We reached the white gate of the "Refuge," under its dark green cliffs of elm. I had my hand on the latch when I heard the quiet voice of the cyclist almost in my ear.
I turned with a little jump. I gave a quick look up at the man's face. It was the sort of quiet, neutral-tinted, clean-shaven, self-contained ordinary face that one would not easily remember, as a rule.
Yet I remembered it. I'd seen quite enough of it already. It was burnt in on my memory with too unpleasant an association for me to have forgotten it.
I heard myself give a little gasp of dismay as, through the gathering dusk, I recognised the face of the man who had wanted to search my trunks at the Hotel Cecil; the man who had afterwards shadowed me down the Strand and into the Embankment Garden; the man from Scotland Yard.
And Miss Million, too, stared at him, and said: "Whatever on earth is the meaning of this?"
There was a horrified little quaver in her voice as she said it, for she'd guessed what was afoot.
I had already told her of the manager's visit to her rooms the day before I came down from London, and she had been really appalled at the event until Miss Vi Vassity had come in to cheer her with the announcement that she was sure this was the last that would ever be heard by us of anything to do with having our belongings looked at.
And now, after three or four days only, this!...
Here we stood on the dusty road under the elms, with the man's bicycle leaning up against the white palings. We were a curious trio! The young mistress in a pink linen frock, the young lady's-maid in black, and the "plain-clothes man" giving a quick glance from one to the other as he announced in his clear but quiet and expressionless voice: "I have to arrest you ladies----"
"Arrest!" gasped Miss Million, turning white. I grasped her hand.
"Don't be silly, my dear," I said as reassuringly as I could, though my voice sounded very odd in my own ears. Million looked the picture of guilt found out, and I felt that there was a fatal quiver in my own tone. I said: "It's quite all right!"
"I have to arrest you ladies," repeated the man with the bicycle, in his wooden tone, "on the charge of stealing Mr. Julius Rattenheimer's ruby pendant from the Hotel Cecil----"