Lady Agatha, for once too dumfounded for speech, could only give a significant look of appeal to her daughters. And at the look John Arbuthnot Sharnbrook, who had taken the precaution to get near the door, opened it quietly and slipped out. Meanwhile the brown eyes of Miss Ethel and the black orbs of Miss Dagmar were fastened searchingly on Lord Quorn, and they transmitted to their owners the impression that he was not an attractive personage. In truth there was yet a good deal of the Jenkins about him. His clothes looked as though he had been in the habit of going to bed in them, and his hair cried out for the barber. For the moment, at any rate, he was not to be jumped at, and with that conviction the original impulse to spring was stilled. Lady Agatha rose, with a lofty ignoring of Lady Ormstork's exultant smile. "If," she said to Gage, "you are not Lord Quorn, as you have all along thought proper to pretend to be, may one ask who you are?" "I am Peter Gage," he answered with a touch of amusement. The eyes of Lady Agatha and her daughters met, and all that could be read in them was an indignant perplexity. "It is all very extraordinary." Colonel Hemyock's thin voice sounded through the room, but his family heeded it not. Their minds were busy with the enigma of the position which was too complicated, not to say suspicious, to be comprehended at once. Only one thing in all the business seemed safe, and their minds jumped together to it. They recoiled, as by a single impulse, from the unattractive personality of Lord Quorn, from the doubtful individualities of Gage and Peckover, and their eyes by common consent sought the spot where their sheet-anchor had lately rested. "Sharnbrook!" "Where is he?" They ran a dead heat to the door, charged through it, and so out into the garden. But John Arbuthnot Sharnbrook's start served him well, and he was at that moment sprinting homewards down the drive with a canny smile on his simple face. Butler & Tanner, The Selwood Printing Works, Frome, and London. _WORKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR._ THE MASTER SPIRIT _Liverpool Post_ says:--"The study of the prostrate man giving the best of his brains to the assistance of Herriard is beyond all praise. It is one more variant of the 'double' theory, but it is one of the best achievements of its kind." _The Tribune_ says:--"It must be admitted that Sir Wm. Magnay knows London life better than many novelists, that his men talk like gentlemen, and that his pictures of society are clever and truthful." _The Manchester City News_ says:--"This well written and attractive story outlines a true picture of the vanities and insincerities of fashionable society in London." _The Road_ says:--"Few plots in even the best up-to-date novels of to-day are as strongly drawn as this one, which has all the freshness of absolute novelty to recommend it."