“That is why I apprehend trouble. We soon shall know definitely. Ten minutes will take us to the house.” It was a palatial residence, indeed, at which they arrived within the time mentioned, and at precisely half past nine o’clock. The night was agreeably warm for October, with a starry sky and a half-filled moon running low in the west, lending a silvery luster to the placid Hudson. “Wait here with the car, Danny,” Nick directed, alighting at the driveway entrance to the somewhat spacious grounds, which occupied a corner and also abutted on a less pretentious rear street. “Come on, Chick, and we’ll very soon solve the mystery.” “Do you know of whom the family consists, Nick, besides Chester Clayton and his wife?” inquired Chick, as they walked up the driveway. “His mother, Mrs. Julia Clayton, and his wife’s father, Mr. Gustavus Langham,” said the detective. “They also have one child about four months old. There may be others for all I know, for I have seen but little of the Claytons, mother or son, since his marriage and that extraordinary case at Langham Manor more than a year ago.” “When Clayton’s double, Dave Margate, was wiped out of existence,” Chick observed. “He was an accomplished and vicious rat, Nick, if ever there was one.” Nick Carter did not reply. He recalled for a moment the twin relationship of the two men mentioned. He was thinking, too, of the terrible secret known only to him and the mother of these two sons, whose extraordinary resemblance to one another had made possible the two strange cases in which they had figured; one a man of wealth, character, and social distinction, the other a notorious criminal, and both ignorant of their kinship and the circumstances under which they had been separated in infancy. Nick’s mind had turned for a moment upon this distressing bit of family history confided to him by Mrs. Julia Clayton. It still was the skeleton in her closet. Despite the death of that vicious son, who had followed the footsteps of his criminal father, or his supposed death under circumstances warranting hardly the shadow of a doubt, there had been no further disclosure of her terrible secret. “Let it die with him, Mr. Carter, if David Margate is really dead,” she had said confidentially to Nick, after the sensational case at Langham Manor. “God grant that it is so. Not that I am an unnatural mother, however, who can deliberately wish for the death of her own son, but because his career has been one of persistent vice and crime, and his kinship with the loyal son who bears my maiden name has been the one black shadow that I have seen threatening the happiness and welfare of Chester Clayton. He does not know; must never know. It will be better far for all concerned. Let the dead bury the dead.”