“Why is there this aroma of mystery hanging about the affair, then?” some one asked.

“Well, for one or two reasons,” Baker answered.  “One, no doubt, is because Sir Timothy has a great idea of arranging the fights himself, and the opponents actually don’t know until the fight begins whom they are meeting, and sometimes not even then.  There has been some gossiping, too, about the rules, and the weight of the gloves, but that I know, nothing about.”

“And the rest of the show?” a younger member enquired.  “Is it simply dancing and music and that sort of thing?”

“Just a variety entertainment,” the proud possessor of the scarlet-hued ticket declared.  “Sir Timothy always has something up his sleeve.  Last year, for instance, he had those six African girls over from Paris in that queer dance which they wouldn’t allow in London at all.  This time no one knows what is going to happen.  The house, as you know, is absolutely surrounded by that hideous stone wall, and from what I have heard, reporters who try to get in aren’t treated too kindly.  Here’s Ledsam.  Very likely he knows more about it.”

“Ledsam,” some one demanded, as Francis joined the group, “are you going to Sir Timothy Brast’s show to-morrow night?”

“I hope so,” Francis replied, producing his strip of pasteboard.

“Ever been before?”

“Never.”

“Do you know what sort of a show it’s going to be?” the actor enquired.

“Not the slightest idea.  I don’t think any one does.  That’s rather a feature of the affair, isn’t it?”

“It is the envious outsider who has never received an invitation, like myself,” some one remarked, “who probably spreads these rumours, for one always hears it hinted that some disgraceful and illegal exhibition is on tap there—­a new sort of drugging party, or some novel form of debauchery.”

“I don’t think,” Francis said quietly, “that Sir Timothy is quite that sort of man.”

“Dash it all, what sort of man is he?” the actor demanded.  “They tell me that financially he is utterly unscrupulous, although he is rolling in money.  He has the most Mephistophelian expression of any man I ever met—­looks as though he’d set his heel on any one’s neck for the sport of it—­and yet they say he has given at least fifty thousand pounds to the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, and that the whole of the park round that estate of his down the river is full of lamed and decrepit beasts which he has bought himself off the streets.”

“The man must have an interesting personality,” a novelist who had joined the party observed.  “Of course, you know that he was in prison for six months?”

“What for?” some one asked.

“Murder, only they brought it in manslaughter,” was the terse reply.  “He killed his partner.  It was many years ago, and no one knows all the facts of the story.”

“I am not holding a brief for Sir Timothy,” Francis remarked, as he sipped his cocktail.  “As a matter of fact, he and I are very much at cross-purposes.  But as regards that particular instance, I am not sure that he was very much to be blamed, any more than you can blame any injured person who takes the law into his own hands.”