unny!" he cried. "Not a moment more."

And he tore off his coat before flinging himself into the nearest chair.

"I'm fairly on the rush," he panted; "having the very devil of a time!
Not a word till I tell you all I've done. I settled my plan of
campaign yesterday at lunch. The first thing was to get in with this
man Craggs; you can't break into a place like the Metropole, it's got
to be done from the inside. Problem one, how to get at the fellow.
Only one sort of pretext would do--it must be something to do with this
blessed picture, so that I might see where he'd got it and all that.
Well, I couldn't go and ask to see it out of curiosity, and I couldn't
go as a second representative of the other old chap, and it was
thinking how I could go that made me such a bear at lunch. But I saw
my way before we got up. If I could only lay hold of a copy of the
picture I might ask leave to go and compare it with the original. So
down I went to Esher to find out if there was a copy in existence, and
was at Broom Hall for one hour and a half yesterday afternoon. There
was no copy there, but they must exist, for Sir Bernard himself
(there's 'copy' THERE!) has allowed a couple to be made since the
picture has been in his possession. He hunted up the painters'
addresses, and the rest of the evening I spent in hunting up the
painters themselves; but their work had been done on commission; one
copy had gone out of the country, and I'm still on the track of the
other."

"Then you haven't seen Craggs yet?"

"Seen him and made friends with him, and if possible he's the funnier
old cuss of the two; but you should study 'em both. I took the bull by
the horns this morning, went in and lied like Ananias, and it was just
as well I did--the old ruffian sails for Australia by to-morrow's boat.
I told him a man wanted to sell me a copy of the celebrated Infanta
Maria Teresa of Velasquez, that I'd been down to the supposed owner of
the picture, only to find that he had just sold it to him. You should
have seen his face when I told him that! He grinned all round his
wicked old head. 'Did OLD Debenham admit the sale?' says he; and when
I said he had he chuckled to himself for about five minutes. He was so
pleased that he did just what I hoped he would do; he showed me the
great picture--luckily it isn't by any means a large one--also the case
he's got it in. It's an iron map-case in which he brought over the
plans of his land in Br