“I am a light sleeper, Cassilis, as you ought to know. The telephone bell woke me some minutes before you came into the house that first night. You moved as quietly as a mouse as soon as you heard it, but you see I was listening before it rang the second time and I had heard you come up to the front door and open it.” How silly all my precautions seemed now! My chief rubbed it into me with a touch of good humour. “I gave you a hint that you might as well make a clean breast of it at once, but you didn’t take it. When you came in to me with Charles’s message your face showed me that you had something more on your mind than having gone out without letting me know. And you gave yourself away when you told me that you had been taken to the Domino Club by a Captain Smethwick. There is no such name in the Army List.” Blunder after blunder, he recounted them all. The theft of the case-book had pointed to the thief being a doctor. The omission of Violet’s name from the list I had copied supplied the key to my motives, and my attack on Sarah Neobard left no doubt that I was in love with the girl she had denounced. My kind-hearted chief had willingly lent himself to my plans for meeting Violet at Tyberton, though he had tried to let me see he was not quite blind. He had followed the history of the Zenobia costume easily enough. And Violet’s refusal to give up the name of her champion had told him more than it had told poor, dull-witted me. “That is my best reason for advising you to start in practice for yourself, my boy. Consider what your prospects are with me. I am at the top of the tree now and my salary is a bare £1,500 a year. And if I make another £500 by my private work it’s as much as I make. That’s not enough for an earl’s daughter to look forward to. You will make double as a fashionable doctor. You have the most valuable gift of all for the medical profession. You are a good listener. The people who will come to you, the patients who really bring in money, don’t want to be cured. They like to fancy they are ill and they want to talk about themselves. Let ’em do it and charge them for it. With my influence and Lord Ledbury’s you won’t have long to wait.” I could only shake my head sorrowfully. “You are very good, sir; you are kinder to me than I deserve. But I have no right to think that Lady Violet will ever marry me.” Sir Frank gave me a queer look. “Then I tell you this--if you don’t marry her, _I will_.” Before I could recover from the start given me by this threat he was consulting his watch again. “Charles ought to be here by this time. And I think he is. I shall be glad if you will come with us, Cassilis. We are going to the Domino Club.”