Now he lay dead, murdered, only God knew as yet by whom. People suspected Luke, because Fate had given a fresh turn to her wheel and reinstated him in the pleasing position from which the intruder had ousted him. Luke de Mountford was once more heir presumptive to the earldom of Radclyffe, and the stranger had taken the secret of his success with him to the grave. CHAPTER XVIII IT WOULD NOT DO, YOU KNOW Since Lord Radclyffe was too ill to attend to anything, or to see any one, it devolved upon Luke to make what arrangements he thought fitting for the lying in state and the subsequent obsequies of the murdered man. For the present, Philip de Mountford lay in the gloomy mortuary chamber of the Victoria police court. Luke had sent over massive silver candelabra, flowers and palms and all the paraphernalia pertaining to luxurious death. The dead man lay--not neglected--only unwatched and alone, surrounded by all the evidences of that wealth which he had come a very long way to seek, but which Fate and a murderer's hand had snatched with appalling suddenness from him. And in the private sitting room at the Langham, Louisa Harris sat opposite her father at breakfast, a pile of morning papers beside her plate, she herself silent and absorbed. "That's a queer tale," Colonel Harris was saying, "the papers tell about that murder in Brussels a year ago--though I must say that to my mind there appears some truth in what they say. What do you think, Louisa?" "I hardly know," she replied absently, "what to think." "The details of that crime, which was committed about a year ago, are exactly the same as those which relate to this infernal business of last night." "Are they really?" No one could have said--and Louisa herself least of all--why she was unwilling to speak on that subject. She had never told her father, or any one for a matter of that, except----that she had been so near to the actual scene of that mysterious crime in Brussels, and that she had known its every detail. "And I must say," reiterated Colonel Harris emphatically, "that I agree with the leading article in the _Times_. One crime begets another. If that hooligan--or whatever he was--in Brussels had not invented this new and dastardly way of murdering a man in a cab and then making himself scarce and sending the cab spinning on its way, no doubt Philip de Mountford would be alive now. Not that that would be a matter for great rejoicings. Still a crime is a crime, and if we were going to allow blackguards to be murdered all over the place by other blackguards, where would law and order be?" He was talking more loudly and volubly than was his wont, and he took almost ostentatiously quantities of food on his plate, which it was quite obvious he never meant to eat. He also steadily avoided meeting his daughter's eyes. But at this juncture she put both elbows on the table, rested her chin in her hands, and looked straight across at her father.