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 from a train passing north through the tunnel.'

'There may have been a struggle,' I remarked, 'and in trying to raise the alarm it might have dropped from her hand.'

'That certainly might have been the case,' the inspector admitted.

An hour later, accompanied by Teddy and Barton, I set out from King's Cross station and, on arrival at Welwyn—a journey a little over twenty miles—we spent the evening in searching inquiry.

The station-master knew nothing, except that both tunnels had been searched without result.

The story told by the platelayer who found the chatelaine was to the effect that he noticed a paper bag lying in the centre of the up-express line and, on picking it up, found the jingling bunch of gold impedimenta. The paper bag had probably been blown along there by a passing train and had somehow become entangled among the short lengths of chain composing the chatelaine.

'Of course it might ha' been there a couple o' days,' the stout, sooty-faced man replied to a question of Barton's. 'I work in the tunnels all the time, but I didn't see it before to-day. We often finds things thrown out o' trains—things people want to get rid of. They must 'ave quite a fine collection o' things up at King's Cross—things what I and my mates have found while we've been a goin' along with our flares.'

'You can form no idea when it might have been thrown out?' I asked.

'Probably late last night, or early this mornin',' was the man's reply. 'I started to examine all the