When they were at a safe distance he turned to Dunn and said

“Is he serious, do you think, or is he playing with her?  I’ll make him pay for it if he is.”

“How should I know?” answered Dunn, quite certain it was no such anxiety as this that had set Deede Dawson watching them so carefully.

Deede Dawson seemed to feel that the explanation he had offered was a little crude, and he made no attempt to enlarge on it.

With a complete change of manner, with his old smile on his lips and his eyes as dark and unsmiling as ever, he said

“Pretty girl, Ella—­isn’t she?”

“She is more than pretty, she is beautiful,” Dunn answered with an emphasis that made Deede Dawson look at him sharply.

“Think so?” he said, and gave his peculiar laugh that had so little mirth in it.  “Well, you’re right, she is.  He’ll be a lucky man that gets her—­and she’s to be had, you know.  But I’ll tell you one thing, it won’t be John Clive.”

“I thought it rather looked,” observed Dunn, “as if Miss Cayley might mean—­”

Deede Dawson interrupted with a quick jerk of his head.

“Never mind what she means, it’ll be what I mean,” he declared.  “I am boss; and what’s more, she knows it.  I believe in a man being master in his own family.  Don’t you?”

“If he can be,” retorted Dunn.  “But still, a girl naturally—­”

“Naturally nothing,” Deede Dawson interrupted again.  “I tell you what I want for her, a man I can-trust-trust-that’s the great thing.  Some one I can trust.”

He nodded at Dunn as he said this and then walked off, and Dunn felt very puzzled as he, too, turned away.

“Was he offering her to me?” he asked himself.  “It almost sounded like it.  If so, it must mean there’s something he wants from me pretty bad.  She’s beautiful enough to turn any man’s head—­but did she know about poor Charlie’s murder? —­help in it, perhaps? —­as she said she did with the packing-case.”

He paused, and all his body was shaken by strong and fierce emotion.

“God help me,” he groaned.  “I believe I would marry her tomorrow if I could, innocent or guilty.”

CHAPTER XIII

INVISIBLE WRITING

It was the next day that there arrived by the morning post a letter for Dunn.

Deede Dawson raised his eyebrows slightly when he saw it; and he did not hand it on until he had made himself master of its contents, though that did not prove to be very enlightening or interesting.  The note, in fact, merely expressed gratification at the news that Dunn had secured steady work, a somewhat weak hope that he would keep it, and a still fainter hope that now perhaps he would be able to return the ten shillings borrowed, apparently from the writer, at some time in the past.

Mr. Deede Dawson, in spite of the jejune nature of the communication, read it very carefully and indeed even went so far as to examine the letter through a powerful magnifying-glass.