He had opened the door of the room in which Spargo had met Elphick and Miss Baylis the night before, and was walking in when he pulled himself up on the threshold with a sharp exclamation.

“Good God!” he cried.  “What—­what’s all this?”

Spargo quietly looked over Breton’s shoulder.  It needed but one quick glance to show him that much had happened in that quiet room since he had quitted it the night before.  There stood the easy-chair in which he had left Elphick; there, close by it, but pushed aside, as if by a hurried hand, was the little table with its spirit case, its syphon, its glass, in which stale liquid still stood; there was the novel, turned face downwards; there, upon the novel, was Elphick’s pipe.  But the rest of the room was in dire confusion.  The drawers of a bureau had been pulled open and never put back; papers of all descriptions, old legal-looking documents, old letters, littered the centre-table and the floor; in one corner of the room a black japanned box had been opened, its contents strewn about, and the lid left yawning.  And in the grate, and all over the fender there were masses of burned and charred paper; it was only too evident that the occupant of the chambers, wherever he might have disappeared to, had spent some time before his disappearance in destroying a considerable heap of documents and papers, and in such haste that he had not troubled to put matters straight before he went.

Breton stared at this scene for a moment in utter consternation.  Then he made one step towards an inner door, and Spargo followed him.  Together they entered an inner room—­a sleeping apartment.  There was no one in it, but there were evidences that Elphick had just as hastily packed a bag as he had destroyed his papers.  The clothes which Spargo had seen him wearing the previous evening were flung here, there, everywhere:  the gorgeous smoking-jacket was tossed unceremoniously in one corner, a dress-shirt, in the bosom of which valuable studs still glistened, in another.  One or two suitcases lay about, as if they had been examined and discarded in favour of something more portable; here, too, drawers, revealing stocks of linen and underclothing, had been torn open and left open; open, too, swung the door of a wardrobe, revealing a quantity of expensive clothing.  And Spargo, looking around him, seemed to see all that had happened—­the hasty, almost frantic search for and tearing up and burning of papers; the hurried change of clothing, of packing necessaries into a bag that could be carried, and then the flight the getting away, the——­

“What on earth does all this mean?” exclaimed Breton.  “What is it, Spargo?”

“I mean exactly what I told you,” answered Spargo.  “He’s off!  Off!”

“Off!  But why off?  What—­my guardian!—­as quiet an old gentleman as there is in the Temple—­off!” cried Breton.  “For what reason, eh?  It isn’t—­good God, Spargo, it isn’t because of anything you said to him last night!”