“Don’t speak to me, sir,” said Bartley.  “I shall say nothing to gratify you nor to affront Colonel Clifford.”

“Speak the truth, sir,” said Colonel Clifford; “never mind the consequences.”

“Well, then,” said Bartley, very unwillingly, “they were clerks in my office, and this one robbed me.”

“One thing at a time,” said Monckton.  “Did I rob you of twenty thousand pounds, as you robbed Mr. Walter Clifford?”

His voice became still more incisive, and the curtain of the little room opened a little and two eyes of fire looked in.

“Do you remember one fine day your clerk, Walter Clifford, asking you for leave of absence—­to be married?”

Bartley turned his back on him contemptuously.

But Colonel Clifford insisted on his replying.

“Yes, he did,” said Bartley, sullenly.

“But,” said the Colonel, quietly, “he thought better of it, and so—­you married her yourself.”

This bayonet thrust was so keen and sudden that the villain’s self-possession left him for once.  His mouth opened in dismay, and his eyes, roving to and fro, seemed to seek a door to escape.

But there was worse in store for him.  The curtains were drawn right and left with power, and there stood Grace Clifford, beautiful, but pale and terrible.  She marched toward him with eyes that rooted him to the spot, and then she stopped.

“Now hear me; for he has tortured me, and tried to kill me.  Look at his white face turning ghastly beneath his paint at the sight of me; look at his thin lips, and his devilish eyebrows, and his restless eyes.  THIS IS THE MAN THAT BRIBED THAT WRETCH TO FIRE THE MINE!”

These last words, ringing from her lips like the trumpet of doom, were answered, as swiftly as gunpowder explodes at a lighted torch, by a furious yell, and in a moment the room seemed a forest of wild beasts.  A score of raging miners came upon him from every side, dragging, tearing, beating, kicking, cursing, yelling.  He was down in a moment, then soon up again, then dragged out of the room, nails, fists, and heavy boots all going, stripped to the shirt, screaming like a woman.  A dozen assailants rolled down the steps, with him in the midst of them.  He got clear for a moment, but twenty more rushed at him, and again he was torn and battered and kicked.  “Police! police!” he cried; and at last the detectives who came to seize him rushed in, and Colonel Clifford, too, with the voice of a stentor, cried, “The law!  Respect the law, or you are ruined men.”

And so at last the law he had so dreaded raised what seemed a bag of bones:  nothing left on him but one boot and fragments of a shirt, ghastly, bleeding, covered with bruises, insensible, and to all appearance dead.

After a short consultation, they carried him, by Colonel Clifford’s order, to the Dun Cow, where Lucy, it may be remembered, was awaiting his triumphant return.