respectable house of entertainment, Mr. Popkiss now addressed himself.

"What have you come in here for? In my coffee-room?"

"I did not come for to be insulted," answered Mr. Sparrow sullenly, as preferring a negative handling of an awkward question.

But Mr. Popkiss held on to the positive. "I ask you what you did come for," he insisted, his severe eye suggesting how much more weight his tone might have carried had his bones carried less.

"He was under the table." Mr. Doutfire made the statement without heat, as though content to let the bare and damning fact speak for itself.

"Most irregular," said Popkiss weakly, at a loss exactly what to do, and wishing, but for the slur on his house, that the law's representative would take the matter out of his hands. "Look here," he went on, with an ill-timed and coldly received wink at the detective, "if you want to play under the table, stop at home and play under your own; if I catch you under mine or anywhere on my premises where there is no call for you to be, I'll pull your wing feathers out, Mr. Sparrow. Now, hop off."

Under other circumstances Mr. Sparrow might have been ready with a more or less pertinent rejoinder to the stout inn-keeper's brutum fulmen; as it was, with the glittering symbols of durance dangling before his fascinated eyes, he was glad enough to find himself in a position to depart even with his repartee unspoken.

"Mercy," commanded her father, dropping the jocular element in his severity; "go into the bar, I'll talk to you presently."

And Miss Popkiss, with the uneasy conviction that she had made a fool of herself, was glad to obey.

"Now, Mr. D., what gives us the pleasure of seeing you here to-day?" inquired the host, lapsing without an effort into affability. "I didn't notice you come in."

"No," replied Doutfire, as he dropped the minatory tokens of his office into his pocket; "I made free of the window—just in the way of business, you understand. Fact is," he continued in a more confidential tone and with a quite unnecessary repetition of his trick of glancing round the room in search of impossible eavesdroppers, "I've had a wire from town. You are likely to have a queer customer to-day."

The fat face of Mr. Popkiss showed no tangible sign of the effect the news had on him. "What, coming here, to this house?" he asked futilely. "For Bunbury Races to-morrow, I suppose?"

"Maybe," Mr. Doutfire agreed, in the tone of one who could say more if he chose, "young swell-mob, I reckon. Travelled by nine-thirty train from Waterloo, alighted at Faxfleet and inquired the way here. I was ten minutes late at the station and got a lift on here, calculating to overtake him. He must have gone by the fields."

"What has he done, Mr. D.?" Popkiss inquired huskily.

"Serious case; counterfeit coin," Mr. Doutfire answered with importance. "One of a flash gang. Now look here," he said with a touch of authority, "The party I want is sure to turn up soon. Don't you allow yourself to do anything calculated to rouse that party's suspicions: serve him with what he calls for, and leave the rest to me."

"I'd better leave the bill to you as he pays in wrong money, eh?" suggested Mr. Popkiss, with true trade waggishness, and becoming purple with enjoyment of his own joke.

Mr. Doutfire permitted himself no more than a faint smile. "Treasury won't see you out of pocket, Mr. Popkiss," he declared with importance, as one fully competent to answer for the liberality of that notoriously niggardly office. Then, as having settled the point, he thrust his hand into his trouser pockets and strutted complacently to the window. "I hope to make a neat job of it this time," he announced.

"Ah, you're a cute one, you are, Mr. D.," said Popkiss knowingly.

"Well," assented Doutfire, still looking out of the window and rattling the money in his pockets, "I flatter myself I have done a few pretty things in my time. Yes," he continued introspectively, "I've got a good bit of the fox in me—natural and acquired in the profession"—he turned suddenly on his heel, confronting Mr. Popkiss—"only in the way of business, mind you."

The sudden volte face so startled the worthy host that all he could put forward by way of comment was the trite formula, "You'll have a glass of me, Mr. D.?"

Possibly Mr. Doutfire took the offer as a tribute to his professional sagacity; all the same, he declined it. "No, thank you. Must keep my head clear. Can't drink."

"What, not in the way of business?" chuckled Mr. Popkiss with another sub-apoplectic seizure. "One glass," he urged, perhaps wishing, in the ticklish position of proprietor of licensed premises to stand well with the representatives of the law.

"Well, just a small one," Mr. Doutfire consented, in a tone which suggested that the blandishments of all the publicans in England should not persuade him to exceed his modicum or his duty.

As they turned towards the bar, Mercy met them. "Father," she said breathlessly, "the carriage from the Towers has just driven into the yard. Colonel Hemyock is asking for you."

"Eh? All right," exclaimed Popkiss, turning down his cuffs in a flurry. "Here, Mercy,"—he ran back—"draw Mr. Doutfire a glass of anything he fancies." And so he bustled out, a quivering jelly of importance and servility, into the courtyard.

CHAPTER III

Colonel Hemyock, the temporary tenant of Staplewick Towers, was a somewhat blatant specimen of a retired military man with an unbounded sense of his personal dignity and importance, which sense he derived from an aristocratic wife. Never in this world was there anybody more starchily dignified than the gallant Colonel looked as he sat bolt upright in his phaeton; a tall, thin, thread-paper of a man, with his sharp aquiline nose, and brushed out white whiskers, whiskers of which not a hair was ever seen out of line. But that was all. For the rest he might have been a figure from Madame Tussaud's with a phonograph inside.

As behind the horseman is said to be invariably seated Black Care, so behind the gallant driver of that phaeton were sitting the Colonel's two-fold cares, his two daughters. People who affected to know everything—and such are occasionally met with in the country—asserted that it was with a view to getting her daughters off that the scheming Lady Agatha Hemyock had insisted on the family's taking up its abode at the missing Lord Quorn's somewhat derelict place. And the policy had not been entirely without result.

But now with the discovery of the new peer the tenancy came to an end. It was simply left for the Hemyocks to close it pleasantly, and, some critics said, designingly, by entertaining the new owner for a few days, introducing him to his property, such as it was, and the Misses Ethel and Dagmar Hemyock, such as they were, and then leaving him to his own devices, and the result of theirs.

"Ah—ah, Popkiss," Colonel Hemyock said in his high, thin voice, acknowledging the bustling innkeeper's salute with a limited flourish of his whip. "I just looked in to say that—ah—Lord Quorn" (he spoke the name with absurd emphasis, shaping his mouth into an O twice as he pronounced it) "is expected to arrive here this afternoon."

So impressed was Mr. Popkiss by the stiff and immaculate Colonel's pomposity that all he could ejaculate was, "Dear me, Colonel! Lord Quorn?"

"Yes," responded the Colonel freezingly, as he stared straight in front of him over his horses' ears; "his lordship has just arrived from Australia."

"I have heard something of it, Colonel," said Mr. Popkiss, regaining his composure; perhaps because his noble visitor suggested by his attitude that he admitted him to no more human fellowship than the mounting block in the yard. "The late peer's cousin, is he not, Colonel? I trust you will not be giving up the Towers?" he added hypocritically, since the Hemyock establishment could hardly be