Thecla Perzio received Barndale with much shyness and embarrassment; and he, seeing that she was a good deal afraid of him, plucked up courage and treated her rather wilfully. He insisted on her going down to his sister at his own house in Surrey and staying there under the old maid’s chaperonage, at least until such time as she should be able to find another suitable companion. The more Thecla found herself overpowered by this masterful son of Anak, the more she felt resigned, and comfortable, and peaceful, and safe. Barndale, like the coward he was, felt his power and took advantage of it. He would have no ‘nay’ on any grounds, but exacted immediate obedience.

To make things smoother he set out that afternoon for Surrey, saw his sister, talked her into a great state of sympathy for little Thecla, and brought her back to town by the next morning’s train. Then, having introduced the ladies to each other, he left them and went to his own chambers in King’s Bench Walk. Arrived there he stooped at the keyhole, finding some trifle or other there opposing his latch-key. The key-hole was half-filled with putty. Barndale never lost his temper. ‘Some genius takes this for a joke, I suppose,’ he murmured philosophically, and proceeded by the aid of a pocket corkscrew to clear the keyhole. He had just succeeded when a hand was laid familiarly upon his shoulder. He turned and saw a stranger clean-shaven, calm, and in aspect business-like.

‘Mr. Barndale, I think?’ said the familiar stranger.

‘Yes,’ said Barndale, looking down at him in a somewhat stately way, in resentment of the familiar hand upon his shoulder.

‘We’ll do our little bit of business inside, sir, if you please.’

Barndale looked at him again inquiringly, opened the door, walked in, and allowed the stranger to follow. The man entered the room and stood before Barndale on the hearthrug. He had one hand in the breast of his coat; and somehow, as Barndale looked at him, he bethought him of the Greek who had stood with his hand at his breast in the Concordia Garden glaring at Leland.

‘I hope you’ll take it quietly,’ said the clean-shaven man, ‘but it’s got to be done, and will be done whether you take it quietly or not. I’m an officer, and it’s my duty to arrest you.’

There passed rapidly through Barndale’s mind the remembrance of a disputed wine-bill, and the service of some legal document which he had thrown into the fire without reading.

He connected the clean-shaven stranger with these things, and was tickled at the idea of being arrested for some such trifle as a hundred pounds. He was so far tickled that he laughed outright.

‘Come,’ said Barndale, still smiling, ‘this is absurd. I’ll give you a cheque at once. Are you empowered to give a receipt?’

The clean-shaven stranger regarded him with a cool, observant, wary eye.

‘It’s my duty to arrest you,’ he said again quietly, ‘and I hope you’ll come quietly and make no fuss about it.’

‘My good man,’ said Barndale, ‘you can’t arrest me if I pay the money.’

‘Come, come, come, sir,’ said the official, with calm superiority in his tone; ‘that’s all very well and very pretty, but it’s Mr. Leland’s affair that I want you for, sir.’

‘Mr. Leland’s affair?’ said Barndale.

‘That little attempted murder the night before last, that’s all. Now, take it quiet; don’t let’s have any nonsense, you know.’

The clean-shaven stranger’s lips pressed close together with a resolute look, and his hand came a little way out of the breast of his coat.

‘Will you have the goodness to tell me what you mean?’ asked Barndale, bewildered, and a little angry to find himself so.

‘Well, if you won’t know anything about it, Mr. James Leland was found yesterday in a house-boat at Thames Ditton, with a pistol bullet into him, and he ain’t expected to recover, and that’s my business along with you, and I’ll trouble you to come quiet.’

The tension on the official nerves made hash of the official’s English. Barndale smote the mantel-piece with his clenched hand.

‘Great God!’ he cried. ‘The Greek! Where is Mr. Leland?’ he asked the official eagerly.

‘In bed at the “Swan,” abeing doctored. That’s where he is,’ replied the official curtly. ‘Now, come along, and don’t let’s have no more palaver.’

Barndale discerned the nature of the situation, and remained master of himself.

