The Riddle of the Purple Emperor. Hanshew Mary E.

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      She cut short Mr. Roberts's excuses and practically drove the two men back until they found themselves once more on the steps. Then the door slammed in their faces.

      Constable Roberts turned swiftly upon his companion, and commenced a pent-up tirade against him for having fetched him out on this wild-goose chase.

      Cleek stood still, pinching his chin with a thumb and forefinger, his eyes narrowed down to slits. Review the facts however calmly, he could still find no fitting solution. Sure he was that a dead woman had stared at him from the floor of that house, but he was also just as sure that the same woman had driven him out from it. And what of Lady Margaret herself? He had not a shadow of right to insist on seeing her. She was in the hands of her natural guardian, and yet, and yet – ! The shadow of doubt hung over him.

      He stopped short suddenly and sniffed in the air, much to the open-mouthed astonishment of Constable Roberts, whose grumbling remonstrances died away.

      "Good Lord man, sir, I mean," he exclaimed, agitatedly, "but what's in the wind now?"

      "Scent and sense, my good fellow," said Cleek. "There is a distinct odour of jasmine in the air and an artificial scent, Huile de jasmin at that. It is a woman's scent, too, and some woman has been here to-night. She's been on these very stone steps."

      "Well, what if she has? That don't excuse you a-saying that Miss Cheyne is dead, when she's no more dead than you or me – " retorted the constable, heatedly. "I shall be the laughing-stock of the country, fetched out like a fool – "

      Hardly listening to the stream of grumbling expostulation issuing from the mouth of Constable Roberts, Cleek bent down and sniffed again vigorously. He tested each step till he reached the gravelled path. All at once he gave vent to a sharp cry of triumph for there, indented in the path before him and revealed by the light of his torch, was the mark of a slender shoe – a woman's shoe unmistakably.

      In a second they had passed the lodge gates and were out in the narrow lane, which was black as a beggar's pocket, and as empty. A placid moon shone over silent fields, and only the soft whirr of the motor broke the silence as they sped along.

      Nevertheless Cleek, as ever, was on the look-out. The sixth sense of impending danger which was in him strangely developed hung over him.

      Suddenly, with a little cry of surprise and a grinding of brakes, he pulled the car up with such a jerk that Roberts, who had subsided into a somnolent silence, was nearly thrown off the seat at his side.

      "A dollar for a ducat but I'm right!" he exclaimed sharply. "There's someone on that side of the hedge."

      Without stopping a second he leaped down, cleared the low hedge as lightly as any schoolboy, and pounced on a crouching, running, panting figure.

      "One minute, sir," he began. Then his fingers almost lost their hold, as the face of a man in deadly terror gazed up at him, and from him to the majesty of the law as embodied in the person of Constable Roberts. That worthy, having descended from the car, was now looking over the hedge.

      "Lawks, sir, if it bain't Sir Edgar himself!" he ejaculated, and the sound of the evidently familiar voice seemed to pull the distraught young man together.

      "Hello, Roberts," he said with a brave attempt at the debonair nonchalance which was his usual manner, an attempt that did not blind Cleek to the fact that his lips were trembling and beads of perspiration standing on his pale forehead.

      "What are you doing gadding around at this time of night?"

      "Me, sir?" replied Roberts, bitterly. "I've bin fetched out to see murdered women and – "

      "Not – not Miss Cheyne!" gasped the young man.

      A queer little smile looped up one corner of Cleek's mouth.

      "Hello, hello!" he said, mentally, "someone else knows of it, eh?" Here was somebody who, to his way of thinking, jumped to right conclusions too quickly. Why should Sir Edgar Brenton, as he knew this man to be, know that it should be Miss Cheyne, unless – and here Cleek's mind raced on wings of doubt again – unless he himself had killed Miss Cheyne? And if so, who was this woman – ?

      As if from some distance he could hear Roberts's grumbling bellow:

      "Miss Cheyne? Lor', don't you go for to say you've got that bee in your bonnet, too, Sir Edgar. It is quite enough with this gent, Lieutenant Deland, a-coming and fetching me away from my bit of supper. What my missis will say remains to be 'eard, as they says. 'Deed, no, Miss Cheyne's as live as you, and in a thunderin' bad temper – "

      "Thank the Lord!" ejaculated the young squire in a low, fervent undertone.

      "An' what made you think, if I might be so bold, Sir Edgar, that it was Miss Cheyne?" asked the constable curiously, voicing Cleek's unspoken thought.

      That gentleman cleared his throat before answering.

      "It was just a chance hit, Roberts," said he, but his voice held an odd little crabbed note in it. "You see, you were coming straight from Cheyne Court, so it couldn't have been any one else."

      "No, sir, come to think, it couldn't be," assented Roberts, and Cleek, who had stepped back into the shadow of the hedge, twitched up his eyebrows as he sensed the relief that stole over Sir Edgar's face.

      "A nice fright you gave me, too," continued the young man, speaking more easily. "I'm supposed to be at a political dinner-fight in London, you know, Roberts. Only just got back, in fact, and I didn't feel up to it, so when I heard that precious motor of yours I was afraid it might be some dashed good-natured friend, don't you know, and so I cut across the hedge."

      "Quite right, too," assented Constable Roberts approvingly, in whose eyes Sir Edgar could do no wrong. Then to Cleek, "Well, sir, I think we'll be moving, if you don't mind."

      "Indeed I don't," Cleek replied, and then he addressed Sir Edgar. "Sorry I startled you, sir – took you for a poacher, don't you know. Perhaps you'll let me drive you through the village if you are going this way." He smiled with a well-feigned air of stupidity, put up his eyeglass into his eye, and lurched up against the young man as he spoke.

      "Pleased," mumbled Sir Edgar, and got into the limousine.

      Another two or three minutes' run brought them into the village, and here Sir Edgar insisted on alighting, and continuing his journey on foot.

      Cleek watched him go with brows on which deep furrows were marked.

      "Wonder what made the young gentleman lie so futilely?" he said at length as his shadow gradually merged in with the darkness ahead.

      "Lie?" echoed the astonished constable, as he fumbled with the latch of his garden gate.

      "Yes, lie, my friend," flung back Cleek, his foot on the step of the car. "He was running to the station not from it; his clothes smelt strongly of the scent which pervaded the house this afternoon, namely jasmine; and thirdly, there was a revolver in his pocket. A revolver is a thing no gentleman takes to a dinner with him, even a political one."

      And, leaving Mr. Roberts to digest this piece of mental food with his long-delayed supper, the car whizzed away in the moonlight. Cleek's first duty was to Ailsa, and he found her waiting for him pale and expectant at the little gate.

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