re going to do. Cyril, it was brave
of you to go."

"It was useless," I cried. "I have failed. He would not believe me,
Valerie, and I am lost eternally!"

"Hush!" she said. "Dear love, you must not say such things. They are not
true. But rise. You must come to him. All this morning he has not been
at all the same. I do not know what to think, but something is going to
happen, I am certain."

There was no need for her to say to whom she referred.

I did as she commanded me, and side by side we crossed the park.

"He has made arrangements to leave England this afternoon," she
continued, as we passed into Piccadilly. "The yacht is in the Thames,
and orders have been sent to hold her in readiness for a long voyage."

"And what does he intend doing with us?"

"I know nothing of that," she answered. "But there is something very
strange about him to-day. When he sent for me this morning I scarcely
knew him, he was so changed."

We made our way along the deserted streets and presently reached Park
Lane. As soon as we were inside the house I ascended the stairs beside
her, and it was not until we had reached the top floor, on which
Pharos's room was situated, that we paused before a door. Listening
before it, we could plainly hear someone moving about inside. When we
knocked, a voice I failed to recognise called upon us to enter. It was a
strange picture we saw when we did so. In a large armchair before a
roaring fire, though it was the middle of summer, sat Pharos, but so
changed that I hardly knew him. He looked half his usual size; his skin
hung loose about his face, as if the bones had shrunken underneath it;
his eyes, always so deep-set in his head, were now so much sunken that
they could scarcely be seen, while his hands were shrivelled until they
resembled those of a mummy more than a man. The monkey also, which was
huddled beside him in the chair, looked smaller than I had ever seen it.
As if this were not enough, the room was filled with Egyptian curios
from floor to ceiling. So many were there, indeed, that there barely
remained room for Pharos's chair. How he had obtained possession of them
I did not understand; but since Sir George Legrath's confession, written
shortly before his tragic death by his own hand, the mystery has been
solved, and Pharos confronts us in an even more unenviable light than
before. Hating, loathing, and yet fearing the man as I did, there was
something in his look now that roused an