d, had
he cared to trust me with his key. It was an office that I had
undertaken for more than one of our absentee tenants. But the lawyer's
only answer was a grip of the hand as the train began to move. And it
seemed to me a haunted face that dissolved into the night, despite the
drooping flower in the flannel coat and the hat worn a little on one
side.

It would be difficult to define the impression left upon my mind by the
whole of this equivocal episode; enough that, for more than one obvious
reason, I said not a word about it to Uvo Delavoye. Once or twice I was
tempted by his own remarks about Abercromby Royle, but on each occasion
I set my teeth and defended the absent man as though we were both
equally in the dark. It seemed a duty, after blundering into his affairs
as I had done. But that very week brought forth developments which made
a necessary end of all such scruples.

I was interviewing one of our foremen in a house that had to be ready by
half-quarter-day, when Delavoye came in with a gleaming eye to tell me I
was wanted.

"It's about our friend Royle," he added, trying not to crow. "I was
perfectly right. They're on his tracks already!"

"Who are?" I demanded, when we were out of earshot of the men.

"Well, only one fellow so far, but he's breathing blood-hounds and
Scotland Yard! It's Coysh, the trick-bicycle inventor; you must know the
lunatic by name; but let me tell you that he sounds unpleasantly sane
about your limb of the law. A worse case----"

"Where is he?" I interrupted hotly. "And what the devil does he want
with me?"

"Thinks you can help him put salt on the bird that's flown, as sort of
clerk to the whole aviary! I found him pounding at your office door.
He'd been down to Royle's and found it all shut up, of course--like his
office in town, he says! Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Gilly! It's
a clear case, I'm afraid, but you'd better have it from the
fountain-head. I said I thought I could unearth you, and he's waiting
outside for you now."

I looked through a window with a scroll of whitewash on the pane. In the
road a thick-set man was fanning his big head with a wide soft hat,
which I could not but notice that he wore with a morning coat and brown
boots. The now eminent engineer is not much more conventional than the
hot-headed patentee who in those days had still to find himself (and had
lately been looking in the wrong place, with a howling Press at his
heels). But eve