Beryl, strapped in, peered below, and then, placing her eye to the powerful night-glasses, she could discern distinctly two fire-engines tearing along to the scene of the conflagration.
Then with a laugh Ronnie pulled over the lever and, climbing high again, swiftly made off in the direction of Harbury.
“That spy won’t ever show a light again!” he remarked grimly.
Next day the newspapers reported a serious and very mysterious outbreak of fire in a photographic studio at the top of a certain block of flats, the charred remains of the occupier, Mr. Richard Goring, a highly respected resident, being afterwards found, together with a mass of mysterious metal apparatus with which he had apparently been experimenting, and by which—as the Coroner’s jury eventually decided four days later—the fatal fire must have been caused.
One morning Beryl and Ronnie, seated together in the drawing-room at Harbury, read the evidence given at the inquest and the verdict.
Both smiled, but neither made remark.
CHAPTER II.
MR. MARK MARX.
“I think we’ll have to give her another dope, Collins,” remarked Ronnie Pryor, as early one summer’s morning he stood before “The Hornet,” which, after a night-flight to the sea and back, was reposing in its “nest.”