When the reporter finally left him, it was with a cheery “Good-night, Colonel.  If I were a criminal, I should be afraid of that analytical mind of yours!”

He went upstairs chuckling.  “The old fool!” he cried as he flung himself into a chair.  “I ’ve got it!  I ’ve got it!  Maurice Oakley must see me, and then what?” He sat down to think out what he should do to-morrow.  Again, with his fine disregard of ways and means, he determined to trust to luck, and as he expressed it, “brace old Oakley.”

Accordingly he went about nine o’clock the next morning to Oakley’s house.  A gray-haired, sad-eyed woman inquired his errand.

“I want to see Mr. Oakley,” he said.

“You cannot see him.  Mr. Oakley is not well and does not see visitors.”

“But I must see him, madam; I am here upon business of importance.”

“You can tell me just as well as him.  I am his wife and transact all of his business.”

“I can tell no one but the master of the house himself.”

“You cannot see him.  It is against his orders.”

“Very well,” replied Skaggs, descending one step; “it is his loss, not mine.  I have tried to do my duty and failed.  Simply tell him that I came from Paris.”

“Paris?” cried a querulous voice behind the woman’s back.  “Leslie, why do you keep the gentleman at the door?  Let him come in at once.”

Mrs. Oakley stepped from the door and Skaggs went in.  Had he seen Oakley before he would have been shocked at the change in his appearance; but as it was, the nervous, white-haired man who stood shiftily before him told him nothing of an eating secret long carried.  The man’s face was gray and haggard, and deep lines were cut under his staring, fish-like eyes.  His hair tumbled in white masses over his pallid forehead, and his lips twitched as he talked.

“You ’re from Paris, sir, from Paris?” he said.  “Come in, come in.”

His motions were nervous and erratic.  Skaggs followed him into the library, and the wife disappeared in another direction.

It would have been hard to recognise in the Oakley of the present the man of a few years before.  The strong frame had gone away to bone, and nothing of his old power sat on either brow or chin.  He was as a man who trembled on the brink of insanity.  His guilty secret had been too much for him, and Skaggs’s own fingers twitched as he saw his host’s hands seek the breast of his jacket every other moment.

“It is there the secret is hidden,” he said to himself, “and whatever it is, I must have it.  But how—­how?  I can’t knock the man down and rob him in his own house.”  But Oakley himself proceeded to give him his first cue.

“You—­you—­perhaps have a message from my brother—­my brother who is in Paris.  I have not heard from him for some time.”

Skaggs’s mind worked quickly.  He remembered the Colonel’s story.  Evidently the brother had something to do with the secret.  “Now or never,” he thought.  So he said boldly, “Yes, I have a message from your brother.”