Smeaton was not a jealous man, and besides, if Johnson did score a success, it was his senior who had given him the materials to work upon. Still, although pleasantly elated, he did not disguise from himself the difficulties of his task. He had to find out where Lady Wrenwyck was hiding--she was hiding, of course, or her whereabouts would have been known to her household. And he did not know the woman by sight. He grappled with the smaller difficulty first, when he met his cousin the footman, at their usual meeting-place. "Any chance of getting a peep at a photograph of her ladyship?" he asked. He had told Willet, such was his name, as much as it was good for him to know, and no more. "I'm very friendly with several of the Wrenwyck lot," was Willet's reply. "I daresay I could smuggle one out for you for half-an-hour, but it's exciting suspicion, isn't it? And I suppose you don't want to take too many people into your confidence?" Johnson agreed with this sentiment emphatically. He could swallow any amount of confidence himself, but he hated reciprocity. Hear everything, and tell nothing, or, at the worst, as little as you can. That was his motto. "It would lead to gossip, and we should have to fudge up some tale or other, Dick. We'll let it alone for the present, and only use it as a last resource." Mr Willet reflected, and then he remembered. "Look here. I've just thought of the very thing! I've a lot of old illustrated newspapers by me. Not very long ago there was a full-page portrait of her, in fancy dress at the Devonshire House ball--Queen of Sheba or something. It's a splendid likeness. If you once see it, you'd pick her out from a thousand. Stay here for ten minutes, and I'll hunt it out and bring it round." Willet was as good as his word. In a little over the time he had stated, the portrait was in Johnson's hands, and carefully scrutinised. In the words of his cousin, wherever he met Lady Wrenwyck he would "pick her out of a thousand." That little difficulty was solved without any loss of time. The important one remained: where was she at the present moment? On this point Willet could give no information. Her maid had packed her boxes, and they had started off one afternoon when her husband was absent, without a hint of their destination from either of them. "Doesn't Lord Wrenwyck know? Surely she must have given him some information, even if it was misleading." "I doubt if Wrenwyck knows any more than we do," replied Willet, alluding to this highly-descended peer with the easy familiarity of his class. "She's disappeared half-a-dozen times since her marriage in this way, and come back when it suited her, just as if nothing had happened." "A rum household," observed Johnson, who was not so used to high-class ways as his cousin. "But you told me that she had no money when she married him. You can't travel about for weeks on nothing. What does she do for cash on these jaunts?"