it!"

But only half the coincidence was present in the father's mind; no thought
of the murder had yet entered it in connection with his boy; and to hear
so emphatic an echo to his foreboding was more than his fretted nerves
could stand. In the same breath he pounced on Thrush for a
pessimist--apologised--and humbly entreated him to take a more hopeful view.

"There may have been an accident, Thrush, but not necessarily a fatal
one!"

An accident! Thrush had never thought of that explanation of the public
mystery; but evidently Mullins had, judging by his almost fiendish grins
and nods behind the poor father's back. Thrush looked at both men with
the troubled frown of a strenuously reasoning being--looked and frowned
again--frowned and reasoned afresh. And then, all in an instant, the
trouble lifted from his face; light had come to him in an almost blinding
flash, such as might well obscure the quality of the light; enough for
Eugene Thrush that it lit him back to his mystery every bit as brightly as
it lit him onward to its solution.

He was even man enough to refrain from reflecting it automatically in his
face, as he put a number of apparently irrelevant questions to Mr. Upton
about the missing boy. What was his character? what its chief points?
Was he a boy with the moral courage of his acts? Would he face their
consequences like a man?

"I never knew him tell a lie in his life," said Mr. Upton, "either to save
his own skin or any thing else; and it was a case of their young skins
when they got into trouble with me! Poor Tony was the most conscientious
of them all, and I hear that's what they say of him at school."

Thrush put one or two further questions, and then said he had a clue,
though a very slight one, which he was rather in a hurry to follow up
himself; and this time the ironmaster went off quietly of his own accord,
with a dejected undertaking to be at his hotel when he was wanted.

"I don't like the look of our friend," remarked Thrush, looking hard at
Mullins when at last they were alone. "He shapes none too well for the
strain he's got to bear; if he cracks up there'll be a double tragedy, if
not a triple one, in that family. We must catch our hare quickly,
Mullins, or we may catch him too late."

Mullins turned on the disagreeable grin that Thrush had so resented a few
minutes before; he took no notice of it now.

"You'll find your man," said Mullins significantly, "the very moment t