On the hot loose sand above the highest seaweed I made her sit down. Presently she had recovered a little. Her manner was now undoubtedly that of a person on whose back a half-withdrawn burden is reimposed. But she shouldered it.

"Where did you get it?" she asked, her eyes on the ring in my palm.

"Do you remember Philip asking me to pack up some sketches for him and sending me his key?"

"He did say something about it. Monty had left."

"I found the ring on the Sunday afternoon I went for the sketches. It was in a hole in the studio floor."

"In a hole.... Ah-h-h-h!"

I looked sharply at her, but continued.

"Stuck quite firmly in: in fact, I had to prise it out with a screwdriver. I didn't know which of them it belonged to—I don't know now—so I slipped it into my pocket. Perhaps you'd better take it."

But she made no movement to do so. She was picking up handfuls of sand and allowing it to slip through her fingers again. She made quite a number of little heaps, which her eyes attentively watched, but her mind was elsewhere—perhaps on that last letter of Audrey Cunningham's, when apparently the engagement had been neither off nor on. She made no sign when I placed the ring in her lap. I had to speak.

"Queer, wasn't it?"

Her murmur was so low that I scarcely heard it. "Of course a thing like that would make it definitely off."

"A thing like what?"

"Losing it like that—after all the other."

"Come, she can hardly have 'lost' it, since I had to get a screwdriver to prise it out!"

"I don't mean 'lost' in that way—be quiet and let me think."

The fingers began to make a fifth sandhill.

I hope I have made it clear that I was confining myself quite strictly to Monty Rooke's affair. If it was simply a misunderstanding I did not think I was going beyond my business in discussing with Mollie whether that misunderstanding might not be removed. But it now seemed to me that I was once more on the verge of far more than this. That deep long-drawn "Ah-h-h-h!" that "A thing like that would make it definitely off" were enough to convince me of this. Evidently my words had meant more to her than to myself who had uttered them. Therefore if Mollie claimed time to think, so did I.

And first of all I recalled my firm persuasion of that Sunday afternoon that Audrey Cunningham had made some sort of a discovery. It might have been an accidental one, or she might merely not have rested until she had made it, but a discovery she had made, and it had to do with the hole in the studio floor. I remembered too my own pacings, eye-measurements, judgment of angles, and my slight chagrin that Philip had frustrated my further investigations by his removal of the key from the cellar door. And it seemed to me that again everything seemed to come round to that cellar of Esdaile's—the cellar on which Hubbard had instantly fastened as holding the answer to the riddle, the cellar in which Philip had spent that unaccountable half-hour and over which he had since so jealously watched, yet the self-same cellar into which both Rooke and Mrs. Cunningham had since descended and found ... nothing.

Yet instantly all my former objections rose again as vividly as ever—the extreme physical improbability that Philip could have seen anything through that peep-hole, the utter unlikelihood that he should have had his eye at it at that particular moment of time, the virtual impossibility that he should have thought of the hole at all on hearing the crash.

And yet in this hole had been tightly jammed the ring now lying in Mollie's lap.

Suddenly Mollie surprised me by looking up and almost brightly smiling. She smoothed out the sandhills and picked up the ring from her lap.

"Well," she said in a tone of relief, "that makes an immense difference. I'm awfully glad you told me. Shall we be getting back?"

But this, it struck me, was rather rushing matters. I thought I had a right to know just a little more than that. Therefore I did not rise.

"One moment," I said. "I should like to know why you said that 'a thing like that would make it definitely off.'"

She smiled again, with a sort of affectionate raillery.

"Oh ... and you're supposed to understand women!"

This I warmly disclaimed. "In any case I only know Mrs. Cunningham very slightly," I protested.

"And you formed no impression of her?"

"I didn't say that."

"Not even that she would be just the woman to take a—hint—of that kind?"

She was gently but quite plainly laughing at me; but, glad as I was to see the cloud disappear from her brow, she was not going to have everything her own way.

"Then she did make a discovery, and received a hint, as you call it, in doing so?"

"Did she?" she parried.

"Did she?"

At that she laughed outright. She patted my sleeve almost as if I had been a child.

"You men can't know how funny you are sometimes!" she mocked me.