"Why?"

Ashe reflected.

"Why? Why? What a beast of a word that is--the detective's bugbear. I thought I had it, until you said--Great Scott! I'll tell you why. I see it all. I have him with the goods. His object in coming to see you about the letters was because Freddie wanted them back owing to his approaching marriage with Miss Peters--wasn't it?"

"Yes."

"You tell him you have destroyed the letters. He goes off. Am I right?"

"Yes."

"Before he is out of the house Miss Peters is giving her name at the front door. Put yourself in Jones' place. What does he think?

He is suspicious. He thinks there is some game on. He skips upstairs again, waits until Miss Peters has gone into your room, then stands outside and listens. How about that?"

"I do believe you are right. He might quite easily have done that."

"He did do exactly that. I know it as though I had been there; in fact, it is highly probable I was there. You say all this happened on the night we first met? I remember coming downstairs that night--I was going out to a vaudeville show--and hearing voices in your room. I remember it distinctly. In all probability I nearly ran into Jones."

"It does all seem to fit in, doesn't it?"

"It's a clear case. There isn't a flaw in it. The only question is, can I, on the evidence, go to young Freddie and choke the scarab out of him? On the whole, I think I had better take this note to Jones, as I promised Judson, and see whether I can't work something through him. Yes; that's the best plan. I'll be starting at once."

Perhaps the greatest hardship in being an invalid is the fact that people come and see you and keep your spirits up. The Honorable Freddie Threepwood suffered extremely from this. His was not a gregarious nature and it fatigued his limited brain powers to have to find conversation for his numerous visitors.

All he wanted was to be left alone to read the adventures of Gridley Quayle, and when tired of doing that to lie on his back and look at the ceiling and think of nothing.

It is your dynamic person, your energetic world's worker, who chafes at being laid up with a sprained ankle. The Honorable Freddie enjoyed it. From boyhood up he had loved lying in bed; and now that fate had allowed him to do this without incurring rebuke he objected to having his reveries broken up by officious relations.

He spent his rare intervals of solitude in trying to decide in his mind which of his cousins, uncles and aunts was, all things considered, the greatest nuisance. Sometimes he would give the palm to Colonel Horace Mant, who struck the soldierly note--"I recollect in a hill campaign in the winter of the year '93 giving my ankle the deuce of a twist." Anon the more spiritual att.i.tude of the Bishop of G.o.dalming seemed to annoy him more keenly.

Sometimes he would head the list with the name of his Cousin Percy--Lord Stockheath--who refused to talk of anything except his late breach-of-promise case and the effect the verdict had had on his old governor. Freddie was in no mood just now to be sympathetic with others on their breach-of-promise cases.

As he lay in bed reading on Monday morning, the only flaw in his enjoyment of this unaccustomed solitude was the thought that presently the door was bound to open and some kind inquirer insinuate himself into the room.

His apprehensions proved well founded. Scarcely had he got well into the details of an ingenious plot on the part of a secret society to eliminate Gridley Quayle by bribing his cook--a bad lot--to sprinkle chopped-up horsehair in his chicken frica.s.see, when the door-k.n.o.b turned and Ashe Marson came in.

Freddie was not the only person who had found the influx of visitors into the sick room a source of irritation. The fact that the invalid seemed unable to get a moment to himself had annoyed Ashe considerably. For some little time he had hung about the pa.s.sage in which Freddie's room was situated, full of enterprise, but unable to make a forward move owing to the throng of sympathizers. What he had to say to the sufferer could not be said in the presence of a third party.

Freddie's sensation, on perceiving him, was one of relief. He had been half afraid it was the bishop. He recognized Ashe as the valet chappie who had helped him to bed on the occasion of his accident. It might be that he had come in a respectful way to make inquiries, but he was not likely to stop long. He nodded and went on reading. And then, glancing up, he perceived Ashe standing beside the bed, fixing him with a piercing stare.

The Honorable Freddie hated piercing stares. One of the reasons why he objected to being left alone with his future father-in-law, Mr. J. Preston Peters, was that Nature had given the millionaire a penetrating pair of eyes, and the stress of business life in New York had developed in him a habit of boring holes in people with them. A young man had to have a stronger nerve and a clearer conscience than the Honorable Freddie to enjoy a tete-a-tete with Mr. Peters.

