“He and I,” replied Spargo, with easy confidence, “are working this case together.  You can tell me anything you’d tell him.”

The landlady rummaged in her pocket and produced an old purse, from an inner compartment of which she brought out a small object wrapped in tissue paper.

“Well,” she said, unwrapping the paper, “we found this in Number 20 this morning—­it was lying under the dressing-table.  The girl that found it brought it to me, and I thought it was a bit of glass, but Walters, he says as how he shouldn’t be surprised if it’s a diamond.  And since we found it, the waiter who took the whisky up to 20, after Mr. Marbury came in with the other gentleman, has told me that when he went into the room the two gentlemen were looking at a paper full of things like this.  So there?”

Spargo fingered the shining bit of stone.

“That’s a diamond—­right enough,” he said.  “Put it away, Mrs. Walters—­I shall see Rathbury presently, and I’ll tell him about it.  Now, that other gentleman!  You told us you saw him.  Could you recognize him—­I mean, a photograph of him?  Is this the man?”

Spargo knew from the expression of Mrs. Walters’ face that she had no more doubt than Webster had.

“Oh, yes!” she said.  “That’s the gentleman who came in with Mr. Marbury—­I should have known him in a thousand.  Anybody would recognize him from that—­perhaps you’d let our hall-porter and the waiter I mentioned just now look at it?”

“I’ll see them separately and see if they’ve ever seen a man who resembles this,” replied Spargo.

The two men recognized the photograph at once, without any prompting, and Spargo, after a word or two with the landlady, rode off to the Atlantic and Pacific Club, and found Ronald Breton awaiting him on the steps.  He made no reference to his recent doings, and together they went into the house and asked for Mr. Aylmore.

Spargo looked with more than uncommon interest at the man who presently came to them in the visitors’ room.  He was already familiar with Mr. Aylmore’s photograph, but he never remembered seeing him in real life; the Member for Brookminster was one of that rapidly diminishing body of legislators whose members are disposed to work quietly and unobtrusively, doing yeoman service on committees, obeying every behest of the party whips, without forcing themselves into the limelight or seizing every opportunity to air their opinions.  Now that Spargo met him in the flesh he proved to be pretty much what the journalist had expected—­a rather cold-mannered, self-contained man, who looked as if he had been brought up in a school of rigid repression, and taught not to waste words.  He showed no more than the merest of languid interests in Spargo when Breton introduced him, and his face was quite expressionless when Spargo brought to an end his brief explanation —­purposely shortened—­of his object in calling upon him.

“Yes,” he said indifferently.  “Yes, it is quite true that I met Marbury and spent a little time with him on the evening your informant spoke of.  I met him, as he told you, in the lobby of the House.  I was much surprised to meet him.  I had not seen him for—­I really don’t know how many years.”