I stood stock-still, not daring to move lest I might come into contact with some hidden wire, the slightest touch of which must bring instant death upon me.

“Your enemies prepared this terrible trap for you,” declared the man who was once my trusted servant.  “When I entered into the affair I was not aware that it was to be fatal.  They gave me no inkling of their dastardly intention.  But there is no time to admit of explanations now, signore,” he added breathlessly, in a low desperate voice.  “Say that you will not prejudge me,” he pleaded earnestly.

“I will not prejudge you until I’ve heard your explanation,” I said.  “I certainly owe my life to you to-night.”

“Then quick!  Fly from this house this instant.  If you are stopped, then use your revolver.  Don’t hesitate.  In a moment they will be here upon you.”

“But who are they, Olinto?  You must tell me,” I cried in desperation.

“Dio! Go!  Go!” he cried, pushing me violently towards the door.  “Fly, or we shall both die—­both of us!  Run downstairs.  I must make feint of dashing after you.”

I turned, and seeing his desperate eagerness, precipitately fled, while he ran down behind me, uttering fierce imprecations in Italian, as though I had escaped him.

A man in the narrow dark passage attempted to trip me up as I ran, but I fired point blank at him, and gaining the door unlocked it, and an instant later found myself out in the street.

It was the narrowest escape from death that I had ever had in all my life—­surely the strangest and most remarkable adventure.  What, I wondered, did it mean?

Next morning I searched up and down Oxford Street for the Restaurant Milano, but could not find it.  I asked shopkeepers, postmen, and policemen; I examined the London Directory at the bar of the Oxford Music Hall, and made every inquiry possible.  But all was to no purpose.  No one knew of such a place.  There were restaurants in plenty in Oxford Street, from the Frascati down to the humble coffeeshop, but nobody had ever heard of the “Milano.”

Even Olinto had played me false!

I was filled with chagrin, for I had trusted him as honest, upright, and industrious; and was puzzled to know the reason he had deceived me, and why he had enticed me to the very brink of the grave.

He had told me that he himself had fallen into the trap laid by my enemies, and yet he had steadfastly refused to tell me who they were!  The whole thing was utterly inexplicable.

I drove over to Lambeth and wandered through the maze of mean streets off the York Road, yet for the life of me I could not decide into which house I had been taken.  There were a dozen which seemed to me that they might be the identical house from which I had so narrowly escaped with my life.

Gradually it became impressed upon me that my ex-servant had somehow gained knowledge that I was in London, that he had watched my exit from the club, and that all his pitiful story regarding Armida was false.  He was the envoy of my unknown enemies, who had so ingeniously and so relentlessly plotted my destruction.