THE PARROT-FACED MAN

Guy Thorne

1917

Contents

Chapter 1 | Chapter 2

Chapter 3 | Chapter 4

Chapter 5 | Chapter 6

Chapter 7 | Chapter 8

Chapter 9 | Chapter 10

Chapter 11 | Chapter 12

Chapter 13 | Chapter 14

Chapter 15 | Conclusion

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1: Under Sentence of Death.

IT WAS about eight o'clock at night, an evening at the end of October, very hot and oppressive. It was not the heat of summer, but a thunderous, sulphurous heat, which hung over London like a pall, turned the blood to something hot and sluggish, and sent a damp and. unhealthy perspiration out upon the face.

Cyril Burlington, the chief descriptive-writer on the staff of that great journal, the Daily Wire, strolled languidly down a cul-de-sac in Fleet Street until he came to the big, arched doorway of the newspaper office. He was a tall, slim, athletic young man of about seven-and-twenty years of age. His face was a dark olive, the jaw firm, square, and resolute; the rather deep-set grey eyes, under overhanging brows of black, wore an expression of placid watchfulness, of alertness, suggesting that his mind was, so to speak, always in harness and ready to start. The black hair curled crisply to the well-shaped head and grew rather low over the forehead, while the lips were clear-cut, resolute, but with something eminently kindly, human, and humorous about them, especially when the face became animated. He was, in short, a singularly good-looking man and had a sense of power and force about him which was only the external evidence of the high position be had already achieved in London journalism.

He entered the big, tiled hall, with the commissionaire sitting at his little table in the corner, and a page boy standing by the door of the waiting-room. The commissionaire, as Burlington pressed the button set in the gilded ironwork of the ornate lift gates, gave him the deferential salute he only accorded to the chief editors and those very high up upon the staff and in the councils of the Daily Wire.

In a few seconds Mr. Burlington was being whirled rapidly up to the second floor, upon which were the principal editorial rooms, including his own.

He was dressed in a suit of grey flannels, and, late as it was in the year, still wore a straw hat. He left the lift, walked down a broad corridor with doors on either side until he came to one on which his own name was painted. He pushed it open and entered his room. It was not a large place, but it was furnished with that calculated luxury which was one of the notable features about the editorial department of the great newspaper.

There were a couple of beautiful, padded armchairs; a Brussels carpet covered tie floor; the writing-table, with its telephone and shaded electric lamp, was a large and handsome piece of furniture; while the long window which looked out over the Embankment was screened by curtains of artistic green.

Cyril threw his hat on to one of the arm-chairs, and sat down in front of the writing-table, switching on the reading-lamp as he did so. Then he took a cigar from a drawer, lit it, and began to smoke vigorously. He did not attempt to write— his contribution to tomorrow's paper was already in type, and had been written at his chambers in the Temple before lunch. He hardly knew why he had come to the office at this hour, save only that the atmosphere of his comfortable chambers had seemed to stifle him when he had returned there after a light dinner at a restaurant in the Strand. He had been unable to remain in the Temple, and this not because of the physical heat and lowering depression which heralded the storm, but because of something in his own mind which lay there heavier, blacker, and more charged with doom than any menace of outside nature could ever be.

This young man's life had been singularly happy and fortunate. At Oxford, where he had proceeded with a brilliant scholarship from Winchester, he had been prominent upon the river— gaining both his "Torpids" and "Eights"— and had taken an excellent degree. He had spoken well at the Union, and had been popular with dons and undergraduates alike.

He had a small, very small, private income. His friends and relations wished him to enter at the Bar, and prophesied a brilliant future for him. He had said nothing, but had quietly taken his own way, determined to make a name for himself in journalism, a profession which attracted him more than anything else. It seemed to him that having a stall at all the important happenings of the drama of life, so to speak, was one of the most exhilarating experiences a man could have. He would see all that went on at first hand, see it before anyone else saw it, and be the medium of giving his experiences to the world, of making a coronation, a review, a celebrated trial, or a deed of heroism live again in thousands upon thousands of his fellow-creatures' brains.

His journalistic career had been short but uniformly successful from the start. He had experienced no struggles, no disappointments, and had mounted the rungs of what is, perhaps, the most difficult ladder in modern life, with abnormal quickness. At twenty-seven his signed descriptive articles were one of the principal features of one of the most popular daily papers in England. The brightness and vividness of his style, together with his keen and sympathetic eye for human events, told at once. His brilliant word-pictures became most vivid and familiar to the great reading public; he enjoyed a magnificent salary, was in perfect health, a bachelor, and not In love.

And yet tonight, as he smoked in his quiet room, his fingers beat a tattoo upon the writing-table before him, and his keen young face was shadowed with profound uneasiness and gloom.

A little marble clock upon the mantelpiece beat out the hour of eight.

Burlington started, and his face grew rather pale.

"Twelve hours!" he muttered to himself. "Twelve hours, and it will all be over."

Suddenly passion seemed to master him. He dropped his clenched hand down upon the table with a loud, resonant blow.

"It will all be over!" he said bitterly. "And the greatest judicial crime of the century will have been perpetrated, and without hope of redress!"

He rose from his chair and began to pace up and down the room, searching his memory, as he had done so many times during the last few days, concentrating his thoughts in a wild and fruitless effort to discover one last means of averting that tragedy of another which was making him sick with impotence and fear.

A month ago, or rather more, a murder had been committed which shook England to its foundations and excited intense and feverish interest in all classes of society.

Mr. William Carne— a well-known Oxford lecturer and a fellow and tutor of St. Paul's College— had been preposterously murdered. Shortly afterwards his man-servant and personal attendant, John Smith, had been arrested on suspicion and committed for trial. This man, by reason of his extraordinary personality and his strange behaviour during his trial, had seized upon the public imagination as few suspected or convicted criminals had ever done before. In great cities, in quiet hamlets, in remote Cornwall, far away to the bleak northern villages of Scotland, nothing was spoken of but the "Parrot-faced Man," as he was called. Small in stature, pale in face, reticent and reserved in manner, the accused man's curiously-shaped round eyes, beak-like nose, and grey, curved lips gave him a strange and compelling likeness to a parrot. It was Cyril Burlington himself, attending the first appearance before the magistrate at Bow Street, who had described John Smith in this way, and within a week the name had passed into the headlines of all the papers.

The trial had lasted three days, and had presented many strange and unusual features, while a total absence of motive had to be reckoned with by the counsel prosecuting for the Crown. It had ended, however, in a verdict of "Guilty," and the ex-valet had been sentenced to death without any recommendation to mercy on the part of the jury, or any hope of it from the judge.

The verdict had been received by the country generally as a fair and just one, but to Cyril Burlington, who had watched every phase of the trial with his keen and trained intelligence, who had reported its aspects in a series of word pictures unequalled for their force and colour, John Smith was absolutely innocent of the crime.

After the condemnation the "Daily Wire," at Burlington's instigation, had immediately taken up a strong line for a reprieve. Yet, great as the power of the paper was generally in public affairs, the opinion of the country was too strongly against it in this instance.

Despite Burlington's articles, and the trenchant leaders upon the subject, the petitions were but scantily signed, and now all hope had been finally abandoned.

It was eight o'clock on the Thursday night. At eight o'clock on the next morning John Smith was to be executed in Oxford prison. Twelve hours!

A groan burst from the young man's lips. Nothing had ever touched him like this in his life— in his smooth, successful untroubled life. His conviction of John Smith's innocence was so strong, he had brooded upon it so constantly, he had made such great efforts to obtain a revision of the sentence, that it had become a personal matter.

He saw the whole scene at that very moment, with the vivid imagination of his temperament— the bare room, with its tiled walls, the deal table in the centre, the truckle bed, the two grim, silent warders in their uniforms, the steel chains running from the belt to the trousers-pockets rattling as they moved; the pale, small figure spending its last hours in this world, with staring eyes and the parched lips of horror.

Suddenly Burlington caught up his hat. His room was as stifling and insupportable as his chambers had been. He would go out into the streets, mingle with the crowds in the streets; forget, if he could, the horror which lay upon him among the stir and movement of the City and the faces of ordinary, untroubled men. He walked down the corridor, and was just turning towards the lift, when Mr. Ommaney, the editor-in-chief, met him outside the editorial room.

"Hullo, Burlington!" he said kindly; for he knew the deep disappointment and sense of impotence under which the young man was labouring. "Didn't expect to see you here tonight!"

"Oh, I just came!" Burlington answered. "I had nothing to do!"

"Come into my room for a minute," Ommaney said, leading the way.

In the editorial room, a very large apartment panelled in oak, and with a large carved marble mantelpiece, Burlington turned to his chief.

"I am frightfully upset about this case, as you know," he said; "but I must thank you for taking the line you did, on my suggestion. I know, of course, that all the other papers were against me, and it has been a great thing to have the 'Wire's' support." Ommaney shrugged his shoulders.

"I trusted your intuition, Burlington," he said; "I trust it still. I am quite prepared to believe, on your assertion, and after studying the points you have marshalled so ably, that the man Smith never committed the murder at all; and I do think that we should have been able to obtain a reprieve, at any rate. I have never known the 'Wire' fail before in its influence. If the Opposition had been in power it would have been another thing. Well, we have done our best, and if I were you I would not take the thing too much to heart."

"I can't help it, somehow or other," Burlington answered. "Heaven knows, Ommaney, I am neither weak nor sentimental; but, for some reason or other, I really am hit hard over this case."

Ommaney nodded kindly.

"Try and forget it," he said. "It'll all be over tomorrow, and when there's no more hope at all, even to the imagination, you'll settle down again."

"It's good advice," Burlington said drearily, "and I must take it. I am going for a brisk walk through London."

"Best thing possible," Ommaney answered. "Tire yourself out, and before you go to bed take ten grains of ammonium bromide. Goodnight!"

He sank into his editorial chair, and pulled the "make-up" of page three towards him, as Cyril left the room and went out into the night.

Despite Ommaney's advice— and, indeed, his own wish— he was unable, with the strongest effort of will, to wrench his thoughts away from that which filled his mind. He walked on into Fleet Street, seeing nothing of his surroundings, avoiding the passers-by and the traffic at Ludgate Circus quite mechanically. He did not even notice that his feet had turned eastwards, as the feet of all preoccupied people who walk mechanically invariably do.

Again and again, as he tramped steadily onwards, his mind reverted to the facts of the trial; to the one significant fact, indeed, upon which the hopes of the defence had been based, and which had, nevertheless, failed so utterly. It was this.

At the time when the murder was proved, by the medical evidence, to have been committed, the man John Smith had asserted that he was in London, watching the procession of the King and the Emperor of Germany from Buckingham Palace to the Mansion House, where the Sovereigns were to be entertained by the Lord Mayor and Corporation of London. Over and over again— he had availed himself of the opportunity of giving evidence in his own behalf— John Smith has reiterated this statement. He had been most precise, mentioning the train by which he left Oxford, the hour at which he had arrived at the Embankment, and the place he had secured. He also gave an accurate and flawless description of the procession and its incidents as at the time that he was supposed to have witnessed it.

To Cyril Burlington, to the prisoner's own counsel, Mr. George Munford, K.C., also, this description had all the ring of truth. To the journalist especially, accustomed to describe just these events, knowing exactly how to present them in vivid words to the mind of the ordinary reader, John Smith's evidence bore upon it the absolute hallmark of truth. No one else, however, had seen the thing in the same light. The prosecuting counsel had pointed out that the details might easily have been gleaned from the full descriptive reports in the papers. John Smith was, unfortunately, unable to produce a single person who had noticed him, or who could swear to his presence in London, and the jury ignored the plea.

Burlington went on and on. The perspiration was streaming down his face as the night grew hotter and hotter. The cool shadow of St. Paul's was grateful for a moment, but Cheapside, almost deserted now, was a long oven. He turned into the great triangle made by the Mansion House, the Bank of England, and the Royal Exchange, his feet echoing on the deserted pavements, and still walked steadily onwards, entirely disregarding his direction. There were still cabs and omnibuses pouring through the approach to Liverpool

Street Station, but he turned to the right and entered Bishopsgate.

On and on he went, until suddenly he found himself in the full, roaring tide of night life. He was in Whitechapel High Road, that great artery of the East End, and the roar of the crowd penetrated him to a consciousness of material life and sound.

The pavements were thronged with people; the shops and great gin-palaces were ablaze with green and orange lights. The kerbs were lined with costermongers' barrows, with their flaring naphtha lamps, which threw a lurid and flickering radiance upon the hard, toil-worn faces of the thronging multitude. Hoarse cries of the street vendors mingled with the shrill laughter of the innumerable girls, in tawdry finery and nodding ostrich plumes, while the swing doors of the public-houses were never still for an instant. The hot, oppressive air was loaded with the odours of fruit, vegetables, fish, and the reeking fumes which came from the bars.

The whole crowd seemed to the young man's trained and nervous brain to be instinct with ghastly gaiety, of fierce, unnatural merriment, which was hardly human under that heavy sky and the approaching menace of the storm. The faces of the people who promenaded the great highway seemed twisted into evil merriment; their jests and laughter had a note of cruelty. A casual oath or coarse expression seemed a thousand times more sinister and horrible than it really was.

"Good heavens," he thought, "what on earth possessed me to come to this filthy part of London? I had no idea where I was going. I had a thousand times better have remained in the office, or have walked through the West End."

Burlington looked upwards. The clock of the great red-brick church, with its illuminated dial, showed him that it was a quarter-past nine.

He hesitated for a moment, being roughly jostled this way and that by the innumerable people upon the pavement; and then he saw that he was standing close to the gaudy entrance of one of those cinematograph theatres which have sprung up all over London, and have become so immensely popular with all classes.

A row of hissing arc lights threw out a steel-blue radiance, over a circle of several yards, and his face was reflected and distorted by a dozen long mirrors which lined the entrance.

His eye fell upon a large card, which stated that the second performance had now commenced. The doors were open, and he could see a carpeted hall, with pay-boxes in one corner, two or three seats of red plush against the walls, and a few palms in pots. There was nobody there save the big commissionaire, who was standing at the entrance. It looked cool and inviting. A whim seized him, and he entered. Anything to be out of this dreadful, laughing, callous crowd.

He found himself in the entrance to the highest-priced seats, and the commissionaire directed him to the pay-box, towards which he strolled.

He got half-way down the hall when he suddenly wondered if, after all, it was worth while to go farther. Was it not better to find a cab and so straight home at once? He stood still for several seconds trying to make up his mind,, and nothing came to tell him that this was the supreme moment of decision in his life, and on his next movement depended his whole career, his whole life's happiness or misery, the misery or happiness of other people whom, at that moment, he had never seen or heard of.

"I might as well go in," he murmured to himself; "perhaps the picture will help me to forget."

He stepped up to the pay-box.

Then he started suddenly. Seated behind the counter, reading an evening paper, was the most beautiful girl he had ever seen in his life.

Seated though she was, he could see that she was tall and of a very graceful figure. But her face, as she looked up at him, sent the blood racing through his veins with astonishment and surprise. It was a patrician's face, a pure oval, crowned with a mass of dead black hair of extraordinary abundance, and arranged in a simple Greek knot. The complexion was dark, like his own, with a faint flush of delicate colour in the rounded cheeks. The eyes, under beautifully-pencilled brows, were of a deep brown, with strange golden lights in them, very clear and steadfast, while the mouth was a perfectly-shaped bow, sensitive, delicate, and clear-cut, with that hint of mystery and reserve one sees in the portraits by Botticelli or Leonardo da Vinci.

For a moment Burlington could hardly speak. Then a wave of something like shame came over him at being so suddenly taken aback. He was not himself, he reflected, as he paid his eighteen-pence for his seat.

"It is very hot," the girl said simply, as she gave him his change.

Her voice was low and musical, cultured in accent, and entirely free from any suspicion of coquetry.

"There is going to be a storm," he answered, with a new thrill of interest. "Don't you find it very hot here?"

She smiled faintly.

"Yes," she answered; "but, I shan't— " She stopped suddenly, and did not conclude her sentence.

He made no comment, but quite casually, and with the well-bred manner of a man of the world, entered into a conversation, to which she replied as simply and naturally as if they had just been introduced in an ordinary drawing-room.

Every second his interest in this beautiful girl, in so strange a setting, grew and increased. She spoke with absolute naturalness, but her phrases were well turned, and in everything she said an individuality was apparent, fresh, unstereotyped, and all her own. For five minutes he chatted and thrilled to find that she was obviously pleased to talk to him, conveying in some subtle way that it was a pleasure to meet with anyone of his class and stamp. He could not, however, in courtesy prolong the interview. Never a man addicted to light and easy flirtations with casual maidens, realising also that the note of gallantry which many men would have attempted was utterly out of place here, he was at length forced to lift his hat and turn reluctantly to the door.

As he passed through it, however, with his brain in a whirl of excitement and interest, he made a mental resolve that this would not be the last time his steps would lead him to the Whitechapel Road. His seat was right at the back of the theatre— a comfortable armchair upon a dais— as far away as possible from the big white sheet upon which the grey figures moved and flickered in fantastic procession.

How lifelike they were! And yet with what strange, inexplicable difference from life itself. Living pictures, ever since their first invention, had always fascinated him. He loved to sit and watch these silent dramas, with their mock loves and hates, their fantastic, bizarre humour.

He had arrived in the middle of one of the comic films, and the packed theatre was roaring with laughter in the dark. He could see nothing but the screen at the end, where a dilapidated man on a bicycle was doing things which suggested some hideous nightmare. He pedalled up the steep sides of houses, fell through the roof, with a crash of masonry, into a dining-room where people sat at a quiet meal.

He careered along telegraph wires, from which a passing aeroplane dislodged him. He fell upon the pavement of the street in several pieces, which joined themselves together, leaped once more upon the bicycle, and flashed away, as the pursuing policeman turned the corner of the square.

Burlington watched all this, but it conveyed little or nothing to his mind. He was thinking with lively wonder of the lovely girl a few yards away in the entresol. It was amazing that she should be there. How could such a flower bloom in an atmosphere like this? What was she? Who was she?

With a burst of applause the comic scene came to an end. The lights were turned up for a minute or two, and the sandy interior and commonplace crowd were revealed to the journalist's eyes. He leant back in his seat and lit a cigarette, ignoring the hot air, the smell of bad tobacco and cheap perfume— thinking of the dark-haired girl, and wishing the lights would go out once more.

Within a minute they did so, and, glancing at the screen, he saw an announcement which turned his thoughts into a very different channel in a single moment.

"The Procession of King George V. and the German Emperor to the Mansion House" was what he read in large letters of fire. His body twisted with a quick, convulsive movement, his hands actually trembled. What strange coincidence was this? Was he fated never to get away from the horror which had lain within him so heavily of late? Why, upon this night of all dreadful nights, should he have come to witness this particular scene?

The procession began, and, with a strange thrill, he saw that the pictures had been taken from a point of vantage on the Embankment! A group of mounted police flitted over the sheet. It was at that moment, so he remembered during the terrible excitement of the remainder of the night, that a sense of something about to happen came to him.

Perhaps he did not realise it at the time, but it was certainly there. He knew in some curious, uncertain way that he was on the brink of some great happening, some revelation only a minute or two ahead in the loom of time.

He watched the slow-moving procession in a sort or dream— seeing it all, noting each detail of this brave array, listening with keen ears to the march the band below was playing, but waiting, waiting breathlessly for something to happen.

In the immediate foreground at the bottom of the picture were the moving heads of the spectators, who stood upon the pavement immediately behind the file of troops at attention which lined the route. As is inevitable in these moving pictures, the heads, so near the camera, were larger than life-size, and grotesquely out of proportion to the rest of the picture. They moved this way and that, like reeds shaken in the wind, turning to each other with moving lips that made no sound.

Suddenly the music of the band changed into the National Anthem. The horses of the Life Guardsmen, immediately preceding the Royal carriage, came upon the scene, and then, suddenly and distinctly, the head of a man in the foreground of the picture turned and stared right out into the auditorium of the theatre.

Clear and unmistakable, enlarged to a greater-than-life size, recognisable beyond possibility of mistake owing to the unforgettable physiognomy, was the face of John Smith, the "Parrot-faced Man," who had but ten brief hours to live.

Burlington gave a sharp cry, which was lost in the blare of the music. He looked round. For at least two seconds that strange and well-known face seemed to be staring straight at him. Then it turned away, and everything faded from the journalist's eyes for a moment. He leant back in his seat, drenched with perspiration, trembling like a leaf, with the whole world spinning round him.

He could not have remained thus for more than ten seconds when life came flooding back to him; his brain leapt up with a blaze of thought, his every faculty abnormally awake and keen. He bounded from his chair, took three steps along the platform, and almost flung himself through the swing doors which led into the entrance-hall. For a moment his eyes winked as he stumbled into the brilliantly-lit and gaudy place. Then he saw that the tall girl had come round from behind her counter, and was standing in the middle of the hall looking towards him. She started when she saw him, and took one step in his direction.

"Mr. Burlington—" she said.

He looked at her vacantly. No thought of the strangeness of the way in which she addressed him came to his mind.

"Hush!" he said, as he would have spoken to a child, quite unconscious of his words in his over-mastering excitement. "Hush! I can't stop now! I have got to save a man's life!"

He dashed out into the roaring street, leaving her standing there alone.

2: A Race With Death.

ABOUT half-past ten at night the commissionaire in the hall of the offices of the "Daily Wire," who had been pacing uneasily up and down in the oppressive and thunderous heat which was hanging over London, was startled to see Cyril Burlington, with a white face and an unusual expression of agitation, rush in from the street outside.

The big, uniformed man had hardly time to touch his cap when the journalist, not waiting to summon the lift, was leaping up the wide carpeted stairs towards the editorial rooms like a goat.

He reached the long corridor upon the second floor is an incredibly short space of time, and burst into the chief editor's room without waiting for an answer to his knock.

Mr. Ommaney, the editor, was stilt there, talking to the news editor. Both men were quietly smoking.

"Good gracious! What's up?" the editor said in a moment, as his eyes fell upon the young man. "Something big?''

Burlington gasped.

"Yes," he said, struggling to get out his words. "One of the biggest things I have ever struck— one of the biggest things the paper has ever had— a man's life hangs on it, it is a question of hours!"

Ommaney glanced quickly at Jones, the news editor, who was already leaning forward with rapt attention. Then he nodded at Cyril Burlington, fully aware of the tremendous excitement under which he was labouring.

"Something to do with the Smith case?" he asked, with sure intuition.

"Everything!" Burlington panted. "John Smith is innocent. I have absolute proof. What I suspected and advocated all along is now beyond possibility of doubt. The execution must not proceed."

While he was speaking, Ommaney, listening intently, had gone to the wall and pressed a bell-push. Almost in a moment the door opened quietly, and a young man with a short-hand notebook and pencil in his hand came into the room.

Ommaney waved his hand towards the table. "Take down what Mr. Burlington says," he ordered.

In a few brief, pregnant sentences, Burlington explained what had occurred at the cinematograph theatre in Whitechapel, the faces of the three men in the room becoming fixed and rigid with tense excitement as he did so.

"You are certain?" Ommaney asked in a sharp, staccato voice. "You would absolutely swear to it; there is no possibility of your being mistaken? Your nerves are very over-wrought, Burlington; this case has been on your mind for days. You are strongly predisposed to find anything in John Smith's favor that you can. You have a cool head, as a rule, I have not yet known your judgment fail. Take into consideration what I have said, and tell me once more if you are certain."

There was a momentary pause. Then the young man's voice rang out clear and quiet in the room. There was no excitement, no nerve tremor in it now. Sober truth, entire conviction vibrated in it, and convinced the sharp man of the world opposite in an instant. "Very well, then," he said. "Pull yourself together, Burlington. We must consider what is to be done. A tremendous responsibility hang's upon us. We have a most difficult task before us if this man's life is to be saved."

With a warning gesture of his hands for them to be silent, Ommaney sank into a chair, put his hands to his head, and began to think deeply.

They watched him with white faces for at least two minutes, and then saw him look up and open his mouth as if to speak.

At that very moment, without warning of any kind, the editorial room was suddenly filled with a blinding white and purple light, a flash which paled the electric globes to dull red filaments in its white, intolerable splendour.

A second afterwards, while they were sitting there as though carved in stone, there was an appalling crash of thunder, so loud, so menacing and near that it stunned the ear, and seemed to shake the great building on the Embankment to its foundations.

The storm, which was to be remembered for many years as the "great thunderstorm" , had begun.

Ommaney leapt to his feet with closed eyes, and his hands to his ears.

"Never mind," he said, after a moment had passed, "storm or no storm, we can't stop to think of that. A man's life depends upon us, and us alone. And this is what we must do— wait a moment." He ran to a speaking-tube in the wall and gave some directions. "I have ordered," he said, "the fastest motor-car from the garage. It will be round in a, minute and a half."

Burlington nodded. He knew the wonderful organisation which prevailed at the garage of the Daily Wire, only two hundred yards away from the offices themselves. A small fleet of motor-cars was always in readiness to take the emissaries of the journal any distance in pursuit of news.

"Very well," Ommaney continued, "we must at once go to Mr. George Munford's house— the counsel who defended Smith— and tell him of what you have seen. Then he must accompany us to the house of the judge— Mr. Justice Mansford, I believe?"

Burlington nodded. "And then?" he asked.

"Then we must get at the Home Secretary, and the order for a reprieve must be telegraphed at once. After that, either tonight or tomorrow morning, the authorities can inspect the film in Whitechapel, and, if it is indeed as you say, John Smith will be saved."

He looked at the clock upon the mantelshelf of his room.

"Plenty of time," he said, "though we may possibly have a long job in finding the three people it is essential to find, but a telegram will certainly be able to reach the prison at Oxford long before the hour fixed for the execution."

"There is just this," the news editor broke in, "judges and Home Secretaries are people of considerable importance. They don't usually give interviews to journalists, if they can help it, unless it is by special arrangement. Do you think Burlington will be able to get in to see them?"

Ommaney nodded

"I am going with him myself," he said. "They'll see me."

Jones smiled. There were, he knew, very few people who would care to refuse the editor of the Daily Wire when he himself called upon urgent business.

The lightning cracked and flickered round the three men as they went downstairs. The thunder was almost continuous, now near, now far, like a methodical beating of gigantic gongs. Every now and again a crash louder than the rest struck the ears with an almost intolerable pain. Such a frightful electrical disturbance as this promised to be had not been known in England for years. It was like some savage tropic storm unbridled in its gigantic fury, wrecking and devastating far from the haunts of men.

The motor-car, a long, lean Mercedes— almost a racing machine, indeed— was waiting at the door, the engines running, and the whole tonneau trembling as if with eagerness to be off.

Phillpot, the head chauffeur, himself was in the driving seat.

Ommaney spoke to him.

"This is a very important night's work, Phillpot," he said. "You will want all your nerve in this storm, which is getting worse every minute.''

The man nodded.

"Yes, sir," he said. "And there'll be a mighty deluge of rain and wind soon."

"Very likely," Ommaney replied. "But whatever happens you must keep this car running. A man's life hangs upon the next hour or two. Drive to 100a. Curzon Street, Mayfair, as hard as you can, but, whatever you do, don't have an accident."

The man nodded. Ommaney climbed into the car after the other two.

"My one hope is," Ommaney said to the news editor, "and that is why I have brought you with me, that we shall be able to get this business over and the reprieve telegraphed to Oxford in time to put the news in the paper. In the first place, let us hope that Munford is at home."

"I expect he is." Jones broke in. "He is leading in that big slander case, and is sure to be getting up his brief, I should think."

"Well, we shall know in a moment," Ommaney said, as the car, which had met with few obstructions in its swift rush towards the west, flashed across Berkeley Square, and finally stopped at the great barrister's door in Curzon Street.

The footman who answered the door looked extremely surprised at the visitors.

Mr. Munford was in, he said doubtfully, but he was at work. He had given strict orders to that effect.

Ommaney nodded.

"Yes," he said, "but this is not an ordinary occasion. Here is my card. Please take it to Mr. Munford at once. I am the editor of the Daily Wire. I am come upon a matter of life and death."

Overawed by Ommaney's manner, the man admitted them into the comfortably furnished hall, and with a civil remark about the storm, which was gathering power and increasing every moment, he hurried away through a door upon the right.

He returned in a minute, his manner showing considerable relief.

"Mr. Munford will be glad to see you and the other gentlemen at once, sir, if you come this way."

The three men were shown into a small library, the walls of which were lined with books. In an armchair at a large writing-table Mr. Munford was sitting smoking an old briar pipe. He rose, and looked inquiringly at the little group.

"Mr. Ommaney?'' he queried.

"Good evening, Mr. Munford," Ommaney said, taking the K.C.'s extended hand. "I should not have ventured to disturb you but for an extraordinary fact of enormous importance in connection with the John Smith case."

The K.C. nodded, his face suddenly becoming alert and watchful.

"He is to be executed tomorrow at Oxford at eight o'clock," he said.

"We hope to prevent it," Ommaney replied, "and with your help. Let me introduce Mr. Cyril Burlington to you." Still with the same watchful expression, the  barrister shook hands with the young journalist.

"Glad to meet you, Mr. Burlington," he said. "I read you very assiduously and, as you know, I have been in entire accord with your view of John Smith's innocence. Pity that between us we could not have saved him."

"I think we shall save him, sir," Cyril answered. And then, in clear, telling words, with full detail, but no redundance, he explained, for the second time that night, the occurrence in the Whitechapel hall.

The barrister listened with the keenest attention, and when the recital was finished gazed searchingly at the young man, weighing him up, as Cyril was well aware, wondering what credence be could place in this extraordinary tale.

"It is a very grave matter," he said, at length. "If you are mistaken, Mr Burlington, the consequences will be most serious. If upon your information this poor man is reprieved, and then upon final examination the proof is not deemed sufficient, you will be doing a dreadfully cruel thing, while involving both yourself and everyone else in dreadful trouble. Do you, and do you"— here he turned to Mr. Ommaney— "both feel absolutely certain? Are you prepared to go through with it to the end?"

"I commit the Daily Wire to it," Ommaney answered in a moment.

"That'll do," Mr. Munford replied, in sharp, business-like tones.

"And now, I suppose," Ommaney said, "we must immediately find Sir James Mansford, the judge?"

The barrister shook his head.

"I fear," he said, "that is impossible. Only this evening, shortly after the closing of the courts. Sir James was taken ill with an apoplectic seizure. The news is not yet generally known. It is not for publication, of course, yet. He is lying unconscious at his house, and grave fears are entertained of his recovery."

Burlington gazed with a white face at the K.C. Munford noticed it.

"But that will not matter," he said quickly. "'As it happens, I myself can see the Home Secretary at any time; we know each other well. And, moreover, I have a special and official title to see him as well. You must pledge me your word, gentlemen, to say nothing of this until information reaches you in the usual way. I have today been appointed a judge of the High Courts."

Ommaney started, and murmured his congratulations. It had long been conjectured that the famous counsel would be elevated to the Bench, but the news was quite fresh.

"We will go at once," Munford went on, leading the way out into the hall after having changed his coat. "The Home Secretary's house is close by, in Berkeley Square.''

With a few exclamations at the violence of the storm, which was unabated, with its continuous thundering and lurid lightning, the little party entered the motor-car, and in three or four minutes were ringing the bell of the house in Berkeley Square.

