"Don't pitch into me!" pleaded Dale-Bulmer, pathetically. "I had to do something; if I hadn't thought of you, and one or two things I've heard about you, doctor, I should only have telephoned to the police; and what's the good of putting these young women in the jug, to be poured out again within a week? I heard you ran a nursing-home for criminals, worth all the prisons in the world."
"But I don't run people into it," said the doctor; "they've got to come in of their own free will. What have you done with this young woman?"
"I? Nothing; it's her own doing entirely. She chose her cover—I only turned the key."
"You've locked her up in some room?"
"Yes—more or less—rather more."
And Dale-Bulmer laughed a rather nervous, guilty laugh.
"Up-stairs somewhere?"
"Yes—look you here! She was picking up those matches when I spotted her from this door, and out she streaked through that one over there. Come and have a look at her line of country, doctor."
It led into an anteroom or inner hall, or the well of some staircase still to come, with a lashed ladder towering in its midst, but not quite reaching a skeleton landing of yawning joists. Dale-Bulmer gazed aloft, wagging a horizontal beard.
"Surely she didn't go up there?" said Dollar.