In spite of my deep anxiety, a feeling of annoyance, of resentment, had come over me. No man likes to be made to look ridiculous, and here was I standing before a lot of constables, all of them staring in inquisitive astonishment at my being thus addressed by the old lady.

"Is this Mr. Berrington, madam?" an immensely tall, bull-necked, plain-clothes policeman, of pompous, forbidding mien, suddenly asked.

"Yes, officer, it is," she snapped. During all the time I had known her I had never seen her quite like this.

"See here," he said, turning to me, "I want your address, and for the present you will stay here."

I am considered good-tempered. Usually, too, I can control my feelings.

There is a limit, however, to the amount of incivility I can stand, and this fellow was deliberately insulting me.

"How dare you speak like that to me!" I burst out. "What has this affair to do with me? Do you know who I am?"

"Aren't you Mr. Michael Berrington?" he inquired more guardedly, apparently taken aback at my outburst of indignation.

"I am."

"Then read that," he said, producing a telegram and holding it out before me.

It was addressed to:

"Miss Dulcie Challoner, Holt Manor, Holt Stacey," and ran:

"The police have recovered property which they believe to have been stolen from Holt Manor. Please come at once to 430 Grafton Street, Bond Street, to identify it. Shall expect you by train due Paddington 12:17.

Please don't fail to come as matter very urgent.

"MICHAEL BERRINGTON."

It had been handed in at the office in Regent Street at 9:30 that morning, and received at Holt Stacey village at 9:43.

"How absurd! How ridiculous!" I exclaimed. "My name has been forged, of course. I never sent that telegram; this is the first I have seen or heard of it."

"That you will have to prove," the detective answered, with official stolidity.

"Surely, Aunt Hannah," I almost shouted--so excited did I feel--as I again turned to her, "you can't think I sent that telegram?"

"I certainly think nothing else," she replied, and her eyes were like shining beads. "Who would send a telegram signed with your name but you, or someone instructed by you?"

I saw that to argue with her in the frame of mind she was then in would be futile--my presentiment at Holt that some day I should fall foul of her had come true! I turned to the officer.

"I must see the original of that telegram," I said quickly, "and shall then quickly prove that it was not sent by me. How soon can I get hold of it?"

"Oh, we can see about it at once, sir," he answered much more civilly, for, pretending to look for something in my pocket, I had intentionally pulled out my leather wallet, containing two hundred pounds or more in notes, and opened it for an instant. There is nothing like the sight of paper money to ensure civility from a policeman disposed to be impertinent--I should like, in justice, to add that most policemen are not.

Also Easterton had come over and spoken to me, and of course pooh-poohed the idea of my having sent the telegram, which had just been shown to him. Dulcie stared at me with large, pathetic eyes, and I knew that, but for Aunt Hannah's so-to-speak mounting guard, she would have asked me endless questions instead of sitting there mute.

"You had better come with me and hear Jack Osborne's story," Easterton said some moments later. "The Inspector tells me he is upstairs, and still rather weak from the effect of the treatment he has received."

I had seen a puzzled look come into Aunt Hannah's eyes while Easterton was speaking, but she remained sour and unbending.

Osborne was sitting up in a chair, partly undressed--he still wore his evening clothes--cotton wool bound round his ankles and one wrist. He smiled weakly as we entered, and the policeman who sat at his bedside immediately rose. It was easy to see that Jack had suffered a good deal; he looked, for him, quite pale, and there were dark marks beneath his eyes. Nor was his appearance improved by several days' growth of beard--he was usually clean-shaven.

His story was quickly told, and points in it gave food for thought, also for conjecture.

It seemed that, while he was at supper with the woman I knew as "Mrs.

Gastrell," at Gastrell's reception, two men, unable to find a vacant table, had asked if they might sit at his table, where there were two vacant seats. Both were strangers to him, and apparently to "Mrs.

Gastrell" too. They seemed, however, pleasant fellows, and presently he had drifted into conversation with them, or they with him, and with his fair companion--Jack, as I have said, is extremely cosmopolitan, and picks up all sorts of acquaintances. I could well believe that at a reception such as Gastrell's he would waive all formality of introduction if he found himself with companionable strangers.

Supper over, the four had remained together, and later, when Jack had seen his fair friend safely into a cab, he had rejoined the two strangers, becoming gradually more and more friendly with them. The reception had not ended until past one in the morning, and he and his two acquaintances had been among the last to leave. Having all to go in the same direction, they had shared a taxi, and on arriving at the chambers which the strangers had told him they shared--these chambers were in Bloomsbury, but Jack had not noticed in what street--one of the strangers had suggested his coming in for a few minutes before returning to the Russell Hotel, where he had his rooms, which was close by.

At first disinclined to do this, he had finally yielded to their persuasion. He had a whiskey-and-soda with them, he said--he mentioned that the chambers were comfortable and well furnished--and one of them had then suggested a game of cards. They had all sat down to play, and--

Well, he remembered, he said, seeing cards being dealt--but that was all he did remember. He supposed that after that he must have fainted, or been made unconscious; he now suspected that the drink he had taken had been drugged.

