“Depends what it is,” said Webb, affecting boredom.

There was a long silence while Bessant chewed his nails and stared at the two men. A full moon rode out from behind a cloud, flooding the rotunda with added light. The rolling parkland of the Wadham estate lay silvered and spread out in front of them through the elegant pillars of the white marble rotunda. On one side loomed the vast bulk of Wadham Hall, its myriad small windowpanes gleaming whitely in the bright moonlight.

“Well, it’s like this,” said Bessant, sitting down on a marble bench while Harold Webb frowned at the servant’s forwardness in seating himself while his betters were still standing, “that there pair, the Comtesse de la Valle-Chenevix and her Uncle Gervase, they’re imposters, see? And worse than that.”

A crafty look marred Webb’s handsome face. “How will I know if you are telling the truth?”

“My story will speak for itself.”

“And how much for this believable story?”

“A monkey.”

“What!” Webb’s face grew quite flushed. “Five hundred pounds is more than a scoundrel like you could earn in his whole life.”

“True,” admitted Bessant. “But your lordship drops more than that at the tables at White’s of a night.”

This was indeed true, as Webb was a notoriously unlucky gambler.

“Give him the money,” said Mr. Russell gleefully. “I always thought there was something shady about that precious pair.” He leaned close to his friend’s ear. “Think on’t,” he whispered. “You lost twice that to Brummell t’other night without so much as turning a hair.”

Harold Webb brooded long and hard. At last he came to a decision.

“Very well,” he said. “A monkey, it is. Speak!”

“Your note of hand, my lord,” cringed Bessant, all mock obsequiousness.

“My word as a gentleman…”

“Your note,” hissed Harry Russell, his eyes gleaming wetly in the moonlight.

“Oh, here it is.” Webb sat down on one of the stone benches and scribbled out a note and handed it to the Groom of the Chambers. “Now…” he said impatiently.

And so Bessant began, talking in a low, hurried, urgent voice while his small audience listened amazed. Lord Webb at one point of the narrative found himself overcome with a strange superstitious dread. For some reason that picture of Alice and her accomplice fading through the wall seemed etched on his brain. But he was not normally an imaginative man and his fears were quickly banished as the story went on and his eyes began to gleam with excitement, especially when Bessant culminated his tale by producing an old, yellowed piece of parchment which he had torn out of a book in the library—a list and description of the late Duchess’s jewels.

“We’ll simply turn over this list to Bow Street,” said Webb excitedly when Bessant had at last fallen silent, “and give them a report of our suspicions and let them do the rest.