He accosted a passing fellow-servitor.

“Seen young blighted Albert anywhere, Freddy?”

It was in this shameful manner that that mastermind was habitually referred to below stairs.

“Seen ’im going into the scullery not ’arf a minute ago,” replied Freddy.

“Thanks.”

“So long,” said Freddy.

“Be good!” returned Keggs, whose mode of speech among those of his own world differed substantially from that which he considered it became him to employ when conversing with the titled.

The fall of great men is but too often due to the failure of their miserable bodies to give the necessary support to their great brains.  There are some, for example, who say that Napoleon would have won the battle of Waterloo if he had not had dyspepsia.  Not otherwise was it with Albert on that present occasion.  The arrival of Keggs found him at a disadvantage.  He had been imprudent enough, on leaving George, to endeavour to smoke a cigar, purloined from the box which stood hospitably open on a table in the hall.  But for this, who knows with what cunning counter-attacks he might have foiled the butler’s onslaught?  As it was, the battle was a walk-over for the enemy.

“I’ve been looking for you, young blighted Albert!” said Keggs coldly.

Albert turned a green but defiant face to the foe.

“Go and boil yer ’ead!” he advised.

“Never mind about my ’ead.  If I was to do my duty to you, I’d give you a clip side of your ’ead, that’s what I’d do.”

“And then bury it in the woods,” added Albert, wincing as the consequences of his rash act swept through his small form like some nauseous tidal wave.  He shut his eyes.  It upset him to see Keggs shimmering like that.  A shimmering butler is an awful sight.

Keggs laughed a hard laugh.  “You and your cousins from America!”

“What about my cousins from America?”

“Yes, what about them?  That’s just what Lord Belpher and me have been asking ourselves.”

“I don’t know wot you’re talking about.”

“You soon will, young blighted Albert!  Who sneaked that American fellow into the ’ouse to meet Lady Maud?”

“I never!”

“Think I didn’t see through your little game?  Why, I knew from the first.”

“Yes, you did!  Then why did you let him into the place?”

Keggs snorted triumphantly.  “There!  You admit it!  It was that feller!”

Too late Albert saw his false move—­a move which in a normal state of health, he would have scorned to make.  Just as Napoleon, minus a stomach-ache, would have scorned the blunder that sent his Cuirassiers plunging to destruction in the sunken road.

“I don’t know what you’re torkin’ about,” he said weakly.

“Well,” said Keggs, “I haven’t time to stand ’ere chatting with you.  I must be going back to ’is lordship, to tell ’im of the ’orrid trick you played on him.”