It was now approaching midnight. Late as it was, however, there was no waiting upon the doorstep. A man-servant admitted them at once on being told their names.

"Mr. Churchstone is not in at present, sir," he said to Munford, whom he appeared to know. "But Mr. Bosanquet, the private secretary, is in the library, and has not yet gone to bed. I will inform him."

They waited for a second or two, when a tall, fresh-faced young man, with the figure of an athlete, and holding a pen in his hand, hurried out to them.

"How do you do? How do you do?" he said, shaking hands with them. "What is this? Come into the library."

He hurried them into a large, official-looking room with three writing-tables covered with documents.

"Good heavens," he said, when Munford had told him the details which brought them there, "what a providential thing. What a providential thing, Mr. Burlington! But"— here his pleasant, boyish face became perplexed— "most unfortunately, and very strangely, Mr. Churchstone is not at home. He had no official engagement for this evening, and, as he is very busy with his new measure for the reform of the police system, he said he would go and take a quiet walk. "He left the house about half-past nine before the storm began, and has not yet returned."

Mr. Munford, who had now cast off all coolness and indifference, and was quivering with excitement, gave an exclamation of troubled surprise.

"What can have happened?" he said hurriedly. "It is nearly twelve o'clock."

The private secretary nodded.

"I know," he said. "I have been wondering myself. There are some important private letters for Mr. Churchstone to sign before he goes to bed. I can only conjecture that he has taken shelter from the storm somewhere— probably in the house of a friend. At any rate, he is certain to be back almost immediately, I should say."

As he finished speaking a large bronze clock beat out the hour of twelve with a deep and solemn note.

All the men looked at each other with strained faces. The same thought was in the mind of each of them. The day had dawned when, unless the stars in their courses were indeed fighting for that unhappy man, John Smith would die the dreadful death of shame.

With a half-sigh and a little groan, Cyril Burlington sank into a chair. He was very white. The enormous nerve tension which he had experienced had robbed him of all vitality. Something in his mind seemed to snap suddenly; he felt as if he was about to faint.

Bosanquet— he was Lord Helston's second son— the chief private secretary to the Minister, of a keen, alert intelligence, rang the bell and ordered refreshments to be brought immediately. A cup of coffee and a sandwich were acceptable to all the visitors, and Burlington, in particular, found himself relieved by the meal— realising that he had been long without food, and that all his energies had been burnt up in this wild effort to save the man at Oxford.

And then they waited.

The storm gradually died away, though it was still hot. The hour hand of the clock moved slowly round once, twice, and yet the one man who could save John Smith had not returned.

To Jones, the news editor, keenly interested, but perhaps less emotionally touched than the others, the scene was one of surprising and terrible interest. He watched the faces of the other men grow visibly older before his eyes, becoming, as it were, whittled down by keenness and terrible anxiety. There was but little conversation, and about ten minutes after two Munford rose from his chair and began to pace up and down the room.

"Supposing," he said, and his voice was dry and crackled in his throat, ''Mr. Churchstone does not return. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, we can do?"

Bosanquet shook his head in desperation.

"There is nothing," he answered. "I can do nothing on my own responsibility. The Under-Secretary for State is in Switzerland; it would be impossible to approach the King at this hour on such evidence as this. We must wait— that is all."

Again they waited, and the silence in the room became terrible.

At last, with a great effort, Bosanquet tried to talk to Cyril Burlington. Both the young men lit cigarettes with shaking hands, and strolled round the big, handsome room, talking in quiet voices. They had been at Oxford together, though they only knew each other by sight, and that provided some material for their strained and desultory talk.

Once, when they had come to the far end of the room, Bosanquet stopped in front of a cabinet upon the top of which were two framed photographs.

One of them was an elderly lady with smooth bands of white hair drawn over a noble forehead. The face below was of extraordinary strength and determination; the eyes, even in the photograph, seemed keen and fiery; the handsome mouth was fixed in stern, resolute lines. The other photograph was that of a man of about forty. It bore a similar resemblance to the first. It was easy to see that they were mother and son.

"Here's a curious thing,"— Bosanquet said to Burlington. "I had forgotten it before. This is a photograph of Lady Carne and her eldest son, Horace, the scientific don, and the brother of William Carne, for whose murder John Smith was convicted. It is a curious coincidence! On this night of all nights!"

Burlington nodded and gazed with interest at the portraits. As he did so he again experienced that curious sense of something about to happen that he had first known in the cinematograph theatre at Whitechapel. It passed away in a second or two, but left its mark, and he remembered it afterwards very well indeed.

He turned away, however, as Bosanquet explained that Mr. Horace Carne was a friend of Mr. Churchstone, and the incident passed from  his mind. There was nothing more to tell him how tragically and strangely the originals of those two photographs were to be immediately interwoven with his life.

IT WAS nearly six o'clock in the morning.

The Home Secretary, who had spent the greater part of the night talking with the Prime Minister in Downing Street, who was unable to sleep, and who had given him shelter, had returned some ten minutes, and heard all that the group of men had to tell him.

At five o'clock the storm had recommenced in double vigour. The thunder and lightning were continuous, but now a furious wind, driving sheets of rain before it, was added to the terrors of the night.

Mr. Churchstone was standing in the middle of the library, wringing his hands. A young man in a black coat, rather dishevelled, stood opposite him, while the others formed a circle round the table.

"It is absolutely certain?" the Home Secretary said in a trembling voice.

"Quite certain, sir," said the young man, who was the private telegraphist and telephone operator at the Home Secretary's house. "All telegraphic communication is interrupted over the home counties, it is impossible to get a wire through or a telephone message to Oxford. Everything is disturbed. Many of the principal lines must have been blown down."

"The motor, sir," Burlington gasped. "Our motor from the 'Daily Wire.' "

"Where is it?" Mr, Churchstone said.

"In your own garage, sir," Ommaney broke* in. "We ventured to send the man there a little after two, with instructions to be ready any moment. It was impossible to leave him out in the storm any longer."

"I'll go," Bosanquet said, realising the situation in a flash, and dashing out of the room like a boy.

"Very good," Mr. Churchstone replied, turning to Ommaney. "I'll write the reprieve at once. Will you stay with me, Mr. Ommaney, and go into this matter thoroughly— and you, Mr. Munford? Bosanquet can go down in the motor with Mr. Burlington, who, I am sure, will wish to see the end of this. There is just time— I pray God there is time."

It was twenty minutes to eight. The last violence of the storm had expended itself. The dawn was tranquil.

Two young men, one in crumpled evening dress, both of them with dirt-stained, wrinkled faces, and terribly dishevelled, were running up the High Street at Oxford.

Upon Magdalen Bridge, a great motor-car covered with mud, battered and motionless, was standing against the kerb— utterly broken down.

Twenty minutes yet remained. James Bosanquet and Cyril Burlington had both been prominent athletes in their Oxford days— not so very long ago. But now, as with a man's life in their hands, they rushed up the most beautiful street in Europe towards the prison at the other end of the town, there was a fury of excitement and a terror of defeat such as they had never known before.

With feet that seemed weighted with tons of lead, with hearts that seemed exploding within them like, the shots of a machine-gun, with eyes suffused with blood, and swollen tongues, they made their last effort.

On and on! Past the long grey front of University College, past the tall spire of St. Mary's, which towered up into the blue of the morning, they continued.

The church bells were ringing all over the University city for early morning service. A policeman or two and a few undergraduates who were early abroad stared in amazement at the two figures as they caught glimpses of their yellow, doom-stricken faces.

On and on! Now Brasenose glides up upon their right, and Carfax comes into view.

On and on, as The Corn flashes past to their right, and, joy inexplicable, the towers of Oxford Castle, where the assizes are held, come into view in the narrow street leading to the station. The prison is just behind, and, even as they race down towards the massive tower which frowns in the background of the castle, they hear the regular beating of the  bell of doom.

It was five minutes to eight. Clang ! Clang !

Clang !

They throw themselves against the great iron-studded door, with its little wicket, pulling violently at the iron bell-handle, beating with bleeding fingers upon the wicket, and trying to shout a summons from their swollen throats.

Clang! Clang! Clang! It seems an eternity until there is a jingle of keys, the loud click of bolts, and two stern-faced men in uniform stand looking strangely at them with white faces.

Bosanquet, with one great effort, pulls the large official envelope from his pocket. He can do no more than whisper.

"A reprieve," he stutters, "from the Home Secretary! The motor-car broke down! Quick, quick! I am Mr. Bosanquet, Mr. Churchstone's private secretary! Quick, for heaven's sake! The governor!"

One of the men snatches at the letter.

"We can do it," he says. "Quick, for heaven's sake!"

And, as Bosanquet falls fainting on the other side of the prison gate the warder dashes off, followed by Cyril Burlington.

Clang! Clang! Clang! Louder and more insistent now. Three minutes to eight.

Burlington remembered little more as he thought it over afterwards. He could only recall a wild phantasmagoria of unlocked doors, of shouts which echoed down gloomy and shadowy corridors, of the sudden egress into a walled yard, across which a little procession was marching towards the open doors of a coach-house, the interior of which was painted black.

It was broad day when the young man woke from the sleep of exhaustion. He was in a pleasant bedroom at the governor's house. The sun was shining in through the large windows, and a fresh breeze, scented with late autumn flowers, eddied into the room. The surroundings were unfamiliar to Burlington.

The governor, a tall, military-looking man, together with the prison doctor, was standing by his bed.

"You are all right now, Mr. Burlington," the governor said. "This is Dr. Burton. You were taken very queer this morning as soon as you had saved a man's life. We put you to bed here, and gave you a composing draught, and you have been sleeping soundly ever since."

He noticed the unspoken inquiry In the young man's eyes, and nodded.

"Yes," he said. "Thank God, you were both in time. The execution has been postponed. Mr. Bosanquet has gone back to London by train, and we are awaiting further instructions. Now, when you are well enough, you shall tell your story. Naturally, I am most anxious to know what has transpired. The Home Secretary's letter was simply a command to stop the execution."

3: A Woman of Mystery.

AT one o'clock, bathed, shaved, having sent out for new linen, Cyril Burlington strolled out into Oxford.

He had told the governor what there was to tell, and now, as he once more entered "The High," immensely refreshed in body and with deep happiness in his mind, he felt as if he had not a care in the world. He, and he alone, had done this great thing! Despite everything, the opposition and unbelief of everyone, fate had given him the task of vindicating John Smith. For the rest, he felt assured that the unhappy man's troubles were now over.

He had refused the governor's kindly invitation to lunch, proposing to himself to call upon the Provost of St. Paul's— his old college— always a constant friend, and very much interested in his career.

He came up to the beautiful old Gothic facade of St. Paul's. The Provost's house was not in the great quadrangle, but opened out into the street. He went up the steps and pressed the bell.

As he was waiting for the door to be opened he heard a crunch of wheels, and a four-wheeled cab, laden with luggage on the top, drove up to the house. The front door opened.

"Good morning, Parker," he said to the old butler, whom he had known throughout his college days.

"Good morning, Mr. Burlington, sir," the old fellow answered, with a surprised smile of welcome. "Yes, sir, the Provost is in, and will be delighted to see you, I am sure. One moment, sir."

The tall-figure of a girl stepped out upon the pavement, and as she did so the young man's heart gave a great leap of wonder, and he gasped with surprise.

The young lady who mounted the steps of the Provost's house, though differently dressed, was, feature for feature, in every line of her figure, identical with the girl he had met at the cinematograph theatre the night before. Her eyes met his with a mild flash of surprise in their depths, and he knew that it was she indeed.

A WEEK had passed since the morning after the great storm, when Cyril Burlington and Bosanquet had brought the reprieve to Oxford.

Cyril was still in the University city.

After his luncheon at Dr. Jackson's, the Provost of St. Paul's College, he had been taken ill during the late afternoon, and for four days had remained in bed at the Randolph Hotel, suffering from nervous prostration. The shock had been so enormous, the long anxiety of the case had ended in prostrating him.

Now, however, he was better, once more master of himself and ready for work again.

And what this work was to be he had already more than an idea. Mr. Ommaney, the editor of the Daily Wire, had twice been down to see him, and it was at the great man's wish that his lieutenant still remained at Oxford. At the moment no very startling news was occupying the energies of Fleet Street. Cyril Burlington was not wanted for anything special.

The sensation all over England, when the news of the reprieve had become known, had been extraordinary, and the sales of the "Daily Wire" had reached their second daily million during the week. The news published by the great journal had been absolutely exclusive; no one else had been able to get hold of it. Ommaney and his satellites had reigned supreme.

During the afternoon of the day after the storm, the London newspapers announced that John Smith had been reprieved— though not pardoned— on the very eve of his execution; but for what reason was not stated, and none of the newspapers was able to find out.

During the same night it had got about in the big newspaper offices of Fleet Street, in that mysterious way in which news does percolate and spread in the great thoroughfare of the press, that the Daily Wire had a great "scoop" in hand in connection with the mystery.

The report originated at about half-past eight in the Press Club, and by nine o'clock news editors of opposition journals had learnt in some mysterious way that the Daily Wire— foremost as always in enterprise and luck— had won the reprieve. Alert journalists had motored off to Oxford at full speed, but their inquiries at the prison had been received with stony silence, and they had returned to town baffled, and with only the most meagre scraps of information— which, nevertheless, expanded in leaded type, they hoped would create some sort of sensation the next morning.

Mr. Churchstone, the Home Secretary, and Mr. Bosanquet also, had absolutely refused to be drawn, though many attempts were made to do so. They felt that the credit of the occasion was due to Cyril Burlington, and that the Daily Wire must have the exclusive news.

On the next morning the whole of the country was thrilled by three columns of as graphic and stirring a story as had ever appeared in the daily paper. Burlington himself had intended to write it during the afternoon, but he had been taken ill, and was unable to dictate to the shorthand writers sent down from London to assist him.

In this emergency Ommaney himself had hurried down to Oxford, together with James Bosanquet, who had supplied the necessary details. Ommaney had written the three columns himself, and at the close of his labours, when motoring back to London, had read over his copy with amazement— so graphic, so ex citing, so unprecedented was the narrative.

Of course, when once the tale was told, all the other papers took, up the cry. The cinematograph theatre in Whitechapel was besieged by crowds of reporters and hundreds of members of the general public; nothing else was thought or spoken of in London or the provinces for several days.

Mr. Churchstone, Mr. Munford, and various other officials and legal dignitaries had held an exhaustive inquiry. Other contributory facts which went to prove the truth of the "Parrot-faced Man's" alibi cropped up, facts which had never come to light during the trial.

The film which established the fact of John Smith's presence during the passing of the Royal procession was carefully scrutinised and enlarged, all the resources of modern scientific photography being employed. The "Parrot-faced Man's" innocence was established with out possibility of doubt, and with far less delay than is usual in such matters the condemned man had been granted a free pardon.

The whole affair from start to finish had only taken a week, and as Cyril Burlington lay in bed in his comfortable room at the Randolph the morning papers announced that on that very day, though the time was a secret, John Smith was to be released from prison. The young man sipped his tea, and gazed with immense satisfaction at the columns of the newspaper. He himself knew very well what time John Smith would leave prison, and where he was going. He had already been permitted

to visit him in the more comfortable cell which had been assigned to him, and he had arranged that during the evening they should meet and have a long interview.

Of course, Oxford was full of rival journalists, all of whom knew that Burlington was staying at the Randolph, and watched his every movement. But the young man was not the chief descriptive writer of the "Daily Wire" for nothing, and he smiled to think how his carefully laid plans would put them all off the scent.

He finished his tea, bathed, shaved, and dressed, and then went into his private sitting-room for breakfast.

It was beautiful weather now as he looked out into Cornmarket Street. Bells were ringing everywhere, undergraduates in cap and gown were hurrying to lectures; the sun shone full upon the Martyrs' Memorial and the white building of Balliol beyond.

"Thank goodness," Cyril said to himself as he took a second kidney— "thank goodness, my appetite has come back at last! Really, I think all this excitement has done me good. I never felt better in my life, nor more pleased with myself generally."

He blushed a little at certain thoughts that came into his mind, and his eyes became brighter.

"Julia!" he murmured. "It's a beautiful name, just the name I should have chosen for her myself. I will not leave Oxford without seeing her again, and alone. I must manage it somehow. There is so much to be explained. I have so much to say to her."

He rose from the breakfast-table, leaving his meal unfinished, despite the boast about his appetite, and began to pace up and down the pleasant sunlit room.

His face became thoughtful as he went over the events of the past one by one, and tried to draw some meaning from them, to piece together the details of a strange puzzle in order to make a coherent whole. He had met the girl, whose name he now knew to be Julia la Touche, sitting behind the pay-desk of the cinematograph theatre in Whitechapel. He had been so struck by her grace and beauty, the sweet and cultured tones of her voice, the lady-like ease of her conversation, that he had momentarily forgotten the trouble that lay so heavily upon him. When he had rushed out of the theatre, after his stupendous discovery, she had been standing in the lighted hall. She had addressed him by his name. He did not notice it at the time, but it had come back to him afterwards when he had more leisure to think— during the long, anxious waiting in the Home Secretary's library, as a matter of fact. He had recalled it then. Afterwards, when his efforts had been crowned with success, at lunch-time on the very next morning, as he awaited admission to the house of Dr. Jackson, the Provost of his old college, he had met the girl upon the steps, entering the house also. He had recognised her in an instant, and she had recognised him also.

"It was extraordinary," he murmured to himself as once again the vivid pictures glowed in his memory. "It means something. It means far more than I can tell now. What it means to me, personally, I hardly dare think!''

With great precision, and with the ordered logic of a mind which owed much of its success to its habit of marshalling facts, he recalled every detail of that eventful day.

He had been immediately shown into Dr. Jackson's study.

The Provost of St. Paul's was an extraordinary man, with a European reputation as perhaps the best Greek scholar in England. He was a clergyman, and very old, infirm of body, but youthful and alert of mind, and, unlike so many of the old school of learned professors, with a quick and vivid interest in all the affairs of the day. From the first, when Burlington had been an undergraduate, Dr. Jackson had encouraged the young man in his journalistic aspirations. Clever as Burlington was, the Provost had realised that his type of mind was not one destined to achieve the highest honours of academic distinction. The press was such a vivid power in the modern world, its captains and lieutenants so powerful for good or evil, that the old man had welcomed the lad's ambitions and done all he could to further them.

His greeting of his former pupil had been more than friendly, and when he learned what errand had brought the young man to Oxford, and the extraordinary happenings of the night and early morning, he was vastly interested.

"Never, my dear Burlington," he said, when the story was finished, and as they were going into the dining-room for lunch, "have I heard anything so dramatic. It is Greek, it is epic, that rush of yours and Mr. Bosanquet's through the storm in the automobile, and your race up the High Street afterwards. We live in wonderful and stirring times, indeed, and such echoes of vivid human life which reach me in my study add a salt and zest to a life the course of which is nearly run."

Dr. Jackson had married rather late in life, and had one daughter. His wife was dead, and when Burlington had been at Oxford the daughter was a girl of sixteen or seventeen, away at school. He knew, however, that she had now returned home to take charge of her father's house.

"My daughter," said Dr. Jackson, as the butler handed round the cutlets, "will be down in a few minutes. As a matter of fact, today a new companion for her has arrived. She is a young lady of three-and-twenty, who was at school with Dorothy— a Miss la Touche — Julia la Touche— a daughter of a dear old friend of mine, a Fellow of Merton.

"Dorothy is lonely in this house, and I gave her her choice of a companion a little older than herself or of asking my sister, Miss Jackson, of Brighton, to come and live with us. She chose, as is very natural, a younger friend, and I have no doubt that she will be much happier, while I myself like to see young and bright faces about me. And there is a peculiar thing about this girl, Mr. Burlington, who will also be down to lunch in a moment or so. It is a thing which will interest you very much. Coincidence seems to be a ruling power in this dreadful affair of murder!"

Burlington had pricked up his ears at once. He said nothing of the night before, but his heart beat furiously, and he listened with strained attention.

"Yes,'' the old man continued, "Miss la Touche, like so many daughters of Oxford men, is, unfortunately, ill-provided with this world's goods, and has been compelled to earn her own living since she left school at Bath. She was for some time a companion to Lady Carne, the mother of poor William Carne, the Fellow of this college who was so mysteriously murdered!"

Cyril, with immense restraint, had done nothing but express a polite and interested surprise. But every pulse in him was beating like a drum; his mouth seemed parched and dry as he drank his claret. A great wonder, a strange hope, which he hardly dared formulate to himself, had come upon him.

"There are some peculiar circumstances about Miss la Touche's arrival here," Dr. Jackson continued, "which I cannot enter into, as they concern her and are her private business, but I am certain that if you see fit to tell her what you have told me, you will greatly relieve her mind. Owing to the circumstances which I have hinted at, I have not seen the young lady for some considerable time, but I happen to know that ever since the murder she has been convinced of the innocence of the man who was condemned. Of course, she knew him well, as poor William Carne lived at the old manor house of Morston with his mother, his elder brother Horace, and younger brother John, some four miles out of Oxford, and, as you are aware, Smith was William Carne's valet.

"She did not appear in the trial in any way," Burlington said quickly. "I was there, you know, and saw it all."

"Er— no," answered Dr. Jackson. "There were, I believe, delicate private reasons. How do you like this claret, Burlington? Moffat, the Bursar, found it for me when he was at Avignon last year. It is really excellent, I think."

Burlington knew that the well-bred and courteous old man would tell him nothing more that concerned the private life of the dark-haired girl. He praised the claret and changed the conversation, though his ears were strained for footfalls in the hall outside, and for the opening of the door.

She came in at last, having changed her travelling dress, following Dorothy Jackson, and introductions were formally made by the Provost.

As the girl sat down at the table, exactly opposite to Burlington, she gave him one quick glance. It was a look which he remembered now in every detail, as he walked up and down his room.

There was again the sudden flash of recognition she gave him upon the doorstep, and it was still amazed and full of wonder. But now, so he fancied— so he was sure, indeed— there was more in it. There was an appeal, a definite signal for him to say nothing of having seen her upon the night before. He could not misinterpret it, and the sense of sharing a secret with her, of keeping as it were a confidence, was subtly sweet. He answered her eyes with his own, saying as plainly as eyes could say that her secret was safe with him. He knew that she understood, and an expression of unmistakable relief had come upon her face.

Old Dr. Jackson was brimming with excitement at Cyril's news, and in five minutes the young man found himself once more re-telling the extraordinary story, marking carefully the varied expressions which flitted across the face of Miss la Touche, seeing it change a dozen times, watching waves of doubt, hope, and intense interest pass over it like the shadows on a field of wheat.

She did not say very much; but now and then let fall an illuminating remark about the conditions of life in the calm household of which she had been a part. He could see that his news, at any rate, had brought her intense relief, and she expressed her absolute belief in John Smith's innocence more than once. And through all her manner he seemed to detect something kept in reserve— some burning confidence that she wished to make to him, but not in the presence of other people.

He had seen her again for a few brief minutes, when, the first day the doctor had allowed him to leave his room, he had called and taken tea at the Provost's house. But the interview had been very brief, and both the old gentleman and his daughter were there also. Now Burlington was absolutely determined to have speech with her. He knew that she had something to tell him. He felt there were explanations to come, new lights to be thrown upon the tragedy of William Carne's death— that tragedy in which he seemed so strangely and inextricably involved. How he

was to meet her he did not know. It was a point for careful consideration. He seriously debated in his mind whether he should not write a note to her asking for a private appointment. He could not decide one way or the other; he knew that he must do so ere the day was out. Perhaps it would be better after all to have his long, quiet talk, with the "Parrot-faced Man," and see what that brought forth.

As he thought it out, and for nearly an hour he paced up and down the hotel sitting-room, he knew, with definite certainty, that it was not only his interest in the case that filled him with such a devouring longing to meet Julia la Touche. There was more than that in it— far more.

His life had been so strenuous, so filled with hard and interesting work, his attitude towards it had always been the detached one of a spectator and recorder, that he had little or no time to think of women. He had been friends with various nice girls, of course; he had flirted a little. But no girl, up to the present; had ever excited in him more than a passing interest, nor had he learned the A B C of love.

Now, he knew it quite well, and there was a strange and poignant sweetness in the knowledge; he had seen a girl different from all the other girls in the world for him. His mind and heart were full of her. Her voice rang in his ears. Her face, with its grave loveliness, was always before his mental vision. Was he in love? That was a question he did not definitely answer to himself, though, deep down in his heart, unadmitted, but there nevertheless, he knew that it was so.

Yes, come what may, he must have a long talk alone with Julia la Touche. Julia! How beautiful the name was! Surely it was the most beautiful of all names.

AT ABOUT half-past eleven a spruce messenger-boy, who had come down from London, was shown up to his sitting-room. The boy had brought a letter from Ommaney, written very late the night before at the editor's private house in Regent's Park.

This was the letter:—

"Dear Burlington,— I have been thinking over all the developments of the Smith case. We shall crown a glorious week by printing your interview with Smith. Again we shall startle London and have a big, exclusive story. I know that you will make a very fine thing of it, and that you have taken all precautions to prevent any of the other men getting hold of Smith. You say that you are to meet him at seven in the evening? By ten o'clock you, no doubt, will have finished the interview and written your copy. Arrangements, as you know, have been made with the Oxford Telegraph office, and we shall have it all at the Wire within an hour. After this, of course, your actual necessity for remaining in Oxford, upon the surface, is over.

"But I have more in mind, and I have been thinking upon the question very carefully. Is this extraordinary crime, this murder of a man so well-known and so highly placed, to lapse into the category of undiscovered crimes, or is it not?  For the next week everyone, and all the newspapers also, will be asking one question: 'John Smith did not commit the murder; who did commit the murder?' As I take it, the usual thing will happen. Paragraphs will go round to say that suspicion is pointing in a new direction, and that the police have a clue. Something else will crop up, and the whole thing will be forgotten. But, if you are willing, I certainly am, that you should take this thing up on behalf of the paper. Without its being known, and with all the resources at our back, I should like you to undertake the investigation of this affair.

"I do not know your point of view, but I should imagine that such a quest would interest you enormously, and bring you in touch with an entirely new side of life and work which would enlarge your horizon. Please understand I do not suggest baldly that you should turn yourself into an amateur detective. You must not look at it in that light. But, believing as you do in Smith's innocence— that innocence which you have vindicated so triumphantly— it seems to me more than likely that you would wish to assist in bringing the real criminal to justice.

"It is certain that somewhere in the background lurks some powerful intellect, urged by some most powerful, though wholly unknown, motive, which is responsible for the crime. Discover that sinister force, my dear Burlington, and you will have earned the thanks of society at large, will add to the brilliant work you have already accomplished on behalf of the paper, and have finished the work you have so worthily begun."

Burlington read the letter through very carefully. Then he took an ABC from the mantelpiece, and found out a train. There was one returning to London within half an hour. He took a sheet of notepaper from the table and wrote one single word upon it,

"Yes."

Then, after a chat with the bright, intelligent messenger, he dismissed him with the reply and a tip of five shillings. His decision had been taken instantly. He would do this thing, come what might, into whatever strange and dangerous paths it might lead him, and with the decision, definitely taken, came a tremendous sense of excitement— the fierce joy of the hunter starting on his quest.

He took a walk until lunch-time, and spent the remainder of the afternoon in the hotel, quietly making notes. About four o'clock a waiter came up to his room saying that a gentleman wished to speak to him, but preferred not to give his name.

Cyril told the man to show up the visitor, and in a minute or two a tall, military-looking man, in private clothes, entered the room, and closed the door behind him.

"Excuse my not sending up my name, sir," the man said. "I am one of the warders at the prison; the governor has sent me with a note from John Smith. Captain Arbuthnot knew that you would probably not wish an officer in uniform to come to you."

He handed the young man a note.

In a well-formed handwriting, and on prison notepaper, Burlington read the following lines: —

Sir.— I shall be at the house in Holywell Street as arranged at seven o'clock. I am informed that the newspaper gentlemen who have been waiting at the prison have been successfully deceived, and that it is thought that I have already left for London in a closed motor-car. There will therefore be little danger of my being recognised in the short drive from the prison to Holywell Street. I write now to ask you, sir, to tell the people at the house at Holywell Street to admit someone with whom I have been in communication during the day. It is essential, sir, that you  should see this person at the same time that you see me. Please, therefore, give orders that anyone calling and asking for you is to be admitted. I must not say any more now, and am, sir, yours most respectfully,

JOHN SMITH.

"Say 'Yes,' please, to Mr. John Smith," Burlington said to the warder, and for the rest of the afternoon, after having sent a messenger to Holywell Street, he remained lost in thought.

The house in Holywell Street, where he had engaged rooms for Smith for the night, was one well known to him. It was kept by an ex-scout of his college, and he himself had inhabited the rooms during his last year at Oxford. The people were faithful and devoted to his interests.

At half past six, after a cup of tea and some sandwiches— for he knew that he would have no time for dinner that night— Burlington left the hotel and walked briskly down "The Broad." He strode past Balliol, Trinity, and the old Examination Schools, and then turned down the long street of quiet houses which ran parallel to "The High" and led to Magdalen Bridge. At one of the houses he stopped, and opened the door, in the usual University fashion, without ringing.

He had not been in the hall for a second when Barker, the ex-scout, came running up the stairs from the kitchen below. The man's fate was excited and pleased. He was glad to be of service to the famous journalist whom he had known and served in his undergraduate days, and was intensely interested in the great Carne mystery.

"Your old room, sir," he said in a low voice, "on the first floor. The shutters are up, the curtains drawn, and there is a bright fire. There are some refreshments and some wine upon the sideboard, in case you should need them. I will be waiting to open the door the moment the cab arrives with John Smith. I got your message, sir, during the afternoon, and it is all right. The lady came ten minutes ago."

Cyril started at the words, but he said nothing.

"All right, and thank you very much, Barker," he said. "I will go up at once."

With his heart beating violently, he climbed the carpeted stairs and pushed open the door.

A little, low cry of wonder escaped him. Standing up, looking with deep, questioning eyes at the doorway, stood Julia la Touche.

Her hands went out to him with an instinctive gesture of relief and welcome.

"At last!" she said. "At last!"

4: A Woman in Deep Waters:

CYRIL BURLINGTON saw the tall and radiant girl standing there, her hands outstretched towards him. She was a lovely, living figure of appeal and confidence.

He was not taken aback— in the ordinary sense of the phrase, that is— but he seemed to himself to moving as an actor in some preordained drama.

He stepped up to her In the curtained room, bowed very low, almost with foreign grace, and took her hands in his.

Then he looked her straight in the face. His own was very earnest and questioning, very firm and strong. There was an absolute frankness in his eyes.

"Yes," he answered her in a voice as low and charged with feeling as her own. "Yes, at last!"

There was a moment's silence, and then Julia la Touche released her hands. She sat down gracefully upon a settee which came out at right angles from the fireplace, and motioned him to an armchair opposite. She murmured something, knitted her brows, and seemed unable to go on for a moment.

He came to the rescue. "You have a great deal to tell me, Miss la Touche," he said. "I do not quite know how or why it is that we should be mixed up in what is certainly the strangest affair I have ever met in my life. I have been able to save John Smith from a shameful and unmerited death. I have met you. I met you on the very night when I discovered the proof of the man's innocence. I met you again the morning after, in totally different circumstances, when I had saved the man. Now the mystery seems only to thicken, to become darker and darker. I feel that I am in very deep waters indeed, and that you, by some strange chance, are also walking in the shadows."

