and his housemaid a half-day’s holiday to attend his funeral.... It had served Nino right, thought Colin; for if he had remained up at the villa he would not have gone back to live in that insanitary hovel by the Marina, where the fever was so prevalent, and he wondered whether, in a sense, it had served him right too, for there was no denying that he had been really fond of him, and that was an offence to his Lord and Benefactor. To-day the memory of Nino was far more vivid than that of Pamela, who was a tiresome woman, greedy and graceless, and often even now, when he lazily awoke in the morning, he found himself sleepily imagining that it was Nino who was moving about the room.... It had been very stupid of him to behave like that: Colin had always been kind to him: he need never have feared for himself. It was Nino’s fear that had driven him into danger: if he had only stopped where he was, and remained gay and companionable, he would have run no risks. But his fright, his mad attempt at escape, had been his undoing; he had run underneath the very wheels like a startled fowl on the high-road. That month, in fact, had been full of incidents, tragic for others, but strangely prosperous for himself: episodes had taken place then far-reaching in consequence, that fitted into each other with more than casual coincidence. At Stanier, before he left, for instance, there had been the discovery and certain solution of that pencil plan in his ancestor’s diary, followed, when he got to Capri, by the finding of what beyond doubt was old Colin’s book of wondrous blasphemies, of which he had so easily possessed himself. And the chain of odd occurrences had not been broken there, for within a week of his having obtained that he saw for the first time Hugh Douglas, now librarian at Stanier.