Looking over my cousin's shoulders were two other faces, one covered with rough hair, and evidently belonging to a game-keeper, the other the beautiful face of my cousin, Lady Ethel Vanborough, St. Nivel's sister.

"Poor fellow!" she remarked sympathetically. "What have they been doing to you?"

I could hardly believe my eyes, and passed my hand wearily across my forehead.

St. Nivel turned to the keeper.

"Give me the brandy flask," he said.

The man produced it, and my cousin poured some out in the little silver cup attached to it.

"It's a lucky thing for you, Bill," he observed, while I greedily drank the brandy down, "that I thought of bringing this flask with me this morning. Ethel was against it; she's a total abstainer."

"Except when alcohol is needed medicinally," she interposed in an explanatory tone, "then it is another matter."

I now took a good look at her; she was wearing a short, tweed, tailor-made shooting costume, and carried in her hand a light sixteen bore shot gun.

"You look just about done," continued her brother. "Whatever has happened to you?"

"You would look bad," I answered, "if you had had nothing to eat since lunch yesterday."

St. Nivel was a soldier and man of action.

"Botley," he said to the keeper, "the sandwiches."

"Now," said the guardsman invitingly, when I had ravenously disposed of my second sandwich, "tell us something about it."

I had just opened my lips to speak, when there came a great cry from the roof of the tower above, and a black body shot past the little window near which I was sitting.

We all ran to the window but could see nothing.

Then St. Nivel made a suggestion.

"Let us mount up to the roof," he said, "and see what is to be seen.
You, Botley, had better go down to the foot of the tower."

The keeper touched his forelock and commenced his descent of the spiral staircase. Meanwhile, Lady Ethel, her brother and I mounted up to the top.

We passed the room in which I had been imprisoned, and went up a very much narrower flight of steps to the roof, coming out at a little door which was standing open. The roof was flat and covered with lead.

"Take care how you tread," cried St. Nivel. "I expect it is all pretty rotten. In fact, Ethel, I think you had better go inside."

Ethel, however, was not of that way of thinking; she was a thorough sportswoman and wanted to see all the fun.

"All right, Jack," she rejoined cheerily. "You go on, I'll look after myself without troubling you."

It was very evident at the first glance that there had been an accident, a piece of the low stone wall which surrounded the roof was gone. It looked as if it had recently tumbled over. St. Nivel was evidently right when he said the place was rotten. Rotten it certainly was.

Stepping very gingerly we all approached the embattled wall, and, selecting the firmest part, looked over, one at a time. I had the second peep and was just in time to see two men, one limping very much—this I am sure was Saumarez—disappear into a neighbouring wood. A countrified-looking boy was running up from the opposite direction.

At the foot of the tower, however, was another matter; huddled up in a heap was the body of a man, with a coil of rope and some shattered masonry lying all around it.

By the body stood Botley, the game-keeper, scratching his head.

It was now very evident what had occurred.

The three miscreants who had tried to torture me had endeavoured to escape by letting themselves down by a rope from the top of the tower. Two had succeeded and one had been killed. The reason of this was obvious, the rope had been fixed round one of the battlements and it had not been sufficiently strong to maintain the weight of the three men. The two lowest had probably got off with a shaking, the man who had got on the rope last had lost his life. All this was perfectly evident.

"Who is it?" shouted Lord St. Nivel to the keeper below.

"Doan't know, me lord," came back the answer, "he's a stranger to me."

The keeper had now been joined by the countrified boy, and the two turned the body over on to its face. I could see that it was the fairer of the two men who had acted under Saumarez' orders.

"I think we had better go down," suggested my cousin, the Guardsman; "we may be of some service there."

On the way down the winding staircase, a thought struck me.

"What has become of that body," I asked, "that was found on Lansdown yesterday morning?"

"What body?" replied my two cousins together.

"The body of an old lady."

"We have heard nothing of it," replied St. Nivel, "and we ought to have done so. But you have not told us what happened to you."

Going down the old stone staircase, I gave them a brief account of my arrest in London and journey down there, with my imprisonment during the night in the tower.

"Well," remarked St. Nivel, while his sister murmured a few words of sympathy, "I haven't quite got the hang of the thing yet, but you must tell us more at lunch."

We found that the man lying at the foot of the tower was certainly dead; his neck was broken.

We could therefore do nothing but leave the gamekeeper in charge of the body while we despatched the boy to warn the police and fetch a doctor.

With a shilling in his pocket to get his dinner, the young yokel set off on his journey, and we strolled away.

"I don't think we'll shoot any more this morning, Jack," Ethel said, "this affair has made me feel a bit shaky."

"Then you had better come up to the house with us, Bill," said her brother, slapping me on the back, "and have some lunch. Then you can tell us all your adventures."

I readily agreed, and we had walked some little distance when I heard footsteps running behind us; we stopped and turned. It was the country boy we had sent to the police.

"I forgot to show you this yere sir," he said, opening his hand, in which he held something carefully clasped.

"What is it?" I asked as he addressed me.

"It's this yere heye, sir," he answered. "It don't belong to the dead 'un; he's got two."

I glanced into his open palm and beheld two halves of a brown artificial eye, made of glass, and much shot with imitation blood!

* * * * *

"No," observed my friend, Inspector Bull, "there's been no body found on Lansdown, and I should have heard of it if there had been without a doubt."

The inspector finished a liberal tumbler of Lord St. Nivel's Scotch whisky and soda, and set the tumbler carefully down on the table as if it were a piece of very rare china.

My cousin, who was standing on the hearthrug, laughed heartily.

"That was only another piece of the rogue's plot," he said. "They must have had a clever head to direct them."

"Yes," I put in, "a clever head with only one eye in it, if I'm not much mistaken."

The inspector gave me a doubtful look; then his eye reverted to the whisky decanter upon which it had been fondly fixed. St. Nivel observed it and pushed the whisky towards him.

"Thank you, my lord," said the police officer, helping himself with a look of intense satisfaction; he did not often get such whisky. "It's a curious thing, however, that this man with one eye should ha' been doing all these pranks right under my nose as it were, and I never even heard of him before."

Being aware of his methods, I was not at all surprised.

Even now, knowing that I was respectably connected, he even suspected me, and regarded me as an impostor with rich relatives.

This story of the finding of the body on Lansdown only confirmed his views of my powers of invention.

"As a matter of fact," observed Lord St. Nivel, "I am only a stranger in these parts, having borrowed a friend's house for a week's shooting; but no doubt you can tell me what this tower is, where my cousin was kept a prisoner, and which my sister and I came across by the merest chance."

"Cruft's Folly," replied the beaming inspector, with his whisky glass in his hand. "Cruft's Folly has stood where it does nearly a hundred years. It was built by some gentleman, I believe, a long while ago, to improve the landscape, just like Sham Castle over yonder."

"But does nobody live in it?"

"No, I've always understood it was quite empty and nearly a ruin."

"Then I have little doubt," said my cousin with a chuckle, "that your friends, Bill, simply appropriated it for their own uses."

"I suppose you'll have the place thoroughly searched, Mr. Bull, won't you?" I asked. "There may be something hidden there which will give you a clue to my assailants."

"You may rely upon that, Mr. Anstruther," replied the inspector, rising and slapping his chest, "but we shall have to communicate with the owner first."

Thus through the red-tapism of the law the chance was lost. Had the old tower of Cruft's Folly been searched at that moment the remainder of this history most certainly would never have been written.