It was with a sad heart and reluctant feet that Luigi took his way towards the hotel at Mapleford where his uncle was awaiting him. The Captain had scarcely expected him quite so soon, deeming it likely that he would not see his way to leave the Chase till after luncheon. The door of the sitting-room was open and he heard his nephew asking for him below. “Is it success, or failure?” he asked himself, not without a certain tingling at the nerves, while Luigi was coming upstairs. One glance at the latter’s face was enough as he halted on the threshold and met his uncle’s gaze. Failure complete and unmistakable was written on every line of it. The Captain drew a long breath and set his teeth hard for a moment or two. “So,” he said with a sort of venomous bitterness as Luigi advanced, “you have come to tell me that you have made a mess of the affair! It is just what I have dreaded all along. I was a fool to let you undertake the job. I ought to have carried it through myself.” “I wish with all my heart that you had. What I have come to tell you is that the game’s up!” “What do you mean?” demanded Verinder, his lips fading to a blue-white. “Just what I say. We’re ruined—there’s no other word for it. Everything is known to Sir Gilbert.” “Everything is a big word.” “Not bigger than the occasion warrants. But perhaps you would like to hear how it has all come about.” “I should indeed. But before you begin pour yourself out a thimbleful of that brandy on the sideboard. You look as if the blood in your veins had turned to water.” “Small wonder if it has, as you will say yourself by the time I have told you all.” We need not follow Luigi in his narrative, nor record his uncle’s comments thereon. There were several points about it which puzzled the Captain, even as they had puzzled his nephew, and for which he could find no adequate explanation. But that in no wise affected the one overwhelming fact, that his edifice of fraud, notwithstanding all the pains he had been at in the building of it, had crumbled to pieces, struck down by some unseen hand, and he was far from certain yet that it might not involve him personally in the catastrophe. For the first and all-important question which he asked himself was, as to the steps Sir Gilbert Clare might decide upon taking now that the nefarious plot of which he had been made the victim was laid bare from beginning to end. Would he, while the first flame of his resentment still burned fiercely, cause a warrant to be issued for the arrest of one Augustus Verinder? It was a possibility which might well cause even a man who prided himself on his nerve to shake in his shoes, and if the Captain did not exactly do that, he was certainly rendered excessively uncomfortable thereby. His somewhat cynical philosophy notwithstanding, the prospect of two or three years’ incarceration in a gaol, with all its concomitant pains and penalties, was no more alluring to him than it is to the majority of people.