Five thousand pounds for a fortnight's badgering. Who wouldn't put up with a bit of discomfort for that. The wily Hun had handed him over far more substantial terrors than these gentlemen were likely to command and his pay for enduring them had worked out at approximately three pound ten a week. He fell to considering in what manner he would invest his earnings and a very attractive farming scheme in New Zealand began to formulate prettily. Farming had always appealed to him and there was a spot in the Canterbury district which had taken his fancy when he had visited the South Island two years before. There were green plains there and lettuce green woods and it was watered by a network of fast running streams, great and little, where fat rainbow trout sunned themselves in the shallows or leapt and jostled where the water tumbled creaming over rock and boulder. By Gad! it would be something like to build one's house in such surroundings--and maybe later on to marry and---- It was the word marry that switched his thoughts up another channel and in imagination found him once again standing beside the girl with the splendid eyes who called at Barraclough's flat two hours before. "Wish she wasn't mixed up in this outfit," he said to himself. "A girl like that! Perfectly ripping creature. By jing! put her alongside a man after her own heart--some decent fellow with the pluck to stand up against that wayward strain--and there might be a good deal of happiness knocking around for the pair of them. I suppose that ass Barraclough turned her down. Pretty hard to please. Wonder if he got away all right. Ripping scent she used. Coty, I believe, something Jacque Minot." As a man will who is trying to revive the impression of a scent he sniffed the air gently with his eyes shut, only to open them with an expression of surprise. Surely it was no imagination but the odour of Rose Jacque Minot, taint and exquisite, seemed to hang in the air. Thin waves of it growing and diminishing in intensity were wafted across his head almost as though directed from a spray. "If that isn't the oddest thing," he gasped. "Now I wonder----" The light flashed up for a second--just long enough to reveal the fact that the room was empty. "Damn funny," he said and sat up in bed puzzling. He remained thus for several minutes but no solution to the mystery presented itself. Moreover, the scent had gone from the air and nothing but the memory remained. "Suppose I can't have been fool enough to imagine it. Never heard of a man being haunted by a perfume." He lowered his head to the pillow feeling, for no explainable reason, strangely disquieted, only to rise again almost instantly exclaiming: "'Tany rate, this is no imagination." For the reek of onions was in the air--gross and nauseous. You could have cut it with a knife.