THE ANNEXATION SOCIETY.

Auckland Star, Volume XLVII, Issue 61, 11 March 1916, Page 18

THE ANNEXATION SOCIETY.

(ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

By J. S. FLETCHER.

CHAPTER XXXL A PLEASAOT PASTORAL KETEEAT. Sharpened to a very fine point by continual polishing on the whetstone of recent necessity, Jimmies wits came instantly to the rescue. He realised half-a-dozen facts in the twinkling of an eye. And in the midst of what until then had been an absorbing coaversation on the merits of various breeds of pigs, he suddenly pulled out his watch, glanced at it, and made a dash for the stables.

"Clean forgotten!" he exclaimed to the landlord. "Made an appointment with a farmer along the road there, and it's past the time now. I'll have to jump for it. See you later," he added, as, having hastily saddled and bridled his steed, he bustled out of the yard. "In for dinner, most likely."

But as he rode round the corner in pursuit of the carriage and pair, Jimmie said to himself that it was highty probable he might never again set foot on those premises. He had 'been quick, to recognise that Scraye had evidently come down to Gillenham over-night or during the night; that he had come to some understanding with Lady Scraye and was taking her off in consequence of it, was obvious—the only thing to do, then, was to follow. fcjeraye might be conducting his step-mother to some safer retreat; he might be taEng her back to town; it occurred to Jimmie that he might have prevailed on her to confess and to reveal, and that the police were going to be consulted. But whatever the reason of Scraye's presence, Jimmie was resolved that it should not interfere with his own pursuit of Lady Scraye. Wherever she went he, too, was going.

The only way out ofGillenham to the nearest main-road was by the narrow lane down which Jimmie had ridden ids borrowed mount the previous evening. The carriage and pair could only ascend this at walking pace; consequently his quarry wae only a little way in advance of Jimmie when he struck into the highnay. He saw at once that it would 'be easy to keep the equipage in eight; the cockaded -hats of the coachman and footman showed well up above the lealless hedges; the polished top of the closed carriage shone brightly in the sun. Jimmie slackened his rein, and confident in the powers of his ibeast, dropped a good half-mile in the rear. Let Lord and Lady Scrayc go where they pleased; he would never ho far behind.

In, the interval which had elapsed between his first catching sight of the occupants of the carriage and his riding out of the inn-yard in pursuit, Jimmie had come to the conclusion that Lord Scrave and hia companion were making for Salisbury. But once away from the village he caw that the carriage was being driven in quite another direction than that of the tall spire which he could see far away in the distance. At a crossroads it turned away to the southward, and proceeded towards the spareelvpopulated country in the neighbourhood of Cranborne and Fordingbridge. It forsook the hijih roadd and took the lanes and byways; it crossed the downs and dropped into the valleys. And for a gooj hour Jimmie followed it patiently, always keeping well in the rear, and always -wondering if Scrayc would recognise him in his present get-up.

The carriage turned at last into a well-wooded valley lying beneath two ridges of upland, and passing through a small, straggling village, turned into the grounds of a house which stood on flic outskirts. Jiinmie palled up his horse when the carriage turned into the drive which ;;ave access to the house; he wanted to get a clear idea of the place to which Lord and Lady Scraye were proceeding. A few minutes' careful inspection showed him an old house, greywalled, moderate in size, which stood in the middle of email pleasure gTounds and gardens, and was fenced in from the road and the village of a high yew hedse, within a palisading of beech and chestnut. H was a pleasant, eminently pastoral and peaceful-looking retreat, which was scarcely big enough for a baronial hall and rather too large for a vicarage or rectory. Jimmie judged it to have b|en built, somewhere abeat the time of Queen Anne, by some City man who desired to spend his autumn of life amidst idyllic surroundings, possibly with a good library and a collection of old pictures within and a herd of prize cattle and a rose garden without. But there was one feature of the place wliieh was certainly not of Queen Anne'e days, nor of Queen Victoria's either, and its presence made Jimmie pull his thinking cap more tightly about his brows. This isolated house, this eminently rural retreat, was supplied with a most elaborate 6y6tem of telegraph and telephone wires. Starting from a standard fixed in one of the gables, the wires stretched across the gardens and lawns to the road on which Jimmie etood —the house, it was evident, was in direct communication with various trunk lines, not merely for telegraphic but for telephonic purposes.

From a wicket-gate which pierced the yew-hedge Jimmie saw the carriage drive up to the front door. He saw a manservant receive its occupants, who passed into the house. A few minutes later the 6ame man emerged from the houee, and evidently gave some order to the coachman, who at once drove his horses round the corner to what was presumably a stable-yard at the end of the gardens. Jimmie concluded from this proceeding that Lord and Lady going to pay a visit of some duration at the ancient, peaceful mansion. And having noticed, a small inn in the village through which he had passed he went back to it, put up his horse, and going into the ioiiee called for a glass of ale and a mouthful of bread and cheese. Over this modest refreshment he asked the landlady a question or two about the neighbourhood, posing once more as a buyer of stock.

" And who," he inquired, in carelese and casual fashion, at the end of a lengthy talk of the village and its possibilities of sheep and cattle, "who might belong to just along the road here —the place where they've got such a lot of telegraph wires? Gentleman's place, I expect?"

" Covert Lodge," said the landlady. " Covert Lodge, you mean, mister. Ah, there'e a foreign gentleman lives there —took it a while back —eighteen months ago, I should say. Leastways, when 1 say a foreign gentleman, he isn't English. Some say he's American, and some says German. It's a queer name —Frobenius. Dr. Frobenius, he calls himself, though he doesn't do no doctoring, not he!"

