belonged to some one else....

“Thax Vail!” she broke off indignantly. “Stop looking as if you’d been slapped! You’re not going to feel badly about this. I forbid you to. Here we all forced ourselves upon you, and turned your home upside down, against your will! And if we’re the losers, it’s our own fault, not yours. We—”

[96]She stopped her efforts at consolation, catching sight of Clive Creede, who slipped unobtrusively into the room. A minute earlier she had seen him go out and had heard his step on the stairs.

[96]

“Well,” she challenged, as she peered up shrewdly into his troubled white face. “Another county heard from? How much?”

Clive laughed, in an assumption of carelessness, and glanced apologetically at Thaxton.

“Not much,” he made shift to answer the garrulous old lady. “Just a little bunch of bills I’d left on my chiffonier and—and a watch. That’s all.”

“The Argyle watch?” cried Miss Lane, in genuine concern. “Not the Argyle watch. Oh, you poor boy!”

“What might the Argyle watch be?” acidly queried Mrs. Mosely. “It must be something priceless, since it seems to stir you people up more than our $12,000 loss. But then—of course—”

“The Argyle watch,” explained Doris, forestalling a hot rejoinder from Vail, “is a big, old-fashioned, gold, hunting-case watch that the Duke of Argyle offered as a scholarship prize once at the University of Edinburgh. Mr.[97] Creede’s father won it, as a young man. And it was his dearest possession. I don’t wonder Mr. Creede feels so about its loss. He—”

[97]

“The Duke of Argyle?” repeated Mosely, lifted momentarily from his daze of grief by sound of so magic and familiar a name. “The one who invented the scratching posts that made folks say ‘God bless the Duke of Argyle’? I read about him in a book. Was he the same one?”

“No,” said Willis Chase, “this was the one who put up sandpaper pillars on the border for Highlanders to rub the burrs off their dialect. He was the laird of Hootmon Castle, syne aboon the sonsie Lochaber.”

Once more Mosely favored the flippant youth with a scowl of utter disgust. Then, turning to the rest, he said:

“An idea has just hit me. I warn you 

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