villager who could be spared from his proper and usual labours, and had offered a handsome reward for success. But when eventide came again, and Mr. Fransemmery, weary with tramping up hill and down dale, returned to his own fireside, no success had materialized; Baron von Eckhardstein, as far as Markenmore folk were concerned, had vanished. Mr. Fransemmery sat down to his solitary dinner, puzzled and wondering. He had thought of little else than the Markenmore problem since it was first presented to him, and the more he thought, the more he was bewildered. He had listened with care and patience, and, he hoped, with understanding, to the evidence put before himself and his fellow-jurymen, and he was bound to confess that he had made little out of it. What seemed to him much the most important fact of that evidence was the affair of the briar-wood pipe. There was no doubt that that pipe had been left on the supper-table at the Sceptre by one of the two men who were there with Guy Markenmore. There was no doubt that Grimsdale produced it at the inquest, passed it round, and left it lying on the table; there was no doubt—none whatever—that it was abstracted from that table between the moment of adjoining and the moment wherein the officious newspaper reporter asked to see it. What was to be deduced from that? In Mr. Fransemmery’s opinion one certain conclusion—the owner of that pipe, the man who had left it at the Sceptre, was present at the inquest, and had kept silence. Who was he? Mr. Fransemmery had asked himself that question a hundred times, and got no answer. He was unaware of Blick’s doings and discoveries, and had only his own knowledge to go on. But he felt sure of one thing—the owner of the pipe had purloined it from the solicitors’ table of the temporary court in the old dining-hall so that it could not be used in evidence against him. Once more—who was he? Mr. Fransemmery was still puzzling about this and various other collateral questions when his bachelor dinner came to its end. He rose from his chair and meditated a little; then, remembering that he had had a very hard and trying day, he went to his modest cellar, found a bottle of his best good old port, and carefully decanting it, carried the decanter and a brightly polished glass or two into his library. With his slippered feet on the padded fender-rail, the decanter of port at his elbow, and a cheery fire of beech-logs in front of him, Mr. Fransemmery proceeded to do more thinking. But he had not followed his train of thought very far when his trim parlourmaid entered to his presence, and informed him that Mr. Harborough was in the hall, and would be obliged if Mr. Fransemmery would see him for a few minutes.