"Getting pretty sick of it, aren't you?" he queried.

A sure conviction possessed Richard that he was in the presence of a
lunatic.

"On the contrary," he replied, "I'm just beginning to enjoy myself."

"Well, well, there's no accounting for tastes. But I should have thought
you'd have had enough of railway stations. Better go home and stay
there."

Richard shook his head sympathetically.

"Try taking a little more soda in it," he suggested. "You'd be a
different man inside a week. So long."

The watcher by the gate was smiling pleasantly to himself as Richard
turned away.

It was nearly one o'clock when his wanderings brought him back to the
neighbourhood of Piccadilly. He had spent the intervening hours, with
little enough success, at the labour bureau in Westminster. From there
he had walked across the Mall and found an empty bench under the trees in
Green Park looking up Park Lane. He had hardly seated himself when he
saw a man come out of a big doorway opposite and hurry eastward in the
direction of Piccadilly Circus. Even at the distance Richard had no
difficulty in recognising the diner who overnight had nodded to him at
the Berkeley.

"Half a mind to give him a shout," he thought, but on reflection "I don't
know though, he seems in the deuce of a hurry and I can't imagine he's
any work to give away."

It would have saved Cranbourne a lot of trouble if he had followed his
first inclination.

CHAPTER 6.

CONCERNING A TIE.

Not a word had been received from Cranbourne. From the moment he left
Lord Almont's flat he disappeared completely. That was Cranbourne's
way, for once an idea started in his brain he rested not until it has
been realised or disproved. He had given himself three days to find a
human duplicate of Barraclough and among a population of seven millions
the task was no easy one. His quarry had dined at the Berkeley on the
twenty-fourth instant but beyond that point information languished.
The redoubtable Brown, prince of head waiters, who knew the affairs of
most of his customers as intimately as his own, was able to offer
little or no assistance. He remembered the gentleman who had dined
alone in a tweed suit and had said something about having no dress
clothes. He believed he had seen him in uniform during the earlier
parts of the war but couldn't recall the regiment. Had an impression
he paid for his dinner with the last of the notes in his pocket but
that m