From an unlighted window over the hall door a voice added itself to the conversation. "God help the house that holds them!" it said, addressing the universe. The window was closed. "That's old McRory!" said Miss Bennett in a horrified whisper. Again I thought of Chinatown, sleepless, incalculable, with its infinite capacity for sheltering the criminal. "--But, darling," said Philippa, some quarter of an hour later, as we proceeded down the avenue in the vaulted darkness of the beech-trees (and I at once realised that she had undertaken the case for the defence), "you've no reason to suppose that they took the car any farther than the hall door." "It is the last time that it will be taken to _that_ hall door," I replied, going dead slow, with my head over the side of the car, listening to unfamiliar sounds in its interior--sounds that did not suggest health. "I should like to know how many of your young friends went on the trip----" "My dear boy," said Philippa pityingly, "I ask you if it is likely that there would have been more than two, when one of them was the lady with the mandoline! And," she proceeded with cat-like sweetness, "I did not perceive that you took a party with you when you retired to the hall with your old friend Miss Bennett, and left me to cope single-handed with the mob for about an hour!" "Whether there were two or twenty-two of them in the car," I said, treating this red herring with suitable contempt, "I've done with your McRorys." I was, very appropriately, in the act of passing through the Temple Braney entrance gates as I made this pronouncement, and it was the climax of many outrages that the steering-gear, shaken by heaven knows what impacts and brutalities, should suddenly have played me false. The car swerved in her course--fortunately a slow one--and laid her bonnet impulsively against the Temple Braney gate pillar, as against a loved one's shoulder. As we regained our composure, two tall forms appeared in the light of the head lamps, and one of them held up his hand. I recognised a police patrol. "That's the car right enough," said one of them. He advanced to my side. "I want your name, please. I summons you for furious driving on the high road, without lights, a while ago, and refusing to stop when called on to do so. Go round and take the number, M'Caffery." When, a few days later, the story flowed over and ran about the country, some things that were both new and interesting came to my ears. Flurry Knox said that Bobby Bennett had sold me her old mare by moonlight in the Temple Braney yard, and it was a great credit to old McRory's champagne. Mrs. Knox, of Aussolas, was told that I had taken Mrs. McRory for a run in the car at one o'clock in the morning, and on hearing it said "De gustibus non est disputandum." Some one, unknown, repeated this to Mrs. McRory, and told her that it meant "You cannot touch pitch without being disgusted."