“The auctioneers who had sold the property were fortunately in a position to acquaint me with the present address of the lady. She was living in lodgings in the Earl’s Court Road, they informed me, and, to supplement her income, which was small, she gave music lessons. They opined that her husband’s death—which occurred in the Malay Peninsula some eighteen months ago—had left her very ill provided for, and that the sale of her household effects had been due to that cause. I must confess that both here and elsewhere I did not hesitate to quote, when necessary, my credentials. You may think that hardly playing the game; in which case I offer no defence. But it saved a world of explanations.

“I called upon Mrs Rivers. She was accessible, of course, professionally, and I took the opportunity to introduce myself and to state my object in visiting her. Fortunately she was well acquainted with the reputation of our Agency, and from that first moment all, so far as she was concerned, was plain sailing. It is unnecessary for me to enter into particulars; but I may say, generally, that she gave me her complete confidence.”

Miss Halifax, fluttering butterfly lashes, shot one glance at the secretary. He sat absorbed and intent, and her lids fell again.

“She was the widow, it appeared,” continued Gilead, “of a Captain Barclay Rivers, who, at the time of his death, had been abroad on a scientific expedition in the Malay Peninsula, and its contiguous islands. Some few weeks before the news of his death had reached her, there had arrived from him through a shipping agency, and directed in his handwriting, a small bale of bird-skins, but unaccompanied by any letter or notification of their despatch. There was nothing about the parcel to lead her to attach any particular significance to its contents, or to any part of its contents, and she put the skins aside, after a brief examination, fully expecting to hear from her husband by the next mail. Instead there came to her the tragic information of his death from swamp fever.

“She was left—needless to elaborate the reasons—in such restricted circumstances that it became necessary for her to realize on her every stick of property, and to retire into obscurity. The parcel of skins was included in the sale, and it found a purchaser. Such was the sum total of her testimony. She had no reason for assuming that the parcel had contained anything extraordinary, and, interested as she was in my view of the case, she was inclined to the belief, I fancy, that it would lead me to no more than the discovery of a beautiful mare’s-nest. Questioned about the contents of the bale, she admitted that, to the best of her memory, it had contained a single skin of the sort described; but she could not in the least recollect if that especial skin had been included in the lot sold by auction. She had, however, no reason for supposing otherwise.

“Well, here was something more gained, if a little less than suggestive. I had, of course, already minutely examined my purchase. It included no rose-ring, and yielded no solution. My next step was to return to the broker’s shop, to enquire if any previous customer had overhauled the packet that I had bought. Judge of my gratification when I learned that a week or two before, a man, answering in every description to my friend of Lower Marsh, had considered, and, after a careful scrutiny, had declined, the purchase. From that moment I saw the connection proved, and knew that it needed no more than tact and persistence to bring me to the heart of the mystery.

“Now it occurred to me that the bonnet shop in the Borough—known as Mélanies’—which had acquired from the broker the bulk of the lot purchased by him, should form my next subject for enquiry, and thither I bent my steps one morning about mid-day. As I reached the place, by a truly extraordinary chance the hands were trooping out to dinner, and amongst them I saw and recognised at once the figure of the girl whom I had seen issuing from the empty shop in Lower Marsh. Fortunately I passed unobserved by her, or she might have suspected something. But it came to me in a flash that she was in league with Jenniver, or whatever the man’s name might be, to trace the rose-ring to some customer of the firm, and that since she had been presumably unsuccessful, the rose-ring could not figure among the stock at Mélanies’, and therefore it was useless my pursuing my enquiries further in that direction. Really, I think, Miss Halifax, I was inspired in all this.”

“I am sure you were, Mr Balm. What was your next step?”

“Why, to induce Mrs Barclay Rivers to come with me to see if by any chance she could identify the man Jenniver himself. It was just possible, and it might explain everything.”

“And did she?”

“She came, with great reluctance. But I was by then, I am afraid, so eager in the quest that I would have abducted her had she refused. My intention was to introduce her to the man as one of those fashionable acquaintances whose custom he had desired; but he saved me the trouble. As we approached the shop he himself, accompanied by the identical young woman of my former acquaintance, issued from it, and the two, unconscious of our presence (it was raining, and our umbrellas were up), went down the street before us. ‘There he is,’ I whispered; ‘and the very girl I told you about with him. Quick! Do you recognize either?’ ‘Both, I am sure,’ answered Mrs Rivers, much agitated. ‘The girl, I am certain, is Annie Milner, a former maid of mine, whom I had to send away for misconduct; and he—wait—I seem to know him; but I’m so flustered.’ At that moment the two stopped at a door, and the man knocked—a double rap. ‘O!’ said my companion on the instant. ‘I know him: He was a postman in our district.’ I started; I turned her swiftly about. I almost ran her from the neighbourhood—for she had given me in those few words the clue I desired, and from that moment everything was clear to me.”

