The home park at Prior's Tarrant lay bathed in the gentle glow of a waning moon, but the hoary faÇade of the mansion itself, and the terrace that skirted it, were in shadow. Up and down in front of the long row of windows a red spark passed and repassed with monotonous regularity—the light of General Sadgrove's cigar as he waited in growing impatience for the coming of the Duke.

After his social duties of the afternoon he had paid a hurried visit to Beaumanoir House to arrange for the Duke's departure in company with his new secretary, and then, armed with credentials from the Duke and heralded by a preparatory telegram, he had proceeded to the Hertfordshire seat by an earlier train. He had good reasons for traveling separately. And now the carriage which he had sent to the little wayside station of Tarrant Road two miles off was overdue, and the General was beginning to chafe.

"I hope I haven't been too cocksure," he muttered, under his close-trimmed gray mustache. "I pinned my faith to Alec's company securing the fellow's safety on the journey at least."

He took another turn, and then, striking a vesta, looked at his watch. It was twenty minutes to eleven, whereas if those he expected had caught the 8.45 from St. Pancras, the carriage should have been back half an hour ago. He had hardly finished this calculation when from behind a gigantic vase on the plinth of the steps leading to the lower level of the gardens there sounded the hiss of a cobra, thrice repeated.

"Azimoolah?" said the General, softly.

His faithful servitor glided forward, almost invisible in the shabby blue tunic which had replaced the spotless white garments of Grosvenor Gardens.

"A queer orderly-room, sahib, but not more so than some we wot of in the by-ways of the Deccan," he whispered, glancing up at the loom of the great mansion. "Well, I have done thy bidding, and have secured a lodging in the village as a poor vendor of Oriental trifles. Furthermore, I have already done some good police work."

"You have discovered that there are strangers dwelling in the place?"

"Not so, sahib; but they have been seen in the village," was the reply. "The woman with whom I have hired shelter says that two men, professing to be painters, were in the park all day painting the trees and the deer, for which purpose they had obtained permission of the steward. Whence the men came the woman did not know, but they drove in in a dog-cart on the St. Albans road."

"Your informant could not tell you if the picture was finished—whether the men were coming again?" the General asked quickly.

It was too dark to see the Pathan's face, but a ring in his carefully managed undertone told of pride in the answer:

"She could not tell me, sahib, but I can tell you. The picture makes the trees look like cauliflowers and the deer like unto swine. Moreover, it is not finished, and the men are coming again—to-morrow, perchance."

General Sadgrove congratulated himself on his foresight. He would have preferred having Azimoolah in the house with him, but he had detached him from personal service, and had sent him down separately to pick up unconsidered trifles in the character of a traveling huckster. And the old sleuth-hound had done well, after only a couple of hours in the place, in bringing this news of painters who could not paint, yet were returning on the morrow. The General had such absolute trust in his henchman's methods that he did not trouble to inquire how the news had been acquired, thereby sparing Azimoolah the needless narrative of a deal with the landlady of the "Hanbury Arms," where the strangers had put up their cart and lunched.

"Very good, old jungle-wolf," was all the comment he vouchsafed, and, making a mental note to see that the park was barred in future to the limners of "deer like unto swine," he was passing on to further instructions when the sound of wheels was heard far away down the avenue, and a moment later carriage-lamps twinkled into view round a corner in the drive.

"Here they come," he said. "Better make yourself scarce now, but stay within call in case I want you."

Azimoolah vanished in the darkness, and the General strolled on to the end of the terrace, where the descent of a flight of steps brought him to the main entrance of the mansion. Stationing himself under the portico, he waited the arrival of the brougham, which presently swung to a standstill, while the big hall door was opened wide by ready hands, and shed a blaze of light on—an empty carriage.

"What's this mean, Perrett?" asked the General, outwardly calm for all the big lump in his throat, and cool enough to remember the name of the gray-haired coachman, learned on his own drive from the station. "Has not his Grace arrived?"

