And the boy answered promptly, "Yes, thik there gentleman, what's stoppin' at the Talbot Arms. And another gentleman, too; o'ny t'other one come after and went t'other way round. A big zart o' a gentleman wi' 'ands vit vor two. He axed me the zame question, had anybody gone by. This is dree of 'ee as has come zince I've been a zitting here."

Guy paid no attention to the second-named gentleman, with the hands fit for two, or to his inquiries after who might have gone before him. He fastened at once on the really important and serious information that the person who was stopping at the Talbot Arms had shortly before turned down the side footpath.

"All right, my boy," he said, tossing the lad sixpence, the first coin he came across in his waistcoat pocket. The boy opened his eyes wide, and pocketed it with a grin. So unexpected a largess sufficed to impress the handsome stranger firmly on his memory. He didn't forget him when a few days later he was called on to give evidence—at a coroner's inquest.

But Guy, unsuspicious of the harm he had done himself, walked on, all on fire, down the woodland path. It was a shady path, and it led through a deep dell arched with hazels on every side, while a little brawling brook ran along hard by, more heard than seen, in the bottom of the dingle. Thick bramble obscured the petty rapids from view and half trailed their lush shoots here and there across the pathway. It was just such a mossy spot as Cyril would have loved to paint; and Guy, himself half an artist by nature, would in any other mood have paused to gaze delighted on its tangled greenery.

As it was, however, he was in no mood to loiter long over ferns and mosses. He walked down that narrow way, where luxuriant branches of fresh green blackberry bushes encroached upon the track, still seething in soul, and full of the bitter wrong inflicted upon him by the man he had till lately considered his dearest friend. At each bend of the footpath, as it threaded its way through the tortuous dell, following close the elbows of the bickering little stream, he expected to come full in sight of Nevitt. But, gaze as he would, no Nevitt appeared. He must have gone on, Guy thought, and come out at the other end, into the upland road, of which the porters at Mambury Station had told him.

At last he arrived at a delicious green nook, where the shade of the trees overhead was exceptionally dense, and where the ferns by the side were somewhat torn and trodden. Casting his eye on the ground to the left, a metal clasp, gleaming silvery among the bracken, happened to attract his cursory attention. Something about that clasp looked strangely familiar. He paused and stared hard at it. Surely, surely he had seen those metal knobs before. A flash of recognition ran electric through his brain. Why, yes; it was the fastener of Montague Nevitt's pocket-book—the pocket-book in which he carried his most private documents; the pocket-book that must have held Cyril's stolen six thousand. Guy stooped down to pick it up with a whirling sense of surprise. Great heavens! what was this? Not only the clasp, but the pocket-book itself—the pocket-book filled full and crammed to bursting with papers. Ah, mercy, what papers? Yes, incredible—the money! Hundred-pound notes! Not a doubt upon earth of it. The whole of the stolen and re-stolen three thousand.

For a minute or two Guy stood there, unable to believe his own swimming eyes. What on earth could have happened? Was it chance or design? Had Nevitt deliberately thrown away his ill-gotten gains? Were detectives on the track? Was he anxious to conceal his part in the theft? Had remorse got the better of him? Or was he frightened at last, thinking Guy was on his way to recover and restore Cyril's stolen property?

But no, the pocket-book was neither hidden in the ferns nor yet studiously thrown away. From the place where it lay, Guy felt confident at once it had fallen unperceived from Nevitt's pocket, and been trodden by his heel unawares into the yielding leaf-mould.

Had he pulled it out accidentally with his handkerchief? Very likely, Guy thought. But then, how strange and improbable that a man so methodical and calculating as Nevitt should carry such valuable belongings as those in the self-same pocket. It was certainly most singular. However, Guy congratulated himself, after a moment's pause, that so much at least of the stolen property was duly recovered. He could pay back one-half of the purloined sum now to Cyril's credit. So he went on his way through the rest of the wood in a somewhat calmer and easier frame of mind. To be sure, he had still to hunt down that villain Nevitt, and to tax him to his face with his double-dyed treachery. But it was something, nevertheless, to have recovered a part, at any rate, of the stolen money. And Nevitt himself need never know by what fortunate accident he had happened to recover it.

He emerged on the upland road, and struck back towards Mambury. All the way round, he never saw his man. Weary with walking, he returned in the end to the Talbot Arms. Had Mr. McGregor come back? No, not yet; but he was sure to be home for dinner. Then Guy would wait, and dine at the inn as well. He might have to stop all night, but he must see McGregor.

As the day wore on, however, it became gradually clear to him that Montague Nevitt didn't mean to return at all. Hour after hour passed by, but nothing was heard of him. The landlord, good man, began to express his doubts and fears most freely. He hoped no harm hadn't come to the gentleman in the parlour; he had a powerful zight o' money on un for a man to carry about; the landlord had zeen it when he took out his book from his pocket to pay the porter. Volks didn't ought to go about with two or dree hundred pound or more in the lonely lanes on the edge of the moorland.

But Guy, for his part, put a different interpretation on the affair at once. In some way or other Montague Nevitt, he thought, must have found out he was being tracked, and, fearing for his safety, must have dropped the pocket-book and made off, without note or notice given, on his own sound legs, for some other part of the country.

So Guy made up his mind to return next morning by the very first train direct to Plymouth, and there inquire once more whether anything further had been seen of the noticeable stranger.



CHAPTER XXIV.

A SLIGHT MISUNDERSTANDING.



On the very same day that Guy Waring visited Mambury, where his mother was married, Montague Nevitt had hunted up the entry of Colonel Kelmscott's wedding in the church register.

Nevitt's behaviour, to say the truth, wasn't quite so black as Guy Waring painted it. He had gone off with the extra three thousand in his pocket, to be sure; but he didn't intend to appropriate it outright to his own uses. He merely meant to give Guy a thoroughly good fright, as it wasn't really necessary the call should be met for another fortnight; and then, as soon as he'd found out the truth about Colonel Kelmscott and his unacknowledged sons, he proposed to use his knowledge of the forgery as a lever with Guy, so as to force him to come to advantageous terms with his supposed father. Nevitt's idea was that Guy and Cyril should drive a hard bargain on their own account with the Colonel, and that he himself should then receive a handsome commission on the transaction from both the brothers, under penalty of disclosing the true facts about the cheque by whose aid Guy had met their joint liability to the Rio Negro Diamond Mines.

It was with no small joy, therefore, that Nevitt saw at last in the parish register of St. Mary's at Mambury, the interesting announcement, "June 27th, Henry Lucius Kelmscott, of the parish of Plymouth, bachelor, private in the Regiment of Scots Greys, to Lucy Waring, spinster, of this parish."

He saw at a glance, of course, why Kelmscott of Tilgate had chosen to describe himself in this case as a private soldier. But he also saw that the entry was an official document, and that here he had one firm hold the more on Colonel Kelmscott, who must falsely have sworn to that incorrect description. The great point of all, however, was the signature to the book; and though nearly thirty years had elapsed since those words were written, it was clear to Nevitt, when he compared the autograph in the register with one of Colonel Kelmscott's recent business letters, brought with him for the purpose, that both had been penned by one and the same person.

He chuckled to himself with delight to think how great a benefactor he had proved himself unawares to Guy and Cyril. At that very moment, no doubt, his misguided young friend whom he had compelled to assist him with the sinews of war for this important campaign was reviling and objurating him in revengeful terms as the blackest and most infamous of double-dyed traitors. Ah, well! ah, well! the good are inured to gross ingratitude. Guy little knew, as he, Montague Nevitt, stood there triumphant in the vestry, blandly rewarding the expectant clerk for his pains with a whole Bank of England five-pound note—the largest sum that functionary had ever in his life received all at once in a single payment—Guy little knew that Nevitt was really the chief friend and founder of the family fortunes, and was prepared to compel the "unknown benefactor" (for a moderate commission) to recognise his unacknowledged firstborn sons before all the world as the heirs to Tilgate. But yesterday, they were nameless waifs and strays, of uncertain origin, ashamed of their birth, and ignorant even whether they had been duly begotten in lawful wedlock; to-day, they were the legal inheritors of an honoured name and a great estate, the first and foremost among the landed gentry of a wealthy and beautiful English county.

He smiled to think what a good turn he had done unawares to those ungrateful youths—and how little credit, as yet, they were prepared to give him for it. In such a mood he returned to the inn to lunch. His spirits were high. This was a good day's work, and he could afford, indeed, to make merry with his host over it. He ordered in a bottle of wine—such wine as the little country cellar could produce, and invited that honest man, the landlord, to step in and share it with him. He had tasted worse sherry on London dinner-tables, and he told his host so. An affable man with inferiors, Mr. Montague Nevitt! Then he strolled out by himself down the path by the brook. It was a pleasant walk, with the water making music in little trickles by its side, and Montague Nevitt, as a man of taste, found it suited exactly with his temper for the moment. He noted an undercurrent of rejoicing and triumphant cheeriness in the tone of the stream as it plashed among the pebbles on its precipitous bed that suggested to his mind some bars of a symphony which he determined to compose as soon as he got home again to his beloved fiddle.

