At last, leaving Rayne there, I drove the old man on to Witham, where I left him at his own request at a point near the wireless telegraph station, and turning, went back to the thieves' garage and there left the car. I did not see Rudolph Rayne again for several days, but according to instructions I received from Madame Duperre, I went by train up to Yorkshire and awaited their arrival. From Duperre, who arrived three days after I had got to Overstow, I gathered that Rayne had suddenly been called away to the Continent on one of his swift visits, "on a little matter of business," added Vincent with a meaning grin. We were smoking together in the great old library, when I told him of my narrow escape on Clifton Bridge. "Yes," he said. "Benton is always trying to get at us. It was sly of him to impersonate old Morley. I wonder how he got to know that you were meeting him? Someone must have betrayed Rayne. I have a suspicion who it may be. If he has, then woe betide him! Rudolph never forgives an enemy or a blunderer." I tried to get from Duperre the reason why the hunchback had met Rayne in such secrecy, but he would divulge nothing. Next day his wife and Lola returned, and that same evening as I sat with the latter in the chintz-covered drawing-room--for though I had been engaged as chauffeur I was now treated as one of the family--I had a delightful chat with her. That she was sorely puzzled at her father's rapid journeys to and fro across Europe without any apparent reason, of the strange assortment of his friends and the secrecy in which he so often met them, I had long ago observed. The truth was that I had fallen deeply in love with the sweet dainty girl whose father was the most audacious and cunning crook the modern world had produced. I believed, on account of the small confidence we had exchanged, that Lola, on her part, did not regard me with actual disfavor. "When will your father be back, do you think?" I asked her as she lounged upon a settee with a big orange silk cushion behind her. She looked very sweet. She wore a pretty but very simple dance-frock of flame-colored ninon, in which I had seen her at the Carlton on the night when I set out to meet the man Tarrant and was so nearly caught. I had given her a cigarette, and we were smoking together cosily--Duperre and his wife being somewhere in the great old house. I think Duperre was, after all, a sportsman, even though he was a practiced crook, for on that night he and his wife allowed me to be alone with Lola. "Do you know a friend of your father, an old man named Tarrant?" I asked her suddenly. "Tarrant--Morley Tarrant?" she asked. "Oh! yes. He's such a funny old fellow. Three years ago he often used to visit us when we lived in Biarritz, but I haven't seen him since." "Who is he?" "He was the manager of the branch of the Credit Foncier. He is French, though he bears an English name." "French! But he speaks English!" I remarked.