"Geoffrey Fleming!" The Colonel wheeled round on his heels like a teetotum. He glanced behind him. "What the deuce do you mean, Frank? If I catch that thief under the roof which covers me, I'll make a case for the police of him." Then Mr. Osborne remembered what, in his agitation, he had momentarily forgotten, that Geoffrey Fleming had had no bitterer, more out-spoken, and, it may be added, more well-merited an opponent than Colonel Lanyon in the Climax Club. The Colonel advanced towards Mr. Osborne. "Do you know that that's the blackguard's chair you're standing by?" "His chair!" Mr. Osborne was leaning with one hand on the chair on which Mr. Fleming had, not long ago, been sitting. "That's what he used to call it himself,--with his usual impudence. He used to sit in it whenever he took a hand. The men would give it up to him--you know how you gave everything up to him, all the lot of you. If he couldn't get it he'd turn nasty--wouldn't play. It seems that he had the cheek to cut his initials on the chair--I only heard of it the other day, or there'd have been a clearance of him long ago. Look here--what do you think of that for a piece of rowdiness?" The Colonel turned the chair upside down. Sure enough in the woodwork underneath the seat were the letters, cut in good-sized characters--"G. F." "You know that rubbishing way in which he used to talk. When men questioned his exclusive right to the chair, I've heard him say he'd prove his right by coming and sitting in it after he was dead and buried--he swore he'd haunt the chair. Idiot!--What is the matter with you Frank? You look as if you'd been in a rough and tumble--your necktie's all anyhow." "I think I must have dropped asleep, and dreamed--yes, I fancy I've been dreaming." Mr. Osborne staggered, rather than walked, to the door, keeping one hand in the inside pocket of his coat. The Colonel followed him with his eyes. "Frank's ageing fast," was his mental comment as Mr. Osborne disappeared. "He'll be an old man yet before I am." He seated himself in Geoffrey Fleming's chair. It was, perhaps, ten minutes afterwards that Edward Jackson went into the smoking room--"Scientific" Jackson, as they call him, because of the sort of catch phrase he is always using--"Give me science!" He had scarcely been in the room a minute before he came rushing to the door shouting-- "Help, help!" Men came hurrying from all parts of the building. Mr. Griffin came from the billiard-room, where he is always to be found. He had a cue in one hand, and a piece of chalk in the other. He was the first to address the vociferous gentleman standing at the smoking-room door. "Jackson!--What's the matter?" Mr. Jackson was in such a condition of fluster and excitement that it was a little difficult to make out, from his own statement, what was the matter.