She breathed a sigh of relief. Her red lips parted.

"Ah!" she said, "you have saved me a great deal of explanation. All you say is perfectly, absolutely true. We are in deep waters! Why I have come here to-night, at great sacrifice and considerable risk to myself, is to exactly define your position and mine in this terrible affair."

Burlington nodded. "Good!" he said, in his quick, alert way, as if he were ticking off the heads of a statement one by one. "We understand each other, Miss la Touche; and now, please let us go more into detail."

She took from him his quick, businesslike manner, and responded to it quickly.

"Very well, then," she said, "I will begin. The Provost has probably told you that I am the daughter of an old friend of his?"

Again Burlington nodded.

"I was at school with Dorothy Jackson," she continued. "When my father died he left me without means, and I became companion to Lady Carne, of Morston Manor, some eight miles away from Oxford.

"Lady Carne had— and this you also probably know quite well— three sons— Horace Carne, the elder, and a world-famous scientist; William Carne, the unhappy man who was murdered so strangely; and a younger brother, John, also a rising scientist. Lady Carne is the widow of Sir Augustus Carne, the famous professor of medical psychology.

"I became," she went on in her low, vibrating voice, "companion to Lady Carne. Mr. Horace Carne"— she hesitated for a moment, and a blush mounted in her cheeks— "did me the honour to pay me considerable attention. He— he— "

"Fell in love with you, in fact," said Cyril Burlington, though without a trace of jocularity in his voice.

She nodded. "Yes," she replied, with a little shudder, "he did. And then, and then— " Once more she found a great difficulty in speaking, and the rosy flush in her cheeks deepened to crimson.

Cyril Burlington tapped the palm of his out-stretched left hand with a forefinger of his right. He had the air of listening to her as a solicitor would listen to the confession of a client. It was the attitude, and probably the only attitude, which encouraged her to proceed.

"Well," she continued with a little gasp, "poor William Carne seemed to be— to be— "

"Number two," Burlington replied briskly. "May I light a cigarette, Miss la Touche, while you are telling me all this?"

His fingers were busy with his cigarette-case almost instantly upon her nod of permission. He struck a match and began to puff at his cigarette. "William Carne," he said— puff, puff— "yes, the man who was murdered was also in love with you."

His voice was so matter-of-fact, his delicacy in elucidating her story so tactful, that the blushing girl found new courage to continue. She threw out one of her hands with a graceful gesture.

"You understand— thank you," she said. "Well, it was just like that. Horace Carne has one of the most brilliant brains— extraordinarily brilliant brains— in England to-day; but he is a devil— a devil incarnate!"

"I've heard of him," Cyril Burlington said in a quiet voice, "as a man who is likely to go to the very top. I've heard of him, also, as a man very much admired and respected in his work. That is all I know of him."

The girl clenched her teeth, and her eyes became full of memory and horror.

"He is a devil incarnate!" she said again.

"Go on, please," Burlington said, leaning forward from his chair, his face a wedge of keen attention.

"William Carne," she said, "was a kindly, clever man. He, as you know, was a don of St. Paul's, and a great friend of Dr. Jackson. He was interested in science, but only in a dilettante way. He had not a tenth of the brilliancy of his elder brother, nor even of the younger brother John. Horace and William came to— oh, it is very difficult for me to say!— but, Mr. Burlington, they both loved me, and quarrelled bitterly about me. I feared and hated Horace; I had nothing but a very lukewarm liking for William.

"Things, however, came to such a pass that I resolved to fly from Morston Manor. I had nowhere to go, and I knew that my only friend, the Provost of St. Paul's, would not have understood my reasons for leaving. I had a few pounds saved up, and I disappeared to London. When my money was almost exhausted, I answered an advertisement which resulted in my obtaining the situation at the pay-desk of a cinematograph theatre in Whitechapel, where you saw me first. The work was dreadfully distasteful, but the Jew who managed the place was not unkind, and I was enabled to live.

"During my employment there I heard, in common with the rest of the world, of the dreadful murder of Mr. William Carne, and the arrest of John Smith upon suspicion. John Smith, whom you have saved from a dreadful death, is a strange and peculiar character. His appearance, as you know, is abnormal. But his intelligence is great, and his fidelity to the master whom he was accused of murdering was intense. I knew far more of that sinister household at Morston Manor than any outside person could ever know. I read the accounts in the papers, and day by day my heart failed within me to see the cunning web woven around Smith. But I could do nothing. I had nothing but suspicion to go upon, and the time came when I realised that John Smith must die for a crime which he could never have committed. On the very night before the execution you arrived at the picture theatre."

"Yes," Burlington broke in, "and I met you. I wondered— oh, how I wondered!— why you were there. But that night was an extraordinary one. My nerves were strained to breaking point. I had wandered into the theatre absolutely by chance. But, Miss la Touche, when I ran out with the wonderful knowledge that saved John Smith, you were standing in the hall. I did not remember it for some time, but afterwards I did. You spoke to me by my name— why was that?"

"Oh, that was very simple," she said with a sad smile. "First of all, a week before I had seen your picture in one of the papers, and underneath it was written that this was a photograph of the brilliant young journalist who had done, and was doing, so much to obtain a reprieve for the accused man. And then, when you had gone into the theatre, the commissionaire at the door recognised you, and spoke to you. He had been temporarily employed at the offices of the Daily Wire, and knew you quite well by sight. 'That's Mr. Burlington who has just gone in, miss,' he said to me."

"I see," Burlington replied. "It was all quite simple."

"All quite simple," she answered in a low voice.

"And now, Miss la Touche," he said, in a very earnest voice, "I gather that you have not told me all this without a purpose?"

"No," she said; "a thousand times no! I liked William Carne, as I told you. I could never have any warmer feeling for him, but he was a good man. I like and admire his servant, John Smith, a man with a heart of gold. I would give anything in this world to unravel the mystery of Mr. Carne's death. Somehow or other I feel it a duty. It obsesses me day and night. I can think of nothing else. I shall never be happy again until that is done. I know of your efforts for John Smith. I hoped— I wondered if you— with your keen brain and wonderful powers, with a great news-paper behind you— would care to pursue the matter. I communicated with John Smith in prison. I was allowed to see him. He also spoke to me of you— "

She ceased, and looked earnestly at the cool young man before her.

Burlington threw his cigarette into the fireplace, and rose. Instinctively she rose also.

"Miss la Touche," he said, in a low, passionate voice, "Julia, before you had spoken to me I had made up my mind. I will see this thing to the very end. Whatever may be the truth of this dreadful mystery, whatever horrors I may encounter in my work, I will remain steadfast until I have made it all as clear as day and brought the real criminal to justice. I will tell you more. The editor of the 'Daily Wire' wrote to me only this morning, and sent the letter down by special messenger, asking me to do just this thing. If I felt inclined. In answer I sent him back the single word, 'Yes.' I repeat that word to you."

Her lovely face was raised to his, and the lips were parted in breathless excitement and hope. He caught her by both hands and drew her gently towards him.

"Julia," he said, with swift, passionate utterance, "from the very moment on the night when I first saw you, you came into my mind and heart as no other girl has ever done. I know, without possibility of mistake, that you are the only girl in the world for me. Julia, my darling, if I pursue this thing to the end, and am triumphant— when I have made it all clear as daylight— then, will you give me my reward ?"

Her head drooped. She did not speak. She could not, but the trembling hands in his told him well enough the joyous news that she cared for him. Already she cared for him!

But he would hear it from her own lips. "Tell me! Julia, my queen and my lady, will you give me my reward?"

She only spoke one word in answer— "Cyril." Then— for this young man was no laggard lover— he caught her close to him in a wild embrace.

No other girl had ever touched his heart. He had never had any time for love-making. If rules there were, and gradations to be gone through, he was ignorant of them all. He only knew that love had come to him, and that he must hold her in his arms or die.

A sharp sound, half cough, half giggle, burst out suddenly in the room.

There was a gasp of astonishment from Burlington and a little cry from the tall girl with her tear-stained face. They turned in amazement, and saw, standing by the shut door, one of the most extraordinary figures that perhaps their eyes could have lighted on in England that day. A little man, not much more than five feet high, dressed in a black suit, and bowing nervously, stood by the closed door. His face was of extraordinary pallor— the paleness one sees in the unfortunate victims of lead poisoning. His eyes were round, bright, and unwinking. The nose was large and beak-like, the mouth beneath it— though hidden— curiously curved, and  with grey lips.

"I beg your pardon, miss," said this odd creature, in a curious, squeaking voice; "I am  sure I beg your pardon, sir, but I was told to come up at once and — " He said no more, but gazed with his round, unwinking eyes at  the confused couple before him.

It was John Smith, the "Parrot-faced Man." Burlington stepped towards John Smith, but Julia was quicker still. She caught the little fellow's small and rather claw-like hands in hers.

"Oh, John," she said, with the tenderest pity in her voice; "oh, John, I am so glad. I am so very, very glad!" She returned to Burlington. "And you owe it all to Mr. Burlington," she said. "He has saved you. It is he who has done everything for you."

A faint colour came into the cheeks of the little man. He seemed greatly embarrassed.

"I know, miss," he replied. "I can't say enough. You see, sir"— he turned his round, staring eyes upon Cyril— "you see, sir, when a man's been snatched off the very drop, so to speak, it is not easy to put into words what he thinks. They actually had me," he went on to Julia in a tone of frightened astonishment, "they actually had me, miss, with my wrists strapped behind my back and walking straight into the execution shed."

Julia shuddered.

"Yes, yes," she said hurriedly; "but do not tell any of the dreadful details, John. I've got something to tell you."

With her hand upon the little man's shoulder, she half led, half pushed him to a chair and made him sit down.

"Now, what I have to tell you is this," she went on. "Mr. Cyril Burlington here is going to fathom this mystery to the very bottom. You are cleared. It is obvious you could not have killed poor Mr. William; but the dreadful, the awful question remains— who killed him? Mr. Burlington is going to devote all his time and all his energies to finding out. You and I are going to help him."

The little man rubbed his claw-like hands together, and a dry chuckle came from beneath the beak-like nose.

"Bless you, miss," he said, "I knew that quite well. Why, miss, I have had two interviews with Mr. Burlington, and it is his very life-blood, it is, to be in a thing like this.''

Burlington made an impatient movement of his hand.

"That'll do, Smith," he said. "The fact remains that I am going to see this thing through. We three are here alone now. No one suspects this consultation. I have my own powers, such as they are. I have, as well as that, command of unlimited money and the most powerful resources possible. It is you who have to show me the lines upon which I must proceed."

There was a dead silence in the room.

Now, for the first time, Julia la Touche grew  uneasy and seemed to have no word to say. The "Parrot-faced Man" sat motionless in his chair, but curious, horny lids had dropped over his round, bright eyes, and he seemed lost in thought.

Suddenly Julia looked up at the clock upon the mantelshelf. She jumped up quickly.

"I must go," she said. "I must go back to St. Paul's. Dorothy Jackson will be wondering what has become of me. I will leave you two together." Burlington accompanied her to the door of the house, and, as he pulled back the latch, he caught at her hands once more, now encased in long tan-colored gloves.

"Julia," he whispered, "you will remember— you will remember our promise?"

She gave him one long, steady look. That was enough. He closed the door behind her, and, with an exultant triumph in his heart, ran up the stairs again like a boy and entered the room where John Smith was waiting.

A great change had come over John Smith's face and manner during the brief interval of Cyril Burlington's absence.

His eyes were bright as ever, but his hands were shaking, and in the lamp-light of the shuttered room the young man saw that little globules of sweat had started out all over his face.

He did not wait for the other to speak. "You mean this, sir!" he said, in a voice so charged with excitement and emotion that all the duty of its tone seemed gone. "You mean this, sir?"

Burlington looked down upon him and thrust his hands deep into his trousers pockets. He knew that this was no ordinary query.

"I mean it,'" he said quietly.

The little man pulled his pocket-handkerchief from his left sleeve and mopped his face.

"I knew it, sir," he replied quite simply. "Well, then, that being so. I must tell you that you are going— that we are going, for I must be with you in this until the very end— into the most dreadful danger."

Again Burlington nodded. "There is always danger in these affairs, I suppose," he said.

"I know nothing about 'these affairs,' sir," said the "Parrot-faced Man." "All I know is that in getting at the truth of Mr. William's murder, the master I loved so truly and whom they said I killed, we shall be incurring  risks and entering into danger that you can have no idea of whatever. Sir"— and his voice almost broke upon the word— "sir, there are two, if not three, devils incarnate for us to meet and conquer. We must oppose all our cunning, all our resources, against two of the cleverest, most unsuspected, and most brilliant criminals probably alive in the world to-day. For they are not ordinary criminals, sir.

"The dreadful thing that they have done— for indeed, it is they that have done it, and no other— has not been done for mere money or personal gain. In the first place, it has been done in the interests of a wicked by-way of science, which some of the greatest scientists have feared to tread. In the case of one of them there was also the masterful influence of love. That dear young lady who has just left us awoke it. But the other is greater than all, and we stand before a combination so great, so cunning, and so powerful that you may well ask yourself if you really mean to go on with this to the end. For my part, I will avenge the master that I loved, and if I do so my life is well lost in the endeavour. For you it is different. You are young, celebrated, a gentleman of position, and"— here the little man hesitated for a moment— "I ask your pardon if I say what I should not in my station, but you have love before you."

Cyril Burlington was most powerfully impressed. He realised now, more than ever before, into what hidden paths the Fates had led him, that he was voyaging upon deep waters or standing upon the frontier of a country so sinister and gloomy that it had no name.

Yet he did not hesitate for a moment.

"My duty," he said, "is to find out the truth of this matter. I am the representative of the leading journal of the day, which has commissioned me to do so. My inclination coincides exactly with my duty. My reward will be commensurate with the perils which you tell me I must undergo. I should like to ask you one thing, however," he continued, in a somewhat lighter voice. "I know little of you save that you were the late Mr. William Carne's servant, but you express yourself as no servant would do. This, while it shows me that I have a more valuable ally than I thought in the contest before me, also gives me cause for wonder."

The "Parrot-faced Man" nodded quickly. "Yes, yes," he said, in his odd-sounding voice, and for a moment spoke as equal to equal, "that is so, that is so. For, you see, Mr. Burlington, my name is not John Smith, and I am not by birth a servant to anyone. That, however, is a minor mystery, a minor point which you will doubtless know of in the future. It is immaterial at the present moment."

Burlington sat down on the other side of the fire.

"The reason," he said, "is immaterial, the fact is not. We shall understand each other, I can see, Mr. Smith."

"We shall and must," said the "Parrot-faced Man" earnestly, "for we are going into the dark together to do justice."

In reply, Cyril stretched out his hand towards the other's. They shook hands, and in that clasp their companionship, their enterprise, was sealed for ever and a day.

"And now, Smith," Burlington said, after a moment or two's silence, "you have much to tell me. I am quite in the dark. The first weapons are in your possession; show them to me."

"I will," the other replied, rising from his seat and beginning to pace up and down the room with an odd, hopping step.

As ho did so he seemed more like a bird than ever, a grotesque, parrot-like figure, and yet even the jerky movements had a suggestion of terrible purpose in them.

The room was very hot, but Burlington had not dared to undo the shutters.

"Look here," he said, in a low voice, "suppose we open the door a little to let some of the heat out? The people of this house are in my confidence, and no one can overhear what we say; besides, we can talk in low tones."

Smith nodded, and Burlington set the door a little ajar, looking down the passage first to see that no one was there.

"And now," he said, when he had done this, "the first question to ask you is, naturally, whom do you suspect?"

The "Parrot-faced Man" stopped in his hopping walk, came up to Burlington, and put one thin, crooked hand upon his arm.

"I will tell you," he said, and was about to speak further when there was a loud whirring noise of a bell in the lower part of the house.

Both men stopped and remained rigid as they were.

In the over-charged state of their nerves the ringing was ominous and startling. They heard steps coming up from the kitchen stairs, go along the hall, and then the latch of the door as it was pulled open.

Both of them stood in a strained attitude of listening.

They heard a pleasant, high-bred voice speak to the man who had answered the door.

"Oh, Barker, has a young lady— in fact, has Miss la Touche, who is staying with the Provost of St. Paul's, been here this afternoon?"

They heard the answer.

"A young lady, sir— no, sir, there's been no young lady here at all. The rooms are empty at present. Mr. Rathbone, who has them this term, has been ill and hasn't come up yet."

"Oh, I see!" the pleasant, vibrating voice continued, though there was a note of doubt in it. "I must have been mistaken, then. The rooms are empty?"

"Quite empty, sir," the ex-scout's voice answered in surprised tones.

"Oh, very well, then! I made a mistake. Good-night. Barker!"

"Good-night, sir!" The door closed.

Cyril Burlington stood listening to this voice in an agony of attention. Why, he could not have said.

But almost immediately that the sound of the closing door and the man's returning footsteps came to them, he felt gripping, claw-like fingers upon his arm. Looking down, he saw that the face of his companion was livid with hatred and with fear. He saw that the curved, grey lips beneath the huge, beak-like nose were trembling, quivering, trying to articulate.

Suddenly the grip upon his arm relaxed, and the little man in the black suit fell in a tumbled heap upon the floor.

5: The Carnes of Morston Manor

MORSTON MANOR was a famous old mediaeval house some eight miles from Oxford. The late Sir Augustus Carne had bought it when at the height of his fame, and had retired there to spend his declining years with his wife and three sons.

It was a grim old place, fortified and surrounded by a moat. Situated in a remote part of the country, surrounded by a somewhat considerable moor, and with spinnies of tall pine-trees growing up almost to the edge of the moat itself, it was now and had always been spoken of in the past by the country folk as a strange house.

There were legends about it. It was haunted, of course, and the ghosts were said to be of a peculiarly evil and malevolent variety.

When Sir Augustus Carne had bought the place and small surrounding estate, the manor had been long empty. The famous scientist restored it, and the old legends, which had been in abeyance for some time, sprang up into people's minds, none the less because of the strange household that inhabited the building.  The recent terrible murder of one of the sons of the grim old lady who was the chatelaine of Morston had not done the house any good whatever in public opinion.

Few people visited there.

The Carnes took neither place nor interest in County society. A few celebrated scientists arrived on short flying visits, and that was all.

Nobody knew exactly whet went on at Mors-ton, but among the simpler people of the re-mote villages and outlying farms there was an uneasy feeling that the place was unhallowed, and that the secret activities behind those stern and frowning walls were not such as the sun liked to look upon.

It was about five o'clock in the afternoon— the same afternoon when Cyril Burlington was meeting the "Parrot-faced Man" and Julia la Touche in the rooms at Holywell Street. In a long, low parlour, panelled in dark oak, and lit by two mullioned windows heavily leaded, Lady Carne was sitting in a high-backed chair by the side of a fire of smouldering elm logs. It was almost dark outside, and upon the tea-table, which had been carried in by a quiet, reserved-looking manservant, four tall candles in silver holders were lit.

Perhaps in all England it would have been difficult to find a more extraordinary personality than that of old Lady Carne. She was old, very old, a big woman, extremely corpulent. And yet, above the large body which extreme age had failed to shrivel and dry up, the head was striking to a degree, the deep-set eyes shining with unusual brilliancy.

A mob cap of lace, in the early Victorian style, was drawn closely round the almost hairless skull. The nose was beaked like a hawk's, the black eyes were extraordinarily brilliant, restless, and relentless of expression. The mouth, which even now showed in its debased curves that it must have once been very beautiful, quivered and worked unceasingly.

In the whole aspect of Lady Carne there was something that suggested continuous, never-ceasing expectation.

She looked round the panelled room with a quick, bird-like glance. Then, with a gesture of impatience so real that it was almost violent, she caught at a teacup of marvellous old Worcester china and sipped while her trembling hand held it to her trembling lips.

She had hardly put down the cup upon the tea-table when a door in the panelling opened noiselessly and John Carne, her youngest son, came into the room. The man closed the door without a sound— a door which seemed part of the panelling now and gave no indication of its presence. Then, with soft footsteps, he came into the little circle of light from candles and log fire.

He sat down upon a chair opposite his mother.

John Carne was a man of some three or four and thirty. He was short, stout, and clean-shaven. His hair was dark red, and his eyes were of a curious dark red also. The firelight glittered in them. The hairless face was pale, the well-cut lips showed nothing at all, and, indeed, there seemed to be a veil or mask over the whole countenance.

There was something markedly distinguished about John Carne, nevertheless. The plump figure in its grey Norfolk jacket and the knickerbockers of an ordinary country gentleman, the enigmatic face, had a curious quality of distinction.

Few people of the outside world ever saw Mr. John Carne. He lived a hermit's life, for the sake of science, in the remote Oxford-shire manor house. But, in conjunction with that of his elder and even more distinguished brother, Horace, his name was beginning to be known all over Europe as one of the most distinguished physicists of the day. And, as it is true that no man can become eminent in a science or an art without bearing, in some fashion or another, distinguishing marks of what he is, so, on the rare occasions when John Carne travelled to London, Paris, or Vienna, to read a paper at some eminent congress of the scientific world, his personality was a notable one.

John poured out a cup of tea for himself. His fingers were long, white, and bloodless, deft as those of a woman making lace. He poured out his tea, adding cream and sugar with the careful precision of a man dealing with drugs in a laboratory.

Lady Carne spoke first. Despite her extreme age— she had been a friend of Darwin, and had known Professor Huxley well— her voice was round and firm, with a high, vibrating ring. Now it was very anxious.

"John," she said, with a clear precision of speech that well-known people employed in the Victorian age, "then your brother has not yet returned from Oxford?"

John shook his head.

"No, mother," he replied; "I can't think what has kept him. I don't like it."

The old lady's eyes glowed more brightly than ever.

"Don't be faint-hearted and apprehensive," she said, with extreme bitterness and energy in her voice. "Have we gone so far that we are to be afraid now?"

"I will smoke a cigarette, if you will allow me, mother," the young man said ceremoniously.

The distinguished old lady by the fire made an impatient movement of assent with her hands, upon which rubies and emeralds glittered with baleful green and scarlet fires.

She did not understand this modern habit of smoking, but it was as nothing. It was a petty thing. Great issues throbbed and pulsed in her mind, one glowing purpose animated it; she was impatient of any interruption to the sinister swing of her thought.

John Carne lit his cigarette and smoked quietly for a moment or two.

"You see," he said, "I am naturally very anxious. Everything was arranged so well, and yet at the last moment things went absolutely wrong owing to unforeseen coincidences. Ten days ago we felt that we were all perfectly safe here, that nothing could possibly interrupt the quiet progress of the greatest experiment the world has ever seen, and then" — his voice rose a little in tone, and a note of disgust and apprehension came into it— "and then Smith was reprieved. Who could have foreseen such an occurrence? Where do we stand now?"

The old lady gazed into the fire, and her shrivelled lips snapped into a hard grey line below the aquiline nose.

"It shall not be," she muttered to herself. "Nothing shall stop us now we have gone so far— nothing, nothing, nothing!"

"I hope nothing will," John Carne replied, sipping his tea delicately with a curious feline motion. "But all the same, mother, we have got to face facts. John Smith is acquitted. John Smith is free. John Smith is probably— indeed, is certainly, as I heard over the telephone from Oxford this morning— now in London. He is extremely intelligent. He saw much here. He has suspected us, but he will not now— "

His voice died away, but old Lady Carne interrupted him with extreme vehemence.

"You fool," she said; "do not talk in this fashion to me! What is this servant man, however intelligent he may be in his own way, in regard to the progress of science? In order to accomplish our plans, we arranged to have him removed. A life such as his is as nothing when such mighty issues are at stake. Another life was as nothing! Why do you mention such an inconsiderable incident now as that of John Smith's existence or non-existence? He has served our turn."

Suddenly John Carne rose to his feet and threw his cigarette into the wide, old-fashioned grate.

"Mother," he said, "you are devoted, as I and Horace are devoted, to one great end; but you ignore facts— necessary facts, dangerous facts! This man is free; he knows something, he suspects more. He can never now be arraigned again for the murder. It is inevitable that the question will arise in the public mind as to who killed William. I read the journals of the day; you do not. You do not know the fury of excitement, of interrogation, the lust of detection which is animating the press, and especially the Daily Wire,  which has been so instrumental in upsetting our plans, and which has prevented John Smith from being silenced for ever."

Lady Carne laughed harshly and contemptuously.

"The press!" she said, with a venomous sneer. "John, you are unnerved this afternoon. You are unnerved because Horace has not returned from Oxford when he said he would. What's the press?"

The young man shook his head. He knew that his mother was incapable of understanding the enormous developments of social life during the last twenty years. Probably there was no woman in Europe so intimately acquainted with modern scientific progress upon the lines of certain investigations, begun by her husband and continued by her sons. But her knowledge of modern life stopped there. It was useless to explain to her.

After a few minutes' more desultory conversation, John Carne left the room with his precise and noiseless step.

He crossed a wide hall with a gallery round it, a ghostly and rather forbidding place, with its sombre portraits upon the walls, its suits of armour, and a certain air of inhospitality and chilliness which even a great fire, burning upon an open hearth below a huge stone mantelpiece, which was historic, failed to dispel. He opened a door upon the other side of the hall, and entered a much more cheerful apartment.

This was a long room, the walls of which were covered with books, though here and there a long portrait hung between the shelves. It was brilliantly lit with electric light— for the Carnes had established a complete electric plant at Morston— much current being required for their scientific pursuits, in addition to lighting and heating.

This, which was known as the "library," was the general living-room of Horace and John Carne. A door at one end opened into what had once been a billiard-room, but which now, considerably added to, had become an up- to- date laboratory and workshop for experimental purposes.

Closing the door, John Carne bolted it noiselessly. Heavy shutters already covered the three great windows which looked out into the park, and over these long red curtains were drawn.

John Carne was quite alone and secure from observation.

With quick footsteps he went to a bureau in one corner of the room, unlocked it, and withdrew a cut-glass spirit case and a syphon of soda-water. With a hand which shook with eagerness he half-filled a tumbler, splashed in a little mineral water, and drank it off with a deep sigh of satisfaction. Then, lighting another cigarette, he began to walk slowly up and down the room, his head bent in thought, his lips firmly compressed.

After five minutes of this promenade he at last , settled down to a cigar. A change for the better had come into his face. Presently he got up and unbolted the door.

He felt a little better now, a little less perturbed, though for a week or more his nature, in which the instinct of self-preservation was inordinately strong— a nervous system under-mined by secret drinking, which no one but his brother Horace knew of— had suffered agonies of apprehension.

He had stopped his walk, and had settled down in an armchair by the fire with the Daily Wire of that morning, when he heard the faint "tzim-tzim" of a motor-car outside in the park. He put down the paper and listened intently.

In a moment or two more he heard the door of the vestibule open and someone enter the hall. There was a sharp question from the butler, and as John rose to his feet his brother Horace, wearing a heavy, fur-lined coat, and a motor-cap drawn over his eyes, strode into the room.

Horace Carne was about forty years of age. He was tall and very handsome, with dark curly hair, already beginning to grow grey at the temples. The nose was aquiline, and the eyes blazed with purpose and intelligence. If the face had a fault, it was that the jaw was almost cruel in its strength and determination, and that the well-shaped lips were perhaps a trifle thin. To take all in all, Horace Carne was one of the most distinguished-looking men it would be possible to meet with in any rank of life. He looked, as he was, eminent.

He took off his coat, threw his cap on the table, sank into a chair opposite his brother, and accepted a cigarette from the case which John held out in silence.

"Well?" the younger man said briefly, though he could hardly control the anxiety in his voice.

"You may set your mind at ease, my dear John," Horace Carne remarked, with ever so little of a sneer.

No one admired his brother's brilliant scientific attainments more than he did, but the stronger and more relentless nature had at times a certain contempt for the weaker one which was under his control.

John Carne, whether he noticed the sneer or not, sank back in his chair with a long sigh of relief.

"We are in deep waters," he said, in a low voice, "very deep waters, and I am not ashamed to own my apprehensions have been very great. But I have always had immense confidence in you, Horace, and what you say reassures me."

"We are in deep waters," Horace Carne answered gravely, "but the conduct of our affairs is safe in my hands. All you have to do is to trust in me. Do you think," he went on, his voice rising a little, and with an arrogant gesture of his hand— "do you think that we should have gone so far, and done what we have done, for me to allow the results of all our labours to prove useless now? No. An unforeseen coincidence has established John Smith's innocence of the murder of William before a tribunal."

As he spoke the name of his late brother, a close observer might have detected a curious tightening of the lips and an icy note of triumph in his voice.

"But what of that?" he went on.

"Simply," John replied, "that the police must now be actively forming theories as to who really killed"— and he smiled faintly and curiously as he spoke the word "killed"— "who really killed William."

Horace nodded.

"It doesn't require brains of your and my calibre to discover that," he answered with some irritation. "But this afternoon I have spent nearly two hours with the chief of the Oxford police and a London detective. They were neither of them fools. They were quite bright in their own way, but they were incapable of bold flights, and thought along stereotyped lines. You and I, who have devoted so much of our lives to the study of criminal psychology, know well that nearly all crime is committed upon stereotyped lines. This being so, these two policemen were absolutely like wax in my hands. Of course. I had thought the thing out very carefully before seeing them. There was, as you know, an apparent disagreement between Dr. Bosustow and ourselves as to the time William had been dead when his body was found. I utilised this to the utmost. I recalled a circumstance which I had forgotten— that John Smith was an expert motor-driver, that our regular chauffeur was away at the time, and that it was within the bounds of possibility that John Smith might have been at the procession in London, and also, have committed the murder. That was one hypothesis I put before them. The other was the unlikely, but still quite possible, fact that John Smith had a double. Neither of them would agree to this at all, until I told them a few scientific facts about the births of children abnormal in features or strangely deformed in some way or other. I showed them that it was quite possible, given the circumstances which I need not now detail to you, that there might be another "Parrot-faced Man" in London, and that he might even be a relative and in collusion with Smith. In short, I left both the superintendent and the detective from Scotland Yard— absolutely their leading man— in the full conviction that there has been a mis-carriage of justice, and that John Smith really committed the murder after all. But, as you know, a man can't be tried again for murder when he's once been acquitted. John Smith is now absolutely safe from the law. This means that Scotland Yard's interest in him entirely ceases. They may all be perfectly convinced that he committed the murder— and I am certain that that is the attitude that will now be taken up after my conversation this afternoon— but they will do nothing. Even though they did, what could they discover? But we need not discuss that possibility. We are as safe from the interference of Scotland Yard as though the thing had not occurred."

Again John Carne gave a great sigh of relief. "But what of Smith himself?" he asked. "You know how shrewd and indefatigable the man is. You know also the deep affection he had for— " He didn't conclude the sentence.

Horace nodded. "But," he said, "I have taken all that into consideration. First of all, despite his pardon, Smith will be hopelessly discredited by the police. He has no friends, and not much money. He really knows nothing; he can only suspect."

"But he has friends," John retorted. "He has the most powerful friend a man can have. He has the Daily Wire as his friend, and all the vast organisation behind it."

Horace Carne laughed contemptuously, and snapped his fingers.

