all the week. It was a comfort to think that this vigil
was a useful one.

Severino slept fitfully, and Langholm had never a long stretch of
uninterrupted thought.

But before morning he had decided to give Steel a chance. It was a vague
decision, dependent on the chance that Steel gave him when they met, as
meet they must. Meanwhile Langholm had some cause for satisfaction with
the mere resolve; it defined the line that he took with a somewhat
absurd but equally startling visitor, who waited upon him early in the
forenoon, in the person of the Chief Constable of Northborough.

This worthy had heard of Langholm's quest, and desired to be informed of
what success, if any, he had met with up to the present. Langholm opened
his eyes.

"It's my own show," he protested.

"Would you say that if you had got the man? I doubt it would be our show
then!" wheezed the Chief Constable, who was enormously fat.

"It would be Scotland Yard's," admitted Langholm, "perhaps."

"Unless you got him up here," suggested the fat official. "In that case
you would naturally come to me."

Langholm met his eyes. They were very small and bright, as the eyes of
the obese often are, or as they seem by contrast with a large crass
face. Langholm fancied he perceived a glimmer of his own enlightenment,
and instinctively he lied.

"We are not likely to get him up here," he said. "This is about the last
place where I should look!"

The Chief Constable took his departure with a curious smile. Langholm
began to feel uneasy; his unforeseen sympathy with Steel assumed the
form of an actual fear on his behalf. Severino was another thorn in his
side. He knew that Rachel had been written to, and fell into a fever of
impatience and despair because the morning did not bring her to his
bedside. She was not coming at all. She had refused to come--or her
husband would not allow it. So he must die without seeing her again! The
man was as unreasonable as sick men will be; nothing would console him
but Langholm's undertaking to go to Normanthorpe himself after lunch and
plead in person with the stony-hearted lady or her tyrannical lord. This
plan suited Langholm well enough. It would pave the way to the "chance"
which he had resolved to give to Rachel's husband.

That resolve was not weakened by successive encounters, first with a
policeman near the entrance gates, next with a trespasser whom Langholm
rightly took for another policeman in plain clothes, an