they had cut a neat hole in the lid and extracted the contents
piecemeal. These were not strewn broadcast about the room, but set out
with some method on a dressing-table as well as in the basin and the
bath. Apparently the stage of selection had been reached when we
interrupted the proceedings, and the first thing that struck me was the
amount of fine old plate and silver, candelabra, urns, salvers and the
like, which had not been removed; but Delavoye was already up to the
right armpit in the chest, and my congratulations left him grim.

"They've got my mother's jewel-case all right!" said he. "She has one or
two things worth all those put together; but we shall see them again
unless I'm much mistaken. Come into my room and hear the why and
wherefore. Ah! I was forgetting young ambition's ladder; thanks, Gilly.
I hope you see how hard it's hooked to the woodwork on this side? It's
only been their emergency exit; we shall probably find that they took
their tickets at the pantry window. Now for a drink in my room and a bit
of Sherlock Holmes' work on the lucky slipper!"

I wish I could describe the change in Uvo Delavoye as he sat at his desk
once more, his eager face illumined by the reading gas-lamp with the
smelly rubber tube. Eager was not the word for it now, neither was it
only the gas that lit it up. At its best, for all its bloodless bronze
and premature furrows, the face of Uvo was itself a lamp, that only
flickered to burn brighter, or to beam more steadily; and now he was at
his best in the very chair and attitude in which I had seen him at his
worst not so many minutes before. Was this the fellow who had toyed so
tremulously with a deadly weapon and a deadlier idea? Was it Uvo
Delavoye who had deliberately debauched his mind with the thought of his
own blood, until to my eyes at least he looked capable of shedding it at
the morbid prompting of a degenerate impulse? I watched him keenly
examining the thing in his hands, chuckling and gloating over a trophy
which I for one would have taken far more seriously; and I could not
believe it was he whom I had caught with a revolver, loaded or unloaded,
screwed into his ear.

It was in a silence due to two divergent lines of thought that we both
at once became aware of a prolonged but muffled tattoo on the door
below.

"Coppers ahoy!" cried Uvo softly. "I thought you hauled the rope-ladder
up after us?"

"So I did; but how do you know it's a copper?"

"Who e