So he walked along by himself, elate, and with a springy step, on thoughts of ambition intent, till he came at last to a cool and shadowy place, where as yet the ferns were NOT broken down and trampled underfoot, though Guy Waring found them so some twenty minutes later.

At that spot he looked up, and saw advancing along the path in the opposite direction the burly figure of a man, in a light tourist suit, whom he hadn't yet observed since he came to Mambury. The very first point he noticed about the man, long before he recognised him, was a pair of overgrown, obtrusive hands held somewhat awkwardly in front of him—just like Gilbert Gildersleeve's. The likeness, indeed, was so ridiculously close that Montague Nevitt smiled quietly to himself to observe it. If he'd been in the Tilgate district now, he'd have declared, without the slightest hesitation, that the man on the path WAS Gilbert Gildersleeve.

One second later, he pulled himself up with a jerk in alarmed surprise. "Great heavens" he cried to himself, a weird sense of awe creeping over him piece-meal, "either this is a dream or else it IS, it must be Gilbert Gildersleeve."

And so, indeed, it was. Gilbert Gildersleeve himself, in his proper person. But the eminent Q.C., better versed in the wiles of time and place than Guy Waring in his innocence, had not come obtrusively to Mambury village or asked point-blank at the Talbot Arms by his own right name for the man he was in search of. Such simplicity of procedure would never even have occurred to that practised hand at the Old Bailey. Mr. Gilbert Gildersleeve appeared on that woodland path in the general guise of the common pedestrian tourist with his head-quarters at Ivybridge, walking about on the congenial outskirts of the Moor in search of the picturesque, and coming and going by mere accident through Mambury. He had hovered around the neighbourhood for two days, off and on, in search of his man; and now, by careful watching, like an amateur detective, he had run his prey to earth by a dexterous flank-movement and secured an interview with him where he couldn't shirk or avoid it.

To Montague Nevitt, however, the meeting seemed at first sight but the purest accident. He had no reason to suppose, indeed, that Gilbert Gildersleeve had any special interest in his visit to Mambury, further than might be implied in its possible connection with Granville Kelmscott's affairs; and he didn't believe Gwendoline, in her fear of her father, that blustering man, would ever have communicated to him the personal facts of their interview at Tilgate. So he advanced to meet his old acquaintance, the barrister, with frankly outstretched hand.

"Mr. Gildersleeve!" he exclaimed in some surprise. "No, it can't be you. Well, this IS indeed an unexpected pleasure."

Gilbert Gildersleeve gazed down upon him from the towering elevation of his six feet four. Montague Nevitt was tall enough, as men go in England, but with his slim, tailor-made form, and his waxed moustaches, he looked by the side of that big-built giant, like a: Bond Street exquisite before some prize-fighting Goliath. The barrister didn't hold out his huge hand in return. On the contrary, he concealed it, as far as was possible, behind his burly back, and, looking down from the full height of his contempt upon the sinister smirking creature who advanced to greet him with that false smile on his face, he asked severely,

"What are YOU doing here? That's what I have to ask. What foxy ferreting have you come down to Mambury for?"

"Foxy ferreting," Montague Nevitt repeated, drawing back as if stung, and profoundly astonished. "Why, what do you mean by that, Mr. Gildersleeve? I don't understand you." The home-thrust was too true—after the great cross-examiner's well-known bullying manner —not to pierce him to the quick. "Who dares to say I go anywhere ferreting?"

"I do," Gilbert Gildersleeve answered, with assured confidence. "I say it, and I know it. You pitiful sneak, don't deny it to ME. You were in the vestry this morning looking up the registers. Even YOU, with your false eyes, sir, daren't look me in the face and tell me you weren't. I saw you there myself. And I know you found in the books what you wanted; for you paid the clerk an extravagant fee. ... What's that? you rat, don't try to interrupt me. Don't try to bully me. It never succeeds. Montague Nevitt, I tell you, I WON'T be bullied." And the great Q.C. put his foot down on the path with an elephantine solidity that made the prospect of bullying him seem tolerably unlikely. "I know the facts, and I'll stand no prevarication. Now, tell me, what vile use did you mean to make of your discovery this morning?"

Montague Nevitt drew back, fairly nonplussed for the moment by such a vigorous and unexpected attack on his flank. Resourceful as he was, even his cunning mind came wholly unprepared to this sudden cross-questioning. He felt his own physical inferiority to the big Q.C. more keenly just then than he could ever have conceived it possible for a man of his type to feel it. After all, mind doesn't always triumph over matter. Montague Nevitt was aware that that mountain of a man, with his six feet four of muscular humanity, fairly cowed and overawed him at such very close quarters.

"I don't see what business it is of yours, Mr. Gildersleeve," he murmured, in a somewhat apologetic voice. "I may surely be allowed to hunt up questions of pedigree, of service in the end to myself and my friends, without YOUR interference."

Gilbert Gildersleeve glared at him, and flared up all at once with righteous indignation.

"Of service in the end to yourself and your friends!" he cried, with unfeigned scorn, putting his own interpretation, as was natural, on the words. "Why, you cur! you reptile! you unblushing sneak! Do you mean to say openly you avow your intention of threatening and blackmailing me? here—alone—to my face! You extortionate wretch! I wouldn't have believed even YOU in your heart would descend to such meanness."

Montague Nevitt, flurried and taken aback as he was, yet reflected vaguely with some wonder, as he listened and looked, what this sudden passion of disinterested zeal could betoken. Why such burning solicitude for Colonel Kelmscott's estate on the part of a man who was his avowed enemy? Even if Gwendoline meant to marry the young fellow Granville, with her father's consent, how could Nevitt himself levy blackmail upon Gilbert Gildersleeve by his knowledge of the two Warings' claim to the property? A complication surely. Was there not some unexpected intricacy here which the cunning schemer himself didn't yet understand, but which might redound, if unravelled, to his greater advantage?

"Blackmail YOU, Mr. Gildersleeve," he cried, with a righteously indignant air. "That's an ugly word. I blackmail nobody; and least of all the father of a lady whom I still regard, in spite of all she can say or do to make my life a blank, with affection and respect as profound as ever. How can my inquiries into the two Warings' affairs—"

Gilbert Gildersleeve crushed him with a sudden outburst of indignant wrath.

"You cad!" he cried, growing red in the face with horror and disgust. "You dare to speak so to me, and to urge such motives! But you've mistaken your man. I won't be bullied. If what you want is to use this vile knowledge you've so vilely ferreted out, as a lever to compel me to marry my daughter to you against her will—I can only tell you, you sneak, you're on the wrong tack. I will never consent to it. You may do your worst, but you will never bend me. I'm not a man to be bent or bullied—I won't be put down. I'll withstand you and defy you. You may ruin me, if you like, but you'll never break me. I stand here firm. Expose me, and I'll fight you to the bitter end: I'll fight you, and I'll conquer you."

He spoke with a fiery earnestness that Nevitt was only just beginning to understand. There was something in this. Here was a clue indeed to follow up and investigate. Surely, a menace to Granville Kelmscott's prospects could never have moved that heavy, phlegmatic, pachydermatous man to such an outburst of anger and suppressed fear.

"Expose YOU?" Nevitt repeated, in a dazed and startled voice. "Expose YOU, my dear sir! I assure you, in truth, I don't understand you."

The barrister gazed down upon him with immeasurable scorn. "You liar!" he broke forth, almost choking at the words. "How dare you so pretend and prevaricate to my face? I KNOW it's not true. My own daughter told me. She told me what you said to her—every word of your vile threats. You had the incredible meanness to terrify a poor helpless and innocent girl by threatening to expose her mother's disgrace publicly. Only YOU could have done it; but you did it, you abject thing, you did it. She told me with her own lips you threatened to come down to Mambury, to hunt up the records. And she told me the truth; for I've seen you doing it."

A light broke slowly upon Montague Nevitt's mind. He drew a deep breath. This was good luck incredible. What Gilbert Gildersleeve meant he hadn't as yet, to be sure, the faintest conception. But it was clear they two were at cross-questions with one another. The secret Gilbert Gildersleeve thought he had come down to Mambury to discover was not the secret he had actually found out in the register that morning. It was nothing about the Kelmscotts or Guy and Cyril Waring; it was something about the great Q..C. and his wife themselves—presumably some unknown and disgraceful fact in Mrs. Gilbert Gildersleeve's early history.

And here was the cleverest lawyer at the English criminal bar just giving himself away—giving himself away unawares and telling him the secret, bit by bit, unconsciously.

