against me is now at least inconclusive, isn't it?" Preston laughed with the girl as they moved away. "Really, Miss Varris, you appeared just in time to save me from arrest, I fear."
"How? What do you mean?"
"Well, you see, I have been travelling only eight days now with Mr. Dunneston. I had told him that I was in Winchester and Rochester and a few other places about the time of the robberies there, and he knows of himself that I have established a certainly 'extraordinarily coincidental' connection with the past three crimes. Also, he has no way of knowing whether or not I am an hereditary thief, so he was just considering whether it was his duty to have the police investigate me, when you came up and saved me."
"But that is just what I don't understand," the girl returned. "How could that clear you from the suspicions you say he was holding against you?"
"Oh, he said you gave him," Preston re-
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