It was one o'clock in the day when they reached the great iron gates of Maudesley Abbey in a fly which they had chartered at Shorncliffe. It was one o'clock on a bright sunshiny day, and the heart of Mr. Carter the detective beat high with expectation of a great triumph. He descended from the fly himself, in order to question the woman at the lodge. "You'd better get out, Sawney," he said, putting his head in at the window, in order to speak to his companion; "I shan't take the vehicle into the park. It'll be quieter and safer for us to walk up to the house." Mr. Tibbles, with his blue-bag on his arm, got out of the fly, prepared to attend his superior whithersoever that luminary chose to lead him. The woman at the lodge was not alone; a little group of gossips were gathered in the primly-furnished parlour, and the talk was loud and animated. "Which I was that took aback like, you might have knocked me down with a feather," said the proprietress of the little parlour, as she went out of the rustic porch to open the gate for Mr. Carter and his companion. "I want to see Mr. Dunbar," he said, "on particular business. You can tell him I come from the banking-house in St. Gundolph Lane. I've got a letter from the junior partner there, and I'm to deliver it to Mr. Dunbar himself!" The keeper of the lodge threw up her hands and eyes in token of utter bewilderment. "Begging your pardon, sir," she said, "but I've been that upset, I don't know scarcely what I'm a-doing of. Mr. Dunbar have gone, sir, and nobody in that house don't know why he went, or when he went, or where he's gone. The man-servant as waited on him found the rooms all empty the first thing this morning; and the groom as had charge of Mr. Dunbar's horse, and slep' at the back of the house, not far from the stables, fancied as how he heard a trampling last night where the horse was kep', but put it down to the animal bein' restless on account of the change in the weather; and this morning the horse was gone, and the gravel all trampled up, and Mr. Dunbar's gold-headed cane (which the poor gentleman was still so lame it was as much as he could do to walk from one room to another) was lying by the garden-gate; and how he ever managed to get out and about and saddle his horse and ride away like that without bein' ever heard by a creetur, nobody hasn't the slightest notion; and everybody this morning was distracted like, searchin' 'igh and low; but not a sign of Mr. Dunbar were found nowhere." Mr. Carter turned pale, and stamped his foot upon the gravel-drive. Two hundred pounds is a large stake to a poor man; and Mr. Carter's reputation was also trembling in the balance. The very man he wanted gone—gone away in the dead of the night, while all the household was sleeping! "But he was lame," he cried. "How about that?—the railway accident—the broken leg——"