This chance was too valuable for Mr. Montague Nevitt to lose. At all risks he must worm it out. He paused and temporized. His cue was now not to let Gilbert Gildersleeve see he didn't know his secret. He must draw on the Q.C. by obscure half hints till he was inextricably entangled in a complete confession.

"I had no intention of terrifying Miss Gildersleeve, I'm sure," he said, in his blandest voice, with his best company smile, now recovering his equanimity exactly in proportion as the barrister grew angrier. "I merely desired to satisfy myself as to the salient facts, and to learn their true bearing upon the family history. If I spoke to her at all as to any knowledge I might possess with regard to any other lady's early antecedents—"

Gilbert Gildersleeve's brow was black as night. His great hands trembled and twitched convulsively. Was ever blackguard so cynically candid in his avowal of the basest crimes as this fine-spoken specimen of the culture of Pall Mall in his open confession of that disgusting insult to a young girl's innocence? Gilbert Gildersleeve, who was at heart an honest man, loathed and despised and scorned and detested him.

"Do you dare to hint to me, then," he cried, every muscle of his body quivering with just horror, "that you told my own daughter you thought you had reason to suspect her own mother's early antecedents?"

Montague Nevitt looked up at him with a quietly sarcastic smile. "All's fair in love and war, you know," he said, not caring to commit himself.

That smile sealed his fate. With an irrepressible impulse, Gilbert Gildersleeve sprang upon him. He didn't mean to hurt the man: he sprang upon him merely as the sole outlet for his own incensed and outraged feelings. Those great hands seized him for a second by the dainty white throat, and flung him back in anger. Montague Nevitt fell heavily on a thick mass of bracken. There was a gurgle, a gasp; then his head lolled senseless. He was very much hurt. That at least was certain. The barrister stood over him for a minute, still purple in the face. Montague Nevitt was white—very white and death-like. All at once it occurred to the big strong man that his hands—those great hands—were very fierce and powerful. He had clutched Nevitt by the throat, half unconsciously, with all his might, just to give him a purchase as he flung the man from him. He looked at him again. Great heavens—what was this? It burst over him at once. He awoke to it with a wild start. The fellow was dead! And this was clearly manslaughter!

Justifiable homicide, if the jury knew all. But no jury now could ever know all. And he had killed him unawares! A great horror came over him. The man was dead—the man was dead; and he, Gilbert Gildersleeve, had unconsciously choked him.

He had no time to think. He had no time to calculate. His wrath was still hot, though rapidly cooling down before this awful discovery. Hide it! Hide it! Hide it! That was all he could think. He lifted the body in his arms, as easily as most men would lift a baby. Then he laid it down among the brambles close beside the stream. Something heavy fell out of the pocket as he carried it. The barrister took no heed. Little matter for that. He laid it down in fear and trembling. As soon as it was hidden, he fled for his life. By trackless ways, he walked over the Moor, and returned to Ivybridge unseen very late in the evening. Ten minutes after he left the spot, Guy Waring passed by and picked up the pocket-book.



CHAPTER XXV.

LEAD TRUMPS.



Naturally, under these circumstances, it was all in vain that Guy Waring pursued his investigations into Montague Nevitt's whereabouts. Neither at Plymouth nor anywhere else along the skirts of Dartmoor could he learn that anything more had been seen or heard of the man who called himself "Mr. McGregor." And yet Guy felt sure Nevitt wouldn't go far from Mambury, as things stood just then; for as soon as he missed the pocket-book containing the three thousand pounds, he would surely take some steps to recover it.

Two days later, however, Gilbert Gildersleeve sat in the hotel at Plymouth, where he had moved from Ivybridge after—well, as he phrased it to himself, after that unfortunate accident. The blustering Q.C. was like another man now. For the first time in his life he knew what it meant to be nervous and timid. Every sound made him suppress an involuntary start; for as yet he had heard no whisper of the body being discovered. He couldn't leave the neighbourhood, however, till the murder was out. Dangerous as he felt it to remain on the spot, some strange spell seemed to bind him against his will to Dartmoor. He must stop and hear what local gossip had to say when the body came to light. And above all, for the present, he hadn't the courage to go home; he dared not face his own wife and daughter.

So he stayed on and lounged, and pretended to interest himself with walks over the hills and up the Tamar valley.

As he sat there in the billiard-room, that day, a young fellow entered whom he remembered to have seen once or twice in London, at evening parties, with Montague Nevitt. He turned pale at the sight—Gilbert Gildersleeve turned pale, that great red man. At first he didn't even remember the young fellow's name; but it came back to him in time that he was one Guy Waring. It was a hard ordeal to meet him, but Gilbert Gildersleeve felt he must brazen it out. To slink away from the young man would be to rouse suspicion. So they sat and talked for a minute or two together, on indifferent subjects, neither, to say truth, being very well pleased to see the other under such peculiar circumstances. Then Guy, who had the least reason for concealment of the two, sauntered out for a stroll, with his heart still full of that villain Nevitt, whose name, of course, he had never mentioned to Gilbert Gildersleeve. And Gilbert Gildersleeve, for his part, had had equal cause for a corresponding reticence as to their common acquaintance.

Just as Guy left the room, the landlord dropped in and began to talk with his guest about the latest new sensation.

"Heard the news, sir, this morning?" he asked, with an important air. "Inspector's just told me. A case very much in your line of business. Dead body's been discovered at Mambury, choked, and then thrown among the brake by the river. Name of McGregor—a visitor from London. And they do say the police have a clue to the murderer. Person who did it—"

Gilbert Gildersleeve's heart gave a great bound within him, and then stood stock-still; but by an iron effort of will he suppressed all outer sign of his profound emotion. He seemed to the observant eye merely interested and curious, as the landlord finished his sentence carelessly—"Person who did it's supposed to be a young man who was at Mambury this week, of the name of Waring."

Gilbert Gildersleeve's heart gave another bound, still more violent than before. But again he repressed with difficulty all external symptoms of his profound agitation. This was very strange news. Then somebody else was suspected instead of himself. In one way that was bad; for Gilbert Gildersleeve had a conscience and a sense of justice. But, in another way, why, it would save time for the moment, and divert attention from his own personality. Better anything now than immediate suspicion. In a week or two more every trace would be lost of his presence at Mambury.

"Waring," he said thoughtfully, turning over the name to himself, as if he attached it to no particular individual. "Waring—Waring—Waring."

He paused and looked hard. Ha! so far good! It was clear the landlord didn't know Waring was the name of the young man who had just left the billiard-room. This was lucky, indeed, for if he HAD known it now, and had taxed Guy then and there, before his own very face, with being the murderer of this unknown person at Mambury, Gilbert Gildersleeve felt no course would have been open for him save to tell the whole truth on the spot unreservedly. Try as he would, he COULDN'T see another man arrested before his very eyes for the crime he himself had really, though almost unwittingly, committed.

"Waring," he repeated slowly, like one who endeavoured to collect his scattered thoughts; "what sort of person was he, do you know? And how did the police come to get a clue to him?"

The landlord, nothing loth, went off into a long and circumstantial story of the discovery of the body, with minute details of how the innkeeper at Mambury had traced the supposed murderer—who gave no name—by an envelope which he'd left in his bedroom that evening. The county was up in arms about the affair to-day. All Dartmoor was being searched, and it was supposed the fellow was in hiding somewhere in the neighbourhood of Tavistock or Oakhampton. They'd catch him by to-night. The landlord wouldn't be surprised, indeed, now he came to think on it, if his truest himself—here a very long pause—were retained by-and-by for the prosecution.

Gilbert Gildersleeve drew a deep breath, unperceived. That was all, was it? The pause had unnerved him. He talked some minutes, as unconcernedly as he could, though trembling inwardly all the while, about the murder and the murderer. The landlord listened with profound respect to the words of legal wisdom as they dropped from his lips; for he knew Mr. Gildersleeve by common repute as one of the ablest and acutest of criminal lawyers in all England. Then, after a short interval, the big burly man, moving his guilty fingers nervously over the seal on his watch-chain, and assuming as much as possible his ordinary air of blustering self-assertion, asked, in an off-hand fashion, "By the way, let me see, I've, some business to arrange; what's the number of my friend Mr. Billington's bedroom?"

The landlord looked up with a little start of surprise. "Mr. Billington?" he said, hesitating. "We've got no Mr. Billington."

Gilbert Gildersleeve smiled a sickly smile. It was neck or nothing now. He must go right through with it. "Oh yes," he answered, with prompt conviction, playing a dangerous card well—for how could he know what name this young man Waring might possibly be passing under? "The gentleman who was talking to me when you came in just now. His name's Billington—though, perhaps," he added, after a pause, with a reflective air, "he may have given you another one. Young men will be young men. They've often some reason, when travelling, for concealing their names. Though Billington's not the sort of fellow, to be sure, who's likely to be knocking about anywhere incognito."