"No, sir," replied the old servant, leaning from the box. "There has been an accident to the 8.45. No one hurt, sir. No need for alarm, for his Grace can't have been in the train."

"How do you get at that?" the General asked, doubtfully.

"The train was derailed between St. Albans and Harpenden, sir. Some of the passengers were shaken, but none badly injured; so the fast train that followed was run on to the up metals and brought them on, stopping at every station. But none got out at Tarrant Road. James here," indicating the footman, "ran along the train and looked into every carriage, but he could not see the Duke."

And Perrett won golden opinions from the General by adding that, not satisfied with that, he got the station-master to wire up the line to the point of the accident, and received in reply the positive assurance that no injured persons had been left behind. All had been forwarded to their destinations by the succeeding fast train, which had been made "slow" for the purpose.

The General had already mastered the time-table, and knew that only one more train from London would stop at Tarrant Road that night—the last, due at a quarter past midnight. The coachman therefore received, as he had expected, orders to return to the station in time to meet that train, and the General, lighting a fresh cigar, strolled back to the terrace, where, in response to his low whistle, Azimoolah glided to his side.

"There is work afoot," he said, briefly. "Canst, as of yore, do without sleep at a pinch?"

"Ay, and without food if it is so willed by Allah and the sahib."

Whereupon the General gave him the best directions he could to the scene of the railway accident fifteen miles away, and bade him hie thither with all speed and glean particulars on the spot, especially with regard to the life they were pledged to defend and the nature of the accident, which might be no accident at all, but a move of their mysterious antagonists. It needed but few words to make Azimoolah understand, and he was gone—even before his hand, raised in unconscious salute, had dropped to his side.

The General fell to pacing to and fro again, striving to penetrate the new situation that had arisen, and, as was his wont when matters went wrong, not sparing himself much scathing criticism. For what had seemed to him good reason, he had put all his eggs in one basket—"gone nap"—as he reflected, on the Duke and Forsyth catching the 8.45, and now disaster had overtaken that very train. If the village post-office had been open, he would have wired to know if the Duke was still at Beaumanoir House, for everything hinged on whether he had started, and Sadgrove felt an ominous presentiment that he had. The people he was playing against were not the sort to wreck a train without prospect of adequate result.

Presently the twin lamps went twinkling down the avenue again, and the General tried to comfort himself with the hope that when they reappeared Beaumanoir would be in the carriage. After all, Alec Forsyth was with him. What had befallen the one should have befallen the other, and he had the greatest confidence in his nephew's readiness and resource. It might even be, the General told himself, that Alec had suspected foul play to the 8.45, and had purposely delayed departure—although, in conflict with this theory, arose the conjecture that in that case the railway people would have been warned, and there would have been no "accident" at all.

But what was the use of following threads which, in the absence of a substantial starting-point, led nowhere? The worried veteran gave up the futile task in favor of more practical work, and occupied himself in learning the route by which the miscreants who had tried to suffocate the Duke had reached the chimney-stack over his chamber. He found that a decayed buttress had given them access to the top of the ancient refectory, whence an easy climb along a slanting gutter-pipe formed a royal road to the roof of the main building.

The discovery, interesting in itself, was doubly so from the deduction to be made therefrom. The men who had climbed the roof would have been caught like rats in a trap if the Duke had raised the alarm, and they must either have had complete confidence in their ability to kill him by the charcoal fumes, or, in the event of a hitch, in the Duke's unwillingness to rouse the household.

"Egad! but they must have a nasty grip on him, to trust to his not squealing under such provocation," the General murmured, as the sound of wheels drew him at last from the age-worn buttress back to the portico. "If he's turned up all right I'll try and persuade him to confide the secret before we go to bed."

