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"Will you help me up, please?"

For answer he stooped and lifted her to her feet without any apparent effort.

"Are you staying at the Hall?" he asked, and there was something so formal and so suggestive of polite small talk about the question that her lips trembled.

"Yes—I am. Are you ... were you thinking of burgling the Hall?"

She felt rather than heard him laugh.

"You won't believe that I am not a burglar——"

"Are you?"

There was a challenge in the voice.

"Really," said James Morlake after a while, "this situation is verging on the grotesque...."

"Are you?" she asked again, and as she expected, so he replied.

"I am."

She would have been bitterly disappointed if he had said anything else. A burglar he might be, a liar he could not be.

"Well, we've nothing to burgle, Mr.——" She stopped suddenly. Did he know that she had recognised him?

"Mr.——?" he suggested. "You said just now 'It is true'—meaning it was true that I am a burglar. Were you expecting a visitation to-night?"

"Yes," she said, having none of his scruples. "Mr. Hamon said that we might be robbed."