Old Bob seemed something inclined toward optimism, when the boat lay alongside a landing-stage at Woolwich, and Kirkwood had clambered ashore.

"Yer'll mebbe myke it," the waterman told him with a weatherwise survey of the skies. "Wind's freshenin' from the east'rds, an' that'll 'old 'er back a bit, sir."

"Arsk th' wye to th' Dorkyard Styshun," young William volunteered. "'Tis th' shortest walk, sir. I 'opes yer catches 'er.... Thanky, sir."

He caught dextrously the sovereign which Kirkwood, in ungrudging liberality, spared them of his store of two. The American nodded acknowledgments and adieux, with a faded smile deprecating his chances of winning the race, sorely handicapped as he was. He was very, very tired, and in his heart suspected that he would fail. But, if he did, he would at least be able to comfort himself that it was not for lack of trying. He set his teeth on that covenant, in grim determination; either there was a strain of the bulldog latent in the Kirkwood breed or else his infatuation gripped him more strongly than he guessed.

Yet he suspected something of its power; he knew that this was altogether an insane proceeding, and that the lure that led him on was Dorothy Calendar. A strange dull light glowed in his weary eyes, on the thought of her. He'd go through fire and water in her service. She was costing him dear, perhaps was to cost him dearer still; and perhaps there'd be for his guerdon no more than a "Thank you, Mr. Kirkwood!" at the end of the passage. But that would be no less than his deserts; he was not to forget that he was interfering unwarrantably; the girl was in her father's hands, surely safe enough there—to the casual mind. If her partnership in her parent's fortunes were distasteful, she endured it passively, without complaint.

He decided that it was his duty to remind himself, from time to time, that his main interest must be in the game itself, in the solution of the riddle; whatever should befall, he must look for no reward for his gratuitous and self-appointed part. Indeed he was all but successful in persuading himself that it was the fascination of adventure alone that drew him on.

Whatever the lure, it was inexorable; instead of doing as a sensible person would have done—returning to London for a long rest in his hotel room, ere striving to retrieve his shattered fortunes—Philip Kirkwood turned up the village street, intent only to find the railway station and catch the first available train for Sheerness, were that an early one or a late.

A hapchance native whom he presently encountered, furnished minute directions for reaching the Dockyard Station of the Southeastern and Chatham Rail-way, adding comfortable information to the effect that the next east-bound train would pass through in ten minutes; if Kirkwood would mend his pace he could make it easily, with time to spare.

Kirkwood mended his pace accordingly, but, contrary to the prediction, had no time to spare at all. Even as he stormed the ticket-grating, the train was thundering in at the platform. Therefore a nervous ticket agent passed him out a first-class ticket instead of the third-class he had asked for; and there was no time wherein to have the mistake rectified. Kirkwood planked down the fare, swore, and sprinted for the carriages.

The first compartment whose door he jerked violently open, proved to be occupied, and was, moreover, not a smoking-car. He received a fleeting impression of a woman's startled eyes, staring into his own through a thin mesh of veiling, fell off the running-board, slammed the door, and hurled himself to-wards the next compartment. Here happier fortune attended upon his desire; the box-like section was untenanted, and a notice blown upon the window-glass announced that it was "2nd Class Smoking." Kirkwood promptly tumbled in; and when he turned to shut the door the coaches were moving.

A pipe helped him to bear up while the train was making its two other stops in the Borough of Woolwich: a circumstance so maddening to a man in a hurry, that it set Kirkwood's teeth on edge with sheer impatience, and made him long fervently for the land of his birth, where they do things differently—where the Board of Directors of a railway company doesn't erect three substantial passenger dep?ts in the course of a mile and a half of overgrown village. It consoled him little that none disputed with him his lonely possession of the compartment, that he had caught the Sheerness train, or that he was really losing no time; a sense of deep dejection had settled down upon his consciousness, with a realization of how completely a fool's errand was this of his. He felt foredoomed to failure; he was never to see Dorothy Calendar again; and his brain seemed numb with disappointment.

Rattling and swaying, the train left the town behind.

Presently he put aside his pipe and stared blankly out at a reeling landscape, the pleasant, homely, smiling countryside of Kent. A deeper melancholy tinted his mind: Dorothy Calendar was for ever lost to him.

The trucks drummed it out persistently—he thought, vindictively: "Lost!... Lost!... For ever lost!..."

And he had made—was then making—a damned fool of himself. The trucks had no need to din that into his thick skull by their ceaseless iteration; he knew it, would not deny it....

And it was all his own fault. He'd had his chance, Calendar had offered him it. If only he had closed with the fat adventurer!...

Before his eyes field and coppice, hedge and homestead, stream and flowing highway, all blurred and ran streakily into one another, like a highly impressionistic water-color. He could make neither head nor tail of the flying views, and so far as coherent thought was concerned, he could not put two ideas together. Without understanding distinctly, he presently did a more wise and wholesome thing: which was to topple limply over on the cushions and fall fast asleep.

