“Gad! they’ve found the body,” he exclaimed, in a hoarse, excited voice, fairly running to the front door and throwing it open with a crash that rang through the old house from floor to rafters, and brought Borkins scuttling up the kitchen stairs at a pace that was ill-befitting his age and dignity.  Merriton gave him a curt order.

“Have the morning-room door thrown open and the sofa pulled out from against the wall.  My friends have been for a walk across the Fens, and have found something.  You can see them coming up the drive.  What d’you make of it?”

“Gawd! a haccident, Sir Nigel,” said Borkins, in a shaky voice. “’Adn’t I better tell Mrs. Mummery to put the blue bedroom in order and ’ave plenty of ’ot water?...”

“No.”  Merriton was running down the front steps and flung the answer back over his shoulder.  “Can’t you use your eyes?  It’s a body, you fool—­a body!”

Borkins gasped a moment, and then stood still, his thin lips sucked in, his face unpleasant to see.  He was alone in the hallway, for Doctor Bartholomew’s fat figure was waddling in Merriton’s wake.

He put up his fist and shook it in their direction.

“Pity it ain’t your body, young upstart that you are!” he muttered beneath his breath, and turned toward the morning room.

Meanwhile Merriton had reached the solemn little party and was walking back beside Cleek, his face chalky, the pupils of his eyes a trifle dilated with excitement.

“Found ’em?  Found ’em both, you say, Mr. Headland?” he kept on repeating over and over again, as they mounted the steps together.  “Good God!  What a strange—­what a peculiar thing!  I’ll swear there was no sight nor sign of them when I’ve tramped over the Fens dozens of times.  I don’t know what to make of it, I don’t indeed!”

“Oh, we’ll make something of it all right,” returned Cleek, with a sharp look at him, for there was one thing he wanted to find out, and he meant to do that as soon as possible.  “Two and two, you know, put together properly, always make four.  It’s only the fools of the world that add wrong.  If you’d had as much practice as I’ve had in dealing with humanity, you’d find it was an ever-increasing astonishment to see the way things dovetail in....  Who’s this, by the way?”

He jerked his head in the direction of the doctor, who had stopped at the foot of the steps and waited for them to come up to him.

“Oh, a very old friend of mine, Mr. Headland.  Doctor Bartholomew.  Has a very big practice in town, but a trifle eccentric, as you can see at first glance.”

Cleek sent his keen eyes over the odd-looking figure in the worn tweeds.

“I see.  Then can you tell me how he finds time to run down here at leisure and visit you?  Seems to me a man with a big practice never has enough time to work it in.  At least, that has been my experience of doctors.”

Merriton flushed angrily at the tone.  He whipped his head round and met Cleek’s cool gaze hotly.