"Hunting gent?" suggested Jimmie. " Xice country for hunting, this, I ehoniji

The landlady laughed. "Hunting!" she exclaimed. "Nay, not likely! He's a student—all for books and papers and sueh-like—they say he's thousands upon thousands of books in that house. Besides, he's an old man. No—he took that house when old Colonel Warrinder died, and he brought all these here books and papers and instruments and thing 3, and there he always is—rarely goes out of hie own grounds. But them telegraph wireeT —no wonder you've noticed them, for everybody does. They cay he keeps a telegraph office in the house."

" Saves trouble, no doubt," observed Jimmie. "No bother about bringing telegrams from the post office." " Well, of course, we haven't a telegraph office in this place," said the landlady. " It's too small, and telegrams have to be brought a couple of miles. But as I cay, this Doctor Frobenius, he has sent his what you might call right into his own room. And telephone, too —they cay he can talk to people in America without getting out of his chair!"

Jimmie drank off his ale, promised to return later for his horse, and walked out. He was bent on obtaining some sort of access to the house which now sheltered Lord and Lady Scraye and the mysterious individual known to the natives as Doctor Frobenius, and his brain was busied in inventing means, excuses, schemes, whereby his intentions might be carried out. Aβ a preliminary to further operations, he walked through the village and turned up a narrow lane which led to the top of a low hill, from the ridge of which it was possible to look down upon the house and its immediate surroundings. TBere was nething out of the common in what he saw, always excepting the unusual number of telegraph and telephone wires. He saw the Scraye coachman and footman chatting to what was probably the Frobeniue coachman at the door of a saddle-room; he saw various evidences of domestic life about the house. Dr. Frobenius, whoever he was, whatever ho might be, was certainly not a hermit. There was, in fact, a good deal of animation about Covert Lod«e, and Jimmie recognised that it might not be eaey to get into closer touch with it.

From a hidden position on the ridge he examined the house and its grounds with a view of gaming an entrance, if not by daylight, at any rate by night. The house itself stood at the end of a wide lawn, two sides of which were enclosed by thick plantations. Its I gardens and stables were at the rear, and had separate entrances. The yewhedge which shut off the whole place from the road ran up to the edge of the plantations and shrubberies; it seemed to Jimmie that if he slipped within the wicket gate from which he had first viewed the house he could make his way through shrubberies and behind hedges until he came close to the French windows which opened out .of all the ground-floor rooms. There would be vast risk in such a venture, no doubt, but he was determined to take it. Know he would, somehow, what Scraye and his step-mother were doing there/and what their business was with this mysterious dweller in the wilds who kept a. perfect battery of wires upon his roof. As he crept down from the ridge Wimmie heard a bell ring in the stableyard of Covert Lodge. He looked through a convenient gap in the hedge, and saw the £}craye eoachjnan man and the man with whom thevMiad been talking saunter leisurely across to a buck entrance. And glancing at his watch, he saw that it was just one o'clock.

"Servants' dinner-hour," mused Jimmie. "Xow'e the time to get into those grounds —there'll be nobody about." There was nobody about, certainly, in the road which ran alongside the yewhedge. Jimmie looked up and down its length as he sauntered along; there was not a soul in sight when he slipped through the wicket-gate and behind a big clump of evergreens which stood immediately in front of it. There he paused to prospect and to consider. From the wicket-gate a palh led away beneath the yew-hedge; at a little distance it branched off into the plantations which bordered the lawn. Paths, however, were things to be strictly avoided, while they were also things to keep a watchful eye on, lest they should be trodden by the enemy. And* Jimmie presently began to edge his way across the plantation, from shrub to shrub, keeping further and further from the path and yet approaching the lawn at a point near the house. He had just come up to the edge of the turf and dropped down behind a great mass of evergreens, when he saw two ladies emerge from one of the French windows and begin to pace a narrow terrace which ran before it. In then] he recognised Lady Scraye and Mrs. Wvthenshawe.

Jimmies heart thumped mightily as he recognised the lady of Wilton Crescent. Here, at any rate, was something tangible, something that might turn out to be trumps in the best sense. He know that Lady Scraye was somewhere within the precincts of Covert Lodge, but he did not know that Mrs Wythenshawe was there to keep her company. Well, wherever those two were there would be mischief, and Jimmie suddenly held his breath and made himself extremely small behind his shelter of rhododendrons. At another window of the house appeared one of the strangest figures he had ever known or dreamt of—the figure of a slightly-built, spare man, whose head seemed to be much too large for his body; whose white hair seemed vastly too luxurious for even the large head'; whose face, pale as that of a corpse, was lighted up by a pair of dark, burning eyes; whose hands, long, slender, attenuated, were for ever used in restless gesticulation; whose thin, bony limbs, that seemed to jerk rather than to move, were clothed in sombre black, topped by a great black poncho and a huge black sombrero. This extraordinary figure waved an imperious hand to the two ladies who had strolled to the further end of the.terrace; they caught sight of the gesture of undoubted authority, and they ran—as slaves might run to a master who had the power of life and death. They and the sinister figure vanished, and Jimmie drew a long breath and straightened himself. "Frobenius!" he muttered. "Frobenius! Or the very dcv " The pressure of something on the back of his head made him start and turn. He found himself looking down the barrel of a revolver, and behind the revolver stood a large, grim-featured man. (To be continued daily.)