the
chauffeur the way, perhaps Mr. Narkom will take us over to your house in
his motor."

"Mind? No, certainly I don't mind. Anything in the world to get at a
clue to this thing, Mr. Headland, anything. Do let us go at once."

Cleek led the way from the room. Halfway down the stairs, however, he
excused himself on the plea of having forgotten his magnifying glass,
and ran back to get it. Two minutes later he rejoined them in the little
drawing-room, where the growling Captain was still demanding the whole
time and attention of his daughter, and, the motor being ready, the
three men walked out, got into it, and were whisked away to the house
which once had been the home of the vanished George Carboys.

It proved to be a small, isolated brick house in very bad condition,
standing in an out-of-the-way road somewhere between Putney and
Wimbledon. It stood somewhat back from the road, in the midst of a
little patch of ground abounding in privet and laurel bushes, and it was
evident that its cheapness had been its chief attraction to the two men
who had rented it, although, on entering, it was found to possess at the
back a sort of extension, with top and side lights, which must have
appealed to Van Nant's need of something in the nature of a studio. At
all events, he had converted it into a very respectable apology for one;
and Cleek was not a little surprised by what it contained.

Rich stuffs, bits of tapestry, Persian draperies, Arabian
prayer-mats--relics of his other and better days and of his Oriental
wanderings--hung on the walls and ornamented the floor; his rejected
pictures and his unsold statues, many of them life-sized and all of
clay, coated with a lustreless paint to make them look like marble, were
disposed about the place with an eye to artistic effect, and near to an
angle, where stood (on a pedestal, half concealed, half revealed by
artistically arranged draperies) the life-size figure of a Roman
senator, in toga and sandals, there was the one untidy spot, the one
utterly inartistic thing the room contained.

It was the crude, half-finished shape of a recumbent female figure, of
large proportions and abominable modelling, stretched out at full length
upon a long, low, trestle-supported "sculptor's staging," on which also
lay Van Nant's modelling tools and his clay-stained working blouse.
Cleek looked at the huge unnatural thing--out of drawing, anatomically
wrong in many particulars--and felt like quo