"Take me back! Take me to the place you brought me from," I cried to the stooping figure.  
The others had come up. The chauffeur¹ was vague and mumbling². He was drunk enough to be stubborn, cautious. But money quickened him.
 
He had picked me up, he said, "in one of the streets...." he couldn't say positively³ which, and he mentioned several. It might be any one of them; but it wasn't far from St. John's Wood Station.
 
In spite of the man's condition I wanted to get into his cab. I had a horror of losing him.
 
"I have taken his number," the Healer said, as though that were enough.
 
And all the while—— But we are coming, Betty! Coming....
 
The other driver had been summoned. I heard the names of streets and of police-stations. They settled which would be the one.
 
"Will you drive very fast?" I asked. "I[Pg 323] will give you all I have if you'll drive fast."
 
The drunken chauffeur followed us in his swerving⁴, rocking cab. I leaned out of the window all the way, weeping, praying. And I never took my eyes away from the only clue.
 
Minutes and minutes went by. I seemed to have spent my life hanging out of a taxi window, watching a drunken driver steer⁵ his uneven⁶ course. He ran up on a curbstone, and the cab tilted⁷. Then it righted, and came on at a terrific pace, almost to capsize again as it turned the abrupt⁸ corner, which we ourselves had rounded just before we stopped. I looked up, and saw a light burning in a lantern above an open door.
 
The room we went into was smaller than the one at Alton Street.
 
And Betty wasn't there.
 
Only one man, standing⁹ at a high desk. An honest-looking, fresh-coloured man; but quite young. When the others began telling him why we had come I broke in: "This is not an ordinary thing. We must see the inspector¹⁰."
 
The young man said he was the inspector.
 
Among us we told him.[Pg 324]
 
The drunken cabman, almost sober, spoke¹¹ quite differently. Sensible, alert. Now something would be done! I no longer regretted the youth of the inspector. This man was human.
 
"You will bring 'the List' and come with us at once?"
 
I was told he could not come. An inspector must stay at his post. An inspector's post was the station.
 
But I clung to the hope he had inspired. What had he turned away for with that brisk air? My eyes went on before him, looking for the telephone he must be going to use; or an electric bell that should sound some great alarum, summoning a legion of police.
 
He had come back; he stood before us holding in his hand a piece of yellow paper. Precisely¹² such a piece of paper as that on which already, there in Alton Street, the miserable¹³ story was set down. I shall not be believed, but this man, too, began to write on the glazed¹⁴ surface with a stump¹⁵ of blunt lead-pencil.
 
"Don't wait to write it all again!" I prayed. "Telephone for help...."
 
But he, too, made little of the need for haste.[Pg 325] He, too, made much of what I had noticed as we left Victoria—the homely¹⁶ woman and the policeman watching as we drove away.
 
"You think," Mrs. Harborough said, "that the woman was suspicious?"
 
"No doubt—and no doubt the............