, but was unable to articulate a word.

I saw the fun had stopped and the faces of all were turned upon me
anxiously. The Baron had risen, and his dark countenance peered into
mine with a fiendish, murderous expression.

"I'm ill!" I gasped. "I--I'm sure I'm poisoned!"

The faces of all smiled again, while the Baron uttered some words which
I could not understand, and then there was a dead silence, all still
watching me intently--all except a fair-haired young man opposite me,
who seemed to have fallen back in his chair unconscious.

"You fiends!" I cried, with a great effort, as I struggled to rise.
"What have I done to you that you should--poison--me?"

I know that the Baron grinned in my face, and that I fell forward
heavily upon the table, my heart gripped in the spasm of death.

Of what occurred afterwards I have no recollection, for when I slowly
regained knowledge of things around me, I found myself lying beneath a
bare, leafless hedge in a grass field. I managed to struggle to my feet,
and discovered myself in a bare, flat, open country. As far as I could
judge it was midday. I got to a gate, skirted a hedge, and gained the
main road. With difficulty I walked to the nearest town, a distance of
about four miles, without meeting a soul, and to my surprise found
myself in Hitchin. The spectacle of a man entering the town in evening
dress and hatless in broad daylight was no doubt curious, but I was
anxious to return to London and give information against those who had,
without any apparent motive, laid an ingenious plot to poison me.

At the "Sun" I learned that the time was eleven in the morning. The only
manner in which I could account for my presence in Hitchin was that,
believed to be dead by the Baron and his accomplices, I had been
conveyed in a car to the spot where I was found.

What, I wondered, had become of the fair-haired young man whom I had
seen unconscious opposite me?

A few shillings remained in my pocket, and, strangely enough, beside me
when I recovered consciousness I had found a small fluted phial marked
"Prussic acid--poison." The assassins had attempted to make it apparent
that I had committed suicide!

Two hours later, after a rest and a wash, I borrowed an overcoat and
golf-cap, and took the train to King's Cross. At Judd Street Police
Station I made a statement, and with two plain-clothes officers returned
to the house in Burton Crescent, only to find that the fair Julie and
her