“Mr Balm! How? O, please go on!”

“One moment. I went straight, after seeing her home, to Scotland Yard, and, by virtue of those same credentials, secured an examination of the portraits of convicted criminals. The man of Lower Marsh figured amongst them. ‘Who is he?’ I asked. ‘George Lightfoot’ was the answer; ‘a Kennington postman sentenced to eighteen months imprisonment for letter-stealing, and discharged, after serving his term, within the last few weeks.’ There, Miss Halifax!”

“O! but I’m not there, indeed.”

“Why, you see, Captain Barclay Rivers had written a letter to his wife, telling her that he was forwarding the bale of skins, and mentioning a secret connected with one of them; and that letter Lightfoot had stolen amongst others. But, before he could formulate any plan for acting upon the information contained in it, he was trapped and arrested on another charge and sent to prison, only to find upon his release that the lady had been made a widow, and the bale sold and its contents scattered during his confinement. Hence his advertisement, and, generally, his determined efforts to trace the several items of the parcel; hence, moreover, his subornation and ruin of the unhappy girl at Mélanies’, whom he had known and courted when he was a postman and she a maid at Mrs Rivers’s, and whom he had, since his release, tracked to the shop in the Borough, and won to his nefarious purposes.”

“And you saw through it all in that single instant?”

“I will not go so far. But I had at least a vision of the truth. Still there remained to discover the nature of the secret, and the whereabouts of the lost skin—for by now I was convinced that the rose-ring, and the rose-ring alone, the one specimen of its kind which, it would seem, the parcel contained, held the solution of the mystery. Well, I discovered it; but at a fatal moment for one poor creature.”

“O, don’t stop!”

“I must hurry rather. There is much ground to cover in a few words. You will take for granted, Miss Halifax, the tedious process of inquiry they represent. In brief, I questioned Mrs Rivers as to her former ménage, and learned that in the time of Annie Milner there had been but one other servant in the house, namely a cook, Bessie Cotton by name. It was just possible that she might know something about the lost rose-ring.

“I traced this girl to the situation she had procured through her former mistress, from that situation to another; finally, to small lodgings she was occupying in the neighbourhood of Newington Butts. I found her at home, and opened upon her at once on the subject of the rose-ring. To my amazement she broke into a passion of tears and half coherent protestations, denouncing, as I understood, her former fellow-servant Annie Milner for having brought the law on her—as she supposed, in my person. It was long before I could convince her that I was not a plain-clothes constable, long before I could quiet and reassure her; but I succeeded at length, and persuaded her little by little to make a full confession to me of the truth. And what do you think it was?”

“It was she who had stolen the rose-ring?”

“It was she—a mere impulsive misdemeanour—a mere sin of vanity, committed for the purpose of adorning a cherished hat—which hat still survived so adorned. Seeing the parcel of bright skins so little regarded she had succumbed one day to the temptation of the rose-ring, attracted by its eyes and its singularity, and had appropriated it to herself.

“But now observe the irony of circumstance—or was it, perhaps, an instance of subconscious telepathy, of simultaneous suggestion? Anyhow, it appeared, Annie Milner and I had conceived at the same moment the same hypothesis about this girl her former fellow-servant; only—Annie had been an hour or so beforehand with me in giving practical effect to her hypothesis. In short, she had paid a visit that very morning to Bessie Cotton during her dinner hour, had wormed the truth out of her, and had demanded the hat itself as the price of her silence. And Bessie had yielded up her plunder intact, and Annie had carried it away—whither?

“For a moment, as you may imagine, I felt completely nonplussed. And then it occurred to me that Annie, having already sacrificed her dinner time to this quest, would for certain postpone carrying her prize to Lower Marsh until after business hours. I acted promptly upon that conjecture—which fortunately proved the correct one—you shall hear with what result.”

Gilead then related to his absorbed listeners the adventure with which we are already acquainted.

“We cannot gather,” he said at the end, “whether the villain had predetermined upon murdering his victim, with a view to silencing an untrustworthy confederate, or whether, as he himself declares, she drove him to madness at the last by coquetting with him, witholding her capture, and threatening to give the whole thing away unless he agreed to her extravagant terms. The fact that he made a jealous preserve of the premises—which he was renting for a few weeks at a few shillings a week from a local landlord—the fact of the spade and mattock in the cellar—these are at least subjects for grave suspicion. But likely enough we shall never know the truth.”

“And the mystery, Mr Balm. O, Mr Balm—please!”

Gilead laughed at the impatient young lady, as he raised the parrakeet-skin from the table.

