Sturgis had now become involved in a long story of his early manhood, and even had Soapy been less distrait he might have found it difficult to enjoy it to the full. It was about an acquaintance of his who had kept rabbits, and it suffered in lucidity from his unfortunate habit of pronouncing rabbits "roberts," combined with the fact that by a singular coincidence the acquaintance had been a Mr. Roberts. Roberts, it seemed, had been deeply attached to roberts. In fact, his practice of keeping roberts in his bedroom had led to trouble with Mrs. Roberts, and in the end Mrs. Roberts had drowned the roberts in the pond and Roberts, who thought the world of his roberts and not quite so highly of Mrs. Roberts, had never forgiven her. Here Sturgis paused, apparently for comment. "Is that so?" said Soapy, breathing heavily. "Yes, sir." "In the pond?" "In the pond, sir." Like some Open Sesame, the word suddenly touched a chord in Soapy's mind. "Say, listen," he said. "All the while we've been talking I was forgetting that Mr. Carmody is out there on the pond." "The moat, sir?" "Call it what you like. Anyway, he's there, fishing, and he told me to tell you to take him out something to drink." Immediately, Sturgis, the lecturer, with a change almost startling in its abruptness, became Sturgis, the butler, once more. The fanatic rabbit-gleam died out of his eyes. "Very good, sir." "I should hurry. His tongue was hanging out when I left him." For an instant the butler wavered. The words had recalled to his mind a lop-eared doe which he had once owned, whose habit of putting out its tongue and gasping had been the cause of some concern to him in the late 'seventies. But he recovered himself. Registering a mental resolve to seek out this new-made friend of his later and put the complete facts before him, he passed through the green baize door. Soapy, alone at last, did not delay. With all the pent up energy which had been accumulating within him during a quarter of an hour which had seemed a lifetime, he swung the hatchet and brought it down. The panel splintered. The lock snapped. The door swung open. There was an electric switch inside the cupboard. He pressed it down and was able to see clearly. And, having seen clearly, he drew back, his lips trembling with half-spoken words of the regrettable kind which a man picks up in the course of a lifetime spent in the less refined social circles of New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago. The cupboard contained an old raincoat, two hats, a rusty golf club, six croquet balls, a pamphlet on stock-breeding, three umbrellas, a copy of the _Parish Magazine_ for the preceding November, a shoe, a mouse, and a smell of apples, but no suitcase. That much Soapy had been able to see in the first awful, disintegrating instant. No bag, box, portmanteau, or suitcase of any kind or description whatsoever. II