Francis Tredethlyn’s conduct for the last few weeks had quite baffled his friend’s penetration. The Cornishman had grown suddenly preoccupied and reserved. He might still be seen in the haunts of the Bohemians--for Mr. Lowther took care that he should not easily extricate himself from the bonds that he had allowed to be coiled about him; but Francis, always unwilling to be led into the scenes where he had no pleasure, was now more unwilling than ever, and Harcourt found it very difficult to play the game he wanted to play without showing his cards. If it had been a mere question of plucking so many feathers from an innocent pigeon, the thing might have been done easily enough, perhaps; but Mr. Lowther evidently wanted something more than his friend’s golden plumage. It seemed, indeed, as if he would be satisfied with nothing less than the utter ruin and degradation of Maude Tredethlyn’s husband. To-day, walking up and down the study, whose broad plate-glass window commanded an agreeable view of a stony quadrangle and the roofs and chimneys of a mews, Harcourt thought very despondently of that grand scheme to which he had devoted himself so patiently since his return to England. “What secret is the fellow hiding from me?” he thought, resentfully; “he refused to dine with me to-day, and he threw over the party I made for Greenwich the day before yesterday. He has made no book for the York summer, and yet he is less at home than ever. What does it all mean? Can he have gone to the bad in real earnest at last, and without any help from me? There must be something in it; but what is the something?” Tired at last of such meditations as these, Harcourt Lowther flung himself into a chair to compose the letter he had talked about writing when he entered the study. He wrote his note, which was very brief, and the gist of which was to remind Francis of some engagement that would entail the usual champagne drinking, the usual squandering of money for the gratification of the worthless society in which a few innocent pigeons abandoned themselves to be plucked without mercy by every species of predatory fowl. After having written this little note, so carefully worded that no print of the fiend’s hoof could have been deciphered therein by uninitiated eyes, Harcourt Lowther sat with his elbow on the table, biting the feather of his pen, and ruminating moodily. There were open letters and tradesmen’s bills lying about upon Francis Tredethlyn’s disorderly writing-table. Mr. Lowther flung aside his pen presently, and amused himself by a careless examination of these documents. Some of the bills were heavy ones, but not so heavy as to make any very serious inroad upon the Cornishman’s fortune, and Harcourt tossed them away from him one after the other, uninterested in their details, unconcerned by their sum-totals, until he came to a dead stop all at once at the first line of a document which seemed to him to bear an extraordinary significance.