emissary from those fortune-hunting people. I know what they say-they say that we want to keep the estate in our own hands, (qui s'excuse s'accuse, thought Balmaine). It is false, we want to do nothing of the sort. You may depend on our hearty co-operation. I am glad you have taken the matter up. Your connection with the Press will count greatly in your favour. Yes, Philip Hardy was frequently in Switzerland. You may find some trace of him. You will doubtless travel about a good deal, and if you should be successful you may depend on being handsomely remunerated. I do not mean merely in finding Philip Hardy, but in finding a clue to his fate and that of his daughter."

"Do not mistake me, Mr. Artful," said Balmaine, slightly colouring. "I am not an amateur detective. Consider that I take an interest in the case-that is all. I am poor, as I have said, and if I incur expense in my search I will ask you to recoup me. But for myself, I do not ask reward; if, however, anybody should aid me I might ask-"

"Yes, I understand. By-the-bye, you know our theory, that Philip Hardy is immured in some Austrian dungeon, probably in the North of Italy. If you can throw any light on the mystery we shall be glad, very glad. And now I must pass you on to Mr. Baggs. You will find him in the next room. Good-day, sir, good-day. I hope you will have a pleasant journey, and return with Mr. Hardy and his daughter."

And Mr. Artful smiled a gracious smile, and bowed a courtly bow.

"Chivalrous young fool," he muttered, as the door closed behind Balmaine. "Pretends not to care for money!"

Baggs was a very pleasant old fellow, and, if possible, more affable than his master; but he had little to tell Balmaine that the latter did not already know. He showed him copies of Philip Hardy's letters to his father, written out fair in a book which had evidently been frequently consulted. They all referred to business, and contained little more than formal advice of drafts which Philip had passed on his father's firm; but, as in one or two of them he mentioned having written fully a few days previously it was evident that their correspondence had not been limited to business communications, and the last of all, dated from Lugano, said that he had just had Vera's photo taken, and would send it in a subsequent letter.

"Have you got this photo of Miss Hardy?" asked Balmaine.

"I am sorry to say we have not, sir. I

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question if it ever came. The letter from Lugano, as you will perceive, was written only a few weeks before the old man died, which, as we think, was about the time his son fell into the hands of the Austrians." "Can you show me the originals of these letters ?"

"Certainly," answered the old clerk, looking somewhat surprised; "but I assure you they are faithful copies, not a word has been altered or added."

"I am quite sure of that. I should like to see the originals nevertheless, if only to acquaint myself with the character of Philip Hardy's handwriting."

"By all means, I will get them."

As he spoke, Mr. Baggs went to a big japanned tin box, marked, "John Hardy's Trustees, No. 2," and after fumbling a few minutes among a mass of papers, produced a bundle of dusty letters. They were tied together and carefully docketed, generally with the words: "Philip Hardy, advising draft for £ — All were written on foreign post, and having been folded in the old-fashioned way, the direction and post marks were on the outer sheet. They had been posted at sundry places, and showed what a wanderer the man was, and that he had never remained long in the same locality. Although most of them were written in Italy, many were dated from Switzerland, but only two from France; from which Alfred naturally concluded that Philip Hardy's wanderings had been almost altogether limited to the two former countries. One, dated from the Baths of Lucca, mentioned briefly, and in a postscript, the birth of Vera. It was probably written at the time when father and son were estranged, owing to the latter's marriage. The last letter of all, though dated from Pallanza, bore the post-mark of Lugano, and the half-erased imprint of an hotel at Locarno, the Hotel Martino.

Of all these things Balmaine took careful note, especially of the dates of the letters, the places from which they were written, and the names of the bankers or others to whose order Philip Hardy had made his drafts.

"Is there anything more I can do for you?" asked Baggs, as Alfred closed his memorandum book.

"Yes; tell me what like a man was Philip Hardy when you last saw him."

"That was the last time he was in England, thirteen years ago. Dear me, how time flies! Let me see; yes, I remember him very well. He did not stay very long;

he said he must hurry back to his wife and child, whom he had left at-where was it Let me see.'

"Somewhere in Italy?" suggested Alfred. "No, not Italy, Switzerland; near some lake, I think. There are lakes in Switzerland, I suppose ?"

"Only about a thousand," returned Balmaine gravely.

