reveal to me.”

“It was, I suppose, in connexion with that document he always carried?”

“I believe it was,” was her response. Then she added, returning to her previous observations, “Why speak of your indebtedness to him, Mr Greenwood, when I know full well how you sold your best horse in order to pay my school fees at Bournemouth, and that you could not hunt that season in consequence? You denied yourself the only little pleasure you had, in order that I might be well cared for.”

“I forbid you to mention that again,” I said quickly. “Recollect we are now friends, and between friends there can be no question of indebtedness.”

“Then you must not talk of any little service my father rendered to you,” she laughed. “Come, now, I shall be unruly if you don’t keep to your part of the bargain!”

And so we were compelled at that juncture to cry quits, and we recommenced our friendship on a firm and perfectly well-defined basis.

Yet how strange it was! The beauty of Mabel Blair, as she lounged there before me in that magnificent home that was now hers, was surely sufficient to turn the head of any man who was not a Chancery Judge or a Catholic Cardinal—different indeed from the poor, half-starved girl whom I had first seen exhausted and fallen by the roadside in the winter gloom.

Chapter Five.

In which the Mystery Becomes Considerably Increased.

That the precious document, or whatever it was, sewn up in the wash-leather which the dead man had so carefully guarded through all those years was now missing was, in itself, a very suspicious circumstance, while Mabel’s vague but distinct apprehensions, which she either would not or could not define, now aroused my suspicions that Burton Blair had been the victim of foul play.

Immediately after leaving her I therefore drove to Bedford Row and held another consultation with Leighton, to whom I explained my grave fears.

“As I have already explained, Mr Greenwood,” responded the solicitor, leaning back in his padded chair and regarding me gravely through his glasses, “I believe that my client did not die a natural death. There was some mystery in his life, some strange romantic circumstance which, unfortunately, he never thought fit to confide to me. He held a secret, he told me, and by knowledge of 

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