a
look of abject misery. "I want to speak to you--I simply must speak to
you. I've been waiting for the chance, and now that it's come--Look
here! You're not going back on me, are you?"

"Going back on you?" repeated Anita, showing her pretty white teeth in
an amused smile. "What shall you mean by that 'going back on you'--eh?
You are a stupid little donkey, to be sure. But then I do not care to
get on the back of one--so why?"

"Oh, you know very well what I mean," he rapped out angrily. "It is not
fair the way you have been treating me ever since that yellow-headed
bounder came. I've had a night of misery--Zuilika never showing herself;
you doing nothing, absolutely nothing, although you promised--you _know_
you did!--and I heard you, I absolutely heard you persuade that St.
Aubyn fool to stop at least another night."

"Yes, of course you did. But what of it? He is good company--he talks
well, he sings well, he is very handsome and--well, what difference can
it make to you? You are not interested in _me, amigo_?"

"No, no; of course I'm not. You are nothing to me at all--you--Oh, I beg
your pardon; I didn't quite mean that. I--I mean you are nothing to me
in that way. But you--you're not keeping to your word. You promised, you
know, that you'd use your influence with Zuilika; that you'd get her to
be more kind to me--to see me alone and--and all that sort of thing. And
you've not made a single attempt--not one. You've just sat round and
flirted with that tow-headed brute and done nothing at all to help me
on; and--and it's jolly unkind of you, that's what!"

Cleek heard Anita's soft rippling laughter; but he waited to hear no
more. Moving swiftly away from the well-hole of the staircase he passed
on tiptoe down the hall to the Major's rooms, and, opening the door,
went in. The old soldier was standing, with arms folded, at the window
looking silently out into the darkness of the night. He turned at the
sound of the door's opening and moved toward Cleek with a white,
agonised face and a pair of shaking, outstretched hands.

"Well?" he said with a sort of gasp.

"My dear Major," said Cleek quietly. "The wisest of men are sometimes
mistaken--that is my excuse for my own short-sightedness. I said in the
beginning that his was either a case of swindling or a case of murder,
did I not? Well, I now amend my verdict. It is a case of swindling _and_
murder; and your son has had nothing to do with either!"

"Oh, thank