body of Henry Semlin that lay at my feet.

The passport had been issued at Washington three months earlier. The
only _visa_ it bore was that of the American Embassy in London, dated
two days previously. With it was a British permit, issued to Henry
Semlin, Manufacturer, granting him authority to leave the United Kingdom
for the purpose of travelling to Rotterdam, further a bill for luncheon
served on board the Dutch Royal mail steamer _Koningin Regentes_ on
yesterday's date.

In the long and anguishing weeks that followed on that anxious night in
the Hotel of the Vos in't Tuintje, I have often wondered to what
malicious promptings, to what insane impulse, I owed the idea that
suddenly germinated in my brain as I sat fingering the dead man's
letter-case in that squalid room. The impulse sprang into my brain like
a flash and like a flash I acted on it, though I can hardly believe I
meant to pursue it to its logical conclusion until I stood once more
outside the door of my room.

The examination of the dead man's papers had shown me that he was an
American business man, who had just come from London, having but
recently proceeded to England from the United States.

What puzzled me was why an American manufacturer, seemingly of some
substance and decently dressed, should go to a German hotel on the
recommendation of a German, from his name, and the style of his visiting
card, a man of good family.

Semlin might, of course, have been, like myself, a traveller benighted
in Rotterdam, owing his recommendation to the hotel to a German