“I told you,” he said, “that there was but one missing link needed to complete the chain of evidence. That missing link was, of course, Captain Barclay Rivers’s letter, which was found on Lightfoot. It told, in brief, of the Captain’s startling discovery, among the ruins of a temple of Kandy in Ceylon, of an almost priceless gem; of his apprehensions that this treasure might be lost or stolen from him in his varied wanderings, and of his final determination to send it home in a parcel of the skins of birds shot by him, concealed within the head of a rose-ringed parrakeet, the only specimen of its kind, he was careful to explain—with an elaborate description of the bird for his wife’s instruction—that the bundle contained.”

With these words Gilead, lowering the skin for the eager scrutiny of his two guests, laid open the body, and showed them how the whole cavity of the skull was filled with a single dark stone, which, projecting to the sockets, seemed to form the eyes. Then, delicately inserting a finger and thumb, he produced the gem for their inspection.

“It is an incomparable sapphire,” he said—“in a fine state always one of the most precious of precious stones. This example may be pronounced, in bulk and depth of colour, no less than superlative.”

As he spoke, his man entered the room.

“What is it, David?” he exclaimed.

“A lady to see you, sir.”

“What name, man? Why don’t you show her in?”

“Hearing you had visitors, sir, she begged if you would come to her instead.”

He proffered a card.

“It is Mrs Barclay Rivers herself,” said Gilead, turning gleefully to his guests. “I had half-expected her. Excuse me a moment.”

As he left the room, Miss Halifax, with a heart-felt sigh, turned to the secretary.

“Damn!” said that young gentleman laconically.

“I’m convinced she’s young and beautiful and romantic,” murmured the amanuensis unhappily. “Did you notice how shyly he referred to their confidences? A designing creature! Visitors, indeed! I’ve a presentiment we’re going to have our poor little noses put out of joint, Herbert.”

“Hush!” he whispered.

Voices were audible in the passage, and the next moment Gilead laughingly re-entered the room, ushering in his visitor. Miss Halifax rose with a frigid demeanour and a cold feeling at her heart—and encountered the figure of a buxom red-faced woman of sixty, waddling in like a jovial duck.

“Well, I’m blessed!” said Mrs Barclay Rivers, “if this ain’t like a scene out of Dickens, and the conspirators all met together in old Joe’s rag shop! What a pretty frock, my dear!”

Miss Halifax, with a delicious laugh, ran to take the hand offered.

CHAPTER VII.
THE QUEST OF THE WAX HAND

It was not to be supposed that the Agency, so catholic, so philanthropic, so disinterested in its labours, and withal so boundlessly endowed, would long escape the notice of those social powers, which, through all changes of creed and government, work steadily on in the cause of the human decencies. With these Gilead’s name was soon to become an almost apostolic one, and gradually, as he proceeded on his way, the executive, the police, the Home Office itself became his informal allies. A latitude was permitted him in the matter of technical infringements of the law, and he was made secure against official and officious interference. In his clean and fearless spirit of Knight-errantry, he probably realized little of the indulgence granted him, and, in cases where his way was made inexplicably smooth, accounted the fact to nothing more than the inherent rightness of things. On more than one occasion, indeed, Scotland Yard flagrantly abetted him in acts which, strictly speaking, were illegal. But then, if it had withheld its support, a scoundrelism or so would have prospered. It is true that Gilead was accustomed to give practical expression to his admiration of the force in princely gifts to its charities and awards to individual merit; but I for one will not believe that such generosity would, if construed into bribery, have induced it to condone for a moment a real offence in him. The police favoured him because he contributed, and contributed largely, to their power for good.

One morning the following advertisement, thumb-marked by the Secretary for his consideration, engaged Gilead’s attention:—

The usual reference number followed. Gilead thought a moment, then looked up.

“This, Nestle,” said he, “is hardly out of the common.”

“Hardly, sir,” replied the secretary. “Only the offer of services guarantees it as genuine. But if you would rather it went through the ordinary channels—”

“No,” said Gilead. “If you have nothing better to offer, I will take it. Romance, after all, must walk sometimes on the highway, if we have the eyes to distinguish her. I will undertake this, Nestle.”

He requested Miss Halifax to make an appointment with the advertiser to call on the morning next but one, and there left the matter for the time being.

At the hour specified the expected visitor arrived, and was shut in to his interview with the head, Miss Halifax, as usual, being present. Gilead’s ready sympathy was awakened on his first sight of the young man, who, in addition to a nervous white complexion and troubled eyes, was disfigured by the loss of his right hand, the place of which was supplied by a stump and hook.

The calm eyes of the young plutocrat would yield at first, however, no ground to sentiment. Enough experience had taught him to safeguard his emotions.

