watch Richard O'Brien's widow, might easily have been clever enough to
suborn a messenger waiting for one Ernest Borrow.

"What are you mumbling about?" Anthony wanted to know, when I forgot to
answer. "Have I put some idea that you don't like into your head?"

"I was turning your question over in it," I explained, "and wondering
what to answer. Of course, Miss Gilder's rather important, and I
believe her father's obsession used to be when she was a child, that
she'd be kidnapped for ransom. The 'little sprite of a woman' you
admire so much, knew the Gilders in those days. She says that the
unfortunate baby used to be dragged about in a kind of caged
perambulator, and that some of her nurses were female detectives in
disguise, with revolvers under their white aprons. No wonder the girl
revels in emancipation and travel! I should think, now she's grown up
to twenty-one years and five foot eight or nine of height, without
being kidnapped, there's not much danger so long as she keeps in the
boundaries of civilization. Still, one never knows, in such a queer
world as ours, where newspapers live on happenings we'd laugh to scorn
if they came out of novel writers' brains."

"That's the only incentive you can suggest for spying, unconnected with
my affairs?"

I hesitated, for Biddy's secret was not my secret, and it seemed that I
had no right to pass it on, even to my best friend. I must ask Biddy's
permission before telling Fenton that Mrs. Jones was the widow of the
informer Richard O'Brien; that she feared over-subtlety on the part of
the enemy might confuse her girl travelling companion with Esme
O'Brien, hidden in a convent school near Monaco. "It's just credible