“I fancy not,” Somerfield admitted.  “Perhaps he kicked over the traces a bit when he was over this side.  You Americans generally seem to find your way about—­in Paris, especially.”

Mr. Coulson shook his head doubtfully.

“There wasn’t much kicking over the traces with poor old Fynes,” he said.  “He hadn’t got it in him.”

Somerfield scratched his chin thoughtfully and looked at Penelope.

“Scarcely seems possible, does it,” he remarked, “that a man leading such a quiet sort of life should make enemies.”

“I don’t believe he had any,” Mr. Coulson asserted.

“He didn’t seem nervous on the way over, did he?” Penelope asked,—­“as though he were afraid of something happening?”

Mr. Coulson shook his head.

“No more than usual,” he answered.  “I guess your police over here aren’t quite so smart as ours, or they’d have been on the track of this thing before now.  But you can take it from me that when the truth comes out you’ll find that our poor friend has paid the penalty of going about the world like a crank.”

“A what?” Somerfield asked doubtfully.

“A crank,” Mr. Coulson repeated vigorously.  “It wasn’t much I knew of Hamilton Fynes, but I knew that much.  He was one of those nervous, stand-off sort of persons who hated to have people talk to him and yet was always doing things to make them talk about him.  I was over in Europe with him not so long ago, and he went on in the same way.  Took a special train to Dover when there wasn’t any earthly reason for it; travelled with a valet and a courier, when he had no clothes for the valet to look after, and spoke every European language better than his courier.  This time the poor fellow’s paid for his bit of vanity.  Naturally, any one would think he was a millionaire, travelling like that.  I guess they boarded the train somehow, or lay hidden in it when it started, and relieved him of a good bit of his savings.”

“But his money was found upon him,” Somerfield objected.

“Some of it,” Mr. Coulson answered,—­“some of it.  That’s just about the only thing that I do know of my own.  I happened to see him take his pocketbook back from the purser, and I guess he’d got a sight more money there than was found upon him.  I told the smooth-spoken gentleman from Scotland Yard so—­Mr. Inspector Jacks he called himself—­when he came to see me an hour or so ago.”

Penelope sighed gently.  She found it hard to make up her mind concerning this quondam acquaintance of her deceased friend.

“Did you see much of Mr. Fynes on the other side, Mr. Coulson?” she asked him.

“Not I,” Mr. Coulson answered.  “He wasn’t particularly anxious to make acquaintances over here, but he was even worse at home.  The way he went on, you’d think he’d never had any friends and never wanted any.  I met him once in the streets of Washington last year, and had a cocktail with him at the Atlantic House.  I had to almost drag him in there.  I was pretty well a stranger in Washington, but he didn’t do a thing for me.  Never asked me to look him up, or introduced me to his club.  He just drank his cocktail, mumbled something about being in a hurry, and made off.