"Well, it's not a pleasant business." "I know that. The papers are full of it, and it's all a confounded damnable business, Tom, and that's all about it." "Unfortunately it's not 'all about it,'" rejoined Sir Thomas dryly. "That's what Louisa says. Women are so queer about things of that sort, and the papers are full of twaddle. She is anxious about Luke." "I don't wonder." "But it's all nonsense, isn't it?" "What is?" Colonel Harris did not reply immediately; for one thing, he did not know exactly how to put his own fears and anxieties into words. They were so horrible and so farfetched that to tell them plainly and baldly to his brother-in-law, to this man with whom he was soberly smoking a cigar in a sober-looking office, whilst hansoms and taxicabs were rattling past in the street below within sight and hearing, seemed little short of idiocy. He was not a man of deep penetration--was Colonel Harris--no great reader of thoughts or of character. He tried to look keenly at Sir Thomas's shrewd face, but all he was conscious of was a net-work of wrinkles round a pair of eyes which seemed to be twinkling with humour. Humour at this moment? Great Heavens above! "I wish," he blurted out somewhat crossly at last, "you'd help me out a bit, Tom. Hang it all, man, all this officialism makes me dumb." "Don't," said Sir Thomas blandly, "let it do that, Will," and the speaker's eyes seemed to twinkle even more merrily than before. "Well then tell me something about Luke." "Luke de Mountford," mused the other as if the name recalled some distant impression. "Yes, Luke de Mountford, who is engaged to Louisa, your niece, man, and she's breaking her heart with all the drivel these newspapers talk and I couldn't bear it any longer; so I've come to you, Tom, and you must tell me what truth there is in the drivel, and that's all I want to know." Sir Thomas Ryder seemed, whilst the other thus talked volubly, to have suddenly made up his mind to say more than had originally been his intention. Anyway, he now said with abrupt directness: "If, my good Will, by 'drivel' you mean that in the matter of the assassination of Philip de Mountford, in a taxicab last night, grave suspicion rests on his cousin Luke, then there's a great deal of truth in the drivel." Colonel Harris received the sudden blow without much apparent emotion. He had been sitting in an arm-chair with one hand buried in his trousers pocket, the other holding the cigar. Now he merely glanced down at the cigar for a moment and then conveyed it to his lips. "What," he asked, "does that mean exactly?" "That unless Luke de Mountford will, within the next forty-eight hours, answer certain questions more satisfactorily than he has done hitherto, he will be arrested on a charge of murder." "That is impossible," protested Colonel Harris hotly. "Impossible? Why?"