. Something sparkled in the big pink
palm he extended to Saxham--something sparkled, and spurted white and
green and scarlet points of fire from a myriad of facets. The something
was an oval miniature on ivory. A slender gold chain, broken, dangled from
its enamelled bow. From within a rim of brilliants the lovely, wistful
face of a young, refined, high-bred woman looked out, and with all his
iron self-control Saxham could not restrain a sudden movement and a
stifled exclamation of mingled anger and surprise.

For at the first glance the face was Lynette's.

With a dull roaring of the blood in his ears and an unspeakable rage and
horror seething in him, he took the portrait from the Major's palm, and
held it with a steady hand, in a favourable light.

Marvellously like, but not Lynette's face!

The eyes were larger, rounder, and of gentle blue-grey, the
squirrel-coloured hair of a brighter shade, the sensitive mouth sensuous
as well, the little chin pointed. She might have been a few years under
thirty; the arrangement of the hair, the cut of the bodice, might have
indicated the height of the latest fashion--say, twenty-two or even three
years back. Some delicately fine inscription was upon the dull gold of the
inner rim of the miniature-frame, within the diamonds that surrounded it.
Saxham deciphered: "Lucy, to Richard Mildare. For ever! 1879."

* * * * *

The dull, dark crimson that had stained the Dop Doctor's opaque skin had
given place to pallor. His face was sharp and thin, and of waxen
whiteness, like the face of one newly dead. His blue eyes burned ominously
in their caves under the heavy bar of meeting black eyebrows. His voice
was very quiet as he asked: "How did you come by this?"

"It dropped down out of the sky," said Major Bingo measuredly, "with the
bits of evidence I've told you of, and a few others, when the big stone
chimney at Haargrond Plaats blew up with a thunderin' roar. The other bits
of evidence were bits of a man--two men you might call him! And, by the
Living Tinker, considerin' how he was mixed up with the rest of the
rubbish, he might have been half a dozen instead of Bough Van Busch!"

"He had this upon him? He--wore it round his neck?" Saxham asked the
question in a grating whisper, dropping the clenched hand that held the
diamond-set miniature upon the arm of his chair.

"I should think it probable he did," said Bingo placidly, "when he had a
neck t