Presently I pulled up before the big old seventeenth-century posting-house in the long, quiet village of Ripley, once noted in the late Victorian craze of the “push-bike” as being the Mecca of the daring cyclist who ran out of London and back.
The great gateway through which the mail coaches for Portsmouth used to rumble was dark and cavernous, but on the right I saw a small door, and opening it found myself in a very low-ceiled but cosy bar, in which burned a great log fire with shining pewters above it. The Talbot is nothing if not a link with the days of the highwaymen of Weybridge Heath. Few inns in England are so unspoiled by modern improvements as the Talbot, at Ripley.
In the rather dim light of that low-pitched, well-warmed inn parlor, with its wide, inviting chimney-corner, I saw four men. One of them, facing the firelight, I recognized from the photographs Rayne had shown me—the man with the moonstone in his tie.
I ordered my drink loudly, and looked him full in the face. Then, when a few moments later I had drunk it, I wished the barman good night and went out. Reëntering the car, I drove out of the village towards Guildford, and there waited expectantly. In ten minutes he came out of the darkness.
“Mr. Hargreave?” he asked, and, after replying, I invited him inside the car, whereupon he at once recognized Madame in the half-light. It was plain that they were known to each other.
“I expected Vincent would be with you. Where is he?” asked the man named Houston.
“He’s away. I don’t know exactly where he is,” Madame replied. “But what game are we going to play to-night?”
“A very merry one. It may be amusing, it may be tragic,” was the man’s reply. “We’re picking up May Cranston at Horsley Station presently.”
“May Cranston!” echoed Madame, astounded. “I thought she went to America after that affair in Dinard!”
“So she did, but she’s back again. May is a pretty shrewd girl, you know.”