He drew one out of the little phial and laid it in the palm of his hand, and with the other thumb as piston, ground it down to fine powder and then, sniffed it, recollecting that story which Maud Duggan had told him of her suspicions with regard to the poisoning of her father. But after he had touched the tip of his tongue to it, he smiled a little. "H'm. Nothing but aspirin. I thought as much, certainly, when she told me the story. So that explodes _that_ little theory once and for all--if there was anything in it from the beginning.... Nicely appointed chamber, I must say." He walked leisurely about it, lifting a pillow there, and dropping it back into its place, and straightening the set of a chair, pushed out of its usual position by a very obvious hurry of the room's occupant. And he was just in the act of doing this trivial thing when he came upon a little screw of paper lying in a twisted ball beneath a chair which stood close up to the Turkish stool, and evidently dropped by accident (which undoubtedly was the fact). Cleek stooped to pick it up, smoothed it out in his fingers, and then of a sudden sucked in his breath, and every muscle in that well-organized frame of his went taut as iron. For the paper--innocent as it looked--contained news which certainly was enough to startle the most unsuspicious police-constable in existence. For, written across its surface, having neither name nor address nor date, and in a calligraphy which was undoubtedly foreign, were the words: Meet me at three o'clock by the G. F. Road. Everything successfully carried out. Muffled clapper. Must see you. Utmost importance. A. M. "Hello! Hello!" rapped out Cleek in the sharp staccato of excitement. "Then she _did_ have something to do with it, after all, did she? Gad! a dollar to a ducat that there's someone else in this affair whom we've never even hit upon yet! What a bit of luck Dollops turned up at that moment--when _she_ was just on the way! Let's see--what's the time? Three o'clock. Gad! I'll nip along myself, and come in at the finish, and hear what I can hear from the good lady's lips herself, and see who the dickens it is who's meeting her. There's more in this than meets the eye, Cleek my boy, and don't you forget it!" Following the direction shown him by Mr. Narkom (who was still standing like a monument of Patience in the little shrubbery where they had first caught sight of her wandering ladyship), Cleek pelted off in the direction of the woods, every faculty alert, and in the hastily donned rubber-soled shoes proving himself a silent if a fleet-footed pursuer. But he was doomed to disappointment upon his quest. For halfway toward the Great Free Road as that portion of the country was called, through a belt of thick trees which entirely hid the landscape from view, he met Dollops, looking disconsolately upon the ground, hands in pockets and face dejected, and cannoned into him as they came abreast of each other.