Come." All in a moment a light seemed to break over Cleek's brain.

The missing link had been supplied--the one thing that could make possible the wild thought which had come to him last night had been given into his hands, and here at last was the key to the amazing mystery! He turned without a word and went with Arjeeb Noosrut.
"What an ass!" he said to himself in the soundless words of thought "What an ass never to have suspected it when it is all so dear!" Meantime Ailsa and the boy, dismissed from any further need of service, walked on through the deepening dusk and turned their faces homeward.
But they had not gone twenty yards from the spot where Cleek had seen them last when his little lordship set up a joyful cry and pointed excitedly to a claret-coloured limousine which at that moment swung in from the middle of the roadway and slowed down as it neared the kerb.
"Oh, look, Miss Lorne; here's mummie's motor car; and I do believe that's Bimbi peeping out of it!" exclaimed the child--"Bimbi" being his pet name for Captain Hawksley--then broke, in wild excitement, from Ailsa's detaining hand and fled to a tall, military-looking man with a fair beard and moustache who had just that moment alighted from the vehicle.

"It is Bimbi--it is!--it is!" he shouted as he ran.

"Oh, Bimbi, I _am_ glad!" "Ceddie, dear, you mustn't be so boisterous!" chided Ailsa, coming up with him at the kerb.

"How fond he is of you to be sure, Captain Hawksley.