he skirted slush and garbage sinks, slipped around the blacker gulfs
that denoted unguarded basement holes, and eluded the hideous shadows
that lurched by in the gloom.

Hugging the wall, he presently became aware of footsteps behind him. He
rounded a corner, and, turning swiftly, collided with something which
grabbed him with great hands. Without hesitation, the lad leaned down
and set his teeth deep into the hairy arm.

The man let go with a hoarse bellow of rage and the boy, darting across
the alley, could hear him stumbling after him in blind search of the
narrow way.

As he sped along a door suddenly opened in the blank wall beside him,
and a stream of ruddy light gushed out, catching him square within its
radiance, mud-spattered, starry-eyed, vivid.

A man stood framed in the doorway.

"Come in," he commanded, briefly.

The boy obeyed. Surreptitiously he wiped the wet and mud from his face
and tried to reduce his wild breathing.

The room which he entered was meagre and stale-smelling, with bare floor
and stained and sagging wall-paper; unfurnished save for a battered deal
table and some chairs.

He sank into one of them and stared with frank curiosity past his
employer, who had often entrusted him with messages requiring secrecy,
past his employer's companion, to the third figure in the room--a
prostrate figure which lay quite still under the heavy folds of a long
dark ulster with its face turned to the wall.

"Well?" It was a singularly agreeable voice which aroused him, soft and
well-bred, but with a faint foreign accent. The speaker was his
employer, a slender dark man, with a finely carved face, immobile as the
Sphinx. He had laid aside his Inverness and top hat, and showed himself
in evening dress with a large--perhaps a thought too large--buttonhole
of Parma violets, which sent forth a faint fragrance.

Of the personality of the man the messenger knew nothing more than that
he was foreign, eccentric in a quiet way, lived in a grand house near
Portland Place, and rewarded him handsomely for his occasional services.
That the grand house was an hotel at which Poltavo had run up an
uncomfortable bill he could not know.

The boy related his adventures of the evening, not omitting to mention
his late pursuer.

The man listened quietly, brooding, his elbows upon the table, his
inscrutable face propped in the crotch of his hand. A ruby, set quaintly
in a cobra's head, gleamed from a ring upon his li