Burgo crossed to the door and stood listening with bated breath and one ear pressed against it, but the silence indoors remained unbroken. After waiting for full two minutes, but which seemed to him nothing short of a quarter of an hour, he went back and gave a longer and a still more vigorous tug at the rope. Then he listened again, and presently he was rewarded by hearing the banging of a door somewhere in the lower parts of the house, followed by a peculiar thumping sound, faint at first, but which gradually came nearer as it quitted the flagged hall and advanced slowly up the oaken staircase, its approach being marked by a distinct tap on each stair, twenty-six in all. Burgo had counted them many a time when a boy, just as he had slidden many a time down the broad, polished oaken balusters.

As he stood listening his heart beat a little faster than common, and he told himself that had that sound broken upon his ear in the dead of night, he could scarcely have heard it without a shudder. Nearer it came till it stopped opposite the door of his room. Then the key was turned, and the door flung roughly open, and to Burgo\'s astonished eyes there stood revealed a short, thickset, blear-eyed old man, with what seemed to him a most unprepossessing cast of face, whose chief garment was a greasy, much-worn overcoat, which reached nearly to his heels. He was lame, and it was the tapping of the heavy iron-shod stick which he used to aid him in walking that had so puzzled Burgo.

For a few seconds the men stared at each other in silence. Then Burgo said: "Who are you, and what are you doing here?"

"Didn\'t you ring, sir?" asked the man. Burgo nodded. "Very well, then, ain\'t I come to let you out?"

"Who told you to come and let me out, as you term it?"

"My leddy."

"And where is her ladyship?"

"Gone."

"Gone! And where is Sir Everard?

"Gone too--they\'re all gone."

For a moment or two Burgo\'s brain reeled, and he had to steady himself against the doorpost. He was weak from want of food, and he had not yet recovered from the effects of the narcotic.

"And when did Sir Everard and Lady Clinton take their departure?" was his next question.

"Between seven and eight o\'clock last night."

"Bound for where!"

The fellow favoured Burgo with a cunning grin. "It\'s none o\' my business to answer that question, sir. Maybe I know, and maybe I don\'t, but if you ask no questions, you\'ll be told no lies."

Burgo smothered the execration that rose to his lips. To have vented his temper on such a fellow would have been absurd. Besides, he had not done with him.

"And who may you be, my friend, if the question is not an impertinent one?" he asked.

"I\'m the caretaker appointed by her leddyship. Me and my old woman have got to look after the house while the family\'s out of town."

"What has poor Benny Hines done to be turned adrift?" queried Burgo to himself. Then aloud he said: "And so you were told by her ladyship to come and let me out when I rang, were you?"

Again the man grinned. "What I was told was, that there was a young gentleman upstairs what had taken more to drink than was good for him, and that he was sleeping it off, and that when he rang I was to go upstairs and unlock the door."

Mr. Brabazon laughed aloud; but it was not a pleasant laugh to hear. "Oh, ma chère tante, que je vous aime beaucoup!" he exclaimed. The man was to come when I rang the bell, but care had been taken by robbing him of his matchbox and cutting the bell rope to delay the summons as long as possible.

For a few moments he stood considering, then drawing half a sovereign from his pocket and balancing it on the end of his forefinger, he said with a meaning look at the man: "Come now, I have no doubt that if you chose you could tell me where the luggage which the family took with them was addressed to."

The man glanced from the coin to Burgo\'s face, and then back again with a cunning leer. Then drawing a step or two nearer, he said in something between a whisper and a croak: "I don\'t mind telling you, sir, that I did make it my business--and why not, hey?--to see where her leddyship\'s big trunk was directed for.",

"Yes," said Burgo.

"Brussels was the word I read, sir, in letters a inch long."

Burgo tossed him the coin. The information was well worth it.

Half an hour later a hansom deposited him and his portmanteau at the door of his lodgings.

When he had had a bath and some breakfast he felt more like himself again. Then he lighted a pipe and sat down to consider.

His distrust of Lady Clinton, which not all her smiles and all her amiability had sufficed to eradicate, had proved to be but too well grounded. When she had found him, as the result of an accident, reinstated in Sir Everard\'s good graces she accepted the situation like the clever woman she was, but it had only made her all the more determined to carry out her own schemes, and she had done so with a boldness and a decision which gave Burgo a far higher opinion of her powers than he had held before. She had brushed him from her path after a fashion which not one woman in a thousand would have had either the brain to plan or the courage to carry out. Once more she had Sir Everard under her sole control, and there was no one to say her nay. What had heretofore lurked in the background of Burgo\'s mind as nothing more than a sinister shadow now took shape and consistency--grew and spread till it overshadowed him like a huge funereal pall, on which an invisible finger traced in letters of molten flame the one word Murder. Burgo faced the word while he shuddered at it. By what purpose save one had she been actuated from the beginning?--and recent events clearly proved that she was still as firmly bent on carrying it out as ever she had been. What that end was it seemed to him there was no longer any need to ask.

One solitary gleam of comfort came to him, and one only. It was derived from his uncle\'s words: "I shall not die till after the 12th of October." Meanwhile he had been spirited away--whither?

"If her ladyship thinks she has finally choked me off she will find herself very considerably mistaken," said Burgo to himself with a grim smile, as he knocked the ashes out of his pipe. "Ten o\'clock to-morrow morning will find me in Brussels."

There were two people whom he told himself he should like to see before leaving town--to wit, Mr. Garden and old Benny Hines. So, leaving the packing of his portmanteau till later in the day, he now sallied forth with the intention of calling on the latter of the two first. He had not forgotten that the old man\'s niece was parlour-maid at No. 22, and it seemed to him, seeing how unlikely it was that Lady Clinton should have taken any of the servants with her, unless it were her own maid and her husband\'s valet, that he might be able to obtain indirectly, through Benny, some information with regard to the proceedings of the day before, which would prove serviceable to him.

On reaching the house he found there both Benny and the old man\'s niece, and as the latter had already exhausted her budget of news as far as h............