he table as if he had been kicked off it. "What
do you mean?" he cried. "How can you possibly see a man?"

"I can see him through the window," replied the secretary, mildly.
"I see him coming across the moor. He's making a bee line across the
open country toward this tower. He evidently means to pay us a
visit. And, considering who it seems to be, perhaps it would be more
polite if we were all at the door to receive him." And in a
leisurely manner the secretary came down the ladder.

"Who it seems to be!" repeated Sir Walter in astonishment.

"Well, I think it's the man you call Prince Michael," observed Mr.
Fisher, airily. "In fact, I'm sure it is. I've seen the police
portraits of him."

There was a dead silence, and Sir Walter's usually steady brain
seemed to go round like a windmill.

"But, hang it all!" he said at last, "even supposing his own
explosion could have thrown him half a mile away, without passing
through any of the windows, and left him alive enough for a country
walk--even then, why the devil should he walk in this direction?
The murderer does not generally revisit the scene of his crime so
rapidly as all that."

"He doesn't know yet that it is the scene of his crime," answered
Horne Fisher.

"What on earth do you mean? You credit him with rather singular
absence of mind."

"Well, the truth is, it isn't the scene of his crime," said Fisher,
and went and looked out of the window.

There was another silence, and then Sir Walter said, quietly: "What
sort of notion have you really got in your head, Fisher? Have you
developed a new theory about how this fellow escaped out of the ring
round him?"

"He never escaped at all," answered the man at the window, without
turning round. "He never escaped out of the ring because he was
never inside the ring. He was not in this tower at all, at least not
when we were surrounding it."

He turned and leaned back against the window, but, in spite of his
usual listless manner, they almost fancied that the face in shadow
was a little pale.

"I began to guess something of the sort when we were some way from
the tower," he said. "Did you notice that sort of flash or flicker
the candle gave before it was extinguished? I was almost certain it
was only the last leap the flame gives when a candle burns itself
out. And then I came into this room and I saw that."

He pointed at the table and Sir Walter caught his breath with a sort
of curse at his own blindness