the limousine was soon gliding comfortably up the long drive toward Calmount Castle, and the fulfilment of at least one part of the quest that had brought them here.
The great front door stood wide open, and in the frame of it was a tall, erect, white-haired gentleman staring down at them blankly from beneath shaggy eyebrows. Cleek stepped forward, and removed his hat.
"Sir Lionel Calmount?" he said politely. "We come on account of Maurevania. Will you give us a hearing?" He thrust out the Maurevanian ring, and at sight of it the old man changed colour.
"If you have much to say," said he, leading the way to a small drawing-room at the rear of the building. "What do you want with me, sir? And what is the business you have come upon?"
"I want the release of your prisoner, Miss Ailsa Lorne," rapped out Cleek sharply, meeting the keen eyes with his own. "She is under the protection of the British Government, and Scotland Yard has come to take possession of her and bring her safely back home."
Sir Lionel clicked his teeth together.
"Impossible! Miss Lorne is . . . well, to speak perfectly plainly, she is not in possession of her senses, sir. She is mad."
"Mad! Not unless you have driven her insane with your atrocities. For God's sake, let us see her, lest I do you an unjust injury, Sir Lionel. I beg of you to take me to her at once!"
The old man switched round and looked at him keenly.
"Who are you, that you ask this of me?"
"Deland, Lieutenant Deland," Cleek made answer, "and responsible for the safety of the lady you have so foully injured!"
Sir Lionel's ruddy face went dough white; he shut his hands together and breathed hard. "Injured?" he bleated incredulously. "Injured, my dear sir? I have done Miss Lorne no personal injury, I assure you. She has greatly endeared herself to my wife and to me by her gentleness of disposition, and we feel only a great grief at the terrible thing that has deprived her of her mind. But as for any personal injury; you speak in riddles."
Mr. Narkom looked at Cleek; Cleek looked at Mr. Narkom. The old man's words rang true. There was a great light shining in Cleek's eyes.
"If you will come this way," went on Sir Lionel, and the two men followed him silently through a long hallway, into what was probably the music room, for at one end of it stood an organ and at the other a piano. Seated before it, playing softly to herself, was Ailsa, with her dear hand unblemished, but bare of the ring that Cleek had first put upon her finger many months before. She looked up, and seeing Cleek dressed as she had seen him so often, rose to her feet and came running toward him.
"Lieutenant Deland!" she cried, putting out her hands impulsively, "this is indeed a surprise. So you discovered me, and come to take me back home again? Why, and you, too, Mr. Narkom? Ah, but this is too good to be true!"
With a little ejaculation of relief Cleek caught the small hands in his.
Mr. Narkom drew the attention of Sir Lionel, and tactfully contrived to leave the two together.
"Count Irma came for me," whispered Ailsa, under cover of the conversation. "He told me you had sent for me to come to the Embassy, and I was to send on your ring as a sign that I was well; an officer in another car took my message to you while I packed. Luckily they never noticed my new leather-covered travelling basket for the pigeons that you gave me. Dear things! They did not know of what invaluable use they were to prove, otherwise they would have taken it from me. But I smuggled it into the back of the car, and contrived to get it out when no one was looking. Then I was driven straight here, and Sir Lionel and his wife were told I was mad! Mad, mind you!"
Cleek pressed her hands in his, too thankful at her escape to care aught for his own danger.
"Come, let us get away," he said. And Narkom turned at the same time. "I must get back to London, Sir Lionel. I think I have convinced you that you have been fooled and deceived. How serious the consequences might have been I need scarcely say. But if Count Irma returns "
"He will be refused admittance," said Sir Lionel sternly. "I am not to be made a catspaw, as he will see. You and your friend are as safe here as in the King's palace itself. It is late. I beg you to stay, if only for the night."
Narkom looked at his ally dubiously, but Cleek was gazing in turn at Ailsa, and it seemed to him as if her eyes signalled "Yes." And accordingly, some five minutes later, the dazed but delighted Lennard was being led off for a welcome meal and rest, while a party of five were soon seated round the dining table, Cleek laughing as happily as if Maurevania and all its troubles were at the bottom of the sea, now that he knew Ailsa was safe, and that the whole thing was but a malicious plot to entrap him.
An onlooker would have deemed it the most commonplace of country dinners, for it was not until dessert was reached that anything untoward occurred.
Just as the door opened to admit the butler with this course, the house rang from end to end with the sound of laughter, harsh, malicious, utterly mad. Lady Calmount looked at her husband with blanched cheeks. Then she sprang to her feet; she was shaking as if with the ague.
"Lionel, Lionel, that dreadful laughter again!" she cried hysterically, forgetting all else but her terror, her unutterable fear. "Oh, my boy, my boy! God help us all! What is to be done?"
Sir Lionel laid a steadying hand upon her arm. His own face was pale, but he remembered the presence of strangers, and sought to calm her.
"Hush, hush, my dear!" he said persuasively, pressing her back. "It is some servant, some trick. You must not pay any attention to it. What's that, Miss Lorne? Smelling salts? Oh, thank you very much. That will be best. There, there!" He smoothed Lady Calmount's pale cheeks with a tender hand, his own face as white as hers.
Ailsa looked up at Cleek. Then she nodded her head.
"Tell him, dear Lady Calmount, tell the lieutenant. He can help you, if any one can," she said softly in her low, sweet voice. "What is the meaning of that awful laughter? I heard it last night, and I really thought you had a mad person under your roof. So if there is anything to tell. . . ."
"Oh, there is, there is!" broke in Lady Calmount despairingly. "You tell them, Lionel; I can't. I can only think of my boy's danger; he is coming to his death, I know he is, and it is too late to stop him! Oh, it is cruel, cruel! What shall I do? What shall I do?"
There was a pregnant silence; then, with a look of mute pity at his wife, Sir Lionel cleared his throat.
"This must be all inexplicable to you, Lieutenant Deland," he began haltingly, wiping his face with a silk handkerchief, "but I will try to explain. We are in very great trouble. Within the year both my younger sons have been killed, I might say murdered, in some mysterious, diabolical manner by some agent that works by supernatural powers; there is no other possible explanation. They have been done to death, though showing no sign of wound or poison, just as that laughing gypsy swore that the sons of our house should die, when she cursed them root and branch."
"Hallo! Hallo! what's that?" said Cleek, sitting up sharply, and dropping his table napkin. "A gypsy's curse and the sons of the family dying mysteriously ! That's melodramatic, surely!"
"God help us! It is indeed," said Sir Lionel. "There is only my eldest son left now. He has been abroad, or else Heaven knows but what he, too, might now be lying with his ill-fated brothers. It is all so inexplicable, and yet so appallingly true! You can understand how I dread to see Edward enter the castle