Though he accepted Aline's father as a necessary evil and recognized that his position ent.i.tled him to look at people as sharply as he liked, whatever their feelings, he would be hanged if he was going to extend this privilege to Mr. Peters' valet.

This man standing beside him was giving him a look that seemed to his sensitive imagination to have been fired red-hot from a gun; and this annoyed and exasperated Freddie.

"What do you want?" he said querulously. "What are you staring at me like that for?"

Ashe sat down, leaned his elbows on the bed, and applied the look again from a lower elevation.

"Ah!" he said.

Whatever may have been Ashe's defects, so far as the handling of the inductive-reasoning side of Gridley Quayle's character was concerned, there was one scene in each of his stories in which he never failed. That was the scene in the last chapter where Quayle, confronting his quarry, unmasked him. Quayle might have floundered in the earlier part of the story, but in his big scene he was exactly right. He was curt, crisp and mercilessly compelling.

Ashe, rehearsing this interview in the pa.s.sage before his entry, had decided that he could hardly do better than model himself on the detective. So he began to be curt, crisp and mercilessly compelling to Freddie; and after the first few sentences he had that youth gasping for air.

"I will tell you," he said. "If you can spare me a few moments of your valuable time I will put the facts before you. Yes; press that bell if you wish--and I will put them before witnesses. Lord Emsworth will no doubt be pleased to learn that his son, whom he trusted, is a thief!"

Freddie's hand fell limply. The bell remained un-touched. His mouth opened to its fullest extent. In the midst of his panic he had a curious feeling that he had heard or read that last sentence somewhere before. Then he remembered. Those very words occurred in Gridley Quayle, Investigator--The Adventure of the Blue Ruby.

"What--what do you mean?" he stammered.

"I will tell you what I mean. On Sat.u.r.day night a valuable scarab was stolen from Lord Emsworth's private museum. The case was put into my hands----"

"Great Scott! Are you a detective?"

"Ah!" said Ashe.

Life, as many a worthy writer has pointed out, is full of ironies. It seemed to Freddie that here was a supreme example of this fact. All these years he had wanted to meet a detective; and now that his wish had been gratified the detective was detecting him!

"The case," continued Ashe severely, "was placed in my hands. I investigated it. I discovered that you were in urgent and immediate need of money."

"How on earth did you do that?"

"Ah!" said Ashe. "I further discovered that you were in communication with an individual named Jones."

"Good Lord! How?"

Ashe smiled quietly.

"Yesterday I had a talk with this man Jones, who is staying in Market Blandings. Why is he staying in Market Blandings? Because he had a reason for keeping in touch with you; because you were about to transfer to his care something you could get possession of, but which only he could dispose of--the scarab."

The Honorable Freddie was beyond speech. He made no comment on this statement. Ashe continued:

"I interviewed this man Jones. I said to him: 'I am in the Honorable Frederick Threepwood's confidence. I know everything.

Have you any instructions for me?' He replied: 'What do you know?' I answered: 'I know that the Honorable Frederick Threepwood has something he wishes to hand to you, but which he has been unable to hand to you owing to having had an accident and being confined to his room.' He then told me to tell you to let him have the scarab by messenger."

Freddie pulled himself together with an effort. He was in sore straits, but he saw one last chance. His researches in detective fiction had given him the knowledge that detectives occasionally relaxed their austerity when dealing with a deserving case. Even Gridley Quayle could sometimes be softened by a hard-luck story.

Freddie could recall half a dozen times when a detected criminal had been spared by him because he had done it all from the best motives. He determined to throw himself on Ashe's mercy.

"I say, you know," he said ingratiatingly, "I think it's bally marvelous the way you've deduced everything, and so on."

"Well?"

"But I believe you would chuck it if you heard my side of the case."

"I know your side of the case. You think you are being blackmailed by a Miss Valentine for some letters you once wrote her. You are not. Miss Valentine has destroyed the letters. She told the man Jones so when he went to see her in London. He kept your five hundred pounds and is trying to get another thousand out of you under false pretenses."

"What? You can't be right."