After a long time he seemed to realize rather hazily that the carriage-door had been opened to admit somebody. Its smart closing bang shocked him awake. He sat up, blinking in confusion, hardly conscious of more, to begin with, than that the train had paused and was again in full flight. Then, his senses clearing, he became aware that his solitary companion, just entered, was a woman. She was seated over across from him, her back to the engine, in an attitude which somehow suggested a highly nonchalant frame of mind. She laughed, and immediately her speaking voice was high and sweet in his hearing.

"Really, you know, Mr. Kirkwood, I simply couldn't contain my impatience another instant."

Kirkwood gasped and tried to re-collect his wits.

"Beg pardon—I've been asleep," he said stupidly.

"Yes. I'm sorry to have disturbed you, but, you know, you must make allowances for a woman's nerves."

Beneath his breath the bewildered man said: "The deuce!" and above it, in a stupefied tone: "Mrs. Hallam!"

She nodded in a not unfriendly fashion, smiling brightly. "Myself, Mr. Kirkwood! Really, our predestined paths are badly tangled, just now; aren't they? Were you surprised to find me in here, with you? Come now, confess you were!"

He remarked the smooth, girlish freshness of her cheeks, the sense and humor of her mouth, the veiled gleam of excitement in her eyes of the changing sea; and saw, as well, that she was dressed for traveling, sensibly but with an air, and had brought a small hand-bag with her.

"Surprised and delighted," he replied, recovering, with mendacity so intentional and obvious that the woman laughed aloud.

"I knew you'd be!... You see, I had the carriage ahead, the one you didn't take. I was so disappointed when you flung up to the door and away again! You didn't see me hanging half out the window, to watch where you went, did you? That's how I discovered that your discourtesy was unintentional, that you hadn't recognized me,—by the fact that you took this compartment, right behind my own."

She paused invitingly, but Kirkwood, grown wary, contented himself with picking up his pipe and carefully knocking out the dottle on the window-ledge.

"I was glad to see you," she affirmed; "but only partly because you were you, Mr. Kirkwood. The other and major part was because sight of you confirmed my own secret intuition. You see, I'm quite old enough and wise enough to question even my own intuitions."

"A woman wise enough for that is an adult prodigy," he ventured cautiously.

"It's experience and age. I insist upon the age; I the mother of a grown-up boy! So I deliberately ran after you, changing when we stopped at Newington. You might've escaped me if I had waited until We got to Queensborough."

Again she paused in open expectancy. Kirkwood, perplexed, put the pipe in his pocket, and assumed a factitious look of resignation, regarding her askance with that whimsical twist of his eyebrows.

"For you are going to Queensborough, aren't you, Mr. Kirkwood?"

"Queensborough?" he echoed blankly; and, in fact, he was at a loss to follow her drift. "No, Mrs. Hallam; I'm not bound there."

Her surprise was apparent; she made no effort to conceal it. "But," she faltered, "if not there—"

"'Give you my word, Mrs. Hallam, I have no intention whatever of going to Queensborough," Kirkwood protested.

"I don't understand." The nervous drumming of a patent-leather covered toe, visible beneath the hem of her dress, alone betrayed a rising tide of impatience. "Then my intuition was at fault!"

"In this instance, if it was at all concerned with my insignificant affairs, yes—most decidedly at fault."

She shook her head, regarding him with grave suspicion. "I hardly know: whether to believe you. I think...."

Kirkwood's countenance displayed an added shade of red. After a moment, "I mean no discourtesy," he began stiffly, "but—"

"But you don't care a farthing whether I believe you or not?"

He caught her laughing eye, and smiled, the flush subsiding.

"Very well, then! Now let us see: Where are you bound?"

Kirkwood looked out of the window.

"I'm convinced it's a rendezvous...?"

Kirkwood smiled patiently at the landscape.

"Is Dorothy Calendar so very, very beautiful, Mr. Kirkwood?"—with a trace of malice.

Ostentatiously Kirkwood read the South Eastern and Chatham's framed card of warning, posted just above Mrs. Hallam's head, to all such incurable lunatics as are possessed of a desire to travel on the running-boards of railway carriages.

"You are going to meet her, aren't you?"

He gracefully concealed a yawn.

The woman's plan of attack took another form. "Last night, when you told me your story, I believed you."

He devoted himself to suppressing the temptingly obvious retort, and succeeded; but though he left it unspoken, the humor of it twitched the corners of his mouth; and Mrs. Hallam was observant. So that her next attempt to draw him out was edged with temper.

"I believed you an American but a gentleman; it appears that, if you ever were the latter, you've fallen so low that you willingly cast your lot with thieves."

Having exhausted his repertoire of rudenesses, Kirkwood took to twiddling his thumbs.

