A very small stone will put out of gear the most skilfully constructed and reliable machine. A very small modicum of fact will reduce the most skilful and elaborate fiction to its elements. The letter which Loring was studying now with knit brows and compressed lips brought him private information, which he knew might be public property twenty-four hours later, to the effect that the Welcome Diamond Mine was under water. As soon as that fact was generally made known, shares in the Company would be practically worthless. He folded the letter and sat for a moment tapping it meditatively against the table. He was thinking deeply; not now about the actual contents of the letter, but of a question which they had raised in his mind; a question interwoven and complicated with other carefully-laid plans. Finally he threw the letter down on the table with a movement of sudden resolution. “I must!” he said to himself. “It won’t do to risk a row.” He glanced hastily at his watch, and then drew out a sheet of note-paper and wrote rapidly: “DEAR JULIAN, “Be here to-morrow at ten sharp. Don’t fail. “Yours, “MARSTON LORING.” He directed the letter, and then rose quickly, took up the hat and light overcoat lying on a chair near him, and went out with the letter in his hand. At the porter’s lodge he stopped. “Get this sent by hand this evening,” he said, giving the man the letter addressed to Julian. The other letter he posted himself as he passed along the Strand. He was on his way to dine in Curzon Street, and among his subsequent engagements for the evening the Academy soirée occupied a prominent place. It was nearly twelve o’clock when he arrived at Burlington House, and the vestibule and staircase were alike crowded with people going up and coming down; smiling, nodding, and generally obstructing the way, with a bland oblivion of any but their own individual rights to a passage. At the foot of the stairs Loring was seized upon and absorbed in a portentous obstruction, of which the centre figure was Mrs. Halse, a truly electrifying figure in a painfully fashionable evening “frock” of a brilliant green. “I was just looking for a man,” she said, in her usual strident tones. “They get such an extraordinary lot of people together here that picking out any one one knows is like looking for a needle in a bundle of hay. I suppose nobody ever did look for a needle in a bundle of hay, by-the-bye. Mr. Halse isn’t here, of course”--Mr. Halse was seldom known to appear in public, and when he did so, his meek presence was obviously entirely devoid of interest for his wife--“and I’m looking after Hilda Compton; her husband’s coming to fetch her, but he doesn’t care about her going about alone. Quite right, too, I tell him,” she added, with a laugh. “But of course it won’t last.”