Danvers was quite chagrined when, on investigation, it was proved that Arthur Cutbush had gone to the York races three days before the assault, and never left that city until the Saturday evening, when a telegram from Miss Turner summoned him to Weston. Moreover, the girl did not break off her engagement with young Cutbush, and thus the total absence of motive was a serious bar to the likelihood of the theory. Then it was that the Chief sent for Lady Molly. No doubt he began to feel that here, too, was a case where feminine tact and my lady’s own marvellous intuition might prove more useful than the more approved methods of the sterner sex. 2 “Of course, there is a woman in the case, Mary,” said Lady Molly to me, when she came home from the interview with the chief, “although they all pooh-pooh that theory at the Yard, and declare that the female voice--to which the only two witnesses we have are prepared to swear--was a disguised one.” “You think, then, that a woman assaulted Jane Turner?” “Well,” she replied somewhat evasively, “if a man assumes a feminine voice, the result is a high-pitched, unnatural treble; and that, I feel convinced, would have struck either the maid or the lodger, or both, as peculiar.” This was the train of thought which my dear lady and I were following up, when, with that sudden transition of manner so characteristic of her, she said abruptly to me: “Mary, look out a train for Weston-super-Mare. We must try and get down there to-night.” “Chief’s orders?” I asked. “No--mine,” she replied laconically. “Where’s the A B C?” Well, we got off that self-same afternoon, and in the evening we were having dinner at the Grand Hotel, Weston-super-Mare. My dear lady had been pondering all through the journey, and even now she was singularly silent and absorbed. There was a deep frown between her eyes, and every now and then the luminous, dark orbs would suddenly narrow, and the pupils contract as if smitten with a sudden light. I was not a little puzzled as to what was going on in that active brain of hers, but my experience was that silence on my part was the surest card to play. Lady Molly had entered our names in the hotel book as Mrs. Walter Bell and Miss Granard from London; and the day after our arrival there came two heavy parcels for her under that name. She had them taken upstairs to our private sitting-room, and there we undid them together. To my astonishment they contained stacks of newspapers: as far as I could see at a glance, back numbers of the _West of England Times_ covering a whole year. “Find and cut out the ‘Personal’ column of every number, Mary,” said Lady Molly to me. “I’ll look through them on my return. I am going for a walk, and will be home by lunch time.”