“I heard a noise and came down to see what it was,” answered Dunn.  “There was a light in the breakfast-room, but I didn’t see any one, and the front door was open so I came out here.  Is anything wrong?”

“That’s what I want to know,” said Deede Dawson.  “Come back to the house with me.  If any one is about, he can just take himself off.”

He spoke the last sentence loudly, and Dunn took it as a veiled instruction to his companion to depart.

He realized that if he had saved Clive he had done so at the cost of missing the best opportunity that had yet come his way of obtaining very important, and, perhaps, decisive information.

To have discovered the identity of this stranger who had come visiting Deede Dawson might have meant much, and he told himself angrily that Clive’s safety had certainly not been worth purchasing at the cost of such a lost chance, though he supposed that was a point on which Clive himself might possibly entertain a different opinion.

But now there was nothing for it but to go quietly back to the house, for clearly Deede Dawson’s suspicions were aroused and he had his revolver ready in his hand.

“I suppose it was only cats all the time,” he observed, with apparent unconcern.  “But at first I made sure there were no burglars in the house.”

“And I suppose,” suggested Deede Dawson.  “You think one burglar’s enough in a household.”

“I don’t mean to have any one else mucking around,” growled Dunn in answer.

“Very admirable sentiments,” said Deede Dawson and asked several more questions that showed he still entertained some suspicion of Dunn, and was not altogether satisfied that his appearance in the garden was quite innocent, or that the noise heard there was due solely to cats.

Dunn answered as best he could, and Deede Dawson listened and smiled, and smiled again, and watched him from eyes that did not smile at all.

“Oh, well,” Deede Dawson said at last, with a yawn.  “Anyhow, it’s all right now.  You had better get along back to bed, and I’ll lock up.”  He accompanied Dunn into the hall and watched him ascend the stairs, and as Dunn went slowly up them he felt by no means sure that soon a bullet would not come questing after him, searching for heart or brain.

For he was sure that Deede Dawson still suspected him, and he knew Deede Dawson to be very sudden and swift in action.  But nothing happened, he reached the broad, first landing in safety, and he was about to go on up to his attic when he beard a door at the end of the passage open and saw Ella appear in her dressing-gown.

“What is the matter?” she asked, in a low voice.

“It’s all right,” he answered.  “There was a noise in the garden, and I came down to see what it was, but it’s only cats.”

“Oh, is that all?” she said distrustfully.

“Yes,” he answered, in a lower voice still, he said: