"I should hope so! Why, I caught her on the very point of setting fire to that very heap of shavings--and me without a hose-pipe in the house! Those are her matches on the floor; _she_ wasn't going to turn tail till she'd done her job--and didn't till I nearly trod on it! You could hardly expect me to bow her out of the front door after that!" Dollar could only stare into the jovial face wreathed in rubicund grins, but no longer free from a certain serio-comic compunction and concern. "But, my dear sir----" "Don't pitch into me!" pleaded Dale-Bulmer, pathetically. "I had to do something; if I hadn't thought of you, and one or two things I've heard about you, doctor, I should only have telephoned to the police; and what's the good of putting these young women in the jug, to be poured out again within a week? I heard you ran a nursing-home for criminals, worth all the prisons in the world." "But I don't run people into it," said the doctor; "they've got to come in of their own free will. What have you done with this young woman?" "I? Nothing; it's her own doing entirely. She chose her cover--I only turned the key." "You've locked her up in some room?" "Yes--more or less--rather more." And Dale-Bulmer laughed a rather nervous, guilty laugh. "Up-stairs somewhere?" "Yes--look you here! She was picking up those matches when I spotted her from this door, and out she streaked through that one over there. Come and have a look at her line of country, doctor." It led into an anteroom or inner hall, or the well of some staircase still to come, with a lashed ladder towering in its midst, but not quite reaching a skeleton landing of yawning joists. Dale-Bulmer gazed aloft, wagging a horizontal beard. "Surely she didn't go up there?" said Dollar. "Like a lamplighter, doctor! I went the way we'll both go now, if it's all the same to you." A fine forked staircase bore them from the lower corridor to its counterpart above. And here the leader trod gently, a finger laid across his lips. "That's the room," he whispered, pointing to a shut door in a side passage. "I--I almost think I'll leave her to you, doctor. It's not locked--not the door." "I thought she was your prisoner?" "Yes--but you'll see where she's hidden herself. I did turn _that_ key, doctor, but that's all I did. Still, I think I'd rather you let her out." There was nothing facetious in his droll air of guilt; he seemed really rather ashamed of his impetuous measures, as if long in doubt as to their gallantry, and abashed by the unspoken criticisms of the man whom he had brought so far afield on the spur of a flustering moment. But the truth was that Dollar did not blame him in the least, as he turned the handle softly, and heard a pusillanimous step retreating down the corridor.