“You advertised for help,” he said. “May I ask, in the first instance, your name?”

“Dobell, sir,” answered the stranger, in a low voice—“Felix Dobell.”

He hung his head. He was patently in great mental suffering. His age appeared to be about that of his questioner’s; but some illness of life had lined his face prematurely. In appearance he might have stood—on that line of social demarcation which divides the accepted from the not quite acceptable—for a clerk on the lower grade. But his speech was educated and his dress quiet.

“And your vocation?” asked Gilead.

“I was cashier, sir, to a firm of law stationers.”

“Was?”

He noticed and emphasised the past tense.

“I was forced to leave, sir,” said the visitor scarce audibly.

“Forced?”

Again he accentuated the word, quietly, but significantly.

“No, not in that way, sir,” answered the other—“not, indeed. It was because I feared to be tempted to it that I left. I come to you with clean hands so far; indeed I do, sir.”

He put out his arms with an instinctive movement, and withdrew them as quickly. Miss Halifax, leaning over her table, shaded her eyes with her palm. But Gilead sat, to all appearance, as cold as judgment.

“You will forgive me,” he said; “it is necessary. You proposed, if I remember rightly, some indiscriminate form of service in return for this loan?”

“I have trained my left hand, sir,” answered the visitor eagerly, “to do the work of my right, and better. Anything in my power I will do gladly.”

“Fifty pounds is a large sum. For what purpose do you require it?”

“To pay a debt.”

Again the answer was hardly audible.

“Very well,” said Gilead—“and if I accept your terms, and require you, in exchange for the gift, to pick a man’s pocket for me?”

Miss Halifax rose in soft amazement. The stranger rose too.

“I have come to the wrong place,” he said. “It is only a judgment, I suppose; but—O, let me go, sir! let me go before I make a fool of myself.”

“You won’t do it?”

“No.”

The amanuensis forestalled him at the door.

“Mr Balm!” she whispered, in a voice from which every expression but wonder was gone.

Gilead rose, with a smile, and crossing the room swiftly, put a firm detaining hand on the young man’s shoulder.

“Come,” he said, “tell us all about it from beginning to end.”

His tone was unmistakable. With one amazed look at him, the young fellow dropped his face into his single palm, and bowed his shoulders as if quite broken with grief.

“Come,” said Gilead a second time; “it was a test, no more. Don’t you know us, man?”

It was evident that he did not. In a few sweet sympathetic words Miss Halifax informed him of the nature of the harbour of refuge into which he had drifted—in despair, it appeared; almost without a hope. Even when he realized at last his happy fortune, it was minutes before they could restore him to a frame of mind meet for explanations. But at length, abashed, grateful, half stunned in the prospect of help, he faltered out a desire to be questioned—and condemned, if need be.

“That is very well, then,” said Gilead. “You must tell us, if you will, as much about your life and circumstances as is necessary to an elucidation of the matter.”

“If you will only begin by questioning me, sir,” answered the visitor, evidently greatly overcome, as he seated himself diffidently on the chair to which he was motioned. “I think—I believe that I should find it easier to answer than explain. There is so much that is bewildering, as well as so much that is shameful in my story. But I will speak the whole truth; I will leave out nothing. Only question me.”

Gilead, seated opposite, nodded his assent reassuringly.

“I am sure you will,” he said. “Tell me, in the first place, who you are.”

“My father,” answered the young man, “was a respectable print-seller and frame-maker in Southampton Row. He gave me a good education. My mother, who died young, I never knew.”

“And yourself?” asked Gilead.

“When I was twenty-one,” said the young man, a sudden pink suffusing his wan features, “my father procured me a situation in the studio of Mr Auguste Lerroux, who dealt with him.”

He appeared to have prepared himself for the slight start which his words evoked. He looked up quickly, and dropped his eyes again, a deadly pallor replacing the momentary flush on his cheeks.

“The well-known artist and sculptor?” asked Gilead, resolutely commanding himself. “Well?”

“My father,” went on the visitor, in a low voice, “over-estimated some small ability which I possessed, and persuaded Mr Lerroux to take me on as his assistant, with a view to better things. I had not been with Mr Lerroux a year when my father died.”

He paused, in painful embarrassment, and again Gilead encouraged him to proceed.

“My father,” continued the young man, with evident difficulty, “was always, I fear, improvident and unpractical. It was deemed necessary after his death to sell the stock and goodwill of the business in order to discharge the debts with which it was encumbered. They proved greater than expected, and, for nett result, I found myself thrown virtually penniless upon the world. It was then that I succumbed to temptation.”

“Ah!” said Gilead, in a tone which he strove to make appear unconcerned. “And now we come to it, Mr Dobell.”

