ll me," I cried in desperation.

"_Dio!_ Go! Go!" he cried, pushing me violently towards the door. "Fly,
or we shall both die--both of us! Run downstairs. I must make feint of
dashing after you."

I turned, and seeing his desperate eagerness, precipitately fled, while
he ran down behind me, uttering fierce imprecations in Italian, as
though I had escaped him.

A man in the narrow dark passage attempted to trip me up as I ran, but I
fired point blank at him, and gaining the door unlocked it, and an
instant later found myself out in the street.

It was the narrowest escape from death that I had ever had in all my
life--surely the strangest and most remarkable adventure. What, I
wondered, did it mean?

Next morning I searched up and down Oxford Street for the Restaurant
Milano, but could not find it. I asked shopkeepers, postmen, and
policemen; I examined the London Directory at the bar of the Oxford
Music Hall, and made every inquiry possible. But all was to no purpose.
No one knew of such a place. There were restaurants in plenty in Oxford
Street, from the Frascati down to the humble coffeeshop, but nobody had
ever heard of the "Milano."

Even Olinto had played me false!

I was filled with chagrin, for I had trusted him as honest, upright, and
industrious; and was puzzled to know the reason he had deceived me, and
why he had enticed me to the very brink of the grave.

He had told me that he himself had fallen into the trap laid by my
enemies, and yet he had steadfastly refused to tell me who they were!
The whole thing was utterly inexplicable.

I drove over to Lambeth and wandered through the maze of mean streets
off the York Road, yet for the life of me I could not decide into which
house I had been taken. There were a dozen which seemed to me that they
might be the identical house from which I had so narrowly escaped with
my life.

Gradually it became impressed upon me that my ex-servant had somehow
gained knowledge that I was in London, that he had watched my exit from
the club, and that all his pitiful story regarding Armida was false. He
was the envoy of my unknown enemies, who had so ingeniously and so
relentlessly plotted my destruction.

That I had enemies I knew quite well. The man who believes he has not is
an arrant fool. There is no man breathing who has not an enemy, from the
pauper in the workhouse to the king in his automobile. But the unseen
enemy is always the more dangerous; hence my deep