When he recovered consciousness he had no idea where he was, or how long he had been insensible. The room was unfamiliar to him, and everything about him strange. He was stretched upon a bed, in an apartment much larger than the one he was now in, with hands and feet tightly tied. The two windows faced a blank wall, the wall apparently of the next house; later he came to know, by the sound of Big Ben booming in the night, that he was still in London.

The door of the room was at the back of the bed; he could not see it from where he lay, and, bound as he was, could not even turn, but was forced to lie flat upon his back.

He had not long been conscious, when the light of day began to fade.

Soon the room was in pitch darkness. Then it was he became aware that someone was in the room. He listened attentively, but could hear nothing; nevertheless the presence of a man or woman made itself "felt"

beyond a doubt. He judged the time of day to be about six o'clock in the evening, when suddenly somebody touched him--a hand in the darkness. He started, and called out; but there was no answer. Some minutes later a man spoke.

The voice was not that of either of the men he had met at Gastrell's reception; he could swear to that, he said. Yet he seemed to recognize the voice, indeed, to have heard it recently. He racked his brains to remember where, but to no purpose.

The man spoke in a low tone, and its _timbre_ and inflection betrayed what is called the voice of a gentleman, he said.

"You have been brought here," the man said, "to give certain information, and to reveal certain secrets. If you do this, you will be released at once--you will be taken away from here in an unconscious state, just as you were brought here, and set down in the night not far from your hotel. If you refuse, you will be taken out during the night, and dropped into the Thames."

The man had then gone on to question him. The questions he had asked had been numerous, and one and all had had to do with persons of high station with whom Jack was on terms of intimacy--all of them rich people. What most astonished him, he said, was that his unseen interlocutor should know so much about him--his questions and remarks showed how much he knew--and that he should apparently know who all his friends were.

Jack could not remember all the questions he had been asked, but he repeated some of them. Whereabouts did the d.u.c.h.esse de Montparna.s.se keep her jewels in her chateau on the Meuse? The questioner said he knew that Osborne could tell him, because he knew that Osborne, just before going to Nigeria, had, while staying at that chateau, been shown by the d.u.c.h.esse herself her priceless jewellery--one of the finest collections in the world, chiefly valuable owing to its interesting historic a.s.sociations.

Then, in which apartment in Eldon Hall, in Northumberland, the seat of the Earl of Cranmere, was the large safe that Lord Cranmere had bought ten months before from an American firm, the name of which was given? He said that he, Osborne, must know, because he was a guest at Lord Cranmere's when the safe arrived--which was the truth. He also wanted to know if there were a priests' hiding-hole in Eldon Hall, as was the case in so many of the large country mansions built about the same period, and, if so, its exact whereabouts in the house.

As Jack Osborne said this, my thoughts flashed away to Berkshire, to Holt Manor, to the dark, depressing hiding-hole there that I had peered down into more than once. Who had spoken to me of that hiding-hole only recently? Why, Dulcie, of course. She had mentioned it whilst telling me about Mrs. Stapleton, and about Sir Roland's showing the young widow over the house. Dulcie had mentioned it specially, because Mrs.

Stapleton had evinced such evident interest in it.

I checked my train of thought, focussing my mind upon that single incident.

Mrs. Stapleton, the "mysterious widow" of whom n.o.body appeared to know anything, had been strangely interested in that hiding-hole and in all that Sir Roland had said about it--Dulcie had told me that. The hiding-hole was in close proximity to Sir Roland's bedroom, and to one other room from which valuable jewellery had been stolen. Mrs. Stapleton had left the neighbourhood on the day after the robbery, had been absent ever since--that of course might be, and probably was, merely a coincidence. At supper at Gastrell's reception in c.u.mberland Place Mrs.

Stapleton had acknowledged "Mrs. Gastrell's" smile of recognition, and an instant later the two women had stared at each other stonily, and Mrs. Stapleton had a.s.sured me that she did not know the other woman, that she had "never seen her before." Then those two men, of whom Osborne had just spoken, had of their own accord joined him and "Mrs.

Gastrell" at supper, and eventually he had gone with the men to their flat in Bloomsbury. And now here was an unseen man, evidently a scoundrel, inquiring the whereabouts of a safe in a country house belonging to a n.o.bleman known to be extremely rich, and asking in particular if the house possessed a priests' hiding-hole, and if so, exactly where it was located--a man who threatened evil if the information were withheld. Could all this, I could not help wondering, be mere coincidence? Then on the top of it came that extraordinary telegram sent to Dulcie from London, with my name attached to it.

Jack, however, had not done relating his adventures, so I turned again to listen to him.

"A third thing the fellow asked," he said, "was the name of Hugo Salmonsteiner's bankers--Salmonsteiner the millionaire timber-merchant whose son was out big-game shooting with me a year ago. It seemed an absurd question, for surely it must be easy to find out who any man's bankers are, but still he asked me, and appeared to be most anxious that I should tell him. Oh, but there were scores of other questions, all much on the same lines, and tending to extract from me information of a peculiar kind."

"Did you answer any of them?" Easterton asked.