"'Sure thing!'--to quote Katie again. Just took a spin over to show myself off. Plenty of brass trimmings! What? I thought, dad, you'd like to be sure that I really am done with the clubs at last. Not because they blacklisted me--for they didn't--but because--oh well, _you_ know. No taxicabmen need apply--that sort of thing. I'll be invited to resign from every blessed one of them to-morrow, and there's not a chap connected with any one of 'em who'd be seen taking a match from me to light his cigarette with after this. All the same, though, I go out of them with a clean slate, and that's all I cared about. I did get that two hundred after all, pater. Curzon and Katie raised it for me between them--out of their own private accounts, you know--and as driving a car is the only thing I really do understand, I'm earning the money to pay them back this way." "That's the stuff, by Jupiter! That's the stuff!" rapped out Cleek, impulsively. "You ought to have known from the first, Sir Mawson, that they don't make thieves of this sort of material?" "Thieves? What do you mean by thieves? And who the dickens are you, anyway? I say, dad, who's this johnnie? What's he driving at? What does he mean by talking about thieves?" "The necklace--the Ranee's necklace! The Ladder of Light!" bleated Sir Mawson feebly. "It is gone! It is lost! It went when _you_ went. There has been no trace of it since." Then he joined Lady Leake, and plucked at the boy's sleeve, and between them out came the whole miserable story. "And you think that I stole it? You dare to think that?" flung out his son, jerking back from him and brushing aside Lady Leake's solicitous hand. "Very well, then, think what you jolly well please! I'm done with the lot of you!" And after that--the Deluge! Speaking, he turned on his heel and rushed back to his taxi, wrenched open its door, revealing what none of them had suspected before, because of the drawn curtains: that the vehicle was occupied--and sang out in a fine fury, "Pull up the blinds, Curz. Come out, old chap. Come out, Major! Come out, Katie--all of you--at once! There isn't going to be any 'jolly lark,' any 'pleasant surprise,' any 'killing of the fatted calf.' This isn't a comedy--it's a tragedy! Hop out lively--the lot of you! I'm done with my father, and I've got to get back to my place in the ranks as fast as I can fly. I'll pay you back, Katie. I'll pay you back, Curz, old chap! Yes, by God! I will if I drive this thing night and day without sleeping!" Then came a sudden banging of the taxi's door, a hoot from the horn as he jumped back to his seat and sounded a warning note, and in the winking of an eye he was off and away, and there in the road stood a stout, pleasant-faced old gentleman, a youth with a budding moustache, and a bright-faced, fairylike little lady of about eighteen, all three of whom were standing stock still and staring after the vanishing taxi in the blankest of blank amazement. Of a sudden, however: