Beaumanoir’s harassed brows cleared as he met Alec Forsyth’s honest gaze and he felt the grip of his honest hand. Their ways had lain apart for the last few years, but a very real friendship, begun in the Eton playing fields, had survived separation. Of all his acquaintances, Alec had been the only one to go down to Liverpool twelve months before to bid scapegrace Charles Hanbury farewell. "I had a call to make, before going to Pattisons’ in Lincoln’s Inn," said the Duke. And then with quick apprehension he added, pointing to the door he had just left: "Have you come from there? Have you business with Ziegler too?" "Ziegler? Who’s Ziegler?" asked Forsyth, looking puzzled by his sudden confusion. "No, I haven’t been to those rooms, but to the suite beyond. A duty call on a certain Mrs. Talmage Eglinton, but, thank goodness, she wasn’t at home. Now about yourself, Charley. Fortune smiles again, eh?" "It’s only a sickly grin at present," Beaumanoir replied, dejectedly. "See here, Alec; I’ve got my bag on a cab outside. I landed at Southampton too early for lunch. Come and talk to me while I get a snack before going to the lawyers." A few minutes later they were seated in a Strand restaurant, and the young Scotsman heard all about his friend’s struggles with the demon of poverty in New York, but never a word of the trouble that was brooding. In his turn Forsyth was able to fill in the blanks of the family solicitor’s cablegram, and enlightened Beaumanoir as to the manner of his succession to the title. The late Duke was traveling to Newmarket in a racing "special," accompanied by his nephew and heir, George Hanbury, when they had both met their deaths in a collision. The double funeral had taken place at Prior’s Tarrant, the ancestral seat of the Dukes of Beaumanoir in Hertfordshire, three days before, the arrangements having been made by the solicitors, in the absence of the next successor. The last Duke having been a childless widower, and both his brothers, the fathers respectively of George and Charles Hanbury, having predeceased him, there had been no near relatives to follow the late head of the house to his last resting-place. "Let me see, my cousin George had a sister, Sybil, who used to live with my uncle," Beaumanoir mused aloud. "I wonder what has become of her." "I believe that she is still at your town house in Piccadilly," replied Forsyth with a constraint which the other did not notice in his self-absorption. But the next moment it struck Beaumanoir as odd that the information should have been so readily forthcoming, for he had been unaware that his friend knew his relatives. "You have made Sybil Hanbury’s acquaintance, then?" he asked. "Yes, since your departure for America," was the reply. "I had the pleasure of meeting her first at my uncle’s in Grosvenor Gardens—General Sadgrove’s, you know. I dare say you remember him?"