The landlord laughed. "Oh, we've plenty of that sort," he replied good-humouredly. "Both ladies and gentlemen. It all makes trade. But your friend ain't one of 'em. To tell you the truth, he didn't give any name at all when he came to the hotel; and we didn't ask any. Billington, is it? Ah, Billington, Billington. I knew a Billington myself once, a trainer at Newmarket. Well, he's a very pleasant young man, nice-spoken, and that; but I don't fancy he's quite right in his head, somehow."

With instinctive cleverness, Gilbert Clildersleeve snatched at the opening at once. "Ah no, poor fellow," he said, shaking his head sympathetically. "You've found that out already, have you? Well, he's subject to delusions a bit; mere harmless delusions; but he's not at all dangerous. Excitable, very, when anything odd turns up; he'll be calling himself Waring and giving himself in charge for this murder, I dare say, when he comes to hear of it. But as good-hearted a fellow as ever lived, though; only, a trifle obstinate. If you've any difficulty with him at any time, just send for me. I've known him from a boy. He'll do anything I tell him."

It was a critical game, but Gilbert Gildersleeve saw something definite must be done, and he trusted to bluster, and a well-known name, to carry him through with it. And, indeed, he had said enough. From that moment forth, the landlord's suspicions were never even so much as aroused by the innocent young man with the preoccupied manner, who knew Mr. Gildersleeve. The great Q.C.'s word was guarantee enough—for any one but himself. And the great Q.C. himself knew it. Why, a chance word from his lips was enough to protect Guy Waring from suspicion. Who would ever believe, then, anything so preposterously improbable as that the great Q.C. himself was the murderer?

Not the police, you may be sure; nor the Plymouth landlord.

He went out into the town, with his mind now filled full of a curious scheme. A plan of campaign loomed up visibly before him. Waring was suspected. Therefore Waring must somehow have given cause for suspicion. Well, Waring was a friend of Montague Nevitt's, and had evidently been at Mambury, either with him or without him, immediately before the—h'm—the unfortunate accident. But as soon as Waring came to learn of the discovery of the body, which he would be sure to do from the paper that evening at latest, he would see at once the full strength of whatever suspicions might tell against him. Now, Gilbert Gildersleeve's experience of criminal cases had abundantly shown him that a suspected person, even when innocent, always has one fixed desire in his head—to gain time, anyhow. So Waring would naturally wish to gain time, at whatever cost. There were evidently circumstances connecting Waring with the crime; there were none at all, known to the outer world, connecting the eminent lawyer. Therefore, the eminent lawyer argued to himself, as coolly almost as if it had been somebody else's case, not his own, he was conducting—therefore, if an immediate means of escape is provided for Waring, Waring will almost undoubtedly fall blindfold into it.

Not that he meant to let Guy pay the penalty in the end for his own rash crime. He was no hardened villain. He had still a conscience. If the worst came to the worst, he said to himself, he would tell all, openly, rather than let an innocent man suffer. But, like every one else, in accordance with his own inference from his observation of others, he, too, wanted to gain time, anyhow; and if he could but gain time by kindly helping Guy to escape for the present, why, he would gladly do so. An innocent man may be suspected for the moment, Gilbert Gildersleeve thought to himself, with a lawyer's blind confidence; but under our English law he need never at least fear that the suspicion will be permanent. For lawyers repeat their own incredible commonplaces about the absolute perfection of English law so often that at last, by a sort of retributive nemesis, they really almost come to believe them.

Filled with these ideas, then, which rose naturally up in his mind without his taking the trouble, as it were, definitely to prove them, Gilbert Gildersleeve hurried on through the crowded streets of Plymouth town, till he reached the office of the London and South African Steamship Company. There he entered with an air of decided business, and asked to take a passage to Cape Town at once by the steamer "Cetewayo", due to call at Plymouth, outward bound, that evening. He had looked up particulars of sailing in the papers at the hotel, and asked now, as if for himself, for a large and roomy berth, with all his usual self-possession and boldness of manner. The clerk gazed at him carelessly; that big and burly man with the great awkward hands raised no picture in his brain of the supposed murderer of McGregor in the wood at Mambury as that murderer had been described to him by the police that morning, from a verbal portrait after the landlord of the Talbot Arms. This colossal, red-faced, loud-spoken person, who required a large and roomy berth, was certainly "not" the rather slim young man, a little above the medium height, with a dark moustache and a gentle musical voice, whom the inn-keeper had seen in an excited mood on the hunt for McGregor along the slopes of Dartmoor.

"What name?" the clerk asked briskly, after Gilbert Gildersleeve had selected his state-room from the plan, with some show of interest as to its being well amidships and not too near the noise of the engines.

"Billington," the barrister answered, without a glimmer of hesitation. "Arthur Standish Billington, if you want the full name. Thirty-two will suit me very well, I think, and I'll pay for it now. Go aboard when she's sighted, I suppose; nine o'clock or thereabouts."

The clerk made out the ticket in the name he was told. "Yes, nine o'clock," he said curtly. "All luggage to be on board the tender by eight, sharp. You've left taking your passage very late, Mr. Billington. Lucky we've a room that'll suit you, I'm sure, It isn't often we have berths left amidships like this on the day of sailing."

Gilbert Gildersleeve pretended to look unconcerned once more. "No, I suppose not," he answered, in a careless voice. "People generally know their own minds rather longer beforehand. But I'd a telegram from the Cape this morning that calls me over immediately."

He folded up his ticket, and put it in his pocket. Then he pulled out a roll of notes and paid the amount in full. The clerk gave him change promptly. Nobody could ever have suspected so solid a man as the great Q.C. of any more serious crime or misdemeanour than shirking the second service on Sunday evening. There was a ponderous respectability about his portly build that defied detection. The agents of all the steamboat companies had been warned that morning that the slim young man of the name of Waring might try to escape at the last moment. But who could ever suspect this colossal pile, in the British churchwarden style of human architecture, of aiding and abetting the escape of the young man Waring from the pervasive myrmidons of English justice? The very idea was absurd. Gilbert Gildersleeve's waistcoat was above suspicion.

And when Guy Waring returned to his room at the Duke of Devonshire Hotel half an hour later, in complete ignorance as yet of the bare fact of the murder, he found on his table an envelope addressed, in an unknown hand, "Guy Waring, Esq.," while below in the corner, twice underlined, were the importunate words, "IMMEDIATE! IMPORTANT!"

Guy tore it open in wonder. What on earth could this mean? He trembled as he read. Could Cyril have learnt all? Or had Nevitt, that double-dyed traitor, now trebled his treachery by informing against the man whom he had driven into a crime? Guy couldn't imagine what it all could be driving at, for there, before his eyes, in a round schoolboy hand, very carefully formed, without the faintest trace of anything like character, were the words of this strange and startling message, whose origin and intent were alike a mystery to him.

"Guy Waring, a warrant is out for your apprehension. Fly at once, or things may be worse for you. It is something always to gain time for the moment. You will avoid suspicion, public scandal, trial. Enclosed find a ticket for Cape Town by the Cetewayo to-night. She sails at nine. Luggage to be on board the tender by eight sharp. If you go, all can yet be satisfactorily cleared up. If you stay, the danger is great, and may be very serious. Ticket is taken (and paid for) in the name of Arthur Standish Billington. Settle your account at the hotel in that name and go.

"Yours, in frantic haste,

"A SINCERE WELL-WISHER."

Guy gazed at the strange missive long and dubiously. "A warrant is out." He scarcely knew what to do. Oh, for time, time, time! Had Cyril sent this? Or was it some final device of that fiend, Nevitt?



CHAPTER XXVI.

A CHANCE MEETING.



There wasn't much time left, however, for Guy to make up his mind in. He must decide at once. Should he accept this mysterious warning or not? Pure fate decided it. As he hesitated he heard a boy crying in the street. It was the special-edition-fiend calling his evening paper. The words the boy said Guy didn't altogether catch; but the last sentence of all fell on his ear distinctly. He started in horror. It was an awful sound: "Warrant issued to-day for the apprehension of Waring."

Then the letter, whoever wrote it, was not all a lie. The forgery was out. Cyril or the bankers had learnt the whole truth. He was to be arrested to-day as a common felon. All the world knew his shame. He hid his face in his hands. Come what might, he must accept the mysterious warning now. He would take the ticket, and go off to South Africa.

In a moment a whole policy had arisen like a cloud and framed itself in his mind. He was a forger, he knew, and by this time Cyril too most probably knew it. But he had the three thousand pounds safe and sound in his pocket, and those at least he could send back to Cyril. With them he could send a cheque on his own banker for three thousand more; not that there were funds there at present to meet the demand; but if the unknown benefactor should pay in the six thousand he promised within the next few weeks, then Cyril could repay himself from that hypothetical fortune. On the other hand, Guy didn't disguise from himself the strong probability that the unknown benefactor might now refuse to pay in the six thousand. In that case, Guy said to himself with a groan, he would take to the diamond fields, and never rest day or night in his self-imposed task till he had made enough to repay Cyril in full the missing three thousand, and to make up the other three thousand he still owed the creditors of the Rio Negro Company. After which, he would return and give himself up like a man, to stand his trial voluntarily for the crime he had committed.

