ou, because you are the only
man I dare to trust. Except the big chief at headquarters, you are the
only person in England, I hope, who knows that Nayland Smith has
quitted Burma. I must have someone with me, Petrie, all the time--it's
imperative! Can you put me up here, and spare a few days to the
strangest business, I promise you, that ever was recorded in fact or
fiction?"

I agreed readily enough, for, unfortunately, my professional duties
were not onerous.

"Good man!" he cried, wringing my hand in his impetuous way. "We start
now."

"What, to-night?"

"To-night! I had thought of turning in, I must admit. I have not
dared to sleep for forty-eight hours, except in fifteen-minute
stretches. But there is one move that must be made to-night and
immediately. I must warn Sir Crichton Davey."

"Sir Crichton Davey--of the India--"

"Petrie, he is a doomed man! Unless he follows my instructions without
question, without hesitation--before Heaven, nothing can save him! I
do not know when the blow will fall, how it will fall, nor from whence,
but I know that my first duty is to warn him. Let us walk down to the
corner of the common and get a taxi."

How strangely does the adventurous intrude upon the humdrum; for, when
it intrudes at all, more often than not its intrusion is sudden and
unlooked for. To-day, we may seek for romance and fail to find it:
unsought, it lies in wait for us at most prosaic corners of life's
highway.

The drive that night, though it divided the drably commonplace from the
wildly bizarre--though it was the bridge between the ordinary and the
outre--has left no impression upon my mind. Into the heart of a weird
mystery the cab bore me; and in reviewing my memories of those days I
wonder that the busy thoroughfares through which we passed did not
display before my eyes signs and portents--warnings.

It was not so. I recall nothing of the route and little of import that
passed between us (we both were strangely silent, I think) until we
were come to our journey's end. Then:

"What's this?" muttered my friend hoarsely.

Constables were moving on a little crowd of curious idlers who pressed
about the steps of Sir Crichton Davey's house and sought to peer in at
the open door. Without waiting for the cab to draw up to the curb,
Nayland Smith recklessly leaped out and I followed close at his heels.

"What has happened?" he demanded breathlessly of a constable.

The latter gla