look at the title page, for the half of it was smothered under loose papers, one or two of which his act sent fluttering to the floor. The April number of The Gardener and Fruit Grower. Reading of flowers and of fruits, of Nature's good and beautiful things, and all the while—— Yes, indeed, Shakespeare was right. It is a mad world! Worse than mad: it is wicked! And the sons of men are the wickedest things in it!
Oh, well, he mustn't stand wasting time here in moralizing and mooning. Ailsa was waiting.
The papers he had disturbed lay on the floor, close to a half-filled scrap basket. Unimportant things enough they were: seedsmen's circulars, soap advertisements, tailors' announcements, all the litter of loose-leaf insets that are thrust between the covers of monthly magazines; quite unimportant, and not worth the trouble he was taking to gather them up and replace them upon the desk. But—— Oh, well, he shouldn't like the General to think that when he came into the library to use his telephone he'd been cad enough to look over his papers; so, of course—That all of them? Any drop into the waste basket by chance? Perhaps that bit of white paper with the red blob of sealing wax on each end might have fallen with the rest. He picked it out of the basket, turned it over, and decided that it hadn't; smelt it, smiled one of his curious one-sided smiles, and flung it back into the basket.
Even an old soldier may have his foibles and his weaknesses. It is on record that Bonaparte had a secret love of bonbons; that Washington had a passion for barley sugar; and that Drake slept always with anise seeds within easy reach.
He turned away as he tossed the paper back, walked to the door, opened it, and stepped out. The staircase down which he had run in such hot haste at the sound of Dollops's whistle was before him. He stopped an instant and looked up it, then nodded his head in the direction of Lord St. Ulmer's quarters, and if he had put his thoughts into actual words, would have said this:
"I'll know your part in it, and I'll see your face by hook or by crook before this night is over; I promise you that, my man!" Then he turned again, and went down the hall to the dining-room.
Harry Raynor was still there, lying with his arms sprawled out upon the table and his head sunk between them.
Cleek stood still and looked at him. Of a certainty, the man had moved since last he saw him; but whether that movement had been merely the unconscious stirring of a sleeping man or the fellow had been up and about in the meantime, it was impossible to say.
Cleek, taking no chances, closed and locked the door, and assuming once more his "Barch" tone and manner of expression, advanced to his side, shook him, and said:
"I say, Raynor, don't be a howling ass! Buck up and don't sleep the whole blessed night away. I'm jolly lonesome."
Young Raynor went on snoring serenely, and neither answered nor moved.
Still Cleek was taking no chances. He repeated the operation with greater force and louder spoken words, and finding it produced no effect, finally shook the man so hard that his head lolled over on one arm and let the hidden face come into sight.
The jaw hung loose, the scooped cheeks and pendulous lip gleamed pale as ivory, and the whites of his eyes shone like narrow bands of silver through the slits of their half-closed lids.
There was no question whatsoever regarding the man's condition. Satisfied now, Cleek felt his pulse, pushed up one of his eyelids and examined the eye itself. The pupil was largely dilated, the white suffused considerably, and both were slightly filmed.
"Hum-m-m!" he breathed conclusively, then turned from the man and looked at the decanters and glasses on the littered table. "Port, Brandy, Benedictine, Scotch. To be sure! to be sure! Who is to know the taste of a mere guest in the matter of his after-dinner drink? So, if it is put in all——" He took up the decanters one by one, sampled their contents in turn, and smiled one of his queer crooked smiles when he set the last one down.
"Clever, very clever, my friend," he said. "And who was to tell you that the guest would not drink at all?"
Then he turned on his heel suddenly and left the room.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
THE OPEN WINDOW
He had scarcely taken a dozen steps down the hallway, however, before he encountered General Raynor, who had just then reëntered the house by the front door.
His rugged old face wore a look of deep anxiety, as though the exciting scene through which he had so recently passed bore heavily upon his spirits, despite Cleek's attempt to allay his distress by branding Dollops as a possible sneak thief; but he brightened perceptibly and made a valiant effort to appear quite at his ease when he looked up and saw Cleek.
"Get your call over the telephone all right, Mr. Barch?" he inquired pleasantly.
"Yes, thanks," said Cleek serenely, still keeping up his "Johnnie" air. "Awfully obliged to you, I'm sure. Dickens of an important message. Should have been in no end of a hole if I hadn't received it. But I say, General, you ought to be more careful, you know, especially with sneak thieves about."
"As how, Mr. Barch?"
"Why, that blessed swing window in the library. I found the thing unfastened, don't you know."
He hadn't, of course, for he had not been near it. But his statement undeniably agitated the General, though he made a brave effort to disguise it.
"Did you?" he said. "That's peculiar. I never noticed it. I must speak to Johnston about it; it's his duty to see that it is locked, and I supposed he had done so. Still, it's of no great consequence as it happens. The sneak thief didn't enter by that way, I am sure."
"No, but he might easily have done so; and if he had come in there while you were alone you might have had a warm time of it; don't you think so, eh, what?"
"I fancy he would have had a warm time of it, as you express it, Mr. Barch. I'm not so old but I know how to take care of myself, believe me."
"No, I suppose not," said Cleek. "Had a jolly lot of practice in your young days—with the gloves and all that. Forty-fifth Queen's Own used to have a national reputation for the best boxers and wrestlers in the service, I'm told. Suppose it was the same in your day; and you got a lot of practice out there in Simla in your subaltern days."
"You are wrong in both particulars. I did not belong to the Forty-fifth Queen's Own, Mr. Barch, and I was not billeted to India. I passed out of Sandhurst into the Imperial Blues, and from the time I was twenty-two until I was twenty-six I was stationed at Malta."
Cleek made a mental tally of those two statements.
"Oh, I see; mistake on my part," he said serenely. "Malta was it? And the Imperial Blues? Thought Harry said the other. I've got a rotten memory. But it doesn't matter which, does it, so long as you learned the trick, and are able to put up a stiff fight and floor a burglar still? I'll lay you could floor one in short order, too, when I come to look at you," he went on, glancing the General up and down with apparent admiration. "Lord! shouldn't like to run foul of you when your temper's up. Built like a blessed gladiator. Shoulders on you like a giant; arms like—mind if I feel what they're like?"
Impudently taking hold of him before he could reply or resent the familiarity, Cleek