It was a young man's scheme, very fond and youthful; but with the full confidence of his age he proceeded at once to put it in practice. Indeed, now he came to think upon it, he fancied to himself he saw something like a solution of the mystery in the presence of the great Q.C. at Plymouth that morning. Cyril had found out all, and had determined to save him. The bankers had found out all, and had determined to prosecute. They had consulted Gildersleeve. Gildersleeve had come down on a holiday trip, and run up against him at Plymouth by pure accident. Indeed, Guy remembered now that the great Q.C. looked not a little surprised and excited at meeting him. Clearly Gildersleeve had communicated with the police at once; hence the issue of the warrant. At the same time the writer of the letter, whoever he might be—and Guy now believed he was sent down by Cyril, or in Cyril's interest—the writer had found out the facts betimes, and had taken a passage for him in the name of Billington. Uncertain as he felt about the minor details, Guy was sure this interpretation must be right in the main. For Elma's sake—for the honour of the family—Cyril wished him for the present to disappear. Cyril's wish was sacred. He would go to South Africa.

The great point was now to avoid meeting Gildersleeve before the ship sailed. So he would pay his bill quietly, put his things in his portmanteau, stop in his room till dusk, and then drive off in a close cab to the landing-stage.

But, first of all, he must send the three thousand direct to Cyril.

He sat down in a fit of profound penitence, and penned a heart-broken letter of confession to his brother.

It was vague, of course; such letters are always vague; no man, even in confessing, likes to allude in plain terms to the exact nature of the crime he has committed; and besides, Guy took it for granted that Cyril knew all about the main features of the case already. He didn't ask his brother to forgive him, he said; he didn't try to explain, for explanation would be impossible. How he came to do it, he had no idea himself. A sudden suggestion—a strange unaccountable impulse—a minute or two of indecision—and almost before he knew it, under the spell of that strange eye, the thing was done, irretrievably done for ever. The best he could offer now was to express his profound and undying regret at the wrong he had committed, and by which he had never profited himself a single farthing. Nevitt had deceived him with incredible meanness; he could never have believed any man would act as Nevitt had acted. Nevitt had stolen three thousand pounds of the sum, and applied them to paying off his own debt to the Rio Negro creditors: The remaining three thousand, sent herewith, Guy had recovered, almost by a miracle, from that false creature's grasp, and he returned them now, in proof of the fact, in Montague Nevitt's own pocket-book, which Cyril would no doubt immediately recognise. For himself, he meant to leave England at once, at least for the present. Where he was going he wouldn't as yet let Cyril know. He hoped in a new country to recover his honour and rehabilitate his name. Meanwhile, it was mainly for Cyril's sake that he fled—and for one other person's too—to avoid a scandal. He hoped Cyril would be happy with the woman of his choice; for it was to insure their joint happiness that he was accepting the offer of escape so unexpectedly tendered him.

He sealed up the letter—that incriminating letter, that might mean so much more than he ever put into it—and took it out to the post, with the three thousand pounds and Montague Nevitt's pocket-book in a separate packet. Proud Kelmscott as he was by birth and nature, he slunk through the streets like a guilty man, fancying all eyes were fixed suspiciously upon him. Then he returned to the hotel in a burning heat, went into the smoking room on purpose like an honest man, and rang the bell for the servant boldly.

"Bring my bill, please," he said to the waiter who answered it. "I go at seven o'clock."

"Yes, sir," the waiter replied, with official promptitude. "Directly, sir. What number?"

"I forget the number," Guy answered, with a beating heart; "but the name's Billington."

"Yes, sir," the waiter responded once more, in the self-same unvaried tone, and went off to the office.

Guy waited in profound suspense, half expecting the waiter to come back for the number again; but to his immense surprise and mystification, the fellow didn't. Instead of that, he returned some minutes later, all respectful attention, bringing the bill on a salver, duly headed and lettered, "Mr. Billington, number 40." In unspeakable trepidation, Guy paid it and walked away. Never before in all his life had he been surrounded so close on every side by a thick hedge of impenetrable and inexplicable mystery.

Then a new terror seized him. Was he running his head into a noose, blindfold? Who was the Billington he was thus made to personate, and who must really be staying at the very same time in the Duke of Devonshire? Was this just another of Nevitt's wily tricks? Had he induced his victim to accept without question the name and character of some still more open criminal?

There was no time now, however, to drawback or to hesitate. The die was cast; he must stand by its arbitrament. He had decided to go, and on that hasty decision had acted in a way that was practically irrevocable. He put his things together with trembling hands, called a cab by the porter, and drove off alone in a turmoil of doubt, to the landing-stage in the harbour.

Policemen not a few were standing about on the pier and in the streets as he drove past openly. But in spite of the fact that a warrant had been issued for his apprehension, none of them took the slightest apparent notice of him. He wondered much at this. But there was really no just cause for wonder. For at least an hour earlier the police had ceased to look out any longer for Nevitt's murderer. And the reason they had done so was simply this: a telegram had come down from Scotland Yard in the most positive terms, "Waring arrested this afternoon at Dover. The murdered man McGregor is now certainly known to be Montague Nevitt, a bank clerk in London. Endeavour to trace Waring's line of retreat from Mambury to Dover by inquiry of the railway officials. We are sure of our man. Photographs will be forwarded you by post immediately."

And, as a matter of fact, at the very moment when Guy was driving down to the tender, in order to escape from an imaginary charge of forgery, his brother Cyril, to his own immense astonishment, was being conveyed from Dover Pier to Tavistock, under close police escort, on a warrant charging him with the wilful murder of Montague Nevitt, two days before, at Mambury, in Devon.

If Guy had only known that, he would never have fled. But he didn't know it. How could he, indeed, in his turmoil and hurry? He didn't even know Montague Nevitt was dead. He had been too busy that day to look at the papers. And the few facts he knew from the boys crying in the street he naturally misinterpreted, by the light of his own fears and personal dangers. He thought he was "wanted" for the yet undiscovered forgery, not for the murder, of which he was wholly ignorant.

Nevertheless, we can never in this world entirely escape our own personality. As Guy went on board, believing himself to have left his identity on shore, he heard somebody, in a voice that he fancied he knew, ask a newsboy on the tender for an evening paper. Guy was the only passenger who embarked at Plymouth; and this person unseen was the newsboy's one customer.

Guy couldn't discover who he was at the moment, for the call for a paper came from the upper deck; he only heard the voice, and wasn't certain at first that he recognised even that any more than in a vague and indeterminate reminiscence. No doubt the sense of guilt made him preternaturally suspicious. But he began to fear that somebody might possibly recognise him. And he had bought the paper with news about the warrant. That was bad; but 'twas too late to draw back again now. The tender lay alongside a while, discharging her mails, and then cast loose to go. The Cetewayo's screw began to move through the water. With a dim sense of horror, Guy knew they were off. He was well under way for far distant South Africa.

But he did NOT know or reflect that while he ploughed his path on over that trackless sea, day after day, without news from England, there would be ample time for Cyril to be tried, and found guilty, and perhaps hanged as well, for the crime that neither of them had really committed.

The great ship steamed out, cutting the waves with her prow, and left the harbour lights far, far behind her. Guy stood on deck and watched them disappearing with very mingled feelings. Everything had been so hurried, he hardly knew himself as yet how his flight affected all the active and passive characters in this painful drama. He only knew he was irrevocably committed to the voyage now. There would be no chance of turning till they reached Cape Town, or at, the very least Madeira,

He stood on deck and looked back. Somebody else in an ulster stood not far off, near a light by the saloon, conversing with an officer. Guy recognised at once the voice of the man who had asked in the harbour for an evening paper. At that moment a steward came up as he stood there, on the look-out for the new passenger they'd just taken in. "You're in thirty-two, sir, I think," he said, "and your name—"

"Is Billington," Guy answered, with a faint tremor of shame at the continued falsehood.

The man who had bought the paper turned round sharply and stared at him. Their eyes met in one quick flash of unexpected recognition. Guy started in horror. This was an awful meeting. He had seen the man but once before in his life, yet he knew him at a glance. It was Granville Kelmscott.

For a minute or two they stood and stared at one another blankly, those unacknowledged half-brothers, of whom one now knew, while the other still ignored, the real relationship that existed between them. Then Granville Kelmscott turned away without one word of greeting. Guy trembled in his shame. He knew he was discovered. But before his very eyes, Granville took the paper he had been reading by that uncertain light, and, raising it high in his hand, flung it over into the sea with spasmodic energy. It was the special edition containing the account of the man McGregor's death and Guy Waring's supposed connection with the murder. Granville Kelmscott, indeed, couldn't bring himself to denounce his own half-brother. He stared at him coldly for a second with a horrified face.

