XXI.--THE GREEN TABLE 215

XXII.--DISCLOSES A SCHEME 224

XXIII.--THE FALLING SHADOW 235

XXIV.--THE BLOW 244

XXV.--TO PAY THE PRICE 255

XXVI.--A CHILD'S QUESTION 265

XXVII.--THE INTRUDER 275

XXVIII.--THE CLOSED BOX 284

XXIX.--DEADLY PERIL 293

XXX.--THE WHITE LIE 299

THE WHITE LIE

CHAPTER I.

IS MAINLY MYSTERIOUS.

"A woman--perhaps?"

"Who knows! Poor Dick Harborne was certainly a man of secrets, and of
many adventures."

"Well, it certainly is a most mysterious affair. You, my dear Barclay,
appear to be the last person to have spoken to him."

"Apparently I was," replied Lieutenant Noel Barclay, of the Naval Flying
Corps, a tall, slim, good-looking, clean-shaven man in aviator's garb,
and wearing a thick woollen muffler and a brown leather cap with rolls
at the ears, as he walked one August afternoon up the village street of
Mundesley-on-Sea, in Norfolk, a quaint, old-world street swept by the
fresh breeze of the North Sea. "Yesterday I flew over here from Yarmouth
to see the cable-laying, and met Dick in the post-office. I hadn't seen
him for a couple of years. We were shipmates in the _Antrim_ before he
retired from the service and went abroad."

"Came into money, I suppose?" remarked his companion, Francis Goring, a
long-legged, middle-aged man, who, in a suit of well-worn tweeds,
presented the ideal type of the English landowner, as indeed he
was--owner of Keswick Hall, a fine place a few miles distant, and a
Justice of the Peace for the county of Norfolk.

"No," replied the aviator, unwinding his woollen scarf. "That's just it.
I don't think he came into money. He simply retired, and next we heard
was that he was living a wandering, adventurous life on the Continent. I
ran up against him in town once or twice, and he always seemed amazingly
prosperous. Yet there was some sort of a mystery about him--of that I
have always felt certain."

"That's interesting," declared the man at his side. "Anything
suspicious--eh?"

"Well, I hardly know. Only, one night as I was walking from the Empire
along to the Rag, I passed a man very seedy and down-at-heel. He
rec