But when the brougham stopped, it disgorged no Duke, but only Alec Forsyth, pale of face, and for once in his life half afraid of meeting his uncle's expectant eye. But he kept his presence of mind sufficiently to control his voice as he informed the General—the information being really for the servants who had appeared at the hall door—that his Grace had not arrived. In silence the General led the way to the dining-room, and it was not until he had dismissed the butler with the assurance that they would need nothing more that night that he found speech in the curt monosyllable, "Well?"

For answer Alec handed him a telegraph form conveying the message:

"To A. Forsyth, passenger by 8.45, St. Pancras terminus.

"Come back at once, urgent. Am in great distress. Persons threatening Duke detained here. He will be quite safe if he goes on, though not if he returns with you—Sybil Hanbury, Beaumanoir House."

The General glanced through it and gripped the position.

"Beaumanoir was in the 8.45?" he snapped. "That telegram is a forgery, and you show it to me to explain your separation from him?"

Forsyth bowed his head in grieved assent to both questions.

"I am, of course, to blame for trusting that infernal thing," he said. "But I had better put you in possession of the facts at once, for until I reached Tarrant Road station and learned of Beaumanoir's non-arrival from the coachman I had hoped that he had come through all right. I ascertained at Harpenden, where I first heard of the smash, that no one had suffered serious injury."

The facts as related by Forsyth were very simple in themselves, though greatly enhancing the perplexity of the Duke's disappearance. The two friends had left Beaumanoir House in a hansom, giving themselves, as had been arranged, barely time enough to catch the train at St. Pancras. They had already taken their seats in an empty compartment on which the guard had, at their request, placed an "engaged" label, when a telegraph-boy came along the line of carriages, inquiring for Forsyth by name. On reading the message he had acted on the impulse of the moment, and asking the Duke to excuse him on the score of urgent private business, had left the train and driven back to Beaumanoir House, to find the telegram repudiated by Sybil as not emanating from her and its contents quite unfounded.

"I expect she let you have it," the General remarked grimly.

"She was a little cross," admitted Forsyth, flushing at the reminiscence. "I do not see, though, that I could have ignored what purported to be an appeal for assistance from a woman in distress—leaving aside my personal relations with her."

"Don't kick, laddie. I'm to blame for leaving our precious vanishing nobleman in the hands of a man in love. What next?"

"I hurried back to St. Pancras, and, just missing the fast train which afterwards picked up the 8.45 passengers at the scene of the accident, had to kick my heels until the last train started. But it was no accident, Uncle Jem. A big baulk of timber had been placed across the rails, they told me at Harpenden."

The General knitted his brows and pondered the problem, presently suggesting tentatively that there was no proof that the Duke had after all gone in the 8.45. He might, on finding himself suddenly deprived of his companion, have got out before it started. But this theory was at once knocked on the head by Forsyth's assertion that the train had begun to move before he left the platform, and that Beaumanoir, still seated in the "engaged" compartment, had waved him farewell. If the Duke had not got out at an intermediate station, he must have disappeared at the place of derailment, the latter contingency being the more probable. Also the most alarming, because the stranded passengers had had to wait for three-quarters of an hour at the side of the line in the dark, at a remote spot surrounded by woods.

"Humph! It looks very much as if they'd got him this time," was the General's final comment. And he straightway walked over to the sideboard and poured himself out a glass of wine, motioning his nephew to join him. The action was significant of conclusiveness, and seemed to say that, doom having overtaken the Duke, there was nothing more to be done. The old gentleman drank his wine slowly, then turned to Forsyth with the fierce exclamation:

"First time Jem Sadgrove was ever beaten by a woman. Mrs. Talmage Eglinton, or whatever she may choose to call herself, has scored a record."

"Mrs. Talmage Eglinton! What on earth has she got to do with it?" was Forsyth's astounded rejoinder.

