It is not with impunity that men between fifty and sixty, especially if they have lived under constant self-repression--which doesn't apply to colonels--let their angry passions rise. The Home Secretary was badly blown. He felt groggy. His exertion was already beginning to make him a little stiff. He halted towards the dining-room and groped for a pint of champagne which he knew to stand by. He pulled the cork with his last strength. He took a mighty draught. He felt better. He took another. Then he saw the world sanely, and he saw it whole--such is the power of the god. There was hardly a drain left. He glanced over his shoulder, found himself alone, put the neck of the bottle to his lips and sucked it down. "Ah!" said the arbiter of Wormwood Scrubbs and Lord of Pentonville. "That's better." He felt almost genial--normal, anyhow, at last. Even a trifle super-normal. With sprightlier step he regained that comfortable chair wherein he had been relaxing his overstrained mind when George Whaley had so imprudently intruded. It was not once in a blue moon that Humphrey de Bohun thought tobacco a boon, but the occasion called for it. For the matter of that, it was not once in a blue moon that he drank more than half a glass of wine at a sitting--let alone of a Sunday morning during church time--and bubbling wine in plenty leads to smoking: hence the fortunes made by Greeks and Egyptians in their sales of hay cigarettes to the young bloods. Humphrey de Bohun groped in his daughter's open box for a cigarette, tapped it, with a surprisingly modern gesture, on his thumbnail, and as he lit it sank back into the chair he had left and wondered whether indeed he had reached repose. Was there anyone left, he thought drowsily, who could come with yet another story of the blasted gem? He was already half asleep, but there passed before his drooping eyes what seemed a regiment: Galton had been sure of it--he had seen it, seen it on Bill; Bill had been sure of it--he had tested it, tested it on McTaggart; McTaggart had been sure of it--he had got it by second sight, and was absolutely certain of Collop; and Collop--oh well! God bless Collop! For after all he had _produced_ it--snatched from the talons of a fowl. The elderly gentleman's head drooped and nodded; the cigarette fell from his lax fingers; it set fire to the Aubusson carpet, which smouldered in faint wreaths, but did no harm, and soon went out. Thus did the adventure of the Emerald of Catherine the Great end, as all things end, in smoke. * * * * * * * Far, far, in the less pretentious but roomy apartments of the East Wing, George Whaley, suffering untold things, sought for and found the Boy, the culprit, Ethelbert. They met in the passage that leads from the servants' hall to the Yard; but when I say met, I rather mean that their visages encountered the one the other at the turn of a corner separated by a space of some five yards.