As the hansom bowled along we three had what occasionally approached a warm discussion.

‘Marjorie was in that bundle,’ began Lessingham, in the most lugubrious of tones, and with the most woe-begone of faces.

‘I doubt it,’ I observed.

’She was,—­I feel it,—­I know it.  She was either dead and mutilated, or gagged and drugged and helpless.  All that remains is vengeance.’

‘I repeat that I doubt it.’

Atherton struck in.

’I am bound to say, with the best will in the world to think otherwise, that I agree with Lessingham.’

‘You are wrong.’

’It’s all very well for you to talk in that cock-sure way, but it’s easier for you to say I’m wrong than to prove it.  If I am wrong, and if Lessingham’s wrong, how do you explain his extraordinary insistance on taking it inside the cab with him, which the bobby describes?  If there wasn’t something horrible, awful in that bundle of his, of which he feared the discovery, why was he so reluctant to have it placed upon the roof?’

’There probably was something in it which he was particularly anxious should not be discovered, but I doubt if it was anything of the kind which you suggest.’

’Here is Marjorie in a house alone—­nothing has been seen of her since,—­her clothing, her hair, is found hidden away under the floor.  This scoundrel sallies forth with a huge bundle on his head,—­the bobby speaks of it being five or six feet long, or longer,—­a bundle which he regards with so much solicitude that he insists on never allowing it to go, for a single instant, out of his sight and reach.  What is in the thing? don’t all the facts most unfortunately point in one direction?’

Mr Lessingham covered his face with his hands, and groaned.

‘I fear that Mr Atherton is right.’

‘I differ from you both.’

Sydney at once became heated.

‘Then perhaps you can tell us what was in the bundle?’

‘I fancy I could make a guess at the contents.’

’Oh you could, could you, then, perhaps, for our sakes, you’ll make it,—­and not play the oracular owl!—­Lessingham and I are interested in this business, after all.’

’It contained the bearer’s personal property:  that, and nothing more.  Stay! before you jeer at me, suffer me to finish.  If I am not mistaken as to the identity of the person whom the constable describes as the Arab, I apprehend that the contents of that bundle were of much more importance to him than if they had consisted of Miss Lindon, either dead or living.  More.  I am inclined to suspect that if the bundle was placed on the roof of the cab, and if the driver did meddle with it, and did find out the contents, and understand them, he would have been driven, out of hand, stark staring mad.’

Sydney was silent, as if he reflected.  I imagine he perceived there was something in what I said.

‘But what has become of Miss Lindon?’