ling, and in
and out of the open safe.

He turned, but stopped abruptly when half-way across the room, standing
stock still with his back to the window.

There was a faint distinct tapping as though slender fingers were
beating a ghastly, distant drum.

It stopped--it continued--it stopped.

Then fell one little solitary rap like a drop of water falling on a
metal plate, and it died away into silence.

And Sir Jonathan threw up his fine old head and laughed.

"Surely I've got India on the brain to-night, and as surely I want a
good long holiday," he said, as he sat down at his desk and picked up
his pen. "And I must remember to tell the gardener to clip that tree
to-morrow. How Jan will laugh when I tell him that I was absolutely
scared by a branch rubbing against the window."

For five long minutes he sat frowning down at the pen in his hand.
Three times he commenced to write, and three times he stopped; twice he
lit a cigarette and let it go out, and deeper grew the lines between
the brows and round the mouth, until he shivered and turned quickly in
his chair.

"That felt just like a sea-fog creeping up behind; stupid to keep the
window open even in spring," he said as he picked up a log from a
basket by his side and threw it deftly into the wide-open grate, leant
sideways to separate two brass ornaments on a table which had jangled
one against the other, and sighing turned restlessly in his chair.

"Confound those great market lorries," he muttered, looking round the
room with its cabinets and shelves filled with the strange and weird,
beautiful and unsightly curios he had brought back from every corner of
the globe. "They shake the house enough to bring it down about one's
ears."

The moon was slowly shifting as he leant back and settled himself
comfortably in the high leather chair; the room was getting darker and
there had fallen that intense almost palpable stillness which envelops
most great cities after midnight, and against which his thoughts stood
out like steel points upon a velvet curtain.

Clear and sharp as steel they shot indeed, this way and that through
his mind; but hold them he could not, analyse or arrange them he could
not, neither would his hand move towards the pen a few inches from the
finger-tips.

"God!" he suddenly thundered, striking the arm of the chair with his
fist. "The answer is just there on the tip of my tongue--before my
very eyes--within reach of my fingers, and