Feeling absurdly foolish, I switched off the light, and left the house. Plainly, Lucy Kingdon had ceased to fear me. She believed that she had won the fight, that her position was impregnable. Either she thought that Marcia Lawrence had escaped, that we had not traced her to the _Umbria_, or she knew that the telegram was a blind, and that we had been misled by it. Which was right, I wondered. And she must have come off well, too, in that interview with Mrs. Lawrence, which I would have given so much to have overheard--must have convinced her of her innocence, else she would not still be employed as a maid in the Lawrence house, and retained so near her mistress. How had she done it? How had she succeeded in blinding her mistress so completely? Then a sudden thought stabbed through me. Was it possible, I asked myself, that Mrs. Lawrence had been a party to the deception--that she had knowingly assisted in the farce of the telegram, for my benefit? But, as I reviewed her behaviour at our morning interview, I could not believe it. She was no such consummate actress as that would imply. If I was a dupe, then she was a dupe also. Busy with this problem, I made my way through the grove along the path back to the Kingdon cottage, and stood for a moment looking over the hedge before opening the gate. There was a light in the room which I took to be the dining-room, but even as I gazed at it, the light moved, a shadow crossed the blind; the light reappeared in the kitchen, faded and disappeared--then, a moment later, my heart leaped suffocatingly as I perceived a glimmer of light at the ventilator in the foundation! What was this woman doing in the cellar? What was the task that was going forward there? I entered the grounds and started forward along the hedge, when suddenly a hand reached up from the shadow and held me fast. For an instant I struggled fiercely to free myself--but only for an instant. "Come, Lester, sit down," said a voice carefully repressed, but which I nevertheless recognised as Godfrey's. "I was looking for you," he added, as I dropped to the grass beside him. "Oh, is it you, Godfrey?" I asked, much relieved. "I rather thought you might be out this way, when I found you weren't at the hotel. What are the developments?" "Wait a minute. I wonder where that light has gone?" "It's in the cellar," I said, and pointed out to him the faint glimmer which marked the ventilator. "It was there last night. I sat here for over an hour and watched it," and I told him briefly of my adventures of the night before. He listened without comment until I had finished. "It's a pity you didn't tell me that this morning," he said. "I didn't see that it was connected with the case in any way. Is it?" "I don't know," he answered slowly. "Perhaps it is. Did Miss Kingdon mention it when she saw you this morning?" "Yes--she said she'd been in the cellar, putting away some fruit."