athed.

Meanwhile, papers were examined, and every box and chest which
contained written matter was searched for a clue to the missing child.
Peter was engaged in long consultations with detectives, and lawyers
were running up goodly bills, and British Consuls were making
investigations abroad. A whole train of inquiries was set in motion,
and pens and tongues were busy. The powerful hand of the law stretched
itself out in secret to this country and to that, only to be met with a
baffling failure to hold or to discover anything. Money was spent
lavishly, and great brains tried to solve the mystery; and Mrs. Ogilvie
lay in her grave in a silence that could not be broken, her hand, which
had traced the few lines on one sheet of notepaper, cold and still for
ever.

CHAPTER VIII

When Peter came back from Spain he came to an empty house. The big
reception rooms at Bowshott were swathed in brown holland and
dust-sheets, pictures were covered and carpets rolled up, giving an air
of desolation to the place. The flowers in the formal gardens had all
been dug up, and the carefully tended designs--so like a stitchwork
pattern--had lost their mosaic of colour, leaving merely a careful
drawing of brown upon green. The banks of flowering exotics, which his
mother had loved to have in her drawing-rooms, had been removed to the
greenhouses and conservatories. The sight of the gardeners mowing, for
the last time in the season, the hundred-year-old turf of the lawn
conveyed a suggestion of regret with it; the old pony harnessed to the
mowing machine stepped sedately and quietly in his boots on the close,
fine grass. Everything about Bowshott looked stately and beautiful in
the clean, sharp air of the morning, when Peter drove up to the
entrance after a long night journey and ascended the flight of steps
leading to the hall door.

His return to the inheritance which had been indisputably his since he
was a little boy had a horrible feeling of unreality about it. Half a
dozen times in the course of the morning he had to check himself when
he found his thoughts wandering to alterations or improvements, and to
tell himself, with a bewildered feeling, that perhaps he had not a
right to a flower in the garden or a chair in the house.

'I can't believe it's not mine,' he said aloud, as he drove up the long
avenue from the station in his dog-cart, with one of the famous
Bowshott hackneys in the shafts. 'I can't believe it'