The General paused and looked at his nephew curiously. "Then I made a false move," he went on--"a false move which may have wiped the seventh Duke of Beaumanoir out of the peerage. I told Mrs. Talmage Eglinton that the Duke was going down to Prior's Tarrant by the 8.45. Yes, you may well stare, but I had an object. I also told her that you were going down with him, believing that that would secure you both a peaceful journey; for, vulgarly speaking, the woman is glaringly sweet upon you, laddie. I ought to have given such a combination as she works with credit for the cunning which drew you from your post."
Forsyth flushed with annoyance. It was not pleasant to hear that his friend's life might have been sacrificed through his uncle's perception of a feminine weakness which had irked him throughout the London season--in fact, ever since Mrs. Talmage Eglinton had made her mysterious appearance on the fringe of society. The card, however, on which the General had staked and apparently lost had been distinctly "the game" if he, Forsyth, had only played up to it himself by sticking like wax to poor hunted Beaumanoir.
But _why_ was Beaumanoir being hunted? That easy-mannered unfortunate, who had exchanged a life of reckless irresponsibility for sordid penury, and the latter for the headship of a historic house, had performed all these _demivoltes_ without making a visible enemy save himself. Why should he have incurred a remorseless hatred which aimed at nothing less than his life?
"The Star-spangled Banner looms largely on the horizon of all this," the young man mused aloud. "Can you explain that phase of the mystery, Uncle Jem?"
"The hub of the wheel, I take it, is my old friend Leonidas Sherman, or, rather, the three millions sterling which he is on his way to this country with," said the General briskly. "Big American robbery, worked by a disciplined gang, and somehow your pal Beaumanoir is entangled. The day he was at our house he tried vaguely to warn Leonie. Hinted that Sherman should be warned to be careful."
Forsyth heard the amazing theory with an inward qualm lest his shrewd old relative should have hit on the solution of the puzzle, and it filled him with greater apprehension than even the physical peril of the Duke had instilled. "Entanglement" in Beaumanoir's case could only mean complicity, for if his knowledge of the scheme was not a guilty knowledge, if he had become possessed of the secret accidentally, why did he not invoke the aid of the police and expose the conspirators? Forsyth saw that the General read what was passing in his mind, and he clutched at the only visible straw in defence of his friend.