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 have no difficulty in inspiring the necessary confidence to put the business through, and you will then be troubled no further by us.—C. Z.”

“Poor old Beau! He’s played up as well as if we had told him all about our plan,” Forsyth muttered as he replaced the letter and took another look at himself in the glass. “I trust they won’t call me ‘your Grace,’ and make me laugh.”

But it was in no laughing mood that he switched off the electric light, listened at the door for fully a minute, and then softly opened it. His room, as it had been in the London house, was next to that of the Duke, and, satisfied that there was no one in the corridor, he slid out softly and shut the door behind him. A few natural steps having brought him opposite the Duke’s room, he fell at once into Beaumanoir’s limp, and so continued his way to the head of a secondary staircase that led down to the service rooms on the ground floor.

At the foot of the stairs, never forgetting his limp, he traversed several passages in which at long intervals only had a light been left burning, and at length he came to a massive oak door. Opening this, he found himself at