Once again the voices of the Wild called out to the Caged Wolf; once again, the old things beckoned and the new things lost their savour and the Devil said, as before, “What is the use?  What is the use?” and the Savage cried out to be stripped and flung back into the wilderness as God made him, and called and called and called for an end to the things that stank in his nostrils and for the fierce companionship of his kind.  And but that Time had staled these things a little and blunted the keen edge of them so that they could not endure for long, and there was Dollops and the lessons and Dollops’ future to recollect, the Wolf and the Savage and the Devil might not have hungered in vain.

Followed a period of intense depression when all things seemed to lose their savour and when Narkom, amazed, said to himself that the man had come to the end of his usefulness and had lost every attribute of the successful criminologist.  For the next three cases he brought him Cleek botched in a manner that would have disgraced the merest tyro.  Two, he failed utterly to solve, although the solutions were eventually worked out by the ordinary forces of the Yard; and in the third he let his man get away under his very nose and convey Government secrets to a foreign Power.  It was but natural that these three dismal failures should find their way to the newspapers and that, in the hysterical condition of modern journalism, they should be flung out to the world at large with all the ostentation of leaded type and panicky scare heads, and that learned editors should discourse knowingly of “the limitations of mentality” and “the well-authenticated cases of the sudden warping of abnormal intelligences resulting in the startling termination of amazing careers,” or snivel dismally over “the complete collapse of that imaginative power which, hitherto, had been this detective’s greatest asset, and which now, on the principle that however deep a well may be if a force-pump be put into it it must some time suck gravel, seemed to have come to its end.”

These things, when Cleek heard of them, affected him not at all.  He seemed not to care whether his career was ended or not, whether the world praised or censured.  Neither his pride nor his vanity was stirred even to the very smallest degree.

But Narkom, loyal still, took these gloomy prophecies and editorial vapourings much to heart and strove valiantly to confound the man’s detractors and to put the spur to the man himself.  He would not believe that the end had come, that his mental powers had run suddenly against a dead wall beyond which there was no possibility of proceeding.  Something was weighing upon his mind and damping his spirits that was all; and it must be the business of those who were his friends to take steps to discover what that something was and, if possible, to eliminate it.  He therefore sought out Dollops and held secret conclave with him; and Dollops dolefully epitomized the difficulty thus:  “A skirt—­that’s what’s at the bottom of it, sir.  No letter at all these ten days past.  She’s chucked him, I’m afraid.”  And with this brief preface told all that he was able to tell; which, after all, was not much.