"That for the Daily Wire!" he cried. "They have had their sensation, and a very great one it has been. They are quite satisfied. Tomorrow a king will be assassinated. There will be a Government crisis; or an American millionaire will invite the gilded aristocracy of New York to a dinner-party with live pigs. As far as the Daily Wire is concerned, the thing is absolutely dead also. I shall have John Smith watched for a little time, however. He went to London this morning in a closed motor. I have men looking out for him. His old mother lives in Brondesbury, a suburb of London, and he will be sure to go to her. If the man tries to make himself obnoxious, he can be put out of the way very easily. There will be no difficulty about that."

"No, of course not," John replied, in a voice as indifferent as if it were proposed to drown a kitten. "Then I think we really are safe. And that journalist man— what's his name?"

John went on.

"Oh, the fellow Burlington," Horace replied. "He is leaving for London this afternoon. In fact, he will be now on his way. I had inquiries made at his hotel. The detective who has been working for me in Oxford would have telephoned before now if he had not caught the train. He is a clever fellow, that Burlington. He was at Paul's, I have ascertained, and a very popular man in his year. But this is merely in his day's work. He has had his 'scoop,' as the journalists call it, and next week he will be in Constantinople interviewing the Sultan, or anything you like."

"Very well, then," John replied. "You have relieved my mind of all that lay upon it. We can now pursue our work unhampered in any way."

Horace nodded.

"Yes," he said. But now the coldness had gone from his voice, and his eyes were almost dreamy. He had only one confidant— except upon scientific matters— in the world. That was his brother John. Even to stern old Lady Carne, who was privy to everything else in his life, who knew every detail of what had gone before, he never spoke of what was coming to mean a passion, which threatened the dominion even of science. But to John he had let drop a few hints now and then, and the younger man had understood.

"Well," he said, "Julia is now in Oxford again, so you will have your chance, Horace. You frightened her before. Our mother frightened her especially. This is a strange and gloomy house for a young girl. You were too vehement altogether. You frightened her into flight."

"I know," Horace answered simply; "but I am wiser now. She shall see me in another guise, away from science, away from all that is gloomy to her. I shall visit the Provost of Paul's— oh, my plans are all made, believe me."

"It is a curious thing," he went on, "that this afternoon I called at the Provost's house, and was told that the Provost was engaged, that Miss Jackson had gone to town for the day, and that Miss Julia la Touche had left the house a short time before to go for a walk. I left the house, and turned down Holywell Street. It was getting dusk, and, of course. I could not be sure, but I could have sworn that I saw her coming out of a house in Holywell Street— University lodgings, they are, and kept by a man who was once my scout at Paul's. The figure came out, and was lost in the dark before I came up to the house. I thought it odd, and I thought I would make sure, but on inquiring from Barker I found that nobody had been there. It was very odd."

John shrugged his shoulders. "My dear Horace," he said, "really you seem to have wasted your time upon a very unimportant matter, anyway." He rose from his chair, and stretched his arms. "The great point is that we are now absolutely free to pursue the great experiment to the end."

Horace also rose, and became alert and brisk in manner once more.

"Yes." he said; "and as a preliminary let us make the examination. Remember that only another night's work remains before the delicate coherer will be ready to receive the brain waves. It is a pity that the last one we made was not sufficiently delicate."

"Yes," John replied, "it was a pity, but that will soon be put right."

As he spoke he pressed the button of an electric bell.

When the butler came in answer, Horace gave orders that on no account were they to be disturbed for the remaining hour before dinner. The butler withdrew, and Horace locked the door behind him. Then he went to the door leading into the laboratory, opened it, and switched on the electric lights, filling the long room with a brilliant radiance which fell upon a hundred strange pieces of delicate mechanism, a table of gleaming microscopes and section cutters, stands of chemicals, blow-pipes, and Bunsen burners.

"There," he said quietly to John, "we shall be thought to be within.''

The laboratory had no windows, but in the daytime received its light entirely from a large skylight. At night, when lit within by electricity, anyone passing outside would conclude that work was going on within. The two men came back into the library.

John Carne took a chair and placed it in front of a portrait close to the frame. Then Horace Carne felt for a moment in the gilt mouldings upon one side of the frame, and withdrew a small portion of gilded flower and fruit, which slid out easily and showed a small button in the plain wood behind.

The scientist pressed the button, then, pushing the picture itself gently with his hand, it swung away, showing a small room no bigger than a bathing-machine, carpeted with felt, and with a trapdoor from which the head of a ladder protruded in one corner. There was an electric switch in this secret-covered room. John, who had stepped over the frame from the chair on which he stood, switched it on. Horace followed in a moment, and stood beside him. The door picture was pushed back into its place with a little click.

The rungs of the ladder were covered with flannel. The two men descended, one after the other, their feet making no noise as they did so. When they got to the bottom a low passage stretched before them. It was lined with matchboard, which damp had swollen, and in places cracked the wood, for it led directly under the moat of Morston Manor, and was, indeed, though considerably enlarged and improved, originally part of a secret hiding-place contrived for priests in the proscribed days of the Reformation. At the far end of the passage was a massive oak door, which Horace again unlocked.

As he did so a gust of warm air came out to them from behind the heavy curtain. Horace had stretched out his hand to pull back the curtain, when he stopped suddenly, his head bent forward, his whole body stiffened; with his other hand he clutched his brother's arm with a vice-like grip.

From the warm, black silence, beyond came a sound so weird and strange, so utterly outside human experience, that the two men were momentarily frozen into statues of fear.

For what they heard was a voice, and yet not a voice. It was hardly human, it was hardly mechanical, and yet it partook of both.

If a dead man could have a voice and was speaking from the bottom of a deep grave, it might have been like this. And the word that the voice said was "Murder!"

For nearly half a minute the Carnes remained motionless before the curtained archway.

There was no more sound. And then, in a voice trembling horribly, but now more with excitement than fear, Horace spoke.

"The coherer!" he stuttered. "It is partially successful! We have done it! We have changed the whole fabric of human life!"

He pulled aside the curtain with a rattle. All was warm darkness within, until his fingers found the electric switch. And, reeling like drunken men, the brothers entered the place beyond.

6: ''Beware That Man!"

CYRIL BURLINGTON had been in London a fortnight. The mystery of William Carne's murder, the sensational trial and liberation of John Smith, the "Parrot-faced Man," were almost forgotten by the general public In the hurry and excitement of a new war scare with Germany.

Upon a bright, cold, winter's afternoon, just as daylight was fading, a large and very fat youth, seventeen or eighteen years old, with a heavy, pudding-like expression, and small pig-like eyes in which shone no gleam of intelligence, was slowly and methodically brushing a suit of clothes in Cyril Burlington's chambers in the Inner Temple.

Wilkins, which was the name enjoyed by this singular-looking person, had been Burlington's valet and general factotum for three years. He was a well-known figure in the Inner Temple, and something of a butt to the barristers' clerks, the laundresses, and porters of the place. He rarely spoke, and when he did it was generally to utter some feeble witticism or naive remark more fitted to a child of ten than to a corpulent youth close upon manhood. Everyone knew Cyril Burlington in the Temple— the famous journalist who occupied a large suite of rooms towards the end of Crown Office Row, and not far from the gateway which leads to the cluster of great newspaper buildings fringing the east end of the Embankment.

And everyone wondered why the brilliant and successful young man did not provide himself with a more adequate factotum than this fat, rustic-looking youth. Cyril was often joked about it, but he always answered, with a smile, that his wants were few, and that Wilkins suited him very well for the present, together with the woman who came in for the earlier part of the day to attend to the fires and sweep the rooms.

No one knew anything about Wilkins save his master, and to Cyril Burlington his servant was worth his weight in gold, and he would not have parted with him upon any consideration whatever. He had found the boy during one of his journalistic investigations, and rescued him from misery and shame; and from the very first day when, actuated by pity, he had done this, he had never regretted it.

For under the fat, sleepy exterior, the foolish, expressionless face, a mind keen as a razor and sharp as a needle was constantly at work. Nothing escaped Wilkins. His judgment was sharp and penetrating. He had been of use to his master in incalculable ways, he was absolutely faithful, and he would have shed the last drop of his blood for Burlington. The fat youth was brushing a suit of clothes upon a deal table in the room. A bright fire burnt upon the hearth, the window was closely shuttered and covered with a curtain, while the electric light which was hung from the centre of the ceiling was turned on. In an old comfortable armchair by the side of the fire, smoking a cigarette that was almost hidden by his huge, beak-like nose, sat John Smith.

For a fortnight the "Parrot-faced Man" had remained in Burlington's chambers, only going out late at night, and with his face heavily muffled in a scarf, in order to take a little fresh air. Even then he had never left the precincts of the Temple, and no one suspected his presence in Crown Office Row.

For a fortnight Smith and Burlington had been making preparations and planning out a campaign, which was to result in the discovery of the darkest and most impenetrable mystery the country had known for many a long year. There had been much to do, an infinity of detail to discuss, multiple preparations to be made.

From the very first both Smith and Burlington had realised that the former's whereabouts must be kept absolutely secret. After a very few hours' conversation with Smith, the journalist had realised that he was fighting against adversaries of a resource and intelligence unprecedented in his experience, and, perhaps, in the experience of the police of Europe. The circumstances attached to Smith's own arrest for murdering his late master, the finished art with which someone or something that was not coincidence had woven a web around him which had so nearly brought him to the gallows— all these showed the quality of the enemy well enough. But when, in addition. Smith had told the man who had saved him many other details about his life at Morston Manor, when Julia la Touche had contributed all she knew as well, then, indeed, Burlington determined to leave no single chance untried, no detail in his scheme incomplete.

He had unlimited time from the Daily Wire. His resources also were unlimited, backed, as he was, by the most famous journal of the day. He had but to speak and a thousand helpers would arise to do his bidding — money, skill, the assistance of experts, were all his to command.

He had already made a certain test. The result showed that the people at Morston Manor were on their guard.

The small house in Brondesbury where Smith's mother dwelt was watched to see if it was spied on, and a private detective had little difficulty in discovering that another of his trade was lurking in the neighbourhood, waiting for the appearance of the "Parrot-faced Man."

That in itself was quite significant, and Smith remained in absolute seclusion with Burlington and Wilkins, planning and preparing for the coming campaign. And now, after long thought and infinite care in the preparations, war was to be declared.

On that very night the three men were to start for Oxfordshire in a large private motor, and now Smith and Wilkins were occupied in finally packing the portmanteaus and making other necessary arrangements.

Cyril Burlington himself was with Julia la Touche.

The beautiful girl had come up to London for a day's shopping with her young charge and friend, the daughter of the Provost of Paul's. The girls had arrived in London about eleven, and Burlington had been with them the whole day by arrangement— Dorothy Jackson being only too pleased to assist in the affair, delighted with the love secret of an-other, as young girls are until such time as they have one of their own.

Cyril Burlington was to see the girls off by the five o'clock fast train from Paddington, and would be back in his chambers by six.

"Well, what's next?" said Wilkins, as he folded up a pair of his master's trousers and placed them in the suit-case.

He spoke in a voice which no one but his master— and, during the last few days, John Smith— had ever heard. It was a sharp, ringing voice, instinct with alertness and capability, and utterly different from the thick and lazy drawl which was all the outside world ever heard from him. The "Parrot-faced Man," himself of very good intelligence, had come to regard the fat youth with something almost like reverence. His mental dexterity was so marked, his adoration for Burlington— an adoration which poor John Smith now shared to the full— was so much the ruling factor in the youth's life, that Smith, but hardly recovered from the terrible shock he had undergone, regarded his young friend with something like awe.

"Well, I think there's nothing more to do, Mr. Wilkins," Smith replied.

"I don't think so," answered the other. Smith nodded thoughtfully.

"The plans that I have drawn out of the Morston Manor are in Mr. Burlington's large kit-bag," he said. "The revolvers and ammunition are all ready. Electric torches and chloroform-pads, burglar tools — " His voice faded away into a startled silence.

"Heavens," he continued at length, gazing with his curious round eyes into the glowing depth of the fire, "this is a rummy start, if ever there was one. To think of a gentleman like Mr. Burlington and you and me all going off into the country like conspirators, as you may say, with a bagful of gear that would get us all locked up in five minutes if a police-inspector came across it."

The youth Wilkins rubbed his two fat hands together with a chuckle of intense enjoyment. His infantile mouth expanded in a grin of plea-sure, the beady eyes shone like fire.

"Rummy start!" he said. "I've been in some big things with the master before now, but this is the biggest of 'em all. Why, Mr. Smith, master's name will be more before the public than ever it was when he saved you in the nick of time. It'll be the biggest thing of the century."

Smith nodded.

"Yes," he answered slowly, "but even now, Wilkins, I do not believe you half realise what those three are doing at Morston. You don't realise it a bit. Mr. Burlington is the cleverest gentleman I have ever met, but Lady Carne and her two sons are inhuman. And there's something in that house going on still that the very powers of night would cry out upon if they but knew."

A curious gleam, which Smith saw nothing of, passed over the big, pink face of his fellow servant. It came and went in a flash; but if he had noticed it, the other could not have failed to have been startled and, perhaps, uneasy.

"That's all very well, Mr. Smith," Wilkins retorted; "but master's a match for any of your rascals down in the country, that I am certain of. And, what's more, he has got me, though I says it as shouldn't. And what's more still, he has got the Daily Wire behind him; and if that isn't enough to shove a man through anything I should like to know what is, that's all!"

"Well, we shall see," the other answered. "But I can tell you, Wilkins— not that I am losing hope in any way— that we've got some very dreadful things to face."

"They'll be faced," Wilkins answered quietly, and proceeded to lock and strap the suit-case. This done, he went to a cupboard by the fireplace and produced a bottle and a couple of glasses.

The bottle contained a peculiar brand of cordial, of which Master Wilkins approved very much indeed. It was an odd taste at his age, but his youth had been peculiar, and at no time had Cyril Burlington ever known his factotum in the least influenced by drink.

Wilkins's eyes fell lovingly upon the bottle as he pushed it over towards his friend.

"An inch or two of that, with a little cold water, will put you right, Mr. Smith,'' he said. "There's nothing like it. You will think differently about your country swells when you have had a drop. Have you packed all your own things— the tinned meat, the beef essences, biscuits, candles, and what not?"

John Smith nodded. "Yes," he said, "everything is in a small tin trunk. The blankets are in a small bale tied up with string."

Wilkins sipped his drink, and began to chuckle quietly to himself.

"Well," he said, "I'd rather it was you than me, old Robinson Crusoe. I shouldn't relish the idea of living in a deserted lime-kiln on a moor this weather."

John Smith shuddered a little.

"No more do I," said he; "but it is the only way. I must be in touch with you and Mr. Burlington at the Sportsmen's Rest, two miles away over the moor, and a mile away from Morston Manor itself. But my face is well known on the country-side. If I were to be seen by daylight it would be known at the Manor within half an hour, and all over that part of Oxford in a day. Why, when we had that famous man of disguises here the other day, even he said he could do nothing much for me." He ended his speech with a rather bitter laugh.

"Well, of course, Mr. Smith," Wilkins replied hurriedly, "there's no manner of use in disguising the fact that you do look a little different to most people one meets with. So do I, if that is all. And for my part," he added hastily, in a well-meant endeavour to, as he thought, soothe the other's feelings upon a delicate matter, "I'd rather be distinctive-like. Go out into the street, and everyone you meet is as like to everyone else as one egg is to another. I don't think you and I need call to be like the rest of the world at all, though, of course, that old lime-kiln don't sound as cheerful as it might be."

And here the youth's sense of humour again overcame him for a moment, and he chuckled quietly to himself.

While the "Parrot-faced Man" and Wilkins were thus making the final preparations and  discussing their chances in the dangerous campaign to come, Cyril Burlington was walking up and down the long departure platform at Paddington, talking earnestly to Julia la Touche.

Dorothy Jackson had already secured a seat in a first-class carriage, and the lovers were enjoying a final five minutes together before the fast Oxford train started.

"Cyril," the girl said, and there was a break in her voice, while her beautiful dark eyes shone like stars in the steely-blue light of the electric arcs, "I cannot tell you how I fear for you. Your feet are straying into dark and unknown pathways. Even now I feel half-inclined to beg you to go no further in this matter."

"My darling," he said, and there was a ring of pride and triumph in his voice that this peerless maiden should fear for him so greatly. "My darling, you know that you would not really counsel me to give it up. I have set my foot to the plough; God helping me I will shed the light of truth and day upon this horror, and bring the true criminals to their doom. You said to me in that house at Oxford that when this task was accomplished, then you would be mine for ever and ever. Even if now you were to make no condition out of your sweet love for me, yet I should still go on. My honour is engaged. I will see the murderers of William Carne punished, and the suspicion which yet remains about poor John Smith dispersed; and I will do something for the great newspaper which has made me what I am, that perhaps no one else in England is capable of doing."

She lifted her face to his, very grave and pale.

"So be It, dear Cyril," she said, and there was now no tremor in her voice, while her lips curved with happy pride at her lover's words.

"So be it, my dear love. God will aid the fight. And now," she said finally, for the great minute hand of the clock at the end of the station was approaching the hour of five, and her eyes had fallen upon it, "I am very glad that you see with me in the matter of Horace Carne. As I told you, he is often at the college now. He comes to see the Provost more than he did, and is ingratiating himself in every way with dear old Dr. Jackson. I know well with what reason he comes. I am free from his coercion now. The power of that dark trio at Morston Manor cannot be exercised upon me as it was, so he is trying other methods.

"I know it is hard, dear: but, as I said, it is the only way to lull Horace Carne's suspicions. I must be apparently pleasant with him, lead him on to think that perhaps"— she blushed a little— "that perhaps his hopes are not quite in vain, although the very sight of him fills me with a secret loathing for which there is no name. His face is horrible, and his very presence inspires a chilling fear; yet by lulling his suspicions, by allowing him to see me and talk to me now and then, I shall gain the most valuable information. I loathe the necessity for doing any such thing. Deceit and double dealing are abhorrent to me, but with foes like ours, and the cause we have at heart, all weapons are legitimate."

"They are," Burlington went on grimly. "Oh, my darling, I hate and loathe to think of this man being near you and having access to you, but my own personal feelings must go by the board in this case. I should be unworthy of the mission I had undertaken if I did not feel that. Thank God that you are in safe hands at the Provost's house. Thank God also that I, John Smith, and a third helper, of whom as yet you know nothing, but who is extraordinarily clever and resourceful, will be within a few miles of you and ready to be summoned at any time. Do this, then, my brave darling, and delude Horace Carne into a false security"— and here Cyril's voice sank a full tone and became very earnest— "but on no account whatever trust yourself alone to the man in any way, accept no dubious invitations, be constantly upon the watch."

"I will, Cyril dear," Julia answered. "And now, look, it is time for me to get into the train."

A ticket-collector had come up and was holding open the door of the first-class carriage.

In the swift taxi-cab that bore him back to the Temple, Cyril opened a copy of the French scientific review which, he remembered, Julia had given him earlier in the day with a request to read a certain article in it by the famous Parisian professor, Jules de Vernecourt.

He had not thought of it till then, but now he recollected that Julia's words had been a little singular.

"Dr. Jackson was talking about this article the other day," she said. "The recent work of Horace and John Carne is constantly referred to in it. Dr. Jackson gave me the review, saying that he thought it might interest me, as, indeed, this special article has. No, I don't want to say anything to you about it at present. There are, however, certain passages in the review marked in the margin with blue pencil. Those markings are mine. I want you to read the article very carefully, Cyril dear."

Burlington had put the journal in the pocket of his fur coat, and now, as the taxi-cab was excellently lit with an electric light at the back, he took it out and began to turn over the pages.

He lit a cigarette, lay back in the cab, and went on. As he read he became more interested and his face changed a little. Then, as he saw the first reference to those "clever and world-famed English scientists, Mr. Horace and John Carne," he started, and his whole attitude became tense.

It was not the name; it was the trend of thought ushered in by the paragraph that commenced with the reference. It was here also that the thin blue pencil line in the margin began.

"Heavens above!" he thought. "Was this faint hinting and shadowing forth of a theory  so extraordinary and novel that it cut down to the very base and foundation of life itself, was this the true solution? Might it not be that he had stumbled on a little tiny thread which, followed up, might grow stronger and stronger until light was shed upon a horror that he did not even now dare to formulate in his mind?"

He turned the page with shaking fingers. The two new pages which met his eyes had blue pencil marks upon all the margins— marks much firmer and darker now, marks sometimes twice repeated.  And then suddenly the taxicab stopped with  a jerk. He was at the gates of the Temple.

He paid the driver and hurried through the ancient, echoing gates, dimly lit here and there by three gas-lamps, towards his own chambers. Arrived there, he opened the door with his latchkey, flung his coat to Wilkins, who had hurried into the hall at the sound, and went into the library. It was a large, beautifully-furnished room, with, every modern bachelor luxury that a refined, artistic taste and a comprehensive purse could supply.

"Ask Mr. Smith to come here at once, Wilkins," he said, sinking into an armchair and adjusting a reading-lamp upon a small table by its side. In a moment Mr. Smith had entered, and directly he saw Burlington he knew that something strange and momentous was afoot.

Cyril signed to him to take a chair opposite.

"Now, look here, Smith," he said. '"I have just come across the leading scientific review in France, in which there is an article by a professor of world-wide celebrity upon certain recent experiments, which have been made in Paris, in which Horace and John Carne have been concerned, and which, I gather from the article, they are prosecuting themselves at Morston Manor. I have not had time to read all the article, but there are one or two passages which are strangely suggestive. I will read you a paragraph which has just come under my eye, and which you will readily understand, I will translate as I read. Your quick intelligence will tell me whether, by a strangely fortunate accident, I am upon the right track or not."

He cleared his throat and began. He read paragraph after paragraph in a low voice that trembled with excitement.

Once he looked up at the "Parrot-faced Man."

The little fellow was huddled up in his chair, his round, unblinking eyes fixed upon the reader. Little beads of sweat were coming out upon his face, though the room was by no means hot.

Suddenly, as Burlington read yet another paragraph, the "Parrot-faced Man" jumped up from his chair with a half-strangled cry, not a shriek, not a groan, not a snarl of triumph, but partaking of all three.

Most powerfully affected, Cyril Burlington rose also, and the two men— one so tall and striking in his young, manly strength, the other so grotesque a caricature of manhood— stood gazing in each other's eyes unable to utter a single word.

At that moment there came a sharp knock at the door. Wilkins entered.

His manner seemed strange to both of them, as they turned and looked at him with white, inquiring faces. He closed the door quietly.

"I am very sorry, sir," he began, in a curious voice— a voice in which one might almost have thought there was an under-current of amusement if the words he spoke had not been so grave and startling.

This new sensation, so unexpected, so incredible, took all their power of speech away from the two men.

"Yes, sir," he said. "I am very sorry to say that I must give notice, as I have accepted another situation."

Burlington found his voice at last. "Another situation!" he gasped. "Wilkins, what does this mean? Now, of all the moments in the world! With whom have you accepted another situation?"

"With Mr. Horace Carne, sir, of Morston Manor!" said the pudding-faced boy.

Then there was a dead silence in the room.

7: Dr. Bosustow.

CAPTAIN HARDY, of the 2nd Yorkshire Regiment, had been staying at the Sportsmen's Rest, in Oxfordshire, for four days.

The Sportsmen's Rest was an old-fashioned country hostelry on the big moor which surrounded Morston Manor and Morston Village. There was a large, shallow lake not a quarter of a mile away upon the moor, where wild duck were found in some abundance, while the snipe-shooting all over the moor was very good.

Mr. Tims, the landlord of the inn, did very well in the winter by putting up sportsmen who were fond of wild-shooting. He rented the shooting of nearly two thousand acres, and the Sportsmen's Rest was known to many gunners as an ideal spot for a few days' duck-shooting in the winter, and not too far from London.

Captain Hardy was a tall, handsome young officer. He wore a very slight moustache, his hair was almost black with reddish lights in it now and then, and the skin of his face and bands was tanned a dark-saddle colour by the Indian suns. It was understood he was on leave from his regiment, which was stationed in the Deccan.

He had arrived four days before in his own motor, which was housed in the garage of the hotel. He inhabited a private room, but was also constantly seen in the public rooms of the hotel, and had made himself a general favourite with everyone.

Each night he had gone out upon the moor, quite alone as far as human companionship went, but accompanied by one of the land-lord's retrievers. So far since his arrival the captain had had rather poor sport, though he hoped for better. Only on one occasion had he brought home a leash of duck.

Cyril Burlington had a cousin, named Hardy, who was a captain in the Yorkshire Regiment, and was at present on leave from India. Captain Hardy, however, had no mind to waste his time upon lonely Oxfordshire moors. He loved the life and whirl of London too well, and was spending his time in Eng-land in full enjoyment of the delights of the town.

Cyril Burlington had borrowed his personality— that was all.

The journalist had gone to his cousin and told him a little— a very little— of the truth. He had explained that he was upon an important secret investigation for the Daily Wire. He had told Captain Hardy that it was essential to the success of his mission that he should not be known as Cyril Burlington in the remote country village to which he was going. Captain Hardy, a light-hearted and irresponsible young man, had thought the idea an excellent joke, and when Burlington had placed his chambers in the Temple at his cousin's disposal the soldier had been delighted to avail himself of the opportunity of saving himself expensive hotel bills.

"My dear Cyril," Hardy had said, "go and be me in the country, by all means. I shan't give you away. You're too steady a going buffer to get me into any scrape— and, by the way, old chap, I wonder if you could lend me a tenner for a month?"

So it had been arranged. Cyril Burlington, with a moustache which had grown rapidly, with hair that was daily sponged with a black liquid supplied by Mr. Willy, the famous costumier of Wardour Street, with face, neck, and hands stained with a light preparation, was now established at the Sportsmen's Rest, a mile from Morston Village, as Captain Hardy, who was enjoying a little duck-shooting in the country.

Cyril sat in his comfortably-furnished private sitting-room at the inn. It was about three o'clock in the afternoon of a dull and bitterly cold day. The surrounding moor was grey, and momentarily growing greyer. The sun was sinking over the distant lake in a red, round ball. A wind was rising, and ere night a gale would be blowing. A bright fire was kindled on the hearth, and the young man was enjoying an excellent cigar. He was also holding out his left hand and turning it curiously this way and that in the light which came from the flaming logs.

Upon the little finger of his left hand was a signet-ring of dull gold, rather worn and thin, and with a monogram— now hardly to be deciphered— upon the shield. It was the first time Cyril Burlington had ever worn a ring in his life, but this had arrived for him by that morning's post. It was from Julia.

A letter had accompanied it, and had stated that it was the ring the girl's mother had given her father many years ago when they were first engaged.

Before leaving London, Cyril had purchased a half-hoop diamond ring, which he had sent to Julia as an engagement-ring. It had been a grief to him to think that the sweet maiden he loved so truly could not wear it at once. There were reasons against that. It was essential that Mr. Horace Carne should be deceived.

Still, as Julia had pointed out in an answering letter, Cyril at least could wear her father's ring. He was doing so now, and turning it over and over till it seemed like a band of living fire upon his finger. How beautiful that was! How it Inspired him and helped him to see this visible pledge of Julia's avowed love for him. It seemed, indeed, a presage of success.

Of success! For all, even in his mind, was un-certainty and doubt as yet. The campaign, begun with such high spirits, such grim determination, was already beginning to be a nerve-racking and depressing business beyond all his anticipations.

He knew, indeed, that such a great enterprise as that which he had undertaken required infinite patience and courage. Nevertheless, it was an intense strain upon the nerves to stay in this little country inn, as he had been doing, to live under another man's name and to keep up the part.

It was the enforced inaction that irked him most. Certainly he was now nearer and nearer— though in theory only— to the heart of the mystery. He had formed a working hypothesis, but that was, as yet, all that he had been able to do.

He had been waiting, waiting.

He rose from his comfortable seat by the fire and began to pace the room with long, impatient strides. The wind howled outside, and a sudden gust of rain beat upon the window-pane.

Suddenly, in his walk, he heard the "toot, toot!" and then the rapid panting of an approaching motor-car. He hurried to the window, and saw, through the driving rain, his own motor, in the charge of Greener, one of the head chauffeurs of the Daily Wire garage, coming back from Oxford.

Greener, with his car, had been lent to Cyril for his investigations. The man was a clever mechanic and driver, and, moreover, was as secret as the grave. He had no idea as to what his temporary master, Cyril Burlington, was doing. He only knew that he was upon important business for the Daily Wire.

That was enough for him, and, being a reticent Scotsman, he sustained his part of chauffeur to Captain Hardy very well, doing what he was told without comment— doing it thoroughly and well.

Three minutes afterwards there was a knock at the door, and Greener entered. He put down a parcel upon the table.

"That's what you want, sir, I'm thinking. Is there anything else?"

"Nothing now, Greener, thank you. But be ready if I want you at any moment." The man nodded and left the room.

Cyril took out his pocket-knife and cut the string of the parcel, which bore the name of a firm of outfitters in "The High" at Oxford.

He drew out a wide, thick jersey or sweater of dark grey wool, so dark that it approached blackness. Then followed a somewhat expansive pair of flannel trousers of exactly the same colour. He looked at the things for a moment, knitted his brows, and beat a little tattoo with his fingers upon the table. He was puzzled. He did not under-stand.  Then his face cleared suddenly.

"Well," he said to himself. "I shall know soon why Wilkins wants these things. I can trust him absolutely. Already in the initial stages of this business he has accomplished more than any of us. This afternoon I shall know much more."

He walked to the fireplace, and spread out his hands to the blaze, for the windows of his private sitting-room did not fit too well, and the room was cold. As he did so, he thought, with intense admiration, of the quickness and brilliancy of his chief lieutenant.

ON THE afternoon in the Temple, five days before, when Burlington had read the sinister and significant paragraph from the review to John Smith, the shock of Wilkins's announcement that he was about to enter another service had been intense.

It had been very quickly explained, however, and its suddenness was due to the fat youth's ineradicable love of a dramatic situation.

Wilkins, early initiated into the whole business of the John Smith reprieve and the dark mystery of Morston Manor, had made many shrewd suggestions to his master. The lad had been reading that part of the  Daily Wire in which gentlemen's servants are advertised for. By great good luck and a curious coincidence, he had seen that Lady Carne, of Morston Manor, was advertising for another indoor servant, to take the place of a butler who was leaving, and eventually to be promoted to that post. He had said nothing to Burlington, but had immediately replied to the advertisement under the name of Henry Wilkins, that of his eldest brother, who was second footman at the house of a well-known society woman in Berkeley Square. This brother Henry was about to give up service to be married, and to take a small greengrocer's shop in Mayfair. The astute youth from the Temple, whose own name was William, had let his brother somewhat into the secret, had used his testimonials, and had been accepted as indoor man at Morston Manor. He could not resist telling his master and John Smith of the great stroke he had made, but immediately afterwards he had explained the circumstances. On the morning  after Cyril Burlington and John Smith had motored through the night into Oxfordshire, Wilkins had gone down by train and presented himself at the Manor.

This very morning Cyril Burlington had received a short note by post, requesting the articles of clothing, for which he had sent Greener into Oxford, and which now lay upon the table.

As soon as it was dark, the note had also informed him, Wilkins, who had a couple of hours off, would make his way to the inn with news of the highest importance.

