I entered, and we drove off up Rathbone Place. As
we proceeded, our patient's face grew more and more ashen, drawn, and
anxious; his breathing was shallow and uneven, and his teeth chattered
slightly. The cab swung round into Goodge Street, and then--suddenly, in
the twinkling of an eye--there came a change. The eyelids and jaw
relaxed, the eyes became filmy, and the whole form subsided into the
corner in a shrunken heap, with the strange gelatinous limpness of a
body that is dead as a whole, while its tissues are still alive.

"God save us! The man's dead!" exclaimed the inspector in a shocked
voice--for even policemen have their feelings. He sat staring at the
corpse, as it nodded gently with the jolting of the cab, until we drew
up inside the courtyard of the Middlesex Hospital, when he got out
briskly, with suddenly renewed cheerfulness, to help the porter to place
the body on the wheeled couch.

"We shall know who he is now, at any rate," said he, as we followed the
couch to the casualty-room. Thorndyke nodded unsympathetically. The
medical instinct in him was for the moment stronger than the legal.

The house-surgeon leaned over the couch, and made a rapid examination as
he listened to our account of the accident. Then he straightened himself
up and looked at Thorndyke.

"Internal haemorrhage, I expect," said he. "At any rate, he's dead, poor
beggar!--as dead as Nebuchadnezzar. Ah! here comes a bobby; it's his
affair now."

A sergeant came into the room, breathing quickly, and looked in surprise
from the corpse to the inspector. But the latter, without loss of time,
proceeded to turn out the dead man's pockets, commencing with the bulky
object that had first attracted his attention; which proved to be a
brown-paper parcel tied up with red tape.

"Pork-pie, begad!" he exclaimed with a crestfallen air as he cut the
tape and opened the package. "You had better go through his other
pockets, sergeant."

The small heap of odds and ends that resulted from this process tended,
with a single exception, to throw little light on the man's identity;
the exception being a letter, sealed, but not stamped, addressed in an
exceedingly illiterate hand to Mr. Adolf Schoenberg, 213, Greek Street,
Soho.

"He was going to leave it by hand, I expect," observed the inspector,
with a wistful glance at the sealed envelope. "I think I'll take it
round myself, and you had better come with me, sergeant."

He slipped the letter in