ugh scoundrel! I have always known it, and my uncle
has already dismissed him for tampering with some of his letters. He
was telling us about it last night, and Watson leaves him at the end of
this week. Depend upon it, the chap was trying to get the papers in
his own hands for ends of his own, and I think you were awfully plucky
to catch him at it as you did. But now we must get hold of him at
once, and get the packet from him.'

'I expect he will have left the neighbourhood,' said Agatha. 'If you
wish to open the cupboard, my sister will tell you the secret. She has
accidentally discovered it. Shall we go to the study now?'

The young man agreed at once to this proposal, and when Clare came
forward, he looked at her with secret laughter in his eyes.

'They say a woman never rests content under a mystery,' he said; 'and
you have proved my good angel, so I can only avow my gratitude. But do
you know that from a boy I have viewed that cupboard as impenetrable as
the sphinx itself? And yet my energy or ambition to solve its secret
was never sufficient to allow me to succeed. My father always told me
that age had some advantages, and that when the time came for me to
know all that he did, I should do so.'

Clare flushed and felt very uncomfortable; then she met the young man's
gaze calmly.

'I know I have shown the weakness of our sex, but it is not often one
is brought into contact with such a mystery; and having had your
father's Arabic motto translated to me, I could not resist the
temptation of trying to prove its truth. I need not say I have not
opened the cupboard. That temptation I was enabled to resist.'

'And the motto?' inquired the young man, passing his hand almost
tenderly over his father's handiwork, and a shade coming over his brow
as he spoke.

Clare's face was sad too, as she remembered from whom the translation
had come, but she repeated quietly,--

'"A closed bud containeth
Possibilities infinite and unknown."'

Then, stooping down, she turned the carved bud, until a sharp click was
heard, and the door moved forwards; and then linking her arm in that of
Agatha the sisters left the room, and Alick Lester was alone with the
secret solved at last.

Two or three hours passed, and still he was shut in the study. When he
at last appeared in the drawing-room, he seemed to have left his youth
and brightness behind him there. He asked with knitted brow and
anxious face if he might s