“So it was safer to have her out of the way?”

“Yes.”

“But, look here, Tony, why do you want to bother about this end of it?  We can always get in at the bowling-green end.”

“I know, but if we do that we shall have to do it openly.  It will mean breaking open the box, and letting Cayley know that we’ve done it.  You see, Bill, if we don’t find anything out for ourselves in the next day or two, we’ve got to tell the police what we have found out, and then they can explore the passage for themselves.  But I don’t want to do that yet.”

“Rather not.

“So we’ve got to carry on secretly for a bit.  It’s the only way.”  He smiled and added, “And it’s much more fun.”

“Rather!” Bill chuckled to himself.

“Very well.  Where does the secret passage begin?”

CHAPTER XI

The Reverend Theodore Ussher

“There’s one thing, which we have got to realize at once,” said Antony, “and that is that if we don’t find it easily, we shan’t find it at all.”

“You mean that we shan’t have time?”

“Neither time nor opportunity.  Which is rather a consoling thought to a lazy person like me.”

“But it makes it much harder, if we can’t really look properly.”

“Harder to find, yes, but so much easier to look.  For instance, the passage might begin in Cayley’s bedroom.  Well, now we know that it doesn’t.”

“We don’t know anything of the sort,” protested Bill.

“We—­know for the purposes of our search.  Obviously we can’t go tailing into Cayley’s bedroom and tapping his wardrobes; and obviously, therefore, if we are going to look for it at all, we must assume that it doesn’t begin there.”

“Oh, I see.”  Bill chewed a piece of grass thoughtfully.  “Anyhow, it wouldn’t begin on an upstairs floor, would it?”

“Probably not.  Well, we’re getting on.”

“You can wash out the kitchen and all that part of the house,” said Bill, after more thought.  “We can’t go there.”

“Right.  And the cellars, if there are any.”

“Well, that doesn’t leave us much.”

“No.  Of course it’s only a hundred-to-one chance that we find it, but what we want to consider is which is the most likely place of the few places in which we can look safely.”

“All it amounts to,” said Bill, “is the living-rooms downstairs dining-room, library, hall, billiard-room and the office rooms.”

“Yes, that’s all.”

“Well, the office is the most likely, isn’t it?”

“Yes.  Except for one thing.”

“What’s that?”

“Well, it’s on the wrong side of the house.  One would expect the passage to start from the nearest place to which it is going.  Why make it longer by going under the house first?”

“Yes, that’s true.  Well, then, you think the dining-room or the library?”