The will, though not technically worded, was perfectly good and legal, and Juliet could have all the money she was likely to want for the present by accepting the offer of an advance which the lawyers begged to be allowed to make.

Gimblet wrote, further, that the list of names of members of the Nihilist society entitled the "Friends of Man" which he had discovered at the same time as the will and, contrary to Lord Ashiel's wishes, sent off by registered post to Scotland Yard, had been communicated to the heads of the police in Russia and the other European countries in which many of those designated were now scattered, with the result that a large number of arrests had been quietly made, and the society practically wiped out. The foreign guest of the Crianan Hotel was still at large. The name of Count Pretovsky was not on the list and nothing could be proved against him. He had moved on to another hotel farther west, where he was lying very low and continuing to practise the gentle art of the fisherman. A member of the Russian secret police was on his way to Scotland, however, and it was likely that Count Pretovsky would be recognized as one of the persons on Lord Ashiel's list who were as yet unaccounted for.

Gimblet told them, besides, that he had succeeded in finding the widow of the respectable plumber named Harsden, whom Julia had mentioned as being her father. Mrs. Harsden corroborated the story, and said that it was certainly the Countess Romaninov to whom Mrs. Meredith had consigned the little girl they had given her.