I dragged my arm free and went, blind and stumbling, towards the sound. I shall find someone to go to the Queen...! The Healer had followed quickly: "What are you doing! That's a public-house." They took me back, they put me in the cab. I hardly knew why I resisted, except that I was looking wildly about for someone to appeal to, and I kept childishly repeating: "The Queen ... the Queen." While Mrs. Harborough was being helped into the cab after me, I leaned out of the window on the opposite side, looking up the street and down. The wind blew cold on my wet face. "The Queen, the Queen! Oh, why are you Queen of England, if you can't help Betty?" The door of the public-house opened, and a man reeled out. A man in chauffeur's dress. A man--with crooked shoulders! I remembered now. I opened the cab-door on my side, and tore across the street with voices calling after me. The unsteady figure had stooped down by the waiting taxi, and set the machinery whirring. "Tell me," I bent over him. "Are you the man who brought me to Lowndes Square an hour or so ago?" The man looked up. As the cab light fell on his face I recognised him. Oh, God, the relief! CHAPTER XXXI THE MAN WITH THE SWORD "Take me back! Take me to the place you brought me from," I cried to the stooping figure. The others had come up. The chauffeur was vague and mumbling. He was drunk enough to be stubborn, cautious. But money quickened him. He had picked me up, he said, "in one of the streets...." he couldn't say positively which, and he mentioned several. It might be any one of them; but it wasn't far from St. John's Wood Station. In spite of the man's condition I wanted to get into his cab. I had a horror of losing him. "I have taken his number," the Healer said, as though that were enough. And all the while---- But we are coming, Betty! Coming.... The other driver had been summoned. I heard the names of streets and of police-stations. They settled which would be the one. "Will you drive very fast?" I asked. "I will give you all I have if you'll drive fast." The drunken chauffeur followed us in his swerving, rocking cab. I leaned out of the window all the way, weeping, praying. And I never took my eyes away from the only clue. Minutes and minutes went by. I seemed to have spent my life hanging out of a taxi window, watching a drunken driver steer his uneven course. He ran up on a curbstone, and the cab tilted. Then it righted, and came on at a terrific pace, almost to capsize again as it turned the abrupt corner, which we ourselves had rounded just before we stopped. I looked up, and saw a light burning in a lantern above an open door. The room we went into was smaller than the one at Alton Street. And Betty wasn't there. Only one man, standing at a high desk. An honest-looking, fresh-coloured man; but quite young. When the others began telling him why we had come I broke in: "This is not an ordinary thing. We must see the inspector."