It was all the pleasanter to find a ruddy, genial, bearded face, mounted on a spotted tie that went twice round a nineteen-inch neck, smiling a welcome under the entrance arch. The man introduced himself as Dale-Bulmer, bolting a mouthful made for rolling on the tongue. Dollar was much taken with the humor and simplicity of his address and bearing. A smart chauffeur waited with a plutocratic car in the sweep of the drive. And there was no third sign of life about the place. "Awfully good of you to come," said Dale-Bulmer, with apologetic warmth. "I thought you might, from what I'd heard of you, and you seemed to jump at it when I rang you up. I haven't known anybody take so kindly to a trip since I left the bush." "An Australian?" asked the doctor, with all a doctor's readiness to make talk; but he was more curious than ever to learn the secret of his summons. "Yes! I come from that enlightened land, where Labor runs the show and Women have the Vote. In fact," the big man added, with the fat chuckle heard over the telephone, "that's precisely why I _have_ come from Australia--as I was fool enough to say the other night at a meeting in these parts. But I seem to have jumped out of the frying-pan into the fire." [Illustration: There was no sign of life] "I'm sorry to hear that," observed Dollar, with polite forbearance. "Well, not quite into the fire, as it happens," said Dale-Bulmer, chuckling again in his noble neck. "Come inside, and you'll see." He led the way into a broad central corridor, choked with ladders and builders' tools, pipes and tubing, curtain-rods, and a stack of boards; but a model of order compared with the chaos visible through an open door at which he paused. Here were more bare joists than navigable floor, and a forest of scaffolding therefrom to the crisscrossed plaster ceiling. "Look you here!" said the man from Australia, and pointed to a heap of shavings on a remnant of the floor. "The British workman's such a careless dog," sighed Dollar, shaking a sententious head, for a box of vestas had been spilt about the place. "British workman be hanged!" cried the other bluntly. "The British workman's got a job here that will keep him in beer and betting-money till Christmas, and as much longer as he can spin it out. This is the little game of another sporting type--the British lady burning for the vote!" "So that's it! But are you sure?" asked Dollar, though he wanted to ask if that was all. "Certain. I met a flaming brace of 'em on bicycles, just outside my boundary. This is what I was to get for speaking out about them the other night." "I don't see their literature, and I can't smell their paraffin." "It's in that bottle on the mantelpiece. Something must have scared them at the last moment--all but one sportswoman." "What about her?" "I've got her," said Dale-Bulmer, with sepulchral excitement. "Got her prisoner?"