The coincidence of which the shrewd, fat youth had taken advantage had entirely altered the plan of campaign. It seemed to mean— doubtless it would be— a tremendous advantage to the investigators to have a tried and confidential agent in that house of mystery and gloom, and a piece of good fortune that could hardly have been hoped for.

As yet, however, Burlington had heard nothing from his fellow-conspirator until that morning. It was for this reason that he strode so impatiently up and down the little room he had taken.

He had not, however, been idle by any means. At night, when he had been supposed to be shooting wild duck on the moor, he had been holding long conferences with John Smith, hidden in an old deserted lime-kiln upon the moor, living a rigorous and secret life, like some wild beast in its lair. At nights they had approached near the Manor itself, and surveyed the lonely, mysterious house from all points of the compass. Smith had explained this or that door, had acquainted Burlington with the inner arrangements of the Manor.

This, however, had been all, until, upon the day before, Burlington had found something to do, that there was some progress to be made while he was waiting for his first momentous meeting with the new footman at Morston.

It was John Smith who had suggested the line of investigation, and Cyril, tired of inactivity, had pursued it with eagerness.

The Sportsmen's Rest was about two miles from Morston Moor, and a mile upon the other side from Morston Village itself. It was to someone living in the village— someone indicated to him by John Smith— that Cyril's attention had been turned upon the previous day.

Morston Village was a small and scattered hamlet, sloping down through water meadows to the Thames. Living in the village was a certain Dr. Bosustow. This man had long retired from regular practice. He came from Cornwall, where, if the truth had been known, his reputation was none too good. Some six years before he had inherited a cottage in Morston, a small income, and a few acres of land from a relative, and had come from the west to spend the remainder of his days in Oxfordshire.

The man had elements of cleverness in him. He might have risen to eminence in his profession had it not been that he was a confirmed drunkard, and very seldom sober enough to be of any use to himself or anyone else. His name was still upon the register, however, and, though he did not make a point of practising, people now and then consulted him from neighbouring villages, and he did what he could for them. There was no other regular doctor nearer than the outskirts of Oxford; and Bosustow still kept a tarnished brass plate upon the front door of his house.

When William Carne had been foully murdered— as it was invariably believed at the time— by John Smith, this Dr. Bosustow had made the post-mortem, and given evidence at the local inquest. Such a course was perfectly satisfactory, and the evidence was as plain as possible, and perfectly satisfied the police.

The two sorrowing brothers, Horace and John Carne, both held medical degrees, and had attended the post-mortem. They had disagreed somewhat with Dr. Bosustow as to the exact time at which the Cornishman stated the murder had been committed. But on general lines they themselves had no fault to find with his post-mortem. This had been gravely detailed to Cyril Burlington by John Smith, and the young man had seen a possible clue to be gathered from this drunken, retired medical man while he was waiting for Wilkins's first report.

Accordingly, upon the day before, in his character of Captain Hardy, he had called upon the old doctor for a prescription for incipient ague, which he felt approaching upon those damp moors, and which he had contracted whilst shooting upon the vast swamps of the Deccan in India.

Old Bosustow had dispensed a preparation of quinine; then, glad in his lonely and rather disreputable retirement to have an audience, he had detained his patient for some hours, and they had talked and drunk much whisky together.

Cyril had endured the old drunkard's babble for nearly half a day. He had laid himself out to be interesting, and also deferential, to Bosustow, and, when the two men parted, it was with a swearing of friendship on the part of the doctor and an incoherent desire to see more of his new friend. Cyril had given Bosustow one of the cards he had had engraved for the campaign, and had invited the old man to spend part of the forthcoming afternoon with him. He was now awaiting Bosustow's arrival at the Sportsmen's Rest. Cyril promised himself that during the coming interview he would learn some important facts which might or might not bear upon the astonishing theory he had formed. It would be essential to get rid of the fellow before Wilkins arrived, or to make him so drunk that he could be safely disposed of. But any chance was well worth trying, and it might be that the old doctor really held the key to the whole mystery.

At that very moment Cyril heard a loud, clamorous voice echoing through the lower regions of the hotel.

He recognised it in a moment, opened his door, and slowly descended the stairs to the bar-parlour. As he did so he wondered what course he should adopt, for he had become perfectly aware that his guest had arrived, but in a state which would probably preclude him getting anything out of him at all. He hurried through into the bar-parlour, where he found Dr. Bosustow in an armchair by the fire.

The old man was truly a most disreputable figure. The grey hairs upon his head induced no reverence for age. His white beard was stained with the juices of tobacco, and his withered cheeks showed a very improper acquaintance with spirits.

Opposite to this grievous disreputability, Cyril Burlington sat himself and stretched out a hand, which was immediately seized by a trembling and discoloured claw.

"So you are here, Dr. Bosustow," the young man said, with an assumption of welcome which he was indeed far from feeling. "You have remembered my invitation, and given me the pleasure of being your host."

"For my part," said the old gentleman, "it has been long since I have met a gentleman like you. Soldiers don't come my way, gentlemen less seldom. But when I meet a captain of his Majesty's with a friendly nature and a good swallow for the wine of Scotland, then, indeed, I am instant upon the project of a meeting."

"For my part," Cyril Burlington returned, falling into the old man's pedantic humour, "I am neither difficult upon the recognition of a kindred spirit nor slow to welcome him at my house. And now, doctor," he continued, "if you will do me the honour to mount the stairs to my private room I have no doubt that we shall be very pleasant with each other until the evening falls."

So saying, Cyril Burlington linked his arm into that of his guest, and, carefully urging him up the stairs, finally deposited him by his own fireside.

This done, and a jorum of whisky placed upon the table in a pewter jug by the obsequious landlord, the two men were left alone. For some good quarter of an hour the aged gentleman from Cornwall babbled of unconsidered things. He bewailed his loneliness no less than he congratulated himself upon his present good fortune in meeting a man after his own heart, with whom he could have not only a word, of course, but a pleasant conversation over a friendly glass. The old man wept, and, as he did so, Cyril Burlington made a note that there is nothing more distressing and more disreputable than the tears of senile inebriety.

Shortly afterwards, reanimated by the full glass, Dr. Bosustow became not only merry, but confidential, and related with some animation the recent experiences of his retirement in Oxford.

It did not take the adroit Burlington any long time to lead his sottish friend's reminiscences into the direction of the immediate past. And it was with a thrill of more than usual urgency that Cyril leant forward in his chair and began to glean from that slack and trembling mouth something of what he designed to hear. They were in the full of the Morston Manor mystery.

"Yes, my dear old boy, my good, kind friend, if I may so address you," said Dr. Bosustow. "Yes, I conducted the post-mortem upon my poor young friend, William Carne."

"You knew him well, I suppose?"

"Never saw him in my life, my dear old boy, until he lay upon the table murdered! Ay, murdered!" And here Dr. Bosustow wept very bitterly, gazing into the glowing fire, shaking his disreputable old head, and inordinately suffused by spirituous grief.

Cyril wagged his head in answer.

"Yes, yes," he said, in hollow, yet sympathetic tones.

"You may well say," the doctor replied, stretching out his hand for his tumbler and hurriedly refreshing himself; "you may well say, my poor young friend, W'll'm Carne."

Burlington felt that the psychological moment had arrived. He spoke in a keener and more incisive voice. "I read of the post-mortem in the papers, of course," he said, "and of the great skill with which you had conducted it."

"Great skill! Great skill!" the doctor replied, lifting his glass to his lips.

"What about the brain?" Burlington said, in a low, confidential voice.

Dr. Bosustow put down his glass upon the adjacent table with a hand that shook so much that the tumbler went spinning and rattling in a small circle over the table-cloth.

"Ah," he said, "you've heard something?"

Cyril Burlington shook his head.

"No? Well, then, all I can say— can shay— is that you are a most brilliant old friend. It was a curious thing, but when I got to; the brain— of course, my dear old friend's young brothers were assisting me— upon my soul we didn't find anything there! Man's skull was empty, entirely empty!"

Cyril Burlington rose from his seat; every pulse in his body throbbing; he had a great difficulty in controlling his voice.

"They said," the old creature babbled on— "they said, when I told 'em, I was not myself. I mentioned it to the coroner's officer, but he laughed at me— me that am a Doctor of Medicine! I mentioned it to my poor, dear young friend's brothers, and they were very sympathetic, but would not believe me. So I said no more about it at the inquest. Of course, dear old boy, I don't deny that now and then— after an honourable career— I now and then look upon the wine when it is red. But, as far as I remember— as far as I remember— I was perfectly sober at the post-mortem. And," the old wretch continued, in a voice which suddenly became convinced and strong, "if there was anything in the skull of William Carne when I opened it, then I'm a Dutchman! Somebody had been there before me, though I never looked for the usual signs of a pre-examination. But I repeat— I certainly repeat— "

The old man's voice ended in a plaintive bleat. His eyes became glassy, he fell forward in his chair and spoke no more.

Burlington regarded him for a moment or two with deep, thoughtful eyes. Then he rang the bell and summoned the landlord.

"Look here," he said, "the doctor is not very well."

"The usual complaint, sir," the landlord answered with a grin. "Bless you, we know the old fellow well enough! But I expect you don't want him here no more?"

"I tell you what," Burlington said after a moment's apparent consideration. "Get him downstairs, put him in my motor, and tell the chauffeur to drive him home."

"Very good, sir," said the landlord. "Oh, by the way, sir, there's a young man downstairs in the public bar with a note for you."

"For me?"

"Yes, sir. He is a new servant at Morston Manor, and he has brought a note. He says his instructions were to give it to you yourself."

"Morston Manor?" Cyril said with a puzzled air. "Yes, sir, it is the big house close by. You must have seen it when you have been out shooting. Lady Carne, sir, and Mr. Horace and Mr. John Carne. I expect they have heard you are here, sir, and probably it's a note of invitation like, or something of that sort."

Cyril started.

"Oh, yes," he said, "of course! When I came down here I was told that Mr. Horace Carne would probably leave a card on me. Very well, take down the doctor and show the young man up."

Dr. Bosustow was now but a feeble bag of bones, and was assisted downstairs with but little difficulty on the part of the host.

Almost immediately afterwards steps were heard upon the stairs. There was a knock at the door, and the landlord entered.

"The footman from Morston Manor, Captain," said the landlord.

A fat youth, in the discreet black of an in-door servant, wearing a waistcoat of yellow striped with black, which could be seen beneath the long drab overcoat he wore, came into the room with a bowler hat in one hand and a letter in the other.

"All right, Tims." Burlington said. "Please go down and see after the doctor. Get him right if you can, and, at any rate, don't let him go until I come down."

"I'll get him right in about a quarter of an hour, sir," said the landlord, with a confidential smirk. "Bless me, I know his habits very well."

With that the landlord closed the door and hastened down the stairs.

The sound of his feet had hardly died away upon the bottom step when Cyril Burlington saw that the large, plump face of his devoted servant was pale as chalk.

He saw that the small black eyes were glittering with something he had never seen in them before, and he noticed that the cherub pink lips themselves were cracked and grey.

"Well, Wilkins?" he said, in a hurried, vibrating whisper.

The fat youth came a little into the room and caught at the edge of the table with one hand in its wash-leather glove. He caught at it as if for support, and swayed a little this way and that.

"Oh, master!" he said. "Oh, master!"

8: The Shadow of Terror.

IT was midnight on the same day when Wilkins had come to the Sportsmen's Rest during the late afternoon, and Cyril Burlington had managed to rid himself of the loquacious old drunkard, Dr. Bosustow.

In a low chamber, no bigger than an ordinary bathroom, a man was crouched upon a heap of blankets. From a small brazier came a dull red glow of coke and blocks of wood. The entrance to this strange place— which had been the furnace of an ancient and deserted lime-kiln upon Morston Moor— was no larger than a man might crawl through with ease. It was covered now by a curtain of sacking.

Crouched on his blankets, looking from time to time at his watch and smoking a short briar pipe, sat the "Parrot-faced Man."

By his side was a magazine revolver, which from time to time he fingered lovingly, with a curious glint in his round eyes as he did so.

In here he was warm and comfortable. An open portmanteau lay against one smoke-blackened wall. Tins of preserved food were tossed here and there, and there was even a copy of the Daily Wire of two days ago.

Suddenly John Smith raised his head with an intent attitude of listening. He heard a low, flute-like whistle, which seemed to come from above.

In an instant be had shambled from his blankets and hurried to a corner of the cell where the old flue ran upwards.

He whistled in exactly the same key, and once again the answering flute-like note, came to his ears.

A moment afterwards, as he sat by the glowing coke in the brazier, there was a sound of scuffling and the sacking was pushed aside.

Cyril Burlington crawled in on all fours, and rose to his feet.

The young man stretched himself, and spread out his hands towards the glowing brazier.

"Good heavens," he said. "What a wild night this is, and how bitterly cold! Smith, it is for tonight!"

"For tonight?" The voice of the "Parrot-faced Man" cracked with eagerness like a whip.

"Yes, for tonight; everything depends upon it."

"It is much quicker than I thought, sir."

"It is, indeed. But Wilkins has been with me at the Sportsmen's Rest. I had imagined that he would only bring a first report, but he has done his work quickly and well. Everything is prepared. Tonight we take our lives in our hands, and it is now, if ever, that we shall know the truth."

Smith sat down again upon his blankets. A curiously tranquil expression had come upon his face.

"Now I am happy," he said. "It has been the suspense that has unnerved me so. I have gone through so much in the immediate past that nothing can dismay me and nothing can move me from my purpose. Is it soon?"

Cyril Burlington snapped the hunting-watch he wore. "It is now twelve," he said. "We have not to be at the Manor until half-past one at the earliest. Meantime, I have much to tell you."

The other nodded. Rummaging among his blankets, he pulled out a large silver hunting flask, which Burlington had lent him. He handed it to the other. "There's water," he said, "if you wish, sir, but you had better take it neat."

The young man unscrewed the top of the flask and drank some of the spirit. His face was very stern and fixed. There was a steady glow in his eyes. He handed the flask back to the "Parrot-faced Man" without a word. Then, very slowly, he took a briar pipe from his pocket, filled, and lit it.

"Now listen!" he said suddenly. "I'll tell you all that I have learnt. In the first place, as you know, the article in the French review, part of which I read you at my chambers before leaving London, and which we have discussed and thoroughly gone into since then, set me upon a certain definite train of thought.

"You supplied, in the first instance, the necessary motive. It is obvious that, for some reason or other, your late master, William Carne, was murdered.

"You were accused of the murder, and a most cunning web of circumstances was woven round you, culminating in the fact that a considerable sum of money, which Mr. Carne had recently drawn from his bank in notes, was supposed to have been stolen by you. I was certain from the first that you had not committed the murder. A coincidence enabled me to prove the fact. You are free. The question at once arises— who killed William Carne, and for what reason? As far as I have been able to ascertain during the last fortnight in London, the police still believe that you were the murderer. They can do nothing, and as far as Scotland Yard is concerned, the question is closed.

"But you and I know you did not commit it, and the question has arisen— who did, and for what reason? "What you've told me partly supplied a reason. In the first instance, William Carne , was in love with Miss la Touche. Horace Carne, the elder and more brilliant brother, was also in love with her. She seemed to favor neither of them much, but it she was ever going to yield— during the time that she was Lady Carne's companion— it was obvious that she would have preferred William. That is a strong motive, but in itself it is not strong enough for the committal of a dastardly crime by a man of such eminent position as Horace Carne, with the help of his little less celebrated brother John. Very well, then; a contributory motive had to be sought for before we could have any basis at all for our investigations.

"That article in the French review seemed to supply it. Tell me in your own words, Smith, exactly what that article seemed to mean. Tell me in a brief sentence."

The "Parrot-faced Man" clenched his odd, claw-like hands over his knee and stared straight into the glowing coals in the brazier. "Correct me if I am wrong, sir," he said in a low voice, "but it seems to me that it hinted at this possibility: Investigations of the French professor, and those who have been working with him on the same lines, for some years have all been directed towards the obtaining of a proof that the human brain might possibly have an independent life of its own when divorced from the body. That is to say, that the brain itself can still think, and so the personality of a man be preserved, when it is not part of the body at all."

Burlington took his pipe from his mouth and nodded. His face had grown a little whiter, the lines about his mouth were chiselled deep as if upon a marble mask.

"Yes," he answered, in a voice as low as Smith's own. "Now, Smith, I will tell you what happened this afternoon."

He looked at his watch, as Smith did also. Then the latter composed himself to listen, and while the rising wind howled round the red-lit hiding-place, Burlington told his tale.

"Dr. Bosustow, of course, you know of," he said, marshalling his facts with the lucidity of the trained journalist, and wasting no single word.

Smith nodded.

"Very well, you set me on him. I easily made his acquaintance by the trick you suggested, and found him, as you said, a drunken old fool, with the remains of some brilliancy. This afternoon I entertained him as my guest at the 'Sportsmen's Rest.' He arrived more or less intoxicated, and I completed that intoxication. It was a horrible thing to do, but I did it."

The "Parrot-faced Man" chuckled cynically. He shared none of Cyril's scruples.

"A glass or two more or less of whisky will make no difference to that gentleman," he said. "But go on, sir."

Cyril continued. "I directed the conversation to the post-mortem upon Mr. William Carne. The doctor was ready, and even eager, to talk about it. Then, with some suddenness, I sprang the question of the brain upon him. The answer was exactly what I expected to hear. It seems the wretched old man still imagines that when the skull was opened the brain had been already removed. He is not quite certain. He knows his own state very well, and that he is really rarely sober. Still, he has a cloudy belief, even now, that there was no brain in the skull of the murdered man. Horace Carne, who assisted in the post-mortem, laughed the thing to scorn. It remains merely as a confused memory in the doctor's mind."

"But it is enough for us!" Smith burst in, in a high and almost hysterical voice. "It points to the something— the something we suspect."

"And yet," the "Parrot-faced Man" continued. "I don't see how that helps, Mr. Burlington. There can be no proof one way or the other. If those wretches, Horace and John Carne, murdered their brother and dissected him for their own purposes, it is a thing so terrible that one's very tongue almost refuses to speak the words. But even if they did, who is to prove it, and how much farther have we gone?"

Cyril Burlington made a warning gesture with his hands.

"Be calm, Smith," he said. "I have much more to tell you. We have already almost satisfied ourselves as to the dreadful dual motive which resulted in the foul murder of your late master. As you say, if the matter only remained there, we have done no more than find out what is probably the truth. But," and here his voice sank almost into a whisper, and either the heat of the place in which he was or some inward horror sent the perspiration starting out upon his face in glistening beads— "but I am convinced we are only upon the threshold of this terrible affair. Wilkins came to me this afternoon, almost immediately after I had finished with Dr. Bosustow.

"During the morning I had received a note from Wilkins, asking that the darkest possible sweater and flannel trousers should be bought for him in Oxford. I sent in Greener, and the things were procured. I readily understood that the lad wanted them for purposes of disguise, or to escape observation while he was investigating what was going on in the Manor House. Then Wilkins came. He was in great state of agitation. This is what he told me.

"Wilkins soon discovered that the late butler, a man called Smithers, had been sent away with a handsome gratuity, because, as the other three servants of the house said, he had been prying rather too much into the affairs of his two masters. You know the absolute appearance of dense, pudding-headed foolishness Wilkins presents to the outside world. From the very first moment he has managed absolutely to deceive Horace and John Carne, and also that dreadful old lady, their mother, of whom he speaks in tones of the liveliest horror. He has managed to do his work satisfactorily for the short time he has been at Morston, and is regarded by everyone  as an amiable fool.

"The staff of indoor servants at present is small. There is an old deaf and rheumatic cook, a local village girl acts as kitchen-maid, and the housemaid, who is a tall, dark, and rather beautiful girl, acts also as Lady Carne's maid. That's all.

"Apparently everything was open and aboveboard. Horace and John Carne seemed to rather ostentatiously show their new servant that this was so. Wilkins's keen brain spotted that at once. Both his masters have been pleasant with him, and they have shown him things which an ordinary master would not do to an ordinary servant, unless there was some motive behind it. He has been employed sweep out the laboratory, which, I understand, is a large, glass-roofed room leading out of the library."

John Smith nodded.

"That's it, sir" he said. "That is where all the experiments are conducted. But when I say all, I am certain that the word applies only to those experiments and scientific works which all the world might see. From something Mr. John Carne once let fall when he wasn't sober, from the fact of some mysterious building operations, conducted by strangers from London, when I was given a fortnight's holiday, and also from some expression of uneasiness and disgust which my dear late master let fall one night in my hearing, I came to the conclusion, and still strongly believe, that somewhere in that wicked house Mr. Horace and Mr. John Carne are doing things that must never see the light of day."

Burlington started.

"You are right, Smith," he said, in a low tone. "Wilkins had made a strange discovery. It is that discovery that we must push to its very end tonight.

"But I will tell you the story as Wilkins told it to me, in sequence," he continued, knocking the ashes from his pipe upon the brick floor, and forgetting, in his eagerness, to light it again.

"One thing that struck Wilkins very much was that in a house where, at any rate, despite the fewness of the servants and the retired life lived by its inmates, minor economies are not thought of, there is no stint of beer in the servants' hall. Wilkins, although a new and more or less untried servant, was put in charge of a wine-cellar, plentifully stocked, and was not given a cellar book."

John Smith interrupted. "It is so, sir," he said. "It always has been so. The way in which the house is conducted is most liberal. Smithers, the late butler, used to drink a bottle of port every night of his life, and not a word was said."

"Very well, then. It is all the more strange that the whole house, ever since Wilkins has been there, and for some considerable time previously, as he has learnt from his fellow-servants, seems to have been fed upon pork. Some old disused sties at the back of the stables have been refitted, and several pigs have been brought to the Manor. In fact, pigs are being constantly killed, and there is so much pork available that it is being given away to the poorer villagers who choose to call for it.

"Wilkins at once saw what a strange thing this was, and how it clashed with everything else in the life of the Manor. You know how clever he is, Smith. He immediately set out to find a reason. He discovered that either Mr. Horace or Mr. John Carne had a peculiar habit of being present when any pig was killed in the out-houses. A local labourer kills the animals, but Wilkins found that one or other of the brothers was always there, and with a curious piece of apparatus. This consists, as far as Wilkins has been able to ascertain, of a large glass jar with a curious-shaped stopper. This jar is inserted in an earthen-ware receptacle which is full of hot water when it is taken out to the back of the house. A portion of the blood of each animal that is killed is immediately preserved in the glass jar, and taken, warm as it is, into the laboratory. It is obvious, therefore, that some experiments are being conducted in which warm and almost living mammalian blood is essential. Hence the plethora of pork in the house. Now this in itself would not be a very astonishing thing.

"Both Horace and John Carne hold a vivisector's license to perform experiments upon living animals. There are cages of guinea-pigs and rabbits in the laboratory, and in this these celebrated and scientific men differ in no way from hundreds of others who are conducting experiments for the good of man-kind. But, in conjunction with what we"— the young man's hand rose to his throat, and he could hardly speak for a moment— "what we dimly see and suspect, the fact is most significant."

The "Parrot-faced Man's" round eyes were blinking with excitement. His small mouth was parted in breathless attention.

"Wilkins is wonderful, sir," he said. "But, even now—"

"Listen to the last part of the story," Burlington replied.

"Wilkins realised that there was some place in Morston Manor which was hidden from everyone else. He made it his business to spy at all hours of the day and night. With wonderful cunning and despatch, he has been watching Horace and John Carne.

"He came to the conclusion that it was late at night, when all the rest of the household was supposed to be asleep, that the brothers carried out whatever their secret experiments were. He took a desperate resolution, resolving to sacrifice his life, or to, at the very least, risk the most terrible trouble.

"After dinner and coffee, which the brothers take in the drawing-room with Lady Carne, Lady Carne goes to bed. After that the brothers retire to the billiard-room, where they play a game or two. A spirit-case and syphons are taken in about ten o'clock by Wilkins, who is then ordered to bed. From the window of his bedroom, which overlooks the windows of the billiard-room, he noticed that the light there was always extinguished by half-past ten.

"He discovered, however, by hiding himself in the long corridor of the south wing, where the bedrooms used by the family are, that Horace and John Carne did not go to bed until the early hours of the morning. He also discovered that the great laboratory remained unlit during those hours— the windows in the roof were absolutely dark. It remained, therefore, perfectly obvious that the Carnes were in the library. The library, whilst sweeping it out, Wilkins had thoroughly examined."

"There's nothing in the library, sir," Smith said, with conviction, "that would excite any suspicion; though what might possibly lead out from the library by some way— as I have found that of which nobody knows anything— I cannot say."

"You've hit it, Smith; your suspicions have been verified, absolutely. Last night Wilkins took his magazine revolver, and in his stockinged feet hid himself in the library while the brothers were playing billiards. In one corner of the place, close to the door, he told me, there is a picture screen of embossed Spanish leather. He got behind this, daring everything, and watched.

"About eleven o'clock the Carnes came into the library, switched up the lights, and locked the door. Without troubling at all to search the room, perfectly secure as they thought, they went to a large picture which hangs against the wall, and somehow or other opened it like a door. A dark cavity was disclosed. The two brothers talked eagerly together in technical phrases which the lad could hardly understand, stepping through the picture-frame into the darkness.

"One phrase he heard— it came from Horace Carne— before the two disappeared. 'Tonight we will make him speak.' "

There was a dead silence in that red-lit, tomb-like place. Outside the wind had dropped, but the two men looked each other straight in the face, and both their faces were pallid with horror.

Suddenly Burlington looked at his watch once more. He jumped up from his seat with a gasp of relief.

"Now, Smith," he said, "let's be us and doing! It is time. Action is everything. Imagined horrors fret the nerves to breaking point. The unknown unmans a man. Action will make us ourselves again, and we are, I think, determined upon this adventure to its very end."

"To its very end," echoed the "Parrot-faced Man."

"You quite realise, Smith," Burlington said finally, "that we are about to commit a crime— a burglarious entrance, to say the very least of it?"

Smith nodded, and for a moment his self-control deserted him.

"I would break into anywhere," he cried in a high falsetto voice, "to bring those cruel murderers to their doom!"

Burlington brought his hand down upon the little man's shoulder with a kindly but heavy pressure.

"That is well," he said; "because if ill comes to us, there can be no appeal to the police, no appeal to the public. If we are beaten, we are lost. We disappear. For my part, I cannot involve the greatest newspaper of the day in the disastrous scandal of my failure. You, on your part, are already tainted, and if we both fail I assure you, my dear Smith, that, for its own sake, the 'Daily Wire' will leave us and our fates severely alone. It must be so. It will be so. And now, John Smith, shall we go out into the night— shall we adventure the unknown or shall we not?"

The "Parrot-faced Man" said nothing at all, but rummaged among the blankets on which he had been sitting, and withdrew a little round tin which had held blacking. It now contained powdered burnt cork. Without a word, the grotesque little fellow began to smear his face with powder until even the prominent features were indistinguishable.

Then he handed the tin to Burlington, and, with a shudder of disgust, the young man also effaced his personality.

Then they stood looking at each other, grim and horrible, with their revolvers in their pockets, wearing the cheap but complete disguise that robbers and murderers use.

HALF AN hour afterwards, in the bitter cold and overwhelming darkness, they crouched in a plantation of laurels close to the side wicket door at Morston Manor.

They crouched there and waited. They had not been in their hiding-place more than five minutes when, from the heavily-barred window at one side of the narrow, nailed door of oak, they saw a sudden flash.

It was their confederate Wilkins. Burlington took a small electric torch, no bigger than a prayer-book, from his pocket, held it at arm's length, and pressed the button twice. There were two answering flashes, and the window had hardly become black velvet once more when Burlington and Smith were at the door and the former was scratching gently upon it with his nail.

It opened without any noise, and they were both drawn in quietly. The door closed behind them, and at last they stood within Morston Manor. Wilkins flashed his electric torch for a moment, once upon the face of his master, once upon that of John Smith. Then he turned it upon himself, and they saw that he was dressed in grey, nondescript clothes, and that his face was as black and unrecognisable as their own."

"We are now, sir," he said, "in the passage  which leads from the servants' quarters to the baize door into the great hall. To-night, as I told you would happen, Mr. Horace and Mr. John Carne are in bed. Follow me without the slightest noise, but have your revolvers ready."

Their leader pushed open the baize door, and they found themselves to a large space, dimly lit from a light which glowed in a gallery above. They were in the famous panelled hall of the Manor, and without a moment's pause Wilkins led them across the wide carpeted space to the great oak door of the library. He opened this with infinite precaution, and a gust of warm air fell upon their faces, while the glow of an expiring fire showed dimly red in the dark. Wilkins felt with his hand to the left of the door. There was a click as he pulled down the switch of the electric lights, and suddenly the library leapt into view.

"I've found out how the door in the picture works," Wilkins whispered.

"Very well," Cyril replied; "then we will go down and explore. You, Wilkins, will wait here and be on guard."

"Can't I come with you, sir?'' came in a keen whisper .

"No, you must stay here. You know the house better than we do. Smith and I will go. If you fire a shot, we will return at once from whatever we find— if, indeed, return is possible."

The picture of Sir Augustus swung slowly out of its frame. Mounted on a chair, with their electric torches in their hands, Burlington and John Smith passed through into the darkness beyond. They found the head of the descending stair and, creeping like mice, disappeared from view.

Five minutes passed without a sound to the intent ears of the youth. The perspiration trickled down his blackened face and made white furrows in it, but he remained without movement, listening intently.

Suddenly something came into the back of his throat like a steel wedge, and his heart began to thump like an Indian drum.

The door leading into the library was flung open, and, with unsteady footsteps and a dazed wonder in his eyes, John Carne came into the library.

Wilkins had made one fatal mistake in his calculations. He had believed that both Horace and John Carne had gone to the south wing and were in bed. He did not know that the younger brother had returned from the south wing into the library to find more drink in the cupboard where he kept his tantalus. John Carne had stumbled town, already half-drunk, into the library, had found his bottle of brandy, but no syphons, no bottles of soda-water. The drink crave was on him strongly this night. He had staggered into the laboratory, closed the door, turned on one of the water-taps and filled up the half-empty decanter; then he had drunk deeply and long, until he sank into an adjacent chair and fell into a drunkard's sleep.

Now the growing cold in the laboratory and the wan light of the late-risen moon shining through the windows in the roof had roused him. He realised what he had done. More or less sober, with an urgent longing for his warm bed, he had staggered into the library.

The picture of his father was swung out of place, and within twelve feet of him stood an unknown figure in dark, nondescript clothes, and with a blackened face— a figure which held towards him the long, steady, and gleaming barrel of a Webley magazine pistol, Mark 4.

The suddenly-sobered scientist and the squat, disguised figure remained absolutely motionless.

Eyes of terror and menace challenged eyes of menace and terror.

9: "Give me the letter."

IT was a dainty little room in which Julia la Touche was sitting. The walls were panelled in old oak— real old oak, no modern invention of the upholsterer. The fireplace recessed into a thick wall, and the coals glowed in an iron basket upon this ancient hearth.

All the rooms in the Provost's house at St. Paul's College were like this. St. Paul's was one of the oldest colleges in Oxford, and the Provost's house formed part of the very earliest portion. It had been brought up to date in many ways— there was electric light, for instance— and all modern comforts had been added to the beauty of the Middle Ages.

The house in this way was an ideal combination of picturesque antiquity and modern luxury, while the private sitting-room, which had been apportioned to Julia, was by no means the least charming nook in the old rambling Gothic edifice.

