the steaming glass of spirits and water which Miss Pett
presently brought him, and took her advice about going to bed. Without
ever knowing anything about it he fell into such a slumber as he had
never known in his life before. It was indeed so sound that he never
heard Miss Pett steal into his room, was not aware that she carefully
withdrew the precious waistcoat which, through a convenient hole in the
wall, she had watched him deposit under the rest of his garments on the
chair at his side, never knew that she carried it away into the
living-room on the other side of the cottage. For the strong flavour of
the lemon and the sweetness of the sugar which Miss Pett had put into
the hot toddy had utterly obscured the very slight taste of something
else which she had put in--something which was much stronger than the
generous dose of whisky, and was calculated to plunge Mallalieu into a
stupor from which not even an earthquake could have roused him.

Miss Pett examined the waistcoat at her leisure. Her thin fingers went
through every pocket and every paper, through the bank-notes, the scrip,
the shares, the securities. She put everything back in its place, after
a careful reckoning and estimation of the whole. And Mallalieu was as
deeply plunged in his slumbers as ever when she went back into his room
with her shaded light and her catlike tread, and she replaced the
garment exactly where she found it, and went out and shut the door as
lightly as a butterfly folds its wings.

It was then eleven o'clock at night, and Miss Pett, instead of retiring
to her bed, sat down by the living-room fire and waited. The poke bonnet
had been replaced by the gay turban, and under its gold and scarlet her
strange, skeleton-like face gleamed like old ivory as she sat there with
the firelight playing on it. And so immobile was she, sitting with her
sinewy skin-and-bone arms lying folded over her silk apron, that she
might have been taken for an image rather than for a living woman.

But as the hands of the clock on the mantelpiece neared midnight, Miss
Pett suddenly moved. Her sharp ears caught a scratching sound on the
shutter outside the window. And noiselessly she moved down the passage,
and noiselessly unbarred the front door, and just as noiselessly closed
it again behind the man who slipped in--Christopher, her nephew.

CHAPTER XXIV

STRICT BUSINESS LINES

Mr. Christopher Pett, warned by the uplifted finger of his aunt,
ti