Could the intruder have been a woman? Had the bracelet fallen from her wrist in her hurried flight? Or had it fallen from the pocket of a burglar who had secured it with some booty from a house in the vicinity? Ella looked out into the small garden, but the intruder had vanished. Therefore she closed the window, to find that the catch had been broken by the mysterious visitor, and then returned again to her room, where she once more examined the bracelet beneath the light. "It may give us some clue," she remarked to herself. "Yet it is of very ordinary pattern, and bears no mark of identification." Next day, without telling her father of her midnight discovery, she met Seymour Kennedy by appointment at the theatre, showed him what she had found, and related the whole story. "Strange!" he exclaimed. "Extraordinary! It must have been a burglar!" "Or a woman?" "But why should a woman break into your house?" "In order to watch me. Perhaps Ortmann or my father may have suspicions," replied the actress, arranging her hair before the big mirror. "I hope not, Ella. They are both the most daring and the most unscrupulous men in London." "And it is for us to outwit them in secret, dear," she replied, turning to him with a smile of sweet affection. In the days that followed, the mystery of the intruder became further increased by Ella making another discovery. In the garden, upon a thorn-bush against the wall, Mrs Pennington found a large piece of cream silk which had apparently formed part of the sleeve of a woman's blouse. She brought it to Ella, saying: "I've found this in the garden, miss. It looks as if some lady got entangled in the bush, and left part of 'er blouse behind--don't it? I wonder who's been in our garden?" Ella took it and, expressing little surprise, suggested that it might have been blown into the bush by the wind. It, however, at once confirmed her suspicion that the midnight visitor had been a woman. While Ella sang and danced nightly at the theatre, and afterwards drove home to Castelnau, to that house where upstairs was stored all that high-explosive, Seymour Kennedy maintained a watchful vigilance upon Ernst von Ortmann, the chief of enemy spies, and kept that unceasing watch over him, not only at the house at Wandsworth, but also at the magnificent mansion in Park Lane. To von Ortmann's frequent dinner-parties in the West End came the crafty and grave-faced old Drost, who there met other men of mysterious antecedents, adventurers who posed as Swiss, American, or Dutch, for that house was the headquarters of enemy activity in Great Britain, and from it extended many extraordinary and unexpected ramifications. That some great and desperate outrage was intended in the near future Kennedy was confident, as all the apparatus was ready. But of Drost's intentions he could discover nothing, neither could Ella.