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172 never before seen but whose life he had schemed to take these many years. His heavy voice boomed and echoed through the car like the sounding of a tocsin. …

Alan made no effort to respond, but listened with his head critically to one side and an exasperating expression of deep interest informing his countenance until Mr. Trine was out of breath and vitriol; when the younger man bowed with the slightest shade of mockery in his manner and waved a tolerant hand to Barcus.

"He has, no doubt," Alan inquired, "his own private cell aboard this car?"

"Yas, suh," Barcus agreed, aping well the manners of his apparent caste and colour. "Ain't dat de troof?" he chuckled.

"Take him away, then," Alan requested wearily— "if you please."

"Yas, suh," Barcus replied, with nimble alacrity, seizing the back of the wheeled chair and swinging it around for a spin up the length of the car.

Before Trine had recovered enough to curse him properly, the door to his drawing-room was closed and Barcus was ambling back down the aisle.

His grin of relish at this turning of the tables on the monomaniac proved, however, short-lived. It erased itself in a twinkling when Judith shouldered roughly past him, wearing a sullen and forbidding