Metropole over a glass of coffee and a liqueur of cognac, I began to
realise the utter hopelessness of my search.

Digby Kemsley was ever an evasive person--a past master in avoiding
observation, as I well knew. It had always been a hobby of his, he had
told me, of watching persons without himself being seen.

Once he had remarked to me while we had been smoking together in that
well-remembered room wherein the tragedy had taken place:

"I should make a really successful detective, Royle. I've had at certain
periods of my life to efface myself and watch unseen. Now I've brought it
to a fine art. If ever circumstances make it imperative for me to
disappear--which I hope not," he laughed, "well--nobody will ever find
me, I'm positive."

These words of his now came back to me as I sat there pensively smoking,
and wondering if, after all, I had better not return again to London and
remain patient for the additional police evidence which would no doubt be
forthcoming at the adjourned inquest in a week's time.

I thought of the clever cunning exercised by the girl whom I so dearly
loved and in whose innocence I had so confidently believed, of her blank
refusal to satisfy me, and alas! of her avowed determination to shield
the scoundrel who had posed as my friend, and whom the police had
declared to be only a vulgar impostor.

My bitter reflection maddened me.

The jingle and chatter of that noisy cafe, full to overflowing at that
hour, for rain had commenced to fall outside in the boulevard, irritated
me. From where I sat in the window I could see the crowds of business
people, hurrying through the rain to their trams and trains--the
neat-waisted little modistes, the felt-hatted young clerks, the obese and
over-dressed and whiskered men from their offices on the Bourse, the
hawkers crying the "Soir," and the "Derniere Heure," with strident
voices, the poor girls with rusty shawls and pinched faces, selling
flowers, and the gaping, idling Cookites who seem to eternally pass and
re-pass the Metropole at all hours of the day and the night.

Before my eyes was there presented the whole phantasmagoria of the life
of the thrifty, hard-working Bruxellois, that active, energetic race
which the French have so sarcastically designated "the brave Belgians."

After a lonely dinner in the big, glaring salle-a-manger, at the Grand, I
went forth again upon my quest. That the fugitive had been in Brussels on
the previous day was p