If you are a constant reader of the newspapers, as probably you are, you will no doubt recollect the great sensation caused next day on the publication of the news of the gruesome find in that, one of the most aristocratic thoroughfares of Bayswater.

The metropolitan police were very reticent regarding the affair, but many of the papers published photographs of the scene of the exhumations, the exterior of the long-closed house, and photographs of the various police officials. That of Guertin, however, was not included. The famous investigator of crime had no wish for the picture of his face, with its eyes beaming benignly through his gold glasses, to be disseminated broadcast.

The police refused to make any statement; hence the wildest conjectures were afloat concerning the series of tragedies which must have taken place within that dark house, with its secluded, tangled garden.

As the days went by, the public excitement did not abate, for yet more remains were found—the body of a young, fair-haired man who had been identified as Mr. Cyril Wilson, a member of the Travellers’ Club, who had been missing for nearly nine months. The police, impelled by this fresh discovery, cut down the trees in the garden and laid the whole place waste, while crowds of the curious waited about in the neighbourhood, trying to catch a glimpse of the operations.

And as time wore on I waited in daily expectation of some sign from the woman I so dearly loved.

Guertin, who still remained in London, assured me that she was safe in hiding with her father, Phil Poland.

“And you will, of course, arrest him when you can discover him,” I remarked, as I sat with the famous detective in his room at the Grand Hotel in Trafalgar Square.

“I do not wish to discover him, my dear Monsieur Biddulph,” was his kind reply. “I happen to know that he has deeply repented of his wrongdoing, and even on his sudden reappearance at Stamford with the remaining portion of his once invulnerable gang, he urged them to turn aside from evil, and become honest citizens. He has, by his wrongful conviction of murder, expiated his crimes, and hence I feel that he may be allowed a certain leniency, providing he does not offend in future.”

“But a warrant is out for him, of course?”

“Certainly. His arrest is demanded for breaking from prison. His escape is one of the most daring on record. He swam for five miles in the sea on a dark night, and met with most extraordinary adventures before a Dutch captain allowed him to work his passage to Rotterdam.”

“But he will not dare to put foot in London, I suppose. He would be liable to extradition to France.”

“Who knows? He is one of the most fearless and ingenious men I have ever known. He can so alter his appearance as to deceive even me.”

“But the metropolitan police, knowing that Sylvia—I mean Sonia—is his daughter, may be watching my house!” I exclaimed in alarm.

“That is more than likely,” he admitted. “Hence, if you want to allow madame, your wife, an opportunity to approach you, you should go abroad somewhere—to some quiet place where you would not be suspected. Let me know where you go, and perhaps I can manage to convey to them the fact that you are waiting there.”

The hotel at Gardone—that fine lake-side hotel where I had first seen Sonia—occurred to me. And I told him.

“Very well,” he said cheerfully. “I shall return to Paris to-morrow, and if I can obtain any information from either of the prisoners, I will manage to let Poland know that his son-in-law awaits him.”

Then I thanked the great detective, and, shaking hands warmly, we parted.

What Guertin had told me regarding the strange discovery of a man who closely resembled him outside Poland’s house on the night of the latter’s arrest held me much puzzled. Even he, the all-powerful chief of the sÛretÉ, had failed to solve the enigma.

Next afternoon Shuttleworth called upon me in Wilton Street, and for a long time sat chatting.

At last he looked at me gravely, and said—

“I dare say you have been much puzzled, Mr. Biddulph, to know why I, a clergyman of the Church of England, have apparently been mixed up with persons of shady character. But now that four of them are under arrest, and a fifth, we hope, will shortly be apprehended, I will explain. As you perhaps know, Sonia was the daughter of the Honourable Philip Poland, who came to live at the Elms, which is close to the rectory at Middleton. We became great friends, until one evening he made a strange confession to me. He told me who he was—Louis Lessar, who had been the leader of a dangerous band of international thieves—and he asked my advice in my capacity of spiritual guide. He had repented, and had gone into retirement there, believing that his sins would not find him out. But they had done, and he knew he must shortly be arrested. Well, I advised him to act the man, and put aside the thoughts of suicide. What he had revealed to me had—I regret to confess it—aroused my hatred against the man who had betrayed him—a man named Du Cane. This man Du Cane I had only met once, at the Elms, and then I did not realize the amazing truth—that this was the selfsame man who had stolen from me, twenty years before, the woman I had so dearly loved. He had betrayed her, and left her to starve and die in a back street in Marseilles. I concealed my outburst of feeling, yet the very next evening Poland was arrested, and Sonia, ignorant of the truth, was, with a motive already explained by Monsieur Guertin, taken under the guardianship of this man whom I had such just cause to hate—the man who subsequently passed as her father, Pennington. It was because of that I felt all along such a tender interest in the unhappy young lady, and I was so delighted to know when she had at last become your wife.”

“You certainly concealed your feelings towards Pennington. I believed you to be his friend,” I said.

“I was Sonia’s friend—not his, for what poor Poland had told me revealed the truth that the fellow was an absolute scoundrel.”

“And you, of course, know about the incident of a man closely resembling the French detective Guertin being found dead outside the door of the Elms?”

“Certainly,” was his reply; “that is still a complete mystery which can only be solved by Poland himself. He must know, or else have a shrewd idea of what occurred.”

As we chatted on for a long time, he told me frankly many things of which I had not the least suspicion, at the same time assuring me of Sonia’s deep devotion towards me, and of his confidence that she had left me because she believed being at her father’s side would ensure my own safety.

And now that I knew so much of the truth I longed hourly to meet her, and to obtain from her—and perhaps from the lips of Philip Poland himself—the remaining links in that remarkable chain of facts.