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Betcher called them plainly the "Terrible People." Sometimes he added adjectives of force and colour.

With no other emotion than one of joy at the prospect of a day in the out-of-doors, Nora came to Marlow.

Harry, the boatman at Meakes, straightened his back, wiped his forehead with a bare brown arm, and regarded the inquirer with the respectful interest which all boatmen assume so naturally toward all folks who are not equipped or costumed for the river.

"Mr. Monkford's house?"

He shaded his eyes from the reflected glare of the sun and pointed up river. Here the stream turns abruptly toward Temple Lock. In the one bank the meadows stretch to the long woods; behind the trees on the other, the tower of Bisham Church shows grayly. It was toward Bisham that the boatman looked.

"You can't see the house from here," he said, with an air of disappointment which suggested that for the first time in his life he realized and regretted the invisibility of Bendham Manor. "It's old— you can see the place if you walk up the path. A red house with twisting chimneys."

He looked at her doubtingly. There were twelve punts to be baled and a four-oared skiff to be made ready for a picnic party almost due. She was very pretty. It was lady-prettiness, fragile and dainty and white. Red lips and gray eyes that held the ghost of a smile. She wore a little black felt hat without ornamentation and a blue costume that was nearly black, severe, and straight, yet for some reason peculiarly feminine. Also there was a suppleness and grace in the slim lady who had arrested his eye as she walked toward him along the towpath, long before he had seen her face.

"It's a long way round by road," he said, emphasizing in his fashion the service he was about to offer. "You cross the bridge and take the second lane to your right where the war memorial is— a long way. I'd better row you across, ma'am."

"You're very good," she said.

She had a nice voice, sweet and rich. Some gentleman's wife, he thought, for she was not a flapper. There was a maturity in her manner, a self-assurance in the decision she revealed. Nora Sanders was in truth an old woman of twenty-two and reconciled to her great age and exceedingly blank prospects. Her years troubled her not at all, though the terrible thirties lay over the brow of the hill; nor did her emphatic singleness, for she had met no man whose quality of mind and heart set her dreaming in the quiet dusk. But it was very dreadful to be companion-secretary to a woman of sixty and to absorb from day to day her acrid philosophies. She had gone halfway to meet middle age (this was her pet illusion), and there was no way out. Marriage was only a jump from one rut to another and maybe a worse. Such dreams as she had were curiously temperate. If she gave a brevet to her fancies, they moved soberly to posts that a woman might hold in some great business organization, where the salary was large and the possibilities of promotion at least encouraging.

As Harry went to find oars, her eyes roved up and down the river. The roar of the weir was pleasant and soothing, the clang of the clock in old Marlow Church as it struck three belonged to the harmonies of the place and the time. A racing four came swinging round the bend of the river; the rhythmic thud of oars against steel outriggers was a concert in the melody of that drowsy summer afternoon.

Harry brought the boat to the side of the towpath, and she stepped in.

He was inclined to be informative as he set the nose of the boat upstream.

"...there's a trout in that hole, the biggest in the river. Some say he's thirty years old an' more. Lots of young gentlemen have tried to get him, but he just laffs at 'um! Got away with more tackle than any fish that ever lived. You'll see him to-night; he feeds at a quarter of eight."

She murmured a polite interest. The "hole" must be imagined as a deep depression in the river's bed beneath the placid and unbroken water. Harry's tit-bit was to come.

"That's Shelton's boat." He jerked his head sideways to a weather-beaten craft moored to the lawn of an empty house. A whale-decked power boat that had once been brave and white and was now water-rusted and uninviting. She wondered who Shelton was, and, even as she wondered, he supplied a startling scrap of biography.

"Shelton was hung for killing a copper— policeman. Biggest forger in the world, so the newspapers say— not that you can believe newspapers. They said Marlow was flooded in the spring an' the water hardly came over the path!"

She was looking at him in open-eyed wonder, and from him she turned back to scrutinize the tragic craft.

"Hanged?"

Harry nodded. He seemed to take credit himself for the operations of justice.

"You wouldn't believe it if you read it in a book; Shelton's boat there and Mr. Monkford's home just round the corner!"

