alive. I shall make it my very especial business to ascertain whether he
is or not. And if he is not, I shall take it to myself as a sacred duty
to lay my hand on the man who has compassed his death."

I looked at Thorndyke with something akin to awe. In the quiet
unemotional tone of his voice, in his unruffled manner and the stony
calm of his face, there was something much more impressive, more
fateful, than there could have been in the fiercest threats or the most
passionate denunciations. I felt that in those softly spoken words he
had pronounced the doom of the fugitive villain.

He turned away from the window and glanced round the empty room. It
seemed that our discovery of the fastenings had exhausted the
information that it had to offer.

"It is a thousand pities," I remarked, "that we were unable to look
round before they moved out the furniture. We might have found some clue
to the scoundrel's identity."

"Yes," replied Thorndyke; "there isn't much information to be gathered
here, I am afraid. I see they have swept up the small litter from the
floor and poked it under the grate. We will turn that over, as there
seems to be nothing else, and then look at the other rooms."

He raked out the little heap of rubbish with his stick and spread it out
on the hearth. It certainly looked unpromising enough, being just such a
rubbish heap as may be swept up in any untidy room during a move. But
Thorndyke went through it systematically, examining each item
attentively, even to the local tradesmen's bills and empty paper bags,
before laying them aside. Another rake of his stick scattered the bulky