Promptly Victor became deaf, blind, and numb to the fascinations so generously paraded by Lady Randolph West; and presently excusing himself, left her and sought his rooms.

As he went up the stairs, he saw the door to his bedchamber cautiously opened far enough to permit one eye to spy out and discover his approach.  Immediately then the door swung wide, and Nogam ambled into view with an envelope on a salver and an air of childlike innocence, an assumption of ease so transparent, indeed, that only the vision of a child could have been cheated by it.

“Just coming to look for you, sir,” he announced, glibly.  “Telegram, sir—­just harrived.”

“Thanks,” said Victor, shortly, taking the envelope and marching on into his rooms.

His manner toward his servants was always abrupt.  No need to be alarmed by this manifestation of it.  Blinking mildly, Nogam trotted at his heels.

Seating himself at an escritoire, Victor opened the envelope with a display of languid interest.  Curiosity about the contents of a telegram is ordinarily acute.  Victor, on the contrary, sat for a long moment staring thoughtfully at nothing and absently turning the envelope over and over in his hands; while Nogam with specious nonchalance found something unimportant to do in another quarter of the room.

The envelope was damp and warm to the touch.  True:  nightfall had brought with it a thick drizzle, and Frampton Court was more than a mile from the post-office.  On the other hand, the night was as cold as charity; and an envelope recently steamed open might be expected to hold the heat for a few minutes.

Victor thumbed the flap.  It lifted readily, without tearing, its gum was wet and more abundant than usual—­in fact, it felt confoundedly like library paste, a pot of which, in an ornamental holder, was among the fittings of the escritoire.  On the desk pad of blotting paper, too, Victor detected marks of fresh paste defining the contour of the flap.

With a countenance whose inscrutability alone was a threat, Victor took out and conned the telegraph form.

“CONSULTATION SET FOR MIDNIGHT TO-NIGHT TAKING YOUR ADVICE SHALL NOT ATTEND BUT LEAVE FOR BRIGHTON ELEVEN P.M.”

A message ostensibly so open and aboveboard that it hadn’t been thought worth while to hide its wording under the cloak of a code.

There was no signature—­unless one were clever or wise enough to transpose the two final letters and take them in relation to the word immediately preceding.  “Eleven, M.P.”, however, could mean nothing to anybody but Victor—­except a body clever enough to hide a dictograph detector in a turnip.  So Victor saw no reason to believe that Nogam, although undoubtedly guilty of the sin of prying, had been able to read the meaning below the surface of this communication.

Nevertheless, undue inquisitiveness on the part of a servant in the pay of Victor Vassilyevski could have but one reward.