e; I was
getting anxious--it doesn't do to be late on these occasions, you know.
Let me see, do you know Mr. Walter Hornby? I don't think you do." He
presented Thorndyke and me to our client's cousin, and as we shook
hands, we viewed one another with a good deal of mutual interest.

"I have heard about you from my aunt," said he, addressing himself more
particularly to me. "She appears to regard you as a kind of legal
Maskelyne and Cooke. I hope, for my cousin's sake, that you will be able
to work the wonders that she anticipates. Poor old fellow! He looks
pretty bad, doesn't he?"

I glanced at Reuben, who was at the moment talking to Thorndyke, and as
he caught my eye he held out his hand with a warmth that I found very
pathetic. He seemed to have aged since I had last seen him, and was
pale and rather thinner, but he was composed in his manner and seemed to
me to be taking his trouble very well on the whole.

"Cab's at the door, sir," a clerk announced.

"Cab," repeated Mr. Lawley, looking dubiously at me; "we want an
omnibus."

"Dr. Jervis and I can walk," Walter Hornby suggested. "We shall probably
get there as soon as you, and it doesn't matter if we don't."

"Yes, that will do," said Mr. Lawley; "you two walk down together. Now
let us go."

We trooped out on to the pavement, beside which a four-wheeler was drawn
up, and as the others were entering the cab, Thorndyke stood close
beside me for a moment.

"Don't let him pump you," he said in a low voice, without looking at me;
then he sprang into the cab and slammed the door.

"What an extraordinary affair this is," Walter Hornby remarked, after we
had been walking in silence for a minute or two; "a most ghastly
business. I must confess that I can make neither head nor tail of it."

"How is that?" I asked.

"Why, do you see, there are apparently only two possible theories of the
crime, and each of them seems to be unthinkable. On the one hand there
is Reuben, a man of the most scrupulous honour, as far as my experience
of him goes, committing a mean and sordid theft for which no motive can
be discovered--for he is not poor, nor pecuniarily embarrassed nor in
the smallest degree avaricious. On the other hand, there is this
thumb-print, which, in the opinion of the experts, is tantamount to the
evidence of an eye-witness that he did commit the theft. It is
positively bewildering. Don't you think so?"

"As you put it," I answered, "the case is extraordina