I will come at half-past seven .-- FLOSSIE." Duncombe drew a little sigh of relief.

At last then he was to know something.

He was very English, a bad amateur detective, and very weary of his task.

Nothing but his intense interest in the girl herself--an interest which seemed to have upset the whole tenor of his life--would have kept him here plodding so relentlessly away at a task which seemed daily to present more difficulties and complications.

Yet so absorbed had he become that the ordinary duties and pleasures which made up the routine of his life scarcely ever entered into his mind.