I had intended paying a special visit to Miss Milly Hart on my own account; but either by accident or design--at the time I was not sure which--de Cartienne always seemed to frustrate my plans. Even to myself I would not acknowledge that I had any other motive save pure curiosity; but I was still determined by some means or other to see a photograph of the missing Mr. Hart. The strange disappearance of the one in the sitting-room at the inn--it had never been found--puzzled me, and whenever I caught myself thinking of the incident, it was always in connection with Leonard de Cartienne. It seemed very absurd, when I considered the matter calmly, but nevertheless I could not escape from it. It haunted me, as ideas sometimes will. One afternoon, about two months after my arrival at Borden Towers, Cecil and I were reading together in the study--or, rather, I was endeavouring to encourage one of his rare fits of industry by helping him through a stiff page of Livy--when the door opened suddenly and de Cartienne entered with an open telegram in his hand. Seeing me, he stopped short and frowned. "Hallo, Len! What's up?" Cecil exclaimed. "What have you got there? A telegram?" de Cartienne nodded and, after a moment's hesitation, handed it over. "It's from Fothergill," he explained. "He is coming over to-night, and wants us to dine with him." "Should like to awfully," Cecil said, "but I don't see how we can. Old Grumps wouldn't let us go, of course, and I don't see how we can manage it without his knowing." "Don't you? Well, I do," de Cartienne remarked drily. "Grumps is going over to Belscombe this evening to take the chair at the literary society there. He'll have to dine at six and leave at a quarter to seven. I know that, because I heard him give his orders. That will leave us plenty of time to get down into the town by eight o'clock; and we shall be all right for coming back, of course." "That's capital!" declared Cecil, shutting up his Livy with a bang. "We will have our revenge on old Fothergill to-night. Just what I've been looking forward to." de Cartienne shrugged his shoulders. "Well, I don't know," he said slowly. "I fancy. Fothergill is a bit too good for us. I shan't be very keen on cards to-night, I can tell you. I lost more money than I cared about last time he was here." Cecil laughed carelessly. "You didn't lose as much as I did," he remarked. "But, then, Fothergill had all the luck. I never remember such a run of trumps as he held in that last deal; and you played villainously, you know--gave him no end of tricks." The very faintest suspicion of a smile--an evil smile it was--trembled on de Cartienne's lips, and he turned away towards the window as though to hide it. "I wasn't in very good form that night," he acknowledged. "I must make up for it to-night, if we can get Fothergill to give us our revenge." Cecil drummed upon the table with his fingers and raised his eyebrows slightly.