With one of those rare flashes of intuition which are the very inspiration of genius in a man of his profession, Blick moved like lightning to that coat and slid his right hand into the nearest pocket. He felt a pair of gloves—and beneath the gloves, a pipe. With his ears strained to the keenest tension and his eye kept warily on the folding curtains, he drew that pipe out and gave one glance at it. He would have chuckled with delight had he dared—for this was the pipe that Grimsdale had found on the supper-table at the Sceptre! There was no doubt of it—there was the slight chip in the briar-wood. . . . “Where is Mr. Blick?” demanded a woman’s voice, somewhere behind the curtains. “In the front hall?” Blick slipped the pipe back into the pocket, moved himself six inches, and was staring with much interest at a fox’s mark, mounted on the wall, when the curtains parted and a woman appeared. For a second he looked at her with suddenly awakened interest; and she was no ordinary woman, he decided. Primly and somewhat coquettishly dressed in black, with a smart cap and an even smarter apron of spotless muslin, she looked more French than English, and as vivacious as she was undeniably pretty. But the prettiness was somewhat faded; this, decided Blick, was a woman of thirty-five or so who had had affairs in her times; there were the signs of old fires in her brilliant eyes and about her lips; it seemed to him that she was the sort in whom secrets lie sleeping. And she was the sort of a woman, too, who could not look at a man without smiling at him: she smiled now as she glanced at the latter. “Mr. Blick?” she said in a soft, demure voice. “You want to see Mrs. Tretheroe? She is not very well—that affair this morning, you know, and all the rest of it—nervous headache. But if it’s business——” “It is, but nothing to distress Mrs. Tretheroe,” answered Blick. “A question or two.” The woman held aside one of the curtains and revealed a roomy inner hall, on one side of which rose a galleried staircase. “Come this way, please,” she said. Blick followed her up the stair. An open door at the end of the gallery showed him a drawing-room, and in it a grand piano; at the piano sat the blond-moustached man. He was singing, evidently to please himself, and accompanying his fine baritone voice with soft chords. His conductress glanced at Blick and smiled again. “The Baron—singing Italian love-songs!” she murmured. “He prefers that to shooting, or hunting, or golf! Tastes differ—don’t they?” “With nationalities,” said Blick. He had already decided that Mrs. Tretheroe’s maid was a bit of a character, worth cultivating, and he smiled back at her. “I guess he’s not English, eh?” he suggested. “German!” answered the maid knowingly. “All fat!” She laughed, paused before a door, tapped gently, and opening it, motioned Blick to enter. “Mr. Blick, ma’am.”