erect; the air smelt faint of earth. In the breakfast-room the
bookcase still swung open. Late evening mantled the garden; and in
sheer ennui again he sat down to the table, and turned for a last not
unfriendly hob-a-nob with his poor old friend Sabathier. He would take
the thing back. Herbert, of course, was going to translate it for him.
Now if the patient old Frenchman had stormed Herbert instead--that
surely would have been something like a coup! Those frenzied books.
The absurd talk of the man. Herbert was perfectly right--he could have
entertained fifty old Huguenots without turning a hair. 'I'm such an
awful stodge.'

He turned the woolly leaves over very slowly. He frowned impatiently,
and from the end backwards turned them over again. Then he laid the book
softly down on the table and sat back. He stared with narrowed lids
into the flame of his quiet friendly candle. Every trace, every shred of
portrait and memoir were gone. Once more, deliberately, punctiliously,
he examined page by page the blurred and unfamiliar French--the sooty
heads, the long, lean noses, the baggy eyes passing like figures in
a peepshow one by one under his hand--to the last fragmentary and
dexterously mended leaf. Yes, Sabathier was gone. Quite the old slow
Lawford smile crept over his face at the discovery. It was a smile a
little sheepish too, as he thought of Sheila's quiet vigilance.

And the next instant he had looked up sharply, with a sudden peculiar
shrug, and a kind of cry, like the first thin cry of an awakened child,
in his mind. Without a moment's hesitation he climbed swiftly upstairs
again to the big sepulchral bedroom. He pressed with his fingernail the
tiny spring in the looking-glass. The empty drawer flew open. There were
finger-marks still in the dust.

Yet, strangely enough, beneath all the clashing thoughts that came
flocking into his mind as he stood with the empty drawer in his hand,
was a wounding yet still a little amused pity for his old friend Mr
Bethany. So far as he himself was concerned the discovery--well, he
would have plenty of time to consider everything that could possibly now
concern himself. Anyhow, it could only simplify matters.

He remembered waking to that old wave of sickening horror on the first
unhappy morning; he remembered the keen yet owlish old face blinking
its deathless friendliness at him, and the steady pressure of the cold,
skinny hand. As for Sheila, she had never done anything b