emblance of any
human shape save for its clothes, really would appear to every one as
that of the Hon. Robert de Genneville, while the latter disappeared for
ever from the old world and started life again in the new.

"Then you must always reckon with the practically invariable rule that a
murderer always revisits, if only once, the scene of his crime.

"Two years have elapsed since the crime; no trace of Timothy
Beddingfield, the lawyer, has ever been found, and I can assure you that
it will never be, for his plebeian body lies buried in the aristocratic
family vault of the Earl of Brockelsby."

He was gone before Polly could say another word. The faces of Timothy
Beddingfield, of the Earl of Brockelsby, of the Hon. Robert de
Genneville seemed to dance before her eyes and to mock her for the
hopeless bewilderment in which she found herself plunged because of
them; then all the faces vanished, or, rather, were merged in one long,
thin, bird-like one, with bone-rimmed spectacles on the top of its
beak, and a wide, rude grin beneath it, and, still puzzled, still
doubtful, the young girl too paid for her scanty luncheon and went her
way.

CHAPTER XXXIV

THE MYSTERIOUS DEATH IN PERCY STREET

Miss Polly Burton had had many an argument with Mr. Richard Frobisher
about that old man in the corner, who seemed far more interesting and
deucedly more mysterious than any of the crimes over which he
philosophised.

Dick thought, moreover, that Miss Polly spent more of her leisure time
now in that A.B.C. shop than she had done in his own company before, and
told her so, with that delightful air of sheepish sulkiness which the
male creature invariably wears when he feels jealous and won't admit it.

Polly liked Dick to be jealous, but she liked that old scarecrow in the
A.B.C. shop very much too, and though she made sundry vague promises
from time to time to Mr. Richard Frobisher, she nevertheless drifted
back instinctively day after day to the tea-shop in Norfolk Street,
Strand, and stayed there sipping coffee for as long as the man in the
corner chose to talk.

On this particular afternoon she went to the A.B.C. shop with a fixed
purpose, that of making him give her his views of Mrs. Owen's mysterious
death in Percy Street.

The facts had interested and puzzled her. She had had countless
arguments with Mr. Richard Frobisher as to the three great possible
solutions of the puzzle--"Accident, Suicide, Murder?"

"U