“If anybody had come last night I shouldn’t have heard them,” he confessed. “I slept like a dead man.” He touched his head gingerly. “It smarts, but the ache is gone,” he said, not loth to discuss his infirmities. “The doctor said I had a narrow escape; he thought there was a fracture. Would you like me to make you some tea, miss, or shall I call the servant?” She shook her head, but he had already disappeared, and came seeking her in the garden ten minutes later, with a cup of tea in his hand. He told her for the second time that he was a police pensioner and had been in the employ of Gonsalez for three years. The Three paid well, and had, she learned to her surprise, considerable private resources. “Does it pay them—this private detective business?” “Lord bless your heart, no, miss!” He scoffed at the idea. “They are very rich men. I thought everybody knew that. They say Mr. Gonsalez was worth a million even before the war.” This was astonishing news. “But why do they do this”—she hesitated—“this sort of thing?” “It is a hobby, miss,” said the man vaguely. “Some people run race-horses, some own yachts—these gentlemen get a lot of pleasure out of their work and they pay well,” he added. Men in the regular employ of the Three Just Men not only received a good wage, but frequently a bonus which could only be described as colossal. Once, after they had rounded up and destroyed a gang of Spanish bank robbers, they had distributed £1,000 to every man who was actively employed. He hinted rather than stated that this money had formed part of the loot which the Three had recovered, and did not seem to think that there was anything improper in this distribution of illicit gains. “After all, miss,” he said philosophically, “when you collect money like that, it’s impossible to give it back to the people it came from. This Diego had been holding up banks for years, and banks are not like people—they don’t feel the loss of money.” “That’s a thoroughly immoral view,” said Mirabelle, intent upon her flower-picking. “It may be, miss,” agreed Digby, who had evidently been one of the recipients of bounty, and took a complacent and a tolerant view. “But a thousand pounds is a lot of money.” The day passed without event. From the early evening papers that came from Gloucester she learned of the fire at Oberzohn’s, and did not connect the disaster with anything but an accident. She was not sorry. The fire had licked out one ugly chapter from the past. Incidentally it had destroyed a crude painting which was, to Dr. Oberzohn, more precious than any that Leonardo had painted or Raphael conceived, but this she did not know.