Mr. Mallory patted his daughter's shoulder in mock encouragement. "Go ahead, Miss Cocksure," he smiled at her. "But, if I am not mistaken, you will find that Mademoiselle Louise carries too many guns for an honest English craft like my little Enid. There! that's a nautical simile suitable for a sailor's bride. Now run away to your golf and leave an old fogey to worry the thing out as best he can. I am past the age for personal adventures in disguise, or I should be sorely tempted to explore The Hut in some other character than my own."
Enid pouted a little at the disparagement of her detective powers, and then, after a dutiful peck at the clean-shaven paternal cheek, shouldered her clubs and made for the garden gate. Half-way across the lawn she wheeled round and shouted back—
"Don't wait lunch for me. Mona and I have arranged to have a snack on the links and go out for another round in the afternoon."
Mr. Mallory nodded and turned to re-enter the house. As a resident at a seaside resort where most people were engaged in amusing themselves, he had grown accustomed to the ordinary meals being movable feasts, sometimes omitted altogether so far as Enid was concerned. During the summer months she would frequently disappear after breakfast, and not be seen again till she arrived late but apologetic at the dinner table. Even that important function was occasionally allowed to go by the board when the popular little lady was intercepted on her way home and dragged into some neighbour's house to spend the evening.
To-day, keen sportswoman though she was, Enid's thoughts were chained quite as much by her father's self-imposed anxieties as by the game she loved. Passing by the entrance gates of The Hut, she looked in vain up the drive for any signs of the persons enumerated by her father as probably connected with the case, and it was only when she had reached the links on the breezy moor and had been duly chid by her waiting friend for unpunctuality that she shook off her absorption and gave herself up to the game. Conscious of her slackness, she forced herself to play rather better than usual, but at the close of the afternoon round she allowed her obsession to resume its sway.
Concocting some frivolous pretext, she avoided walking down the road to the town with other homeward-bound golfers, and contrived to slip away unseen along a moorland path which led to the town by another and longer route at the edge of the cliff. It had in Enid's eyes the merit of passing quite close to the rear of The Hut, whereas the road was separated from the house by the whole extent of a fairly long carriage drive. Somehow the secluded abode of Mr. Travers Nugent had for her that day the attraction of a magnet. She simply could not keep away from it.
There was no definite plan in her head, only an intense longing that something might happen which would enable her to fill the gap in her father's investigations. Before it struck out on to the cliff the path led her through a maze of gorse bushes very near the back gate out of which Nugent had shown Pierre Legros on the night of his first interview with him. When Enid came opposite this gate, which was of oak set in an impenetrable hedge of blackthorn, she was seized with an irresistible impulse to see if the gate was fastened. She fought against it for as long as it took her to walk resolutely ten paces by, and then there recurred to her her father's words—
"I am past the age for adventures, or I should be sorely tempted to explore The Hut in some other character than my own."
The temptation was too strong for her. Retracing her steps, she picked her way across the few intervening yards of heather and tried the gate. To her surprise it was neither locked nor bolted, but opened inwards to the extent of the couple of inches for which she only dared apply pressure at first. Growing bolder, she pushed the gate further open and peered in. The house was partly visible fifty yards away through a screen of copper beeches, but an intense silence brooded over it, nor in the foreground of garden was there any sign of human life.
"Dad was pleased to be sarcastic about my ability to find out things," she murmured to herself. "All the same I think I'll do a little scout on my own account. It would be good fun to take the old dear a tit-bit of information that he hadn't been able to ferret out himself."