There were two windows in Julia's room— heavily-mullioned windows— and the girl sat by one of them looking out through the small leaded panes upon the famous gardens of the college. The trees were all bare of their leaves now, those ancient oaks and immemorial elms. But the lawns stretched away to the river, and every now and again Julia saw the figures of young men in white flannel shirts and college blazers going backwards and forwards among the barges.

She saw this because a last gleam of watery sunshine was cutting through a grey blanket of river mist, which was rising rapidly and encircling all the towers, spires, and ancient buildings of the University. She watched, and even as she watched the greyness rolled up around the buildings of Paul's. All was grey now; all was grey outside.

She pulled two heavy curtains of peacock-blue across the leaded panes which showed the late sombre afternoon beyond. Then she switched on the electric light, which hung in a corona from the panelled roof. She looked round her room. At right angles to the old fireplace was a huge Chesterfield settee, covered with dark olive linen. It was here that pretty Dorothy Jackson came before going to bed, and the two girls would exchange confidences of the day, hand in hand. In a big shelf upon one wall was Julia's library, gleaming with red, gold, and blue. There was her little writing-table, upon which a huge and massive ink-stand of silver stood, a prodigious piece of plate presented to her father by the fellow dons of his college. Over the fireplace the old oak shelf which projected bore nothing but four massive silver candlesticks, which were part of the appurtenances of the house.

Yet in the very centre of the mantelpiece there was one addition. This was a photograph-frame of maroon leather, one of those expensive decorations to a room which have thick doors of leather that meet in the centre, and are fastened over the photograph within.

Julia wore a watch at her waist-belt, hanging from a thin gold chain around her slender neck. She took out the watch, and there was a tiny key attached to the ring. She opened the locked doors of the photograph, threw them wide, and gazed with eyes which filled with anxiety and terror at the picture of a young man with a strong, clean-cut face, and eyes so resolute and clear that, even in the photo-graph, they seemed to glow.

Across the bottom of the photograph, in the curious running hand which seems to be germane to the journalist, these words were written:—

"To my love and my lady, that she may think of me sometimes when I am not here."

The girl leant with her elbows upon the mantelshelf, and gazed straight into the eyes of the portrait. Her face was pale, and now and then she shuddered as if with fear. Four days ago she had sent her father's wedding-ring to Cyril, and late on the evening of the same day had received a hurried note of thanks and loving devotion from him, headed "The Sportsmen's Rest." This note had arrived by the nine o'clock post which is delivered in Oxford.

Since then she had heard nothing whatever from Cyril.

He had promised to write a note to her, however brief, every day. He had not done so. In the note acknowledging with fervour her love-token of the ring, he had said that upon that very night it was quite probable that the real investigation of the mystery of Morston Manor would begin. Since then there had been a dead silence, and her whole heart was filled with fear and apprehension. She had written, indeed, to "The Sportsmen's Rest," begging for a reply, but there had been none. She had hesitated to send a telegram, because Cyril had warned her most carefully from doing anything which might draw undue attention to the presence of "Captain Hardy" in the remote hostelry upon the moor.

Now she was in a terrible quandary, and every nerve was strung up to its highest tension. This blackness, this silence, this dreadful uncertainty was killing her.

Upon this day the Provost and Dorothy Jack-son had gone to London, where they were to spend the night at a West End hotel. The Provost was lecturing to a society of antiquarians, and his daughter was with him. Julia had been asked to go, but she had refused, wishing to be alone with her thoughts, and especially to be on the spot in case any communication arrived from Cyril Burlington.

There was a knock at the door, and a trim housemaid entered.

"Shall I bring up your tea here, miss, or would you rather take it in the drawing room?"

Julia shut the doors of the photograph-frame with a hurried movement, but not before she had noticed a sympathetic glance front the girl who stood waiting at the door.

"I think I will come down to the drawing-room, Parker," she said.

"Very good, miss; then it will be served in five minutes," said the maid.

Julia locked the photograph-frame, went into her own room, sponged her face, arranged her hair, and descended to the drawing-room. She would not remain in her pleasant nest alone with her thoughts and fears. The big drawing-room would, perhaps, change her mood and bring her thoughts which would be distracting.

She went down the beautiful old oak stair-case, which is one of the glories of Oxford, crossed the hall, and entered the drawing room. As she went in, old Casley, the butler, was arranging the tea equipage and pulling a big arm-chair to the side of the glowing fire.

Everybody in the Provost's house loved Julia, and old Casley himself adored her.

"There you are, miss," he said, looking like a bishop, and speaking almost pontifically. "I think the tea is rightly made. There's cake and some sandwiches, and in the hot-water dish, miss, there's some college 'grease.' "

Julia smiled.

"Oh, that's very good of you, Casley!" she said, appreciating to the full the compliment the old fellow had paid her.

Certain colleges at Oxford have a special brand of teacake soaked in butter, which the undergraduates, returning from the football field or from the river, greatly delight in. The recipes for these dainties are jealously guarded by the college chefs, and Casley must have made interest with the head of St. Paul's kitchens to provide Julia with this luxury.

The door closed, and the girl sat alone in the big dim drawing-room. A few tall candles, in their massive silver holders, made a little oasis of light, and the red glow of the fire was comforting. She poured out some tea, made a trial of the "grease," and was feeling, perhaps, a little more reassured in her mind, when the door of the drawing-room opened.

It opened ceremoniously, and Casley made an announcement which went through the young girl like a spear.

"Lady Carne," said Casley, in his sonorous voice.

Julia rose from her seat, trembling, as into the room came the tall old lady with the glowing eyes and hooked nose, dressed in severe black and of ancient fashion, to whom she had been companion in the past.

The butler closed the door.

For a moment, in the big drawing-room, the two women looked at each other without a word. Perhaps— Julia, at any rate, could not have said— there was a curious challenge in that moment of expectation. When she thought it over, months afterwards, she realised that it must have been so. Now, however, she simply waited, and wondered why the eminent old recluse of Morston Manor had called on her.

"Ah, Julia," Lady Carne said, in her smooth, powerful voice. "I had hoped to find you alone!"

The voice purred and echoed in the large room.

Julia caught all her faculties together. She felt that an ordeal was before her. What it was she did not know.

"Oh, how do you do, Lady Carne?" she said, drawing the Chesterfield to the fire and helping the stern old dame into it. "Tea?"

"If you please, Julia," Lady Carne replied. "Julia, we have not been good friends for a long time. You left my house, my dear, in a secret and hurried way not long before the dreadful tragedy that occurred at Morston."

Julia brought the old lady her tea, and set the cake-stand close to her. Then she settled down and waited to hear more, though her heart was beating terribly, and she felt upon the eve of some extraordinary revelation.

"You know why I left, Lady Carne," she answered in a tremulous voice.

The keen old face, in its bonnet of black, with the old-fashioned satin strings tied in a bow beneath the chin, nodded vigorously.

"I know," she said. "My son Horace. And my son"— she hesitated for a moment— "that was, made love to you. Our people are masterful, Julia. The men of our house have always been dominating people. They have thought that to wish a thing is enough, and that it must certainly be theirs. Horace made a mistake— as I told him at the time, though you knew nothing of it— in his endeavours to force you into an engagement. Your position with me, of course, was, in some sort, that of a dependent, but, as I told my son, your father's daughter was not to be approached in that way. You left us. The tragedy came about. That disorganised our house for a long time. I know what you did when you fled from our house at Oxford."

The old lady spoke the last words In a deep voice, and with great gravity of manner.

Julia started violently.

"You know?" she cried. "How can you know, Lady Carne?"

"I know. I know all about the cinematograph theatre. I know all about everything. It is because I know all about everything that I have come here to see you this afternoon. If Dr. Jackson and Dorothy had been at home I should still have asked for a private inter-view with you."

"But what can you wish to say alone with me, Lady Carne? I don't understand."

"You will understand in a moment, Julia, for I have come to you with a strangely curious message, and one which you cannot but answer."

"Tell me— tell me! Is it about—"

Lady Carne nodded.

"It is about him," she said. "I know all about your engagement to Cyril Burlington. It is from him that I have come."

Julia rose to her feet, and her hands flickered in front of her.

"Oh, tell me!" she cried, forgetting everything else in her urgent need to have news of her lover. "Oh, tell me! "Where is he? What is he doing? Why has he not written?"

"He has written. I am the bearer of a communication from Mr. Burlington to you."

"You, Lady Carne?"

"Yes. Strange as it may seem, knowing what you know, and knowing what I know, I am your lover's messenger. He is in dire need of you and what you can do for him."

"In need?" The girl's voice broke from her in a half sob and half cry. "Cyril wants me! Oh, Lady Carne, tell me quickly— quickly!"

One old lean hand in her black glove went up in reproof.

"Hush, Julia!" Lady Carne replied. "There is much before you. You must listen to me with the greatest care. First of all, do you know this?"

Lady Carne opened a reticule which hung from her left wrist, and withdrew a small object wrapped in tissue paper. It was a ring. She unscrewed the paper and handed it to Julia.

"The ring! The ring I sent Cyril four days ago— my father's wedding ring!"

"Yes. I was to give you that before I gave you Mr. Burlington's letter, in order to convince you, against your very natural suspicions, that I had come direct from him, that he was in great danger, and that he needed you."

Julia kissed the ring with an almost hysterical movement, and thrust it upon her finger. Then, with her great, dark eyes glowing, she knelt opposite the tall, black figure upon the Chesterfield, and caught at one gloved hand.

"The letter— the letter!" she cried. "Oh, give me the letter!"

"I will do so in a moment, Julia, but before I do I wish to say this to you. I do not know what the letter contains, except that it is an appeal to you to come to Morston at once. I know, also, that it gives you certain directions as to how you are to proceed."

"To come to Morston?" Julia said slowly. "With you, Lady Carne?"

"With me, Julia, I am doing something which I never thought to do. You knew me as a proud, reserved woman when you were my companion. You thought that I favoured the advances of my son Horace towards you. It is quite true. But things have happened since your departure— things in connection with the frightful tragedy of my second son's death— which have altered my feelings entirely. Your lover, Cyril Burlington, is engaged in investigating secrets connected with him, of which I know nothing. I do know, and I have long suspected, that there is a dreadful mystery surrounding William's death. I am a hard woman, Julia. You have always found me so. I am a hard woman still. But I have a sense of justice and of rectitude, and, come what may, I must do as my conscience dictates. Now read your letter."

The old lady withdrew an envelope from her reticule, and handed it to Julia.

The address was written in pencil, but Julia well knew the writing. She tore open the envelope, and this is what she read:—

"Beloved, I cannot write you a long letter. I cannot in detail explain the necessity for writing as I am writing. Lady Carne is bringing you this letter, together with the ring you sent me, to show you that it comes from me, and that you must do exactly as I say. I am in grave peril, and so is John Smith. We have at last discovered something of the mystery, and we are both placed in a situation which may end fatally if you do not immediately respond to my words.

"Lady Carne does not know all. At the same time, she realises the inevitable, and views with horror what she already knows about Horace and John Carne. She is an old woman, and I must not mix her up too intimately with what I fear is going to be a horrible tragedy. Still, she is acting for me, and you must do exactly as she tells you. Remember, I cannot explain until I see you what you have to do for me.

"Directly Lady Carne hands you this letter — if you can possibly and in any way manage it— you must dress yourself for out-of-doors. Then you must write a note to say that you are going to London by the seven o'clock train on urgent private business. You must leave this note so that it will be found by the servants and handed to the Provost as soon as possible. Then dress yourself in that dark coat and skirt which you wore when you came to see me and John Smith in the house at Holywell Street. Wear a veil. Leave the Provost's house, and walk down the 'High,' over Magdalen Bridge, and half-way up the Iffley Road.

"A motor-car, in which Lady Carne will be, will turn out of the suburb by the Cowley Fathers' Monastery, and you will get into it at once and be driven to Morston to meet me and to be told what you must do.

"Dearest, this all must seem very dreadful and mysterious to you, but perhaps my life depends upon it. CYRIL."

Julia read the letter, and it fluttered from her trembling hands upon the floor.

Then she turned to the tall, black figure by her side.

"Oh, Lady Carne! What does this mean? Tell me! Is my boy in danger?"

"I cannot tell you any details, Julia. I am forbidden to do so. I have had to bring you this note because I have sympathy for you and your lover; because, also, I have a sense of justice. But I must stand apart. You must find out what the issue is for yourself. All I can say is that if you obey Mr. Burlington's commands, then all may yet be well, and certainly you will save him from horrors that I shudder to think of, mother that I am of those two men at Morston!"

Julia jumped up, her face alight with resolution. She did not see the cold, awful grin that passed over the faded face— a face like old ivory— of the woman upon the Chesterfield.

"But what am I to do, what am I to do? Tell me at once, Lady Carne."

The old woman fumbled at her breast and took out an old, thin gold watch with a gold face— a mid-Victorian watch.

"It is now five o'clock," she said, in a quiet voice. "What you must do, Julia, is this. Dr. Jackson and Dorothy are in town for the night?"

"Yes."

"Well, that simplifies matters. Write a note to say that you are leaving Oxford by the seven o'clock train, and that you will be in London for two or three days. This will naturally seem very strange to the Provost and his daughter, but you must make some excuse of very urgent private business. Take a hand-bag, and, wearing the clothes Mr. Burlington tells you of— at least, he informed me that this was one of his directions— give the note to the butler, and leave the house with the bag in your hand. Turn as if you were going towards the station.

"I see that, very fortunately, there is a  heavy fog over the town; when you are quite certain that old Casley has closed the door, turn at once into the 'High,' go over Magdalen Bridge, and half-way up the Iffley Road. No one will see you. No one will recognise you. I shall be waiting there with the closed motor in which I arrived. You will get in without a word, and I will drive you straight to Morston Manor, where you will see your Cyril and know what you have to do to save him. Now, do you understand? Is your mind perfectly clear upon all these points?"

"Perfectly clear, Lady Carne. And oh, I thank you— I thank you again and again for what you have done!"

She knelt at the old lady's feet, and caught the thin hands in their black gloves, and bent her lovely head over them with broken sobs of thanks.

"Oh, Lady Carne, I know what this must be to you! You are going against your own remaining sons; you are doing this for Cyril and for me!"

Her head was bent low over Lady Carne's knees. She did not see the malevolent grin that flashed upon the yellow face. She did not notice the acid note of mockery in the voice that answered her. She did not know, in her impulsiveness, that the aged and shrivelled body, which stood so proudly above her, was the shell in which lurked some devil of the pit.

Five minutes after this, when everything had been finally arranged between them, Julia rang the bell, and the butler showed Lady Carne to her waiting motor-car, which had been summoned from an adjacent garage in the Turl.

Julia-went up to her bedroom, but, when her fingers were on the handle of the door, she remembered that she had left Cyril's letter in the drawing-room. She hastened down again, and searched all round the great Chesterfield where she had been sitting with Lady Carne, handling it. She took one of the silver candlesticks and crawled upon her knees, searching for the letter. She did not find it.

Concluding that Lady Carne must have seen it and taken it in order that none of the servants should find it— which was indeed the case— she returned to her room and dressed herself in the coat and skirt of dark grey tweed which her lover had suggested.

Then, coming into her sitting-room, she wrote exactly the note that she had been told to write, addressing it to the Provost. Finally, she put a nightdress and toilet articles into her dressing-bag, and came quietly down the wide oak stairs.

The hall was quite empty, and brilliantly lit by electric lights, and also by the fire which glowed upon the hearth.

She put her letter upon an oak table, opened the massive oak door, and slipped out into the foggy evening. She turned to the right, and made straight for the High Street.

She did not see, as she did so, that a tall, young woman, of exactly her height and build, dressed in a dark tweed coat and skirt, watched her safely into the High Street, and then walked briskly to the station.

This young woman, who wore a veil over her face, and was exactly like Julia in appearance, caught the seven o'clock train to London. She spoke to one of the ticket collectors, who recognised her and addressed her as Miss la Touche; she bought two or three newspapers at the bookstall, and the clerk who served her mentioned to his superior that "Miss la Touche was obviously going up to town to join the Provost of Paul's and his daughter."

That arrangement of the far-seeing minds at Morston Manor was completed without a hitch.

The real Julia la Touche walked down the "High," and crossed over Magdalen Bridge.

The High Street of Oxford, as everyone knows, is lit by tall, electric-light standards, which pierce brilliantly even through the thickest of river fogs. Over Magdalen Bridge two roads stretch out as from the apex of a right angle. The road to the left leads to the suburb, the road to the right is the Iffley Road, bordered on one side by rows upon rows of handsome villas, and on the other by the walls and confines which separate the University grounds and College football fields from the pavement.

When Julia had hurried half-way up the Iffley Road and saw through the mist the high chapel of the Cowley Fathers cut into the dark, she also saw a large closed motor waiting by the side of the pavement.

This must be it! It was; the door swung open even as she approached. Lady Carne's encouraging voice was heard from the darkness within. Julia entered. The door was closed, and immediately the big 30-h.p. motor-car rolled away  towards Morston Manor.

The two women exchanged few words during the next half-hour.

"I won't talk to you now, Julia," the old lady said, patting the girl upon the knee. "You  will soon be with your lover, and you will hear what he has to say. You have been a brave girl in doing what you have done, and you will be rewarded."

Half an hour passed, as the car was not driven fast, and then there was the click of a gate, the deep voice of a lodge-keeper, the crunch of the heavy tyres upon gravel, and the car stopped.

Lady Carne, with a somewhat strange agility for a woman of her years, descended first, helping Julia after her. A big door opened and closed behind Lady Carne and Julia la Touche as they entered the hall at Morston  Manor.

Curiously enough, there was no servant to welcome them. The hall was warm and comfortable, vast and beautiful, but quite silent.

"Come up to my room at once, Julia," Lady Carne said, standing at the foot of the wide staircase. "You will know everything in a few minutes."

The old lady flitted up the staircase, and Julia followed her. They went half-way round the gallery, pushed opened a green baize door, took a few steps down a carpeted corridor, and entered Lady Carne's boudoir.

The boudoir was very brilliantly lit, and seated in an armchair by the side of the fire, smoking a cigar, was Horace Carne.

He rose as the women entered, and advanced towards Julia with a face that blazed with triumph.

10: The Fight Begins.

THE two men confronted each other in the lighted library.

The one, short, fat, with blackened face, and dressed in dark grey flannel; the other, in evening dress, with ruffled red hair and heavy eyes, only just started out of sleep.

Wilkins covered John Carne with the heavy, automatic pistol. His feet were planted some way apart. Terror was in his heart, and he knew that one of those unforeseen accidents  had occurred which, by a turn of fate, may destroy the best-laid plans.

Through the black aperture of the swing-picture his master and the "Parrot-faced Man" were lost. What they were doing he did not know. Where they were he could but dimly imagine. All he knew was that he had failed to give the alarm, and that, through a piece of incredible misfortune, he was discovered.

John Carne stared steadily at the squat, black-faced figure before him which held out the menacing weapon. He did not move, and his face showed no change of expression, but the mind behind worked with enormous rapidity. The drunken stupor was over, the mists of sleep were clearing away, and one of the keenest and most incisive brains in England was summing up the situation in a lightning flash.

John Carne did not, at that moment, in the least realise who the figure that opposed him was. He thought only of burglars, but even as he thought it he saw in the corner of his eye that the secret picture panel was open, and that down there in the dark unknown people were at work. These could be no ordinary burglars, and to the guilty conscience and strained nerves of this supreme criminal the fact came like a message of death.

In his younger days John Carne had played at three-quarters for the University Rugby team, and had been the most brilliant Blue of his year.

His decision was taken in a moment.

Suddenly, with a roar like a bull, he bent half double and ran upon Wilkins— rushing across the room with the trunk of his body at right angles to his legs, with arms out-stretched.

The onslaught was so sudden and so furious that the fat youth was taken utterly by surprise. John Carne collared him "low," and he fell heavily upon the carpet with a dull thud, while the magazine pistol was knocked out of his hand.

Carne was on him and above him in a moment, clutching the fleshy throat with his strong left hand, confining and throttling the windpipe with fingers like steel.

Wilkins's feet drummed upon the thick carpet with a muffled sound. His face grew black. His tongue began to protrude. With his knees upon his victim's chest, his left hand choking the life out of him, Carne stretched out his right arm and caught up the heavy pistol.

Once, twice, thrice he brought it down with carefully calculated force upon the other's head.

Little beads of blood began to start out among the hair. The eyes suddenly seemed to roll up like a curtain, the pupils entirely disappearing, and leaving only a horrid expanse of blood-shot white. Then John Carne rose to his feet and stared down upon the motionless figure upon the carpet.

"You're all right," he muttered to himself, and then turned and stared with a white face at the yawning aperture in the wall. He was in evening dress, as has been said, and wore light dancing pumps; they made no noise as he hurried to the long black slit and listened intently.

And now the sweat began to roll down his face, his hands trembled, and his lips twitched as he heard the slow and steady noise far down in the bowels of the earth.

To him, with his recovered faculties, this meant far more than any ordinary burglars' invasion of the house. In those distant sounds below he seemed to hear the slow pulsing of the great clock of doom.

Suddenly he twitched himself away from the secret door, and ran hurriedly into the laboratory beyond. Against one wall there was the mouth of a speaking-tube. It led directly into the bedroom of his brother Horace, and had proved a convenient means of communication when some delicate experiment was being conducted and both of the Carnes could not be present at the same moment.

He pulled out the boxwood whistle, and the little chain which held it rattled as he pressed the mouthpiece to his lips and blew lustily. It might have been his imagination, or he might have heard it, but certainly he seemed to be cognisant of a faint shrill summons somewhere in the upper parts of the house. He clapped the mouthpiece to his ear, and waited in horrid anxiety, leaning against the wall, the sweat from his face dropping in little beads upon the parquet floor of the laboratory, his ears strained la the last agony of expectation and hope.

He heard some dull, heavy movement, and then— oh, inexpressible relief!— the keen voice  of his brother came down the tube. "What is it? Who are you?"

"John. Come at once, Horace— come down! Bring some weapon. People are here; people have gone down through the picture under the moat, and are at work upon the door of the big room. One of them was left on guard here. I fell asleep in the laboratory, and as I opened the door and came out into the library I found the fellow, masked and threatening me with a pistol. I managed to silence him. I think I have killed him, and I made no noise. People are at work down below. They will find out our secret! Come at once!"

He held the trumpet-shaped piece of vulcanite to his ear, and heard nothing but a quick answering hiss. Then, replacing the speaking-tube, he walked slowly back into the brilliantly-lit library, and looked down upon the bloodstained stranger whom he had overcome.

The motionless figure presented a strange and hideous sight. In the struggle the black with which the face was covered had been scarred here and there by fingermarks, and there were broad white lines which showed the flesh beneath. These were intersected and bedrabbled with slowly-welling crimson. A sort of rattling snore came from the carpet.

Then John Carne heard rapid, pattering feet outside in the hall. The handle of the library door clicked; it was pushed cautiously open, and Horace Carne entered, in pyjamas, dressing gown, slippers, and carrying a heavy steel poker.

Horace entered, and closed the door, and then John threw back his head and began to chuckle.

"Heavens!" he said, in a voice instinct with evil mirth. "Was that all you could find, Horace?"

Horace Carne looked swiftly round the room, and put the steel bar down upon the writing-table. Both men spoke in whispers. "Be quiet, John. What is all this?"

"I came out of the laboratory, where I had fallen asleep, and found this"— Carne indicated the figure on the floor with a motion of his left hand— "waiting for me. There are people down there." He turned with a terror-stricken face towards the picture.

Horace Carne spoke no word at all. Absolutely without noise he dropped on his knees at Wilkins's side. His long, firm, white hand went up to the pocket of his pyjama coat, withdrew a handkerchief, and began to sponge away burnt cork and blood with swift, careful movement.

The whole thing did not take ten seconds. Then he looked up at his brother.

"This," he said in a hissing whisper, "is our new servant, whom we thought an absolute, complacent fool. John, we are tricked!

This"— he had risen to his feet, and gave the still body a contemptuous kick— "was no fool. While we have imagined ourselves absolutely secure, we have been watched, and, in all probability, the end has come!"

John Carne had thrust his hands into his trousers pockets. He shrugged his shoulders as he confronted his brother.

"Well," he said, "if that is so, we must make an end of it as quickly as possible. We have tried our best. We are on the point of discovering the whole mystery of life. We have used every method to do so. If our work has now to be brought to an end, then it must be so. I am not afraid— I am not afraid, though I am bitterly disappointed. Are you afraid, Horace?"

The taller man, with his hawk-like face, put out his arm in its sleeve of gaudy green and gold silk, and gripped his brother upon the shoulder.

"No, John," he said, "I am not afraid, though it does seem absolutely like the end, doesn't it? Still, we have got a chance yet, and we will risk everything."

All this conversation had not occupied more than the space of a single minute, and as the brothers looked at each other, abnormal criminals as they were, something glowed out upon the face of each of them which, if it was insanity, was yet a cold strength and determination which had a certain fineness in it.

The younger brother's fears were all over in the hour of imminent danger. The elder brother had never had any fears at all. Their aims were identical, they had descended to the very depths of hell in order to wrest the secrets of life from the pit itself. And in this hour of almost certain discovery they were collected, firm, and strong.

Horace took the lead. He stooped down and took up the pistol, with the blood-stained butt, from the carpet.

"Fully loaded," he whispered. "Ten shots. It is the new regulation Webley. Very well, I'll take this, and you catch up that poker which made you laugh so— I caught it up from the big fireplace in the picture gallery as I came down. They are down there?"

John nodded.

"People are down there," he said. "Who or what they are I do not know, but they are working at the door of the big room at the end of the passage. Come here— listen!"

Horace and John Carne moved noiselessly to the secret door and listened. From far down below they heard a very quiet, very continuous, grinding noise.

"Look here," Horace whispered. "I've got the pistol. I understand the mechanism quite well. I'll creep down the ladder and make a reconnaissance." He pointed to his feet, which were shod with felt bedroom slippers. "I shall make no noise at all," he said, "and  I can peep along the passage— thank goodness it is a straight one— and see, perhaps, who and what these intruders are. You wait  here and come down at once if I call."

John nodded. Together the two brothers mounted the chair which had been left at the bottom of the picture-frame and stepped into the little chamber beyond. It was quite dark. Obviously, then, the night-comers, whoever they were, had not discovered the electric switch.

At the top of the ladder John Carne waited while his brother descended slowly, rung by rung, without making the slightest sound.

The ladder was a long one, but as Horace Carne descended the well in which it was he became aware, even at this distance, that at the far end of the passage there was a light. Slowly, slowly he crept down until, catching hold of a higher rung with his left hand, he bent and peered along the damp way which  went beneath the moat.

This is what he saw. Two figures were at work upon the massive oak door which held the dreadful secret for which the scientists of Morston Manor had pledged their honour and their lives.

One held up a candle-end. The back of this figure was toward the watcher, but he saw that it was the figure of a tall, and by all appearances that of a youngish man. The other figure was small and somewhat hunch-backed, and it was this figure that was patiently working a centre-bit around the lock of the door.

Every now and again the smaller figure— which seemed oddly familiar to Horace Carne — put down the tool and flashed a light into the holes that he had made around the lock with an electric torch.

The brain of the great scientist worked quickly. He realised that, whoever these people were, they imagined themselves perfectly secure from interruption owing to the fact of their sentinel above. They had heard nothing of his brother's engagement with Wilkins.

Not a sound of his own slowly-creeping advance had been heard, either. To a certain extent the unknown figures, working at the door of the Room of Mysteries, were in his power.

He crept noiselessly up the ladder once mere and whispered the result of his investigations to John. There was a hurried confabulation between the two in tones so low that anyone standing within a yard of them could hardly have determined their import. Then Horace caught his brother by the shoulder, and there was an evil smile of triumph on his face as he whispered certain instructions into the other's ear.

Immediately John stepped once more through the picture-frame into the library and hurried into the laboratory. He was fully a minute absent, but when he returned he was carrying, with some care, a large test tube of some transparent liquid carefully corked at one end. The test tube was nearly a foot long and as thick as a cucumber. The liquid within, whatever it was, made it heavy.

John pressed it into his brother's hand, and Horace once more carefully descended the ladder. The same scene met his eyes as before— two dark figures working at the massive door.

Horace Carne judged the distance between himself and those ominous figures with great precision. He weighed the heavy vessel in his hand, rested it for a moment upon the fourth rung of the ladder, and then leapt lightly to the ground. Even then the dull thud of his arrival upon the earthen floor was not heard by the two figures in the little yellow circle of light fifteen yards away.

Horace Carne stepped lightly four yards up the passage, swung his right hand behind him once or twice, and then, with careful calculation, threw the tube of brittle glass towards his unknown adversaries.

The missile sped noiselessly, fell with a loud crack and a noise of escaping gas, three yards from the door and those who were at work upon it.

Immediately the light went out, there came two muffled cries from the end of the passage, and then a dull noise of falling. Horace Carne stumbled up the ladder again and met his brother at the top.

His face was perfectly calm, but there was a wicked light, almost as of pleasure, upon it.

"They're all right, John," he said. "I'll go down in ten minutes or so and throw another tube that will clear the air. Then we shall find them still unconscious and be able to discover who and what they are. Meanwhile, what about this?" Again he stirred the unconscious figure of Wilkins, which lay upon the floor, close by the big screen of stamped Spanish leather.

"I'll examine him," John Carne answered. "I didn't hit very hard. I expect he's only stunned. At any rate, we will see." And  his deft fingers moved gently and swiftly over  the skull.

Both of the Carnes held the highest medical degrees possible, though neither of them had ever practised, preferring to devote their whole time and their ample fortune to investigations in that hinterland of science where only men of the highest qualifications  and brilliancy are found: Had these two men chosen to practise, there is no doubt at all but that they would have been, John the most successful surgeon, Horace the most successful physician, of the day.

After a couple of minutes John looked up. "Nothing the matter," he said. "Nothing dangerous, that is. A possibility of concussion— but I think only a possibility. I have made a careful examination. Well, what are we to do?"

Horace's keen, distinguished face showed that he was thinking deeply.

"We shall know more soon," he said at length, "when we have found out who those people below are. They may be only ordinary burglars, and this fellow here their confederate, though I should have thought he is far too big a fool ever to have been an accomplice. Still, he may be a good actor, and possibly we have been deceived. I tell you what we will do. We will take him upstairs to his own room at once. We can carry him between us, though he is a big weight. Fortunately, we are both of us pretty strong. Then you sit by him while I mix a draught in the laboratory. I will give him something that will keep him quiet tor a long time. We will bring him nearly to consciousness first and make him drink it. It will be quite easy to tell the cook that Wilkins is ill."

Together the strong, athletic men carried the senseless body of the fat youth to the room he occupied in the north wing. In six minutes more his head had been sponged, and he had been forced, hardly knowing what he did, to  drink a white liquid in which there was a little grey sediment.

Then the brothers descended to the library. As a matter of precaution John picked up the automatic pistol, while his brother prepared some chemical in the laboratory, descended the ladder, and again broke a glass tube by throwing it to the end of the passage, first having switched on the electric light which Cyril Burlington and John Smith had failed to discover. Then Horace Carne, still in his pyjamas, returned to the library and lit a cigarette.

"I think I'll take a little whisky, John," he said. "I suppose you have got some somewhere?"

