“What was she like?” demanded Gregg, leaning forward again.
Mr Stubbs looked at him with a shade of uneasiness in his eyes. “Why, I didn’t get much sight of her face, she being crying into her shawl fit to break her heart.”
“Ah, so you didn’t see her face!” said Gregg. “Perhaps she was a tall girl—a very tall girl?”
Mr Stubbs had been engaged in filling a long clay pipe, but he laid it down, and said slowly: “Ay, she was a rare, strapping wench. She had yaller hair, by what I could see of it.”
Gregg sat back in his chair and set his finger-tips together, and over them surveyed the Runners with a peculiar glint in his eyes. “So that was it!” he said. “Well, well!”
“What do you mean, ‘that was it’?” said Mr Stubbs.
“Only that you have seen Ludovic Lavenham; yes, and let him slip through your fingers too, I dare say.”
Mr Peabody, observing his colleague’s evident discomfiture, came gallantly to the rescue. “That’s where you’re wrong,” he said. “What we’ve done is, we’ve Lulled him—if so be it is him, which we ain’t proved yet. What we have to do now is to make a Pounce, and that, Mr Gregg, is what we decided to do without any help of yourn.”
“You had better have made your pounce when you had him under your hand,” said the valet dryly. “It is said in these parts that there are cellars below the ones you may see at the Red Lion; cellars which only Nye and Clem know the way into.”
“If that’s true, we shall find them,” said Mr Stubbs, with resolution.