It was daylight now; the clock over the mantelpiece showed it to be a quarter past five.

“Just wait a moment. I’ll be with you in a jiffy.”

He ran up the stairs and in five minutes rejoined her, dressed, and, lifting her into the car, he sent the little machine flying down the drive.

“How did you get into the house?”

“I came through your study. I rang the bell at the door, but nobody answered me. And then I tried your French windows and they were open.”

“I’m always forgetting to lock them. I’m glad I did. And they will never be locked in the future,” said Dick. “Now just tell me what happened?”

She told her story coherently. Her very association with this man had restored her failing courage. And as she grew calmer she became penitent.

“What a scare-cat you will think I am!” she said ruefully. “I don’t know what time it was – about half an hour ago, I think – but I was sleeping when I heard voices. I went to the window and looked out. It was still rather dark; there are an awful lot of trees before the house; but I could see two men, and I wouldn’t have known one of them was Arthur, only I heard him speaking angrily.”

“Did you hear anything he said?”

“No, they were too far away. They were near the laurels that hide the house from the road. And then I saw Arthur strike the man, and they began to struggle, and that is all I saw. By the time I’d got downstairs they had disappeared.”

“But you say you saw him? How could you?”

Dick gave a version of his encounter with the lawyer that was more flattering to Arthur than was deserved.

“But that couldn’t be true!” she said, in perplexity. “He hadn’t been to bed at all. What is the meaning of it, Dick?”

“The Lord knows!” said Dick piously. “I wish my friend Puttler was here.”

The car ran through the cutting and took the long, straight road to Willow House; they were turning into the drive when Dick saw a man walking in front of him.

“There’s your Arthur,” he said, and she uttered a little cry of thankfulness.

It was Arthur with a difference. His nose had been bleeding, one of his eyes was slightly discoloured. In other circumstances Dick would have laughed, but the girl was so concerned with her brother’s injuries that it would have been brutal even to find anything amusing in the discomfiture of this dandified young lawyer.

“It was nothing,” he said gruffly. “I met a poacher and had a slight argument with him.”