"Did he?" I said absently.
Then we turned up the road to the "Refuge." Neither of us realised that the man on the bicycle had turned his machine, and had noiselessly followed us down the road again.
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.
"Miss Smith——"
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.
Mercy! What could he want?
"Miss Million——" he said.
And Miss Million, too, stared at him, and said: "Whatever on earth is the meaning of this?"