o much, that's all."

"You really mustn't tell me?"

"I've told you so fifty times," he said. Which was untrue. You know he
had really only told her twice.

"Very well, then," she said heroically, "I won't ask you a single thing.
But you'll tell me the minute you can, won't you? And you'll let me
help?"

"Nobody can help, no one can advise me," Edred said. "I've got to do it
off my own bat if I do it at all. Now you just shut up, I want to
think."

This unusual desire quite awed Elfrida. But it irritated her too.

"Perhaps you'd like me to go away," she said ironically.

And Edred's wholly unexpected reply was, "Yes, please."

So she went.

And when she was gone Edred sat down on the box at the foot of his bed
and tried to think. But it was not easy.

"I ought to go," he told himself.

"But think of your father," said something else which was himself too.

He thought so hard that his thoughts got quite confused. His head grew
very hot, and his hands and feet very cold. Mrs. Honeysett came in,
exclaimed at his white face, felt his hands, said he was in a high
fever, and put him to bed with wet rags on his forehead and hot-water
bottles to his feet. Perhaps he was feverish. At any rate he could never
be sure afterwards whether there really had been a very polite and
plausible black mole sitting on his pillow most of the day saying all
those things which the part of himself that he liked least agreed with.
Such things as--

"Think of your father.

"No one will ever know.

"Dickie will be all right somehow.

"Perhaps you only dreamed that about Dickie being shut up somewhere and
it's not true.

"Anyway, it's not your business, is it?" And so on. You know the sort of
thing.

Elfrida was not allowed to come into the room for fear Edred should be
ill with something catching. So he lay tossing all day, hearing the
black mole, or something else, say all these things and himself saying,
"I must go.

"Oh! poor Dickie.

"I promised to go.

"Yes, I will go."

And late that night when Lord Arden had come home and had gone to bed,
tired out by a long day's vain search for the lost Dickie, and when
everybody was asleep, Edred got up and dressed. He put his bedroom
candle and matches in his pocket, crept down-stairs and out of the house
and up to Beale's. It was a slow and nervous business. More than once on
the staircase he thought he heard a stair creak behind him, and again
and again as he went along t