‘I will come with you,’ he said with grave self-possession. ‘I am somehow suspected of having a hand in the attempted murder of my friend. Now, you shall arrest me since you must, but you shall not tie the hands of justice by preventing me from tracing the criminal. The man who has committed this crime is Demetri Agryopoulo, a Greek, attached to the Persian Embassy at Constantinople. You look like a shrewd and wary man,’ Barndale took out his cheque-book and wrote a cheque for one hundred pounds. ‘When you have done with me, cash that cheque and spend every penny of it, if need be, in pursuit of that man. When it is gone come to me for more. When you have caught him, come to me for five hundred pounds. Wait a moment.’

He sat down and wrote in a great, broad hand: ‘I promise to pay to Bearer the sum of Five Hundred Pounds (500L.) on the arrest of Demetri Agryopoulo, attachÉ to the Persian Embassy at Constantinople__W. Holmes Barn-dale.’ He appended date and place, and handed it to the officer.

‘Very good, sir,’ said he, waving the papers to and fro in the air to dry the ink, and keeping all the while a wary eye on Barndale. ‘I know that my opinion goes for nothing, but if I was a grand jury I should throw out the bill, most likely. We’ll make it as quiet as we can, sir; but there’s two of my men outside, and if there should be any need for force it’ll have to be used, that’s all.’

‘I shall go with you quietly,’ said Barndale. ‘I have two things to impress upon you. Let no apparent evidence in any other direction throw you off the scent on which I have set you. Next: send a smart man to Thames Ditton and let him collect evidence of all the grounds on which I am suspected. Now I am ready.’

Thus torn with grief for his friend, and sorrow for his lover, but moved to no upbraiding of Fate for the cruel trick she had played him, this British gentleman surrendered himself to the emissary of Public Gossip and went away with him.

The officer, having ideas of his own, got into a cab with Barndale and drove straight to Scotland Yard. On the way Barndale set out the evidence in favour of his own theory of the crime and its motive. Inspector Webb’s experience of criminals was large; but he had never known a criminal conduct himself after Barn-dale’s fashion, and was convinced of his innocence, and hotly eager to be in pursuit of the Greek. When the cab drew up in the Yard a second cab drew up behind it, and from it emerged two clean-shaven, quiet-looking men in inconspicuous dresses, whom Barndale had seen in King’s Bench Walk as he had gone that afternoon to his chambers. Scarcely had they alighted when a third cab came up, and from it dashed a mahogany-coloured young man with grey hair, and assisted a lady to alight. Catching sight of Barndale, the lady ran forward and took him by the arm.

‘Oh, Will,’ she said, ‘you have heard this dreadful news?’

‘My poor child!’ he answered.

‘This,’ said Lilian, pointing out her companion, ‘is Dr. Wattiss, who saved James’s life.’

‘Hundred and Ninety-first Foot,’ said the medical man. ‘I’ve had considerable experience in gunshot wounds, and I don’t think Mr. Leland’s case at all desperate, if that’s any comfort to anybody,’ There the doctor smiled. ‘You are Mr. Barndale, I presume. Miss Leland has evidence of the name and even the whereabouts of the scoundrel who inflicted the wound, and we are here to hunt him up.’

‘May I ask who’s the suspected party?’ asked Inspector Webb with his eye on the doctor.

‘Demetri Agryopoulo,’ said Lilian, ‘a Greek——’

‘Attached to the Persian Embassy at Constantinople.’ said Inspector Webb. ‘All right. Come with me, ma’am. This way, gentlemen.’ And the inspector marshalled them all upstairs. There he gave a whispered order to an officer who lounged to the door, and placed his back against it, and there picked his teeth, insouciant. The inspector disappeared. In two minutes he was back again.

‘This way, ma’am. This way, gentlemen,’ And he ushered all three before him up a set of stone stairs, down a set of stone stairs, and into a carpeted apartment, where sat a gentleman of military aspect, behind a business-looking table overspread with papers.

‘You have a statement to make to me, I believe,’ he said to Lilian with grave politeness.

Lilian told her story without faltering and without superfluous words. When she mentioned the pipe Dr. Wattiss drew a packet from his pocket and unwound it carefully, and laid the precious meerschaum on the table.