"Bless me! what a country for water it must be. Well, I cannot for the life of me remember the name of the lake, but I can tell you what Mr. Philip was like. Height about five feet ten, long-limbed and slim; but strong, I should say, very strong; laughing blue eyes with long lashes-I remember telling my wife what beautiful eyes he had. Light-complexioned, chestnut hair and beard, and a pleasant manner. We used to say that everybody liked him but his father. Did not seem to care much about money, as different from the old man as chalk from cheese, and no more idea of business than a child. Quite a gipsy sort of man. The father must have wondered-I am sure other people did-how he came to have such a son. He had out-of-the-way ideas too, and was always doing out-of-the-way things. That's why I sometimes think he may still be living in some out-of-the-way place, if not in Europe, then in Asia, Africa, or America."

"I should think that is very likely," observed Balmaine, amused by this rather comprehensive suggestion.

"Anyhow, sir, I hope you will find either him or the little girl, or ascertain what has become of them."

"I mean to try," said the young fellow, and with that he took his leave.

CHAPTER XIV.-A SUCCESSFUL JOUR

NALIST.

"WHY am I giving myself so much trouble about this affair?" was the question Alfred asked himself as he strolled through Lincoln's Inn Fields; "and why should I take so much interest in the business of people I never saw, probably never shall see?"

A very pertinent question, to which there was more than one answer.

First of all, from a desire to oblige Warton, who had behaved so well at the time of his father's death, and who, though rather a rough diamond, was a very good fellow. If there was any chance of doing the clerk a good turn-and the finding of the missing Hardys might conceivably put money in his

pocket-it was his duty to do it. Warton, moreover, had contrived to communicate to Balmaine some of his own eagerness and enthusiasm, and the latter's curiosity was thoroughly roused. What could have become of Philip Hardy and his daughter? Had the former, as was surmised, been immured in some Austrian dungeon, or, as was equally possible, if not more probable, shot by order of a drum-head court-martial? In that case what had become of his child? Perhaps some good soul had adopted her, perhaps her mother's relations (who were her mother's relations ?) had found her out, and were bringing her up. It might even be that she was working for her living, or begging her bread, or (horrible thought!) trudging through England or France as the companion of some villainous Italian organgrinder. It was conceivable, too, that she might be living near the fortress in which her father was confined, waiting patiently for his release. Hardly probable, however. In that event Philip Hardy would surely have communicated with his friends; he would want money, and he would not let his child waste her life in the wretched monotony of some Austrian garrison town, away from all the advantages of education. There were other and darker possibilities. Italy was not the most secure of countries, and it was quite conceivable that Hardy and his daughter might have been murdered by brigands, drowned in crossing a lake, or destroyed by an avalanche in some Alpine pass.

All these suppositions added piquancy to the mystery, about which there was enough of romance to fire his imagination and suggest a great variety of possible solutions. And what were his chances of success? He could not think they were very brilliant, yet he did not despair, and the more he thought the stronger grew the conviction that, sooner or later, and somehow or other, he should find Miss Vera Hardy-if she were alive.

As Balmaine reached this conclusion he arrived at the office of Mr. Furbey, the newspaper correspondent, to whose influence he was indebted for his appointment on the editorial staff of the Helvetic News. Furbey was a middle-aged man with long sandy whiskers tipped with white, a big face, and a complexion which suggested that he had a weakness for good living. He dined Alfred at his club and gave him some good advice.

"It is a queer sort of paper, the Helvetic News," he said; "it has had some ups and

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'No, not quite so bad as that. Before its prosperity is really assured, I ought to have said; for I have seen so many papers start up and go down that I am never quite sure about anything that has not three or four years behind it, and not always then. But just now the Helvetic seems to be in very good feather. I get my cheque every month, and I used to be glad to get it every three. It is by no means a bad opening, if you want to acquire experience in your profession."

"That I do, most decidedly. But there is one thing that has rather been weighing on my mind-do you think I shall be able to do the work?"

"Of subediting the Helvetic News?" said Furbey with an amused laugh. Of course, you will. You are too modest, Mr. Balmaine. Why, I do not think there is a pressman in Fleet Street who would not undertake to edit the Times at a minute's notice, with the full belief that he could do it better than Delane himself. But you will mend of that -modesty and journalism are a contradiction in terms. If you want to get on you must assert yourself. It did not use to be so, but the most important qualifications of a journalist now-a-days are impudence and push."

"In that case I am afraid I shall not become an ornament of my profession, for I fear that I am sadly lacking in both these qualifications."

"Most men are at starting, and you have not had much chance of developing either impudence or push down there at Calder. You will find your work at Geneva a good deal more interesting, I fancy, than chronicling small beer at Calder."

Alfred winced. He did not like this belittling of the paper he had edited and the place where he was born.

