Miss Mettleby heard all this with a rapidly deepening feeling of guilty complicity in some dark plot, and yet, beneath this sickening dread, she felt a vague hope that now she would glean some intelligent idea of the mystery into which she, Mr. Fair—all her world, had been so suddenly plunged by the hurrying events of the past two hours. “Oh, you see, sir,” she began; “I assure you that I know absolutely nothing at all about what Mr. Ferret was about—nothing. I am the governess in Mr. Fair’s family, that’s all. And this evening when the family were at dinner Mr. Ferret came into the library—nearly frightening me to death—and told me that a foreign gentleman was in our house who intended some sort of mischief to my kind employer. So he asked me to watch the street door and to follow the man if he should go out before Mr. Ferret returned from telegraphing or something. And, of course, the whole thing is non——” Her pitiful little plot to divert police suspicion from her knight until the horrible evidence of someone’s guilt—not his, not his!—could be removed was nipped at this point by the entrance, to her unspeakable surprise, of Ferret himself, smiling and unruffled. “Ferret, do you know this young lady?” asked the inspector perfunctorily. “Yes, sir,” replied Ferret, with a salute—military to his chief and cavalier to the trembling Kate. “She’s the governess, sir, at Mr. Maxwell Fair’s. How are you again, miss? You are here rather earlier than I looked for you. She’s a regular corker, sir.” “Silence!” snapped the Inspector, to whom discipline was all. “This young person was telling me that she watched as you requested. Go on, miss.” “Well, Mr. Ferret had scarcely gone out when the foreign gentleman passed out of the street door and I immediately followed him,” went on poor Kate, with oozing hope that her blundering lie would be believed, now that that gimlet-eyed Ferret was here to observe her. “The man crossed the square and walked quickly down the next street.” She stopped. Ferret seemed to be whistling in mild but growing unbelief—conduct which he suddenly abandoned on receiving a wireless message of caution from the Inspector. The nimble mind of Ferret caught his superior’s point at once, so he fell in with his policy and said, as if to encourage Kate to proceed bravely with her transparent and useful lie: “Didn’t I tell you he would do so?” “Be quiet, Ferret!” cried Sharpe, fearing that Ferret would develop some new indiscretion. “Go on, miss, go on. You saw the gent turn the corner?” “Yes,” replied Kate, with fresh courage; “he turned the corner and I ran after him. There were many people in the narrow street into which he had turned, but I kept him in view and——” “And you jumped into the next cab as quick as a flash—” put in Ferret, when he noticed that her powers of creation were ebbing, “and followed him until you saw him go into—go on, go on, miss—you’re great, you are.”