The young fellow's earnestness and feeling warmed the cockles of the great detective's heart. He liked John Dashwood and he took no pains to conceal the fact. A portly, well-groomed man of sixty, with a self-satisfied smile on his keen, smoothly shaven face, who had come out of the house and approached unperceived, now broke in with the remark: "I'll bet it's a secret you are discussing." "What makes you think so?" asked John Dashwood quickly. "The expression of your face. There is certainly something about the position of your lips, your eyes are slightly narrowed, your head is bowed in a suspicious manner, your----" "Might we not have been exchanging simple confidences?" put in Nick, with a smile. "Possibly. But confidences are secrets, you know." The speaker leaned against the railing in front of the two friends and regarded them benignly. "We were not discussing secrets," said Dashwood, as he threw back his head, though his manner was pleasant enough. "No? Then you should have been, for all of us have our secrets." Dashwood shook his head. "You must except me, Mr. Leonard," he said. "What? A man without a secret? Come, now, Dashwood, you must be joking. I don't assume, of course, that any secret you may have hidden in your breast is of a shady nature, but to say that your mind is an open book, that during your twenty-six years of life--twenty-six or twenty-seven, which is it?" "Twenty-six." "That during your twenty-six years of life you have never had any experience which, for honorable reasons, you have thought best to keep to yourself, or have never been the recipient of another's secret, equally honorable, but not proper for publication, is to stamp you as an exceptional man." Dashwood laughed. "I am an exceptional man, then, for really I haven't any secrets. But as for Mr. Carter, here," turning and nodding in his friend's direction, "he is nothing less than a walking mystery. He has to be, you know, for he is a detective." Mr. Leonard looked keenly at Nick Carter. "How is it?" he asked, in a bantering tone. "Are you as Dashwood says, or is he mistaken, and are you to be placed with him in the category of unfledged innocents? Come now, out with the truth. Are you a man with a corroding secret, or are you not?" "There are some matters of no concern to the general public," replied Nick, rather coldly, "which I have found advisable to keep to myself. But"--with a smile--"they are honest ones, I assure you." "Would your enemies think so if they knew them?" queried Leonard provokingly. "My enemies give me little concern." "Neither do mine, for I have none," said John Dashwood proudly. Gabriel Leonard lifted his eyebrows. Then he spoke rather cynically. "You are both to be congratulated. Dashwood, especially. A man without a secret and with not an enemy in the world! Your condition, I suppose, must be attributed to the very lucky circumstances that have hitherto surrounded your existence."