The other nodded and brought two full kegs from the laboratory. The two men sipped and smoked calmly, talking in low voices of what was to be done.

A quarter of an hour passed, and the hour of three beat out in sonorous strokes from the sombre-looking clock of black marble upon the mantelpiece of the library. Horace jumped up from his chair and threw away the end of his cigarette.

"Now, then," he said, "come along! We will get to the bottom of this matter. It will be quite safe in the passage by now."

The two men went quickly down and hurried along the damp underground passage with its  rotten match-boarding. A faint chemical aromatic smell lingered in the strange place, but the air was breathable. At the very foot of the heavy door two figures were lying, two figures with blackened faces. A series of holes had been cut round the lock, and another steady half-hour's work with the centre-bit, which lay across the body of the taller figure, would have completed the work and gained the intruders an entrance to what lay beyond.

Horace bent down over the figures, and even his calm was suddenly and violently disturbed.

"Good heavens!" he said, and if ever fear mingled with uncontrollable surprise came into a man's voice and made it hollow as doom it did so now. "Good heavens!" he repeated. "Look!"

He had turned over the shorter of the two figures, and there, despite its disguising blackness, the face of John Smith, in all its strange, unique deformity, was plain to both of the brothers.

They stood looking at each other with faces from which every vestige of colour had faded, and with eyes that questioned as, perhaps, lost souls may question each other when they find that, after all, hell exists.

John Carne spoke first— only one word, an interjection:—

"Ah!"

The sound was horribly significant. The other nodded.

"Yes" he said, "it is so. We have been lulled into a false security. It is my fault. I had thought everything was as it should be. We have underrated Smith's capacity all along, but, even yet, we do not know everything. It is obvious that we are in great danger, because Smith himself could not possibly have organised this raid, without confederates, upon his own initiative. It was only a pure accident that has enabled us to discover what has been going on. It may be that it is all up with us, John. On the other hand, even now we may save ourselves by prompt action. We must carry these men into the experiment room and search them thoroughly. Then we can decide what must be done."

John Carne took a key from his pocket and opened the massive door.

Immediately a gust of warm air— something like the air of a hothouse— came out upon their faces. The heavy black curtain which hung before the door was pulled aside with a sharp rattle of the rings upon the brass rod above, an electric switch clicked, and, with great care, exacting all their strength, the motionless figures of the night-comers were half dragged, half carried, into the secret room the other side of the moat.

"Now, then," said Horace, in a voice that twanged like the E string of a violin— "now, then, we shall know our fate."

Suddenly he gave a loud whistle.

"Ah," he cried, "now we have the truth of it! This is Cyril Burlington, the journalist of the Daily Wire, who very nearly wrecked us before."

11: Events of an Hour.

CYRIL BURLINGTON groaned heavily. He opened his eyes as if he were lifting weights with a tremendous effort. He felt as if jagged particles of steel— not blood— were running through his veins.

His eyes were open at last, and this is what he saw and of which he became aware. He was sitting in a heavy armchair of oak; his coat and waistcoat, tie and collar, had been removed. He was bound with leathern straps to the chair in which he was— ankles, knees, wrists, trunk, and head strapped and buckled to the rigid wooden structure.

He remembered quite well the sudden vision of a tall figure, clad in green and gold, running towards him, with something that glistened in his hand. He had caught a glimpse of the face, and had known it was Horace Carne, the man whom he had seen in the Central Criminal Court when the "Parrot-faced Man" was tried for his life. Cyril's eyes went upwards. He found his immediate horizon bounded by a black curtain running upon a brass rod. Above the curtain he could see that he was in some brilliantly-lit place, for there was a space of some two feet from the top of the curtain to the overhanging roof of a sort of alcove in which he soon realised he was sitting. All he could discover between the top curtain rod and the roof was a whitewashed space upon an opposite wall. There was a clock upon the wail, and the hands stood at twenty minutes past four.

Twenty minutes past four! Why, then, all that had happened to him must have been in less than an hour! Yet that could not be so.

A keen, analytic brain, such as his, accustomed to weigh evidence and judge circumstances with great rapidity, soon disabused itself of that idea.

It must then be nearly half-past four upon the following afternoon of the night when he, John Smith, and Wilkins had made their desperate attempt to solve the mystery of Morston.

The thought of John Smith came into his mind as he made this discovery about the clock. His head could move a little in its encircling collar of pigskin straps. He turned it to his right, and was just able to see out of the corner of his eye another still figure, bound upon a chair like his own. With a horrid thumping of the heart, he recognised the ex-valet.

John Smith was obviously still unconscious. Cyril tried to speak, but only a low croak came from his dry, parched throat. A deadly sickness of mind and body re-asserted itself, and for a moment he almost sank back into lethargy. Then, with a great effort, he called upon his waning forces, and once more sat in pained attention in his chair of torture. The air was warm, rather sickly, and with a certain hothouse atmosphere. He listened intently, but all he could hear was a stead tick, tick. At first he thought it proceeded from the large clock he could see upon the opposite wall, but he eventually decided it must come from some hidden mechanism lower down on the floor of the room, which was hidden from him by the curtain.

He realised at once what had happened.

For some reason or other, Wilkins, watching above, had failed, had been discovered and overpowered. Otherwise, he and Smith would have had due warning of the approach of their enemies. Their enemies had overpowered them.

They had thrown some stupefying gas towards the end of the passage. Now, Cyril knew very well, he and his unconscious companion to the right were absolutely in the power of two, if not three, of the most brilliant and unscrupulous criminals in Europe.

The people who had got him in their grip were not criminals in the ordinary sense of the word. They were criminals who would stick at nothing for the sake of a great scientific idea.

Cyril was mapping out the situation, and a steady despair was beginning to pulse through his tortured veins, when his ears caught a sound.

There was a somewhat distant click, as of a key in a lock, the rattle of a curtain being withdrawn, and then firm, swift footsteps approaching the alcove where he was imprisoned.

The next thing he knew was that the curtain of black stuff in front of him was pulled aside, and a tall, very handsome man in tweeds, with a clean-shaven face, was standing before him.

Immediately Cyril realised that he and John Smith, in their chairs, were set upon a low dais which occupied the whole of the alcove. From where he sat, looking beyond the newcomer, he could see into a long, low room with boarded walls, brilliantly lit, the floor covered with heavy Indian matting, and filled with curious machinery and apparatus of unknown shapes standing upon massive tables.

As for the tall man, Burlington recognised him at once. The high, domed forehead, the beak-like nose, the steady, glowing eyes, the extraordinary distinction apparent in every feature, were perfectly familiar to the journalist. It was Horace Carne, and all Cyril's conjectures became certainties in a flood of realisation and despair.

Be that as it may, Cyril felt no fear. There was an exultation even in knowing the worst and being confronted with his enemy at last.

"How do you do, Mr. Horace Carne?" he said, in a cracked voice, but one which betrayed no tremor whatever.

The other nodded at him gravely and seriously.

"Good afternoon, Mr. Burlington," he replied, in his rich and finely modulated voice. "You see, I am perfectly acquainted with who you are. I am a great believer in saving time, and I have a horror of long explanations. Allow me to inform you, therefore, that every one of your late movements is perfectly familiar to me, and that we are quite well acquainted."

A horrible pang of realisation shot through Cyril's mind. All his papers, which he had been afraid to leave behind him, even locked in his kitbag at the Sportsmen's Rest, were upon him at the time of his adventure. Horace

Carne had doubtless read them all, and there could not be a detail in the campaign that was not familiar to him. Especially he remembered the small pocket diary in which from day to day he had jotted his impressions and conjectures. It was a complete revelation, and it must now be in the hands of his captor.

"Apparently we are well acquainted," Cyril said, with a bitter laugh— his voice was coming back to him. "It was not an acquaintance I should have sought, Mr. Horace Carne."

"Indeed? How odd of you to say that, Mr. Burlington! You seem to have sought it most persistently, so that you now find yourself in a very unpleasant situation."

Cyril was silenced. The bitter taunt was only too true, and the exulting power in the man's voice showed him clearly that he had come to the very end of things. At that moment there was a low moan from the bound figure of John Smith. Horace Carne stepped up upon the dais and lifted an eyelid of "The Parrot-faced Man" with calm, professional fingers.

"He will be unconscious for half an hour yet," he said; "and meanwhile, Mr. Burlington, I am going to have a conversation with you. In the first place, you've made an intrusion into my private affairs in the course of your disgusting profession of a sensational journalist. At any cost you have been determined to gain credit for yourself, and the newspaper that employs you, by means of finding out such secrets as I am interested to preserve. You were the means of saving that misbegotten creature there"— he indicated the figure of John Smith with a gesture of supreme contempt— "you were the means of saving him from the gallows. That was a pure accident, though I am not at all pleased with your many public efforts to turn the minds of the public, even while the trial was on. That I could have forgiven; you were exercising your very unnecessary and most unpleasant avocation, and, I suppose, even Cyril Burlingtons must live. After that, however, you have made it your business to follow up my affairs, and, in league with the servant of my late brother, you have broken into my house in the hope of discovering something."

Horace Carne paused for a moment; stepping a few yards away to the right, out of sight of Burlington, he returned with a chair, and sat down upon it and lit a cigarette.

"You have been singularly successful, Mr. Burlington," he said, still in the light conversational tone he had adopted from the first. "You have discovered a great deal, and you will discover everything— or, rather, it will be told you. In fact, Mr. Burlington, I think you may congratulate yourself upon achieving almost everything that you hoped for. Almost everything, with the exception of two points. That is to say, that before you die you will become perfectly acquainted with the experiments of myself and my brother John, in which you have taken such an undue interest; but you will not live to publish them to the world. In fact, if I may put it so without unduly distressing you, this place where you now are, and into which you came with no invitation, is a place you will never leave at all."

Cyril faced the cool, mocking man without a tremor. Directly he had begun to speak the young man felt that his doom was sealed.

Well, he would take it like a man. If he was to die, he would die for the sake of duty, honour, and righteousness. He would not quail.

He did not realise what else he was to hear. "That being disposed of, Mr. Burlington— and you quite understand that your death-warrant is signed— I will direct your attention to the second point. From a careful perusal of the letters found upon you, and your most interesting diary, I have learnt, with considerable surprise, that you are in love with Julia la Touche, and that she imagines herself in love with you.

There was a slight, very slight, tremor in the man's voice, but Cyril noted it.

He threw back his head as far as the confining and rasping collar of leather would allow him, and laughed. The laugh was hollow, the laugh of a man who knew he was doomed, but, nevertheless, it was a laugh of triumph.

It had its effect.

The tall man opposite rose from his chair and cast it away from him with a swirling motion of the hand. The beautifully regular face became suffused with dark blood, the eyes glared, the clear-cut lips curled away from the white, massive teeth, and an un-chained devil and wicked madman was revealed.

Cyril realised in a second more than he had ever known before about all this dreadful mystery. One of the finest brains in Europe, upon the scientific side, was, nevertheless, unhinged and divorced from honour, duty, or morals, and he was in the hands of a mad-man, more relentless than Nero or Caligula, a thousand times more sinister for ill. With a tremendous effort Horace Carne controlled himself.

"You may laugh," he said very quietly and coldly. "But I must remind you of the old proverb that in the last event it is those who win that laugh. Is that fellow unconscious?" He looked keenly at the rigid figure of the "Parrot-faced Man." "Oh, yes!" he continued. "We are men of one class, Mr. Burlington, and I should not wish to discuss questions affecting a lady before an ex-servant of my house."

Cyril made a slight movement of his head.

"I have discovered," Horace Carne went on, "that you are in love with Miss la Touche, and that she fancies herself in love with you." Cyril lifted his eyelids ever so little.

"Fancies?" he said.

He expected another outburst of fiendish wrath, but he was disappointed. His opponent shook his head in a grave, considering fashion.

"Fancies, I repeat," he said, "for the affections of a young girl are very fluid and erratic things, and can be controlled by a strong hand. You are about to die, Mr. Burlington, and to die in a fashion which the ingenuity of the Inquisition or the tortures of ancient Rome could never have conceived. You are about to die, and yet you are about to live in a prisoned immortality which depends entirely upon my will.

"I will explain these matters later. Meanwhile let me tell you as man to man— for shortly you will be very much less than man— that for two years my life has been devoted to two separate aims. One thing has been the advancement of science in the direction of my own investigations— an advancement in which your young and healthy body will be of material service; the other has been a curious failing in a man of my temperament— or, at least, it seems so to me. It is an overmastering failing, however, and one to which, I am sure, you will be most sympathetic. I love Julia la Touche more than almost anything in the world. I am a cold man, Mr. Burlington; I have never had a love of this sort before. Even now I do not believe that I could comfortably settle down. A love that lasted more than a week might seriously disturb my work. At the same time, so curiously are we all constituted, I am prepared to sacrifice everything in the world for the love I bear for Julia la Touche. To put it shortly, Julia is to be mine, and nothing now can prevent it."

A loud, hoarse cry burst from Cyril's dry, cracked lips. He strained at the bonds which held him till the massive oak chair in which he was confined quivered.

"You devil!" he cried. "You scoundrel! You, you—"

Horace Carne nodded gravely.

"You are interesting," he said; "and when I operate upon you and take your brain from your skull for further and, believe me, for you most unpleasant investigations, I realise that I shall have a good subject under my hand. Of course, Mr. Burlington, I should never have said anything of what I have to you if you were not upon the point of death, There is no possibility of such a conversation ever reaching other ears. Naturally, I should have made no confidences if it had not been so. I've made my confidence, however, and now allow me to inform you of the utter subjection of your state, and of the means which I am employing to secure my ends."

The bound man, into whose heart the chill of death had already crept, preserved a noble courage in his aspect.

"As you are aware, Mr. Carne," he replied, "I am by no means an unintellectual person. I am quite capable, as you see, of putting my personal wishes and hopes aside and of being intensely interested in your scheme. I will just say this— that somewhere in the back of my mind, or, as you would prefer to call it, my brain, there is a more or less lingering certainty that your schemes will come to nothing, owing to reasons which you cannot understand; but, at the same time, go on with your amusing synopsis, because, as I say, it interests me. I am in considerable physical pain, and anything that distracts me from that is most welcome."

Horace Carne slapped his hand upon his knee.

"Now, I like that," he said. "I like you, Cyril Burlington. You are a man after my own heart, and I only wish that—" Suddenly he leapt from his chair and smacked the bound man upon the face with his open palm. "You cur, you dog," he said, "to dare to aspire to Julia! Now, then, listen! I will tell you at last what I have done."

Once more Horace Carne resumed his seat and began to speak in a mechanical voice, which betrayed no shadow of feeling, but simply detailed his whole purpose.

"I will cut it as short as possible, Mr Burlington," he said. "It was quite easy, when I and my brother stupefied you, to find out who you were. It was a mistake on your part to carry letters from the Daily Wire, from Miss la Touche, and other people, upon your person. That is a mistake which you have, no doubt, regretted, but which has been entirely in my favor.

"You have been established for some days at the Sportsmen's Rest. That creature there"— once more he pointed to the "Parrot-faced Man"— "has been hiding in a lime-kiln. By some adroit means you have introduced a servant of yours to be a servant of mine. He is disposed of, you will be interested to hear. As far as you yourself are concerned, I have spent a pleasant morning in arranging as follows:—

"My brother, John Carne, as well as being a scientist of great achievements, is also an amateur artist, and has a talent for imitating handwriting. A telegram has already been sent by an agent of ours in London to your chauffeur at the Sportsmen's Rest, telling him that he is to pack your bags, to pay your bill, and to take your effects to the Randolph, in Oxford, where you were staying a short time ago. He is to stay there until a boy messenger comes from London with your orders. That boy messenger will arrive about six o'clock this evening, and a note, apparently in your handwriting, and upon the Daily Wire paper, which you habitually use, will direct him to proceed at once to Penzance, in Cornwall, and to await you there.

"All this may seem to you a most risky proceeding on our part, but, believe me, we have covered our tracks so that your disappearance from the world of men will be a nine days' wonder, but can never possibly be traced to us here. As for John Smith, your interesting correspondence has already in- formed me that you have kept him very secret indeed, and that— unconsidered person as he is— no one will ever inquire for him when he also disappears.

"That," Horace Carne went on, still in his monotonous voice, "dispenses with the three of you. But I have a rather more ingenious plan than this— allow me."

He jumped up from his seat like a cat, stretched out his hand, and withdrew an old- fashioned ring from Cyril's little finger.

"This," he said, "is very interesting. Miss la Touche's letter to you enclosing it has told me all I want to know. If everything goes as I design it, and I think the cards are absolutely in my hands, in a couple of days you will see Miss la Touche again for the last time. A letter will be sent to her enclosing this ring, and written in a handwriting which she certainly will be unable to distinguish from your own.

"My mother, Lady Carne, will take it herself, and Miss la Touche, who formerly lived In this house, will return with my mother unknown to anyone. She will return in answer to an appeal from you for her presence— as she will think it. I have many resources at my command, Mr. Burlington, and Miss la Touche's absence from the Provost's house at Paul's will be attributed to a quite different cause from the real one.

"We are fortunate in this house in possessing a servant who, in form and figure, curiously resembles the young lady in whom we both take such an interest. My brother John, who is hand-in-hand with me, is, I believe, on terms of great friendship with this girl. Everything works for good in a well-regulated household, and a friendship which, at first, I regarded with some disfavour, turns out to be a cogwheel in the machinery of your doom and my desire.

"It will appear to everyone in Oxford that Miss la Touche left the Provost's house and went to London. She will leave a note behind her saying she does so for urgent private business, and the reason that she will write such a note, and leave it behind her, will be because the letter, which, apparently, comes from you, will bid her do so. She will arrive here in two days more, and I shall confront her with you. But you, Mr. Burlington, will not be quite the person that you are at present. I shall have subjected you by that time to certain operations and experiments which will completely change your view of life.

"Miss la Touche will see you, and will be told that if she consents to be mine you will be saved from the last degradation of all. I have little doubt of the result of this plan. It will be this. Miss la Touche will become, not your wife, but mine. She will buy, as she thinks, your life. In a sense she will do it, for, although your body will be buried in the garden in quicklime, you will still have a life of thought left to you, so dreadful, so entirely dependent upon my will, that you cannot, at the present, conceive of what I mean."

Then Horace Carne stood up, thrust his hands into his pockets, threw back his head, and laughed loudly and long.

He saw the face of his prisoner changed utterly to a chalky whiteness. He knew at last that he had triumphed even over the calm courage of a man who realised he was about to die.

"Now," he said, rocking from side to side with insane and evil mirth, "now, Mr. Burlington, I will let you into the true secret of Morston Manor." As he chuckled another figure came behind the little proscenium of the alcove in which the bound men sat.

It was John Carne, whom Cyril had never seen before. The younger brother caught the elder by the shoulder and began to talk to him in low, rapid tones.

The conference lasted for two or three minutes, and then Horace turned to Cyril Burlington.

'"Everything goes very well,'' he said. "Allow me— Mr. Burlington, of Paul's and of the Daily Wire,  Mr. John Carne, also of Paul's.

"And now, Mr. Burlington, as you prevented a private execution in Oxford Prison, I wish to give you an opportunity of seeing a private execution in Morston Manor. I perceive that our friend, Mr. John Smith, with his parrot- face, is coming to himself. Help me, John— thank you. The chair is heavier than the man— careful over the step— that's all right. Put him full in front of Mr. Burlington.

"Now I think we will leave them face to  face for an hour while we dine comfortably.

"Mr. Burlington, when we have dined, you will have the opportunity of seeing a most interesting operation, and one which, to an inquiring mind like yours, cannot fail to be of extreme benefit."

12: On the Brink of Death.

THE "PARROT-FACED MAN" was speaking hurriedly in his chair confronting Cyril Burlington.

"I see, sir," he concluded. "I understand all that you have told me, now that I have come to my senses. We are to die. But I tell you this, sir— and something within me makes me quite certain of what I say— dear Miss Julia will come to no harm. Sir, I have been far nearer death than you have ever been. At the moment when I was crossing the prison yard to the execution shed, I realised many things, as a drowning man is said to do. Strange voices spoke in my ears, I seemed no longer to be of this earth; and now the same influences are at work. I know this. I shall die, but you will not. You will have much to endure, but in the end the wicked will be confounded, and you and Miss Julia will be saved."

Cyril's melancholy voice rang into the room like a bell.

"No," he said. "I fear you are mistaken, my friend. "We must die together. Yet I cannot believe that Providence will allow my love to come to harm."

"When I am gone, sir," the "Parrot-faced Man" went on, "you will realise the truth of what I am saying now. We have the best part of an hour alone together. From where I am I can see all this room, and the Carnes have gone. And, look here, sir, I have one arm free. The tongue of the buckle has slipped in the strap hole, and this left arm has a certain freedom of movement."

"Can you untie yourself?" burst from Cyril's lips, in an agony of excitement.

"No, sir. The buckles of the other straps are all behind the chair, but this arm is free."

"Then how can that help us?"

"It cannot help us, sir, to get free; but I can anticipate the cruel torture to which I am, doubtless, about to be put, and I can save you from being a witness of it. No, sir, do not make any protest, because it will be quite unavailing. In a situation of this sort suicide is hardly a sin. But I wish that before I go I might penetrate the mystery of my poor master's death."

The "Parrot-faced Man's" voice had hardly ceased when both the captives started and shuddered in their bonds. There was a sudden whir and click of mechanism, a quick snap as of the breaking of a steel spring, and then— silence.

"What's that?" Cyril asked.

"I don't know, sir; but it is some of their devilish machinery here that must have gone wrong."

"I can see nothing. What can you see, Smith?"

"It's a long room, sir, panelled round with ; painted wood, and upon all sides are curious looking scientific instruments and oddly-shaped pieces of apparatus, which mean nothing to me. A little to my right, and just out of your view, there is a very large wooden table. It is as big as a billiard-table, and it is covered with complicated machinery— that is to say, I should not call it exactly machinery, sir, but it seems more like a chemical apparatus. At one corner of the table is a large mahogany box. It has a glass front, and I can see things of shining brass, and coils of what look like electric wires inside. Until a moment ago, a regular ticking sound came from this box. Then there was the noise we heard, and now the ticking is silent."

"I heard the ticking also," Burlington answered eagerly, "before that man came into the room at all, and while you were still unconscious. Yes, it has stopped!"

The two men looked at each other with a strange surmise in their eyes. Then Burlington saw the strange little creature in the chair below upon the floor of the room stiffen strangely, and then begin to tremble in his bonds.

A sound, a sound so strange that it turned the young man's blood cold with apprehension and excitement, welled out into the silence.

It was the sound as of a voice, but a voice so spectral, thin, and ghostly that it could have come from no human lips. It had a faint, metallic ring, as of a gramophone heard from an enormous distance, but it was no gramophone. It was like the voice of a dead man echoing upwards from a deep tomb, and the words it said were: "John Smith, John Smith, what are you doing here?"

Both the prisoners remained absolutely still.

The voice went on: "John, my faithful old John, why have you come here to trouble me in my hell?"

The "Parrot-faced Man" shrieked loudly. "It is my master's voice," he cried; "it is Mr. William's voice!" He struggled violently in his bonds, and by an almost superhuman effort wrenched his head round in its confining band till the skin of the neck was rasped, and a crimson stain began to edge that cruel collar.

The voice went on: "Yes, I can see you faintly. What are you doing here?"

"Can you hear me, sir? Where are you? What are you?"

"Yes, I can see you dimly, hear you dimly. The machinery of my prison doors has gone wrong. Once more, dead man that I am, I am in momentary correspondence with life. At any moment the wicked fiends who have made we what I am may shut me off again. Tell me, quickly, what are you doing here? Are you in their power too?"

The "Parrot-faced Man" made a tremendous effort. As Cyril Burlington, his blood congealed with fear, his eyes starting from his head, listened to the rapid, concise words which poured from John Smith, he realised more than ever before how love and single-minded purpose can transform a man upon the very brink and edge of death.

In a dozen lucid sentences the "Parrot-faced Man" explained exactly why he was a bound captive in this dreadful subterranean room.

He answered the ghost-like voice, and told it how, within a few yards, Cyril Burlington also was sitting, awaiting torture and death. Like the bald, cold statement of some mathematical proposition, the whole history of the last few weeks was detailed. What Horace Came had said and threatened was explained, the fate designed for Julia la Touche was recounted. And then there came from the odd, little creature, with the bleeding neck, one final and passionate appeal.

"Master, master, I have got to die soon— in a very few minutes. They shan't have me,  they shan't have me: they shan't have my brain. I have got one arm free. I can just reach a long tie-pin in my cravat. That will do the trick. But, tell me, master, where are you, dear master?"

Once more the sighing, unnatural voice whispered through the room.

"Old friend, my body is lying in Morston churchyard, no doubt in our family vault. But I, what is really I, still live in a torture and blackness so dreadful that it must soon end. You will not understand, perhaps, all of what I am going to tell you, but, briefly, it is this:—

"My two brothers believed— and they have dreadfully justified their belief— that the human brain has an independent life apart from the body. They made innumerable experiments up-on the lower animals. I helped them in these experiments. I was the final victim of their lust for scientific knowledge, and my elder brother's hate for me, because I loved the girl that he also loved.

"You have told me that you were nearly hanged for my murder. It was well contrived, as I see now. Horace and John killed me, and took my brain from me when I was in the very article of dissolution. Since then they have kept this last mortal part of my life by means of their awful discoveries. I am able to think still. My brain is fed with warm mammalian blood and the derivatives of phosphates they have discovered. I have no physical sensation save only that of thought.

"I know that I, or what I have become, float in a great sealed chamber of glass, and am fed at stated intervals to preserve the life of thought. I have no body now, I can feel nothing. All I can feel are the emotions of horror, misery, and black despair. You know, faithful old servant and friend, how wireless telegraphy acts. Radiations, unseen waves, pass through the ether to a delicate receiving instrument. The brain itself is a wireless telegraphic instrument of incredible delicacy. It was this undoubted fact that led my brothers and me towards our first experiment. Every human brain gives out radiations. A thought persists through the ether. It is for this reason that two people, who have been long silent, suddenly say the same thing to each other. It is for this reason that one thinks of an absent friend, and in a minute or two afterwards receives a letter from him or meets him unexpectedly.

"My unhappy brain— that awful, inhuman thing that I am now— sends out radiations and is capable of receiving them. My two brothers have invented a series of the most wonderful and delicate instruments that science and skill have ever constructed. The radiations of my thought play upon delicate membranes which are tuned to produce the sounds of human speech. I am thinking, and thus you are hearing my voice. The human eye telegraphs what its lenses receive to the brain. Delicate lenses, more powerful than the human eye, have been constructed, and photograph what is before them upon a sensitive plate, which gives out vibrations that in turn reach my brain. Hence I can both see and speak, when it pleases my gaolers to connect their delicate machinery with the floating, grey matter in its glass bowl.

"An accident has happened to the clock-work which feeds the bowl and controls the machinery of my correspondence with outside life."

Cyril Burlington could bear no more. His head drooped, a black cloud descended upon him, and he fainted away. He did not hear the remainder of the conversation, unparalleled in the history of the world.

He did not hear how the thin, ghostlike voice grew thinner and thinner and faded away. He did not hear the "Parrot-faced Man's" agonised appeal to him. John Smith's words of farewell fell upon unconscious ears.

And he did not see the supreme gesture of despair with which the little man felt at his neck, and withdrew a long, sharp pin of gold.

When he returned to consciousness he had a dim vision of two figures bending over a chair, he faintly heard two low, snarling voices, indistinct with horrid rage.

Then the curtain was drawn quickly over the alcove in which he was imprisoned, and he sank back into a lethargy which was almost unconsciousness.

13: "Unless You Save Him."

"NO, MY DEAR Julia," said Lady Carne, "there cannot possibly be any anxiety about your strange disappearance from the Provost's house until to-morrow midday, when Dr. Jackson and Dorothy return. The servants will wonder, of course, but they will not venture to communicate with your master before he arrives. Then, of course, there will be many conjectures and a great hullabaloo. Your note, however, will effectively prevent Dr. Jackson and his daughter taking any steps to find out where you are until at least three or four days have elapsed. By that time I defy anyone in Europe to discover you."

It was about nine o'clock at night, and Julia la Touche was seated in a luxuriously-furnished bedroom. A big fire glowed and electric lights twinkled upon the dressing-table and over the mantelpiece.

The girl had not been in Morston Manor for ten minutes when she realised that she had been trapped.

Now, with the most cynical coolness, the grim and wicked old woman, who had lured her out of Oxford, was detailing the whole villainous plot which had been accomplished. Julia knew all, and was sitting upon a couch at the foot of the bed, with her elbows upon her knees, her hands pressed to her face, and staring into the fire.

She was a tall, vigorous girl, and in a moment could have overcome even the wiry old woman who sat before her. She knew, however, that this was useless. She was perfectly aware that John Carne was sitting outside the door of the bedroom upon a chair in the passage. She also saw, with fascinated and horror-struck eyes, the little glistening toylike revolver upon Lady Carne's knee, and watched the bony fingers playing with the stock, with a certainty that it would be used should the occasion arise.

"So you see, my dear Julia, you are absolutely in our power here. It is a pity"— the old woman looked towards a tray upon which there was a bowl of soup, now cold, and a rack of toast— "it is a pity that you have not refreshed yourself as I hoped you would do. For I have more to tell you. Although, as you now know, Mr. Cyril Burlington did not write the letter which made you come with me, he is, nevertheless, in this house, and has been for four days. It rests with you whether he will ever leave it again."

As the grim old lady's concluding sentences fell upon her ear, the girl, tortured beyond all power, rose to her feet and threw our her arms with an inexpressibly piteous gesture of appeal.

"Cyril! Cyril!" she wailed. "Where are you? Oh, come to me, come to me!"

"He won't hear you, Julia," Lady Carne said, with an evil snigger. "He is not in this part of the house at all. And he certainly won't come to you. You will have to go to him if you wish to save him."

"Save him, save him? Oh, Lady Carne, I beg you, I implore you, I entreat you— from what, from what?"

The old woman did not answer for a moment or two, but gazed steadily upon the little silver-plated revolver with which her lean hand was toying.

Then she looked up suddenly.

"From something which, as a sensible girl, you will doubtless wish to spare him," she said. "From the fate of William Carne."

Julia's whole body trembled.

"I knew it, I knew it!" she cried. "But that you can say this to me of your own son— oh, it is beyond all human belief! I always knew you were a wicked woman, and there are things from the nethermost depths of the pit more kindly than you!"

"That's as may be," the old lady returned, with perfect equanimity. "Julia, if opportunity had led you to the stage instead of the some-what less exciting avocation of lady's companion or governess, I really begin to think you would have made a success. You, your lover, and that distressing person. John Smith, had very nearly hit upon the truth when your schemes failed. Mr. Burlington now knows the truth in its entirety. John Smith knew it— "

"Knew it?"

"Oh, yes. Didn't I tell you? He committed suicide two days ago, and a very good thing for him, too. What my reasons have been for being cognisant of all that has passed, for aiding and abetting my brilliant sons in what they have done, you cannot have the least understanding.''

The girl stared at the old woman with a face of frozen horror.

"Can any living being understand?" she whispered, through dry, cracked lips.

Then suddenly she bent her head and fell into a storm of weeping, so deep and agonising, and yet so different from the ordinary hysteria of a woman, that even Lady Carne was frightened.

