ho he was?" Sabatini asked.

"No one had any idea," Arnold answered. "I think that I was the only
one who had ever seen him before. The night I dined at Mr.
Weatherley's for the first time and met you, I was with Mrs.
Weatherley in her room, and I saw that man steal up to the window as
though he were going to break in."

"This is most interesting," Sabatini declared. "Evidently a
dangerous customer. But you say that you found him dead. Who killed
him?"

"There was no one there who could say," Arnold declared. "There were
no servants in that part of the house, there had been no visitors,
and Mr. Weatherley had been in bed since half-past nine. We
telephoned for a doctor, and we fetched Mr. Weatherley out of bed.
Then a strange thing happened. We took Mr. Weatherley to the room,
which we had left for less than five minutes, and there was no one
there. The man had been carried away."

"Really," Sabatini protested, "your story gets more interesting
every moment. Don't tell me that this is the end!"

"It is not," Arnold replied. "It seemed then as though there were
nothing more to be done. Evidently he had either been only stunned
and had got up and left the room by the window, or he had
accomplices who had fetched him away. Mr. Weatherley was very much
annoyed with us and we had to make excuses to the doctor. Then I
left."

"Well?" Sabatini said. "You left. You didn't come straight here?"

Arnold shook his head.

"When I got into the road, I could see that there was a policeman on
duty on the other side of the way, and quite a number of people
moving backwards and forwards all the time. It seemed impossible
that they could have brought him out there if he had been fetched
away. Something made me remember what I had noticed on the evening I
had dined there--that there was a small empty house next door. I
walked back up the drive of Pelham Lodge, turned into the
shrubbery, and there I found that there was an easy way into the
next garden. I made my way to the back of the house. I saw lights in
the kitchen. There were three of his companions there, and the dead
man. They were trying to see if they could revive him. I looked
through a chink in the boarded window and I saw everything."

"Trying to revive him," Sabatini remarked. "Evidently there was some
doubt as to his being dead, then."

"I think they had come to the conclusion that he was dead," Arnold
replied; "for after a time they put on his overcoat and drag