“Flitch again!” ejaculated the colonel.

“Yes, you have luck, you have luck,” Willoughby addressed him, still clutching Crossjay and treating his tugs to get loose as an invitation to caresses.  But the foil barely concealed his livid perturbation.

“Stay by me, sir,” he said at last sharply to Crossjay, and Clara touched the boy’s shoulder in admonishment of him.

She turned to the colonel as they stepped into the hall:  “I have not thanked you, Colonel De Craye.”  She dropped her voice to its lowest:  “A letter in my handwriting in the laboratory.”

Crossjay cried aloud with pain.

“I have you!” Willoughby rallied him with a laugh not unlike the squeak of his victim.

“You squeeze awfully hard, sir.”

“Why, you milksop!”

“Am I!  But I want to get a book.”

“Where is the book?”

“In the laboratory.”

Colonel De Craye, sauntering by the laboratory door, sung out:  “I’ll fetch you your book.  What is it?  Early navigators?  Infant hymns?  I think my cigar-case is in here.”

“Barclay speaks of a letter for me,” Willoughby said to Clara, “marked to be delivered to me at noon!”

“In case of my not being back earlier; it was written to avert anxiety,” she replied.

“You are very good.”

“Oh, good!  Call me anything but good.  Here are the ladies.  Dear ladies!” Clara swam to meet them as they issued from a morning-room into the hall, and interjections reigned for a couple of minutes.

Willoughby relinquished his grasp of Crossjay, who darted instantaneously at an angle to the laboratory, whither he followed, and he encountered De Craye coming out, but passed him in silence.

Crossjay was rangeing and peering all over the room.  Willoughby went to his desk and the battery-table and the mantelpiece.  He found no letter.  Barclay had undoubtedly informed him that she had left a letter for him in the laboratory, by order of her mistress after breakfast.

He hurried out and ran upstairs in time to see De Craye and Barclay breaking a conference.

He beckoned to her.  The maid lengthened her upper lip and beat her dress down smooth:  signs of the apprehension of a crisis and of the getting ready for action.

“My mistress’s bell has just rung, Sir Willoughby.”

“You had a letter for me.”

“I said . . .”

“You said when I met you at the foot of the stairs that you had left a letter for me in the laboratory.”

“It is lying on my mistress’s toilet-table.”

“Get it.”

Barclay swept round with another of her demure grimaces.  It was apparently necessary with her that she should talk to herself in this public manner.

Willoughby waited for her; but there was no reappearance of the maid.