TWICE during the journey to London Leloir entered the compartment where Sir Anthony was, once bringing him tea, and again, just after leaving Normanton, bringing him the evening papers.

One of the dining-car attendants, who was a friend of Leloir’s, afterwards deposed that there was something very strange about the man’s manner.

“He looked startled and white,” ran his deposition, “looked like a man who had seen a ghost. I’ve known him a year, met him first on the run to Carlisle, then I met him in town by appointment and we went to a music hall together. He was always a good companion, and spent his money freely, but when he came into the car-kitchen for his master’s tea he had no sense in him; I asked him how his master was, he took me by the buttonhole and he says, ‘Parsons, do you believe in the supernatural?’

“‘No,’ I says, ‘I don’t. What makes you ask me?’

“‘Because,’ he says, and then he stopped, for the head attendant was calling to me.

“I’d give a dollar,” concluded Mr Parsons, “to know what he did mean, and I’d bet a dollar it was something queer.”

At St Pancras two broughams were waiting; Gyde got into the first, Leloir got on the box, and they drove off; the secretary and the dispatch boxes followed in the second brougham.

It was half-past eleven when they arrived at 110B Piccadilly.

Sir Anthony went to his own room, followed by his valet; the secretary went to his own room and to bed, as did Raymond the butler who was a man who kept early hours.

At midnight the house was as silent as the tomb.

Now, Mr Folgam’s apartments were on the same floor as Sir Anthony’s bedroom, and he was lying in bed reading The Count of Monte Cristo, when, very shortly after midnight, he heard a cry.

It was exactly like the howl of a dog. It was not like the sound a human being would emit, he afterwards deposed; and in this Mr Folgam, who was not a student of inarticulate sounds, was wholly wrong; for it was exactly like the cry of a man in the extremity of terror or mental............