eing obliged, of course, to stop
for a second and turn on the extinguished light before he could see in
which direction this pseudoservant had gone, much less follow him; but
by the time he had done this Cleek was safely out of sight, and was
engaged in tearing off his evening clothes and bundling them back into
the kit bag as fast as his hands could fly.

The turning on of the light had resulted in the discovery that the
passage was empty, and in a moment there was an uproar. For no sooner
had Raynor voiced one astonished "Good Lord! why, the fellow's
gone--gone as clean as a whistle, blow him!" than Lord St. Ulmer began
to rattle out an absolute fusillade of excited cries and frightened
queries and suggestions, all snarled up in one hopeless tangle of
jumbled words, and to tug with all his force at the bell rope hanging
beside his bed.

"Head him off! Have him stopped! Find out who he is and what he's up
to!" he shrilled out in an excited treble, which was audible to Cleek,
even through the thickness of the dividing wall. "Send for your father.
Call up the servants. I want to know who that man is and what he was
doing here."

If that were possible, he had certainly gone the surest and the shortest
way about accomplishing what he desired, for the wild pulling of the
bell rope had brought the servants flocking up by one staircase and the
General and a couple of footmen dashing up by another; and for the next
twenty seconds, what with young Raynor trying to give his version of the
affair and his lordship excitedly flinging out his, there was confusion
and hubbub enough in all conscience. Nobody had any light to shed on the
mysterious occurrence, however; nobody had seen any man coming down any
staircase, and nobody had the very slightest idea who that particular
one could be, whence or why he had come, nor whither and how he could
have gone.

It was in the midst of this confusion that suddenly the door of the room
immediately adjoining his lordship's bedchamber was drawn sharply
inward, and then as sharply reclosed until it left but a half foot or so
between itself and the casing, and through that half foot of space the
head of Mr. Philip Barch was thrust; not, however, before the General
and his son and the two footmen had had a chance to see that the owner
of that head was arrayed simply in his underclothing, and to understand
why he had partly reclosed the door when he found people in the
immediate neighbourhood