ntage of your generosity. The flat and all its contents are
absolutely safe in my hands. And if you should decide, in the future,
that I must accept the consequences of to-night's work, I shall not
shuffle. All I want is to be left alone _now_.'

Polycarp opened the door.

'Good-night,' he said. 'Perhaps you did save my life. But if you had
appealed on that account to my gratitude I should have been obliged to
refuse your request.'

'I know it,' said Hugo. 'I knew whom I was talking to. Good-night, and
thanks.'

'I shall lock this door,' Polycarp called out, departing.

'Yes, do; and, I say, you'll lay hands on that man of Hawke's easily
enough in a day or two.'

'Oh, certainly,' said Polycarp. 'I have not forgotten him. But I was
compelled to deal with you first.'

Twisting his white moustache, and buttoning his overcoat across the vast
acreage of his shirt-front, Polycarp disappeared from Hugo's view into
the corridor.

CHAPTER XVIII

HUSBAND AND WIFE

Hugo bolted the front-door on the inside, relighted the candle which
Hawke's man had used as a weapon, and placed it in the middle of the
hall floor. He then penetrated into the servants' part of the flat, and
emerged on to the balcony by the small side-door, which was open, and
had evidently been forced by Hawke's man. And there, on the balcony, he
leaned over the balustrade in the cold humid night, and tried to recover
his calmness. He felt that any systematic, scientific search of the
premises would be impossible to him until his mind resembled somewhat
less a sea across which a hurricane has just passed.

Many questions stood ready to puzzle his brain, but he ignored them all,
and fell into a vague reverie, of which Camilla was the centre. And from
this reverie he was suddenly startled by the clear, unmistakable sound
of a door being shut within the flat. It was not the shutting of a door
by the wind, but the careful, precise shutting of a door by some person
who had a habit of shutting doors as doors ought to be shut.

'Polycarp has returned!' was his first thought. But he remembered. 'No!
I bolted the front-door on the inside.'

The conundrum of the clock and of the two sizes of footprints in the
drawing-room recurred to him. Without allowing himself to hesitate, he
strode back again into the flat, with a sort of unbreathed sigh, an
unuttered complaint against circumstances for not giving him an
instant's peace.

The candle was still pla