“Hmm.  Well that remains to be seen, doesn’t it, Mr. Narkom?” returned Cleek, with a smile.  “Dollops has a way.  And he knows it.  I’ll warrant there won’t be much that Borkins can keep from the sharp little devil!  Well, it seems to be getting dusk rapidly, Sir Nigel, what about those flames now, eh?  I’d like to have a look at ’em if it’s possible.”

Merriton screwed his head round to the window, and noted the gathering gloom which the fire and the electric lights within had managed to neutralize.  Then he got to his feet.  There was a trace of excitement in his manner.  Here was the moment he had been waiting for, and here the master-mind which, if anything ever could, must unravel this fiendish mystery that surrounded two men’s disappearances and a group of silly, flickering little flames.

He turned from the window with his eyes bright.

“Look here,” he said, rapidly.  “They’re just beginnin’ to appear.  See ’em?  Mr. Cleek, see ’em?  Now tell me what the dickens they are and how they are connected with Dacre Wynne’s disappearance.”

Cleek got to his feet slowly, and strode over to the window.  In the gathering gloom of the early winter night, the flames were flashing out one by one, here and there and everywhere hanging low against the grass across the bar of horizon directly in front of them.  Cleek stared at them for a long time.  Mr. Narkom coming up behind him peered out over his shoulder, rubbed his eyes, looked again and gave out a hasty “God bless my soul!” of genuine astonishment, then dropped into silence again, his eyes upon Cleek’s face.  Sir Nigel, too, was watching that face, his own nervous, a trifle distraught.

But Cleek stood there at the window with his hands in his trousers’ pockets, humming a little tune and watching this amazing phenomenon which a whole village had believed to be witchcraft, as though the thing surprised him not one whit; as though, in fact, he was a trifle amused at it.  Which indeed he was.

Finally he swung round upon his heels and looked at each of the faces in turn, his own broadening into a grin, his eyes expressing incredulity, wonderment, and lastly mirth.  At length he spoke: 

“Gad!” he ejaculated with a little whistle of astonishment.  “You mean to tell me that a whole township has been hanging by the heels, so to speak, upon as ridiculously easy an affair as that?” He jerked his thumb outward toward the flames and threw back his head with a laugh.  “Where is your ‘general knowledge’ which you learnt at school, man?  Didn’t they teach you any?  What amazes me most is that there are others—­forgive me—­equally as ignorant.  Want to know what those flames are, eh?”

“Well, rather!”

“Well, well, just to think that you’ve actually been losing sleep on it!  Shows what asses we human beings are, doesn’t it?  No offence meant, of course.  As for you, Mr. Narkom—­or Mr. Gregory Lake, as I must remember to call you for the good of the cause—­I’m ashamed of you, I am indeed!  You ought to know better, a man of your years!”