ectful
side of him was turned to me again.

"Your master is with Mr. Toller?"

"Yes, sir."

What I felt, amply justified the lawyer in having exacted a promise from
me to keep carefully out of the Cur's presence. "You might knock him on
the head again, Mr. Roylake, and might hit a little too hard next time."

But I had an idea of my own. I said, as if speaking to myself: "I would
give a five pound note to know what is going on upstairs."

"I shall be glad to earn it, sir," the fellow said. "If I make a clean
breast of what I know already, and if I tell you to-morrow what I can
find out--will it be worth the money?"

I began to feel degraded in my own estimation. But I nodded to him, for
all that.

"I am the innocent cause, sir, of what happened last night," he coolly
resumed. "We kept a look-out on the road and saw you, though you didn't
see us. But my master never suspected you (for reasons which he kept to
himself) of making use of the boat. I reminded him that one of us had
better have an eye on the slip of pathway, between the cottage and the
river. This led to his sending me to the boathouse--and you know what
happened afterwards. My master, as I suppose, is pumping Mr. Toller.
That's all, sir, for to-night. When may I have the honor of expecting you
to-morrow morning?"

I appointed an hour, and left the place.

As I entered the wood again, I found a man on the watch. He touched his
hat, and said: "I'm the clerk, sir. Your gamekeeper is wanted for his own
duties to-night; he will relieve me in the morning."

I went home with my mind in a ferment of doubt. If I could believe the
servant, the Cur was as innocent of the abduction of Cristel as I was.
But could I trust the servant?

The events of the next morning altered the whole complexion of affairs
fatally for the worse.

Arriving at the cottage, I found a man prostate on the road, dead
drunk--and the Cur's servant looking at him.

"May I ask something?" the man said. "Have you been having my master
watched?"

"Yes."

"Bad news, in that case, sir. Your man there is a drunken vagabond; and
my master has gone to London by the first train."

When I had recovered the shock, I denied, for the sake of my own credit,
that the brute on the road could be a servant of mine.

"Why not, sir?"

"Do you think I should have been kept in ignorance of it, if my
gamekeeper had been a drunkard? His fellow servants would have warned
me."

The man smiled. "I'