208
XXII. FACE TO FACE 220
XXIII. A COUNTERFEIT PRESENTMENT 224
XXIV. FIRE! 232
XXV. "IT'S DOGGED AS DOES IT" 239
XXVI. A TELL-TALE ORNAMENT 246
XXVII. TOO LATE! 269
XXVIII. A WILD-GOOSE CHASE 276
XXIX. AT THE HOUSE BY THE LOCK 284
XXX. CONCLUSION 298

THE HOUSE BY THE LOCK

CHAPTER I

The Lady in the Stage Box

"Hullo, old chap! Who would ever have thought of seeing you here
to-night? What's brought you back to civilisation again?"

I turned suddenly, surprised by the sound of a familiar voice in my ear.
It was the night of Christmas Eve, and I was just entering the lobby of
the St. James's, the first time, as it happened, I had seen the inside
of a theatre for two years.

For the fraction of a moment I could not remember where I had known the
man who addressed me so jovially. My way of knocking about the world
brought me into contact with so many people that it was difficult to
sort my gallery of faces, and keep each one mentally ticketed. But after
a second or two of staring through that convenient medium, my monocle, I
was able to place the man who had accosted me. He was a rich mining king
from Colorado, by the name of Harvey Farnham, whom I had met in Denver,
when I had been dawdling through America three or four years ago.

I pronounced his name with a certain self-satisfaction in having so
readily recalled it, and we shook each other by the hand.

"What's brought me back to civilisation?" I echoed, lazily. "I really
don't know--unless it was because I'd got tired of the other thing.
Adventure--change--that's what I am in search of, my dear Farnham."

"And you come back here from service as war correspondent in Egypt
(where I last read of you in the papers as having been carried down a
cataract for twenty-six miles before a launch ran out and saved you) in
the hope of finding 'adventure' in this workaday close of the nineteenth
century? That's too good."

I laughed and shrugged my shoulders. "Yes; why not? Why should there not
be as great a possibility of obtaining new sensations, or at least old
ones in different form,