Polycarp opened the door.

‘Good-night,’ he said.  ’Perhaps you did save my life.  But if you had appealed on that account to my gratitude I should have been obliged to refuse your request.’

‘I know it,’ said Hugo.  ’I knew whom I was talking to.  Good-night, and thanks.’

‘I shall lock this door,’ Polycarp called out, departing.

’Yes, do; and, I say, you’ll lay hands on that man of Hawke’s easily enough in a day or two.’

‘Oh, certainly,’ said Polycarp.  ’I have not forgotten him.  But I was compelled to deal with you first.’

Twisting his white moustache, and buttoning his overcoat across the vast acreage of his shirt-front, Polycarp disappeared from Hugo’s view into the corridor.

CHAPTER XVIII

HUSBAND AND WIFE

Hugo bolted the front-door on the inside, relighted the candle which Hawke’s man had used as a weapon, and placed it in the middle of the hall floor.  He then penetrated into the servants’ part of the flat, and emerged on to the balcony by the small side-door, which was open, and had evidently been forced by Hawke’s man.  And there, on the balcony, he leaned over the balustrade in the cold humid night, and tried to recover his calmness.  He felt that any systematic, scientific search of the premises would be impossible to him until his mind resembled somewhat less a sea across which a hurricane has just passed.

Many questions stood ready to puzzle his brain, but he ignored them all, and fell into a vague reverie, of which Camilla was the centre.  And from this reverie he was suddenly startled by the clear, unmistakable sound of a door being shut within the flat.  It was not the shutting of a door by the wind, but the careful, precise shutting of a door by some person who had a habit of shutting doors as doors ought to be shut.

‘Polycarp has returned!’ was his first thought.  But he remembered.  ’No!  I bolted the front-door on the inside.’

The conundrum of the clock and of the two sizes of footprints in the drawing-room recurred to him.  Without allowing himself to hesitate, he strode back again into the flat, with a sort of unbreathed sigh, an unuttered complaint against circumstances for not giving him an instant’s peace.

The candle was still placidly burning in the hall, but its position had certainly been shifted by at least three feet.  It was much nearer the portiere leading to the inner hall.  Hugo listened intently.  Not a sound!  And he stared interrogatively at the candle as though the candle were a guilty thing.

However, he now possessed the revolver of Hawke’s man, and this gave him confidence.  He left the perambulating candle to itself, and proceeded to the inner hall by the light of his own electric lamp.  The door of the principal bedroom, which he had originally meant to invade, lay to his right; the entrance to the drawing-room lay to his left.  He thought he would take another look at the drawing-room, and then he thought: