He lay awake for some time, but he must have been slumbering fitfully for over an hour when he felt himself gradually awakening—not from any sudden start, but from a growing sense of strange oppression in his lungs. As his senses returned the choking sensation increased, and finally he lay wide awake, wondering what was the matter. Every minute it became harder to breathe the stifling air, and at last he flung the bedclothes off in the hope of relief, and in doing so saw something so unaccountable that his reeling senses were stricken with amazement rather than fear. There was a fire in the grate. Glowing steadily in the recess of the ancient fireplace a great red ball burned, without flicker and without flame, but lurid with the unwavering light that comes from fuel fused to intense heat. Even without the terrible oppression at his chest there would have been a weird horror in this mysterious fire introduced into his room at dead of night—into a room with locked door and fastened windows. But what did this ghastly struggle for breath portend? "Charcoal! Ziegler!" were the two words that buzzed in response through his fast-clouding brain. CHAPTER VI—_The General is Curious_ On the following afternoon at tea-time four ladies were seated in the pleasant drawing-room of 140 Grosvenor Gardens, the residence of General Sadgrove, late of the Indian Staff Corps. Mrs. Sadgrove, a fair, plump, elderly dame, needs no special description, and two of the other tea-drinkers—Mrs. Senator Sherman, as she preferred to be called, and her daughter Leonie—we have met before. The fourth occupant of the room—a girl dressed in deep mourning—was Sybil Hanbury, who had come to discuss her engagement to Alec Forsyth with her motherly old friend, Alec’s aunt by marriage, Mrs. Sadgrove. Owing to the recent deaths in her family the engagement was not to be publicly announced at present; but Sybil had no secrets from the Sadgroves, who had known her from a baby, long before she had been taken up, on the death of her parents, by her grandfather, the late Duke of Beaumanoir. Miss Hanbury owed her attractiveness to her essentially English type, not of beauty—she would have disdained to lay claim to that—but of fresh, healthy coloring, a suspicion of tomboyishness, and a lithe, supple figure that stood her in good stead in the hunting and hockey fields. A trifle slangy on occasion, she was a good hater and a staunch friend, with a temper—as she had warned Alec already—that would need a lot of humoring if they were not to have "ructions." "I’ve got the makings of a termagant, my dear boy, but it will be all right if you rule me with a velvet glove," she had remarked within five minutes of their first kiss. In fact, Miss Sybil Hanbury was a bit of a hoyden; but a very capable little hoyden for all that, and absolutely fearless.