FREYBERGER had slept scarcely three hours during the night, yet he looked quite fresh.

He had done a tremendous lot of work in the way of putting out nets.

He had as complete a list as could be obtained of the lodging-houses in the neighbourhood, every early morning coffee stall in Kensington and Bayswater had been kept under surveillance, also the newspaper shops. The tube stations at Notting Hill Gate, Holland Park, Shepherd’s Bush, and Queen’s Road, Bayswater, had been watched, and the result, up to this had been the arrest of one man who had easily proved his identity and the fact of his innocence.

The bother was that Klein’s description as to dress could not be given. Only the fact that he was pale, clean-shaven, of the middle height and spoke with a German accent.

“How fortunate,” cried Hellier; “you are the very person I wished most to see.”

“Mr Hellier, I believe,” replied the other, who did not seem at all enthusiastic at the meeting. “What can I do for you?”

“Will you walk a few paces down the street?”

“Certainly.”

“It’s this way,” said Hellier. “I read in the papers this morning of a crime.”

“Which?”

“The murder of Mr Goldberg.”

“Yes, yes.”

“You remember what I said to you last night?”

“Perfectly.”

“Well, it occurred to me that this was the crime we were waiting for.”

“I was unaware that I was waiting for any crime,” said the other.

“Well, you remember my predicting that a crime of this nature would occur?”

“An easy prediction in London, where we have a murder every second day.”

“Not strangulation without an apparent motive.”

“Well, well; what do you wish to say about it?”

“Well, convinced in my own mind that the author of this crime was also the criminal in the Gyde and Lefarge cases, I determined to come up here and look about.”

“To play the r?le of an amateur detective, in short.”

“Yes, but please don’t misunderstand me. My object is not curiosity. I will be frank with you. I love Mademoiselle Lefarge, and I can never hope to marry her till her father’s name is cleared.”

“You wish to marry this lady and cannot do so till her father’s name is cleared. Is that what I understand you to say?”

“Yes.”

“Well, shall I tell you how you can best help to clear her father’s name?”

“Yes.”

“Go home and forget about it all; leave the matter in the hands of professional men who know how to act. Nothing interferes so much with us as interference.”

“Perhaps, but you know chance sometimes gives a clue where intelligence fails to find any. What would you say if I told you that I believed I had seen Klein, the man you are looking for, this morning?”

Freyberger started, but recovered himself instantly.

“I would say that I believed you to be mistaken.”

“Yet I have seen a man whose face closely resembled that portrait you showed us last night.”

“Where?”

“In St Ann’s Road, close to St James’s Road. I strolled along it by chance this morning, after visiting the scene of the murder, and, coming out of one of the houses, I saw this man.”

“Yes?”

“I followed him to the High Street. There he got on to a motor-omnibus and I lost him.”

“You lost him!”

“It was not my fault, for I could not stop the omnibus and there were no cabs.”

“It does not in the least matter,” said Freyberger, in a tone of assumed indifference, “for it was a thousand to one you were mistaken.”

“If that is your opinion,” said Hellier, angry at the other’s tone, “there is no use in our discussing the matter further. I wish you good day.”

“Stay a moment,” said Freyberger.

“Yes.”

“You say you saw this man coming out of a certain house. Can you recognize the house again?”

“Yes.”

“Well, as a matter of form, I will accompany you there.”

Hellier hesitated a moment, then he conquered his sense of pique and turned in the direction of Hammersmith.

They walked, scarcely exchanging a word. Freyberger’s mind was filled with anxiety, expectancy and a sense of deep irritation.

There was something exasperating to him about Hellier. This outsider had already cast so much light on the case; was it destined that he should cast more?

“This is the house,” said Hellier, when they had reached the place.

“Empty,” replied Freyberger, looking over the railings.

It was the only detached residence in the road, all the other houses were semi-detached.

The garden was neglected and the front windows blindless and dusty.

Freyberger opened the gate and, followed by Hellier, walked up the path to the front door. He knocked and rang, but there was no reply.

“Let’s try the back,” said Freyberger; “some people live in the back premises and only keep a hall door for ornament.”

But no one, apparently, lived in the back premises of No. 18 St Ann’s Road.

A glassed-in verandah ran along the whole of the back.

