nce a man strays out of the common herd, he's
more likely to meet wolves in the thickets than angels. From what I can
gather in just these few pages this Sabathier appears to have been
an amorous, adventurous, emotional Frenchman, who went to the dogs as
easily and as rapidly as his own nature and his period allowed. And I
should say, Lawford, that he made precious bad reading for a poor old
troubled hermit like yourself at the present moment.'

'There's a portrait of him a few pages back.'

Mr Bethany, with some little impatience, turned back to the engraving.
'"Nicholas de Sabathier,"'s he muttered. '"De," indeed!' He poked in at
the foxy print with narrowed eyes. 'I don't deny it's a striking, even
perhaps, a rather taking face. I don't deny it.' He gazed on with
an even more acute concentration, and looked up sharply. 'Look here,
Lawford, what in the name of wonder--what trick are you playing on me
now?'

'Trick?' said Lawford; and the world fell with the tiniest plash in the
silence, like a vivid little float upon the surface of a shadowy pool.

The old face flushed. 'What conceivable bearing, I say, has this dead
and gone old roue on us now?'

'You don't think, then, you see any resemblance--ANY resemblance at
all?'

'Resemblance?' repeated Mr Bethany in a flat voice, and without raising
his face again to meet Lawford's direct scrutiny. 'Resemblance to whom?'

'To me? To me, as I am?'

'But even, my dear fellow (forgive my dull old brains!), even if there
was just the faintest superficial suggestion of--of that; what then?'

'Why,' said Lawford, 'he's buried in Widderstone.'

'Buried in Widderstone?' The keen childlike blue eyes looked almost
stealthily up across the book; the old man sat without speaking, so
still that it might even be supposed he himself was listening for a
quiet distant footfall.

'He is buried in the grave beside which I fell asleep,' said Lawford;
'all green and still and broken,' he added faintly. 'You remember,' he
went on in a repressed voice--'you remember you asked me if there was
anybody else in sight, any eavesdropper? You don't think--him?'

Mr. Bethany pushed the book a few inches away from him. 'Who, did you
say--who was it you said put the thing into your head? A queer friend
surely?' he paused helplessly. 'And how, pray, do you know,' he began
again more firmly, 'even if there is a Sabathier buried at Widderstone,
how do you know it is this Sabathier? It's not, I thi