on't require a house party next week."

"I shan't ask a soul," the Duchess answered. "Do you mind ringing the
bell as you pass? I'll have Miss Smith back again and send these letters
off."

"Good!" the Duke declared. "I'm going down to the House, but I don't
suppose there'll be anything doing. By the bye, we shall have to be a
little feudal next week. Japan is a country of many ceremonies, and,
after all, Maiyo is one of the Royal Family. I have written Perkins, to
stir him up a little."

The Duke drove down to the House, but called first in Downing Street. He
found the Prime Minister anxious to see him.

"You've arranged about Maiyo coming down to you next week?" he asked.

"That's all right," the Duke answered. "He is coming, for certain. One
good thing about that young man--he never breaks an engagement."

The Prime Minister consulted a calendar which lay open before him.

"Do you mind," he asked, "if I come, too, and Bransome?"

"Why, of course not," the Duke replied. "We shall be delighted. We have
seventy bedrooms, and only half a dozen or so of us. But tell me--is
this young man as important as all that?"

"We shall have to have a serious talk," the Prime Minister said, "in a
few days' time. I don't think that even you grasp the exact position of
affairs as they stand today. Just now I am bothered to death about other
things. Heseltine has just been in from the Home Office. He is simply
inundated with correspondence from America about those two murders."

The Duke nodded.

"It's an odd thing," he remarked, "that they should both have been
Americans."

"Heseltine thinks there's something behind this correspondence," the
Prime Minister said slowly. "Washington was very secretive about the man
Fynes' identity. I found that out from Scotland Yard. Do you know, I'm
half inclined to think, although I can't get a word out of Harvey, that
this man Fynes--"

The Prime Minister hesitated.

"Well?" the Duke asked a little impatiently.

"I don't want to go too far," his chief said. "I am making some fresh
inquiries, and I am hoping to get at the bottom of the matter very
shortly. One thing is very certain, though, and that is that no two
murders have ever been committed in this city with more cold-blooded
deliberation, and with more of what I should call diabolical cleverness.
Take the affair of poor young Vanderpole, for instance. The person who
entered his taxi and killed him must have done so while the v