“I have it!” he rumbled, triumphantly. “And in my pocket reposes the electric lamp. I ascend; you, my good friend, will follow.” True enough he scrambled upward and, to my unspeakable amazement, disappeared in the chimney. Filled with great wonder I followed and saw him standing in a recess high above my head, a recess which he must have opened in some way unknown to me. He extended a long arm and grasped my hand in his. “Up!” he cried, exerted his surprising strength, and jerked me up beside him with as little effort as though I had been a child. He pressed the button of a torch which he held and I saw that we stood upon an exceedingly steep and narrow wooden stair. “It is in the thickness of the wall between the panellings,” he whispered, solemnly; “a Jacobite hiding place. Sir James knows nothing of it, for has he not spent his life in the Bush?” He mounted the stair. “On the right,” his voice came back to me, “the gun room, the billiard room! On the left, the banquet room. From here comes the laughter--from here comes the danger.” Still he ascended and I followed. The narrow stair terminated in a dusty box-like apartment no more than six feet high by six feet square. Moris Klaw, ducking his head grotesquely, stood there shining the light about him. From the floor he took up a square wooden case and waved to me to descend again. “No exit,” he said; “no exit. Sir James’s bedroom is upon the farther side, but, as I had anticipated, there is no exit.” We returned the way we had come; clearly there was no other. Beneath his caped coat Moris Klaw jealously concealed the case which he had discovered in the secret chamber. I was filled with intense curiosity; but Moris Klaw, having gone to his room, asking me to await him outside in the drive, returned, ultimately, without the case, but carrying a huge notebook, and intimated that he was prepared to reënter the waiting car. Behind the pebbles of his pince-nez his strange eyes gleamed triumphantly. “We triumph,” he said. “The haunting of Grange succumbs to the Science of the Mind!” IV We all had lunch at Friars House, but were by no means a jovial party. Sir James seemed worried and preoccupied, and Clement Leyland even more reticent than usual. Moris Klaw talked, certainly, but his conversation turned entirely upon the subject of the Borgias, concerning which notorious family he was possessed of a stock of most unsavoury anecdote. So realistic were his gruesome stories, delivered in that rumbling whisper, wholly impossible to describe or imitate, that every mouthful of food which I swallowed threatened to choke me. Afterward we wandered idly about the beautiful old grounds, which bore ineffaceable marks of monkish cultivation. Sir James, who was walking ahead with Moris Klaw and Isis, suddenly turned and waited for me. I had been examining a sundial with much interest, but I now walked on and joined our host.