we return the better."

"The wife can bring him while I am changing my boots. Hurry down to the
_Fox_, Maggie, and tell Tom he's wanted at once."

"Don't tell him what it's for until you get him outside," hastily
counselled the butler as the policeman's wife was departing on her
errand. "Sir Philip won't like it if he hears that what happened
to-night was discussed in the _Fox_ tap-room."

The little clock on the mantelpiece had barely ticked off five
additional minutes when Mrs. Lumbe returned in a breathless state,
accompanied by a young man with billiard chalk on his coat and hands.

"This is my brother, Detective Caldew," said Mrs. Lumbe, between pants,
to the butler. "I told him about the murder, and we hurried back as fast
as we could."

"It's a horrible crime, and we must lose no time while there is still a
chance of catching the murderer," said the young man, regaining his
breath more easily than his stout sister. He brushed the billiard chalk
off his clothes as he spoke. "Let us go at once."

Tufnell cast a curious glance at the new-comer. He saw a man of about
thirty-five, tall, well-built and dark, with a clean-shaven face and
rather intelligent eyes under thick dark brows. He had some difficulty
in recognizing Detective Caldew as the village urchin of a score of
years before who had touched his cap to the moat-house butler as a great
personage, second only in importance to Sir Philip Heredith himself.

Tufnell was not aware that in the former village boy who had become a
London detective he was in the presence of a young man of soaring
ambition. Caldew had gone to London fifteen years before with the idea
of bettering himself. After tramping the streets of the metropolis for
some months in a vain quest for work, he had enlisted in the
metropolitan police force rather than return to his native village and
report himself a failure. At the end of two years' service as a
policeman he had been given the choice of transfer to the Criminal
Investigation Department of Scotland Yard. He had gladly accepted the
opportunity, and had shown so much aptitude for plain-clothes work that
by the end of another two years he had risen to the rank of detective.
Caldew thought he was on the rapid road to further promotion, and had
married on the strength of that belief. But another ten years had passed
since then, and he still occupied a subordinate position, with not much
hope of promotion unless luck came his way. And t