appen so rapidly as a lot of you
young people imagine. You are Scotch, are you not?"

"I am. And my father is Sir Andrew Duggan, of whom you have no doubt
heard. He--he has large possessions in Scotland. A big landowner, you
know----"

"And a hard one," said Mr. Narkom mentally, recalling certain paragraphs
about the gentleman which appeared from time to time in the Scotch
papers.

"Our home is at Aygon--Aygon Castle, in Argyllshire. And there are two
of us by our father's first marriage--my brother Ross and me. Ross, as
you know, is heir to the estates, of course, as eldest son of the line
(that part of them which is entailed); but some seventeen years ago my
father married again, an Italian woman whom he met upon one of his
periodical journeys abroad."

"And this is the woman in question?"

"It is!" Her voice ran up a tiny scale of excitement. She shut her
hands together and breathed hard, and leaning forward in her seat, let
her big dark eyes dwell a moment upon his face. "That woman is a
would-be murderer, a fiend incarnate, prompted to heaven knows what
awful action by her ambitions for her son Cyril!"

"Your father's child?"

"My father's child. Cyril is sixteen this birthday--a nice lad, but with
all the Latin traits of his mother's race--those traits which mix so
badly with our Scotch character, Mr. Narkom. Paula has planned this
thing from the beginning--slowly, secretly, steadily. She has planned to
wrest the estates from Ross, to turn his own father against him, so that
at the last he will remake his will and leave all that he possesses to
Cyril--and rob Ross of his rightful inheritance!"

"My dear lady, have you any foundation for believing this?" put in Mr.
Narkom at this juncture, as she paused. "An ambitious woman is not
necessarily a potential murderess, you know."

"But this one is. One can see it in her eyes when she looks at Ross, and
one can read it in every gesture--every thought that passes across her
face. She is a dangerous woman, Mr. Narkom, who will stop at nothing.
Her own father, I believe, had a career that was shrouded in mystery, so
far as we can trace, but there was theft in it, and crime, too--that
much I have ascertained. His daughter is the fitting descendant of the
family. I repeat, there is nothing she will stop at--nothing!--and now
that Ross has taken up with this electricity installation--he has been
mad on engineering ever since he was big enough to toddle, but Father