# Waylaid by Wireless/Chapter 3

CHAPTER III
THE GIRL TO THE RESCUE
"He was suggesting to you that you are—the thief?" the girl turned uncertainly from the Englishman to the American again. "Oh—not seriously, of course!"
"In all British seriousness, Miss Varris," Preston replied.
"Ah; but I say, Mr. Preston, I say—" the Englishman began.
"Of course, Miss Varris," the American went on, "to be fair, you must understand that Mr. Dunneston was not doing it in a personal or offensive way at all. He was merely pointing out in a friendly manner how directly the facts of the case proved against me; wasn't that it, sir?"
"Ah; but I told you, Mr. Preston," the Englishman replied, "that as no other ​plausible explanation covered the facts as I knew them a moment back, I was forced to consider the points of your connection with these cathedral crimes, sir. But I am not all sure now, Mr. Preston and Miss Varris," he nodded reassuringly to the young people. "Perhaps as plausible and certainly a preferable explanation of Mr. Preston's peculiar conduct may be considered which would render his connection with the crimes still—still extraordinarily coincidental," he warned fairly, "but inconclusive—oh, quite inconclusive!"
"Why; what do you mean?" the girl looked to the Englishman. But Preston nodded his acknowledgment to the Briton and moved to lead her away.
"Thank you, Mr. Dunneston!" he forestalled further explanation. "Thank you, sir!"
The girl hesitated a moment; then gave her hand frankly to the Englishman.
"We shall see you again, Mr. Dunneston?" she said.
"Awfully good of him to think the case ​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 ​replied vaguely, "a plausible and preferable explanation of certain actions of mine which had puzzled him—particularly my dubitable presence upon this cathedral tour."
"But how?" the girl persisted.
"Oh—let's not analyze! You've done it, and, if I know the English, you've made him now really unnaturally trustful of me. But, Miss Varris, where is Mrs. Varris?" he changed suddenly.
"She was to go over to the cathedral with Mrs. Hastings. And I told her I would return there."
"Can we find her there now, then?"
"We, Mr. Preston?" the girl teased.
"Oh, I forgot." Preston met her easily. "Your mother has the family funds, hasn't she? And after what you have heard you can't quite consider my connection with the crimes inconclusive enough so that you dare to take me to her."
"Yes; you have evidently forgotten, Mr. Preston," the girl retorted.
​"What?"
"What you have said at many and various times about cathedrals—and about cathedral towns, too. And also, if I recall correctly, you must be forgetting a good many of your volunteered comments upon persons who 'do' the churches and their cities. I shall be very glad to take you, of course; but do you dare go?
"Test me!"
"But what are you doing in this town, Mr. Preston?" the girl asked, half amused, half puzzled. "And not only what are you doing in Ely, but what were you doing in the other cathedral towns where you established that 'at least extraordinarily coincidental connection' of yours with crime? And what were your remarkable actions which were so inexplicably suspicious?"
"Must you know before you finally decide whether it is safe to take me to Mrs. Varris and the treasure—hand-bag?"
"Of course! And also how you attached ​yourself to—Mr. Dunneston, isn't it, with his delightfully inconclusive suspicions."
"Come then," Preston laughed as he led out upon the lawn.
It was the very hour of perfection in the heart of an English morning, when the adjustments of the dawn with the day are over and all the land has settled itself in security and quiet to the serene sufficiency of its established toil.
Toward the tiny, town market-place country carts creaked sturdily down the bedded road, while the bees boomed about the warm honeysuckle against the green walls on either side of the ancient way, and the red and yellow poppies and field flowers opened their blossoms slowly to deck discreetly the even acres of the growing grain.
The American, as he came out to that peaceful country, quivered gladly with the delight of it all—the clipped hedgerow and speckless road, the serried spinneys and shining copse, the red-roofed, vine-clad, gray stone cottages ​with the gleaming fens and willow banks of the little stream beyond. And above, touching the clear blue sky, climbed the Norman and old English towers of Ely, carved clear and crested by the sun; while below, the white-fleeced sheep grazed in the grass at their base, almost within their cool shadow.
The calm, settled, and irrevocable manner and mind of this whole peaceful countryside and its people came to the young American with unexpressible understanding as he drew in with his breath the deep satisfaction and firm establishment of their very air. Many times before, and for many, many weeks when he was a boy he had come over to this England with his mother and sisters and their friends. But for three weeks this time he had been alone—solitary and untended of his own countrymen in England. And he felt he was just beginning to sound the hitherto all unsuspected depths of the fundamental differences—the delightful and discreet, oh, eminently discreet, differences which distinguish ​the understanding of the Englishman and the American. As he reckoned it over in the settled glory of the sunlight, he smiled jubilantly at the expectant girl beside him.
"What is it?" she asked.
"Oh, I was just thinking about the English in general," he said, "and most particularly of the especial gorgeousness of my Englishman."
"Oh; Mr. Dunneston?" the girl encouraged.
"Yes; that is, I think that's his name."
"Why, don't you know his name?" the girl asked, puzzled. "I thought you said you had been travelling with him for eight days."
"I have—in which period I have elicited everything else and was just reaching the name. I thought you knew," Preston smiled, "that as the name is the first thing one finds from an American, it's the last from an Englishman. But as I got it from his luggage last week and have been calling him by it ever since, I suspect he will feel confidential enough ​to confess it to me pretty soon now. I think we've gone through almost everything else."
"Then tell me about him first," the girl commanded. "There's something so delightfully British and—foreboding about him that I—"
"Foreboding! Foreboding's just the word, Miss Varris," Preston congratulated. "I've been trying to think ever since I met him exactly what his charm was and—'delightfully foreboding,' that's it!"
"Tell me then," the girl asked again impatiently, "where did you meet him, and how?"