to breakfast.

He sighed.

"If I had the luck of a decent French poodle, this plutocrat Fenley
would eke have invited me to lunch," he grumbled.

Then his eyes sought the sketch, and he forgot the girl in her
counterfeit. By Jove, this _would_ be a picture! "The Water Nymphs."
But he must change the composition a little--losing none of its
character; only altering its accessories to such an extent that none
would recognize the exact setting.

"Luck!" he chortled, with mercurial rise of spirits. "I'm the luckiest
dog in England today. Happy chance has beaten all the tricks of the
studio. O ye goddesses, inspire me to heights worthy of you!"

His visions were rudely dispelled by a gunshot, sharp, insistent,
a tocsin of death in that sylvan solitude. A host of rooks arose
from some tall elms near the house; a couple of cock pheasants flew
with startled chuckling out of the wood on the right; the white
tails of rabbits previously unseen revealed their owners' whereabouts
as they scampered to cover. But Trenholme was sportsman enough to
realize that the weapon fired was a rifle; no toy, but of high velocity,
and he wondered how any one dared risk its dangerous use in such a
locality. He fixed the sound definitely as coming from the wood to
the right--the cover quitted so hurriedly by the pheasants--and
instinctively his glance turned to the house, in the half formed
thought that some one there might hear the shot, and look out.

The ground floor window by which the girl had entered still remained
open, but now another window, the most easterly one on the first
floor, had been raised slightly. The light was peculiarly strong and
the air so clear that even at the distance he fancied he could
distinguish some one gesticulating, or so it seemed, behind the glass.
This went on for a minute or more. Then the window was closed. At the
same time he noticed a sparkling of glass and brasswork behind the
clipped yew hedge which extended beyond the east wing. After some
puzzling, he made out that a motor car was waiting there.

That was all. The clamor of the rooks soon subsided. A couple of
rabbits skipped from the bushes to resume an interrupted meal on
tender grass shoots. A robin trilled a roundelay from some neighboring
branch. Trenholme looked at his watch. Half past nine! Why, he must
have been mooning there a good half hour!

He gathered his traps, and as the result of seeing the automobile,
which had not moved yet, de