Forsyth stood aside at the stair-foot for them to pass, and then, moved by the furtive glances they turned back at him, he ran upstairs two steps at a time. He knew all his fellow-lodgers by sight; but these men were strangers, and he did not like the looks of the curiously assorted pair. On coming to the door of his rooms, he rapped and spoke the agreed signal, but something prompted him not to wait, and simultaneously he turned the handle. The door swung open at once, without any unbarring from within.
"Where have you got to?" cried Forsyth, peering round the room, in which the gas burned low, just as he had left it.
There was no response; and with a sinking heart he turned on a full light and dashed into the bedroom, only to find that also vacant. The Duke of Beaumanoir had vanished from his refuge.
There was no doubt that he was in neither of the rooms. A hasty search put that beyond question. Instinctively Forsyth ran to the outer door and at once made the discovery—for which he was already prepared—that his chambers had been forcibly entered during his absence. The door had been wrenched open with a jemmy, and had simply been pulled to on the departure of the intruders. The shattered woodwork round the spring-lock told its own tale, though the mystery was increased by the fact that the old-fashioned bolts had been withdrawn.
But what of Beaumanoir?
[CHAPTER VIII—The Cut Panel]
In the famous white drawing-room at Beaumanoir House Sybil Hanbury was preparing to end a solitary evening by the simple process of going to bed. The butler, a martyr to punctilio, had insisted on lighting every jet in the chandeliers and in the sconces on the walls, with the result that the vast apartment scintillated like a ball-room, accentuating the loneliness of the black-clad little figure of its sole occupant.
Sybil laid aside her book, and surveyed the splendid emptiness of the room with a smile of amusement for her monopoly of so much gorgeously upholstered space. But as she realized that her monopoly of the white drawing-room was only a detail in the much larger incongruity of her monopoly of the Piccadilly mansion, her face took a graver look.
"I trust that the Vincents will be ready to take me in next week," she mused with a touch of impatience. "The idea of a score of servants and an acre of ducal palace being run for a simple body like me is too ridiculous, especially with the rightful owner ready to take possession."
She had been both puzzled and attracted by her cousin at General Sadgrove's that afternoon. As a child she had heard so much contemptuous obloquy poured on the absent ne'er-do-well that, in spite of his generosity to Alec Forsyth and his consideration for herself, she had been prepared to cling to the old prejudice. It had, however, at once broken down under the pathetic plea for friendship which she had discerned in the Duke's troubled eyes, for her womanly insight told her that the new head of the family was under the influence of a mental strain almost amounting to physical distress.