one door in this library, as it seems, and they are carefully watching that."
As he speaks he softly opens the window and fires at the man in the garden, who falls, only uttering a groan. As Raymond predicted, he faints with the pain.
With the rapidity of lightning he flings the window up violently, hurls the pistol to the farthest extremity of the garden, snatches the Marquis's hat from the chair on which it lies, presses one finger on the gilded back of a volume of Gibbon's Rome, a narrow slip of the bookcase opens inwards, and reveals a door leading into the next apartment, which is the dining-room. This door is made on a peculiar principle, and, as he pushes through, it closes behind him.
This is the work of a second; and as the officers, alarmed by the sound of the opening of the window, rush into the room, the Marquis gives the alarm. "He has escaped by the window!" he said. "He has wounded your assistant, and passed through that door. He cannot be twenty yards in advance; you will easily know him by his having no hat on."
"Stop!" cries the detective officer, "this may be a trap. He may have got round to the front door. Go and watch, Johnson."
A little too late this precaution. As the officers rushed into the library, Raymond passed from the dining-room door out of the open street-door, and jumped into the very cab which was waiting to take him to prison. "Five pounds, if you catch the Liverpool Express," he said to the cabman.
"All right, sir," replied that worthy citizen, with a wink. "I've druv a many gents like you, and very good fares they is too, and a godsend to a hard-working man, what old ladies with hand-bags and umbrellas grudges eightpence a mile to," mutters the charioteer, as he gallops down Upper Brook Street and across Hanover Square, while the gentlemen of the police force, aided by Dr. Tappenden and the obliging Marquis, search the mews and neighbourhood adjoining. Strange to say, they cannot obtain any information from the coachman and stableboys concerning a gentleman without a hat, who must have passed through the mews about three minutes before.
Chapter III.
The Left-handed Smasher makes his Mark.
"It is a palpable and humiliating proof of the decadence of the glories of white-cliffed Albion and her lion-hearted children," said the sporting correspondent of the Liverpool Bold Speaker and Threepenny Aristides—a gentleman who, by the bye, was very clever at naming—for half-a-dozen stamps—the horses that didn't win; and was, indeed, useful to fancy betters, as
