ort he abandoned the search. Unpursued, the clue might presently
return to him.

Riffle reappeared on the stoep bearing a tea-tray. Josephus sat erect.
For full ten minutes his brown eyes gazed ardently towards the table.
What had happened? What untoward event had occurred? Antony was oblivious
of his very existence. Munching bread and butter, drinking hot tea
himself, he appeared entirely to have forgotten that a thirsty and
bewilderedly disappointed puppy was gazing at him from the harbourage of
his old coat. At length the neglect became a thing not to be borne.
Waving a deprecating paw, Josephus gave vent to a pitiful whine.

Antony turned. Then realization dawned on him. He grasped the milk jug.

"You poor little beggar," he laughed. "It's not often you get neglected.
But it's not often that bombshells in the shape of ordinary, simple,
harmless-looking letters fall from the skies, scattering extraordinary
contents and my wits along with them. Here you are, you morsel of injured
patience."

Josephus lapped, greedily, thirstily, till the empty saucer circled on
the stoep under the onslaughts of his small pink tongue.

Antony had again sunk into a reverie, a reverie which lasted for another
fifteen minutes or so. At last he roused himself.

"Josephus, my son," he announced solemnly, "there are jobs to be done,
and in spite of bombshells we'd better do them, and leave Arabian Night
wonders for further contemplation this evening."

CHAPTER II

MEMORIES

Some four hours later, Antony, once more in his deck-chair on the stoep,
set himself to review the situation. Shorn of its first bewilderment it
resolved itself into the fact that he, Antony Gray, owner of a small farm
on the African veldt, which farm brought him in a couple of hundred a
year or thereabouts, was about to become the proprietor of an estate
valued at a yearly income of twelve thousand,--subject, however, to
certain conditions. And in that last clause lay the possible fly in the
ointment. What conditions?

Antony turned the possibilities in his mind.

Matrimony with some lady of Nicholas Danver's own choosing? He dismissed
the idea. It savoured too much of early Victorian melodrama for the
prosaic twentieth century. The support of some antediluvian servant or
pet? Possibly. But then it would hardly be necessary to require verbal
communication of such a condition; a brief written statement to the
effect would have sufficed. The house ghos