"Don't be vexed," continued Furbey, who had detected the young fellow's annoyance. "You will be of the same opinion yourself before we meet again. I have gone through the same thing myself. I received my first training in the office of a Catholic paper in the south of Ireland."

"You are an Irishman then?"

"I am, or as I once heard a countryman of mine say, who had been a long time settled in England, I was originally. Well, when I

was about twenty I went north, and got a berth on a Tory Protestant paper in Belfast, and one of the first jobs I had was reporting the speeches of a lot of Presbyterian parsons at a religious meeting. You may imagine my feelings. But it was a useful experience. It taught me a lesson in tolerance I shall never forget. I learnt for the first time in my life that there are two sides even to a religious question, and now I have no religious opinion left worth mentioning."

"And does your indifferentism extend to politics?"

"I am a Liberal if anything; most pressmen are I fancy. But I cannot afford to let my political opinions interfere with my professional duties."

"You mean that you are for the side that pays the best?" said Alfred with a slight touch of scorn in his voice.

"I mean that if I was offered a berthand wanted one-on the staff of a Tory paper I should take it, and write what I was told to write. You are shocked, I dare say; but that is a feeling you will get over by-andby. Do you think the fellows who do the leaders in the big dailies believe one half they write? They are not such fools."

"They are not high-principled journalists, then," was Balmaine's thought, but not wanting to offend his host he said, "Perhaps you are right as to your facts-though I confess I am very much surprised-but can a man heartily and effectively advocate a cause in which he does not believe?"

"Certainly. You know the True Blue?"

Alfred knew it very well. The True Blue had been his father's favourite weekly paper, and he used often to call attention to the vigour of its literary style, and the soundness of its political views,

"Well, I know the editor of it, and a very clever fellow he is, but a Radical and FreeThinker."

"Am I to understand, then, that London journalists as a class are ready to prostitute their pens to the highest bidder?"

All that

"You put the case too strongly. I say is, that most pressmen, being dependent on their pens for their daily bread, cannot be choosers; they must take such situations as they can get, and write-if it be their function to do original articles-what they are ordered to write. I get my living by writing London letters for country papers. I work with the advertising agent whose name is over the door. You know the arrangement. We give a letter a week for a column of space, which my colleague fills

with advertisements, and we make a very fair thing of it. The letters I write are, of course, pretty much alike as regards gossip, but when I touch on politics or political personages I must, of course, adapt my remarks to my audience."

"Which means, I suppose," laughed Balmaine, "that when you write for the Calder Mercury you praise up Disraeli as a heavenborn statesman, while in the Bradford Blazer you denounce him as an unscrupulous charlatan."

"No, no; I never use unparliamentary language. I don't think it pays. But don't you think that promiscuous advocacy is far worse than mercenary journalism? Whether this or that government is the better; whether this or that measure is wise or expedient, is merely a matter of opinion; whether you are right or wrong nobody is much the worse; and whatever you may yourself think, your paper, at least, has the courage of its convictions, and, as a rule, sticks to the side in which it professes to believe. But a barrister is always ready, for a certain number of guineas, to plead for a murderer or defend an oppressor of the poor. Advocacy is the most immoral of professions. Nothing would persuade me to become a barrister, yet barristers are esteemed honourable men, and the one who most successfully perverts justice and prostitutes his talents becomes the keeper of the Queen's conscience and a great peer."

"You forget," said Balmaine, surprised alike by Furbey's views and by the bitterness with which he expressed them; "you forget that unless both sides of a contested case are effectually stated essential facts may be forgotten, important considerations overlooked. And how is a barrister to know beforehand that a cheat is in the wrong-how, until he has heard what the other side has to say, know the weakness of his own?"

"To such cases as that my remarks do not apply; but there are cases in which counsel must know that they are pleading for an unrighteous cause, and that they can win only by imputing baseness to their opponents and practically bearing false witness against their neighbours, and yet if they do win they get high praise and more business."

"But don't you see that if the law be right in regarding an accused person as innocent until he is proved to be guilty, advocates cannot be wrong in acting on the same principle? There is something in what you say-the system has its drawbacks; there are unscrupulous barristers, as well as unscrupulous journalists, but taking it all round

you must admit that it does not work badly."