"Is that a coincidence?" she asked.

Evidently it was. All Marlow had been talking about it. Shelton once had a little bungalow beyond Temple where he lived alone. That power boat of his had held a small printing press, and some of the famous letters of credit which had alarmed the financiers of two continents had been created in the cabin of the Northward.

"There's nothing in it, though— the coincidence, I mean." Harry was explicit on this point. "After Shelton was hung, his bungalow and boat was sold up. A man named Finney bought the boat, and he sold it to another gentleman."

He explained the vicissitudes and fortunes of the Northward in detail.

"But where does Mr. Monkford come into all this?" Nora was interested to ask.

"He hung Shelton," said Harry solemnly, "him and Mr. Long, the celebrated detective, he's over there now. I saw him rowing about in the dinghy this afternoon."

She knew that Joseph Monkford was a prominent member of the Bankers' Association. It was the only subject on which Miss Revelstoke grew voluble. The old woman had known Monkford when he was the branch manager of the Southern Bank— she had her account with him. And Mr. Monkford had risen, by sheer native genius, to the position of general manager of the Southern and to the chairmanship of the board of directors of the Bankers' Association.

"Him and Betcher Long," said Harry, with relish, "hung Shelton. Long found him an' was goin' to pinch him when Shelton pulled a gun and killed an officer named Lacy, who was with Long. You don't mean to tell me you never heard about it, ma'am? Why, it was only a year ago."

Nora shook her head. She never read horrors of any kind. It was a grievance with people she met at Miss Revelstoke's that she knew nothing of topical events, and had no view as to whether He was to blame or She was to blame in the current cause célèbre.

The house was in sight now. A rambling Elizabethan mansion of dull red brick. It stood back amidst the poplars, a wide green lawn separating the building from the river.

Harry pulled vigorously at one oar, and the boat shot through the small landing stage. Here the stream shallowed; the sandy bottom was free of weeds, and she saw a school of roach pass leisurely under the boat across the sunlit bed. Two men were fishing from the lawn— one at either end. They looked up as the boat came to the bank, and surveyed her absently. Then they returned to the contemplation of their red floats. Gathering up the parcel she was carrying, Nora reached out her gloved hand and caught the edge of the pier.

"No, thank you, ma'am."

She had opened her bag and was searching for her purse, as she stood on the stage, but Harry pushed off the boat and signalled his farewell.

"Mr. Monkford will have you brought back, ma'am," he shouted.

She gave him a little smile which he valued, though he was a married man, and made a way across the close-cut lawn.

Chapter 7

THE entrance to the house was on the shore side, and a footman took her parcel and ushered her into the big hallway.

"Mr. Monkford has a gentleman with him at the moment, miss," he said, opening the door of a small drawing room, but she had taken two steps to the place of waiting when the man she sought appeared in a doorway on the opposite side of the hall. He was short, stout, and rather bald. She could not help thinking at that moment that nobody less like the nemesis of the unfortunate Shelton was imaginable than the jovial, red-faced man, with his ludicrous spectacles and his polka-dot waistcoat.

"Come in, Miss Sanders, come in— it is Miss Sanders, isn't it? Did Miss Revelstoke get that statuette for me? Splendid! What a superstitious lady she is, to be sure!"

Miss Revelstoke and her sometime banker shared one hobby, the collection of Roman antiquities. The statuette which Nora had brought had been acquired by her from a dealer— its gruesome character made the transfer to Mr. Monkford a perfectly natural one.

"Come right in. That parcel must have been heavy. If I had known you were coming, I'd have sent the car.

I'd like you to meet a friend of mine— one of the best— yes, one of the best! "

He had a trick of repeating his final sentences that amused the girl. A stimulating, vital man, who radiated a heartening life force, his friendship was as much part of him as the average man's superficial courtesy.

"Let me take your umbrella"— he bustled with it to the hat-stand, talking all the time—"an umbrella on a day like this!"

As she followed him into the big library that overlooked the river, she saw, standing by one of the windows and gazing gloomily across the lawn to the river, a man she had seen somewhere before. Then, in a flash, she knew him and saw the sudden recognition in his eyes.

