how to put his hand on the spring in the
wainscoting, and it yielded to his touch. It was discomposing to find
the key of the real door standing, ready for turning, in the lock. In
theory, the key was never out of the master's immediate possession. An
oversight, then? Constans's mind reverted to the one occasion in his
remembrance on which the Rat's-Hole had been used, that day a fortnight
back, when his sister Issa came out of the birch-copse, with her hands
full of May-bloom and Quinton Edge had waited under cover of the alders.
It was possible; his father might have forgotten. And yet----

Constans took the key and slipped it into the bosom of his doublet. Then
closing the secret door in the wainscoting, he drew one of the big
leather screens into convenient position and crouched down behind it.
The dying fire gave out a flickering and uncertain light; he watched the
grotesque procession of the shadows on the opposite wall until his eyes
grew heavy. The odor of a smouldering bough of balsam-fir hung in the
air--warm, spicy, soporific. He slept.

VI

TROY TOWN

Constans awoke just as the footsteps died away; he listened, but again
the stillness was profound. He felt his way to the secret door; the
wainscot screen stood ajar. It was plain that some one had come to the
Rat's-Hole only to discover that the key of the outside door was
missing. Constans realized that he, too, had missed something--his
chance to get to the bottom of the mystery. Shame on such a sentinel!

Without any definite plan of action, Constans made his way to the lower
hall. The moonbeams were pouring a flood of light through the east
windows and he could see plainly. The peddler's couch was empty, save
for his gabardine of gray and the false hair that had served him for a
beard. There were two figures dimly visible in the obscurity of the
vaulted entrance to the water gate. They were working at the clumsy
fastenings of the doors. As Constans ran up he recognized his sister
Issa and the man who called himself Quinton Edge.

Without a word Constans seized the girl by the arm and swung her behind
him. He struck at the Doomsman with his hunting-knife, but the latter
caught his wrist with the grip of a wolf-trap. Yet even at that moment
of stress Quinton Edge's voice preserved its soft, mincing inflections;
the man wore his irritating affectations of speech as jauntily as he did
the ostrich plumes in his cap.

"A brave ruffling of feathe