“Yes, sir,” said the visitor. He looked up, his eyes shining; but there was a piteous tremor about his lips. “I succumbed, sir,” he said, “and to my everlasting shame. I want to put it before you quite plainly, without extenuation or self-defence. It was this way. Mr Lerroux had engaged to pay me a certain small salary, but, as a matter of fact, he did not keep to his promise, or only so scantily and fitfully that, at the time of my father’s death, I had been able to put by no more than a pound or two, which represented my entire savings. There was a reason for this, as I knew. My employer figured large before the world of critics, but he was not a popular artist, and his patrons were few. He was generally hard-pressed for cash, and I knew, and know now most bitterly to my cost, that he had recourse to the money-lenders. At the time of which I speak he was in a desperate state, and I must believe that he had no choice but to discharge me. Anyhow he did discharge me, I thought harshly and cruelly, and at twenty-two I found myself cast adrift without means or prospects.”

He paused. “Come,” said Gilead, “we are no Pharisees here.”

“At first,” said the young man, lowering his eyes, “I hardly realised my position. I was strong and hopeful, and foresaw no great difficulty in procuring a situation. I did not understand that, without especial attainments, my chance was almost nothing in the struggle for existence. But I was quickly disillusioned. In a few weeks’ time I was utterly destitute, and at my wits’ end to know what to do or where to turn.”

“I was used to frequent a free library in the district where I lodged, to read the advertisements in the papers and answer such of them as I thought promising. One day the devil put it into my head that the walls of this room offered a resource to a starved and desperate man. There were hung on them a number of Japanese prints” (Gilead stirred and drew in his breath), “the gift of an eccentric patron, some of which my knowledge gained under Mr Lerroux told me were of considerable market value. What loss, moral or material, would their removal entail upon the frequenters of such a place? Christmas cartoons, I thought, would prove infinitely more to their taste. I dismissed the temptation, but it returned again and again, and each time more formidable. Presently, half involuntarily, I satisfied myself of the ease with which the room could be entered at night from the back, which abutted upon an empty yard. And then—and, then, sir, at last, I fell.”

Trembling all over, he took from his breast a pocket-book, and from the book a number of papers, one of which he selected and, rising, carried across to Gilead.

“Will you please to read it sir?” he said. “It is a damning witness, but a reminder and a warning which I can never make up my mind to part with.”

He stood with bowed head, while Gilead accepted and examined the slip presented to him. It was merely a printed paragraph, a cutting of a newspaper report, and it ran as follows. Gilead read it out in a low voice, that Miss Halifax might hear:—

Gilead looked up with a reassuring smile.

“Let him that is without sin among us cast the first stone,” he said.

The young fellow gave an irrepressible gasp.

“God bless you!” he said; “God bless you, sir, for that! But there is worse to follow—something infinitely more horrible and distressing.”

His listener’s brow darkened a little.

“Some later crime?” he asked softly.

“I will not—I must not say another word,” answered the visitor in agony, “until you have gone through this also. It is dated only three days later.”

Half dreading what was to come, Gilead accepted a second newspaper cutting from his hand, and, bending with compressed lips, read it out as he had the former:—

Gilead looked up from his perusal of the paper without a word.

“No, sir,” cried the young man—“before God I am guiltless. You must believe it, or there is an end of all hope for me.”

“I believe it, Mr Dobell,” said the soft clear voice of Miss Halifax.

Gilead smiled.

“You have your advocate, you see, sir,” he said. “And now, if you please, you will give us your true version of this affair, the main particulars of which are of course known to me. It will spare you pain, perhaps, if I recall them. My Lerroux was known to have possessed a pistol of this description, he was known to be in embarrassed, even in desperate circumstances, and he had been heard to threaten self-destruction. At the same time, the mere fact of his possessing the pistol was held to be no necessary proof of his having used it against himself, and the hint of a second party in the studio gave an ugly complexion to the affair. The evidence as to Mr Lerroux’s habits was inconclusive, the medical testimony was inconclusive, and in the end, if I remember rightly, the Coroner’s Jury brought in a open verdict.”

“They did, sir,” said the young man in great emotion; “but, for detective purposes, all reference to the clue which the police possessed had been withheld from them. But I knew what it was—I knew. I knew that I had touched blood, and printed with it upon the doorpost the very damning sign that had already once marked me down.”

“Sign!” exclaimed Gilead.

“I had,” said the other, hardly able to articulate, “a cross-cut, an old wound, upon the thumb of my right hand which, once detected, could not fail to betray me.”

“Your right hand!” Miss Halifax, standing a little apart, breathed out the words between pity and amazement.