Then he said, in a very low and distant voice, "I know your identity, Mr. Billington," with a profoundly sarcastic accent on the assumed name, "and I will not betray it. I know your secret, too; and I will keep that inviolate. Only, during the rest of this voyage, do me the honour, I beg of you, not to recognise me or speak to me in any way at any time."

Guy slunk away in silence to his own cabin. Never before in his life had he known such shame. He felt that his punishment was indeed too heavy for him.



CHAPTER XXVII.

SOMETHING TO THEIR ADVANTAGE.



At Tilgate and Chetwood next morning, two distinguished households were thrown into confusion by the news in the papers. To Colonel Kelmscott and to Elma Clifford alike that news came with crushing force and horror. A murder, said the Times, had been committed in Devonshire, in a romantic dell, on the skirts of Dartmoor. No element of dramatic interest was wanting to the case; persons, place, and time were all equally remarkable. The victim of the outrage was Mr. Montague Nevitt, confidential clerk to Messrs. Drummond, Coutts, and Barclay, the well-known bankers, and himself a familiar figure in musical society in London. The murderer was presumably a young journalist, Mr. Guy Waring, not unknown himself in musical circles, and brother of that rising landscape painter, Mr. Cyril Waring, whose pictures of wild life in forest scenery had lately attracted considerable attention at the Academy and the Grosvenor. Mr. Guy Waring had been arrested the day before on the pier at Dover, where he had just arrived by the Ostend packet. It was supposed by the police that he had hastily crossed the Channel from Plymouth to Cherbourg, soon after the murder, to escape detection, and, after journeying by cross-country routes through France and Belgium, had returned via Ostend to the shores of England. It was a triumphant vindication of our much maligned detective system that within a few hours after the discovery of the body on Dartmoor, the supposed criminal should have been recognised, arrested, and detained among a thousand others, in a busy port, at the very opposite extremity of southern England.

Colonel Kelmscott that day was strangely touched, even before he took up his morning paper. A letter from Granville, posted at Plymouth, had just reached him by the early mail, to tell him that the only son he had ever really loved or cared for on earth had sailed the day before, a disinherited outcast, to seek his fortune in the wild wastes of Africa. How he could break the news to Lady Emily he couldn't imagine. The Colonel, twisting his white moustache, with a quivering hand on his tremulous lip, hardly dared to realize what their future would seem like. And then—he turned to the paper, and saw to his horror this awful tale of a cold-blooded and cowardly murder, committed on a friend by one who, however little he might choose to acknowledge it, was after all his own eldest son, a Kelmscott of Tilgate, as much as Granville himself, in lawful wedlock duly begotten.

The proud but broken man gazed at the deadly announcement in blank amaze and agony. His Nemesis had come. Guy Waring was his own son—and Guy Waring was a murderer.

He tried to argue with himself at first that this tragic result in some strange way justified him, after the event, for his own long neglect of his parental responsibilities. The young man was no true Kelmscott at heart, he was sure, or such an act as that would have revolted and appalled him. He was no true son in reality; his order disowned him. Base blood flowed in his veins, and made crimes like these conceivable.

"I was right after all," the Colonel thought, "not to acknowledge these half low-born lads as the heirs of Tilgate. Bad blood will out in the end—and THIS is the result of it."

And then, with sudden revulsion he thought once more—God help him! How could he say such things in his heart even now of HER, his pure, trustful Lucy? She was better than him in her soul, he knew—ten thousand times better. If bad blood came in anywhere, it came in from himself, not from that simple-hearted, innocent little country-bred angel.

And perhaps if he'd treated these lads as he ought, and brought them up to their own, and made them Kelmscotts indeed, instead of nameless adventurers, they might never have fallen into such abysses of turpitude. But he had let them grow up in ignorance of their own origin, with the vague stain of a possible illegitimacy hanging over their heads; and what wonder if they forgot in the end how noblesse oblige, and sank at last into foul depths of vice and criminality?

As he read on, his head swam with the cumulative evidence of that deliberately planned and cruelly executed yet brutal murder. The details of the crime gave him a sickening sense of loathing and incredulity. Impossible that his own son could have schemed and carried out so vile an attack upon a helpless person, who had once been his nearest and dearest companion. And yet, the account in the paper gave him no alternative but to believe it. Nevitt and Guy Waring had been inseparable friends. They had dined together, supped together, played duets in their own rooms, gone out to the same parties, belonged to the same club, in all things been closer than even the two twin brothers. Some quarrel seemed to have arisen about a matter of speculations in which both had suffered. They separated at once—separated in anger. Nevitt went down to Devonshire by himself for his holiday. Then Waring followed him, without any pretence at concealment; inquired for him at the village inn with expressions of deadly hate; tracked him to a lonely place in the adjacent wood; choked him, apparently with some form of garotte or twisted rope—for the injuries seemed greater than even the most powerful man could possibly inflict with the hands alone; and hid the body of his murdered friend at last in a mossy dell by the bank of the streamlet. Nor was that all; for with callous effrontery he had returned to the inn, still inquiring after his victim; and had gone off next morning early with a lie on his lips, pretending even then to nurse his undying wrath and to be bent on following up with coarse threats of revenge his stark and silent enemy.

So far the Times. But to Colonel Kelmscott, reading in between the lines as he went, there was more in it than even that. He saw, though dimly, some hint of a motive. For it was at Mambury that all these things had taken place; and it was at Mambury that the secret of Guy Waring's descent lay buried, as he thought, in the parish registers. What it all meant, Colonel Kelmscott couldn't indeed wholly understand; but many things he knew which the writer of the account in the Times knew not. He knew that Nevitt was a clerk in the bank where he himself kept his account, and to which he had given orders to pay in the six thousand to Cyril's credit, at Cyril's bankers. He knew, therefore, that Nevitt might thus have been led to suspect the real truth of the case as to the two so-called Warings. He knew that Cyril had just received the six thousand. Trying to put these facts together and understand their meaning he utterly failed; but this much at least was clear to him, he thought—the reason for the murder was something connected with a search for the entry of his own clandestine marriage.

He looked down at the paper again. Great heavens, what was this? "It is rumoured that a further inducement to the crime may perhaps be sought in the fact that the deceased gentleman had a large sum of money in his possession in Bank of England notes at the time of his death. These notes he carried in a pocket-book about his person, where they were seen by the landlord of the Talbot Arms at Mambury, the night before the supposed murder. When the body was discovered by the side of the brook, two days later, the notes were gone. The pockets were carefully searched by order of the police, but no trace of the missing money could be discovered. It is now conjectured that Mr. Guy Waring, who is known to have lost heavily in the Rio Negro Diamond Mines, may have committed the crime from purely pecuniary motives, in order to release himself from his considerable and very pressing financial embarrassments."

The paper dropped from Colonel Kelmscott's hands. His eyes ceased to see. His arm fell rigid. This last horrible suggestion proved too much for him to bear. He shrank from it like poison. That a son of his own, unacknowledged or not, should be a criminal—a murderer—was terrible enough; but that he should even be suspected of having committed murder for such base and vulgar motives as mere thirst of gain was more than the blood of the Kelmscotts could put up with. The unhappy father had said to himself in his agony at first that if Guy really killed that prying bank clerk at all, it was no doubt in defence of his mother's honour. THAT was a reason a Kelmscott could understand. That, if not an excuse, was at least a palliation. But to be told he had killed him for a roll of bank-notes—oh, horrible, incredible; his reason drew back at it. That was a depth to which the Kelmscott idiosyncrasy could never descend. The Colonel in his horror refused to believe it.

He put his hands up feebly to his throbbing brow. This was a ghastly idea—a ghastly accusation. The man called Waring had dragged the honour of the Kelmscotts through the mud of the street. There was but one comfort left. He never bore that unsullied name. Nobody would know he was a Kelmscott of Tilgate.

The Colonel rose from his seat, and staggered across the floor. Half-way to the door, he reeled and stopped short. The veins of his forehead were black and swollen. He had the same strange feeling in his head as he experienced on the day when Granville left—only a hundred times worse. The two halves of his brain were opening and shutting. His temples seemed too full; he fancied there was something wrong with his forehead somewhere. He reeled once more, like a drunken man. Then he clutched at a chair and sat down. His brain was flooded.

He collapsed all at once, mumbling to himself some inarticulate gibberish. Half an hour later, the servants came in and found him. He was seated in his chair, still doddering feebly. The house was roused. A doctor was summoned, and the Colonel put to bed. Lady Emily watched him with devoted care. But it was all in vain. The doctor shook his head the moment he examined him. "A paralytic stroke," he said gravely; "and a very serious one. He seems to have had a slighter attack some time since, and to have wholly neglected it. A great blood-vessel in the brain must have given way with a rush. I can hold out no hope. He won't live till morning."

