“As I don’t suppose anybody will think it worth while to confiscate my few traps, will you be good enough at your convenience to have them forwarded by rail to the address given below. “With reference to what passed this morning, it seems to me that my wisest plan is to say nothing. _Qui s’excuse _, they say, but, in my case, it would be hopeless to attempt the first, and I have surely done enough of the latter to satisfy anybody. At any rate, ‘them’s my sentiments.” “Yours truly “L. R.” “What shocking flippancy in one so young!” said Lady Pell. “Let him go; it is perhaps as well,” remarked the Baronet as he gave the note back to Lisle. “His doing so solves what otherwise might have proved a difficulty to me. I think we have already got from him all the information needful for our purpose, but should we require him at any future time, his note will furnish us with a clue to his whereabouts.” Luigi had stolen out of the house almost like a thief in the night—never to cross its threshold again. So many things had happened and in so short a time, and there was mixed up in them such an element of the inexplicable, that he seemed to have lost control of his thoughts, which kept veering about from one point to another unable to fix themselves on anything for more than a few seconds at a time, and tormenting him now with one question and now with another, to which no answer was forthcoming. Who, or what was the Grey Monk? Were it merely a figment of the brain, an illusion of the senses, would it have had the power, not to speak of the will, to shut the door of the strong room upon him and turn the key? And yet to regard it as a being of flesh and blood was to confront himself with one enigma after another and all equally insoluble. Then again, through what channel had Sir Gilbert made the fatal discovery that he, Luigi Rispani, was not his grandson? Evidently no suspicion of the truth had been in his mind only a few hours before. At dinner on Sunday Sir Gilbert had questioned him about his Continental trip, and had seemed satisfied with his answers. The bubble had burst between ten o’clock on Sunday night and half past ten on Monday morning. Whose was the hand that had wrought the mischief?