The young man fought to command himself, and presently continued in a stronger voice: “Listen to me, sir—only listen to me, and, God helping, I will win your belief and pity. I tried to rob the library—it is all true—and at the last moment my courage failed me. I got home, got to bed, the most abased cowering reptile on God’s earth. Rising the next day to the full horror of my fall, I read in the evening paper of my own mad attempt and of the clue I had left behind me—a thumb-mark on the wall. From that moment hell seemed to have opened. I pretended to have cut myself, and enclosed my thumb in a stall. While in the very act a thought like a stab struck into my heart. I might take what precautions I might: there was another witness to that tell-tale scar in the studio of Mr Lerroux. If the police were to secure it before I could, my doom was sealed. I threw away the useless stall—I was mad by then with shame and apprehension, incapable of judging the extreme improbability of their alighting on this remote piece of evidence. At first I thought I would call on Mr Lerroux and implore him to give me the thing I needed; but the terror of exciting suspicion thereby, and so defeating my own ends, was a sufficient deterrent. Then in a moment my acquaintance with his house and way of life rushed upon me. He lived alone, somewhat freely, and was careless of precautions. I knew that after dinner he never went near his studio, and that to enter it from the back, where a door gave upon a strip of garden, should be a very easy matter. I ask you to believe, sir, that I was by then in a state of mind beyond the reach of reason. Moreover I only intended to appropriate what was already in a manner my own. About ten o’clock I crept round the studio side, treading upon flower-beds, and found, as I had expected, the door unlocked. I listened a moment, and then opened it with infinite caution. All was silent and dark within, save for a red gleam from the stove which stood to one side a little away from the wall. I knew where the thing I had come to seek was deposited; but, fearful of stumbling over some obstruction, I decided to kindle momentarily a spill of paper in order to take my bearings. Stealing to the stove on tiptoe, I saw an envelope or wrapper lying handy, and stooped to secure it. My fingers came up wet and sticky, and, as I kindled the paper, and turned with it in my hand, I saw—O, my God!—my old master lying dead on the floor in a pool of blood.”

Grey as ashes, the narrator, unable longer to support himself, sank back into the chair from which he had risen. His listeners hurried to sustain and reassure him.

“Say no more, my poor fellow,” said Gilead. “It is all plain, and you shall spare yourself. It was like this, was it not? In the midst of your horror, the awful responsibility, the awful peril you had incurred smote you out of stupefaction, and, without giving another thought to your purpose, you turned and fled, leaving that tragic thumb-mark for a clue to your pursuers?”

The young man thanked him with a look full of pathos and gratitude.

“I thought I should die, mercifully die,” he whispered, “when I heard what I had done. It must have been on the door-post, which I clutched to save myself from falling. Somehow I got home unobserved, and washed my hands; and then—O, my God, the cruel irony of Fate!—I found a letter awaiting me, offering me a post in a big law-printers and stationers to whom I had applied. If it had only come a week earlier!”

Miss Halifax, with a motion of infinite pity, touched his mutilated arm. Her intuition had already guessed the truth. He looked up at her with a faint smile.

“Yes, Miss,” he said—“the day that I began work, I was standing by a printing machine, when I heard one of my companions read out that very description of the suicide I showed you, and learnt for the first time of the clue I had left. I was again wearing my thumb-stall, and, not out of courage, but in a simple impulsive frenzy, I thrust my hand among the moving machinery, and the next moment fainted. When I came definitely to my senses, it was to find myself—with joy and relief—secure for ever from the witness I most feared. But, heaven help me, it was only a respite.

“The firm were very good to me, and kept me on, as having been injured, accidentally as it was supposed, in their service. And I tried to repay them by devotion to my work. In time the capacities of my two hands seemed all concentrated in the one left, and I became expert with it as I had never been with my right. Months past, and nothing happening to alarm me further, I grew by degrees to a certain confidence, and to a hope that the police had ceased to interest themselves in the matter of the thumb-marks. And then one day, all in an instant, my silly self-delusion was scattered to the winds. I received a visit in my lodgings from an enemy I had never conceived or dreamed of.”

He passed a hand across his damp forehead. Gilead patted his shoulder reassuringly.

“You remember, sir,” continued the young man, “my reference to money-lenders? There was one of these, a Mr Raphael Colfox, of Great Queen Street, who was often with my employer Mr Lerroux. I think he not only bled him pretty freely, but, with an eye to future possibilities, was in the habit of acquiring from him at nominal prices works of his. Among those that had passed into his possession was, it appeared, that very piece which I had risked my soul to obtain. He had come to tell me so, with the intimation that his late appearance in the matter was due to nothing more than the difficulty he had found hitherto in running me to earth. He had seen, he said, the thumb-mark on the post, and had at once identified it with another in his possession; and he offered me his silence at a price. All my explanations and protests were in vain, and he ended by convincing me that he held my life in his hands.”

