eccentric
route. At any rate--and this is the important fact--he was not in the
house, and no one had seen him leave it.

"After a hasty meal Mr. Hurst returned to town and called at the office
of Mr. Bellingham's solicitor and confidential agent, a Mr. Jellicoe,
and mentioned the matter to him. Mr. Jellicoe knew nothing of his
client's return from Paris, and the two men at once took the train down
to Woodford, where the missing man's brother, Mr. Godfrey Bellingham,
lives. The servant who admitted them said that Mr. Godfrey was not at
home, but that his daughter was in the library, which is a detached
building situated in a shrubbery beyond the garden at the back of the
house. Here the two men found, not only Miss Bellingham, but also her
father, who had come in by the back gate.

"Mr. Godfrey and his daughter listened to Mr. Hurst's story with the
greatest surprise, and assured him that they had neither seen nor heard
anything of John Bellingham.

"Presently the party left the library to walk up to the house; but only
a few feet from the library door Mr. Jellicoe noticed an object lying in
the grass and pointed it out to Mr. Godfrey.

"The latter picked it up, and they all recognised it as a scarab which
Mr. John Bellingham had been accustomed to wear suspended from his
watch-chain. There was no mistaking it. It was a very fine scarab of the
eighteenth dynasty fashioned of lapis lazuli and engraved with the
cartouche of Amenhotep III. It had been suspended by a gold ring
fastened to a wire which passed through the suspension hole, and the
ring, though broken, was still in position.

"This discovery, of course, only added to the mystery, which was still
further increased when, on inquiry, a suit-case bearing the initials
J.B. was found to be lying unclaimed in the cloak-room at Charing Cross.
Reference to the counterfoil of the ticket-book showed that it had been
deposited about the time of arrival of the Continental express on the
twenty-third of November, so that its owner must have gone straight on
to Eltham.

"That is how the affair stands at present, and, should the missing man
never reappear or should his body never be found, the question, as you
see, which will be required to be settled is, 'What is the exact time
and place, when and where, he was last known to be alive?' As to the
place, the importance of the issues involved in that question are
obvious and we need not consider them. But the question of