erence
that lies betwixt your disclosing a plot to the secretary of state, and
causing this Caryll to disclose it--as might happen if he were seized?
First discover the plot--find out in what it may consist, and then go to
Lord Carteret to make your terms."

He looked at her, out of temper by her rebuke. "I may be as dull as your
ladyship says--but I do not see in what the position now is different
from what it was."

"It isn't different--but we thought it was different," she explained
impatiently. "We assumed that your father would not have betrayed
himself, counting upon his characteristic caution. But it seems we are
mistook. He has betrayed himself to Caryll. And before we can move in
this matter, we must have proofs of a plot to lay before the secretary
of state."

Lord Rotherby understood, and accounted himself between Scylla and
Charybdis, and when that evening Green's messenger found him, he gnashed
his teeth in rage at having to allow this chance to pass, at being
forced to temporize until he should be less parlously situated. He
returned Mr. Green an urgent message to take no steps concerning Mr.
Caryll until they should have concerted together.

Mr. Green was relieved. Mr. Caryll arrested might stir up matters
against the slayer of Sir Richard, and this was a business which Mr.
Green had prevision enough to see his master, Lord Carteret, would
prefer should not be stirred up. He had a notion, for the rest, that
if Mr. Caryll were left to go his ways, he would not be likely to give
trouble touching that same matter. And he was right in this. Before his
overwhelming sense of loss, Mr. Caryll had few thoughts to bestow upon
the manner in which that loss had been sustained. Moreover, if he had a
quarrel with any one on that account, it was with the government whose
representative had issued the warrant for Sir Richard's arrest, and no
more with the wretched tipstaff who had fired the pistol than with the
pistol itself. Both alike were but instruments, of slightly different
degrees of insensibility.

For twenty-four hours Mr. Caryll's grief was overwhelming in its
poignancy. His sense of solitude was awful. Gone was the only living man
who had stood to him for kith and kin. He was left alone in the world;
utterly alone. That was the selfishness of his sorrow--the consideration
of Sir Richard's death as it concerned himself.

Presently an alloy of consolation was supplied by the reflection of
Sir Richard's