pped out to meet him.

"Why, what the devil--" he was beginning in his bluff, normal tones,
when the servant, showing a white, scared face, cut him short.

"A terrible thing, Sir Terence! Oh, the saints protect us, a dreadful
thing! This way, sir! There's a man killed--Count Samoval, I think it
is!"

"What? Where?"

"Out yonder, in the quadrangle, sir."

"But--" Sir Terence checked. "Count Samoval, did ye say? Impossible!"
and he went out quickly, followed by the butler.

In the quadrangle he checked. In the few minutes that were sped since
he had left the place the moon had overtopped the roof of the opposite
wing, so that full upon the enclosed garden fell now its white light,
illumining and revealing.

There lay the black still form of Samoval supine, his white face staring
up into the heavens, and beside him knelt Tremayne, whilst in the
balcony above leaned her ladyship. The rope ladder, Sir Terence's swift
glance observed, had disappeared.

He halted in his advance, standing at gaze a moment. He had hardly
expected so much. He had conceived the plan of causing the house to
be searched immediately upon Mullins's discovery of the body. But
Tremayne's rashness in adventuring down in this fashion spared him even
that necessity. True, it set up other difficulties. But he was not sure
that the matter would not be infinitely more interesting thus.

He stepped forward, and came to a standstill beside the two--his dead
enemy and his living one.

CHAPTER XIII. POLICHINELLE

"Why, Ned," he asked gravely, "what has happened?"

"It is Samoval," was Tremayne's quiet answer. "He is quite dead."

He stood up as he spoke, and Sir Terence observed with terrible inward
mirth that his tone had the frank and honest ring, his bearing the
imperturbable ease which more than once before had imposed upon him as
the outward signs of an easy conscience. This secretary of his was a
cool scoundrel.

"Samoval, is it?" said Sir Terence, and went down on one knee beside
the body to make a perfunctory examination. Then he looked up at the
captain.

"And how did this happen?"

"Happen?" echoed Tremayne, realising that the question was being
addressed particularly to himself. "That is what I am wondering. I found
him here in this condition."

"You found him here? Oh, you found him here in this condition! Curious!"
Over his shoulder he spoke to the butler: "Mullins, you had better call
the guard." He picked up the slend