"Miss Sanders, this is Mr. Long."

Long! The name was familiar, but for the moment she could not place him. And then she remembered the boatman's story and Shelton, who was hanged. Betcher Long, the detective! She wondered if Betcher were a Christian name bestowed by an eccentric parent.

He was looking at Nora; his gaze enveloped her, item by item. She felt this, yet was not uneasy; her dominant expression was of the power she had overlooked when she had seen him first. The tremendous strength of him, the queer magnetic qualities of his eyes. Was it imagination, born of the mystery of his profession? she wondered. Was she endowing him with ideal qualities? She had never met a detective before. They belonged to a terrible and a romantic world. He was wonderfully alive, communicating to her a sense of immense completeness— hand and eye, brain and thew, and above all a transcendent individuality. She was eager, impatient to know all about him, his beginnings, his life, his strange career. And just as she was hoping that he would speak and disillusion her, Monkford bustled to the fireplace and rang a bell.

"We'll have tea," he said. "The other matter can wait."

Betcher Long seemed content to wait. He strolled to the window and resumed his staring. The fishermen interested him.

For a few minutes, Nora was occupied with the object of her call.

"Miss Revelstoke would have sent the figure by post, but I rather think it got on her nerves," she said, with a half-smile.

The banker was busy unwrapping the parcel. An uncovering of paper wrappers showed a small wooden box, and the lid of this he prized off with a paper- knife. Beneath was a mass of wooden shavings into which the hand of the collector dived. It emerged holding a small object wrapped in silver tissue, and, when this was removed: "Wonderful!" He was awe-stricken.

And wonderful it was— a nude figure of a negress, about six inches high. Betcher himself found the statuette of greater interest than the landscape, and came slowly across the room.

"Perfect! The workmanship... exquisite!" Monkford gasped his admiration in disjointed words. The woman was carved from ebony— erect, chin raised, defiant. The tiny hands held across her an ivory sword. Girt about the bare waist was a metal belt from which hung an empty scabbard, the only other metal being a thin golden fillet about the woolly head.

"I don't see the inscription."

"It is underneath, on the base of the pedestal," said Nora, and Monkford turned the figure upside down. And now the inscription was decipherable, though the characters were almost microscopic in their smallness.

"Latin," said Monkford, unnecessarily. "Can you read it, Long?"

To her surprise, the detective nodded. He scanned the writing, his lips moving, and then he read aloud:

I am Death who waits at the end of all roads. Men see me and forget their happiness, straightway falling upon their swords. Beware, 0 Stranger, lest for love of me you too die by your own hand!

Betcher Long was watching her as he read. Though she could not see his face, she had no doubt. When he had finished reading, Monkford chuckled.

"Great! That is unique— almost! They have one in the Cluny Museum— the Black Fate. She's supposed to possess all sorts of mystical powers... genuine, I'll swear. There are three in Europe and one in America. You can tell your lady, Miss Sanders, that I'm a proud and happy man."

"Black Fate?" Betcher's brows met in a frown. "Black Fate— hum!"

Again he read the inscription. When he finished and looked up, his eyes were fixed on hers.

And then she asked a question that was out before she could govern her tongue. It was apropos of nothing. It was, she knew, in execrable taste, but a force within her, beyond her own power to resist, impelled the words.

"Who was Shelton?"

There was a dead silence; her heart beat wildly at her own temerity. They saw the colour come and go from her cheeks.

"Oh, I'm so sorry— I don't know what made me ask such a stupid thing!"

Monkford's face was gray; there was a wild, hurt look in his eyes. From being a figure of rubicund fun, he had become a worn and tragic man.

Whatever effect her question might have upon Monkford, the corner of the detective's mouth twitched in secret amusement.

"Shelton was a forger who killed a policeman," he said simply. "I arrested him, and he shot the officer who was with me. He was hanged."

He glanced at his silent host, and, watching him, Nora saw in that glance a hint of worry.

"Nobody guessed he would pull a gun: I suppose he went mad. We wanted him for forgery and fraud. He took more money out of the American and English banks than they like to remember, and we could never get him."