ollow,' he said stubbornly.

'You don't mean,' said Mr Craik, who had not removed his gaze from
Sheila's face, 'I am not to take it that you mean, Mrs Lawford, the--the
other?'

'Yes,' said Sheila, 'HIS'--she patted her skirts--'Sabathier's.'

'You mean,' said Mrs Lovat crisply, 'that the man in the grave is the
man in the book, and that the man in the book is--is poor Arthur's
changed face?'

Sheila nodded.

Danton rose cumbrously from his chair, looking beadily down on his three
friends.

'Oh, but you know, it isn't--it isn't right,' he began. 'Lord! I can see
him now. Glassy--yes, that's the very word I said--glassy. It won't do,
Mrs Lawford; on my solemn honour, it won't do. I don't deny it, call it
what you like; yes, devils, if you like. But what I say as a practical
man is that it's just rank--that's what it is! Bethany's had too much
rope. The time's gone by for sentiment and all that foolery. Mercy's all
very well, but after all it's justice that clinches the bargain. There's
only one way: we must catch him; we must lay the poor wretch by the
heels before it's too late. No publicity, God bless me, no. We'd have
all the rags in London on us. They'd pillory us nine days on end. We'd
never live it down. No, we must just hush it up--a home or something;
an asylum. For my part,' he turned like a huge toad, his chin low in his
collar--'and I'd say the same if it was my own brother, and, after all,
he is your husband, Mrs Lawford--I'd sooner he was in his grave. It
takes two to play at that game, that's what I say. To lay himself open!
I can't stand it--honestly, I can't stand it. And yet,' he jerked his
chin over the peak of his collar towards the ladies, 'and yet you say
he's being fetched; comes creeping home, and is fetched at dark by a--a
lady in a pony-carriage. God bless me! It's rank. What,' he broke out
violently again, 'what was he doing there in a cemetery after dark? Do
you think that beastly Frenchman would have played such a trick on Craik
here? Would he have tried his little game on me? Deviltry be it, if
you prefer the word, and all deference to you, Mrs Lawford. But I know
this--a couple of hundred years ago they would have burnt a man at the
stake for less than a tenth of this. Ask Craik here. I don't know how,
and I don't know when: his mother, I've always heard say, was a little
eccentric; but the truth is he's managed by some unholy legerdemain to
get the thing at his finger's ends; that's