t Luke would be Earl of Radclyffe after me.

"It was not likely that in their search for the missing criminal who
had stabbed an unknown stranger in a cab, the Belgian police would
suspect an English peer. The mystery of that crime has remained
impenetrable, because nothing was ever known of the stranger who was
murdered. At the mean hotel where he lodged no one knew anything
about him. Only one person knew and he was silent for purposes of his
own.

"Before the police searched the unknown stranger's room, the room
which he shared with the chance friend whom he had picked up on the
Belgian boat, the latter already had found and concealed the papers
which would have revealed the identity of the murdered man, if not
that of his murderer.

"I, at home in England, wondered how it was that the Belgian police
had never discovered that the murdered man was named Philip de
Mountford and that he claimed to be the heir to the earldom of
Radclyffe. I expected paragraphs in the paper, some unpleasantness
even, but none came.

"I could not understand it, for I had forgotten the existence of the
chance friend.

"And then one day last April I understood. Once more I had letters
from abroad, from a man who claimed to be my brother's son. At first I
thought the whole thing a silly imposture, until the day when a man
confronted me in my own house, armed with every proof that I had
killed Philip de Mountford in Brussels. He had the latter's passports,
his birth and marriage certificates, his letters of identification,
all, all the papers that he had filched from among the dead man's
things, and which he now flaunted before me, daring me to prove him an
impostor. 'If I am not Philip de Mountford,' he said to me, 'then
where is Philip de Mountford?' And from that hour, I was as wax in his
hands. He held me and he knew it. I might have proved him an impostor,
and he could prove me a murderer.

"Heaven alone knows how I did not lose my reason then. I floundered in
a sea of wild conjectures, wild projects, wild hopes of escape. But
my tyrant held me, and I dared not rebel.

"And once more I was obsessed with the awful certitude that Luke would
never be Earl of Radclyffe after me, while this man lived.

"He had so taken upon himself the personality of Philip, the evidences
which went to prove his identity with the late Arthur de Mountford's
son were so strangely circumstantial, that, short of my proclaiming
loudly that I had killed m