t locked till late in the morning, and the lodge
keeper had seen no one pass. Fisher was fairly sure that he had
before him a mathematical problem in an inclosed space. His instinct
had been from the first so attuned to the tragedy that it would have
been almost a relief to him to find the corpse. He would have been
grieved, but not horrified, to come on the nobleman's body dangling
from one of his own trees as from a gibbet, or floating in his own
pool like a pallid weed. What horrified him was to find nothing.

He soon become conscious that he was not alone even in his most
individual and isolated experiments. He often found a figure
following him like his shadow, in silent and almost secret clearings
in the plantation or outlying nooks and corners of the old wall. The
dark-mustached mouth was as mute as the deep eyes were mobile,
darting incessantly hither and thither, but it was clear that Brain
of the Indian police had taken up the trail like an old hunter after
a tiger. Seeing that he was the only personal friend of the vanished
man, this seemed natural enough, and Fisher resolved to deal frankly
with him.

"This silence is rather a social strain," he said. "May I break the
ice by talking about the weather?--which, by the way, has already
broken the ice. I know that breaking the ice might be a rather
melancholy metaphor in this case."

"I don't think so," replied Brain, shortly. "I don't fancy the ice
had much to do with it. I don't see how it could."

"What would you propose doing?" asked Fisher.

"Well, we've sent for the authorities, of course, but I hope to find
something out before they come," replied the Anglo-Indian. "I can't
say I have much hope from police methods in this country. Too much
red tape, habeas corpus and that sort of thing. What we want is to
see that nobody bolts; the nearest we could get to it would be to
collect the company and count them, so to speak. Nobody's left
lately, except that lawyer who was poking about for antiquities."

"Oh, he's out of it; he left last night," answered the other. "Eight
hours after Bulmer's chauffeur saw his lawyer off by the train I
heard Bulmer's own voice as plain as I hear yours now."

"I suppose you don't believe in spirits?" said the man from India.
After a pause he added: "There's somebody else I should like to
find, before we go after a fellow with an alibi in the Inner Temple.
What's become of that fellow in green--the architect dressed up a