The wonderful coolness and audacity of his companion filled Jack with admiration. He had forgotten for the moment that there was any danger at all. It seemed to him to be a good thing to have so adroit and cunning a colleague to work with. The whole thing had been so wonderfully swift; hardly a moment seemed to have elapsed between the extinguishing of the light and the return of Seymour with the duplicate of the plan safely in his pocket.

What he proposed to do next Jack could not guess for the moment, neither did he much care. At the same time, he felt quite convinced of the fact that Seymour had some deep scheme in his mind. Jack's spirits rose in quite an unaccountable way. He warmly congratulated himself on the fact that he had found Seymour and brought him into the campaign against Anstruther. The danger was by no means over yet, as Seymour must have recognized; but that did not seem to trouble him much, for he was shaking now with suppressed mirth, and was evidently enjoying the situation as one does a screaming farce from a comfortable place in the stalls.

Jack was about to whisper something of this to his companion, when the latter checked him with a touch on the arm. Inside the room, in the comparatively moderated light of the lamps, Jack could see Carrington fussing about uneasily. "I tell you that there were two plans," he muttered. "I am absolutely certain there was a duplicate. If you have played any kind of trick upon me I hope you will confess it at once."

"Trick be hanged, suppose that I indulge in practical joking? I say you have made a mistake; the duplicate plan is somewhere else."

"And I am equally certain that it was with those papers," Carrington blustered. "They were lying side by side a minute ago. And now one of them is gone, and you want me to believe that it has been spirited away by unseen hands."

"I don't want you to believe anything of the sort," Anstruther replied. "Not a minute had elapsed between the time that the light went out and the moment I lighted the match. What a nervous, frightened fool you are. You will be saying next that Seymour is concealed somewhere in the room, and snatched this brilliant opportunity for purloining these papers. Really, we are getting on. Hadn't you better look round the house. You will have to go to bed presently, and I should advise you to lock your door."

All this brutal sarcasm was utterly lost upon Carrington. He was as frightened and nervous as a lonely woman in a lonely house, who has discovered some strange man there. He darted from the room, followed by Anstruther's contemptuous laughter, and returned presently, saying that he had made a thorough search of the flat.

"Most assuredly nobody is on the premises," he said. He was by no means convinced yet that Anstruther was not playing some cunning trick upon him. "It is most extraordinary. You may say what you like, and prove what you like; but I am ready to swear that I brought both those plans into the room with me five minutes ago."

"Oh, look up the chimney," Anstruther growled. "Take all those plants out of your conservatory, and see if the thief hasn't vanished up the water pipe. I am sick of all these nervous fears and hysterical suspicions. It has always been the curse of my existence that I can never lay hands on an accomplice who is anything but a knave or a fool."

Without heeding the savage outburst, Carrington took one of the little silver lamps from the table, and, holding it up by its crystal receiver, advanced cautiously in the direction of the conservatory. Jack held his breath, and prepared for the worst. He felt pretty sure now that he and Seymour would be discovered. Not that he much minded, except that he was extremely anxious not to be recognized by Anstruther; but that risk had to be run. It was a pity, too, seeing what a marvelous amount of information had been gleaned during the last half-hour; but that was all part of the game.

"Is it possible he has vanished through the skylight?" Anstruther sneered.

Carrington muttered that there was a drop of some thirty feet outside the conservatory. He still advanced with the lamp in his hand, and peered about him with an anxious face. The moment was a critical one indeed, and Jack wondered if Seymour's wonderful fertility of resource would be equal to the occasion. In the dim light of the lamp he saw Seymour's right arm steal out, and his sinewy fingers close upon a piece of hose pipe attached to a tap in the wall. Evidently this had been used for watering the flowers. The gardener responsible for the well-doing of the rooms doubtless understood his work, and watered each pot separately, instead of spraying the whole place indiscriminately; for attached to the hose-pipe was the small nozzle meant to convey a fine single jet for some distance.

Jack began dimly to understand what Seymour meant to do. It was going to be a dangerous experiment, but danger was quite absolutely necessary if the eavesdroppers were to escape unrecognized. If Seymour's plan was absolutely successful, there was just the chance of them getting away without their presence there being indicated at all.

Jack saw the lean, brown hand stretch forth and turn on the tap in the wall. Then the tap at the end of the hose slid round, and a tiny spray of water, fine as a needle and strong as the arrow from a bow, struck the chimney of the lamp, now nearly red hot, and a tremendous smash of cracking glass followed.

Carrington staggered back, and a kind of hysterical scream broke from his lips. With his nerves strung at high tension, the shock of the bursting explosion rendered him nearly mad with terror. Seymour turned off the tap again, feeling sure that his business was well done.

"By Jove, that was wonderfully smart, and quickly done," Jack whispered to his companion. "I rather pride myself upon the ingenuity of my stories, especially as regards the plots of them, but I never could have thought of anything quite like that."

"Not bad," the other said quite coolly. "It was all a matter of accuracy of aim and steadiness of hand. But to a man like myself, who has had vast experience of big game shooting, a little affair like that is a mere nothing."

"But you might have missed," Jack said. "The deviation of that spurt of water by even so much as a hair's breadth would have carried it full into Carrington's face, and then our presence must have inevitably been discovered. That is where the dramatic side of it appeals to me."

"It appealed to me also," Seymour whispered coolly. "But I had only to imagine that the lamp was the face of a famous old man-eating tiger who nearly did for me four years ago in Upper Burmah, to render my hand absolutely s............