"I admit nothing of the sort," said Furbey, thumping his fist on the table; "I would abolish it utterly. English law is an ungodly tangle, and lawyers are unconscionable bloodsuckers. If you knew as much of them as I know you would say the same. But let us drop the subject; it always puts me out of temper. I think I did not tell you that the editor of the Helvetic News is a connection of mine, a half-cousin in fact." Mr. Gibson, you

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'No, I was not aware. mean. I have had a letter from him." 'Yes, I mean Mr. Gibson; Ned Gibson, we generally call him. I will write and ask him to do for you what he can. He is a very decent fellow, Ned, as you will find; but he has his fads, as you will also find. He fancies he has an awful lot of work to do, and it is to that idea, I imagine, that your engagement is partly due. He pretends to want more help. Why, I could edit that paper on my head. I do almost as much work in a day as he does in a week. But you keep in with him; he may be very useful to you. Another thing: if you keep your eyes open you may fake up a letter now and again for one of the London papers."

"Yes," said Balmaine, to whom the idea was by no means new, "I intend to do so. Which of them would you recommend me to try ?"

"I really cannot tell you. One is about as good as another, I fancy, for your purpose. Try one, and if that is no go, try another. You should not have much difficulty in writing something worth printing. Accounts of Alpine accidents, especially if the victims happen to be English travellers, always make gocd copy. I should think you might easily pick up fifty or sixty pounds a year in that way."

"I am afraid that is too good to be true," said Alfred; "but I shall do my best, and you may be sure that if I fail it will not be for want of perseverance."

Fifty pounds, or even half of it, would make a nice addition to his slender income, and without some such help it would be impossible for him to do much towards solving the Hardy mystery. He felt encouraged by Furbey's opinion that he should be able to do so well, but for the rest, the conversation had been rather an unpleasant surprise. He was disillusioned. He had thought that London journalists were a class apart; that the men who every morning weigh statesmen in the balance and instruct the nation

in its duties-who write as if their judgment was faultless and their knowledge unlimited -were of a morality beyond reproach, and would rather perish than express opinions which they did not entertain or advocate a cause in which they did not believe. But if Furbey was right their knowledge was empiricism, their morality a fraud, and their opinions a pretence. He could not credit it. Furbey was a cynic, and thought that others were as destitute of professional honour as himself. At any rate, if journalists were no better than their kind they were no worse, and there must be among them men who would scorn to say what they did not think, and rather starve than prostitute their pens for money and place.

CHAPTER XV.-THE HELVETIC NEWS." A LARGE room on the first floor of a house in a leading street of Geneva, known as "La Rue de la Montagne." Though lofty and well lighted, this room is of somewhat barn-like aspect and barely furnished. There is neither carpet on the floor nor paper on the walls. In the centre is a big table, littered with unopened journals in various tongues. In the neighbourhood of the windows are three small writing-tables and as many chairs. What the original colour of them may have been it would be hard to say, but they are now black with ink stains and polished with much usage.

At one of the tables sits a man busily writing; as it would seem from frequent references to a foreign journal before him, translating. At another table sits another man with a big pair of scissors he makes cuttings from an English newspaper and with a big brush pastes them on a sheet of foolscap. When he has done with the newspaper he drops it on the floor, and as there are about fifty papers there already he looks as if he were being gradually engulphed in a sea of news, or preparing to make a holocaust of himself, for a spark from the cigar he is smoking would almost certainly set the pile in a blaze.

"Have you any copy ready,

paste man.
Milnthorpe ? Entrez !"

Whereupon there enters a stout, goodlooking young fellow in a drab blouse. He has a pleasant smile and holds in his hand a number of printed slips.

Bonjour, messieurs," says Lud, as he goes briskly up to the scissors-and-paste man's desk.

"This is what I have over, Mr. Delane," he says in very fair English, at the same time showing his slips.

"Why, what a lot you have! Chauncy's letter, too, that Mr. Gibson said had to go in anyhow. My eye, won't there be a row!"

Another knock at the door, followed by the entrance of the knocker, a tall, well setup man, with a game leg and a walkingstick.

After casting an angry glance at Lud, as the latter withdraws, he greets the subeditors with easy familiarity and seats himself unceremoniously on the big table.

The new-comer may be twenty-eight or thirty years old; he has well-cut features and a healthy complexion, albeit the squareness of his jaws and the thinness of his lips, which are unadorned by beard or moustache, give him a somewhat hard, and, at times, a cynical expression. His brown hair is closely cropped, and his general appearance that of a man who has undergone military training.

"Any news?" he says, drawing a cigarcase from his pocket. "I'll thank you for a. light, Delane.'

"Nothing very important, I think. Have you brought any copy with you?"

"Of course I have; that is what I came for. Here it is. Give it to Lud yourself. If he mauls any more of my copy, as he did last week, I'll wring his neck for him."

"I would not try anything of that sort on if I were you, Corfe. Lud is a sturdy fellow and not so much to blame as you think. His compositors don't know a word of English, remember."