’I fancy that Miss Lindon, at this moment, is—­somewhere; I don’t, just now, know exactly where, but I hope very shortly to be able to give you a clearer notion,—­attired in a rotten, dirty pair of boots; a filthy, tattered pair of trousers; a ragged, unwashed apology for a shirt; a greasy, ancient, shapeless coat; and a frowsy peaked cloth cap.’

They stared at me, opened-eyed.  Atherton was the first to speak.

‘What on earth do you mean?’

’I mean that it seems to me that the facts point in the direction of my conclusions rather than yours—­and that very strongly too.  Miss Coleman asserts that she saw Miss London return into the house; that within a few minutes the blind was replaced at the front window; and that shortly after a young man, attired in the costume I have described, came walking out of the front door.  I believe that young man was Miss Marjorie Lindon.’

Lessingham and Atherton both broke out into interrogations, with Sydney, as usual, loudest.

’But—­man alive! what on earth should make her do a thing like that?  Marjorie, the most retiring, modest girl on all God’s earth, walk about in broad daylight, in such a costume, and for no reason at all! my dear Champnell, you are suggesting that she first of all went mad.’

‘She was in a state of trance.’

‘Good God!—­Champnell!’

‘Well?’

‘Then you think that—­juggling villain did get hold of her?’

’Undoubtedly.  Here is my view of the case, mind it is only a hypothesis and you must take it for what it is worth.  It seems to me quite clear that the Arab, as we will call the person for the sake of identification, was somewhere about the premises when you thought he wasn’t.’

’But—­where?  We looked upstairs, and downstairs, and everywhere—­ where could he have been?’

’That, as at present advised, I am not prepared to say, but I think you may take it for granted that he was there.  He hypnotised the man Holt, and sent him away, intending you to go after him, and so being rid of you both—­’

‘The deuce he did, Champnell!  You write me down an ass!’

’As soon as the coast was clear he discovered himself to Miss Lindon, who, I expect, was disagreeably surprised, and hypnotised her.’

‘The hound!’

‘The devil!’

The first exclamation was Lessingham’s, the second Sydney’s.

‘He then constrained her to strip herself to the skin—­’

‘The wretch!’

‘The fiend!’

’He cut off her hair; he hid it and her clothes under the floor where we found them—­where I think it probable that he had already some ancient masculine garments concealed—­’

’By Jove!  I shouldn’t be surprised if they were Holt’s.  I remember the man saying that that nice joker stripped him of his duds,—­and certainly when I saw him,—­and when Marjorie found him!—­he had absolutely nothing on but a queer sort of cloak.  Can it be possible that that humorous professor of hankey-pankey—­may all the maledictions of the accursed alight upon his head!—­can have sent Marjorie Lindon, the daintiest damsel in the land!—­into the streets of London rigged out in Holt’s old togs!’