A good deal, it appeared, according to the view which the General had contrived to piece together, and which, leaning against the sideboard, he proceeded to propound in spasmodic jerks. Beginning with a description of how he had witnessed Beaumanoir's narrow escape of being run down by Mrs. Talmage Eglinton's landau, he hinted at the dawn of suspicion in his own mind on finding her immediately afterwards calling at his house, yet strangely silent on having nearly killed a man in the streets. Then, when Forsyth had consulted him after the midnight episode at Beaumanoir House, and had told him of the Duke's visit on the day of his arrival from New York to someone occupying the next suite at the hotel to that of Mrs. Eglinton, he had been fairly certain of his clue. Having satisfied himself by personal observation that the ducal mansion in Piccadilly was closely watched, he had set himself the task of establishing a connection between the soi-disant widow and her neighbor at the hotel—a task which had been successful so far as convincing himself went.

Forsyth recognized that, for all the mischance of the evening, his uncle had put in some good detective work, and said so. "You must have been quick, too," he added. "Is it permitted to ask how you managed it?"

"It was very simple," the General replied, with a relish for the remembrance. "I carted all the women off to call on the lady, and while we were there Azimoolah, in the character of an Indian rajah, blundered into Mr. Clinton Ziegler's rooms, which I had in the meanwhile ascertained communicated with Mrs. Talmage Eglinton's. When the prearranged hubbub commenced she gave herself away by an unconscious movement to the communicating door, showing that she was in the habit of using it, unknown to the hotel people, who believe that they have divided one big suite into two smaller ones let separately. She's clever, and pulled herself together at once, but I had got what I wanted—the fact that she was anxious about the rumpus my good old Khan, tricked out in a suit from Nathan's and a stage diamond, was raising next door."

"That seems convincing, certainly," said Forsyth.

"Azimoolah's experiences were even more so. Mr. Clinton Ziegler has some associates with a very pretty way with them when Asiatic princes stumble by chance into his rooms. Of course, it was Azimoolah's cue to be a bit boisterous and persistent, but they needn't have roused the tiger in him by giving him the congenial task of disarming them of two uncommonly murderous knives. Funny thing is, that when I went in as an interpreting peace-maker, I saw no sign of Ziegler, who, I gathered at the hotel bureau, is an invalid and never goes out. The two men in the room were able-bodied fellows, fashionably dressed, but with that in their faces which there is no mistaking. The 'crime-look' is an open sign to those who know."

The General paused and looked at his nephew curiously. "Then I made a false move," he went on—"a false move which may have wiped the seventh Duke of Beaumanoir out of the peerage. I told Mrs. Talmage Eglinton that the Duke was going down to Prior's Tarrant by the 8.45. Yes, you may well stare, but I had an object. I also told her that you were going down with him, believing that that would secure you both a peaceful journey; for, vulgarly speaking, the woman is glaringly sweet upon you, laddie. I ought to have given such a combination as she works with credit for the cunning which drew you from your post."

Forsyth flushed with annoyance. It was not pleasant to hear that his friend's life might have been sacrificed through his uncle's perception of a feminine weakness which had irked him throughout the London season—in fact, ever since Mrs. Talmage Eglinton had made her mysterious appearance on the fringe of society. The card, however, on which the General had staked and apparently lost had been distinctly "the game" if he, Forsyth, had only played up to it himself by sticking like wax to poor hunted Beaumanoir.

But why was Beaumanoir being hunted? That easy-mannered unfortunate, who had exchanged a life of reckless irresponsibility for sordid penury, and the latter for the headship of a historic house, had performed all these demivoltes without making a visible enemy save himself. Why should he have incurred a remorseless hatred which aimed at nothing less than his life?

"The Star-spangled Banner looms largely on the horizon of all this," the young man mused aloud. "Can you explain that phase of the mystery, Uncle Jem?"

"The hub of the wheel, I take it, is my old friend Leonidas Sherman, or, rather, the three millions sterling which he is on his way to this country with," said the General briskly. "Big American robbery, worked by a disciplined gang, and somehow your pal Beaumanoir is entangled. The day he was at our house he tried vaguely to warn Leonie. Hinted that Sherman should be warned to be careful."

