"Your chauffeur!"
"I could not risk the thief having access to a fast car."
"But what if this fellow Cressit refuses to go?" enquired Lord
Beamdale.
"He won't," said Malcolm Sage grimly. "D.O.R.A. is still in operation. I had to remind him of the fact."
Malcolm Sage picked up his hat and coat and walked towards the door.
"I must be going," he said. "I have still several things to attend to. You won't forget about the plunder from the garage?" he added.
"But what am I to do about Miss Blair?" asked Sir Lyster.
"That's a question I think you will find answered in the Gospel of St. Luke—the seventh chapter and I think the forty-seventh verse"; and with that he was gone, leaving three Ministers gazing at one another in dumb astonishment.
Had a cynic been peeping into the library of The Towers a few minutes later, he would have discovered three Cabinet Ministers bending over a New Testament, which Sir Lyster had fetched from his wife's boudoir, and the words they read were: "Wherefore I say unto thee, Her sins, which are many, are forgiven; for she loved much."
"Strange," murmured Lord Beamdale, "very strange," and the others knew that he was referring not to the text, or to the unhappy girl— but to Malcolm Sage.