Supposing this might well be the case, Bevill determined to search the grounds and afterwards the house as thoroughly as might be, while understanding that, no matter how much he might endeavour to make that search complete, it could by no possibility be so. The gardens were too vast, the house too extensive. As he approached one spot any person whom he sought might easily move to another; chance alone, the luckiest of all chances, could bring him into contact with any lurker who should be about. Nevertheless, he decided to attempt the search, and, feeling for his pistols, which in no circumstances was he ever separated from, he began to make as thorough an inspection of the place as was possible. Yet, when all was concluded, and when he had been all about the grounds, and had peered into the other arbours and _bosquets_ and behind bushes, and had then once more wandered over the vast, lonely house, he had found nothing. After which, since still he felt sure there had been some listener crouching behind that arbour while the plans of himself and the others were being determined, he brought out a chair on to the lower verandah and, wrapping himself lightly in his cloak, since now the night was growing cool, determined to keep watch as long as possible. The early summer dawn came, however, and Bevill was still awake, but had seen nothing, whereupon he at last decided that it must have been some animal that had been sleeping behind where they all sat. [Illustration: "The gardener carried something else in his hand."] An hour or so after this and when he had obtained some refreshing sleep on the great lounge in the hall, old Karl appeared, bringing the usual food which he had received instructions from Sylvia to provide each day so long as Bevill should remain at the Weiss Haus. The gardener carried, however, something else than this in his hand, namely, a three-cornered hat, which he at once said he had found in the path that led from a little wicket gate he alone used, and which opened from the road leading from his cottage to the grounds behind the stables. "Another hat!" Bevill exclaimed, taking it from the old man's hands and turning it over in his own. "Another! Whose this time?" To whomsoever it might have belonged, it did not, however, appear to the young man that it was any more likely to have belonged to Francbois than had done the earlier discovered one. If anything, it was an even poorer specimen of headgear than that had been, and was a hat that, though originally not of a common order, gave signs that it might in its existence have passed from one owner to another; from, indeed, a well-to-do man down to one who would be willing to accept it in its final state of usefulness.