Mr.Martin looked up from his desk when they appeared, and requested his daughter to check a bundle of postal orders.

The pretext was painfully obvious, but Grant was not so wishful now to clear up matters with Doris's father, as the girl herself might be trusted to pass on an accurate account of the affair from beginning to end.
He was about to reach the street quick on Furneaux's heels when the little man turned suddenly.
"By the way, don't you want a shilling's worth of stamps ?" he said.
Grant smiled comprehension, and went back to the counter, where Doris herself served him.

She did not try to avoid his glance, but rather met it with a baffling serenity oddly at variance with her momentary loss of self-possession in the garden.
When he entered the street the detective had vanished.
He walked down the hill at a rapid pace, disregarding the eyes peeping at him through open doorways, over narrow window-curtains, and covertly staring when people passed in the roadway.

The sensitive side of his temperament shrank from this thinly-veiled hostility.

He was by way of being popular in Steynholme, yet not a soul spoke to him.