"Another, Captain Digby?" Cleek flashed round on the young man. "Another? Does that mean that you have had a colleague or assistant before this?" "Why, yes--a fellow officer, Captain Brunel--Max Brunel. We are bosom friends as well. We were at Heidelberg together, and he is the very soul of honour." "H'm----" Cleek turned aside to pick up his hat from the rack, a queer little smile twitching up the left side of his face, and when he looked back at Captain Digby his gaze was a very intent one, as if he were asking himself whether the Captain's innocence and belief were real or assumed. * * * * * It was exactly two o'clock when Lieutenant Arthur Deland, tall, well-set, and debonair, with the stamp of the army all over him, arrived as arranged at St. Mary's Abbey, Hampshire, the family seat of the Digbys, which was noted for a wonderful painted shrine of the Virgin Mary, said to date back to the sixteenth century and renowned throughout all the southern counties of England. He found the laboratory exactly as the young scientist had described it, absolutely sound-proof, light-proof, and as innocent of hole or aperture in its concrete walls and floor--with the exception of the door leading from the dining-room--as the inside of an egg. His introduction to the family--a large one--caused him to be voted an acquisition to its amusement by its younger and more frivolous members. Before he had been in the house an hour, the very sight of his gold-rimmed monocle and the sound of his inane laugh was a signal for the spoilt Digby twins, aged eight, literally to fling themselves upon him, notwithstanding the gentle protests of their meek little fair-haired governess. She had been curtly introduced as Miss Smith by his hostess, and then allowed to fade away into the obscurity she so obviously preferred. Within the next twenty-four hours Lieutenant Deland gained much intimate knowledge as to the ways and characters of an interesting family. Fancies are queer things, and he found himself greatly disliking Colonel Digby's wife, a hard-faced, gushing woman, shrill of voice, and quick to scold, and he was not surprised to learn that she was the Colonel's second wife, and not the mother of the Captain at all. According to the gossip elicited in the servants' hall by Dollops, who had been allowed to accompany him at the last moment, the dreamy, absent-minded scientist had been snapped up by the lady, herself a widow, when on a visit to Vienna. He had found himself married "before he was properly awake," as Dollops expressed it with a significant grin.