For answer Alec handed him a telegraph form conveying the message:
"To A. Forsyth, passenger by 8.45, St. Pancras terminus.
"Come back at once, urgent. Am in great distress. Persons threatening Duke detained here. He will be quite safe if he goes on, though not if he returns with you—Sybil Hanbury, Beaumanoir House."
The General glanced through it and gripped the position.
"Beaumanoir was in the 8.45?" he snapped. "That telegram is a forgery, and you show it to me to explain your separation from him?"
Forsyth bowed his head in grieved assent to both questions.
"I am, of course, to blame for trusting that infernal thing," he said. "But I had better put you in possession of the facts at once, for until I reached Tarrant Road station and learned of Beaumanoir's non-arrival from the coachman I had hoped that he had come through all right. I ascertained at Harpenden, where I first heard of the smash, that no one had suffered serious injury."
The facts as related by Forsyth were very simple in themselves, though greatly enhancing the perplexity of the Duke's disappearance. The two friends had left Beaumanoir House in a hansom, giving themselves, as had been arranged, barely time enough to catch the train at St. Pancras. They had already taken their seats in an empty compartment on which the guard had, at their request, placed an "engaged" label, when a telegraph-boy came along the line of carriages, inquiring for Forsyth by name. On reading the message he had acted on the impulse of the moment, and asking the Duke to excuse him on the score of urgent private business, had left the train and driven back to Beaumanoir House, to find the telegram repudiated by Sybil as not emanating from her and its contents quite unfounded.
"I expect she let you have it," the General remarked grimly.
"She was a little cross," admitted Forsyth, flushing at the reminiscence. "I do not see, though, that I could have ignored what purported to be an appeal for assistance from a woman in distress—leaving aside my personal relations with her."
"Don't kick, laddie. I'm to blame for leaving our precious vanishing nobleman in the hands of a man in love. What next?"