ay long, and far into the night.

No other part of London offered such variety and scope in the study of
humanity. The City was stodgy, the Strand too uniform, Piccadilly too
fashionable, and the select areas for bachelor chambers, such as the
Temple and Half Moon Street, were backwaters as remote from the roaring
turbulent stream of London life as the Sussex Downs or the Yorkshire
Moors.

In addition to these things, the spot offered a fine contrast in walks
to suit different moods. There was that avenue of wizardry, Fleet
Street, whose high-priests and slaves juggled with the news of the
world; there was the glitter of plate-glass fronts between the Circus
and St. Paul's, the twilight stillness of the archway passages and their
little squeezed shops, the isolation of Play House Yard and Printing
House Square, the bustle of Bridge Street, and the Embankment. From his
window Colwyn could see the City shopgirls feeding the pigeons of St.
Paul's around the statue of Queen Anne.

To Colwyn, London was the place of adventures. He had lived in New York
and Paris, but neither of these cities had for him the same fascination
as the sprawling giant of the Thames. Paris was as stimulating and
provocative as a paid mistress, but palled as quickly. In New York
mysteries beckoned at every street corner, but too importunately.
Neither city was sufficiently discreet for Colwyn's reticent mind. But
London! London was like a woman who hid a secret life beneath an austere
face and sober garments. Underneath her air of prim propriety and calm
indifference were to be found more enthralling secrets than any other
city of the world could reveal. It was emblematic of London that her
mysteries, in their strangest aspects and phases, preserved the air of
ordinary events.

Colwyn saw nothing extraordinary in this. To him Life seemed so
perpetually inconsistent that there could be nothing inconsistent in any
of its events. It was to his faith in this axiom, expressed after his
own paradoxical fashion, that he partly owed some of those brilliant
successes which had stamped him as one of the foremost criminal
investigators of his day. He never rejected a story on the score of its
improbability. He had seen so many unusual things in his career that he
once declared that it was the unforeseen, and not the expected, which
occurs most frequently in this strange world of ours. That was, perhaps,
partly due to the wide gulf between human ideals and