han this, at ten
o'clock Captain Travers made an excuse of having letters to write, and
left the room, and it was scarcely six minutes later that she followed
suit.

But the captain had not gone to write letters, as it had happened.
Instead, he had gone straight to the morning-room, an apartment
immediately behind that in which the elder Mr. Bawdrey's collection was
housed, and from which a broad French window opened out upon the
grounds, and it might have caused a scandal had it been known that Mrs.
Bawdrey joined him there one minute after leaving the drawing-room.

"It is the time, Walter, it is the time!" she said in a breathless sort
of way, as she closed the door and moved across the room to where he
stood, a dimly-seen figure in the dim light. "God help and pity me! but
I am so nervous I hardly know how to contain myself. The note said at
ten to-night in the morning-room, and it is ten now. The hour is here,
Walter, the hour is here!"

"So is the man, Mrs. Bawdrey," answered a low voice from the outer
darkness; then a figure lifted itself above the screening shrubs just
beyond the ledge of the open window, and Cleek stepped into the room.

She gave a little hysterical cry and reached out her hands to him.

"Oh, I am so glad to see you, even though you hint at such awful things,
I am so glad, so glad!" she said. "I almost died when I read your note.
To think that it is murder--murder! And but for you he might be dead
even now. You will like to know that the doctor brought the stuff you
sent by him and my darling is better--better."

Before Cleek could venture any reply to this, Captain Travers stalked
across the room and gripped his hand.

"And so you are that great man Cleek, are you?" he said. "Bully boy!
Bully boy! And to think that all the time it wasn't some mysterious
natural affliction; to think that it was crime, murder, poison. What
poison, man, what poison?"

"Ayupee, or, as it is variously called in the several islands of the
Eastern Archipelago, Pohon-Upas, Antjar, and Ipo," said Cleek in reply.
"The deadly venom which the Malays use in poisoning the heads of their
arrows."

"What! that awful stuff!" said Mrs. Bawdrey, with a little shuddering
cry. "And some one in this house----" Her voice broke. She plucked at
Cleek's sleeve and looked up at him in an agony of entreaty. "Who?" she
implored. "Who in this house could? You said you would tell
to-night--you said you would. Oh, who could have t