y enough, was in the throes of some sudden illness or seizure.
His fresh-coloured face was growing positively livid, and he plucked at
the edge of the table with twitching fingers. As Harley reached his side
he made a sudden effort to stand up, throwing out his arm to grasp the
other's shoulder.

"Benson!" cried Harley, loudly. "Quick! Your master is ill!"

There came a sound of swift footsteps and the door was thrown open.

"Too late," whispered Sir Charles in a choking voice. He began to clutch
his throat as Benson hurried into the room.

"My God!" whispered Harley. "He is dying!"

Indeed, the truth was all too apparent. Sir Charles Abingdon was almost
past speech. He was glaring across the table as though he saw some
ghastly apparition there. And now with appalling suddenness he became as
a dead weight in Harley's supporting grasp. Raspingly, as if forced in
agony from his lips:

"Fire-Tongue," he said... "Nicol Brinn..."

Benson, white and terror-stricken, bent over him.

"Sir Charles!" he kept muttering. "Sir Charles! What is the matter,
sir?"

A stifled shriek sounded from the doorway, and in tottered Mrs. Howett,
the old housekeeper, with other servants peering over her shoulder into
that warmly lighted dining room where Sir Charles Abingdon lay huddled
in his own chair--dead.

CHAPTER III. SHADOWS

"Had you reason to suspect any cardiac trouble, Doctor McMurdoch?" asked
Harley.

Doctor McMurdoch, a local practitioner who had been a friend of Sir
Charles Abingdon, shook his head slowly. He was a tall, preternaturally
thin Scotsman, clean-shaven, with shaggy dark brows and a most gloomy
expression in his deep-set eyes. While the presence of his sepulchral
figure seemed appropriate enough in that stricken house, Harley could
not help thinking that it must have been far from reassuring in a sick
room.

"I had never actually detected anything of the kind," replied the
physician, and his deep voice was gloomily in keeping with his
personality. "I had observed a certain breathlessness at times, however.
No doubt it is one of those cases of unsuspected endocarditis. Acute.
I take it," raising his shaggy brows interrogatively, "that nothing had
occurred to excite Sir Charles?"

"On the contrary," replied Harley, "he was highly distressed about some
family trouble, the nature of which he was about to confide to me when
this sudden illness seized him."

He stared hard at Doctor McMurdoch, wondering