"I'll defy the police to find 'em, anyway," replied Addie with a quick response of lip and eye. "I don't do things by halves. I say—they're gone! But—I'm here. Come, now—I've made a clean breast of it all. The thing's over and done with. There's nothing to prevent Miss Greyle there coming into her rights—I can prove 'em—my father can prove them. So—is it any use doing what that old gentleman's just worrying to do? You can all see what he wants—he's dying to hand me over to the police."

Sir Cresswell Oliver rose, glanced at Audrey and her mother, received some telepathic communication from them, and assumed his old quarter-deck manner.

"Not tonight, I think, Petherton," he said authoritatively. "No—certainly not tonight!"

* * * * *

Some months later, when Audrey Greyle had come into possession of Scarhaven, and had married Copplestone in the little church behind her mother's cottage, she and her husband, to satisfy a mutual and long-cherished desire, visited a certain romantic and retired part of the country. And in the course of their wanderings they came across a very pretty village, and in it a charmingly situated retreat, which looked so attractive from the road along which they were walking that they halted and peered at it through its trimly-kept boundary hedge. And there, seated in the easiest of chairs on the smoothest of lawns, roses about him, a cigar in his mouth, the newspaper in his hand, a glass at his elbow, they saw Peter Chatfield. They looked at him for a long moment; then they looked at each other and smiled delightedly, as children might smile at a pleasure-giving picture, and they passed on in silence. But when that village lay behind them, Copplestone gave his wife a sly glance, and permitted himself to make an epigram.

"Chatfield!" he said musingly. "Chatfield! sublimely ungrateful that he isn't in Dartmoor."