“Well,” he said, taking a seat at the table, and coolly blowing a cloud of smoke into the air—“what do you want with me?” He noticed, as he spoke, that the man who had guided him to the room appeared to have a direct interest in whatever proceedings were afoot; inasmuch as that he took a seat at the table, quite as a matter of course. “Where’s the Count?” abruptly asked one man—a tall, sandy-haired fellow, with grey eyes far too close together to make his countenance a pleasing one. “The very question I was going to ask you,” replied Philip. “Do you suppose I’m the Count’s keeper?” “Well—he left here with you last week,” replied the same man, in an injured tone. “We supposed he’d been staying with you as usual.” “Then you supposed something that didn’t happen,” said Philip, in the same surly tone as before. “I’ve seen nothing of him since—since that night.” Then, a sudden thought occurring to him, he added—“I left him—down by the river.” A shrill voice—piping, and thin, and unsteady—broke in from the other end of the table. Its owner was a little man, with a figure as thin and shrunken and unsteady as his voice—a man with no linen to speak of, who yet had whiskers, which had once been fashionable, on either side of his grimy face, and whose shaking hand affectionately clasped a glass of spirits. “A split in the camp—eh?” he squeaked out. “Ogledon and his cousin had a row—eh?” Philip Chater was learning many things and learning them quickly. If Ogledon—the man expected at Chater Hall by the housekeeper—and the man known as the Count were one and the same person, and that person Dandy Chater’s—and his own—cousin, what had they both to do with these men, and why had both disappeared—the one murdered, and the other missing? “Hold your tongue, Cripps,” exclaimed the man who had spoken first. “The Count knows his own business—and ours; I expect he’ll be here presently——” (“I sincerely hope he won’t,” thought Philip.) “In the meantime, if you’re sober enough, Doctor”—this to the man he had addressed as Cripps—“we’ll get to business.” Philip Chater pricked up his ears; he remembered, at that moment, that Betty Siggs, in her disclosure to him of the story of his own life, had mentioned a certain drunken little doctor, of the name of Cripps, who knew the secret of his birth, and had been paid to keep it. “You’ll be glad to know, Dandy,” went on the man, who appeared to act as a species of leader—“that the business at Sheffield has turned up trumps. We don’t mention names, even amongst ourselves; but the haul was bigger than we anticipated. The man behind the counter—you know who I mean—gets a thousand for handing over the flimsies; and gets it pretty easily, too, to my mind. The rest is divided out between us, except for your share and Ogledon’s. Here’s yours”—he handed a packet across the table to Philip—“and perhaps, as the Count hasn’t turned up, you’d better take his as well. Here it is.”