“I agree,” he said, coolly. “What would you expect? I had to do this, since you would not let me persuade you. I have saved you from a very awkward position.”

“You have placed me in a worse one,” she retorted. “What do you intend to do with me now?”

He freed her wrist and regarded her speculatively, with a cold smile twitching at the corners of his mouth. “That depends,” he said. “I have, thanks to Mr. Labar, had to push things rather in a hurry. How much of what he told me about you was true? Not all, I’m sure, or you wouldn’t have been allowed to walk out of the police station this morning.”

He had contrived to startle the girl out of her attitude of cold resentment. She pulled herself round till she was half-facing him.

“What did he say? What does he know?”