characterized his attitude toward the great
Scotland Yard detective. He credited T. B. with qualities which perhaps
that admirable man did not possess, but, as a set-off against this, he
failed to credit him with a wiliness which was peculiarly T. B.'s chief
asset. For who could imagine that the detective's chief object in
calling upon Poltavo that evening was to allay his suspicions and soothe
down his fears. Yet T. B. came for no other reason and with no other
purpose. It was absolutely necessary that Poltavo should be taken off
his guard, for T. B. was planning the coup which was to end for all time
the terror under which hundreds of innocent people in England were
lying.

After an exchange of commonplace civilities the two men parted,--T. B.,
as he said, with his hand on the door, to prepare for his Paris trip,
and Poltavo to take up what promised to be one of the most interesting
cases that the Fallock blackmailers had ever handled.

He waited until he heard the door close after the detective; until he
had watched him, from the window, step into his cab and be whirled away,
then he unlocked the lower drawer of his desk, touched a spring in the
false bottom, and took from a secret recess a small bundle of letters.

Many of the sheets of notepaper which he spread out on the table before
him bore the strawberry crest of his grace the Duke of Ambury. The
letters were all in the same sprawling handwriting; ill-spelt and
blotted, but they were very much to the point. The Duke of Ambury, in
his exuberant youth, had contracted a marriage with a lady in Gibraltar.
His regiment had been stationed at that fortress when his succession to
the dukedom had been a very remote possibility, and the Spanish lady to
whom, as the letters showed, he had plighted his troth, and to whom he
was eventually married in the name of Wilson (a copy of the marriage
certificate was in the drawer), had been a typical Spaniard of singular
beauty and fascination, though of no distinguished birth.

Apparently his grace had regretted his hasty alliance, for two years
after his succession to the title, he had married the third daughter of
the Earl of Westchester without--so far as the evidence in Poltavo's
possession showed--having gone through the formality of releasing
himself from his previous union.

Here was a magnificent coup, the most splendid that had ever come into
the vision of the blackmailers, for the Duke of Ambury was one of the
riche