in a breast pocket.

His imagination had not tricked him.  The stuff did smell of fresias—­which he proved by holding it to his lips for an instant—­the very scent that had come out to him whenever the dryad door opened, in reality and memory, the scent he had grown intimate with while the Moon dress hung in his wardrobe during those days when he had awaited a chance to present his offering to Ena!