"I've come to tell you that you are to be spared the ordeal of meeting the third degree men of Scotland Yard," he said laughingly, and her eyes spoke her relief.
"Haven't you been out this beautiful morning?" he asked innocently, and this time she laughed aloud.
"What a hypocrite you are, Mr. Tarling!" she replied. "You know very well I haven't been out, and you know too that there are three Scotland Yard men watching this hotel who would accompany me in any constitutional I took."
"How did you know that?" he asked without denying the charge.
"Because I've been out," she said naively and laughed again. "You aren't so clever as I thought you were," she rallied him. "I quite expected when I said I'd not been out, to hear you tell me just where I'd been, how far I walked and just what I bought."
"Some green sewing silk, six handkerchiefs, and a tooth-brush," said Tarling promptly and the girl stared at him in comic dismay.
"Why, of course, I ought to have known you better than that," she said. "Then you do have watchers?"
"Watchers and talkers," said Tarling gaily. "I had a little interview with the gentleman in the vestibule of the hotel and he supplied me with quite a lot of information. Did he shadow you?"
She shook her head.
"I saw nobody," she confessed, "though I looked most carefully. Now what are you going to do with me, Mr. Tarling?"