Page:Alice Stuyvesant - The Vanity Box.djvu/271

 names of places and streets and people. Below the village, and the house Barr occupied as steward on the Friars' Moat estate, is a small house, a sort of cross between a villa and a cottage, standing in a garden on the highroad. Liane must have passed it constantly. It's called Deodar Lodge; and the man who lived there, up till a short time ago, was named Ernest Bayne—a writer for socialist papers, and an intimate friend of Ian Barr's. You see the likelihood, don't you, that a Frenchwoman—unused to pawnshops, afraid or being caught, yet nerved by necessity—would snatch at anything familiar that sprang into her head, when hearing that she was obliged to give name and address? The fact that she wasn't English herself would make her cautious to choose something she felt sure was quite English, lest she should make a mistake, and rouse suspicion. She suddenly found herself thinking of Bayne and Deodar Lodge; so she changed Bayne into Bayneson, unconscious that she'd hit upon a weird sort of combination. And as she's very likely living in lodgings in some Crescent, in Westbourne Grove, she tacked that on to her Deodar."

"That hangs together plausibly," said Burrows, pleased with the young man's building up of one deduction on another. "I suppose you think she's in Westbourne Grove because she went to a small place like Ebbitt's, of whose existence she wouldn't have known unless she'd happen to pass it."