"It is at the side of the house, and was originally a stable till we had it concreted inside and out. Solid six feet of concrete doors, ceiling—everything.
"Hullo! Concrete everything? How do you see in it?"
"Artificial light always, run by my own generator and dynamo, overhead. Only one door opens into the laboratory and that is from the drawing-room inside the house and it is guarded by a soldier. No one ever enters save myself; no one, not even among the rest of the family, save my father, knows of the nature of my work. Is it any wonder that my chief suspects me?"
"Well, there's nothing to be said or done till I come down and see things for myself," said Cleek, very quietly. "Will there be any difficulty in your admitting me into the laboratory, by the way?"
"Not a scrap. I shall just say you are another colleague——"
"Another, Captain Digby?" Cleek flashed round on the young man. "Another? Does that mean that you have had a colleague or assistant before this?"
"Why, yes—a fellow officer, Captain Brunel—Max Brunel. We are bosom friends as well. We were at Heidelberg together, and he is the very soul of honour."
"H'm——" Cleek turned aside to pick up his hat from the rack, a queer little smile twitching up the left side of his face, and when he looked back at Captain Digby his gaze was a very intent one, as if he were asking himself whether the Captain's innocence and belief were real or assumed.
It was exactly two o'clock when Lieutenant Arthur Deland, tall, well-set, and debonair, with the stamp of the army all over him, arrived as arranged at St. Mary's Abbey, Hampshire, the family seat of the Digbys, which was noted for a wonderful painted shrine of the Virgin Mary, said to date back to the sixteenth century and renowned throughout all the southern counties of England.