Freyberger tried the verandah door, it was locked. Some green shelves, containing a few empty flower-pots, were visible; against one of the shelves stood a hoe, on the blade of the hoe some dark brown traces of earth proclaimed to the eye of the detective that the instrument had been used quite recently, and not for hoeing but for digging.

“There is no one here,” said Freyberger.

“No one now,” replied Hellier, “but there has been some one.”

“Oh, yes, no doubt; one might say the same of Sodom and Gomorrah, or Pompeii.”

“If Klein has been here, if this is one of his hiding places, he may come back.”

“If,” replied Freyberger.

They were walking back down the garden path.

At the gate Hellier made one last attempt to infect the detective with his own idea.

“Could you not get a search warrant and search the place?”

This remark completely broke Freyberger’s temper down, and the German came out.

“Search warrant! You talk like a child, not like a man. Warrant to search for what? Flower-pots? What I will do in the case I will do. I wish for no interference. I wish you good day.”

He turned to the left, towards Malpas Road. Hellier to the right.

“Fool,” thought Hellier, “pig-headed ass; no matter—wait.”

“Swine-hound,” thought Freyberger; “directing me what to do! Search warrant!”

Freyberger turned the corner, walked a hundred yards down Malpas Road and then came back.

Hellier was not in sight. The detective waited for a moment or two to make sure, and then approached No. 18.

He entered the gate, closed it behind him, and made for the back garden.

Here he stood for a moment, looking about him with eager eyes. Then he began searching about on the ground attentively, as a person searches who has dropped a coin.

There was a fairish sized grass plot, on which the grass was rank and long. A gravelled walk lay round it, and a flowerless flower bed between the walk and the garden wall.

There was no sign of a bootmark anywhere, though the ground was soft and there had been no frost on the previous night.

The gravel was disturbed on the walk leading to the verandah, but that was nothing.

In that portion of the garden where digging was possible there was no sign. Yet the hoe had been used quite recently, and a sure instinct told him that it had not been used in the front garden, where observation was possible, but here, in this place that was overlooked by nothing but blind walls and the back windows of an empty house.

Suddenly his eye was struck by an object upon the flower bed by the rear wall.

A half-withered cabbage leaf. There were withered leaves and to spare in the garden, but this was the only cabbage leaf. Nothing looked more natural or in keeping with the general untidiness of the place. A thousand men hunting for traces would have disregarded it.

Freyberger walked towards it and picked it up.

The bit of ground it had covered had been disturbed.

In a moment, digging with his naked hand, he had unearthed a flat, morocco leather-covered box. He opened it, it was a jewel case and empty. Upon the silk lining of the cover was the name and address:

“Smith and Wilkinson, Regent Street.”

Smith and Wilkinson, Sir Anthony Gyde’s jewellers.

He unearthed another box, and yet another.

The sweat stood out in beads upon his forehead.

There was something in the Gyde case that affected him as he had never been affected before. Perhaps it was some effluence from the obscure and diabolical mind with which he felt himself at war; perhaps it was the extraordinary intricacies of the pursuit, and the foreknowledge that the creature against whom he had pitted himself was at once a demon, a genius and a madman. Perhaps it was on account of all these reasons that, when he unearthed these recent traces, his soul turned in him and a furious hunger and hatred filled his heart.

The hound hates the thing he is pursuing. The lion hates the buck. All hunting is an act of vengeance; not for food alone does the pursuer chase the pursued, but from some old antipathy begotten when the world was young.

At times Freyberger, in his unravelling of the Gyde case, was seized by an overmastering desire to have his hands upon the creature he was pursuing and to drag him to his death.

It is one of the laws of mind that the ferocity of the pursuer increases at each double and shift of the pursued.

Carefully searching with his hands in the soft earth and finding nothing else, Freyberger smoothed the soil, replaced the cabbage leaf and carefully effaced his traces on the gravel of the walk. Then, with the jewel cases in the pocket of his overcoat, he approached the house.

He examined the lock of the verandah door. The affair was so shaky that he could have burst it in with a kick, but violence was the last thing to be used. He drew from his pocket what the thieves of Madrid term a “matadore”; what the Apachés of Paris term a “nightingale”; what an honest man might call a piece of thick wire about a foot long, but of such material as to be fairly easily bent or straightened without danger of fracture.

He bent............