And indeed, as it turned out, about ten that night the Colonel's loud and stentorious breathing began to fail slowly. The intervals grew longer and longer between each recurrent gasp, and life died away at last in imperceptible struggles.

By two in the morning, Kelmscott of Tilgate lay dead on his bed; and his two unacknowledged and unrecognised sons were the masters of his property.

But one of them was at that moment being tossed about wildly on the waves of Biscay; and the other was locked up on a charge of murder in the county jail at Tavistock, in Devonshire.

Meanwhile, at the other house at Chetwood, where these tidings were being read with almost equal interest, Elma Clifford laid down the paper on the table with a very pale face, and looked at her mother. Mrs. Clifford, all solicitous watchfulness for the effect on Elma, looked in return with searching eyes at her daughter. Then Elma opened her lips like one who talks in her sleep, and spoke out twice in two short disconnected sentences. The first time she said simply, "He didn't do it, I know," and the second time, with all the intensity of her emotional nature, "Mother, mother, whatever turns up, I MUST go there."

"HE will be there," Mrs. Clifford interposed, after a painful pause.

And Elma answered dreamily, with her great eyes far away, "Yes, of course, I know he will. And I must be there too, to see how far, if at all, I can help them."

"Yes, darling," her mother replied, stroking her daughter's hair with a caressing hand. She knew that when Elma spoke in a tone like that, no power on earth could possibly restrain her.



CHAPTER XXVIII.

MISTAKEN IDENTITY.



To Cyril Waring himself, the arrest at Dover came as an immense surprise; rather a surprise, indeed, than a shock just at first, for he could only treat it as a mistaken identity. The man the police wanted was Guy, not himself; and that Guy should have done it was clearly incredible.

As he landed from the Ostend packet, recalled to England unexpectedly by the announcement that the Rio Negro Diamond Mines had gone with a crash—and no doubt involved Guy in the common ruin—Cyril was astonished to find himself greeted on the Admiralty Pier by a policeman, who tapped him on the shoulder with the casual remark, "I think your name's Waring."

Cyril answered at once, "Yes, my name's Waring."

It didn't occur to him at the moment that the man meant to arrest him.

"Then you're wanted," the minion of authority answered, seizing his arm rather gruffly. "We've got a warrant out to-day against you, my friend. You'd better come along with me quietly to the station."

"A warrant!" Cyril repeated, amazed, shaking off the man's hand. "There must be some mistake somewhere."

The policeman smiled. "Oh yes," he answered briskly, with some humour in his tone. "There's always a mistake, of course, in all these arrests. You never get a hold of the right man just at first. It's sure to be a case of his twin brother. But there ain't no mistake this time, don't you fear. I knowed you at once, when I see you, by your photograph. Though we were looking out for you, to be sure, going the other way. But it's you all right. There ain't a doubt about that. Warrant in the name of Guy Waring, gentleman; wanted for the wilful murder of a man unknown, said to be one McGregor, alias Montague Nevitt, on the 27th instant, at Mambury, in Devonshire."

Cyril gave a sudden start at the conjunction of names, which naturally increased his captor's suspicions. "But there IS a mistake, though," he said angrily, "even on your own showing. You've got the wrong man. It's not I that am wanted. My name's Cyril Waring, and Guy is my brother's. Though Guy can't have murdered Mr. Nevitt, either, if it comes to that; they were most intimate friends. However, that's neither here nor there. I'm Cyril, not Guy; I'm not your prisoner."

"Oh yes, you are, though," the officer answered, holding his arm very tight, and calling mutely for assistance by a glance at the other policemen. "I've got your photograph in my pocket right enough. Here's the man we've orders to arrest at once. I suppose you won't deny, now, that's your living image."

Cyril glanced at the photograph with another start of surprise. Sure enough, it WAS Guy; his last new cabinet portrait. The police must be acting under some gross misapprehension.

"That man's my brother," he said confidently, brushing the photograph aside. "I can't understand it at all. This is extremely odd. It's impossible my brother can even be suspected of committing murder."

The policeman smiled cynically. "Well, it ain't impossible your brother's brother can be suspected, anyhow," he said, with a quiet air of superior knowledge. "The good old double trick's been tried on once too often. If I was you, I wouldn't say too much. Whatever you say may be used as evidence at the trial against you. You just come along quietly to the station with me—take his other arm, Jim, that's right: no violence please, prisoner—and we'll pretty soon find out whether you're the man we've got orders to arrest, or his twin brother." And he winked at his ally. He was proud of having effected the catch of the season.

"But I AM his twin brother," Cyril said, half struggling still to release himself. "You can't take me up on that warrant, I tell you. It's not my name. I'm not the man you've orders to look for."

"Oh, that's all right," the constable answered as before, with an incredulous smile. "Don't you go trying to obstruct the police in the exercise of their duty. If I can't take you up on the warrant as it stands, well, anyhow, I can arrest you on suspicion all the same, for looking so precious like the photograph of the man as is wanted. Twin brothers ain't got any call, don't you know, to sit, turn about, for one another's photographs. It hinders the administration of justice; that's where it is. And remember, whatever you choose to say may be used as evidence at the trial against you."

Thus adjured, Cyril yielded at last to force majeure and walked arm in arm between the two policemen, followed by a large and admiring crowd, to the nearest station.

But the matter was far less easily arranged than at first imagined. An innocent man who knows his own innocence, taken up in mistake for a brother whom he believes to be equally incapable of the crime with which he is charged, naturally expects to find no difficulty at all in proving his identity and escaping from custody on a false charge of murder. But the result of a hasty examination at the station soon effectually removed this little delusion. His own admission that the photograph was a portrait of Guy, and his resemblance to it in every leading particular, made the authorities decide on the first blush of the thing this was really the man Scotland Yard was in search of. He was trying to escape them on the ridiculous pretext that he was in point of fact his own twin brother. The inspector declined to let him go for the night. He wasn't going to repeat the mistake that was made in the Lefroy case, he said very decidedly. He would send the suspected person under escort to Tavistock.

So to Tavistock Cyril went, uncertain as yet what all this could mean, and ignorant of the crime with which he was charged, if indeed any crime had been really committed. All the way down, an endless string of questions suggested themselves one by one to his excited mind. Was Nevitt really dead? And if so, who had killed him? Was it suicide to escape from the monetary embarrassments brought about by the failure of the Rio Negro Diamond Mines, or was it accident or mischance? Or was it in fact a murder? And in any case—strangest of all—where was Guy? Why didn't Guy come forward and court inquiry? For as yet, of course, Cyril hadn't received his brother's letter, with the incriminating pocket-book and the three thousand pounds; nor indeed, for several days after, as things turned out, was there even a possibility of his ever receiving it.

Next morning, however, when Cyril was examined before the Tavistock magistrates, he began to realize the whole strength of the case against him. The proceedings were purely formal, as the lawyers said; yet they were quite enough to make Cyril's cheek turn pale with horror. One witness after another came forward and swore to him. The station-master at Mambury gave evidence that he had made inquiries on the platform after Nevitt by name; the inn-keeper deposed as to his excited behaviour when he called at the Talbot Arms, and his recognition of McGregor as the person he was in search of; the boy of whom Guy had inquired at the gate unhesitatingly set down the conversation to Cyril. None of them had the faintest doubt in his own mind—each swore—that the prisoner before the magistrates was the self-same person who went over to Mambury on that fatal day, and who followed Montague Nevitt down the path by the river.

As Cyril listened, one terrible fact dawned clearer and clearer upon his brain. Every fragment of evidence they piled up against himself made the case against Guy look blacker and blacker.

The magistrates accepted the proofs thus tendered, and Cyril, as yet unassisted by professional advice, was remanded accordingly till next morning.

Just as he was about to leave the Sessions House in a tumult of horror, fear, and suspense, somebody close by tapped him on the shoulder gravely, after a few whispered words with the chairman and the magistrates. Cyril turned round, and saw a burly man with very large hands, whom he remembered to have had pointed out to him in London, and, strange to say, by Montague Nevitt himself—as the eminent Q.C., Mr. Gilbert Gildersleeve.

The great advocate was pale, but very sincere and earnest. Cyril noticed his manner was completely changed. It was clear some overmastering idea possessed his soul.

"Mr. Waring," he said, looking him full in the face, "I see you're unrepresented. This is a case in which I take a very deep interest. My conduct's unprofessional, I know—point-blank against all our recognised etiquette—but perhaps you'll excuse it. Will you allow me to undertake your defence in this matter?"

Cyril turned round to him with truly heartfelt thanks. It was a great relief to him, alone and in doubt, and much wondering about Guy, to hear a friendly word from whatever quarter.

