e had
pictures, too--photographs. I shan't try to tell you what they
represented. I'm not thin-skinned; but there are some subjects that no
man anxious to avoid Bedlam would willingly investigate. On the table
by the lamp stood a number of objects such as I had never seen in my
life before, evidently of great age. He swept them into a cupboard
before I had time to look long. Then he went off to get a bath towel,
slippers, and so forth. As he passed the fire he threw something in. A
hissing tongue of flame leapt up--and died down again."

"What did he throw in?"

"I am not absolutely certain; so I won't say what I _think_ it was,
at the moment. Then he began to help me shed my saturated flannels,
and he set a kettle on the fire, and so forth. You know the personal
charm of the man? But there was an unpleasant sense of something--what
shall I say?--sinister. Ferrara's ivory face was more pale than usual,
and he conveyed the idea that he was chewed up--exhausted. Beads of
perspiration were on his forehead."

"Heat of his rooms?"

"No," said Cairn shortly. "It wasn't that. I had a rub down and
borrowed some slacks. Ferrara brewed grog and pretended to make me
welcome. Now I come to something which I can't forget; it may be a
mere coincidence, but--. He has a number of photographs in his rooms,
good ones, which he has taken himself. I'm not speaking now of the
monstrosities, the outrages; I mean views, and girls--particularly
girls. Well, standing on a queer little easel right under the lamp was
a fine picture of Apollo, the swan, lord of the backwater."

Sime stared dully through the smoke haze.

"It gave me a sort of shock," continued Cairn. "It made me think,
harder than ever, of the thing he had thrown in the fire. Then, in his
photographic zenana, was a picture of a girl whom I am almost sure was
the one I had met at the bottom of the stair. Another was of Myra
Duquesne."

"His cousin?"

"Yes. I felt like tearing it from the wall. In fact, the moment I saw
it, I stood up to go. I wanted to run to my rooms and strip the man's
clothes off my back! It was a struggle to be civil any longer. Sime,
if you had seen that swan die--"

Sime walked over to the window.

"I have a glimmering of your monstrous suspicions," he said slowly.
"The last man to be kicked out of an English varsity for this sort of
thing, so far as I know, was Dr. Dee of St. John's, Cambridge, and
that's going back to the sixteenth century."