The narrator, whose voice had sunk lower and lower, gave a little choke here, and stopped.

“I see,” said Gilead, “I am beginning to see very clearly. Tell me only, if you can, what was this article you desired so much to get into your own possession.”

“It was a cast of my right hand, palm uppermost, sir, that Mr Lerroux had taken most beautifully in wax. And my name was on it.”

There followed a short silence; and then Gilead spoke in the soft ominous voice that it always thrilled Miss Halifax to hear.

“This is all quite plain, Mr Dobell, and I thank you for coming to us in your difficulty. I should like to ask you a final question or so. This first visit of Mr Colfox’s—when did it occur?”

“About six months ago, sir.”

“And he has been—we won’t mince matters—blackmailing you ever since?”

“He forced me to accept a promissory note, sir, for an imaginary accommodation, and he has been—yes, he has been bleeding me on it ever since. I owe him fifty pounds at this moment, and he is pressing for its payment under threat of exposure. I had to leave my situation a month ago, or I don’t know what would have happened. I am not strong, and this constant misfortune and persecution seem to unbalance my reason. It was his own suggestion that I should advertise as I did in the Daily Post.”

“Exactly. You are convinced, of course, that he actually possesses the wax cast?”

“I have seen it, sir.”

“Where?”

“He keeps it in a safe in his office.”

“Does he, do you know, sleep on the premises?”

“No, I am sure he does not, sir. I know his private address.”

“Very well, Mr Dobell. And now I am going to place you in the hands of my secretary, Mr Nestle, who will make himself responsible for your present custody and well-being. Be assured that you have nothing to fear and everything to hope; that this nightmare shall not be permitted to demoralise you much longer. Come.”

The young man tried to articulate his thanks, but, utterly failing, Gilead took him gently by the arm and led him from the room.

Half an hour later Mr Balm presented himself at Scotland Yard, and, requesting an interview with the Chief Superintendent of the Criminal Investigation Department, was immediately shown in to that weighty official.

“Mr Ingram,” said the visitor, “I want you to introduce to me an extremely expert burglar.”

The Superintendent laughed, and, leaning his elbows on his desk and propping his chin on his clasped hands, regarded the other humorously.

“Come, Mr Balm,” he said; “what’s your latest little game?”

Their interview was a long one, and its termination left the Superintendent immensely interested and surprised. He whistled reflectively to himself more than once.

“So,” said he, “this is the explanation of the thumb-marks—as odd a coincidence as I’ve known, sir.”

“How about my burglar?” asked Gilead.

The Superintendent slapped his hand softly on the desk.

“Mr Balm,” he said, “you’re an odd one—upon my word you’re an odd one, sir. But I like your idea. What’s the harm, now? Nothing interfered with and nothing taken. I think I may say you may look to us in the matter. Of course, if the thing remained, and the man chose to produce it, your prodigy might have a devil of a business to clear himself. And we should be forced to take action, with what result the Lord only knows. But this alternative, if you can carry it through, ends the matter, and without loss to anyone but the skunk that deserves the worst. Go and see him, sir, and make sure, if you can; and then come back and report to me. In the meantime there’s a man—Jerry Trimmer’s his name—well, it’s my opinion that if you were to lock up that man nekked in a safe, he’d find means to bore his way out somehow. I’ll make enquiries about him.”

Mr Raphael Colfox had his offices in a dull stuccoed block of building that neighboured on the north-east corner of Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Here, high up, he laid his web for the hard-pressed flies that always came buzzing in plenty about that legal honey-pot. Gilead, being brought in to him by way of a dismal little ante-den, smelling of damp ledgers and having a shrewd anæmic child in it for clerk, found his gentleman a genial strong-voiced figure of sixty or so, with stubby white eyebrows, stubby white moustache, and white hair brushed forward of his ears at the temples. He wore a full grass-green bow at his neck, his frock coat bulged a little in the waist, and the only spot of colour in his face was supplied by his nose, which was somewhat shapeless and inflamed and sown with short white hairs.

“And now, sir,” said he, after some brief preliminaries, “what can we do for you?”

Gilead’s natural repugnance for the fellow made him a little short in his answers. His own clear candour never took such offence as it did at those who, experience told him, would be ready to flout him unknown, and to lick his plutocratic boots were he to reveal himself. He had no mercy on such toadeaters, and found any dissimulation, even for the best ends, difficult in their presence.

“That remains to see, sir,” he said. “Nothing, I may premise, in the way of loans or accommodations.”

“Not?”

Mr Colfox, sitting back at his ease, raised his eyebrows and nothing else.

