“We’re done!” answered Bryce.  “I was a fool not to go last night!  We’re forestalled, my friend!—­that’s about it!”

“By—­whom?” inquired Harker.

“There are five of them at it, now,” replied Bryce.  “Mitchington, a mason, one of the cathedral clergy, a stranger, and the Duke of Saxonsteade!  What do you think of that?”

Harker suddenly started as if a new light had dawned on him.

“The Duke!” he exclaimed.  “You don’t say so!  My conscience! —­now, I wonder if that can really be?  Upon my word, I’d never thought of it!”

“Thought of what?” demanded Bryce.

“Never mind! tell you later,” said Harker.  “At present, is there any chance of getting a look at them?”

“That’s what I came for,” retorted Bryce.  “I’ve been watching them, with young Bewery.  He put me up to it.  Come on!  I want to see if you know the man who’s a stranger.”

Harker crossed the room to a chest of drawers, and after some rummaging pulled something out.

“Here!” he said, handing some articles to Bryce.  “Put those on over your boots.  Thick felt overshoes—­you could walk round your own mother’s bedroom in those and she’d never hear you.  I’ll do the same.  A stranger, you say?  Well, this is a proof that somebody knows the secret of that scrap of paper besides us, doctor!”

“They don’t know the exact spot,” growled Bryce, who was chafing at having been done out of his discovery.  “But, they’ll find it, whatever may be there.”

He led Harker back to Paradise and to the place where he had left Dick Bewery, whom they approached so quietly that Bryce was by the lad’s side before Dick knew he was there.  And Harker, after one glance at the ring of faces, drew Bryce back and put his lips close to his ear and breathed a name in an almost imperceptible yet clear whisper.

“Glassdale!”

Bryce started for the third time.  Glassdale!—­the man whom Harker had seen in Wrychester within an hour or so of Braden’s death:  the ex-convict, the forger, who had forged the Duke of Saxonsteade’s name!  And there! standing, apparently quite at his ease, by the Duke’s side.  What did it all mean?

There was no explanation of what it meant to be had from the man whom Bryce and Harker and Dick Bewery secretly watched from behind the screen of cypress trees.  Four of them watched in silence, or with no more than a whispered word now and then while the fifth worked.  This man worked methodically, replacing each stone as he took it up and examined the soil beneath it.  So far nothing had resulted, but he was by that time working at some distance from the tomb, and Bryce, who had an exceedingly accurate idea of where the spot might be, as indicated in the measurements on the scrap of paper, nudged Harker as the master-mason began to take up the last of the small flags.  And suddenly there was a movement amongst the watchers, and the master-mason looked up from his job and motioned Mitchington to pass him a trowel which lay at a little distance.