Telephoning the Brelliers was a mere matter of minutes, and by that means Merriton made perfectly sure that Wynne had not put in an appearance at Withersby Hall.  Brellier himself answered the phone, and said that he was just thinking that as Wynne hadn’t turned up yet, they must indeed have been making a night of it at the Towers.

“However,” he continued, “if you say you all retired around about one o’clock, and Wynne left you soon after ten—­well, I can’t think what has become of him....”

“He went out to investigate those devilish flames!” remarked Merriton, as a rather shamefaced explanation.  Then he fairly heard the wires jump with the force of Brellier’s exclamation.

“Eh—­what?  What’s that you say?  He went out to investigate the flames, Merriton?  What fool let him go?  Surely you know the story?”

“We did.  And we did our best to dissuade him, Mr. Brellier,” replied Merriton wearily.  “But he went.  You know Dacre Wynne as well as I do.  He was set upon going.  But he has not come back, and some of the chaps here set up a search-party to hunt for him.  They discovered nothing.  Simply some charred grass in the middle of the Fens and the end of his footprints....  So he didn’t come round to your place then?  Thanks.  I’m awfully sorry to have bothered you, but you can understand my anxiety I know.  I’ll keep you posted as to any news we get.  Yes—­horrible, isn’t it?  So—­so beastly uncanny....”

He hung up the receiver with a drawn face.

“Well, Wynne didn’t go there, anyway,” he said to the group of men who clustered round him.  “So that’s done with.  Now we’ll just have to possess our souls in patience, and see what Constable Haggers can do for us.  I vote we tumble in for forty winks before the sun gets too high in the heavens.  It is the most reasonable thing to do in the circumstances.”

The days that followed brought them little light upon the matter.  Wynne, it proved, was a man apparently without relations, and devoid of friends.  The local police could make nothing of it.  They had had such cases before, and were perfectly willing to let the matter rest where it was.  Interest, once so high, began to flag.  The thing dropped into the commonplace, and was soon forgotten, together with the man who had caused it.

But Nigel was far from satisfied.  That he and Dacre Wynne were really enemies, who had posed as friends made not a particle of difference.  Dacre Wynne had disappeared during the brief time that he was a guest in Merriton’s house.  The subject did not die with the owner of Merriton Towers.  He spent many long evenings with Doctor Bartholomew talking the thing over, trying to reconstruct it, probe into it, hunt for new clues, new anything which might lead to a solution.  But such talks always came to nothing.  Every stone had already been turned, and the dry dust of the highway afforded little knowledge to Merriton.

Across the clear sky of his happiness a cloud had gloomed, spoiling for a time the perfection of it.  He could not think of marriage while the mystery of Dacre Wynne’s death remained unsolved.  It seemed unthinkable.