hand.  Here and there was a perennial type, the pale actor with soft hat and blue-black chin, the ragged sloucher from park to park.  Langholm could have foregathered with one and all, such was the strange fascination of the town for one who was twice the man among his northern roses.  But that is the kind of mistress that London is to those who have once felt her spell; you may forget her by the year, but the spell lies lurking in the first whiff of the wood pavement, the first flutter of the evening paper on the curb; and even in the cab you wonder how you have borne existence elsewhere.

The hotel was very empty, and Langholm found not only the best of rooms at his disposal, but that flattering quality of attention which awaits the first comer when few come at all.  He refreshed himself with tea and a bath, and then set out to reconnoitre the scene of the already half-forgotten murder.  He had a vague though sanguine notion that his imaginative intuition might at once perceive some possibility which had never dawned upon the academic intelligence of the police.

Of course he remembered the name of the street, and it was easily found.  Nor had Langholm any difficulty in discovering the house, though he had forgotten the number.  There were very few houses in the street, and only one of them was empty and to let.  It was plastered with the bills of various agents, and Langholm noted down the nearest of these, whose office was in King’s Road.  He would get an order to view the house, and would explore every inch of it that very night.  But his bath and his tea had made away with the greater part of an hour; it was six o’clock before Langholm reached the house-agent’s, and the office was already shut.

He dined quietly at his hotel, feeling none the less that he had made a beginning, and spent the evening looking up Chelsea friends, who were likely to be more conversant than himself with all the circumstances of Mr. Minchin’s murder and his wife’s arrest; but who, as might have been expected, were one and all from home.

In the morning the order of his plans were somewhat altered.  It was essential that he should have those circumstances at his fingers’ ends, at least so far as they had transpired in open court.  Langholm had read the trial at the time with the inquisitive but impersonal interest which such a case inspires in the average man.  Now he must study it in a very different spirit, and for the nonce he repaired betimes to the newspaper room at the British Museum.

By midday he had mastered most details of the complex case, and made a note of every name and address which had found their way into the newspaper reports.  But there was one name which did not appear in any account.  Langholm sought it in bound volume after bound volume, until even the long-suffering attendants, who trundle the great tomes from their shelves on trolleys, looked askance at the wanton reader who filled in a new form every five or ten minutes.