s the threshold of the house or to
obtain even the merest glimpse of the murdered man. For all that,
certain facts relative to the position in which the body had been found,
together with the mysterious marks upon his shirt bosom, had leaked out,
and as Scotland Yard, as represented by Cleek and Superintendent Narkom,
had chosen to remain silent for the present relative to such clues as
had been discovered, this gave room for some fine flights of fancy on
the part of the representatives of the press.

The special correspondent of the _Evening Planet_ "discovered" that the
Count was "a well-known Austrian nobleman" who had offended the famous
Ravaschol group, and was the author of the equally famous "Ninth Clause"
which had acted so disastrously against it--a circumstance which, the
_Planet_ claimed, left no shadow of a doubt regarding "the true meaning
of the mysterious markings upon the shirt bosom of the unfortunate
gentleman." Whereupon the representative of its bitterest rival, the
_Morning Star_, as promptly discovered that he was nothing of the sort;
that he had been "positively identified" as the former keeper of a sort
of club in Soho much frequented by Russian, German, French, and Italian
anarchists; and that, on its being discovered by those gentry that he
had sold to the police of their several countries secrets thus learned,
he had been obliged to disappear from his regular haunts in order to
save his skin. And, furthermore, as the address of the house in which
that club had been maintained, and from which he had carried on his
system of betrayal, was 63 Essex Row, the explanation of the markings
was quite clear--to wit: "Four and two make six; one and two make three;
furthermore, the peculiar formation of the repeated figure 2 is, of
course, a rude attempt to make it serve for the letter S. as well;
which, taken in conjunction with the three X's, leaves no room for doubt
that these markings stand for Number Sixty-three Essex Row and for
nothing else."

Now as it happened that 63 Essex Row had, at one time in its career,
been the seat of just such a club and just such a proceeding as the
_Morning Star_ stated, nothing was left the _Evening Planet_ but
sneeringly to point out that "the imaginative genius of our esteemed
contemporary should not let it fail to remember that the man
Lovetski--to whom it doubtless refers, and whose mysterious vanishment
some years ago has never been cleared up--had his supporter