again, softly, softly padding across the room toward him.  He saw the black shadows of stockinged feet as they crossed the path of moonlight, and sucked in his breath.  Man’s feet!...  Whose?...  Then something shook the bedstead with tremendous force, but without sound.  It was as if some object had been hurled forcibly into its softness.  The footsteps turned again, hurriedly this time, and there was a sound of a deep-drawn breath—­a breath full of pent-up, passionate hatred.  Then the figure ran lightly across the room, and as it flashed for a moment through the bar of moonlight, Cleek looked out from his safe hiding-place and—­saw!  The eyes were narrowed in the ivory-tinted face, the jaw heavy and undershot as a bull-dog’s, while a dark coloured mustache straggled untidily across the upper lip.  The moonlight, cruelly clear, picked out the point of something sharp that shone in one clenched hand, something that looked like a knife—­that was a knife.

Then the figure vanished and the door closed noiselessly behind him.

Hmm.  So this question of the Frozen Flame was as urgent as all that, was it?  To attempt to murder him, here—­in the house of the Squire of Fetchworth.  He wriggled out of his hiding place, a little stiff from the cramped position he had held, and guardedly lit his candle.  Then he surveyed the bed with set mouth and narrowed eyes.  There was a sharp incision through the clothes, an incision quite three inches long, that had punctured the pillow which lay beneath them—­the pillow that had saved him his life—­and buried itself in the mattress beneath.  Gad! a powerful hand that!  He stood a moment thinking, pinching up his chin the while.  He had had his suspicions of Borkins, but the face that he had seen in the moonlight was not the butler’s face. Whose, then, was it?

CHAPTER XIII

A GRUESOME DISCOVERY

Through the long watches of the night Cleek sat there thinking, his chin sunk in one hand, his eyes narrowed down to pin-points, the whole alert personality of the man vitally dominant.  No, he would not tell any one of the happening except Dollops and Mr. Narkom.  It would only invite suspicion, throw the house into a state of unrest which was the very thing that he was anxious to avoid.  As dawn broke, and the danger for that night was past, he got to his feet, plunged his face into cold water, which cleared away the cobwebs, undressed, and then tackled the question of the injured bedding.

The mattress could be turned—­that was easy enough, and the slit would probably not be noticed.  The bedclothes, too, might be turned the other way up, and with care the injured parts tucked in tightly at the bottom.  It would leave them a little short at the top perhaps, but that couldn’t be helped.  Suspicion must be allayed at all costs.  Time enough to bring the would-be murderer to justice when he had solved the riddle in its entirety.  There were two pillows, so he took the damaged one, tore off its case, and tucked that away in his kit-bag, pushed the bag under the bed, and then set about the remaking, with some small success.  At least for the time, the incisions in the blanket and sheets would not be noticed, and in the morning he would invent some excuse to have them changed.