"As for the rest; when Van Nant entered that studio to-night, frightened half out of his wits at the knowledge that he would have to deal with the one detective he feared, I knew that if he approached that statue and made any attempts to examine it I should have my man, and that the hiding-place of his victim's body would be proved beyond question. When he did go to it, and did examine it--Clarges Street at last, thank fortune; for I am tired and sleepy. Stop here, Lennard; I'm getting out. Come along, Dollops. Good-night, Mr. Narkom! 'And so, to bed,' as good old Pepys says." And passed on, up the street, with his hand on the boy's shoulder and the stillness and the darkness enfolding them. CHAPTER XXVII For the next five or six weeks life ran on merrily enough for Cleek; so merrily, in fact, that Dollops came to be quite accustomed to hear him whistling about the house and to see him go up the stairs two steps at a time whenever he had occasion to mount them for any purpose whatsoever. It would not have needed any abnormally acute mind, any process of subtle reasoning, to get at the secret of all this exuberance, this perennial flow of high spirits; indeed, one had only to watch the letter box at Number 204, Clarges Street, to get at the bottom of it instantly; for twice a week the postman dropped into it a letter addressed in an undoubtedly feminine "hand" to Captain Horatio Burbage, and invariably postmarked "Lynhaven, Devon." Dollops had made that discovery long ago and had put his conclusions regarding it into the mournfully-uttered sentence: "A skirt's got him!" But, after one violent pang of fierce and rending jealousy, was grateful to that "skirt" for bringing happiness to the man he loved above all other things upon earth and whose welfare was the dearest of his heart's desires. Indeed, he grew, in time, to watch as eagerly for the coming of those letters as did his master himself; and he could have shouted with delight whenever he heard the postman's knock, and saw one of the regulation blue-grey envelopes drop through the slit into the wire cage on the door. Cleek, too, was delighted when he saw them. It was nothing to him that the notes they contained were of the briefest--mere records of the state of the weather, the progress of his little lordship, the fact that Lady Chepstow wished to be remembered and that the writer was well "and hoped he, too, was." They were written by _her_--that was enough. He gave so much that very little sufficed him in return; and the knowledge that he had been in her mind for the five or ten minutes which it had taken to write the few lines she sent him, made him exceedingly happy.