re you a detective?"

Syme's heart turned to stone, but his face never changed.

"Your suggestion is ridiculous," he began. "Why on earth--"

The old man struck his palsied hand passionately on the rickety table,
nearly breaking it.

"Did you hear me ask a plain question, you pattering spy?" he shrieked
in a high, crazy voice. "Are you, or are you not, a police detective?"

"No!" answered Syme, like a man standing on the hangman's drop.

"You swear it," said the old man, leaning across to him, his dead face
becoming as it were loathsomely alive. "You swear it! You swear it! If
you swear falsely, will you be damned? Will you be sure that the devil
dances at your funeral? Will you see that the nightmare sits on your
grave? Will there really be no mistake? You are an anarchist, you are a
dynamiter! Above all, you are not in any sense a detective? You are not
in the British police?"

He leant his angular elbow far across the table, and put up his large
loose hand like a flap to his ear.

"I am not in the British police," said Syme with insane calm.

Professor de Worms fell back in his chair with a curious air of kindly
collapse.

"That's a pity," he said, "because I am."

Syme sprang up straight, sending back the bench behind him with a crash.

"Because you are what?" he said thickly. "You are what?"

"I am a policeman," said the Professor with his first broad smile.
and beaming through his spectacles. "But as you think policeman only
a relative term, of course I have nothing to do with you. I am in the
British police force; but as you tell me you are not in the British
police force, I can only say that I met you in a dynamiters' club. I
suppose I ought to arrest you." And with these words he laid on the
table before Syme an exact facsimile of the blue card which Syme had in
his own waistcoat pocket, the symbol of his power from the police.

Syme had for a flash the sensation that the cosmos had turned exactly
upside down, that all trees were growing downwards and that all stars
were under his feet. Then came slowly the opposite conviction. For the
last twenty-four hours the cosmos had really been upside down, but now
the capsized universe had come right side up again. This devil from whom
he had been fleeing all day was only an elder brother of his own house,
who on the other side of the table lay back and laughed at him. He did
not for the moment ask any questions of detail; he only knew the
happy and sill