on their feet.

"Are all your waiters here?" demanded the colonel, in his low, harsh
accent.

"Yes; they're all here. I noticed it myself," cried the young duke,
pushing his boyish face into the inmost ring. "Always count 'em as I
come in; they look so queer standing up against the wall."

"But surely one cannot exactly remember," began Mr. Audley, with heavy
hesitation.

"I remember exactly, I tell you," cried the duke excitedly. "There never
have been more than fifteen waiters at this place, and there were no
more than fifteen tonight, I'll swear; no more and no less."

The proprietor turned upon him, quaking in a kind of palsy of surprise.
"You say--you say," he stammered, "that you see all my fifteen waiters?"

"As usual," assented the duke. "What is the matter with that!"

"Nothing," said Lever, with a deepening accent, "only you did not. For
one of zem is dead upstairs."

There was a shocking stillness for an instant in that room. It may be
(so supernatural is the word death) that each of those idle men looked
for a second at his soul, and saw it as a small dried pea. One of
them--the duke, I think--even said with the idiotic kindness of wealth:
"Is there anything we can do?"

"He has had a priest," said the Jew, not untouched.

Then, as to the clang of doom, they awoke to their own position. For a
few weird seconds they had really felt as if the fifteenth waiter might
be the ghost of the dead man upstairs. They had been dumb under that
oppression, for ghosts were to them an embarrassment, like beggars. But
the remembrance of the silver broke the spell of the miraculous; broke
it abruptly and with a brutal reaction. The colonel flung over his chair
and strode to the door. "If there was a fifteenth man here, friends," he
said, "that fifteenth fellow was a thief. Down at once to the front
and back doors and secure everything; then we'll talk. The twenty-four
pearls of the club are worth recovering."

Mr. Audley seemed at first to hesitate about whether it was gentlemanly
to be in such a hurry about anything; but, seeing the duke dash down the
stairs with youthful energy, he followed with a more mature motion.

At the same instant a sixth waiter ran into the room, and declared that
he had found the pile of fish plates on a sideboard, with no trace of
the silver.

The crowd of diners and attendants that tumbled helter-skelter down the
passages divided into two groups. Most of the Fishermen followed the