found out not half an hour ago. I was going on to
tell Polke about it at once, but I remembered that you were in the house
at this cricket club meeting, so I thought you'd do instead--you can
tell Polke. I'm in a bit of a hurry myself--you know it's Wymington
Races tomorrow, and I'm off there tonight, at once, to meet a man that I
do a bit of business with in these matters--we make a book together,
d'ye see--so I can't stop. But come this way."

He led Neale out into the long sanded passage, and down through the rear
of the old house into a big stable-yard, enclosed by variously shaped
buildings, more or less in an almost worn-out and dilapidated condition,
whose roofs and gables showed picturesquely against the sky, faintly
lighted by the waning moon. To one of these, a tower-like erection,
considerably higher than the rest, the old landlord pointed.

"I suppose you know that these back premises of mine partly overlook
Joseph Chestermarke's garden?" he whispered. "They do, anyway--you can
see right over his garden and the back of his house--that is, in bits,
for he's a fine lot of tall trees round his lawns. But there's a very
fair view of that workshop he's built from the top storey of this old
dove-cot of mine--we use it as a store-house. Come up--and mind these
here broken steps--there's no rail, you see, and you could easy fall
over."

He led his companion up a flight of much-worn stone stairs which were
built against the wall of the old dove-cot; through an open doorway
twenty feet above; across a rickety floor; and up another stairway of
wood, into a chamber in which was a latticed window, from which most of
the glass and the woodwork had disappeared.

"Now, then," he said, taking Neale to this outlook, and pointing
downwards. "There you are!--you see what I mean?"

Neale looked out. Joseph Chestermarke's big garden lay beneath him. As
Walford had said, much of it was obscured by trees, but there was a good
prospect of one side of the laboratory from where Neale was standing.
That side was furnished with a door--and on the level of that door at
the extreme end of the building was a window fitted with a
light-coloured blind. All the other windows, as in the case of the side
which Neale had seen previously from the tree on the river-bank, were
high up in the walls and fitted with red material. And from the
curiously shaped smoke stack in the flat roof, the same differently
tinted vapours which he had noticed o