"I found out everything there was to be discovered, ma'am. She had a postal order for ten shillings which her father had sent her for her birthday."
"And that was all?"
"And one for two pounds that I sent her on the same occasion. She changed them this morning at the local post office. At the station, they could give me no particulars; she was not known by sight to any of the officials there. The local police are going to make inquiries. On the way from Victoria just now, I put an advertisement into the newspaper she was most likely to see, asking her to communicate with me."
"I might have guessed," said Mrs. Hillier, gratefully, "that you would do all that was possible. But she is a queer child, and I wish I could tell what is likely to happen to her."
It was just because Miss Muriel had always behaved differently from anyone else that I felt anxious. All the same, I declared to Mrs. Hillier that it was impossible to share her fears; I spoke of Miss Muriel as a rather spoilt young lady who would very quickly resent the discomforts she encountered, and, the two pounds ten gone, we might expect her to ring the bell at Gloucester Place, and demand to be fussed over, and treated as though she had acted courageously and with shrewd common sense. There was no music from the pianoforte that evening. I went up to my rooms, at the top of the house, as early as convenient, leaving a thoughtful family group to discuss the matter. To detach myself from worry, I wrote a long letter to Quartermaster-Sergeant Cartwright. In his last pencilled note, he had explained that his father, taken ill on the second day of Cartwright's leave, required his attention during the rest of the time, and he seemed to hint that I might have some excuse for feeling annoyed at not seeing him again. My letter was calculated to re-assure him. I asked for the address of his people, and promised, when this came, to call and see them. It can be added that the part of Cartwright's note which gratified me the most came at the end where three crosses had been drawn, small enough to be over-looked unless one was searching for them.
My intention was to give my full time to the job of discovering Miss Muriel. The advertisement appeared, and in answer to it, I received a card from her, postmarked London, N.W., bearing nothing more than three words—
"Quite all right!"
—And I should have made an effort to search the postal district indicated—although, as I knew, it included Kentish Town, and Hampstead, and Cricklewood, and all sorts of distant places—but for the fact that I was suddenly bound, hand and foot, to London Street. Millwood left, and in the circumstances one could not blame him for leaving. His effective talk at recruiting meetings had been noticed by the authorities, and he received an offer that excited him, and gave him enormous gratification; he bustled around before leaving for the tour in the manner of a junior clerk starting for his first holiday. One speech, they told him, would be all that was needed, and this speech was to be delivered in the Midlands, up in the North, and, in fact, wherever he was instructed to go. So Millwood—when I had chosen a new suit for him, and selected a new hat, and made him look fairly respectable, without suggesting prosperity—Millwood went off, and on the top of this, Peter's mother came from Deptford, and with a preliminary announcement that she intended to behave herself in a lady-like manner, asked what the blazes I meant by paying her boy twelve adjective shillings a week, when, at the Arsenal, he could be earning untold gold, and thus save his poor father from the necessity of going out to work. She described my origin as German, and warned me to look out for an attack on the shop; I stopped the shouted tirade by handing to Peter the wages due, and advising him to follow his extraordinary parent.
"I don't want to go with her, miss," he pleaded. "I'm very comfortable where I am."