s of various agents, and Langholm noted down the nearest of these,
whose office was in King's Road. He would get an order to view the
house, and would explore every inch of it that very night. But his bath
and his tea had made away with the greater part of an hour; it was six
o'clock before Langholm reached the house-agent's, and the office was
already shut.

He dined quietly at his hotel, feeling none the less that he had made a
beginning, and spent the evening looking up Chelsea friends, who were
likely to be more conversant than himself with all the circumstances of
Mr. Minchin's murder and his wife's arrest; but who, as might have been
expected, were one and all from home.

In the morning the order of his plans were somewhat altered. It was
essential that he should have those circumstances at his fingers' ends,
at least so far as they had transpired in open court. Langholm had read
the trial at the time with the inquisitive but impersonal interest which
such a case inspires in the average man. Now he must study it in a very
different spirit, and for the nonce he repaired betimes to the newspaper
room at the British Museum.

By midday he had mastered most details of the complex case, and made a
note of every name and address which had found their way into the
newspaper reports. But there was one name which did not appear in any
account. Langholm sought it in bound volume after bound volume, until
even the long-suffering attendants, who trundle the great tomes from
their shelves on trolleys, looked askance at the wanton reader who
filled in a new form every five or ten minutes. But the reader's face
shone with a brighter light at each fresh failure. Why had the name he
wanted never come up in open court? Where was the evidence of the man
who had made all the mischief between the Minchins? Langholm intended
having first the one and then the other; already he was on the spring to
a first conclusion. With a caution, however, which did infinite credit
to one of his temperament, the amateur detective determined to look a
little further before leaping even in his own mind.

Early in the afternoon he was back in Chelsea, making fraudulent
representations to the house-agent near the Vestry Hall.

"Not more than ninety," repeated that gentleman, as he went through his
book, and read out particulars of several houses at about that rental;
but the house which Langholm burned to see over was not among the
number.

"I want