"My dear girl," said Ross Duggan's voice a trifle testily, "what a fool you are to come out here at this time--if you'll excuse my saying so! Sit down, for heaven's sake, if you must be here, and don't let those men down there see you. I'm--I'm making some observations on my own, but at any minute someone may come up here--and I wouldn't answer for the consequences. You've fallen into a hornet's nest, Catherine, and only a woman with some desperate plan of action would do that. Don't you know what's being carried on down there?" She shook her dark head, and dropped instantly into a little heap of satin and dark-coloured velvet beside him in the darkness. "No," she whispered softly. "I wondered what you were doing, and who your companion might be. Send him away, Ross. I _must_ speak with you alone!" "All right." The inflection of voice was so identical with that of the new lord of the manor as to make Dollops fairly jump at sound of it. He would hardly have been able to believe the evidence of his own ears if he had not seen this thing done before in those old Apache days, in the Inn of The Twisted Arm, when the notorious Margot and her crew had run them to earth and this was the only way out: "Get along there, Parsons. There's nothing more to be seen now. You can meet me some time next week--if things go all right with me and I'm not already swinging at the end of a long rope! And we'll have another confab together. But you'd better make yourself scarce now. There'll be a dickens of a kybosh if they find we've broken parole, and I don't want you hauled into the beastly thing. So long. And _listen--listen_: be careful--do!" Dollops nodded his head forthwith, and by dint of wriggling and scrambling made his exit from this astonishing pair, and, free of the bare moorside at last, broke cover and started off at a good run, wondering what the dickens they had stumbled into _now_. Meanwhile the erstwhile Ross and his lady friend sat on behind the furze-bush in their somewhat ridiculous predicament, and talked in whispers. "What is it you want to say to me?" said "Ross," a hint of sharpness in his low-pitched voice. "That you should run this risk--it is madness, Catherine--madness!"