The idea of a professional criminal being served with such specious pomp tickled Forsyth’s sense of humor; but, restraining an impulse to laugh in the fellow’s face, he responded gravely to the salutation and stated his business. He had come, he said, after mentioning his name, on behalf of the Duke of Beaumanoir, to see Mr. Ziegler by appointment on a matter of private business. "Mr. Ziegler is expecting you," Benzon replied, scrutinizing the visitor’s face narrowly. "Unfortunately he is not so well as usual this morning, and is not yet dressed. I must ask you to wait a little till he is ready to receive you." Forsyth bowed and took the chair offered him, not without an inward chuckle at the discrepancy between the haste of the bell-boy’s summons to the suite and the delay in receiving him. To his mind the position was clear. Mrs. Talmage Eglinton desired to keep up the polite fiction of her innocence to the end, yet Ziegler was apparently not prepared to go forward with the business without an opportunity of consulting her. She had come up to town for the express purpose of advising, perhaps supervising, her colleagues at an important crisis, and was doubtless on her way to the hotel after the diversion he had created, so that it was necessary to get him out of the entrance-hall before she passed up to her suite. "I shouldn’t wonder if she isn’t the boss of the show, with Ziegler, who is probably her husband, as figure-head," Forsyth told himself. Benzon, with a polite excuse, had retired into an inner room; but his place had immediately been taken by a well-dressed but cadaverous individual whom Forsyth recognized as the man in clerical attire whom he had seen descending the stairs in John Street after the forcible entry into his chambers, the miscreant who later on the same eventful night had called at Beaumanoir House in the character of a disguised police-officer. There was evidently no disposition to leave him alone in the ante-room, and so give him a chance to open the outer door and witness Mrs. Talmage Eglinton’s arrival in the next suite. So twenty minutes passed, and Forsyth was speculating as to how communication would be carried on with the female partner during the forthcoming interview, when Benzon returned and announced that Mr. Ziegler was awaiting him. He could not help observing how much better suited was this bowing and smirking American swindler to the _rôle_ of a superior flunkey than to that of a British cavalry officer.