And Cyril knew he was safe in Gilbert Gildersleeve's hands: the greatest criminal lawyer of the day in England might surely be trusted to set right such a mere little error of mistaken identity. Though for Guy—whenever Guy gave himself up to the police—Cyril felt the position was far more dangerous. He couldn't believe, indeed, that Guy was guilty; yet the circumstances, he could no longer conceal from himself, looked terribly black against him.

"You're too good," he cried, taking the lawyer's hand in his with very fervent gratitude. "How can I thank you enough? I'm deeply obliged to you."

"Not at all," Gilbert Gildersleeve answered, with very blanched lips. He was ashamed of his duplicity. "You've nothing to thank me for. This case is a simple one, and I'd like to see you out of it. I've met your brother; and the moment I saw you I knew you weren't he, though you're very like him. I should know you two apart wherever I saw you."

"That's curious," Cyril cried, "for very few people know us from one another, except the most intimate friends."

The Q.C. looked at him with a very penetrating glance. "I had occasion to see your brother not long since," he answered slowly, "and his features and expression fastened themselves indelibly on my mind's eye. I should know you from him at a glance. This case, as you say, is one of mistaken identity. That's just why I'm so anxious to help you well through it."

And indeed, Gilbert Gildersleeve, profoundly agitated as he was, saw in the accident a marvellous chance for himself to secure a diversion of police attention from the real murderer. The fact was, he had passed twenty-four hours of supreme misery. As soon as he learned from common report that "the murderer was caught, and was being brought to Tavistock," he took it for granted at first that Guy hadn't gone to Africa at all, but had left by rail for the East, and been arrested elsewhere. That belief filled him full of excruciating terrors. For Gilbert Gildersleeve, accidental manslaughterer as he was, was not by any means a depraved or wholly heartless person. Big, blustering, and gruff, he was yet in essence an honest, kind-hearted, unemotional Englishman. His one desire now was to save his wife and daughter from further misery; and if he could only save them, he was ready to sacrifice for the moment, to a certain extent, Guy Waring's reputation. But if Guy Waring himself had stood before him in the dock, he must have stepped forward to confess. The strain would have been too great for him. He couldn't have allowed an innocent man to be hanged in his place. Come what might, in that case he must let his wife and daughter go, and save the innocent by acknowledging himself guilty. So, when he looked at the prisoner, it gave him a shock of joy to see that fortune had once more befriended him. Thank Heaven, thank Heaven, it wasn't the man they wanted at all. This was the other brother of the two—Cyril, the painter, not Guy, the journalist.

In a moment the acute and experienced criminal hand recognised that this chance told unconsciously in his own favour. Like every other suspected person, he wanted time, and time would be taken up in proving an alibi for Cyril, as well as showing by concurrent proof that he was not his brother. Meanwhile, suspicion would fix itself still more firmly upon Guy, whose flight would give colour to the charges brought against him by the authorities.

So the great Q.C. determined to take up Cyril Waring's case as a labour of love, and didn't doubt he would succeed in finally proving it.



CHAPTER XXIX.

WOMAN'S INTUITION



Next morning, Cyril Waring appeared once more in the Sessions House for the preliminary investigation on the charge of murder. As he entered, a momentary hush pervaded the room; then, suddenly, from a seat beneath, a woman's voice burst forth, quite low, yet loud enough to be heard by all the magistrates on the bench.

"Why, mother," it said, in a very tremulous tone, "it isn't Guy himself at all; don't you see it's Cyril?"

The words were so involuntarily spoken, and in such hushed awe and amaze, that even the magistrates themselves, hard Devonshire squires, didn't turn their heads to rebuke the speaker. As for Cyril, he had no need to look towards a blushing face in the body of the court to know that the voice was Elma Clifford's.

She sat there looking lovelier than he had ever before seen her. Cyril's glance caught hers. They didn't need to speak. He saw at once in her eye that Elma at least knew instinctively he was innocent.

Next moment Gilbert Gildersleeve stood up to state his defence, and gazed at her steadily. As he rose in his place, Elma's eye met his. Gilbert Gildersleeve's fell. He didn't know why, but in that second of time the great blustering man felt certain in his heart that Elma Clifford suspected him.

Elma Clifford, for her part, knew still more than that. With the swift intuition she inherited from her long line of Oriental ancestry, she said to herself at once, in categorical terms, "It was that man that did it. I know it was he. And he sees I know it. And he knows I'm right. And he's afraid of me accordingly." But an intuition, however valuable to its possessor, is not yet admitted as evidence in English courts. Elma also knew it was no use in the world for her to get up in her place and say so openly.

The great Q.C. put his case in a nutshell. "Our client," he contended, "was NOT the man against whom the warrant in this case had been duly issued; he was NOT the man named Guy Waring; he was NOT the man whom the witnesses deposed to having seen at Mambury; he was NOT the man who had loitered with evil intent around the skirts of Dartmoor; in short," the great Q.C. observed, with demonstrative eye-glass, "it was a very clear case of mistaken identity. It would take them time, no doubt, to prove the conclusive alibi they intended to establish; for the gentleman now charged before them, he would hope to show hereafter, was Mr. Cyril Waring, the distinguished painter, twin brother to Mr. Guy Waring, the journalist, against whom warrant was issued; and he was away in Belgium during the whole precise time when Mr. Guy Waring—as to whose guilt or innocence he would make no definite assertion—was prowling round Dartmoor on the trail of McGregor, alias Montague Nevitt. Therefore, they would consent to an indefinite remand till evidence to that effect was duly forthcoming. Meanwhile—" and here Gilbert Gildersleeve's eyes fell upon Elma once more with a quiet forensic smile—he would call one witness, on the spur of the moment, whom he hadn't thought till that very morning of calling, but whom the magistrates would allow to be a very important one—a lady from Chetwood—Miss Elma Clifford.

Elma, taken aback, stood up in the box and gave her evidence timidly. It amounted to no more than the simple fact that the person before the magistrates was Cyril, not Guy; that the two brothers were extremely like; but that she had reason to know them easily apart, having been associated in a most painful accident in a tunnel with the brother, the present Mr. Cyril Waring. What she said gave only a presumption of mistaken identity, but didn't at all invalidate the positive identification of all the people who had seen the supposed murderer. However, from Gilbert Gildersleeve's point of view, this delay was doubly valuable. In the first place, it gave him time to prove his alibi for Cyril and bring witnesses from Belgium; and, in the second place, it succeeded in still further fastening public suspicion on Guy, and narrowing the question for the police to the simple issue whether or not they had really caught the brother who was seen at Mambury on the day of the murder.

The law's delays were as marvellous as is their wont. It was a full fortnight before the barrister was able to prove his point by bringing over witnesses at considerable expense from Belgium and elsewhere, and by the aid of a few intimate friends in London, who could speak with certainty as to the difference between the two brothers. At the end of a fortnight, however, he did sufficiently prove it by tracing Cyril in detail from England to the Ardennes and back again to Dover, as well as by showing exactly how Guy had been employed in London and elsewhere on every day or night of the intervening period. The magistrates at last released Cyril, convinced by his arguments; and on the very same day, the coroner's inquest on Montague Nevitt's body, after adjourning time upon time to await the clearing up of this initial difficulty, returned a verdict of wilful murder against Guy Waring.

That evening, in town, the most completely mystified person of all was a certain cashier of the London and West County Bank, in Lombard Street, who read in his St. James's this complete proof that Cyril had been in Belgium through all those days when he himself distinctly remembered cashing over the counter for him a cheque for no less a sum than six thousand pounds to "self or bearer." Had the brothers, then, been deliberately and nefariously engaged in a deep-laid scheme—the cashier asked himself, much puzzled—to confuse one another's identity with great care beforehand, with a distinct view to the projected murder? For as yet, of course, nobody on earth except Guy Waring himself on the waters of Biscay knew or suspected anything at all about the forgery.

Elma Clifford and her mother, meanwhile, had stopped on at Tavistock till Cyril was released from his close confinement. Elma never meant to marry him, of course—to that prime determination she still remained firm as a rock under all conditions—but in such straits as those, why, naturally she couldn't bear to be far away from him. So she remained at Tavistock quietly till the inquiry was over.

On the evening of his release Elma met him at the hotel. Her mother had gone out on purpose to leave them alone. Elma took Cyril's hand in hers with a profound trembling. She felt the moment for reserve had long gone past.

"Cyril," she said, boldly calling him by his Christian name, because she could call him only as she always thought of him, "I knew from the first you didn't do it. And just because I know you didn't, I know Guy didn't either, though everything looks now so very black against him. I can trust YOU, and I can trust HIM. All through, I've never had a doubt one moment of either of you."

Cyril held her hand in his, and raised it tenderly to his lips. Elma looked at him, half surprised. Only her hand, how strange of him. Cyril read the unspoken thought, as she would have read it herself, and answered quickly, "Never, Elma, now, till Guy has cleared himself of this deadly accusation. I couldn't bear to ask you to accept a man who every one else would call a murderer's brother."