n the end,
another man was to appear, another man was to win her, and the dream was
to turn out nothing more than a dream after all.

Once again the voices of the Wild called out to the Caged Wolf; once
again, the old things beckoned and the new things lost their savour and
the Devil said, as before, "What is the use? What _is_ the use?" and the
Savage cried out to be stripped and flung back into the wilderness as
God made him, and called and called and called for an end to the things
that stank in his nostrils and for the fierce companionship of his kind.
And but that Time had staled these things a little and blunted the keen
edge of them so that they could not endure for long, and there was
Dollops and the lessons and Dollops' future to recollect, the Wolf and
the Savage and the Devil might not have hungered in vain.

Followed a period of intense depression when all things seemed to lose
their savour and when Narkom, amazed, said to himself that the man had
come to the end of his usefulness and had lost every attribute of the
successful criminologist. For the next three cases he brought him Cleek
botched in a manner that would have disgraced the merest tyro. Two, he
failed utterly to solve, although the solutions were eventually worked
out by the ordinary forces of the Yard; and in the third he let his man
get away under his very nose and convey Government secrets to a foreign
Power. It was but natural that these three dismal failures should find
their way to the newspapers and that, in the hysterical condition of
modern journalism, they should be flung out to the world at large with
all the ostentation of leaded type and panicky scare heads, and that
learned editors should discourse knowingly of "the limitations of
mentality" and "the well-authenticated cases of the sudden warping of
abnormal intelligences resulting in the startling termination of amazing
careers," or snivel dismally over "the complete collapse of that
imaginative power which, hitherto, had been this detective's greatest
asset, and which now, on the principle that however deep a well may be
if a force-pump be put into it it must some time suck gravel, seemed to
have come to its end."

These things, when Cleek heard of them, affected him not at all. He
seemed not to care whether his career was ended or not, whether the
world praised or censured. Neither his pride nor his vanity was stirred
even to the very smallest degree.

But Narkom, loyal still