Forsyth heard the amazing theory with an inward qualm lest his shrewd old relative should have hit on the solution of the puzzle, and it filled him with greater apprehension than even the physical peril of the Duke had instilled. "Entanglement" in Beaumanoir's case could only mean complicity, for if his knowledge of the scheme was not a guilty knowledge, if he had become possessed of the secret accidentally, why did he not invoke the aid of the police and expose the conspirators? Forsyth saw that the General read what was passing in his mind, and he clutched at the only visible straw in defence of his friend.

"If Beaumanoir was culpably implicated these scoundrels wouldn't want to kill him, any more than he would want to queer their game by having Senator Sherman warned," he said.

"There you put your finger on the crux," replied the General, who disliked the raising of questions which he could not answer.

"And," proceeded Forsyth, pursuing his slight advantage, "you would never have got Beaumanoir to assent to Mrs. Talmage Eglinton being asked here if he had known her to be a professional criminal. The 'honor of the house,' as he calls it, is undoubtedly the motive of his inexplicable silence. He would hardly compromise that august sentiment, for which he is apparently willing to die, by desecrating Prior's Tarrant with the presence of a woman likely to figure in the police-courts—a woman, too, who, if your theory is correct, has designs against the father of the girl for whom I veritably believe he has more than a passing regard."

The General, secretly in danger of losing his temper—a thing he never really did—concealed his emotion by affecting to ruminate. The thought of his invitation to the dashing American, afterwards carelessly endorsed by the Duke, restored his equanimity.

"That was a neat touch," he remarked meditatively as he selected a cigar from his case. "If his Grace is not cold meat, I'd give a good deal to be living under the same roof with him and Mrs. Talmage Eglinton for a few days, with the prospect of Senator Sherman's arrival at the end of them."

He held the cigar he had chosen poised between finger and thumb, and suddenly gazed round with a comical expression at the rich appurtenances of the majestic dining-room. The maze of this latter-day pursuit had led him into unfamiliar paths. His ancient triumphs had been won under the free sky, where he could unravel a knotty point with the aid of tobacco at will; but now he wanted to smoke, and was confronted by sternly repressive ducal splendor.

"Mustn't light up here, I suppose," he grunted. "Let's get into the open and have a whiff. Yes, I know it's two o'clock, but we can't go to bed."

He moved to one of the French windows, and, parting the heavy curtains, unfastened the bolts and stepped out on to the terrace where he had spent the earlier hours of the evening. Instantly both he and Forsyth, who followed close behind, became conscious of the sound of heavy breathing. As the shaft of light shot from the opened window they saw that at the apex of the shaft, half way to the balustrade of the terrace, two men were locked together on the ground in a ferocious struggle, while twenty paces off, in the shadow of the gray pile, the dim shapes of two other men paused irresolute, as if their advance had been checked by the sudden opening of the window.

For two seconds General Sadgrove's eyes blazed along the line of light; then with a spring that would have done credit to one of half his age, he hurled himself upon the combatants, and selecting the topmost for his onslaught, dragged him from the prone figure below.

"Get back to the window! Watch those other fellows!" he called to his nephew, who was hurrying to his assistance. And Forsyth did as he was bid, though he had hardly run back and put himself on guard when the two distant prowlers vanished into the deeper shadows of the refectory wall.

With no gentle hand the General hauled his struggling captive towards the window. Half Forsyth's attention was diverted to the other party to the fray, who was slowly rising from the ground, and the other half to the dark end of the terrace, where the remaining pair had disappeared; and it was therefore not until the General had arrived, hanging like a terrier to his prisoner, that the obedient sentinel had eyes for them. But at last he had to stand aside to allow the veteran firebrand to drag the fighting, kicking figure into the room, and then only did he notice details.

"You've got the wrong one!" he exclaimed. "Don't you see—that's your own man, Azimoolah?"