o
identify him, if I could, as Mr. Douglas Romilly. Well, he isn't Mr.
Douglas Romilly, and that's all there is about it. As to my going out
with him last evening, I can't see that that's any concern of any one. He
was kind to me, cheered me up when he saw that I was disappointed; I told
him my whole story and that I didn't know a soul in New York, and we
became friends. That's all there is about it."

"That so?" the detective observed, with quiet sarcasm. "You seem to have
a knack of making friends pretty easily, Miss Wenderley."

"It is not your business if I have," she snapped.

"Well, we'll pass that, then," he conceded. "I haven't quite finished
with you yet, though. There are just one or two more points I am going to
put before you--and this gentleman who is not Mr. Douglas Romilly," he
added, with a little bow to Philip. "The first is this. There is one fact
which we can all three take for granted, because I know it--I can prove
it a hundred times over--and you both know it; and that is that the Mr.
Merton Ware of to-day travelled from Liverpool on the _Elletania_ as Mr.
Douglas Romilly, occupied a room at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel as Mr.
Douglas Romilly, and absconded from there, leaving his luggage and his
identity behind him, to blossom out in an attic of the Monmouth tenement
house as Mr. Merton Ware, a young writer of plays. Now I don't think,"
Mr. Dane went on, leaning a little further over the table, "that the Mr.
Douglas Romilly who has disappeared was ever capable of writing a play. I
don't think he was a man of talent at all. I don't think he could have
written, for instance, 'The House of Shams.' Let us, however, leave the
subject of Douglas Romilly for a moment. Let us go a little further
back--to Detton Magna, let us say. Curiously enough, there was another
young man who disappeared from that little Derbyshire village about the
same time, who has never been heard of since. His name, too, was Romilly.
I gathered, during the course of my recent enquiries, that he was a poor
relation, a cousin of Mr. Douglas Romilly."

"He was drowned in the canal," Beatrice faltered. "His body has been
found."

"A body has been found," Mr. Dane corrected, "but it was in an
unrecognisable state. It has been presumed to be the body of Philip
Romilly, the poor relation, a starving young art teacher in London
with literary aspirations--but I hold that that presumption is a mistake.
I believe," the detective went on, h