reeting and assure her that I will come there as soon as ever I
am given strength so to do.

"I have been at that spot once only, yet every detail of its
appearance is impressed indelibly upon my memory. Alas! that I
do not know its name. Search and you will assuredly find it--and
you will see her. You will speak, and give her courage."

I bit my lip.

A sudden thought illuminated my mind.

The yellow flower!

Was not the mysterious woman whom I was to meet on the night of the
fourteenth also to wear a yellow flower--the mimosa!

CHAPTER IV.

"DEAR OLD DIG."

I told Edwards nothing of Sir Digby's curious request, of his strange
confidences, or of the mysterious letter to "E. P. K.", which now reposed
in a locked drawer in my writing-table.

My friend, be he impostor or not, had always treated me strictly
honourably and well. Therefore, I did not intend to betray him, although
he might be a fugitive hunted by the police.

Yet was he a fugitive? Did not his words to me and his marvellous
disguise prior to the tragedy imply an intention to disappear?

The enigma was indeed beyond solution.

At seven o'clock my visitor, finding necessity to revisit Harrington
Gardens, I eagerly accompanied him.

There is a briskness and brightness in Piccadilly at seven o'clock on a
clear, cold, winter's night unequalled in any thoroughfare in the world.
On the pavements and in the motor-buses are thousands of London's workers
hurrying to their homes in western suburbs, mostly the female employees
of the hundreds of shops and work-rooms which supply the world's
fashions--for, after all, London has now ousted Paris as the centre of
the feminine mode--the shops are still gaily lit, the club windows have
not yet drawn their blinds, and as motors and taxis flash past eastward,
one catches glimpses of pretty women in gay evening gowns, accompanied by
their male escorts on pleasure bent: the restaurant, the theatre, and the
supper, until the unwelcome cry--that cry which resounds at half-past
twelve from end to end of Greater London, "Time, please, ladies and
gentlemen. Time!"--the pharisaical decree that further harmless merriment
is forbidden. How the foreigner laughs at our childish obedience to the
decree of the killjoys. And well he may, especially when we know full
well that while the good people of the middle class are forced to return
to the dulness of their particular suburb, the people of the