“I will come to the point at once,” said Gilead. “I am something of a collector, a virtuoso, and I am told that you possess works, which you may not be unwilling to sell, by the late Auguste Lerroux.”

The moneylender pricked up his ears. Here, for the first time, was shadowing itself out a justification of his foresight. His nerve of cupidity thrilled. He must make the best of this chance.

He nodded his head agreeably.

“You are told,” he said. “May I ask by whom?”

“I employ an Art agent and adviser,” said Gilead, frowning over even that harmless prevarication. “I asked you a question, sir. It is immaterial who or what prompted it.”

The moneylender recognized an imperious client; he recognized also a patently affluent one. His manner became propitiatory.

“Well, it is true,” he said. “I speculate a trifle sometimes in this form of property; but it is hardly worth my while—the profits are so small. However, as it happens, I have a little bust by the master in that safe now, if you would care to look at it. I acquired it only a short time before his death, and it represents, I may say, his finished style. A few other, more important works, are in my possession, if—”

“I will look at the bust,” said Gilead, rising. His veins were pulsing with excitement, but he allowed no sign of it to appear on his face. There was a safe in the room set upon a stand in one corner; but it was not to that, sleek in green and brass, that the moneylender had referred. He went to a panel in the wall which he unbuttoned, and revealed a second safe—plain black iron and of a much older and smaller pattern—which was sunk into the brickwork. Gilead, looking over his shoulder as he unlocked this, was aware of a little throng of bijoutry within, of the bust in question, and, quite unmistakably, of a cast of a hand in wax. His fingers itched to pluck out the witness and cast it into the fire.

Mr Colfox, unsuspecting as an infant, withdrew the bust and held it to the light for the visitor’s inspection.

“Not much wrong with that, sir, I think,” said he.

Gilead gave a diplomatic interval to its examination.

“And your price?” he enquired, looking up.

“It is an exquisite thing,” said the moneylender—“Lerroux quite at his best. It wouldn’t be worth my while to part with it under a hundred.”

Gilead handed back the treasure.

“Nor mine to give it,” he said. “I will call again; and in the meantime think of fifty. Good morning.”

He was out and clattering down the stairs before the other could interpose. As he dropped, he heard the voice of the moneylender fading above him in plaintive remonstrance. His heart was stern with anger and resolve and a heat of triumph. It would be glorious to catch this scoundrel in his own springe.

A few hours later saw him closeted at the Agency with Superintendent Ingram, and an extremely small man of a somewhat aggrieved and fretful cast. This latter sat upon the edge of his chair, his knees together, his hands fingering his cap on them, and his little legs tucked under. He was a mere shred of a creature, with a thin shaved face, a cross mouth and eyes, and a dyspeptic cough. He wore a suit of ginger-coloured dittos, and a scarf round his neck of a chess-board pattern.

“Well, Trimmer?” said the Superintendent.

The little man jumped.

“There!” he said, “I wish you wouldn’t take me so sudden, Mr Ingram. I’m bilious, that’s what I am. These late hours play old Harry with a man of my constitution. You make me nervous.”

“Well, I’m sorry,” said the Superintendent. “It was thoughtless of me. You were at a party last night, no doubt. You should take more care of yourself at your age, you know. One of these days you’ll be laid up for good and all, Trimmer.”

A ghost of a smile twitched Mr Trimmer’s lips.

“It’s a question with me between a sanatorium and a monastery, Mr Ingram,” he said; “but I must finish my little bit of a fling first.”

“Well,” said the Superintendent; “this is without prejudice to your choice, you know. Do you think you can do it?”

“Think I can do it!” The little man winked at Gilead. “Ask a card-sharper if he thinks he could play ‘Old maid’.”

“You know what you’ve got to do, and leave no sign?”

“You,” said Mr Trimmer, “play your part, and I’ll play mine. The gentleman, I understand, guarantees the blunt?”

“Fifty for the attempt, and fifty more if you succeed,” said Gilead, smiling. He vastly preferred this sort of rascal to the Colfox.

Mr Trimmer would condescend to no further discussion of his ways and means.

“I was cracking nuts,” he said to the Superintendent, “before you’d got your milk teeth.”

Bribes, says a French proverb, can get in without knocking. That very night a little monkey-like figure of a man, balancing on a window sill which he had reached from an empty suite of chambers next door, forced a latch and dropped softly into that section of the Queen Street building which contained Mr Colfox’s office. By a very curious coincidence, the caretaker was engaged at the moment, at the hall door down below, in a close discussion with a policeman, who had knocked him up to enquire as to his knowledge or observation of some suspicious characters who had been seen lately hanging about the neighbourhood. While they talked, Mr Trimmer had entered, by means known to himself, the private sanctum of the money-lender, and was proceeding, with swift sure touches, about his business.