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 effect of hardening the ironical smile which for some little time now had hung round his lips.

"May I ask you," said the Duke with the air of a man pretty badly hipped, "not to speak of this matter to anyone until there has been an opportunity for further discussion?"

The abrupt change in the tone confessed a moral weakness which Sir Dugald was quick to notice. But he fell in with the suggestion, with a show of ready magnanimity for which the Duke could have slain him. There was no wish to cause avoidable unpleasantness. Sir Dugald was good enough to say that it was in the interests of all parties that the skeleton should be kept in the cupboard. The matter was bound to give pain to a number of innocent people, and if the Duke, even at the eleventh hour, would be reasonable he might depend upon it that Sir Dugald Maclean would be only too happy to follow his example.

V

Upon the retirement of the unwelcome visitor, the Duke gave himself up to a state of irritation verging on fury. Unprepared for this new turn of the game, taken at a complete disadvantage by a man of few scruples and diabolical cleverness, he was now horribly smitten by a sense of having said things he ought not to have said. On one point he was clear. In the shock of the unforeseen he had yielded far too much to the impact of a scoundrel.

The position seen as a whole was one of very grave difficulty, and the instinct now dominating his mind was to seek a port against a storm which threatened at any