It was all perfectly plain. And if she did not fall in with their plans she too would be murdered in her turn. The situation seemed perfectly hopeless, and she almost gave way to her grief. Here she was, up in Yorkshire that is, if the information which the man had given her was correct; and there seemed no reason why it should not be—and there was absolutely nothing to point the way of the detectives towards here, even if they as much as suspected that she had been kidnapped.

Then she had a pleasant thought. After all, Henry Fairhurst was on her side. He was not such a fool as he looked; and he had promised to telephone the news to her when he had talked over the matter of the forged will with Shelley.

Would he think that there was something wrong when he found that she was not in? Would he have the sense to go back at once to the Yard and tell them that she had mysteriously disappeared? And would the detectives have enough skill to trace her?

These questions, of course, were quite unanswerable; and yet she found her mind going over them again and again.

She felt tired. The long interview with her captor had been more exhausting than she had realised at the time. She would lie down on the bed for a few minutes, she thought. She would not go to sleep, of course. It would be perfectly ridiculous to go to sleep in broad daylight like this. But it was so pleasantly restful just to close her eyes for a minute and to relax…In a minute she was asleep.

Chapter XVIII

Chapter XVIII

Northward Ho!

“This is all very mysterious, Mr. Moss,” said Shelley, slowly recovering from his astonishment that the young Jew did not even know the man who had presumably sent him the note.

“I’ll say it is,” Moss agreed.

“I’d give a lot, Mr. Moss,” added Shelley, “to know precisely who it is that is holding Miss Arnell prisoner—or who has, at any rate, kidnapped her and taken her off to the north of England in this cavalier fashion. It would be interesting to know who he is.”

“Sorry I can’t help you there, sir,” said Moss. “But it looks as if catching that man is your pigeon. Don’t think I can be much use to you, really. Guess I’ll get home to bed—that is, if you don’t want me to stay here. I presume I’m not under suspicion; or under arrest; or anything like that.” And he laughed, though the laugh was not a particularly impres-sive effort; it spoke bewilderment, fear, and—so Shelley thought—hostility.