was moving
toward the door, I know now that I probably turned directly from it;
for, as I groped about in the night, calling frantically for the police,
my fingers touched nothing but the dripping fog, and the iron railings
for which I sought seemed to have melted away. For many minutes I beat
the mist with my arms like one at blind man's buff, turning sharply in
circles, cursing aloud at my stupidity and crying continually for help.
At last a voice answered me from the fog, and I found myself held in the
circle of a policeman's lantern.

"That is the end of my adventure. What I have to tell you now is what I
learned from the police.

"At the station-house to which the man guided me I related what you have
just heard. I told them that the house they must at once find was one
set back from the street within a radius of two hundred yards from
the Knightsbridge Barracks, that within fifty yards of it some one was
giving a dance to the music of a Hungarian band, and that the railings
before it were as high as a man's waist and filed to a point. With that
to work upon, twenty men were at once ordered out into the fog to search
for the house, and Inspector Lyle himself was despatched to the home of
Lord Edam, Chetney's father, with a warrant for Lord Arthur's arrest. I
was thanked and dismissed on my own recognizance.

"This morning, Inspector Lyle called on me, and from him I learned the
police theory of the scene I have just described.

"Apparently I had wandered very far in the fog, for up to noon to-day
the house had not been found, nor had they been able to arrest Lord
Arthur. He did not return to his father's house last night, and there is
no trace of him; but from what the police knew of the past lives of the
people I found in that lost house, they have evolved a theory, and their
theory is that the murders were committed by Lord Arthur.

"The infatuation of his elder brother, Lord Chetney, for a Russian
princess, so Inspector Lyle tells me, is well known to every one. About
two years ago the Princess Zichy, as she calls herself, and he were
constantly together, and Chetney informed his friends that they were
about to be married. The woman was notorious in two continents, and when
Lord Edam heard of his son's infatuation he appealed to the police for
her record.

"It is through his having applied to them that they know so much
concerning her and her relations with the Chetneys. From the police Lord
Edam learned