‘What is this statement of a nightly quarrel between the two residents in the house-boat, Webb?’ Thus spoke the superior officer behind the business table.

‘Man named Hodges, sir,’ responded the inspector, ‘states that he overheard violent rows after dusk.’

In spite of all his grief and anxiety Barn-dale laughed, and was about to speak in explanation when Lilian rose and laid a letter on the table.

‘Will you kindly read that, sir, and then ask Mr. Barndale to explain?’ she said simply.

The military-looking official took the letter and read it through. It ran thus:—

‘I think you had something to say, sir,’ said the military official turning to Barndale, and handing the letter back to Lilian.

‘The supposed quarrel between poor Leland and myself is easily explained. We were rehearsing for amateur theatricals, almost nightly, in a somewhat animated scene, and I can only suppose that we were overheard, and that our play was taken for earnest.’

‘Have you any clue to the whereabouts of this Greek?’ the officer asked Lilian. The doctor broke in—

‘Miss Leland was describing the Greek to me this morning with a view to his identification, when a man walked into the room, said he had overheard the lady through the open window, and had seen the man she described two hours before. He was the boots of an hotel at Kingston. We came here at once, after sending an officer to look after him.’

‘That will do, Mr. Webb,’ said the superior official. ‘There can be no necessity for detaining this gentleman.’

Lilian and the doctor read this last sentence in its most superficial light, but Barndale rose and turned with a feeling of vast inward relief—

‘Our bargain holds good still,’ he said to the inspector, as they went downstairs together.

‘Yes, sir,’ said the inspector, and bade the trio adieu with great politeness.

They three took train for Thames Ditton at once, and by the way Barndale told the story of his arrest.

Arrived at the historic ‘Swan,’ they settled down to their separate avocations—Lilian and the doctor to nurse Leland, and Barndale to do all that in him lay to track the Greek. My story nears its close; and I may say at once, without word-spinning, that Demetri Agryopoulo disappeared, and was no more heard of. He was too wily to speak the English described in the advertisement of his peculiarities. He spoke German like an Alsatian, French like a Gascon, and Italian like a Piedmontese, and could pass for any one of the three. By what devices he held himself in secrecy it matters not here to say. But again, and for the last time in this story, he went his way, and the darkness shrouded him.

On the day following Barndale’s arrest and release, Lilian sat by her brother’s bedside, when the door of the bedroom opened noiselessly, and two women stole in on stealthy tiptoe.

One was Barndale’s maiden sister, and the other was poor little Thecla Perzio.

Lilian kissed them both; and Thecla said, in a tearful, frightened whisper.

‘It is all my wicked, wicked fault. But O mademoiselle, may I not help to nurse him?’

‘Not mademoiselle, dear—Lilian!’ was Lilian’s sole answer.

So the three women stayed, together with mamma Leland, and nursed the invalid in couples. And it came to pass that the indiscreet little Thecla won everybody’s heart about the place, and that everybody came to be assured that no lack of maidenly honour had made her indiscreet, but only a very natural, unsuspecting, childlike confidence. It came to pass also that when Leland Junior began to get better he saw good and sufficient reasons for setting a term to his bachelor existence.

And with no great difficulty Thecla Perzio was brought to his opinion.

By Christmas time Leland was well and strong again. The chase after the Greek was dismissed from the official mind by this time: and Barndale, being reminded of Inspector Webb by the receipt of the promissory note for five hundred pounds, wrote to that official to offer him a week or two in the country. The inspector came, and brought the marvellous pipe with him. It had been detained until then to be put in evidence in case of the Greek’s arrest and trial.

The inspector heard the comedy, and told Barndale, later on, that he regarded the quarrel scene as a masterpiece of histrionic art.

‘I don’t wonder that bumpkin took it all for earnest,’ he said. ‘I should ha’ done that myself. No, thankee, sir. I don’t care about mixing with the lords and swells upstairs. I’ll have a look in on the butler. Smoking the old pipe again, I see, sir. Not many old meerschaums knocking about with a tale like that attached to ‘em.’

It pleases me to add that Doctor Wattiss officiated at Leland’s wedding, and married the maiden sister.