"I want to ask you if you think it fair to me or my son, to leave us in ignorance of the place where you are to meet the thieves who stole our—my son's jewels?"

"Mrs. Hallam," he said soberly, "if I am going to meet Mr. Calendar or Mr. Mulready, I have no assurance of that fact."

There was only the briefest of pauses, during which she analyzed this; then, quickly, "But you hope to?" she snapped.

He felt that the only adequate retort to this would be a shrug of his shoulders; doubted his ability to carry one off; and again took refuge in silence.

The woman abandoned a second plan of siege, with a readiness that did credit to her knowledge of mankind. She thought out the next very carefully, before opening with a masked battery.

"Mr. Kirkwood, can't we be friends—this aside?"

"Nothing could please me more, Mrs. Hallam!"

"I'm sorry if I've annoyed you—"

"And I, too, have been rude."

"Last night, when you cut away so suddenly, you prevented my making you a proposal, a sort of a business proposition...."

"Yes—?"

"To come over to our side—"

"I thought so. That was why I went."

"Yes; I understood. But this morning, when you've had time to think it over—?"

"I have no choice in the matter, Mrs. Hallam." The green eyes darkened ominously. "You mean—I am to understand, then, that you're against us, that you prefer to side with swindlers and scoundrels, all because of a—"

She discovered him eying her with a smile of such inscrutable and sardonic intelligence, that the words died on her lips, and she crimsoned, treasonably to herself. For he saw it; and the belief he had conceived while attending to her tissue of fabrication, earlier that morning, was strengthened to the point of conviction that, if anything had been stolen by anybody, Mrs. Hallam and her son owned it as little as Calendar.

As for the woman, she felt she had steadily lost, rather than gained, ground; and the flash of anger that had colored her cheeks, lit twin beacons in her eyes, which she resolutely fought down until they faded to mere gleams of resentment and determination. But she forgot to control her lips; and they are the truest indices to a woman's character and temperament; and Kirkwood did not overlook the circumstance that their specious sweetness had vanished, leaving them straight, set and hard, quite the reverse of attractive.

"So," she said slowly, after a silent time, "you are not for Queensborough! The corollary of that admission, Mr. Kirkwood, is that you are for Sheerness."

"I believe," he replied wearily, "that there are no other stations on this line, after Newington."

"It follows, then, that—that I follow." And in answer to his perturbed glance, she added: "Oh, I'll grant that intuition is sometimes a poor guide. But if you meet George Calendar, so shall I. Nothing can prevent that. You can't hinder me."

Considerably amused, he chuckled. "Let us talk of other things, Mrs. Hallam," he suggested pleasantly. "How is your son?"

At this juncture the brakes began to shriek and grind upon the wheels. The train slowed; it stopped; and the voice of a guard could be heard admonishing passengers for Queensborough Pier to alight and take the branch line. In the noise the woman's response was drowned, and Kirkwood was hardly enough concerned for poor Freddie to repeat his question.

When, after a little, the train pulled out of the junction, neither found reason to resume the conversation. During the brief balance of the journey Mrs. Hallam presumably had food for thought; she frowned, pursed her lips, and with one daintily gloved forefinger followed a seam of her tailored skirt; while Kirkwood sat watching and wondering how to rid himself of her, if she proved really as troublesome as she threatened to be.

Also, he wondered continually what it was all about. Why did Mrs. Hallam suspect him of designing to meet Calendar at Queensborough? Had she any tangible ground for believing that Calendar could be found in Queensborough? Presumably she had, since she was avowedly in pursuit of that gentleman, and, Kirkwood inferred, had booked for Queensborough. Was he, then, running away from Calendar and his daughter to chase a will-o'-the-wisp of his credulous fancy, off Sheerness shore?

Disturbing reflection. He scowled over it, then considered the other side of the face. Presuming Mrs. Hallam to have had reasonably dependable assurance that Calendar would stop in Queensborough, would she so readily have abandoned her design to catch him there, on the mere supposition that Kirkwood might be looking for him in Sheerness? That did not seem likely to one who esteemed Mrs. Hallam's acumen as highly as Kirkwood did. He brightened up, forgot that his was a fool's errand, and began again to project strategic plans into a problematic future.

A sudden jolt interrupted this pastime, and the warning screech of the brakes informed that he had no time to scheme, but had best continue on the plan of action that had brought him thus far—that is, trust to his star and accept what should befall without repining.

He rose, opened the door, and holding it so, turned.

"I regret, Mrs. Hallam," he announced, smiling his crooked smile, "that a pressing engagement is about to prohibit my 'squiring you through the ticket-gates. You understand, I'm sure."

His irrepressible humor proved infectious; and Mrs. Hallam's spirit ran as high as his own. She was smiling cheerfully when she, too, rose.

"I also am in some haste," she averred demurely, gathering up her hand-bag and ............