monkey trick
looks like mere madness, but I suppose he was mad, partly with the
boredom of watching over what he felt was a fraud, though he
couldn't prove it. Then came a chance to prove it, to himself at
least, and he had what he called 'fun' with it. Yes, I think I see a
lot of details now. But it's just the whole thing that knocks me.
How did it all come to be like that?"

Fisher was looking at him with level lids and an immovable manner.

"Every precaution was taken," he said. "The Duke carried the relic
on his own person, and locked it up in the case with his own hands."

March was silent; but Twyford stammered. "I don't understand you.
You give me the creeps. Why don't you speak plainer?"

"If I spoke plainer you would understand me less," said Horne
Fisher.

"All the same I should try," said March, still without lifting his
head.

"Oh, very well," replied Fisher, with a sigh; "the plain truth is,
of course, that it's a bad business. Everybody knows it's a bad
business who knows anything about it. But it's always happening, and
in one way one can hardly blame them. They get stuck on to a foreign
princess that's as stiff as a Dutch doll, and they have their fling.
In this case it was a pretty big fling."

The face of the Rev. Thomas Twyford certainly suggested that he was
a little out of his depth in the seas of truth, but as the other
went on speaking vaguely the old gentleman's features sharpened and
set.

"If it were some decent morganatic affair I wouldn't say; but he
must have been a fool to throw away thousands on a woman like that.
At the end it was sheer blackmail; but it's something that the old
ass didn't get it out of the taxpayers. He could only get it out of
the Yank, and there you are."

The Rev. Thomas Twyford had risen to his feet.

"Well, I'm glad my nephew had nothing to do with it," he said. "And
if that's what the world is like, I hope he will never have anything
to do with it."

"I hope not," answered Horne Fisher. "No one knows so well as I do
that one can have far too much to do with it."

For Summers Minor had indeed nothing to do with it; and it is part
of his higher significance that he has really nothing to do with the
story, or with any such stories. The boy went like a bullet through
the tangle of this tale of crooked politics and crazy mockery and
came out on the other side, pursuing his own unspoiled purposes.
From the top of the chimney he climbed he had caught