CHAPTER I


The sound came again--so unmistakably, this time, the sound of a
footstep in the soft, squashy ooze on the Heath, there could be no
question regarding the nature of it. Miss Lorne came to an instant
standstill and clutched her belongings closer to her with a shake and a
quiver; and a swift prickle of goose-flesh ran round her shoulders and up
and down the backs of her hands. There was good, brave blood in her, it
is true; but good, brave blood isn't much to fall back upon if you
happen to be a girl without escort, carrying a hand-bag containing
twenty-odd pounds in money, several bits of valuable jewellery--your
whole earthly possessions, in fact--and have lost your way on Hampstead
Heath at half-past eight o'clock at night, with a spring fog shutting
you in like a wall and shutting out everything else but a "mackerel"
collection of clouds that looked like grey smudges on the greasy-silver
of a twilit sky.

She looked round, but she could see nothing and nobody. The Heath was a
white waste that might have been part of the scenery in Lapland for all
there was to tell that it lay within reach of the heart and pulse of the
sluggish leviathan London. Over it the vapours of night crowded, an
almost palpable wall of thick, wet mist, stirred now and again by some
atmospheric movement which could scarcely be called a wind, although, at
times, it drew long, lacey filaments above the level of the denser mass
of fog and melted away with them into the calm, still upper air.

Miss Lorne hesitated between two very natural impulses--to gather up her