“Well, I would almost as soon be hanged!” cried Val.  “And now, what do you want me for, and why have you kept me here?”

Mr. Carr drew his chair nearer to Lord Hartledon.  They alone knew their own troubles, and sat talking long after the afternoon was over.  Mr. Taylor came to the room; it was past his usual hour of departure.

“I suppose I can go, sir?”

“Not just yet,” replied Mr. Carr.

Hartledon took out his watch, and wondered whether it had been galloping, when he saw how late it was.  “You’ll come home and dine with me, Carr?”

“I’ll follow you, if you like,” was the reply.  “I have a matter or two to attend to first.”

A few minutes more, and Lord Hartledon and his care went out.  Mr. Carr called in his clerk.

“I want to know how you came to learn that the man I asked you about, Gordon, was employed by Kedge and Reck?”

“I heard it through a man named Druitt,” was the ready answer.  “Happening to ask him—­as I did several people—­whether he knew any George Gordon, he at once said that a man of that name was at Kedge and Reck’s, where Druitt himself had been temporarily employed.”

“Ah,” said Mr. Carr, remembering this same Druitt had been mentioned to him.  “But the man was called Gorton, not Gordon.  You must have caught up the wrong name, Taylor.  Or perhaps he misunderstood you.  That’s all; you may go now.”

The clerk departed.  Mr. Carr took his hat and followed him down; but before joining Lord Hartledon he turned into the Temple Gardens, and strolled towards the river; a few moments of fresh air—­fresh to those hard-worked denizens of close and crowded London—­seemed absolutely necessary to the barrister’s heated brain.

He sat down on a bench facing the water, and bared his brow to the breeze.  A cool head, his; never a cooler brought thought to bear upon perplexity; nevertheless it was not feeling very collected now.  He could not reconcile sundry discrepancies in the trouble he was engaged in fathoming, and he saw no release whatever for Lord Hartledon.

“It has only complicated the affair,” he said, as he watched the steamers up and down, “this calling in Green the detective, and the news he brings.  Gordon the Gordon of the mutiny!  I don’t like it:  the other Gordon, simple enough and not bad-hearted, was easy to deal with in comparison; this man, pirate, robber, murderer, will stand at nothing.  We should have a hold on him, it’s true, in his own crime; but what’s to prevent his keeping himself out of the way, and selling Hartledon to another?  Why he has not sold him yet, I can’t think.  Unless for some reason he is waiting his time.”

He put on his hat and began to count the barges on the other side, to banish thought.  But it would not be banished, and he fell into the train again.

“Mair’s behaving well; with Christian kindness; but it’s bad enough to be even in his power.  There’s something in Lord Hartledon he ’can’t help loving,’ he writes.  Who can?  Here am I, giving up circuit—­such a thing as never was heard of—­calling him friend still, and losing my rest at night for him!  Poor Val! better he had been the one to die!”