eir attention, and they both turned their heads.

From a first-story window Hugo was gesticulating at them.

CHAPTER XXVI

SECOND TRIUMPH OF SIMON

'Come up at once,' Hugo whispered. 'Door opposite top of stairs.'

And he threw down on to the pavement a latchkey.

'What do you think of yourself now, Si?' Albert asked his brother, as
they entered the house. 'You've let yourself in for something at last.'

They found Hugo in an ordinary bedsitting-room. He was wearing his hat
and his overcoat, and staring out of the open window. It was a cold
night, but he did not seem to feel the icy draught which blew into the
apartment. The whole of his attention appeared to be concentrated on No.
23. He did not at first even turn to look at the brothers when they came
in. They explained themselves.

'I will tell you why I am here, and what has occurred to me,' said
Hugo, playing, perhaps rather nervously, with the knife and cheese-plate
which still lay on the small table by the window. 'Then we can decide
what to do. I've hired this room.'

No doubt existed in his mind that Simon had happened upon the track of
the veritable living Ravengar. It could not be a coincidence that a man
so strongly resembling Ravengar, a man posing as a doctor, and buying
nearly a sovereign's worth of chloroform, should be occupying rooms in
the same house as Camilla. The tremendous revelation of Ravengar's
genius for stratagem and intrigue afforded by the recital of the two
brothers came upon Hugo with a dazing shock. This man, whom he knew from
Camilla's own story to be curiously deficient in ordinary human
sentiments, had arranged a sham suicide for the benefit of the general
public. He had let Hugo into the secret of that deception, but only to
cheat him with another deception, and a more monstrous one. The brain
that could conceive the fiction of suicide in the vault--a fiction
which, while lulling Hugo into a false security as regards Camilla's
safety, at the same time poisoned his happiness--such a brain might be
capable of unimagined horrors. Sane or mad, the mere existence of that
brain was a menace before which Hugo trembled. He realized that Ravengar
had been consummately acting during the latter part of their interview
on the first day of the sale, and again consummately acting when he
spoke to Hugo on the telephone. Ravengar had, beyond doubt, deliberately
set himself to lure Camilla back to England, and he had succeeded.
Beyo