She went up to the girl and tapped her smartly upon the shoulder.

"Pull yourself together," she said, in a snapping, crackling voice. "What a son of mine can see in you I don't know, but for the sake of science, of human knowledge, I accept all he does, for in the whole world at this moment there is no one penetrating more deeply into secrets of nature."

And now Lady Carne herself was transformed. Her face flashed out into colour, her old eyes grew young as the eyes of a girl who loves. "For knowledge," she whispered in an awed tone, "of the secrets of nature."

And then Julia knew. In one flash everything was revealed to her. She realised that this was a house of madness, that the horrible old lady and her sons had thought too long upon one thing. The frightful crimes they had committed, and were about to commit, were simply the products of an insane arrogance of spirit which made them disregard all laws, human or Divine.

Yes! This was it. For the pursuit of science these people had wrought horrors which might change the sweet airs of summer to frost and ice, might make the very sun hide itself behind a pall of impenetrable cloud.

And with this realisation there came to her a hope that all was not yet lost. John Smith, that good and kind little man of whom she was so fond, was dead, whether by his own hand, as Lady Carne said, or whether foully murdered, she could not know. But Cyril— Cyril was alive.

"What am I to do?" she asked, in a low, expressionless voice.

Lady Carne shrugged her shoulders.

"To make a choice," she said, in acid tones from which all the wild exultation of the previous moment had passed. "I have already told you that Cyril Burlington is in the most imminent danger, and has already; suffered things which you will not like to hear of. But you can save him yet, if you wish, and restore him to the outside world as a free man."

"If I wish?" "If you wish. We can put it to the proof at once, and you can make your decision. For my part, I am quite indifferent upon the matter, save only that my son Horace will probably be incommoded in his great work if you do not make the decision which he desires. At all events, if you will now come with me to another part of the house, the whole matter can be settled for once and all. Are you willing to do this?"

Julia bowed her head.

"Very well, then, follow me." Lady Carne went to the door, and rapped sharply with a bony knuckle. There was the click of a turned key, the door swung open, and John Carne stood up in tho passage. Again he was in evening clothes, but his red face and wandering eyes showed that he was, if not drunk, at any rate under the influence of alcohol.

"Miss la Touche will go with you, John," Lady Carne said, "and discuss what is to be done."

Together with the short, powerful man, Julia passed along the carpeted corridor, and descended the broad stairs into the hall. Without a word, she followed her guide into the large and brilliantly-lit library, which she had known so well in the past.

Upon the writing-table was a decanter of port and some glasses. John Carne turned to Julia and tapped her on the arm.

"Look here," he said, in a voice that was a little thickened, but not unkindly, "look here, Julia, you take a glass of port. You will want it; I can tell you that. I am sorry for all this, and I'm afraid you've got a bad time in front of you. But I am in it— we're all in it— and I can do nothing to help. Only do take a glass of cordial, there's a good girl!"

Julia la Touche was no fool. Exactly what was in front of her she did not know; but she was aware that it was to be terrible. She saw also that John Carne meant kindly, and she realised that perhaps the cordial would help her through the imminent ordeal. It would be well, also, to humour this half-drunken man, the only person in that dreadful house who seemed to have a heart at all. With nervous fingers she lifted the glass to her lips, and drank.

She never knew, and never could have explained, how she was taken down to that secret and subterranean room where she spent the most dreadful moments of her life. Years afterwards, when talking it over with her husband, she always stated that she had seen nothing of the picture, remembered nothing of the descent down the ladder. All she remembered was her terrible confrontation with Cyril.

Horace Carne had met her at the door and led her to a seat.

Lying upon a mattress, which sloped upwards from the floor of the secret room in which she found herself, was her lover. A rug was drawn up to his chin, and over his mouth a grey pad, like one of those respirators elderly people wear in London fogs, was fixed. His eyes only spoke, and spoke with a terrible appeal. And before this catafalque the young girl was placed to make the great decision of her life.

There was something almost like a ceremony in a church about it. Horace Carne stood by the side of her chair, with his hand upon her arm. His right arm was stretched out towards the corpse-like figure upon the sloping mattress. His voice echoed in the room with a cold hollowness, which yet betrayed an immeasurable desire.

"Julia," he said, "there lies the man whom you think you love— you have thought that you love. You know now what has gone on in this house, and you know what his fate is going to be, unless you save him— get away, John! I don't want you! I don't want you! Julia, most perfect girl in the whole world of girls, I love you! I loved you in the past; and you fled from me. I swore to myself that you should not escape me. You have not escaped me, my Julia, my dear, pretty Julia, my lovely lady with the black hair and pearl-like face! You are going to be mine now— you are going to be mine!"

Hardly knowing what she did, with glazed eyes and an almost automatic action, Julia rose from her seat. She stretched out her long pale fingers over the bed where the bound man with the pad upon his face was lying.

"Here," she said, "here is my love!" Horace Carne stepped up to her, and forced her to look into his great, commanding face, from which intellect and madness blazed out and flickered together like the light of torches.

"As you will," he said. "You will always be mine, whatever you may say. You are lost to the world; you are in my power. Yet if, as you say, you care for that"— he made a contemptuous motion of his hand towards the rigid figure upon the mattress— "then you can save it from the doom to which my brother and I have already condemned it. I will put it to you quite quickly. If you consent to be mine, without fuss or trouble, and give me your pledge to be so, then I will not take the brain— a very interesting brain—  from Mr. Burlington. I will let him go free, upon his promise never to impede my actions, or to be concerned with them any more."

Julia looked at the face— the half-masked face— of the man she loved. The eyes only were clear and blazed at her. She thought that they appealed to her to save him from a fate more hideous than she could picture or history show.

Yet what did those straining, agonised eyes mean? What message was the half-dead man whom she loved trying to send to her? What did those eyes say? Eyes that were alive and yet not alive! What the silent, motionless figure on the couch thought— if think it did— she would have given worlds to know. Act Horace Carne as he might, her love was there— on that deadly bed.

The man was now leaning over, waiting for her answer.

She turned to Horace Carne. "I accept your wicked terms," she said, in a loud ringing voice, "but I must have the night to think over them. I am your prisoner; I am in your toils. It seems that, in the end, I must do your will; but I will have a few hours of grace. At mid-day to-morrow I will give you my answer— yes or no!"

She stretched out her hands over the bound figure of her lover in the sweetest and most pitiful caress.

"I will save you, dear!" she said. "I will save you!"

14: Fate the Destroyer.

JOHN CARNE left the dreadful room beyond the moat, closed the door slowly, went along the subterranean passage, and climbed the ladder into the ante-room behind the picture. He grumbled and cursed slowly to himself.

His mind was in a whirl of disgust and terror. He was half drunk, and the dreadful interrogation of Julia la Touche had filled even him with horror. Murderer as he was, absolutely callous when scientific interests were  concerned, he was unused to this torture of living people. He knew also that what his brother Horace was doing and had done must eventually be discovered. He saw the net closing around him, and that his mother and his brother should have openly kidnapped a young lady of position seemed to him a fatal thing. She was a beautiful girl; too good for Horace, he reflected. Oh, Horace was mad, his mother was mad, he himself was mad!

The atmosphere of blood and murder, of dreadful secrecy and horrid gloom, in which he had lived during the last few months, acted upon nerves weakened and half destroyed by alcohol, and the man with the dark red hair sank into a chair in the library, when he had replaced the swing picture, and pressed his hot hands to his head with a low groan.

He could not sit there. Lady Carne had gone to bed; the pretty housemaid who had personated Julia at Oxford Station was now in London. He had no confidant at all, and yet the desire of speech and action possessed him most powerfully.

What was Horace doing down there with that graceful and charming girl? What devilish inquisition was proceeding in the subterranean room where the Brain was?

He rose to his feet with another groan, and then another idea came to him. There was that fat young man in the north wing. It had been apportioned as his duty to look after the damaged youth until Horace had decided what was to be done with him. The suicide of John Smith had been terribly unnerving, though John Carne had felt in his heart a sense of relief that the "Parrot-faced Man" had ended his troubles himself. He shuddered at the thought of that midnight sortie, when he and his brother had taken the limp little body out into the dark and buried it in the grounds. Perhaps this Wilkins would have to go. Yes, it might be necessary; they must preserve themselves from discovery. At the same time, the poor wretch was lying in his locked room in the north wing, and, John suddenly remembered, he had taken him no food for more than a day.

Remorse and kindliness reasserted themselves in his mind. If that poor fellow who was the spy of Cyril Burlington had to be killed, then killed he must be. Meanwhile—

Carne drank off nearly a tumblerful of port, and shambled towards the kitchens. He  switched on the electric lights, and foraged clumsily in the old stone larders of this ancient house.

There was the half of a cold pheasant upon a plate.

"That'll do the poor fellow some good," John Carne thought in his muddled mind.

He cut a huge wedge of brown bread from a loaf, and put a pat of butter upon the plate. Then his roving eyes saw a couple of bottles of champagne standing upon the shelf of the larder. They had been brought up from the cellars, no doubt, for the dinner which neither he nor his brother had eaten. He tucked one of the bottles into the side pocket of his dinner-jacket, hugged the loaded plate close to his chest, and went up the staircase, along the corridor, to the north wing.

The north wing was the oldest part of  the house, and the servants were placed there. The passage along which Carne went was very low. Worm-eaten panels of black oak were on either side, and the doors of the rooms which gave on to the passage were massive and strong. Carne arrived in front of the door where Wilkins was confined.

He put the food he had brought down upon the floor, and withdrew a key from his pocket.

"Poor fool," he thought, "he shall have one or two good feeds, at any rate, before Horace finishes with him. He will have to be got out of the way; but meanwhile, now he is better, let him enjoy himself for the last day or so."

With these thoughts in his mind, Carne turned the key and opened the door.

It may have been well for him that a kindly thought was in his mind when he went to his swift and sudden death.

The whole of Morston Manor was lit by electric light made by the oil engine and dynamos in the stable yard. High in the ceiling of the ancient room in which Wilkins had now been confined for four days one bulb had glowed unceasingly, the switch being outside in the passage. The room to which the unconscious fat youth had been taken from his sleeping-room was at the end of the servants' corridor. It was generally unused. The windows were strongly barred and heavily shuttered within. At some time or other in the Middle Ages it must have been used as a strong-room for the security of treasure.

So John Carne entered a box-like place in which the air was warm and stifling, but which was flooded with light. He was a strong, sturdy man, and had given no thought whatever to the possibility of an attack from the wounded young fellow who was so jellified and plump. He had forgotten that, day by day, Wilkins had recovered from the battering about the head. He did not know, had never known, what an acute intellect was hidden behind his servant's foolish mask.

He opened the door, and then turned round to pick up the bottle of champagne and the bird.

It was almost his last movement in this world.

Something sprang at him, leapt upon his back like a heavy weight, and with a loud exclamation he fell prone, half in, half outside the panelled room.

Immediately he was dragged, face on the ground, right into the room, In his half-muddled state he heard the door quietly closed, felt himself turned over, and stared straight up into the blazing eye of the electric bulb.

Then he felt swift, strong fingers about his neck. In this world he never knew anything more.

Wilkins stood up three minutes afterwards, and gazed down with horror upon the motionless form. He had long awaited the opportunity for such a move as this. Fat as he was, and without any indication of physical force or athleticism, he was nevertheless strong and supple. Some months before, realising how he might add to his usefulness and equipment by physical accomplishments, he had attended a school of ju-jitsu. His master, Cyril Burlington, had taken great interest in his progress, and the youth had become singularly apt in the strange science of attack and defence which has come from far Japan and bids fair to revolutionise European ideas upon the subject. Wilkins was as proficient in the new science as the members of the London police force, who have all been trained in its intricate mysteries.

Now he had put one of his last lessons to fearful use. He had accomplished the dreadful ko-ki-you, and John Carne's sinful soul had fled from his body.

Wilkins's coat and waistcoat had been taken away from him. He stood up in stockinged feet, trousers, and a shirt. Now, stifling a shudder of repugnance and the natural horror of what he had done, he bent over the still warm body and searched the pockets with dexterous fingers. He found many things which were of no use to him, but two objects he withdrew with a little sigh of satisfaction. One was a four-bladed pocket-knife, the other a pair of folding nail-scissors. His brain worked at rapid speed. He opened the nail-scissors, wrapped the dead man's handkerchief round the handles, gripped it firmly in his right hand, and was now provided with a dagger as strong and rigid as anyone could desire.

Then he opened the door very quietly and listened.

Not a sound came up to him from the big house below. From John Carne's watch he had ascertained that it was only half-past nine, and he knew that the sinister inhabitants of Morston Manor must yet be stirring and afoot. He had absolutely nothing to guide him in his proceedings. Certainly he knew the house well, but that was all. What had happened to his master or John Smith he could only conjecture, though during his imprisonment his faithful, devoted intelligence had been directed to that one point. He had come to the conclusion, natural enough under the circumstances, that the other two partners in the conspiracy had been discovered, as he himself had been, and were themselves imprisoned in some other part of the house.

He realised that it was courting death, and probably death in some very dreadful form, to once more seek the library and the hidden picture door. Whatever might be going on down below there, in that hideous place of which he had learnt in the first place, it was obvious that he dared not approach it. Some-one would be on guard. He must make his way out of that house, by some means or other, and, even in his stockinged feet, fly through the night to Oxford and alarm the city. He had quite sufficient confidence in his own powers to be sure that he could make the police believe him. And he could call upon the Provost of Paul's with such spoken credentials as would ensure him an immediate hearing. He stepped out into the passage as noiselessly as a cat, switched out the light in the place of his captivity, and locked the door.

Then he stood listening. Again, all was still.

To his right the long corridor stretched, and midway in its length was the head of the staircase which came up straight from the grand gallery below, which, in turn, was approached by the large staircase from the hall. In a moment the fat youth decided that he dare not descend by this means. Then he remembered, as his eyes fell upon another door at the farthest end of the corridor, that the staircase to the servants' quarters was be-hind it. He naturally knew the back part of the house very well, and he determined that it must be by this means that he would leave the house. He must creep carefully down those creaking stairs and make a dash for the back door of the Manor. Two servants only would probably be in the kitchen at the pre-sent moment. These were Melita the house-maid, and the old, deaf cook. It was most improbable that another manservant had been engaged so speedily. He was moving along the corridor with noiseless footsteps, and had just come abreast of the baize door in the centre of it, when he heard a sound of loud, wailing cries interspersed with a harsh, commanding voice.

With infinite precaution he pulled the swing door open and peeped through. As he did so the noise became louder, and he heard that it was the voice of a woman. He recognised also the low tones of Horace Carne, which seemed to be alternately commanding, pleading, and exulting.

Wilkins went straight through the swing door and leant over the balcony. From where he stood he could see into the great gallery which ran round the hall. What he saw was this:—

A girl, half supported by his master, was standing crying bitterly by the side of one of the massive oak doors which led into a bedroom upon the gallery. Horace Carne was opening this door with a key.

This is what Wilkins heard:—

"My dear, you'll get over this," came up to him in waves of sound. "At twelve to-morrow you will give me your decision; till then you belong to yourself; after that, Julia of my heart, you will belong to me— to me! Cyril Burlington will go free, pledged to silence, and I, my darling, will make you happier than you can dream of. I will lavish upon you all the powers of my mind, all the strength of my great love. You shall knew what it is to be loved by a man like me, and if you have ever dreamed of the fabled paradise of religion, you shall enter with me a state more glorious, more full of absolute beatitude than even that."

There came another loud echoing wail from the girl as the man laid his hand upon her arm and pushed her gently through the door of the bedroom. Then he closed the door with a whispered word or two, which Wilkins could not catch, locked it carefully, and descended the stairs towards the hall, swaying slightly this way and that like a drunken man.

That he was no drunken man the fat youth knew very well. He had not been a servant in that house for nothing. The dead red-headed man upstairs was the drunkard, and, if Horace Carne swayed as he walked, it was with the intoxication of malice.

And in that moment of horrified waiting Wilkins had recognised the tall, dark-haired girl in the gallery below. He had never seen Miss Julia la Touche, but he had heard the whole story from his master, and he had become familiar with a photograph which stood upon the mantelpiece of Burlington's sitting  room in the Temple.

This story has not explained itself if those who read do not understand that the plump youth was a person of the most penetrating intellect. Although he had no data upon which to go, he realised, incredible as it was, that by some means or other the lady that his master loved was in the clutches of the terrible folk at Morston.

Like lightning he came to the conclusion that through Miss la Touche, and through her alone, he would learn something of the truth. And even as the thought flashed out upon his inner consciousness, and he made up his mind to a most desperate endeavour, it occurred to him that the key which he had seen Horace Carne using below looked very much like the key of the room from which he had just escaped, and which he felt rigid in the pocket of his trousers.

"Well," Wilkins said to himself, "it is a toss-up, come or go, death or life, and everything for Mr. Cyril." With these words, and a half-formed fear that never again would he visit the familiar scenes he loved so well, grasping his improvised weapon in his right hand, Wilkins ran noiselessly down the stairs until he was in the great gallery of the house. He looked over the massive oak balusters.

The big hall, with its suits of armour, its ancestral pictures, was quite empty. As usual, a great fire burnt upon the hearth, and lights glowed everywhere. The library door had just clicked, and Wilkins felt sure that Horace Carne would be there, or in the secret place below, for a considerable time.

He took a desperate resolution, then he acted upon it. He took the key of the room where he had been confined, and approached the door which he had seen the tall, dark- haired girl enter in such evident distress.

He looked at the keyhole. With careful fingers he inserted the key. Both lock and key were ancient, and he realised with a thrill of satisfaction that he could open the door.

With a swift movement of his hand he turned the key, opened the door, stepped in- side, closed and locked it again without a word. Then he turned. The tall girl he had seen a few minutes ago had risen from a couch at the end of the bed and stood looking at him and trembling.

Her face was perfectly white and stained with tears.

"Hush," Wilkins said, raising a warning hand, and noticing as he did so how absolutely filthy it was. Then he caught sight of himself in a long mirror upon the wardrobe, and started at the ghastly appearance he presented, with his bandaged head, his black and bloodstained face, his shoeless feet, and lack of either coat or waistcoat.

He saw horror in the girl's eyes, but it passed away instantly as he went on.

"It is I, miss— Wilkins— Mr. Cyril's man. You know, miss that I came here to be butler, so as to know everything that was going on. It was I that let Mr. Cyril in. They half killed me, and I have been kept locked up, but I have managed to escape. Why are you here? Do you know anything of my master?"

The girl gave one great sob of relief, and then, with an infinite effort of will, suppressed it. Hers was a brave, strong nature, and, despite all the horrors she had gone through, she made the greatest effort of her life at coherency and control.

In a few brief sentences she acquainted Wilkins with all that had passed as far as she knew it. She told him of what was to happen upon the morrow, and how she had resolved to sacrifice herself to save her lover.

The fat youth stared at her in amazement.

"But, miss," he said in a hoarse whisper, "surely you cannot believe those men? They'd never let him go, and your sacrifice would be worse than nothing. It is death, miss, for me and for Mr. Burlington if I do not get away. And poor John Smith"— the fat youth shuddered— "poor fellow, he's done the best part for himself, after all, though it was dreadful for you to hear it, miss. But there's one thing, miss," he said, in fierce exultation, and in a voice so savage with suppressed glee that the girl shrank from the grotesque figure he presented— "there's one thing, miss; I've cooked the goose of the red- haired one. Mr. John Carne won't never move no more. He's lying dead up in the room where they shut me."

Julia gave a low wail, and put her hands to her face.

Horror upon horror's head! Oh, to be delivered from this house of murder, to free her lover from his agony!

"Now, miss," Wilkins continued, speaking in a brisk, business-like tone, "I didn't ought to have told you this. Forgive me. Something has got to be done at once. It's on me to save everything. There's just time, though it's a toss up. So long as Mr. Horace Carne stays down below there gloating over poor master like a tom-cat over a mouse, so long we are safe. Mr. John Carne came up to feed me. Mr. Horace won't think of looking for him in my room. Perhaps he won't want him at all, because Mr. John was half drunk when he came up; and I expect his brother knows it, and won't trouble him for the rest of the night. The old lady ought to be in bed by now. The only thing is, how can I get out of the house?"

"Yes, yes?" Julia answered eagerly.

"The front door is impossible, miss. It's bolted and barred. So is the back door, and either of the two servants might be up. At any rate, I could not open it without a great noise, and it is probable that Mr. Carne him-self has locked it up by now and has the keys. I know that's what I should do if I kept a murder-house like this."

He hung his head and thought for a moment.

"Are your windows barred, miss?" he said, raising his head suddenly with a glint of hope in his eyes.

"No," Julia answered. ''There are shutters, as you see, but they can be opened. It is a great height from the ground, though, and the moat is immediately below."

"As to the height from the ground, miss,'' Wilkins said, with almost a chuckle, "them there linen sheets on your bed will bear my weight if they are cut into strips. Though I don't look it, I'm pretty strong, miss. As to the moat, it can be swum; and it is full to the brim, so there won't be any difficulty in getting out the other side."

"But what will you do then?"

"Cut off to Oxford as hard as ever I can go, miss, and rouse the town."

"But it's eight miles away, and you are wounded. You have no shoes."

Wilkins merely grinned. He was already at the bed, taking off the sheets, and bringing them in a pile to the middle of the room.

"Now, miss," he said, "you've got a pair of scissors, perhaps, in your dressing-bag."

Julia hurried to the dressing-table, and produced what was wanted. With swift, dexterous fingers— it was astonishing how clever were those plump and dirty hands— the fat youth was tearing the fine linen into strips. Julia stood watching him in a maze of dawning hope, and then she, too, knelt down, ashamed of herself for her inaction, and helped him as skilfully as she could.

In ten minutes a long, stout rope had been knotted together, which would have borne the weight of a heavier man than Wilkins.

"If it don't reach, miss," Wilkins whispered, "then I must let myself drop quietly into the water, that's all. There's not likely to be anybody to hear. There's one thing, miss, I've thought of— that there big bath towel. I shall be bitter cold when I've swum the moat, and a rub down would help me. When we have opened the shutters quietly and the windows, too, and while I'm going down the rope, please throw that towel right over the other side, where I shall find it. Directly you hear me go into the water, pull up the sheets, hide them in the cupboard, make the bed look as ordinary as possible, turn out the light, and get into bed. Then, in case anybody comes in to you, they won't suspect anything. Now, then, for the window."

Together the strange couple crept to the long window. The bar lifted with a loud creak, and they stood in breathless suspense for nearly three minutes without further movement.

There was no sound from below, and the window opened almost noiselessly. Fortunately, the headrail of the bed was near the window. Wilkins knotted the improvised rope to it, tied it with all his strength, and then went to the window.

It was pitch dark, but far away in the northern sky there was a faint glow upon the horizon. It was the lights of the city of Oxford.

Julia whispered a good-bye and a few words of encouragement. A fat form disappeared over the window-sill. Then came a hurried whisper:—

"Snap off the light, miss. I forgot; it's shining right over the moat."

Julia fled to the switch by the door and clicked it. Then she waited in the dark.

She heard a gentle splash, a rippling sound, followed by movements as of something scrambling upon the ground, then a low, very low, whistle reached her. She heard the snap of twigs, and all was still.

With infinite precaution she pulled up the rope of sheets, closed the window, and barred the shutters. In two minutes more, although fully dressed, she was lying apparently asleep in bed in a room which was only lit by the glow of the expiring fire. She lay there trembling and praying.

15: "Surrender."

A LONG, COVERED motor-car, with only one headlight, was proceeding very slowly along the deserted moorland road from Oxford. Within it were four men, three of them big, stem-faced fellows, the other a slim man with a slight moustache.

"We cannot be far off now, Mr. Ommaney," said one of the men.

"I am glad, inspector," answered the editor of the Daily Wire.

"So am I, sir," the other answered, "for I fear a very black business is in front of us. We have had our suspicions up at Scotland Yard for some time, but we could do very little. I am very glad you have come yourself, sir. It is an honour, I am sure, to have you with us."

Ommaney made a slight gesture of negation with his hand.

"No, no," ho said. "The best lieutenant I ever had, Mr. Cyril Burlington, whose name is known to everyone in England as perhaps the most brilliant journalist of his day, is possibly in deadly peril and upon business, not only of public justice, but of the Daily Wire. I could do no less than come, but we owe the fact of our being here at this moment entirely to the intelligence of Greener, the chauffeur."

He nodded with his head towards the driver seated in front.

"I quite agree with you, sir," the inspector replied. "If he had gone straight to Penzance before coming to see you at the Daily Wire with that telegram and the forged letter, then goodness knows when we should have been able to make the attempt. It was the fact of his bringing that letter, cleverly imitated as it was, that enabled me to get the search warrants."

"Will you get into the house easily and quietly, do you think?" Ommaney asked.

The other nodded. "Yes," he said. "In the shrubbery a detective from Oxford has already put a light ladder. The plans of the house are well known to us. Both front and back doors would take too long to open, and would make too much noise. But above the front door is a large window. My man, Jack-son here, with his tools will get through that in ten minutes, and then we shall be in the square gallery which goes round the hall. Hullo! What's this?" His voice broke off suddenly.

The car had stopped with a sudden grinding of the brakes, and the chauffeur was descending hurriedly.

In a second more Ommaney and the three detectives were out upon the road. In the light which streamed from the single acetylene lamp of the car they saw Greener bending over a prostrate figure.

Inspector Philpott whipped out an, electric torch from his pocket and pressed the stud.

"Heavens! This," Ommaney cried in a shrill voice of alarm, "this is Mr. Cyril Burlington's personal servant, who was employed upon this investigation. He is the man I told you of in confidence, who obtained the situation of butler to Mr. Horace Carne."

"He's half dead then," the Inspector answered grimly. "His head has been all battered about. He is without coat or waistcoat; his feet are a mass of wounds."

Ommaney unscrewed the top of silver travelling flask, and poured a liberal dose of brandy down the throat of the unconscious youth lying in the centre of the frozen road.

The effect was instantaneous. There was a stir, a moan, and then the grotesque face was all alive and working with excitement.

Wilkins recognised Mr. Ommaney at once.

"Oh, sir," he said, "thank God you've come! Murder, and worse than murder— horrible  things, I can't hardly speak of. They've got Mr. Cyril, sir, and they're murdering him slowly. They've got Miss la Touche there, from Oxford, locked up. They had me prisoner, but I escaped an hour ago, only I fainted here on the road. I was coming to Oxford to call the police. There is no time to be lost."

Again Mr. Ommaney held the flask to the boy's lips. He was assisted into the car, and a warm coat wrapped round him.

"Are you strong enough to tell us now?" Ommaney asked.

"I'm strong enough to tell you everything, sir, and to guide you down to their awful secret room."

There was a sharp exclamation from Inspector Philpott, and then, as the car started slowly again, Wilkins began his story.

Conclusion.

THE LIGHTS were all lit in the hot, underground place of doom with its faint aromatic smell.

Horace Carne sat upon the edge of the heavy table upon which the infernal apparatus of the brain was placed. He was toying with a cigarette and looking over the table at the figure of Cyril Burlington, still strapped down upon the sloping mattress, but with the pad which had prevented him from speaking, during Julia's agonising appearence, now removed.

Horace Carne looked extraordinarily handsome, though his eyes blazed with a madman's light, and fiendish mockery flickered about his lips.

"Yes, Mr. Burlington," he said in his low, cultured voice, "you have played a game with me, and I have won. Miss la Touche has consented to be mine in order to save you. Although, had I allowed you to speak, you would have forbidden her a thousand times, yet she mistook the appeal in your eyes, and now everything is settled. I don't propose— I tell you this for your satisfaction— to inflict any physical torture upon you; that would be quite unworthy of me. About mental ones after the death of your body— your body alone, you will observe— I would say nothing. You will learn of this before very long. Some time tomorrow— I have, not quite decided, when— a chloroform pad over your face— "

He laughed quietly to himself. By his hand was lying a long surgeon's knife, which he held up and played with. It glittered in the light. "What do you say, Mr. Burlington?" he asked.

"I don't know," Cyril replied in a faint voice, "whether Heaven can forgive you. But I am taught by my religion that He forgives all who repent.

"I don't know whether you will ever repent. But, Horace Carne— and this is the last word I shall ever say to you— do with me what you will, for what you do to me I forgive you."

There was a dead silence in the room, and then— Crash! Crash! Crash!. With a loud shout, a body of people rushed through the broken door and into the room.

"Surrender, Horace Carne, in the King's name!" came in a loud voice from the leading man.

In an instant the madman realised that in the very hour of his triumph the game was up.

"Not alive, curse you!" he yelled. "And before I go I'll make an end— " With lightning rapidity be whipped up the long surgical knife and attempted to spring across the table.

He was too late. Once, twice, Inspector Philpott fired, and with a loud yell of despair the tall figure of Horace Carne shot almost in mid-air and fell with a crash upon the devilish apparatus on the table, breaking it into a thousand pieces. The others took no notice of him, rushing to the mattress on the floor. No one heard the sudden whir of clockwork, the drip of liquid, and the tinkle of shattered glass.

THE GENERAL public, either through the medium of the Daily Wire or from any of the actors in it, never knew the secret history of Morston Manor, nor the unspeakable horrors which concluded the drama of the "Parrot-faced Man."

But for three years before that brilliant journalist returned to England and to work, the word "brain" and the word "parrot" were never mentioned in a beautiful little villa upon Lake Como. It was only owing to the loving care of his wife and a certain fat, merry-faced young man, who became extraordinarily popular with the Italian peasants, and often described to them the superiority of a certain beverage called "ginno" over the local wines, that Cyril returned to his full mental powers and learned to look upon the awful ordeal of the past as a time of terror through which the lovely girl by his side had come to him.

IN THE Oxford Cemetery a beautiful monument of white marble stands over a grave which bears but two initials and these words:

J. S.

FALSELY ACCUSED.

PUBLICLY PARDONED.

The End

___________________

As serialised in The World's News, (Sydney) starting 3 March 1917

Partial Bibliography

Cyril Arthur Edward Ranger Gull (1875 –1923)

British author of over 100 works, fiction and non-fiction, mostly as by "Guy Thorne", a few as by "Ranger Gull" and "Cyril Cresswell Inglesby".

1898: The Hypocrite

1902: Back to Lilac Land: A Theatrical Novel.

1902: The Serf

1902: The Adventures of Ulysses the Wanderer: An Old Story Retold

1903: When it was Dark

1905: A Lost Cause

1906: Made in His Image

1906: The Soul-Stealer

1907: Oscar Wilde (as by Inglesby)

1908: The Angel

1909: The Socialist

1909: When it was Dark: The Story of a Great Conspiracy

1911: House of Torment

1912: A Butterfly on the Wheel: A Novel

1912: The Complete Wildfowler

1912: The Drunkard

1913: Not In Israel

1914: Chance in Chains: A Story of Monte Carlo

1915: The Enemies of England

1915: The Secret Service Submarine: A Story of the Present War

1915: And It Came To Pass

1915: The Secret Sea-Plane

1917: The Parrot-faced Man

1918: Lucky Mr Loder

1918: the Secret Monitor

1919: The Air Pirate

1921: The City in the Clouds

1921: the Love Hater

1923: The Dark Dominion

1924: When the World Reeled

Table of Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Conclusion